Jack Ketchum - I'm Not Sam

“You remember this?” I ask her.

“Remember? ’Member what?”

“This. Doing this. Us being here together.”

She shakes her head. “I never did.”

It seems to take forever but by the time I’ve got the animal hospital ready for surgery in the living room, the Easy Bake Oven alive and bake-ready in the kitchen, she’s already got the Once Upon A Monster video game running and Teddy and Abby Cadabby are having tea under the watchful eye of her new Baby Alive Doll.

That goddamn doll is spooky.

I figure I’ve got to log in some drawing time.

I work for maybe an hour, hour and a half but something’s wrong again. Now it’s Samantha herself who somehow seems to be eluding me on the page. She doesn’t look right. I’ve been drawing this woman for weeks now and know exactly who she is. Hell, I’ve even put her face and head back together after a shotgun blast.

So what’s my problem?

I go back through the first few pages and study her, then flip to today, go to the middle and flip again, back to the first few and flip to yesterday, back and forth until finally I’ve got it. She’s consistent until yesterday, when I had that difficulty with perspective. And today’s an extension of what I did yesterday. I’d have seen it then if I hadn’t been occupied with composition. It’s subtle but it’s apparent now.

Sam would have caught it in a minute. I try not to think how much I miss that.

Samantha’s gotten slightly slimmer. A little less heft to the breasts, a bit narrower in the hips and thighs. A little more like the real Sam.

More like Lily.

And I’m thinking well, what the hell, fuck it, I can fix that — it’s ridiculous and annoying to have to do over the last three pages but it’s no big deal and god knows I’ve been preoccupied with the real Sam so that it’s no huge surprise that she’d have crept a bit into my work — I’m thinking this when I hear a crash from the kitchen.

In the kitchen the scene would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic. There’s Sam at the counter, hands raised in what looks like surrender, her eyes wide and mouth agape like she’s just seen a ghost scutter across the floor. Only what’s down there is a sodden paper napkin beside some buttery toweling, each of which is soaking up a mixture of what turns out to be flour, baking powder, vanilla, vegetable oil and round red sugar crystals. Barbie’s Pretty Pink Cake . Which is also all over the tail and haunches of my cat. She’s skulking toward the door.

I grab her before she can make her getaway and now it’s all over me too for chrissake.

I rush her to the sink.

“Jesus, Sam! What the hell…?”

“My elbow I hit it and it fell and she was there and I’m not Sam !”

“Okay you’re not Sam goddammit, but gimme a goddamn hand here. Turn on the tap, will you? Warm, please. Not hot.”

I can’t keep the edge out of my voice and I don’t try. What the hell was she thinking, doing this without me being here? My cat hates water unless she’s drinking it.

“Here. Hold her here. Around the shoulders.”

She does as I say and miraculously Zoey’s behaving so I tip a bit of dish detergent into my hands and rub it into a lather, rinse and do it again.

Then I go to work on my cat.

Zoey keeps giving me these disgusted looks until at last I’ve got her toweled dry and we set her free. Sam hasn’t said another word to me through the whole thing.

“Look, I’m sorry I snapped at you,” I tell her.

“I’m not Sam. You keep calling me Sam. Why?”

I have no good answer to that. At least none she’d understand.

“You remind me of somebody.”

“Who?”

“Somebody I know.”

“Is she nice?”

“Yes. Very nice.”

This is killing me.

“Let’s clean up this mess on the floor, okay?”

“Okay.”

At around eight that night I turn the sound off on a show about elephants on NATURE and pull out the photo album. We stopped taking photos a few years back for some reason, but there we are in the old days just after we met, Sam thirty and me twenty-eight in front of the Science Museum, taking in the fireworks at Carousel Park, down by the Falls, Sam on a bench in City Park, waving at me.

“She does look a lot like me,” she says.

I say nothing.

There are three pages of photos I took at the St. Augustine Alligator Farm back in our 2008 vacation and these seem to fascinate her. The crocks and turtles, the albino alligators, the wild bird rookery, the Komodo Dragon. She’s forgotten Sam entirely.

I turn to some of the older family photos. My mother and father, my brother Dan, her parents on her father’s birthday. She doesn’t seem interested in these at all.

“They’re nice,” she says. “Can we watch the elephants?”

I’m awakened by Lily’s voice.

“Patrick? I’m scared.”

She’s turned on the light in the hall behind her and she’s standing in the doorway in her Curious George pajamas, hands and cheek pressed to the doorjamb like she’s hugging it. I’m still woozy from sleep but through the open window I can hear what’s bothering her.

Above the chirping of crickets, the wind’s whipping the howling and yipping of a pack of coyotes across the river. They’ll try to take cows down now and then over there and they tend to like to celebrate when they do. There seem to be a lot of them tonight, and the mix is eerie, from the long sonorous wolf-like wail of the adults to the staccato yip yip yip of the young. Which sounds for all the world like demented evil laughter.

Even the crickets sawing away in the darkness sound vaguely sinister tonight.

No wonder she’s scared. Even to my ears it’s spooky.

She looks so vulnerable standing there. Shoulders hunched, legs pulled tight together, her thumbnail pressed against her upper front teeth. More like a kid in some ways than I’ve yet seen her. So much less of Sam, so much more of Lily.

Almost like the daughter we’ll never have.

“It’s okay. It’s just a bunch of coyotes. They can’t hurt you. They’re way out there over across the river.”

“Patrick?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m scared.”

“I know you’re scared but you don’t have to be. To them it’s a kind of music, like singing, only because we’re not them, it sounds weird, a little scary. That’s all.”

“Singing?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Try to go back to sleep, Lily. They really can’t hurt you. Honest.”

“Can I…could I stay with you, Patrick?”

I want her to. I don’t want her to.

Contradictions slam together.

“You’ll be fine over there, Lily.”

“No I won’t.”

“Sure you will.”

“No I won’t. I’ll be good, I promise. I won’t wriggle around or anything. I promise.”

I can hear the tremble in her voice. Almost like a desperation there. She really is scared.

“Okay,” I tell her. I scoot over to the far side of the bed by the window. She scampers to the bed as though the floor’s on fire and hops in. Throws the light summer bedcovers over her shoulders and snuggles up next to me. She’s shaking.

It’s automatic. I put my arm around her and then her head is resting on my shoulder.

I haven’t done anything like this for days.

It makes me almost light-headed.

It’s as though this is Sam again, as always. As though nothing’s changed. But one thing reminds me that everything’s changed.

Her hair.

When Sam comes to bed and we hold one another close like this I’m always aware of the faint traces of shampoo in her hair, Herbal Essence or Aussie Mega. It’s a clean smell, as familiar to me as the scent of her breath or the feel of her skin beneath my hand.