Jack Ketchum - I'm Not Sam

Zoey’s favorite stuffed toy is lying near the baseboard at the entrance to our living room. I pick it up and inspect it for glass. It’s clean. It’s escaped the general devastation.

Our cat has the strangest relationship to this thing. Every now and then we’ll hear her yowling, this loud sad mournful sound coming out of her, and every single time the toy’s on the floor or the bed or the couch where she’s deposited it right in front of her.

The toy’s a tuxedo, just like her. Patrick’s theory is that she thinks it’s family — a dead or lost brother or sister possibly. I tell him that’s morbid. But with that sound she makes, he might be right.

I toss it out of the way down the hall toward the bedroom and plug in the vacuum. It roars to life.

For a while after that all I’m really conscious of is my battle against the glass, the tinkling of glass through the metal wand. When I get to Patrick’s framed Incredible Hulk poster, the beer bottle and the painted shade I carefully pick up the larger pieces and put them in the trash basket. The smaller ones fly through the wand.

Is a wand called a wand because it’s magic? There’s the momentary urge to giggle. I wonder what Lily’s laugh was like.

I set the coffee table, standing lamp and fireplace screen to rights and shake out my wedding dress. I inspect it for damages. There’s dried blood on the train. There’s a small tear from the end of the zipper down, about an inch long. The blood can be cleaned and the tear repaired but the veil is hopeless, torn to pieces.

And that’s when it hits me. I did this. The shattered glass, the overturned furniture, the torn dress.

I did all of it.

A little girl inside me. But also me.

Once I’ve got the place straightened up and I’m satisfied that all the glass is swept away I set to deconstructing what Lily’s done while I was away. The wedding dress goes in the hamper for cleaning and repairs.

Teddy goes back behind the glass doors in the hutch in our bedroom. Patrick’s still sleeping the sleep of the dead, if not the innocent. In the guestroom — her room — I gather up the Barbies, thinking I’ve got to get rid of those swimsuits at some point and dress them in their proper clothes, and put them in the hutch beside Teddy where they belong.

The boxes for all the toys are in the guest room closet. I’m not surprised to find them there. Patrick’s an inveterate pack-rat.

For some reason I want that Easy-Bake oven out of my kitchen right away.

I pull the box out of the pile and in the kitchen, pack the entire ridiculous bright-purple thing away along with all its pans and moulds and boxes. I trek it back to the guest room and shove it deep under the bed.

That’s when, for the second time, I notice the half-empty glass of milk on the bedside table. A shaft of sunlight through the trees turns the film on the glass opaque.

I wonder how long it’s been sitting there. Usually a kid will want a glass of milk right before bedtime.

But last night I slept in our bed with Patrick, not here.

Connection: and this one hits me like a brick, complete with all its implications, implications I know suddenly that I’ve been avoiding ever since my talk with Doc this morning — I woke up in his bed, our bed, finally Sam again, with Patrick’s semen sliding out of me.

I was wrong. He was unfaithful to me. He slept with Lily.

An image scuttles through my mind like a spider in a web. I’m sitting in a dark movie theatre with my Uncle Bill, who I love beyond all logic for his crooked smile, his deep blue eyes and his curly red hair. I’m ten years old so logic’s not important. Love is.

Uncle Bill’s come to live with us in the spare room, and much later I find out why. He’s been under my dad’s supervision. My father has vouched for him with the local police, all of whom he knows, and most of whom are friends. Bill is a former postal worker who’s been caught stealing money and checks out of the mail. My father has made a deal to hush it up. It’s either live with Dad or go up on federal charges. Bill has wisely chosen the former.

But now in that movie theatre — lunch at Bonvini’s Pizzeria and a day at the Colony Theatre being Bill’s present to me for my tenth birthday — his hand has come to rest my bare left knee. To this day I can’t recall what the movie was, though I know that I very much wanted to see it at the time, because all I remember is the fear and embarrassment, the humiliation I felt as that hand moved under my skirt, up my leg, over my thigh and between my legs, stroking me.

About a year ago I performed an autopsy on a nine-year-old girl who had hung herself from a pipe in the basement of their home with her father’s belt. Suicides among children under twelve are rare, but not unheard of. This little girl carried visible signs of vaginal bruising and internal tearing. Her father had been fucking her with both his penis and, as it turned out, a hairbrush.

Suicide among children is rare, but we all know that child abuse is not.

I remember my rage that day. It wasn’t at all professional. I managed to hide the fact from my co-workers, but when I came home Patrick got the full brunt of it for what must have been an hour, and he agreed with me that there were people out there who were people in name only, who had only a cosmetic connection to the rest of the human race, who lived their lives without empathy or sense of justice.

And now I’m angry. Angry at myself for never telling on Uncle Bill all those years ago. Angry at Patrick for betraying me in this strange foreign way, and betraying his words to me that day.

I feel a slow burn building.

I know what Patrick’s hiding from. He’s hiding from the fact that last night, he was fucking a child. And he knew it.

I go to the bedroom. The bed’s empty. Patrick’s gone.

He’s not in the living room. He’s in the kitchen. He’s pouring himself a cup of coffee. He’s pulled on a pair of boxers and when he hears me behind him he turns around. He looks like hell.

“What did you do last night, Patrick?”

He stops mid-pour.

“I know all about Lily. I talked to Doc. I know everything. So I’m asking you to tell me about it. What did you do?”

He finishes pouring and slips the mug into the microwave.

“Do you hear me?”

He won’t look at me. He presses the keypads on the microwave and it begins its steady wind-tunnel hum.

“You know what this makes you, don’t you?”

I almost don’t hear his reply.

“You’re my wife, Sam,” he says.

“Yes. But I wasn’t your wife last night, was I? I was some little girl. According to Doc, six or seven years old. So how many times, Patrick? How many times did you fuck me? Did you fuck me every night for eighteen days? Did I put up a struggle or did I just let you?”

“NO! ONCE! I swear to you, once, only last night! Only last night! Never before that. And that was after days of you walking around half-naked, asking me to help you wash your hair in the bathtub, clip together your bathing suit, and seeing you in that wedding dress again — I thought it was you for a moment, Sam! I did! And when I called your name, when I tried to touch you, you just went berserk, you screamed at me I’m not Sam, you trashed the room! And then a little later you seemed to forgive me and you were out of the dress, the dress was on the floor, you were naked, and there was glass everywhere, and so I picked you up and carried you…”

“And you couldn’t help yourself, is that it?”

There’s no way I can keep the acid out of my voice. I can see he looks exhausted, defeated. To me that reads weak and at that moment I hate him for it.