Sure enough, Sam fished out his key chain, the Volvo key attached. “Oh, hell!” Sam struck his forehead with the palm of his hand. “My fault,” he said to the manager. “I gave you the wrong one after I parked the car. And didn’t think to check. I’ve had it in my pocket all this time while my poor wife … I feel so stupid. Do let me treat you to a meal, a week of meals, at our sandwich shop. Please convey my apologies to the attendants. I’m such a …”
“Sam,” Annie said. “Shut up and take me home.”
All the how could you especially at this times dried up as Sam struggled to hold back sobs. All recriminations vanished as Sam led Annie upstairs to the bedroom, fresh sheets on the bed, flowers on the bureau, a jar of malted milk balls set out on a brand-new wicker breakfast tray with a stack of page-turning mysteries piled next to it. “I was so worried, such a wreck over, well, everything, I must have been out of my mind,” he confessed.
And a week later, he ended up in the hospital. “Clinical depression,” the doctor diagnosed. “Emotionally fragile,” he warned.
Now Annie sticks the newspaper back under the coffee table and thinks about Sam, about how their loss has pulled them closer, not caused the kind of rift other tragedy-plagued marriages suffer. She and Sam resemble puzzle pieces. Apart, their edges are so jagged and jutting, so awkwardly notched, it’s hard to get a sense of them—until, fit together, they form a complete and continuous whole.
Like the couple in the newspaper, they’ve been close from the start. Well, almost, she corrects, depending on how you define start. She pictures the redheaded young man whose brass-buttoned blue blazer topped pressed white trousers. Whose side-parted hair gleamed like glass. He was holding a martini in the bar where everybody else was chugging beer and wearing jeans. Charles. Hardly a Chuck or a Charlie, though the other college kids she hung out with that summer addressed him that way. “Are you the last virgin in New York?” he said to her in his tidy bed in his shiny downtown loft.
“I’m from Maine,” she said.
“That explains it,” he said, pulling her to him with practiced ease.
It was her fish-out-of-water interlude, a time when she and Sam had decided to take a break for the summer. She’d secured an internship in New York between freshman and sophomore year, sharing a hellish Hell’s Kitchen one-bedroom, one-bath walk-up with Rachel and the two NYU juniors who answered their need-roommates ad. Untethered to home, family, Sam, she’d discovered an alternate universe that eclipsed her normal world and turned her into a second self she barely recognized.
She’d worked at a now-defunct women’s magazine. Hidden from the valuable front-of-the-house real estate just off the elevator, she sorted unsolicited submissions into graveyard file cabinets and sent hope-dashing form rejection slips to the writers of the unread articles. Though it wasn’t the glamorous job she had anticipated, its recompense was the glamorous Charles.
“A summer fling,” Rachel pronounced. “A rite of passage.”
The rite ended in August along with her lease on big-city life. Charles had moved on to a sophomore at Columbia. Besides, she’d had her fill of martinis; she grew to loathe Charles’s bay rum aftershave. Right after Labor Day, she was back home and with Sam.
Soon they were inseparable, so much so that they were AnnieandSam, one word spoken on a single exhaled breath. They knew they’d be married. Their wedding was already planned for the week after graduation. Though Annie worried about jobs, where they would live, Sam was sure everything would work out. “Minor details,” he said dismissively.
She remembers the day the details started to fall into place. She pictures the library at Bowdoin: she and Sam, AnnieandSam, chairs pulled up to the table behind the stacks. Sam unloaded a backpack’s worth of law school brochures. Annie added articles on entry-level publishing opportunities and the limited market for English majors. They fanned them out.
Sam turned to her. “Do we really want to do this?” he asked.
She examined the brochures: the smiling multiethnic students, the swaths of Frisbee-strewn green campuses, the spires of Manhattan skyscrapers, graduates clutching diplomas underneath hanging scales of justice. She checked out the publishing newsletters with their photographs of newly minted editors, stuffed bookshelves rising to the ceilings of charming offices, cubicles overrun by teetering columns of manuscripts. She shook her head. “No.”
“Me neither.”
“Your parents …?”
“They want me to be happy.” He picked up a sheet, which listed lawyers’ starting salaries, a first-year fortune that would sustain, for a decade, an extended family in rural Maine.
“Ursula?” he asked.
“Not an issue. She’s already given up on me.” Annie studied the chart of salaries. “I don’t want to live in New York.”
“Me neither.”
“Or Boston,” she continued.
He groaned. “Or, God forbid, somewhere out west.”
She pushed aside the sheaf of papers. “Would it be childish and unambitious of me, not to mention a waste of a good education, to say that I want to go home?”
“Woo-hoo!” he yelped, causing a shush from somewhere over by Biographies. He grabbed her. He kissed her forehead, her cheeks, her lips.
“Funny that some people can’t wait to get away. But for us …” she said.
“We’re homebodies,” he finished. “Two of a kind. How amazing that we found each other.”
“Amazing,” she echoed. She turned serious. “But what will we do when we go back to Passamaquoddy?”
He scraped his chair around so he was facing her. Their knees touched. He took her hands in his. He beamed his irresistible-Sam grin. “The most important thing is having decided where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives. I have utter faith that everything will turn out okay.”
Because for Sam, it always did.
Once upon a time. Before the shadow on her lungs started to cast its shadow on him, on both of them, on AnnieandSam.
Back then, she tried to believe him, tried not to counteract his good humor, his trust in the future, tried not to play the pessimist to his Pangloss-like certainty that all would be fine in this best of all possible worlds.
“What’s more, we don’t have to decide everything this minute,” he added.
She refrained from pointing out that they were seniors in college, that they were returning to a town in Maine hit by a depressed economy. That they were liberal arts majors, trained for nothing but careful reading and enlightened thinking and composing a strong intellectual argument headed by topic sentences and anchored by footnotes.
Sam changed the subject. “Talked to my mom last night,” he confided.
“And …?”
“She sends her best to you.”
“Very nice.”
“She filled me in on the gossip, who died, who was arrested for a DUI, who gave the biggest donation toward a stained-glass window for the temple. Betty and George Grismisch, if you want to know.” He laughed. “Then there’s Evelyn Benoit’s new home entertainment system …”
Why was he yakking about such things when their prospects felt so precarious—at least to her? “Sam!”