The Accident Season (13 page)

Sam says, “In this house we never really know what’s wrong, only that something’s wrong. It’s fucked up.” His foot taps on the ground like he’s nervous, or angry. He points an accusing finger at Alice. “And what the hell happened to you after I left you at the hospital? Or are you keeping your secrets too?”

“Sam,” I say like a warning.

“No, he’s right,” Alice tells me, and she suddenly sounds just as angry as Sam. “You’re right,” she says to him. “You want us to share our secrets? Okay, I’ll tell you what I think—I’ll tell you a secret.” Her voice is dangerous, like the edge of a cliff. She says, “I think this accident season thing is bullshit.”

I put up my hands to stop her, as if her words are physical things that can reach out and hurt us. “Alice, come on.”

“It is.”

I look anxiously toward the living room door. Sam didn’t close it when he came in, and I’m worried my mother will hear.

“What about all the falls and bumps and bruises?” I say it in a whisper that comes out as a hiss. “What about the car that just hit you? Mom’s hand, her broken arm? The bookshelf that fell on me? Sam in PE?”

“Coincidence,” says Alice. “For the most part. The rest? They’re not accidents. You think my phone just slipped out of my hand that night? I was angry.” She says it with passion. “I threw my lamp at the wall.”

Sam opens his mouth to say something, but I cut him off. “But it was still an accident that my shelf fell down,” I say. My hiss gets louder. “And what about all the cuts and stitches? What about the broken bones of every other year?” My voice is at normal volume now and it feels too loud to my ears. “What about the narrow escapes, Alice? Like the time Sam cracked his head on the kitchen tiles? Or when that glass
broke and nearly severed the vein in your wrist? Or the time I almost drowned?”

Alice’s eyes are like someone else’s. “You really think all those were accidents?”

Later I’ll let myself look back on that sentence and figure out what’s wrong with it, like in a children’s picture puzzle, but for now I just raise my voice even louder and say, “What about the tragedies, Alice? What about Dad, and Granddad? What about Seth?”

“Oh yeah?” Alice shouts. “What about Seth? What about how he died was an accident?”

“Alice,” Sam says softly.

“Look,” she says, “I know you don’t want to believe it. I know you never have, but that wasn’t an accident. He didn’t hit his head on that rock by accident.”

And maybe her words are physical, maybe they do grab us and take us away from the wrapped-up doll’s house to the evening after one of my mother’s gallery openings in Westport four years ago. They bring us right there—I can see by his pale face that Sam’s there with me: We’re not in the living room anymore, we’re down past the pier, by the rocks, we’re daring each other to jump into the water fully clothed, but my mother won’t let us. Not during the accident season, she says.

“He didn’t know that there were rocks there,” Sam says in a strange voice. “None of us did.”

“Yeah,” says Alice. “None of
us
”—she gestures around
at the three of us—“pushed him in. That part, that wasn’t an accident.” She shakes her head and talks over us when we try to speak. “Seth was pushed into the water, he hit his head. That’s not an accident. And I know you don’t like to think about it because Christopher’s your father, but—”

“It was an accident,” Sam says again. His face is too pale and his cheeks are flushed. They stand out; they remind me that there’s blood beating under there, a network of veins.

I put my hands on his. “It was a game,” I say to Alice. “Christopher just did it as a joke. We’ve done the same thing in summer. I can’t count how many times I’ve pushed Sam into the river.” Sam’s hands reach around and squeeze mine.

Alice’s face is unreadable. “If that’s what you tell yourself,” she says. “But I don’t think it’s what Mom tells herself. I don’t think that’s what keeps her awake at night.”

Sam’s face is furious, but his eyes are filled with tears. Alice gets up and storms out of the living room, and when she has gone, the whole house feels more breakable than ever, and unsafe even under all its layers.

***

When we go to bed, I lie awake for a long time. My head swims from the whiskey I drank with Alice and from everything she has said. I feel that strange stinging sensation against my cheek again. It lingers like pins and needles. The wind whistles by my window, and suddenly I want to be outside. I open my bedroom door to go downstairs and Sam is
standing there, right in front of me, his eyes hooded and his hair messed like he’s been tossing and turning in bed. One of his hands is raised like he was about to knock.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hi.”

I feel silly and tipsy in my pink fleecy pajamas. Sam inclines his head toward the stairs. “I heard you moving around in your room,” he says, “and I just wondered if you wanted to go for a quick smoke before bed.” He is wearing a rumpled hoodie over his pajamas and his feet are bare. “I couldn’t sleep,” he adds.

“Me either,” I say. I realize that my chest is tight. Maybe a smoke would help.

I follow Sam downstairs and out through the kitchen door. The rain is torrential against the windows, but we shelter between the back door and the shed and the wind doesn’t even ruffle our hair. It slants through the garden and needles through the trees. The world looks like it’s melting. I light a cigarette with shaking hands and pass the lighter to Sam. I don’t know what to say.

“Do you remember that street performer in Galway the day we found the magic shop?” I say after a long smoky silence. I reach up and touch the shed roof. It’s rusted and slick with rain.

“A street performer?” Sam hugs his arms to his chest, his cigarette perilously close to his clothes. The wind finds its way in through our pajamas.

“The metal man. The human statue guy.”

“You mean the guy in the Halloween costume earlier?”

“I don’t know if it was a Halloween costume. I bumped into him last week in Galway too.” I take my hand down from the shed roof too quickly and the side of a corrugated-iron sheet cuts me, slices into my palm like a lifeline. Blood beads through the seam. I close my fist so Sam won’t notice. I’m not ready to go inside just yet. “I just thought that’s why you seemed to recognize him.”

“I never saw him before,” says Sam.

I back away from the shed and lean against the cold wall of the house. “Alice thought he was someone else,” I say. “That’s why she stopped. That’s why the car hit her.”

Sam shrugs. “I guess he looked like the Tin Man from
The Wizard of Oz
.”

I don’t know why, but I keep going. “You didn’t think he looked like Christopher?”

Sam sort of smiles. It looks more like a grimace. “I guess,” he says. “Maybe. If he were ten years younger and made of metal. It was just a passing resemblance, but I’m sure Melanie knows that guy. She knows most of the street artists around here.” He takes a sharp drag of his cigarette. “I wouldn’t even know what Christopher looks like anymore.” He tosses his hair out of his eyes. “He could look completely different. I know I do. If he saw me now he’d never recognize me.”

I think of Sam at thirteen, his hair shoulder-length and
tangled, his body scrawny, his eyes cheeky and confident, his voice pitching like a ship at sea, and I smile. Then I look at Sam at seventeen. I stand out in the yellow light of the kitchen window in front of my ex-stepbrother and really look at him. I see the blue streak in his dark hair, the freckles on his cheekbones, his fingernails bitten to the quick. I see his broad shoulders and big, square hands. I see his smile that flickers like a silent-film ghost. I look into his riverbed eyes and they look straight back into mine and my heart gives a little lurch.

“And you know what?” Sam says. “I’m glad. I don’t know what I’d do if I looked like him.”

I’m taken aback by his tone. “But he’s your dad, Sam.”

“Yeah,” says Sam. “And what good does that do me? He left.” He finishes his cigarette and buries his hands deep into the pockets of his hoodie. “He doesn’t love me, he doesn’t care. He never cared. I kept trying not to believe it for years, but there’s nothing I can do about it, so . . .” He shakes his head with one eyebrow quirked like it doesn’t even matter, like it’s no big deal. “So I hate him.” There’s something underneath the raised eyebrow and the feigned nonchalance, though—I can feel it. It simmers like a storm.

Then he says it, softly but fast, like something he needs to get out but doesn’t want to say. “I think maybe Alice is onto something.”

I’m sure the shock registers on my face. “What?”

“I’ve been thinking about this,” he says. “So much. I’ve
been going over and over everything: how he left, why he didn’t take anything with him, why he only calls once a year, why he never comes back, not even for a vacation. Don’t you think there’s something that doesn’t add up?” His eyes on mine are almost pleading. I don’t know if they’re pleading with me to agree or to prove him wrong.

“I don’t know, Sam,” I say finally. “I think it just sounds like a shit person who doesn’t care about anyone else.”

Sam’s eyes are dark in the cold night. River-after-sunset eyes. “I guess you’re right.” He seems relieved. I try not to think about what Alice said earlier.
It was an accident,
I think.
It was the accident season
.
That’s all there is to it
. I’m not sure I believe myself.

Sam leans back against the shed wall and lights another cigarette. I check the cut on my palm and see that it has stopped bleeding. I crack my knuckles loudly in the careful quiet our words have left behind. Beside me, Sam blows out three perfect smoke circles. I stretch after one of them before it wafts into nothingness and I stick my tongue through it like we all did last night out here in the garden before Sam and I went down to the river and it was frozen. It seems like a long time ago now.

Breaking the smoke circle is like breaking a spell. Sam grins at me and it’s as if the last few hours have been forgotten. I giggle. The air is cold and dries my tongue. I taste smoke and rain and mushy autumn leaves. Sam takes another
puff, and soon there are three more smoke circles floating around our heads. Like a little kid trying to pop all the soap bubbles, I tongue every one of the circles. Sam puffs out some more and curls up his tongue in that way that’s supposed to be genetic and pokes at the smoke circles with me. We laugh low so as not to wake anyone up. The house is silent and seems far away behind us.

I go after one of the smoke circles that has drifted away. It is deformed and oblong, and when I lean forward to catch it with my tongue I overbalance and almost fall down the back step into the stormy garden, but Sam grabs my waist and pulls me back into the shelter of the shed and we both laugh some more.

We are very close. I notice it suddenly. Sam’s arms are still around my waist. He smells nice. His hair is completely black in the darkness and I can hardly see his eyes.

“When you kissed Bea,” I say to him slowly in the circle of his arms, “you said it was to prove the cards wrong.” Sam nods slightly. “Did it work?” I ask.

Sam stares straight at me. “No,” he says.

I know he won’t tell me, but I ask anyway. “What did they say to you?”

Sam just sort of smiles. I duck my head awkwardly. I uncross my arms and let my hands rest lightly on Sam’s shoulders. “You’re warm.”

Sam laughs a little. I clear my throat.

“So, um,” I say awkwardly, keenly aware of his arms around me, “did you have a good time in the city with Martin?”

“We just hung out at the arcade, played some games. But then I told him about the shop where we got our costumes and he wanted to go, but we couldn’t find it.”

“What do you mean you couldn’t find it? It was just off Shop Street.”

Sam shrugs. His arms are still around me. I’m finding it a little difficult to concentrate on what he’s saying. “It wasn’t there.”

“Like it’d closed down?”

“Like it’d never existed.”

Little goose pimples prickle my skin.

“I mean, those costumes are almost too perfect, you know?” he says. “You already sometimes look like you have wings.”

He brings his hands up behind my back to my shoulder blades. His hold brings him closer to me. His face is only inches away. He lowers his head and rests his forehead against mine. We lick our lips like a mirror image.

Sam kisses me. It starts with the lightest touch of lips on lips, tilted heads, short of breath. We hover as if on a threshold. My heart beats hard. Then our mouths press together. Our eyes close and our lips open and Sam very slowly slips his tongue into my mouth, and when I touch it with my own, he deepens the kiss, wrapping his arms around my waist
and pulling me tight toward him. Our mouths become my whole world. Warm lips, gentle tongues, quiet breath, wild hunger. My hands curl in his hair. We are connected lips to lips, chest to chest, knee to knee like we’re just one person. I can feel the kiss in my mouth and in my mind, as a crazy wanting in my heart, as butterflies in my tummy and as a great ache stretching lower, all the way to my toes. I can feel it in my heartbeat and in every bruise. I’ve never been kissed like this.

Then the house phone rings. It is three o’clock in the morning and it rings like the end of the world. Sam and I spring apart like the opposite poles of two magnets. I turn and run into the kitchen to answer.

It’s Nick.

“Cara?” he says. “Can I talk to Alice?”

I don’t even think. I say, “No.”

“She’s not answering her phone,” he says like he didn’t hear me. “But I thought she’d be up.”

My heart is still pounding. I can hear someone coming down the stairs. Footsteps and heartbeats. Sam stands shadowy in the doorway to the kitchen. The back door is still open, spills cold air all through the house. Sam’s hands are at his mouth.

Alice comes into the kitchen and makes to take the phone out of my hand. My fingers tighten automatically around it. She pulls at it, but I won’t let go.

“Call my cell,” she says into the phone, bending her head to my hand so he will hear her. Immediately her phone starts to ring.