Laugh (26 page)

Wondered if she even wanted children.

He realized that he didn’t know if he did or not. That he would be okay with whatever Nina wanted, but if he were to have children, it would only be with Nina.

“You’re here late.”

“How’s Tay?”

She turned and smiled at him. “You know, she’s doing good. She’s healing so well her surgeon got her flowers for her room today, like a prize. I think he was just trying to cheer her up, because she’s already impatient.”

“Her pain’s manageable?”

“Very, she says. I believe her. She seemed to have a lot of energy.” Nina was quiet, then said, “She’s worried about treatment. The radiation and chemo.”

“It isn’t easy.”

“She’s never sick. Never takes sick days, doesn’t even have allergies, and most farmers I know, over time, have at least a few of those from exposure.”

“Hang on to that, Nina. She will get sick from treatment, but that she’s had a healthy life, entered into this with good health, is young, works for her.”

“Okay.”

Sam reached out and traced Nina’s profile, over her forehead, down her nose, over her lips and chin.

“I’m sorry about earlier,” he said.

She shook her head. “It’s okay, I’m sorry I just …”

“No, I mean it. I’m not an intuitive or sensitive man, Nina. I’m best when I know exactly what to do, and I almost never do. I’m not good at thinking through how someone might react to something I do or say. I struggle with empathy.”

She looked at him then.

“I told you that after Russ died, I found out that I was pregnant.”

“You alluded to that, yes.”

“I couldn’t have that baby, because I was so sad, so angry, so empty that I was certain I would have nothing to give that baby to grow. I know about how to make things grow, I know what it takes to nurture something so it’s healthy and strong, and I didn’t have those things, not for me, and not for another person. For a person who deserved all the love in the world.”

Sam took her hand, had to touch her. Her voice was one he hadn’t heard from her before, all in her throat, not from
her.

“I can understand that, Nina. I can.”

“I know,” Nina said. “I know that you can, and even if you couldn’t, it doesn’t make it less true, it’s not something I can change, and Sam, I don’t regret it. Not the way my family does, they way they want me to.”

He couldn’t think of what to say, so he didn’t say anything.

He just sat next to her and held her hand.

“On a day like today, though,” Nina said, “when the harvest has gone so badly, and my best friend is in the hospital, and I am far away from home, I can’t help but think what my life would be like if Russ had lived.”

Sam kept sitting, kept holding her hand, but he had to look away.

Had to.

“We’d have moved to Seattle like he wanted. Had a kid. No fields, no farms. Jobs that didn’t depend on the weather. We’d have taken our kid to her grandparents’ farm so she understood her roots, but our days wouldn’t be ruled by what might or might not happen a year out, two years out. I don’t know why, even, I think of that baby being a girl. I just do. Maybe because I was a girl, then.”

“Sounds nice.” Sam closed his eyes, squeezed Nina’s hand.

“That’s what I think about on a day like this. I think about how nice the weather is in Seattle in the summer. I think about how Russ always loved this divey burrito place there, and maybe we would’ve gone there for dinner on a nice summer day in Seattle after we picked our kid up from school.”

Nina squeezed his hand back, finally, but Sam still couldn’t open his eyes.

The worst part was he sat on the bench and he wished that what Nina was saying could be true for her. He could see her laughing with some guy, some nice guy, with a kid with long dark braids, on some city street, getting ready to order burritos.

He
wanted
it to be what had happened, for Russ to have come back from war so that he watched Nina get fat with their kid and be a dad. Nina lost that man, and that man lost more than his life, he lost Nina.

Thinking about him as someone who loved Nina and couldn’t have a whole life with her gave Sam insight into
her
grief. This was a man who had thought about her, kissed her, made her happy, saw her happy.

And now
he
just wanted her to be happy.

That’s all.

Which meant that by understanding what Russ had missed out on, Sam could find a place inside him that wondered how Nina had ever moved on. How she got up the next morning, the one after that.

He’d seen her laugh, and it was a miracle, everything about it.

He wasn’t a man particularly given to prayer, but he thought about Russ, and thinking about him and what he didn’t get to see and what Nina had moved on from, just
thinking
about that, well, it
felt
like a prayer.

“So that’s why I got out of your car, Sam. Because that’s what I was thinking. And there you were,
taking me to your family with a pie, and how you look at me is so beautiful. Even what you asked me, after our date, was beautiful.”

“I’m sitting here thinking that if I could, I’d give you that. Your life in Seattle. Just like you said.”

“Sam.”

“I would. I love you. I know that I’m not supposed to say that yet, that I’m not supposed to feel it, doesn’t make it any less true.”

He felt her hand on his face, and he turned to look at her. He knew she was crying, had been crying while she talked to him, but it was worse to see the tears.

She kissed him, and he reached up to slide his hands around her nape.

Her mouth was soft, her kisses perfect.

He kissed every part of her mouth, followed her tongue with his, moved to kiss her eyelids and her ears, her jaw and her neck.

Then their kisses were deeper, and it felt so good. She felt so fucking good; her skin was warm, though he could still make it rough with goose bumps just by running his fingers over her shoulders, her upper arms, by scraping his teeth over her neck.

She pulled away.

“Was it good? To see your sister Destiny?”

“It was.”

“I’m glad.” Nina leaned back. “I miss my family, Sam.”

He pulled her close, to sit along his side.

“When’s the last time you saw them?”

“I see them a couple times a year. It’s still so hard for them though. To forgive me. To embrace what I’ve done here, the choices that I made. They’re still there, you know. Where Russ grew up. So everywhere they go, they see him. My parents see me and him everywhere they walk all over that place. I know they feel like I’ve denied them something—some measure of comfort, some way to make their pain less. I hurt them, by being here. By living my life.”

“But isn’t it easy for you to imagine, too, that their lives there are nothing but being hurt and angry? This is hard for me to explain, so bear with me, but because you don’t see them often, all you see is the hardest parts of everything they feel, all at once, without any perspective on what they probably feel most of the time.”

“What do you mean?” Her voice was quiet, like she was really listening to what he had to say.

“I just mean that they have lives. Just like you do. They’re living them. You laugh and have fun. So do they.

“You can’t feel guilty for having a life. I respect your grief, just like you respect and share theirs. Just
because you are living a life that you wouldn’t have lived without Russ, just because they have a life that’s different without him, it doesn’t mean it’s not a life with good days. It doesn’t mean no one is supposed to love. Or laugh.”

He felt like his arms and legs were more disconnected from his body the longer she was quiet.

Like his heart had stopped.

He believed, really believed, what he had just told her, but if it wasn’t possible for her to understand, he was lost. He would lose her.

Nina did know how to nurture and grow something so that it was loved, and so that it provided love. Sam thought that maybe she believed she had simply made something other people could love, and all she had to do was work and work and make everything that she did good, and others would believe in it, feel compelled to give to it, nurture it, and that would provide life and its penance.

Sam understood.

He was a boy who had felt useless and wanted nothing more than to help. He found his own way to it, and even found what gifts he could focus on to come closest to a meaningful life. If he just made everything around him work,
he
would work. If Nina could just make everything around her deserving of love,
she
could love.

He had also grown to understand, since losing his mother, since medical school, how wide open life is to death. How it wasn’t really a transition, how everybody was right up against it, all the time.

Death was a companion that wasn’t concerned with the life you had made, because to death, all life was the same. It was just life.

It could be lost, and what was left to sift through? But those who survived weren’t the concern of death, not at all. Death had to be what concerned everyone who lived. Sam had started to think about this all the time, what everyone he loved understood about him and would always understand about him. What about his life he could help them know.

He hadn’t gotten comfortable with death; if anything, it scared him more than ever. He still had so many
questions
for his mother. That was the main thing she had left behind. Questions and stories and mystery. This was especially true for Des and PJ. He knew things that they didn’t, had some understanding of both what their mother would have wanted them to know and what his mother loved about them.

Tonight he had felt that in Betty, too. Felt that her own grief for her best friend had been folded into what she knew Marie would have wanted her to do.

To help them know their mother, because their mother couldn’t know them.

He was certain there were parts of Russ that only Nina knew and understood, and that Russ’s parents yearned for. When they yearned for Nina, when they made her feel that they yearned and grieved for Russ and
Nina’s potential child, Sam thought that really, they grieved everything they didn’t know and could never know; even if Russ had lived, they couldn’t have known those things.

Death made you grieve things that might not have ever been yours.

It just did.

It took so much that it seemed liked death took everything.

Sam had watched his dad die, watched his horrible struggle and battles, and quit smoking, quit every habit that anyone had ever said was bad.

No virtue followed, though, no safety from dying. Tay, after all, was young and strong and treated her body with virtue. If death didn’t recognize whether a life was filled with love, it was likewise unable to know the choices a body had made.

Sam had struggled to quit anger and fear, which were probably a lot worse than pie, if only for what you left everybody else to deal with after you were gone.

“So you think that all I need is to see my family more?” Nina asked.

“Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Well, I don’t know them, but what you’ve told me makes it sound like they love you and are good people. It sounds like your parents must have had a hard life when they were young, and maybe you don’t know everything about how hard it was, but that they loved you, and the life they have now is pretty great. Russ’s parents loved you and extended their family to yours. So yeah, I think this might be one of those cases that “more” fixes things.”

“I think you’re being wise.”

“Yeah? I’m not used to that.”

“I know, but it’s true. It’s hard though, for farmers to get away.”

“Your parents and Russ’s parents, from what you’ve told me, have worked hard to have it a little more easy than they might have, years ago. You too, I think, have worked really goddamned hard so a lot of the burden of running a farm is shared. Maybe—” Sam paused, wondering if he should push it.

“What?”

“Maybe there was something going on with Russ so that he couldn’t see that he would never have to do everything on his own. Maybe when he told you that he didn’t want to farm anymore, wanted a different kind of life, it was really that he couldn’t see how to make a life with you that just belonged to the two of you.”

“Maybe.”

They sat listening to traffic. To the junebugs.

“Also,” Sam said, “you made this whole big thing here. I know you did it with the family you built here,
but at first it was just you.”

“That’s true and not true.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I think what you’re trying to tell me is that maybe I did all of this with more help from my family, from my parents and in-laws, than I ever completely understood.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

He leaned over and kissed her temple.

“You know what?” Sam asked.

“What’s that?”

“I’m pretty fucking smart, I think.”

Nina laughed. “You only just figuring this out, Opie?”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “I am.”

She had taken Sam Burnside upstairs, even though what she should have done was to send him home and go to bed. Tomorrow wouldn’t be any easier than today, even with Adam’s help, and it would start just as early.

She wanted Sam, though.

She wanted him inside her, she wanted his hands moving over her body, she wanted to feel him move over and under her, hear how he said her name.

Just a little, too, she wanted the risk to her heart, to do things that softened him and made it impossible for him to hold back how he felt. Sam Burnside was not a moderate man, and she found herself a little bit tired of moderation.

After today, after doubting herself, doubting she could ever slow down and have a life without there being consequences to everyone who depended on her, she needed to test her doubt.

Sam and his love, his insight, were asking her to.

When they were inside of her apartment, he said, “What do you need?”

She leaned against him. Put her ear against his chest.

“Not to think.”

“Yeah,” Sam said, against her neck. “Don’t do that.”