She’s a fucking trooper.
Not a wiggle out of her. A half hour later we’re back in the car headed home. And our timing’s perfect because as we turn onto the driveway, the long clay road that cuts through our forest, there’s a UPS truck just ahead of us.
Or maybe it’s not perfect. The driver’s going to meet Lily.
Anyway, our toys are here.
The driver’s a woman of about forty who I’ve never seen before, not our usual driver, very pretty even in her baseball cap and oversized drab brown uniform. ‘Mornin’, she says as she gets out of the truck and we both say ‘mornin’. She hauls open the back.
“I’ve got nine for you today, Mr. Burke, Miz Burke.”
“I’m Lily.”
“Glad to meet you, Lily.”
“What’re these?”
“We ordered them, remember? On the computer.”
“Toys!” she says.
The driver says nothing but it can’t possibly be lost on her that this is not the voice of your normal thirty-something woman. We help her unload. The silence is pretty thick except for Sam, who’s humming IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREEN. And I can’t help it, I’m embarrassed for her. Or maybe for me, I’m not sure. Either way it sucks.
When we’ve got them all inside and I’ve signed for them the driver gives me a smile as she climbs back into the truck but she won’t meet my eyes.
“You have a good afternoon,” she says.
And I can almost hear her thinking she’s so pretty, too bad she’s retarded. And too bad for him too.
She pulls away. I almost want to throw something. But I don’t.
Lily wants to open everything right away but it’s way past lunchtime so I make us some tuna sandwiches and a pitcher of lemonade and we take them outside to the old stone barbecue and eat at the wooden table there. The sun is glinting on the river. There’s the scent of earth and trees and grass growing. It’s a relaxing, Saturday-or-Sunday kind of thing to do and Sam and I have done it many times. But Lily just wolfs it down. She really wants at those packages.
“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.