33
Sam
Sam wouldn’t have been ready to say goodbye to Wyatt on Labor Day under normal circumstances, but now, saying goodbye like this, she felt like she’d had something ripped from her body. Something that was critical to her functioning. Her family was silent in the car, and as they got closer to Manhattan, Sam felt the panic you feel when you’ve become disoriented in the water and you don’t remember which way is up. She felt like everything she’d thought she knew about the world had been wrong.
“My parents have started therapy,” she told Wyatt on the phone in late September.
“I cannot imagine your dad in therapy.”
“Me neither. It’s weird here, this thick tension in the apartment and my dad sort of walking on eggshells. I’m pretty sure my mom could get him to do anything she wanted right now.” It was almost as if her mother was in a newly restructured marriage, and she was enjoying the position of power. It was unnerving.
“Well I hope she makes him suffer for a little while longer, he deserves it.”
“Wyatt.”
“I mean it. He broke my family; he can sweat it out for a little while before he gets his happy ending.” Sam wanted to say that Bill hadn’t broken their family, that Wyatt himself had told her a million times how broken it already was. But there was anger in his voice that Sam had never heard before. She was scared to push back.
“How’s your dad doing?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Looks like he’s going to stay in Florida and my mom’s going to keep the beach house. He’s angry and quiet. So I guess nothing’s new.”
These conversations went on throughout the fall. Some days they caught up like old friends and then talked about how much they missed one another. On those days they talked about moving out to Los Angeles. Sam had a packed junior year course load and was studying for the ACT, her ticket to either UCLA or USC. Wyatt just wanted to graduate and get his life started. On other days it was tense, especially if Wyatt asked about her parents.
“They seem a little better,” Sam said. It was November and the air in the apartment did feel lighter.
“So they go to a shrink a few times and suddenly your dad’s not chasing women?”
Sam’s chest went tight. She knew that making excuses for her dad just made Wyatt angrier, but she was coming around to accepting the whole thing, and if Wyatt could too, everything could go back to normal. “He says it was about his art, about being so desperate for a new idea that he lost his grip on reality.”
Wyatt let out a hard breath. “Remind me never to use my music as an excuse to act like an asshole.”
These exchanges were usually punctuated with “sorry” or “let’s not do this,” but their relationship was poisoned. It was impossible for Wyatt to think of his mom alone in that cold house without blaming Bill. He was constantly reacting to all the ways Sam was like her dad, even the things he used to say he loved about her, like her imagination and her directness. Sam could feel Wyatt closing off. Even the sound of his I love you lost its tenderness. He said it the way you’d say goodbye.