The Grown Ups Page 29

  “Okay,” she said slowly. “I think you already apologized.”

  “You wouldn’t answer my calls.”

  “I couldn’t, Sam.”

  “Bella—” Sam looked behind her to the open door of her apartment.

  Suddenly, she understood his apprehension. “Are you here to challenge Ted to a duel? He’s gone.”

  “What?”

  “Ted. He’s gone.”

  “When?”

  “Since before Thanksgiving.”

  “He never came back from that writing thing?”

  She sighed. “There wasn’t a writing thing.”

  “But—” Sam hung his head as he figured out exactly what Bella was telling him. “I told you he was no good for you.”

  Bella’s mouth twisted into a smirk. “He moved out before I came back after Thanksgiving. It was mutual.” She shrugged. She hoped it appeared casual.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? At Thanksgiving, you should have told me.”

  “Why are you here, Sam?” She felt a flush start on her chest and rise up to her neck, past the fur collar.

  “I never wanted to hurt you, Bella.” Sam leaned against the doorframe. “I want another chance.” He hesitated. “Can you give me—us—that?”

  “Sam.” Bella sighed. She felt an old ache in her gut. “Don’t you see it was all too much? Ted had just left. You were telling me you loved me out of the blue. I just couldn’t handle it.” She looked at him. “You really pissed me off. Do you have any idea how long I waited to hear that from you? And it never came. So then I met Ted, only to totally give up myself in the process. I just needed some distance. From him. From you.” She turned and walked back into her apartment. She needed something to do.

  She heard Sam follow her in. He hesitated as he crossed over the threshold. She turned to look at him and saw that he was taking in all the packing boxes huddled against one wall. “You’re moving?”

  Bella gave a slight shrug. “I can’t afford the rent alone.”

  “Talk to me,” Sam said. “Please.”

  Bella stared at him long and hard. She shook her head. “Can you close the door?”

  He did as she asked, turning the bolt.

  “What happens now, Sam?” She was close enough for Sam to see she was trembling all over and she didn’t care. Not anymore. He grabbed ahold of her fingers and tugged her hand, bringing her up next to him. She could smell the old fur coat mixed with the essence of Sam, his shampoo, his clothes, and his skin, his everything. She ran a tongue over her teeth, aware of her sleep breath. She placed her cheek against Sam’s and said, “You’re here, but what happens now?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam whispered. “I don’t know. But I miss you, Bella, all the time. I miss you so damn much.” His hands were in her hair as he held her face away from his so he could look at her. “I’ve never felt anything for anyone like I feel for you. Not then. Not now. Not ever. Do you believe me?”

  Bella wasn’t moving but every molecule in her being was hurtling toward Sam. Attaching. Her lips moved against his throat, along his jawbone, and to his ear before they finally found his mouth. When Sam kissed her back it was like they were kids, fumbling, unsure of where to put their lips or tongue, of how much pressure to apply before teeth got in the way. When Sam pulled away Bella was scared that they had waited too long and that he would turn around and go. Instead Sam said, “I’m so nervous.”

  “Me too,” she whispered.

  Sam slipped his arms inside the fur coat and circled her waist. She rested her head on his shoulder. After a while they moved to her bed. The sheets and pillow were still warm from where she had been tangled in the blankets. Sam held Bella tightly and she pressed against him, relieved that she still fit. They talked in whispers even though no one could hear them. Sam told her about Suzie in the hospital bed, fiercely guarding that tiny life. He told her about Michael and how, in Sam’s arms, Michael had needed him. He told her about his father, how he wondered if he was losing his mind.

  As Bella told him she worried all the time how fucking fragile everything was, Sam ran his hands up the length of her body, finding his way inside the coat and under her T-shirt. Right away there was the familiar urgency between them. Bella shrugged out of the coat and sat up. Sam pulled the shirt over her head and took a nipple in his mouth as she tugged at his belt buckle and zipper. She pushed him back to climb on top of him. By then both of them were gasping for breath, neither of them able to slow down or make it last. Sam grabbed ahold of Bella’s hips roughly, wanting her closer, matching her rhythm with his own.

  “Look at me,” she said, and so he did as both of them let go. Bella wasn’t sure which of them laughed first or why, but soon they were laughing, clinging to each other, nearly crying. Both of them were breathing hard, as if they’d run a marathon. Bella pushed herself up and Sam reached to wipe the tears from her cheek. She caught his hand and held it as she tried to catch her breath.

  The look Sam gave her was solemn. “I know,” Sam said. “I know that I nearly blew it. I’m an idiot.”

  “Yup, you are.” She leaned down and kissed him deeply and then pulled away. “But lucky for you I’m fond of your kind of idiot.” Sam looked up at Bella. She saw him at fifteen, at sixteen, at seventeen. They had always been one crush away from each other, and yet this boy whom it felt like she had loved her entire life was now this man who was looking up at her as if she was his everything. Sam rolled her over onto her back and kissed her slowly. There were so many things Bella had to say, so many things she wanted to tell him. But not now. There would be time, much later in the quiet, there would be time.

  Five weeks later Bella stood in the kitchen of Sam’s restaurant wearing nothing more than an old T-shirt of his and smearing the last of the goat cheese on a slice of bread. Sam watched her as she scraped the remains of the cheese from the wrapper with her index finger and held it up by his lips. “Eat,” she commanded. Sam licked the cheese from her finger.

  Bella shook her head. His mother really had mastered this cheese. It was tart and creamy, flavored with a nice selection of herbs. “So good, right?” Bella took more bread and then went over to the walk-in. She bent over so that Sam could see the lacy strip of her underpants.

  “Enough about the cheese!” Sam groaned. The Styrofoam cooler of goat cheese had arrived from his mother shortly after Sam had called to tell her about Suzie. It had arrived with no note, just the information sheet about the cheese and his mother’s goats that was shipped with every order. It was crazy, Sam told Bella, to have any expectations where his mother was concerned; still, she confused him. Nevertheless, he and Bella had been steadily working their way through the cheese in the hours after closing each night.

  Bella retrieved a platter of cold Greek chicken just as Sam slid his hands up her bare back and under the T-shirt. “Sorry, buddy, I found something else.” Bella shimmied away from Sam’s hands and turned around to put the chicken on the counter. She peeled back the plastic wrap and delicately picked a long strip of pepper and an olive off the top. When she saw Sam watching she dangled a piece of chicken in his face.

  Sam took the chicken. Before he ate it he said, “You got a little something there.” He pointed to her incisor as he popped the chicken in his mouth.

  “When I get fat will you still want me?” Bella smiled and licked the lemony oil from her fingers at the same time. She took a swallow of water and felt the olive let go from her tooth.

  “You have to ask?”

  Bella shook her head. Every night they slept in a tight hold, Bella curled with her back against his chest, as if making up for lost time.

  Sam leaned across the prep table and took the chicken platter. They had become midnight food raiders since the restaurant officially opened a month ago. Bella never imagined how thrilling the routine of an ordinary day could be. Every night after closing Sam cleaned the kitchen and then prepped for the next day before crawling upstairs to their tiny room. Bella would wait for him i
n bed, the only real piece of furniture they had, among a fan of students’ papers. As soon as she heard him on the stairs she collected the papers into a pile, removed her glasses, and placed them on an overturned box that served as a temporary nightstand. Sam would take three steps into the room before collapsing facedown next to her on the pillow, bringing with him the slight whiff of what he’d cooked that day along with the bleach he used to wipe down the surfaces of the kitchen.

  Bella would climb on top of his back and knead her fingers into the deep tissue, softening the knots in his shoulders. While her hands worked she asked him about the day: what he cooked, what people had liked, and what he had eaten, which, despite the multitude of dishes he’d made, usually amounted to nothing more than tastes, and his stomach would always growl on cue. Somehow they managed to leave the bed and go down to the kitchen for a snack before going back upstairs, where sex took on the flavors of whatever they’d eaten that night.

  They had almost lost each other—a fact Bella was reminded of twice a day when she saw her toothbrush next to his in a cup on the sink. It was still a miracle to both of them, she knew, that somehow she had found her way back. They had moved all of her stuff from the apartment she had shared with Ted back to her father’s house and into her old room because the space above the tavern was so small. Bella’s father appeared to like Sam no better now than he had when Sam first broke his daughter’s heart. But Bella believed her father would soften. In the last few weeks her father had popped into the restaurant after he got off the train, often sitting at the bar for a beer and whatever special Sam had made that day. Bella knew the small talk was minimal, but Sam claimed to have hope that they could work up to complete sentences soon.

  Sam wanted Bella to have a place of her own, but he didn’t want her to leave him, so he hauled an old door and a couple of sawhorses upstairs and made them into a desk jammed into the eave. When he told her the desk was for her writing she had cried. They slept twisted together on the hammock-like mattress every night, and Bella commuted to the city three times a week to teach her classes at Hunter. It was an arrangement that worked for now because they were making up for lost time. But Bella knew, eventually, they would have to live like grown ups and get a real place.

  Bella replaced the plastic wrap on the chicken and put it back in the walk-in. Sam cleared the counter of the goat cheese wrappers and crumbs and met her by the light switch. He slipped an arm around her waist and turned off the lights before they started up the stairs. Bella felt a pressure in her chest when she looked at Sam, her heart slamming against her rib cage in anticipation of what would come next. A feeling she knew would never go away.

  Suzie stayed on bed rest for ten weeks before she delivered a healthy baby boy, Leo Samuel Turner, three weeks early, on her birthday. Bella and Sam went to visit them in the hospital when Leo was just a few hours old. Leo had a head of dark curly hair and, according to Sam, the features of Sam and Michael’s grandfather, their father’s father, who had lived to be one hundred and one years old. Bella insisted to Sam that he keep that bit to himself. She told him all babies, no matter the gender, looked like little old men to everyone but their parents.

  “Except ours,” Sam said, surprising Bella. She remembered Ted’s refusal to even entertain the thought of children. She hadn’t even gone there yet—thinking about children that potentially belonged to Sam. But now that he put it out there it made the most perfect sense. Of course they would have children one day.

  The elevator doors opened and Marguerite and Hunt joined them at the nursery window. “The doctor is in with Suzie, so I went and did some shopping downstairs,” Marguerite announced, waving a baby blue teddy bear. “It’s so silly, I know.” Her eyes were watery. She tugged on Hunt’s sleeve. “Hunt, look at that precious boy.”

  “He is handsome,” Hunt agreed.

  Bella saw Sam glance over at his father. She wasn’t sure if Hunt was looking at the right baby, although she supposed it didn’t really matter at this stage.

  Suddenly Hunt reached over and touched Bella on the top of the head. “The first time I met you, you were in your mother’s arms.” He screwed up his face as if he was thinking hard, and then he dropped his hand and relaxed into a soft smile. “Sam had been hit by a swing here.” He touched the spot above his left eyebrow and Bella saw Sam mirror him, searching for the microscopic remains of a scar with his fingertips. “And you were crying because he was bloody and hysterical.” He laughed. “Your mother handed me a towel. I think Sam’s howling ended the picnic.”

  Sam shook his head and smirked. “I still have that ability.”

  “Elizabeth was so angry with me because I had taken Michael to look at the ducks when I was supposed to be keeping an eye on Sam at the swings.” He turned to Sam. “I had no idea you saw me leave, and that you wanted to come with us and started to follow.” He blinked hard several times before he turned back to Bella. “And Elizabeth said that was my problem. That I never paid enough attention to Sam.”

  Bella shuffled her feet and inched closer to Sam. Marguerite glanced quickly between the two of them, and then back at Leo. No one said anything for a long moment, and then Bella looked up and saw Michael walking down the hall. She nudged Sam with her hip. Michael had a couple of days’ growth of beard, and his eyes were shiny with fatigue, but he was grinning as if it were Christmas morning. As he came toward them he tossed a tangerine back and forth in his hands.

  “Here.” He handed Sam the tangerine. “I’m going in to get Leo and bring him to Suzie. Everything’s good. Everything’s great.” He bounced up and down on his feet.

  “Sam?” Hunt said loudly, still waiting for an answer.

  Michael’s head jerked up as if it had been pulled by a string. He gave Sam a quick look that Bella couldn’t interpret.

  “Everything is good, Dad,” Sam said reassuringly.

  Marguerite said, “Michael is going to get Leo and bring him to Suzie now, Hunt.”

  “Leo?”

  Michael cupped his father’s elbow and turned him toward the window. He guided his father’s hand so that it was pressed flat against the glass, hovering over the baby. “Here, Dad. Here’s your grandson.”

  In that moment Bella knew that something was really wrong with Hunt. That Michael had maybe known the details and that he was keeping it from Sam.

  “Come here, Sammy,” Michael said over his shoulder. He put Sam’s hand over their father’s on the glass. “Stay,” he commanded as he pushed open the swinging doors to the nursery. None of them moved. Bella could feel nervous energy coming from Sam and Marguerite. When Michael reappeared he was wearing a smock and his hands were gloved and he was lifting his son from the plastic bassinet. Leo’s head was covered by a blue cap and his body was mummified in blankets. Only his squishy pink grandpa face was visible. Michael held Leo aloft on the other side of the glass.

  “Dad,” Sam whispered, “there he is, there’s Michael’s son.”

  Michael looked at Sam and then to their father. When Bella saw the expression on Michael’s face she wanted to run. Hunt was crying silently, the tears flowing freely down his cheeks. He didn’t move to wipe them.

  “Dad?” Sam prompted. “Dad?”

  “You believe me, right?”

  It took a second for Bella to realize that Hunt was still trapped in the earlier conversation. She had no idea whether Hunt even noticed Leo. Slowly she watched Sam release his father’s hand from the glass as Michael put Leo back in the bassinet. They watched Michael adjust the tiny blue cap and tuck in the tails of the blankets. Bella thought of the thousands of nights Michael would spend tucking in his son before the boy wouldn’t need him anymore. She remembered how Sam had told her that was one of his fondest memories from when he was still small enough to share a room with Michael: their father coming into their room carrying with him the exotic scents of the city, crouching down between their beds and asking them each to recall one good thing and one bad thing from their day.

&nbs
p; “I believe you, Dad,” Sam whispered.

  Bella watched as Hunt’s tears darkened his shirt collar. She saw Marguerite turn away quickly and fumble in her handbag.

  “I believe you,” Sam said again.

  Bella held her breath, waiting for Hunt to acknowledge what Sam had said. Marguerite produced a tissue from her bag and stuffed it into Hunt’s hand. “Hunt,” Marguerite said. Her voice was loud and a little sharp. “Hunt.”

  Hunt turned to her and smiled. “Oh, what a day,” he said. “What a day to remember.”

  Bella could see the relief in Sam’s posture; his shoulders and spine relaxed.

  “I’m hungry,” Hunt announced.

  Sam pulled Michael’s tangerine from his pocket. He looked as if he was about to hand it to his father but then he began to peel the thick skin himself. The sharp tang of citrus filled the air. Bella watched Sam break apart the tangerine. He offered half the sections to his father. Hunt popped the entire thing in his mouth and began to chew. After he had swallowed Sam pulled apart the remaining sections one by one and fed them to his father. They all stood there for as long as it took, silent and waiting. There was nothing else to do.

  EIGHTEEN

  Fragile

  Suzie—2011

  When Suzie got out of the shower Leo had on his thinking face. He was staring wide-eyed, curled up on Michael’s chest, his cotton-covered bottom perched up in the air. When he saw her he pursed his lips but he didn’t protest, so she crossed the room and pulled on a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. She left off the bra. There was no need to be constantly fumbling with the hooks.

  Michael’s arms were wrapped firmly around the baby, keeping him in place, but his head was back against the wall, his eyes closed and his mouth slightly open. Residency and a fellowship, the life of a doctor, had trained him to sleep anywhere and at any time. Suzie had joked that a medical residency was the only thing that could possibly prepare you for the sleep deprivation an infant brought into your life.