“My mother,” she whispered.
“And after you were twelve?” Pausing in wiping her face, he waited for her answer, but she gave none.
Sam turned her face away. “I think I’d like to lie down now,” she said as she started to rise.
“Go to bed? By yourself?”
“Mike, please. I really don’t want to—”
He would not allow himself to be angry because she seemed to think that he’d demand sex from her at a time like this. Remembering that she’d said that when she found out her father was dying all she wanted to do was go home to her husband and have him hold her, he caressed her cheek. But her husband hadn’t been there when she’d needed him, and after her mother had died and she’d needed her father, he’d failed her too. Mike thought that it was time that a man didn’t fail her. “Sam-Sam, I’m not going to leave you alone. Your father may have left you alone to be an adult, but I’m not going to.” Picking her up in his arms, cradling her like a child, he started out of the bathroom.
“Put me down,” she said, struggling against him.
Stopping in the hallway, he looked down at her. “I’m not going to allow you to be alone. Call me autocratic, call me a male chauvinist pig. Call me whatever you want, but tonight you aren’t going to be alone. This time you aren’t going to have to deal with death by yourself.” When she pushed against him, he pulled her closer. “You aren’t big enough to fight me.”
He started walking, not toward his bedroom as she’d thought he meant to, but toward the back garden, and as he walked, he pulled an afghan from the back of a chair. When he was in the garden, he sat with her on a chaise, holding her on his lap as though she were a child, and put his hand on the side of her head as he pulled her head down to his shoulder.
“Tell me about your mother,” he said.
Burying her face in the muscle of his shoulder, Sam shook her head. Right now the last thing in the world she wanted to think about was her mother, about her mother being held to a hot radiator, her mother begging for the safety of her child.
“What was her favorite color?”
He waited, but when Sam didn’t speak, he said, “My mother’s favorite color is blue. She says it’s the color of peace, and with all of us kids peace is what she most wants in life.”
Sam was silent as he tucked the afghan over the two of them. It was a balmy, warm day, but Sam’s shock had made her body cold to the touch, as though all her warming blood had retreated to somewhere deep within her. Stroking her damp hair back from her temple, Mike pulled her closer, trying his best to cover all of her with his own body. He didn’t know why he was so adamant about it, but he felt it was imperative that he get her to talk.
“Did your mother sing to you?” he asked. Sam didn’t answer. “Did I ever tell you that my great-great-grandmother was a famous opera singer? She was called La-Reina. Ever hear of her?”
Sam shook her head no.
“My father has some records she made. Pretty good voice if I do say so myself. It amazes me, though, that no one in my family can sing a note. Not fair, is it?”
She was silent as he rubbed her back and held her so very tightly, so very securely to his big body. Samantha remembered what she had worked so hard not to remember: No one had held her after her mother died. After her mother’s death, her father had spent three years sitting in a darkened room. Most days he didn’t bother to shave or change out of his bathrobe, and he ate only enough to keep himself alive. Sam had done her best to cheer him up, but whatever she did, she never allowed him to see her own loneliness. She had never let him see her own sadness, never let him know how much she needed him, and how much she missed her mother.
“Yellow,” Sam whispered. “My mother liked yellow.”
Mike held Samantha for hours as she talked to him and told him about her mother and about how much her mother had meant to her. Remembering the story she’d told him about her father and her being like clocks that ran down after Allison Elliot died, Mike began to hear something else in Samantha’s words: She blamed herself for her mother’s death. She’d said that to him once, that she had killed her mother with her demands to go to a children’s party, but she’d covered herself by saying that she knew that wasn’t true. He now realized that had been an intellectual response. On a gut level, Samantha really and truly thought her mother’s death was her fault. What’s more, she thought that her father also believed she was responsible. Why else had Dave shut her off, not looking at his only child, not talking to her, not comforting her? The selfish bastard! Mike thought. He’d thought only of his own grief and not his daughter’s.
After Kane’s wife had died, Kane’s grief had debilitated him, but he’d done his best to be there for his boys who’d waked in the night crying for their mommie.
But Samantha hadn’t cried and she wasn’t crying now. She was pale and cold and so weak she could hardly move her hands, but she was dry eyed. Denying herself the release of tears was the way she had punished herself for causing her mother’s death
and her father’s grief.
“As a child I was a terror,” Sam was saying. “I was selfish and demanding and always had to have my own way. Once my mother bought me a beautiful pair of blue velvet shoes, and I was so rotten, I wouldn’t even try them on. I’d wanted red patent leather shoes.”
“What did your mother do?”
“She told me that she was not going to drive all the way back downtown to purchase different shoes for me. She said she was not raising a prima donna and that I was to take what I could get.”
“Did you get your red shoes?” he asked softly, already hating this story. It was the third one she’d told in which her normal, childish selfishness was blown up into making Samantha sound like a child demon.
“Oh yes. The next day, I told my mother how pretty her hair was and how blue her eyes were. I told her I was pleased she didn’t look old like my friends’ mothers who were without exception fat and ugly. I told her she should dress like the beauty she was. She smiled at me and asked what I had in mind, so I told her I remembered seeing a dress on a mannequin in the window of Stewart’s Department Store that would look fabulous on her.”
“And she took you back downtown?”
“She said that such sincere flattery and such cleverness in trying to get what I wanted deserved to be rewarded, but she warned me that there had better actually be a dress in Stewart’s window or I’d catch it.”