No Way to Say Goodbye - Anna McPartlin [99]
Mary was quick to replenish it.
“She’s only a baby,” Ivan said. “She’s just getting used to the situation.”
“Neither of them is a baby and Chris is as bad. He told me to fuck off the other day.” Her voice had risen.
Mary poured her some water in a different glass. She ignored it.
“And I gave out to him,” Ivan said, tired of the conversation.
“Not enough,” she replied.
“Well, what should I have done? Beaten him?” he said, annoyed now.
“You’re being ridiculous.”
The meal pretty much finished in that vein. Ivan defended his children’s behaviour and Sienna defended her reaction to a difficult situation. Mary opened a second bottle of red so that she could block out the bickering. The argument ended in stalemate so they sat in silence in front of the first episode of the second season of Lost. Mary and Sienna shared the bottle of wine, and Ivan got through a six-pack of beer.
They left at just after ten. Mary stood outside and waved them off. Sam’s car was outside but she knew he was in the hotel with Mia. It was only up the road so he’d probably walked and his house was dark and still. She had drunk too much wine so she sat on her wall to watch the water. It was still so warm. She wondered if when Mia had said she needed closure she had been telling the truth. After all, why should she? Mary was a stranger. Then she wondered if Sienna was right and Mia was seeing someone else – and, if so, why had he followed her on a visit to an ex-boyfriend and why was he staying in another hotel. Mostly she wondered why she couldn’t stop wondering about Sam Sullivan. He’s not yours, Mary.
She went to bed early, hoping to sleep soundly, but woke to banging on her neighbour’s door a little after two. She climbed halfway out of the window but she still couldn’t see who was there so she convinced herself it was Mia. He’s not yours, Mary, she reminded herself. It’s for the best, she lied. “Closure,” she muttered, and turned off the light.
Having deposited Caleb at his destination, Sam returned to bed. Now he had no distraction, he worried that he was slipping, and that although he had won a hard battle he was about to lose the war. He had come a long way in six months. Here, in this beautiful gentle place, he was further from his New York self than he could ever have imagined. And it wasn’t just Mary who had encouraged the change: it had been the place and its people, but mostly it had been himself. For years he had desperately wanted to escape himself. He had known that the man he once was would have to die, and he had died one night six months and a lifetime ago, yet just below the surface that dead man’s memories remained intact, haunting him as surely as a determined ghost.
Phones had tried to get him to talk about his past during his stay in rehab. He had employed every trick in the book to get his patient to reveal the depths of himself so that they could work through it. But he had failed.
Phones had certainly learned a lot, though. He discovered that Sam had been born an outsider. It became obvious early on that his patient’s love of his grandmother, although not Oedipal, was certainly a form of idealization. And Phones’s patient notes included his theory that the timing of her death at the cusp of his manhood ensured that her grandson would find it difficult to meet another woman, including his own mother, who could live up to the one his grandmother had become in his mind. A woman who, had she survived, would have revealed herself to be human and flawed, rather than the embodiment of a boy’s idea of perfection. This theory was validated by Sam’s inability to find lasting love but it did not explain the darkness that lay deep within his psyche. Something terrible had happened to him. Phones was sure that he had not suffered parental abuse, terrible poverty or, aside from an ill grandmother, loss. He’d never been at war and he seemed not to have been involved in an incident that would have precipitated post-traumatic stress.