The door swings open, and there’s Sam. “Hey,” says Sam. She looks terrible, even worse than Timothy. Dark circles under her eyes, messy hair. She sounds bad too; there’s a crack in her voice.
“Can I come in?”
Sam shrugs again and stands aside for Amy to enter, keeping her back angled away.
“Sam. I just came from seeing Uncle Timmy.” Sam’s shoulders tense. Amy tries to keep her voice calm and measured but she isn’tfeelingcalm and measured. “If Gertie is sleeping, let’s go upstairs.” Sam waits for Amy to go up the stairs, then she follows her. When they reach the main floor Sam flops on the couch and Amy, remaining standing, says, “I can’t believe you had a party! Sam! What were you thinking?”
Sam closes her eyes, and rests her head on the back of the couch. When she opens her eyes she sighs and says, “It wasn’t supposed to be a party. It was supposed to be a get-together, just the cast and a couple others. It got a little out of control.”
“Whoever it was supposed to be! That’s incredibly disrespectful to your uncle. It would have been disrespectful even it was his house, but this issomeone else’s housethat you’re lucky enough to be living in. That’s extra disrespectful.”
“I thought he wasn’t coming home. I would have had it all cleaned up.”
“That doesn’t matter. That’s not the point.”
Sam snorts.
“Did you justsnort?”
“Maybe.”
“Why?”
“I just think it’s pretty funny that you, of all people, are worried about honesty.”
Amy does a quick mental rundown of her last several interactions with her daughter. All very normal, everything on the up-and-up. She can’t come up with anything untoward. “What in the world are you talking about?”
Sam gets up and walks to the table in the breakfast nook; she sits, so Amy sits too. Sam says, “When my Disney show was canceled.” Amy’s stomach drops. “Uncle Timmy told me that it wasn’t up to him, whether or not I stayed out there. He told me it was up to you. You lied to me and told me Uncle Timmy had to go on location. You hadhimlie to me. He never went away on location that year! Check his IMDb. I did. He didn’t shoot anything outside of L.A. until I was a sophomore in high school.”
Amy’s heart is beating faster and her palms are starting to sweat. “When did he tell you this? Andwhy?”
“It doesn’t matter.” It does matter though. Did Timothy tell Sam this because he was still mad abouttheirfight? Here she’d thought they were doing well—that they’d made some real progress!
“Whatever Timmy told you—it’s not exactly the whole story, Sam.”
Sam rises from the table and stomps down the stairs, and Amy, stonewalled, bewildered, doesn’t follow her.
Time passes. How many minutes? Amy doesn’t look at her watch. She waits for a while to see if Sam will emerge from her bedroom and come back upstairs, so they can talk. When she doesn’t, she takes an exploratory trip around the main floor of Floyd Barringer’s house. Amy had been so young when Timmy was in high school—she was just the pesky little sister, not really even old enough to tag along, not threatening enough to be an actualbother. But she remembered Floyd because he was always nice to her, and she had a little bit of a crush on him. Not a real one, of course: when the boys were seniors in high school she was just a little peanut of a thing, nine or so. Sometimes Floyd and Timothy would drop her off or pick her up at a friend’s house, and they always smelled like forbidden things: cigarette smoke and leather motorcycle jackets and something else, earthier, that she now realizes was probably weed.
She studies the photo of Floyd and his adult children—one boy, one girl—that sits on the mantel in the open-concept living room. Floyd has the puffy face that signifies wealth and success across a certain swath of America, and that part isn’t familiar, because he used to be thin as a reed, but his smile is recognizable, and she likes the way he has an arm around each of his kids. He looks loving and proud and supportive without being possessive. Go Floyd, she thinks. You seem to have it figured out. A house like this, a family like that.
She steps out on the deck and looks at the slice of Vaill Beach visible from here. To the left is the looming, forbidding beauty of Mohegan Bluffs. She thinks about the Niantic and Mohegan people, who battled for supremacy of the island, until the Niantic forced the Mohegans to their deaths over the cliffs. Why must humans always be fighting one another, each side armed with a stalwart belief in its own agenda? Look at her and Sam, look at her and Timothy!
Eventually she goes back inside, descends the stairs to the bedroom level, and knocks on Sam’s door. The door to the room where Gertie sleeps is still closed, so she keeps her knocking soft.
“I’m not here,” says Sam, but Amy keeps at it, and finally Sam releases an audible sigh and says, “Come in, Iguess.”
Sam is lying on her bed, arms folded, staring at the ceiling. It takes a moment for Amy to figure out what’s different about herand then she realizes she rarely sees her daughter not in motion, not on a screen or in conversation, not laughing or talking or moving. She’s completely, utterly still.
“May I sit?” Amy tips her head toward the bed. Sam grants her a grudging nod before moving over about an eighth of an inch. Well, that’s something. Amy sits. “Timmy’s right,” she says. “All that time in New York, forMockingbird. Then another year away from home forMy Three Daughters. Your dad and I talked about it, and we didn’t want you to grow up in Timmy’s world. We wanted you to grow up in the world that we made for you and Henry. We figured that if acting was something you really wanted to do you’d find your way back to it. We figured you didn’t need to be a child actor to be an actor.”
“I don’t know,” says Sam. “I don’t know what I needed to be. I don’t know what I should have been.” Her face crumples and she looks like a little girl once again, like the girl who used to write letters to the Elf on the Shelf in the off-season because she was worried he’d think nobody loved him for who he really was outside of Christmas.
“It was the right thing for you to come home then, and if we had to... massage things a little to get you there, and if that upsets you, well, I’m sorry. I am sorry.”
“Lie,” said Sam. “Not massage.”
“Fine. Yes, okay. Lie.” Amy’s hand hovers over Sam’s leg. She wants to put a hand on her calf, to reassure her, but she can sense that Sam doesn’t want to be touched right then. So she tries to reassure her with her voice instead. “Sam, honey. You’ve got so much ahead of you. We didn’t want you to rush that. We wanted you to be able to make those decisions later, with the grounding of a solid home behind you. You’re just getting to the good part right now.”
