Page 28 of Same Time Next Summer

Wyatt looked down at her hand in his, so angry at Bill for creating this moment.

“Last night I saw your dad and my mom, kind of making out. There’s been some kind of an affair and my dad went back to Florida.”

Sam just looked at him. “I don’t understand.”

“I know, this is really hard to hear, and it was really hard to see.”

Sam turned away from him and stared straight out the windshield. The silence that followed put new space between them. Finally, Sam said, “Take me home.”

When Wyatt pulled into his driveway, Sam went right into her house without saying a word. He tried to imagine what she’d find in there. Would Travis be home? Would they all just talk about it? Wyatt was overcome with jealousy at the thought. His dad had just gotten up and left, and the Holloways were probably already in group therapy.Thanks, Bill, for blowing up my family.

Apparently, Laurel couldn’tspend another night next door to Marion. But, of course, she wasn’t going to leave Bill alone living next to her. From his kitchen window, Wyatt could see Bill and Travis packing up the car to go back to Manhattan.

He texted Sam: What’s happening? Are you leaving?

Sam: Looks like it. Can I come say goodbye?

Wyatt: Meet me at the beach

They had ten minutes to say everything that was hopefully going to make this thing okay. Wyatt sat with his arm around Sam and felt the weight of her legs draped over his. He felt her head on his shoulder, exactly where it was meant to be, and ran his fingers over the tangle of her hair. He wasn’t sure that he’d processed what he’d seen last night or that he had any idea of what was going to happen, but he did know that right in his arms was everything that mattered. “I love you and this has nothing to do with us, okay?” he kept saying.

Sam cried and let him hold her. “I don’t understand how this can be happening.”

“I can’t believe I’m not going to see you tomorrow.” Wyatt felt emptied out as he said these words, as he imagined his body alone without Sam. He felt the happiness that he’d been so acutely aware of all summer start to melt away, and anger filled the empty space.

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 havestarted 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 anewly 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 couldtoo, 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 hisI love youlost its tenderness. He said it the way you’d say goodbye.

---