Page 31 of Same Time Next Summer

Sam

As her junior year wrapped up and the summer loomed, Sam dreaded going out to the beach. She’d never been there without Wyatt, and the thought of looking down the beach and not seeing him walking toward her with his surfboard, not hearing his guitar from the treehouse—it was enough to take her down for good. She daydreamed about picking up her phone and seeing a text: Meet me at the beach. And that daydream made her whole body ache. Her parents agreed to let her stay in the city for the summer, and her mother came back every few weeks to check on her. Sam worked as a hostess in a Mexican restaurant and saw herself and Wyatt in every couple that walked in and shared nachos. She tried to divine from their body language what it was that they were doing right.

When Sam startedher senior year there was no doubt that she needed help, and she agreed to see a therapist. Dr. Judy let her talk for the first three sessions withoutsaying much at all. Sam told her the whole story of their relationship and their families and the blowup. She confessed that she sometimes spent the hours between three and five a.m. staring at her phone, willing something to happen.

“Sometimes when my body is exhausted in the pool, I force myself to swim one more lap so he’ll call. Or I tell myself that if I get to Fourteenth Street and the light is green it means he’s going to call. I hold my breath a lot.” Sam laughed a tiny laugh and pulled a throw pillow onto her lap. The piping was coming unraveled and she wanted to pull it right off. “I’ve gone crazy, haven’t I?”

“A little bit,” said Dr. Judy, leaning forward in her chair for the first time. “It’s not your fault. You’re addicted.”

“To Wyatt?”

“Yes. To him and mainly the idea of him. You are addicted to the dopamine reaction you feel when you get a hit of him. This is typical of a user who became hooked on a substance during a critical time of development, and now that addiction is woven into your nervous system. You’re well into your detox, and I am recommending no contact, which should be easy.” Dr. Judy laughed at that last comment, which stung.

“You’re putting me in a twelve-step program for heartbreak?”

“Kind of. You have an open wound, let’s let it scab and then heal.”

Sam stared at her hands. There was a raw cuticle on her right index finger that gave her a delicious spurt of pain when she worried it with her thumb. “But I love him. That’sthe whole point. You can’t just make yourself stop loving someone.”

“You’re eighteen years old. You’re not in love with this boy. It’s youth and sex and excitement, all mixed up into an obsession. Technically, I’d call this an adjustment disorder. We have to get you adjusted to life without him and focused on something else.”

Sam just stared at her.

“Trust me on this, and I can help you.”

It seemed to Sam that she was probably right. She must have been addicted if the thought of never touching him again made her physically sick. Dr. Judy even went so far as to tell her parents to get her a new phone to break the visual and tactile association with Wyatt. Sam had to promise not to look him up. No Myspace, no Facebook. Sam liked the basic idea of this. She liked the idea that she had a disease that could be cured. She liked the implication that maybe Wyatt was bad for her. She felt a bit of relief in the way Dr. Judy minimized the whole thing, like she’d flicked the lights on in a horror movie to reveal that the bloody bits were just ketchup.

When Gracie wasborn in December, Sam dutifully visited her mother at the hospital. Bill placed Gracie in her arms without even asking. Sam handed her right back. Travis was home for the holidays, and the apartment was too small for a family of four plus a crying baby. Gracie slept in a bassinet in her parents’ room, but the every-three-hours wailing seeped right into Sam and Travis’s room and workedSam’s already agitated nerves. It was her father who had caused the breakup, but in truth it was Gracie who was the last straw. Sam wasn’t about to admit to Dr. Judy that she resented a baby, but there it was.

Sam babysat for the first time when Gracie was six weeks old. She woke up from her nap screaming, and Sam found her in her crib sweaty and red-eyed. “You stink,” Sam said, lifting her up and placing her on her parents’ bed to change her. Gracie looked Sam right in the eye, like she wanted to tell her something.

Sam grabbed the bottle her mother had left her and plopped onto the sofa with Gracie in her arms. She reached over to grab the TV remote and startled Gracie into a smile. Gracie looked up at Sam with the bottle between her gums and a big grin on her face, and Sam felt the hardness in her soften a bit. She leaned back and let herself feel the weight of Gracie in her arms, a whole human being with a whole future ahead of her. She wondered who was going to break Gracie’s heart.

Sam started jumping in to help with Gracie whenever she could. She liked to wear the baby carrier on her chest while she walked around the city. She wore her dad’s parka because it was big enough to close around the two of them, and she warmed her lips on the rim of Gracie’s tiny pink hat. The weight of her and the smell of her made Sam feel like she was connected to something permanent.

When Gracie was three months old, Sam offered to take the bassinet into her room for a few nights. “You look exhausted, Mom. And I’m up anyway.”

Laurel placed her hands on Sam’s cheeks. “I’m so worriedabout you. You need to start sleeping. You’re going to fall apart.”

“Ha. Too late. Just let me have her for a few nights. Leave me the three a.m. bottle.”

The first night they shared a room, Gracie woke up at two. Sam had been lying awake listening to her breathe. There was a rhythm to Gracie’s breathing that went well with the hum of the First Avenue traffic. Another thing she would have liked to have told Wyatt. Sam changed Gracie’s diaper and settled back into her bed to give her a bottle. Gracie gave Sam a sleepy smile in thanks. Apparently, they both fell asleep, because the next thing Sam knew, it was seven and time to get up for school. It was the best night’s sleep Sam had had in months.

Gracie became a permanent resident of Sam’s room and they were both sleeping eight hours at a stretch. Sam and Dr. Judy started talking about things that were not necessarily Wyatt related—her college plans, her career plans, her mixed feelings about not going to the prom.

On a regular Tuesday session, Sam walked in with a large envelope. “I got into USC.” The first thing she’d thought when she opened the mailbox was that she couldn’t wait to tell Wyatt. She winced at the fresh pain.

“Oh,” said Dr. Judy. “What does that bring up for you?”

Sam tried not to roll her eyes, but it wasn’t easy. She assumed Dr. Judy endured a lot of eye rolling with comments like that. “On one hand it makes me excited. Like I could go to where he is and maybe run into him. Or he’d hear I was there and want to start over?” Sam ran her hand over the envelope like it was a pet.

“On the other hand?”

Sam looked over Dr. Judy’s shoulder at the framed beach scene that was supposed to relax her but never did. “On the other hand, I know that’s a fantasy and that if he wanted to see me he would have called me by now.”

“Exactly.”

Sam really did hate Dr. Judy just a little bit. “And when I think about it, going out there and not being with Wyatt would be a lot more painful than staying here. And being with Gracie.”

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