BEFORE
Sam makes repetition feel new. He makes years pass in seconds.
The sun never rises quite the same, he tells me as the sun curves over the earth like a halo. Silhouettes of construction workers play with their orchestras of metal and machinery outside Sam’s window.
Every day, they build, till our little town becomes a city. The process is gradual, but it feels instantaneous. It feels the same when I realize Sam is growing as fast as our home.
Lanky and pale, he begins to fill out. His bones stretch furiously overnight. Those honey eyes settle on thinning cheekbones. His voice starts to crack, and his shoulders broaden. His temper becomes unpredictable, foul, and moody too.
But for all that’s changed, Sam is still a child. In the mornings, he wakes me with tickles up and down my sides. His breakfast goes untouched unless sweet bread and pudding sit on the plate. He lies about little things like brushing his teeth or doing his lesson work. And his curiosity is as insatiable as it always was.
“Sweet Sam,” he whispers. “Sweet Sam, wake up.”
My eyes flutter open. Sam’s face casts a shadow on mine, blocking out the basking sun. The summer heat turns him dopey and half-lidded. He leans in, voice cool on my chin, lips a breath from my nose.
“You’re so beautiful.”
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“It means I like looking at you,” Sam says. He scoots closer, sighing and stretching his limbs like a cat. “I like being with you.” His fingers trace my shirt collar, up my neck, poking my features.
Sam is still unable to touch other people. Other people are not allowed to touch him. I am the only exception. Most of the day, he is confined to his room. He calls it his bubble, his chamber, and, on sadder days, his cage. He spent so long staring through its glass partitions, I think he started to resent it. It was easier to pretend that room was the world when he wasn’t tall enough to see outside of it.
“I like being with you too,” I say.
Sam hums in pleased, tired tones.
Nurse Ella explained Sam’s disease to me a long time ago. She said it was simple, yet it wasn’t. She said he was normal cognitively, physically, and in every way, but one. She said his body couldn’t protect itself. She said that job fell onto our shoulders.
“If I see a single scuff on those pants, I’ll make you wash them in the river, young man!” she yells, sitting on the park bench as Sam and I run together across the field.
Nurse Ella is a harsh, disciplined woman. She wears her hair in a tight bun at the back of her neck. Her white uniform is neat, pressed, stainless. I’m convinced her back does not bend, and her hands are made of iron.
“Old hag,” Sam whispers, laughing, sticking his tongue out at her, and tugging me along.
Nurse Ella opens her newspaper with a displeased grunt.
Sam is under Ella’s care. When he was little and rambunctious, no other nurses could handle him. Nurse Ella was not deterred. She washed her hands vigorously and marched to wherever Sam had run off. She grabbed the collar of his shirt, dragged him back to his room, and warned him that little boys who don’t take their medicine cannot grow into strong knights. She told Sam that if he wanted his pudding and his sweet bread, he would keep himself clean, tidy his room, and do as he was told.
Nurse Ella is good at bargaining.
She is good at keeping Sam safe.
She told Sam all the fairytales she knew. She reads to him and smacks his arm with the cover if he interrupts. She sewed him a mask, told him not to lose it, and always wear it over his nose and mouth. She scolds him frequently. She makes him sit and think about his actions.
Almost daily, Sam tells Nurse Ella that she is boring and mean and an old hag. Nurse Ella reminds him that she doesn’t care.
She does care, though, I think, as much as I do.
For someone in Sam’s position, not living is a precaution, she once told me, looking at Sam past the glass as his doctors made him lie on his side and examined his body. That’s what those foolish men in white coats tell me. She made her signature displeased grunt. Pessimists. The lot of them, keeping a child cooped up here forever. That won’t do. He must live. Once you’re my age, living is unpleasant. Come along.
Where are we going? I asked.
Nurse Ella never answered my questions. She just told me to hurry up and follow.
She takes Sam and me outside every Saturday, no matter the weather. She makes sure Sam is wearing his mask and gloves. She tells us to hold hands as we cross the street. She takes us to the bakery, to the newspaper stands, and to the park.
Sam feigns deathly injury when I poke my stick between his ribs. He retaliates, his sword swinging at my leg. I jump over it, landing off balance and falling in the grass.
Sam laughs at me. He says I look like a ragdoll. Then he throws his stick aside and sits next to me, trying to catch his breath. Heat swelters beneath his mask on days like this. Sweat trickles from his brow, and his lungs beg for cooler air. Sam is careful not to touch his face despite that. He doesn’t take off the mask or fidget with it. Instead, he closes his eyes and lets the trees’ shady patches and distant construction sounds obscure his hard breathing.
Nurse Ella sits on the bench, back straight and iron-handed, giving us the occasional glance. All around her, people exist in a world I seldom see.
The park is full today of color and birds and people passing through, on bikes, on foot, in couples, with pets, and with joy.
A woman dressed in far too many layers throws bread crumbs in the path, pigeons gathering in a flock around her. An old man wipes his grandson’s crumb-ridden mouth with a handkerchief. Girls, in a hurry, canter with their arms interlaced and school bags bouncing on their backs.
Just behind them, a couple holds hands, the two leaning on each other, whispering affections, and smiling all the while. The girl spins in her dress, the boy twirling her by the hand. They don’t pay any mind to the park or the world around them. The path is merely a dirt road, and the civilians around them are merely background in their play.
The wind blows, leaves rustling overhead. The boy takes the girl’s face in his hands. Their noses brush. She presses a kiss to his lips. Pink dusts the boy’s cheeks.
It makes me smile that the girl gives him color.
I wonder if Sam feels the same way. Only Sam isn’t smiling at the sight. His mask conceals his mouth, but his eyes are lightless.
The woman throwing bread crumbs glances at him, leering at the mask and gloves. She shivers, quickly turning back to her flock. The old man holds his grandson’s hand. He picks up the pace passing Sam, leaving more room than he would with any other stranger. The running school girls pause, their canter slowed to a trot as they whisper to each other and stare.
Sam quickly turns away from the path. He hooks his elbows around his knees, hiding his face, making fists to conceal the gloves behind his pant leg. After a second’s fidgeting, he grabs me by the wrist and pulls me upright, dragging me into a hiding place behind the bushes.
“Sam?” I call. “What’s wrong?”
“People are looking at me,” he whispers. His thumb slips over the scar on his wrist, the one he was given years ago in the dim corner of a closet. “They all think I’m different.”
They. The children in his past? Some are dead, some have gone home. What they left behind is greater than a little white line on his wrist.
Sam lets me go, breathless, too aware of himself. Even beneath the shade, behind a cluster of hedges, he hunches, makes himself smaller. Like he doesn’t want to exist.
“You are different,” I say. Sam’s gaze drifts from the ground to me. I smile, just as the girl did looking at her partner. “No one else has suns in their eyes.”
Sam blinks. The sun sifts through the leaves casting shadows that flurry with the breeze as if to prove my point. They play on his face the same way rays of light kiss him in the mornings.
“You’re beautiful,” I say, my fingers dragging up to his face, trailing the jaw that’s become sharper the older he grows. “People like looking at you.”
The passerbyers past the brush going on with their days are left only with an empty space of grass. I wonder how blind they must be. To not notice all the joy that exists under Sam’s mask.
“Do you mean that?” he asks. The bush crams us together. Our knees brush, his hip nudging mine. He looks down at me as if all the people on the other side aren’t there anymore.
“Of course I do.”
Sam doesn’t smile. The skin around his eyes doesn’t crease. Instead, he smooths his touch down my arm, his pupils expanding. His curiosity explores more freely than before. The shame he used to wear when accidentally grazing my chest or my back or anywhere that clothes cover skin, dissipates. His inhibition fades with it.
Sam pulls down his mask.
I panic, reaching to put it back on, but he stops me. He takes both my wrists and bends down so our foreheads kiss.
“Sam, you’ll get sick–”
“I don’t care,” he whispers. His eyes close. He breathes me in, releasing my hands and cupping my face. His movements are awkward, unsure, but at the same time impatient.
I plant my hands on his chest. His pulse thrums fast and hard. It quickens as he leans in, so close that our noses touch and his lips just barely sweep across mine.
“Sam! Get out of there this instant!” Nurse Ella’s voice rings like a church bell. If church bells were terrifying, that is.
Sam pulls away, pulling the mask back over his face. He grabs me by the arm again, dragging me into a run.
“C’mon, c’mon let’s go!” he screeches. We almost trip over each other and the twigs, somehow making it out in one piece. Together we sprint, Nurse Ella marching on after us. Sam laughs all the while, jumping over the paths, through the trees, making sure I’m still with him.
The two of us skid to a stop right before falling into a puddle of mud, but the wind has other ideas. The two of us lose our balance and fall together. The mud sloshes around us, seeping into our clothes. Sam sits up to make sure I’m alright. Once he sees that we’re both only breathless and covered in dirt, that smile finally curves his face, creasing the skin around his eyes.
He looks so happy. Even if it is brief, a cursory tick of an arrow on a watch, the moment ebbs with rays of light. It makes the times Sam is lost in his own head, cooped up, staring through glass, seem insignificant.
“Oh, you filthy little animals!” Nurse Ella yells, stomping over to the edge of the mud bath. She plants her hands on her hips. “At this rate, I’ll have to hose you off like dogs! Out! Now!”
Sam and I obey, trudging out of the water, side-eyeing each other in the process, snickering under our breaths.
Nurse Ella drags us back home by our ears, all the while spouting lecture after lecture. She drops us right outside the door, telling us to wait for her unless we want to eat nothing but spinach for the rest of the week. She comes back with buckets of water and pours them over our heads. Sam and I squeal and shiver. Nurse Ella takes to scrubbing our heads with what looks like a small broom.
Once our skin is raw, and we smell of soap, Nurse Ella grunts. “Silly children.”
“I’m not a child anymore, Nurse Ella,” Sam says, his ankles rocking back and forth. “I’ll be taller than you soon.”
“Yes, well, until you’ve learned not to play in the mud, you’ll be a child in my eyes,” Nurse Ella says. She drops towels on our heads. Tells us to come back inside once we’re dry. Before she goes, she takes Sam’s temperature, releasing a heavy exhale when it comes back normal.
She’s a good person, I think.
Good and mean, but good all the same.
“Sam,” I say. “Do you think we could have more adventures like this?”
He looks out into the horizon, past the park and the bakery and the newspaper stands. Past the construction miles in the sky and all the noise with it.
“We could run away together,” he says. “Just you and me. No one else. What do you think?”
I swallow hard, the hospital’s walls and all the people inside tugging. I think of everything I’d be leaving behind, running away. But then, I think of Sam’s face as we hid in the brush. I think of his laughter in the mud, of his lips so close to stealing mine.
“Will that make you happy?” I ask.
“Yes,” he says.
“Promise?”
“Promise.” Sam grabs me round the waist, tucking his head in the crook of my neck, stretching his limbs like a cat on a rooftop. He kisses my cheek, whispering, “You make me so happy, my sweet Sam.”
