**************
Adele Lyman turned another page in the album. “This is one of my favorites. Josh had just turned 6; Joanie was 11. Halloween. They were always into historical figures.”
Cassandra Brandt leaned over and touched the picture. “Joanie’s obviously Cleopatra, but...who are you, Josh?”
He blushed. “Benjamin Disraeli.” Sam roared with laughter, and Josh shot him the Glare of Death. Their mothers had been here one hour, and already the baby pictures.
“That’s odd,” Adele said. “There’s an empty spot. I wonder what went here.”
A white mist rolled in. Josh looked at Sam; Sam was fuzzy and fading. “Sam!” he called, but it did no good. “Sam!”
“Josh! Josh, wake up!”
Josh’s head snapped up. “Wha—”
“You fell asleep at the table again.” Josh blinked.
Noah Lyman.
“I — I’m sorry, Dad.” He looked down at his hand. His ring was gone. No; he was 11. What would he be doing with a ring on his wedding finger?
His mother smiled sweetly as she put breakfast in front of him. “Who’s Sam?”
“I — I don’t know.”
...Sam reached for Josh through the fog. No. We’ve been through too much already. “Josh! Don’t leave me!”
“Sam!” Sam popped up in bed. For a moment he had no idea where he was. Then he rubbed his eyes and looked toward the door. “Sam, get up. You’ll be late for school.” Sam swung his legs over the edge of the bed, noticed his father still watching him. “Who’s Josh?” Sam knew his dad didn't like him paying too much attention to other boys, though he didn't know why.
Sam shook his head. “I had a funny dream.” He got up and got ready for school, like he did every day. But he didn’t feel the way he did every day. He was aching, like he’d forgotten something, and the third finger of his left hand itched.
Josh was in a daze all day. Teachers called on him three and four times without response. He stared at his friends as though they were strangers. You could see in his walk that his mind was elsewhere. Sam. The name was stuck in his mind, and he didn’t know why.
Sam couldn’t stop staring at the older boys at recess and in the halls. A couple of them noticed and whispered with nervous cruelty about the “Seaborn faggot.” Tall boys with light brown hair and confident swaggers held a particular fascination. At one point he heard, as clearly as though someone had said it aloud, “Forget it. Josh is in Connecticut.” He had no idea who Josh was, and only the vaguest concept of Connecticut.
The second day was better. Beneath his father’s scruity, Sam woke up again calling for Josh, but he made it through the day without thinking of him more than a few times. Josh dreamed of the mysterious boy with bright blue eyes, and his mother asked if Sam wasn’t the adorable red-headed girl in Josh’s class, but his day, as well, passed without incident. Their parents breathed easier, though Elliot Seaborn, as he climbed into bed the second night, told his wife, “I’m worried about Sam.”
Then the third day, which should have been better than the second, turned out to be unbearable. Sam took all the money he had saved from moving lawns and selling lemonade, from a paper route and extra chores around the house, and, begging the remainder from his brother, bought a recording of “Ave Maria.” After school Josh checked out every Dickens novel in the library. Across a span of three thousand miles and a quarter of a century, both boys looked at the third finger of their left hands and wondered why they felt like finding whatever went there was the most important thing they’d ever do.
All hell broke loose on the fourth day. Sam had been playing the “Ave Maria” over and over since the time he bought it. Sometime late the fourth evening, Elliot came to his younger son’s room and watched his son listening to that heartbreaking piece of music, eyes squeezed shut, tears streaming unchecked down his face. Something did not sit right with Elliot Seaborn. “Sam,” he asked quietly, “you’ve been listening to that all night. Why don’t you play something else?”
Sam, somehow, did not sense danger. “No!” he practically screamed it. “I have to keep listening...for Josh.”
Then his father’s fingers dug into his shoulder, and his father was shaking him. “Who is Josh? Who is he?” And Sam sobbed, and could say nothing.
Elliot stormed back to his bedroom. “Call your shrink,” he told Cassandra. “Something’s wrong with Sam.”
Josh brought Bleak House to the dinner table and continued reading, as if he’d literally fallen into it, as he pulled in his chair and put his napkin in his lap.
“No books at the table, Josh,” Adele said as she brought his plate over. He nodded but did not put the book away.
“Josh, did you hear your mother?” Noah asked.
Josh looked up. “Oh. Sorry, Mom.” And turned another page.
“Joshua!” Noah snapped. “You know the rule. We have asked you twice now. Put your book away.”
Josh found he couldn’t do it. He stared at his parents, bewildered, but he couldn’t put the book down.
“Well, then,” Adele said, seeing her son was not going to follow instructions, “maybe you should go to your room and not eat dinner, if you’d rather read.”
It was when Josh Lyman, a rapidly growing child with an admirable appetite, actually got up and left the table without dinner, that his parents truly began to worry. “You’d better call Stanley,” Noah said grimly. “Something’s wrong with Josh.”
On the fifth day, there were psychiatrists.
Leona was more of a spiritualist than a therapist; her office was filled with crystals and soft sitar music. Sam played with the cars and toy soldiers on the floor, because he knew she expected him to. Leona asked a few questions about girls. Sam said they were all right. She asked about boys. He kept his face neutral, blank, as though he didn’t understand the question. She asked who Josh was. He didn’t answer.
Stanley was an old friend of Noah Lyman’s. Everyone was an old friend of Noah Lyman’s, but Stanley was a good man and an adequate therapist. He engaged Josh in tangential patter about sports and school. He asked about Joanie, and Josh admitted that sometimes he still blamed himself for her death. Stanley did not ask about Sam.
Elliot Seaborn didn’t particularly trust Leona. Still, when she said that 8 is far too young for a child to know if he’s a homosexual, Elliot was relieved. There was time to save Sam. Elliot loved his son, but there were possibilities a father simply could not bear.
Stanley told Adele and Noah that different children react to tragedy in different ways. Josh was the kind who would be relatively calm when the incident happened, but would store his pain away, waiting to explode at another time.
Adele wanted to hold her son. She wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault Joanie died and to encourage him to cry, or scream, or do whatever he felt like he needed to do, but Stanley had warned them not to pressure Josh into revealing his emotions before he was ready. So she just reminded him they were leaving for vacation on Friday, and not to forget to pack his swim trunks.
On the morning of the seventh day, Josh started crying when he saw a picture of the White House, and Sam, perhaps under the influence of Cassandra’s hippie psychiatrist, blurted to his mother, “I remember being 32.” They both noticed a thin strip of the skin on their left ring finger slightly paler than the rest of their hand, as though it wasn’t accustomed to exposure to the sun.
Then the Seaborns and the Lymans were airborne. The Lymans were racing through O’Hare, not as rushed to make their connecting flight to Las Vegas as Noah suggested. Josh stopped dead in the middle of the terminal. The intercom announced the arrival of a flight from Los Angeles. Slowly, Josh walked to the gate of the incoming flight.
“Josh? Josh, come on,” Noah urged. “What are you doing? We’re going to miss our flight.”
But Adele held her husband back. Maternal instinct said something vitally important was about to happen to her son.
Sam scuffed his feet on the jetway carpet and grumbled about old, scary relatives who called him “Sammy-boy” and pinched his cheeks. Elliot herded him along, pausing occasionally to ask Paul to keep up, or to ask Cassandra if he’d remembered everything from the wedding gift to their return tickets. A huge grin spread over Sam’s face, and he started running up the jetway, heedless of his parents’ sharp admonitions and the startled yelps of other passengers as he bowled them over. Sam burst through the gate and into the waiting area. There he was, tall and awkward, light brown hair and dark brown eyes. “Josh!”
Josh smiled the most beautiful smile in his 11-year-old arsenal. There were the black hair and blue eyes he hadn’t quite been able to remember for the past week. “Hey, Sam.” And they embraced, two little boys in the middle of an airport who might have been brothers or cousins.
They heard the roar behind them. “Sam!” Their hearts jumped; Josh grabbed Sam’s hand and yanked him to Noah and Adele.
“Dad!” he panted. “Take our picture.”
“What? Joshua, who is this boy?”
“Just take the picture, please. And hurry.”
A large, angry man who looked a great deal like Sam was storming across the terminal. “Samuel Norman Seaborn!”
“Sam,” Adele whispered. “Noah, take the picture!”
Noah began fiddling with his camera’s numerous buttons and knobs, muttering about everyone losing their minds. Elliot Seaborn bore down on them with the intent of a freight train. “Hurry, Dad!” Josh shouted.
Noah raised the camera.
Elliot took a final, lunging step forward and clamped a meaty hand on Sam’s shoulder. He ripped him away. Sam, or maybe Josh, or maybe it didn’t matter which one anymore, screamed.
Click.
The white mist rolled out. Sam looked at Josh; Josh was solid and real and sitting on the couch beside his mother. They looked down at their left hands. Their rings were where they belonged.
“That’s odd,” Adele Lyman said. “I don’t remember this picture. I don’t even know what it’s supposed to be.” Josh and Sam stared at the fuzzy image. “Noah never did get the hang of that camera."
Two hands clutching desperately. The bottom half of one torso and a set of legs being forcibly dragged out of the frame.
Proof.
Their eyes locked, Sam and Josh wordlessly pushed off the couch and stood, staring at each other, in the middle of the living room rug. “Josh?” Adele asked, concerned.
“Sam, are you all right?” Cassandra said.
They took one step forward. Sam’s hand went to the back of Josh’s neck, the other to the small of Josh’s back. Josh’s hand tangled in Sam’s hair, the other on Sam’s hip. Their lips met in a fire of need — the need to prove the other was real. The feel of Sam’s tongue and the taste of Josh’s mouth were the only things they could believe in. Cassandra smiled. “Isn’t that sweet?” she said quietly. Adele looked away and cleared her throat uncomfortably.
They broke the kiss and pressed their foreheads together. “I thought—”
“So did I.”
“What the hell happened?”
“All I know is that you were gone.”
“But none of that ever happened. It wasn’t real.”
“It was real enough. Too real.”
Cassandra’s brow creased. “What are you two talking about, Sam?”
“I think we’ve looked at enough pictures for today, Mom,” Josh said.
Adele frowned, but she closed the album without protest. There was something about Josh just then...something she almost remembered, or that had almost happened. She set the photo album on the coffee table and turned to Cassandra. “I don’t know about you, but I could use some lemonade.”
And they left their sons wrapped in each other’s arms, gaining strength and belief that they had survived something in those few seconds. They refused to think about what would have happened had Noah not captured that grainy image. They refused to consider that he might not have; that in the world they lived in every day, those seven days never happened. They closed their eyes to the memory of the white mist; they believed in each other, and, just for this moment, nothing else. It was enough.
END