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When the call came through I was with Sam in his office. He had just gone in to pick up some papers for a breakfast meeting and I was waiting in the doorway. Ginger said it was a personal call from California. The caller said it was urgent.
I wasn’t listening to the conversation when I heard Sam gasp as if someone had punched him. He hadn’t sat down to take the call and he gripped the desk for support. I got to him in time to take the phone from him before he dropped it and I wrapped my arm around him.
“This is Josh Lyman,” I said. “What’s going on?”
“My name’s Fran.” A young woman spoke over the sound of a baby crying. “I’m a friend of Sally Seaborn. Sam’s sister. Something awfuls happened. There was a car crash. His sister and his mother are both dead.”
“No. Are you sure?”
“I’ve been to the hospital, I’ve seen them, I spoke to Sal before she died. I’m sure.” Her voice faded as she tried to keep a check on her emotions. “There was a collision involving four cars, they think someone’s brakes failed.” She stopped speaking again and then gathered herself to continue. “I’m sorry, can you explain to Sam. I’m so sorry.”
“I’ll take care of it,” I said, hardly able to process the information myself.
“Josh, Sal has a baby.”
“I know.” I did know. Sally had a baby who could only have been about four months old. A little girl called Emma. There was a recent picture of her propped up against Sam’s telephone and the last time we had a delay at an airport we had chosen a toy penguin for her.
“The baby’s fine,” said Fran. “She was in the car but she wasn’t hurt.”
“Thank God,” I said, then whispered to Sam. “Emma’s okay, Emma’s fine.”
He started to try and move away from me but I kept a grip on him.
“I’m at Sal’s house now and I’m looking after Emma.”
“Right,” I said.
“But Josh, I need to know what to do. I have my own children and I’m at work tomorrow. I’m really sorry. But do you know the family situation?”
“Yes.” I knew that Emma’s father was an English man called Rick who had left as soon as he found out Sally was pregnant. I knew there were no other brothers or sisters. “What about their dad?” Of course relations had been strained between Sam’s father and the rest of the family but still…
“He doesn’t want to know.”
“She’s his granddaughter.” I breathed, incensed.
“He didn’t know anything about Emma. Sal hasn’t spoken to him since…you know…she never told him about Rick or the baby. He showed up at the hospital and he’s dealing with the funeral but he couldn’t deal with Emma.”
“Does Rick know?”
“I spoke to him, but he doesn’t want to deal with this either. Plus, he said he didn’t think Sally would want him anywhere near the baby and I know that’s true. Josh, Sal asked me to get Sam. Before she died, that’s what she wanted.”
I thought about what Sam would do if he were in any position to make a decision. “Sam’s going to be on the next flight. Can you take care of the baby until he gets there?”
“Of course. I’ll wait here.”
I took the details and disconnected. Sam was leaning heavily into me now and I needed both my arms to support him.
“Oh God, Sam.” I whispered as his body shook. He breathed short urgent breaths and seemed about to collapse. I couldn’t support him any longer and we ended up on the floor in the tiny space behind his desk. I held him against me, my arms around him, his head buried in my neck. Sam didn’t speak or make a sound, all his strength seemed to be focussed on simply breathing and controlling the shudders that wracked his body.
I couldn’t say how long we stayed that way but after what seemed a long time, Toby was picking his way through the furniture to get to us. He crouched down to survey the situation.
“What happened to him?” he asked. When I didn’t answer he laid his hand on Sam’s back and then on his hair. “Come on Sam, let’s stand up.”
The two of us helped Sam into his chair where he put his head in his hands and didn’t move.
Outside the office I quickly explained to Toby and Leo, who arrived soon after, what had happened and that Sam had to get to California. Naturally neither of them had a problem with this and Toby shouted to one of the assistants to book his flight.
“Make that two flights,” I called after him and stopped Leo as he headed into the office to talk to Sam. “Leo, I’m going with him.” I said.
“Josh,” he said. “I can’t afford to have you both out. Someone else can go with him.” This was a tricky one. Sam and I had been together for almost a year but we were by no means out. In fact we had told no one about our relationship. We had agreed not to lie if anyone asked outright but that didn’t mean we invited any questions and so far we hadn’t had any. We were fairly off-hand with each other at work and I firmly believed that no one suspected anything at all. No one who hadn’t looked behind Sam’s desk five minutes earlier that is.
“I’m going with him.” I ignored Leo’s penetrating stare. “I’ve got nothing that can’t be put off and I swear I’ll be back by Monday.” It was Thursday, it didn’t give me much time but it was all I was going to get.
“I’ll just look after the country while you’re away then shall I?” Leo growled. “Just don’t switch off your phone.”
We left soon after, taking nothing with us but the few things we kept in the office for the occasional unplanned overnighter. I was worried about whether Sam would be able to cope with the flight but, as it turned out, his formidable self-control and state of dazed shock carried him through without incident. My hand at his elbow or on his shoulder he let himself get swept in and out of taxis, check-in lines and waiting areas.
On the plane, I told the stewardess Sam wasn’t feeling well and she brought him a blanket and pillow. I gripped his hand under the blanket for most of the flight while he stared ahead. He spoke only once, when he turned to me and said, “Maybe Fran made a mistake. It could be a mistake.”
I squeezed his hand tighter. “It wasn’t a mistake, Sam.” He nodded and returned to his thoughts. Eventually he closed his eyes but I don’t think he slept.
We flew into Los Angeles and took a long cab ride from the airport to Sally’s house in the suburbs. By then I could see that Sam was beginning to come out of shock and register his surroundings.
Fran was there to meet us on the doorstep. She immediately put her arms around Sam and hugged him, sobbing soundlessly. He seemed overwhelmed by the emotion but held her nevertheless.
Finally she brought us inside, leaving us in the living room while she went to get cold drinks. We met Emma there for the first time, she was asleep in a baby chair, tucked in with the penguin Sam and I had bought for her.
Emma seemed very small to me. Though I had no clear idea what size a four month old ought to be I had convinced myself she would be sturdier than this tiny sparrow-like creature appeared to be. She was beautiful though. She had a mass of black hair, Sam’s complexion and the beginnings of the Seaborn fine features.
When Fran returned she sat and took some time to explain what had happened. Whether it was true or not she convinced Sam that neither his mother or sister had suffered at all before they died and I will always be grateful to her for that.
Finally she looked at her watch and said that she had to be going to pick up her own children. She looked at me critically and said. “Have you looked after a baby before?” The answer was terrifyingly, no.
And while Sam ran a finger gently through Emma’s hair Fran explained to me with small words and visual aids the essentials of formula preparation, diaper changing, which way was up and what day it actually was as it was obvious to her I had no idea. Then clearly convinced she was leaving a helpless infant in the hands of Laurel and Hardy she wrote down three telephone numbers and promised to come back tomorrow. So that didn’t scare me at all.
When I came back from seeing her to her car Emma had woken up and was screaming, Sam’s father was leaving a long message about the funeral on the answering machine and Sam was in the bathroom throwing up.
I picked Emma up and jiggled her about a bit. It didn’t seem to help, in fact it made her scream even louder. She was roaring away and tugging frantically at a handful of my hair when Sam came out of the bathroom. He looked pale and watery eyed.
“Are you all right?” I asked. Dumb question.
“Yeah,” he said and rescued Emma from me. She went willingly into his arms and immediately stopped crying.
“You found the off-button.” I said admiringly.
“I think she’s confused, I must look a bit too much like Sal.” The two of them appraised each other with identically sombre expressions until they shared an encouraging smile. It was Sam’s first smile that day.
I took Em back from Sam because he was starting to look unsteady again and she immediately protested loudly about this. I got Sam to go and sit down on the couch and took her into the kitchen.
Fran had set up a feed for the baby in a…thing… I just had to switch it on. When the bottle was ready, I cradled her, as instructed, and gave it to her. To my surprise she stopped crying and started feeding immediately.
She had Sam’s mesmerizing blue eyes and, as she fed, she stared up at me seeming to take in every possible detail. At the same time her tiny fists clenched and unclenched through pure enjoyment.
“Hey Sam,” I said, joining him on the couch. “You want to see something cute?” And we both watched her feeding for a while, doing the little thing with her hands. Adorable didn’t cover it.
“What’s going to happen to her?” Sam asked quietly.
“She’s going to be fine.”
“There’s no one now. No one in the family to look after her.”
“Don’t think about it. There’ll be time to make those kinds of decisions.”
“It wouldn’t be fair for me to take her. I’m never home and she needs a mother.”
“Sam, don’t worry, you’ll do the right thing. And there’s not going to be a shortage of people wanting to adopt her.”
“There’s Fran,” he said. “She and Sal were friends since they were kids. She’s married and she’s got children so Em will have brothers and sisters. I’m going to ask her to…” The end of the sentence was lost in a wave of emotion.
“Sam, come on, don’t do this.” He fell silent, going back to watching Emma and she fixed her intense gaze on him.
When she finished feeding I held her against my shoulder and rubbed her back almost exactly as they do on television and it had the desired affect.
I was hoping that she would go to sleep as I really needed to pay some attention to Sam. She did seem to be starting to get sleepy as well so I gathered my courage and took her into the bathroom to change her. Which really wasn’t so bad, and I think I did quite a professional job even though, in my opinion, the diagrams on the packaging don’t recognise how complicated the job is when the changee is flaying about like a windmill.
When I managed to wrestle her back into the…thing…she was wearing I laid her on her back in the crib in Sally’s bedroom. I kissed her goodnight, offered her the penguin which she accepted and dimmed the light. She seemed content so I left her there and went to find Sam.
He was standing at the kitchen table going through a plastic bag which Fran had told us contained his mother and sister’s personal effects. There were two purses and he was going through them. He looked up.
“Is she okay?” He asked.
“Yeah, I think she’s going to sleep.”
“Thanks for doing that. Did you know what to do?”
“She was pretty patient. What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for phone numbers. I’ve got to start calling people.”
“Not now, Sam. Leave it until tomorrow. You need to rest, have something to eat.”
“I’ll do some now, while she’s asleep. People need to know, I guess and I know when the funeral is because I listened to dad’s message.” His tone was flat, I could only imagine how he had felt about the bland message left by his father.
“You should phone him back.” Asshole though he was, he had just lost a daughter.
“Not now, I can’t talk to him now. But I’ll start calling people.”
I put my arms around him and he dropped his head onto my shoulder. I held him for a while and talked to the top of his head. “You have to eat something, you haven’t eaten anything all day.”
“I don’t think I could keep anything down Josh, my stomach’s doing cartwheels.”
“Well, you’ll try.” I kissed him and let him go. I went through the fridge and then the kitchen cupboards and found a couple of cans of soup. “How about some of this?”
“Josh.”
“Just give it a go, okay.” He nodded and sat at the kitchen table to wait for the soup to heat. He carried on going through the purses. I saw him looking at a photograph that he had found slipped into the pages of his mother’s diary and searching his pockets for his glasses. I found them in my pocket and I gave them to him. He stared at the picture, it was a snapshot of Mrs Seaborn, Sally and Emma, the two women smiling into the camera.
“I hadn’t seen them in more than a year you know. I didn’t go home when Em was born, I didn’t even go home at Christmas.”
“They understood.”
“I don’t know why they should. I could have gone back. For a weekend at least, but I didn’t think it was important, everything else was more important.”
“Sam, when was the last time you had a whole weekend off? When was the last time your week was less than seventy hours long?”
“Well, I got it wrong. I got the priorities wrong.”
“Maybe, but they understood. They were incredibly proud of you. Just take a look round this house.” It didn’t take more than a cursory glance to prove that. There was a picture of Sam from the inauguration framed in the living room, a row of videos on a shelf where some of Sam’s TV appearances had been recorded. Pictures of him cut from newspapers were pinned to the board in the kitchen. “And you did a hell of a lot for Sally and the baby, and for your mom after she and your dad broke up. They knew you loved them, Sam.”
“I know…it’s just that I think I’d give anything to see them again, just once.”
He continued to stare at the photograph until I set the food in front of him. I was relieved to see that he did eat and he started to look better and become more focussed almost immediately. After he finished he picked up the diaries and went back into the living room with Sally’s cordless phone. He sat on the couch then and began to call the people in his mother’s address book.
I checked on Emma and she and her penguin were sleeping peacefully so I went back into the kitchen to make some tea. I brought it into the living room and sat next to Sam. I listened as he explained to one of his mother’s friends that something terrible had happened and…I wrapped my arms around him and he soon leaned into me. I held him as he talked on the phone for almost two hours, patiently answering the same questions and murmuring the same sympathetic words. Finally, after one particularly intense call to one of his sister’s friends he began to cry with choking sobs and unstoppable tears.
“Okay, that’s enough.” I took the phone out of his hands and gathered him into my arms. I held him close as he sobbed and I thought that my heart would break along with his.
When, at last, he stopped crying, he lay quietly in my arms. I asked him if he wanted to try and sleep and I took him into Sally’s bedroom. I got him ready for bed and lay next to him, stroking his hair, until he fell asleep.
With both Emma and Sam asleep I went round the house locking up and switching lights off. The time difference was catching up with me and I got ready for bed myself, suddenly utterly exhausted. I curled up to Sam and once I fell asleep it was deep and dreamless.
***************
Emma slept until about 4am when she woke up crying. She had been asleep for a lot longer than I could have hoped, she must have been exhausted from her terrible day. I picked her up, quietening her down as miraculously she hadn’t woken Sam.
I recognised the ‘hungry’ signal from last time and took her into the kitchen to get the feed started. I hazarded a guess that the other end would need attention as well so I took her into the bathroom while the bottle heated. Frankly, I was a complete natural and Emma was gurgling happily on the changing mat while I changed her diaper.
I didn’t think I would ever tire of watching her feed. It was evidently such an intense experience for her. She took the opportunity to study my face again and I wondered if she knew that the face that used to be there was missing. I wondered if she had already forgotten her mother or still searched for her in the new faces. I was grateful though that she was too little to understand the catastrophe that had befallen her and the uncertainty over her future.
She didn’t seem interested in going back to sleep after her feed so we had a wander around the house, looking at things for a while and her unblinking gaze took in everything.
I tried to put her to bed after about an hour but she seemed all set to start crying again so I picked her up, wrapped her in a blanket and gave her the penguin. We sat by the French Windows in the living room to watch the day start, and I told her a few things about Sleeping Beauty with a short explanation of the ideological context. She watched me closely as I spoke, quickly coming to the conclusion that I didn’t know what I was talking about and smiling indulgently.
Sam came and found us watching the sunrise, not long after. He knelt by the chair and kissed Emma and then he kissed me. He looked tired and subdued but he was more himself.
“You should have woken me,” he said, letting Emma grab his finger in both her hands.
“We're fine,” I said. “We were just having a chat.”
“Oh no, about what?”
“Gender relations in the workplace. She needed her consciousness raising.”
“What does she think about the ERA?”
“She’s kind of a reactionary, I have to say Sam.”
He smiled at me, and it was nice to see that again.
“Josh,” he said eventually. “If I live to be a hundred, I’ll never forget what you did for me yesterday. How you kept me together.”
“Sam, you know, if there’s anything I can do for you…anything at all.” We kissed once more and Emma laughed as Sam tickled her tummy. “What do you want to do today?” I asked.
“I want to see Sal and mom at the funeral home, if I can. I should talk to dad and maybe see the family lawyer about mom’s estate and about getting Emma adopted. I want to talk to Fran. I mean if she could take her that would solve everything.”
“Yeah, it would.” I said, but there was doubt in my mind about it and I was not quite sure why. Fran having her would clearly be the best solution.
“Josh, I’ll take her if you want to get some sleep or whatever.”
“I won’t sleep now but I’ll take a shower, if you’re going to be okay.”
“Course,” he took Emma from me and folded his arms around her, letting me show him how to support her head given that I was such an expert in the field.
I showered and dressed, then played with Em while Sam did the same. She had some really good toys, things that buzzed or rang, spun round or squished.
“Are you improving your cognitive skills, Josh?” Sam asked when he came to find us.
“I think I’ve got this hand/eye coordination thing down.”
He picked Em up from my lap and said confidentially to her. “Now you just tell me if Uncle Josh doesn’t share his toys.” She looked adoringly at him and settled comfortably in the crook of his arm, reaching up to try and touch his face.
Something occurred to me. “Is the car just outside Sal’s?”
We went out front. “Yeah, it is,” he said. “They were in mom’s car when…I think I saw keys in Sal’s purse.”
“We okay to drive it?”
“Yeah. Yeah.”
“Do you want to go and get some breakfast? It’s still early.”
“Sure, and we should go to mom’s place. I’ve got some clothes there, jeans and stuff we can use.” Sam was all business now. I put my hand on his arm.
“Are you okay Sam?”
“I am. I think I am.” He kissed Emma’s hand as she reached for him again.
*******************
We left soon afterwards, stopping for breakfast and then going on to Sam’s mom’s house to change out of yesterday’s suits into Sam’s old stuff. Unlike Sal’s house, his mom’s place was full of history and memories. Sam recognised that he couldn’t really cope with this so while we waited for 9 o’clock to come so we could start making phone calls we went out into the backyard.
It was the first time that I remembered we were in California. It was beginning to be a warm day and not too cold for a baby to be outside, especially one dressed in one of the many sweaters she inexplicably seemed to own. Em lay on a blanket rattling a rattling thing that we had found in the house and waving her legs and arms around and telling us all kinds of things. She really was a most contented baby. Sam sent her into paroxysms of delight by repeatedly burying his head in her tummy and making monster noises. Then when we came inside she slept again with her head on his shoulder while he planted soft kisses on the top of her head.
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