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step-child, you have outlived your time / you represent embarrassment and failure
*
Ever since Molly was a little girl, Sam Seaborn has been the Ice Cream Man. She doesn't remember, though logic and a knowledge of her family's history demands that it must once have existed, a time when he wasn't the one who always seemed to show up when she was hurting or feeling sad and take her out to the Dairy Queen, or the fancy ice cream parlour a few blocks from her father's place in Manhattan, or, later, when he was there all the time, the strange little place just around the corner from their house in Brooklyn, which was all gleaming white tile and full of the grin of the Polish man behind the counter.
On these quests for ice cream Sam would never say much. He would walk to wherever they were going in silence, and his steps would always match hers. Occasionally, when she was still little, her dad would walk too fast for her; now she is almost as tall as he is, but she remembers thinking that his legs were so impossibly long that she would never be able to catch him up. But she and Sam would always be in step. Eventually they would get to whichever place it was to be that day and he would ask her what she wanted, and she when she told him it mostly involved pistachios or caramel or sometimes mango sorbet (usually not all together). Sometimes he would smile as if, from his vantage point of advanced adulthood, he couldn't possibly understand why she would want that much chocolate sauce on anything, and sometimes he would just pay for the ice cream and hold the door for her as they left the shop. Then he would walk beside her once again, quiet, watching their feet as they retraced their path. She remembers that his steps seemed to echo on the sidewalk, as though there were no other people in the city but them. Sometimes they would go straight back to the apartment in Manhattan or to the house in Brooklyn; sometimes they would walk around a little, making sad little songs on the sidewalk with their shoes. Sam would tell her that walking around a little is a classic method of coping for members of the Ziegler family, and usually when he would say that, Molly would want to reach for his hand, because he always sounded a little, a very little bit, sad when he gave her that line. Maybe because he felt like he wasn't part of the Ziegler family, not yet. Usually she didn't reach up, because she just wasn't that kind of little girl. But she often wanted to.
These are some of the things Molly knows about Sam Seaborn. Sam smiles more than anyone else in her family. He owns two sets of identical monogrammed white shirts, one for each day of the week, which hang in the closet in her father's room, beside the clutter and drab colours of her father's side. He taught her and her brother about punctuation by making up stories about the all the different marks, their jobs, personalities, and all their funny ways, and when their father told Sam to stop patronising them Sam just said what she (and Huck) were thinking: "No, they're enjoying it, and it's helping them". They were only five at the time. Their dog (Princeton) is named after him, though she and Huck are not meant to know that. He took her (not Huck; he gets seasick) sailing one time and they watched the sunset from the deck of his boat. He makes her dad happy, she thinks, even though her dad tries his best to hide it. He makes Molly happy too. He is still, even now that she is fifteen and tall and proud in a way that she does not understand, the Ice Cream Man.
Molly has observed the way Sam looks at her father, and the way her father looks at Sam. Sam's feelings are obvious, written all over his face in bright red ink, and he doesn't care who sees them; for him it is simple, and honest, and the last thing he would ever be is ashamed. Her father's way is different: glancing looks when he thinks no-one is watching even though Molly doesn't believe he is ashamed either; odd, faraway smiles that come over his face ever so often, and which Molly thinks he might not even know he's making; the way he bullies Sam about wearing warm clothes when the winters get really bad and asks him six times before he goes on a sailing trip whether he's packed his wet weather gear. And the odd times, the strange times that seem to belong to no particular time or space, only to her dad and his boyfriend, that he shows Sam some small tenderness, and it seems as though the action is both the most difficult and the most necessary thing he has ever done. Molly remembers that it was the same with her father and her mother, except that her mom was just about the same as dad, and the fun part with them was watching for the fireworks.
Now that her mom is dead, Molly finds that she notices these things more.
*
For a little while, when he was about seven and everything in the world seemed much too overwhelming to be comprehended through speech, Huck stopped talking. Now that he is fifteen and the world has once more become incomprehensible, he finds that his mouth is, again, full of nothing but silence.
Sam had been there the first time. He had worried more that Huck's father had. His dad had watched and known and trusted that whatever was causing this shying away from speech, this muteness that was just as complete at home as it was at school, this heavy silence that was pressing down on Huck's tongue like a polished stone, would dissolve and pass away. He never treated Huck any differently (their communication was not based on speech anyway) but Sam, who was still shy of the twins and anxious that they should like him even though back then there was nothing to dislike him for but that same sense of anxiety, seemed lost without questions and debates and games and interaction. There was a nagging, a prickly atmosphere of worry circling Sam that year that Huck remembers vividly. He got the feeling that Sam wanted to reach into Huck's mouth and pluck out the stone and throw it away, and that he believed that if he could do that, maybe Huck would love him back. And Huck knew that there was something else, something secret, informing these desperate gambits for his affection. Now that he knows what that something was, he is able to be sympathetic; at the time he had just wanted Sam to go away.
Sam had Molly from the start -- she loved him from the first minute they met, but Huck has always known himself as his father's son. There was never enough room for anyone else.
This time around, holding in his chest the perfect knowledge of the absence of his mother from the world that Huck imagines as a small stone egg weighing down on his heart, Sam is handling things a little differently. Huck figures this is probably to do with the fact that they are all more silent now, this time around. Molly takes it out in adrenaline and team sports. She says (at night, sitting on her bed with her arm pressed against his) that helps her to stop thinking. His father stops saying words and starts writing them down again, and Huck never sees him crying but thinks he might have heard it, one night, when the air was still and cold. Sam does what he can to stop them falling into their own separate miseries and he mourns Huck's mother in his own way, but Huck can see the different colours of his grief, and the way he looks at Huck's father now: because Sam knows how Huck's father felt about Huck's mother, because he still feels like second-best.
Huck's way is to stop speaking again, and this time Sam doesn't try to get him to answer questions, or play games that require vocal participation. Every morning, in the house in Brooklyn that they all share now, he swops out his usual 'Morning, Huck' for a dimly lit smile and a nod of his head.
He breathes in Huck's muteness, and his exhales are quieter for it. The air is still heavy between them but now the weight comprises the text of conversations they had with few words, or none at all. It is subtext and silent promises and the gentle thawing of a layer of ice Huck hadn't even been aware of; it is Sam's honest gladness in Huck's friendship; it is the feeling that is left behind when Sam's hand moves away from Huck's shoulder.
So, when he is crying in what he thought was an empty house, feeling fifteen and helpless and hating everything with a black hate, and hating in particular this house, and Manhattan, and living in New York, and the stupid, desperate, unfair calamity that happened and means that he can never see his mom ever again, and he hears the weight of footsteps creak the floorboards outside his bedroom door and looks up to see Sam there, coming towards him with his hands open and his face unhappy, Huck doesn't turn away. He cries into Sam's shirt and he is glad, in a small shamed secret part of his heart, that Sam's grief is not the same as his father's or his sister's, or his own, and so has space inside it for someone else. Sam doesn't say a word. He doesn't stroke Huck's hair or pat his back to let him know that it is time for the embrace to stop now. He doesn't cry. He sits on the edge of Huck's bed and holds him inside his loose arms and his silence, and he stays until Huck is done, and Huck knows he won't say a word about it once it is over.
It takes almost nine months for Huck to begin to speak again, but it seems to him that Sam keeps the silence inside for a lot longer.
*
Sam starts with the simplest thing, just "I'm sorry" whispered into the curls at the back of Toby's neck, in the night, that night. Toby doesn't say anything in reply, and he doesn't reach back for Sam's hand or turn over in the bed to face him, but neither does he pull away when Sam strokes a hand -- trembling, white and trembling -- over his shoulder.
What do you say, anyway, to answer the formulaic sorrow of your second partner in response to the death of your first? Sam cannot, even with his extensive library of Ziegler reference material, think of a single word Toby would feel comfortable saying right now, either trite or honest, even here in the darkness. So Sam sighs, as quietly as he can, and presses a kiss to Toby's shoulder, and goes to sleep thinking about funeral arrangements and the full-time parenting of two teenagers, and how glad he is to be relatively rich at this stage of his life. Practical things, he thinks, concentrate on practical things; no one else is going to have the space to.
That thinking about practicalities conveniently shuts down the part of his brain that is, and always has, orbited a single point of faith: that Toby was in love with Andy in the way that never really stops, never lessens, never goes away or gets supplanted, is just a bonus.
At the funeral his first instinct, even though everyone else -- Mrs. Bartlet, Josh, C.J., Matt Skinner, even Will Bailey -- is standing close around the grave flanking Toby and the twins and Andy's sister and her children, carefully but protectively, is to stand well back. His first instinct is to disappear. He feels very well defined, appallingly present in his black suit and uncomfortable formal shoes; he feels as though he draws everyone's eye, even as they try not to look at him. It is only that Molly wants to hold his hand, that she presses the side of her arm against his so hard that he has to put an arm around her because he is worried that she will crumple and fall, that keeps him from walking away altogether.
Later, C.J. finds him and hugs him, hard. Sam discovers, a little ridiculously, that as soon as she lets go of him he wants to cry. "You're doing good, soldier boy," she says. Her eyes are red, full of tears. Then she walks away.
That night, once the kids are asleep in the New York beds that Sam suspects still have a tint of strangeness about them, Toby is almost completely silent. He responds with grunts and nods to the offers of coffee, with mute refusal to offers of food (chips, pie, and Sam's last crazy effort, an apple), with a long sigh to Sam's suggestion that they both go to bed. But he gets up and follows Sam upstairs. He brushes his teeth while Sam does his best to make the bed look like they didn't just get out of it an hour ago, while he turns off the lights and takes off his watch and tie. Toby gets undressed in the half-light of the lamp on his beside table; pyjama pants and his undershirt. Sam watches him from the bed and pushes himself up against the wall which borders his own side as Toby gets in at the other.
He is silent. Even his breathing is beyond the edge of Sam's hearing. Sam thinks he's asleep until:
"I'm older, you know?" he says, up to the ceiling, lying on his back with his hands folded over his chest in a way that brings a creeping kind of dread up into Sam's mouth. "I was older. I thought it would be me."
"Toby."
"I didn't count on the irresponsibility of out-of-state truckers. Or the solidity of their mudguards. The trucks, I mean. Not the truckers," he sighs and stops. "Dangling modifier patrol," he says, in that quiet whisper that seems to Sam to draw the air in the bedroom in close to them, like a blanket.
"Yes," Sam says, not turning to look at him. Sam shifts in the bed so that he is gazing at the ceiling too. He thinks if they turned off the lamp on the table on Toby's side, they might be able to see stars up there.
"So now it's like I don't really get what's happening. Like something went wrong with gravity, or it was dark at midday or something."
"Yeah."
"Or somebody called to ask me to emcee a Republican fundraiser."
Sam smiles, just a little. "Yeah."
There is a pause. Toby's inhalations draw the ceiling close in and make it seem as though the darkness is pressing in on Sam's body, and his exhalations push it back up to the roof and disperse it, for a while. Sam realises that he is holding himself taut in the bed, and that some of the muscles in his thighs are starting to hurt.
Then, a little chuckle. Not a convincing one, but an attempt. Toby says, "You can speak, you know," still speaking quietly, still staring at the ceiling. "I promise not to find everything you say egregiously offensive and/or distressing. Just this once."
"Thank you for that convincing assurance, Toby. Can I have it in writing?"
"I'll draw something up," Toby says. His head shifts on the pillow, just a fraction. Sam doesn't turn his head. Toby sighs, and the bed cowers under the exhalation. Then he says, "I'm glad you're here, Sam," and the words seem to prickle low in Sam's belly.
He doesn't turn, though Toby's gaze has shifted. Sometimes, Sam knows, Toby likes to look at him, just look. He's never said anything but Sam knows that he does. And although he doesn't enjoy it, although it makes him self-conscious and uneasy, Sam likes to give Toby the things he wants. So he stares straight up at the ceiling, and the invisible stars. He says, "Yeah."
"You really can indulge yourself in a complete sentence, Sam. In fact, the monosyllables are kinda freaking me out," he says, and what would usually be dark sarcasm in his tone has mellowed to wryness. It makes Sam want to put his head down on Toby's chest and listen to the vibration.
"I don't know what I should say, Toby. I don't know what I could possibly say right now, tonight, in your bed, with your children down the hall. Everything I can think of sounds wrong."
"So, sound wrong."
"Thank you, that's ... " Sam sighs. "That's comforting."
Another pause. Sam listens to their breathing, and realises that they are following the same rhythm.
"She thought of you as family, you know. She knew you were scared of her or she'd have teased you more about it, about this. Us, I guess. There were whole routines you never heard. While you were in California."
"Toby, I ... Hey, wait a second, I wasn't scared of her."
Toby turns his head again. This time Sam turns too. "Oh, really? So that you were always mysteriously absent from the room immediately after her caller I.D. came up on the phone was just happy accident, huh?"
"I talked to her!"
"Yeah, like a little boy caught with the thing up the tree."
Sam frowns. "That was a story hour I was obviously absent for."
"You were ... skittish, is my point. It's understandable. I had a lot of practice, and an innate talent for wrangling beautiful women which, I'm sorry to say, or rather I am not at all sorry to say, that you lack."
"Wrangling?"
"Something."
"Beautiful women?"
"Beautiful men require a different technique."
"Oh yeah?"
Toby smiles at him, just a little. "See, it's so subtle you didn't even know," he says. Sam feels fairly terrible when he realises that he is blushing. Toby smiles a little wider, and runs his thumb around the line of Sam's jaw. "See?" he whispers.
"Toby -- "
"You think, maybe, that I was just putting up with you all this time? That I was waiting for the best moment to put you off the plane?"
"I don't know," Sam says, honestly.
"I loved her," he says. "I still do, I think."
"Yeah," Sam says, and wraps the word up in a sigh that won't stay in his chest even though he knows it ought to.
"But this is ... this is different."
"Different."
"This is what it is. Now. This is ... this is what it is."
"I don't want that part in writing," Sam says, trying to smile. "Thanks anyway."
"The heart is large enough, or elastic enough, to contain within itself, during the course of a life, more than one person."
Sam snorts, softly. "Yeah. And I love you too."
"You're not the other woman, Sam. This is your house too; you pay half the mortgage payments. You put the kids to bed in it when they were small. You're here with me, every night."
"You didn't say my kids."
"You noticed that."
"She died, Toby."
"Yeah. She did."
"I think, at the back of my mind I thought ... I always thought maybe the two of you would. You know."
Pause. Toby is staring at the pillow by Sam's hand, where he has propped himself up a little, the better to talk. Sam watches him breathe, in and out, and is still staggered by the depth, the textures, the hugeness of the feeling he has for this man, and how unable he feels to put words around it, how weighted and dumb his tongue feels in this silence. Eventually Toby continues.
"Maybe we would have. I don't know. But it'd have been Andy calling the shots. Doing the asking. I'm not very good at that anyway."
"Yeah."
"But then."
Sam smiles. "I turn up and screw your secret plan."
"And me," he says, quietly. The smile is in his voice.
"And you, yes."
"So it goes."
"Toby, I felt wrong standing there today. I'd never felt that way before. Ashamed. Like ... like I'd done something wrong."
"You haven't done anything wrong."
"Yeah."
"Molly was pretty clear that you were where you should have been."
"Yeah."
"Huck's just doing his thing. He'll undergo visible thawing soon."
Sam smiles again. "Yeah." He swallows. "And you?"
"'My peace is gone. My heart is heavy.' Where else should you have been?"
"I see your Goethe and raise you Charlotte Brontë: hidden in your attic?"
"That's the mad first wife."
"Well, the basement then. Or a pokey apartment in Crown Heights."
"Standing next to me. Next to Molly and Huck. Is where you should have been. Exactly where you were."
"Toby -- "
"You were exactly where you were meant to be. It's over, Sam. Stop feeling bad about things you can't change and guilty for things you didn't cause. This is it now, you and me."
"I just -- "
"Stop."
"Toby -- "
He swallows Sam's protests; he kisses Sam into silence. When he draws away Sam nods, then presses another kiss to Toby's cheek. The room is quiet now, and the darkness around the edges seems warm and familiar. It falls on Toby's face, making him look older; giving him silences to wear. Sam touches his lips gently, for a moment, and then nods again.
"Can we go to sleep now?" Toby says, stroking his thumb ponderingly over Sam's chin.
"Sure," Sam says.
"Okay."
"Okay."
Somewhere in the night, during the time when the light of the moon from the uncovered window in the wall of their bedroom shines in onto their bodies in the bed, Sam wakes up and realises that Toby has curled around him in his sleep. Just one arm and the point of one ankle pressing against Sam's calf, and the roundness of his belly fitted into the line of Sam's back. Toby hides grief well when he's awake, when he can wash his face with freezing cold water every hour on the hour to reduce the redness round his eyes and when the whiskey helps him to stop caring about the appearance either way, but asleep fragility comes into him, and breathes softly inside him. He shifts against Sam's shoulder, restless, a little grunt sounds in Sam's ear. Sam pulls, gently, on the arm that is already curled over his hip, and moves it down so that Toby's hand is resting over his stomach. Then he covers Toby's arm with his own. And then he sleeps.
*
just as motherless birds fly high / so shall I