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It had been a shock, in a surprising number of senses. He hadn’t foreseen that his attempt at hotwiring the car would trigger an anti-theft device. Nor had he anticipated the bolt of electricity that had blasted through his body and flung him to the ground. And on this evening of adventure, survival, and masculine introspection he certainly hadn’t expected to be confronted by the face of one Diane Chambers. The image had been as clear as if she’d been standing right in front of him: all wide eyes and golden hair. Maybe it had been the effect of the shock, or perhaps it was due to the sheer suddenness of the apparition, but he’d been unable to fight the instinct to reach out for her. Nobody had mentioned it, but Sam suspected that he’d also called her name.
They were supposed to be getting some sleep before sunrise, by which time someone was expected to have come up with a plan to get them out of the mess they’d ended up in. Frasier lay next to Sam under the makeshift awning that they’d managed to cobble together from a couple of branches and the junk in Cliff’s wagon. A light snoring came from Frasier’s other side where Cliff had cocooned himself in a sleeping bag, while Norm – always two steps ahead of everyone on matters of comfort and convenience – had installed himself in the car before anyone else had chance to speak. Despite their less than adequate situation none of them appeared to have had any trouble drifting into unconsciousness. Sam, however, was unable to do more than doze for a few minutes at a time before jerking awake, and although there was a chill in the air and the stiffness in his back provided an unwelcome reminder that he wasn’t as young as he used to be, the cause of his restlessness was far from corporeal. Grimacing, he propped himself up against the side of the car and stared out towards the road, desperate to occupy his mind with something located in this reality, but the blackness simply stared back at him.
He couldn’t understand what had happened. Lately something had felt off, but he’d been unable or perhaps unwilling to pinpoint the source of his discomfort. In times gone by Diane would have pulled him into his office or followed him to the pool room, out of the communal gaze, and forced him to talk it through with her. She’d have done it weeks ago, he acknowledged ruefully. But he’d ignored it, stubbornly suppressing his growing unease until now it overwhelmed him. No matter how hard he tried to concentrate on something else – working out what they were going to do come morning, reciting his pitching statistics, anything – his thoughts kept racing back to her. Why her? Why now? And was he imagining that tightness in his chest? He rubbed his eyes, feeling as if his head might explode. Was he simply losing his mind? There was only one person here qualified to answer that question.
“Frasier,” he hissed, but there was no response. He hesitated briefly before reaching out and prodding what he hoped was the back of his friend’s sleeping form. “Psst, Frasier, are you awake?”
With a muffled grunt Frasier rolled over. “I am now, thank you.”
“Sorry.” He wasn’t. “I, er… can’t sleep, so I thought you might be having trouble too.” It was taking too much effort to keep his breathing steady and he hoped that his casual tone was enough to mask it.
“No Sam.” His vowels were elongated as if he were talking to a child. “I was sleeping.”
“Oh,” he feigned indifference, “well, that’s good.” It suddenly occurred to him that he had no idea where to begin. In the silence he grappled for words, but there really was no easy way to broach the subject of his phantom ex-fiancée.
“Is something troubling you Sam?” Frasier asked, the annoyance in his voice so thinly-veiled that he really needn’t have bothered.
He almost brushed the question off – no, he was fine, just couldn’t sleep – but as if on cue the image of Diane interrupted his thoughts once again, silencing his instinctive reply. It was the dead of night; maybe he should grasp the opportunity to be truthful. You can’t be held to things said in the dark.
He relented. “I saw Diane.” He felt ridiculous as the words lingered between them and wanted nothing more than to reach out into the night and snatch them back.
“What?” There was a shuffling sound as Frasier dragged himself upright.
“Diane,” he repeated. It was out there; he might as well try. “I saw her when I got zapped.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just as I said.” This was going to be even harder than he thought. “Cliff’s anti-theft thing shocked me and I saw her – it was only for a moment, but it was like she was right there.” This was a mistake. “It was really weird,” he finished lamely, although the general weirdness of the experience was the least of his worries.
“How did she look?”
Jesus, this was impossible. “What’s that got to do with it?” Sam asked, impatience pushing his voice above a whisper. “I don’t know, just – like herself. She looked like Diane?” What did it matter how she looked? Surely his primary concern should be the fact that he saw something that definitely wasn’t there?
“Okay Sam, take it easy. It’s not uncommon for people who have near-death experiences to describe having seen visions or hallucinations. The brain really is a marvelous thing.”
He exhaled slowly. Not mad then, that was something. “Yes, but why her?”
“Diane? Let’s see.” Frasier paused as if he really was pondering the question, but the sarcasm in his tone ruined the illusion. “This is the woman who left you standing at the altar and subsequently failed to return to you as promised. Tell me Sam, did you experience any significant moments of abandonment as a child?”
“God, Frasier.” He didn’t quite know what he’d expected from this conversation, but this was definitely not what he’d had in mind. “What’s next?” he sneered, “are you going to interpret my dreams or something?”
“Why do you say that?” The sarcasm was gone – his interest apparently aroused. “Is there a particular reason you’d like to discuss them?”
Sam groaned in frustration. “If I wanted you to analyze me… I don’t know – I’d have booked an appointment or something.” It came out more aggressively than he’d intended.
“Well,” Frasier said with an indignant snort, “the day any of you leeches deign to engage my services professionally and remunerate me appropriately for the extensive expertise from which I have, until now, generously allowed you to benefit I’ll-”
“You’ll what?” Sam shot back.
Frasier sighed in defeat. “I can’t think of anything sufficiently drastic to convey how utterly implausible it is.”
They sat uncomfortably in silence for several minutes. Sam hadn’t meant for him to take the rebuke to heart, but the point stood. Not everything needed to be a therapy session. Why did people have to talk so much?
When Frasier eventually spoke, it was almost to himself. “It may be a lack of resolution,” he mused.
“Huh?” Sam didn’t follow.
“Diane. The reason you saw her in a moment of crisis. Have you considered that you might still have feelings for her?”
“No,” he replied quickly, his mouth suddenly dry. “That’s ridiculous. I haven’t seen her in, what – going on five years now? I’ve barely thought about her.”
Lie.
He did think about her. He tried not to – was desperate not to – but it happened. He thought about her whenever the occasional group of college-types came into the bar, wondering if she’d taken up her master’s in LA. It would be a shame if all those hours she’d taken out of her shifts had gone to waste. He thought about her when he realized that he was about to end a sentence with what he now understood to be a preposition. He’d do it anyway, but her admonishment would dance lightly at the back of his mind.
“Unresolved feelings can prey on us for a long time,” Frasier pressed.
Why did he have to go digging around in all of this?
“Sometimes,” he continued, “they may even go through a period of dormancy before resurfacing.”
“I resolved everything there was to resolve,” Sam stated firmly. “Diane’s out of my life now and that’s best for both of us. There’s nothing left.”
Lie.
Resolved feelings couldn’t explain the pang of sickness he felt when he looked at her letters, bound with ribbon in the draw of the nightstand by what used to be her side of his bed. They couldn’t explain why he sometimes sat in what he still thought of as her spot at the corner of the bar, as if a change of perspective could shed light on something he’d missed. Something that could explain why the loneliness he had once sensed fleetingly on the periphery had migrated to the center and why the aching hollow it created, which he felt most acutely when the bar was empty and the lights low, resisted his attempts to fill it with his usual distractions.
“Why did you come on this trip Sam?” Frasier asked abruptly. “Out of all of us your inner hairy man is the closest to the surface.”
“I told you,” he replied briskly, eager to move on. “I had the time of my life travelling across the country with Buck. I thought it was about time I tried to rediscover some of that freedom and have a good time with my friends – no work, no pressure. I just want to enjoy the ride and maybe, if things go to plan, get all the way to California and Diane.”
It took him a beat to catch it. His stomach lurched horribly. His heart began pounding in his ears. Even in the dark he could feel Frasier’s stare.
“No,” he chuckled dryly, “no-no-no. Obviously I meant Disney. We’d get all the way to California and Disney.” He wasn’t going to let a slip of the tongue be twisted into something it wasn’t. “The reason I said that was because of – we’d just been talking about-”
“There’s no need to be defensive Sam.”
“Yes, there is,” he snapped, not noticing that his voice was getting louder, “because you seem to think I’m a heartbroken teenager or something. That I’m pining after her like some pathetic loser. Well let me tell you, if she can get over me, I can certainly get over her!”
“I’m just trying to help,” Frasier interjected calmly but Sam barely paused for breath, the words tumbling out of him.
“And that’s another thing. When you’re about to die and your life flashes before your eyes isn’t it supposed to be, you know, your life – the whole thing? Not just one person?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “My life has been full: baseball, the bar, my friends, the women – all of it. I’ve seen and done things that most of you haven’t even dreamed of, so if the brain really is such a marvelous thing how come it boiled my entire existence down to Diane fucking Chambers?” He heard the venom in his voice but it was too late. He couldn’t stop. “That woman bugged me for years – and I mean she really drove me nuts. Drove herself insane in the process of course, but you’d know all about that. And then just when I thought we’d finally got it together she went and ditched me for a better offer.”
Lie. Huge. A whopper.
It seemed to ring out into the night, but he barely recognized the words as his own. Shit. He couldn’t do that to her; she didn’t deserve it. “No.” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes until it hurt. “That’s not fair.”
“Oh, how so?”
“She didn’t ditch me.” She wouldn’t have done that. “I told her to go.” He practically had to force her out the door.
“So you decided to do what you thought was best for both of you?” Frasier asked lightly.
“Yes.” Really? “No, I don’t know.” Sam scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I wanted to marry her, I really did. More than I’ve wanted anything in my life.” A bitter smile flickered across his face as he recognized the absolute truth of the statement. “But I couldn’t bring myself to stand in the way of her finding greater happiness. And I guess that’s what she did.” How could he begrudge her that?
“What of your happiness?”
His happiness? He dug his heels into the dirt. This was like being turned inside out and examined, like being held up to the night and told not to move as it took a look around. Nobody had really tried to do that since Diane.
Truthfully? He missed her. It didn’t feel the same as when she’d first left, when his misery had been tempered by the knowledge both that he’d chosen this and that he’d done so out of love. By the time six months had elapsed and she hadn’t even called it had become a stinging bite of rejection, topped with the shame of foolishly having allowed himself to hope for anything different. It was no longer the crushing grief that had overwhelmed him in the months that followed, forcing him to abandon the place he’d felt so at home. It was a steady, quiet ache – a sense of loss that was rarely intrusive, but always there.
He missed the softness of her, her warmth, but also the way that she would prickle and stick her nose in the air in sharp defiance when she thought she was right. The way her chin betrayed her every emotion like a tell. Waking to find her wrapped around him as if there were no other place she could possibly be. The feeling of her hands in his hair, fingernails grazing his scalp as she gently drew him from sleep on the mornings when she was first to rise. He found himself missing the signs of her – those little intrusions that proved just how entwined they’d become. The pile of books on her nightstand that eventually became so tall she’d started a pile on his nightstand. The clothes that she’d leave in his draws – the familiarity of seeing her sweaters folded neatly next to his. The smell of her on his sheets.
He missed the way she made him feel. The way she challenged him, infuriated him, loved him with her whole heart. The way she had of looking through all of his charm and bravado and seeing things in him that he didn’t even know were there. It left him exposed and oddly unsure of himself. Off-balance. She’d somehow got under his skin without him realizing and by the time he found her there she’d already left her mark.
Would he be happier now if she’d stayed? She had made a home in his heart like nobody else ever had and in doing so had acquired a unique power to break it. He was under no illusion that it would have been easy, but as to his happiness there was no doubt in his mind.
“I finally had an idea of where my life was going, you know.” He cleared his throat, unsure whether he could explain the certainty he’d felt that night they’d finally decided to get married. “It was like I could see the road in front of me: what was coming, but also where it was going to end. And I was happy.” So unbelievably happy. “But now…” He was aimless, adrift, alone. “I don’t know. Things have obviously turned out differently.”
“I see.” Frasier seemed to hesitate for a moment. “Sam, did you and Diane ever discuss having children?”
Little Sams and Dianes? “It might have come up once or twice, why?”
“This business with Rebecca –” Sam could tell he was trying to be delicate, “trying to have a baby – it may have stirred up thoughts of Diane because she’s the person with whom you had been expecting to take this step.”
Until her, the idea that he might one day have a family of his own was just something to be considered in the abstract: a fantasy incompatible with the reality of who and what he was. Diane had been the first and only woman he’d truly pictured someday being the mother of his children.
“This association could have been lingering under the surface and the electric shock simply threw it sharply to the forefront, which is why the image appeared so vivid.”
He knew then that she was going to be with him for the rest of his life – a lingering figment of the path not taken. He’d planned to marry her, raise children with her, grow old with her. His whole life would have been hers.
“She’s never going to leave me, is she?” he whispered, the words thick in his throat.
“Just give it time,” Frasier said, not without kindness. “I know you miss her, but you will move on.”
“You think so?” He was so tired.
“Yes Sam. It might take a while, but your subconscious will eventually allow you to give her up.”
Except that he now understood that he wouldn’t. Wouldn’t stop thinking about her – hoping that she was okay and worrying that she wasn’t. Wondering whether she ever thought of him or whether she’d already let him go. He couldn’t give her up if he tried.
He took a deep breath, expecting to feel lighter – somewhat exorcised – but although his thoughts were no longer racing uncontrollably a dead weight seemed to have settled in his chest. Glancing to the side he was surprised to discover that he could nearly make out Frasier’s silhouette despite the darkness. Dawn was approaching quicker than he’d anticipated and their time was almost up.
“You won’t tell the others about this will you Fras?”
“I’m sorry Sam, but this wasn’t a professional consultation.”
“What?” he asked, laughing nervously, his jaw clenched. “What does that mean?”
“Well,” Frasier said matter-of-factly, “it means that this conversation isn’t subject to the rules on doctor-patient confidentiality.”
Sam’s heart began to pound rapidly in his chest and he sat a little straighter against the car. This had barely been for Frasier’s ears, let alone anyone else’s. “I swear,” he hissed through gritted teeth, “if you say anything-”
“Relax Sam,” Frasier chuckled, patting his knee, “I’m just messing. This can stay between us.”
“Oh,” he heaved a sigh of relief. “Right.” Crisis averted. “Thanks. And thanks for, you know…” Listening. Talking him down. Confirming that he wasn’t losing his mind.
“That’s quite alright. A pathetic creature disturbing my sleep and forcing me to listen to it whine about its problems? It’s just like being at home!”
Sam paused, a grin breaking slowly across his face. “You are talking about your patients, aren’t y-”
“Of course I’m talking about my patients!”
“Okay, okay! Sorry for waking you up. You have helped, thank you.”
“They don’t call me Dr Frasier Crane MD PhD APA for nothing you know.”
“Nobody calls you that Frasier,” Sam yawned, stretching out his legs.
“Lilith does sometimes,” came the muttered reply.
“Yeah, well, the less I know about that, the better.”
They sat quietly as the darkness began to lift, the dawn bathing the empty road in cool blue light, until eventually sunrise broke over the mountains. In a second the night was gone, taking with it the vulnerabilities it had revealed and the reluctant confessions to which it had been the most encouraging witness. It was a new day on the same old road: destination, unknown.