Stay (ARC)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  spoke again, interrupting my thoughts about apologies.

  “Will you take me out there again tomorrow? I don’t

  think I could find the place just all on my own.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll take you out there any day you

  want.”

  I had a dozen questions, but I didn’t ask any of them.

  I didn’t want to jinx it.

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  CHAPTER TWELVE

  That’s Not Him

  It was at least two weeks later, and it might even have

  been three. It was one of those mornings when—after

  I’d done my run and taken the dogs home—I was jog-

  ging down the path toward town and ran into Connor

  walking up the same path to the lady’s cabin.

  He stopped when he saw me.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said in return.

  I always wanted to ask him a million things. What

  they talked about. Whether it was helping him. What it

  meant that he kept going there on his own. If there was

  any room for me in this new equation.

  Yes, much as I hate to admit it, I was feeling jealous

  and left out. It’s not pretty, but there it is, and it’s the truth.

  “You doing okay?” he asked me.

  He. Asked me. If I was okay.

  Just for a minute I almost blasted out the truth: That

  it was killing me. That I felt like I’d given him the best

  tool I had to understand my life, and now I no longer had

  it for myself, because how could I ask the poor lady to

  save two pesky young guys at once? And that I couldn’t

  stand not knowing how it was going, what was being

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  said. It was my thing, my idea. And I didn’t even get to

  ask if I should feel good about it. It was driving me crazy.

  Stone crazy.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”

  In my defense, I kept my crap to myself. At least I was

  that much of a friend.

  “Good,” he said.

  “You?”

  “Not sure. I’m here, anyway.”

  I didn’t know if he meant here on this path through

  the woods, going out to talk to the lady again. Or here

  on the earth in general. And I didn’t ask.

  “Know what I was thinking?” I asked him.

  “No. I don’t. What were you thinking?”

  “That your grandmother used to be like that. She would

  say anything that came into her head. She didn’t hold back.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. He clearly had not thought of

  that on his own. “She did. Didn’t she?”

  Connor had adored her. But then she went and died

  when we were seven. The fact that he had no living

  grandparents might have factored into my thinking about

  taking him to meet Mrs. Dinsmore. But it had not oc-

  curred to me at the time that she had a lot in common

  with the grandparent he’d loved the most.

  I waited to see if he could make some kind of con-

  nection. Maybe realize that he liked her for that reason.

  But he didn’t seem to want to talk about it anymore, and

  I couldn’t tell if he connected those details or not.

  The conversation stalled. Connor shifted from foot

  to foot, and I could see he wanted to move on.

  “Maybe I’ll come by later,” I said.

  “Yeah, good.”

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  But I didn’t go by later. Because my whole world had

  changed by later. Hanging out at Connor’s house was

  soon the last thought that was likely to cross my mind.

  * * *

  When I walked through the kitchen door, my father was

  home. And it was a weekday. A working day. So that was

  strange. But not as strange as the fact that my parents were talking to each other. And quietly at that.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, leaning close

  together. As though there had already been someone in

  the house who might overhear.

  I heard my father say something about a general dis-

  charge, and how it follows a person through the rest of

  his life. I didn’t know what he meant. It sounded like a

  medical condition.

  Now, I’m not one to talk much about people’s en-

  ergy, or aura, or whatever you want to call it. I just take

  people straight on without all those extra levels of …

  whatever. But I still have to say it: In that moment, there

  was something invisible hanging in that room that just

  bowled me over. I could feel it. And it nearly knocked

  me down.

  They looked up and saw me standing there.

  “Lucas,” my mother said.

  I wanted to ask what was going on. What was wrong.

  But I didn’t. And I think the fact that I didn’t had some-

  thing to do with the whole Connor and Mrs. Dinsmore

  thing. I had begun to assume that pretty much nothing

  was any of my business. I had started to keep my ques-

  tions to myself.

  “I’m going upstairs,” I said.

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  “Wait,” my father said. His voice was booming and

  big. Deep.

  I stopped in midstride.

  “Before you go up there,” my mother said, “we need

  to tell you something.”

  I walked to the table. It was only a few steps, but I

  remember a distinct feeling like I was walking up to a

  hangman’s noose or a guillotine. Marching to my own

  execution.

  I sat.

  “What?” I said.

  My mother spoke first.

  “Your brother is home.”

  “What?” There was no delay, not even a fraction of

  a second. It just burst out of me. “How? How is he home?

  How can he be?” It sounded like I was arguing, but the more I talked, the more I was getting excited. In the back

  of my mind I was beginning to wonder why they weren’t

  treating this like a good thing. “He wasn’t supposed to

  be able to come home for…” Then I hit a big question.

  Not the biggest. The biggest hadn’t made it through the

  jumble of my thoughts yet. But big. “Wait,” I said. “Did

  you know about this?”

  My mother looked down at the table in shame.

  “And you didn’t tell me?” I shouted, raising my voice in a way I never did to my mother.

  Well, from that moment forward I could never again

  claim that I’d never yelled at her. Everything was chang-

  ing in that moment.

  “It was just a few days,” she said. “We were trying to

  figure out the best way to tell you.”

  I sat a minute with my mouth hanging open. I had

  all these things I wanted to say, and might well have said.

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  How it really isn’t so hard. How she maybe could have

  used the words she’d used a minute ago. “Your brother

  is home.” See? Easy.

  I didn’t say any of those things. Because, before I

  could, the biggest question came up through my thoughts.

  I asked it. I couldn’t not ask it.

  “Did he get injured?”

  A pause. One I didn’t like. It wasn’t what I would

  call long, but it was long enough to contain some news


  I didn’t want to hear.

  “He…,” my mother began, “…hurt his foot.”

  My father lost it and started yelling at her.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ellie, how can you say a thing

  like that? Why do you talk in euphemisms? Just tell the

  boy the truth. He doesn’t have a ‘hurt foot.’” He said

  those last two words in a high, mocking voice, showing

  us both what he thought a foolish woman sounded like.

  “Half of it is blown off.”

  My ears tingled while I sat and digested that, and

  listened to them fight.

  “Now see here, I won’t have you telling me how to

  raise my son! I raised those two boys into fine young men,

  and where were you? Working every minute!”

  It struck me that almost every important develop-

  ment of my life had sounded something like this. That I

  had absorbed almost every piece of family news over this

  blaring backdrop of rage.

  “If they were both fine young men, he wouldn’t have

  done what he did.”

  “Don’t you dare, Bart! Don’t you dare say a thing

  like that to me! You have no idea what he went through

  over there!”

  “Well, you don’t either.”

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  “But you’re the one making judgments based on what

  you don’t know.”

  The volume of their voices was starting to hurt my

  eardrums.

  In my head, in the privacy of my imagination, I took a

  brilliant stand. Literally and figuratively. I stood, towering over them, and told them to stop. Now and forever. Just

  stop fighting. I told them it was killing me. At a moment

  like this, when I should be upstairs welcoming my brother

  home, it was a crime to be expected to sit here and listen

  to all this screaming. I told them it had been this way as

  long as I could remember, and I couldn’t take much more.

  I asked them if they knew how much it took out of me.

  In the real world, I stood. Just like I had in my fan-

  tasy land.

  Then I walked out of the room.

  Because in the real world I couldn’t even have shouted

  them down. They never would have disconnected from

  their fighting long enough to give me their attention.

  Besides. I had more important things to do.

  I walked up the stairs, still hearing them shouting.

  “It was irresponsible!” My father.

  “I won’t let you speak that way about him! He’s my

  son!” My mother.

  Their voices got quieter as I walked upstairs. Not

  because they lowered their volume. Because I was walk-

  ing away.

  “Your son? Not our son?”

  “Well, isn’t it always moments like this when you foist

  them off on me?”

  I stepped up onto the landing and looked in the dir-

  ection of Roy’s bedroom door. It was closed. It had never

  been closed while he was gone. Not one time.

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  I walked to it, a dizzy feeling in my head. Like I was

  dreaming. Was it possible that all this was only a dream?

  I steeled myself and knocked.

  “Who is it?” I heard. A weak, mushy sort of voice

  through the door.

  “It’s me, Lucas.”

  “Oh. Okay. Come in.”

  I opened the door.

  The first thing I saw was the foot. It was bandaged,

  of course. So I wasn’t literally seeing the foot. But I was

  getting a good look at where it ended.

  My brother was under the covers, but his foot was

  outside them, and propped up on a pillow. I guess even

  the weight of blankets would have been unbearable on

  that wound.

  It wasn’t really half the foot gone, like my dad had

  said. More like a third of it. More like from the ball of

  the foot, I was guessing, where the big toe joints into it at the base. From there forward, nothing. Air. It reminded

  me of Libby Weller’s brother Darren, and how nothing can be more shocking than just about anything. No amount

  of wounding of a human body part could be worse than

  the utter absence of it.

  He noticed me noticing.

  “Hey buddy,” he said, his voice fuzzy.

  “Land mine?” I asked. That’s what had gotten Libby

  Weller’s brother. A land mine.

  “Gunshot.”

  I looked at him then. At his face. And I got a second

  major shock.

  I thought, Wait. That’s not Roy.

  I thought, They sent us back the wrong brother.

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  I mean, the shape of his face was familiar. And his

  hair was the right color of sandy dark blond, though it

  was much shorter than I had ever seen it. It wasn’t that he

  had some major feature that identified him as someone

  else entirely. He just wasn’t quite Roy.

  It was like seeing someone on the street that I thought

  might be Roy, and waiting for that click of familiarity.

  And never getting it.

  I figured it would come along in time. But, the prob-

  lem was, I had no idea how much time. In that moment I’d have guessed fifteen or twenty minutes would solve

  the issue. It ended up being closer to fifteen or twenty

  years. But I don’t mean to get off track.

  “Sit down,” he said. And his voice sounded like his

  voice, only with most of the life gone out of it.

  I pulled up a chair.

  The room was dim. Weirdly dim, like Connor’s house.

  The curtains were drawn tightly closed. And yet he was

  staring toward the window as if he could look out of it,

  which struck me as strange.

  “You look so different,” I said.

  “Must be the hair.”

  He lifted a hand to run it over his buzzed head, but

  he almost missed. He had to adjust the path of that hand

  to guide it to his own scalp.

  I could still hear our parents fighting downstairs. But I

  couldn’t make out individual words, which was a blessing.

  I thought about the letter. My last letter. The humiliat-

  ingly mushy one. How long ago had I sent it? More than

  three weeks ago. Maybe a month. I had no idea if he’d

  gotten it. It was impossible to know with that APO mail.

  Sometimes it was two weeks. Sometimes two months.

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  One letter my mother sent him never got there, as far as

  we could tell.

  I was hoping he hadn’t seen it.

  Sitting there with him, looking right into his face,

  I couldn’t imagine saying the things I’d said in that let-

  ter. Sad, but true. It just felt too personal. It felt like the truthfulness of the words would rip me open, exposing

  a part of me that might not survive out in the air. It was

  all just too important.

  And yet some part of me had to know.

  “I sent you a letter,” I said. “After I answered the last

  letter you sent me. It was just an extra one. It was short.

  But probably you’ll never get it now. Which I think is

  okay because—”

  “I got it,” he said.

  Then we just sat there in silence for a minute. R
eally,

  a full minute or more. And while we were sitting, I felt

  my face get redder and redder and redder.

  “Why do you think it all came down the way it did?”

  he added.

  “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know how it

  all came down.”

  “Oh.”

  More silence.

  “What were you trying to tell me?” I asked him, anx-

  ious to change the subject. “In that last letter? Something

  you saw, but it got all blacked out.”

  “No.” His voice sounded firm for the first time. Almost

  normally firm for Roy. Not quite, but at least in the right

  ballpark. “No, you don’t need to hear that. The minute I

  sent that letter I was sorry. The minute it was out of my

  hands I would’ve done anything to take it back. When I

  found out you couldn’t read it, I was so relieved. I never

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  should’ve put that on you. Once a thing like that gets into

  your head you’ll never get it out again. Never.”

  He dropped into silence. Then, much to my alarm,

  he began to cry. Really sob openly. Roy was five years

  older than me, and I had never seen him cry. At least,

  not that I could recall.

  “I just wanted to get home to you,” he said. “When

  I got that letter. But I didn’t want to let the guys down.

  It still kills me that I let the guys down.”

  I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Oh hell,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m on so many painkill-

  ers. I mean, they’ve got me so doped up, buddy. Morphine

  up the wazoo. Not literally. I just mean I’m on a lot of it.”

  He fell silent. I waited while his sobs wound down.

  A long, slow, painful wait.

  I felt a little better knowing he was on heavy meds.

  Because otherwise his behavior was scaring me. But know-

  ing he was on a lot of morphine really helped explain

  things. He had been given a huge dose of truth serum.

  He would come around when it wore off. Go back to

  seeming like himself.

  “I should probably get some sleep,” he said.

  “Sure. I’ll just leave you be. We’ll have plenty of time

  to talk later.”

  I let myself out of his room.

  My father had left to go back to work. Or, anyway,

  he’d left. I could hear the tires of his car crunching on

  the gravel of the driveway. The part about his going back

  to work was just a guess.

  I was hungry, but I didn’t go into the kitchen. Because

  my mom was still in there, and I was afraid she would

  tell me more. I was pretty sure, without ever talking to