Stay (ARC)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  did you tell her you’ve been going?” I had purposely

  resisted asking.

  “Just that I’ve been taking a long walk in the morn-

  ing. Which is true. Well. True enough, anyway. In a way

  she’s been happy about it, because I guess she figures it’s a good sign that I want to get out of the house more. But I

  also think it makes her a little nervous. Here,” he added,

  “you want to hold her?”

  I took the kitten from him and held her against my

  own belly, and I swear she felt like she weighed nothing

  at all. But she was real, all right. I could feel her tiny

  heart beating. And when I scratched her behind the ears,

  she purred.

  I confess I was a bit smitten. I could only imagine

  how Connor must’ve felt about her.

  Connor accidentally moved the toy. She saw the move-

  ment and scrambled to get down, nearly scratching me

  with those tiny razor claws. I let her go.

  She ran for the space under the bed, but Connor ex-

  pertly used the dangling mouse to change her mind and

  draw her away.

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  For a space of time—I could not have told you how

  long a time it was—we just watched the cat attack that

  dangling mouse. Every time she did something wild and

  outrageous, we burst out laughing. Which was nice. I

  wondered when Connor and I had laughed together.

  How long it had been.

  Then he got to his feet and handed me the stick.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

  He moved off in that direction. Connor had a bath-

  room attached to his bedroom. Apparently everybody

  did. Except yours truly.

  The kitten ran under the bed, and I didn’t react fast

  enough to stop her.

  “Don’t let the cat go under the bed,” he said before

  closing the bathroom door.

  I lay down on my belly and looked under at the kit-

  ten, and she looked back at me with those astonishing

  blue eyes.

  “Why not?” I called in to Connor. “What happens

  if she goes under the bed?”

  “It’s just really hard to get her out again.”

  “Can’t you just pull the bed out from the wall?”

  “You can put the bed anywhere you want, but she’ll

  stay right under the middle of it where you can’t get to

  her. I think it’s like a game to her.”

  “So how do you get her out once she goes under there?”

  “You have to crawl under there on your belly.”

  I sighed. And began crawling.

  The kitten evaded me by running to the top end of the

  bed. Which was a tactical error, because a wall stopped

  her. She sat hunkered against a heat vent, looking ready

  to fly away again. But I caught her before she could.

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  Feeling more than a little claustrophobic in that tight

  space, I gently pulled her away from the vent.

  That’s when I saw it.

  At first I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing. But I

  knew it was something. Something that was not supposed

  to be there. It was inside the vent, behind the metal grate.

  Nothing is supposed to be back there except air. So when

  you see something, whatever you think it is, it’s going to

  stand out as a thing out of place.

  I held the kitten close to my shoulder and tried to

  take a minute to let my eyes adjust. There wasn’t a ton

  of light under Connor’s bed, of course. And there wasn’t

  any inside the heating duct.

  Still, I could see the corner of something. A small box,

  maybe. And a bit of curved something that looked like

  polished wood or some other hard substance.

  I had a bad feeling about what it might be. I could’ve

  been wrong, but I had to know.

  I wiggled out from under the bed and pulled the head

  side of it back from the wall. I wasn’t sure what to do

  with the kitten, so I put her inside my shirt and she held

  still there. For the moment, anyway.

  I dug around in my pocket, where I knew I had a little

  bit of change. Found a dime. I used it as a screwdriver

  to take out the two decorative screws that held the duct

  cover in place. They were loose. Somebody had obviously

  taken the cover off recently.

  I laid the two screws on the carpet and pulled off the

  grate. Reached my hand in. Pulled the two items out

  into the light.

  A brand-new, unopened box of one dozen bullets.

  And a handgun.

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  I got to my feet, holding them. Staring at them in

  my hands.

  I heard Connor’s voice. He was back in the room.

  “Oh, you pulled the bed out,” he said. “I told you,

  that never works.”

  I looked up from my hands to see why he was not

  reacting to my discovery. He was looking down, still

  tucking in his shirt.

  I said nothing.

  A moment later he looked up.

  We both just stood there for a minute, almost meeting

  each other’s eyes but not quite. It was one of those near

  misses we’d learned to do so well.

  The moment stretched out.

  The cat began to wiggle in my shirt.

  “I know you might not believe this,” Connor said.

  His voice sounded like half himself, half somebody else.

  Like Connor fully grown, maybe. “But I haven’t been

  lying to you about any other things. This is the first lie I told you since we were, like, ten.”

  I looked directly into his face. He looked away.

  “What did you lie to me about when we were ten?”

  He surprised me by laughing. Not the way we laughed

  at the kitten and her wild hunting antics. There was noth-

  ing merry about it. It sounded more like a comment on

  the ridiculousness of our situation.

  “I don’t even remember,” he said. “Can we stay with

  what’s important here?”

  “Promise me you won’t lie to me for the rest of this

  talk.”

  “Okay. I promise.”

  “You were serious about this.”

  “At one point, I think … yeah.”

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  “But that’s over now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  He actually stopped to think for a minute. That was

  interesting. I guess it could have meant he wasn’t com-

  pletely sure. But I took it to mean he was taking seriously

  his promise to tell me the truth.

  The kitten thrashed violently in my shirt, scratching

  my belly.

  “Ow!” I shouted, and tried to fish her out of there.

  But she was on the move.

  “Why is the cat in your shirt?”

  “It’s a long story. Now who’s having trouble staying with what’s important?”

  The kitten had scrambled around to my back side, and

  her thrashing was untucking my shirt in the back. I tried

  to catch her with one hand—the other one was full—but

  she was too fast for me. She leapt to her freedom, landed

  on her feet on the rug … and ran under the bed.
/>
  “Okay,” Connor said. “You’re right. And the answer

  is yes.”

  “I think I forgot the question now.”

  What I really meant was that I had lost track of how

  it had been phrased. Whether a yes answer was the good

  news or the bad news.

  “Yes, that’s over now.”

  I breathed out a boatload of tension and anxiety, and

  felt like overcooked noodles without it. I sank down onto

  his bed, still holding those alarming items. I could feel

  my hands shaking. I guess the shock was wearing off. I

  guess it was finally dawning on me that I was holding

  something in my hand that kills people. Something that

  almost took my friend Connor right out of the world.

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  “So…,” I began. I think my voice might’ve been a

  little shaky, too. “If we get rid of this, you won’t just find another way?”

  “No,” he said. “I won’t. I promise.”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed with me, but

  not too close. A respectful distance away. I say respectful

  because he was giving me space to be angry. I could tell.

  I could feel him braced against my possible anger.

  I didn’t answer. I was just staring at the polished wood

  handle of his father’s gun.

  “When I came over to your house the other morn-

  ing…,” he began. “When was that? When I came over

  to talk to you about how it was going over at Zoe’s? I’d

  already changed my mind by then.”

  I breathed for a minute. Deeply. Trying to feel less

  shaken.

  It’s weird how you know something, but you don’t

  really know it. You have a sense of it inside your gut.

  And then all of a sudden you find out it’s real. You see it, right in front of your eyes. And part of you thinks, What are you so shocked about? You knew this all along. But when the gun is lying in your hands, let me tell you … that’s a

  whole different brand of knowing.

  It cuts right through the middle of you.

  “So we get rid of this,” I said.

  “Okay, yeah. That would be good.”

  “You want to give it back to your dad?”

  “No! He can’t know I had it. My mom can’t know I had

  it either. Let him think he lost it, or it got stolen. He can buy another one. He can afford it. He probably already did.”

  “Okay, fine. So we dump it. Get me some kind of

  bag or something. To put it in. I can’t just carry it down

  the street like this.”

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  For a minute he rummaged around. Opening draw-

  ers, staring into his closet. I think he was a little bit in shock, too. Bottom line, most people don’t keep bags in

  their bedroom.

  “Use the pillowcase,” he said, pulling it off his bed

  pillow. “I’ll tell my mom the cat shredded it and I threw

  it away.”

  I took it from him, and put the gun and the box of

  bullets in the bottom of it. And I tied the whole thing

  in a big, soft knot.

  I stood there staring at it for a minute. The kitten

  peeked out from under the bed, maybe wondering why

  nobody was trying to catch her.

  “That’ll look too weird,” Connor said.

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  He hurried over to his closet and took his school

  backpack down off a hook on the inside of the door. It

  was empty because it was summer. I put the weird knot

  of pillowcase into the bottom of it and shrugged the pack

  onto my back.

  “Thanks for doing this for me,” he said.

  “Thanks for not using it on yourself.”

  It was a pretty direct statement. It burned coming

  out. Probably burned him to hear it. It hit me that I had

  been talking around the thing. With both Connor and

  Mrs. Dinsmore. Using soft, not very exact words, like

  “not staying.” But damn it all to hell, sometimes you just

  have to call a thing what it is. And if they’re harsh words, maybe it’s because it’s a harsh thing. And maybe it’s better to recognize that. I’m not sure what I thought I was ac-complishing by trying to make it sound nicer than it was.

  I snuck down the stairs and made it out of the house

  without running into Mrs. Barnes. I trotted down their

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  porch stairs and broke into a run on the sidewalk. But

  the load in my pack bounced around too much. It was

  small as loads go, but weirdly heavy.

  Then I decided running would draw too much atten-

  tion to me anyway. Because nobody runs with a backpack.

  I made a beeline for the woods. And, because it was

  an entry point I had never used before, and a part of the

  woods I didn’t know like the back of my hand, I promptly

  got lost.

  Score one for my mom.

  * * *

  It had been just long enough to worry me. I’d been back-

  tracking, and thinking I was on the right path, and then

  finding out it was the same path I’d been lost on all along.

  I was starting to get scared.

  Then I remembered to use the sun.

  It was well up now, shining into my eyes. Which meant

  I was facing the same direction I’d be facing if I were sitting on Zoe Dinsmore’s porch. Which meant I wasn’t running the long way through the woods, and I wasn’t facing

  town. Which meant if I just kept going, I would hit the

  River Road.

  Problem was, there was no real path in that direction.

  But I pushed on anyway.

  It was slow going because I had to pick my way through

  tree roots and underbrush. My legs were getting scratched

  up. I’d have to wear long pants for weeks to hide the dam-

  age. In the middle of a hot summer. But I just kept going.

  Sweat poured down my legs and down my neck into

  my collar, and it tickled. But I just kept going.

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  And then I burst out onto the road. Suddenly. Somehow

  the brush had hidden it until the last minute, and I hadn’t

  seen it coming.

  I crossed the road and looked down into the muddy,

  fast-flowing river. And I cursed it. Actually cursed it out

  loud.

  “You son of a bitch,” I yelled at the river, which

  couldn’t have bothered to be insulted by my words. “You

  swallowed up everybody’s peace of mind in this town.

  Least you can do is take a problem off our hands for a

  change.”

  I dropped the backpack onto the ground. Looked

  around me 360 degrees. There was not a soul to be seen.

  Well, a soul. But not a person. A buck stared at me from

  the shoulder of the River Road, as if trying to figure

  out what I was so upset about. Then he trotted away, his

  hooves clattering over the tarmac.

  I took out the knotted pillowcase. Swung it around

  like winding up for a pitch. But just before I let it go, I

  had a bad thought. Imagine if I threw it too far and it

  landed on the bank on the other side. Exposed.

  The nearest bridge was probably three and a half miles

  away. And what if I got to the other side and couldn’t

  find the spot where it had l
anded?

  I did a light underhand swing, but before I could let

  go, I was struck with another bad thought.

  Imagine if I threw it not far enough, and it landed on

  this near bank. This muddy, slippery, very steep bank. I’d

  have to scramble down there and try to get it. But one

  false move and that river might take me away.

  I put it back in Connor’s pack and ran three and a half

  miles down the road shoulder to the bridge.

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  It was a one-lane bridge with a high iron structure

  to support it, built for cars but also built back when cars

  were a lot smaller. There was a car coming; I could hear

  it. I ducked into the woods and leaned on a tree until it

  had crossed the river and gone on its way.

  Then I walked out of the woods and onto the bridge

  with the terrifying bundle under my shirt. On every step

  it poked at the place where the kitten had scratched me.

  I stood a minute, just looking down and watching the

  water flow. But there was a method to my madness. I was

  straining my ears to be sure there was no one coming.

  When I was sure I heard nothing but silence, I looked

  around. All around. But if there was ever a deserted part

  of the developed world, I was standing in it on that crazy

  morning.

  I slipped the pillowcase out of my shirt and let it fall

  straight down into the river.

  “You owe me one,” I told the river. Quietly this time.

  “You owe us all one. You hide that for me. You make

  this one thing right, at least.”

  I looked around again, but thankfully I had not been

  seen. There was simply no one there to see me.

  I ran back down the road toward my familiar entrance

  to the woods on the river side. The one that would take

  me in a fairly straight line to Zoe’s cabin.

  When I passed the cemetery, I could see fresh flowers

  on the two graves. Matching red flowers on long stalks.

  But I was too upset to think much about it, and I didn’t go

  closer. I slowed my feet for just one beat, staring at them.

  Then I ran as fast as I had ever run in my life. Or

  maybe faster.

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  She was on her way back from the outhouse when I burst

  over the rise, still sprinting like a maniac.

  “What the hell got into you?” she asked when I was

  close enough to hear her.

  I stopped in front of her. I could barely speak I was

  panting so hard.