Stay Where I Can See You

by Katrina Onstad

  “Ms. Madeline Kaplan,” he said. “Do you know where you are?”

  Maddie paused. “A club?”

  “A service club.”

  A girl piped in: “We tutor and do food drives.”

  A boy added: “We give back to the community.”

  Maddie looked at them. “What community?” she asked.

  “Our own,” said another girl. “Fifteen percent of the people who live in this neighbourhood live below the poverty line.”

  Sophie grabbed Maddie’s hand, leading her to sit down. “It’s actually fun. You can just sit in and decide later if you want to join,” she said. “We’re brainstorming.”

  “Mindsqualling,” said the boy.

  “Psychegusting,” said the poverty-line girl, so proud of this phrase that she tapped it into her phone.

  “Synonym nerds,” said Sophie.

  Maddie couldn’t tell if this assessment was affectionate or not.

  “All rights, mes amis,” said Dr. Goldberg. “We need that one big project that will galvanize the student body this year.”

  “Bake sale?”

  Sophie wrote BAKE SALE on the whiteboard.

  “Food drive?”

  “Tutoring? Our local public elementary school has a forty-five percent ESL rate.”

  A boy said, “It’s so patronizing to assume that just because someone doesn’t speak English as a first language, they need our help.”

  Sophie’s hand hovered over the whiteboard, unsure whether to write.

  “We do tend to get a bit . . . colonialist,” murmured someone else.

  The poverty-line girl pinkened and shot back, “Oh really? Are we so PC as to ignore the needs of newcomers right on our doorstep?”

  “We don’t know what they need,” said Sophie. “But we could ask.” She wrote TUTORING on the board.

  Dr. Goldberg turned to Maddie. “Madeline, any thoughts?”

  Maddie looked at him. “I’m still not—what exactly is this club?”

  After a moment of silence came a tumble of words. “We’re community activists.”

  “Philanthropists.”

  “We build bridges.”

  “We empower.”

  There was nothing else to do, Maddie knew, but nod and smile. She wondered what it was about suffering that made them all so alert. She had gone along, too, back at her old school, collecting toys for the children’s hospital, and selling cupcakes for endangered species. But she wasn’t moved from within. She was like a dancer who learned her moves from YouTube. She wondered if she would ever feel real sadness for the world, or if she would just keep nodding along, faking it like the rest of them, right into adulthood.

  * * *

  Maddie retreated to the library. She had fallen behind on her work already. There were hundreds of pages to read, dozens of equations to solve. Around her, students stewed in the same panic, surrounded by textbooks, binders and laptops. Maddie began watching Mitch Hedberg videos on her new laptop, trying not to laugh out loud.

  An email popped up in her inbox. Subject: Hello

  Hi Maddie,

  You don’t know me but we should meet. Write me back.

  It was sent to her school account, but if it was from another student, they were hiding behind a generic Gmail address. Probably spam. She considered deleting it, but something pulled at her, and she left it unanswered instead.

  When she looked up, she saw Joshua at a faraway table. He even sat lightly, his fingers turning the page of a textbook. Maddie removed her headphones and shut her computer, opening a book. When she glanced over again, Joshua was typing, eyes locked on a laptop. She looked down, flipping pages. Had he sent the email?

  When she looked up again, Joshua was next to her.

  “Want to go for a walk?” She grinned, pleased to hear in the timbre of his voice that he was nervous, too.

  They walked together through the hall, Maddie side-glancing at his light, clipped stride. When they pushed open the door, a cooler fall light covered the street, the traffic lights caught in its haze.

  Maddie had already mined social media for Joshua. He came up in the student directory, with a serious, deep-eyed gaze: Joshua Andrada. Programmers Club. Born: Quezon City. That was it. Maddie Wikipedia’d Quezon: Philippines; 7,104 islands prone to earthquakes and typhoons; coups; a place with the very cool name of the Chocolate Hills of Bohol. She had scanned Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. No sign of him there. Joshua left almost no digital footprint, at least not under his own name.

  “Where should we go?” Maddie asked.

  “I have to work in an hour.”

  Back home, her friend Raj worked in his father’s restaurant. Some kids worked at camp, and girls babysat. But Maddie didn’t know anyone with a real job, the kind that involved bosses and uniforms.

  “I’ll walk with you.” Her sudden burst of confidence surprised her: wherever he was going, she wanted to go.

  They passed the football stadium of the university, weaving between tangles of construction. Above them, cranes swung in the wind, piling beams on top of fresh skyscrapers. Joshua offered up simple questions, and Maddie answered in the bland tones she gave her parents. It was another thing she didn’t like about herself. Why do you get so boring when you’re actually excited? she wondered. She was skipping all the interesting parts. He could not possibly be enjoying this tedious walk through this cement city with this pudding of a girl.

  “Look,” he said, and they stopped in front of a new building, a steel and glass checkerboard bowl. “Do you think it’s ugly?” he asked.

  Maddie knew the museum. Her family had driven there once to look at dinosaurs. It had seemed like such a long drive to reach it, and now here it was, accidentally.

  “No,” she said. “But it needs humans in it, or else it’s just like . . . a spaceship that crashed here.”

  “I kind of like it,” said Joshua. “My mother thinks it’s the ugliest.”

  “Is she an architect?”

  He laughed. “No, she’s just judgmental.”

  They cut through the legislature, over green lawns and past a statue of a king on a horse clutching his helmet. Joshua would take his citizenship oath in that building, he said, hopefully next year. There had been a delay because of a problem with his birth certificate. His grandfather had already mailed him a tie from the Philippines for the ceremony. Maddie pictured Joshua singing the national anthem; he probably had a beautiful singing voice.

  “Will you put your hand on a Bible?” she asked.

  “You can bring one if you want,” said Joshua.

  “Could you swear on anything? Like an Archie comic?”

  Joshua laughed. She was surprised how easily he moved between laughter and uncanny stillness.

  Maddie felt her phone pulse through her backpack. It would be her mother. She ignored it.

  They kept walking. Noodle restaurants and shops selling bongs. She had been here before. They were approaching the Lottery Offices. Maddie slowed in the sidewalk crowd, bodies braiding around her. Joshua moved ahead, and she was tempted to call out to him, to explain what had happened to her right here, on this sidewalk, just a few months ago. But she had told no one in the city. When you’re a teenager, so much is shameful: the strange new hairs above your lip; how you sometimes can’t look your mother in the eye for no real reason. The shame about the money was different. To mention it would be showing off, and there was nothing worse than a girl who got caught looking for attention, Maddie knew.

  Up ahead, Joshua stopped, noticing her absence and looking around, anxiously, until he located her, standing in front of the Lottery Offices, considering what to say. He waved her forward, and she went, saying nothing.

  * * *

  The air in the food court was gluey. Empty tables were scattered with garbage, and at the full ones, people lifted food from styrofoam boxes into their churning mouths.

  “Do you like working there?” Maddie asked, and then burned pink at the question. Duh, she though
t. At the sub shop where Joshua worked, Maddie saw a bent-backed older woman with plastic gloves and yellow smock, smearing something neon orange on a bun.

  But Joshua said, “It’s pretty good. Brainless. The boss is nice. He lets me make up shifts if school gets busy.”

  “Hairnet or no hairnet?”

  “No hairnet,” he said.

  It was time for them to part, Maddie knew, but they stood across from each other, not moving.

  “The worst part is the garbage. I always have to do it, because I’m basically the only guy and the women won’t go. It’s this long corridor, and it gets darker and darker, and more and more of the slime from the bags leaks as you go, so by the time you get to the room, you’re basically wading through a garbage river. The bins are so full they don’t close. There are rats, too. You hear them more than you see them.”

  “That’s worse. I’d rather see them.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how much garbage is in here. It’s like its own planet.”

  “People are disgusting,” said Maddie, looking around at the chewing faces.

  “Customers take so much stuff they don’t need. It’s like: ‘Free straws! I’ll take three!’”

  They shared a moment of repulsion.

  Joshua sounded so much like a teenager that Maddie was surprised, but comforted, too. His otherworldly quality receded slightly, and now they were not so far apart.

  7

  GWEN: BEFORE

  When Gwen stopped running that day after the attack in the donut shop, she found herself in the cold at the mouth of the College subway station. She looked down the stairs, and she could not think of a single place to go. Because she was afraid—of what she had seen, of what she had done and not done—she yearned to be comforted, and comfort was still Daniel. He was the thing to be feared, and he was the comfort from that thing. She recognized this split thinking as a form of madness, but still she went back to the professor’s house. She told herself that if he showed up, they could make sense of what had happened together. At the same time, she dreaded his return.

  The floors of the little house were sharp with needles and bottles and long, circular conversations generated by half-sleeping bodies. Gwen smoked pot and bartered for cigarettes and toothpaste, locking herself into a fog that would allow her to sleep. The little money she’d saved would run out soon. She hunkered down in a sleeping bag in the bedroom. No one bothered her. She was Daniel’s still, marked.

  She smoked mostly in the bathroom. The white tiles along the wall were smeared with filth, but Gwen liked it in there, alone. She would sit on the edge of the tub and smoke, peering out the small window at the garden covered in snow.

  In the ransacked medicine cabinet, she saw an empty Tylenol bottle without a lid and a pregnancy test in an unopened box. How odd that this one item would survive. And then an electric realization coursed through her.

  Minutes later, the stick turned blue, and a cross appeared. Gwen caught her breath, checking and rechecking the instructions, the road map.

  Underneath the sink, she found a can of Comet, yellow gloves and a wizened sponge. Hazily, she sprinkled the white soap on the floors and flung it across the walls, and began scrubbing. And then she heard the front door open, and a woman’s voice screaming: “What the hell is going on? What the hell?”

  The professor had returned, at this of all moments. Was it the New Year already? Gwen pictured what the woman was discovering in her living room: mounds of bodies shaking beneath her soft throws. She was seeing pizza boxes and burn holes in the rug.

  “Where the fuck is Kristina? Who are you people? I’m calling the police.”

  Gwen scrubbed faster. She kept cleaning, pushing through the panic. She had smoked so much pot! She pictured a baby with flippers and a heart on the outside of its chest; all the worst things would come to nest in her body. Payback.

  The professor was rattling the bathroom doorknob.

  “Who’s in there?”

  Gwen scrubbed.

  Because there was no one to tell, she wouldn’t have to explain why she didn’t get an abortion. There was no moral high ground in the decision, which wasn’t a decision. Of course every sound argument was against a baby. The church had no say; Gwen’s father thought church was for suckers who wanted to give away their money. Gwen’s God, as far as she had one, didn’t want women to suffer, or children to be unloved. Gwen had sat in the free clinic waiting room while Laura had an abortion. Laura emerged through the door afterwards with an entirely new face—terror replaced with relief. Gwen had hugged her friend close.

  But this was different. Something in Gwen had shifted when the cross on the stick grew darker. A blind over a window snapped up. Light poured in. This swerve in her circumstances was somehow inevitable, anchoring. A change—the most dramatic of all changes—was instantly, entirely welcome. She felt like Laura after the abortion: relieved, and unjudged.

  “Who’s in there?” The door shook.

  If the baby is okay, I’ll never smoke again, Gwen thought, scrubbing. I’ll never see Daniel again. I will call my mother.

  A baby would make everything different. She could fire every cell in her being and do.

  She dropped the sponge. This part is over.

  She opened the door to the screaming professor. Gwen brushed past her, grabbing her backpack. One by one, the squatters stumbled out of the house into the snow, clutching plastic bags, scattering in the streetlight. Gwen ran down the front walkway, the professor yelling behind her. Police sirens drew closer.

  Gwen’s shoes were wet, and the cold air clawed at her, as if she were wearing no clothes. Christmas lights twinkled on porches. She was so tired, her mind muddy. Her wet feet took her to Palmer’s.

  Through the stale beer and smoke, she found Gus in the back room, behind his desk, as if he’d been waiting for her.

  “You looking for your boyfriend?”

  Gwen didn’t answer because she didn’t know. Maybe she was making sure he wasn’t there. Maybe she was saying goodbye.

  “Fucker stole from me,” said Gus. “Cops picked him up. He’s no genius, that one. Had my seven thousand right in his pocket.”

  Daniel in a cell. Daniel in a locked box. She should have felt relieved, but it was all mixed up. If he got picked up because of Gus, and not the attack in the donut shop, then he wasn’t actually caught. But—okay—neither was she.

  And then a prick of a thought: No one stays in jail forever.

  “What about you now?” said Gus, leaning back, smirking. He was ridiculous. “You gonna work for me?”

  Outside, in the bar, there was a smash of glass and yelling, as if someone had dropped a box of bottles. Gus leapt to his feet.

  “Goddammit!” He pushed past Gwen, swearing.

  Alone in the tiny room, Gwen leaned forward, opened the desk, and without looking behind her, picked up Gus’s black handgun. In the split second she held it, it was as banal in her hand as a stapler. Quickly she put the gun in her backpack and was pulling closed the zipper when Gus strode back through the door.

  Years later, she would remember the moment that followed, and how she mumbled and got out of the room. In the hall, a man walked by with a guitar case. She nodded at him and kept moving, waving lightly at the bartender, eye on the door, waiting to be stopped. But no one stopped her. She walked right out onto the street.

  Once, when she was a child, her father had driven Gwen and her sister out to the river, lining up beer cans and giving each girl a turn with a shotgun. The first time, Gwen pulled the trigger and the sound made her cry out; the kick threw her shoulder backwards. But the next time, Gwen figured it out, and the bullet hit the can, knocking it to the ground. Nancy wandered around in her red cap, complaining of boredom. Gwen’s father stood behind her, endlessly directing. As she improved, she grew more and more aware of how easy it would be to turn around and put a hole in her father’s head. Maybe her father sensed it, because after she’d hit three cans in a row, he said, “Com
e on, now. Time to go.” And he never took her shooting again.

  Gwen had never owned much, but from apartment to apartment, from those first days with Maddie in student housing, all the way to Shadow Pines, and now, in their new house, she had kept Gus’s gun. It stayed wrapped in a dishtowel, bound with elastic bands, at the bottom of the ratty pack that had been with her on the streets that summer. It had stayed there for years, witness to all her changes, untouched but nearby. And loaded.

  * * *

  Only a nurse and a doctor were in the hospital room with Gwen for Maddie’s quick, bullet birth.

  “Can I use this phone?” Gwen asked, closing her eyes to place the call.

  The next morning, her mother picked them up, and Gwen returned home to her childhood bedroom in Procter with Maddie in her arms. They lay side by side, Gwen looking up at the popcorn ceiling, plotting her next move.

  For those first months, her mother changed diapers, but she still vanished to her bedroom in the afternoons. Nancy, Gwen’s sister, was in her final year of high school, with her university acceptance letters stacked up on the kitchen table in order of preference. She would poke her head into Gwen’s room and eye-roll at her sister with her half-shaved head, softening slightly to greet the baby kicking on the bed.

  Gwen’s father mostly kept his distance. He held the baby sometimes, and Gwen was surprised to hear him cooing. But the next hour he would revert to the snap and growl. He looked on every person in the house as a hindrance to order. “Why is there so much plastic crap everywhere?” “Who screwed up the remote control?”

  With the bedroom door shut and the cordless phone in her lap, Gwen got ready to start over. Because she had been pregnant and poor, it turned out that she qualified for a special program at the university that accepted high school dropouts. She applied for every grant and every student loan available to single mothers. One morning, with Maddie tucked into a carrier on her chest, she took the bus to the city, paying with coins taken from her mother’s wallet during one of her naps.

  The grants Gwen earned provided just enough money to afford a furnished, one-bedroom apartment in student housing. She told her mother that she would be leaving while her father was at work, and her mother said sleepily: “Oh, Gwyneth. That’s a very good idea. It’s awfully crowded in the house, isn’t it?”