The Six Rules of Maybe

by Deb Caletti

  I didn’t really know where I was going. Not to Nicole’s or Jasmine’s. If I had a father, I thought, this would be the time I would go to wherever he was. It was not the kind of thought I usually allowed myself. It was stupid. But this time I gave myself a pass for one visiting-my-perfect-father fantasy. I tried it on for about two seconds until it felt like I was wearing a silly and pointless hat in public. Awkward, embarrassing, never mind.

  Instead I drove over to Point Perpetua Park. I had another fantasy on the way—me putting Jitter into a baby seat and driving far away where I could make sure he was never around unhappy parents. I would buy him soft clothes and read him books and teach him to aim high. It was still early evening, and the light was just dimming to twilight and turning thoughtful. I walked down the forested path and out to the beach. An older lady with poofy white hair walked with her small poofy, white-haired dog, and Bea Martinsen, who told fortunes at the Sunday market, sat at one of the benches eating a take-out hamburger from one of Pirate’s Plunder’s bags. When I reached the beach, I saw a couple who looked like they were having an argument and the guy who always played the bagpipes around town, who now sat on the sand and watched the waves. I picked my way over to the rock where Hayden and I had sat. A small collection of shells was up there—someone had been there since we had and had forgotten their treasures.

  The water was choppy, and the waves were traveling at a rambunctious angle. A tanker inched by in the distance. The wide sea and rocks and beach should have set things right for me, that’s how it had always worked before, but I still felt some ugly feeling in my chest, something metallic and twisted, some kind of wreckage. I tried to untwist and understand. It didn’t feel good. It felt a little close to hate. Maybe I was hating Juliet, and it felt wrong to hate Juliet. Maybe what I hated was that Juliet could do no wrong even when she did one of the biggest wrongs.

  The arguing couple made up, took hands, and then kissed deeply by the shore, the water wetting their shoes. The old lady appeared with her dog and they walked a bit, and then she picked him up just before he headed toward a glittery pool of broken glass. Maybe I had also always felt sure of something I wasn’t so sure of now. That if I followed some rules of being nice and good, everything would work out okay. That at least this meant I was giving fate its best shot to follow through the way it should. Good people would get good things; wrong acts were punished. You’d get back what you gave, because that was only fair. Maybe being good to other people was often really only about hope—your hope that if you acted the right way, the pieces of the universe would fall into their true and just place. If you were being honest, that was a good part of why you did it, right? It was a way to protect yourself. Sort of a shield against wrongness, only maybe wrongness just didn’t care about rules or hope or other people’s good intentions.

  I sat there for a long time, until everyone had left and there were only two guys smoking cigarettes on the beach. The shadows were getting long and night was falling, and so I finally left. I went down to the marina and picked up a hamburger and fries and a shake at Pirate’s Plunder, because I tended to catch other people’s food choices, same as a yawn. I ate it in Mom’s car with the windows rolled down so the lingering french fry smell didn’t give away what I’d actually done with my night.

  The TV was on in the living room but the lights were off when I got home. I didn’t want to catch Juliet and Hayden making out, so I crept upstairs. There was a crack of light under my mom’s door. I made my way over the creaks in the hall, shut my door by turning the handle oh-so-quietly.

  There was a tap then.

  “Scarlet?”

  “Yeah.”

  Mom poked her head in. “You okay?” One hand was on the doorjamb, the other at her side. Plain, ringless hands. She never wore rings. I had asked her why, once. She had said she liked her hands to belong to herself.

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t seem okay. Can I come in?” I nodded. She sat on the edge of my bed. She looked up at my wall of photos—Mrs. Martinelli in her frog sweatshirt, the back of Nicole and her mom looking into their refrigerator, Buster standing around with Ginger, as if they were catching up on dog gossip, a little girl staring with wide eyes into Randall and Stein Booksellers as if it were a toy store.

  “I like that one,” she said.

  “This?”

  A shot of Goth Girl’s Mona Lisa. The Saint Georges’ lawn took up the top half of the frame; the painting filled the bottom.

  “Next to it.” It was the back of Mr. Martinelli’s neck. The straight line of his crew cut set against a blue sky. “You’ve got a really good eye, you know.”

  “Thanks.”

  She tucked her brown hair behind her ears, and then tucked it again, as if she were about to deliver some bad news. She opened her mouth to say something, shut it for a revision, tried over. “I know this is hard. This stranger, coming and moving into our house … His dog. All this with Juliet. This situation thrust on us. I know that even I don’t understand how this happened.”

  I looked down at my comforter. Traced the threads with my finger. Boy, was she getting it wrong.

  “It’s new for me, too,” she went on. “We don’t even know anything about him. And then, a baby …” She sighed. “God. She’s so young. I think about how young I was… .”

  I tried to imagine this, a younger version of my mom, pregnant with Juliet. Some stranger with white-blond hair who spoke and ate and made decisions and maybe loved Mom and maybe didn’t. Twice in one day was more than I’d thought about him in years.

  “I don’t understand how she could do something so stupid,” I said.

  Mom thought. “Well, sometimes … you think it’s going to decide something. Marriage. A baby.”

  I didn’t know where she was going with that. Mom could be fond of misty and beside-the-point musings. The kind you got when you’d been listening to music and were therefore in some mood to be profound. I didn’t care about any of that. Profound was just a way to keep your distance from prickly life truths. I didn’t want soft, misty talk. I hated conflict, hated it, especially with Mom, but I chanced the truth. “You don’t seem that upset,” I said quietly.

  “What?”

  “Not really. You’re not that mad at her.”

  Mom shook her head. She looked at me like she couldn’t quite understand where I was coming from. Her face changed, lost its softness. Her voice was irritated. “I’m just trying to do the best I can here.”

  I kept tracing the threads with my fingertip. I could go farther, but it might mean a real argument, a guilty and unsettled night’s sleep, and the dreaded waking up with the knowledge that things were wrong between us. I kept quiet. We just sat there silently. I listened to Mr. Martinelli drag his rubber garbage cans down the cement driveway to the curb.

  “All right, Scarlet. If this is the way you want it … ,” Mom said. She waited, but I gave her nothing back. She got up and left me alone again.

  I tried to get into bed and go to sleep, but sleep was stubborn and taunting, staying just out of reach. I wondered if I should make a list of things we needed for the baby. I listened to crickets and folded up my pillow and tried it that way and then unfolded it again. The sheet had gotten all scrunched at the bottom of the mattress and I was sorting out my confused bed when I heard a noise out on the street. Footsteps. A voice? I peeked out my window.

  Oh God, it was Clive Weaver outside again, naked as the day he was born. He was out by the mailboxes. He muttered something. And then he said, “Roscoe Oil, those bastards!” so loudly that he caused a far-off dog to bark and Ally Pete-Robbins’s porch light to go on.

  “Mr. Weaver!” I whispered as loudly as I could.

  He looked around as if God were talking to him. I could only imagine how surprised he’d be when God turned out to be a seventeen-year-old girl.

  “Up here!” I whispered. “It’s me, Scarlet.”

  “I thought maybe the mail was late,” he said.

/>   “It’s not late,” I said. “It came this afternoon.”

  “They’d never have let us get away with that shit,” he said.

  “I think you’d better go inside and go to bed,” I said. His nakedness was not as shocking the second time around.

  “What?” he shouted.

  “Go inside and go to bed.”

  “So long,” he said.

  Mr. Weaver shuffled back in the direction of his front door, his slippers scuffing along on the sidewalk, his flabby white ass making a sad retreat. I climbed back into bed. Someone was going to have to do something about him. Probably that someone was going to be me. Ever since way back in kindergarten, when Mr. Keneely needed “someone” to walk with Renee Horton to the office when she was about to throw up and nobody, nobody offered to help, I’d been the someone who would finally raise their hand. Whether someone ever got to be anyone—that was what I wasn’t so sure of anymore.

  Chapter Ten

  In the morning, there were cars out in front of Clive Weaver’s house. Two cars. Serious-looking cars. I hoped he hadn’t died or anything. It didn’t seem like a death-type morning. The guys working on the house behind us were getting an early start; I heard the cheery chink, chink, chink of the ladder rising, the clatter of lumber being dropped. A crow heckled his nasty caw, caw from a tree, as another, more positive-thinking bird group twittered cheerfully from farther off. A milk truck from Daly Farms was stopped in front of Ally Pete-Robbins’s house, the driver hopping into the wide-open truck door and starting the engine back up with optimistic vigor. Blue sky, a tree shimmering in a slight breeze. All in all, not a day someone’s life was over.

  I walked past Juliet’s closed door. It seemed heavy with sleep and secrets and entwined bodies and sheets in disarray. I tried not to think about what my sister had said, about Hayden in bed. I pretended not to see the door the way you pretend not to see things not entirely hidden that should be entirely hidden, life’s little moments of too much information—Wiley Rogers’s older brother selling drugs across the street from our high school, for one example; Hailey Benecci’s anorexia, for another.

  It was not exactly like I hadn’t been faced with Juliet’s sex life before. There were countless times she’d come home with her hair smashed up and tangled and her makeup long gone, and sometimes I’d actually catch her and Buddy on the couch in our living room. There would be a panicked flurry of jumping up and adjusting clothes and Buddy looking around on the floor with one hand for his shirt that had fallen, wearing underwear so tight he could have been on the swim team. But this was different, even though Juliet was married now. Hayden wasn’t Buddy or Adam Christ or Harrison Somebody. He was more real. He had strong-looking shoulders, and life goals, and a dog he scruffed under the neck and crooned at. He wasn’t some idea of a man, he actually was a man. It made that closed bedroom door—

  “Morning,” Hayden said from the kitchen.

  “Oh!” I said. I felt some weird relief at the sight of him standing there in his jeans and his favorite soft green T-shirt, his cheeks stubbly and unshaven, his hair a bird’s nest tangle of curls. Assumptions were sometimes tricky territory.

  “I’m afraid this coffeepot may have stopped working.” He was holding an empty cup, World’s Best Mom written on it, with a picture of a trophy cup. Mother’s Day from a thousand years ago.

  “Mom unplugs it every night,” I said.

  He shook his head to indicate he couldn’t believe his own stupidity, looked behind the coffeepot, and lifted the cord up as evidence that I was right. “I see,” he said. And then: “Every night?”

  “She’s convinced it will burst into flames.”

  “Mothers,” he said.

  “Mothers,” I agreed. “Do you have one? I mean, where is yours? Are yours. Your parents?” It was true what Mom had said—we didn’t know anything about him. He could have been raised by wolves for all we knew. I got a cereal bowl, poured breakfast. Mom had already gone to work, and if I wasn’t waiting at the curb in fifteen minutes, Derek would drive on without me.

  “I don’t see my father much anymore. Not a great guy. Actually, a bad man. You know.” I did. “Mom is in Portland. She’s a sculptor. Really good. She’s getting pretty successful now, I’m proud to say.”

  “How does she feel about …” I waved my arm in a circle.

  It was quiet except for that stupid crow. He was cawing along and then got frenzied as crows do sometimes, the caws turning into that garble-garble strangled-turkey sound. Zeus leaped to his feet and trotted out to the kitchen window as if to protect us from imminent danger. In his mind, as long as he kept his eye on things, we’d be safe.

  “That crow,” Hayden said. “Turkey murder.”

  “I was just thinking the exact same thing,” I said.

  I thought for a moment he would skip the answer to my question, but he finally spoke after the coffeepot began to burble. “Mom’s um … disappointed. I’m the only child, and this isn’t how she saw things going. Or how I did, honestly. She offered to help so we could stay in Portland, but Juliet …” He shrugged a well-you-know-how-this-story-ends shrug.

  “But I guess you and Juliet have that in common,” I said.

  “We both have disappointed mothers?” Hayden leaned with his back against the counter as he waited for the coffee. Zeus turned his attention back to him, looked up at Hayden as if he was the center of everything great—steaks and dog biscuits and shady spots and car rides.

  “Fathers. You know.”

  “Asshole fathers?”

  “Absent ones.”

  “Mine was around; he just wasn’t a nice guy.”

  “Maybe we had it better, then. We didn’t know what kind of guy he was.”

  “You knew he was a coward,” Hayden said.

  My chest filled with an unfamiliar feeling. Something large. It was the great rising flood you feel when the kid you know is cheating from you gets caught, or when the creep driver who’s been riding your tail gets pulled over. I didn’t answer him right away, though. It wasn’t something I liked to think about. But the place he’d just brought me to was a great place, where he was standing up to the bully just by speaking the truth.

  “A coward?” I said.

  “Absolutely, Scarlet.”

  He held my eyes, driving his point home. I looked down. All the greatness was too much suddenly; the awareness of how much his words meant embarrassed me.

  “Anyway,” I said. “You and Juliet. A match made in childhood.”

  The coffeepot filled cheerfully. Hayden tilted his head and narrowed his eyes at me. “There you go again,” he said. “Jesus. Nothing much passes you by, does it, Scarlet Ellis? You are a life-watcher. You take it in, all of it.”

  I willed myself not to blush. “I gotta run,” I said. I rinsed my bowl, jammed it into the dishwasher.

  “Look both ways and don’t talk to strangers,” he said.

  “Okay, Dad,” I said.

  I waited outside for Derek. The day was sunny and you could smell flowers blooming. I swear I could smell the orange red of Ally Peet-Robbins’s bed of primroses. I had that big, big feeling that sat right next to giddy. Where you feel like you could build a building or stop warring nations or create a masterpiece, and you want to start right then. I life-watched; I took it all in, it was true. That was me. That’s who I was. That’s who I was exactly.

  Usually you could hear Derek Nakasani’s car before you could see it. The Camaro made the sound a large animal might make in the back of its throat when provoked. I once made the mistake of making Derek wait because I was late, or should I say making Derek not wait. So I tried to be early and stood in front of our house with my backpack at my feet. The cars still sat in Clive Weaver’s driveway, quiet with importance.

  My eye caught on something on the sidewalk in front of Goth Girl’s house. Something pink. A new design started already? I crossed the street to get a better look.

  A new design, yes, but it was nothing like an
ything she’d ever drawn before. It was simple. The sparest message. No hints of famous paintings, no family members in punishing poses. No vampires with fangs and blood. Just a red Volkswagen. A tuxedo. A dress, one that a princess might wear—pink, with a full skirt. Underneath it were the words Prom dress. A pair of shoes, and the words under that: Prom shoes.

  Every bad thought I’d had the night before about helping people, about being a good person—they vanished, just like that. This was why you helped people. This was why you did the right thing. Because you could make a difference when no one else could. Because you were actually needed. You watched life, you took it all in, and then you did something about it. Goth Girl was talking to me. Goth Girl was telling me her deepest secret.

  Goth Girl wanted to go to the prom.

  “Are you ignoring me? Because I have the feeling you’re ignoring me.” When I shut my locker door and turned around, I found Reilly Ogden standing there.

  “Jesus, Reilly, you scared me.” Reilly had a way of appearing out of nowhere. That day, he wore a black dress shirt open to his chest, a traveling salesman stuck in the seventies, ready to pick up foxy chicks in a hotel bar. His hair had something slippery on it; it was stuck up in some punk-cool, circa 1980. His tennis shoes were high-tech millennium cool. Who knew what year the actual Reilly Ogden was inside.

  I had seen Reilly’s house once, the night I made the mistake of going to the dance with him. It was one of those flat fifties houses with small windows and that white stuff that looks like Grape-Nuts sprayed onto the low ceiling. There was a BMW out front, his parents’ car. Inside, the living room smelled like someone had just cooked bacon. It had a sort of creepy basement. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m really only about sixty-eight percent okay with basements.

  “Scarlet, what’s wrong? Things haven’t been the same between us.”