by Deb Caletti
Sitting on the rock at Point Perpetua, I had felt an ease with Hayden that I was unfamiliar with. But I had been wrong then. I was still on a rope bridge, all right, one with fraying knots and old jute. He was my sister’s husband, and even if she didn’t love him, he wasn’t mine. I could stand on that bridge with all my wants and desires, but beneath me, there were the raging waters and the hard fall of heartbreak.
One thing I knew, straightforward ease did not cause you to awaken night after night, did not cause you to turn the knob of the front door and walk out to the only place that was really yours, your own truck, so that you could lean against it and feel the comfort of it. Straightforward ease did not cause others to go out after you because they worried, because some part of them wanted to save you, because they knew you deserved better.
Sometimes we would talk.
“We are the worst pair of insomniacs,” he said once.
I nodded, though I’d never had trouble sleeping before, not until he came and I would lie awake and listen for the sound of him, or sometimes, go outside myself first in hopes he might appear. “It’s the curse of the busy head,” I said. “They could make a horror movie with that title.”
“Too bad busy heads aren’t given mandatory work hours. Nine to five, no overtime,” he said.
“Otherwise, fired.” I slashed the air.
“We’ve got to be more strict with our heads.”
“Absolutely.” I shivered, even though the night was warm. “A mind is a tyrant.” Mine was, anyway. Sometimes, I got so sick of being in my own head, it would have been nice to be anywhere else for a while. I wished for a mind that was peaceful and orderly, like a well-run office. Mine was more like a hospital emergency room.
The smell of Hayden’s cigarette rose up and wandered off. It was one bad habit he had, a habit Juliet wrongly appreciated. I imagined her curling up to him when he came back to bed, her head on his chest, the smell she liked on his breath.
“So, what brings you in to see the doctor today,” I said.
“Hmn. I’m afraid I have a chronic desire to save people.” He put his hand through his curls and they fell back to where they’d been before. He wore cargo shorts low on his hips, the loose, soft-looking sea-green T-shirt he loved. That wedding ring, catching the streetlight.
“I know about that,” I said. “I’ve got it too. Maybe it’s catching.”
“Not catching enough,” he said. He thought about this. We both did. “The need to rescue …” His words drifted off.
“I know all about it,” I said. It’s you I want to rescue I wanted to say but didn’t. It was funny. He saw Juliet in need of saving, when he was the one who needed it most of all. Sometimes, I guess, we couldn’t see past our own intentions.
“I was even a lifeguard in high school.” He shrugged. It was apologetic. God, he looked good in the streetlight on those summer nights.
“You were?” I tried to picture this. Maybe for a moment I saw myself pretending to drown. “Did you wear that white stuff on your nose?”
“Nah. Urban lifeguard myth. Mostly I had to tell little kids to walk, not run.”
The sky was beautiful, and we were both looking at it. Deep, dark, intense white speckles spread out like the grandest present ever. “That’s it, probably,” he said upward, to the night. “See there? Those people we want to save? They’re the intense flashes of fire across our otherwise empty black sky.” He nodded, as if agreeing with his own self. He sounded like one of his notes then. I could almost see the words written in his firm, small handwriting. Was he right about this? I just thought being a rescuer was who I was, and that helping others was the right thing to do. I didn’t like this idea, that there were people who were sky and people who were stars. I think I wanted to someday be a flash of light across a plane of darkness.
“I don’t know. Maybe we’re just nice people,” I said. “Not boring ones.”
He leaned down, stubbed out his cigarette on the driveway, showing the long curve of his back. He held the cigarette butt between his fingers, looked around for somewhere to toss it, then tucked it into his T-shirt pocket instead. Hayden never seemed to mind my presence there at night. Actually, he seemed glad when I appeared. I wondered if that’s what us rescuers really wanted—that same feeling of protection offered back to us, just once. Maybe I wanted to give Hayden something because of how badly I wanted him to give me something. In my most private thoughts, too, I sometimes felt like Reilly had—I offered something and Hayden took it, and that had to mean something, didn’t it? I repeated rule four of The Five Rules of Maybe over and over. You had to place hope carefully in your hands.
“Think about it,” Hayden said. “At the center of the most empty, hollow places there’s a vortex of activity and motion … Astronomy 101.”
“Are you calling us empty?”
“I’m just saying that maybe we ought to be making our own vortex, you know? Instead of using everyone else’s? I’ve been thinking about this. I don’t even know how to put words to it. But we could stop getting sucked into every available black hole. We could want things.”
“We do want things.”
“For ourselves.”
What I wanted was to circle my fingers around his wrists, to feel his arms around me, to rest my head on his chest, to breathe the smell of night in his hair. That’s what I wanted for myself. He was looking at me, urging me to hear this thought of his, and I did hear then. Want was a shut door, and I opened it just a small bit, just enough to get through, the way you push a door just a bit with your toe when your arms are too full of other things. It’s what the rules said anyway, right? Before you got to rule four about holding hope carefully, you had one and two and three, about belief and pursuit of it, about clear determination. Know what you desire… . Then go.
At that moment, Clive Weaver came outside. He had rediscovered his robe, thankfully. He shuffled down his walkway and looked down the street as if it were two o’clock when the mail came. He was out there more and more often with us, the people who thought too much during the time when other people rested.
“Evening,” Clive Weaver said.
Hayden gave Clive a two-fingered salute in response.
“I believe I’ve lost Corky,” Clive Weaver said. Corky, Clive Weaver’s little black-and-white dog, was actually sitting upright on their porch step then, smiling. He never usually got to stay up this late.
“Behind you,” Hayden said.
“Ah,” Clive Weaver said, as if this were the answer to a great mystery. He looked at Corky for a while. “It’s over faster than you think,” he said finally.
You could hear crickets off in the blackness somewhere and the sound of a distant airplane. As we watched Clive Weaver wander back across his grass in his tired robe on that June night, I suddenly wasn’t so sure about what Hayden had said, about wanting things for yourself. Hayden didn’t look so sure either, anymore. Clive Weaver wanted things badly.
“As you were saying … ,” I whispered.
“Shit, man.” Hayden sighed.
I looked up at our sky, stars twinkling, twinkling, twinkling their forever-ness. “If this were the movies, this would be the time a shooting star would streak across the sky,” I said. “To make us think something great was heading our way after all.”
Hayden looked up too. The sky just kept looking the same as it had before, and both of us caught the moment of hilarity at the same time. We both laughed, oh God, we laughed so hard, trying to be quiet, holding our stomachs. There was no shooting star, of course, not a one, and Hayden was bent over laughing and saying, “Fuck. Fuck,” and I was gasping for air. Then he mimed looking up again, and so did I, and of course there was still no dramatic cinematic moment, only regular life, and it was hysterical all over again.
I was bent over and my arms were crossed against my stomach, and I wasn’t even looking at him because I was laughing so hard and trying to be quiet at the same time. And that’s when I felt each of his hands
behind me on my shoulders, giving them a shake, the way a father might shake the shoulders of a kid he was joking with. But then he turned me around and I turned to him and we hugged there. We hugged for a moment and then he released me and he was still grinning.
I had felt his back under the flat of my hands, his soft shirt, my cheek ever so briefly against him, there where his heart was. He had held me, and I had held him, too. God, it felt good, it did. I had let want in, opened the door ever so slightly. But want without the belief you can get what you want is pointless. You have to have hope, so I let that in too. You have to. To want things and go for them and believe, even in impossible situations … Hope was what you had when you had nothing else. Hope was the perfect shiny top on the Christmas tree, the glowing halo of every wish, the endless beacon of a lighthouse bringing tormented ships home at last.
Chapter Seventeen
Are you disappointed about tonight?” Juliet asked me. We were outside in the backyard, and Hayden was grilling hamburgers on our old barbecue that no one had used in a hundred years. Smoke billowed every now and then, as if in some occasional frightening emergency. There was that summer smell of briquettes and Hayden’s open beer and the coconut suntan lotion on Juliet’s arms. Mom had music playing, and it came outside through the screen door. Juliet wore one of Mom’s old aprons, and it showed off her bulge. Hayden rubbed it when she passed, like it would give him good luck.
“Disappointed?”
“Prom.”
“How’d you even know it was tonight?” Hayden asked.
“Rebecca’s little sister?” Juliet said. “I do have friends here.”
Hayden let this go. His eyes were watery from smoke, and he wiped them with the sleeve of his T-shirt.
“I’m not disappointed,” I said. “I move on quickly. I’m not one of those people who really cares about stuff like that.” Actually, I was happy. Really happy. I had that excited feeling, the one you used to get when you were a kid and it was Halloween night. I’d even offered to mow the front lawn so I wouldn’t miss a thing. I couldn’t wait to see Goth Girl and Bomb Boy all dressed up and heading out to dinner. I’d seen Kevin Frink at school and offered him the money I’d promised for dinner. He’d refused it. He wanted to take Fiona to the Harbor Tower instead, the nicest restaurant on the island. He had a hickey on his neck, just above the collar of his T-shirt.
“Well, you can hang out with us if you’re feeling depressed,” Juliet said.
We all sat on Mom’s checkered tablecloth laid out on the grass and ate dinner on paper plates. I wolfed down my hamburger and the potato salad that Mom made and hurried out of there. I changed into my old ragged shorts that used to belong to Juliet and this T-shirt I’d had for a billion years, hauled the push mower out from the garage. I hooked up the grass catcher and looked for a second garden glove just to pass the time.
When I heard Kevin Frink’s Volkswagen come down the street, I realized how anxious I was. Both my stomach and heart were doing the tango surges of nerves. Kevin parked and got out in his big black tux, his hair smoothed back on his large head. Shiny shoes. He must have lost weight in the last few weeks—his usual large, bulky overhang seemed contained or at least well hidden. I bet he even smelled like cologne. He carried a small gold corsage box in one hand.
“Kevin!” I shouted.
I put both thumbs in the air, shook them in victory. Kevin did a very non-Kevin thing. He spun a full circle on the bottoms of those shoes, showing me the whole look. I wanted to applaud. I wanted to take pictures and show them to all the relatives.
“Fantastic!” I said instead. “You look great!”
He grinned. “I’m not dancing, so you know,” he said, and then he walked up to Fiona’s door. He rang the bell, and Mrs. Saint George answered. She wasn’t smiling. She shook his hand and let him in and the door closed.
I cut six or seven stripes of lawn, stopping the flick-flick-flick of blades often. Our yard was small, and I needed to do slow-motion mowing or the task wouldn’t last. Finally, the Saint George door opened, and there was the sound of conversation. Kevin said something that made Mr. Saint George laugh a hearty obligation laugh. Fiona’s mother chirped a few words in response.
And then there was Fiona herself. I actually gasped. She wasn’t wearing the fluffy pink number she’d drawn in chalk, but a sleek apricot dress that clung tightly to a body she’d never before shown underneath her usual sweatshirts and jeans. Her raven black hair was swooped up, and her bangs were sprayed across to show her deep eyes rimmed with her dark eyeliner. She was a little uncertain in her shoes, holding a bit of Kevin Frink’s tux sleeve to steady herself. But she looked beautiful. Goth Girl looked beautiful.
I went back to my lawn mowing as they drove away. I finished in two seconds. When I was done, I sat down on the short, scratchy grass and looped my arms around my legs. I felt so satisfied. The night was sweet summer light. When Jeffrey and Jacob came out to play, when Jacob laid down on the sidewalk with his legs straight together and his arms flung out, and said, “Look, I’m Jesus on the sidewalk,” I actually smiled.
For a good while after Kevin Frink and Fiona Saint George drove off together in that car, I was sucked right into the whole idea that said the Prom was the end of that story, same as the Wedding was the end of the story. But there was something big and long and important called After the Prom and After the Wedding which was basically all the time that came beyond dancing in uncomfortable shoes. Of course, sometimes after isn’t long and important. Sometimes it’s brief and shattering. After is fate’s own personal cinematic moment, the one when you’re sure the movie is over and the bad guy is dead and gone forever but when he pops back up instead, reaching for the knife on the floor beside him.
School got out, and summer eased all the way in, and I worked most days helping at Quill Stationers. On my days off, I continued to make progress on the Clive Weaver project, to read psychology books about how to fall out of love. I listened to Jeffrey and Jacob ride their bikes over wooden ramps, fight and make up, ride their bikes again. I watched Juliet grow round, watched her hand move to her stomach when she’d feel the fluttery butterfly movements of the baby that we could finally feel too, if we held still long enough.
The construction workers over the back fence kept working on the house behind us. The songs from their radio—You can’t always get what you wa-aant …—were our summer sound track, along with the noise of lumber dropping and hammers against nails and the keshank of a shovel into gravel. There was the perpetual smell of newly sawed wood. Joe, the miserable ice-cream man, made increasingly insistent loops around our streets now that school was out. Juliet and Hayden went to see Dr. Crosby, and we got our first real picture of Jitter, a black-and-white sonogram image—a tiny curled-up body with small fists, an image that looked more like an incoming weather system than a baby.
And then things were different.
I heard Mr. and Mrs. Martinelli’s garage door lift on its squeaky hinges as I sat outside on the lawn waiting for Juliet. Soon, Mr. Martinelli was bringing out card tables, unfolding their thin metal legs.
“Lemonade stand?” I joked, but he didn’t hear me. He was focused. Mrs. Martinelli called out something to him from the garage, and then they began hauling out armloads of stuff to the now upright tables—crystal dishes and old suits, blocky clock radios and record albums, a TV that looked heavy enough to anchor a ship.
They both disappeared inside the house, and then there they were again, struggling to get a large wood bed frame out the door. Mr. Martinelli was sweating.
“Slow down, sugar,” Mrs. Martinelli said. She could bite when she wanted to—I’d heard her snip and nag at him over the years, in ways that made you feel bad for him. But her words were patient this time. Cheerful, even.
“Do you need some help?” I called. I could just see them both having a heart attack right there. I tried to remember how many times you were supposed to compress the chest and how many times you were supposed t
o blow into the mouth. “Just a sec.” I jogged over.
Mr. Martinelli puffed air out of his cheeks. “It’s not that heavy, sweet pea,” he said to Mrs. Martinelli. But he looked relieved to set it down.
“You always were my muscle man,” she said to him.
I lifted Mrs. Martinelli’s end easily. “What is it?” I asked.
“Our old water bed,” Mr. Martinelli said. “Set it by the curb. This oughta draw the folks in.”
“What are you guys doing?”
“A little housecleaning,” Mrs. Martinelli said.
“A little housecleaning,” Mr. Martinelli repeated.
They looked guilty. I couldn’t figure out why, unless they’d just held up a Saint Vincent de Paul truck. I poked around a Tupperware container of old-guy tools and a dish of necklaces. A stained-glass lamp, a fondue pot, macramé plant hangers, saucepans …
“Hey, you guys had this in there.” I held it up. I think it was a picture of their grandkids. One of those creepy, stiff images of two kids sitting at an angle against a blue photographer’s backdrop. The little boy wore a plaid tie and a navy blue vest; the little girl had a matching plaid dress. “Probably don’t want to get rid of this, right?”
“Someone might want the frame,” Mrs. Martinelli said.
“Two bucks,” Mr. Martinelli offered.
“No thanks,” I said. We had our own relatives.
“Cute kids, though,” Mrs. Martinelli said. She hunched over a table with a fat marker in her plump hand.
I set the picture down. I was poking through a dish of groovy old-lady earrings when I heard the slow squeal of bike brakes behind me.
“Hey.”
I turned. “Oh!” Straddling his bike, right there, was Jesse Waters, Shy, on my own street on my own Saturday morning. Nicole was going to be pissed. He shook his dark hair out of his eyes.