Here to Stay

by Suanne Laqueur

  He wrapped an arm around her, pushed off the floor, rolled her down onto the rug and got her underneath him where he had always loved her best.

  “It’s real,” he said. His fingers gently moved a piece of hair out of her face before he pinned her with his mouth and his body. Her arms and legs clutched him as he pushed into her. Her hand tight in his hair and her teeth at his earlobe as he reared back and plunged again. Further. Harder. Deeper. Groaning and crying. Nothing like a lover, just some deranged lunatic fucking her back into his life.

  His phone pinged an incoming text.

  I miss you. What are you doing?

  He put the birth control pills as he had found them and shut the cabinet.

  Snooping, he typed back.

  Did you find the porn?

  Not yet.

  You suck at snooping then.

  I do. Better text me when you leave so I can put everything back.

  Alphabetical order, please.

  You keep your underwear in alphabetical order?

  Hello? Have we met?

  A clearing of a throat. Erik looked up to see the cleaning lady in the kitchen doorway. He smiled, took his mug and headed back into the living room. He felt in the way and useless. And cold in his short-sleeved T-shirt and bare feet.

  He texted Daisy again: Is there anything resembling a man’s sweatshirt on the premises?

  Sorry, I’ve only had women lovers since I moved in. You can wear that fur coat in the front closet if you want.

  He drank his tea and considered. I think I’ll go back to the hotel and get some warmer clothes.

  Kindly leave your house keys on the piano, she replied.

  You think I’m running away again?

  I think you should run your ass to the hotel, check out, bring your stuff to my place and put your ass back in my bed. Any other questions?

  He wanted to ask if she loved him. Instead he asked where he could get an egg and cheese sandwich.

  Sorry, we don’t have those in Canada.

  Do you love me?

  A few agonizing moments passed.

  Kate’s Bakery is a couple blocks down from your hotel. I love their egg and cheese sandwich. But not as much as I love you.

  “NO MORE REHEARSALS after this,” she said the next morning. “Tomorrow we’ll sleep in.”

  It was hard to let her go, the reluctance even keener because they were starting to find their groove again. Sighing like a small thunderstorm, she slid out of bed. Erik let his hand run down her arm, holding onto her fingers and staying suspended in mid-air as she headed for the bathroom. His throat grew warm when she stopped to look back over her shoulder and extend her own hand.

  “Is this real?” she asked, fingers reaching.

  “It’s real,” he said. He curled his fist around the air and let it drop onto the blankets.

  After the jingle bells on the front door rattled to stillness, he fell back asleep and dreamed he was busily sandpapering his forehead because he needed to repaint himself in different colors. He woke up to Bastet, Daisy’s cat, licking his face. He grimaced under her rough tongue and gently pushed her away. “Morning.”

  Undeterred, she nudged her silver brow against him, purring. Daisy had declared the cat a standoffish bitch, but the bitch seemed to like Erik. Which he appreciated.

  He got up and made some tea, moving easily around the kitchen now and finding things on the first try. Bastet perched on the counter and watched, still purring, her tail wrapped primly around her feet. He poured her a little milk into a saucer then took his mug into the living room, looking around the furnishings and fixtures with increasing familiarity.

  Daisy bought a house, he marveled to himself. She had him beat—he and his wife were still renting when they separated. He couldn’t swing the rent on just his salary and it was too much square footage for a single man anyway. And too depressing. He moved back into one-bedroom digs in the business district of Brockport and spent as little time as possible there. He only unpacked a quarter of the boxes. Just the essentials. All along, it seemed something was telling him he was in a holding pattern, and he wasn’t to commit to a living space until certain decisions were made.

  And a phone call placed.

  He built up the fire. Straightened the couch pillows which were still lopsided and crunched from last night’s lovemaking. The memory of cries and moans echoing in his ears, he folded the two wool throw blankets and laid them across the chairs in front of the hearth. One was upholstered in rust chenille (“Edith,” Daisy called it) and the other a handsome brown leather (“Archie.”)

  Daisy liked to name her world. Her car, her favorite cast-iron skillet, the washing machine. A child of European parents, she grew up in houses with names. This one was called Barbegazi, after legendary Swiss gnomes beloved to the previous owner. Erik rolled the word around his tongue like a piece of candy as he wandered the first floor, looking at and gently touching Daisy’s things. Books and music and pictures. An upright piano the previous owners had left behind. Erik sat and played a little, then got up and smelled the blossoms on the Meyer lemon tree, which, oddly, didn’t have a name. (“It hasn’t told me yet,” Daisy said.)

  He put on jacket, hat and gloves and went outside. It was an unnecessary inspection—she had been taking care of herself for years, still he felt the need to take a good look at the place and make sure she was safe. He walked the property and could find no fault. The house and its two outbuildings—a detached garage and a small shed—were solid, sound and shipshape. The gardens were rock hard and barren, filled with dead branches and clumps of decaying, toppled-over foliage. But he could imagine them in their spring and summer glory. He crunched over the frosty grass to the long dock at the edge of the frozen lake and stood staring for a long time.

  Inside, he made more tea. Headed upstairs to get his phone, figuring he could sit in front of the fire and make a few calls. A handful of people knew he was here and probably would want to know how it was going.

  Sell everything, he imagined saying. Transfer all funds. Never coming back.

  He paused in the stairwell, fascinated by the gallery of photos Daisy had hung there. Pictures of her at all stages of her career. Partnerships with men Erik didn’t recognize. Some pictures were matted and Daisy had written captions with pencil, giving provenance. Erik read things like Rakewind debut, Cleveland, 1997, with Gabriel Ostin and Primo Vere debut, New York, 1998, with Anouar Bourjini. Strange to see her partnered with someone other than Will Kaeger, who had been Daisy’s exclusive cavalier at Lancaster University, and Erik’s best friend.

  Or was it ex-best friend?

  Probationary best friend, he decided, and wondered if Will would get a kick out that. Maybe in time. You couldn’t waltz back in after a twelve-year estrangement and expect to get many laughs.

  Here was a picture of Daisy and John Quillis in partnering class. Looking like a young Ron Howard and branded as Opie in college, John was now a ruggedly handsome young man and, according to Daisy, a rising star with the Boston Ballet. He and Daisy started dating when they both lived in New York City, and eventually moved in together.

  Balanced on the edge of a tread, Erik peered close at the picture. The photographer must have snapped the shutter at the precise second John caught Daisy in his arms: his shirt rippled out behind him and a spray of sweat arced off the back of his head. Daisy’s eyes were closed, her mouth open in a smile, her body both taut and trusting. Further up the incline of the wall was another picture of them dancing. A real life shot. Dancing as lovers, not as performers. Out at a swing dance club venue. Hands joined, their bodies rearing back in mid-step, but their eyes locked and loaded. Joy etched every line of their bodies and Erik felt a pang in his chest.

  She lived with him. He was her lover.

  This wasn’t news. He found out long ago, when he reached such a nadir in his isolated existence, he felt compelled to pick up the phone and call Daisy. John answered. Then Erik’s stagnant world started spinning
out of control and he became aware of just how deep one’s rock bottom could get.

  I’ll tell her you called, Fish. But I’d appreciate if you wouldn’t make a habit of it.

  Fingers resting on the glass of the picture frame, Erik put his forehead a moment in the crook of his elbow. He could feel sorry for himself all he wanted but one irrefutable fact remained: John saved Daisy’s life.

  John first saw the scars and clued in to the ritualized cutting. It was John who found her in the bathroom after she stepped out of ritual and blindly slashed her skin in a desperate frenzy. He was the one to see what Erik didn’t: the Lancaster shootings had thrown Daisy’s mental health onto a trajectory with disaster. She was in trouble long before Erik left. The desertion only compounded the issue.

  Erik wasn’t there when Daisy reached her own nadir, a bottom littered with broken glass, not rocks. John found her. John called for help. And all through Daisy’s recovery—the stay in the psych hospital and the months of therapy afterward, battling anxiety and depression and, above all, a pervasive unresolvable guilt for what she had done to Erik—John was there.

  You left when she was weakest. He stayed.

  Erik exhaled heavily and moved up a step. Here hung a picture of Daisy and a tall silver-haired man. Erik guessed it was her last boyfriend, Ray. They were dancing at a wedding or some occasion. Ray in black tie. Daisy in a pale cream dress. Ray had her thrown back in a deep dip and she was wide-mouthed laughing, hanging onto his shoulders.

  A picture of Daisy and Lucky Dare, now Lucky Kaeger, Will’s wife. In the picture she was in her wedding dress, her crazy blonde curls curbed into a neat bun but one or two errant spirals spilling around her face. Daisy, maid of honor, beside her in a pale blue gown, all gorgeous arms and shoulders, her blue-green eyes like two jewels. Another photo of Daisy dancing with Will, the longtime partners showing everyone how it was done. Will looking sharp and bad-ass in a tux as he twirled Daisy under one hand, the other at her waist.

  Who was your date to their wedding? Were you with Ray then?

  He moved up and down the stairwell. The pictures were hung in no order, leaving him confused and slightly fretful.

  Here was an obviously post-performance Daisy—hair up, stage makeup, arms full of flowers—cozied up to a man in suit and tie. Erik had gone through life being told he could stand in bars and take numbers, but next to the strapping hunk of dude in the picture, Erik was the bar’s invisible busboy. The picture was labeled only Rakewind, 1997, Washington, D.C. No names. Daisy was smiling at the camera but the man was smiling at her. Chemistry oozed out of the frame and dripped down the wall.

  Interspersed with the couple pictures were ones of Daisy alone. Studio shots in class or rehearsal. Solo performances. Warming up in the wings for Phantom of the Opera. An adorable portrait of her catnapping beneath a grand piano, one hand closed around her pointe shoes, the other pillowed beneath her cheek. All up and down the wall she smiled and dazzled and laughed with old and new friends.

  Who were these people?

  I missed all this. She had a life all these years I know nothing about.

  He’d reached the small landing where the stairs made a quarter turn. A narrow window, its top half a stained glass mosaic. A skinny table with a potted fern. And more pictures, including one of the Lancaster gang. Obviously taken at the memorial ceremony in 2002, marking ten years since the shooting incident in Mallory Hall. It left six people dead, over a dozen others wounded and innumerable lives changed.

  Erik took the frame down from the wall and his finger touched it, taking attendance. Daisy. Will. Lucky. John. And good Lord, was that Neil Martinez? He was a giant compared to Erik’s memory, all brawny bulk. Next to him stood David Alto. Bald from chemo. Fragile in the shadow of Neil’s muscle, his hands stuffed in his pockets.

  All of them were crowded up with Cornelis Justi, the conservatory’s beloved director. He stood center of the group, his arms thrown wide to gather them all in. He was bald too, but he had always been. Bald, black and beautiful, Kees Justi owned center stage of every situation. Not an attention-seeker, he simply came with an irresistible pull of gravity, drawing in everything and everyone. He’d even been an unknowing beacon for Erik, who drove down to Lancaster on a whim a little over a month ago.

  He hadn’t set foot on the campus in twelve years. He was sure he was only going to look around and maybe visit his old technical theater professor. Instead, his feet had walked him straight into the theater of Mallory Hall, straight down the aisle past the ghostly echo of gunfire and into Kees’s waiting arms. They went for beers. They talked a long time. About the shooting. About Daisy. About Daisy sleeping with David and Erik leaving without a backward look. Until now.

  “You left,” Kees said, his direct gaze on Erik both loving and stern. “You chose to leave. Sit there and own it. You turned your back on her, man. Now what the fuck do you want?”

  And at the time, in that place, in Kees’s uncompromising company, it was surprisingly easy for Erik to distill what he wanted down to a single thing and give it a name:

  “I want to turn around,” he said.

  Four days later, he picked up the phone and called Daisy.

  He hung the picture back up and took down another from the same timeframe. The circle of friends now on the porch of Daisy and Lucky’s old apartment on Jay Street. Will with his arms around a pregnant Lucky. John standing behind Daisy with his arms around her shoulders, his cheek on hers. David alone in the middle.

  Gazing down at his tribe, Erik’s hand wandered up to touch the gold chain on his neck. The heirloom charms of fish, boat and saint’s medal glided through his fingers. Like the tribe, it had been lost to him for years. The discovery of David in bed with Daisy had led to a brutal fistfight in the kitchen of the Jay Street apartment. In the mêlée, the gold chain broke off Erik’s neck and, unknown to him, was kicked beneath the stove. It remained there nine years, until the gang discovered it on their return visit in 2002.

  He stared at the group on the porch, looking for evidence of himself.

  Was this before or after they found my necklace? Is it in Daisy’s purse or Will’s pocket? Did they find me yet? Am I here?

  He looked down along the entire gallery of the stairwell.

  Am I anywhere on this wall?

  His stomach was starting to hurt.

  A picture of Lucky in a hospital bed with one of her babies. A blue cap so Erik guessed it was Jack. Will squashed on one side, Daisy on the other.

  I missed all this.

  Just off the landing was one last black and white shot of Will and Daisy from the college years, practicing in Mallory Hall’s theater. Lighting instruments and technical mess were scattered across the apron of the stage. A ladder was in the background, with a boy in a baseball cap halfway up the rungs, looking over his shoulder at the dancing couple.

  Erik squinted. A smile broke through and relief cascaded over his shoulders.

  Here I am.

  Close by, he found another black and white of Will, dancing alone on the same stage. And in the background was Daisy, sitting on the floor with her back up against the proscenium, reading a book. Erik lay on the floor, his head pillowed on her outstretched legs. His ankles crossed, his hands folded on his chest, the bill of his cap pulled low.

  He touched the picture, still smiling as the knot in his stomach loosened. He was here. He was allowed on the wall. Not front and center—but when was he ever? Even in the background, he was here. She allowed him to be here.

  His feet were happy up the three remaining steps. He unplugged his phone from the charger and dialed. Two rings. Three.

  “Tell me something good,” Kees Justi said on the other end.

  “I don’t got good,” Erik said. “I got great.”

  THE NEXT MORNING THEY slept in until ten. Then they had Warrior’s Breakfast. Daisy made bacon and fried potatoes and sunny side up eggs. She toasted half a loaf of raisin pecan bread and filled her biggest cups with stron
g tea. The kitchen was chilly, so they sat kitty-corner at the small table in the living room, nearer to the fireplace. Their ankles twined beneath the feast.

  “Happy?” she asked.

  He was too happy to answer. He pushed his plate away and pulled her into his lap. His arms wrapped around her slender body and he laid his trusting head on her heart, held her tight while she fed him the last crispy bits of potato, the burnt buttery raisins and the toast crusts. His hand worked its way up the back of her shirt or inside a pant leg, caressing her softness.

  “Let’s go back to bed,” she said. “Let’s lie around in bed all day. Sleep and make love. We’ll only get up to pee or eat.”

  “Let’s do that,” he said into her neck, his hand moving slower underneath her clothes.

  They stayed where they were, kissing longer and deeper. She swung a leg over to straddle him. He pulled her shirt off, gathered her breasts in his hands, hungry for skin, to suck and lick and fill his mouth with her response.

  She slid his shirt over his head, slid her hand down his heaving chest and trembling stomach and into his pants. His erection rose up long and hard into her palm and pulled back along the length of his spine, drawing him in both directions, a taut wire. He jerked and strained and crackled beneath her. His fingers slid into her mouth, then took the savory wet down between her legs. Past the warm pink and deeper to the hot red. Up to his knuckles in her velvet depths.

  “Want to go upstairs?” she whispered.

  “No,” he said, pulling her pants down her hips. “I want you right here.”

  He kicked his own sweats free and turned her away from him. She pulled on the clip at the back of her head and let her hair fall past her bare shoulders. Reaching behind to help guide him in, she settled down snug in his lap.

  “God,” she said, hunched a moment over the table, her fingers white at its edge. “Nobody fucks me like you.”

  Through the muck and mire of emotion collected in his chest came a sword of masculine affirmation. A smug, bright blade cutting through the fog to show the sunshine of his maleness, bright and powerful and blinding.