Here to Stay

by Suanne Laqueur

  The waitress delivered their beers and they drank. Will shook his wrist out and looked at his watch. “Go.”

  “I left Lancaster. Sulked for a few months then went back to finish my degree at SUNY Geneseo. I stayed there about four years after I graduated. Worked at the Playhouse. Cobbled an existence from a bunch of little jobs. Perfected the art of shutting down. Then I had my spectacular breakdown. I think a year going into it and a year coming out of it. In ninety-seven I got a job at SUNY Brockport. Moved there. Met a woman. Dated her two years. Got married…”

  “No details.”

  “Marriage fell apart. I got divorced. I headed to Lancaster and saw Kees. I picked up the phone and made a long overdue call. I bought a plane ticket. I showed my ugly face so everyone could smack the shit out of it. I ordered a beer. The end.”

  “All right then.”

  They sat in awkward silence, drumming fingers and spoons, avoiding eyes.

  “Did I apologize for that phone call?” Erik asked.

  Will shrugged one shoulder.

  Erik forced himself to be still. “I’m sorry.”

  Will ran his three-fingered hand through his hair. In college, it had been an impressive mane, falling below his shoulders. He shaved it down to the scalp after the shooting. Now it was a short and shaggy cut that framed the strong T of his nose and eyebrows, and the slanting accents of his cheekbones. Erik could stand in a bar and take numbers as long as Will wasn’t anywhere near.

  Now Will smiled, rubbing the back of his neck. “Dude,” he said. “I got so much to say, I’m kind of paralyzed. I don’t know where the fuck to even start.”

  “I hear you.”

  Silence. Will drained the rest of his beer and plonked the glass back onto the table. “Jesus, if this actually were a date, I wouldn’t call you again.”

  Erik killed his own draft. “Wouldn’t blame you.”

  The waitress came over. “Une autre tournée, messieurs?”

  “La même chose,” Will said, sliding the glasses toward her. “Merci.”

  Erik echoed his thanks to her back. “Tournée. Does that mean a round?”

  Will nodded, his fingers fidgeting around the table. Which was odd. Will was, in Erik’s memory, preternaturally composed.

  “I quit smoking,” Will said, taking a deep breath and linking his hands on the tabletop. “Never mind the nicotine addiction. It’s crazy how dependent I got on that bit of business to occupy my hands. I’ve never had to pay this much attention to holding still before.”

  “I’m thinking this conversation might be easier if we had a cord of wood to split and stack.”

  Will laughed. “Too bad I already have my winter supply laid in.”

  “Where are you and Lucky living now?”

  “We’re west of the city.” He turned a placemat over. “You got a pen? You must. You always had a pen.”

  Erik had a pen and Will grinned as it was handed over. “I always had smokes, you always had a pen.”

  “What do you carry now?”

  “Fucking gum. It’s pathetic. Merci,” he said to the waitress who set down the next round. He drank as he sketched a quick map of Saint John, putting his house and Daisy’s house into perspective. “We love the place but it’s small. And with this third kid coming we really need to think of moving. I’d rather do it before the baby comes than after.”

  “What’s parenthood been like?”

  Three slow chuckles in Will’s chest. “Dude, that’s not small talk. We’d need a camping trip to discuss parenthood.”

  Which was fine with Erik, who had severe fertility issues and wasn’t yet ready to talk about them. He fished around for a topic and finally asked, “Do you miss dancing? Performing, I mean.”

  Two years earlier, Will and Daisy retired as principal dancers with New Brunswick Ballet and took up reins as co-artistic directors.

  “I do,” Will said slowly, as if taking the admission for a test drive. “But it was time.”

  “How so?”

  Will reached behind to touch the left side of his back. “Scar tissue from the bullet wound, for one thing,” he said. “Didn’t bother me until I turned thirty, then every other day it seemed my back was giving me grief.” He held up his maimed hand, flexed it back and rotated it around. “But more than my back it was this. Sounds fucked for a dancer, right? But all the compensating for my lost fingers over the years was doing a number on my wrist. Bad tendonitis. It started to affect my ability to partner safely. I came close to dropping Daisy in a performance one night and I knew I’d have to make a decision soon. So I made it before anyone else could. You know—leave the party while you’re still having a good time?”

  “But you miss it.”

  Will nodded. “It was a good party. Sometimes I’ll be in rehearsal or watching a performance from the wings and I feel a bone-deep envy I’m not doing it anymore. But in other ways, I’m glad to be out. I can indulge my carb addiction. I wake up in the morning without my first thought being whether or not I can plié. Things like that.”

  “You like running a company?”

  “I like running this one. And I like running it with Daisy.”

  “I wondered if your onstage partnership would lend itself well that way.”

  “Same kind of seamlessness. I start, she finishes. She jumps, I catch. I’m where she needs me to be, she stays out of my way. I don’t really like teaching class, she loves it. She hates the administrative and marketing shit and I actually enjoy it. So it works.”

  “But who didn’t see that coming?” Erik said.

  “It’s good,” Will said, folding and unfolding his napkin. “It’s been a good life.”

  Silence settled between them again. Erik drank his beer and tried to relax into it. Will’s phone pinged from his jacket pocket and he checked it.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “My wife has invited you for dinner.”

  “Really?”

  Will squinted at the phone, running a hand through his hair. “Unless she means she’s serving you as the main course.”

  Erik laughed weakly. “She’s pissed at me, isn’t she?”

  Will bobbled his head around. “You have different shit to work out with all of us,” he said. “She was pissed, but you know Luck. She’ll bitch you out, have her say, make it clear. And then she’ll put it behind her. She’s not a grudge-holder.”

  “I’m just worried about the size of the grudge,” Erik said.

  “Size doesn’t matter,” Will said as he texted.

  “Easy to say when you’re well-hung.”

  “How would you know?”

  “I lived with you for three years,” Erik said. “Baron von Casual Nudity.”

  Will grinned and put his phone away. “Come on, finish up. Dais is already heading to our place. We’ll have some dinner, we’ll talk, we’ll get drunk and screw. What do you say?”

  “Just like old times,” Erik said, killing the rest of his beer. “Minus the dinner.”

  “HOW MAD WAS LUCKY?” Erik felt compelled to ask again as he and Will walked to their cars.

  “Well,” Will said. “She and I had only just started up again when Columbine happened. And that day she was emotional in general but particularly angry at you.”

  “Me?”

  “Angry you didn’t call us. That not even a shooting could move you to reach out to Dais at most. Me at least.”

  Erik tucked his chin down into his jacket collar, swallowing around a cold empathy. He lamented almost the identical thing to his therapist years ago but in regard to his father.

  Byron Fiskare had abandoned his family and disappeared without a word. Erik couldn’t make the slightest conjecture if the man was even alive. The shooting incident at Lancaster, splashed across national media with Erik’s name in countless articles and news reports, hadn’t even flushed him out. Leading Erik to wonder if his father was indeed dead.

  “Would it help to know,” he said, “I spent most of that day in a drugged st
upor because I saw the news coverage and passed out on the floor of the student lounge?”

  Will glanced at him. “For real?”

  “For real. One minute I’m watching the news with all my peers. Then I’m lying on the floor with my heart exploding through my chest. One of my more spectacular panic attacks.”

  “Huh. That sucks.”

  “I woke up in a woman’s bed so it wasn’t all bad.”

  Will laughed. “Did you bang her at least?”

  “I married her.”

  He followed Will’s car out of Saint John, west over the river into the suburbs. The beers were heavy in his stomach and he kept sighing around the tight thumping in his chest. Lucky could be even more outspoken than Will. Like him, she hated drama and preferred people voice the brutal truth so shit could get done. Her love was unconditional but it was often tough.

  Erik never denied the reason he could tolerate Will’s flirting was Lucky. She was the safety net under all the carrying on. The same time Erik was falling in love with Daisy, Will was falling in love with Lucky. The four of them went everywhere and did everything together. Will remained open about his bisexuality, but Erik had never seen him seriously engage with men on a sexual plane. He had only seen Will with Lucky, a guy in love with a girl. Erik was comfortable with the teasing, with the winks and cracks and insinuations because in his personal experience, to his observant eyes, Will was straight.

  But when James Dow came to Lancaster in Erik’s junior year, and Erik began to see first-hand the other side of Will’s coin, it was another experience. James disturbed the precious status quo and reversed the polarity of Erik’s carefully-ordered universe. The affair with Will raised Erik’s hackles in all kinds of ways, none of them pleasant. It both repelled him and made him jealous. It started to pull threads out of the fabric of daily life. The second semester of 1992 felt like a pot about to reach the boiling point, the tension rising up to the surface and starting to break in bubbles of danger.

  Then it boiled over.

  And it nearly got them all killed.

  Will turned into the driveway of a low-slung bungalow with a stone facade. A couple spotlights lit up a tiny porch and a yellow door. Daisy’s car was already parked at the curb and Erik pulled his rental in behind it.

  “It’s nice,” Erik said.

  “It’s small,” Will said. “Soon to be even smaller.”

  Lucky met them at the front door. She kissed Will and shooed him inside, then stepped onto the porch in front of Erik and pulled the yellow door shut behind her. She crossed her arms and looked at him. His brain drained of words. All he could think was how much she resembled Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction and how much he felt like a rabbit about to be boiled.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  She took a step and hit him.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  Her open hand smacked him again, hard against his upper arm. She planted her other palm in his chest and shoved him backward. “Get the fuck off my porch, asshole.”

  “Finally some refreshing honesty,” Erik said, stumbling down the steps.

  “You fucking punk.” She followed, backing him down the walk toward the driveway, punctuating her lament with a volley of slaps. “You son of a bitch, I hate you. You stupid, stupid, stupid thing. I could kill you.”

  She wasn’t fooling around. He couldn’t recall being hit this way since his pissy adolescent days, when his mother wouldn’t hesitate to swat him for being fresh.

  “I love you too,” he said, shielding his head.

  She had him up against the car now, still letting him have it. After a few more good slaps, Erik started dodging them. He got a hand around one of her wrists, then the other, pulling her in, too close to hit.

  “Don’t fucking hug me,” she said, her voice thick with tears.

  “I’m not.” He drew her against him, where, finally, she crumpled and sobbed.

  “I hate you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said against her head, taking a handful of her blonde spiral curls and holding them to his face. His own eyes watery and burning.

  “You broke his heart,” she said through her sobs, her fists pounding weakly on his back. “You broke Will’s heart, do you know that? Do you know what you did to him? You stupid, stubborn ass.”

  “I know,” he whispered. “I was wrong. I’m sorry, Luck.”

  Now the hands that punched and slapped him turned tender, holding his head, caressing his shoulders, and all the while she was weeping, “Oh why, Erik, why? Why’d you do it?”

  “I’m so sorry.” He held her tight, sniffing hard against memory. Lucky crawling around in the blood on the stage floor after the shooting, in a frantic race against time and veins. Will was shot through the side and had his hand nearly blown off. Daisy’s femoral artery was severed. Together Erik and Lucky pressed their hands against the wounds and held back the tide until help arrived. And it didn’t stop there. Another night, another bloody floor, and Erik holding onto Lucky as she miscarried a baby at Jay Street. So much blood over all those years. Blood that permanently stained so many memories.

  Our little love story was part of a larger epic.

  And Erik had closed the book and left it all behind.

  “I hate you,” Lucky said, laying her cheek against his jacket and exhaling.

  “I hate me too,” he said, slowly becoming aware of a presence that eclipsed their emotion: Lucky’s belly, hard and curved against his. He had never hugged a pregnant woman before. It surprised him, the persistent and pervasive heat. It even vibrated slightly, like a little engine in the cold night. Above that awesome warm sphere, Lucky’s shoulders began to shiver.

  “You’re cold,” he said. “Go inside.”

  “All right,” she said, wiping her eyes on his scarf. She turned to head up the walk but Erik stayed where he was.

  “Can I come in?” he asked.

  She turned, dragging the back of her hand across her face, sniffing and considering. Her magnificent cloud of curly hair backlit by the porch lights. A deep breath and at last her smile. “Yes, asshole, you can come in.”

  “Neither got Lucky’s hair,” Erik said, looking at Jack and Sara Kaeger, who were both dark-haired, sleek and slim like their father.

  “I know, right?” Lucky said. “But hey, I’m not complaining. Hair like mine is a bitch. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.”

  “I love your hair,” Will said, burying his face in it before coming to sit next to Erik on the couch. Beers and potato chips were passed while domestic chaos raged. A little overwhelmed, Erik shrank back into himself, observing.

  Daisy apparently was Jack’s property and the boy was throwing Erik some appraising looks over his shoulder with an expression far beyond his four years. He leaned on Daisy’s knees now, speaking French as he showed her a myriad of things, his back firmly to Erik’s gaze.

  Sara, who was just past two, kept up a constant stream of chatter to anyone who would turn an ear in her direction.

  “Does she ever take a breath?” Erik said, laughing as he was handed dolls, blocks, stuffed animals and crayons under a narrative volley that seemed part French, part English and part Swahili.

  Not laughing, Will shook his head. “She never shuts up,” he said quietly. “Dude. I’m not even kidding. She talks in her sleep. I mean she never. Shuts. Up.” He slumped into the cushions and his last word dissolved in a small moan of despair. He exhaled heavily and for a split second, his head touched Erik’s shoulder.

  “It’s all right,” Erik said, smiling, his hands full of toys.

  Sara did take a breath then, pausing to look from her father to Erik and back again. She said something Erik couldn’t understand and Will laughed and pulled the little girl onto his lap.

  “She asked if Lucky spanked you before.”

  Erik nodded at Sara, pushing his lower lip out a little. Looking sympathetic, she handed him another crayon.

  Finally the Kaegers’ nanny herded the
kids upstairs for baths and bed and the four friends were able to sit at the small kitchen table and eat. Over beef stew and buttered noodles, Erik remained slightly disengaged. It could hardly be helped when conversation kept slipping into work mode. Lucky, after years in private practice, was now the physical therapist for New Brunswick Ballet. She, Will and Daisy were friends and co-workers and their lives rotated around the theater and their houses accordingly. Unfamiliar with either, Erik ate, listened and watched. Beneath the table, Daisy’s calf crossed over his, and as Lucky passed dishes, she would often caress his arm.

  It was enough for now. He was happy to just be included.

  The nanny looked around the kitchen doorway and waved goodnight. “All prison cells secure. Nine o’clock tomorrow?” she asked Lucky.

  “Ten’s fine. Thanks, Sofia.”

  To another chorus of goodnights, Sofia let herself out.

  “She Italian?” Erik asked.

  “Spanish,” Will said.

  “Basque,” Lucky said.

  “Whatever,” Will said. “The kids like her. After the string of au pair nightmares we’ve had, she could be from Mars for all I care.”

  “They all come from Europe?” Erik asked.

  “Most of them,” Will said.

  “And always girls?”

  Will nodded.

  “They tried the manny thing once,” Daisy said.

  “Can we not get into that?” Will said.

  “Manny?” Erik looked around the table.

  “Male nanny,” Daisy said. “Manny. What was his name, Alonzo?”

  “Alessio,” Lucky said, getting up to clear the dishes. “He was the Italian. That got out of hand fast.”

  “What,” Erik said, handing Lucky his plate. “He was hitting on you?”

  Daisy and Lucky pointed to Will and Will pointed to himself.

  “Jesus,” Erik muttered.

  Daisy laughed and got up to help clear. “It was a train wreck.”

  “Hey.” Will spread out his hands. “I behaved. Right, Luck?”