Here to Stay

by Suanne Laqueur

  Erik tossed his phone aside and sighed, arms crossed tight over his chest. Teeth aching. The lonely cobra still stirring in his gut and the silence of the little apartment pressing on his ears.

  “It’ll be all right,” he said softly.

  But he awoke in the thin, wee hours. Crying out into the dark, ripped from dreams of blood pouring off the stage in Mallory Hall. A gunshot like a punch to his chest. His insides caving in, not from pain, but the despair of helplessness. Paralyzed and dying, unable to stop James from going back to shoot Daisy dead.

  His voice echoed off the bedroom walls in a strangled yell. T-shirt stuck to his back with sweat, heart writhing within his chest. Holding his head, he pulled in breath after breath. Putting the world back in place, remembering when it was and where he was.

  It’s all right, he thought. This is now. She didn’t die. You found her. She’s safe.

  He stripped his damp shirt off and threw it on the floor. Moved over to the other side of the bed which was dry, but cold. He pulled the covers high, letting his shaking breaths warm him.

  You’re safe.

  He shouldn’t be surprised. The nightmares of the shooting always came to him in the fall. Something about the turn of season and the shortening of days triggered them. Still, he thought having Daisy back in his life might have kept them at bay this year. His stomach twisted in a strange disappointment. Almost a reproof. As if he had let himself down.

  You can’t help it, he thought. It’s not something you do, it’s something that happens to you.

  He hesitated, looking at the phone on the bedside table. Daisy’s words in his head.

  I want you to trust me with your darker sides.

  Pushing against the notion that calling made him weak, he reached. His eyes squinted against the glare of the phone’s display as his thumb picked out the number. Two rings. Half of a third and then Daisy’s voice in his ear. Sleepy, but not surprised.

  “Hey,” she murmured. “You all right?”

  He curled into her comfort. “I had a bad dream…”

  DAYS FOLDED INTO WEEKS. They laughed through the misery of separation. They bitched and moaned to the world at large but never to each other. They came to easy agreements about money and domestic affairs. The house was in Daisy’s name, but she included him in the maintenance decisions and transferred many into his hands. She never treated him like a guest. Barbegazi was his home. And when he pulled into the driveway Sunday nights and the porch light went on, it always filled him with joy. Rain or snow, frigid or mild, Daisy always came out to meet him, running the last few steps and jumping into his arms.

  It was hard not to ask for more. But he wanted more. Often to a desperate and frustrated distraction. Phone sex was a red-hot novelty the first few times, but it left him empty and blue afterward. He suffered through the work week, rubbing sulky ones out in the shower, volleying back Daisy’s lewd texts with his own obscene intentions. Not soon enough it was Sunday, when he was dropping his backpack in the front hall and pushing Daisy up the stairs with a sailor’s agenda.

  “Jesus,” she said, gasping as she crawled up the mattress toward the pillows.

  “Come here,” he said, catching one of her ankles. “I’m not done with you.”

  “No. My brains are gone. I can’t.”

  “You can,” he said, dragging her back. “And you will.”

  She did.

  “You are a hundred times the lover you were in college,” she said later.

  He pressed his face into her breasts. “A hundred.”

  “Yes. I counted.”

  “Counting means you still have brain cells left,” he said. “Which means I’m definitely not done with you.”

  He was done exalting the past, though. The gilded monument to the college era was unceremoniously toppled and a new regime of magnificent sex ruled the bedroom. They made love with an astonishing freedom. Physically fearless and verbally uninhibited. Confident with their desires and needs.

  “It’s so different,” he said in the drowsy aftermath. “But I can’t put my finger on why.”

  She yawned against his chest. “Well, you fuck like a grownup now.”

  He chuckled into her hair. “I do my big boy fuckies.”

  They rolled away, laughing. Rolled back, clonked heads and snorted, laughing harder. Their utter joy in each other’s company piled up on the bed like extra throw pillows. The dark of the bedroom shimmered around them, suffused with laughter and passion.

  “I love you,” he said, his voice hoarse with happiness. “And I love fucking you…”

  The spires of the cathedral sparkled against candlelit walls. Buttressed and vaulted and arched, their bodies ringing like bells within. Her arms unfolded, her legs beckoned and he came to her any way she would have him. He reached high and far into her body, her love spooling out like a ribbon and wrapping around his limbs.

  He had three nights to wind himself up in her scent and feel and taste. Too soon it was Wednesday and they had to pry their fingers off what they’d made and let it go another week.

  Missing Daisy did make his teeth ache. Yet Erik genuinely loved working at the theater, which saved him from both the melancholy and the harrowing schedule. His fingerprints were on every inch of wiring, every lantern, every screw sunk in every strut. He did good work and made good contacts. He made friends with the cast and slowly earned the respect of his crew.

  Most of his young minions were Acadians with a grudging understanding of English and a fierce, tribal mentality. Many had fought to get this job as an alternative to a lifetime of drudge work in the fisheries. One or two, Erik suspected, were closeted gays looking for a safer environment.

  Impatient to overcome the cultural gap, he started listening to French language tapes on the drives to Saint John and back.

  “Finally a legitimate reason to talk to myself in the car,” he said to Daisy.

  He made slow progress. Nothing he heard on the tapes sounded remotely like what came out of his men’s mouths at work. Worse, most of the instruction was useless to him. Knowing how to pass the salt or discuss the weather wasn’t helpful when he had to show a tech how to set the proper DMX value for the automated lighting fixtures.

  He persevered, listening hard. He picked up technical terminology first, courtesies next, and finally curses.

  “Listen to you,” Will cried. “Swearing like a native.”

  Between the vehicular courses and the backstage education, he ended up with a ridiculous accent and a pathetic lingo that couldn’t even be called pidgin. He got laughed at a lot. But the good kind of laugh. The stagehands slowed down their talk, gently corrected his mistakes and when they started calling him Fish, he knew he had arrived.

  One Monday afternoon, late in September, Lucky called Erik’s cell phone.

  “Are you home?”

  “I’m here. Dais is food shopping.”

  “No, I want you. Are you decent?”

  “I am.”

  “I’m coming over.”

  “To kill me?”

  But she had hung up. Erik shrugged and went back to his sandwich making. He pulled up to the kitchen island with chips and a beer just as Lucky yoo-hooed from the front hall. She walked into the kitchen carrying Jacy in her carseat. She set it on the counter and took her jacket off.

  “Hey beautiful,” Erik said, touching the tip of Jacy’s nose. She was looking everywhere but at him. Babies didn’t seem to dig him much. A newspaper was wedged between her squirming body and the side of the seat. Lucky took it, smoothed it out on the table next to Erik’s lunch.

  “I was waiting in line for my coffee and I picked up La Presse. Just scanning through the arts section. I nearly dropped dead when I saw this,” she said.

  “La Presse is in French. I can’t read it.”

  “Neither can I but as far as I can make out, it’s about a retrospective for deWrenne Atelier. They’re one of the biggest jewelry houses in Montreal. But look. Here. You don’t need to know
French…”

  Her finger circled one of the color photographs. In a nest of black velvet lay a gold fish, the end of a gold chain in its mouth. It was articulated in four sections and intricately carved, its eye a tiny red jewel. A few inches down from it on the chain hung a smaller gold fish.

  An exact copy of the gold fish hanging around Erik’s neck.

  “Do you see what I see?” Lucky said.

  “I see it.” His heart pounding, Erik’s eyes scanned the words printed below the photograph.

  Le gousset, poisson d’or, environ 1887. Fabriqué par deWrenne comme cadeau de mariage pour Bjorn Fiskare de Clayton, New York. Bijou de montre, un cadeau pour commémorer la naissance du fils aîné de Fiskare, Kennet. Trois poissons supplémentaires ont été créés pour chaque enfant Fiskare, leur localisation étant à ce jour inconnues. (Collection privée)

  Erik reached behind and unclasped his necklace. He separated the gold fish from the rest of the charms and carefully laid it down next to the picture in the newspaper.

  “It matches,” Lucky said. “It’s the same fish. And it says Fiskare. Right there.”

  “Jesus,” Erik said.

  Lucky took out her phone, zoomed in on Erik’s fish next to the photograph and its French text. The shutter clicked. “Sending this to both Dais and Will,” she said, her thumbs busy on the keypad. “One of them can read it.”

  She put her phone down, took Jacy out of the seat, held her up high and sniffed her butt before handing her to Erik. Jacy glared at him.

  “She always looks at me like I owe her money,” Erik said. He tried a couple of bounces, but she was having none of it. She squirmed and fussed in his hands. Lucky took her back.

  “You big baby,” she said. “Handsome hunk like him offers his lap, you say yes.”

  Erik smiled, and tugged one of Lucky’s curls. “How you feeling?”

  “Better.”

  “Good. You look better.”

  “You were right about meds cutting out the extreme ends of the spectrum,” she said. “Which is good because it stops the free-falling anxiety. But on the other hand…”

  “You don’t get real jazzed up about anything,” Erik said. “I remember.”

  “It’s sort of surreally neutral. But I’m eating and sleeping again. I’m not crying all the goddamn time or having a panic attack at the thought of leaving the house. So I’ll take it.”

  Her phone pinged. They both bent their heads to the display.

  HOLY SHIT, Will had texted.

  Erik’s cell phone rang, it was Daisy.

  “Holy shit,” she said. “Is that another fish?”

  “Sure as hell looks like it. I can’t read the text.”

  “It’s a chain for a pocket watch. Made in 1887 by deWrenne as a wedding present for Bjorn Fiskare of Clayton. And an accompanying watch charm, made to commemorate the birth of Fiskare’s oldest son, Kennet. Isn’t your grandfather’s name Kennet?”

  “It is. But eighteen eighty-seven? It’s too early to be my grandfather. He was born in the twenties or something. It must be another relative.”

  “It says three additional fish were made for each Fiskare child, whereabouts unknown. This is from a private collection.”

  “Look at my arms,” Lucky said. “Look at the hair standing up on my arms.”

  Every hair on Erik’s body was standing up. His lunch forgotten, he snapped his own picture of the newspaper and texted it to his mother. Call me when you see this.

  She called him five minutes later. “I see your fish and I see Fiskare, what does the rest say?”

  He told her.

  “Holy shit.”

  “Right?”

  “Well, it’s news to me. I know nothing about that necklace other than it was a family heirloom.”

  “I want to dig into this.”

  “You should. This is exciting. Let me know what you find out.”

  Lucky had taken a pen and circled the byline of the article, Pavitra Mhendu. Her finger circled the phone number of the newspaper. “You want to call?”

  He went through the switchboard, asked for Pavitra Mhendu and was transferred to voicemail. He told who he was and what he had, left his number, thanked her and hung up.

  “This is the most excited I’ve been in months,” Lucky said. “Can I keep watching?”

  “You found it, clever girl. You’re on the team.”

  “See?” Lucky said, kissing Jacy’s fat cheek. “Always stop for coffee.”

  Erik finished his lunch and Lucky flipped through a magazine. They drummed their fingers on the table and tried not to stare at the phone. But after twenty minutes, Jacy was having a meltdown. Lucky left and Erik went out to cut the grass.

  Pavitra didn’t call back until four o’clock. “Mr. Fiskare,” she said, her voice chirping and melodic. “I am pleased you called me. I was so surprised.”

  “You and me both,” he said.

  “Do you recognize any of the names in the article?”

  “I do, but I’m afraid I don’t know a whole lot about that side of the family tree so I’m not sure who they are to me. But I have one of those small gold fish. I’m wearing it right now.”

  “Well, the fob and the charm came from the private collection of Vivian deWrenne. I interviewed her for the article. She’s head of the company now. It’s always been family-run. Do you know of any relation between your family and the deWrennes?”

  “No,” he said, wondering if the connection were somewhere along his grandmother’s side. Her name was Astrid but with a pang, he realized he didn’t know what her maiden name was.

  “Well let me hang up and call Madame deWrenne. She’s quite busy, but I’m sure she’d want to talk to you. She pressed the point that the small fish charm was one of four made by her great-grandfather, and the other three were missing, so to speak. She’ll be thrilled to know another has resurfaced. May I give her your telephone number?”

  “Please do. Yes.”

  THE KAEGERS CAME BACK to Barbegazi for dinner that night, with much discussion about the newspaper article and Erik’s necklace passed around the table so everyone could examine it with fresh eyes. Christine called once to see if any new developments had surfaced. Erik could only relay the name Vivian deWrenne which Christine didn’t recognize.

  The Kaegers left and Erik was stringing his guitar when his cell phone rang with an unidentified number. His gut twisted in a hunch and he answered formally, “Erik Fiskare.”

  “Erik, this is Vivian deWrenne, from deWrenne Atelier.”

  “How are you?”

  “Among many other things, I’m delighted to meet you.”

  “Same here. That article made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It’s still up.”

  “Well, I should say the name on my birth certificate is Vivian Fiskare. I use deWrenne professionally. And if you’re wearing one of those gold fish and it was passed down through your family then I believe you and I are cousins.”

  “We are?”

  “Let me figure a few things out. Hold on, I’m pouring a drink. I’m exhausted. I just got in from Europe.”

  “You can call me back if you want.”

  “Oh no, I’ll never sleep if I don’t get to the bottom of this. I don’t sleep anyway. I don’t even know what time it is.”

  “It’s ten-fifteen where I am.”

  “Is it? Oh dear, I’m calling you late. I’m so sorry.”

  “No, I won’t sleep either so we may as well get into it.” He looked up to see Daisy in the living room doorway, eyes wide. He gave her a thumbs-up. “Would you mind if I put you on speaker? My girlfriend is dying to hear this.”

  “Oh certainly. Am I on? Hello?”

  “Hello,” Daisy said.

  “Hello there, I’m Vivian. I’m going to drink and ask questions. Your job is to write it all down.”

  Daisy held up pen and paper as though Vivian could see her. “I’m writing.”

  “Now, Erik, who is your father?”

&
nbsp; “Byron.”

  A long pause. Long enough to make Daisy and Erik exchange glances.

  “I know who you are,” Vivian said. “I know exactly who you are.”

  “We’ve met?”

  “You probably wouldn’t remember. You were a little boy. I was maybe twenty-three and you couldn’t have been more than five.”

  “Where was it? In Clayton?”

  “Back up a moment, I need to fit us together first. If you’re Byron’s son, then Kennet is your grandfather, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Kennet is Emil’s son.”

  “I don’t know,” Erik said. “I’m sort of embarrassingly clueless about my family history. My knowledge ends at Kennet.”

  “Kennet was Emil Fiskare’s eldest son.”

  “Who was Kennet’s mother?” Daisy asked, writing names and drawing lines on her pad.

  “Oh God, what was her name,” Vivian said. “Martha? Mary? Something with an M. She and Emil ran the hotel up in Clayton.”

  “I grew up across from the hotel,” Erik said. “On Hugunin Street.”

  “Now Emil,” Vivian said. “Here’s where we connect the dots. Emil was one of four children. He had one older brother, another Kennet, who married into the deWrenne family. He was my grandfather. What does that make us?”

  Daisy was drawing and mumbling under her breath. “I think that makes you and Erik’s father second cousins. So you and Erik are second cousins once removed?”

  “Sounds good on paper,” Vivian said. “So my grandfather Kennet was the eldest. Then came Emil, your great-grandfather. Then the twins, Erik and Beatrice. Four children in all. Antoine deWrenne, the jeweler, made a gold fish at the birth of each child, for Bjorn to wear on his watch chain. And the big fish, the articulated one, that was a fob at the end of the chain. It kept the chain from sliding through his buttonhole.”

  “The article said the big fish was a wedding present,” Erik said.

  “Yes, exactly. It was made for Bjorn when he married Marianne Dupre. I don’t think the photograph in the article showed it, but his initials are engraved in the tail fin.”

  “I have his Saint Birgitta medal,” Erik said, reaching a finger up to touch it. “It’s engraved with his initials on the back. B.K.E.F. And the date 1865.”