Here to Stay

by Suanne Laqueur

  The four of them.

  Doing it together.

  “I don’t care if it’s weird,” Erik said. “Buy that damn house.”

  ERIK KEPT WORKING ON his French. He had a good ear and while he still struggled to put a sentence together, he at least knew what it was supposed to sound like.

  “He has no game,” Will said. “But it sounds like he has game, which technically is half the game.”

  Whenever Erik saw Francine, she took care to use slow, simple sentences and crystal enunciation. It drove Joe crazy.

  “You’re talking to him like Charles de Gaulle,” he said.

  “Charles de Gaulle spoke beautiful French,” Francine said.

  “De Gaulle addressed his wife as vous.”

  “So do you sometimes.”

  “When I’m begging for mercy.”

  “Well, that’s every night,” Francine said.

  Joe glanced sideways at Erik. “Cover your ears.”

  Erik laughed. “I actually followed all that.”

  At home, Erik found it easiest to practice with Jack and Sara Kaeger. Their corrections didn’t make him feel as stupid. They didn’t show off or educate. They just talked to him.

  At least, Sara talked to him.

  “Sara will talk to a garden hose,” Will said.

  Jack was a harder nut to crack.

  Erik and Daisy expected a lot of adjustments being back together. Nobody expected Jack Kaeger to have such a hard time with it. He didn’t like Aunt Daisy having a live-in boyfriend. Didn’t appreciate someone on the side of the bed he’d claimed as his own. Didn’t care for this stranger in the midst.

  Fini.

  The engagement was a catalyst for a string of bewildering awkward moments. Sullen behavior and rude words at the communal dinner table. More than once Will ended up sending Jack to his room, then calling him down later for a forced apology that made everyone feel rotten.

  Daisy tried to make extra special time alone with Jack, but it only seemed to make things worse. Erik walked a constant careful line, not being unapproachable but not being overly hearty and uncle-ish either.

  “Dude, I’m sorry,” he kept saying to Will.

  “No, no. He has to deal with it. But damn, who the hell saw this coming?”

  “He’ll work it out,” Lucky said. “Everyone just keep being nice. We have to keep up a united front. He doesn’t have to love it, but he can’t be nasty about it.”

  “When did your mother start to date again?” Daisy asked Erik. They were in the yard, edging the garden beds.

  “I was in middle school, I guess,” he said. “She went out more openly when I was in high school. Like when I was a sophomore, this guy she was dating came for Thanksgiving dinner.”

  “How did you feel about it?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t feel bad or angry. I guess by that time I was done with any fairytale notion my dad was coming back. And done with any jealous ideas she couldn’t have anyone new. All her relationships seemed really casual. I don’t know if they were or if that was the front she was projecting for me and Pete. They were all nice, but no one guy was on the scene long enough for me to get attached.”

  “Until Fred.”

  Erik rested his hands on the end of the shovel and set his chin on top. “Right away I sensed Fred was different. I liked him and I liked how he treated Mom. I remember playing basketball in the driveway with him one day and it was fun and relaxed. And I kind of exhaled and thought, This guy is different. I got a good feeling about him.”

  “I wonder if your mother was waiting for that moment. Waiting for your permission. Kind of like you felt Fred was waiting for yours.”

  But Erik had lost his train of thought while looking at her. Her eyes were brilliant turquoise. Her cheeks were pink with fresh air and bits of leaf matter were stuck in her hair. He reached and picked them out, the moment vibrating in his bones.

  “I got a good feeling about you,” he said.

  The Kaegers closed on the house next door. Two more Adirondack chairs appeared at the end of Barbegazi’s dock. Jack and Sara ran back and forth freely between the yards, repeatedly slamming the pergola gate at the center of Barbegazi’s wooden fence.

  “That fence is infested with something,” Daisy said. “I don’t know if termites or carpenter ants, but every time the gate slams, you see a cloud of sawdust.”

  “The fence is fine,” Erik said. “Whoever built the pergola didn’t know what they were doing. It needs to be replaced.”

  “Well, get on it,” Will said. “You’re diminishing my property value.”

  Erik flipped him off. “Get on this, asshole.”

  Not a week later, Jack came tearing through the fence, letting the gate crash closed behind him. The pergola teetered back and forth before majestically toppling to its death. Luckily Erik was right there, cutting back the rose bushes. He yanked Jack out of the way, sending the two of them into a rolling pile just before the pergola hit the ground and disintegrated in a rubble of wood.

  For a minute, neither of them said anything, lying on the grass breathing hard. Looking at the mess then at each other. Jack’s eyes were doubled in size and he appeared on the verge of running for his life.

  “You all right?” Erik said.

  Jack nodded slowly.

  “I think we best keep this our little secret.”

  Jack nodded harder. They got up, brushed off, and surveyed the mess.

  “Well, that saves me the trouble of knocking it down,” Erik said, kicking at the structure.

  “What will you do?” Jack said.

  “I’ll build another one.”

  “You know how?”

  “Sure.” He went to the garage to get the wheelbarrow, not looking to see if Jack was following. He rolled back and started chucking the broken-up wood into the well. Jack reached for a piece.

  “Ah ah,” Erik said. “You’ll get splinters. Go get your gloves.”

  Daisy had bought Jack and Sara little garden kits, including kid-sized gloves. Jack fetched his and helped Erik pick up every piece.

  “Thanks for the help,” Erik said, checking his watch. “Now I have just enough time to run out to Home Depot. See if I can get another kit.”

  He walked off, pushing the barrow, again not looking back. Hardly six steps when he heard the voice behind him, along with the sound of a tiny nut cracking.

  “Can I come with you?”

  Erik smiled over his shoulder. “Go ask your mother.”

  He built the new pergola during his next two days off. At first Jack just watched. But soon he was measuring and marking, holding and bracing. Erik tightened the straps on his extra pair of safety goggles until they fit the boy’s head. Then he coached Jack with the Makita drill, keeping his hands on top. Jack flinched at the sound and the vibration only a few times before he was confidently sinking the screws.

  “Let me do it alone,” he said.

  “Nope,” Erik said. “Not until you’re ten. That was my dad’s rule.”

  “Where’s your dad?”

  Erik paused. “He went away.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The screw dropped on the ground as Jack looked back over his shoulder. “He went to forever? Like my pépère?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Were you sad?”

  Erik nodded.

  Jack looked down. He picked up the screw and set it carefully against the drill bit. They went back to work.

  Jack stayed all day. As the sun slipped behind the trees, a rich garlicky smell drifted out of the house, beckoning.

  “I made spaghetti and meatballs,” Daisy called out the kitchen door. “You want some, Jack?”

  Together he and Erik washed their hands in the mudroom sink and he had dinner with them.

  “Want to sleep over?” Daisy asked afterward.

  Jack made a show of thinking about it. “Where would I sleep?”

  “In the guest room.”
>
  He was quiet and a little moody, but he slept over. The next morning, Daisy discovered Erik and Jack in the galley closet in the office, in deep consultation.

  “What are you guys up to?”

  “Uncle Erik says he can build a bed in here,” Jack said.

  Erik and Daisy exchanged a single telepathic glance.

  “You can?” Daisy said, eyebrows high.

  “I think so,” Erik said. “Right under these eaves.”

  “I can lie in bed and look out the window,” Jack said, standing on tiptoes to see out the compass rose porthole.

  “A bunk bed?” Daisy asked, her elbow grazing Erik’s side.

  “I was thinking a loft bed with a desk underneath,” Erik said, elbowing her back.

  “It’ll be my room when I sleep over,” Jack said.

  “It’ll be your office,” Erik said.

  They sat at the kitchen table and drew plans. Then they built it together, hammering and nailing through a month of Sundays. Daisy went to flea markets and found a handsome patchwork quilt, a pair of reading lamps and an old radio. She hung a bulletin board over the desk and lined up mason jars with colored pencils and crayons. Erik put up tiny Christmas tree lights around the porthole window.

  Jack’s only request concerned the doors. He didn’t like them shut. “Then it’s too tight in here,” he said. “It feels far away.”

  Erik took the doors off their hinges and Daisy hung heavy curtains in their place.

  “’Night, Uncle Erik,” Jack said, tucked up in bed. He leaned and hooked an arm around Erik’s neck in a quick hug.

  “See you in the morning,” Erik said softly, rubbing the little boy’s head. He backed through the doorway and let the curtain fall.

  And exhaled.

  THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED THAT night and Erik built a fire. He sat in the leather chair, his feet up and Jack’s hug lingering on his neck. His fingers toying with the charms on his necklace.

  He went to forever?

  Were you sad?

  Daisy was reading and eating oranges. The flames were fragrant with the peels she kept tossing into the hearth. When the kettle whistled in the kitchen, she put her book down and went in to make them tea.

  Erik stared into the flames.

  “Don’t touch the drill, Erik.” He could hear the voice perfectly. Accompanied by the woodsy smell of sawdust and the metallic heat of a still-spinning blade. He was seven and it was the summer his father knocked down the wall between Erik and Peter’s bedrooms. Over days and weeks, a forest playground emerged in the shared space.

  The memory settled in his hands. Not an elusive feather but a full, plump bird, warm and alive. His young legs crouched down amidst the mess of construction. He reached to touch the Makita drill, wanting it. Coveting its solid, manly power and the things it could construct. He was on the verge of picking it up, intent on curling a finger around the trigger and setting the barber pole spiral of the bit into action. Then he glanced up. Byron’s sapphire blue gaze looked back at him. Amused, but firm. The slightest shake of his ash-blond head. The light through the window catching the grey above his ears. The gold chain rolling at his neck.

  “When you’re ten,” he said.

  Erik took his hand off the drill and off the memory. The bird flew away.

  “What are you thinking about?” Daisy asked, setting his mug down.

  “My father,” he said.

  She settled in Edith, curling her legs up underneath her. “Do you want to find him?”

  “I want…” Erik closed his eyes and let what he wanted float into his presence. Gently he pressed it down. “I want to know more about him. I liked hearing Vivian deWrenne tell me about him. I liked her stories. I guess I’d like to know what happened. Without having to have any contact with him. I want his story. Like if someone could just hand me a file folder and say ‘here.’”

  “See pages forty-two through fifty. Call with questions.”

  “Exactly. Let me hear the story, let me process it and see if any of it…”

  “Resonates?”

  “I guess. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to forgiveness with him, Dais. I know it’s the noble and enlightened thing to do, but I don’t know if I have it in me.”

  “Nobody can fault you for that.”

  “But maybe if I knew the story. And if I knew more about the Fiskares in general, so I could put the story into context. Then maybe not forgiveness but understanding?”

  “Or simply to know. Finally stop wondering about it and have the truth. Be free of the unknown.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you afraid of what you’ll find out?”

  “Sure.”

  “What’s the worst? What would be a story that just breaks your heart?”

  “That… He left because he didn’t love me. Didn’t want me. I don’t know, what the fuck, am I insane for making it about me?”

  “What other perspective do you have?”

  “I mean, Jesus, what makes a man leave? Not just leave but disappear, cut everything off and— All right, don’t look at me like that.”

  Daisy hid her twitching mouth in her tea mug and kept her eyes away from his.

  He laughed. “I walked into that bear trap, didn’t I?”

  “Well,” she said. “Put it on the list. If we’re going to brainstorm, let’s brainstorm. What makes a man leave? He leaves because he’s hurt and wants to escape.”

  “He leaves because he loves someone else,” Erik said.

  “He leaves to protect. His presence brings danger. Real or imagined.”

  Erik raised his eyebrows. “You’re good at this. Maybe he was a spy?”

  Daisy twisted her mouth, rolling her eyes a little. “I confess I sometimes wondered if he saw something he shouldn’t have seen and went into the Federal Witness Protection Program. Far-fetched, I know, but I thought about it.”

  “Hurt,” Erik said, ticking off on his raised fingers. “Love. Danger or to protect. What else?”

  They both thought.

  “Maybe,” Dais said slowly, “he leaves because he feels unworthy. Somehow. It’s sort of an offshoot of the protection theory. Not that he brings danger but he brings despair. No good can come of him being there. He’s failed and they’re better off without him.”

  Erik sighed. “I don’t know, I can’t get my head wrapped around that one. I just don’t have any memory of him being a morose man. Or he and my mom being an unhappy couple. But God knows my memory isn’t the most trustworthy thing. Just because I didn’t see it doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.”

  He stared into the flames, lost in thought. After a few minutes Dais stroked his forearm and opened her book again. Letting him be.

  He looked down, scooping up the boat charm on his necklace.

  Where did this one come from? What does it mean?

  Who am I?

  He gathered up all the charms in his hand, remembering when his mother had given him the necklace. He’d been about sixteen. And he didn’t want it.

  “It belongs to your name,” Christine said, laying it in his palm and closing his fingers over it. “It’s an heirloom. Don’t let one asshole ruin it for you.”

  He reached down and picked up his laptop. Opened an online maps application and typed in Clayton, New York. He zoomed in on the little peninsula jutting into the St. Lawrence River. Switching to satellite view, he scrolled northeast, looking for his block.

  He found it, but didn’t recognize anything.

  Let it come to you. Don’t grab at it.

  Hugunin Street made up the block’s southern border. Erik lowered a fingertip and touched the second house on Hugunin’s south side. There. He lived there. He closed his eyes and remembered. Buff-colored shingles. One big triangular gable facing Hugunin and gables on the east and west sides. His window overlooked the driveway. On the other side of the driveway…

  White feathers floated in his peripheral. His finger moved and touched Farmor’s house. He remembered. He
was allowed to walk there alone. If he wanted to cross the street, he needed permission and a pair of eyes on him. If he wanted to go to the water, he needed an adult.

  “I need to know where you are,” his mother always said.

  With permission, his adult finger now crossed Hugunin Street. So many houses on its north side. He didn’t remember so many. Only the one on the corner and the gravel path alongside it. Someone lived in that house, someone belonging to him. He was allowed to use the footpath, cutting through to the hotel.

  His eyebrows knitted together. So much of the big block appeared to be parking lot. He didn’t remember all this paving. He remembered grass and trees and flowers behind the hotel. It was still there, though, the L-shaped building. The map labeled it The Saint Lawrence Inn, which must be its new name. He closed his eyes.

  The Fisher Hotel.

  He held still and let it come to him. The building’s north side, the short end of the L, facing the water. Verandas on both the main and second floor. Three wide steps leading up to the porch. Erik’s chin lifted, as if looking up. He remembered the fish. Carved from wood and polished to a high gloss, it hung from two chains over the steps, welcoming the guests.

  “Where are you?” Daisy said, her voice tiptoeing into his reverie. He blinked and focused on her hand, curled around the mug, the flames catching the edges of Astrid’s diamond. He looked at her face. Her eyes caught his and held. The clock ticked.

  “How would you feel about taking a little trip?” he asked.

  “THREE OPTIONS,” ERIK SAID. “We fly to Plattsburgh via Boston and drive three hours. Or we fly direct to Montreal and drive three hours. Or we fly to Watertown via Philadelphia and drive thirty minutes.”

  “Watertown has an airport?”

  “Watertown International Airport. Which only flies commercially to Philadelphia. But if you’re coming in from Europe on your private jet, you can land there. With two hours notice.”

  “I’m sure a ton of rich jet-setters fly to Watertown all the time.” She put up her hands. “This is your expedition. You pick.”

  They flew to Montreal and met Vivian for dinner. They had tickets to see Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater—which Erik enjoyed more than he thought he would—and a room at the Intercontinental, which was impossible not to enjoy. In the morning, they picked up their rental car and headed southwest out of the city.