by Deb Caletti
Stay
Also by Deb Caletti
The Queen of Everything
Honey, Baby, Sweetheart
Wild Roses
The Nature of Jade
The Fortunes of Indigo Skye
The Secret Life of Prince Charming
The Six Rules of Maybe
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
First Simon Pulse hardcover edition April 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Deb Caletti
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. SIMON PULSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc. The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event. For more information or to book an event contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at www.simonspeakers.com.
Designed by Mike Rosamilia
The text of this book was set in Scala.
Manufactured in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Caletti, Deb.
Stay / by Deb Caletti.—1st Simon Pulse hardcover ed.
p. cm.
Summary: In a remote corner of Washington State where she and her father have gone to escape her obsessive boyfriend, Clara meets two brothers who captain a sailboat, a lighthouse keeper with a secret, and an old friend of her father who knows his secrets. ISBN 978-1-4424-0373-4 (hardcover)
[1. Fathers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Secrets—Fiction. 3. Islands—Fiction. 4. Dating (Social customs)—Fiction. 5. Stalking—Fiction. 6. Washington (State)—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.C127437St 2011
[Fic]—dc20 2010021804
ISBN 978-1-4424-0375-8 (eBook)
To Jen Klonsky—For all that you do to bring our books into the world, and for doing it with such respect, care, and sisterly good fun . . . my thanks. This one’s for you, Pal.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 1
First off, I’ve never told this story to anyone. Not the entire thing anyway, and not entirely truthfully. I’m only telling it now for one reason, and that’s because an untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean. I learned that. This kind of story, those kind of things kept secret—they have the power to keep you hidden forever, and most of all from yourself. The ghosts from that drowned ship, they keep haunting.
So here is the story. Sit back and make yourself comfortable and all that.
I met him at a basketball game.
Wait. You should also know that another friend of mine, Annie Willows, had asked me to go with her and her friends to El Corazon that night to hear some band and that I didn’t go. If I had gone, all this might never have happened. The way two people can end up in the same place, find each other in a crowd, and change their lives and the lives of the people around them forever . . . It makes you believe in fate. And fate gives love some extra authority. Like it’s been stamped with approval from above, if you believe in above. A godly green light. Some destined significance.
Anyway.
My school was playing his, and I was there with my friend Shakti, who was watching her boyfriend Luke, number sixteen, who was at that moment sitting on the bench and drumming his fingers on his knee like he did when he was nervous. Inside the gym there was that fast, high energy crackle of competition and screaming fans and the squeak of tennis shoes stopping and starting on shiny floors.
He was with another girl; that was one thing. I was aware of her only vaguely as she moved away from him. She maneuvered sideways through the crowd, purse over her shoulder, heading to the bathroom, maybe. His eyes followed her and then landed on me, and by the time she came back, it was over for her, though she didn’t know it. That sounds terrible, and I still feel bad about it. But something had already been set in motion, and I wonder and wonder how things would have been if I’d have just let that moment pass, the one where our eyes met. If I had just taken Shakti’s arm and moved off, letting the electrical jolt that passed between us fade off, letting the girl return to his side, letting fate head off in another direction entirely, where he would have kept his eyes fixed on the girl with the purse or on another girl entirely.
My father, Bobby Oates*, said that love at first sight should send you running, if you know what’s good for you. It’s your dark pieces having instant recognition with their dark pieces, he says. You’re an idiot if you think it means you’ve met your soul mate. So I was an idiot. He looked so nice. He was nice. After Dylan Ricks, I was looking for nice. Dylan Ricks once held my arm behind my back and then twisted so hard that I heard something pop.
“Thirsty!” I yelled to Shakti, and she nodded. I moved away from her, followed the line of his eyes until I was standing next to him. I wish you knew me, because you’d appreciate what this meant. I would never just go walking up to some guy. I would never ignore the fact that his girlfriend was right then in the bathroom putting on new lip gloss. Never. I was nice and my friends were nice, which meant we lacked the selfish, sadistic overconfidence of popularity. But I didn’t care about that girl right then. It’s awful, and I’m sorry, but it was true. I kind of even hated me for it, but it was like I had to do what I was going to do. I can’t explain it. I wish I could. He was very tall and broad shouldered, white-blond hair swooped over his forehead, good-looking, oh, yeah, with those impossible, perfectly designed Scandinavian features. Still, it wasn’t just his looks. It was some pull. The ball hit hard against the backboard, which shuddered and clattered. The ref’s whistle shrieked and the crowd yelled its cheers and protests.
I held my hands up near my ears. “Loud,” I said to him.
He leaned in close. His voice surprised me. He had this accent. It was lush and curled, with the kind of lilt and richness that made you instantly think of distant cities and faraway lands—the kind of city you’d see in a foreign film, with a snow-banked river winding through its center, stone bridges crossing to an ornate church. Ice castles and a royal family and coats lined with fur. The other guys in that gym—they watched ESPN and slunked in suburban living rooms and slammed the doors of their mothers’ minivans. See—I had already made him into someone he would never be, and I didn’t know it then, but he was already doing the same with me, too.
“I don’t even know what I’m doing here,” he said. “I actually hate sports.”
I laughed. “How many people here are secretly wishing they were somewhere else?”
He looked around. Shook his head. “Just us.”
I was wishing that, all right. I was wishing we were both somewhere else. A somewhere together. A warm heat was starting at my knees, working its way up. “I’ve got to
. . .” I gestured toward Shakti.
“Right,” he said.
I made my way back to Shakti, who was standing on her toes at the sidelines, trying to see Luke, who had been called in to the game and who was now dribbling the ball down the court in his shiny gold shorts. “He’s in,” she said. “Oh, please, God, let him not do what he did last time.”
But I was too distracted to actually watch and see if Luke would accidentally pass the ball to an opposing teammate as he had during the last game. My focus had shifted, my whole focus—one moment he wasn’t there and then he was, and my mind and body were buzzing with awareness and hope and uncertainty. You have ordinary moments and ordinary moments and more ordinary moments, and then, suddenly, there is something monumental right there. You have past and future colliding in the present, your own personal Big Bang, and nothing will ever be the same.
That was the point, there, then, when I should have shaken it off and gone on. I see it like an actual road in my mind, forking off. I should have kept my eyes on Luke with his sky-length legs and skinny chest; I should have cheered when he passed that ball just as he should have, to number twenty-four, who shot a clean basket. I should have stayed in that moment and moved on from that moment, when Shakti grabbed my arm and squeezed. Instead, I watched him as he headed through the crowd, and he looked back at me and our eyes met again before he disappeared.
It was already too late. Basically, two springs and two summers and the sea and the haunting had all already happened.
Chapter 2
That was before.
But after, as that second summer approached, my father decided we needed to leave. It felt too dangerous there. We rented our house to a researcher doing work at the university. Something scientific. It was hard to imagine a science guy in our house, which overflowed with my father’s books and papers and his collection of ship lanterns and paperweights. My father would be leaving behind his cherished and tangled grapevines, which grew over a large arbor in the yard and which he tended to lovingly with clippers and a careful eye. We’d be back in time for their ripening, in time for him to make his home brew wine. I thought my dad drank too much, for one thing.
I stood in the open doorway of his office, the large old French doors swung wide. His reading glasses were on a chain and hung down on his chest.
“It all seems too big,” I said.
We were trying to hurry, but I couldn’t seem to get going. My father was shoving things into a box. “Don’t get stuck, Clara Pea. Get a move on.”
“How do you pack for three months?” I asked him. I’d never been gone from home that long. Everything about the trip seemed hard to grasp. My mind felt lately like a building destroyed by a natural disaster, where all I could do was walk around the rubble and wonder what I could possibly do next.
“Just bring the things you love most. You’ve got to have good things around you now, right, Pea? Your favorite shoes, your favorite sweater. Shirts, T-shirts. You need anything else, God forbid, we can go shopping.” Dad hated shopping. Malls, cell phones, and reality television—don’t even get him started.
“You bringing that?” I asked. He was wrapping one of his paperweights, one of the largest, shaped like an old typewriter and just as heavy.
“I’ll keep it under the bed since I don’t have a baseball bat.”
My stomach dropped. His eyes were bright and he was grinning, but I thought he might be serious, too. He felt that same shadow looming that I did. One time I actually drove too fast and turned down some crazy street because I thought I was being followed. Looking at Dad then, I felt guilty suddenly, or rather, again, for this leaving. He had a book due by the end of the summer. He had every reason to stay here where he was.
“Pea, you know I can write anywhere,” Dad said, reading my mind. He was good at that. He was someone you couldn’t hide from. “I could write in the back of a pickup truck driving across the country. Who could have complaints about the beach, Pea? I just might want to stay.”
“God, Dad.” I rubbed my forehead. “This is all so strange.”
“It’s good for both of us,” he said, even though there was nothing good about what was happening. He finished wrapping the paperweight in newspaper and set it in a wide leather bag. I could see the fat pages of a manuscript there, too, and a stack of index cards wrapped in a rubber band. “You need a place you can breathe for a while. I need a place you can breathe for a while.” My father knew about recovering yourself after you were sure you were lost. He had taken a trip like this once. Different, though. It was more about grief than guilt, and it only lasted the two weeks he thought he could be away from me, since I was young and needed him. I had stayed with JoJo Dean, a friend of my father’s, as my father mourned my mother in private.*
“You went away to a beach before,” I reminded him.
“A different beach. Not one I want to go back to.” He closed the zipper of the bag. “Haul ass, kid,” he said.
And so I did.
* * *
We left the city behind us and drove north, until the land flattened into farms and pastures and tulip fields. And then east, down two-lane roads forested on each side, full of tall evergreens and dark, mossy places that made the air feel suddenly cool. Little towns appeared at stoplights, three or four buildings at most, a church, a café, sparse I-wonder-who-lives-here-and-why streets. And then forest again.
“Do you remember the bridge?” my father asked. The car smelled like french fries, and the backseat held the crumpled-up bags from our lunch stop.
I looked around. “Bridge?”
“Not yet. This is one you wouldn’t miss. It’s the bridge over Deception Pass. We came here a long time ago. I carried you in a pack down to the beach. After we hiked up to the car again, we realized you’d lost your sandal. Your mom ran all the way back down the trail to get it. I said, Leave it, we’ll buy her new ones, but she ran the two, three miles down there anyway. Came back with that shoe.” He smiled. “A triumph.”
I smiled, too. The windows were rolled down. He was shouting a little. He didn’t like air-conditioning when you could get the smells and feel of the real outside right there in your face.
“Okay, be ready.”
He was right. Deception Pass—you couldn’t have missed that bridge spanning those waters. It was almost shocking the way nature can be so suddenly before you in all its enormity and beauty. Out of the forest, and then—wow. Just, wow—this deep, steep down-ness, this drop to the sparkling waters of Deception Pass, a thin bridge spanning the impossible distance.
“Let’s pull over. This is a bridge you have to walk across.”
“Got it. A metaphor, right?” Dad was a writer down to his cells, and he loved metaphors. Everything was a metaphor. Your dirty laundry could be one. Unexpected encounters with dog shit, definitely.
“Ha, I didn’t even think of it,” he said. He’d already unbuckled his seat belt and had flung his door open in the small crescent of gravel that was the lookout point. “Deception Pass. How does one make that crossing, at least permanently?”
“You’re asking me?” I said. We wouldn’t be standing there right then if I understood how to manage deception and my own self-lies. I stepped outside. I breathed in—the air felt huge. The blue-gray-green waters that stretched out before us sparkled in the sun. It smelled great out there. “I keep feeling like we have to go. Like we have to hurry.”
“We can relax now,” he said. He took a big dramatic breath. “Ah! This is magnificent, eh? Christ, I should set a book out here.”
He was right. The rock wall that dropped to the water was sheer and craggy, and as we stepped out onto the narrow footpath of the bridge itself, my stomach seemed to tumble and fall the million miles down to the jagged waves below. The landscape was moody and dangerous. “I can’t look,” I said. It was too far down. We were safe; our feet were on the solid ground of the bridge and I gripped the iron rail, but my heart still felt the long, long drop.
�
�Look right at it. Know you can,” Dad said. “Look right at that fear. Fear is the biggest bullshitter.”
This was not just some motivational rah-rah to get me through what was happening right then. This was how my father talked a good lot of the time. His words had layers—they went two or three directions when other people’s words went one. He was curious and playful and hungry for meaning, and his speech reflected that. My friends said he sounded like a writer. I didn’t know what this meant until I stayed over at Annie’s or Emma’s or Shakti’s houses, where dads either asked you about school or didn’t say much at all.
You had to walk single file on that bridge, and so I followed him across, the cars whipping past us on one side, the sheer drop below us on the other. We made it to the far end, where a matching set of warning signs were posted along the cliffs, as if anyone would be stupid enough to climb there. I felt a little sick and a little proud. It had a sort of significance, though I didn’t know what kind. It had to—you didn’t cross the perilous distance over Deception without it meaning something.
We got back in the car and wound our way down the island. You could practically follow the wet and salty air and that tangled underwater smell right down to the sea. The house was small and gray and shingled and sat at the tip of the peninsula. In spite of everything I felt excited, like I wanted to run out and explore the place, like you do when you’re a kid on vacation. My father had found the house in the back of Seattle magazine, where the travel ads are. Some guy was renting it out while he was working in California. We left the car packed and my father unlocked the front door, and I checked it all out—the small kitchen and the closets and the little white bedroom with white curtains that would be mine and the bigger paneled bedroom that would be my father’s. The man who owned the house had good taste—his shirts were expensive and the cupboard had flavored vinegars and fancy olives and a bottle of Scotch.
“Something to do with the film industry,” my father guessed. “California, right? It makes sense.” He was standing by the bookshelf, the first place he always went to find out about a person.