by Deb Caletti
My father noticed. Christian and he always stayed their polite distance, but Dad would catch me in the hall sometimes, stop me on the way to my room. What’s with all his questions, C.P.?, he’d ask. You in jail or something? You the princess in the tower? I’d get pissed, and he’d back off. He learned what not to say, too.
Still, if it was just that all the time, just insecurities and jealousies, I would have left. It wasn’t just that all the time. Not at all. We went swimming a lot that summer. He’d come by Armchair Books when I was done working, and we’d head across the street to Greenlake. We’d lay our towels out on the dock; our hair slicked back, that clean, tired, swimming happiness just soaking up the late afternoon sun. We sometimes laughed so hard, my stomach hurt. We would drive. We’d ride the ferries back and forth from Seattle to the islands just to feel the strong wind on the decks. I wasn’t a princess in a tower when we stood at the front end of the ferry watching the city zoom toward us across the water, Christian’s arms around me from behind.
“Unforgettable,” he would say.
“I know,” I would agree.
It was just after school started again, senior year, when my dad went to this literary event. Wait, I remember. Book party at Third Place Books, for . . . What was his name. The guy that does the literary courtroom novels.* Christian and I were alone in the house. I’d made a fire. We’d ordered a pizza, and we were sitting on the couch, the pizza in the box in front of us on the coffee table. The fire snapped and popped and made my face hot. We were using paper towels on the backs of Dad’s magazines for plates.
“Cheese chin,” I said to Christian. I pointed.
“You’re the cheese chin,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to use a fork.”
“Fork you,” I said, and he laughed.
We kissed a tomato sauce and sausage kiss and it was delicious. Just as delicious as past kisses like the orange juice kiss and the ice cream sandwich one. We ate and tried to remember every time we’d ever had a pizza. “Round Table,” I’d said. “I was on a T-ball team. End of season party. I was maybe six. They gave us little statues.”
“I can’t picture you playing sports,” he said.
“One season,” I said. “Your turn.”
“We’re not counting every night my father ordered it in instead of cooking, right? So . . . Okay. Classroom holiday party when I was twelve. Mrs. Bonnevier, that year we spent in France. She paid for it with her own money. I saw her take the bills from her purse. It seemed sad.”
I nodded. I thought. “My father said we used to go to someplace called Pizza and Pipes when I was a baby. Him and my mom and me. They thought it was hilarious. It had some enormous pipe organ in the place. Like, two stories tall. It’s not there anymore.”
“And you’d think pizza plus enormous musical instruments would really bring in the crowds,” Christian said.
“Exactly. Okay. Pagliacchi Pizza. In the car, with . . . Wait. It’s not my turn.”
Christian chewed, swallowed. He looked at me. His face glowed in the orange light of the fire. I thought he was beautiful. God, I thought. My eyes would be a hundred years old and still want to keep looking and looking at him. “With who?”
I felt it, some stone drop inside. I could hear the way his voice changed. He was still smiling. But I knew I could take some wrong turn here and he wouldn’t be smiling anymore. The whole night could be ruined right there. I practically saw the street sign in front of me. DANGEROUS CURVES AHEAD.
“My father. We ate it in the front seat of the car as we drove home from Portland. Don’t remember why we were there. Just him trying to shift and eat a big messy all-meat number and worrying about getting in an accident.”
“I thought you were going to say you had it with Dylan.”
“Nope,” I said. The bad feeling shouted louder. It grew badder and bigger, but my insides were shrinking, shriveling.
“Well, I’m sure you did. Ate pizza. Did lots of things. You guys were together six months.”
Of course we had. I’d eaten pizza in the car with Dylan, too, once. After a football game, and he was starved, but we wanted to be alone. And other times. Once right on that same couch. He’d been sitting right where Christian was, and we’d used magazines for plates. I wouldn’t have told Christian that, though. I wouldn’t have mentioned any of those things. “Not even,” I said. “Dylan didn’t like pizza. If I’d have eaten pizza with him, it would have been the worst pizza ever. I’d have thrown it right up. I’d have had to put pepperonis over my eyes just to look at it.”
He didn’t laugh. He got quiet. It was very quiet except for the fire. A log cracked and snapped in half, showing its secret inner kryptonite. “Christian . . .” I moaned. “Let’s not do this?”
“Do what?”
I took his magazine from him, set it down. I climbed on his lap. “You’re the only one I ever want to eat pizza with forevermore,” I said. I plastered a bunch of kisses on his face. “Pizza is your food from now on. Cornflakes are. Oranges are.”
He turned his mouth away.
“If I ever have to eat pizza with anyone but you, I’ll refuse. I’ll do like this.” I clasped my mouth shut. I pretended to talk through it. “I hant bleet hanyflung ike at.”
“Stop,” he said.
“What?” I said. I was pleading a little.
“I just can’t stand the thought of your mouth on someone else’s. Let alone anything else.”
I got off his lap. “Yeah? I can’t stand the thought of yours on Angelie what’s-her-face’s. Or that other girl.” But I was lying. I didn’t really think about it much. I couldn’t even remember the one girl’s name.
“But you see him all the time,” Christian said.
“What do you mean? I never see him,” I said. Another lie. Dylan was in my Spanish class.
“You probably wish you did.”
“Aaargh!” I pretended to strangle him. Nothing. He just sat there, wearing his mood like a cape, drawn around himself. We finished the pizza. We lay down next to each other and kissed, but it was all layered with hurt and distance, some weird emotional parfait. I kept trying and trying to reach him. See, I got deep into it with him. I was right there, too. I didn’t stop it or step out of it. I felt as desperate to make him stay close, to keep him close, as he did—love, if that’s what you could call it, was bound up with some bottomless, clutching need. Tightly bound, so that you couldn’t tell the need from the love. It got late and Christian went home. I watched the taillights of his car disappear down the street. Even the taillights seemed hurt.
That night I lay in bed, listened to my father’s car come into the garage, listened to him brush his teeth in the bathroom. Usually I might get up to see him, but I pretended to be asleep. All at once, my head was busy counting up my lies. I had never been a liar, but now they rolled off my tongue like lies were a second language I was suddenly fluent in.
I was only right there, where the path has turned and you think you might be lost but aren’t even sure of it yet. The place in those creepy movies with the couple in the car on a dark night, a secluded road, where they pull off and they’re making out and she first hears the twig branch break.
Those lies. I didn’t realize it fully yet, but I guess you could say I was already in hiding from Christian Nilsson.
Chapter 10
By the third day of my new job, I knew I would not be going to Friday Harbor with Finn Bishop. Some snakes couldn’t be charmed, and Sylvie Genovese was one of them.
She toured me around the grounds. She took me inside the lighthouse, up its narrow, endless flight of winding stairs to the top where the lantern was. But she made it clear she would only take people up there who she felt were smart enough to be safe. It is not a play area , she said to me, wagging her finger as if I had already used the upper balcony like a jungle gym. She taught me how to use the cash register, and when I made a mistake, she’d snap: Have you been listening? What did I say about this? She quizzed me on the reading mate
rial. Silly me, I hadn’t remembered the exact date of Captain Bishop’s marriage to Eliza Bishop. I smiled and chatted with the visitors who came in, but I hadn’t moved the tour on quickly enough, and I’d let the children touch things in the store without watching them. I couldn’t understand if we were trying to welcome people or drive them away.
I complimented her hair. This nest? I praised Roger. Ah, he is just a little demone. I didn’t take lunch. You have to eat. I took lunch. I like to see devotion to the task. The only time she seemed happy was when she’d come in from fishing, after bringing her little boat out to sea, or working in her garden with Roger sleeping in a spot of sun nearby. You saw her smile then, when she was alone or had just been alone. I guessed snakes weren’t much for company. It was so different from Armchair Books, where the owner, Derek, with his kind eyes and beard, would laugh and have parties for us and his favorite customers after the store closed on Thursdays, for no reason. Armchair Books had a fireplace and posters of Parisian book stalls on the walls, a picture of an armchair painted on the front window.
I was glad for the moment when Sylvie took her boat keys off the hook by the door, the ones attached to a foam key chain so they could float if dropped in water. I’d have an hour’s peace. If no one came in, I’d dust the cases in the museum that were filled with old paraffin containers and navigational instruments, or refill the shelves, or fold the sweatshirts and T-shirts that were always getting unfolded. I’d make sure there were lots of choices of sizes available in all styles: the simple lighthouse image with its name underneath, the lighthouse with Bishop Rock Rocks! in crazy letters, the pigeon head (he was actually a seagull) with a small lighthouse in the background, Pigeon Head Point Lighthouse written in script. I was glad she didn’t make me wear one. Those T-shirts with the flat slabs of rubbery images always felt unbearably scratchy and uncomfortable to me.
When all of that was done, and if there were no visitors anywhere on the premises, I was allowed to sit by the counter and read, which is what I would do, taking my bookmark from my latest find from the Bishop Rock Library. I would wonder what the upstairs of the house was like, where Sylvie Genovese lived. I could hear her on the phone sometimes, speaking Italian, and I wondered what brought her here, if she, too, were licking her wounds. You could see her boat zipping along or bobbing in the waters out front, her small figure capably steering that motor, her chin tipped to the sun.
That’s what I was doing, reading, wondering about Sylvie Genovese as Roger kept guard by the door nearby, when I heard Sylvie shouting outside. She was agitated and yelling about something, and Roger leaped up and started to bark, and I got up too and ran out, seeing if I could be of help. She’d probably get pissed at me for trying to help if I did, or for not helping if I didn’t, I thought, but her voice was too excited not to wonder what was going on.
I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.
“Dad?”
My father was sprawled out along the grass on the top of the cliff. His mouth was twisted in pain and he had twigs and grass in his hair and a swipe of sand stuck to his face and along one leg. Sylvie was kneeling beside him sweating madly, her own leg scratched and bleeding a bit. Roger barked and turned in circles, doing another badly timed circus trick.
“You know him? He belongs to you?” Sylvie said in that beautiful voice.
“I wouldn’t exactly say that,” I said.
“Clara,” he said.
“What are you doing?” I asked. Asked sounds like I was calm and reasonable. It was actually sort of a high shriek. Like I didn’t have enough problems with Sylvie Genovese.
“Visiting Annabelle.” He winced. “I think I broke my ankle.”
“He fell. I had to haul him up.”
I wanted to laugh, but I wasn’t that stupid. I wished I could have seen that—gorgeous, small Sylvie Genovese manhandling poor broken Pops. He had sand stuck to the side of his face. A bubble of hysteria rose up, and I tried to swallow it down. I clapped my hands so that Roger would stop the jumping around and the barking.
“Roger!” Sylvie said, and he was immediately still. He sat his little butt right down and looked at her with eager attention, as if he were a student about to be asked a question he was sure he knew the answer to. “Go in my bathroom upstairs and get the medical kit. Under the counter,” she said.
Okay, I’m an idiot, because for a second I thought she was talking to Roger until I realized she meant me. I ran back inside. I crossed the rope that was strung between the banisters. I made a wrong turn and ended up in Sylvie’s bedroom. I saw her unmade bed filled with white pillows and a plump white comforter and a soft saffron-colored quilt, books all around, a room to love. Her jeans were tossed on the floor, a pair of black undies, too. I backed out, found the bathroom. It smelled good, and there was an array of bottles and lotions on the counter, a picture in a frame facedown.
I had no time to snoop, but I did have time to lift the frame and set it back down again, time enough to see the picture of Sylvie Genovese standing next to a man holding a basket of lemons in front of an orange house. I looked under the counter. A box of tampons, toilet paper, cleaning supplies. Wait. A blue plastic container with a handle. I yanked it out, opened the clasps. Bingo. An Ace bandage, iodine, cotton swabs, all that stuff. I ran back down the stairs.
Sylvie Genovese’s sweater was bundled up under my father’s head. He was laughing, and so was she. She was looking right down at him, and her teeth were so white against her olive skin, and his hair was so black against his own. She plucked a strand of grass from his shirt. I stopped suddenly, holding that kit, causing Roger, who I didn’t realize had been following so closely, to run into the back of my legs. Sylvie had not yet wrapped my father’s ankle in the tight, tan cloth. She had not yet cleaned her own wound.
But I knew right then I might be making it to Friday Harbor after all.
“I was beginning to think you weren’t coming,” Finn Bishop said.
“Just busy at work.” I smiled. I had waited for a long time for the boat to come in; finally I saw the tip of the mast in the sharp blue sky and there it was, Obsession , returning to the dock and getting bigger and bigger as it neared. Finn had helped the passengers off, extending his hand and all the while looking over at me and beaming. Finally they had all disembarked, and Jack had headed over to get some food at The Cove. We were standing there alone, alone if you didn’t count the fisherman and the tourists and the knobby-kneed seagulls and a single pelican standing on a piling.
“Not fired yet?”
“No,” I said smugly. I was feeling smug.
“Ready to come on board?” He had his hands in his jeans pockets. He was rocking a bit on his heels.
I was ready. “I’ve heard the ghosts of drowned sailors are haunting these waters,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am. You never want to be in a boat after dark. They’ll grab you by the ankles and pull you down, trying to save themselves.”
He hopped on the boat, reached over and took my hand, and I came on too. I shivered in spite of myself. The image of a hand around an ankle. “Cold?” he asked.
“Fine,” I said. Great, actually. I was filling up with great. Funny, but it was so different being on the dock versus being on the boat, and we hadn’t even left yet. Maybe it was the thrill of what was coming—the about-to-leave before the leaving. The boat rocked. I realized you needed special footing to keep your balance.
“Careful,” Finn said.
“Where should I be?” There were bench seats by the big steering that Jack used, and there was the huge deck-nose of the boat, lined with complicated rows of ropes. It would be easy to be in the way here.
“The best seat—way up front. I won’t worry about you being hit with the boom.” He slapped the huge metal rail at the bottom of the big sail. “You’ve got to hold on. The boat will heel, right?” He tilted his hand. “You won’t fall. No one ever has. You got these lifelines.” He pushed against the thin wires stretched alongside the boat,
a railing of sorts, but not one you could imagine holding up anything, let alone a slipping body.
He waited. “If you’re nervous about that, you can sit back here and listen to Jack bullshit the customers.”
“I’m not nervous,” I said. I could see Finn’s sure footing. I climbed up, made my way over ropes and pulleys to the very tip of the boat. “Here?”
Finn nodded, pleased. “That’s right.”
We talked for a bit. He asked where I was from and where we were staying and for how long. I told him the what but not the why. Something occurred to me. Maybe Dad would consider it cheating, but I asked anyway. “The house we’re staying in? The one at the very tip of Possession Point?”
“I know it. We go right past there, what, six times a day?”
“Do you know who lives there?”
“Nope. Someone who’s gone a lot. It always seems empty.”
“So you don’t know if the guy’s a movie director.”
Finn laughed. “I don’t think so. Nope. We’d know it. Some cousin of Kurt Cobain’s was out here for a while and everyone knew the poor sucker’s every move. ‘He’s a vegetarian.’ ‘He bought fifty pounds of concrete at the hardware store.’”
“We’re just trying to figure out about our host,” I said. “Lame personal mystery.”
“I can find out for you.”
“That’s okay. Dad would probably rather keep guessing,” I said.
He looked at me. “I like to guess about someone. But then, it’s even better when you know more.” He was sitting beside me with his legs stretched out. “I’d like to know more,” he said to me. “You know, about you.”
My stomach flipped. His eyes really were sweet, if you could believe eyes. It’s hard to trust those kinds of observations when they’d been so wrong before. I thought about Annabelle’s word, instinct. I worried mine had been lost at sea like those drowned sailors, the ways it had gone wrong haunting me forevermore.