Stay

by Deb Caletti

  “You have more ghost action right where you work,” Finn said.

  “Sylvie Genovese?” I guess in some ways she did seem haunted.

  Finn laughed. “Eliza Bishop. The Captain’s wife? People really have seen her. My mother, and she doesn’t even believe in that shit. Lots of other people. They hear her in the house. They see her up on the tower. She flung herself off of there after the old guy drowned at sea.”

  “I read about it. I was practically quizzed on it. Guess I better keep my eyes open for her.”

  “The sailors down there . . .” He gestured out toward the black waters. “People say they hear them moaning. Wind and a little imagination, right? There’s this guy. Randy Vishner. Fisherman? He claims they overturned his boat, grabbed his legs, and yanked him down. But Randy Vishner . . .” He tipped his hand up as if drinking from a bottle.

  “’This is your brain. This is your brain on booze,’” I said.

  “Exactly. Alcohol hauntings.”

  “We have a ghost near us, supposedly, at home,” I said. “Greenlake. This lake in the middle of the city? A girl was murdered there, by her boyfriend. You’re supposed to see her at night when you go there to make out.”*

  “That’ll kill the mood. Pardon the pun,” Finn said.

  Finn had found my hand again. I was glad. It was stupid, I know, but all that talk gave me the creeps. Especially sitting there in the darkness, where the night’s black sea looked capable of different things than the day’s blue one. There were bodies under that water, drowned ships. I felt little prickles of nerves. That tingle that goes up your back, even when there’s no good reason for it. I squeezed his hand, and he squeezed mine back.

  We talked about my plans now that I’d graduated, plans I was still unsure about. I’d gotten off track last year with everything that happened. I’d missed acceptance deadlines. But all I told Finn was that I was taking a year off before I went to school. He had gone away for two years himself but was back home again. He was thinking about staying. He loved being with his family and running the business. We talked about other things. Music. Learning to drive. Being an only child. Loving fried foods and orange juice and the crunchy layer of frosting that a cupcake gets. I told him about my second grade teacher, Miss Spelling. How much I loved that name.**

  The radio that had been playing was off now. It was quiet between us, too. Finn was looking in my eyes like he’d found something good there, and I was looking back in his. His face had started to look familiar to me. I wanted to kiss him so bad, and you could feel that space where you knew it was going to happen. I looked at his mouth. I wanted to lean in to it. Instead, my own voice surprised me.

  “I want to kiss you, but I want to look forward to the thought of kissing you for a while first.”

  “I know exactly what you mean,” he said. “Exactly.”

  We were whispering. It might have been one of those rare, perfect moments. We sat there in it, taking it in, until he stood up. “Come on,” he said. “It’s getting late.”

  He walked me back to my car. He kissed my hair good-bye. He said something into it very quietly. “Shy girl.”

  I had been a shy girl, a cautious, mostly quiet one, but I had been renamed and renamed again, redefined until I couldn’t see myself anymore. I had been bold and then I had been forward, and then, when things got worse and I had been twisted into the unrecognizable, I had been only lost. But with that word, “shy”—I was returned to myself again.

  My father wasn’t home yet when I got there. We’d forgotten to leave a light on, and the house was all gray shadows and emptiness. I let myself in. I felt nervous out there all alone. I could hear the wind whistling around the roof, the thrash of the waves. I undressed, with that silly, strange feeling that someone was watching. I thought about ghosts and the rest of those who can’t let go. I tried to fall asleep, but I only lay awake with my eyes open. I thought about that huge, heavy paperweight under my father’s bed, wishing it were under my own. I had that same old feeling you had when you were a kid, when you needed to get up to pee but were too afraid. I used to think those robbers were in the hall, waiting, but now I thought of the widows of sea captains and dead girls.

  I told myself how stupid I was being, and I got up, and the floor was cold under my feet, and my long T-shirt made me feel too exposed. My ankles were bare. My legs. I crept down the hall. I was actually creeping, so I might not disturb whatever—whomever—might be disturbed. I reached the bathroom and that’s when I screamed. I actually screamed, stupid, stupid—it was my father in his white T-shirt, heading the same direction with the quietest of steps.

  “Clara!” he said.

  “Oh, God, Dad, I’m sorry.” I had my hand to my chest.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “Jesus, honey. Next time I’ll make more noise.”

  “I guess I got a little creeped out here on my own.” We faced each other in the hall. My heart was still doing this mad babamp babamp. Something was different, though. I squinted in the darkness. I took a good look at him for the first time. “Are you okay?”

  “She’s not married,” he said. “Never has been. She only uses ‘Mrs.’ so people will keep their distance.”

  “Well, that’s good, isn’t it?” He flipped the bathroom light on, and we both blinked in the sudden brightness. Maybe it was the shock of instant illumination, but it looked like his olive skin had turned pale. He searched around for that aspirin bottle again, as if he’d forgotten where he’d put it.

  He turned to me, stared. “It’s just that . . .”

  He looked ill. “What? Are you going to be sick?”

  “I could maybe love this woman,” he said.

  I didn’t know what to say or what to think. In the hall, I had been scared enough to scream, but right then, as he stood there holding that bottle, his eyes hollow, he was the one who looked like he’d seen a ghost.

  Chapter 11

  Christian and I were the kind of couple people start thinking of as one person. Our names came together when anyone spoke about either of us. Christian and Clara. ChristianandClara . We saw all of the seasons and the holidays and were going on our second view of them together. We had our second Christmas. He gave me this necklace with intertwined C ’s. I gave him a leather wristband* he never took off as long as I knew him. It wasn’t really his type, but he wore it anyway. I was with him when Mr. Hooper got sick. We visited him in the hospital in that blue and white gown, and then he was back home again in his jogging suit and scuffers, more thin and quiet than before. Christian and I made plans to go to college together. I was there for him after he had this big blowout with his stepfather. We had history. That leaf he had given me had long ago turned brown and crunchy and layered with meaning. We had daily routine.

  Routine is cement for some people, coziness made solid, certainty building more certainty. For others, routine cracks surfaces with its weight, creating a boredom that presses down and down until something breaks. You’d understand either of those things, wouldn’t you? The settling in or the boredom of settling in? But what I didn’t understand was this thing that happened—when routine caused a person more fear. Because the more Christian came to rely on me, to feel I was the “perfect” person for him, the more convinced he became that he would lose me. And the more he was afraid of losing me, the more paranoid he got and the more he made sure that what would happen next was what he feared most.

  And what a shame it was. It was all so needless. I loved him. The only one who changed that was Christian himself.

  Are you wearing that?

  I guess I am, since I have it on.

  I can practically see your nipples.

  It’s hard to stand up for yourself when you are burning with shame.

  I’ve heard that people stay in bad situations because a relationship like that gets turned up by degrees. It is said that a frog will jump out of a pot of boiling w
ater. But place him in a pot and turn it up a little at a time, and he will stay until he is boiled to death. Us frogs understand this.

  Why you didn’t tell me you were going to the library? he asked me once.

  I didn’t know. I just decided.

  You just decided as you were driving past? When it’s ten minutes out of your way?

  It’s not logical, Christian. It’s not some sort of math equation you can find a flaw in. I decided, I went.

  A person doesn’t mention a plan they have, it makes you wonder if they have something to hide.

  Christian, listen. You’ve got to stop this. You’ve got to knock this off. All this jealous stuff, distrust—it doesn’t look good on you. It’s unattractive. You’re wrecking things. It wasn’t the first time I said it. I said it all the time. The anger, though, it was just another ineffective tool in the box with the other ways I dealt with Christian’s jealousy. It lay there uselessly along with the reassurance and the joking and the diversion, the ways I kept my eyes down, the clothes I wore or didn’t wear anymore.

  I’m sorry, Clara. You’re right. You are. I am so sorry. I don’t deserve you.

  It was sometime around February. Cold enough that everything was white with frost, even in the afternoon. I was glad Christian was coming to pick me up from school. I hate the cold. I feel it deep in my bones in a way I’m not sure everyone does. The bell had rung and there was the slamming of locker doors and the mix of people lingering to stay and people hurrying to go. I was heading out the main entrance of school. A few guys were ahead of me, and I saw him there. Dylan Ricks. His friend, Jake McNeal, stopped to tie his shoe, and they all stopped and Dylan saw me.

  “Hey,” he said.

  The whole scene suddenly played out in my mind. Christian would be waiting at the curb in his car. He would remember Dylan from the time I’d pointed him out long ago, before I knew not to. Christian would see Dylan talking to me and would watch my own lips move, and I would have to look at Dylan, and I knew what that would mean. So I just brushed past Dylan like I didn’t notice him there right in front of me, which was stupid and embarrassing. And when I got to the car, I understood that I was right; Christian’s face was tight and hard, and that tightness made me mad in a way it hadn’t before. I had guessed it and now that’s what was happening, and when you start predicting things like that, you realize you’ve reached some end point of knowing. This is how it will always be and will always be and will always be. It’s the dark side of knowing how he’ll order his coffee and that he’ll get stressed when he’s late because he always gets stressed when he’s late.

  “I thought you said you never saw Dylan.” The car was idling. Christian flicked off the heat with an angry hand even though it was freezing. “You lied to me.”

  Which was true. I saw Dylan every day in Spanish. I borrowed a pen from him when mine started leaking ink. He told me when his dog died, because I’d really liked that dog.

  “You probably lied about sleeping with him, too,” Christian said. “You’re the kind of person that would sleep with him.”

  Also true.

  I started to realize that anything I did, any way I could have handled this—well, I couldn’t win. No matter what. Each way I turned, there “it” was. The realization changed something. But, see, the problem was, other things had changed, too. I had started to wonder if maybe Christian was right about me. I wondered if maybe I was that someone he always accused me of being. Maybe I’d been her all along.

  The lying got worse. More and more, he thought I was trying to hide things from him because I was hiding things from him. I wanted to hide things from him. I wanted space to breathe. I went with Shakti and Nick to Red Robin and told him I went with Dad. I did that all the time. I had a roast beef sandwich once and told him I had a salad. I really did. I think I just wanted pieces of me he couldn’t see or find or judge somehow.

  I started to think a lot about going away to school. We had both planned to go to the University of Washington so we could be together, but instead I dreamed about foreign cities that were farther away and full of strangers. I went with my father to check out a university in Vancouver, Canada, and Christian called so many times that my father got pissed and took my phone and stuck it in the pocket of his jacket. I wasn’t sure I minded. I avoided looking at that pocket.

  Christian could always feel my lies and sense my secret retreat. We went to visit Mr. Hooper. I read to him, a Chekhov book of stories Christian had gotten from the library. The proposal embarrassed her with its suddenness, by the fact that the word wife had been spoken, and by the necessity of refusing it. She could not even remember what she had said to Laptev, but she continued to feel traces of the violent, disagreeable emotion with which she had rejected him . . . Mr. Hooper had fallen asleep. His wispy white hair stood up straight against the back of the chair where his head lay and made me feel sad.

  “I love you,” Christian said. He took the book from me. Kissed me softly.

  “I love you too,” I said. I meant it.

  “You won’t ever leave me, will you?” he said.

  If you go to school in Vancouver, it’s over, he said.

  Why? It’s not that far away, I said.

  You’d take up with someone else.

  No.

  You were the one, he said, who came on to me. You came right up to me. You threw yourself at me.

  You wish, I’d said. The anger—it was my favorite tool now. He’d used up my patience.

  That other guy had his hands all over you that day.

  Who?

  You know who. Nick. I saw him.

  He’s my friend.

  And are you always so forward with guys? You kissed me. You were the one who pushed for sex. Angelie would never have done that. She had morals. She respected herself.

  Angelie was the girl at the basketball game. The one he’d been seeing before me. For, maybe, a month. He’d brought her up often. She’d become the Virgin Mary, I swear. Go ahead and be with Angelie, then, I said. Go for it.

  You wouldn’t even care, would you?

  I sighed. Of course I’d care, Christian.

  You’d just go with some other guy.

  Well, probably I would, eventually. The phrase, some other guy—I was getting tired of it. Those words grated on me. He said those three words as often than any. More often than “I love you.”

  You’d tell everyone what an asshole I’d been. He was afraid of this. Really afraid. Of people knowing the kinds of things he said when we were alone.

  No. I wouldn’t do that.

  All you’d have to do is call up Jake Ritchee. I’m sure he’d have sex with you, too.

  We were in his room. Sandy and Elliot were gone. Shopping. Costco, or something. It was a regular weekend day. The tree outside his room was empty of all leaves. Stark. The street was messy and windblown. We’d probably had a small storm the night before. One of their garbage cans was knocked over. I’d been staring out his window, because I didn’t want to see his face when he got like this. His words pissed me off, but confused me, too. I turned away from the window. I looked at him.

  Who is Jake Ritchee? I don’t even know a Jake Ritchee.

  Right, he said. He looked disgusted. He started pacing in his room. The space felt too small. I wanted out of there.

  I’ve never heard of Jake Ritchee. I don’t know what you’re even talking about.

  He gave you his card. His fucking phone number.

  I had no idea what he meant. None. He searched around on his desk. Shoving books and papers. Calculus Concepts landed on the floor with a smack. You never heard of him? His voice dripped sarcasm. He handed me a business card. I looked down. I saw my own writing there on the back. My name and phone number. My e-mail address. I turned the card over. Jake Ritchee, it read. Smith and Gray Auto.

  I remembered. I remembered bringing my father’s car in to be repaired. I remembered Jake Ritchee, too, in his blue coveralls, a guy about twenty-something, who expl
ained our diseased transmission to me so that I could explain it to my father. I had plucked one of his cards from the plastic tray on the counter, next to some shiny pamphlets advertising radial tires. My father always had questions.

  I opened my mouth to explain, because explaining was what I always did with Christian, another tool in that box. But I stopped. I had another realization then as I held that card, a way too late realization: I was tired of explaining. I had jumped right into this game and played it along with him, and that had been my fault. But I had reached the sudden point where I didn’t want to do it anymore. No explanation would be good enough, ever. If he had kept this card since that night, if he chose that meaning over the one the card really had—his truths would never, could never, be what the truth really was.

  I tossed the card at him. It spun like a little paper boomerang and fell, hitting the top of Christian’s shoe. I walked to the door.

  You’re not going to leave, he said.

  Yep, I said.

  So you dated this guy.

  Jake Ritchee fixed my father’s car.

  I know how you like dark-haired guys, he said.

  I brushed past him. I walked down the stairs. Christian’s mother had just gotten a cat, and it slipped out the front door when I opened it. I went down the driveway and remembered that Christian had driven me over. I didn’t have Dad’s car. And it was raining now, hard. It didn’t matter. I walked to the bus stop nearby. I knew the route from coming here so many times. I waited about twenty minutes for the 259. I sat behind an old woman in a red crocheted hat. It had a green fringy ball on top. Very Christmas-y.

  The rain dripped down the large windows of the bus. The huge wipers were going fast. My pant legs were wet, and I was cold. And then his words sank in. They sank in, and I sat there in some sort of shock. Christian had gone to Smith and Gray Auto to check out Jake Ritchee. It would be the only way he’d know that Jake Ritchee had black hair.