Stay

by Deb Caletti

  “Hmm,” I said. “Bread with mayonnaise maybe won’t even turn his head.”

  “No, bread’s fine. It’s not good for him to eat so much junk food,” she said. “Hey, Clara?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You should come over for dinner or something. My mom would love to meet you. She can’t understand why Finn has been so happy lately. But it aaaaalll makes sense to me,” she said.

  “Maybe I should wait for Finn to ask,” I said.

  “He’s clueless. Hey, Finn!” she shouted. She actually stepped out from The Cove and yelled and then whistled that great whistle some people can do with their fingers. Finn was bent over the lines on the boat, looked up and waved, then hopped off and came our way.

  “That is so cool, that whistle. I always wished I could do that.”

  But Cleo wasn’t listening. “I invited Clara over for dinner, okay?”

  “Great,” he said. He laced his fingers with mine. “You can be overwhelmed with the entire crazy family now.” But he was smiling. He was like one great big Sunday afternoon—the kind where you stay in your p.j.’s and watch movies and eat popcorn. Where life is at its uncomplicated best.

  And so I went over to Finn’s house that night. He’d pointed it out to me before, the small white clapboard not far from the docks. It was a simple house inside—wood paneling, and the kind of couch with a sag that made you work hard to rise from. A wicker chair, a coffee table filled with books, a basket of shells, a lamp made out of a twisting driftwood log, breezy cream curtains. There was a large canvas on one wall, an abstract painting with the varied blues of the sea. I stood before it. Maybe I was only imagining the curve of Possession Point.

  “I like this,” I said to Finn. I was taking it all in, this place where he grew up. Cleo, in her wild floral blouse and jeans, was finding some music to put on.

  “Yeah?” His hand was resting on the small of my back.

  “He painted it,” Cleo said, over her shoulder. A moment later, on came a gravelly voiced guy singing a soft, thoughtful song.

  “You did?”

  He shrugged, shy. “One of those things,” he said.

  “One of those things,” Cleo mimicked. “A new age Picasso. Kid’s got talent.” Cleo grasped him on the shoulders and shook, and right then their mom opened the door and came in, a grocery bag on one hip. She had long hair, and wore jeans and a denim jacket with a tank top underneath, a wide belt. She had eyes that were definite. Cheekbones, too. She looked like an older Cleo—someone who knew her mind. I was surprised then, when she gave me a big smile and with her free hand pointed at me.

  “You. You I am glad to meet,” she said.

  “Clara, Mom. Mom, Clara,” Finn said.

  “Ness,” she said. “As in Vanessa, not Loch.”

  “Yeah, but sometimes she’s a monster,” Cleo said.

  Ness snagged a brussels sprout right from the bag and lobbed it right at her, but it missed and rolled under the television.

  “Take your roughhousing outdoors, children,” Finn said as he leaned down to retrieve it. He held up the brussels sprout. “Don’t you know we hate these things?”

  “Cleo loves them,” Ness said.

  “I do not,” Cleo said.

  “You’ve always loved them.”

  “Never.” Cleo followed Ness to the kitchen.

  “Why do I buy them, then?” Ness said. “I can’t stand them either.”

  We were alone for a minute. Finn leaned over and kissed my cheek. “You’re in my house.”

  “I’m in your house,” I said. “I like being in your house. I feel like I’ve been here a million times.” It was true, too. I remember the time I first went to Christian’s, and even the time I went over to Harrison Daily’s.* You could feel the otherness of a person when you went to their house. It could be a weird and wrong other, where a place smelled like a litter box or Pine-Sol or had some reclining chair that gave you the creeps for some reason. You could tell all at once if it was a Super Athlete family or a Gross From Too Many Pets one, and you knew if you fit or not. You knew if you wanted to sit down and eat there, or if you secretly wished you’d brought your own silverware. It could feel too clean, where you were sure you’d spill the drink you were offered. Shakti’s house was very different than ours, with its Indian wall hangings and carved wood furniture, but it matched me anyway. I got right in and wanted to stay. And it was like that there at Finn’s. A match, for whatever reason.

  Finn’s mother had a huge music collection, and Finn showed me different CDs and played me bits of songs, and Ness and Cleo shouted out other suggestions, and then dinner was ready. Ness made Parmesan chicken and a salad, and we all sat at a round table in the kitchen. Cleo brought out two chunky wood candlesticks and lit the candles and turned down the light. Their old dog Shane woke from a long nap to sit under the table. We clinked glasses, and Jack came home to change his clothes, snitching a few dinner rolls on his way back out again.

  I got up to use the bathroom, and I don’t know why I did it, but I looked in their medicine cabinet. Sometimes you get that urge, the bathroom equivalent of googling someone. Inside, there was the usual assortment of Band-Aids and cold medicine, but a whole row, too, of amber plastic bottles with white caps, prescriptions made out for Thomas Bishop, Finn’s dad. He’d been dead for years, and I guess Ness couldn’t throw those bottles away.

  I felt bad when I shut that door. We’d been having this great warm time together, but this family had seen some things, been through layers of life I knew nothing about. Layers I couldn’t understand. A father getting thinner and thinner, his skin yellowing, those hospital rooms with sliding curtains. I’d glimpsed their most private moments, and I was still a stranger to them.

  I washed my hands, used one of the blue towels folded in neat rectangles on the counter.

  It hit me then.

  Hospital.

  My father’s words. They said at the hospital that there was nothing more that could have been done.

  I felt the spin of confusion starting. Had he gotten mixed up? Had I? I’d always been told my mother died at home. Did they take a person to a hospital anyway? Was that part of the procedure? In my imagination, I had never seen her in an ambulance, a hospital, people in blue scrubs with their hands on her. I’d only pictured what I remembered of our old house. A horrible imagining of her on the living room floor. Being carried out down the stairs. Hospital wasn’t a word ever used before about her. Was he lying to me? Because that’s what it meant when people changed their stories, didn’t it?

  I was scared. I felt it right there in the Bishops’ bathroom, because it seemed like my father kept getting farther away from me, and I needed every anchor I had left. I needed to understand what was real, what I had to be afraid of and what I didn’t.

  Finn and I did the dishes since Ness and Cleo had cooked. Cleo went out to meet some friends and Ness went to her room to watch a movie. We washed dishes in that candlelight, Finn’s arms plunged into the soapy water and me with the towel.

  “You’ve got a great family,” I said.

  “We’re enmeshed, right? I took psych 101. Cleo will probably never leave the house.”

  “You go through a lot together . . . That’s what happens,” I said. I had a Disney Movie moment, the thought that if you put Finn’s half of family with my half, we’d have a whole.

  “We look out for each other,” he said.

  “Right. Exactly,” I said.

  He drained the water from the sink, snatched the towel from me, and dried his hands. He pulled me close. His face was so sweet in that candlelight. His eyes, showing me every bit of himself, even if I was not yet that open. I wanted to stay right there, because it was so safe. I don’t know if it’s what every girl wants, but it’s what I wanted, that feeling, being held firmly, the sense that any storm could come and blow the roof right off but in his arms there’d be shelter.

  My phone rang then. I could hear it, thrumming in my purse in the living r
oom, muffled but responsibly doing its job.

  “Your phone,” Finn said, not taking his eyes from mine.

  “Stupid phone. I hate that phone,” I said, not taking my eyes from his.

  He kissed me, then, and it was slow and delicious and his mouth tasted just like mine. I felt the sweet tingle of desire and he pressed hard against me until we finished that kiss and he drew away.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “Wow,” I agreed.

  He kissed my forehead. “Do you need to check your phone? In case your father twisted his other ankle or something?”

  I laughed. “Probably,” I said. I went into the living room, sorry that the moment in the kitchen was over, wishing I could have held onto that and onto that. It’s wrong, how shortchanged some moments are. So brief, and yet you can sit in some miserable math class for fifty of the longest minutes of your life. You can sit in the DMV, you can have an argument, you can go to the dentist—hours. And yet a sweet kiss is over so fast.

  I fished around in my purse and stupidly couldn’t find my phone, given that it was one of the biggest things in there. Finally, yes, there it was.

  Finn’s fingertips were on my waist. I opened the phone. I was an idiot, because it took me by surprise. Every time it happened, I was shocked.

  I snapped the cover shut. “Jesus.”

  “Clara?”

  “Jesus, it’s him.”

  “It’s okay, Clara.”

  “It’s him already. He found the number already.”

  “He doesn’t know where you are. You’re okay.”

  The phone trilled then, right there in my hand. He was calling again. I dropped it and it fell on the floor. I felt like my breath had been taken. No more air.

  “I’ll answer it,” Finn said. “Let me take care of that prick.”

  “No!” I said. “No, you can’t do that.” I tried to breathe. I swear to God, it was like he was right there watching us when we kissed. Like he felt that betrayal, knew of it, miles away.

  “This is crazy,” Finn said.

  How can you ever explain this to someone who hasn’t been in it? The way that you can still feel that alarmed responsibility, that guilt? You could be away from it for weeks, be there at the beach where your mind could clear and you could see how Finn was right, it was crazy, your own responses most of all. And yet there was that phone number, there was his fingers dialing you right then, and you could snap back to that place of panic like you’d never left. You fell right into that way of being, that craziness, same as hooking back up with an old friend you hadn’t seen in a while.

  “Don’t!” I grabbed Finn’s arm as he reached for the phone.

  “I’m just going to shut it off, okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  And then he did. And after he did, I pulled him down beside me on that saggy couch and I told him everything.

  Chapter 17

  I parked Dad’s car in Christian’s driveway. Your mind can sometimes do this interesting thing (mine can, anyway) where it seems it’s the mind of two different people, acting and feeling two different ways, because right then I was still not feeling afraid, and yet I remember that I put my keys in my pocket, not in my purse, in case I needed to get out of there in a hurry. Part of me was in charge of being naive and part of me was handling the street smarts. Even though it seems like self-protection leaves you, I think it is probably always there. You don’t listen to it for a thousand complicated reasons—your own fear and denial and stupidity and good-heartedness, but it stays on task, shouting truths at you. You turn your back on it, but self-protection never abandons you. Never.

  I kept touching those keys with my fingertips in my jacket pocket. I can feel their cold, jagged metal on my fingertips right now, this minute, as if my fingers have their own memory. It was reassuring to know they were there. I imagine it was the same kind of false reassurance people get from a can of mace on their key ring or a deadbolt or some superstitious behavior like knocking on wood, because, really, those things are no protection against someone’s strong will.

  I’d asked Christian if his parents were going to be home, and he’d said yes. Only one of their cars was parked on the street, though. The driveway looked empty, just a scattering of leaves scritching and doing leaf somersaults in the wind. The house looked dark. My mind was still performing its dual role—it seemed possible Christian wasn’t there at all, that he’d stood me up and I’d have to turn around and go back home, and then I flashed on some stupid eleven o’clock news vision of him lying in there in a pool of blood.

  Keys in my pocket. Good. I knocked on the door. There was some new, floral wreath type decoration hanging there—dried flowers, a fading smell of potpourri. My stomach started to feel a little sick. I realized I didn’t want to see him again. Not at all. Not for a second. Out here it was me in the cold air, trees whispering the far-off rumor of spring, my hands in my pockets, freedom. In there, the dark weight of emotion. Nothing he would say could change my mind. As I’ve said, he often seemed to know my thoughts before I did and could sense the secret murmurs I didn’t dare speak. But at the same time he refused to know what I told him outright, what I wrote to him over and again, what I was most sure of. To face someone with that much hope felt horrible. I felt so cruel.

  He must have been watching me out of the living room window, because the door opened right up. “I thought you’d change your mind,” he said.

  My throat clinched. All at once I felt like crying. I had been worrying about his emotions, but mine were there too. Big, a storm, they could wash me out to sea, because he was still just himself to me in so many ways. I was still drawn to the good parts. But he also looked strange—his cheeks thinner, his eyes different, like they were too far from me and too close to me at the same time.

  “You probably won’t even come in,” he said.

  “I’ll come in,” I said. My voice was shaky from the desire to cry. It was happening already. I was getting sucked in as if I were reading a script and not saying the things I wanted to say myself.

  He shut the door behind me. “Let’s go upstairs. My parents might just walk in.”

  “I thought your parents were going to be home,” I said. But I followed him upstairs, anyway. I touched the keys with my fingers. “Where are they?”

  “They’re moving some stuff up to the cabin.” Their second home, the A-frame on a rambunctious river. I remembered one time that Christian and I had driven out there alone. We’d spent a short but fantastic afternoon mostly on that couch in front of the fireplace before driving back. I’d felt so close to him then. I couldn’t have imagined anything coming between us.

  “It’s a good two hours away,” I said.

  “You act like you’re afraid to be alone with me,” he said. He shut the bedroom door. I felt the closing of it in a way I had never felt before or since, as if we were sealed in a vault, as if the elevator doors were closed with you and a man and a bad feeling. I was aware of myself in relation to where I was in the room, where the door was. That other part of my brain was taking over. I did not want him between me and that door. I could be backed into some corner. He sat at the edge of the bed and reached his hand out to me. “I missed you so much.”

  I didn’t take his hand. “Christian . . .” I said. I meant, Let’s not do this. I meant, Things are different now.

  “You won’t even hold my hand?”

  I wanted to open that door so badly. “You won’t even touch me?” I could feel his anxiety rise. It started to slowly seep into the closed room, the way poisoned gas does in some action thriller. I felt like gagging.

  “Christian, you said you wanted to see me. You said it would give you closure.” I could hear the begging in my voice.

  “You think we can have closure? You think this is something you get over? Come on, you know we belong together. You know it.” Now he was pleading. I felt tricked, but it was stupid. Why, why had I believed he only needed this one, last thing? I’d been as
morbidly hopeful as he was being now. His hands sat helplessly in his lap. Something looked funny about his arms. I could see scratches disappearing up his sleeves, like he’d been attacked by some cat.

  “I’m so sorry you’re hurting,” I said. I stood there by the door. It was all starting to feel a little unreal. I was taking it in in pieces. His room, that known place, the bed where we had lain together, the brown plaid flannel sheets. His bookcase, where his CD player and speakers sat, a plaster figure of one of those London phone booths, a mug from the world ice hockey championships that his real father had given him, an ashtray of golf tees from the time his stepfather took him out. A framed picture of me that I had given him last Christmas. I was there, looking out at myself. And under his bed, a rope, looped again and again into a figure eight, fastened with twine. A rope?

  “Hurting? Hurting? You have no idea. This is killing me. You’re killing me. You come into my life, you change it. Change it forever. You’re everything to me. And then you just leave?” He started to cry. Sob. “You have no idea what you’re doing.” He rocked back and forth.

  “Christian . . .” I said. I meant, Please don’t. I meant, Get yourself together.

  “I told you, I can change. Whatever you want. Whatever.” His shoulders were shaking. He was sobbing so hard. Howling. I put my arms around him. I was standing up as he sat. He clung to my arms. I could actually feel the wet of his tears through my shirt.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I said. “You’ll be okay.”

  “I’ll be okay?” He suddenly shoved me back, away from him. “You’re probably okay now, aren’t you? You probably have already moved on to the next one. Fucking some other guy already.”

  All right. That was enough now. I stepped back. This could maybe get out of control. It was getting out of control now. “Of course not,” I said.

  “Right.” His face looked hollow; that’s the only way I can think to describe it. His eyes were wild, but there was nothing behind them. Some blazing fire at the entrance to a dark, empty cave. “You said you loved me. I guess that word doesn’t mean the same thing to me as it does to you.”