by Deb Caletti
“Yes it does,” I said. My voice was hoarse.
“What about our house?” We’d picked one out, the one that would be ours someday, right across from Greenlake. “What about coming with me to Copenhagen?”
“Christian,” I said.
“It all meant nothing. Because you just want to fuck other guys. That’s what you want.” His face was turning red.
“No,” I said.
He stood up. He paced to the window and turned to look at me. “You want to fuck other guys.”
“Christian, stop it,” I said.
“Don’t you?”
I wanted out of there. Out! The voice inside shouted. Out now! “I’m just going to—”
“You’re going to leave?”
My hand was on the doorknob. “No,” I said. “I’m not going to leave. I’m just going to go out for a little bit. I’ll go out and come right back.” My voice—the kind you’d use with a man holding a gun to a hostage. “We’ll just take a little break and I’ll come right back.”
The sound that came from him, then—the sound of an animal. It unfurled from his throat, a roar. “Goddamn you!” He brought his hands to his face. He dug his nails in, scratching long red tracks down his face. Long, red, horrible scratches, the same ones on his arms. His own fingers destroying his own flesh.
“I’m going to . . . I’m just going to . . .” I grabbed the handle of the door and flung it open. I started down the hall, but he was screaming. I ran. Somehow he was down on the floor. I was at the top of the stairs. His hand was around my ankle. He gripped me for a moment, and I struggled for balance. My shoe pulled off. I was going to go down, down, but I broke free or he let go, I don’t know.
“Go ahead and leave, you bitch! Go ahead! Just go!”
My legs were shaking, my arms, all of me. I ran down those stairs. I looked up for only a second. He stood above me at the rail, his mouth open, shouting. I can tell you, I didn’t hear that beautiful accent then, or see those beautiful eyes. He didn’t seem human to me.
Keys. Motion. I looked up again, just long enough to see him try to lift himself over the banister. He was heaving his body up by his palms on the rail.
I flung open the front door and ran down the drive. My hand was shaking so hard I could barely get the key in the ignition. Every part of me was shaking. I was so, so cold and shaking and trying to drive and lock the doors and it was dark out. I locked the doors because I didn’t know if he’d gone over that rail or if he was right now picking up his own set of keys, heading to that car on the street.
A car honked at me. I didn’t understand, and then I realized my headlights were still off. In my rearview mirror in the dark, all the headlights looked the same. His could be there somewhere among them. I was shaking and my heart was pounding and something strange was happening, like I wasn’t in my own body anymore, just watching this person who was me and not me. I was scared, he was behind me in his car. I didn’t want to drive home because he would know I had gone there. He would be in my driveway. He would be anywhere I went. I just drove. I took streets I didn’t know so I could lose him. I saw the freeway entrance and got on, started driving on I-90 east. I was scared he was behind me all the way, even when I turned off thirty miles later in this town called North Bend. There were a lot of trees there, a huge, looming mountain. I had no idea where I was.
I pulled over the first chance I got. I didn’t know what to do. I saw his leg going over that rail. I kept seeing it. Those scratches. Him scratching his face. And then I remembered that rope. He had a rope curled under his bed. It had never been there before. I could imagine him holding it—the yes, the no. I needed to call someone. His parents. I didn’t have his parents’ number. If they went to their cabin, they could be gone all weekend, no matter what Christian had said. What had he said? I opened my phone. No reception. I had no idea where I was, and it was so dark out there and windy, more windy than it got at home, huge dark trees.
I drove in the direction I thought the town might be. I was safe, wasn’t I? I was safe if even I didn’t know where I was? He couldn’t know I was here. I still felt he might be behind me. He would jump out when I didn’t expect it. I needed a phone. The part of me that had been looking out for me before now told me what I needed to do. A phone, and fast. Were there even pay phones anymore?
The town was a small, old town. An old logging town. An old theater with a long, lit-up sign. A shoe store, a drugstore, a place that sold ammunition, yeah, I was way out of the city. I’d been driving for a while. All the lights were dimmed. The streets were still. I saw an Arco station at the end of the block. Like a gift from God, a phone booth sat in the very outer corner of the lot. A streetlight lit it up.
I got a handful of change from my purse. Even the handful of change looked unreal. I was in some town holding a handful of change. I was so cold and still shaking and so the change danced in my palm. The coins didn’t make sense. I couldn’t seem to figure out what quarters meant or what dimes meant.
I was in a phone booth, and the trees were blowing and branches were coming down. One landed on the hood of the car. I only had one shoe. I could feel the bumpy asphalt under my sock as I walked. I’d never even used a pay phone before, and I tried to read the directions, but the words didn’t mean anything, and then I realized I probably didn’t even need money for the number I was calling. I picked up the handle, which was red and felt greasy. I pressed the square silver buttons, which were cold. I remember that, how those silver buttons felt.
9-1-1. The numbers felt monumental. Like a decision. Something huge I could never go back from and Christian would never recover from because it meant that everyone would know the secret places that were between us. He was always afraid of having people know and see what he had done. And so was I; I was just as ashamed. Now I was opening all doors and all windows and shouting for help and everyone would hear. There is no privacy in a crisis. I was revealing more with those numbers than I would ever likely reveal again, about him, but about myself, too.
I don’t remember what I said, or the other voice on the phone, only the magnitude of what I was doing. He could be fine, right? An ambulance could scream up to his house, and all the neighbors would come outside, and he could be sitting on his living room couch, and he would hate me for what I had told people about him with that call. His behavior was his biggest secret. He would never understand why I pushed those buttons. But, the stairs. The scratches. That rope. The desperation.
I spoke. I guess I did. And then I hung up. I thought I might vomit. The ambulance would come. There would be red lights spinning on his street, in front of his house. People would pound on the door. They would take him against his will to a hospital. He’d be scared and pissed and confused and he would not know what to do. He would be all alone. They would find out if he was crazy. He would ride in some ambulance and sit by himself in some room where there were boxes of rubber gloves and syringes, and they would take his blood pressure and ask him questions and a psychiatrist would talk to him, and this was because he had loved me and I had made him love me like that.
I called my father. I had our car. So he came to get me with our neighbor, Russ Mathews, who was a college professor at the university. His wife was one, too. They had a son somewhere in California. Russ was usually friendly and talkative, but he was quiet that night. He dropped my father off and nodded to me and patted my father twice on the shoulder, and now I knew that Russ Mathews and his wife and maybe even the son in California would know this secret of Christian’s and mine and would know what I had done.
My father didn’t say anything. He held my hand. We drove down the street and he said, “Ammunition?” when we passed that store, as if he couldn’t believe there were whole stores for stuff like that, as if he couldn’t believe we were in some town right then with such stores.
He wrapped me in blankets when I got home and brought warm socks, and then I had to shove the blankets off in a hurry to throw up.
I
came back and he wrapped the blankets up tight again. He made tea, of course. I wanted the blankets over my face. I wanted to stay in there and not come out ever.
“What will happen to him?” I was so afraid to know. I was scared they would let Christian go and I was scared they would keep him. I couldn’t imagine where he was or what was happening to him. Him was also still this guy that I had loved. The guy who had brought me four bottles of ginger ale when I was sick once because he didn’t know what else to do. The guy who loved the way the air smelled when it was about to snow.
“I think they’ll take him to Harborview,” my father said. “I’ll call over there and find out what’s going on.”
He got out the big phone book in the kitchen cupboard. It seemed like it had all the answers and no answers, that thick book with yellow pages. He went into his office and shut the door, and that was fine. I tucked the blankets over my face. The shivering had stopped but I was filled with the nausea of horror. I still didn’t feel like me in my own body. I didn’t even know where me was. Those were my hands on that quilt. I thought of my shoe, a brown ballet flat, sitting on the stairway landing of Christian’s house. I wished I could get it. I so much wanted it back with me, where it belonged. I felt bad for it there, anxious for it, as if it had been taken prisoner.
My father reappeared. He looked tired. He ran his hands through his hair and I saw the gray underneath. He held his glasses in one hand.
“Don’t tell me,” I said. “Tell me.”
“Fucking idiots,” he said. “They let him go.”
I started to cry. “Why? Why did they let him go?”
“They said he wasn’t a danger to himself. Someone tries to leap over a goddamn stairwell just wants to get down in a hurry? Scratching himself? A person’s got to be holding a gun to their head or someone else’s before something can be done? Christ.”
My father went into the kitchen. I could hear the water running, a pot being noisily freed from the others out of the cupboard, a spoon against a cup.
He reappeared. “We need more than tea.” He handed me a mug, and kept one for himself. Hot water, whiskey, honey. He’d made these for me when I was sick and couldn’t sleep.* I could feel the warm liquid relax me.
“If that fucker comes near you, I’m having him arrested,” my father said. “Just so you know.”
He left the hall light on when we went to bed, like he used to when I was little. I tried to sleep but couldn’t. They had let Christian go. I didn’t know where he was. I imagined him sitting out by my curb, right outside. I imagined him with that rope around his neck. I imagined him creeping up our stairs. I sat up in bed and held my pillow and watched every set of car lights drive down my street, their shine passing across the blinds on my window.
I heard a voice outside. I shot up out of bed. My heart thudded like crazy. Someone was shouting something. I crept to my window as if Christian could hear my footsteps. I cracked the blinds, peered through. When I looked out, I saw our neighbor, Mr. Willows, out on his lawn in his bathrobe, looking for Misty, his cat. The street, our regular street, where Mrs. Porter delivered our mail, where I swept leaves and learned to drive and walked home from school—it seemed still and dangerous in the night. I tried to breathe. I didn’t know where I could go to feel safe.
Even in the day that regular street would not look the same to me, no street would. Everything had changed, and everything would stay changed because that’s what happens when the fear gets in.
Chapter 18
I told the rest to Finn, too. All of it. How my father talked to Christian’s mother. How Christian had walked fifteen miles home from the hospital after he’d been released. He was scratching his skin with his nails, Christian’s mother said. They found that rope. They worried he was suicidal. His mother watched him all the time. They were trying to get him in to “see someone.”*
I heard that he had quit his job with Mr. Hooper. I pictured the old man left with only the tired books from his shelf, nothing wonderful and new from the Seattle Library, just waiting. He would be there in his jogging suit and his scuffers. The thought of that jogging suit made me so, so sad.
I didn’t hear from Christian for weeks. My phone was silent; there were no e-mails or texts. Two weeks later the messages started up again. My father called Captain Branson, and we followed his advice. I did not answer, except for one e-mail that told him not to contact me anymore. And then, later, that “someone” they were trying to get Christian to see called me. A Dr. Harrelson. He told me that Christian was suffering from an obsession and I was the object of it and that it was best to stay away. I didn’t understand what that call meant or why I was even talking to the old, deep-voiced doctor, until Wayne Branson explained it to my father. A mental health professional has a “duty to warn” if they feel a person is in possible danger from their patient.
For the next few months I dragged myself through classes, my senior year. Everyone was talking about prom and graduation and what schools they’d been accepted to, and I was thinking about that rope. I was wondering when the next e-mail would come, or that call from his parents saying that they had found him hanging from the rafters of their back deck. Señora Kingslet asked me to stay after class, tried to talk to me about what was wrong. My grades in her class were slipping. I was so tired. Acceptance letters were coming in the mail, colleges at home and away, but I missed the deadlines for mailing anything back. The future was impossible to think about while trying, trying to swim in the present and the past.
I graduated with my class. My father was there in the audience with our friends Gigi and Lee, who had known me since I was a baby. We didn’t see them often. I sat in the sea of purple gowns and mortarboards and camera flashes, and I could only look out in the crowd and wonder if he was there somewhere, watching me. I kept thinking about those old black-and-white movies of President Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy, riding in that car. How they didn’t know a sniper would fire from an open window.
And then one day after that Christian appeared on our doorstep when my father was arriving home. He saw Christian there as he pulled up. My father said he was so angry he didn’t trust himself. He got out and strode up to Christian and yelled at him to get away and stay away. After Christian drove off, he called Christian’s stepfather. No more contact, he said. No more updates on Christian’s “mental health.” No more anything. Right away, right then, he found us the house on Bishop Rock. He wanted us to get out of there. You see something in a person’s eyes, he said. You see the way nothing matters.
“Jesus, Clara,” Finn said. He was holding my hands on that soft couch in his house.
It was hard to say this, but I needed to. I got it out, a whisper. “I can understand if you don’t want to see me anymore.”
“Clara, what do you mean? Why would you say this?” He was looking at me hard. He really didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.
“How could you want to, after what I did?” The words were stone and thorns, struggling from my throat. “I know people say it wasn’t my fault, but it was. I thought you’d be able to understand this.”
“I’m sorry, I just don’t. It wasn’t your fault.”
“It was. I know what people really think. What I think. Why didn’t you this, Why didn’t you that. Why didn’t you stop it.”
Finn stood. “Let’s go for a walk. The beach? What coat did you bring?”
“No coat.”
“No worries. We’ll borrow one of Cleo’s.”
He was busy suddenly, rummaging in the closet, pulling out his own jacket and yanking down a blanket from the top shelf and tossing me this black denim coat of Cleo’s with Manny’s Tavern written on the back. Below the letters, there was a skull and crossbones.
“Cleo loves pirates,” he said. “She’d be one, if she had the right bird.”
It was great timing, because right then he opened the door and that stupid seagull was standing there on the front lawn. I wouldn’t have believed it if I
hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.
“He could work,” I said.
“Any old pirate can have a parrot,” Finn said. He took my hand. We walked the few blocks toward the ocean. I was glad for Cleo’s jacket. It was cold out by the beach, and the night was quiet except for the slow rhythm of the waves. We stepped our way carefully over the rocks and driftwood. We walked along the hard part of the sand, looked out onto the sea. Only the occasional red bobbing of a boat light interrupted its endless blackness.
“You know,” Finn said. “I blamed myself when my dad was sick.”
“He had cancer. You didn’t cause that.”
“I know. But I still felt all this guilt. Maybe not for causing it, but for all the ways I could have made his life better but didn’t. I was an ass to him sometimes, you know? The impact you have on someone you care about.”
“But I did cause it.” I knew that. “I could have left him alone. If he’d have stayed with this other girl . . .”
“It might not have been any different.”
“I caused the want and the need. I liked it, okay? I made it all that important. That big. I was too much.”
Finn stopped walking. He held my arms. He looked at me. “Clara,” he said. “Listen.”
You read all kinds of books and see all kinds of movies about the man who is obsessed and devoted, whose focus is a single solid beam, same as the lighthouse and that intense, too. It is Heathcliff with Catherine. It is a vampire with a passionate love stronger than death. We crave that kind of focus from someone else. We’d give anything to be that “loved.” But that focus is not some soul-deep pinnacle of perfect devotion—it’s only darkness and the tormented ghosts of darkness. It’s strange, isn’t it, to see a person’s gaping emotional wounds, their gnawing needs, as our romance? We long for it, I don’t know why, but when we have it, it is a knife at our throat on the banks of Greenlake. It is an unwanted power you’d do anything to be rid of. A power that becomes the ultimate powerlessness. Right then, on the beach with Finn Bishop, I learned that the most true-love words are not ones that grasp and hold and bind you, twisting you both up together in some black dance. No, they are ones that leave you free to stand alone on your own solid ground, leave him to do the same, a tender space between you.