Stay

by Deb Caletti

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Call me later?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  We held hands, and we started toward the end of the dock where Obsession was. I looked back over my shoulder. “Check it out,” I said. I pointed back toward our table. Gulliver was eating his way around the heart.

  “Hey, you’re welcome. No problem,” Finn shouted at him, and I laughed. If someone was looking at us right then, this is what they would have seen. Our hands locked together, the effortless way we had with each other. They would have seen my head tipped toward Finn with happiness as I laughed. It would have looked like I had completely moved on.

  Dad was still gone when I got back late that afternoon. His laptop was on the kitchen table, open but turned off. I felt the kind of tired old people must feel, and ancient sea turtles, and trees that had been standing for hundreds of years. I got in my crispy white sheets and put the pillow over my head and shut out everything.

  When I woke up, the room had gotten dark, and I was confused for a moment about what day it was and what time until that wake-moment came where the pieces fall into place, where there is either relief or some terrible remembering about what is. I could hear the television on. As I said, my father rarely watches television. It sounded like some nature show, that TV rainforest background of twittering birds and crickets chirping.*

  Sometimes a nap makes you feel worse. I got out of bed. My head was draggy and fuzzed.

  “Morning, Glory,” my father said. He wasn’t even wearing his glasses, which meant I knew he couldn’t even see that lizard walking along that branch. He was wearing pajama pants and his old Al Gore Prosperity and Progress 2000 T-shirt. I’d seen him without his glasses a million times, but it still made his face look odd, like a room after the furniture has just been moved around.

  “What time is it?”

  “A little after nine. You were tired. I got us a pizza.” He gestured toward the fridge. The lights from the television flickered across his face.

  “We conserving energy around here?” The room was dark; outside those windows it was darker still, only the pink line of the horizon breaking up the wall of gray turning rapidly black.

  Dad switched on a table lamp beside him. We both blinked in the sudden brightness. “Never mind,” I said.

  He turned it back off again, and it was a relief. I went to the fridge and took out a floppy slice of pizza from under the cellophane wrap on the plate. “Mm—love cold pizza.”

  “Your phone’s been ringing in your purse,” he said. “I keep hoping your wallet will answer.”

  “Ha,” I said. “My wallet’s the strong silent type. Hasn’t spoken to anyone in years.”

  I hadn’t woken up all the way yet, because I was just eating that pizza standing by the fridge and joking around and not thinking. And then I did wake up, because I realized the importance of that ringing phone. It could be Shakti. It could be Christian himself. It might be Finn, though it was still a little early for him to be finished at the docks.

  “I hate phones,” I said.

  “We were better off when people didn’t talk so much,” my father said. A disgusting-looking insect was apparently doing it with another disgusting-looking insect on the television. “When every little feeling anyone had wasn’t puked out on someone else.”

  “Thanks for that image,” I said. My phone was blinking the red on-off urgency of a message. “Shit.”

  “What?” he said. He turned on the couch to face me. I held up a hand.

  Shakti. I listened. Clara, it’s me. I’m so sorry. Something terrible happened. I’m just sick about it. Christian called here while I was out . . . He talked to my mom. I’d told her, you know, about you being there . . . Not why, nothing about him. He was just being all nice, looking for information . . . I’m so, so sorry. She started to cry. I could hear her struggling to talk. Call me back . . .

  “No,” I whispered. No!

  “Clara?”

  My father put the remote control down and came over to me. I handed him the phone. He replayed the message. “Clara,” he said. “Clara! Why? Why did you tell her?”

  “She didn’t tell him. Her mother . . .” I wanted to cry. Oh, God. God, I had been such an idiot.

  “Jesus,” my father said. He rubbed his forehead. “He could be here right now!”

  “I’m so tired . . .” I said.

  “We’re hostages. I’m finished being a hostage, all right? Finished.”

  He slammed the phone down on the table. He opened one of the kitchen cupboards, decided against getting whatever he was about to get, flung the door shut so that it banged. He sat back down on the couch, clicked through the channels until he came back again to the nature show. He sighed. He took my hand. “Ah, shit, honey.”

  I didn’t say anything. Just held his hand.

  “We’ve got to make a plan, Clara. He could come here. He could be here. I’ve got to get in touch with Branson tomorrow.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You need to stop being sorry and be this angry, too, Clara Pea. Your guilt is bullshit.”

  It didn’t feel like bullshit. My guilt felt so big, it was like a living thing. I could feel its heart beating. I sat beside him on the couch, drew my knees up, wrapped my arms around them. Night comes under the canopy, and a hidden world reveals itself . . . We watched frogs and the glowing eyes of monkeys. I looked over at my father, watched his profile, watched his eyes soften again.

  “I saw you at the Portside,” I said. “With Annabelle. I would have come over, but it looked like you were arguing.”

  He kept watching that TV. His face flashed with colors from the lights of the television—yellow and then green and white.

  “We were,” he said.

  “I heard her say something. ‘It’s her story, too.’”

  So much sat there between us, suspended. He’d let it all out of his hands, and what was suspended would be dropped, and things would shatter, and I was not ready for it. “I thought maybe you were arguing about your new book or something,” I said.

  “Right.” His face took on that sagging, old look I’d seen in the restaurant. He didn’t look like the same person who was slamming things around just a while ago. “Right. My editor. Her story, too. One could argue. Etcetera, etcetera. I’m trying to decide whether I agree or not,” he said.

  The rainforest show was over. Upcoming—Deadliest Sharks! We sat there. We watched huge, prehistoric bodies snaking through deep waters. Fatal encounters between humans and great whites. We saw what happens when two dangerous creatures end up in the same place at one ill-fated moment in time.

  Well, I couldn’t sleep after that nap, obviously. Dad went to bed, but I stayed up and talked to Finn and then half-watched some stupid movie. It was late when my phone rang. It buzzed and skirted around the hard surface of the table like a little remote control car. Shakti. I didn’t feel like answering. Even her name felt loaded, weighted down by the complicated responsibilities of friendship. But Shakti—she had stayed up all night with me once, helping me color this huge trifold map of ancient Greece for a project due the next day. She was so serious about it, trying to do a good job for me. She would offer her favorite jacket, too, if I ever needed it, the new one any other person would be too selfish to share. On Mother’s Day, she brought me flowers. Who would think of that? That’s the kind of person she was.

  “Oh Clara, I am so sorry. I’ve been gone all day because Grandma Shia had some stroke or something. She’s fine, we just got her home, but I couldn’t exactly call. I feel so awful about this. My stupid mother. She feels terrible. She just keeps saying, ‘He was such a nice boy. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.’ He called all casual, trying to see if you’d been around. I should have told her the truth a long time ago, but you know how she freaks out about everything. And I was careless. I was so happy to hear from you, I’d said to Mom, ‘Oh, I heard from Clara, and she’s in Bishop Rock!’ and my mother said, ‘I t
hought she went to Europe,’ and I said, ‘No. They’ve got a house on the beach.’” Shakti started to cry.

  “It was an accident,” I said.

  “I’m so sorry.” She was crying hard. I looked out toward that black, black sea out the windows. A layer of fog slunk along the ground.

  “You didn’t mean any harm.”

  “Remember when he checked the mileage of your car?”

  “I forgot about that.”*

  “If anything happens to you . . .”

  “Nothing’s going to happen. Dad’s here. I’ll be careful.” Shakti stopped crying. I heard her sigh. She sounded exhausted. She’d had her own bad day. “Let’s just get some sleep.”

  “My stupid mother.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “I didn’t tell her in the first place because she couldn’t have handled it. So much for protecting anyone.”

  The conversation with Shakti unsettled me. That dark house did. But I knew if I turned on the lights, it would be worse. Someone could see in when I wouldn’t be able to see out. I realized that fear and guilt were both cheap and easy emotions, ready and always available, the salt and pepper to the more exotic herbs that took more effort to gather, like courage or determination or regret.

  I was listening too hard, and when you listen too hard you’re bound to hear something. An airplane flew overhead; the floor creaked. Silence, and then the distant but insistent hum of a car motor. In the movies, some stupid person always walks outside when they hear a noise and are afraid, but I opened the front door and went outside because I did not want to be afraid any longer. Going outside was an act of confrontation, the anger my father said I needed. I walked down the path through the thick swath of fog. I could hear the low moan of the foghorn at Pigeon Head Point, could see the slow arc of the lighthouse beam, there and then not there.

  Yes, a motor. And now the swing of headlights. Shit, it was too foggy to see the car.

  “Are you out here?” I said. “Are you watching me right now?” My own voice sliced into that wideness of night. It came to me: I was standing outside in my T-shirt and shorts, in a town far from home, the dewy beach grass wetting my ankles. My father was sleeping inside in our mystery host’s bed.

  Fury seemed to roll out from the very center of my chest. I hated Christian then. Hated him. For what he had done to my father and me, for what he had done, even, to us. I had loved him and worried about him, and he had mattered so much to me, but now he would not go and the hatred filled me.

  “I wish I’d never met you.”

  No one stepped from the haze to answer.

  “You,” I hissed. “You were the one that betrayed me.”

  Chapter 20

  “I told you, Clara. When you take people into the light-house, you must lock the door behind you. You were the last one, you and that couple.”

  “I’m sorry, Sylvie.” Roger lay there with his chin on his paws while I stood there and got reprimanded. I guess I wouldn’t be told her personal secrets today. I guess I wouldn’t be given cups of tea.

  “This is my responsibility. I am not sure you understand.” Her dark eyes bore into mine.

  “Sylvie.” She’d been going on for five minutes. I’d left the door unlocked, okay. I’d made a mistake.

  “It is not safe. People could get hurt.”

  “I understand.” An edge crept into my voice. It was wrong, but that edge was there anyway.

  “You do not understand. Someone was there this morning. Maybe he was sleeping inside. I saw him coming out, retreating down the rocks. Roger started to bark . . .”

  Something slammed in my chest.

  “Clara? Are you all right? You need to be able to accept a reprimand when one is due. Clara?”

  “Yes. Who was he?”

  “A boy, Clara. One of those high school boys who drink at the beach. That is what I am trying to tell you. They have parties on the beach, they drink, they mess around up here. What would happen if he had gone up to the top of the lighthouse? If he went outside, on the upper deck, drunk? There have been beer bottles on the grounds. A condom! Idiots.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “It doesn’t matter. He is gone. The police cannot catch someone who is not here. Like smoke, he is gone. We were lucky, do you see? It was a near miss.”

  “Kids hang out there all the time,” Finn said. “It could have been anyone, Clara.”

  “You’re right,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s enough for him to know where you are. It doesn’t mean he’s here.”

  I didn’t believe it, though. I knew what I knew. I can only explain it as, I felt him. The way you feel someone staring at you. The way you know when a person you love is about to drive up, or that it’s them on the other end of the ringing phone. Close family, someone you love, loved— you operate on another plane besides this one. It is the plane that animals understand, the dogs who smell cancer, the cats who flee before a storm, the coyotes, made crazy by a full moon. Maybe it’s the plane where spirits exist, too. Where sand dollars cover the beach and where you hear the bang of shutters even though there is no wind.

  I didn’t* have actual words for it. I can only say that there was no way I was going to go home that day after work. I called my father, who said he was still waiting to hear back from Captain Branson. I told him I would be back after the sunset cruise with Finn that night. I stayed in the library. I ate my lunch there, same as that bad year in the seventh grade when the girls all turned on each other**, when I always felt alone and the library was the safest place. I sat in the back corner of the Bishop Rock Library, hiding in the protection of the shelves of biographies, stories of people who had gone through much more than I ever would, people who got through. I could see the door from where I sat. This is what those guys in the Mafia did, I remembered. It was in some movie. They would sit where they could see what was coming.

  The afternoon turned to dusk. I took my sweater from the arm of the library chair and put it around me. I left the library and went to the marina.

  “Are you going to be warm enough?” Finn said when I arrived. “I’ve still got Cleo’s coat.”

  “Great,” I said.

  “This is going to be stupid,” he said. “Just so you know. It’s a tour that the Captain Bishop Inn does every month. But you can hang out with Jack and me.”

  I took a seat on the small bench behind the wheel. Jack tossed me a blanket from below. “Before the wackos use them all,” he said. He had extra energy in his step that night, and I noticed again how alike but not alike he and Finn were. Jack’s rumpled white T-shirt half tucked into his dark jeans, his unruly hair, his unshaven face—it all made you think of tangled sheets and sloppy kisses and a grip that was firm but slightly careless. Finn’s clothes were not all that different—a wrinkled denim shirt with cowboy snaps and jeans and a leather belt; unshaven and tousled, too, but eyes that were slightly sleepy, a mouth for only thoughtful, careful words.

  I could see the van from the inn arrive out by the dock lot. The passengers ducked their heads and came out down the van steps, huddling like children on a field trip. The driver parked the van, stayed there to have a cigarette; I could see his elbow resting out the window, the exhale of smoke that looked like some visible form of relief. He was glad to have that over.

  The woman leading the group had that red-purple hair, the misguided magenta that’s not seen in nature.* It was cut bluntly, framing her round, energetic face. She was gesturing and talking and walking, shouldering a huge, overloaded purse that meant she liked to be prepared. Behind her was a group of about fifteen people, a grab bag of various types, mostly middle-aged. A woman with gray curls in a violet velour jumpsuit, holding the hand of a chunky man with a large, proud belt buckle. Another woman with long straight, gray-black hair to her waist, the kind of hair that looks heavy and burdensome, dead cells from the 1970s, walking next to her friend in an I only eat organic tan skirt and hippies never had shoes this expensive san
dals. A tall, thin man with a pensive, chunky sweater carried a notebook. Two girls about my age in Bellevue High School Track sweatshirts clung together, giggling.

  “Here they come,” I said to Jack. Finn was already at the ramp, getting ready to assist them on board. “What exactly is this again?”

  “Jesus,” Jack shook his head, smiling that smile that was always more of a grin. “Captain Bishop Inn. First they walk the people around the parts of the hotel that are supposed to be haunted. Some specific bedroom, the old servants’ quarters of the kitchen. Then they head down to the William Harvard house. You know it?”

  “No,” I said.

  “He was one of the first people to live here full-time, way the hell back years ago. It’s more like a cabin, up near that bank of trees near the north part of the island? Just off Deception Pass? Anyway, he was slaughtered by some Indians. People see him hovering or whatever ghosts do. Moving shit around.” Jack laughed. “After that, they bring everyone here, and we go up and down the coast, trying to scare the shit out of the folks.”

  “You guys sure like your ghosts around here,” I said.

  “Like? Business . . .” He made that gesture with his thumb rubbing his fingers, indicating money. “Ever since it was on Evening Seattle . . .”

  “None of it’s true?”

  “Oh, the things that happened, very true. And people see this shit, so who knows? I don’t care, is all I’m saying. Believe what you want. Beliefs don’t hurt anyone. Wait, that was brain-dead. Beliefs hurt people all the time. Uh, come on, religion?”

  “Racism? All the isms?”

  “Yeah. But, go ahead and believe in ghosts, right? You got your harmless beliefs, you got your not so harmless. These people never bombed no clinic.” We watched them come up the dock, and the idea of those people as dangerous made you laugh. One guy was trying to put film in his camera as he walked.