Stay (ARC)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  “Good luck,” I said.

  He looked into my face for a weird length of time. It

  was starting to feel spooky.

  “Please don’t make me go out anymore,” he said. It

  was as sincere a plea as I had heard in my young life to

  that date. “Please?”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  He walked into his house to face the music, and I

  walked home to mine. To face the fighting.

  * * *

  My parents were indeed fighting when I got home, so I

  locked myself in my room. And I wrote a letter to Roy. Even

  though I hadn’t heard back from him since my last letter.

  Dear Roy,

  I think this is kind of a weird thing to say

  to your big brother. And I think, if we were

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  both home and I said this to you, you’d

  probably laugh at me or hang me up on

  the coatrack by my shirt or something. But

  you’re not home. That’s the problem.

  I love you.

  I’m sorry. I just had to say that, because

  I’ve been thinking about it but I can’t re-

  member if I ever did. Tell you, I mean.

  Be careful, and please come home.

  Your brother,

  Lucas

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  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I’m Alive

  When I got out there the following morning, Mrs.

  Dinsmore was nowhere to be found. And the dogs were

  gone. It was a jolt I felt right down through my gut and

  below.

  I thought maybe she had put the dogs somewhere

  and … I don’t know. Taken them to the pound, maybe. Or

  done something to herself and then one of her daughters

  had … Well, it’s hard to recount what I was thinking.

  It was just a lot of thoughts flying in a lot of directions.

  All terrible.

  I panicked.

  I started running through the woods, yelling for the

  dogs. Yelling both of their names. But I had no idea of a

  direction, so I was more or less running in circles, flip-

  ping the hell out. If there was ever a better example of

  a human imitating a beheaded chicken, I haven’t seen it

  to this day.

  After a minute or two of that insanity Vermeer ap-

  peared out of nowhere and gave me a strange look, with

  her head tilted. As if to say, “What on earth are you so

  upset about?”

  Then she turned back into the woods, stopping once

  to look over her shoulder at me. To see if I was going

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  to follow. I followed, my heart still banging around in

  my chest.

  She led me back to Rembrandt and Mrs. Dinsmore.

  The lady was sitting on a little folding chair, on a high

  hillock of ground that looked down through hundreds

  of trees at a snippet of the river. She had an artist’s easel in front of her, and she was painting the forest.

  She was a good painter.

  I sat down on the ground next to her, still trying to

  settle my heart and breathing. She knew I was there. I

  could tell. But she didn’t look directly at me or say any-

  thing. She just painted.

  I liked the way she handled the light.

  The sun was just barely showing behind a sea of leaves.

  And she had painted that, though the sun was higher in

  real life than on her canvas. She must’ve been out there

  working for a long time. The rays extended in a circle,

  clearer in a few places where gaps in the leaves let them

  through. It wasn’t perfectly realistic, the way she had

  painted it. Not exactly like a photograph. It was … more somehow. A little more than the real sun. A little bit styl-ized. But she had certainly captured it.

  “I like the way you do light,” I said.

  At first she only grunted.

  Then she said, “Thanks. What were you yelling about

  back there?”

  “Oh. I didn’t know where you were. Or where the

  dogs had gone.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I don’t want to talk about what I thought.”

  I watched her work in silence for a minute, Rembrandt’s

  big head in my lap.

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  “I wrote to my brother,” I said. A minute or two later.

  “Said what I needed to say.”

  “Good.”

  “I mean, he hasn’t seen it yet. I only just dropped it

  in the mailbox this morning. It takes forever for mail to

  get back and forth.”

  “Government work,” she said.

  “I’m not sure what that means.”

  “It means government never works very well.”

  “Oh.”

  Another long silence. I watched her work for more than

  a minute on one leaf. Just the way the light touched that one leaf out of hundreds. The part of the painting that should

  have been river was still blank white canvas. I wondered

  if she didn’t want to paint that part. I wondered if she’d

  be happier if I went away and left her to work in peace.

  “And I tried to be a good friend to my friend,” I said.

  “But I didn’t do a very good job of it.”

  “But you tried,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure if I had her full attention or not. It was

  hard to tell.

  “But the problem was, I tried to get him to do things

  that would be the right things for me to do. But I don’t think they were the right things for him. I was trying to help him the way I thought he should be helped, but he’s not me.”

  She let her brush hand fall to her side and looked over

  at me. For the first time that morning. Really studied

  my face.

  “What?” I said. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No. Not at all. You just said something very intel-

  ligent. Something that puts you ahead of most of the

  adults I know.”

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  “Oh.” I hadn’t expected anything like a compliment

  from her, and it caught me off guard. “Why do I do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Try to take responsibility for everything and fix

  everybody.”

  “What makes you think I know?”

  “Not sure. You just seem to know things.”

  She sighed. Scratched her nose with the back of

  her hand, probably to avoid getting paint on her face.

  “Sometimes when a kid’s got nobody really running

  things in his life, he’ll decide to take over and take

  charge of everything. Otherwise the world just seems

  to be spinning out of control. That seem to hit a note

  in you?”

  I didn’t want to say how much it did, so I just said,

  “You know, I could go away and leave you alone if you’d

  rather just paint in peace.”

  She sighed, and began to pack up her paints into a

  tote bag by her feet.

  “No, that’s okay. That’s enough for one day anyway.

  I’ve been out here for hours. Enough is enough.”

  I helped her pack up, and I carried her folding chair.

  She slung the straps of the tote bag over one shoulder and

  carried the wet canvas carefully. And we walked back to

  the cabin together.

>   “What will you do with it when you’re done paint-

  ing it?” I asked.

  “No idea,” she said.

  “I didn’t see any paintings hanging up in the cabin.”

  “I don’t hang them up.”

  “Do you sell them?”

  “Not really. My daughters have a few. There are some

  out in the shed.”

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  I looked up to see that we were almost back at the

  cabin. And I knew suddenly that I wanted to say some-

  thing to her. And that it was important. And that I didn’t

  have very much time. With Mrs. Dinsmore, you never

  wanted to assume you could tell her tomorrow.

  “I think you should stay,” I said.

  She stopped walking. Shot me an odd look without

  really turning her head.

  “Stay where?”

  “You know. Not … go.”

  “Oh. That kind of stay.”

  “Yeah. That kind of stay.”

  We walked again. Up to the cabin.

  She stepped up onto the porch and turned to face me.

  I just stood, looking down at the dirt, one hand on each

  of the dogs’ heads.

  “And why do you think that?”

  “Because you help me.”

  “Can’t really stay just for somebody else,” she said.

  “No, I didn’t mean that. I didn’t mean stay just for me.”

  “Well, what did you mean, then?”

  “I meant … you have things about you … I just think

  … I don’t know how to say what I think. I guess I think

  people can learn things from you. You know. So I hate

  to think about going back to … without you.”

  “You might be the minority opinion on that,” she

  said. “But I’ll take your thoughts under consideration.”

  The old me would have retreated. Not questioned her.

  But I was having to learn to step up. Being around Zoe

  Dinsmore was forcing me to be a slightly new Lucas. To

  be more somehow, like the sun in her painting.

  “What exactly does that mean?” I asked, still petting

  the dogs’ heads.

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  “It means I’ll give your opinion the weight it deserves.”

  “In other words, you think it deserves nothing.”

  “No. I didn’t say that. What I think I should do is

  more important to me than what you think I should do.

  But that doesn’t mean your opinion has no value to me

  at all. Now, I’m going in. You should go running with

  the dogs. You’ve been missing a lot of mornings, and I

  think it would do all three of you good.”

  And with that she was gone.

  The dogs and I ran. Probably six miles or more.

  It did all three of us good.

  * * *

  I was jogging down Main Street by myself, doing what

  I more or less thought of as a cooldown, when I heard a

  female voice call my name.

  I stopped. Turned all the way around.

  At first I saw no one.

  Then a second later Libby Weller stepped out of the

  doorway of the ice cream place, and waved at me.

  I waved back, all ready to run on. But she motioned

  me over.

  I went, because I couldn’t figure a way to ignore a

  direct order like that one. But I really didn’t want to talk about Roy.

  “Hi,” I said.

  She was wearing short-shorts. Her legs were long and

  tan, and it was all I could do not to stare at them. Her

  hair was pulled back into a light brown ponytail. She was

  every bit as tall as I was, maybe even half an inch taller.

  And I was pretty tall. She was a year older than me, which

  always made it feel weird to talk to her.

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  “Hi,” she said back.

  A little shyly, I thought. What she had to be shy about

  … well, I had no idea.

  “I was just going in for an ice cream soda. Want to

  join me?”

  “Oh. I can’t. I’m in training.”

  I would’ve killed for an ice cream soda, and training

  had nothing to do with it. If anything, another pound

  or two would have done me good. The problem was, I

  had no money in my pocket. None. And you didn’t ask a

  girl to buy you an ice cream soda. That would be totally

  humiliating.

  “At least come sit with me while I drink mine.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  But I really just wanted to run home.

  * * *

  “So how’s Darren doing?” I asked after a minute of watch-

  ing her nearly turning her cheeks inside out trying to get

  a plug of ice cream up and out of her straw.

  She took her mouth off the straw. Frowned. I won-

  dered if I shouldn’t have asked.

  “Not so good,” she said. “He’s depressed, I think.

  Nobody’ll say it but me, but it’s so obvious. And he’s

  getting really frustrated. He’s supposed to get a prosthetic.

  You know. A false foot he can strap on. But now the

  stump is infected, and it’s much too painful. He’d rather

  die than put any weight on it. So it’s going to be another

  couple of months at least. And he hates the crutches,

  because when he uses them, it pulls on these muscles in

  his chest where he took some shrapnel. So he mostly just

  stays in bed.”

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  “Oh,” I said, wishing I had never brought it up. “That’s

  too bad.”

  “I just hope when Roy comes home, he comes home

  in one piece. You know. All of him.”

  “I just hope he comes home,” I said.

  She shot me a funny look, and I realized I was set-

  ting my hopes weirdly low. So I added, “Yeah, but … of

  course. Uninjured would be great.”

  For a good minute or more we lived out an awkward

  silence.

  “Does he have anybody he can talk to?” I asked.

  “Well. Me.”

  “Yeah. Right. Of course. But I guess I meant…”

  “Somebody who knows about war stuff.”

  “Right.”

  “He has a counselor at the VA. But it’s the govern-

  ment, so I don’t know how good the guy is.”

  I thought about Zoe Dinsmore and what she’d said

  about government work. How it never works very well.

  Then Libby spoke again, knocking me out of those

  thoughts. What she said knocked me out of everything,

  actually. My whole life up to that moment.

  “How come you never ask me anywhere?”

  Honestly. That’s what she said.

  “Ask you anywhere?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where, for example?”

  “You know … out. For example.”

  Then I felt like a complete idiot. Because Connor

  had been right all along. And I’d been too stupid to see

  it. Even a second before she said it, I hadn’t seen, though

  we’d been sitting together for several minutes and she

  hadn’t mentioned my brother once. Not even when I

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  brought up hers. My first thought was that I wanted to

  tell Connor about this. Tell him he’d been right. Because

  that’s always a good-feeling t
hing when somebody lets

  you know you were right. Then my second thought was

  that I shouldn’t tell Connor, because it was bad enough

  he was stuck in his house and feeling all desperate and

  angry and depressed. Hearing that I was not only out and

  about but making a date with a pretty girl would have to

  be something like rubbing salt in his wounds.

  “Well…,” I began. “I guess I just didn’t know you

  wanted me to.”

  “I talk to you every chance I get.”

  “I thought it was just because of my brother being

  drafted, like yours.”

  “I didn’t know what else to talk to you about,” she said.

  And with that we fell deeply into that humiliated

  silence. The one where you have no idea what else to

  talk about.

  “I could ask you somewhere,” I said. Anything to

  break the stillness. “A movie, maybe.”

  “That would be nice. Tonight?”

  “I was thinking Saturday.”

  I got my allowance on Fridays. But I didn’t want to

  say that, because it made me sound too young and too

  broke and too utterly ridiculous.

  “Okay,” she said. “I accept.”

  “What do you want to see?”

  “I don’t care. You choose.”

  “Okay,” I said. But it was not okay. It was a huge

  burden, and I felt in no way up to the task. What if I

  chose something she hated? “I’m going to finish my run

  now. But I’ll call you.”

  “You better.”

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  I smiled without meaning to.

  Then I got up and left the shop. Picked up a run before

  the door had even swung closed behind me. As I ran by

  the window she waved at me, and I waved back. I felt

  my face redden to a humiliating degree. Fortunately, that

  takes a minute to play out. And it only took a couple of

  seconds to run by the window. So I don’t think she saw.

  So that’s how fast the world changes, I thought as I ran home. I’m minding my own business, thinking it’ll be a day just like any other. And then all of a sudden I realize I might be about to have a girlfriend for the first time ever.

  And I hadn’t even seen it coming. But maybe you

  never do.

  * * *

  When the dogs met me outside the cabin the following

  morning, Mrs. Dinsmore was nowhere to be seen. I fig-

  ured she was just inside. At first I didn’t think anything

  about it. I was all ready to go running without giving

  the lady another thought.

  Then I started worrying, and I didn’t want that on

  my mind the whole run. It was hard enough trying not