by Deb Caletti
“Trust me,” I said, as we left the cold of the store and went back outside into the glad sun. “She likes to be given things. Presents. Compliments. To feel special.”
He looked at me and laughed a little like he thought I was joking. “Chocolate. Check,” he said. I could tell he still thought he was doing something for me, not for himself. He probably thought that ring on his left hand and on hers meant that he and Juliet would sit on some porch watching their children play on some lawn for years to come. But Juliet didn’t stick with things too long. I’d played the flute all through middle school and had been taking pictures forever, but Juliet went from flute to guitar to pottery to boys. Her speed wasn’t porch so much as highway. And a ring, anyway—a ring was a declaration of hope, not a mission accomplished.
Zeus waited in the back of the truck parked at the curb in the shade, his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth like a drunk in a bad cartoon. I swear, dog tongues doubled in length on a hot day. Zeus’s toes had their new manicure from Pet Palace, which we had found all the way out of the main part of town, next door to the Rufaro School of Marimba. Zeus had walked out of there all careful and proud as if he knew he was different and more beautiful. But now he looked as if his enthusiasm was wearing thin.
“Gotta give him some water, pronto,” Hayden said. He retrieved a large, full plastic jug behind his seat and a pale, old Tupperware bowl, used just for that purpose.
“I’m going to pop in there a sec,” I said, as he unscrewed the water bottle lid and poured. I gestured to Randall and Stein Booksellers across the street, next to Mom’s store, Quill.
“Sure.”
They knew me well in there. Bonnie Randall raised her eyebrows when I set What to Expect When You’re Expecting on the counter.
“For my sister,” I said.
I dashed across the street with my green bag, hopped back in the truck. We were done with our errands; probably Hayden wanted to get home. But I didn’t want the time to be over yet. The day had been the kind of comfortable good fun you just wanted more of. I didn’t know when I’d had that much comfortable good fun, maybe way back when I was a kid.
“Do you have time to see one more thing?” I said.
“I’m not in any hurry,” he said. “I’m having a great time.”
I took a big breath, and the day smelled especially good. “Remember Deception Loop that took us to the hotel? We get back on there.” The Horseshoe Highway was the island’s inner main road, and Deception Loop circled its outer edge, giving glimpses of the Strait of Juan de Fuca between the tall firs and evergreens that lined the road. I directed Hayden around the island, toward Point Perpetua Park. There was a preschool class having lunch at the picnic tables and an old lady with one leg in the air doing tai chi on the grass, but we passed all of them and walked down the trail toward the lighthouse. Zeus ran ahead but kept running back again to make sure we weren’t far behind him. We emerged from the trail onto a wide beach, and I led Hayden over driftwood and around rocks toward my favorite huge boulder just before the lighthouse itself. It took some climbing, but the rock was high and flat and from up on top, the view over the sound went on forever. This was one of my favorite places to take my camera. I’d come out here alone, on my own, just to watch and see what might appear. It was a great big peaceful movie that was running all the time.
“Wow. This is some view.” Hayden sat right down, dangled his legs over the side. I lifted my camera, took quick aim, called his name. “Oh great, I’m sure my eyes were closed,” he said.
I sat beside him. Zeus was down below, happily sniffing seaweed and exploring the mysterious crevices between driftwood logs. It was the kind of windy that makes you feel pleased and alive. “In a few weeks, the orcas will be here. This place will be packed with people. The island gets nuts. When all the tourists leave, there’s an annual ‘Thank God They’re Gone’ celebration.”
“Invasion, huh?” Hayden said. “Well, it’s fantastic right now.” The sound gleamed, sunlight on sea, a thousand glimmery water stars. It was cool there by the water, but I knew the sun was secretly intense. I tilted my chin up, breathed the salty air that always seemed to me delicious enough to drink up.
“No great silver steel buildings, though,” I said.
“God architecture,” he said.
“He knew what he was doing.”
“And no Urban Studies final for Him either.”
“It makes you think about all the big words,” I said.
“I was just thinking that,” he said.
We were sitting close. Our legs were almost touching. I could feel Hayden’s, I don’t know, presence, self, Hayden-ness, right there next to me. His watch on his wrist, the strength of his square shoulders. I was just being myself then. This seemed shocking. Even talking to boys at school made me feel I was on some swinging rope bridge high above a raging river, where the lines just ahead looked fuzzy and frayed. Myself wasn’t something I was all that often. Not without all the inner and outer monitoring systems working, the ones that looked out on the horizon for oncoming disasters. But I was just being myself, and you wouldn’t believe what a relief it was.
“I like your places, Scarlet Ellis,” he said.
“Yeah?”
“I do.”
“Everyone likes the beach,” I teased. “Who doesn’t like the beach?”
“I like this beach.”
We sat in that ease in the sun before a sparkling sea. It was one of those few right moments in your life that you might always remember. When something was as still and true as a blade of grass, when you wished you could hold your breath and make time stop for a good long while. On and on, it would go. On and on, and it would just keep being right.
Mrs. Martinelli barreled in our direction the second we pulled into the driveway. She stepped over the junipers between our yards like an army recruit in a row of tires.
“Who is this young man? I’ve seen his truck,” she said, but you could tell she couldn’t care less if she got an answer. Bits of juniper now clung frantically to her white tennis shoes. She was wearing her favorite sweatshirt—the one with a pair of frogs sharing a single umbrella, sheltered from sequined raindrops.
I made an uh-oh face toward Hayden so he’d be ready. You need advanced warning for some people, and, as much as I loved her, Mrs. Martinelli was one of them.
She thrust a paper into my hands. “I’ve been waiting all day to see you. We have received a New Communication.” She was beginning to sound like the scam letters themselves—those Business Propositions written by criminals who were very fond of Capital Letters.
I’d felt a little generational responsibility for her and Mr. Martinelli, ever since she first told me about getting the e-mails. Our elders had tried to warn us about the risks of drug use, something they knew about from personal experience. Maybe we needed to return the favor about technology use, something we knew about. They had no idea of the dangers involved. Rose Marie and Herb Martinelli had gotten their first computer about five months ago, and somehow word had gotten out that two new suckers were driving full speed along the Information Highway without their seat belts buckled.
“This arrived via Electronic Mail,” Mrs. Martinelli said. Her eyes were big behind her glasses. “Mr. Martinelli experienced a Printer Jam. He had to dismantle the machine with a kitchen knife. You may notice a few words missing.”
God, he’d killed that printer. There were long white spaces between some of the words, which Mrs. Martinelli had filled in with a pen, her handwriting as thin and fragile as the veins you could see all over her legs when she wore shorts.
Dearest One,
Permit me to inform you of my desire of going into business relationship with you. I must not hesitate to confide in you for this simple and sincere Business. I am MORIN JUDE the only daughter of late Mr. and Mrs. Boni JUDE. My father was a very wealth cocoa merchant in Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory coast. My father was Poisoned to death by his business Partner
s on one of their outings on a business trip to France. My mother died when I was a baby and since then my father took me so special.
Before the death of my father in a private hospital here in Abidjan he secretly called me on his bed side and told me that he has the sum of Five million, Five hundred thousand United State Dollars. USD ($5,500,000) left in one of the prime Banks here in Abidjan. He asked that I should seek for a foreign partner in a country of my choice so that they might continue his cocoa plantation….
“Mrs. Martinelli, just click the REPORT SPAM button on your e-mail page and don’t open up mail from people you don’t know. I told you, remember?” This was my version of the “Just Say No to Drugs” speech.
“Scarlet. This sounds like a wonderful opportunity.” Her cheeks were flushed.
“Millions of people received this same letter, Mrs. Martinelli. Millions. Some guy with a creepy mustache and no job wrote it in his mother’s basement.”
“Mr. Martinelli and I love cocoa in the evenings,” she said.
“Trust me,” I said.
She stared hard at me with those big eyes. “The Ivory Coast,” she said. The words managed to be both wistful and full of adventure.
“His mother’s basement,” I said.
She sighed dramatically as if there were things I’d never understand. She made her way back into her own yard, but not before she snatched the letter back with a little bit of nastiness. Her butt was big and bumpy in those stretchy pants, but still she held that paper as if it were somehow breakable. The way you hold precious things, or should hold precious things.
“Uh-oh,” Hayden said as he locked the door of the truck.
“I know.”
“I always wondered how those guys actually made any money,” he said.
“There you go.”
He came around the other side of the truck and stopped for a second, set his hand on my arm. “Scarlet.”
Some things had the right amount of weight. A quilt as you slept, carefully chosen words, fingertips.
“I really want to thank you. It’s a little weird for me here. You know—all of it. What’s going on, a new place, the whole deal. But you made it great today, and I really appreciate that.”
His eyes were warm and brown as coffee. I looked at them for a long while and he looked back. I felt something from him that you don’t feel very often. I guess it was sincerity.
“No problem, Hayden,” I said.
He let my arm go. He went inside to find Juliet. But I could still feel his touch there on my skin, lingering for a moment before fleeing, the way a good dream does, just as you wake.
Chapter Six
You two got sunburned,” Juliet said at dinner. Juliet was in a bad mood, and I remembered then what Juliet in a bad mood looked like. Her temper rolled in, clouds over sky, first hazy and meandering and then dark and full and fixed. Juliet’s bad moods were irritation and dissatisfaction looking for a purpose. In other people, in me, irritation needed something to grab on to or else it just faded away with a cold drink or a nap or someone else’s patience. But Juliet seemed to like the thrilling ride from irritation to anger; she searched around for a reason to lose her temper until she found one.
It might have even felt a little good if our mutual sunburn had been what had made her mad. But I could never be a threat to Juliet. I was sure of that. Juliet held men in the palm of her hand. I had no magic tricks or power; I was only my plain old self and didn’t know how to be different than that.
I knew Juliet, anyway. The accumulation of small things that together make you momentarily hate your life and everyone in it could send her fuming—not finding pants that fit and then spilling her lemonade, or a long, hot day in the car with Mom who never seemed to notice when the light turned green. Juliet had a way too of putting things and people in the space between herself and what was true. If she’d had a fight with Buddy Wilkes, it was me whom she yelled at, and if our mother had upset her, Buddy himself might be the one to get her frosty words. I wondered if Hayden knew this about her yet. It was something a husband ought to know.
“It was a sunny day,” Hayden said. It sounded like an apology, and Hayden shouldn’t have given that. Not just for the obvious reasons but for a bigger one—Buddy Wilkes never took her crap.
“Must be nice to have a day off work,” Dean Neuhaus said. Mom had invited him for dinner. He sat at the end of the table in his pressed pants and pressed shirt, his tie still tight against his throat, his brown hair cut straight across the back of his neck. It was the kind of hair that said you followed the rules.
Dean had sort of been forgotten down there at the end of the table, with his prim, righteous mouth and expensive watch and leather shoes, and Dean Neuhaus didn’t like to be forgotten. One of the things I hated most about Dean was how he’d hint at his moral superiority while at the same time pointing out how humble he was. To Dean Neuhaus, everything was a sign of his moral superiority, from the way he loaded the dishwasher to how manicured his fingernails were. Dean Neuhaus had come here from London, and he managed to make our entire country inferior to his too—our grossly abundant restaurant meals, our bad-mannered children, our sloppy and distasteful use of the English language. He was even morally superior about our leftovers—he would never waste food like we did. I located him in my psychology books, the way a bird-watcher finds the exact bird he’s seen: Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. King of Order was disordered.
“You always spend so much time at your job, it’d be good for you to have some time off,” my mother said to OCD Dean Neuhaus.
“I don’t take time off when my company needs me. Do you know how hard it is for me to take time off? I have six months of vacation time accrued,” he said. Dean Neuhaus did something with computers at Microsoft, something that obviously made him money. He had an ex wife and two kids, Brenda and Kevin, but we hadn’t met them yet. His real past seemed to be the Volvo he had had before his Lexus, and a Rolex he had once owned that had been stolen.
“I’m so happy that you two had such a great time while I was off being pregnant,” Juliet said.
“Did you like your present Hayden got you?” I asked. My own gift, What to Expect When You’re Expecting, sat near her plate, the cover glossy and uncracked.
“Oh right! I almost forgot,” Hayden said. He pushed his chair back, disappeared for a minute.
“So what’s the big present?” Juliet asked.
I ignored her. “Six months is a lot of vacation time,” Mom said.
“My problem is, I just don’t believe a person should think about themselves first,” Dean Neuhaus said to her. He dipped a bit of falafel into some tzatziki sauce. “There’s a lot of garlic in here.”
Mom stabbed her dinner with her knife. She claimed Dean was kind and responsible and had other good qualities, but you never actually witnessed them. Maybe she’d seen them once and just kept hoping they’d reappear, like a rare creature once spotted in the wild.
Hayden reappeared with the purple box. He was sunburned, and his nose was a happy red, the kind of red that meant fun and summer and other good things. He stood beside Juliet, holding that box, and she just looked at it without taking it.
I remembered the note I’d read when we’d returned home that day. I’d snatched it quickly from Juliet’s bedside table, read it in the bathroom with the door shut and locked, returning it to its place immediately afterward. My heart beat fast as I read the words.
Juliet—
I want to wash your hair with a shampoo that smells like fruit—mango, or strawberries. I want to walk on a beach with you, dragging a big stick behind us, making a message in the sand that we try to believe an airplane will really see. I want to kiss saltwater from your lips. I want us to listen to music with our eyes closed; I want to read musty books while lying next to you—books about fascinating things like mummies and eccentric artists and old shipwrecks in the Pacific. I want to have picnics on our bed and crawl into cotton sheets that smell li
ke summer because we left the windows open when we were gone. I want to wake in the night with you and marvel at the stars and try to find the moon through the trees. I want all the sweet things in life. But only by your side.
I thought of the letter as Juliet made a little hnn sound, a dismissive sort of exhale. Being impossible to please seemed the worst kind of cruelty right then. When someone gave you everything and it was still not enough, when you made them prove and prove their love again, you were the evil witch of fairy tales; you had snakes for hair and a small stone heart.
“Sweet Violet’s,” Juliet said, looking at the package. “I haven’t seen anything from that place in way too long.”
A moment passed between them. A moment that meant she was giving him information about Buddy Wilkes and about himself and about all the men who she might have let love her. He did an unexpected thing then, a good thing, because he was making it clear he wasn’t a fool. He tossed the box onto the table so that it slid her direction, and then he left the room. His dinner still sat half-eaten at his place. It was quiet, and Juliet just kept eating as if she couldn’t care less or maybe didn’t even notice what we all noticed. You could see a whole relationship sometimes in a moment like that one. You could get all the information you needed in just a few seconds.
“That’s the father of your baby, Juliet Rose,” my mother said.
