by Deb Caletti
I thought about Jitter inside there, inside my sister. I hoped he or she was sleeping, or that the watery depths made words and experiences too muffled and foggy to really hear or feel. Juliet put her hand to her stomach, protecting the baby from who knows what. Mom’s judgment, probably. Then again, she probably just had eaten too fast.
“I don’t know why people bother with American chocolates,” Dean Neuhaus said.
*
Dean Neuhaus drove off later in his Lexus, which had, I was sure, exactly the right tire pressure, its floors vacuumed free of any bits of dirt from the shoes of passengers. I saw Juliet in the kitchen, sneaking bites of leftover pie from a few days before, straight out of the pan with a fork.
“Remember when Mom took us to the drive-in movies that one time? She wanted to make sure we went before the theaters were all gone,” Juliet said. Another forkful of pie disappeared. “God, we drove for hours, remember? Some town out in the middle of nowhere. Nothing around but RV World and Boat World and all those worlds that had nothing to do with ours, remember? That place—Chain Link Fence World.”
It occurred to me that this was the Juliet that Hayden loved. The one that was funny and thoughtful, her bare feet on the wood floor, her eyes calm. When she sang, her voice was so sweet and beautiful, it could break your heart. But I didn’t feel like reminiscing about old times or being open to Juliet’s good qualities. I kept thinking about how happy Hayden had looked on that rock. A person could be such a happiness thief.
“God, you’re a bitch sometimes,” I said.
“What?” she said. She looked honestly perplexed.
“You better be careful. You lose him, and you’re going to be sorry.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“You finally found a good guy. Let alone …” I gestured toward her body. “You better not mess it up.”
She looked at me for a moment. She set her mouth in a line. “Don’t think you know anything about this,” she said. “Because you don’t. Not a single thing. What are you, like, seventeen?”
I shot her daggers with my eyes. I hated this trick of hers, a trick she’d been doing forever. When she was eight, I was just a baby kindergartener. When she was in the sixth grade, I was a stupid eight-year-old. When she was in high school, everyone in my middle school looked so young. We were so immature. And the thing was, every time she did it, it worked. Every time, I felt like the little kid who had to stay at day care when she went off to big school with her backpack and her chin in the air. I didn’t say anything. Just kept shooting my daggers. I was old enough to know what I knew.
She put the pie dish, fork and all, back into the freezer and the door slapped shut. It was amazing, really, how these other people, your family, held huge and great pieces of your own self, your definition, your place in the world. I could be eighty-five, maybe even have done great and powerful things in my life, our mother long gone, and I’d still be who I was in those long ago home videos of us. The one where I was the little kid at my sister’s birthday party with all her friends, or the ones where Mom taped the two of us playing. There we were in our twin footie pajamas tossing dolls and plastic food and trucks from the toy box, and there was Mom’s voice coming loud from her place behind the camera. What are you guys doing? she would ask us, and Juliet, the authoritative munchkin, would answer: We’re going to play doggy and owner, or something like that. My voice would come next, always next, this small echo, Play doggy. Juliet was always in the lead, and I was her echo. Always. And she was in the lead again, right that moment, when she turned and left the room, taking all of our history with her.
My window was open, and I could hear the crickets outside, making the just-right sounds of a still May evening. You could smell the temperature change through the screen, the air turning from daytime grassy and warm to cool and wet, with that spring night smell of darkness and ripe fruit. That smell always made me feel things deeply, possibility and despair, even way back when I was a kid and didn’t know those words. You just felt it anyway, something big, something about life that maybe didn’t have a name yet.
The book I had given to Juliet had lain abandoned on the kitchen table after everyone had left, and so I picked it up and brought it to my room. I propped on my bed and read.
Week three: Your soon-to-be-baby has started its miraculous transformation from single cell to baby boy or girl. This week, the fertilized egg—or zygote—divides several times over to become a tiny ball of microscopic cells smaller than the period at the end of this sentence.
Week four: The blastocyst that will be your baby splits to form the placenta and the embryo, and the specialized parts of your baby’s body begin to develop.
Jitter had been going through eons of evolution before we even knew he or she existed. It felt important to know these things about him or her. Him or her. Which, I wondered? How do you picture a person in your mind without knowing this? I decided to refer to Jitter in my mind as a he, the generic he, the he in books that meant neither he nor she, just a someone. It seemed important to decide and clarify this, even in my mind. It seemed the best way to show how welcome he was, no matter what.
I read further. As the first trimester comes to a close, your baby’s about the size of a peach. I thought about a peach wrapped in a soft blanket. I thought about wheeling a peach around in a baby carriage. I pictured me and the peach baby in the park, park ladies leaning in to look, cooing with love and envy. I found myself reading the next few paragraphs over and over again, the way you do when you haven’t been paying attention. I wasn’t thinking about babies or peaches, then, I was thinking about what it might be like to have someone wash your hair, a guy someone, a man, fingers through strands, a cool rinse, your hair slicked back, the drip of water down your neck caught by a towel.
That’s when I heard their voices through the wall. Muffled and heavy. The thick crackle of an argument, her and then him. A pause, then rapid fire. More silence and then her again. Buddy Wilkes’s name said aloud. I listened to Juliet and Hayden and thought about my mother and Dean Neuhaus and my stalker, Reilly Ogden, and Nicole’s parents and even my own parents. I wondered if maybe we were just meant to love the people who would make us most unhappy.
Juliet and Hayden fell silent. After a while, it was late enough, finally, for me to do what I needed to do. I went to my desk and took out the container of chalk; I’d first found it in the garage, still on the metal tray of the chalkboard Juliet and I had used when we played school. I crept downstairs, turned the door handle quietly. From outside, I could see Mom’s bedroom window light turn off. And then Juliet and Hayden’s, too.
I crossed the street, the asphalt cool and bumpy on my bare feet. I could see Goth Girl’s drawing by the light of the streetlamp. Today she had finished her Last Supper drawing. I could see the figure in the middle where Jesus usually sat, but instead of Jesus there was a woman with brown hair and the checked coat I’d seen on Mrs. Saint George. Mr. Saint George was at the table too, I thought, next to a vampire in jeans and a T-shirt and a wild-haired witch in a tight black dress. And there was Goth Girl herself, in the figure that had her back toward the rest of them. There was Goth Girl’s straight black hair, anyway, her favorite black sweatshirt.
I took my chalk and headed to the empty place just past the drawing, as I had done several times before. At first, I had tried the usual ways of being a nice person to someone who needed a nice person in their life—I had smiled at her in the halls at school and tried to make conversation when I saw her at home. But Fiona Saint George always averted her eyes, the way you do when you look straight at the sun. Her art was a message, a letter made from a single picture, and the most important thing about a message was for it to be heard. You reach out, and someone reaches back; you give, and someone gives in return—it was one of the Fair and Right principles of the universe.
So I knelt next to the painting. This is beautiful, I wrote, on the square of sidewalk nearest the drawing. Y
ou are incredibly talented. I signed my note: A friend who believes in you.
I brushed the chalk from my hands, stood. Across the street in my own driveway I saw something then—a tiny orange light, the glow of the end of a cigarette. My first thought was of Buddy Wilkes, that Buddy Wilkes had somehow heard my sister was back, and that he was sniffing around our driveway for her scent. Maybe he’d throw pebbles at her window while she slept beside her husband.
But when I crossed the street I saw that it was not Buddy at all, but Hayden himself.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I said.
Hayden exhaled up toward the sky. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, just his cargo shorts hanging at his hips. His skin glowed from the streetlight. I felt a little shy, seeing that much of him, and a strange feeling filled me, a feeling I did not want to call desire or anything close to desire. He didn’t seem surprised to see me crossing the street. Or maybe his thoughts were so much somewhere else that anyone could have appeared then and he wouldn’t have blinked. The president of the United States, even, and he’d have only exhaled into the night same as he just had.
“I don’t really smoke. At least I haven’t in a long while.”
“You shouldn’t,” I said. He looked strange smoking. He wasn’t the type. You pictured him making his own juice with carrots and ginger and raw honey, not smoking some stupid cigarette.
“Juliet likes it,” he said.
“She likes it?”
“She likes the way it tastes.”
“That’s idiotic,” I said. “I’m sorry, but, God.”
He didn’t say anything. He leaned against the side of his truck. He took another drag on the cigarette and exhaled again. It sounded like a sigh. He seemed to have the capacity for moody introspection. Juliet liked moody. I was wondering right then if maybe I liked moody too. Rational thoughts and irrational feelings were dancing badly together inside of me, out of step and offbeat, something that would have to be fixed, and fast. “You’re not close,” he said finally. “Some sisters are close.”
“We used to be close. Closer. I did her math homework for her. She’d let me hang out with her and her friends. Complain about how unfair Mom was being. I always wished we were twins so we could do everything together. But, you know, she left. I’m still here. Do you have a sister?” I asked.
“Only child.”
“Maybe we’re just too different,” I said. I waited for him to acknowledge this, but he said nothing. “Maybe she’s … more like our father.”
The thought had made a sudden, stunning appearance. It shocked me. This had never crossed my mind before. Our father never crossed my mind. We hadn’t ever even seen his picture, so he, his, him—they were empty, single-dimensioned words unconnected to an actual person. He was that wisp of smoke now disappearing by the streetlight. I might remember what he smelled like. A cologne that smelled like oiled wood, thick as incense. At least, I had smelled incense burning once, and it had triggered a memory that couldn’t quite become a memory.
Hayden just took this in. It wasn’t as shocking to him as it was to me. I still felt as if I’d been slapped, and it was me who had done it. “Your mother’s boyfriend is a dick,” he said.
I laughed loudly. “You noticed.” The corners of his mouth turned up in a smile. I wanted to open that smile up wider, to see the Hayden of the afternoon back again. But I suddenly couldn’t think of anything else to say, and the smile was retreating. He was retreating. I could feel the moment of connectedness passing, my chance being lost. I wanted to play and volley and be back in that place we had been together before, that great place. I needed something, something quick—I grasped and caught something silly and lighthearted. Silly and lighthearted would do.
“So, Hayden Renfrew. What was your most embarrassing moment?”
It sounded workable until I said it. As soon as the words slipped out I knew I had done something horribly and terribly wrong. A humiliating misstep. I felt it all in one second of pause. The night, the cigarette smoke lingering in air, the heaviness of his thoughts—my words were inappropriate and idiotic. Oh God, why had I said that? Why, why, why? And why couldn’t you take back a moment sometimes? One little moment? Is that asking so much? God, I suddenly sounded thirteen. My red shorts and my white tank top felt young and shameful, my feet in my flip-flops did too. I felt so ashamed of my painted toenails in the streetlight.
“Why did I say that,” I said.
He finished his cigarette, threw it to the ground, and stubbed it out with the toe of his sandal. He picked it up and tucked it into his shirt pocket. I was filled with the disgrace of my own age and immaturity. I had widened some gap between us, and there was no way to close it again. Juliet had been right. I knew nothing about this. I was seventeen and he was twenty-three, and he was a man, a man who was married and who was going to be a father.
There was the sound of a hawk overhead, the Martinellis’ TV on, too loud. Hayden spoke finally.
“I was on a date with a girl once,” he said. “And we had just gone to this Asian market. I had this white bag filled with hum bows. You know hum bows? Those white balls of dough stuffed with meat?”
I nodded.
“Well, I dropped the bag. We were parked on a hill, and the bag dropped, and one of the hum bows fell out, and I started chasing it. Instead of just letting it go, I ran after it, down this hill. Running and grabbing and missing. I didn’t stop to think what would be better for my dignity; I just kept going after it. I chased the hum bow down the street until it finally stopped underneath the wheel of a delivery truck.”
He looked at me and grinned in the darkness. But it wasn’t a real grin—his eyes weren’t involved. It was politeness, the kind of grin you give as a gift even if you don’t feel at all like smiling. Hayden was a nice person, too.
We just stood in silence. Something occurred to me then, and I said it. “A good lot of the time, nice people are doomed.”
He laughed then, right out loud. A real laugh. A loud, surprised one. “Shit, Scarlet,” he said. “Shit. You.” He pointed his finger at me. “Yes indeed. God, I’ve got to have another cigarette now.”
I wanted to make him laugh again. Or say another thing that pleased him. But nothing came. “It’s true, though, isn’t it?”
“I think it’s one of the truest things I’ve ever heard,” he said.
We were quiet. The night settled and filled in the spaces around us. The two of us had made something better, even for a moment. “You going back in?” I asked.
“In a minute.”
“Okay. See you in the morning, then.”
“Good night, Scarlet.”
I went back inside. I tried to close my eyes, but I kept feeling his presence there, standing just under my window, his bare skin white in the moonlight. I didn’t sleep until I heard the soft click of the front door, his footsteps climbing the stairs.
Chapter Seven
It was a stupid cliché, but I didn’t fit in at Parrish High. High school mostly felt like a sentence I was serving because of some crime I’d committed, maybe in a past life. Sometimes being there actually hurt in a physical way, the way it hurts when you have to keep running that last bit of the mile in the PE track unit, when you’re sure you can’t go on anymore. Some sort of burning in your chest and heaviness in your legs.
I’d always known I was different from other people. I knew it, because I felt perpetually awkward, and I realized everyone else wasn’t going around feeling like that, at least not quite so much of the time. Mr. Kennedy, our high school librarian (I was his TA for a semester), said it was because I was a reading person, meaning, I guess, that all the books you read made you see things differently. But Mom said I was born mature, that I was a mini-adult from the time I was four and she caught me trying to write checks in her checkbook with my crayons. I once passed the Theosophical Society out by Honey B’s Bakery, and that old lady that runs it, Cora Lee, told me I was an old soul. Then she gave me a pamphlet for their
next lecture, “Understanding Ourselves in the Cosmos.”
Maybe that was it, that I was a reading person, or a mini-adult, or an old soul, because I just never got the rules of high school. It all seemed silly. All the big emotion and drama and all the gushy love and spitting hate and lip gloss reapplied and reapplied and reapplied in the smudgy mirrors of the girls’ bathroom. The She’s such a bitch! And It’s just because he likes you! and What’d he say, tell us! All that. Most of the time, anyway, she wasn’t a bitch and he didn’t like her and whatever he had to say didn’t mean anything. I tried to be part of it all, but inside I knew I was only faking. To me, it felt like someone had pushed the PAUSE button of my life and I still had to wait another year until it finally might start to play again. The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn’t the actual world, that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how hard you tried.
My mother thought my problem was all about leaping in and overcoming my social anxiety. She actually used those words, even though I knew from my psychology books that I didn’t have social anxiety. I looked it up. The only anxiety I had was dealing with everyone else’s anxiety about my being an introvert. There were always all these suggestions for how to make me less of who I was. Joining clubs—that was a big one. Getting involved in school events, like dances or some sport. To Mom, it was about being brave or not being brave, not about just being who you were. I’m convinced there are some people who are just born joiners of groups—fitter-inners, seamless social creatures, lovers of half-fake happy-to-see you’s and insincere hugs and little screams of excitement that convincingly cover what’s probably boredom. And then there are others, the ones who feel every false moment to the point of bodily pain and who can’t be anyone except whom they are, as much as they try.
