by Deb Caletti
“Scarlet, is that you?” Hayden called from the living room.
“Yep, it’s me,” I called back.
“Can you give me a hand?”
Hayden’s voice was muffled, and when I went to him, he was hunched behind the TV cabinet; his butt clad in those cargo shorts was the only real visible part of him. I didn’t mind this.
“What’s going on?” I said.
“Behind the cabinet. Can you see this cord I’m wiggling?”
I looked. “Uh-huh.”
“Grab it for me, would you?”
I reached back and caught it.
His head appeared. His hair was all tousled, and one curly lock fell over his forehead. “I thought that Dean was an engineer,” he said. He took the wire from me. “Thanks.”
“He is an engineer. Computer engineer.”
“That’s even worse. Dick wad can’t even hook up a VCR properly. I can’t stand that guy. ‘I think Americans are so pompous and judgmental,’” he said in a high Dean-accented voice, with his cheek against the cabinet.
“You sort of sounded like the queen of England.”
“You should hear my Nixon,” he said.
“I can’t understand what she sees in him. I just can’t.”
“Maybe he’s one of those things people either love or hate, like beets,” he said.
I laughed. “Ha. You are the one who notices life, remember, like you told me?”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
“I guess we’re an awful lot alike,” he said.
He leaned back behind the cabinet again, and I could hear the scritching of wires against wood. “There. That should do it. Hey, thanks. My trusty assistant there wasn’t much help.” Zeus was curled up in front of the couch, snoring. He snored like an old man.
“They always ask to go on their break, just when you need them,” I said.
“Ever since he joined the dog union he’s been impossible.” Hayden reappeared again. “Okay, let’s try it.”
He sat down on the couch. I shouldn’t have sat beside him because of how much I wanted to sit beside him, but I did anyway. He picked up the remote and pointed it toward the TV. One of Mrs. Martinelli’s old exercise tapes started up. A dark-haired studly guy appeared; he was on a Hawaiian beach, surrounded by six women on round mats, all with their legs in the air.
“Let me hear you!” the stud said. “Seven, eight, nine, ten. Feel your buttocks burn!”
“No wonder Mrs. Martinelli watches so much TV,” I said.
“I’m sure this got her heart rate up, all right.” The muscled leader was now lunging side to side as if he were in a duel. Robin Hood and his merry Lycra-clad women.
“I’m sure Mom appreciates your help,” I said.
“Take that, Dean Neuhaus,” he said. “Sucker engineer.”
Zeus began to dog-dream growl, accompanied by a half-suppressed dog-dream bark, a funny little wuf that made his lips flubber. “Zeus is chasing bad guys in his sleep,” I said.
“He’s a hero in his own mind.”
We watched his furry butterscotch chest go up and down with sleep, as the exercisers on TV squatted down, their arms straight out in front of them.
“Maybe he’s ripping Dean Neuhaus’s pant legs to shreds,” I said.
“Buddy Wilkes’s neck,” Hayden said.
He looked at me and I looked at him, and I couldn’t help it. I took his hand. I held it and I rubbed the back of his hand with my thumb. It was probably the wrong thing to do, but I didn’t care. I wanted to lean over, kiss him. I wanted that bad. I let that thought in, allowed it for just a moment, and it felt good. But for now, I just squeezed his hand. He squeezed back as if it were the most innocent thing in the world. My skin on his—it didn’t feel innocent, not to me.
“It’s really hard to understand,” he said.
“It’s going to be okay,” I said again, and again the words felt echoey and vacant. I’d never wanted to help anyone like I wanted to help him. I could love him the way he deserved to be loved. I wanted to give him so much that it was an actual ache. My heart felt like it was taking up ninety-five percent of my body.
“You’re going to love someone properly, Scarlet. I can tell that.”
I couldn’t speak. Any words I might say were caught in my throat. It seemed possible that my real voice would be locked inside forever.
“God, is it a million degrees in here, or is it just me? Jesus.” He let go, wiped his forehead with the bottom of his T-shirt.
“I’ll open some doors,” I said.
Hayden turned his eyes to the tight bodies on the TV. “I bet that guy’s about eighty now,” he said.
I didn’t wait to talk to Mom about Juliet this time. I would handle this myself, if no one else would. Hayden could get hurt. That baby could. And that baby wasn’t just Juliet’s baby, it was all of ours. I could feel him move under my hand. If you held very still, that baby rolled and turned against your palm. I imagined he was having the most peaceful underwater time he might ever have. No matter what I felt, at least, at the very, very least, he deserved to be born into a parental land that was not war torn. It seemed to be one of those simple human rights that was so basic that it became impossible, like equality or the pursuit of happiness.
I waited until Juliet got home, until Hayden had taken Zeus with him to do some work on Will Quail’s boat. Juliet was in her old room, going through the clothes she still had in her closet. She wore a pair of shorts low down on her hips, and a T-shirt that stretched so tight that the bottom of her round belly showed underneath. There was a big pile of pants and blouses and skirts on the floor, which I assumed she was getting rid of. Any other time I might have liked to go through it, trying on things that were her but that maybe could be me with some effort. But now I didn’t even want those things.
I flung the envelope her way. The corner of it hit the top, fleshy part of her bare arm and fell to the floor.
“Jesus, Scarlet,” she said. “What are you doing?”
“Question better asked of you.” I stood in her doorway. I didn’t even want to be in her room.
“Do you want this?” she asked, before she bent down to see what I’d flung at her. It was a sweatshirt with our school emblem, a tiger, on the front. I’m surprised she was getting rid of it. I’d have thought she’d try to hang on to her glory days as long as possible. Glory days were a pretty simple thing on an island, and even simpler in the sub-island that was high school. They were a whole lot harder to come by out in the big world.
She looked at the envelope in her hand. Her face got red. She just kept staring down at it, at the jagged bits where I’d torn the paper.
“You had no right,” she said softly.
“You have no right,” I said.
“You butt into everyone’s business.”
“Only when I need to. Like now.”
“Need to? Right. You do it because you don’t have your own life. That’s why. That, and a complete lack of confidence and self-esteem. What, the world won’t turn without your help? People won’t fall apart without you.”
Her words stung. “You brought Hayden into our lives. You brought this baby. You made it our business. You can’t just make a mess and think we’re all going to sit around and clean it up.”
“I’m not asking you to clean up anything.”
“We have to watch people get hurt.”
Her eyes blazed. Maybe with anger but maybe, too, with shame. “We.”
“Yeah, we. Mom and me. You’re playing out your family drama right under our noses.”
She threw the sweatshirt at the top of the pile. “Mom supports me. Mom supports my own decisions. Don’t speak for Mom. You don’t know. At least she remembers that I’m an adult. In your mind I’m not supposed to grow up. I’m not supposed to do anything I don’t get permission for.”
“Adult? You’ve got to be kidding. It’s the last thing you’re acting like.” I was breathing hard. I looked at her face
, the face I’d known for years and years. She was selfish. A selfish person. I’d been second to her first place forever, but now she was making Hayden bow down to her: Hayden, a good person who didn’t deserve it. He shouldn’t have to follow behind her like she had made me do when I was five, carrying the back of her nightgown like she was the princess. “You go on about growing up. You know what I think? You got pregnant so you didn’t have to grow up. So people would take care of you. So you could stay in our childhood forever. You’re afraid to grow up.”
I hadn’t even known I thought that. But it was clear then. This wasn’t a great big move on her part. It was a way to come home.
Her mouth was slightly open; she didn’t look like the strong person who got everything she wanted all of the time anymore. She wasn’t the person who stood up on a stage while people sat below her and watched. Maybe that person had been too much for her. She had moved all of the pieces around, moved people and their feelings as if they were for her own use only, and now she had gotten herself backed into a corner.
“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. But her words lacked force. She sat on the edge of her bed and held that envelope.
“Buddy is going to somehow make this better?”
“Buddy understands me,” she said.
She disgusted me then. I shook my head at her stupidity. Buddy wasn’t anything true. He treated girls like shit. He was an idea more than a person.
“Buddy’s an excuse not to have anything real,” I said.
She looked pale. Unwell. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at that envelope in her hands.
I had to ask her. I had to. “Buddy’s not …” I didn’t know if I could say it.
“Not what?”
“Buddy’s not Jitter’s father, or anything, is he?”
“Oh for God’s sake, Scarlet,” Juliet spat. “For God’s sake. Just … get out of here, would you? Get.”
And so I did. I got out of there. I left her alone with all the things she wanted and wanted and wanted.
I hadn’t seen Clive Weaver for days. His house sat so quiet, it might as well have been boarded up. The newspapers gathered on his porch. I sniffed around the outside, hoping I didn’t smell something bad like people always did in the crime books, when the neighbor’s gone missing.
I wondered if I should deliver the Make Hope and Possibilities Happen for Clive Weaver project sooner than I’d planned. I had folded more than a hundred paper cranes and had twenty or thirty pieces of mail ready for his box. I wasn’t anywhere near my goal yet, and when I closed my eyes I saw it playing the way I imagined, loads of mail, loads of it. Well then, something else had better be done now. A person ought to check up on him anyway.
I went downstairs and made a quick batch of brownies. Too much fat and sugar was bound to be bad for his heart, yet he needed it for his spirit. I licked the bowl as I waited for them to bake, drank a big glass of milk that chased away the bad feelings I had about Juliet and Hayden and Kevin Frink and about Nicole, too, who had been nothing but cold to me since that day at the pool. I had wanted to help all of them, but it seemed like I was failing miserably.
I felt the way you did when you had been swimming for a long time, or running, or working on an endless research paper. Like the end was too far away, the obstacles too great, like you wanted to lie down and rest. But you didn’t rest, right? Or quit. You didn’t do any of those things that meant giving up, because quitting was for losers and babies, for the weak and lazy, for people with no backbone. You persevered, even if there were setbacks and you were tired and didn’t want to do any of it anymore. If you wanted some sort of triumph, you had to be persistent. You had to pay with all of your endless efforts. You had to stick with it. You just worked harder to make it happen, whatever “it” happened to be.
The chocolate was catching up to me.
I cut the brownies into squares and put them on a plate. I carried them outside, their warmth steaming up the Saran Wrap I had stretched over them. But it was true, wasn’t it? It was practically un-American to not set goals and then do everything you could, everything, to reach them. Quitting—it was a dirty word in a place where pilgrims had endured harsh winters and where pioneers had struggled through death and disease to create new lives. Giving up or stepping back or setting aside something you thought you wanted—it was almost a shameful act. I wasn’t one of those people who gave up easily. Sometimes it was confidence and not the lack of it that made me want to fix the bad I saw around me. I believed in the power a person had to change things.
Clive Weaver’s blinds were drawn, and the house looked very still. I was surprised, then, when the front door opened and Ally Pete-Robbins stepped outside, holding an empty Bundt pan. She looked at my brownies, and I looked at that pan. I wondered if I could see my future in its curved Teflon surface.
“His condition is worsening,” Ally Pete-Robbins said. But she sounded snippy. My brownies were invading her Bundt cake turf.
“Oh no,” I said.
“He has dishes out from days ago,” she said.
“Maybe somebody ought to wash them,” I said.
“I already did.” Her words closed the conversation. Her shoes clipped back down the sidewalk, sounding useful and efficient. I loved that sound, I had to admit, especially when my own heels were making it. Heels on sidewalks or shiny floors—the sound of important business.
But I wasn’t so much in the mood for visiting anymore. The Saran Wrap was coming unstuck around the edges of the plate, and my stomach felt too full from uncooked batter. I rang the bell, though, and when Clive Weaver answered in his bathrobe, his old face unshaven, his breath smelling sour, some mix of coffee and soup in cans, I only handed him the plate and said a few words I can’t remember now. Clive said, That’s mighty kind of you, mighty kind, goddamn, and I swear his eyes started pooling up, the way old man eyes did after so many years of life piling up. I got out of there. I got out of there, but still I could feel some urgent sense of my decisions following me. The decisions I had made, the decisions I was about to make.
Later that afternoon, the big dark Mercedes pulled up in front of the Martinellis’ house. The realtor lady with realtor lady hair and realtor lady shoes came out and rather forcefully dug a hole into the ground in front of the Martinellis’ yard. She shoved the FOR SALE sign into it. I recognized her from all the calendars and magnets and notepads she’d sent in the mail over the years. Yvonne Yolanda, our Friend in the Real Estate Business.
Chapter Twenty
I waited for the Mercedes to leave. The doorbell sounded far away in the Martinellis’ house. I looked into the glass by the door, waited until the bright flowers on Mrs. Martinelli’s dress appeared. I pounded on the door then. She needed to understand the urgency of this. The moment I saw that sign, I knew what was going on. They were not moving to Arizona or Florida or even Montana, where their daughter lived. They had not bought some condo in the sun to live out their days playing golf and sipping “highballs,” as Mr. Martinelli called the gin drinks he had every night at five thirty.
“Mrs. Martinelli, open up,” I said.
She peeked around the door. She wore her reading glasses on a chain around her neck; her dress was a large shouting garden of sunflowers.
“Why, Scarlet,” she said. She sounded like some old lady on television, which is not how Mrs. Martinelli ever talked.
“What have you done?” I said.
“Whatever do you mean?” she said. “Come in, dear.” I rolled my eyes. Next she would be offering me Freshly Baked Cookies and telling me about The Good Old Days. It was the sweet old folks countermove. A cover-up.
“You know what I mean. The FOR SALE sign. Getting rid of all of your stuff. Where is Mr. Martinelli?”
I followed her into the kitchen. It looked empty, and so did the living room. Her collection of glass dogs that had lined the living room shelves was gone. So were the shelves themselves.
“Ginger!” I said.
Oh God, what had they done with her? I could just see the small white dog sitting in the passenger seat of Mr. Martinelli’s Buick, heading for the Great Pound in the Sky.
“Don’t get your knickers in a twist; she’s right here.” Mrs. Martinelli whistled somewhere in the back of her teeth, and Ginger appeared, toenails clicking on the linoleum, her blank black eyes shiny behind her aging bimbo-fluff hair.
I put my hand to my chest. “Thank God.”
“Her kidneys are bad, but Mr. Martinelli said if we’d put him down when his kidneys got bad, it would have been years ago.”
A tea kettle started to whine in high-pitched need. Mrs. Martinelli removed the kettle from the stove, opened a cupboard to reveal shelves vacant except for four lonely cups. She took two down, set them on the counter.
“Cocoa?” she asked. She ripped open a package of Swiss Miss.
“I knew it,” I said.
“It has the little marshmallows,” she said.
“They are scam artists, Mrs. Martinelli. I don’t know where you’re going, but you’re not going to find any cocoa plantation when you get there.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. We’ve talked to Morin Jude herself. We wouldn’t have just gone and sent that kind of money unless we knew she was a real person. They’re getting the house ready for us on the Ivory Coast. Herb has been reading up on cocoa. You would be surprised how involved it all is.” She poured steaming water into the cups. “The seed is actually green when ripe, not red. Isn’t that interesting?”
“We’ve got to call someone and get your money back.” I looked around. The place was so empty, I’d have bet even the phone was gone.
She opened a drawer, a mostly empty drawer, except for the accumulated bread crumbs and toothpicks still clinging for dear life to their old home. She took out a spoon, stirred the brown dust and unnaturally small white bits that were supposedly marshmallows.
