by Deb Caletti
“I was just going for a walk,” she said.
“Right,” I said.
“Scarlet …”
“How about if I come along?” I said. That anger—it was back. I heard it in my own voice and felt it pushing against my chest.
She rubbed her arms as if she were cold. I bet Jitter would have preferred to be tucked into a nice warm bed, instead of out there in the night, staying up too late, heading to places he shouldn’t be heading.
“You know, you used to be nice. I liked you back then. What happened to the nice person that used to live here?”
“Oh,” I said. “I see. I’ve got it figured out now. You’re nice as long as you go along with what other people want. You do or say something people don’t like for once, somehow you’re not nice anymore.”
She wasn’t looking at me, more at a point down the street, somewhere she was wishing she was. But then, she did look. “Are you going to tell anybody about this?” she said.
“Anybody? Like who? Like our mailman? Like your second-grade teacher? Oh, you must mean your husband.”
“Goddamnit.” She shook her head as if she couldn’t believe how unreasonable I was being.
“You get pregnant so you … what, have some sort of answer. Maybe so you don’t have to be all these things you were supposed to be. Right? Okay, I got that much figured out. You wanted some sort of rescue and you got it, but you picked a really fabulous rescuer. Really. It’s, like, the smartest thing you did in all this. Probably, the smartest thing you’ve ever done.” She turned away from me, but she didn’t leave. She just stood there and took it. Maybe she was relieved someone had a conscience, even if it wasn’t her.
“But now … Buddy Wilkes? That’s what comes between you? High school loser boyfriend who doesn’t even want you?”
“God!” she cried. She put her hands up to her face. I wanted to feel bad for her, but I couldn’t. I was so angry with her, maybe seventeen-years’ angry. But especially-now angry. For having everything and for everything not being enough.
“Just … why?” I said.
The night was quiet. Just some crickets, the shimmery shush of trees in the night wind. A man’s faraway cough on a faraway porch.
She looked at me and her face was wet with tears. A strand of her hair stuck to her cheek. And then she said something I didn’t expect her to say. It was so unexpected that it stopped me right there. “What would happen if I let go and loved him, huh? What.”
My breath caught. Before I knew what was happening, my own throat closed up, tears rushed forward. I swallowed hard. I felt some deep loss and recognition at those words—let go. The words seemed so large and impossible and dangerous. I wanted to run to her and hold on, the same as I used to when I was little and scared. I’d get in her bed and she would be the big sister and everything would feel safe, but this time, maybe we’d just hold on to each other. We’d both hold on against big dark things of the night that snatched away what you most needed.
“What would happen?” My voice shook. I could barely say the words. I didn’t want to say them, but they were the ones that most needed to be spoken. “Maybe you’d be happy.”
She looked at me for a while. And then she turned back the way she had come, back to her basement bedroom and to the sleeping body of her husband.
Chapter Twenty-one
That night, I had one of those dreams where you try and make a phone call but can’t, no matter what you do. There was an emergency and I needed to call Mom, but I couldn’t remember her number and every time I tried to dial, something interfered. It’s the dream equivalent of the moment in the horror movies when someone’s car won’t start.
Kevin Frink’s Volkswagen was still parked by the curb in the morning, its rounded top shiny and wet with dew. He was asking for it; I’m sure he knew. Everyone in my life was asking for it. Maybe even me.
Downstairs, Mom looked like hell. She was blowing her nose like she had the start of a cold, and her eyes were flat and tired. Her hair was shoved up in the back like it had been forced against its will to participate in morning. I looked at her hand—no ring. But I saw it there on the counter. A small black velvet box. Funny how a small black velvet box can have the power of a loaded gun.
“So, the new Mrs. Neuhaus?” I said.
She gave a little shudder.
“That’s a good sign,” I said.
“What,” she said into her coffee cup. The word was as flat as her eyes.
“You just shuddered,” I said.
“I didn’t shudder.” But it sounded like a question.
“Yes, you did.”
“I didn’t shudder.”
I let this drop. No one was making pancakes or eggs or some great breakfast this Sunday morning. A big breakfast required optimism. Our house seemed to be lacking that. No, this would be a Shredded Wheat morning, something punishing like that, a spiky bird’s nest rectangle with milk on top.
“You know, my first date with Dean? We went out to this little café. He said, ‘I’ll have what you’re having,’ and I said, ‘I’m just having coffee.’ And he said, ‘I don’t want just coffee.’”
“Uh-huh,” I said. I barely dared to speak. The truth seemed to be sitting there right at the end of my tongue, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to let it out and about. I had done that last night with Juliet, spoken the truth, and all I had gotten from it was the feeling I still had—my heart exposed and hurting. No wonder people stayed hidden.
“The second date, he told me I held my fork wrong. He showed me the proper way. Upside down, like the British. The way I did it looked lower class.”
“We’re all lower class too,” I said. “Look.” I swigged out of the orange juice carton without a glass.
“Scarlet,” she said.
I tried to burp loudly too, but it didn’t happen. It was quiet and unimpressive. I was never very good at that.
“Use a glass,” she said in her mother voice, but it was her amused one.
“Does this mean Dean’s not my new daddy?”
“I thought I was in a bad mood,” she said. She eyed the little box as if it were one of Kevin Frink’s explosive devices. “I told him I would think about it.”
“Think about it? Isn’t that one of those things you either know or you don’t?”
“There’s a lot to consider.”
What was there to consider, just how completely destroyed and unhappy we all would be? The actual degree of destruction? Is that what needed to be considered? And, wasn’t this supposed to be one of those blissful moments of celebration? When the man you supposedly loved asked you to be his wife? She looked horrible. She looked like her personal world had been bombed.
“Well, I can see how overjoyed you are,” I said. It seemed obvious to me, if not so obvious to anyone else. Happiness shouldn’t make you so miserable.
“It’s complicated. Dean has a lot of great qualities. He can offer us a lot.”
Right—he could offer us the chance to feel like crap about ourselves on a twenty-four-hour basis. If there was a time for honesty, right then was it, no matter what the consequences. This wasn’t just her life anyway. “Like what? What can he offer us?” I said, but she didn’t answer. We were interrupted by the sound of Juliet coming up from the basement, the thud of her feet on the stairs. For such a frail-looking person, Juliet had a heavy step, she’d always had. She actually looked pretty great, after last night. She wore a sweet white nightgown and a soft pink robe untied over her belly.
“Oh, I feel like a sea lion,” she moaned, as if she were in distress. But she didn’t look distressed. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes sugar-crystal bright. “Coffee …”
“You’re not supposed to drink coffee,” I said. “The baby ingests whatever you do. His system is too delicate for caffeine.”
“In moderation it’s okay,” she said. “I looked it up.”
“You looked it up?” I was surprised.
“Bring that baby over here,” Mom
said. She put her hands on each side of Juliet, rubbed, bent down, and gave that tummy a kiss. “Good morning, baby.”
“Okay, enough,” Juliet said. But she was smiling.
“Love that baby,” Mom said. “Love that baby.”
“That’s what Hayden says every morning,” she said. She was practically glowing.
If happiness shouldn’t make you so miserable, misery shouldn’t make you so happy.
That Sunday morning, I tried to call Nicole, but she didn’t answer. I tried again. I was beginning to act as desperate as Juliet with Buddy Wilkes.
We stayed in our robes too long that day, past the point of luxury and into the territory of self-disgust. We were all restless and edgy until finally everyone found a place to settle—Juliet took a nap, and Mom got out her scrapbook materials, something she hadn’t done in a long while. She sat cross-legged on the floor and spread out images of Beijing and Darjeeling and Trinidad on our coffee table, studying them with her head tilted to one side as she drank a cold beer. Even Clive Weaver had decided on something—he had taken Corky on a rare walk, letting Corky lead, as always, meaning they were then unwinding themselves around one of Mr. Martinelli’s rosebushes where they had become tangled.
Hayden had taken over my job and mowed the lawn, and as I laid on my bed and read, I had the full summer experience through my window—the sweet new odor of cut grass mixed with warm sun and the smoky, rich smells from someone else’s barbecue, set against the background music of a baseball game in the field a few blocks over and the tinkling notes of “The Entertainer,” coming from psycho Joe’s ice-cream truck.
The lawn mower stopped and started up again in the back. I wished we were having whatever those people were barbecuing. The construction men weren’t working on the weekend so there were no construction sounds, no radio Old black water, keep on rollin’, Mississippi moon won’t you keep on shining on meeee. I did hear the lumbering of a big vehicle out front and a bit later, Mr. Martinelli’s voice talking to another man. I couldn’t see either of them, just heard two voices and saw two old RVs parked next to each other, the Pleasure Way and some other big prehistoric beast, with a license plate that read CAPTAIN ED. Mr. Martinelli boasted about the GPS System and the Ample Storage but Captain Ed must not have been impressed enough, because he drove off a few moments later, leaving Mr. Martinelli silent.
That’s when the blast came. It was an explosive shot, a fierce crack and crash and shatter that I felt through my whole body. There was the clattering of glass, raining down like hail. A few pieces landed right next to me on my bed, one on the very page of Psychological Diagnosis by Dr. Gerald Drinksmore. I flew to my feet. My heart was pounding hard, hard, hard. Jesus, what had happened? There was a jagged hole in my window, right in my own window, glittering glass everywhere, a plastic rocket on my floor.
“Scarlet!” Mom yelled. I heard her racing up the stairs.
“I’m okay,” I yelled back.
I looked outside. I could see Jeffrey and Jacob there, staring back up at me. “Dad said to wait,” Jeffrey said.
Ally Pete-Robbins dashed into the street, her blouse buttoned wrong. “What have you done?” she yelled. She looked up, saw me standing there. “Are you all right?”
“Everyone’s fine,” I called down.
“Dear Lord, you could have hurt someone! You’re lucky no one was hurt!”
Mr. Pete-Robbins came running out next. His hair was messed up, and he was shirtless. “Boys!” he said in a father voice.
“You coulda poked someone’s eye out, Jacob,” Jeffrey said.
Hayden covered the broken window with cardboard and duct tape until it could be repaired, but you could still feel a draft of cool air from the opening. It reminded me of the dreams I had sometimes, when a puncture would appear in the side of an airplane I was in, sucking things out.
I could hear everything outside as if there were no barrier between me and anyone else, none. I shot awake when the milk truck came the next morning—it sounded like it was driving right up to my bed, and while I was getting dressed later on, the voices of a couple and their small children and Yvonne Yolanda barged right in and made me cover up, fast. I hadn’t understood the importance of that sheet of glass before, or even the screen, how necessary a barrier was. Even the thinnest and most breakable boundary was better than none. But now, with only cardboard, I was open and exposed to whatever might happen.
I worked the cash register at Quill while Mom helped customers. I was glad to be there, away from that hole in the glass. It disturbed me. At Quill, I was inside four undamaged walls and large unbroken windows. Joe Nevins from the ferry dock picked out a birthday card for his mother in Florida. Then an hour later, his brother, Jim, came in and did the same, but forgot his wallet. A bunch of tourists came and wandered around but didn’t buy anything. Bonnie Randall from the bookstore next door came and bought a fountain pen, and my teacher, Ms. Cassaday, chose a beautiful leather notebook stamped with shells and scrolls.
Mom let me go a little early; it was a quiet day in the store in spite of the hordes of summer tourists. I headed out with my purse over my shoulder, wondering what I should do with myself, when I heard bells jangle and bash hard against the door of Randall and Stein Booksellers next door. There was Jesse Waters—he rushed out with one of their green bags in his hand.
“Wait!” he called.
I stopped. “Jesse. Hey.” I was both surprised and suddenly guilty. I was sure he was only thinking about what I was: how I’d shoved him away in that strange, unclear way the last time I’d seen him. I was sure what I had done sat between us like a huge animal, and that it would always sit between us, gigantic and unforgivable. “What about all the drowning children?” I said.
“Four until close today. I was actually coming to see you. I saw that you were working… . I saw you here a couple of times… .” He sounded friendly, happy even. He didn’t seem to even remember the large, terrible thing I had last done, and so the beast wandered off. It was a relief to be so easily forgiven. “Anyway, I thought I’d bring you something.”
“Me?” He handed me the bag. There was a little flurry as he grabbed it back and snatched out the receipt. He was giving me a present? I’m not sure anyone had ever done that before. Family, sure, and maybe friends. But a boy, and for no reason? Never.
“It’s a book,” he said. “Well, of course. Bookstore …”
“I can’t believe you got this for me,” I said.
“Maybe you better wait until you see it,” he said. “Before you get excited. I don’t know.”
I took out the book. There was no mistaking the bearded guy on the cover with the serious eyes. “The Interpretations of Dreams,” I read.
His words rushed forward. “I’ve always seen you with a psychology book. So I thought … I didn’t really know what to get. I figured, Freud, psychology. Too … stupid? Obvious?”
I was stunned. “This is so nice of you.”
“It’s okay?”
“Yeah! Great. I’m not exactly used to people doing nice things like this for me.”
“You’re kidding,” he said. He laughed. He looked relieved. He had his jacket on, and I noticed Mr. Martinelli’s cuff link still pinned there.
I just stood there on the sidewalk. Bonnie Randall’s dog was looking at us out of the window. “I can’t believe you even noticed my books.”
“No one else reads stuff like that, if they even read at all,” he said.
“This looks really good,” I said. I looked at the back cover, although the words there did not reach my actual brain.
“I’d have thought people did nice things for you all the time. They should.” He looked at me from under his bangs. It seemed like he really meant it.
“Thanks, Jesse, really. It means a lot.”
“Okay,” he said. “I’ve got to run. I’m glad I caught you before you left.”
“Me too,” I said.
He picked up his bike, set down on its side b
y the front of the store. He got on, and I watched him cruise down the street, one arm waving good-bye just as he rounded the corner.
I felt some high, zapping energy buzz, a mix of pleasure and confusion. It was the mental equivalent of what your body does after one of the lattes at Java Java.
I couldn’t go home yet. I decided to take Mom’s car to Point Perpetua, not exactly where you went for calm and quiet during the summer months, but better than nothing. Tourists were everywhere in the summer months. People who lived near the beaches would steal the park entrance signs and hide them, just to have a little peace. You’d see some couple in matching T-shirts by the roadside, holding one of the island maps and looking perplexed, and you knew just what had happened. Someone like Otto Perkins had snitched the sign and put it in his backyard with the ten or twelve others he’d stolen over the years.
I was lucky to even find a parking space. People came in droves to “whale watch,” but whale watching was no different from fishing—a lot of waiting, little or no outcome usually, and the hours the whales appeared were the ones when visitors from Michigan or California were having cocktails at the Lighthouse or sleeping in their down beds at Asher House B & B, dreaming of raspberry scones. I didn’t think whales liked to be watched. They liked their privacy. Their appearance was a favor, and they gave that favor to only a few.
I grabbed my camera from underneath the seat of Mom’s car, headed down the windy path to the beach. God, I loved that smell—the briney water and the tang of salt, odd ropes of slick seaweed thick with the odor of the oldest and deepest parts of the ocean.
Some stupid kid in cartoon swim trunks was throwing rocks at bored seagulls, and two teen boys I didn’t recognize were swimming where they shouldn’t be. A young woman with short, short hair picked her way along the rocks, looking for treasures. I wished I lived right there on the beach. Every day, you could see what the ocean brought you. I made my own way, my palm finding familiar flat places on which to balance. I climbed up my favorite rock and sat.
