by Deb Caletti
“So that’s what that noise was.”
“I crack jokes to him all the time, but … no answer.”
“Maybe it’s the jokes,” I said.
He laughed. “Do you know this is our second meaningful conversation about dogs talking?”
He remembered. Of course I did, but now I knew that he did too.
We got our food, wrapped in foil, sat out on that same bench in front of the Hotel Delgado, which overlooked the marina. The water off the straits cooled the air, and finally you could take a breath that went all the way through you. The metal rings on the tops of the sailboats clanged against their masts, and you could hear the flap of the flag on the hotel and, on the boats—a couple of guys joking, who later appeared and called out Zeus’s name as if they were old friends. Zeus went over for his own visit and the guys waved to Hayden and then disappeared again. It reminded me that Hayden had his own life outside of us, and this thought took me by surprise even though it shouldn’t have. He had a life and experiences and a past and his own private thoughts and it could be a scary realization, that one. It meant a person had options. It meant they had chances, maybe, to leave.
“Larry and Gavin,” he said. He leaned over and took a man bite out of that burger. Zeus was back again and sitting politely for food, his Please notice, please notice look on his face, sitting as straight as the second-grader who wants so badly to be excused for recess first.
“Your friends,” I said.
“Not exactly. I haven’t seen my actual friends in a couple of months. These guys sailed in from the Keys. I would bet money that Gavin’s running from the law or something. What do you think? Drugs?”
“White collar crime. He used to be a banker,” I said. God, those fries were so good.
“You gotta wonder about guys like that who just disappear.” He froze his burger halfway to his mouth. “Christ, I’m sorry. I can be such an idiot.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. If he thought he was offending me, he wasn’t. Then I realized. “Oh, you mean our father?”
“You sound surprised. Okay, great. You didn’t even care. Now I should apologize for apologizing.” He took another bite, chewed with appreciation.
“It’s just, we don’t even really think about that. Him. It was a long time ago. I don’t have a single memory of him. Not one. So, nonissue, you know? I don’t exactly cry over it every morning.”
“I thought maybe it bothered you like it does Juliet. Zeus, quit it. Back off. Those are not your business.” He leaned down, lifted our Cokes from the ground where Zeus had been sniffing their lids.
“It doesn’t bother Juliet,” I said.
He looked at me, perplexed. “I think it does. I know it does. A lot.”
Now we stared at each other. We each had a person in our mind that the other didn’t know, not at all. I didn’t know how I could make him see.
“Juliet is invincible,” I said.
He laughed.
“Juliet gets what she wants.”
He shook his head, the sort of shake that means you think someone is sadly mistaken. He didn’t understand. Wouldn’t. Maybe even refused to. And if he didn’t understand, if he didn’t see, how could he be warned? How could he ever protect himself? He didn’t see what was coming, what was happening right then at that very moment. Juliet, with her fingers in the belt loops of Buddy’s pants, pulling them down past his thin hips. I could see into Hayden’s future as he sat there on the bench with his soft eyes, and it made me feel like my heart was being crushed.
He put his burger down in his lap. Set down that food and looked at me hard. “Scarlet,” Hayden said softly. If he was calling me, I wanted to go, wherever he was leading. “If you lose someone like that …”
Inside me, there were a pair of doors, and right then something was shoving up against them. Shoving and pressing, but I could not open them, even if he was asking me to. There was too much behind those doors. Too much, enough to spill out and over me; I could feel the press against my chest at only the thought.
“That’s not the way it is,” I said. But my voice was hoarse. Something was squeezing me inside.
There was the scrunch of a paper bag and then the feel of his body as he scooted next to me. He put his arm around my shoulders, and I laid my head against his chest, the soft T-shirt beneath my cheek. I was supposed to be saving him, helping him, leading him to a safer place. But instead, it was me who was feeling the shelter of someone stronger.
“It’s okay, Scarlet. Huh? A lot of life is just about surviving what happens.”
I lifted my cheek from his chest. I was so close to him. He was smiling, and then he wasn’t. His eyes had a seriousness I had never seen before. I could smell the tang of his sweat. I looked into his face and he looked into mine. He swallowed hard.
I leaned in and I kissed him then. His lips were soft and sudden and somehow familiar. I breathed in his smell. I could have wanted more, much, much more; I believed and held on to that belief, I knew what I desired and why; I wanted to go, go—but he pulled away, there was a firm shove on my shoulder.
“Scarlet, stop,” he said. “No.” He looked sad. He looked so sad that shame and embarrassment instantly filled me. I wanted to run. I wanted to run so far away from there.
“Don’t say anything,” I said. “Just don’t.”
“I’m sorry, Scarlet.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m really sorry.” I wouldn’t look at him. “Listen,” he said. “Hey listen.”
“Oh my God. I can’t believe I did that. Oh God. Oh God, I’m so sorry.”
“Scarlet, it’s okay, okay? We’re good friends. We’re good friends and that’s a great thing.”
“I’m so sorry.”
I was too ashamed to look at him, to move, to walk back and sit beside him in that car again. Ashamed, but if he had changed his mind then and kissed me back I’d have forgotten that. He was nervous, rubbing his palms on the bare skin of his legs, running his hands through his hair. We didn’t move or look at each other. We just sat on that bench for a long while, not saying anything. We sat there longer than I even realized, because the sun and sky turned orange-yellow and the night shadow started to fall, and it got cool enough for me to shiver.
“Let’s just go back,” Hayden said finally.
Those words were so simple, you could almost forget how impossible going back truly was.
Chapter Twenty-three
When we came home, the house was still empty, emptier than empty, the way it is when you can hear a ticking clock and the rooms almost echo. Zeus made two victorious laps around the living room, but the furniture seemed to be sitting ever so still, and you could hear the sound of crickets coming through the back screen door we’d left open.
Every movement of mine felt full of shame and humiliation and wrongness. I didn’t speak, because I knew my own voice would be bad and horrible. We, Hayden and me, did not settle onto the couch in the living room to watch the Martinellis’ old movies that had been popular in the 1970s, as he had suggested before. Instead, Hayden said he was going to bed. He walked down the stairs to the basement, but Zeus stayed behind, by my side. He knew when a person needed comfort. He would never know what a fool I was. “Velvet head,” I whispered to him.
Finally, I went upstairs. My room felt like a display of my wrong love, still blazing, blazing right then at that moment—the paper cranes, that photo, all the hours I had spent there with feelings that were mine and mine alone. I could feel Hayden’s presence downstairs, awake and waiting for Juliet. I heard him walking around, heard him come upstairs again, heard the worry in his footsteps.
In my mind I kept seeing Buddy Wilkes, the times he had been at our house. The way he had showed his right to be there—by stretching his legs on the couch, his arm on Juliet’s leg as if to hold her down. And the other times I saw him too. His skin glowing green from the TV left on without any sound, his bare ass leaping into jeans as Mom’s car came down th
e street. Juliet hooking her bra with one arm behind her back. Nothing tender or romantic or permanent, just zippers and hooks and body parts with other body parts and Juliet seeming distant and preoccupied in the morning. Buddy Wilkes’s cigarette butt in our garden the next day.
I put on my long T-shirt, but kept the light off; I lay on my bed in the dark, propped up against my pillows. The light from the streetlamp shined in and illuminated my room in an eerie glow. The paper cranes rustled and swayed in a small breeze. I heard someone’s wind chime outside.
I watched my clock with growing unease. I heard the television go on and then off again. I waited for Hayden to go outside to smoke, a place I might never join him again, but this never happened. The basement toilet flushed. The house was giving away the secret of his restlessness. I got up and looked down the street for a car—Buddy Wilkes’s, Mom’s, anyone’s—same as I used to when I was small and Mom was late coming home. I would watch and watch and beg silently for her car to appear, equally sure as not that it would, relief filling me and being replaced with joy as soon as it did. She always seemed surprised how happy we were when she got home. She’d put Neil Diamond on the stereo, and we’d dance.
But that night, the street was so dark and so still, absent of any cars or people or animals coming or going. The heat had tired people. The SOLD sign on the Martinellis’ house looked very white under the moon; it looked bold, defying the darkness with only pressboard and a declaration.
I could hear every tick of my clock. It was getting close to midnight, and Mom would be home soon, I was sure.
But then, midnight came and went. Serious worry was shoving out shame for my attention. Mom always came home at midnight, always. I kept getting up every few minutes to look out at the empty street. My worry turned to anger. Maybe they just had too much to celebrate. Mom in her slinky black blouse and Dean Neuhaus with his clean fingernails. Mom’s new diamond on her own finger, her hands not belonging to herself anymore. Maybe she was sleeping off a bottle of champagne beside him.
I wondered if I should call. I imagined her cell phone on his bed stand in a house we’d never even visited. He had children we had never even met. I could call and embarrass myself, intrude when it would no longer do any good. I was good at shoving myself into places where I didn’t belong. There was nothing I could do about any of it, anyway. Helping hadn’t kept me safe. It had been an illusion. It had done no good, none, I thought, and it was at that moment, that exact one, that I was thrown back against my bed and to the floor. There was a soul-shattering clash, an explosion, a blast so deep I felt it in my cells, glass raining down, nothing like the toy rocket, although the toy rocket was my first thought. I was on the floor, and glass was falling around like stars. The sky seemed to open. My window was gone, and the black night was there at my fingertips.
I heard shouting. There seemed to be some sort of fire outside through the frame of my window now absent of glass.
Hayden was shouting. Other people too. I didn’t understand what was happening. Nothing made sense. My window was gone and I was sitting in glass and there seemed to be a fire and people were shouting and that’s all I knew.
“Scarlet!” Hayden was there in the doorway. He was still in his shorts, without his shirt. His hands were on either side of the doorframe, as if the frame itself had just stopped him before he fell in.
“I don’t know what happened,” I said.
“There was a blast across the street,” Hayden said.
This didn’t make sense to me, not yet. Glass was in my hair.
“Your window again,” he said. “Are you okay?”
He lifted me up. He set me on my feet. He looked me over. “You’re okay,” he said.
He saw my shock. He put his arms around me. I felt the skin of his chest against my cheek. “It’s okay, sweetie,” he said. I could feel his care. Real and true care. I wanted to stay there, with him holding me. I was scared. It felt safe with his arms around me.
“What happened?” I said.
“Something exploded across the street,” he said again. He gestured toward the window. “I’m going to go see, okay? If everyone’s all right? Maybe there was some kind of gas explosion. God, we need to see if everyone’s all right.”
I felt dizzy and confused, like I was waking from a dream or maybe was still in one. Maybe this was another dream that had a deeper meaning, a blast, my life as I knew it exploding and destroyed. But it seemed to be the present moment after all. I could feel Hayden’s fingers grasping mine. I saw my clock, still ticking; saw that nothing that most immediately needed changing—Mom coming home, Juliet, too—had changed. This disaster had happened and they were still gone and we were still waiting even as we ran down the stairs together to the front door.
Zeus was turning circles of excitement and anxiety. Trotting with wild eyes around the coffee table, muscles tensed in fear for what had already gone wrong.
“You stay here, boy,” Hayden said. He tried to make his voice calm, but if I could hear the alarm there then Zeus heard it a hundredfold. Hayden was putting a T-shirt over his head, and I was following him in my bathrobe, although I don’t remember ever putting it on.
He opened the door, and Zeus was there, and I saw him put one hand on Zeus’s forehead to keep him back, but the front door was always a barrier Zeus wanted to get past, always, even when there was nothing urgent beyond it. The beyond was urgent enough for him, but that night even more so, and he pushed with all his force and broke free.
“Goddamnit, Zeus! Not now! Scarlet …”
“I’ve got him,” I said, even as Zeus’s large butterscotch self raced across the street where I could now see a fire burning in some gaping hole where the Saint Georges’ garage had once been. The walls looked frail and papery and blackened, and you could see Mr. Saint George’s few tools on a pegboard just beyond the fire, and a lawn mower, too, ready to be swallowed by flames. I knew what had happened then, knew that Kevin Frink had found a way to what he most wanted, a way that he was most familiar with, matches and detonators and explosions, the destructive reordering of his own and our own universe.
It hit me, the same as the force that had thrown me across my room, what I had done, what I had contributed to, how this was in good part my fault. Good intentions didn’t even make this forgivable. I had gone where I didn’t belong and set the wrong things in motion. I had tried to give what wasn’t wanted. And I had done it all to make myself feel better, not them. Myself—because it felt better to have a little control over a situation, to feel some power, to move things around for a better outcome. To have fate in your hands instead of the other way around.
Hayden was running and shouting and Clive Weaver was on the lawn in his underwear holding Corky in his protective arms, and Mrs. Saint George was out on her lawn sobbing with Mr. Saint George’s arms around her, as Buster looked worried at their feet. Fiona and Kevin Frink were nowhere in sight. Ally Pete-Robbins held her boys around their shoulders, their eyes wide and blinking as they stood barefoot in their spaceship pajamas, as their father, too, ran across the street to see if he could help. Mrs. Martinelli was in her bathrobe in the driveway, her arm against her eyes from the brightness and growing heat of the flames, and Mr. Martinelli was saying, “Get back, get back; I used to be a firefighter!” People were shielding their loved ones, and my loved ones were missing, except for Hayden, running, and Zeus, running across the street as I called after him.
I went after Zeus, who was racing in mad circles around the yards, crazy from everyone else’s fear and his own sudden release. His people were going fast, and so, he too, needed to go fast. He crossed the street and crossed back again, dashed through the Martinellis’ junipers around the Pete-Robbins’s Acura; he flew past Ally Pete-Robbins, and Jacob made an unsuccessful dive for his collar.
He stopped on the sidewalk across the street. I didn’t want him going near that fire. You could feel the heat of it on your face. I tried to command his stillness with my voice, callin
g him sternly. He was panting. I had a chance. But then, his head turned suddenly toward the wide street beyond that fire, beyond the licking flames and the crackles and pops and the ash floating in the air. He ran.
You could hear the sound of sirens coming. All I could do was the one thing I’d been asked to do by the man I loved, to help the one good dog I was responsible for, and I went after him.
“Zeus!” I clapped madly. I could hear sirens coming closer now. I imagined a night of deception and of fleeing—Kevin Frink and Fiona Saint George heading off to some unreachable place in his Volkswagen, Juliet fleeing her marriage in Buddy Wilkes’s El Camino, Mom fleeing the stagnation of her life in Dean Neuhaus’s arms. And me fleeing, too, leaving my mistakes behind, mistakes now up in flames, running after Zeus as he rounded the corner far beyond the Pete-Robbins’s house.
“Zeus, PLEASE!” I felt frantic now. I couldn’t get to him—he was always just beyond my grasp. I was worried he would be hit by one of the fire trucks or the ambulance, which I could hear approaching. Zeus had abandoned everything in his fear; his anxiety propelled him forward, forward, around, anywhere, in wild motion. We weren’t on our street anymore. I was in my robe in a stranger’s yard. My voice was hoarse from calling. Lights of houses went on, porch lights, too. I ran through the new bark and freshly seeded lawn of the house where the construction had been going on all summer. My chest was full of fire from running. Zeus was in another backyard and I didn’t know if I could keep up with him much longer.
“Boy!” I pleaded. “Zeus!” The commotion on our street sounded like a dim roar, but I could smell the destruction in the air, some dark blend of damage and charcoal and melting plastic. Zeus stopped and looked at me, too far for me to catch him, and when I started toward him, he took off again. I was crying now. “Zeus!” He ran two blocks over and disappeared. I called and called him.
I was desperate for the sight of his butterscotch fur, his triangle ears. I was crying his name and could only see him gone forever, gone, could feel the loss of him, and my own failed responsibility to the man who loved him, whom I loved.
