by Deb Caletti
She broke away from me, took my shoulders. “Oh honey. I got this so wrong. Since …” She put her hands up to her eyes. “Since …” It was funny—I didn’t know what she was going to say before she said it. That’s how far I kept it from my own self. “Since your father left …” The word father sounded funny coming from her. “Juliet had a hard time. More than you—you were younger. You were resilient. She remembered. There’s this thing Juliet has, about going and staying. Keeping people away, she keeps people away, maybe even me, the way you keep people close. You keep people close by looking after them. It’s what I do too. I hold tight. Even what I’ve done with Juliet. See. Scarlet? You and I have always been the similar ones. You and I are.”
I took this in. I had to listen hard. It was a new way of seeing things, and I had held fast for a very long time to my old way. But it made sense to me, the simplest sort. It was possible, maybe, to have facts in your mind that weren’t facts at all. You could build a whole life’s story on false assumptions. You could make truths out of untruths and untruths out of truths. Until you spoke them, really said them out loud or checked for sure, you may not have known which were which.
“Oh sweetheart, I am so, so sorry. I didn’t know. You were just so capable.”
“You’re going to marry Dean,” I said.
“No, honey. I broke up with Dean. I was so late that night because I was telling Dean I didn’t want to see him again.”
“You broke up with him?”
“I kept wishing it would be different. Trying to make it something it would never be. I always hated giving up. But giving up isn’t always the worst thing. It isn’t. It’s gotten a bad name. Giving up can be good. There are better places for my hope. Much better places.”
“Mom …” The word was relief and pleading and understanding and a million other things. I wasn’t capable right then. I set my capability down, and she held me. She patted my back like a baby but I didn’t mind. I felt exhausted from too much emotion. From having the ways I had seen things detonated and shattered. I would have to look again. You could try and understand people, you could read books and understand words and concepts and ideas, but you could never understand enough or have enough knowledge to keep away the surprises that both fate and human beings had in store. This was too bad, I thought, but this was good, too.
We were both exhausted, we agreed. And so Mom and I did the thing that we did sometimes—our own thing—we turned on a movie and she made popcorn, and we ate it and watched, sitting beside each other.
“It’s funny,” she said. The psycho killer in the movie had been finally brought down by the young girl and her kid brother. “No one is ever quite as strong or as weak as you’d think.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Kevin Frink and Fiona Saint George were somewhere in California when Kevin Frink’s Volkswagen broke down. My mother heard this from Mrs. Martinelli, who heard this from Mrs. Saint George. I could imagine Kevin Frink sweating then, somewhere in the heat and dry air, unfamiliar yellow hills around them. Fiona would have used her family plan cell phone to call her parents for help. Fiona Saint George and Kevin Frink were on their way home now, in a rental car with air-conditioning and room to recline their seats. Mr. Saint George had wired her money, because that’s what you did when you loved, right or wrong. When you were gentle, loving people who studied ocean creatures, or who created scrapbooks of faraway places, or who wrote notes that were really poetry, or who folded paper cranes and more paper cranes, you gave when maybe you shouldn’t give, gave even when your very house had been blown to a million pieces.
Or else, you gave until you finally couldn’t anymore.
It had been five days since the blast, five days that Juliet had been gone with Jitter, and five days since I’d last seen the back of Zeus disappear around that corner. I can’t tell you how badly I wanted to see him, to see his funny face, his person-not-person self looking back at me with eager eyes that seemed to wonder what great thing was coming his way next. I would have given anything to see him again. Anything.
You were supposed to have hope, right? You were supposed to respect its power and hold on. And so I did. I held, and held, and let hope fill me. But as the days went on, it seemed I could be holding for a long, long time. Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless.
The Salvation Army truck came and got the last of the Martinellis’ belongings. They didn’t even need a moving van. Rob’s Taxi (basically Rob Millencamp in Rob Millencamp’s Ford Taurus) came and picked them up to go to the airport; Rob waited patiently at the curb reading How to Win at Poker as Mrs. Martinelli rolled her luggage down the walk. Mr. Martinelli wore that Hawaiian shirt again, and he was beaming and bouncing all over the place, pinching Mrs. Martinelli on the butt. She got teary for a moment as she shut the door, but only for a moment. Maybe it was even my imagination.
Mom and I both said good-bye. Mrs. Martinelli had taught her how to prune rosebushes and had given her recipes and advice, and Mr. Martinelli had unclogged our sink and fixed our furnace and repaired our bathroom light switch. They were as close to parents as Mom had, hers being long dead. I saw her watch Mr. Martinelli when he got up on the roof to clean his gutters or when he was on a ladder putting up the Christmas lights. She had always kept a firm eye on him until he was safely down.
“We’ll write you and tell you all about the plantation,” Mrs. Martinelli said.
“You better do that,” I said. I felt choked up suddenly. It was the way she grasped her purse tightly. It was how his hair was combed so straightly across his head and how he smelled of cologne. The vulnerability of that made my throat close. It was the thought of them out in the big, big world, flying across continents, and the disappointment and heartache that would surely await them. That, and the fact that I rather loved Mr. and Mrs. Martinelli.
“Come and see us! We’ll send you the address when we get settled!” Mr. Martinelli said. He slapped the hood of Rob’s Taxi, the same as he used to slap the Pleasure Way, which now was also owned by the people who had bought the house, the motorcyclist and his partner, Jayne, who sold her homemade jam at the Sunday market. I took the Martinellis’ picture, standing close together with their arms around the other’s waist.
Jeffrey and Jacob played with a half-pumped basketball in the street. One would toss it and it would fall with a splat at the other’s feet, causing them both to break into laughter.
“Pfffl,” Jacob said, making a farting noise with his mouth.
“Pfllll,” Jeffrey said, making a farting noise with his.
We hugged good-bye. I gave Mrs. Martinelli a kiss on her soft old cheek. Mr. Martinelli gave me a firm, hearty hug.
“Take care of the old neighborhood,” he said to me.
“Take care of each other,” I said.
The glass had been replaced in my window again, but I heard the sound through the screen as loudly as if the glass weren’t there at all. My mind must have been waiting for it, even in sleep. I looked at the clock—1:30 a.m. Hayden, and those matches.
I looked at him through my blinds, his solitary figure leaning against his truck door in the streetlight. The trees were whooshing around as if we might see a storm after days of dry heat. Purple clouds were inching across the sky. The air smelled as if it were thickening with rain.
The shame of that kiss kept me right where I was, behind the wall we’d built. Maybe he needed to be alone anyway.
I watched him for a moment as the wind picked up. It loosened some small leaves from the Martinellis’ tree, leaves that spun and tossed in the air, most landing on the ground, but one landing unnoticed in Hayden’s hair. It was cheery and sad and hopeful sitting there on his head, waiting to be seen and yet not being seen. The thing was, no matter what, I loved Hayden.
I tossed on my sweatshirt. I stepped carefully and quietly down the path to where he stood.
“The midnight hour,” he said to me.
“Yeah,” I said. “A leaf …”
I took it from his hair and handed it to him and he looked at it as if I’d given him something important.
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “I’ve missed my friend Scarlet.”
I thought I could cry. I leaned my own back against the truck beside him. I was glad to give him something, a leaf rescue, comfort, looking after—maybe just the presence of another person on a summer night when your heart was broken.
He blew smoke out upward to the sky. We both looked at the stars which were out and then gone as a cloud moved past.
I heard the flapping of the black plastic that covered the hole of the Saint Georges’ garage. I heard Clive Weaver’s television, keeping time with the flickering images behind his living room curtain. And then I heard something else. I thought I heard something else.
Hayden stood straight.
“Did you hear that too?” I said.
He nodded.
I didn’t want my heart to soar. I knew what would happen if we were wrong. It had been five days. We all knew what the likelihood was as each day passed, even though no one spoke it.
“Zeus?” Hayden called.
We listened. I strained my ears to hear again, please hear, please, what I thought I had. The jingling of tags.
“Zeus! Come here, boy!” Hayden was looking around, and so was I. Corky might have gotten loose. Clive Weaver might have left his back door open.
“Zeus!” Hayden cried. We heard it again; we did. “Zeus!” Hayden’s voice pleaded too.
“Zeus! Over here. Come here!” I called.
Please.
And then, like in a dream, like your best dream possible, like every hope you’ve ever had finally coming true, there he was. With his butterscotch fur and triangle ears, there he was, trotting around over by our back fence. Trotting around like it was any other day and he was any other dog.
“Zeus!”
I did start to cry then. I did. Hayden laughed out loud. I cried, and tears just streamed. Every piece of me was flying—with relief, with happiness. Something a hundred steps beyond happiness.
“Oh, thank God,” Hayden said. “Thank God he’s okay. Damn you, boy. Damn you for doing that bad thing. You stupid dog! Come here, you idiot.”
And Zeus did. He looked thin and scruffy and mangled, but he came right back to us with the weary joy of homecoming.
I was surprised to hear her voice.
“Reilly Ogden has been calling me endlessly,” Nicole said.
I didn’t answer. Our friendship seemed like something from a long time ago. Maybe it was me who wasn’t sure I wanted to be friends anymore.
“Are you there?” she said.
“Yeah.”
“He says he keeps having this bad feeling that something is wrong with you. He’s worried. He even went to your house.”
“He did?”
“Is something wrong with you?”
“Reilly Ogden has no business worrying about me.”
“He’s a freak, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.”
“I’m fine.”
“Kevin Frink blew up your neighbors’ garage. That’s reason to worry right there.”
She waited. But I didn’t do what I had done for the last weeks or the last years. I didn’t give, explain, plead, ask her to talk, or apologize. “Do you want to get together or something?” she said.
Images flashed—me carrying around her books all those months while she was in those casts. Me listening to every feeling she had had since the sixth grade, staying with her on the phone while she cried, even when I was tired, or when I had my own problems, or when there were other things I wanted to do. Giving, without any end point or boundaries or even the giving back that might make my own constant generosity justifiable. Maybe I should have just let her come into my house, my room, and take everything that belonged to me. That’s what I’d basically said—I’d said, Here. Take it all. “I don’t know, Nicole. I’m rethinking a lot of things right now.”
“Oh,” she said.
I stayed silent. I didn’t feel like giving anything anymore, even words. That’s what happens when you give too much. Suddenly you reach a point of over. You don’t even necessarily know that point is coming. It just arrives. It’s a long overdue passenger on a long overdue train, but finally it’s there.
“I saw Shy at the pool. He asked about you too. Everyone’s asking about you since you sort of … disappeared. He said I should tell you to give him a call if I saw you.”
Jesse, I thought. He had a name. “Great,” I said.
“You can’t make someone love you if they don’t.”
“Yeah. It’s too bad, the thing about people having their own free will,” I said.
She didn’t speak, and neither did I. There was only the infinite dark universe sound of open phone lines minus voices. I didn’t mind this. I hoped she felt a little of my pain, as un-nice as that was. That was the truth, is the truth, of nice people pressed too far. We could start to feel a little mean. A little angry. A lot angry. Anger stores up in there, whether you know it or not.
“Well, I guess I better go,” Nicole said.
“Yep,” I said, and I hung up without saying good-bye.
A week and a half had passed since the explosion, ten days. Kevin Frink and Fiona Saint George arrived back home in the rental car. I saw them go inside the Saint George house, and a few moments later, Officer Beaker showed up. Kevin Frink walked out beside him, Officer Beaker’s hand firmly on his arm. There were no handcuffs or sirens or any of the excitement you might see if it were a movie. In the true crime books, too, it was always more exciting. But Kevin Frink just walked out and got into the car, and that was that. Somewhere along the trip, we learned later, Fiona had told Kevin what she had told her parents from a phone booth in California. She hadn’t wanted any of this. She hadn’t wanted to go to California. She wanted to go to Yale. She hadn’t wanted to tell Kevin before; she’d been afraid to hurt his feelings.
Jitter was twenty-eight weeks old. He was two and a half pounds, and his head was likely down now, getting ready for the trip into the world. He could hiccup and blink and maybe even dream. He was doing all of these new things somewhere else, away from us. I missed Jitter, even if I didn’t miss Juliet.
I could tell something was in the air, change—I could feel it. It wasn’t just the clouds, although they had stayed around and then got heavier, bringing cool air and occasional drizzles from the waters of the straits. You heard people shutting their windows. Clive Weaver had a sweater on when he went to check his mail; he stood out on the street for a long time before Ally Pete-Robbins reminded him that it was Sunday.
There wasn’t any banging and clattering of moving and packing, but then again, he had come with very little. His boundless hope would have filled a thousand moving trucks, but Hayden’s actual belongings took up only the backpack that sat by the front door. The sonogram picture was missing from the refrigerator.
“What’s happening,” I said when I saw it was gone.
Mom sighed.
“I want to know what’s happening.”
“I think you know.”
Hayden himself appeared then. “Scarlet,” he said.
“You can’t leave.”
“Come on and walk me out.” He slung his bag over his shoulder. He hugged my mom and thanked her.
“This is wrong,” I said. I was getting more used to speaking my mind. I was ready for honesty in my life, because the lies had done no good. “Wrong.”
“Come on,” he said to me.
I walked outside with him. Zeus followed, as if this were a regular day and he was going off to work with Hayden at the docks. “You can’t do this,” I said.
Hayden called Zeus, kept one hand on his collar, led him to the car where he jumped into the passenger seat. Hayden shut Zeus safely inside. “After what we just went through with him … You lose something important once, and you’re so afraid it’s going to happen again.”
“We need you here,”
I said. He came back around to his side of the truck. I stood in front of him. You could smell the rain coming again.
“A person can’t just keep trying,” he said.
“You’re supposed to have hope. Everyone knows that. You know that.”
“I’m going to give you something,” he said. “Okay? It’s one of the most important things I have.”
I didn’t want something. I wanted him. I wanted him not to go. Ever.
He reached into his back pocket and took out his wallet. There, in a careful place, separated from the messy bills shoved inside, was a frail piece of lined white paper. He unfolded it carefully. He handed it to me.
“It’s something my mother wrote a long time ago. It’s a good map, when you need one.”
I saw the words, in Hayden’s mother’s own writing, not in his. If it was time for the truth, it was time for it all the way. “I saw this, Hayden. I saw it in a note you wrote to Juliet. The Five Rules of Maybe. And it says it right here. It says to have hope, it says to persist.”
“You saw that note? Oh God, I’m embarrassed.” He ran his hand through his hair. “Jesus.” He thought about this. “Look what I was doing! I didn’t even tell her the truth. See? I left off the most important one! I was trying to make her stay. Jesus,” he said again. “Look.”
He pointed at the paper in my hand.
The Six Rules of Maybe
1. Respect the power of hope and possibilities. Begin with belief. Hold on to it.
2. If you know where you want to go, you’re already halfway there. Know what you desire but, more importantly, why you desire it. Then go.
3. Hopes and dreams and heart’s desires require a clear path—get out of your own way.
4. Place hope carefully in your own hands and in the hands of others.
5. Persist, if necessary.
6. That said, most importantly—know when you’ve reached an end. Quit, give up, do it with courage. Giving up is not failing—it’s the chance to begin again.
“Six rules?” I said.
