The Six Rules of Maybe

by Deb Caletti

  “My mother firmly believed that misguided persistence got us into more trouble than none at all.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Hope, for all its fine qualities, can be a serious problem.”

  “No,” I said again.

  “Maybe nice people don’t have to be doomed. Maybe they can save themselves.”

  “Hayden, please.”

  “Keep this for me,” he said.

  I closed it tight in my hand. He held my arms and looked at me, and then he brought me to him. I could feel his heart beating in his chest, could smell the clean cotton of his soft green T-shirt. I pulled away, met his eyes. He brought me to him again, and I only felt his lips on my forehead.

  “I will always want the best for you,” he said.

  It was Juliet he loved, Juliet he wanted, Juliet that his heart was full of—as unfair as that seemed, as unworthy as she was, there was another truth besides mine, and that’s the way it was. All the will and desire in the world couldn’t change the facts of a person’s heart. Hope was a beacon but it also had the strength of a bully.

  Hayden got into the truck, slammed the door. He leaned out the window. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for me, Miss Scarlet,” he said.

  There’s that moment before your heart is about to break, when it rushes forward in your chest as if to plead, please, please, don’t. My body felt all heart, so much so that I could barely breathe. Please, I wanted to cry, but no sound came out, my heart was in my throat, too. I could be destroyed right there if he were to turn that key and go.

  But he did turn that key. Over the sound of the truck’s engine, he said, “Tell that fucking ice-cream man to get another job already,” but his voice was cracked and his eyes teary.

  Hayden’s truck wasn’t going to go, wouldn’t, couldn’t back out of that driveway, but it did. It did; it backed out and drove forward down our street. Hayden gave a wave of good-bye out the window, and a loss so great overtook me, sucked me up; I could feel something ripping inside me—grief, loosening its tight hold. The loss was so huge it was bigger than Hayden even, bigger than one human could account for, bigger than every disappointment and every separation, big enough for my father, finally, because at its center was the most hollow and lonely abandonment—long, empty stretches of it, of aloneness, of being left behind by someone bigger than you who filled you, whom you had hoped, hoped, hoped was solid enough to make you feel safe.

  I saw Zeus’s sweet head in the passenger seat disappear as they turned the corner. We didn’t even get to say good-bye.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Juliet returned that very afternoon, as soon as she had called home and found out from our mother that Hayden was gone. She’d used up the last part of her last check from the Grosvenor Hotel, staying in the Tide Away Inn in Anacortes, just on the other side of the ferry.

  I didn’t want to look at her shiny blond hair and her large stomach where she was supposed to be keeping our baby safe. She moved back up to her old room, where I could hear her moving around, settling clothes into her old drawers, putting things back on the dresser where they’d always been. We would sleep right next door to each other, pass each other on the way to and from breakfast and dinner, but I would avoid her. Her presence reminded me of what, who, wasn’t there. It reminded me of what she’d already taken from Jitter. If Hayden was goodness, she was badness and the reason goodness was gone. Juliet felt like the worst kind of intruder, like the one we had let in instead of Hayden, the one who had finally decided to set a match to our house.

  Mom seemed to go on like she had before, working and tending to Juliet, making sure she ate and napped, putting her hands on either side of Juliet’s great belly and watching the rolls of Jitter’s round heel or elbow. But something had changed. Mom was more wary with Juliet; she kept her distance and watched, the way you watch something that you’re unsure of from a slight way off.

  The neighborhood felt colorless, and my sadness made everything feel slow and heavy and without purpose. We didn’t see much of the new neighbors; we only heard the motorcycle rev up and leave to go to work and only smelled the smell of blackberries cooking on a stove and warm wax. I didn’t call Jesse or Nicole or Jasmine or anyone else, and I worked at Quill only two days out of those weeks. I was in the self-imposed exile of sorrow and didn’t feel the energy for anything but the back lawn chair and magazines. I didn’t take pictures, didn’t want to capture anything. My psychology books seemed too much, even—too much understanding and no understanding, too many answers and no real answers.

  I went to Point Perpetua one afternoon. I sat on my rock with the clouds lying low over the sea in front of me. I opened the green bag from Jesse, took out the book with its shiny cover and new-book smell. I opened it to the center and stuck my nose in and took a long sniff. I looked at the words at random. It felt thick and complicated and maybe more like the sort of book you think you should like more than you actually do.

  I started the first chapter.

  In the following pages, I shall demonstrate that there is a psychological technique which makes it possible to interpret dreams….

  I liked the idea of a technique, a process, a series of steps for figuring out things and people. I needed some answer to all of the loose puzzle pieces in my mind and heart. I would have to try to put more faith in the idea of a subconscious, though, that supposedly murky land that existed behind a secret door of the mind. Maybe I just didn’t want to believe that there were things I kept even from myself.

  I read for a while, and then I rested and watched the beach that I loved. A man was trying to surf on a white board; there was a family made up of two couples, an assortment of kids, and grandma with her jeans rolled up. There was a father on his knees in the sand too, with a large sand castle taking shape in front of him. His back was curved with effort, and his arms reached to pat and build as his little daughter in a frilly bottomed bathing suit ran to fetch more seawater. The grandma in jeans bent down to choose a rock; a few seagulls on a blank stretch of sand were having a seagull conference with poor attendance. In all of it I could only feel Hayden’s absence.

  That night, Mom tried to barbecue hamburgers for us all; she was terrible at barbecuing, she always had been. We always teased her about the time she had cremated a pack of hot dogs. I watched her humming and trying her best with the smoke swirling around her. I pictured Hayden there with us, doing the job Mom wasn’t so good at, wearing one of Mom’s old striped aprons over his favorite green shirt and cargo shorts. I pictured him as a father, his and Juliet’s baby, all of our baby, tucked in a front pack next to him, but never, ever near the smoke or the fire. I pictured him holding the baby in the crook of his arm, pictured him warning a small child away from the hot metal. He would cut the meat into tiny bits. He would make sure she did not sit too close to the tipping end of the lawn chair.

  That night I dreamed again, with the cool air coming through my screen. I was small, and I was at the beach. I held a bucket of water in sandy hands. I was running toward a sand castle and caught my toe on a hump of driftwood. I started to fling forward, but was caught by the strong hand of my father. He was wearing a soft green T-shirt.

  I woke up in shock. Even if you didn’t believe in the subconscious, maybe it still believed in you.

  I sat upright in my bed, and right then I felt like everyone all at once—me right now; me a long time ago; my mother years ago, losing the man she loved; Jitter, even, adrift and fatherless. Know what you desire but, more importantly, why you desire it. That why was where the trick lay, I realized. Why was a land of trapdoors and hidden places, trees and rocks that looked like one thing, but were actually another.

  I was taking out the garbage when I saw Ally Pete-Robbins’s Acura driving up our street with Clive Weaver in the passenger seat. She stopped in front of our house and rolled down the window.

  “I found him at the ferry terminal, sitting on the bench,” she said. “I thought he had a suitcase
on his knees, but it was an old clarinet case.”

  “Mary played the clarinet in the high school band,” Clive Weaver told me from the next seat. “She was very good, too. She had a gift, you might say.”

  “I would have liked to hear her play,” I said. I still cared very much about Clive Weaver. That was one thing that did matter to me, and I remembered that then.

  “We’re going to get settled back in,” Ally Pete-Robbins said. The window slid back up and they drove home, but that evening, I collected credit card applications and catalog and discount oil change flyers from the recycling bin. I got serious about it. It would take him days and days to open all the mail. I changed the recipients’ addresses from ours to Clive Weaver’s. I wrote more letters on pieces of perfumed stationery that Mom had gotten from Quill.

  Dear Mr. Weaver—

  I hope this finds you well. My husband, Roger Woodruff, and I have returned from the South of France, where we lived for several months. The mail service there was dreadful. I had to write and tell you, as I recalled then your fine service to our home every day for twenty-five years. You are an inspiration, and the French have a lot to learn from the US Post Office and the respected members within it.

  Sincerely,

  Doris Woodruff

  Dear Mr. Weaver—

  I am writing to thank you for the example you set while being our mail carrier while we lived on your route. My son, John Roberts, has decided to join your profession, and I have no doubt it was because of the role model you were without even being aware of it.

  Deepest Gratitude,

  Charlotte Roberts

  Mr. Weaver—

  I am sorry you have been sad. I want you to know, though, that I think you are a fine man, and having you as a neighbor all these years has been really great. Corky, too.

  Love,

  Scarlet Ellis

  Our own first letter from the Martinellis arrived at the beginning of August. Mom waved the envelope at me.

  “You’ll never guess who this is from,” she said.

  I took it from her, looked at the stamps. “Africa,” I said.

  “I’m afraid to look,” she said.

  “They need money. They’re stranded.”

  “I can’t stand it. Open it,” she said.

  I tore open the thin airmail envelope. Mrs. Martinelli’s brittle-thin handwriting filled two pages. I read a little. “Oh God,” I said.

  Mom sat beside me on the lawn chair. “Come on! What?”

  I laughed. “Oh my God. You’re never going to believe this.”

  Dear Annabeth and Scarlet,

  Although it has been an eventful few weeks, Mr. Martinelli and I are finally getting settled at our cocoa plantation, which we have named La Nouvelle Vie, or, new life, in French, the official language here. Our journey was a long one—Mr. Martinelli had his luggage stolen in Marrakech by two thieves posing as rug merchants. We set out after them in a speeding taxi and a ruckus ensued, and this series of events led us to be escorted out of the city by our new friend, the chief constable Mumbao Reynaulds, who we have come to call fondly Burt Reynolds, at his kind suggestion.

  The letter went on. Morin Jude must have met a terrible fate—she never showed at their meeting in Abidjan. No one seemed to have heard of her, until Mr. Martinelli bribed two government officials to speak. They were then put in contact with an individual from a remote village. A hundred dollars exchanged hands, and that’s when they were finally brought to an abandoned plantation and left, holding only the keys to their new home.

  “Can you imagine how much a hundred dollars is to a village like that?” Mom said.

  “They traveled across the world to buy an abandoned plantation for a hundred bucks. Do they know?”

  “Does it matter?” Mom said. Her eyes danced.

  “Not at all,” I said. It was the happiest I’d felt in a long time.

  “What a thrill, huh, Scarlet? What a thrill.”

  The day that the Martinellis’ first letter arrived, construction began on the Saint Georges’ garage. I recognized the voices of the men and their music. Hits of the seventies. Midnight at the o-a-sis … Send your camel to be-ed… . There was always reconstruction going on somewhere. Things that came apart were put together again, never exactly the same.

  I had another dream that night. I dreamed Juliet and I were rolling down a grass hill, rolling and laughing, and when we got to the bottom, there were two sets of hands to lift us up, Mom’s hands, and a man’s, too. There was ice cream, and then things went bad. Juliet was crying and reaching out her arms and Mom was crying and there was a red car driving away, and we stood huddled together and Mom was calling and calling a name.

  That next morning, I felt a sadness so pure I could almost hold it in my hands. It had risen to the surface sharp and clear enough that it felt real. I remembered Juliet beside me in the dream. A feeling of us bonded, sisters, the two of us against all things, against the bad stuff around us. Juliet and me, together.

  She was still sleeping when I went into her room. There was no butterfly candleholder on her night stand anymore, no trace of Buddy Wilkes. She’d been reading my book What to Expect When You’re Expecting, which she’d snitched back from my room and now lay on her floor. One of Hayden’s notes stuck out from the end, used as a bookmark. I shook her shoulder.

  She sighed awake, rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?” she said.

  “Just eight,” I said.

  “For God’s sake, Scarlet. I need my rest.” She rolled away from me. I spoke to the back of her head and the curve of her shoulders. I told her about the dream.

  “Am I remembering this or not?” I said.

  “You’re remembering this,” she said. Her voice was tired.

  I thought of Hayden’s note. I will not leave you like you’ve been left before. I had thought he meant some boyfriend I didn’t know about. Maybe Hayden had been more right about Juliet all long. “Our father is the one who left you,” I said.

  She didn’t know what I meant. “He left you, too.”

  “I didn’t think I remembered anything,” I said. I was still talking to her shoulders.

  “It’s too deep in to ever forget,” she said.

  “What do I do now?” I said. “I liked it better when I didn’t know I knew. When I just thought it was something forgotten.”

  “I think you’re asking the wrong person for advice,” she said.

  I stayed there, kneeling beside her bed. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted from her, or even if she could give it. Finally, she rolled over again and looked at me. “Look, Scarlet, you’ll go on doing what you’ve always done—you’ll make yourself so necessary that no one’ll ever leave you. Or else, you’ll stop. And I’ll keep making sure no one’ll ever leave me by keeping people away. Or else, I’ll stop. Pretty much, that’s all we’ve got as far as choices. You do what you do until you don’t do it anymore.”

  It took me a moment to take this in. When it settled inside and found its place, I realized that she was right. Things can look suddenly different, things you’ve seen every day of your life, like when there’s a snowfall and everything that had always been there before looks new. Or when someone who’s been only thinking things finally speaks them. I could give you my theories on everyone—on why my mother was with Dean Neuhaus, on why my sister wanted Buddy Wilkes or why she ended up pregnant. I could tell you why Nicole had self-esteem issues, or why Kevin Frink blew up that garage. But I never could have explained why I kept so close to other people’s business and so far from my own. Not the reason at the heart of things.

  The truth struck.

  “You love Hayden,” I said.

  “It’s that simple,” she said. “And that complicated.”

  “Jitter is yours and Hayden’s and you love them both.”

  “More than I know what to do with.”

  I leaned over and hugged her then, and she pulled me toward her, up beside her on the bed, her round belly against my
back, and we lay like that for a while, sisters together, just like a long time ago.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  The second letter came from the Martinellis.

  Dear Annabeth and Scarlet—

  The cocoa plants were not cocoa plants at all, and the villa was in terrible disrepair, but neither of us has ever been afraid of hard work….

  And then a third….

  Dear Annabeth and Scarlet—

  We love it here. We hope you’ll come and visit….

  I spent more time with Juliet. I went with her and Mom to see Dr. Crosby, to hear the baby’s heartbeat for myself, to see how Jitter was coming along. As the weather got hotter and she got rounder, she craved lemons and lemonade, and I would bring her frosty glasses and we would sit and talk about baby names and about the time when I was three and stuck a LEGO up my nose, and about the time Juliet was six and locked us and our babysitter outside the house. I learned things about her. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stand the pain of labor or wouldn’t be able to soothe the baby, and she hated that she looked like our father and not our mother, and she once had tried to get Gregory Hawthorne, our middle school algebra teacher, to kiss her. I would put my face right close to Jitter and I would say things like, “Listen, you stay in there until you’re good and ready” and “We can’t wait to kiss your baby neck.” I took Juliet’s picture sideways, and she would hold her dress down as flat as possible to show off Jitter in his best light.

  Something else happened during those weeks, as summer started to close up shop and pull out fall, turning the edges of leaves orange, turning down the night temperatures, getting the display ready same as the drugstore dragging out all of the stuff for the next holiday. My love for Hayden turned into another kind of love, pieces that were there all along though I hadn’t recognized it. A love for Jitter. The desire for Jitter to have something important that I never had. Hayden was right—the list was harder than it seemed. To know why you wanted something, why you desired a person, the real reasons why, the behind-the-reasons reasons … It could be thorny and layered, the answers hiding in the shadows, submerged even, in some depths too far out of your view. Every night I wished for it under the sky of paper cranes. Let Jitter have Hayden. Let Jitter have this good father.