by Deb Caletti
“You don’t want to keep doing what you’re doing? Change something. Change one thing,” Juliet said.
“Reilly Ogden,” I said.
She drove me over to Reilly’s house in Mom’s car. You’ve got to say what you mean and mean what you say, she had said. Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through. She waited in the driver’s seat and I saw that she was keeping her eye on me as I stood on his porch and rang the bell.
Reilly’s mother answered. She was a thick woman with tightly wound hair and she did not meet my eyes. She invited me in, but it wasn’t a real invitation. Reilly was her boy, you could tell.
“Well, it’s about time,” Reilly said.
“Reilly … ,” I said. I remembered Juliet’s words. Nice is shitty self-protection, Scarlet. You’ve got a right to say who you want and don’t want in your life. Selfishness isn’t always a bad thing, in spite of what you think.
“You didn’t mention my new contacts. They’re blue,” he said. He opened his eyes wide for me to peer into.
“I have something to say to you.”
“Come in,” he said. “We can talk in my room. My mother won’t mind.” He opened the door wider and I could see the edge of a recliner with a remote control on the arm. The sound of some war program from the History channel coming from the living room.
“No,” I said. “Here.”
He ignored me, stepped aside as if I’d come in anyway. He thought I’d do what he wanted because I’d never given him reason to think otherwise. You can collude with people like that, Juliet had said, whether you know it or not. Just by not saying no. “She’ll make us sandwiches if I ask.”
“Reilly, I want you to hear me. I want you to leave me alone. I don’t want you to talk to me or follow me or come near me at all. I don’t want to have anything to do with you and I never will. Never.”
“Scarlet,” he said, as if I were being unreasonable.
“Never. Leave me alone.”
A bad thing like selfishness could be a good one, and a good one, like kindness, could be bad. I needed both of those things, I understood, in careful measure. So I turned and went back to the car. I left the fried food smells and the recliner and the creepy basement and those blue contacts and I left the ways all of that might make me feel sorry for him. I turned my back on it, so that, finally, finally, I could look after myself.
The bedroom door was closed again, with just the two of them shut away behind it. I could hear intense, muffled voices, the sound of Juliet pleading her case. I thought I heard the word, but maybe I just hoped I had: Hayden.
I watched Mom when she came out. She didn’t see me, just went downstairs for the rest of the evening; she sat cross-legged on the floor in front of our coffee table, her scrapbook supplies in front of her. When I went downstairs myself, I saw her there. She had her scissors in her hand and a paper image, which she turned in a careful circle as she cut. She looked at the page, thought, glued. And then she set down her scissors and shut the book.
“Juliet’s leaving,” Mom told me the next morning. I stopped my spoon halfway to my mouth.
“What?”
Mom poured coffee into a cup. “I told her she needed to go back to Portland.”
I’d wanted her to lay down the law with Juliet for as long as I could remember. But not now. This wasn’t the time. This was the worst time possible. “You can’t do that,” I said. Juliet couldn’t leave now. She just couldn’t. We needed her. I needed her. Jitter, our Jitter, was going to be born in ten weeks. “She can’t leave.”
“It’s not okay to hide,” Mom said. “She’s got a husband she needs to face. Hayden loves her and that baby. The baby needs a father.”
“Why can’t he come back here?”
“We need to let them work this out on their own. Without us.”
I thought of Hayden, with his kind eyes and strong hands. I thought of his handwriting on a page and his firm grip on Zeus’s collar. I thought of him with that sonogram image; I imagined it tacked up nearby him somewhere, wherever he was now. I thought of Juliet, and Jitter. If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.
“I need to let her grow up,” Mom said.
Juliet was set to leave the next morning. I figured it was time, as good a time as any, for the end of the Make Hope and Possibilities Happen for Clive Weaver project.
I waited until it was dark. I gathered all of my supplies in a big garbage bag and went out the front door. I laid the bag on the sidewalk, let the treasures pour out.
I stuffed the mailbox first. I crammed so many letters in there, he’d have trouble getting them all out. I left the mailbox door open, let the letters pile up on the door itself, and then gather on the ground underneath in an enormous mound.
And then I went to his big tree. I tied crane upon crane—blue and yellow and pink and white, cranes made out of Yvonne Yolanda’s real estate flyers and clothing catalog, cranes made out of tire ads and mattress sales and coupons for extra-larges with everything. A dog barked and the Pete-Robbins’s light went on. I imagined Ally Pete-Robbins peeking at me through the slats in her blinds. But I didn’t care. I just filled that tree so that when he woke up, it would look like every good thing possible had happened.
I thought the cry I heard the next morning was one of pain, the sound of a heart ripping from a body, a howl of deep despair. Sobs, after that. The cries came from the front yard. I didn’t even have time to open my eyes and look before Mom yelled from downstairs. “Scarlet? Scarlet, come down! What did you do?”
My heart stopped. No, please, please, no. I imagined the worst, some disaster again, some terrible thing happening because I had wanted to do something good. I ran downstairs without looking out my window. Oh God, what now? Didn’t I ever learn? I heard Mom’s and Juliet’s excited voices. He was dead maybe. The shock had given him a heart attack and he was naked and dead on his lawn.
But when I got downstairs I saw Juliet at the front window in her robe and her sleepy face, and I saw Mom standing in the open front door. I heard the sound again, but the noise wasn’t what I thought.
“Look,” she said.
Mom pointed to what I already knew was there—the tree, full and bright and glorious in the morning light, shimmery with color and surprise, the mail pile as big as an enormous snowfall—and to what I didn’t know was there, Clive Weaver, bent in half, laughing. Laughing so, so hard. He stood straight, looked over at us, his hand in the air to indicate he couldn’t take the slightest bit more humor just yet. His feet were bare in the wet grass, and Corky ran back and forth in high-strung uncertainty.
I put my hand to my mouth. “Surprise, Clive Weaver!” I shouted. “Surprise for you!” My heart felt so big and wide. You could give and give until it hurt you, give without boundaries or self-protection or reciprocation, give out of fear, and it could leave you empty and depleted and even used. But you could also give out of something very simple—a pure desire—to be kind, and it could double and triple your own joy.
“It’s Christmas, Scarlet,” he said. “It’s goddamn Christmas!”
And that was the best possible outcome, I thought. Because if it was Christmas when you didn’t expect it, it was possible, just maybe possible, that it might be Christmas any day at all.
Chapter Twenty-eight
We would take Juliet to the ferry; that was the plan. She would get on, and Hayden would meet her on the other side. The reunion would be their business, and so would the car ride to Portland and their eventual settling into married student housing at the university. All of the letters he would write her from then on would be their business too. We hugged for a long time before Juliet walked onto the ferry. The four of us. Mom and me and Juliet and Jitter.
We watched her back disappear through the terminal doors.
“Well,” Mom said. That’s what a person said, after all, w
hen there was a big wide range of possibilities in their view, none of which they could truly do much about.
“Well,” I said.
Joe and Jim Nevins lifted the thick ropes from the dock pilings, and the huge white ferry eased away. Cars of tourists were already lined up for the next sailing out. That’s how it was in the summer on Parrish Island. People coming and then leaving. But there were always those few who would look around at the beauty of what we had and who would decide to stay always.
“I’ve got an idea,” Mom said. She had gotten a little too much sun the day before, and her shoulders were the kind of pink that stings a little.
“What kind of an idea?” I said. The ferry was getting smaller and smaller, almost toy boat–size. Seagulls were standing around looking aloof or were busy picking at dropped french fries or cigarette butts. The waters of the Sound were laid out in front of us, glittery in a way that was both mischievous and knowing. Mom looked a little that way herself.
“This is going to sound crazy, but I’ve been giving it some thought.” She stopped, as if she’d told me already and was waiting for my reaction. I wondered if this was the sort of news that people in the movies would have to sit down for.
“Okay,” I said.
“I thought we could visit the Martinellis in Africa. The two of us.”
I wanted to laugh. I did laugh. The thought of Mom and me in Africa seemed as silly as the idea of Mr. and Mrs. Martinelli there.
“I’m not kidding,” she said.
I thought about it, but I could only bring up some image of Mom and me in twin safari hats riding camels, which wasn’t even the right country.
“Listen, Scarlet. It’d be good for us. I’ve been here since I was a girl. I’ve spent my whole life here. I’ve got money saved. I’ve wished for things and never really had the chance… . It’s time to stop dreaming and do something about it. You’ve got to know what you want, then … go.”
I remembered the rule, number two. The paper was folded in my pocket. I had kept it near me since Hayden had put it in my hand. I remembered the last rule, too. Rule six. You let go, and then you start again.
I changed the image in my mind—Mom and me, in our regular clothes, walking down the wide shiny floor of an airport, boarding a huge plane that would take us somewhere with different smells and sounds and sights. Real postcards to Clive Weaver this time. I would need to read up on the Ivory Coast.
“Okay,” I said. I smiled.
“I really want to do this, Scarlet,” she said. “I always talk about it… .”
“So now we stop doing what we’ve always done,” I said.
The frame had been built for the Saint Georges’ garage, and the smell of sweet fresh-cut wood filled our street. The sounds of the construction workers’ radio, too. Well, I keep on thinkin’ ’bout you, sister golden hair surprise… . The motorcyclist next door was named Dennis, and Jeffrey and Jacob followed him around like he was God. It reminded me of the time the guy from the Grateful Dead, Jerry Garcia, came to the island, and all of the dads started wearing tie-dye and hanging around Hank’s—where Garcia had eaten lunch once—grabbing each other’s arms like fourteen-year-old girls whenever they saw him around town. Jacob found one of Ally Pete-Robbins’s bandannas and wore it tied around his head like Dennis did, and Jeffrey tied a shoelace around his neck with a silver gum wrapper hanging from it in some lame attempt to replicate the leather strand with a metal medallion that Dennis wore. I took their picture, arms around each other’s shoulders like tough guys, hung it on my wall with the others.
Nicole called me again, and I answered.
“I’m really sorry, Scarlet,” she said. “I was a shitty friend.”
“I’m sorry too.”
“I was wrong about Jesse.”
“Maybe we can start over,” I said.
“I hope so.”
“I cut my bangs too short a full month ago, and they still look horrible,” I said.
“You told me that cutting your own bangs was an act of self-loathing.”
“I did?”
“I’m sure they look way better than you think. You’ve got great hair, no matter what,” she said.
“I’m going to stop wearing the bag, then.”
“I’ve hated it without you,” Nicole said. “Things are going to be different from now on.” This was how it felt when you didn’t try so hard. When you didn’t control everything. Sometimes maybe it meant people came to you. It wasn’t only Nicole’s fault that she had taken and taken. It was mine that I hadn’t stopped it. I was the willing hostage, the same as Fiona Saint George.
At the end of August, Fiona Saint George left for school, giving me a shy wave through the car window. I heard Kevin Frink was moving away to be with his father somewhere in Florida after he was required to pay the Saint Georges a huge fine. Joe, the ice-cream man, came around less and less during that last week. Things were ending. The sun seemed different in a way you don’t have words for, and I knew that summer was really over. Things could slip away, I realized, and that’s when I went to Randall and Stein and picked out a book on Roman history and carried it in its green bag to the Parrish Island Pool.
Jesse Waters was right there in the ticket booth, not in the high lifeguard chair where I had imagined this scene taking place. So I got in line. I watched him. It was a moment that sat between before and after again; but when he looked up and saw me and he broke into a wide smile, after was right there, right then.
“Can you wait a couple of minutes?” he said. I nodded. I sat out on the hill of grass by the ticket booth, watching the little kids with towels around their necks and girl babies in frilly suits sitting in the crooks of their mothers’ arms. When Jesse came out, I gave him the book.
“You noticed?” he said. I nodded. I was the one who felt shy. We sat together and talked. I felt the crackle of energy between us. This was my own life, not Juliet’s, done in my own way, and I went toward it.
The conversation stopped. I didn’t want it to. What was your most embarrassing moment? I remembered Hayden that night, smoke lifting skyward. I tried again. I said it aloud. Jesse laughed.
“Oh God,” he groaned. “I don’t know if I can tell you this.”
“I promise I won’t tell anyone but a few thousand of my closest friends,” I said.
“Okay, but you’ve got to promise,” he said. I waited. He took my hand, turned it over, and traced my palm as if he were Bea Martinsen who read fortunes at the Sunday market. “Middle school,” he said.
“Oh no,” I said. Everyone knew that was the worst time for an embarrassing moment.
“Uh-huh. We had to write a poem.”
“Oh no.” I started to giggle.
“Had to hand it to a partner to read aloud to the entire class.”
“Oh God,” I said. I was giggling pretty hard.
He paused. “Instead of huge beast, I had written huge breast.”
“No!” I laughed loud and hard. He put an arm around my neck, pulled me close. It felt so good. Part of me lifted right up, like those dreams where you fly.
“You promised, right? Only a few thousand?”
We laughed together until we weren’t laughing anymore. I felt his warm breath on my face. He leaned in to kiss me. It was my own kiss, a right and truthful one. Soft and sweet and long—I couldn’t believe it and then I could. Just like that; it was easy.
On October sixteenth, at 2:35 in the morning, Tess Elizabeth Renfrew was born in a Portland hospital, with her father there to catch her. Mom and I arrived in Portland later that morning. It was the first time I had seen Hayden since he had left in his truck, and none of us could look at one another without our eyes filling. Jitter, now Tess, slept in a tight bundle in a plastic bed on wheels near Juliet. She had rosebud lips. When Hayden unwrapped her so that we could look, we saw her scrawny little chicken legs and tiny, tiny fingernails and arms that flailed at the sudden freedom. She wore a knit hat on her head, which Hayden pulled off carefu
lly so that we could see her funny sweet head with dark hair like Hayden’s.
“Beautiful, beautiful baby Tess,” he sang to her as he wrapped her back up tight. She made gritchy little sounds, and he beamed at us to see if we heard them too. Juliet looked tired, her tummy still round but deflated. She lay her head back on the pillows and smiled.
“Zeus is a big brother dog now,” I said. I still missed him.
“He can teach Tess her first words,” he said, caught my eye, and grinned. “We know he can actually talk. We know it.”
“Yeah, we do,” I said. “He can probably play the piano, too.”
Hayden laughed. “Sneaky canine bastard.” Tess—she was lucky to have him. Juliet, too. All of us were.
We held the baby package and smelled the top of her head and handed her back to Juliet, who seemed suddenly to know what to do. She held her baby like she was a Tess expert. She would hand the baby back to Hayden and he would take her. They were working it out, the two of them.
Mom and I rode back down the elevator a few hours later and found our car in the hospital parking garage. I didn’t want to leave Tess yet. The million pictures I took didn’t seem enough. I wanted to sneak her out the back door, hold her and hold her and hold her. But Mom said they needed time alone. We would come back again soon to visit. And we would come back again after our trip to the Ivory Coast, that we’d be taking during my mid-winter break. We had already gone to the passport office, filled out our forms, and had our photos taken. Every day we checked the mail for the small blue books with the gold seal that meant we could go anywhere.
We got into the car. It was evening, and an October evening too. That summer—a summer of love and detonations and leavings—I had learned that you could be so afraid of loss that you let hope take over, or else, made sure that it never saw the light of day. You had to manage hope. But that night the sky was clear and we had a new baby in our lives and the world had more hope than you had ever known it could hold. It was time for all the optimism in the universe then. All of it. So Mom did the only thing you can do, when you feel that full. When there is so much hope and so many possibilities. She rolled down the windows and turned the music up, loud. It was Neil Diamond, and we both sang along.
