Stay With Me

by Garret Freymann-Weyr

  They're big, red flag kinds of things.

  For example, it's suddenly impossible to care about stage sets. The drama club is putting on The Children's Hour for the Spring Arts Festival. I read the play several times last year and had been looking forward to building sets of the plush library and the grim sitting room that would be required. I had thought of a big bay window for the grandmother's house and narrow shuttered windows for the teachers accused of being lesbians.

  Now, I simply sit through crew meetings wondering why anyone would want to see this play. Can it be worth an entire evening? Even with three changes of scenery? And then suddenly, the deal an audience makes with the actors (where everyone pretends that what's happening is real) strikes me as silly. And a waste of time.

  "And I used to think it was so interesting," I say to Raphael. "The way the audience and the actors pretend different things for the same reason."

  "For the sake of the play," Raphael says. "Is that what you mean?"

  "Yes," I say. "That's exactly what I mean."

  "It sounds like you still think it's interesting," he says.

  "I guess," I say. "I just don't want to build these sets."

  "The Children's Hour is about more than a false accusation, right?" Raphael asks. "Isn't there a suicide at the end?"

  "Offstage," I say. "At the very end. The teacher who believes the lie the most. She blows her brains out."

  "That's what I thought," Raphael says. "Pass me that, will you?"

  We are making salad and I hand him the bowl of cucumber slices, and then—not immediately but after a bit—I put down the knife I am using to chop spinach.

  "Oh," I say. "Of course. She kills herself at the end."

  "Maybe it's not the right play for you just now," he says.

  I watch him make a couple of flower-shaped radishes.

  "Maybe not so much," I say.

  Raphael is staying with me for a few days. He and Clare have decided that when she's away for work, I go to Brooklyn. When she's away because Gyula's in town, Raphael comes to the apartment and sleeps in the living room.

  "She already feels bad about how much disruption you have," Raphael said when he explained who would go where, when, and why.

  I suspect that Clare feels guilty about how often she is away. Raphael says that she thinks I've had entirely too many people leave me recently. Since she can't prevent the travel for work, she thinks she shouldn't also leave to be with Gyula. I actually think that's the best reason of all. It seems fitting that Clare and Gyula should meet only in hotels or in what I imagine is his large and elegant Budapest apartment.

  "It's fun being at your place," I tried telling Raphael in an effort to go to Brooklyn when my sister is with her boyfriend. "I like it."

  And I do. Raphael is still fixing up his third floor and I love how there's a bathroom with no floor or shower and two rooms littered with sawdust and tools. Although, I have to say that when Raphael is at Clare's, his presence removes how much Rebecca still lingers in the apartment. Seeing his shaving stuff in the bathroom makes me happy. But guilty too. That he's had to pack it all up and bring it here.

  "Clare's life with Gyula is already complicated," Raphael said when I asked again if he didn't think I should come to Brooklyn. "It's easier for her if I am the one moving around. That way she doesn't have to feel she's putting you out of your bed."

  I've already put Clare out of her bed. I looked at Raphael, waiting for him to make some sense.

  "So to speak," he said.

  Okay, then. "Well, she's putting you out of yours," I said.

  "In her mind, she still owes you," he told me.

  From things they've both said, I know that Clare views herself as having been the worst sister. Ever. She thinks she clearly failed Rebecca in some way. And that, until now, she avoided me entirely too much. I haven't found a way to tell her that I admired her for being both distant and polite. And that I had avoided her too.

  "She doesn't owe me a thing," I told Raphael.

  "Well, she's more used to my doing things for her," he added. "Don't worry, Leila. This is easy for me. And a pleasure."

  Raphael is thoughtful in a way that the words completely and totally fail to describe. His thoughtfulness is thorough (a word with a spelling I always have to double-check and will never trust). I wonder if Clare ever thinks about what she does, in fact, owe him. More than I owe him for pointing out how a play about a suicide isn't going to inspire me to build its sets.

  In early March, during Clare's third or fourth business trip, I finally ask Raphael if he's one of the people Rebecca saw during the weeks before she did it.

  "I'm not sure," he says. "We had lunch, but that wasn't so unusual."

  I tell him how I wasn't one of the people, but that she did say goodbye. I give him a version of seeing her through a window at Acca without mentioning anything about how I will one day sit in a café with a book I like and, possibly, a great love.

  "So I sort of saw her," I say. "Maybe she meant for me to think that."

  "That's probably right," Raphael says. "And in a way it's nicer not being one of the people she saw ... before she did it."

  "How's it nicer?" I ask him.

  "You're one of the people she couldn't bring herself to say goodbye to," he says.

  This is, as usual, really sweet of Raphael. But totally unbelievable. Rebecca took time to have lunch with him and he's surely someone it was hard for her to see one last time. Harder than seeing me would have been. Unless he's right and they had lunch because they often did. Not because she had to see him one last time.

  If I knew who that was at Acca with her, I'd know something more. I'm not sure what exactly, but I'm certain it's important. Not necessarily the reason behind her death, but part of it.

  "Why do you think she did it?" I ask Raphael. "I mean, do you know her reason?"

  He's quiet for a while. I'm supposed to be doing homework and he's made a fire in the living room to make it less unpleasant. The deal at his house is I do homework for two hours and then I can watch half an hour of television. At home, I'm not allowed to watch at all—my mother believes TV will make me flunk out of school. Having a television, along with the equally forbidden Instant Messaging, has never seemed worth the argument.

  Clare has a small TV that she uses to watch the news and, also, movies when she can't sleep. I do watch at friends' houses, of course, but the half-hour of anything I want on Raphael's wide, thin TV is still a thrill for me. As I flip through my math notes, I hope I haven't asked him something he doesn't want to think about.

  "It would be nice if she'd had a specific reason," Raphael says. "Because otherwise one of us missed a chance to see that she was slipping away."

  "Da and Clare act like her killing herself was in her personality or something."

  "They're not wrong," Raphael says. "But what makes this time hard is how well she hid what she was doing."

  What makes this time hard is that it worked. She died.

  "She hid it all," he says. "And yet everything was there for us to see after the fact."

  "What was there?" I ask.

  Did he get a note I don't know about?

  "She met with her lawyer, closed an account at the bank, and saw a lot of people," Raphael says. "But we didn't know how all the pieces would add up."

  Rebecca's plan. The thing we all examine and stare at like a piece of modern art. What does it mean? What on earth does it mean? This is not a fun question outside of a museum.

  "But who makes a plan without a reason?" I ask.

  "I don't know," he says.

  "There has to have been a reason. A good reason," I say. "And we're not seeing it. The way we didn't see obvious signs of her plan."

  "Maybe," he says.

  I suppose I was hoping Raphael would have an idea about how to start discovering Rebecca's reason. Or that he would know something I couldn't begin to guess. I go back to math, wishing for the umpteenth time that algebra didn't in
volve quite so many word problems. It's worse than physics.

  When my two hours are up, Raphael puts down the journal he's been reading and asks, "What's your pick tonight?"

  I like repeats of old black-and-white TV shows and Raphael likes a fake news show, but I don't get half of what makes it funny.

  "You can decide," I say.

  "Leila, about signs," he says. "And why Rebecca did it."

  He pauses as if to consider what he wants to say.

  "Often the very things we think of as signs are simply the things that we wish were true."

  "And that makes them fake?" I ask.

  "No, because what we wish for is real," he says. "But what they lead us to is, at best, unreliable."

  "And at worst?"

  He smiles. "That probably depends on what we're wishing for."

  Based on what I can tell, Raphael's wish isn't, as family rumor says, to love my sister. It's to keep Clare safe from any and all harm. His desire to protect her is almost something you can touch. I wonder what unreliable things he sees, and how he knows which ones to trust.

  If I want to uncover Rebecca's hidden story, then I need to follow the signs she's left. The unreliable as well as the true. I'll start with the man I saw when my sister was still alive. He's also been left behind and could possibly be a sign. If he's a fake one, at least it's a place to begin.

  Ten

  REBECCA KEPT A DATEBOOK, which now sits on her desk, next to her laptop. She called it my boss. In it was her schedule, reminder notes, and lists. It's my initial idea to go through this book, looking for the name of the man I last saw my sister with.

  Da and Clare (and probably the police) have been all over Rebecca's computer and file cabinets. And they used her address book, which Rebecca had had since college, to notify friends. If they went through her datebook, it wouldn't have been because they were looking for this man whose name I don't know.

  Other than information I don't have, I'm not sure what I'm looking for. But I'm convinced I'll know it when it finds me. I open the datebook and flip immediately to October. I see my tutor on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I'm looking for a day late enough in October for it to have been dark by five.

  I scan through the Tuesdays and Thursdays, and bang, there it is. October 23. In Rebecca's small, square-shaped handwriting: Order #7674 pick up. Eyebrows. Check flour stats. 4:00 w/ T. Caffé Acca. Lettuce for C.

  T. That's not overly helpful. I pick up Rebecca's address book and almost scream when some pages fall out from the ancient binding. The book's not well organized—Raphael, for example, is under C (for cousin?)—and there are thirty-one people in the T section. Even if I knew what to say, I don't think I could place thirty-one phone calls to strangers. I put the datebook and address book back in their places. Then I sit on Rebecca's bed, asking whatever is left of her to forgive me for trespassing. And to let me know, if she can, how to find T.

  I've been putting off quitting the tech crew. It will upset my parents, especially if I have to explain how I've reduced The Children's Hour, a play considered a political masterpiece (I've looked it up; this is the agreed-on opinion), to a reminder of Rebecca's death. Not to mention, how will it look to colleges?

  How I will look to colleges is a question that has been stalking me since the end of tenth grade. Except that I need another four years to figure out what it is I want to do in the theater, I don't care about college so much. It matters a lot to my father, though. I only hope that the college I wind up liking is a place he thinks is good. Clare's college—a small, ruthlessly competitive place in Pennsylvania that made Da very proud of her—is not an option for me.

  "No one expects you to go there," Clare says.

  "Maybe no one expects it," I say. "But Da would love it if I got in."

  "I wouldn't love it," she says. "I was hideously miserable there."

  This is Clare's favorite thing to say about herself. Hideously miserable in college. Loved law school, but hideously miserable during her two years at the law firm. Madly in love with Elias (the vile example of humanity she lived with) until the last eight months of their relationship. Hideously miserable until Gyula found her. And, then, Oh, joy.

  While hideously miserable is pretty easy to figure out, Clare means different things when she says Oh, joy. Ben, who spends just enough time with us to notice certain details, thinks it's always the opposite. That-Clare means What misery. But I think it's more along the lines of Janie's comment about being blonde: joy's not all it's cracked up to be.

  "How about a job?" Clare asks when I explain the trouble I'm having quitting the tech crew.

  She'd been in complete agreement with Raphael that it was the wrong time for me to work on this play.

  "A job," I say, trying to picture it. "I guess."

  "I mean a fun job. One you'd like instead of one that will look good."

  "What about Da?" I ask.

  "I don't think he knows a lot of fun jobs," Clare says. "God, one year, he got Rebecca and me jobs in the hospital's processing department. I've never willingly filed since."

  So it's lucky she has both a secretary and a research assistant.

  "No, what do I tell Da," I say. "About quitting."

  "You could not tell him," she says. "Although that might make it seem like we're hiding something."

  Clare taps her glasses with her pen, a habit that can make Gyula grab her wrist. He says her eyes are the best way he has of guessing her thoughts. So, please, do not have the risk to poke them out.

  "Without your eyes," he said, "I will not know that you are happy to see me."

  Clare considered Gyula and I saw what he meant. Her face had a composed, neutral look, but there was, behind seemingly calm eyes, a building laugh.

  "You're always free to ask," Clare said.

  "She's happy," I said, before remembering that Raphael had called my sister's life with Gyula complicated. I should probably stay out of it.

  "Yes, it is so," Gyula said. "I know, but I like to see it."

  And then Clare did smile at him and I wondered why Rebecca hadn't liked him. Watching Clare and Gyula was like seeing a man who didn't know quite what to do with his most treasured possession. Together they reminded me of a chandelier. One where the crystals and silver are so intricately arranged that you think pretty but also, how is that possible.

  My sister stops her forbidden glasses-tapping and says to me,

  "You get a job first, a fun job, and then we'll tell Da."

  Tell him after the fact. He can't worry or object. Pretty clever.

  "A fun job," I repeat and then, not very seriously, ask, "Can I go to work for a construction crew?"

  "No, union rules are a nightmare in the city," says my ever practical sister, the lawyer. "Why don't you call your boss from last summer? The restaurant manager. Rebecca said they loved you there."

  I got my job at Gaveston's last summer because Rebecca knew the owner. My sister made me work for her at the store before she would vouch for me. She wanted to make sure I could take an order, be polite to strangers, and handle a cash flow.

  "She told you that I worked at Gaveston's?" I ask.

  "She talked about you," Clare says. "It's only me who was the bad sister."

  "That's not true," I say, finally contradicting this belief of hers. "I never thought of it like that."

  "The famous big heart," Clare says, smiling. "Make your call, and if that doesn't pan out, I'll see what I can turn up."

  I call my old boss, who says there's no room on the schedule for part-time help, but that a friend of his at Caffe Acca ("Downtown, on one of those tiny streets, do you know it?") is looking for someone to cover split shifts.

  "It's what he gets for hiring actors," Greg says. "Professionals and students, I told him. It's the only way to go. Have him call me and I'll sing you to the heavens."

  "Thanks," I say, in a fog of disbelief and shock.

  Here's a big red flag that even I can see. If I get this job, I could find T. Mayb
e he lives nearby. Maybe he always has coffee at Acca. Maybe if I worked there, I'd see him when he comes in. Bring his order and ask him who he was to my sister.

  I arrange for an interview.

  Hal Kranem, who is the kind of skinny that makes you think of a chain smoker, has three questions mostly relating to my schedule. Yes, I could do the four-to-seven split, three days a week. Yes, if I had to I could stay later. Yes, if he needs me, I could come in an hour late on the two days I get tutored. Rebecca once said that working in a restaurant is like joining a religion: total submission goes far toward gaining glory. Yes, I tell Hal, I do know Caffe Acca will lose its liquor license if a minor is caught serving drinks.

  "I can take the order," I say. "But I can't bring it to the table."

  "Or clear it," he says.

  That's new, I think, hoping I'll be able to keep a regular coffee cup straight from an Irish coffee one.

  "Or clear it," I say.

  "Greg loved you," Hal says. "When can you start?"

  I leave his small office almost convinced that my sister is still alive and working to shape my life. It's silly, I know, because I clearly owe this job to Greg, but I owed working for him to Rebecca. Maybe this is what people mean when they talk about feeling a hand touch them from beyond the grave.

  Ben's not too happy with my sudden departure from the tech crew. He wants to know if it's because of him. More specifically, some other him.

  "Are you dating somebody?"

  I can't believe he's serious, but he is. The amount of time we spend together, which seems like a lot to me, seems like hardly ever to Ben.

  "No, of course not," I say. "No."

  My inability to work on this play feels private. While Ben used to be the first person who heard what was important and/or private, he isn't anymore. No matter how much I might wish otherwise. My living with Clare and Raphael, who are also consumed with Rebecca's memory, has made it impossible to even pretend that things are the same.