Stay With Me

by Garret Freymann-Weyr

  "There's no point in finding him," I say. "Until I know what to ask. I don't even know what I want him to tell me."

  "Well, I've never heard of him and he wasn't at her wedding or the memorial service," Clare says. "So I don't know what he can tell you."

  That I don't know either is exactly why it feels so important. I tell Clare about signs and how they make us see what we wish. I say that I wish more than anything that I knew Rebecca better. I amend that with,

  "Had known her. For longer or more or closer."

  "I think we all wish that impossible wish," Clare says. "But signs are important. We need them. I need them."

  "When do you ever need them?" I ask, thinking that when it comes to family facts and secrets she knows most of what I wish I did.

  "Well, when you came over on New Year's, you went right to the hotel photographs," Clare says. "I decided that meant you knew what mattered. You were a true Abranel."

  I knew they mattered to Da, which is probably why they matter to Clare. For me, they are one more thing that belongs to someone else's story.

  "Right then I stopped being nervous," she says. "I knew we would be okay together."

  I hadn't thought that Clare was nervous about living with me, but it makes sense. I was as strange to her as she was to me. It's funny what she took as a sign, though. The way I remember that day, she's the one who pointed me in the direction of the lost hotel pictures. I didn't approach the photos on my own, even if Clare remembers it that way.

  Exactly why have I decided that Adrien Tilden holds the answers? Because I saw him with my sister? That's not much to go on. Kind of an indirect route to information.

  I talked to Eamon because he was sitting at a table near one where Rebecca had been. Look how well that turned out. Now I have another person to miss. Maybe Adrien Tilden is only a sign that it's time for me to know something of my own.

  Directly.

  Normally I make every effort to steer clear of the whole topic of what has brought me to live with Clare this year. We can easily discuss Rebecca, but not the pills. I will never know a thing if I continue to rely only on what I hear from other people. I count to three. No bravery. Four, five.

  "You and Da don't think she had a reason," I say. "Something that made her do it."

  My sister takes her barrette out, rearranges her hair, and resnaps the clip.

  "I don't think she had a good reason," Clare says.

  "I don't mean a reason that excuses," I say. "I mean one that explains."

  "Look, Leila, I think it's okay if you and I don't agree about ... about what can be explained."

  "So you don't think I'm wrong?" I ask. "Wrong to think that it wasn't just because she was sick."

  I don't like the word depressed. It's ugly-sounding and if depression kills you then sick seems more accurate.

  "I think ... I think it's such a mess," Clare says.

  She gets up off the couch, disappears into the kitchen, and comes back with a bottle of water and a plate of cookies.

  "I think we each get to decide what happened," Clare says. "My thinking there was no one reason isn't any better than your wishing you knew that one exact thing."

  A statement that will need careful examination before I decide if it's true. I ask Clare if she will help me, when I decide the time is right, to write a letter to Adrien Tilden.

  "Of course," she says. "But I don't imagine you would need it."

  "Da sends my letters back corrected," I say.

  Clare makes a laughing-snort type of sound and water comes out of her nose.

  "Is he still using green ink?" she asks.

  "Yes," I say, glad to hear he did it to them too.

  "I thought Mama beat that out of him," Clare says.

  "I guess not," I say.

  "When you go out into the world," Clare tells me, "no one you meet will have had a father as oddly interesting as ours. That will make up for some of what he does."

  "He is what he is," I say, not meaning to quote Rebecca but knowing this is what she would say if she were sitting here on the couch with us.

  "God, is that true," Clare says. "Did he ever read to you at night?"

  "Fairy tales," I Say. "The originals. Where Cinderella's sisters cut—"

  "You mean hacked," Clare says. "Hacked their heels off to fit into the slipper."

  "All that blood," I say. "I had horrible dreams."

  "We did too," she says. "Mama finally hid the book."

  Clearly not well enough, although I'm glad that by simply being himself Da gave me something to share with Julian and Janie's daughters.

  "I'll miss you," I say to Clare. "When I'm in Poland."

  "You don't have to say that," she says.

  "I know," I say. "But I will."

  "It'll be empty here without you," she says. "You've made so much of this easier."

  Rebecca has faded from the room, taking Adrien Tilden and Eamon with her. From the living room windows, we can see lights glowing across the Hudson. Clare taps her pen against her glasses and I draw my knees up under my chin.

  Eventually, one of us will get up.

  I have exams, after all, and Clare, as she does every night, has to wash her face, make up her bed, put her papers away, and drink a glass of water. At some point this summer, I will write to Adrien Tilden. She may end up believing that we can't, in fact, each decide what happened to Rebecca. Especially if those versions contradict one another. But until then, we're together. Not the same—never to be the same—but it's enough that we're each still here.

  Nineteen

  AT ACCA, HAL ASKS ME what I did to scare off Eamon. Only he calls him that guy who liked you.

  "Nothing," I say. "And he didn't like me."

  "Have it your own way," he says. "That guy who you like?"

  "It's whom you like," I say, sounding for all the world like my father. "And I don't like him."

  "So that's why you're looking at the door every time it opens?"

  Hal is making fun of me while also letting me know he sees what matters to me. That he's sorry, of course, but would like me to stop looking for Eamon every time someone walks in. In this, Hal and I are united. I too wish I would stop.

  And, as soon as my last shift ends, I do. While I'll always love Acca, I'm glad my work here is done. The job was supposed to bring me answers, not more questions.

  ***

  Clare's insisting on a predeparture birthday celebration.

  "I have to go to Vienna and then Sweden the day after you come home," she says. "The trip's going to be a nightmare and I don't want you to be a casualty of that."

  Clare got promoted at work. Or rather, as she puts it, Edward has given her the chance to fail by putting her in charge of a hotel in Vienna. She says no one is allowed to be happy for her until it's clear she won't mess it up. I try convincing Raphael to turn the dinner they are planning into one for her instead of me.

  "I don't think so," he answers. "This is the birthday that gets lost. It's not sweet sixteen and you can't vote yet either."

  Both Da and Janie used to say it was odd how you could vote or join the army at eighteen but not buy a drink. They didn't think that was right.

  "Clare wants to make a fuss over this," Raphael says. "And you have to let her."

  "I've always liked fusses," I tell him.

  "We'll invite Ben," Raphael says.

  "Good," I say. "That'd be good."

  ***

  Now that school is over, the lull between exams and the start of summer plans gives Ben and me a few days to spend time together as we used to. We play cards, listen to music, and look through Ben's collection of industrial design books. We've never read any of them closely, but the diagrams of vacuum cleaners and the insides of the early computers are pretty cool.

  Ben's father came across these books on a business trip to Jakarta, where they're printed for an architecture firm. Mr. Greene is a structural engineer and his company does a lot of consulting in Indonesia. Durin
g eighth grade, these books seemed like a passport to heaven. Ben and I had this idea that if we could understand those first drafts of good inventions, we'd train our minds to come up with our own brilliant designs.

  We've stopped thinking that will happen, but the books are still appealing. Our favorite in the series is an overview of trains with detailed pictures of tracks and steam engines. As we're discussing what could change the world today as much as trains did then, Ben catches hold of the ends of my hair, asking,

  "Was it something I did, you know, when we did?"

  I look at him wrapping my hair around his fingers. Every serious go-round we had of kissing and everything else would start with his holding my hair. His voice is shaky and I wonder how long he's wanted to ask me about the few days we had of sleeping together.

  "It wasn't you," I say. "Of course not."

  "It didn't go right," he says. "Did it?"

  "That wasn't it," I say. "I mean, I'm better at it by myself, but I..."

  Something about the way his breath changes makes me pull back and look at him. Everything in Ben's face has just fallen apart. So now I know. You do not tell someone you have slept with that sex is better without them.

  Should I have known this? Can I fix what I've done to him? I know how I felt that day on the sidewalk with Eamon. I felt safe and complete. With Ben, I felt far away, curious, and anxious to please.

  "It's as if I'm two people," I say. "When we were together, it's like I was different."

  "In a bad way?" he asks. "Because I felt different too, but good."

  "No, no, not at all," I say, desperate to end this conversation. "Not in a bad way."

  "Do you think you'll ever want to again?" Ben asks. "With me, that is."

  I can almost hear Rebecca telling me the solution here. She would surely say that I should sleep with him again. That that would be the best way to find out if I can feel with Ben what I did with Eamon. My dead sister, the big believer in acting first and then sorting it out, is perhaps not the person to go to for advice. I try applying Clare's more cautious nature to Ben's question.

  "I might want to," I say. "If we thought about it slowly."

  "I can think slowly," he says.

  When he leans forward to kiss me, I let him. There's no zing-zang-zoom here, but there might be. Maybe. If we think slowly and wait until the summer has ended before we act.

  The big-fuss dinner is lovely, with flowers on the table and candles in silver holders. Raphael opens champagne and we drink it from glasses which Clare recognizes as being from her grandmother's set. Our grandmother, who died before Da's divorce.

  "She left them to my mother," Raphael says.

  That's interesting, as I'd always heard that Da's mother never forgave Aunt Ingrid for remarrying.

  "They were the ones used at Uncle Jacques's wedding," Clare says. "Grand-mere always marked that day. We'd have dinner at her apartment and drink from these."

  "October third," Raphael says.

  "The seventh," Clare says.

  "Well, it was my mother's first wedding," Raphael says.

  "Let's trust your memory, then," Clare says.

  "Except I don't remember ever getting together with you guys on that anniversary," Raphael says.

  "Believe me," Clare says. "The Barclays were not invited."

  "Got it," Raphael says. "Hard to picture my father there."

  Ben, who knows I love all the rumors, stories, and details that the Abranels brought with them (along with champagne glasses) from Alexandria, looks at me and smiles. I have drawn him my version of the family chart. Here's my uncle who is dead, here's my uncle who is not my uncle, here are my two sisters, both old enough to be my mother, etc.

  As a present, Clare and Raphael give me six chisels, exactly like the ones he has. They are by Robert Sorby and have such beautiful handles they almost look like art instead of tools. Three of them are bevel-edged because everyone needs those, and three are for paring, which will come in handy when we make cabinets for the third-floor guest room.

  "Oh, my God," Ben says. "These are perfect."

  "It was this or a skirt from Prada," Clare says. "I was overruled."

  I've never owned clothes from a "label" before, but these are better. Ben gives me a copy of Ah, Wilderness, which the drama club is putting on in the fall. I will, in spite of my hiatus, run the tech crew, so this play is about to become my bible. It's a comedy, which means I won't need to worry about any dark events taking place offstage.

  On the card, Ben has written, Looking forward to building these sets and more of our slow thinking. I wish that didn't feel like pressure for me to know—quickly—what will happen with us. Even so, I'm very glad he's here. He's like proof that a part of my old life can be in the new now, which is no longer new, but simply now.

  It's been the first really hot day of the year, and Clare keeps holding her hair off her neck until Raphael brings her a large barrette that looks familiar.

  "Oh, bless you," Clare says, her hands winding through her hair as she unsnarls it. "What are you doing with such a thing? Girlfriend leave it behind?"

  What's wrong with her? The last girlfriend he had, he broke up with in February. And she was nothing more than an advertisement for how Raphael likes tall blonde women.

  "It's your sister's," he says quietly, and when she looks at me I shake my head no, not me.

  This, I would like to tell Rebecca, is what happens when you are not here. Because you no longer occupy it, I now share the space you alone used to own.

  "She must have left it the last time she was here," Raphael says. "Ben, can you help me with the cake?"

  "Sure."

  As soon as they leave, I lean across the table and tell Clare that Raphael and his girlfriend broke up. Months ago.

  "Really," Clare says, surprise and pleasure crowding into that one word. "Why wouldn't he have told me?"

  I think of Ben's note and know immediately why Raphael has never mentioned being single to my sister.

  "He knows you know he loves you," I say. "He doesn't want to pressure you."

  "No, that's not it, no," Clare says. "No, it's that he used to rely on Rebecca to tell me about him. It's been years since he's told me anything directly."

  "He's relying on me now," I say. "And I'm late with the update."

  "You think he still loves me like that?" she asks.

  "Yes, Clare, I do," I say, so slowly and deliberately that she laughs.

  "Rebecca always thought he and I were too clueless to make a go of it," she says.

  "You're not clueless," I say. "You're very smart."

  "Not about important things," Clare says, looking at Rebecca's enamel barrette before snapping it into her hair. "You know, she'd bought a new space for the store."

  "I thought she was just thinking about it," I say. "Making plans to buy."

  "Raphael loaned her the money," Clare says. "She closed on the place in October."

  October? She got her drugs in August. In October she was seeing people she wanted to say goodbye to.

  "How can she have been making two sets of plans?" I ask.

  "Two?" Clare asks, getting up to take glass plates from Ben, who whispers, It's chocolate to me.

  "One to go, one to stay," I say.

  Clare sits down next to me, putting her hands on mine.

  "I don't know, it'll never make any sense," she says. "But, look, let's keep this night about you. She can't have them all, it's not fair."

  But of course she can and it's likely she always will. The trick to Rebecca's shadowing us is to pretend that someday she won't. I can do that and say to Clare,

  "I like when your hair is up."

  "You and Gyula," she says with a laugh, returning to her side of the table. "But not Raphael or Da. They like it down."

  The four of us eat the entire cake (chocolate raspberry, a detail I refuse to see as a sign), which is big enough for eight, maybe ten people. Raphael says that as a scientist, he can confidently tel
l us that a serving size is strictly in the eyes of the beholder. He somehow cajoles Clare to eat past her two-bites-I'm-done policy.

  "It's all in the frosting," he says to me. "It has power over her."

  "I think it's a family thing," Ben says. "Leila will eat anything if you add butter and sugar."

  "Leila is exceedingly clever," Clare tells him, and Raphael makes us all drink a toast to me and my cleverness.

  We use lemon water because no one wants any more champagne and Clare says water toasts are the only kind you can trust. The candles have dripped onto the silver and the napkins look like destroyed party dresses, but I wish I could keep us all here at the table. I'd add Rebecca, of course, and William because he likes parties. A chair for Gyula, but only if he behaves exactly as Clare wishes. And Janie. Definitely Janie, with my sisters wearing the best of the dresses she bought for them.

  It's not until three days later, when I'm on my way to the airport, that I realize I will soon be with the two people I forgot to put on that list.

  Twenty

  I THROW UP ON THE PLANE. Three times. I tell the incredibly nice flight attendant who keeps bringing me airsick bags and wet towels that I've lost my airsickness medicine. Airsick doesn't sound nearly as bad as consumed with terror. Especially spoken aloud on a plane these days.

  But my terror is the old-fashioned kind, the kind I've always had. The kind that involves crashing or exploding in midair not because of something anyone does but because flying is not natural. For years Da has said I would outgrow this theory of mine, but it appears to have, instead, gotten worse.

  The apartment in Krakow is nice, with high ceilings and little balconies outside all the windows that face the street. The kitchen is tiny, with a stove that needs a match in order to light, and the huge dining room has the clunkiest-looking table I've ever seen. I guess one person is supposed to cook for a whole lot of people, although I suspect my parents don't use either room very much.

  The only food in the kitchen is bread so stale you have to hold it over the stove's flame (no toaster) to make it edible. It's just as well, as I appear to have lost my appetite somewhere over the Atlantic. In my room, my mother has put small plants on the desk, and Da apparently went out and bought me new pillows, saying, She's very fond of pillows, right?