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Stay With Me

Page 14

by Garret Freymann-Weyr


  So, of course I want him to call, but I also know he can't miss me. I miss you is how Ben ends all his e-mails. Including the last one giving me a list of all the computer gadgets I might ask Raphael to buy. Since I don't want a scanner or a CD burner, I ask Eamon.

  I tell him that my cousin—well, my sister's boyfriend who is my cousin except he's not and someday I'll draw the chart—but the point is he wants to give me something. A big and happy thing that I don't need. Any thoughts?

  "I take it he'd like to give your sister something but can't yet," Eamon says.

  "I think so," I say. "Yes."

  "Time is a nice thing," he says. "Clothes get old and computers break. You could ask for his time."

  I could ask for more of yours, I think, but no. That would just make everything weird and odd. Even if I can't always figure things out, I'm aware that for him being friends is taking more thought and care than dating would. He's mostly the same, but I don't think it's easy. My job is to keep buried whatever part of me likes him as more than a friend.

  "Have a fun trip," I say, after approving his gift suggestion. "Enjoy the ocean."

  Twenty-four

  RAPHAEL'S TIME TURNS OUT to be exactly what I want and need. Now, how often does that happen? Since returning from Poland, I have been on an antidyslexic schedule. Each night, after thirty minutes of knitting and math review, I read ten pages of Monte Crista. I will be done with the book in forty-three days. I rarely need the dictionary but I'm not enjoying anything yet.

  My father and my tutor claim that people read for the company. That a book is like a friend. The characters seem real, they say, and their story important.

  Not so much for me.

  If reading is a struggle, it's lonely. It's just you, the dark cloud of Huh?, and the few glimmers of Oh, yes. I see. I tell Raphael that his present should be to read with me. That way I'll have company even if this guy in Monte Cristo stays in prison forever.

  Clare picks up the book, scanning the cover.

  "Da told you this was her first favorite book?"

  I nod.

  "It was, but he'd given her the unabridged version," Clare says. "Mama had to put up a huge fight to get him to give her this one."

  My sister should be the one to meet with Adrien Tilden and try to shake Rebecca's secrets free. Clare was the one who knew her, all the details belong to her. My Rebecca is like Clare's hotel, an idea more than a reality.

  And yet Da was the one who knew that hotel inside out. Only he's a doctor now and it's Clare whose entire work life is defined by her idea of that hotel. That's worth considering. Because who is to say that my idea of Rebecca is less powerful than Clare's vivid and factual reality?

  During most of July, I see that I had been wrong when I thought Gyula suited Clare. They had certainly gleamed and glittered, but they didn't quite fit the way my sister and Raphael do. They're almost the exact same height and, when not working, can each be found either reading or staring intently through their glasses at nothing.

  Janie was right when she said that Raphael was anxious to please Clare. But this judgment, while clever, missed two things. One, Raphael is anxious to please everyone. It's who he is in the same way that Clare is someone who is blonde. Two, Clare accepts Raphael's efforts to make her life nice. Unlike with Gyula or at work, my sister doesn't need to prove how well she can do on her own.

  At first, I worried that things would be different now that Clare and Raphael were together instead of just unrelated cousins. Instead, everything is easier. Except for Thursdays, Raphael stays at the apartment on weekdays. They sleep in the living room and I make a point of not going in there after saying good night. On the weekends we either go to the house in Brooklyn or the mountains. The drive there takes forever, but Raphael lets me fix the back porch stairs and finish some pantry shelves. We're going to build Clare a window seat and walk-in closet for their bedroom.

  I have a plan to make the side porch, which is screened in, bigger than it currently is. I unroll my sketches and measurements and show Raphael with a voilá. He is suitably impressed and asks if I would be interested in helping him put in a half bath right by the kitchen. He'd have to teach me some plumbing, but we'd have fun.

  "Yes," I say, and then add, "Yes, yes!"

  At dinner, Clare listens to us talk about framing, wiring, and floor installation.

  "I think Leila loves this house more than I love you," she says to Raphael while passing me the bread.

  His face gives away that it's the first time she's said it. He must have thought, during those years when she wouldn't talk to him, that he would never find a way back to her. It makes the whole falling in love thing a little less scary to see that mistakes can be reversed.

  "What is it about Thursdays?" Eamon asks me. "Where's Raphael then?"

  I've been keeping him partially updated about the changes going on at my house. We've taken to meeting on Wednesdays at Acca. His father still has physical therapy and I get off work in time to go downtown and meet Eamon. I am, he likes to say, the highlight of his week.

  I think that's only because outside of work his days are pretty much devoted to making a sick man feel healthy. Not so thrilling. And even though I am his highlight, he always tells me—every Wednesday—that I should find someone better to hang out with.

  "Raphael's at home Thursday nights," I say. "Clare needs time to herself."

  "Is he that annoying?"

  "No," I say. "Of course not. But you know, her last boyfriend was hardly ever around. She's more used to being alone."

  Clare calls Thursday nights having a date with herself. We usually wind up with my making dinner and then eating it while seated on the floor. She likes to play gin rummy and drink enough water to drown a fish. I'm learning to hoard low cards and have beaten her a few times. She says I'm a better player than Rebecca. Maybe so, but probably not as good a cook.

  "What happened to your hand?" Eamon asks, putting his coffee cup down and pointing toward my right thumb.

  I stop eating chocolate raspberry cake and look at my rather impressive bruise. It's of the blackish-blue and orange variety.

  "Hammer," I say. "Bang, oops, missed, hit the wrong nail."

  I screamed so loudly I almost gave Raphael a heart attack. I definitely woke Clare up from her nap.

  "Let me see," Eamon says, taking hold of my fingers.

  It is the first time this summer that he's touched me on purpose. It's still there, though, the zing-zang-zoom. Being desperate to hide it makes it a little worse than before.

  "It's nothing," I say. "Building stuff, you know."

  I pull my hand away, he signals Drew for the check. Everything goes safely back into place.

  I had always thought that being in love made people create a world of their own with space for only two, but my sister and Raphael bring everyone into their new, sharp attention. It's as if finding each other at long last has made them even more capable than usual. There's nothing they touch that doesn't seem easier as a result.

  The letter to Adrien Tilden? Done. Raphael listens to my description, looks at the address book, the book of translated Akhmatova poetry, and considers the fact that Clare has never heard of him.

  "We want to treat him as if he were an old friend," Raphael says. "Without assuming anything. Polite, warm, no pressure."

  "What if he's an old boyfriend?" Clare asks. "Or worse, what if he doesn't even know she's dead?"

  "What if he could tell Leila why he was with Rebecca that day?" Raphael asks. "It's clearly important to her."

  "I just don't want you to be disappointed," Clare says to me.

  "Little late for that," Raphael says, meaning, I think, that when Rebecca killed herself we were all, among other things, disappointed.

  The three of us sit down with paper and come up with the following:

  Dear Adrien Tilden, Allow me to introduce myself as Rebecca Abranel's sister Leila. I have reason to believe you were a friend of hers and at the risk of b
eing intrusive I wonder if I might, at a time that is convenient for you, ask you about her. As I am significantly younger than Rebecca, my knowledge of her is limited and I would gratefully welcome the opportunity to increase it. Thank you in advance, Leila Abranel.

  It doesn't sound like me, but it does sound like us, and it will never get in the mail if I wait until I write it entirely myself.

  With that done, they even find a way (without trying) to help me clear up how I feel about Eamon. His invitation for dinner to meet his father and some other people finally materializes and while Clare says something like Oh, fun, let's buy you a dress, Raphael has other ideas.

  "This is that guy who called here about sending flowers to Poland?" he asks.

  "Yes," Clare says. "I've met him. He's very nice."

  "I haven't met him," Raphael says.

  "Oh, my God," Clare says, laughing. "If you were her father that might actually matter."

  "Clare, are you really going to let Leila go to some man's house?"

  "She has coffee with him," my sister says.

  "Cake," I say. "He has coffee."

  "It's a place where everyone knows her," Clare says. "It's not like they're up to anything."

  "I'm sure she's not," Raphael says.

  "It's not 'some man's house,'" I say, not loving the implication here. "It's his father's. His father knows Charlotte and she knew Janie so it's practically like we know him."

  "Practically isn't good enough," Raphael says.

  "It is for me," Clare says.

  "Well it probably isn't for Eamon," I say. "I think he's been dying for someone to tell me how wrong it is for us to be friends. If you tell me, maybe he'll shut up about it."

  This seems to soothe Raphael a little bit, but he still insists that Eamon come over one night.

  "He's taking care of his sick father," I say. "How is he supposed to do that and be here?"

  "He'll figure it out."

  "You're acting like there's only one reason he'd want to be around her," Clare says.

  "I'm acting like I don't trust men," Raphael says, which makes her laugh so hard, I know I'm going to have to tell Eamon my guardians are demanding a meeting.

  "About time," he says. "I was beginning to think your parents had left you with the most irresponsible people on earth."

  What I would like to know is why, if we're just friends, it's irresponsible for Clare not to think the worst. And then, perhaps later than another girl would, I see why this is hard for him. If I were that mythical twenty, he'd ask me out. Which probably means he likes me more than he wants to. Not exactly as I like him, but also in a hidden way.

  And so, before he arrives to get looked over, I take my secret out and examine it. I like him the way I have never liked Ben, which makes me sad for Ben, but it's too glaringly true to ignore. I like Eamon the way I might have liked Gyula, if he'd ever wanted to be friends with me. A combination of curiosity, alarm, and flat-out glee.

  Okay, then. I can live with this. Even without knowing anything about what Eamon's hidden away. I doubt that the way he likes me involves any alarm or glee, more a kind of reluctance, but it's enough that he might or would like me at all. If I were totally different—smarter, older, whatever.

  Twenty-five

  THE VISIT FOR EAMON TO MEET my wannabe parents takes place on a Sunday afternoon. A family friend agrees to spend an hour or so with Mr. Greyhalle, who doesn't need chronic observation so much as company. We come back from the mountains early and Clare goes out to buy chocolates and pumpkin bread. Raphael promises me no one will be awful.

  "You're very good to let me worry about you," he says.

  "Yes," I say, thinking that if he can keep on making Clare happy I'll let him do anything.

  Eamon's talent for putting people at ease, which I first observed at Acca, also appears here. It turns out that the last TV show he worked on was one of Raphael's favorites. The show about aliens, monsters, and fighting evil was, they tell me, a huge hit with what Raphael calls inept science types.

  "Well, no wonder I never heard of it," Clare says. "I'm not a genius science type."

  I love Clare for transforming Raphael's inept into genius.

  "She didn't have cable until two years ago," Raphael says to Eamon.

  Because Rebecca insisted. I remember that discussion when my sisters moved in together.

  "Leila's not a big fan either," Eamon says. "Do you even like movies, bunny?"

  "Everyone likes them," I say, trying to think of the last one I saw. "Of course."

  "She's like my mother," Clare says. "Loyal to the stage."

  "It's a dying art," Eamon says. "Even my father will tell you that."

  "What did Janie always say?" Raphael asks Clare. "Only a dying art can demand your whole life?"

  Eamon tells us that while this may be an admirable point of view, he has nonetheless invited some people to his father's for me to meet. A production designer because I like to build sets and a producer, who is a lot like Charlotte, although she works in TV Movies also. I may find, he says, that only working in theater is limiting.

  "Leila seems very ambitious," he says to Clare and Raphael.

  I'm not, but they both agree with him so quickly that I wonder. Well, there are things I want, goals I have, and I do work to get them. I thought only people like Clare or my mother, with easy-to-spot careers, were ambitious, but I see how it might fit for me too.

  Clare says that from the moment I saw my first play, I announced that I was moving into the theater. I have no memory of this, but it feels right. Eamon is telling them that when we first met, I was reading a book for school and,

  "I've never seen anyone quite so intent on conquering something," he says. "Very impressive."

  "She's always been really determined," Raphael says.

  I wish they would stop discussing me like this. Enough already.

  "You know, when I was seventeen, I was wandering around India," Eamon says. "Looking for my life."

  Apparently a common thing to do in India, for they have a little discussion about temples, chanting, and the benefits of travel over meditation.

  "I went to Thailand and Cambodia after college," Raphael says. "I almost stayed. What finally brought you home?"

  "I met one too many people who thought searching was living," Eamon says. "I promised myself I would finish school and always have a job."

  "I came back for grad school," Raphael says. "Work's very handy when you're looking for meaning."

  "That's true even in television," Eamon says.

  "Rebecca used to go to an ashram in Massachusetts," Clare says. "She thought of maybe going to India one day."

  Something in her voice catches and Eamon quickly steers the conversation away from Rebecca and her useless plans for the future.

  "So my thoughts were that if I can help Leila meet people who can really help her..." he says. "Well, you know, that would, that would be good."

  He may be making Clare comfortable enough to have an unguarded Rebecca moment, but he's not having nearly the easy time he had when he was last here. Raphael asks how Eamon's father is doing. Which is how I find out that Mr. Greyhalle is seventy-one. How can he be only four years older than Da? Mr. Greyhalle's already had cancer, broken his hip, contracted viral pneumonia, and almost started a fire by forgetting to turn the stove off. When Eamon says, Dad's just got old age catching up with him I think my heart is going to stop.

  "It's a lifetime of bad habits," Eamon says.

  Well, Da has good habits. Does he? Doesn't he? If anything happens to Da, my life will crack into a much bigger new now than it did when Rebecca died. I remind myself that my mother is with him. I calm down. Eamon is saying,

  "My father's not ready to hire help, so I'm the next best thing,"

  "That's got to be stressful," Raphael says. "Does he resent your helping him?"

  "The stress is nothing compared to turning a Japanese cartoon into an American episodic," Eamon says.

 
I recognize a nonanswer when I hear it and I know how much Rebecca would have liked him. I also understand—as clearly as I know anything—that if she were still alive, Eamon and I would never have met. Why is it that the things I know give me a bigger headache than the things I don't.

  The visit ends with Eamon's drawing a floor plan of the monster-haunted castle from his old TV show and Raphael making a beautiful drawing of the DNA in the disease his lab is analyzing.

  "Well, it was very nice to meet you," Eamon says, standing up. "And not nearly as awkward as when I met my prom date's parents."

  "Yeah, sorry about that," Raphael says.

  "No, not at all," Eamon says. "You should know her friends."

  And just as he is smiling at me, Clare, obviously possessed by one of the aliens from his show, says,

  "We weren't vetting you or anything. I mean, we trust Leila to make her own decisions about dating.'

  "Okay, now I feel awkward," Eamon says. "Is this where I need to tell you I have a girlfriend?"

  "You do?" This comes out all shocked-sounding, and I decide I must also be possessed.

  "Not helping," Eamon says to me.

  "No, look, I'm sorry," Clare says. "Really, all I meant is that, in this state at least, you know, the age of consent is seventeen."

  "Also not helpful," Raphael says.

  Clare looks from Raphael to Eamon and then back to Raphael, who starts to laugh. Clare looks horrified with herself for being so weird. Age of consent? Hello, there has to be sex involved before that becomes important. And before that he'd have to ask me out.

  For that matter, I was still months away from seventeen when Ben and I slept together. Did he break the age of consent, or does being the same age give you an escape clause? Funny that there should be laws about all this.

  "I'm sure that's useful to know," Eamon says. "But what with my father and work, I'm kind of overly occupied for dating."

  And yet he was not too occupied in April. And May. Does this mean he's lying now or didn't mean it then when he said he wanted to take me out to dinner? Or did dinner and going from there not mean dating? Dinner, presumably, would be legal at any age.

 

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