Stay

by Deb Caletti

  There was a sign on the door of the keeper’s house. VISITOR HOURS. The place should have been open, but it didn’t look like anyone was there. And another sign in the widow, handwritten: PIGEON HEAD POINT LIGHTHOUSE AND GIFT SHOP NOW ACCEPTING EMPLOYMENT APPLICATIONS. INQUIRE WITHIN. The sign looked yellowed, as if “now accepting” was a permanent condition. I cupped my hands against the glass and tried to look inside.

  “No one home?” Dad said.

  “Doesn’t look like it.”

  “Let’s go around the back.”

  We made our way around to the rear yard. There was a white arbor along the length of the house and a fenced garden back there. A door on the second story that led to a deck was propped open.

  “Hello?” my father called.

  No answer.

  “That’s okay, we’ll come back,” I said.

  “Grapes,” he pointed. “How the hell do you grow grapes here?”

  “Vegetables, too.” I pointed.

  “That’s some kind of green thumb. Let’s wait a few minutes.”

  My good mood was returning, and there was no reason why we shouldn’t wait. There was nothing we had to do here anyway. There was no school or work or room to clean. No friends to call and meet for coffee, no concerts to go to, no movies to pick up at Total Vid. No future to plan just yet. We’d agreed that I would tell my friends we were traveling in Europe for Dad’s book research, so no phoning or texting. No e-mail. We couldn’t chance letting anyone know where we were. I didn’t even tell Shakti the truth. My friends were on one planet, going out and taking last trips together and packing for college, and I had dropped onto another planet, where it was just us knocking around in this empty in-between, this temporary new life. It was lonely and strange and liberating.

  We walked over to the edge of the bluff. The ocean was wide, wide around us; the white waves curved in a majestic arc around the bay, and the sky tried to compete, showing off with bold stripes of white clouds. The ocean roared and you heard a couple of seagulls calling as they looped in circles above. Inside the house, a dog barked.

  My father was quiet, for once. Suddenly quiet. His arms were folded across his chest. His thoughts were a million miles out to sea.

  “Why don’t you like the water?” I asked.

  He thought. He did an evasive word-dance. “I love the water. You can’t not love the water. Seventy percent of our planet is water. Seventy percent of our own bodies are water. It’s what we are.”

  “We can dislike what we are.”

  He ignored this.

  “You won’t go on boats . . .” I tried again.

  “I’ve made peace with the water. I figured out how to love certain parts while I hate other parts.”

  “That doesn’t sound very peaceful.”

  It was obviously something he didn’t want to talk about. He probably didn’t know how to swim and was too embarrassed to say. He looked at his watch. “If your new boss isn’t back here in fifteen seconds, we’re heading out. I’m starved.”

  “I can’t believe you’re hungry after this morning.”

  He watched the second hand of his watch without speaking for fifteen seconds exactly. “Sea air is famishing,” he said.

  We headed to the grocery store to stock up on food, and then we stopped at a shack near the beach that sold fresh fish. We bought crab wrapped in newspapers, and later that evening we unwrapped it and laid it right out on the table, cracking the legs and dipping the sweet white meat into melted butter. The clouds came in—we watched them approach from far off. After dinner, Dad went for a walk, his pants rolled up to his shins, his shirttail out. I went to my room and lay on my bed and started one of the new books I’d gotten from the library.

  I heard Dad’s heavy steps on the deck when he returned, then the bottoms of his sandals being clapped together to free the sand. The door slid open and shut, and then a moment later, open again. A deck chair scraped against the wood. He was just sitting out there, watching the sea. I set my book open at the edge of my bed and got up.

  “What’s he going to think when his good scotch is all gone?” I said. Dad’s feet were on the railing, knees up. He swirled a bit of brown liquid and ice in his glass.

  “I’ll buy him a new one,” he said. Defensive.

  “Fine. Whatever.”

  “If you’ve come to interrupt my peace with your parental attitude, I do hope you’ll cease. In case you haven’t noticed lately, I’m the father here.”

  I sat down. “The new book’s not great,” I said. “Kind of shallow.”

  “Mmm,” he said, and shook his head. “Too bad.” His regret was sincere.

  “I’m going to give it more of a chance.”

  “There are so many that are yours just waiting . . .”

  We always argued about this. I tended to give a book a chance and another chance and another, sometimes seeing it all the way to the end, still hoping for it to turn out different. Maybe I was confused about what you owed a book. What you owed people, for that matter, real or fictional.

  He tinked those ice cubes in that glass. It was the second time in one day I’d seen that look on his face.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yep.” He took a swallow. I once tasted that stuff, just to see what it was like. It burns your throat like a lit match. He moved his free hand in and then out, like the tide. “The ocean . . . It gives, and then it takes. Gives. Takes.”

  It made me uneasy. Maybe he was drunk. I never really saw him drunk, even though I saw him drink often, often enough that it seemed bad for his health. Health, you might guess, was pretty important to me. I had no wish to be an orphan. But if I were being honest, I knew it wasn’t the alcohol that was bothering me right then. It was something in his face, and the time before, too, at the lighthouse. Something closed off and weighty. It was a shut door, and shut doors meant things kept to yourself. There were reasons you kept things to yourself, and they usually weren’t good, happy, open-air sort of reasons. Still, I didn’t want to see behind that door. You think you want to know everything there is to know about everything there is to know. But you don’t. Not really. I had pried the lid off of the dark places of another person before, I had seen inside. Down deep. You don’t want to look at what’s rotting there.

  I left him to brood and went back to my room. My book had fallen to the floor. It said something about where my mind was right then that my first thought was that it had been moved. I even looked around, just in case. I feel ashamed to admit it, but I checked the closet, which only held boxes belonging to our mystery host, labeled WINTER CLOTHES. It’s what I used to do when I was a kid, check the closet before I went to sleep. Making sure there were no robbers there. I wasn’t a kid who believed in some kind of monster.

  I got into my p.j. shirt, brushed my teeth. I was suddenly exhausted. I came back to my room and sat at the edge of the bed, took that business card from my book, where I’d used it as a bookmark. Finn Bishop. Sailor. I tried to make the simple typed words tell me more that they did, but they just sat there without giving. I couldn’t imagine his life or who he was beyond the kind eyes and the strong hands.

  And then the business card reminded me of another business card. Jake Ritchee, Smith and Gray Auto, because that’s how it works after something terrible has happened. You know this is true if something terrible has ever happened to you. A thousand objects take on new meaning. Everything is a reminder of something else. A business card will never be just a business card. A handful of change will not. A rope will not.

  Chapter 5

  Christian called me the next morning after that basketball game, like I knew he would. I was sure of it. Every moment from the time he kissed me, from the time he drove away in his car after that basketball game—it felt like waiting. I think even in sleep I was waiting, and he must have felt the same. My phone rang at two minutes after nine, which probably meant he had told himself not to call until then.

  “It’s crazy, but I alre
ady miss you,” he said.

  “I know. Me too. I could hardly sleep.”

  “Your voice. Morning voice. Husky.”

  “I haven’t talked to anyone yet,” I said. I was still in bed. I was lying down, tucked into the covers.

  “It’s sexy.”

  I felt that way, talking there in bed. I felt like warm liquid, languid.* He was somewhere, who knew, but I was lying in bed, and it felt intimate. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at . . .” He paused. I imagined him looking up at the street sign. “Ravenna and Fifteenth. Several blocks from Mr. Hooper’s house.”

  “Mr. Hooper—wasn’t he on Sesame Street?” I smiled.

  “He’s the old guy I work for. A few days a week I check in on him. He’s in a wheelchair. Refuses to give up his home. I take him for walks. Read to him. Listen to him complain about his nurse.”

  God, he was a good person, too. “That’s so sweet.”

  “Don’t tell anyone that. They’ll think less of me. Still, it means I can’t see you until later.”

  “That’s okay.” Later was forever from now.

  “Can we meet? Do your parents lock you up on a Sunday night?”**

  “We can meet,” I said.

  We made plans. I lay in bed for a long time just feeling delicious anticipation. Then excitement hit. I got up. I had to move a mountain or something.

  * * *

  I told Dad that Shakti and me and our friends Kels and Cleo were all getting sushi and doing our calculus together. Dad didn’t believe in sushi. He believed in meat. I didn’t want to keep a secret from him, and I knew I wouldn’t for long, but if love wasn’t just yours first, it was like cutting up and handing out your birthday cake before you blew out the candles.

  The drive in the car felt like it was miles and miles long instead of just a few. We decided to meet in front of Denny Hall on the University of Washington campus. Denny is the oldest building there, all ancient stone and chiming bells. A long walkway under elms leads up to it, with carved benches on either side marking the earliest graduating classes. There’s lawn there, too, places to walk and sit and talk. I’d brought a blanket. I’d brought small containers of juice so my breath could smell like raspberries and pomegranates when we sat close.

  There he was. He also had a blanket under his arm. I guess we were thinking the same thing, then. The anticipation had been so bright and sharp it almost hurt. My whole body was waiting. I knew this, because when he leaned over and kissed my cheek hello, I felt warm and electric, and the smell of him, that musky deodorant or shampoo or soap, whatever it was—it burned itself into that permanent place in my brain, the one that would make sure that I would remember that smell when I was old and had forgotten most other things.

  I covered the hand he’d set on my face with my own. My face felt hot. I moved his mouth over to mine. I’d never felt anything like this, or had done anything like that, and I felt that sense again, power. He wanted me so badly, I could tell. He was trying not to go there yet, but I was leading and he could only follow and that made me feel like I could lift the sky with one hand.

  The thing is, it can feel good to make someone lose all control.

  I was holding a ball of fire in my hands, like a sorceress. He was pulling at my shirt, pulling me down to the grass, and I went with him. Forget the blankets. Tongues and mouths and hands doing what tongues and mouths and hands were thinking of doing from the first moment, probably.

  I pulled back, then. I felt like I’d been abducted and sucked into another world. I wasn’t even sure where I was for a minute. I was breathless. There was a guy walking his dog right near us. A pair of students with backpacks. But that world with Christian, the one we had ended up in when we were kissing, that place—it was the one I wanted to stay in.

  He looked into my eyes, and I looked into his. I saw so much there. I always would. His eyes were a vivid blue, and so clear it seemed like I could look in there forever and never reach an end. All that feeling—it seemed like it meant something. Something huge. You’re supposed to listen to yourself, right? That’s what I was sure I was doing. What I was hearing—it was so loud.

  He shot meaning into me with his eyes, and I did the same back. I looked at his face—full lips, cheekbones. They were cheekbones I could miss and miss if they went away. I could miss that voice so much if I didn’t have it with me always. Sometimes this seems surprising, but people, a person, can feel that way about you, too. It’s just your regular old self to you, but to them, they couldn’t imagine not looking at your nose, or your chin, the daily old chin you don’t even see anymore. It’s hard to believe, but it’s true. Your old chin can be magic like that, who would have thought.

  “I don’t even know what to say,” he said.

  “I almost didn’t go to that game,” I said.

  “My friend Evan asked me to hang out that night,” Christian said. “I almost didn’t go, either.”

  We sat there with the enormity of that thought. As I said, our meeting felt like fate. But like my father says, fate’s got a fucking sick sense of humor. Fate is a shape-shifter. It is the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think something is one thing, but then it’s another.

  We got back up. Christian spread out the blanket, and we sat on it this time. I circled my knees with my arms.

  “You are so beautiful,” he said.

  I felt beautiful. I’d never felt beautiful before, not really. I didn’t feel ugly, but I never saw myself like Hailey Denison or Zoe Faraone, the kind of girls with blond hair to their waists and stiff, perfect makeup, who only ate rice cakes and half a container of non-non-nonfat yogurt before throwing the rest away. You never really saw their insides. I had brown hair, and I was not thin as a rye crisp. I ate lunch and liked it. Most of the time, I said what I thought.

  “You are a million things,” I said.

  “Happy?” he said.

  I smiled.

  “Completely blown away?” he said. “There’s two. Come here.”

  He was stretched out, and I stretched beside him. He traced the curve of my T-shirt with one finger, along the open neck.

  “Did you wear this just for me?” It was cut a little low. I laughed.

  “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “You must have guys following you all over school, wearing that,” he said.

  I thought it was a compliment. I was sitting there, soaking in the great ego feed of new love, where your wonderfulness merges with his wonderfulness, magic dust that creates some sky-high shiny Christmas tree sparkling with admiration and flattery and tinsel and lights and a billion, hopeful, unopened presents underneath. I just saw it as praise, falling down now like glittering snowflakes. But it was something else. A drop of poison on that gathering snow. That moment in the fairy tale when we know what just happened but the princess doesn’t.

  We talked. For hours, it must have been, because the sky got that sweet, tender yellow tint of a late fall afternoon turning to evening. We talked about everything—his growing up in various European cities, his parent’s awful divorce, his financier father who just moved to Stockholm and who never seemed to call anymore. How his mom would leave them both for months at a time ever since he was a baby, traveling for her work, the work she’d given up now that she’d married his stepfather. The decision they all made for him to come to America to be permanently with her now that one of them was “settled.” The ways he and his mother couldn’t seem to get along. I was driving slowly past his own personal accident scene, taking it in with a sad, shocked heart: the crushed car, the trapped bodies. He didn’t deserve anything bad that ever happened to him. My mental doctor’s bag was out, ready to save him if he needed it. I held his hand.

  We talked about his life now, too. Classes, his love of architecture and science and math and anything with exact outcomes. And me—how I didn’t know what I wanted to study
in college, how the not knowing pressed; my own dad, my mother, the ways I missed her. What I remembered—her holding me. Her voice. How I hated calculus and things with exact outcomes. Even our differences matched perfectly. We finally got up. We stretched and ached from sitting in one place, like old people. That’s how long we were there.

  We kicked through the layer of orange leaves on the ground, walked to our cars. We had chosen the same lot, our cars only a space away, more fate, I was sure. There were a ton of parking lots in that place, small circles upon circles between trees, and rows and rows of spaces. We leaned against his car and kissed some more until my lips were tingly and numb. He plucked a huge orange leaf from the ground and handed it to me, found another and held it carefully by its thin stem, something to remember this by. It was corny, I know. But if you’ve fallen in love, you’ve done it too, whether you want to admit it or not. You have a worn ticket stub or a paper napkin or a flower so dry it’s turning to dust. You experienced magic once, and you want to have a little evidence of that. You don’t want to forget it.

  Of course, you never forget it. We said good-bye, our fingertips trailing away from each other. Even our fingertips were reluctant to leave.

  I started the car. The radio blasted on just as it was when I had turned the car off, and the air conditioner, too, and that seemed strange, because a million years had passed. It was like that moment in the Narnia books, where Lucy and Susan and Peter and Edmund come back through the wardrobe after conquering the White Witch and meeting Aslan and becoming kings and queens, only to find themselves children again back in the room in their uncle’s house where it all began. I had to pee desperately, I realized. I was starving. All of the other human needs had been zapped away under that love spell, but now they were back. I was back.

  I drove home. I was probably unsafe. Driving under a different influence. My thoughts were not with that steering wheel and those mirrors and that four-way stop. I pulled up in front of our house. When I got out, I could smell that my father had cooked something fabulous with garlic. I was so hungry. I had never been that hungry before, I was sure of it.