Stay

by Deb Caletti

  The boat eased to the end of the dock. It was as beautiful as I remembered. The guy who had been high up on the mast before, the one I had guessed was Finn’s brother, was steering a huge silver wheel. He eased forward, backed up, and landed neatly alongside the dock, where Finn jumped off and grabbed the ropes to tie it down. I remembered my driving test, how the whole parallel parking thing seemed as complicated and frustrating as teaching cats to play Monopoly. But these two guys got this huge sailboat where it needed to be as smooth as anything.

  I watched as Finn leaped down, whipped those ropes fast around the dock cleats. The boat snugged right up against a stairwell, which Finn then climbed, giving a hand from boat to stair to several passengers on board. I watched the people walk down the steps—several couples, a family with two girls, another family with a toddler in a life jacket—and they all looked relaxed and happy and windblown. One guy stopped back at the ticket booth, which today had a young woman inside of it, and took out his wallet and handed over some bills, maybe arranging another ride for another day. The passengers wandered off the dock at various times—the couple with the toddler headed for The Cove, the family with the girls stopped to take pictures.

  Finn hopped back on the boat. He obviously had an ease there. You could tell it was his place. I watched him joke with the other guy, and then Finn went down below for a while before coming up again. He worked, making the boat right again after the sail. He coiled the wild ropes into neat circles. He arranged the collapsed sail into folds.

  I had finished my cheeseburger, rolled up the foil into a ball. I was almost done with my drink. I’d been staring, sure. It was then that Finn must have finally felt my eyes on him. I was far away but not so far that he couldn’t see me. He looked my way. He shaded his eyes with his arm as if to make sure it was me. He smiled. He waved, and I waved back.

  I didn’t walk over and talk to him, though, not then. If I needed the time for a tree branch to become just a tree branch again and the wind to become just the wind, then a boy, most of all, needed some time to be only a boy.

  My dad laughed so hard. “You are shitting me,” he said. “You found Annabelle Aurora? On your first day?”

  “You know her?”

  “Very well. She was a professor of mine in New York. I saw her at a party there years later, and we kept in touch. She’s an old friend, Pea. She stayed with us once when she came to a writers’ conference in town. You were just a baby. Of course I knew she was out here. We keep in touch by e-mail. It made the place a good choice, in my opinion.”

  “She’s a friend of yours.”

  “And a poet. A very well-known one, I might add.* I didn’t tell her I arrived yet.”

  “I’m not sure she exactly has a phone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a shack. She’s got an outhouse. You always said poets only got paid in magazine copies.”

  He laughed again. He was loving this. He sure got a kick out of that crazy old lady. “Annabelle is loaded.”

  “No!”

  “Loaded . Her husband was some newspaper guy. Like in, ‘owner,’ not reporter. She might have even had some family money. They had this great apartment. Two daughters. Very close to the girls.”

  “That’s surprising. She’s alone in that weird place.”

  “Happy as a clam, I have no doubt. She always liked the outer edges. The farther, the better.”

  “Clams—right. She said to tell you she had mussels.”

  He slapped his hand on the table. “That fucking Annabelle,” he said. “Good memory for an old broad.” He was grinning wide. His eyes were sparkly. “When she came out to stay with us, we steamed some for dinner. You were too young to remember this, I’m guessing. Your mother—she was in some mood. She went inside. Upset . . . I can’t remember. Annabelle and I ate mussels on the back deck and drank beers until we were toasted. Laughed our asses off remembering these people in our classes and those stupid parties where literary people try so hard to be literary people. Cool superiority as a mask for overflowing insecurity. ‘Every time I see people in social circumstances like that, I can’t help but imagine them in junior high, worrying about who they’re going to eat lunch with,’ Annabelle had said, and I always thought about that later. You see a person’s inner thirteen-year-old and you won’t look at them the same way again.”

  “Probably,” I said. But I was thinking about Dad and old Annabelle Aurora on our deck on a summer night, and my mother in her room. I felt like maybe I could remember that night if I tried hard enough. I wondered what my mother had been thinking and feeling, what had upset her. Those were the times you really felt her absence—when you would never know her, didn’t know her now enough to even guess what would make her leave a houseguest in the middle of dinner. You only had these words—mood, upset—and yet you had nothing to hang them on. You had other words, too. But a word like French, or photographer, or sensitive, they had a thousand meanings and pictures and your own images would be only guesses. It was all the things you could never understand and could never possess that made you ache.

  “Annabelle Aurora,” my father said. His eyes were still all gleamy.

  “The mother you never had?” I said.*

  “I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” he said. “Not at all, really.”

  “She scared me, knowing who I was like that. I thought she was some crazy old fan who knew your life history.”

  “She knows my life history, all right. Indeed she does.”

  I tried to read that book again before I went to sleep. I didn’t like that book, but I kept going for all the reasons a person hangs in with something that isn’t good—you feel bad about not giving it a chance, you’ve already come too far to give up now, you believe it’s going to get better. When you’re a person whose life has mostly brought good things, you believe in goodness. You believe that things will work out. Even the worst things will work out. You believe in a happy ending.

  But you are naive. The mostly good in your life has made you that way. You’ve spent so much time seeing the bright side that you don’t even believe the other side exists. You are wrong about that.

  I closed that book. I wouldn’t open it again, I vowed. It was time I learned something.

  Chapter 7

  He called that night, the night I had come home from the park and had eaten everything in the fridge. Kissing makes you hungry. Hunger makes you hungry. It had gotten late. I had school the next day. I was getting tired, but I just wanted more of him, too, like he wanted of me. I was downstairs in the kitchen getting something to drink, speaking softly, the phone crooked between my shoulder and my ear, when Dad came through. He was turning lights off. He tapped the place on his wrist where a watch would be, turning his eyebrows down in concern. I know! I mouthed. I was mad at him, because I knew he didn’t get this, or even if he did in some general way, he didn’t get this.

  Christian and I talked every night after that. We were both taking AP classes and calculus and had too much homework, so we couldn’t get together, and that next weekend he had plans to go to his parents’ cabin. It was almost unbearable how long those weeks were. I knew if he came over to study that we wouldn’t study, but we ended up spending just as much time on the phone anyway. We spent a lot of time saying I should just come over and If I’d have come over we could have spent all this time together instead of on the phone, things like that. Things you say. Maybe I was nervous for Dad to meet him, or for him to meet Dad, though I had no real reason to think they wouldn’t get along terrifically. Christian was smart and well-read and Dad liked that. There was something, though, that I knew could happen, which was that Dad could see things, he was an observer, and maybe I just didn’t want him seeing and observing anything that might ruin this. I needed him to like Christian and keep his mouth shut and leave it at that.

  Finally, on Friday night, Christian came over to pick me up to go to a movie. I introduced him to Dad and they stood in the hall by the front
door as if no one wanted to venture further in. There was this strained kind of chitchat about the number of daylight hours Copenhagen experienced in the winter or some such thing, and I kept seeing each of them through the others’ eyes, and I got us out of there fast.

  It was so good to see him. God. I felt so happy that we were finally at Friday. The word Friday—streamers could have hung from it, balloons. It was such a great word.

  “I love watching you drive,” I said.

  “I love seeing you in the seat beside me,” he said.

  It felt very Mr. and Mrs., being in his car with him driving, but I also felt a little nervous. We had talked about anything and everything for hours and hours, but it was still all new; being in his car was new, that careful new that made you worry you had mascara tracks or would say something stupid, the exactly stupidest thing to make him know he didn’t want to be there with you after all. You did that when you started to care a lot—you worried he was watching your every move to make sure he really wanted you. You could forget that maybe you were supposed to being doing that too. You forgot it wasn’t just you being watched and judged and trying to pass some test.

  I looked around his car for pieces of him, ways to know him better, but it was very clean—no wrappers or dust or books or empty bottles. Dylan Ricks had had a soccer ball hanging from his rearview mirror and sports equipment piled in the back, water bottles and empty PowerBar wrappers, dirt from cleats and muddy games on the carpets. Athlete leftovers everywhere. I pictured Christian vacuuming the rugs for me, catching the crumbs between the seats, making sure everything shined. Actually, he always kept his car like that, but I didn’t know that then. He liked things clean.* I watched his finger adjust the radio dial. His hands were clean, too. So neat, nails trimmed. I liked that, I told myself. I wasn’t sure I really did, but I told myself I did. It was different from Dylan or from any other guys I knew, even my father, with his spilled spaghetti on his shirts, or the back of his car, so messy with books and empty coffee cups.

  “You’ll like this song,” Christian said. “I hear it and I think of you.”

  “The Way She Moves”, by Slow Change. I’d never really liked them—Hunter Eden seemed like a dick, but that didn’t matter now. I couldn’t wait to go home and really listen to the lyrics. “I hear the neighbor’s TV and I think of you,” I said.

  He didn’t quite know what I meant. He looked at me sideways. “I mean, anything will do it,” I said.

  “Right,” he said. “Exactly.”

  He took my hand. His skin on mine—it sent a zip line of energy through me. A physical hum. I rubbed the underside of his arm with my fingertips until we hit a stoplight and he had to shift gears. I squeezed his forearm—I just kept wanting to touch him. He smelled so good, even from there, that I kept sniffing the air like a dog in the back of a pickup.

  We stood in the ticket line. He put his arms around me from behind and I leaned in tight. “We’re stuck,” I said.

  “Good,” he said. We inched forward in our stuck way. “It’s going to make it hard to see the movie,” he said.

  “It’s going to make it hard to drive home,” I said.

  “We’ll have to decide whose home to live in. Which school. You’ll have to tie our shoes since you’re in front.”

  I laughed.

  “You Americans laugh so loud,” he said.

  I had a prickle of hurt feelings, but I didn’t say anything. “Us Americans like funny boyfriends,” I said. The word was out before I could think. My thought-brakes were a minute too slow. It was all right, though. He kissed my neck.

  “I like the sound of that. Does that mean you’re mine?”

  I stuck our hands in my jacket pockets. I pretended to think about it. “Yes . . .” His. I liked the sound of that too. It’s strange, isn’t it, how that idea of belonging to someone can sound so great? It can be comforting, the way it makes things decided. We like the thought of being held, until it’s too tight. We like that certainty, until it means there is no way out. And we like being his, until we realize we’re not ours anymore.

  It was the first time we’d been out in public together, and the sense of his and mine, the sense of us, was something we were trying on, showing other people to see how it felt. It felt good. Great. It felt like a statement, though the two guys in front of us who smelled like pot couldn’t have cared less, and neither did the ticket seller, with his straight, raven-black hair who didn’t even look at us when he took Christian’s money. Christian insisted on paying, he always would, and that felt good, too. He was taking care of me. You take care of the people you love, but it’s true, too, that you take care of the things you own.

  I wasn’t paying attention to the movie. I was seeing how Christian looked in the seat beside me, as the lights of the film flickered, as they went from bright to dark. He looked so good in profile. He would notice me watching him and squeeze my hand but go back to watching the action. The way he looked made me want to get out of there. I couldn’t wait for us to be alone. The date stuff was fine, going to the movies, whatever. But what I really wanted was to be back in that land we ended up in when we were kissing. That place we disappeared in (and it felt like an actual place, a physical space) where no one else could ever enter.

  It was finally over. I couldn’t tell you what that movie was about for anything. Two spies, that’s all. I can’t even remember the name of the film now, though if I tried hard enough, I might. It’s not important. What’s important was how urgent it all felt. This is the thing I want to say: It wasn’t just him. I wanted to be with him just as much as he wanted to be with me, maybe more, a lot of the time.

  We held hands as we walked out of the theater. The night was cool and welcome, the busy parking lot, cars coming and going, it was welcome, too. Things were happening and shifting, which was so much better than sitting in that seat, waiting. The night was alive again. He unlocked my door for me, and I put my hands on either side of him.

  “Kiss,” I said. He did, but he seemed in a hurry to be done.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  He drove me back home. He didn’t do what Dylan used to—park a few blocks away to have a few minutes alone before going back. He pulled up to my street and actually got right out. I wondered if something was wrong. We walked up to my doorstep. I knew Dad would be asleep, so I didn’t even think about it—when Christian leaned in to me, I pulled the back of his head so his mouth was hard on mine, maybe because that’s what I wanted from him. Maybe because I was trying to be that sexy girl he couldn’t resist. But he could resist. He seemed to be somewhere else. His body felt away from me, and then it didn’t. He was there again, we both were, and his hands were on me, untucking my shirt, his hands up my sides. It got a little out of control. A lot.

  “See what you do?” he said. His lips were shiny in the streetlight.

  “Good night,” I said. I was teasing. It was fun. Christian was grinning.

  “Shit,” he said. “Shit.”

  “I guess you could say I like you. Really like you,” I said.

  “Yeah? I guess you could say I feel too much.”

  I didn’t know what that meant. I wanted to ask; I felt the asking rise up with some sort of desperation, and so I kept it down. Just went on smiling. It seemed dangerous to pursue it. If I did, I thought I might uncover some doubts of his that would grow uncontrollably when exposed to light and air. I pretended everything was fine, that I missed the undercurrent. He kissed my forehead. Kissed my forehead, as if protecting my innocence. He headed back to the car, waved over his shoulder.

  I went inside. I felt anxious, confused. I wanted to call him right then, that minute, but I didn’t. I felt some ugly rush of clinging-begging-panic. I was being stupid, I told myself. This had become too important too fast.

  I was wrong about Dad being asleep. He was actually in our family room, his feet up on the trunk we used as a coffee table, the remote control in his hand. He never watched TV.

  I wa
lked past the doorway, and he looked up. He looked at my untucked shirt. I’m sure my hair was a mess.

  “TV?” I asked.

  “Got some surfing moving at Total Vid, but I finished it. Now, ‘Fifty-seven channels and nothing on.’” He was using his quoting voice, though I wasn’t sure what it was he was quoting.* He was wearing his plaid PJ bottoms, some T-shirt from a concert a million years ago. “Have fun?”

  “Yep,” I said. “You waiting up for me?” He never waited up before.

  “Making sure you’re home safe. My fatherly duty.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be safe?” I suddenly felt testy. It was the night spilling out, sure, but now here was Dad just sitting there, and everything felt weird, but it was Dad that I could get mad at.

  “Driving in cars, earthquakes, boys, a million reasons. Food poisoning. Choking on a popcorn kernel.”

  “You didn’t like him.”

  “I never said that.” But I could tell I was right. His voice tipped up at the end.

  “What? He’s a great guy. Great. He treats me so well.”

  “Terrific. I’m glad.”

  “What?”

  “Clara.”

  “What was it?”

  He turned off the TV. Set the remote control down. “He seemed a little . . .”

  “What?”

  “Rigid.”

  “Rigid. Great.” I was furious. “He’s not some loose, loud American guy, so what? What’s wrong with it anyway? He was being polite. Polite is a good thing. You’re the only parent I know who wouldn’t love polite. No one would be good enough in your mind.”

  Which was a lie, I knew. He wasn’t all that protective about guys, not really. Not even with Dylan, when he should have been. “Untrue,” he said. “Look, C.P. Rigid can be . . . controlling. Sometimes controlling. Hell, a lot of times. After the last guy, Pea, something to look out for.”