Stay

by Deb Caletti

  “Maybe you ought to start job hunting,” Finn said.

  Jack cracked up. “She’ll fire you by . . .” He looked at his brother. “I say Friday.”

  “Next Monday,” Finn said. “She hates the weekend tourists more than she hates the workers.”

  “True,” Jack said. He thought. “Can I change my bet?”

  I groaned. “Really? That bad?”

  “She chased this one guy with her Jeep,” Finn said. “Remember that?”

  They both were chuckling away. I crossed my arms. “I’m proving you both wrong,” I said. I’d suddenly decided. I’d charm the skin off that snake and show these guys. “I’m lasting the summer.”

  “No fucking way,” Jack said. He’d finished his cigarette. Turned his back on his sister, who had given up and gone back into the shack. The seagull still sat on that table. He looked pretty comfy.

  “You last the summer and I’ll sail you over to the San Juan Islands and back. Private charter.”

  “You idiot,” Jack said. “You gotta make that a bet you can win. Jesus, I haven’t taught you anything.”

  I was having so much fun there. I wondered about Finn and Jack and their sister and their life in that place. This would be their life during the summers. There would be no driving to Neumo’s or out to eat in various parts of the city. No concerts or shows or the pierced people at Total Vid or traffic or city buses. No jobs at vintage music stores or comedy places. Just the beach and water and this salty air and working with your hands until you were so tired that maybe you actually slept at night.

  “How about next week?” I said. “After work? After I don’t get fired? I’ll come out then,”

  “That’s so great,” Finn said. “Cool.” He was grinning. “Very cool.”

  “Only if you promise to tell me all about the drowned sailors,” I said.

  “And I’ll tell you about what happened the first time Finn heard about the drowned sailors.” Jack put his hands on Finn’s shoulders.

  “Shut up, idiot,” Finn warned.

  “It was the middle of the night . . .”

  “God damn it, Jack.” Finn lunged for his brother and missed.

  “Awake all night, scared shitless.” Finn lunged again, and this time he caught Jack by the waist and then tucked him under one arm, his knuckles against his scalp. I’d forgotten how physical guys could be. Jack and Finn did not have careful movements and clean hands. They didn’t seem like they would flinch when they heard loud noises like Christian did. They didn’t seem sensitive, in all ways that sensitive made a person require careful handling.

  “Our father’s white T-shirt in the kitchen, okay, okay!” Jack pleaded. Finn let go. Jack was laughing and so was I.

  “I was seven ,” Finn said.

  “You never heard anyone of any age scream like that,” Jack said.

  “You rat bastard,” Finn said. “Your breath smells like a fucking ash tray .” But he wasn’t really bothered. I waited for it, thinking there might be that moment where you saw his hurt or humiliation or shame. When you live for a while with a sensitive person, you are always anticipating. You’re two steps ahead, knowing what the reaction will be to that comment or that film moment or that song. You start trying to steer you both clear of any of the places he could fall into and stay. After that night at the concert I tried to keep my eyes from wandering accidentally somewhere that might upset him. Movies with cheating girlfriends made him sullen, and so I would read the reviews before we chose one, suggesting safe plots with exploding buses and car crashes. His friend, Evan, was teasing him about his girlie silky hair once, just giving him a bad time, and you could see how hurt he got. Really hurt. More than friend-kidding-around hurt. You anticipate, and when you do that for a long while, it’s hard to shake. You get edgy. Like men back from the war who jump when a car backfires.

  But Jack’s story just rolled right off of Finn. He didn’t care. I realized he could take jokes and small blows to the ego without it destroying him. I guess it was the sturdiness of confidence. And that was the first thing I really liked about Finn Bishop.

  “I got a surprise for you tonight, Clara Bella,” my father said that late afternoon. He was sitting out on the deck, an open book on his knee. The tide was inching in. You could see where his footsteps had been a way off, now half covered.

  “Why does that worry me?” I said. “Except there’s not much to do out here but the fried clam special at Butch’s Harbor Bar. That guy Butch gets around. There’s a flyer in every window. Actually, it sounds kind of good.”

  “I’m not telling,” my father said. He looked pleased with himself. You could tell he hadn’t showered all day—his hair was unwashed and his beard was growing, and he had the same shorts on he’d been wearing for the past four days. Hopefully, wherever we were going, he wasn’t going out like that. “Better dress warm.”

  I factored that through the Potential Disaster department of my brain, and all the alarms went off. I was thinking sunset sail with Finn Bishop, me and my dad. I was thinking Dad was going for some bold move (he liked bold moves), face your fear and do it anyway, fear is the biggest bullshitter romantic night for three merged with book research and intrusive questions. “We’re not sailing with the Bishop brothers,” I said.

  His eyebrows shot up. He smiled. “Glad to hear you’re making friends, C.P.”

  “No comment.”

  “Rightly so. No, you know you couldn’t get me to go on that thing. Something else. Come on. Let’s get out of here in, say, twenty minutes?”

  When we met back up, Dad was showered, wearing jeans and a white shirt with the tails out, a bottle of wine tucked under one arm. We got in the car and drove toward the lighthouse and parked.

  “Oh, no,” I said.

  “Come on. You’ll love this old broad.”

  “She’s weird, Dad. I got the creeps.”

  “That was your own deal. Had nothing to do with her.”

  We inched our way down the steep trail. “How’d you even get a hold of her? Does she even have electricity?”

  “I sent her an e-mail. I was guessing she’d be as addicted to it as she ever was. She goes to the Captain Bishop Inn every morning and uses their computer. I wasn’t expecting to hear back from her so soon.”

  “Lucky us,” I said. Dad was ahead of me. He did the sideways dance down. “Don’t break your ankle or anything. I’d never get you out of here.”

  “You forget I played football.”

  “One lousy season.”

  He landed there nicely on his feet. I decided I’d better shut my mouth, because it was me who was slipping and skittering. The lighthouse stood above us, and the keeper’s house (with Sylvie Genovese inside, I was guessing, due to the Jeep out front) was lit and cozy on that cliff. She was probably watching, ready to fire me for my lack of climbing skills. My mood, high and happy after the docks that day, was also slipping. Part of me wanted my own bed in my own room back home, my friends, my life, or rather, my old-old life. But I was here, sliding down some cliff, my just-washed hair already turning stringy from salt air, my “surprise” a dinner with a crazy lady who lived in a shack with an outhouse. We’d better not stay late, because I couldn’t hold it that long, and there was no way I was peeing in that place.

  “I’m in a baked potato mood,” Dad said. “Butter. You know, Pea, I love butter. I really do love it. My heart even swells a little when I think of it. Wonder what we’ll have. Where is her place anyway?”

  I landed. Dad was taking off his sandals, and I did too. So much for showering. So much for Butch’s Harbor Bar. I wouldn’t have minded it. Red-and-white-checked plastic tablecloths with cigarette burns in them sounded kind of nice right then. Hot fried clams served in paper rectangle boats, I imagined. A Budweiser sign in back of the bar with a waterfall that looked like it was moving. “Believe me, you’ll know her house when you see it,” I said. We walked. “Nope, that’s not it. That place has indoor plumbing,” I said.

  My
father gave me a look. “I’m expecting your best,” he said. I was two steps behind him, dragging the way I used to when I was a kid and didn’t want to go somewhere. “How often do you get to have dinner with an esteemed poet? I’m talking National Book Award.”

  He waited for me to catch up. “Fine,” I said. I saw the shack up ahead at the same time he did. Maybe my mind moved over a bit when I did, the way a mind can when you get more information. Because Annabelle Aurora had lit the place up for our welcome. Candles big and small lined the railing of the small deck and the steps to the front door, and there were candles on the windowsills and on pieces of driftwood and set upon rocks out front. Little flickering lights were everywhere. Firefly magic.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said.

  “One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when to keep an open mind,” my father said. “And when not to.”

  I took that hit. I had it coming. Annabelle Aurora emerged from her door and took my father up into a great hug. “Bobby. Look at you!” she said. “My eyes are so happy right this minute. So happy.” She took my hands. “Clara. We meet again.”

  Annabelle Aurora’s stern mouth had relaxed into a smile and her eyes were glittery. She wore a long caftan of a bright magenta. “This is beautiful,” Dad said. He felt the fabric with his fingers.

  “India,” she said. “Come in, come in.”

  It was not at all what I had imagined. I pictured cat food bowls and the smell of tomato soup and a couch with worrisome stains. But the house was clean and warm, with wood paneling and tiny paintings and books in piles used as end tables. It was a cozy, sheltered cave, and it smelled like garlic and wine. From inside, mostly what you saw was the sea out before you. The lighthouse. The sun resting on the horizon.

  They chatted while she steamed the mussels and tossed the “grittle and snips,” the edible plantings she found on the beach, into a salad. She unfolded a little table and set it out on the deck. She draped a cloth over the top.

  “So pretty,” I said. The cloth was blue and soft, swoops of shapes. It looked more like something you’d wear than spill food on.

  “Thailand,” she said.

  We brought out the dishes. Melted butter to dip the mussels in, warm baked bread, the mysterious salad. The sun dipped, and the lights from the candles lit the night like earth stars. Dad and Annabelle Aurora talked books and old friends, though Annabelle remembered to include me. Did you know your father almost failed my class? she would ask. Or, Have you ever been to New York in the winter? Well, your father hadn’t either. We laughed and they drank wine. The salad was strange and tasted like grass and herbs and seaweed. Annabelle told us how she tried to live mostly from the land. She was worried about the mark she’d made in this life. What was wasted. She could manage to eat and survive with most everything from her garden and the beach.

  “No more capers in cut glass jars?” my father said. She leaned over and pinched his arm. We watched the candles flicker.

  “Did you hear that Daniella Morgan married that violinist?” she asked.

  “I heard,” he said.

  “She was in our class,” Annabelle Aurora explained. “Your father followed her around like a puppy. And . . . what was her name? Summer of the Gray Swan? That story. I haven’t forgotten it.”

  “You haven’t forgotten her name, either, you old bitch,” my father said. Annabelle laughed. “You have a mind like a steel trap.”

  “Listen to us and our clichés,” she said. “Someone should pummel us with a red pencil. Fiona Husted.”

  My father looked down at his bread.

  “She dumped him,” Annabelle said to me. “And then she became very successful.”

  “She regretted it,” he said. “Not the success, of course.”

  “Ha!”

  “I know she did.” His voice was quiet.

  “Yes, well,” Annabelle Aurora said. She poured more wine. I thought about my mother, then. The thought came suddenly, a memory, maybe, sparked by this conversation, that name, Fiona Husted. A door slamming—the night she’d had a “mood” when Annabelle visited for dinner. These kinds of stories, maybe, were funny for only a while. Maybe after a while they just made you feel bad. I wondered about the rocky territory of love and security, the ways a known person can suddenly seem unknown enough to threaten our sense of safety. Past loves were never past, Christian had said. I had argued that this was stupid. We could never be part of every corner of a person’s life, and you just lived with that. You didn’t go delving around in those corners in ways that made you feel weird. That was just asking for trouble. You had to separate the real threats from the ones that lived only in your imagination.

  “Ah. All in the sordid past,” my father said.

  “Still,” Annabelle said. “You should maybe start living again. Fiona Husted never married.”

  He was looking at her, and she was looking at him, and they were saying things that only they understood. “‘Love’s tangled branches’” he quoted.*

  “It was a different time in my life. And yours.”

  “‘Deep scratches on bare arms to those who risk passing . . .’”

  “‘To those who brave passing,’ smart-ass.” She threw her napkin at him. It was sort of flirtatious.*

  I helped Annabelle cut thick slices of raspberry pie. We came inside. It was getting cold, and there were mosquitoes. Annabelle started to yawn. Her old eyes looked tired. My father noticed, too, and we cleared the dishes and got ready to leave. He went outside to fold up the table for her.

  Annabelle Aurora took my hands. Hers were small and warm, but she gripped me tightly. “Adrienne Rich wrote about this, what you’re doing,” she said to me. “Primitive tribes send their women away ‘to go down into herself, to introvert, in order to evoke her instincts and intuitions.’** Yes? You, here? Think of it as a natural process. You find yourself by finding your instinct. By listening. By seeing what is.”

  “Dad told you why we’re here,” I said.

  “Well, we all come to the ends of the earth for our own reasons,” she said. She shrugged, as if to say it were a simple matter of fact.

  “What are your reasons?” I asked.

  “To lick my wounds. By the time a person’s my age, they have quite a number of those, I suppose.”

  Dad returned. Annabelle dropped my hands and hugged him good-bye. “Annabelle, it was lovely,” he said.

  And it had been lovely. My father and I trudged back up the narrow piece of sand that was all that was left of the beach now that the tide had come in. We climbed our way back up the steep slope. My father reached the top and held his hand out to me. The lighthouse shot out its intermittent beam in that deep darkness. Sylvie Genovese’s own lights were out. You could only hear the intermittent chshsh of waves unfurling on sand and the threep threep of crickets. The sea was endless-dark except for the glowing tips of the waves in the moonlight.

  We were quiet. My father was deep in his own thoughts. And I was thinking about the women of primitive tribes and a hundred drowned sailors and closing my eyes in my bed at the ends of the earth.

  Chapter 9

  I was not a girl who felt so free and comfortable with my own body that it was easy for me to share it. I was shy. In my bathing suit, I was shy. I remember being scared to start middle school because we thought we were going to have to take showers in P.E. That was the rumor. The image I had was straight out of a prison movie. Naked, exposed me, huddled, arms clutching for cover, as the other girls stood under the water, free and fearless. I still have dreams about that—some sleep-brain P.E. class where I can’t find the hook I left my clothes on. In the dream I am Holocaust thin, as if even my usual protective fat has left me to fend for myself. Of course, they never made us take showers. Still, I am not one of those women you see in gym locker rooms strutting around with their bare droopy breasts and pocked thighs. They don’t even seem to know it might be a good idea to undress in the bathroom stall. Then again, who’s the one with t
he problem.

  I was self-conscious when Dylan Ricks first kissed me, when he touched me. To me, my body seemed only good enough, something you’d buy if it were 60 percent off, but not at full price. I didn’t know what men liked in a body. From what I could tell, it wasn’t what I had. We were told to be thin, but it seemed to me it was girls who wanted that, not boys. Boys liked breasts and asses and thin girls didn’t have those. I was neither thin enough to be admired by girls, nor lush enough to be admired by boys, so my body just seemed . . . serviceable. A toaster. A bicycle. A thing capable enough, I guessed, of carrying my spirit around. I couldn’t understand the worth it might have to Dylan. Dylan had said I was inhibited, but I wasn’t inhibited, I was sixteen.

  When I first leaned in to kiss Christian on those bleachers, the momentum of the night picked me up and set me down into another way of being. A new person in your life gives the rest of it a chance to be new, too. Your life can be whatever you want it to, from there on out. I leaned in and kissed and that is who I was to him, not shy, but bold. Not inhibited, but brave. I was that to him and so I kept being that. It was what I thought he wanted and what he was attracted to, and yet it was this, this exact thing I wasn’t even really, that made him the most insecure.

  I got to the point, later, where I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know which one of those people was me. I just couldn’t tell.

  We didn’t make love often after that time in the car, but when we did, there was an intensity that made me feel too much—I was glass, transparent and breakable. It bound us closer together. It was the one thing we alone had with each other, with no one else, and to me that made it feel like it was brick set tight against more brick, another layer to our own private wall, but that’s not how Christian saw it. For him, it was as if he’d had a nice object, a painting, say, or some vase, and then he suddenly found out it was rare and valuable, so valuable it made him nervous. He needed to guard it. He needed to make sure no one would steal it. It was perfect, so he also needed to make sure it stayed perfect, with the help of his constant, small corrections. When summer came and I started my bookstore job again, he’d ask too many questions about who came in. He worried about my coworker, Mark, even though Mark was a graduate student and had a girlfriend. I learned what not to say.