Stay

by Deb Caletti

  Sylvie took back her empty, clean orange pot and read the note that Dad had tucked inside. I don’t know what it said, but whatever it was, Sylvie turned bitchy again. Sometimes she made me stay late when there was nothing to do. Her eyebrows were always down, and she’d take that boat out on the water and rev the motor—I could hear it. I could see her zipping around on the ocean like she was trying to outrun whatever was behind her.

  They both were pissing me off. I didn’t get the giddy love-stuff and then the complete withdrawal. I guess he still loved my mother and always would. Fine—but he was driving me up a wall. Living with someone like that—it’s like you’re both stuck in some house with boarded-up windows. You start feeling depressed even though you’re not depressed. You can catch a mood like the flu, and that sort of mood was easy to pass on to someone else. Joy is not nearly as contagious as despair.

  So imagine how angry I was when one morning I was leaving for work and he was smoking that stupid cigarette he’d gotten out of the ashtray of the car. That thing had been sitting in there for years. Years. I couldn’t even imagine it would still have in it what he needed from it, nicotine or whatever, but there he was. He was wearing this sick-looking T-shirt from a thousand years ago and his baggy pajama bottoms, and he was sucking on that thing, and I just had enough. I started yelling at him, and he was telling me it was none of my business, and I slammed out the door and went to work, which was the same thing as saving yourself from a sinking ship by jumping into the mouth of a shark.

  Sylvie made me count the cash in the drawer three times, even though I kept coming up with the same number. She got several new boxes of merchandise for the store but just let them sit there where the UPS guy had dropped them, unopened. She snapped at Roger, who looked like he had his feelings hurt, I swear. His eyes got sad. I wanted to scoop him up, because I knew he was going through the same thing I was.

  I decided to go see Annabelle Aurora. It was kind of like telling on Dad, but fine. He was responsible for me, sure, but I was responsible for him too. Right or not, that’s how it was.

  The air felt so good outside. I breathed deeply. It was a blue sky day and the ocean just kept on being the ocean—wide and consistent, in and out, in and out, bringing its little presents to the shore and taking them back again. I made my way down the trail, grasping at sea grass to keep me upright and doing the last bit in an embarrassing half slide, hands up surfer style. That part wasn’t on purpose.

  I hoped Annabelle was home. I walked down the beach to her place and was happy to see her gray head bent over in her garden, checking on her plants. She was holding a fistful of weeds and had a bucket of clams.

  “Clara!” she said. She had an old T-shirt on, her jeans. Her eyes revved up into that twinkle. I swear, her twinkle went from zero to sixty in one second. She was happy to see me. “Where the Christ has your father been? Is he mad at me?”

  “I was hoping you could explain him to me,” I said.

  “Let me make you something. A ginger drink.”

  I followed her inside, and she bustled around the small space. A minute later we were outside again, sitting at that folding table. She set two tomatoes in a bowl in front of us, along with a salt shaker and two tall glasses filled with a light brown liquid.

  She sat down. She propped her feet up on the extra chair. The sea in front of her place had a few huge rocks in it—one shaped like the curved back of a whale, another like the sharp triangle of a fin. Waves broke around them in white froth. I sipped my drink. It was cold, but with the heat of ginger and the sharp breath of cinnamon.

  “This is delicious,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. She took a tomato, chomped into it like an apple, sprinkled a little salt on it, and had another bite. She gestured for me to do the same. I did. I didn’t even like tomatoes all that much, but eating one that way made the tomato taste different. Sort of like its real self. Annabelle set it down on a napkin and folded her hands. A patient Buddha in the guise of an old lady, or the other way around.

  I listened to the roar and crash of waves, the chshsh of water rolling over sand. It was sunny, and the sand looked shimmery. “Do you believe in ghosts?” I asked. It was funny how you could talk about some things in the daylight without a problem. Light is good protection.

  “Ghosts,” she said. She thought about this. “I think we make our own ghosts.”

  “That’s pretty much what Sylvie Genovese said.”

  “Then again, the day after my brother died . . . I went out to the beach. It was filled with sand dollars. Filled. Not one or two, but hundreds.” She pointed to a glass jar that held a few of them. “I’d never seen anything like it. He loved sand dollars. I had to wonder.”

  “Wow.”

  “Yes, indeed. How ready is one to believe in coincidence? Or that everything has an explanation? My brother himself would have said there had been a certain tide . . . Why do you ask?” She sipped her own drink.

  “There’s supposed to be a lot of ghosts around here. The lighthouse is haunted.”

  “That’s what they say.”

  “You don’t think it’s possible? For people who are dead to stay here with us?”

  “Oh, they stay here with us, all right.”

  “I guess so.” I thought about my mother. It was strange how often I was thinking about my mother lately. She seemed more real and present to me than she had in a long time.

  “Then again, I’m not one who thinks many things are impossible. My brother and I were different. A scientist, an artist. Who knows what to believe? We can’t sit on our own island and assume we know all there is.”

  “I think Dad is still in love with Mom,” I said.

  “Really.” She swirled her ice cubes.

  “He’s sitting around morose all the time. He can’t seem to move on.”

  Annabelle made a little hmmph sound, thought about this. “Love.” She looked at me with those blue eyes. “Isn’t it astonishing how confused and complicated such a small, simple word is? It attracts so many other things, doesn’t it, that stick to it like barnacles on rock . . . fear, guilt. Need. You can’t even see the rock anymore. I imagine love in its purest form is a rare thing.”

  “Are you saying he’s not still in love with my mother?”

  “I’m just saying it’s probably hard for him being here, right by the sea. Can you imagine how hard? But, then again, we do that, don’t we? We put ourselves in the worst places in order to travel through them. We don’t even realize it. It’s some need we have. Inner drive . . .”

  I didn’t even hear the last of what she’d said. I got stuck there, on the part about him being by the sea. I didn’t know what she meant. Did she mean because he’d taken a trip to the beach after my mother died? Is that what she was talking about? But I felt something at her words. A tug, like the start of a thread being pulled. The alarm of things starting to unravel. The sea. My mother and father. Something else there, too. Fiona Husted? Annabelle herself? A memory that wasn’t quite a memory, more like something you saw in a photograph and thought you remembered but probably didn’t.

  I interrupted her philosophical rambling. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, it’s purposeful, even if we don’t realize it. The desire to put things in our path to figure out how to finally leave them behind . . .” She didn’t understand what I was asking.

  “No. The sea. What about the sea? Why would it be hard for him to be here?”

  Annabelle Aurora stopped. She started to speak and then changed her mind. She looked at me, blinking. She took in a breath. An oh! The kind of painful surprise you get when you suddenly see that you’re bleeding.

  “Why would it be hard?” I asked again. My alarm was growing. She knew something. And behind that something was a whole other world beyond that island I lived on. I didn’t want to know, but I needed to know. A part of you understands when it’s time for that.

  “Clara,” she said. The wattage in her eyes dimmed. She looked sad
. No, she looked crushed.

  “Tell me.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m an old woman, and I can’t always keep everything straight.”

  I knew that wasn’t true. I could ask her anything, I’d bet, what those weeds were called out there, the medicinal properties of ginger, the National Book Award winner of 1976, and she would know it. “Please,” I said.

  “No, Clara,” she said. She was old and small enough for her wrists to be broken like twigs, but I could tell, too, that she could stand immovable as a tree trunk.

  I sat there and looked at her and she at me. We were two forces. “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “I came one summer, after I divorced my husband of thirty-five years. It was more honest here than the city. Salt grass doesn’t lie, and neither do thorny urchins or sea lettuce. I’m getting too old for anything but the truth. My friends think I’m crazy. My daughters haven’t forgiven me. They’ve tried to come and fetch me more than once. People like their own free will more than anyone else’s.”

  “Annabelle,” I tried again.

  “No, Clara.”

  “You said you believe in the truth.”

  “I love your father. And this is not mine to tell.”

  I pushed away from the table. I wanted to get away from here. This old woman knew things about my father I didn’t know. Maybe even things about me. I thought we were here to get away from Christian. But maybe there was another reason. I needed to get home to my father and find out what the hell was really going on.

  “I need to go,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, Clara. I’m so very sorry,” Annabelle said. But when she reached her hand out to me, I turned away. I left that little house where Annabelle found truth.

  By the time I had gotten back to the car, my brain had done a nifty trick, one of its best, something it was really good at. Already, several stories and excuses and reasons for what just happened had popped in to calm me down. Annabelle knew something, okay, but there were a million possible somethings that would not change my life. Maybe my dad and my mother had met by the ocean. He had a love affair, maybe, a long time ago. Some tragic happening that made him hate the water. No wonder he didn’t want to talk about it. Shakti’s father had been involved with some violent political protests in India, and he wouldn’t say anything about that. It didn’t affect Shakti’s everyday life. It was her father’s own private business.

  The feeling I had, that I was pressing up against something huge, a sense of gathering panic—it was just me, probably. After what had happened with Christian, all of me felt fragile, that was all. I had started seeing tragedy everywhere I looked. I’d stand on a street ready to cross and would be sure I’d get hit by a car. I was sure, too, at other moments, that my father had cancer. Or that a cinder from the fire Dad had built would rise and catch and set us both ablaze. My terror had been turned on and now it couldn’t be shut off, like those stupid car alarms you hear on the street that keep blaring long past any danger.

  We’re as good at talking ourselves out of fear as into it, aren’t we? Maybe better.

  I ate a Snickers bar Dad had on the seat of the car, and I turned the key, and those two normal acts made me quite sure everything else was normal, too. The lighthouse was still the lighthouse and the road was still the road and my hands were on the wheel and there was a scrunched up chocolate bar wrapper beside me, and it was all normal enough that nothing could really be going wrong. I decided not to drive straight home and confront Dad, who would likely think I’d lost my mind. So, big deal. Annabelle knew why he was afraid of the water. So what.

  I calmed down. I drove to the Bishop Rock docks. I could see Obsession out on the water, its tall mast looking old and regal as a king. I waved to Cleo, smelled the reassuring smell of ocean and piers and Cleo’s cheeseburgers. I felt comfort at the solid sound of my shoes against the dock wood, and at the racket of those seagulls—swooping and arcing and whining seagull complaints.

  Finn put his hand to his mouth and called. “Clara!” The passengers were still aboard, and a few laughed.

  “Lovestruck baby,” Jack sang, and tossed the rope to Finn as he hopped off. It was like watching acrobats—their sure and quick-footed moves.

  I relaxed again, in spite of the strange thing that had happened back there with Annabelle Aurora. I realized this was also true in a larger way—even with my past and the sudden bouts of irrational panic it brought, it was relaxing here. It was the foreverness of the water, the ancient art of those huge white sails, the old rocks; it was the Bishop brothers with their family history that named this island. And Finn’s firm grip, and Jack’s cocky scrubble on his face, and Cleo’s seagull that stayed and stayed every single day.

  Finn helped the passengers off the boat, lending each his hand. He trotted over to me when he was finished. Every time I saw him it was the same. He was the same. He was his same, easygoing self with his wide smile and shy eyes. He didn’t become other, surprising things. I had realized what a great thing sameness was. You wouldn’t think it, but it was true. There was a shelter in certain rhythms—seasons and tides and boats that went out and came back in, people who were steady, who kept steady hands on rudders.

  I guess that’s what safety is. Sameness you can count on.

  And sameness was something we should be grateful for, who knew? He wrapped his arms around me. He had never given me such a big, wide open hug before. He smelled like the cold air of outside, and I loved that. Maybe we had come to a similar feeling by our own path, because it felt like we were both somewhere new and large with each other. Or maybe it was just so good to see him. It was as good a definition of love as any—the feeling of just so good to see you that happened to stay.

  “I had a great idea,” I said.

  I was looking at his mouth. He had a terrific mouth.

  “I wonder if it’s the same great idea that I had,” he said.

  “You think—” But I was interrupted. He kissed me then, finally. A sweet, sweet kiss. A delicious, perfect kiss that made me think of peaches and summer and days you got to sleep late.

  The kiss ended. His arms were looped around my waist. I felt so happy. “I guess we did have the same great idea,” I said.

  We looked at each other and smiled like we just discovered something wonderful, maybe kissing itself, something no one else ever figured out. It seemed like ours, a terrific secret.

  “Think we should tell anyone about this?” he said, reading my mind.

  “No way,” I said.

  “Ha, look at you two, sucking face,” Jack said.

  If I had managed to get myself most of the way to There’s a Reasonable Explanation after my visit with Annabelle Aurora, my afternoon with Finn completed that particular voyage. There’s a Reasonable Explanation is definitely a place you can go, a destination. Sometimes it’s a fast trip, a quick, five minute train ride, and other times it’s that kind of travel that involves buses and cars and long waits in airports and heavy bags slung over your shoulder, like the time Dad and I went to Australia. You somehow get there. Tired, questioning why you ever left, but still there. You collapse into There’s a Reasonable Explanation like some hotel bed with great sheets. Or even not great sheets. The arrival is such a relief that the bedspread could be scratchy and it wouldn’t matter all that much. You’re just so glad to be there.

  After that kiss, I hardly noticed the small voice, the static of anxiety somewhere way back that said something was wrong. I felt happy. I felt happy and like I deserved to be that happy and that the happiness deserved “normal.” I wanted all the best things for that happiness, the way you want all the best things for someone you really care about, and normal was the least it deserved.

  So, I did something normal. I did it to spite abnormal, I think. It was sort of defiant. Same as all those people who said they wouldn’t give in to terrorists but would just go on doing their usual thing.

  I called Shakti.

  Yes, I did. On purpose. I was bur
sting with happiness, and when I’d been bursting with happiness before, I would pick up the phone and call my best friend. I’d been doing that for years, ever since we met in the sixth grade. This time I made her promise, I made her swear, and then I spilled it all. Where we were. What had happened since. You could have told me! she said. I would never, ever in a million years tell Christian where you were! I knew that. I did. And I was so glad to have her know the truth. It felt terrible to keep my real life from her. But now she knew, and now my old life and my new one came together. As it should be.

  Normal.*

  Chapter 15

  Breaking up with Christian was not as easy as it should have been. Not even for me. There were things about Christian I would miss.* His voice. I was sure I would never meet anyone again with a voice like that, the way it played, up and down, like music in my ear. But then again, terrible things had been said in that voice. The way he looked—but then again, a person could turn ugly. Their actual look could change when their actions were repulsive. The way he made me feel—that strength and attraction. And then again, those were the things I started to feel ashamed of. He could make me feel as hideous as he made me feel beautiful, as small as he made me feel big, as burdened as he made me feel lucky.