Stay

by Deb Caletti

  I saw our house sitting at the edge of Possession Point, all the lights off. I parked in the gravel driveway, turned the engine off. The house looked still, empty. I walked quickly to the door and found it locked. My hand shook with the key in it, and once inside I shut the door and bolted it again behind me. I felt stupid, because my heart was pounding. I wondered, too, if my mother did not see fate but felt it moving inside of her, held in her grasp, ready to do her bidding. If she felt it rising up within her like some welcome rage, a release of jealousy and too much pain as he sat there with his scotch. The thought of it, even the thought of the smell of that scotch made my stomach swim with nausea.

  I called out, but my father wasn’t home. I looked out the window, to the side of the house near the back deck where my father kept his bike, and I was right, he was gone.* The wind was whistling. Everything was sudden angles in that wind—the grass bent wildly and the waves slanted and the rain, too, fell at a diagonal as the wind pressed against it. I shut the blinds. It was crazy, but I went around shutting everything I could shut. Windows and curtains and closet doors. A bathroom drawer that held my father’s shaving kit. The wardrobe that held the television.

  I found my phone in my purse and then zipped my purse up tight, too. I was going to call my father. Wherever he was, I needed him back. I didn’t want to be in that house all alone with the slanting wind outside. I had never been a baby about being alone, never. But there was this thrum of inevitability inside me, and his presence could stop that, I thought. Something needed to stop it. A person, a conversation, regular keys being dropped on a regular table, some regular words, dinner being made.

  I called him but the phone only rang and there was his voice leaving his message in that smart-ass voice that was only one side of him. I hung up. I tried to tell myself I was being stupid when I knew I was not being stupid, and that’s when the phone started to ring right in my hand and it was him. It was Christian.

  I shoved the phone down deep into the couch, under the cushions. I felt a grip of panic. I opened my purse again and took out my car keys and put them in my pocket, same as I did that other day, the last time I had seen him. I could hear the thrum of ringing under those pillows, and then it stopped. I didn’t know what to do. I needed to do something only I had no idea what.

  I went to my father’s room. I looked under his bed and took out the paperweight he kept there. It was heavy for its size, shaped like a typewriter, jagged and intricate, with frozen, silent keys. I brought it out to the living room. I set it down on the coffee table in front of me.

  I was getting myself worked up over nothing. You could do that. You could make something big in your mind that didn’t exist—Christian himself had done that, and what he’d created was as real to him as real actually was. You could see ghosts. How could you tell the difference? How could you tell the fear inside from the danger outside? How could you hear what was real when the wind was battering and the rain coming down and those ghosts were restless and rising from the seas?

  Chapter 23

  I sat there on the couch and circled my knees with my arms and watched the sky turn briefly pink and orange in the skylight before it went dark. The phone rang under the cushions again. I knew it might be Finn, but it might not be, too. I couldn’t stop to find out, because I needed to listen. The phone stopped. I sat very still and listened hard to the night—the ocean, the wind, the rain, the creak of the joints of the house, so I would hear if he was coming.

  And so I did hear it coming from a long way off, that car. The car was one I knew well—the sound of the engine was. A car engine can sound like no other car engine, same as the sound of a particular car door slamming shut, same as particular footsteps, which I did not wait for. I looked out the window when I heard the engine. I saw the headlights and the outline of the driver, and I knew those headlights and that outline.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I said out loud. My voice was both so big and so small in that room. “Jesus,” I whispered.

  He had closed that door in his room, and I had been trapped in that corner, I remembered that. I would not be trapped again.

  I had the keys in my pocket, but the keys would do no good. The paperweight sat on the table, and it would do no good, either. They were small, silly weapons, pointless objects offering no protection. I saw the headlights swing into the driveway, and they swooped across the living room, same as the lighthouse beam making its slow arc. I went to the sliding door that led to the back deck and opened it, and the blind clattered as I shoved it aside and stepped outside and then remembered that he could hear my shoes on the wooden planks of the deck. I heard him knocking. I heard him calling my name in that voice, and I ran then. I bolted down the dunes toward the beach and I started running and I could still hear him calling out for me.

  The rain soaked my blouse in an instant. It clung to my skin, and my hair was wet and rain dripped down my forehead and I stumbled across bits of driftwood and rock to the place on the shore where the sand was hard and I ran and ran until I realized he might see me easily there. He would walk around the house after he had knocked. He would see the open door. Maybe he would walk around inside the place where my father and I had lived, invading our private space, forcing himself where he wasn’t wanted. He would get in his car again and drive on the road just above me where he would see my white shirt in the darkness.

  I ran back up to the shore again, to a covey of rocks, and I lay down against a huge stone, hidden from the road, feeling the hard slate against my wet clothes, the cold of the rock against my cheek, gritty with sand. My heart was pounding. My phone—it was still under that couch cushion. I felt crazy. I was out of my own body. It was like that other night, when I was driving and there was the ammunition store and the phone booth, and I was in a town where other people lived, not me. I gripped that rock, and the rain soaked my jeans now, and I waited, I don’t know for what, just for the right amount of time, the signal inside that it was the right amount of time, and then I climbed up toward the road and crossed it so that I would be farther from where he might look.

  I ran. My chest was burning with fire from running. I breathed hard. I prayed I might see my father biking up the road, but then I realized how silly that was. Him on a wobbly bike to save me felt as feeble as those policemen on bikes or horses, the ones you were sure wouldn’t be good for much other than stopping some jaywalking citizen. Even my father, though, would not take his bike out now, in this pounding rain and wind. He would stay smartly where he was until he could get a ride back, maybe from Sylvie Genovese’s, if that’s where he was.

  That’s where he was, I was sure of it.

  It suddenly appeared like the right answer, even though I had been moving that direction all along. The lighthouse. The safest place now, I knew, the safest place in any storm, that column of stone, and inside the keeper’s house, Sylvie and my father and Roger, Sylvie’s warm rugs and cups of tea and my father, who would not let anything bad happen.

  Only, he had let something bad happen. He had let it happen and didn’t, couldn’t, stop it.

  The road was empty—there was no car in sight, not Sylvie’s, not Christian’s driving slowly past in that rain. It was just me walking now, walking because I couldn’t run anymore, and the lights of houses coming on in the dark and the wind whistling and the sound of the waves crashing hard into rock and something banging far off in the wind, some door loose on its hinges.

  I could not see the lighthouse in the distance and then I could because the sensors must have gone off, and the beam lit up and it began to swivel in the sky, and I went toward it. It was a long way away when not in the car or on a bike, and I was soaked and started to shiver. A car approached, and I hunched down, and it sped past, a car I did not know. A cat cried out, one of those horrible cat cries, a howl. I felt that howl inside me, curling up from somewhere deep, my own cry. I stood and kept walking, and then I started to run again because I couldn’t bear the rain anymore, that night, that road, and the
sound of my own steps on pavement.

  I ran up the curved drive to the lighthouse. The visitors’ center parking lot was empty, but, yes, there was Sylvie’s Jeep and my father’s bike resting against the gate, and yellow lights blazed upstairs, and in the backdrop was that huge and slowly swiveling beam.

  I caught my breath, thankful that I had made it. My father would be shocked to see me there, standing on the porch, soaked and scared. I bent over, rested my hands on my thighs as I let the fire in my chest subside. It seemed crazy and unreal—the headlights, running out that back door, Christian’s car. It had been real, right? It had been. It was windier up there on the bluff than it had been on the road. The wind had turned from a whistle to a loud, spinning howl, and my teeth were chattering, and I felt so far outside myself that I had a hard time making myself move to that front door, and I just stood there breathing so hard, my hands on my knees.

  But I was there, and so I rested a moment. And in the small space of that moment he was in front of me. He was there with the lighthouse behind him.

  “Clara!” Christian called, and his voice caught in the wind and carried upward, disappearing.

  “No,” I said. “No.”

  He was soaked, too. A striped cotton shirt, his jeans, his hair plastered to his head. His face was much thinner than I remembered. His voice, familiar. He was familiar, too. He was still wearing that leather wristband I had given him that one Christmas. That was the weird thing. I still knew him.

  “Stop. Just stop for a minute!”

  “Get away from me, Christian.”

  “You have nothing to be afraid of, Clara! I need you to know that. I would never hurt you.”

  The rain poured down. I started to cry. “Please, why can’t you leave me alone?”

  “You need to know I would never hurt you!”

  “You came to tell me that? You followed me here for that?”

  “I can’t believe you would think you needed to run away! You needed to hide from me? From me? Do you think I’m a monster?”

  He stepped toward me.

  “No!” I cried. “Dad!” I yelled. My father would hear me. I was in no danger, with my father just steps away in that house, upstairs where the yellow light was. The door would fling open, the police would come. “Dad!”

  My voice lifted up in that wind, too. It lifted and drifted and blew away from that cliff and out to sea.

  “You have nothing to be afraid of. It’s me! It’s only me!”

  “Why did you follow me?” I was sobbing. My face was wet with tears and rain, and my nose was running.

  “To talk to you, Clara. To talk. You won’t talk to me! I need you to know I would never hurt you. I just want to explain!”

  “I don’t want your explanations, don’t you see? I don’t want them. You may need to give them, but I don’t want them.”

  He wouldn’t listen, even then. His need was greater than my will always, always: even as we stood on that bluff, he pressed his need over mine, like a hand over my mouth.

  I should bolt, I thought. My father couldn’t hear me as that rain pummeled down, but he was right there, if I could reach that door. But Christian stood before me, and I knew him, he was familiar in spite of everything, and his arms were out and his palms up as if in pleading, and I could see there was no shiny knife there.

  He saw me soften for that second. He saw it. “Clara,” he pleaded. He stepped closer to me. “I love you. I would never hurt you. That’s all I want you to know. That’s all.”

  “Okay. I know it. Now go.”

  “I loved you. I will always love you. Christ, Clara. We had so much. Why did you throw it away without giving me a chance?”

  This was what happened with him, wasn’t it? If you took one of his words, he gave you a thousand more? If you gave him one of your own, he would beg for a million? It was a never-ending need, a pit too deep to see to the bottom of. It was why Captain Branson said no contact, wasn’t it? Because a single word was just kindling on a fire, and contact like this was gasoline.

  “Please stop.”

  “I want you to know I’ve changed. I’m not the person I was. I’ve learned. A person can learn from their mistakes! I was wrong. How I treated you was wrong.” He stepped even closer. He reached his arms out, pleading. He could touch me if he wanted to. I could barely breathe.

  “I need to go.”

  “Clara. I’ve changed, okay? Just so you know.”

  Rain rolled down his face. The way he stood was familiar. The rhythm of his words. He was near enough, now, for me to feel his breath. His breath was familiar.

  “If you’ve changed, then you’ll understand why you need to leave.”

  “Stop crying, Jesus, listen to me.”

  What was happening—it was all feeling further and further away, not closer. “I don’t want to ever see you again.”

  There was a pause, and the lighthouse beam swiveled around, and he held his arm up to his eyes and so did I. I felt some stupid possibility, the ever-hope that he would hear me as he needed to, that this craziness would stop and he would get in his car and drive away. That’s how crazy I was too, crazy with naiveté and crazy with hope for the normal and crazy in my desire for other people’s reasonableness. I still believed in reason. He was proving me wrong by his presence there, but I didn’t see that. I still hoped he would turn away; I still believed in that outcome.

  And then, like a key turning, a small click, he was in a different place. I saw it in his face. It takes some people a million times to see, but finally it is that millionth time. I saw him clearly, and me clearly. I saw my own stupid hope, and the patterns that made him who he was, patterns that would never change, never. But I could. I could change. I could see.

  “Because of the sailor? Mr. Pizza? Mr. Fuck Me in the Car, too?”

  I bolted, and he grabbed my arm, and I knew I didn’t have a chance to make it to that door and pound hard enough to be heard upstairs. I ran to the only other route to safety I knew—that path to the beach, that steep slope down the cliff where my father had twisted his ankle. I stumbled and skittered and slid on my ass, and I can say I was finally fully afraid and fully aware in a way I had not yet been. Fully afraid, dear God—a fear that stood up and raged with ugliness and power because I saw, saw, that he did not have a knife but he had his own hands. I scraped my way down, ripping the skin from my palms and knees and I could see him above, the light going around again and blinding him.

  I reached the ground and ran. I heard him calling me, saying he was sorry, the word sorry carrying on the wind and carrying again and again.

  He was coming, as I knew he would. I heard his footsteps, heard him running or, at least, I thought I did. I heard hard steps on wood, which I could only connect to Christian, Christian’s nearness, Christian overtaking me. I did not connect them to what they were—the concerned steps of retired Colonel Gerard Yancy in his striped pajamas and slippers on the deck of his beach house, where the wind had carried our voices and finally dropped them. I thought that Christian had overtaken me, and I could no longer see with the rain in my face and my wet hair in my eyes and other visions rolling in like the storm.

  I could not make it to Annabelle’s shack; I could not even make it to the door of the next house, I was sure. Christian’s own voice tumbled to me, calling to me with the clarity brought by the speed and direction of wind, and I did what I had to do. I would go where he could not reach me. I grabbed that rowboat and those two oars stuck upright in the sand, the ones that belonged to retired Colonel Gerard Yancy, only I did not know they belonged to retired Colonel Gerard Yancy. Some strength rose up in me like those pictures you see in old children’s books of sea monsters, rearing their heads from the waters. I grabbed the wood bow of that boat, felt its faded green paint flake off in my hand, tossed the oars in. I pulled it across that sand, to the edge of the water.

  I pushed the boat far enough out for it to catch the waves, and then I waded in with my shoes still on. I was mov
ing in panic. There was another voice rising now, Colonel Gerard Yancy’s, although I couldn’t hear it with the wind pounding in my ears. I had to get away, that’s all I knew, and there was no other away but this one.

  I struggled to get the oars in their oar locks, but my hands were shaking too much, and I gave up and set the oars in the water and began pulling hard. I pulled with such force and panic that I could feel the muscles in my shoulders sear. A thought flashed: I was saving my life as my mother had destroyed hers.

  The waves were sloshing hard, slapping the boat, spilling inside. The sea was pulling me farther and farther out, and even through the slatting rain I could see the shore getting smaller. My breath was coming so hard that I had to stop, to try to breathe, to wipe the water from my face, and when I did, I saw the figure on the shore, retired Colonel Gerard Yancy in his pajamas, and I saw the other figure, Christian, who had not come to follow me at all, but who still stood at the top of those cliffs, at the edge near the lighthouse.

  Something shifted in me then—the knowing, the understanding of what was really meant to happen next. I knew what Christian would do, and the sea kept carrying my boat out, and the waves lapped in, and I felt a despair, a confusion in that storm, of who I was—my father or my mother. I stopped rowing. I realized that my fear brought me here, the storm of another’s emotions. Christian and I had also been in our own boat together, in a sea of his feelings, and I had stepped in, and I had willingly given myself up to the waves that carried me out. I had let him take me up and keep me in the ways he had wanted, and my father, too, had been taken up, then and for years afterward.

  We had let this happen.