Stay

by Deb Caletti

  The boat bobbed and sloshed, and one of the oars then slipped into the water, and I tried to reach it, but I couldn’t. I started to cry as I saw it taken away. I sobbed in despair, and then I howled, like that cat, like both the mother and her children on the doomed West Hartland, their grief, my mother’s grief, my father’s, my own. Water was coming in the boat in great waves, sloshing over the side, and I cried and tried to carry it out in my cupped hands, but it was too much for me.

  Through the rain I could see Gerard Yancy begin to run, and then I couldn’t see him anymore. He was too small. The wind whistled, and the boat carried on those choppy waves and took more water in, and I thought of my mother lifting herself, her leg going over the boat; I thought of Christian lifting himself over that stair rail and of Eliza Bishop climbing those lighthouse stairs. I was on my knees, bailing and bailing with my hands, crying, trying to reach the other side of the boat, trying to save myself, until I leaned too far and the boat caught, and then it went over, and I was under and my clothes filled with water, heavy, heavy weights. My head was underwater, and I couldn’t hear anything but bubbles and watery depth, and my nose burned with the suddenness and cold.

  I thrashed and felt the boat near my fingers; I pulled myself up to breathe but got a mouthful of water. I pulled again; I was not thinking; my body was only doing what it had to. I fought the weight of my clothes and the waves splashing against my face, and then I saw the orange of a life jacket floating nearby. Those old, summer-camp-type orange life jackets made of foam, a black strap that went around the waist. I grabbed it and held and it wasn’t enough to lift me above the waves but was enough to keep me from going under.

  I kicked and fought and held to that stupid piece of foam and tried not to think about my mother underwater, how she did not thrash and fight and find what she needed to hold on to. And then, after only a moment, there was the rumble of something, gone as water sloshed into my ears, and then back again. A choke and rumble, and it was getting louder.

  I knew that the man on the beach had started to run, but there was much I didn’t know. I didn’t know what happened to Christian. I didn’t know that Finn had called and called my phone and had come to our house and seen the open door. He had gone to the lighthouse and found Gerard Yancy pounding and yelling on the door. A girl, a boat. He did not wait for my father and Sylvie to appear—he had instead put the accelerator down and sped furiously back to Obsession, where he realized Jack had the fucking key on that string around his neck.

  It was right, though, that Jack and Finn had finally only unmoored the boat and were still motoring too far off to save me. And right, too, that the Coast Guard had been called only after Gerard Yancy had arrived at the lighthouse. Because it meant that what I heard, that rumble, was Sylvie and my father racing out to me in Sylvie’s bold little boat, and it meant that it was Sylvie who cut the motor where I was clutching that life vest, Sylvie and my father—who was in that feared boat, out in that feared sea—who pulled me in. It was right, because Sylvie needed another chance to save a child, and my father needed another chance to save the one he loved.

  He was sobbing into my wet body, and Sylvie was throwing a blanket on me, and I was shaking and clutching them. I was holding on to the ones who cared enough to go out to sea to bring me back, and they were holding on to the one who wanted nothing more than that.

  Sylvie took my face in one hand. “I suppose now you will be wanting tomorrow off,” she said coolly. And then she kissed my forehead with great tenderness, just before she started that motor again and brought us home.

  Chapter 24

  If my life were a movie, this is what would have happened: Christian would have climbed the lighthouse steps and flung himself over the railing, same as Eliza Bishop. Or he would have pitched himself over the rocks of that cliff, landing dead and battered at the bottom. But that’s not what happened. He did not kill me, and he did not kill himself. Still, that night in the boat I was sure he had; I was as sure he would kill himself as I’d been previously sure he would never harm me. But I could never really know either of those things, could I? Even though it makes us feel better to think so, we can’t predict another person’s actions, not really. Another person is, at the heart of it, unknowable. And if you cannot know a person enough to always guess what they’re capable of, you certainly cannot know them enough to hold them in your hands, to control their behavior, to fight, manipulate, cajole or nurse or soothe them into doing what they should or shouldn’t.

  People will do what they will do. The trick is admitting your own helplessness about that little fact.

  Christian fled the moment Dad came running from the house. He escaped to his car, crying. My father called the police in a fury. An officer would make a visit to warn him to stay away. Even my father was sure we would never hear from him again after that. But two days later, Christian sent a message asking me if I was all right. As if a text was somehow a smaller and less offensive way to approach me. As if I might not notice it as much, or protest this diminished form of outreach.

  We went into the city the next day and got a restraining order.*

  Chapter 25

  “Clara Pea, you’re going to be so pissed,” my father said.

  His glasses were at the end of his nose. His laptop was open in front of him on the table of the beach house. Outside, the day spread out blue and wide and hopeful.

  “What?” I said.

  “I know what our mystery host does.”

  “You cheated! You looked him up!”

  “I’m sorry.” He didn’t look sorry in the least. He looked pleased. He set his coffee cup down hard. “You’re not gonna believe it.” He started to chuckle. “You’re not going to believe what he does.”

  “Okay, what?”

  “Guess.”

  Oh, God. This could take a while. He loved games like this. “Movie producer.”

  “Nope.”

  “Come on, Dad. There are a million professions. A million.”

  He waited.

  Shit.

  Fine. Whatever. “Actor.” Still, that grin. “Famous actor.”

  He laughed a great big ha! and slammed his palm on the table.

  “This is just getting unfair now, because you’re having all the fun at my expense.”

  “Clara Pea, you are whining.”

  He was right. Still, I folded my arms.

  “Oh, all right,” he said. He stood, pushed his chair back. Went to the kitchen, opened the drawer. He held up a knife. One of our mystery host’s really nice ones. Black handle, sharp blade. Cut through apples like they were butter.

  “A knife.” Great. Now we were going to play charades.

  He held up another knife. “Another knife,” I said. He held up yet another one. He was just chuckling like mad now, and I put my hands on my hips. “Okay! A knife thrower.” Silence. “Circus performer.”

  “Mr. Sharpie,” he said. He clapped his hands together happily. The words meant nothing to me.

  “No idea,” I said.

  “Mr. Sharpie?” He looked incredulous that I didn’t know what he was talking about.

  I shook my head. “Obviously an old people thing.”

  “Door-to-door knife sales. Scissors, too. My parents got a set as a wedding gift, and it lasted their whole damn life long. Their whole damn life.”

  “Our mystery host sells knives door-to-door?”

  “General manager now. Worked his way up. The whole West Coast is his territory. California, right? Obviously sold a fuckload of knives, my friend. A fuckload of knives.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. I felt disappointed. All of the special things in the house didn’t feel so special anymore. Not like back when they were a film producer’s things.

  “Clara Bean Oates, what? You’re disappointed.” He set the knives down.

  ‘Well, yeah.”

  “No!”

  “No?”

  “It would have been too obvious, Bean Sprout. Too expected.
Film producer.” He waved his hand as if to whoosh the distasteful idea away. “Knife salesman.” He nodded at the rightness. “Worked his way up from humble beginnings? Dashed hopes of a career in film? Bought himself a place like this on the tip of this incredible peninsula? It’s the real thing, Pea. Honorable. A true accomplishment. Not some stupid fantasy. What is.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Pea.” He sighed as if I were hopeless. He stared me down, hard. “We can’t get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions that we miss the simple beauty of the truth.”

  * * *

  “I’m worried about something,” Finn said.

  We sat at that table, our table, outside The Cove, at the end of the dock closest to land.*

  “What’s that?”

  We held hands. He rubbed the top of mine with his thumb. “That after what happened, you’ll be afraid of the water.”

  It was true—at the thought of water I remembered suddenly the weight of my clothes, swallowing those waves splashing in my face. How cold, cold, cold I was lying in Sylvie’s boat. The shaking. I would close my eyes and see that oar floating away.

  “Our bodies are ninety-eight percent water,” I said.

  “Still.” Finn’s eyes looked troubled. “My life is ninety-eight percent water.”

  I looked out at that ocean, waves in, waves out, the ocean being an ocean, same as it had for a billion years. There were ghosts there, surely, but too, there were ghosts at that cabin just outside of town, the William Harvard House, and ghosts, too, at the Captain Bishop Inn, and ghosts on the banks of Greenlake, and in our old house, even. Ghosts, too, in that telephone booth where I called to have Christian taken away, and ghosts in the gym where we met. I thought of skittering down that cliff path, my name carried down by the wind. “I guess I would have to be afraid of land, too.”

  Finn thought about this. “You’d have to be afraid of your car.”

  He was right. “The lighthouse,” I said.

  “Even right here. This table.”

  He was right about that too. We had been watched there. It would be hard to find a place without memories hovering around it. We would have to move to a foreign country. I thought of Sylvie. It didn’t seem like even that had helped very much.

  “But I love this table,” I said.

  “I love this table, too,” he said.

  “So how do you make it all fit together? How do you take it all in? The good memories and the bad and all the in-between ones? The past and the now and the ghosts and the living?” I looked at Finn. I really needed an answer about this.

  “You’re asking the wrong person,” he said.

  Still, as I sat there, right then I was full with Finn’s sweet company and the sun on my back and Gulliver standing by in his bored but steady way. The water twinkled thoughtfully, a million tiny diamonds on the pinpoints of waves, and that smell, that fantastic smell of the sea—when I breathed it in, it just lifted me right up. “I’m going to keep on loving the water,” I said.

  “I’m glad,” he said. “Because a while back I bet you a trip to the San Juan Islands if you stayed employed by Sylvie Genovese. And, well, Clara Oates, it looks like you’re going to make it.”

  I went to see Annabelle Aurora. I walked down that path which was just a path now, in the daylight. I also walked past the house of retired Colonel Gerard Yancy and saw the boat upturned near his back deck, one oar stuck up in the sand. I made my way to Annabelle’s shack. I didn’t know why she had taken this place in my life, a woman who knew things, a woman who both stood by you but also who stepped aside, but she had. We were connected, is all. She was the closest thing to family that my father had, and so she was mine, too.

  A caftan—that’s what she wore that time, the bright orange of a mango, and a long yellow scarf with tasseled ends, her gray hair curved at her chin. She took my hands.

  “You came to the end of the earth, too, for your own reasons. I am so thankful we didn’t lose you,” she said.

  “Annabelle—when I first met Christian, I knew. I felt this important thing happening. Something that was supposed to happen. Love. I went to it. No, worse. I brought it tome. I’d never been so sure.”

  “Love or need? Love or desire? Love or ghosts, visiting there in the present? I told you, love isn’t often a pure thing.”

  “But I was so wrong.”

  “Maybe it was supposed to happen.”

  “But look how it turned out!”

  “Just because it turned out bad, doesn’t mean it wasn’t meant.”

  “Dad’s right, then. Fate has a fucking cruel sense of humor.”

  “Fate.” She shrugged. She could give or take it, the shrug said. “We do this, don’t we? Put the things in our path to figure out how to finally leave them behind? That is often mistaken for love. But maybe meant, yes? Look what you know now.”

  “You said this thing about instinct. About going away so that you could find it,” I said. “About learning to hear and see.”

  She nodded.

  “That night, on the cliff. I did see. I saw it all so clearly. And then I didn’t. I mean, I saw what we did, what happened between us, what always happened between us, but then I got it wrong. I knew it was in him to kill me or drop himself down those cliffs, too. No matter what he said, I felt the realness of that. But he didn’t. He didn’t do either of those things.”

  She took my hand, and we walked outside to the small table on the deck. We sat. Seagulls screeched in the sky, and the long, low horn of a ship passing blew somewhere in the distance. “Oh, this is not about that boy,” she said. “Listening and seeing—it’s not about guessing what someone else might do. Ah, if we could do that, this life would be a great deal easier, wouldn’t it?”

  I nodded. “It would.”

  “The instinct, the seeing and hearing—it’s not about him! It’s not about fate! It’s not about mysterious forces! It’s about you, Clara. It’s about you trusting what you feel, hearing the warnings you hear. Understanding your ghosts. It’s about not telling yourself anymore that you don’t know what you do know.”

  “All right,” I said. “I see.” I think I did see.

  “But, dear God, don’t listen to me. I’m an old lady in the middle of nowhere without a real toilet.”

  And then that was that on the subject of Christian Nilsson. Annabelle made a ginger drink for us. We sipped it as she told me which plants were edible on this beach. The sea lettuce and the sea asparagus. The ribbon seaweed. You could feed yourself, she said, with all that you have right here.

  The last days of summer flew too fast out of our hands, the way time does when you most want to savor it. I spent the rest of the month working and going to the library and being with Finn. Shakti and her sister drove up and spent a weekend with us, and my father typed madly and read fat books and brought Sylvie Genovese thoroughly into both of our lives. I could see their chemistry, some odd mix of boiling energy and natural connection that made it work. She had come over one night to cook us dinner,* great steaming plates of pasta with a red pepper sauce, and had left to go home to Roger when my father stopped me before I headed off to bed.

  “The summer is ending, Pea,” he said.

  “I know it,” I said. I felt endings everywhere I turned. In the lighthouse gift shop, in the white room of my bedroom at the beach house, in the tip tip tip sound of my father’s fingers on the keys of his laptop.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  We did. I had decided some things that I needed to tell him.

  I sat by him on the couch. “I’ve decided some things,” he said.

  I laughed. “I . . .”

  “What?”

  “I was just going to say the same thing.”

  “You were?” He looked nervous.

  “I’ve been scared to tell you,” I said.

  “Clara, I don’t want to go back,” he blurted. “I know our life is there, our house, your friends . . . We can keep the house, if that’s what you ne
ed. We can do that. You’re an adult now . . . You could live there on your own. But I want to stay here.”

  “Oh, God, Dad. I don’t want to go back either. I didn’t know how to tell you. You keep talking about getting back home—”

  “Because I thought you missed it. I know you’ve got Finn and everything, but you’ve got a whole life there—”

  “I applied for a job at the library. You know how I used to love working at the bookstore. Until I get the whole college thing sorted out. And there’s this place?”

  “Place?” He stopped.

  “A room. Don’t laugh. Above the taffy shop.” I waited. This was the part I was afraid to tell him. “I could afford it.”

  His eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. Mine, too. Then they spilled over. They rolled down my cheeks. “Pea.” He looked surprised, but that kind of surprise that you knew was coming all along. His voice warbled. “You’re leaving the nest.”

  “The new place smells like melting butter.” He laughed, we both did, but tears were rolling down his own cheeks now. “I’m gonna be so sick of that smell. I’ll need to visit you all the time,” I said.

  “Pea, I’m so fucking proud of you.”

  “You are?”

  He shook his head with disbelief. “We’re here.”

  “We are here.”

  He just looked at me, and we were a couple of crying idiots. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He sniffed. “Jesus,” he said. We kept looking at each other. All we’d been through together was with us right there. “Pea.” He squeezed my hand so hard. “There’s something . . .” The words were small and ragged, a whisper. “Are you ever going to be able to forgive me?”

  “Are you ever going to be able to forgive yourself?” I whispered back.

  “Let’s both work on that,” he said.

  “Only a few more trips back and forth over Deception Pass,” I said.

  Obsession was too big to handle on our own all the way out to the San Juan Islands, and so Finn and I took out another of the Bishop family boats, the Freebird.* God, the day was grand, the sky so large, and that’s the way my heart felt, too, as Finn shouted directions to me and I released the rope that let the sail swoop upward, filling with wind. I had always dreamed of a true and right place, and that’s what I felt then as I looked out at the sea and the sky. The rightness stretched farther than I could even see.