Stay

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  She looked at Connor. Then at me. She was wearing her overalls on top of a solid-gray flannel shirt. Her feet were bare and her hair had been freshly braided.

  “And who do we have here?” she asked, indicating Connor with a flip of her head.

  “This is my friend Connor. He’s the one I was telling you about.”

  “I see.” A pause. A sigh. “Well, you two boys come in.”

  But the minute we stepped inside, she grabbed me by the shoulder and steered me back out the door.

  “A private word with you outside,” she said. Then, to Connor, “Make yourself at home, son. We’ll be back in just a few.”

  She pulled the door closed behind us, and we stood on the porch together. The sun was just coming up over the rise, between the trees. It burned into my eyes when I tried to look at her.

  I had the definite sense that I was in trouble.

  “You mind telling me what exactly I’m supposed to do with him?”

  “Um,” I said. Not a great start. “I was hoping you might . . . help him.”

  “Help him how?”

  “I’m not sure. But you always help me. And I don’t know how you do that. You just do, somehow.”

  I watched her eyes narrow. I had to squint to see it, because of the way the rising sun was shining into my own.

  “Let me get this straight,” she said. “You’re worried your friend doesn’t want to live anymore. So you bring him to talk to the one person in the world you know for sure doesn’t want to. Is there a logic in here that I’m missing?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know.” I dug deep. If there was ever a time to dig deep, if there had ever been such a time in my life, this was it. “I think . . . sometimes I’ll think bad things about myself. Like I’ll think I’m stupid or I can’t do anything right. But if Connor told me he was stupid and couldn’t do anything right, I’d stand up for him. Sometimes it’s easy to want something for somebody else, even if it’s more than you want for yourself.”

  “Interesting,” she said.

  I hoped she would go on to say more. She didn’t.

  “Do you think I’m right?”

  “Kid, I have no idea.”

  “It’s dicey,” I said. “I’ll grant you that. All morning I was lying in bed thinking of that room with nothing but mirrors inside. Remember that? It was in that traveling art exhibit that we all went to see when it stopped in Blaine.”

  “I didn’t go to see it,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  I should’ve known. She wouldn’t have wanted to mix with all those locals. Also, now my point was lost. I knew I could never put it into words.

  “I know what happens, though,” she said, “when you have a mirror on both sides of you. It reflects out to infinity.”

  “Right!” I said. “That! I was lying in bed worrying that if you met Connor, his troubles and your troubles would reflect out like that. Multiply. Off into infinity, like you said.”

  She screwed her face up into a cartoon of criticism.

  “So then you got up and brought him here.”

  “Yeah. Sounds weird, I know. But I was still hoping for that first thing, where you want him to stay even if you don’t want to stay yourself. I knew it was either the best or the worst idea I’d ever had. And I tried and tried to figure out which it was. But I couldn’t. There was just no way to know.”

  “Big chance to take,” she said.

  “Yeah. I know. But I was out of ideas.”

  We stood that way for what felt like the longest time. I figured she was thinking. I didn’t want to move or speak, because I didn’t want to interrupt her thinking. In case it was about to come down in my favor.

  “I think you’re crazy,” she said. “And I think I’m crazy to let you talk me into having any part of it. But go on ahead and take your run and leave him here. I’ll see if he wants to talk.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I really appreciate this. I owe you one for it.”

  “You don’t owe me crap,” she said. “And vice versa.”

  Then, just as I was stepping down off her porch, she said one more thing to me.

  “Hey. Lucas. Sorry I cost you that girlfriend.”

  I stopped. Turned back. The dogs were disappointed, I could tell. But they waited.

  “You didn’t,” I said. “She just turned out to be . . . not who I was thinking she was.”

  “Yeah,” she said. She had her arms crossed over her chest. “Relationships are like that. You have to hang back for a time. See what you’ve got and what you’re getting yourself into.”

  I nodded, and began my run.

  What she had just said about relationships—I chalked that up as one more thing I couldn’t possibly have known if I hadn’t had Zoe Dinsmore to tell it to me.

  When I picked Connor up again, it was full-on light. Hot, almost.

  I’d purposely taken a very long run.

  He marched out of the cabin in perfect silence, his eyes trained down to the porch boards. Like his mother.

  I looked past him to the lady and mouthed the words “Thank you” without making a sound.

  We walked through the woods toward town together, my best friend Connor and me. Or I guess it should be “Connor and I.”

  We walked a quarter mile or so without any words spoken. I was beginning to think bad thoughts based on the silence.

  “What did you think of her?” I asked when I couldn’t stand it anymore.

  I wanted to ask what they’d talked about. But I knew it wasn’t any of my business. It hurt to know that, but it was still the damned truth.

  “It was interesting,” he said.

  Then he acted like he planned not to say another word.

  “Good interesting?”

  “Not sure.”

  We walked in silence until we could see town stretched out below. Connor stopped, as though taking in the view. So I stopped, too.

  “We don’t talk like that in my family,” Connor said.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know how to say it. It’s like, at my house, the more it matters, the more we don’t talk about it. That lady, she’ll say anything. She’ll talk about anything. The hardest thing in the world, she just spits it right out. It was kind of . . .”

  I waited. For an uncomfortable length of time. To find out what it “kind of” was.

  “. . . upsetting,” he said at last.

  I started to say I was sorry. But I never got that far. He spoke again, interrupting my thoughts about apologies.

  “Will you take me out there again tomorrow? I don’t think I could find the place just all on my own.”

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll take you out there any day you want.”

  I had a dozen questions, but I didn’t ask any of them. I didn’t want to jinx it.

  Chapter Twelve

  That’s Not Him

  It was at least two weeks later, and it might even have been three. It was one of those mornings when—after I’d done my run and taken the dogs home—I was jogging down the path toward town and ran into Connor walking up the same path to the lady’s cabin.

  He stopped when he saw me.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey,” I said in return.

  I always wanted to ask him a million things. What they talked about. Whether it was helping him. What it meant that he kept going there on his own. If there was any room for me in this new equation.

  Yes, much as I hate to admit it, I was feeling jealous and left out. It’s not pretty, but there it is, and it’s the truth.

  “You doing okay?” he asked me.

  He. Asked me. If I was okay.

  Just for a minute I almost blasted out the truth: That it was killing me. That I felt like I’d given him the best tool I had to understand my life, and now I no longer had it for myself, because how could I ask the poor lady to save two pesky young guys at once? And that I couldn’t stand not knowing how it was going, what was being said. It was
my thing, my idea. And I didn’t even get to ask if I should feel good about it. It was driving me crazy. Stone crazy.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”

  In my defense, I kept my crap to myself. At least I was that much of a friend.

  “Good,” he said.

  “You?”

  “Not sure. I’m here, anyway.”

  I didn’t know if he meant here on this path through the woods, going out to talk to the lady again. Or here on the earth in general. And I didn’t ask.

  “Know what I was thinking?” I asked him.

  “No. I don’t. What were you thinking?”

  “That your grandmother used to be like that. She would say anything that came into her head. She didn’t hold back.”

  “Oh yeah,” he said. He clearly had not thought of that on his own. “She did. Didn’t she?”

  Connor had adored her. But then she went and died when we were seven. The fact that he had no living grandparents might have factored into my thinking about taking him to meet Mrs. Dinsmore. But it had not occurred to me at the time that she had a lot in common with the grandparent he’d loved the most.

  I waited to see if he could make some kind of connection. Maybe realize that he liked her for that reason. But he didn’t seem to want to talk about it anymore, and I couldn’t tell if he connected those details or not.

  The conversation stalled. Connor shifted from foot to foot, and I could see he wanted to move on.

  “Maybe I’ll come by later,” I said.

  “Yeah, good.”

  But I didn’t go by later. Because my whole world had changed by later. Hanging out at Connor’s house was soon the last thought that was likely to cross my mind.

  When I walked through the kitchen door, my father was home. And it was a weekday. A working day. So that was strange. But not as strange as the fact that my parents were talking to each other. And quietly at that.

  They were sitting at the kitchen table, leaning close together. As though there had already been someone in the house who might overhear.

  I heard my father say something about a general discharge, and how it follows a person through the rest of his life. I didn’t know what he meant. It sounded like a medical condition.

  Now, I’m not one to talk much about people’s energy, or aura, or whatever you want to call it. I just take people straight on without all those extra levels of . . . whatever. But I still have to say it: In that moment, there was something invisible hanging in that room that just bowled me over. I could feel it. And it nearly knocked me down.

  They looked up and saw me standing there.

  “Lucas,” my mother said.

  I wanted to ask what was going on. What was wrong. But I didn’t. And I think the fact that I didn’t had something to do with the whole Connor and Mrs. Dinsmore thing. I had begun to assume that pretty much nothing was any of my business. I had started to keep my questions to myself.

  “I’m going upstairs,” I said.

  “Wait,” my father said. His voice was booming and big. Deep.

  I stopped in midstride.

  “Before you go up there,” my mother said, “we need to tell you something.”

  I walked to the table. It was only a few steps, but I remember a distinct feeling like I was walking up to a hangman’s noose or a guillotine. Marching to my own execution.

  I sat.

  “What?” I said.

  My mother spoke first.

  “Your brother is home.”

  “What?” There was no delay, not even a fraction of a second. It just burst out of me. “How? How is he home? How can he be?” It sounded like I was arguing, but the more I talked, the more I was getting excited. In the back of my mind I was beginning to wonder why they weren’t treating this like a good thing. “He wasn’t supposed to be able to come home for . . .” Then I hit a big question. Not the biggest. The biggest hadn’t made it through the jumble of my thoughts yet. But big. “Wait,” I said. “Did you know about this?”

  My mother looked down at the table in shame.

  “And you didn’t tell me?” I shouted, raising my voice in a way I never did to my mother.

  Well, from that moment forward I could never again claim that I’d never yelled at her. Everything was changing in that moment.

  “It was just a few days,” she said. “We were trying to figure out the best way to tell you.”

  I sat a minute with my mouth hanging open. I had all these things I wanted to say, and might well have said. How it really isn’t so hard. How she maybe could have used the words she’d used a minute ago. “Your brother is home.” See? Easy.

  I didn’t say any of those things. Because, before I could, the biggest question came up through my thoughts.

  I asked it. I couldn’t not ask it.

  “Did he get injured?”

  A pause. One I didn’t like. It wasn’t what I would call long, but it was long enough to contain some news I didn’t want to hear.

  “He . . . ,” my mother began, “. . . hurt his foot.”

  My father lost it and started yelling at her.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ellie, how can you say a thing like that? Why do you talk in euphemisms? Just tell the boy the truth. He doesn’t have a ‘hurt foot.’” He said those last two words in a high, mocking voice, showing us both what he thought a foolish woman sounded like. “Half of it is blown off.”

  My ears tingled while I sat and digested that, and listened to them fight.

  “Now see here, I won’t have you telling me how to raise my son! I raised those two boys into fine young men, and where were you? Working every minute!”

  It struck me that almost every important development of my life had sounded something like this. That I had absorbed almost every piece of family news over this blaring backdrop of rage.

  “If they were both fine young men, he wouldn’t have done what he did.”

  “Don’t you dare, Bart! Don’t you dare say a thing like that to me! You have no idea what he went through over there!”

  “Well, you don’t either.”

  “But you’re the one making judgments based on what you don’t know.”

  The volume of their voices was starting to hurt my eardrums.

  In my head, in the privacy of my imagination, I took a brilliant stand. Literally and figuratively. I stood, towering over them, and told them to stop. Now and forever. Just stop fighting. I told them it was killing me. At a moment like this, when I should be upstairs welcoming my brother home, it was a crime to be expected to sit here and listen to all this screaming. I told them it had been this way as long as I could remember, and I couldn’t take much more. I asked them if they knew how much it took out of me.

  In the real world, I stood. Just like I had in my fantasy land.

  Then I walked out of the room.

  Because in the real world I couldn’t even have shouted them down. They never would have disconnected from their fighting long enough to give me their attention.

  Besides. I had more important things to do.

  I walked up the stairs, still hearing them shouting.

  “It was irresponsible!” My father.

  “I won’t let you speak that way about him! He’s my son!” My mother.

  Their voices got quieter as I walked upstairs. Not because they lowered their volume. Because I was walking away.

  “Your son? Not our son?”

  “Well, isn’t it always moments like this when you foist them off on me?”

  I stepped up onto the landing and looked in the direction of Roy’s bedroom door. It was closed. It had never been closed while he was gone. Not one time.

  I walked to it, a dizzy feeling in my head. Like I was dreaming. Was it possible that all this was only a dream?

  I steeled myself and knocked.

  “Who is it?” I heard. A weak, mushy sort of voice through the door.

  “It’s me, Lucas.”

  “Oh. Okay. Come in.”

&nb
sp; I opened the door.

  The first thing I saw was the foot. It was bandaged, of course. So I wasn’t literally seeing the foot. But I was getting a good look at where it ended.

  My brother was under the covers, but his foot was outside them, and propped up on a pillow. I guess even the weight of blankets would have been unbearable on that wound.

  It wasn’t really half the foot gone, like my dad had said. More like a third of it. More like from the ball of the foot, I was guessing, where the big toe joints into it at the base. From there forward, nothing. Air. It reminded me of Libby Weller’s brother Darren, and how nothing can be more shocking than just about anything. No amount of wounding of a human body part could be worse than the utter absence of it.

  He noticed me noticing.

  “Hey buddy,” he said, his voice fuzzy.

  “Land mine?” I asked. That’s what had gotten Libby Weller’s brother. A land mine.

  “Gunshot.”

  I looked at him then. At his face. And I got a second major shock.

  I thought, Wait. That’s not Roy.

  I thought, They sent us back the wrong brother.

  I mean, the shape of his face was familiar. And his hair was the right color of sandy dark blond, though it was much shorter than I had ever seen it. It wasn’t that he had some major feature that identified him as someone else entirely. He just wasn’t quite Roy.

  It was like seeing someone on the street that I thought might be Roy, and waiting for that click of familiarity. And never getting it.

  I figured it would come along in time. But, the problem was, I had no idea how much time. In that moment I’d have guessed fifteen or twenty minutes would solve the issue. It ended up being closer to fifteen or twenty years. But I don’t mean to get off track.

  “Sit down,” he said. And his voice sounded like his voice, only with most of the life gone out of it.

  I pulled up a chair.

  The room was dim. Weirdly dim, like Connor’s house. The curtains were drawn tightly closed. And yet he was staring toward the window as if he could look out of it, which struck me as strange.

  “You look so different,” I said.

  “Must be the hair.”

  He lifted a hand to run it over his buzzed head, but he almost missed. He had to adjust the path of that hand to guide it to his own scalp.