Stay

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  He started it up, and it was loud. It either had those old glass-pack mufflers on it, or maybe even no mufflers at all.

  “You guys brothers?” he asked as we drove out of the bank parking lot.

  I waited for Roy to say something, but he didn’t. I caught Joe’s eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Brothers.”

  “Where do you guys live?”

  “Over on Deerskill Lane. Last block before the dead end.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I know where that is.”

  We drove in silence for a time. Joe rolled down his driver’s window and lit a cigarette, which he held in his left hand, his forearm resting on the edge of the door. The air that flowed in felt hot and summery, even though it was heavy dusk. It smelled of cigarette smoke and contained a light stream of sparks. I couldn’t stop staring at them.

  “How long you been back stateside?” he asked my brother.

  At first, Roy said nothing. Then, when I guess the silence grew too heavy even for him, he said, “Not long.”

  “I’m gonna write down my phone number,” Joe said. “In case you need someone to call.”

  “I won’t,” Roy said.

  “Never know what you’re gonna need.”

  He pulled up in front of our house when I pointed it out to him. My mom had left the porch light on for us. I could see moths playing in the beam of it. Or maybe it wasn’t play to them. Maybe it was desperate. Some crazy way to satisfy a need.

  Roy threw the passenger door open and jumped out. Right, I know. I would’ve thought the word “jumped” was a stretch, too, if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes.

  “Here’s my number,” Joe said to me, scribbling on the inside of a cardboard matchbook cover with a pen that didn’t seem to want to write. “Give it to him when you get in the house.”

  “I don’t think he’ll call,” I said.

  “No. I don’t think so, either. But you never know. This way at least he’ll know he can.”

  “Thanks,” I said. And took the matchbook from him.

  I pushed the passenger seat forward to let myself out. But then I stalled and didn’t move for another few seconds.

  “How did you know?” I asked him.

  “How did I know what?”

  “That my brother was in Vietnam?”

  “Oh. That. Well, I didn’t know, now did I? I couldn’t really know. I just took a guess. Seriously injured is a clue, but he could’ve been in a car accident or something. Mostly I just had a good long look at his eyes and took my best shot.”

  My mom was sitting at the kitchen table, drinking something that looked and smelled alcoholic. She looked up at me as though I’d wakened her from a dream.

  My dad seemed to be absent. Again. I almost opened my mouth to ask if he still lived here. Really, officially lived here. But I never got the chance.

  “So, how’s that going?” she asked me.

  “The meetings, you mean?”

  “That’s what I had in mind, yeah.” A little bit sarcastic. As always.

  “Not sure. Maybe not great so far. But I think maybe it takes more time.”

  She stared down into the brown, liquid eye of her glass again.

  “Connor came by. He wanted you to come over. He said he had something he wanted to show you. But then I told him when you’d be back, and he said you’d best wait until morning.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I walked upstairs, knowing that now I would have to lie there and try to get to sleep, wondering. Wondering what Connor could possibly have to show me that I hadn’t seen a million times already.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Promises and Repayments

  I showed up at Connor’s house a little after six a.m. I could see lights on inside, so I knocked on the door. I thought his mother would scold me for coming by so early, but I had to do it. The suspense was killing me.

  Instead she answered the door with a smile on her face. I was stunned. I don’t think I had ever seen such a thing before.

  “Oh, Lucas,” she said. “Good. You’re here. Connor will be so glad. He can’t wait to show you his kitten.”

  “Connor has a kitten?”

  “He does! We picked her out yesterday afternoon. And she’s just the cutest little thing you’ve ever seen. Snow white, with the most beautiful . . . oh, but why am I telling you? You’re just about to see her. Go on up.”

  I walked down the hall and was dazzled by something like . . . light. When I got level with the living room, I saw she had just one curtain open in that one room. On the side with a view of no neighbors. Just the woods.

  I walked up the stairs and knocked on Connor’s door.

  “Mom?”

  “No, it’s me. Lucas.”

  “Oh, good. Come in, but quick. Don’t let the cat out.”

  I dashed through the smallest space of open door I could possibly manage, then closed it behind me.

  Connor was sitting cross-legged on his bedroom rug. He was holding what I thought was a pretty inventive cat toy. It was just a little fabric mouse, but he had tied it on the end of a string and tied the other end of the string to a stick, so he could dangle the mouse like a caught fish on a rod and line.

  Just for a moment I saw nothing else. No kitten.

  I had a sudden panicky thought. What if there was no kitten? What if Connor and his mother were all happy and excited about something that turned out to be . . . you know . . . completely imaginary? How horrifyingly weird would that be?

  A split second later a completely nonimaginary kitten came zooming into view.

  She had apparently been crouched under Connor’s bedside table, gearing up to attack. And hoo boy, did she ever attack. She flew across the rug and leapt into the air, jumping maybe three or four times her height. She swung at the mouse. Missed. Landed on her feet. They say cats always do. Then she spooked at nothing. A ghost. Her back arched up wildly high, like a cat on a Halloween decoration, and she crow-hopped sideways at nearly the speed of light until she was under the bedside table again.

  Connor and I both laughed out loud.

  “She’s a riot,” he said. “I’ve been laughing pretty much since we brought her home.”

  I sat on the rug near him. He reached over and scooped the cat out from under the table and held her close to his belly, and I petted her. I was surprised when I touched her, because so much of what I’d thought was cat was just fur. She barely seemed to be under there at all.

  She was snow white, like Mrs. Barnes had said. Her ears were a delicate pink. I felt as though I could see right through them. Or almost. Her eyes were the most brilliant shade of blue. Like the sky on a summer afternoon. The contrast of those eyes on the otherwise white canvas of fur was really stunning. I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

  “She’s so pretty,” I said.

  “Yeah, she is. She’ll be a gorgeous cat.”

  “Why do you think your mom broke down and got her for you?”

  “I think she figured it would keep me home more.”

  I instinctively lowered my voice. “Oh. Right. Where did you tell her you’ve been going?” I had purposely resisted asking.

  “Just that I’ve been taking a long walk in the morning. Which is true. Well. True enough, anyway. In a way she’s been happy about it, because I guess she figures it’s a good sign that I want to get out of the house more. But I also think it makes her a little nervous. Here,” he added, “you want to hold her?”

  I took the kitten from him and held her against my own belly, and I swear she felt like she weighed nothing at all. But she was real, all right. I could feel her tiny heart beating. And when I scratched her behind the ears, she purred.

  I confess I was a bit smitten. I could only imagine how Connor must’ve felt about her.

  Connor accidentally moved the toy. She saw the movement and scrambled to get down, nearly scratching me with those tiny razor claws. I let her go.

  She ran for the space under
the bed, but Connor expertly used the dangling mouse to change her mind and draw her away.

  For a space of time—I could not have told you how long a time it was—we just watched the cat attack that dangling mouse. Every time she did something wild and outrageous, we burst out laughing. Which was nice. I wondered when Connor and I had last laughed together. How long it had been.

  Then he got to his feet and handed me the stick.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said.

  He moved off in that direction. Connor had a bathroom attached to his bedroom. Apparently everybody did. Except yours truly.

  The kitten ran under the bed, and I didn’t react fast enough to stop her.

  “Don’t let the cat go under the bed,” he said before closing the bathroom door.

  I lay down on my belly and looked under at the kitten, and she looked back at me with those astonishing blue eyes.

  “Why not?” I called in to Connor. “What happens if she goes under the bed?”

  “It’s just really hard to get her out again.”

  “Can’t you just pull the bed out from the wall?”

  “You can put the bed anywhere you want, but she’ll stay right under the middle of it where you can’t get to her. I think it’s like a game to her.”

  “So how do you get her out once she goes under there?”

  “You have to crawl under there on your belly.”

  I sighed. And began crawling.

  The kitten evaded me by running to the top end of the bed. Which was a tactical error, because a wall stopped her. She sat hunkered against a heat vent, looking ready to fly away again. But I caught her before she could.

  Feeling more than a little claustrophobic in that tight space, I gently pulled her away from the vent.

  That’s when I saw it.

  At first I wasn’t even sure what I was seeing. But I knew it was something. Something that was not supposed to be there. It was inside the vent, behind the metal grate. Nothing is supposed to be back there except air. So when you see something, whatever you think it is, it’s going to stand out as a thing out of place.

  I held the kitten close to my shoulder and tried to take a minute to let my eyes adjust. There wasn’t a ton of light under Connor’s bed, of course. And there wasn’t any inside the heating duct.

  Still, I could see the corner of something. A small box, maybe. And a bit of curved something that looked like polished wood or some other hard substance.

  I had a bad feeling about what it might be. I could’ve been wrong, but I had to know.

  I wiggled out from under the bed and pulled the head side of it back from the wall. I wasn’t sure what to do with the kitten, so I put her inside my shirt and she held still there. For the moment, anyway.

  I dug around in my pocket, where I knew I had a little bit of change. Found a dime. I used it as a screwdriver to take out the two decorative screws that held the duct cover in place. They were loose. Somebody had obviously taken the cover off recently.

  I laid the two screws on the carpet and pulled off the grate. Reached my hand in. Pulled the two items out into the light.

  A brand-new, unopened box of one dozen bullets. And a handgun.

  I got to my feet, holding them. Staring at them in my hands.

  I heard Connor’s voice. He was back in the room.

  “Oh, you pulled the bed out,” he said. “I told you, that never works.”

  I looked up from my hands to see why he was not reacting to my discovery. He was looking down, still tucking in his shirt.

  I said nothing.

  A moment later he looked up.

  We both just stood there for a minute, almost meeting each other’s eyes but not quite. It was one of those near misses we’d learned to do so well.

  The moment stretched out.

  The cat began to wiggle in my shirt.

  “I know you might not believe this,” Connor said. His voice sounded like half himself, half somebody else. Like Connor fully grown, maybe. “But I haven’t been lying to you about any other things. This is the first lie I told you since we were, like, ten.”

  I looked directly into his face. He looked away.

  “What did you lie to me about when we were ten?”

  He surprised me by laughing. Not the way we laughed at the kitten and her wild hunting antics. There was nothing merry about it. It sounded more like a comment on the ridiculousness of our situation.

  “I don’t even remember,” he said. “Can we stay with what’s important here?”

  “Promise me you won’t lie to me for the rest of this talk.”

  “Okay. I promise.”

  “You were serious about this.”

  “At one point, I think . . . yeah.”

  “But that’s over now?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You sure?”

  He actually stopped to think for a minute. That was interesting. I guess it could have meant he wasn’t completely sure. But I took it to mean he was taking seriously his promise to tell me the truth.

  The kitten thrashed violently in my shirt, scratching my belly.

  “Ow!” I shouted, and tried to fish her out of there. But she was on the move.

  “Why is the cat in your shirt?”

  “It’s a long story. Now who’s having trouble staying with what’s important?”

  The kitten had scrambled around to my back side, and her thrashing was untucking my shirt in the back. I tried to catch her with one hand—the other one was full—but she was too fast for me. She leapt to her freedom, landed on her feet on the rug . . . and ran under the bed.

  “Okay,” Connor said. “You’re right. And the answer is yes.”

  “I think I forgot the question now.”

  What I really meant was that I had lost track of how it had been phrased. Whether a yes answer was the good news or the bad news.

  “Yes, that’s over now.”

  I breathed out a boatload of tension and anxiety, and felt like overcooked noodles without it. I sank down onto his bed, still holding those alarming items. I could feel my hands shaking. I guess the shock was wearing off. I guess it was finally dawning on me that I was holding something in my hand that kills people. Something that almost took my friend Connor right out of the world.

  “So . . . ,” I began. I think my voice might’ve been a little shaky, too. “If we get rid of this, you won’t just find another way?”

  “No,” he said. “I won’t. I promise.”

  He sat down on the edge of the bed with me, but not too close. A respectful distance away. I say respectful because he was giving me space to be angry. I could tell. I could feel him braced against my possible anger.

  I didn’t answer. I was just staring at the polished wood handle of his father’s gun.

  “When I came over to your house the other morning . . . ,” he began. “When was that? When I came over to talk to you about how it was going over at Zoe’s? I’d already changed my mind by then.”

  I breathed for a minute. Deeply. Trying to feel less shaken.

  It’s weird how you know something, but you don’t really know it. You have a sense of it inside your gut. And then all of a sudden you find out it’s real. You see it, right in front of your eyes. And part of you thinks, What are you so shocked about? You knew this all along. But when the gun is lying in your hands, let me tell you . . . that’s a whole different brand of knowing.

  It cuts right through the middle of you.

  “So we get rid of this,” I said.

  “Okay, yeah. That would be good.”

  “You want to give it back to your dad?”

  “No! He can’t know I had it. My mom can’t know I had it either. Let him think he lost it, or it got stolen. He can buy another one. He can afford it. He probably already did.”

  “Okay, fine. So we dump it. Get me some kind of bag or something. To put it in. I can’t just carry it down the street like this.”

  For a minute he rummaged around
. Opening drawers, staring into his closet. I think he was a little bit in shock, too. Bottom line, most people don’t keep bags in their bedroom.

  “Use the pillowcase,” he said, pulling it off his bed pillow. “I’ll tell my mom the cat shredded it and I threw it away.”

  I took it from him, and put the gun and the box of bullets in the bottom of it. And I tied the whole thing in a big, soft knot.

  I stood there staring at it for a minute. The kitten peeked out from under the bed, maybe wondering why nobody was trying to catch her.

  “That’ll look too weird,” Connor said.

  “That’s what I was thinking.”

  He hurried over to his closet and took his school backpack down off a hook on the inside of the door. It was empty because it was summer. I put the weird knot of pillowcase into the bottom of it and shrugged the pack onto my back.

  “Thanks for doing this for me,” he said.

  “Thanks for not using it on yourself.”

  It was a pretty direct statement. It burned coming out. Probably burned him to hear it. It hit me that I had been talking around the thing. With both Connor and Mrs. Dinsmore. Using soft, not very exact words, like “not staying.” But damn it all to hell, sometimes you just have to call a thing what it is. And if they’re harsh words, maybe it’s because it’s a harsh thing. And maybe it’s better to recognize that. I’m not sure what I thought I was accomplishing by trying to make it sound nicer than it was.

  I snuck down the stairs and made it out of the house without running into Mrs. Barnes. I trotted down their porch stairs and broke into a run on the sidewalk. But the load in my pack bounced around too much. It was small as loads go, but weirdly heavy.

  Then I decided running would draw too much attention to me anyway. Because nobody runs with a backpack.

  I made a beeline for the woods. And, because it was an entry point I had never used before, and a part of the woods I didn’t know like the back of my hand, I promptly got lost.

  Score one for my mom.

  It had been just long enough to worry me. I’d been backtracking, and thinking I was on the right path, and then finding out it was the same path I’d been lost on all along.

  I was starting to get scared.