Stay

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  But I could tell by the expression on her face that she really didn’t mind at all.

  I didn’t want to go home, because I figured Roy and Mom would need some time to have it out. And if they were fighting, I didn’t want to hear it.

  So I went over to Connor’s.

  I must admit, in addition to his being my friend, I really wanted to see that kitten again.

  Connor surprised me by answering the door.

  “Oh,” I said. “It’s you. Where’s your mom?”

  “Not sure.”

  I followed him down the long hallway and up the stairs, and I didn’t need time for my eyes to adjust. There was light. Lots of it. Apparently, after his mom left the house Connor had gone around and opened all the curtains.

  “She goes out now and doesn’t tell you where?”

  We slipped through his bedroom door carefully, so we didn’t let the kitten out. He never answered. Well, not never. But he moved on to a different topic in that moment.

  “Uh-oh,” Connor said. “She’s under the bed. Well, the best plan is to just sit on the floor and pretend you don’t want her to come to you. And then she will.”

  We sat cross-legged, facing each other. Just for a second we smiled. Then we looked down at the rug, the way we usually did.

  Baby steps.

  “She calls it ‘Me Time,’” he said.

  I had no idea what he was talking about. I thought we were still talking about the cat. And if that had been the case, his comment would have made no sense.

  “What?”

  “My mom.”

  “Oh. Your mom.”

  “She doesn’t say exactly what Me Time is, but once she made some comment about needing someone to talk to. So she might be going to talk to a friend, though I’m not sure who that would be. Or she might actually be in counseling. I’m thinking counseling, because if she had a new friend, I think she’d tell me more about that. She wouldn’t treat it like some kind of secret.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Well. That would be good, if she was in counseling. I mean . . . wouldn’t it?”

  The kitten stuck her head out from under the bed. And my mood just soared when I looked at that little face. Those pink ears and those tiny, round blue eyes.

  She looked at my hand where it sat on the rug, and did that gearing-up-to-attack thing kittens do. Front end hunkered down. Tail end in the air. Eyes all intense. A little swish of her body back and forth. Then she came barreling across the rug, bit my finger with those needle-sharp baby teeth, and ran under the bed again.

  Connor laughed. I laughed, too. It hurt, but not so much that it wasn’t still funny.

  “I think it’s good,” he said. “It’s good to talk to somebody.”

  “Speaking of which. Speaking of talking to somebody. You’re not going to believe this. Zoe Dinsmore is going to be Roy’s sponsor in the program. But don’t tell anybody. It might not be the right anonymity thing, and maybe I shouldn’t have told you. And besides, I don’t want it getting back to my mom.”

  Connor and I had talked once, briefly, about whether Roy would ever get serious enough to get a sponsor. So Connor knew what that meant.

  “Wait. Zoe’s back in the meetings?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t I tell you? I’m sorry. It was just a couple of days ago, and I guess I haven’t seen you since then.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “I’m really glad to hear that. Good for her. And that’s good about her taking Roy under her wing, too. I think she’ll help him.”

  “Yeah. I think so, too.”

  Then we had one of those long silences. Like the old days. The kind that get stronger and more thick and solid the longer they go on, and you start feeling like you can’t break through them.

  But I didn’t want the old days anymore. I wasn’t going back there. So I broke through.

  “She really helped you, didn’t she?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She did.”

  “What was it about talking to her that helped you so much?”

  He didn’t answer right away. But I didn’t feel like he was holding back or holding out on me. He seemed to be really thinking about what he wanted to say.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to put those things into words,” he said.

  “Yeah. Sometimes it is.”

  “I think . . . she made me feel like I was worth having around. And for a while there I didn’t really feel like I was.”

  “It’s good that you believed her.”

  “I didn’t,” he said.

  The cat ran, pretty much sideways, in a wild arc between us and then back under the bed. We were too caught up in what we were saying to laugh.

  “Oh, I don’t mean that quite the way it sounds,” he said. “I just mean . . . I felt like I wasn’t worth much, and sometimes on a bad day I still feel that way. But here’s the thing. Zoe felt like she wasn’t worth much, and like nobody wanted her around, and she almost killed herself over thinking that. But I know she’s worth a lot, and I know I want her around. So I know she was wrong. So now when I feel bad about myself, I think about that, and I think maybe I’m wrong. Maybe things aren’t as bad as I thought. So that’s one of those thoughts that, once you have it, you don’t ever really forget it. Just that idea that when you feel like everything is terrible . . . it might not be the truth. Once you get that in your head, you don’t want to do something based on those feelings if it’s something you can’t ever take back. And this may sound like a strange thing to say, but . . .”

  I waited. But he seemed less and less inclined to go on.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “No. Never mind. It was nothing.”

  “Really. Go ahead and tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”

  “No,” he said. “I know you won’t. I was just going to say that I think maybe I helped her, too. Because she said something like that to me once. Something like . . . like she didn’t believe in herself, but she believed in me. She even told me some stuff that was hard about her life.”

  That made me feel bad. A little, anyway. But all I said was, “Like what? If it’s not too private.”

  “Like about her girls. And why she decided to stay in Ashby. And how now she thinks that was a bad decision, and that it was really hard for them, trying to make that adjustment. Now she thinks it was selfish of her to stay and that’s why they don’t really speak to her much. She says they felt like everybody thought it should have been them who died, not two kids who had nothing to do with Zoe. Not somebody else’s kids. I don’t know if that’s true or not. If people really felt that way. But I guess the girls felt it like a pressure, you know?

  “But I’m getting off track. I just meant to say that it went both ways. She believes in me but not herself. I didn’t believe in myself, but I believe in Zoe. You know, it really helps to have one person who believes in you, even if it’s not you. Even if you can’t quite do it yourself yet.”

  I opened my mouth to say something. Probably that I could imagine what a game changer that would be. Or maybe “lifesaver” would’ve been a better way to phrase it.

  But just then the kitten came out and leapt onto Connor’s back and grabbed on with her claws into his shirt. And obviously also into his skin, because he screamed. But he sort of laughed and screamed at the same time.

  He reached around carefully and took hold of her and pulled her close to his chest, where she couldn’t do much harm.

  “We have got to cut your nails,” he told her.

  We didn’t talk about serious topics anymore that day.

  In fact, we didn’t talk about those early times of his going to see Zoe Dinsmore ever again. Not that I can recall.

  Then again, what more needed to be said?

  If something works, I figure . . . just leave it alone. Let it be a thing that worked. Not everything needs to be picked apart for better understanding. Sometimes it’s okay to just say thank you in the quiet of your head and move along.

  PART TWO: PRESENT DAY
>
  AFTER FIFTY YEARS OF MOVING ALONG

  Chapter Nineteen

  All You

  I could have said right from the start that I’m retelling this story standing beside the freshly dug, open grave of Connor Barnes. While I’m waiting for my friend’s casket to be lowered into the ground. I was tempted to. But I might’ve given a false impression if I’d done it that way.

  It might have sounded like I was saying Connor didn’t make it.

  Connor made it.

  He made it another fifty years, after which he died of stomach cancer at age sixty-four.

  We would’ve loved to have had Connor around another ten or twenty years, but still, he had a good run. And he left the world a lot of value from his time here, not only in the form of the decent life he managed to live, but also in the form of three beautiful daughters and seven grandchildren—five boys and two girls.

  I’m standing here talking to one of the grandchildren, and I have been for what seems like a very long time.

  His name is Harris, and he’s fourteen. He looks a little like Connor did at his age. Lanky and awkward and hopeless to sort out the world he’s been given. It doesn’t escape my notice that he’s the same age Connor and I were in the story. I hope that makes my ramblings even more meaningful to him.

  “So why do we call you Uncle Luke?” he asks me, shielding his eyes against the sun. “If you hate to have anybody call you Luke?”

  He doesn’t ask why everybody calls me Uncle Luke even though I’m not blood family, and even though I would be a great-uncle to him even if I was. But I guess some mysteries are more important than others.

  I say, “Yeah, I figured you’d ask me that. But as you get older, a name that makes you sound young loses its sting.”

  I can tell by the look in his eyes that something I’ve said has gone over his head for the first time all day. Maybe because it doesn’t involve being fourteen. I expect him to ask more about it, but he veers off in an entirely different direction.

  “So by the time you were old enough for the draft, the war was over?”

  I breathe a huge sigh. Because it’s a huge subject. But I’ll tell him the truth. I always tell him the truth.

  “When I turned eighteen,” I say, “the war was still not over.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I didn’t go.”

  He doesn’t say anything. I wonder what he’s thinking. I’m watching family wander back to their cars. Slowly, and a few at a time. But we don’t wander. Because we’re not done.

  “Go ahead and call me a draft dodger if you want,” I tell Harris. But I know he won’t. “There are still a couple of people in town who do, though mostly behind my back. Thing is, there was no dodge about it. I didn’t dodge anything. I didn’t go to Canada. I didn’t bribe or lie to anybody who could get me a better classification in the draft. I didn’t even try to register as a conscientious objector. My understanding was that the CO category is for people who have strong religious convictions against any kind of violence. I wasn’t going to lie, and it didn’t seem right to take one of their deferments.

  “I was honest, and I hit it head-on.

  “I walked into the sheriff’s office and ran into . . . guess who? Right. I knew you could guess because you’re good at this stuff. It was old Deputy Warren.”

  “The guy who broke down Grandma Zoe’s door on that day when she almost died?”

  He calls her Grandma Zoe not because she was anywhere near the age equivalent of a grandmother to him, but because Connor called her that. Harris never met her, which is a damn shame. She died about a year before he was born.

  “The very one,” I say. “And if I told you he didn’t know what to make of me, let alone what to do with me, that would be an understatement.

  “I said, ‘I’m not going to register for the draft.’ And I held my wrists out so he could put the cuffs on me.

  “He stared at them like he’d never seen wrists before.

  “‘I don’t think that’s the way it works,’ he said.

  “‘How does it work?’

  “He scratched his head for a minute, and then he said, ‘I got no idea, son. Nothing like this ever happened around here before.’”

  I watch Harris’s eyebrows go up. Just a little bit. I keep talking.

  “So then he disappeared for a few minutes, leaving me noticeably uncuffed. When he came back, I swear he seemed more embarrassed than angry.

  “‘Nobody else knows, either,’ he said. ‘But we figure in time the Selective Service people’ll get tired of not hearing from you, and eventually they’ll put out a warrant for your arrest. Or something like that. We’re talking about the federal government here, son. It’s not really our department.’

  “I asked him, ‘So you’re saying I should just go home and wait?’

  “‘No,’ he said, and at this juncture I could hear the irritation rising in his voice. ‘No, if you’re asking me what I think you ought to do, I think you ought to sign up. You can get a deferment by going to college, at least for a while. That’s what all the other boys are doing.’

  “I said, ‘But they can pull that out from under me anytime.’

  “He said, ‘A lot of guys get a doctor to write up some excuse.’

  “Well, I guess I wasn’t a lot of guys. If you know what I mean.

  “I said, ‘But I’m fine. So that would be a lie. That would be a total insult to the guys who went over there. I’m not going to lie and cheat to live a nice, comfortable life while they fight. I’m going to make a sacrifice that they could make, too, if they wanted. I’m going to go to jail.’

  “He scratched his head again, and narrowed his eyes at me. Finally he just said, ‘Go home and wait, son. With ideas like that in your head, sounds like jail’ll find you soon enough.’”

  I know he’s about to ask if it did. So I beat him to it.

  “I hurried up the process by writing to the Selective Service and telling them I was never going to sign up, and whatever the penalty might be for that, they should just go ahead and get the proceedings going against me.

  “I served two years. I didn’t have to go to some terrible, dangerous federal prison. I just served my time in the county jail, which I think was fairly irregular as these things go. It was the federal government, like the deputy said. But somehow they referred my case to the local authorities for arrest. Maybe they didn’t know what to do with guys like me, either.

  “It was a blessing at least to be jailed close to home.

  “I got no time off for good behavior, not because I didn’t behave well, but because the guards and the warden and the parole board all had some family or friends who’d signed up for the draft just like they were supposed to do.

  “The food was incredibly bad, which I swear was the second-worst thing about the place, after the noise and the lack of privacy. But it wasn’t supposed to be fun. It was supposed to be the price I paid.

  “And damn it, I paid it.

  “Roy drove out twice a week and brought me some decent food, and your granddad came out twice on some weeks, three times on others. He promised to take me to the Place for one of those chocolate-dipped chocolate ice cream cones the day I got out. It was the only treat he couldn’t figure out how to bring me.

  “You have no idea how many of my days in that hole started with a wish for that ice cream shop not to go out of business while I was rotting. I mean, serving my time. Paying my debt to society.

  “My parents had divorced by then—I know, what took them so long, right?—but my father flew all the way from North Carolina, where he lived with his new wife, to scream at me and tell me how much I’d disappointed him. How I’d ruined my whole life with this bonehead play.

  “And I was a captive audience. Literally.

  “But, you know what? It’s okay. That’s part of the price I paid.

  “My mom only visited three or four times in that whole two years, but she was relieved by what I’d done. She never s
aid so straight out, but I knew.

  “And Zoe.

  “Zoe not only came to visit me now and again, but she wrote me a letter every day. Every day for two years. Seven hundred and thirty letters. I actually counted. In jail, you have time on your hands for stuff like that. Some were full of news from town, others were just her thoughts on this and that. Some were longer than others, but I never had to watch a mail call go by with no letter from Zoe. I think she single-handedly kept our little branch post office afloat during that time.

  “I still have every one of those letters. Stacked and organized by date and rubber-banded in shoeboxes in my closet.”

  My head fills with a very clear, very painful image. It’s taking me off in a different direction in my head. And I go with it. And I retell it.

  “I watched the fall of Saigon from the TV room in the county jail,” I say. “I watched those helicopters teetering on rooftops, trying to take off with too many people loading them down. I watched people try to hang on to the bottom of them, desperate to get out of there. I saw how many never made it out.

  “The war is over, I thought in the back of my head while I watched. But I knew my jail sentence wasn’t.

  “I remember I wondered how Roy felt, watching that on TV. Or Joe, from the NA meeting. Or Darren Weller. It just seemed like everything they’d gone through added up to nothing—at least, nothing anybody got to keep.

  “Next time he visited, I asked Roy what he was feeling when he saw that.

  “He said he hadn’t been able to bring himself to watch.”

  I let a beat fall after that statement. In my mind, it warrants a beat.

  “What about my grandpa?” Harris asks, his face open with awe. His mother is trying to get his attention from over at the cars, and he’s studiously ignoring her. “Was he okay with what you did?”

  “Funny thing about that,” I say. “We actually only talked about it once. He came to the county jail to pick me up on my release day, your granddad, because Roy had to work. He took me out for that ice cream, just the way he’d promised.

  “‘Chocolate ice cream with chocolate coating,’ he told me while we waited in line. ‘That still seems like an awful lot of chocolate.’