Stay (34 page)

“No,” I said. I shook my head. I felt sick. I kept shaking my

head. I didn’t want the words to get in. I didn’t want to know this.

“We were away for the weekend. A beach house. Near here,

but not here.”

“You went to a beach house after she died to recover from

grief.”

He started to pace. He ran his hand through his hair. “We’d

been having trouble. I’d had… I’d been involved with . . . a

woman. Women. Rachel—” A sob escaped his throat. He swal-

lowed. He was fighting back tears. I could feel a grief of my own

growing, growing, threatening to spill. “Found out. She found

out. It was wrong, I know how wrong. I thought I was hot shit,

you know? My book… First book. Mr. Everything.” He put his

palms to his eyes, breathed out, shook his head. “She’d always,

she had problems. Depressed. Fragile. It had gotten too much. I

felt dragged down . . . She knew. Had known, and we were fight-

ing all the time . . . It was supposed to be some
Let’s get this on

track
. . . Some weekend where . . . But we were sitting, having a

drink. I was. All at once, I wanted out. I said I wanted out.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t say it.” The grief rose and spilled. I

started to cry. I looked at the floor, the way the slats of wood fit

into the other slats of wood. My chest felt like it was sinking into

itself. “Please,” I said.

He was struggling. “She stood in the doorway. She just stood,

and then she ran. I thought she was just leaving, you know, to get

away for a while. But she got in this boat. I saw from the window.

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Stay

The boat—it was right there, in front of the house, on the beach.

A row boat. She dragged it out . . .”

I put my hands over my ears. I was crying. I was crying and

shaking my head and my hands were over my ears, but at the

same time I was hearing this as if it were a memory, a known

thing already, like it was something I had known a long, long time

ago and was hearing again. It was searing me, slicing through, a

new truth, yet it felt like something I recognized, too. A horrible

fact, an ugly deformity that was rising slowly and showing itself

again, years later, from behind a mask.

“She got in that boat.” He let out a small cry. An
ahh
of pain.

“Jesus.” His voice was hoarse. “I ran to her. She started it up, and

I heard the motor. The boat was going out . . . I went after her.

In the water. My clothes on. I ran and the waves were splashing

over my head and my clothes were so heavy under the water, and

I was yelling and yelling to her and that boat kept going out. and

it was so far away but I could see it. I would bob up and see it and

scream her name, and I was swallowing water, and then I saw her

stand up and go over the side.”

He began to sob. His face was in his hands. “Rachel, Jesus.”

“No.” I saw the boat in my mind, the choppy black waters.

The woman who was my mother, throwing it all away. I saw

myself in bed at home with some babysitter in another room

watching TV. She got in that boat knowing that and not caring.

My father wiped his eyes with his fingertips. He inhaled,

exhaled. “I was wrong. What I did was wrong. Clara, I know that.

I am so sorry.”

I was crying hard and I felt outside my body and my life and

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Deb Caletti

I didn’t know what was real and wasn’t, because I didn’t know

who she was anymore or who he was or what our life had been

and so I wasn’t even sure who I was or what had happened to

me. I felt my insides spinning, and he came and put his arms

around me and I didn’t want them there, but I did want them,

too, because we were all each other had, really. He was my family

and I was his, and my mother had belonged to us both. He was

breathing hard; I could feel his arms gripping me, and what had

happened with Christian seemed far away, but also closer than

ever, because even through my wracking sobs I understood now

why my father had insisted we run. My fear may not have been

real, but his was, as real as that water soaking my father’s clothes

and his screams and that boat too far for him to catch. Fear was

the biggest bullshitter, he’d said. But sometimes, too, fear told

the truth.

His voice was small. It came from somewhere far away.

“I owed her honesty,” he said. “But did I owe her everything?

Should I have had to hold her life in my hands?”

We clung to each other, and he rocked me, and the house was

quiet except for a ticking clock.
What did I owe her?
he wanted to

know, and I had no answer for him. None. We cried and held

each other because we were two sailors alone in this one boat,

out at sea. We exhausted ourselves. We had come away from the

door. We were inside that house, which was still better than being

outside that house.

“But why did we come here?” I asked. “Why did we come by

the sea?”

He held my arms and looked at me. “I don’t know.” The

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Stay

words were hushed. I looked back in his eyes, and I realized I was

seeing him. All of him, not the joking smart-ass, not the author,

not the father, but the man. He looked a lot like me. “Maybe for

this,” he said. “Maybe for this right here.”

Of course I did not sleep. I am guessing I was in that strange

place that is not awake but is not entirely dreams, either. I felt

sick with grief. Sick with what he had tried to hide from me and

what she was guilty of. I spent the night with images flashing—

limbs tangled in water, torment tangled with selfishness. The

obligations we should feel toward others tangled with the obliga-

tions we should never, ever feel.

* 271 *

Lots of kids, Christian had said.

Oh really? Are you going to have some of them?

They’ll look like you.

Terrific. They’ll get my nose.

He’d spun my hair around one finger. We were lying

on a blanket again near old Denny Hall on the University of

Washington campus. It was summer. His skin was warm on

mine where our legs touched and his breath smelled like the

juice we were sharing. His lips were sticky when he kissed me.

We kissed again because it was kind of funny, that stickiness. You

could turn to liquid in eyes like that, eyes that looked at you with

such love. Mine gave it back to him. That kind of love could feel

like a promise. And then I made a real one.

Promise me you’ll stay right here
, he said.

Stay

Right here? You would have to bring me food. People would have

to come and visit me.

Here,
he lifted his chin, meaning there, in his eyes, with him,

where we were.
Promise you’ll stay.

That is so easy
, I said.
I promise. Of course I promise.

Always. Stay always.

Always.

We see a promise as a personal law, and we see the people

who break them as private-life criminals. We think it automati-

cally, one of those truths that just
is
to us: breaking a promise is

a bad, bad thing. A promise can be buoyant as whispered words

or solemn as a marriage vow, but we view it as something pure

and untouchable when it should never be either of those things.

If a promise is a personal law, a contract, then it ought to be lay-

ered with fine print, rules and conditions, promises within those

promises, and whether we like it or not, it ought to be something

we can snatch back, that we
should
snatch back, if those rules are

violated. And if a promise should be offered carefully, it should

be accepted with even greater care and with the inherent agree-

ment that it is conditional. Because we offer that promise in good

faith—under a tree in the summer or in a church or in the dark

holding hands. And then it’s fall and winter and there is black

jealousy or endless depression or a million other poison arrows,

and you are held hostage by that promise. The promises within

the promises have also been broken, but that’s too complicated

for some raging heart to take in. Betrayal—it goes both ways.

When I got out of bed that next morning at the beach, my

father was sitting on the back deck holding a coffee cup and

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Deb Caletti

watching the ocean. Oh, God, he looked tired. We supposedly

age incrementally as we go through life, but looking at him then,

I was sure that life sometimes instantly and insistently ages us. I

saw it all there, the small and the large—he had searched for 925

parking spaces and had forty-two colds; he’d burnt 120 dinners

and fallen over seven or eight tree roots and had 360 sleepless

nights. He’d lost touch with twelve friends and hung up on fifty-

six telemarketers and was late and stuck in traffic four hundred

times. And he’d had disappointments too many to count and

gotten his heart broken, lost one father, suffered endlessly one

tragedy, and it all now caught up with him as he sat in that chair

holding that cup.

I shouted out a good-bye. The house still smelled like smoke

from the fire in the fireplace the night before. I didn’t want to

talk anymore or be in that house—I needed to be out, even if

out
meant where Christian was. What was on my mind was my

mother, and the story that had been my story nearly my whole

life long but that was now only truly mine for the last few hours.

I didn’t know what to do with it.

I parked in the lighthouse parking lot. I felt the kind of bold-

ness that comes before falling apart. The
What does it matter
kind

of false courage. If Christian was watching me, if he appeared

right then, I’d rip him to shreds with my words. Go ahead and

try to hurt me, because I was beyond feeling anything, that’s what

I told myself. Your hand could be in snow and at first you’d feel

the brilliant sharpness of cold and the stinging pain but then only

warmth and then nothing at all.

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t look over my shoulder, though,

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Stay

as I made my way down that path and picked my way over the

rocks to the beach and Annabelle Aurora’s house. I heard that

phone vibrate on the nightstand during those hours of toss-

ing and turning, and it rang again in my purse on the drive.

I didn’t know if it was Christian or Shakti or even Finn, but I

didn’t look.

It would not be a day where the clouds would eventually

burn off and we’d have the blue of summer sky, you could tell.

The clouds looked like they planned to stay; they’d settled in. It

was cold down there by the water. The gray sky made everything

look gray, the water was gray, and even the beach and the houses

looked dim. We were used to this in the Northwest—the way the

gray would slink in and change how things looked. Our weather

was moody. We lived with it for the reasons anyone lives with

someone moody—when it was good, it was really good.

But right then, gray. Cold. The water didn’t look inviting and

wise, but morose and irritable. The wind even picked up a little,

slanting the waves and bending the sea grass. I walked faster and

pulled my sweatshirt around me.

Annabelle Aurora. I rapped on her door, and she came to it,

dressed in some silky kimono, no makeup on, her uncombed,

silvery hair looking restless and unsettled. She put her hand to it

when she saw me, and you could tell she was probably vain long

ago (or still), a person who cared about her attractiveness.

“Clara,” she said. “I wasn’t expecting company . . .”

“Can I come in?”

“Of course.” She stepped aside. “Let me change . . .”

“I don’t care,” I said.

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Deb Caletti

“All right. I’ll make some tea.”50*

I sat down on her couch, watched her move around in the

kitchen, watched the wind ripple the water outside. She came

back with two mismatched cups, sat beside me, and folded her

kimono around to hide her knees.

“You knew them both. You knew my mother,” I said.

“The two of you talked,” she said. Her eyes were blue like

robins’ eggs.

“Why did
you
know what happened? Did everyone know but

me?”

“We were close friends then,” she said. “And years before,

too. He needed to tell someone. I think he told her family. Your

grandmother, your uncle. They barely spoke.”

“You were close friends,” I said.

“Yes.”

I wondered again how close. All those years ago—she

wouldn’t have been this old. It wouldn’t have been unheard of.

“You knew my mother.”

“I did. Not well. I saw her when I’d come to town. I met her