Stay (9 page)

food booth right by the docks.
The Cove
. I looked up at the menu

posted on the wall behind the counter.

“Variations on a cheeseburger,” the girl behind the counter

said. She was a little older than me, I guessed. Long brown hair

tied back, eyes that didn’t take shit. Either it was just my day, or

the ocean made people tough around here.

“I’ll have a cheeseburger,” I said.

“Good choice. Fries?”

“That’s okay,” I said.

“You gotta have fries. They’re fantastic. On the house. Don’t

feed them to the seagulls, though, okay? They come around and

make my life a living hell. Cove combo two,” she said to the cook

in the back. “Look at him.” She pointed to one of the picnic tables

set out front. A seagull stood on it, plucking at something under

his wing.

“He doesn’t seem to be going anywhere,” I said.

“Gulliver. That’s what I call him. I can’t get rid of the guy.

He’s like a stray dog. He tries to follow me home.”

I laughed. In a few minutes my lunch was ready, and I took

the bag and carried it to the grass that overlooked the marina.

Obsession
was not moored there, but I looked out over the water.

I could see it not far off, and I ate slowly and watched it move in.

The girl was right. The fries were fantastic.

* 64 *

Stay

The boat eased to the end of the dock. It was as beautiful as I

remembered. The guy who had been high up on the mast before,

the one I had guessed was Finn’s brother, was steering a huge sil-

ver wheel. He eased forward, backed up, and landed neatly along-

side the dock, where Finn jumped off and grabbed the ropes to

tie it down. I remembered my driving test, how the whole parallel

parking thing seemed as complicated and frustrating as teaching

cats to play Monopoly. But these two guys got this huge sailboat

where it needed to be as smooth as anything.

I watched as Finn leaped down, whipped those ropes fast

around the dock cleats. The boat snugged right up against a

stairwell, which Finn then climbed, giving a hand from boat

to stair to several passengers on board. I watched the people

walk down the steps—several couples, a family with two girls,

another family with a toddler in a life jacket—and they all

looked relaxed and happy and windblown. One guy stopped

back at the ticket booth, which today had a young woman

inside of it, and took out his wallet and handed over some bills,

maybe arranging another ride for another day. The passengers

wandered off the dock at various times—the couple with the

toddler headed for The Cove, the family with the girls stopped

to take pictures.

Finn hopped back on the boat. He obviously had an ease

there. You could tell it was his place. I watched him joke with

the other guy, and then Finn went down below for a while before

coming up again. He worked, making the boat right again after

the sail. He coiled the wild ropes into neat circles. He arranged

the collapsed sail into folds.

* 65 *

Deb Caletti

I had finished my cheeseburger, rolled up the foil into a ball.

I was almost done with my drink. I’d been staring, sure. It was

then that Finn must have finally felt my eyes on him. I was far

away but not so far that he couldn’t see me. He looked my way.

He shaded his eyes with his arm as if to make sure it was me. He

smiled. He waved, and I waved back.

I didn’t walk over and talk to him, though, not then. If I

needed the time for a tree branch to become just a tree branch

again and the wind to become just the wind, then a boy, most of

all, needed some time to be only a boy.

My dad laughed so hard. “You are shitting me,” he said. “You

found Annabelle Aurora? On your first day?”

“You
know
her?”

“Very well. She was a professor of mine in New York. I saw

her at a party there years later, and we kept in touch. She’s an old

friend, Pea. She stayed with us once when she came to a writers’

conference in town. You were just a baby. Of course I knew she

was out here. We keep in touch by e-mail. It recommended the

place, in my opinion.”

“She’s a
friend
of yours.”

“And a poet. A very well-known one, I might add.10* I didn’t

tell her I arrived yet.”

“I’m not sure she exactly has a
phone.
”

10 Three accents, two famous people, if you’re keeping a tally. Dad knows tons of writ-

ers, so there may be more coming. Oh, and Christian’s father was married for a short

while to a woman who was married to one of the Rolling Stones, if that counts.

* 66 *

Stay

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a shack. She’s got an
outhouse
. You always said poets

only got paid in magazine copies.”

He laughed again. He was loving this. He sure got a kick out

of that crazy old lady. “Annabelle is loaded.”

“No!”

“
Loaded
. Her husband was some newspaper guy. Like in,

‘owner,’ not reporter. She might have even had some family

money. They had this great apartment. Two daughters. Very close

to the girls.”

“That’s surprising. She’s alone in that weird place.”

“Happy as a clam, I have no doubt. She always liked the outer

edges. The farther, the better.”

“Clams—right. She said to tell you she had mussels.”

He slapped his hand on the table. “That fucking Annabelle,”

he said. “Good memory for an old broad.” He was grinning

wide. His eyes were sparkly. “When she came out to stay with

us, we steamed some for dinner. You were too young to remem-

ber this, I’m guessing. Your mother—she was in some mood.

She went inside. Upset . . . I can’t remember. Annabelle and

I ate mussels on the back deck and drank beers until we were

toasted. Laughed our asses off remembering these people in our

classes and those stupid parties where literary people try so hard

to be literary people. Cool superiority as a mask for overflow-

ing insecurity. ‘Every time I see people in social circumstances

like that, I can’t help but imagine them in junior high, worry-

ing about who they’re going to eat lunch with,’ Annabelle had

said, and I always thought about that later. You see a person’s

* 67 *

Deb Caletti

inner thirteen-year-old and you won’t look at them the same

way again.”

“Probably,” I said. But I was thinking about Dad and old

Annabelle Aurora on our deck on a summer night, and my

mother in her room. I felt like maybe I
could
remember that

night if I tried hard enough. I wondered what my mother had

been thinking and feeling, what had upset her. Those were the

times you really felt her absence—when you would never know

her, didn’t know her now enough to even guess what would

make her leave a houseguest in the middle of dinner. You only

had these words—
mood, upset
—and yet you had nothing to

hang them on. You had other words, too. But a word like
French
,

or
photographer
, or
sensitive
, they had a thousand meanings and

pictures and your own images would be only guesses. It was all

the things you could never understand and could never possess

that made you ache.

“Annabelle Aurora,” my father said. His eyes were still all

gleamy.

“The mother you never had?” I said. 11*

“I wouldn’t say that, exactly,” he said. “Not at all, really.”

“She scared me, knowing who I was like that. I thought she

was some crazy old fan who knew your life history.”

“She knows my life history, all right. Indeed she does.”

11 My father’s own mother, Grandma Oates, was a conservative woman who lived in

Iowa with her sister, my aunt Barbara. Grandma Oates made you believe it was pos-

sible for babies to be switched in hospitals.

* 68 *

Stay

I tried to read that book again before I went to sleep. I didn’t like

that book, but I kept going for all the reasons a person hangs in

with something that isn’t good—you feel bad about not giving it

a chance, you’ve already come too far to give up now, you believe

it’s going to get better. When you’re a person whose life has

mostly brought good things, you believe in goodness. You believe

that things will work out. Even the worst things will work out.

You believe in a happy ending.

But you are naive. The mostly good in your life has made

you that way. You’ve spent so much time seeing the bright side

that you don’t even believe the other side exists. You are wrong

about that.

I closed that book. I wouldn’t open it again, I vowed. It was

time I learned something.

* 69 *

He cal ed that night, the night I had come home from

the park and had eaten everything in the fridge. Kissing makes

you hungry.
Hunger
makes you hungry. It had gotten late. I had

school the next day. I was getting tired, but I just wanted more of

him, too, like he wanted of me. I was downstairs in the kitchen

getting something to drink, speaking softly, the phone crooked

between my shoulder and my ear, when Dad came through. He

was turning lights off. He tapped the place on his wrist where a

watch would be, turning his eyebrows down in concern.
I know!
I

mouthed. I was mad at him, because I knew he didn’t get this, or

even if he did in some general way, he didn’t get
this
.

Christian and I talked every night after that. We were both

taking AP classes and calculus and had too much homework,

so we couldn’t get together, and that next weekend he had

Stay

plans to go to his parents’ cabin. It was almost unbearable how

long those weeks were. I knew if he came over to study that we

wouldn’t study, but we ended up spending just as much time

on the phone anyway. We spent a lot of time saying
I should just

come over
and
If I’d have come over we could have spent all this

time together instead of on the phone
, things like that. Things you

say. Maybe I was nervous for Dad to meet him, or for him to

meet Dad, though I had no real reason to think they wouldn’t

get along terrifically. Christian was smart and well-read and Dad

liked that. There was something, though, that I knew could hap-

pen, which was that Dad could see things, he was an observer,

and maybe I just didn’t want him seeing and observing any-

thing that might ruin this. I needed him to like Christian and

keep his mouth shut and leave it at that.

Finally, on Friday night, Christian came over to pick me up to

go to a movie. I introduced him to Dad and they stood in the hall

by the front door as if no one wanted to venture further in. There

was this strained kind of chitchat about the number of daylight

hours Copenhagen experienced in the winter or some such thing,

and I kept seeing each of them through the others’ eyes, and I got

us out of there fast.

It was so good to see him. God. I felt so happy that we were

finally at Friday. The word
Friday
—streamers could have hung

from it, balloons. It was such a great word.

“I love watching you drive,” I said.

“I love seeing you in the seat beside me,” he said.

It felt very Mr. and Mrs., being in his car with him driving,

but I also felt a little nervous. We had talked about anything and

* 71 *

Deb Caletti

everything for hours and hours, but it was still all new; being in

his car was new, that careful new that made you worry you had

mascara tracks or would say something stupid, the exactly stupid-

est thing to make him know he didn’t want to be there with you

after all. You did that when you started to care a lot—you worried

he was watching your every move to make sure he really wanted

you. You could forget that maybe
you
were supposed to being

doing that too. You forgot it wasn’t just you being watched and

judged and trying to pass some test.

I looked around his car for pieces of him, ways to know him

better, but it was very clean—no wrappers or dust or books or

empty bottles. Dylan Ricks had had a soccer ball hanging from

his rearview mirror and sports equipment piled in the back,

water bottles and empty PowerBar wrappers, dirt from cleats and

muddy games on the carpets. Athlete leftovers everywhere. I pic-

tured Christian vacuuming the rugs for me, catching the crumbs

between the seats, making sure everything shined. Actually, he

always kept his car like that, but I didn’t know that then. He liked

things clean.12* I watched his finger adjust the radio dial. His

hands were clean, too. So neat, nails trimmed. I liked that, I told

myself. I wasn’t sure I really did, but I told myself I did. It was dif-