The Six Rules of Maybe (2 page)

I went back in through the screen door and let it slam shut behind me. I wanted to make some kind of noise, because Juliet had gone off to pee and Hayden just stood there in the kitchen with Mom, his hands clasped in front of him. I felt sorry for him—those clasped hands made it look like he was praying.

“I really love your daughter, Mrs. Ellis,” he said. “I’m crazy about her, actually.” One thing was becoming very quickly clear: Hayden was not Juliet’s usual type. Not at all. He seemed solid and grounded the way a tree is, and he was kind, you could tell. He had the sort of kindness that announces itself. Already it was obvious he was nothing like Adam Christ or Evan Giordi or, especially, Buddy Wilkes. Buddy Wilkes gave you the shivers. Me, the bad kind of shivers; my sister, the good kind. If Juliet was going to run off and marry anyone, I’d have guessed it would have been him. Buddy Wilkes III was the one my sister had given her heart
(and everything else) to on and off for all four years of high school. Who was named Buddy anymore? No one. And he still did all those things guys named Buddy did years ago: smoked cigarettes, worked at a gas station, gave girls a “reputation.” He wasn’t a tree, but a high voltage power line, thin and electric and dangerous.

“I’m not a ‘Mrs.,’” Mom said. “Unlike my
daughter.
What did you say your name was?”

“Hayden,” I offered.

“Scarlet. Go upstairs. I have more than I can handle here already.”

I made a
can you believe this?
face to Hayden to convey that Mom had obviously and suddenly lost her mind. I didn’t want him to think I was someone who could be “sent upstairs,” which was something parents did in TV movies, anyway, not Mom. She was going a little nuts, and he looked stunned and helpless. Juliet appeared again. You could hear the gurgling sound of the toilet tank filling up from the open door of the bathroom. “I know this is a surprise,” she said.

“Surprise? Surprise? You’re kidding, right? Let me just think a minute, here,” Mom said. She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips as if a plan might appear to undo what had been done. Mom was always a little frazzled on a regular day. I figured it was what happened when the way things were and the way you wished they would be were not quite the same thing.

“Did you go to Vegas?” I asked. I was suddenly interested in the details, mostly because I was suddenly only realizing there
were
details. My sister had gotten married. My sister, whom I had grown up next to, who sat beside me in the car and at the dinner table, whom I used to take baths with, who taught me how to use makeup and shared her friends with me like she used to share her white-and-pink animal cookies because she always seemed to have
more of everything—she’d gotten
married
. We both used to hide the zucchini we hated in our napkins and test Mom’s patience and fight about who had what and now she’d joined hands with this particular guy and pledged her long life to his, and maybe she’d worn a white dress or maybe her jeans and maybe there was music or maybe there wasn’t and maybe they’d been in a long hall with big windows or barefoot on a beach or gazing into each other’s eyes at a Chapel of Love. How could we not have been there?

“Portland courthouse,” Juliet said. “Five minutes, and the deal was done.”

“It was the happiest moment of my life,” Hayden said. “Even if it was all a little … unplanned.” He reached for Juliet’s hand, but she was taking her hair down and putting it back up again. His ring—it sat solid and permanent on his finger. He was the kind of guy who would want love everlasting and silver anniversaries and Thanksgivings at big tables. The things you
would
want.
I
would want. Juliet’s ring—it seemed small and light. I could see that. Juliet’s ring had wings.

“Jesus Christ,” Juliet said, although I doubted He’d come if she called. The two of them didn’t know each other very well. “I can’t believe it but I have to pee again.”

Mom stopped her forehead rubbing and stood wide-eyed, her face frozen. A freight train might have just come through the living room, its single light barreling straight toward her.

“No,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

“No,” she said again.

Hayden looked desperate. He was pacing while he was standing still; that’s what he was doing.

“What?” I said again.

“Scarlet, I told you to go upstairs!” Mom shrieked.

I didn’t have much choice, then, and as I left the room, I felt the shame and embarrassment of having a mother, which followed me the entire way up the stairs. Banishing me wouldn’t do much good anyway. I was someone who liked to stay toward the background, and when you’re that kind of person you have a way of finding things out no matter where you are. Sometimes, you don’t even have to try—information seeks you out and clings, same as the smell of cigarette smoke to clothes. I knew from a very young age, for example, that our father, Steven Ellis, moved to Vancouver Island around the time I was three, even though I had no memory of it or of him, and even though our mother never spoke of it. Fatherhood was too much for him, from what I understood, the way rich foods are too much for some people’s stomachs.

I knew various facts about other things too. My mother’s subsequent boyfriends: Vic was a cheapskate and Tony’s ex wife took everything he had and Mark thought he was so hot but he couldn’t figure out how much to tip a waiter without counting on his fingers. I also knew that my sister lost her virginity with Buddy Wilkes on her fifteenth birthday, in his parents’ rec room, under a mounted deer head that Buddy and his father killed on a hunting trip. The day after Juliet’s fifteenth birthday, she became a vegetarian for one year; until then, that was the longest she’d been dedicated to anything. And somehow she’d also become just as dedicated to Buddy, as attached as that deer head was to the
faux
pine paneling of the rec room wall.

From my place upstairs, then, I did something I was very good at. I watched and I listened. From the landing I could see Mom’s feet—painted toenails, brown sandals—which were facing Hayden’s—a pair of guy’s feet in sturdy well-worn Birkenstocks.
Can toes look angry? Because Mom’s did. It was a foot face-off. I wished I had my camera with me, because it would have been a good shot. Feet versus feet, the moment in the animal shows just before one creature gets ripped to shreds.

“I know this is a shock,” Hayden said. These were the words being used—
shock, surprise
—words of sudden ambush. “It’s a surprise to me, too,” Hayden said.

“You must have realized there was this
possibili
—”

“Can we go outside or something? The heat is killing me.” Juliet’s feet joined theirs. White sandals with fragile, thin straps and the narrowest of heels. That summer, I would come to understand something about fragility—how powerful it was, how other people’s need could draw you in, bully and force sure as an arm twisted behind your back. But right then I saw only shoes, no big metaphor, two sets of reliable, dedicated feet following those delicate heels outside.

The feet exited stage left. I heard the screen door open, and Hayden called out something to Zeus. Ice cubes were freed from a tray, clinked into glasses. The screen door shut again. Everyone was likely sitting at the umbrella table outside, which meant I’d have a good enough view from the bathroom. I crossed the hall, lifted myself up onto the countertop. The bathroom was still all new starts and shiny surfaces, smelling the blue-brightness of Windex, cleaned only an hour ago by me. Since Juliet had left home, her returns had reached the status of Company Coming, meaning the bathrooms were cleaned for her and Mom had made a dessert, and Mom never made dessert.

“It’s just Juliet,” I had said as Mom spread the pink peppermint-chip ice cream into a chocolate-cookie pie shell, swirling it with the edge of her spatula.

“Juliet’s doing big things in the world,” Mom had said. Mom respected “big things in the world.” Ever since we were kids, we’d hear her talk about
Following Your Dreams
and
Aiming High
and
Seeing the World
as she packed our lunch or drove us home from swimming lessons or carried our tri-fold boards into the cafeteria where the science fair was being held. She’d sing her favorite song “Be” by her favorite singer Neil Diamond as she pasted photographs of places she’d never been into the scrapbooks she made with the scrapbook club Allison, her best friend, started. She’d belt out
“Sing as a song in search of a voice that is silent”
as she glued bits of feathers or shells or other found things to the borders of images of vineyards and castles and ancient cities and other faraway places. The song was her personal big dream anthem—she thought it was about embracing life and finding your true love, but if you listen closely, it’s really a song about God. Big
Him
, not little
him
. I pointed this out once, but she didn’t seem to care. She told me she went through her entire high school years thinking “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from
Jesus Christ Superstar
described her boyfriend, Roger, perfectly.

I opened the window, put my face close to the sneezy mesh of the screen. In the window ledge was one long-expired potato bug, who had apparently set off on a journey across the wide plain of the south side of our house, traveling the endless distance up and over each dangerous stretch of siding, all in order to die in the gutter ledge of our second-story bathroom window. He had had big dreams, too, and look where that had gotten him.

The umbrella of the table hid their faces, but I could see Hayden’s back, and Juliet’s tan arms, and Mom’s profile. Juliet poked at her ice with the tip of her finger.

“I told Hank I quit,” Juliet said.

“Oh, honey,” Mom said. “I just can’t believe this.” She shook her head. One of the chopsticks in her hair was sliding loose and about to fall.

“I suggested maybe just some time off … ,” Hayden said.

“They’re not exactly going to want a pregnant woman crooning to middle-age men on business,” Juliet said.

I sat away from the window. I may have actually gasped. I leaned my slow and clueless self against the just-cleaned mirror.
Pregnant?
As in, having a
baby? Juliet?
I think my heart might have stopped for a second then. At least, the moment had a shutter click of stop action. My stomach did the elevator drop stomachs do when something is utterly and completely wrong. This was not our life. Juliet as a
mother?
Juliet had had a cactus once, given to her by some boy just back from a vacation in Arizona, and that cactus had sat on her bookshelf until it turned a despairing yellow and then shriveled up and died. She could kill a
cactus
. She’d be one of those parents who left a kid behind at a rest stop, driving for miles before she noticed. We’d hear about her on the evening news.

And how did this happen? I mean, I know how, but
how?
It was just after Buddy Wilkes when I first saw the round pink package of pills in a protective oval appear in our bathroom drawer, hidden under the box of tampons. Maybe my cluelessness was understandable, given that pregnant was the last thing you’d expect from Juliet. You’d expect that she’d be telling us she’d just gotten a record deal and was about to become world famous. Maybe that she was moving to a foreign country and taking us all with her, which was, in a way, what was happening. If anything was a foreign country, marriage was. A baby, too.

Hayden leaned back in his chair. There was a sigh in his shoulders.

“So you don’t have your room at the hotel anymore,” Mom said. She sounded crushed. Juliet’s job at the Grovesnor came with room and board, meaning a great big suite and room service whenever she wanted. The room was a strange mix of past and present—a quilt from home on the shiny gold hotel bedspread. A photo album in the drawer next to the bed with pictures of Juliet’s friends from high school, keeping company with the room service menu and the
Portland Attractions Guide
. When it was time for a meal, though, a little table would be wheeled in, with a white tablecloth and elegant food under silver domes and tiny salt and pepper shakers. During our first visit there, my mother, who is as honest as anyone I know, wrapped those tiny salt and pepper shakers in a napkin and snuck them into her purse. The next time we visited, we had a new bath towel at home, with a big, embroidered
G
across the bottom. Mom loved that hotel.

“I didn’t think quitting was necessary—we could stay in married student housing. I could finish my degree… .” Hayden was appealing to Mom, but when Juliet sighed, Mom reached out and took Juliet’s hands. I more than anyone could have told him that no one came before Juliet. You could feel the truckload of loneliness heading his way, as he just stood there, blinking in the bright light of his new marriage.

“I just want to have my baby at home,” Juliet said.

There was the weight of silence, the clasped hands. The chopstick finally slid free from Mom’s hair and clinked to the floor. She bent down and picked it up, stabbed it back decisively in her hair. Zeus, maybe sensing that his beloved Man was outnumbered, came over and set his chin on Hayden’s lap.

“Of course you do,” Mom said. The words were a whisper. Gentle as falling snow. As quiet and powerful, too. “Of course.”

Chapter Three

I
’ve been told a million times that when I was only three years old, I gave my beloved blankie to my mother because she was crying. It was when my father left, I’m sure, though that isn’t the part of the story that gets told. I covered her knees with it. I still have that blanket, though I won’t go around admitting it.

From that moment on, being kind and caring was what I was known for, same as some people are known for being smart or beautiful or for playing the piano, a quality as much a part of me as the scar on my hand from when I picked up broken glass when I was two. In the first grade, I was the one who invited Sylvia Unger to my birthday party (nine years before her first suicide attempt), and from the second grade on, the weird and friendless sat with me at lunch. You ate your tuna and Fritos and tried not to stare at their misguided clothing choices or the way they’d chopped their bangs or the red scratches on their wrists.