The Six Rules of Maybe (28 page)

“Thanks, Jesse, really. It means a lot.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’ve got to run. I’m glad I caught you before you left.”

“Me too,” I said.

He picked up his bike, set down on its side by the front of the store. He got on, and I watched him cruise down the street, one arm waving good-bye just as he rounded the corner.

I felt some high, zapping energy buzz, a mix of pleasure and confusion. It was the mental equivalent of what your body does after one of the lattes at Java Java.

I couldn’t go home yet. I decided to take Mom’s car to Point Perpetua, not exactly where you went for calm and quiet during the summer months, but better than nothing. Tourists were
everywhere
in the summer months. People who lived near the beaches would steal the park entrance signs and hide them, just to have a little peace. You’d see some couple in matching T-shirts by the roadside, holding one of the island maps and looking perplexed, and you knew just what had happened. Someone like Otto Perkins had snitched the sign and put it in his backyard with the ten or twelve others he’d stolen over the years.

I was lucky to even find a parking space. People came in droves to “whale watch,” but whale watching was no different from fishing—a lot of waiting, little or no outcome usually, and the hours the whales appeared were the ones when visitors from Michigan or California were having cocktails at the Lighthouse or sleeping in their down beds at Asher House B & B, dreaming of raspberry scones. I didn’t think whales liked to be watched. They liked their privacy. Their appearance was a favor, and they gave that favor to only a few.

I grabbed my camera from underneath the seat of Mom’s car, headed down the windy path to the beach. God, I loved that smell—the briney water and the tang of salt, odd ropes of slick seaweed thick with the odor of the oldest and deepest parts of the ocean.

Some stupid kid in cartoon swim trunks was throwing rocks at bored seagulls, and two teen boys I didn’t recognize were swimming where they shouldn’t be. A young woman with short, short hair picked her way along the rocks, looking for treasures. I wished I lived right there on the beach. Every day, you could see what the ocean brought you. I made my own way, my palm finding familiar flat places on which to balance. I climbed up my favorite rock and sat.

I lifted my camera to my eye, played around with different shots, took a few that weren’t really any good. The book from Jesse sat in the bag beside me, and I thought about opening it, cracking the shiny cover of that book and sniffing deeply, exploring its contents. But instead, I took a breath and let Point Perpetua settle inside me, and when I did, it was Hayden I kept seeing—sitting beside me that day, his head tilted up to the sun, his eyes closed, wearing his favorite green T-shirt. The way he rested his forearms on his knees, the ease he had with his body, the strength you sensed in his man hands and in his shoulders … A man seemed a fine thing to curl up against. A man could seem like shelter.

It felt like a decision, to keep that bag closed, with the book tucked forever inside. And I guess it was.

Chapter Twenty-two

T
he Martinellis’ house sold in two weeks. On the second Saturday in July, Yvonne Yolanda came back with her real estate lady hair and real estate lady high heels and tacked a
SOLD
sign on, placing it at a triumphant diagonal. We didn’t know who had bought the house, but I did see a motorcycle there a couple of times, the same one, I was almost sure, that belonged to the driver who had so loved Jeffrey and Jacob’s purse trick. I also saw an old pea-soup-green Chevy Nova parked behind the Pleasure Way once or twice. A woman with long black-gray hair and a long skirt and beaded bracelets got out and spent some time looking around the backyard. She looked like the woman who sold her handmade jam at the Sunday market.

I didn’t see Mr. or Mrs. Martinelli to ask, but I did see Kevin Frink. It was a hot, hot day. I was in the backyard on the lawn chair reading
The Psychology of Love
, when I heard my name called. I
jumped—saw Kevin Frink’s face from the nose up, looking over our back fence.

“Kevin!”

He’d surprised me. I clutched my beach towel to my chest, covered up my body in my bathing suit. Good thing Zeus was with Hayden, or he’d have gone nuts. Zeus could be a good guard dog, even if his alarm buttons were sometimes hard to understand. He’d snarl at a large package but sometimes ignore the doorbell. He disliked certain people for his own reasons.

“I need your help,” Kevin said.

I tossed on my T-shirt, unlatched the gate, and let him in. I’d thought he looked bad the last time I saw him, but now he looked worse. The weight that he seemed to have lost was back on, and a roll of stomach pushed against his T-shirt. You could almost see the frantic shoving of potato chips and ice cream and melting cheese that lay there, the impossible, anxious hunger. A small gathering of chin hairs had been allowed to grow too, an uncontrolled faction, a splinter group maybe; if he ignored them, they might attempt takeover. His skin looked white and fleshy, an underground kind of pale. It made you think of night creatures with scared pink eyes.

“What’s going on?” I said. “Wait, do you want something to drink, maybe? Lemonade? Something?” It was strange to have Kevin Frink in my backyard. I thought of the crime books, a killer disguised as a delivery man. Maybe I shouldn’t have offered to get him lemonade. Kevin Frink didn’t belong there with Mom’s pots of tomatoes and the bird feeder (which needed filling) and the pile of our sandals next to the back door. He brought the pieces of a different life. His mom drove a hearse and they lived in a house where the curtains were never open and the roof was green with a thick layer of moss. He had body odor. We had lotions that smelled like
pomegranate.

His eyes shot to our tree, to the noise of a squirrel scratching along a branch. Then, they were back to mine again. “We’ve got to break her out of there,” he said. “You go over, okay? Pretend to ask her somewhere. Shopping. Coffee. Who gives a shit. She goes with you …”

“What do you mean, break her out of there?” He seemed to think I was following along with him inside his head.

“She’s not supposed to leave. Fiona. Especially not to see me. It’s bullshit. She’s
eighteen
.”

“They can’t keep her prisoner.”

“Exactly. Jesus, it’s hot.”

He wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his arm. I pictured Mr. and Mrs. Saint George keeping Fiona locked in her room until she agreed to go to Yale, bringing her sparse meals on metal plates. I had a vision of stone walls, like in medieval prison movies. Then again, they didn’t seem that horrible. Mr. Saint George would bring in Clive Weaver’s garbage cans for him. Mrs. Saint George grew geraniums. They both were scientists over at the Marine Science Center. I doubted you could be too cruel if you studied sea life. “So, why did they ground her exactly?”

Kevin Frink picked at the plastic around the edge of our table. “It was dumb.”

I waited.

“You don’t need to look at me like that,” he said. “Big deal. My mom caught us in the back of the hearse.”

I’d never seen the back of a hearse, but my mind flashed a series of pictures. Maroon carpeting, quilted satin, a single creepy, curtained window. The slick bottom of a casket, slid inside. Kevin Frink’s big white whale flesh. I shuddered.

He stared at me. “For God’s sake, no one was
in
there,” he said. “It’s just a
car
.”

I didn’t want to help him and Fiona, not at all. Not anymore. I felt a little sick, from the sun and hot heavy air and from my intentions, which seemed right then stupid and innocent. They had gotten away from me, had become something else. All of my intentions had. The thing is, you open doors, but you never necessarily know what will come through them.

I wanted to back out of my actions, to sneak away in guilt, the same as that time I once knocked over a container of yogurt in the grocery store when I was maybe ten, leaving a splotch of white on the linoleum floor that I didn’t tell even my mother about. “I can’t do what you want,” I said.

“We just need to get her out of the house. That’s all. That’s all I’m asking.”

“What then?” I was afraid to know.

“She doesn’t want to go to Yale. She said she wasn’t even sure.” The high whine of a saw started over the back fence, and Kevin pulled at his ear distractedly as if the pitch bothered him. The radio started up.
Do you re-mem-ber … The twenty-first night of Septem-ber …
“Fucking Earth, Wind & Fire,” he said. “My
mom
listens to that shit.” He flicked the nail of his middle finger with his thumb over and over again.
Click, click, click.

I wanted to say that not being sure about Yale wasn’t the same as not wanting to go at all. I wanted to say that I was sorry for leading him into a place he wasn’t really ready to be in. And that I was sorry too for abandoning him now in that place. But I didn’t say any of those things. “I can’t, Kevin.”

“You’re kidding, right? I thought you were my friend. I thought I could count on you.” He kept flicking that nail. It was making me
nervous. I wanted out of there. No, I wanted him out of there. This was my place.

I was quiet. I felt that thick curl of guilt again, the one that got in the way whenever there was something I most needed to say. “I
am
your friend,” I said finally.

“Whatever.” He headed for the gate. He stopped the nail thing, but he was shaking his head.

“Kevin.”

“What
ever
.”

The gate slammed behind him, and the latch shut with a clatter. The smell of him hung around a while until it, too, decided to go.

I stood there in the backyard among cheerful things—Mom’s watering can, the doormat with the sunflowers on it—and I listened to Kevin Frink step on the gas of his Volkswagen, listened to the screech and scream of his tires as they rounded the corner of our street.

I could tell the night would bring bad things the moment I heard Juliet’s voice. I had never known a world without Juliet in it, and so when she was angry I could tell before she even said a word. When she was happy or guilty or planning something terrible, I could read it in her gestures and the spaces between her breath, and in the way she held her shoulders. When we gathered in the kitchen that early evening for our own various reasons, and when her voice sounded like bells—sweet and unreal—there was no question in my mind that whatever commitment she had promised Hayden the night before was about to be snatched back and destroyed. She was holding the bomb in one hand and the matches in the other, I knew.

And, I knew, too, because I had seen Hayden’s latest note. It held the kind of relief and certainty Juliet was destined to crush, was crushing right then as we stood there.

Juliet—

Commitment.

When you said the word to me last night, I became sure of one thing: I’m the luckiest man alive.

Juliet’s hair was up from the heat. She wore the lightest dress, white, as thin as a curtain. She smelled like perfume. “I’ll be so glad to see Melissa again. She’s only here for two days… .”

“I don’t remember Melissa,” Mom said. “Melissa who?” But she was distracted. She was looking for something in her purse. You’d have thought she would have heard the bells in Juliet’s voice too, but she didn’t. She never heard those things. She always seemed to listen with hope instead, the hope that everything was just fine.

“Melissa Beene?”

“You were never really friends with her,” I said. “You didn’t even
like
her. You shared a locker one year, that was
all
.”

Juliet ignored me. I noticed that she had painted her toenails, too. They had gone from a chipped pale state to a shiny pink, some statement of intention that shouted more loudly to me, even, than her own voice. “She came over that time when we were working on our senior project, remember?” she said to Mom. “Went on to college in California? Brown hair? We used to go over before school to that bakery that went under.”

“Once!” I said. “If that.” I felt anxiety building inside, felt it pacing somewhere in the area of my chest. You feel joy in your heart and fear in your stomach, but your chest is the place you feel things going wrong.

“Right,” Mom said. “Right. You don’t try to compete with Honey B’s. You just don’t. Ahh, I can’t believe this heat.” She
looked up as if there were a cool breeze to be found high up somewhere.

“Anyway, she said she’d buy me dinner, and God knows, I eat like a horse lately.” Juliet smiled. Hayden was getting a beer out of the fridge. He twisted off the top and took a long swallow.

“Okay, so where is this Honey B’s? I love a good cinnamon roll,” he said. Hayden was always game when it came to food or talk of food. His shirt was loose, and he was barefoot.

“Oh, they’re
huge
,” Juliet said. “Even you couldn’t finish one.”

“I take that as a challenge,” Hayden said. He didn’t hear the bells in Juliet’s voice either. He and Mom
both
listened with hope. He was at ease, just holding that cool beer, and he didn’t know he shouldn’t have been. It was unfair to let him think everything was fine, to not even
warn
him. That seemed particularly cruel of Juliet. I wanted to say something, something that would stop all this right here, but nothing came. I could think only about Juliet and Buddy and Juliet and Buddy and Juliet and Buddy, and something I’d been trying not to think about at all. That day I’d asked Juliet about Buddy and Jitter. How she’d never actually given me an answer.

“You’re on your own for dinner, then,” Mom said to me. “I’m going out myself.” She finally found what she was looking for in her purse—a wad of bills, which she handed to me over the table where I sat.

I didn’t want those bills. I didn’t want anything from Mom then, because she sounded guilty too. Both of them were guilty, already guilty, and they hadn’t even left our kitchen. I knew exactly where Juliet was going—that skanky apartment Buddy Wilkes lived in above the Friedmans’ garage, less than a mile away. And I knew where Mom was going—toward some future involving that black velvet box. I understood something else, too—that premeditated acts were always
the worst ones.