Stay (33 page)

this is from the other side.”

One of the Bellevue High girls giggled. I wanted to as well.

Finn was back again and he must have seen my mouth turn up.

He kicked my shoe softly with the toe of his own, made his eyes

spooky big. The sun dipped on cue. An older couple wearing

matching jackets scooted closer together, and he took her hand.

“You wonder, do you, why seashore towns and lighthouses

always have ghosts? Because this is where the violent seas meet

turbulent shore, where ships of men leave loved ones behind, wit-

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nesses to storms and loss and the drowning and crashing of that

loss. There are hundreds of dead sailors right here, right below us

in these waters. This was a major shipping channel back in time

of the tall ships, and the high winds here made passage deadly.

Many ships went missing. The SS
Highport
, The
Williamson
, the

Queen Victoria
, to name just a few. Is it any wonder that the para-

normal activity here is so great? Tragic loss and great fear means

unsettled spirits.”

Beth Louise stopped. You couldn’t help yourself. You looked

out onto those waters. You imagined.

“The sailing vessels, well, let’s come back to those, because

right now we are over the spot of a tragic shipwreck that took

place on April 1, 1921, the wreck of the SS
Governor
, where the

lives lost were not seamen, but a family. The Washbourne fam-

ily, Harry and Lucy asleep on one side of the cabin and their two

young daughters on the other. Imagine the dark night, the deep

waters, cold, cold. The family was sound asleep the moment that

the captain of the SS
Governor
confused the running lights of the

West Hartland
for the inland light of port and proceeded forward,

until the bow of the
West Hartland
slashed through the ship and

divided the Washbourne family cabin right in half.”

“Oh, God,” the woman with the long hair said. Her friend had

her hand to her mouth. I didn’t feel like joking anymore. Beth

Louise’s voice was calm and undramatic. None of this seemed

silly. This was a real and tragic event, and her voice reflected that.

Even Beth Louise herself was not as silly as she first seemed.

“The crew came quickly to their aid, but the young girls

were trapped, unable to be freed. Water was coming in. Water

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Deb Caletti

everywhere. Harry was brought up top, and, against her will, so

was the now hysterical mother, Lucy. The crew worked to move

the rest of the stranded passengers of the now sinking ship

quickly as possible to the
West Hartland.
But while they were

distracted, Lucy broke free of her rescuers and ran to be with

her children. She was never seen again. The ship sank within

twenty minutes.”

Beth Louise looked grim. Now the Bellevue High girls were

holding hands. The sky was dark. A half circle moon hung high.

Those black waves—they did look so, so cold.

“Lucy is said to haunt the area,” Beth Louise said. “She has

been seen numerous times, by sailors and fishermen and locals.

The Pigeon Point Lighthouse keeper at the time, James Shaw,

witnessed the accident. Today, members of the U.S. Coast Guard

have made reports about seeing the woman in her white night-

gown hovering here and at the lighthouse itself, going inside,

disappearing. Searching.”

Obsession
sliced through the waters, and then Jack called

“Come about!” to Finn, and there was the clatter of boom and

sails as the boat turned to parallel the shore. We could see the

lighthouse up ahead, and then nearer and nearer it came, look-

ing eerie against the backdrop of that story. Its tall white column

held another story now, Lucy Washbourne’s, and another, James

Shaw’s. It was stupid, but I shivered. The whole thing was stupid,

but she was a real mother and they were real children. As the boat

slowed in front of the lighthouse, I thought of Sylvie in there. I

wondered what she and Roger were doing at that very moment.

The house looked dark. I thought of Sylvie’s own loss, and about

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loss itself. What loss can do to us. What even the threat of loss

can do.

“And now we move to what is perhaps Bishop Rock’s most

famous spirit, Eliza Bishop. Her husband, Captain Bishop, was

one of the town’s early leaders. His ship,
Glory,
was hit by a sud-

den storm right here in front of the land named for his father. It

was a terrible wind. The rain slammed hard, waves overtook the

boat; the boat, heavy with water, tilted toward the sea. Desperate

men were running and clinging and sliding down the slanting

floorboards, screaming. Many of the townspeople watched the

terrible wreck from the windows of the old meeting hall, which

no longer stands. Eliza herself ran through the storm to the hall.

She saw that ship sinking, and it was obvious no man would

have made it from that wreck alive. She could see the men, her

husband somewhere among them, flailing but unable to be

rescued in the terrible waters just out of reach. She ran to the

lighthouse. The keeper tried to stop her racing up those stairs,

to the upper level, but she stepped outside onto that deck and

leaped to her death on the rocks below.”

“Jesus,” the man with the big belt buckle said.

“She has been seen for years at the lighthouse, and the ghost

ship
Glory
has been witnessed often, sailing these waters with no

crew aboard.”

Jack and Finn came about again, the whip and rattle of the

sails causing the woman in the expensive hippie sandals to jump

and then laugh at herself. Beth Louise was silent. No one else

spoke, either. It seemed the respectful thing to do. Eliza and

Captain Bishop—they were once living people who felt and loved

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Deb Caletti

and who had slept together in their safe bed. The waves looked

tipped in silver as the moon glowed on and on and on.

Jack glided the boat back into port. The jovial mood that

everyone came with seemed to return once we were off those

waters, back in the safety of harbor. People were joking. Someone

asked the Bishop brothers whether they had ever spotted any

spirits out there, and Jack joked that, no, he hadn’t, but he’d once

seen the Virgin Mary in an abalone shell.

I tried to shift gears, to pick up the new mood, but I felt weighted

down. The deep feelings of other people’s grief and passion and

tragedy—we drew those things to us; we made them romantic and

dreamlike and luridly fascinating. We made them into stories. You

could forget, then, that a girl, a real girl, could stand at the banks of

Greenlake with her heart beating in her throat, her shoes sinking

into the mud. You could forget that Mrs. Bishop felt her life was

over. You could come to think that real fear, real danger, was a far-

away thing. Romantic and dreamlike and luridly fascinating, but not

real, even as you felt it, the phone vibrating in your pocket right then.

Three calls from Christian and one from my father.

Finn jumped from the boat. Took my face in his hands. “I

didn’t hear a word of any of that, because all I could think was

how beautiful you looked in that moonlight,” he said.

I smiled. “Kiss me, because I’d better get home,” I said.

He did. His face was cold against my cold face.

“Thanks for putting up with that just to see me,” he said.

I pretended I thought it was stupid, too. I didn’t want to con-

fess that it disturbed me. “So, Mr. Finn. What do you think about

all of that? If there are ghosts,
why
are there ghosts?”

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He kissed the tip of my nose. “People who can’t let go?”

“We feel sorry for them, though. They’re ‘tormented’ . . .”

“Yeah” he said. “But they scare the shit out of people because

they can’t move on. Selfish.”

“Metaphor,” I said.

But Finn didn’t care about metaphors. He kissed me again.

“Do you want me to walk you to your car?”

I did want him to, but I shook my head. I wouldn’t let him

see how much the dark was scaring me, the sound of the water

against the pilings of the dock, the old wood groaning and creak-

ing as it shifted. “See you tomorrow?”

“Great,” he said.

I walked away, turned to wave. I wished I could run to my

car, but he was watching and it would have been embarrassing.

I wanted to, though. Everything inside was
urging
. I unlocked

my door in a hurry. I got in and locked all of the doors around

me. The street was empty and quiet except for the noise that

spilled from Butch’s Harbor Bar when a couple opened the door

to go in. The steering wheel was cold, the seat, too. I turned on

the engine and blasted the heater and drove home too fast, my

phone right by my hip in the pocket of Cleo’s jacket, those mes-

sages from Christian too close to my body.

I drove through town, down the winding beach road that

hugged the coast. I watched my rearview mirror for lights, but it

was just all darkness stretched out behind me. I saw the house,

our house, sitting at the tip of Possession Point, a yellowish glow

coming from the windows. As I approached, a Jeep passed me.

Sylvie Genovese going home.

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Deb Caletti

I pulled into the driveway. Smoke was coming from our

chimney. My father had lit a fire. Intimate ambience, which could

have been irritating, only it wasn’t. The thought of warmth and

home sounded like a great relief, a place to reach that I hadn’t yet

reached. The distance between the car and the inside seemed so

far still, with all that dark space out there, with that endless beach

grass high enough to hide in, the black banks of rock, the piles of

driftwood right outside my window.

I turned off the engine and looked around before I stepped

out, and I almost ran to that front door. I flung it open and shut it

hard behind me, safe. I was out of breath. At least, I felt the heavi-

ness in my chest that meant I was trying to get air. Drowning

must feel like that.

“Jesus,” I said. I put my hand to my heart, like I’d been

chased and now I had made it. I looked around. The fire was

still popping and snapping, but sleepily, in that winding down

way that meant they’d had a long evening together. There were

candles in candlesticks on the table. The wax dripped down; the

candles were burnt to only a few inches high.

My father was in the bathroom. I heard him. And then he

came out and stared at me, and his face looked strange. His eyes

looked puffy, small slits. I was glad to see him, though. I needed

to tell him.

“He called me again. I know he’s here.”

“We’re going on Monday, Clara. There’s a courthouse in

Anacortes. We’re going to get that restraining order as soon as

the doors open. But there’s something we need to talk about

now.”

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I didn’t say anything. My back was still to the front door. I

understood something. “Whatever your big secret is, you told

Sylvie, didn’t you?”

“Come and sit down.”

It seemed like a terrible disloyalty, him telling her first.

Whatever it was, he was my father and this was my business. It

didn’t feel safe inside there anymore. Inside, outside—nowhere

felt safe. “I don’t want to know your big secret.”

“Clara Pea.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“I should have told you a long time ago, but I couldn’t.”

We stayed there, standing. In the movies, you always see

people sitting down for Big News. People always say that, too,

they urge you to sit before it comes. But sitting is one step further

from the chance to flee. Standing is closer to
away.

“Your mother . . .”

“I don’t want this.”

“I’ve lied to you. I’ve got a hundred good reasons why, but it

doesn’t change the fact that I never told you the truth.”

“I don’t need the truth.”

“Clara, please.” I didn’t want to be told, but he needed to tell.

You could see it. The words had been pressing at him from the

inside for so long and long and long like words do, like secret

shame does. Words must finally be said; they press their way out.

Words came from his fingertips every day, onto pages that were

read by thousands of people, but these private words, they stayed

inside where they didn’t belong, building strength and weight,

shoving harder until they were bigger than he was.

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Deb Caletti

“It’s your problem,” I said. My back was still to the door.

“She didn’t die of an aneurysm,” he said.