Stay (36 page)

the thought of the smell of that scotch made my stomach swim

with nausea.

I called out, but my father wasn’t home. I looked out the win-

dow, to the side of the house near the back deck where my father

* 285 *

Deb Caletti

kept his bike, and I was right, he was gone.51* The wind was whis-

tling. Everything was sudden angles in that wind—the grass bent

wildly and the waves slanted and the rain, too, fell at a diagonal as

the wind pressed against it. I shut the blinds. It was crazy, but I

went around shutting everything I could shut. Windows and cur-

tains and closet doors. A bathroom drawer that held my father’s

shaving kit. The wardrobe that held the television.

I found my phone in my purse and then zipped my purse

up tight, too. I was going to call my father. Wherever he was, I

needed him back. I didn’t want to be in that house all alone with

the slanting wind outside. I had never been a baby about being

alone, never. But there was this thrum of inevitability inside me,

and his presence could stop that, I thought. Something needed to

stop it. A person, a conversation, regular keys being dropped on a

regular table, some regular words, dinner being made.

I called him but the phone only rang and there was his voice

leaving his message in that smart-ass voice that was only one side

of him. I hung up. I tried to tell myself I was being stupid when

I knew I was not being stupid, and that’s when the phone started

to ring right in my hand and it was him. It was Christian.

I shoved the phone down deep into the couch, under the

cushions. I felt a grip of panic. I opened my purse again and took

out my car keys and put them in my pocket, same as I did that

other day, the last time I had seen him. I could hear the thrum of

ringing under those pillows, and then it stopped. I didn’t know

what to do. I needed to do something only I had no idea what.

51 An idiot, to ride when a storm was coming.

* 286 *

Stay

I went to my father’s room. I looked under his bed and

took out the paperweight he kept there. It was heavy for its size,

shaped like a typewriter, jagged and intricate, with frozen, silent

keys. I brought it out to the living room. I set it down on the cof-

fee table in front of me.

I was getting myself worked up over nothing. You could do

that. You could make something big in your mind that didn’t

exist—Christian himself had done that, and what he’d created

was as real to him as real actually was. You could see ghosts.

How could you tell the difference? How could you tell the fear

inside from the danger outside? How could you hear what was

real when the wind was battering and the rain coming down and

those ghosts were restless and rising from the seas?

* 287 *

I sat there on the couch and circled my knees with

my arms and watched the sky turn briefly pink and orange in

the skylight before it went dark. The phone rang under the cush-

ions again. I knew it might be Finn, but it might not be, too. I

couldn’t stop to find out, because I needed to listen. The phone

stopped. I sat very still and listened hard to the night—the

ocean, the wind, the rain, the creak of the joints of the house,

so I would hear if he was coming.

And so I did hear it coming from a long way off, that car.

The car was one I knew well—the sound of the engine was.

A car engine can sound like no other car engine, same as

the sound of a particular car door slamming shut, same as

particular footsteps, which I did not wait for. I looked out the

window when I heard the engine. I saw the headlights and

Stay

the outline of the driver, and I knew those headlights and that

outline.

“Oh, Jesus,” I said out loud. My voice was both so big and so

small in that room. “Jesus,” I whispered.

He had closed that door in his room, and I had been trapped

in that corner, I remembered that. I would not be trapped again.

I had the keys in my pocket, but the keys would do no good.

The paperweight sat on the table, and it would do no good,

either. They were small, silly weapons, pointless objects offering

no protection. I saw the headlights swing into the driveway, and

they swooped across the living room, same as the lighthouse

beam making its slow arc. I went to the sliding door that led to

the back deck and opened, it and the blind clattered as I shoved

it aside and stepped outside and then remembered that he could

hear my shoes on the wooden planks of the deck. I heard him

knocking. I heard him calling my name, in that voice, and I ran

then. I bolted down the dunes toward the beach and I started

running and I could still hear him calling my name.

The rain soaked my blouse in an instant. It clung to my skin,

and my hair was wet and rain dripped down my forehead and I

stumbled across bits of driftwood and rock to the place on the

shore where the sand was hard and I ran and ran until I realized

he might see me easily there. He would walk around the house

after he had knocked. He would see the open door. Maybe he

would walk around inside the place where my father and I had

lived, invading our private space, forcing himself where he wasn’t

wanted. He would get in his car again and drive on the road just

above me where he would see my white shirt in the darkness.

* 289 *

Deb Caletti

I ran back up to the shore again, to a covey of rock, and I lay

down against a huge stone, hidden from the road, feeling the hard

slate against my wet clothes, the cold of the rock against my cheek,

gritty with sand. My heart was pounding. My phone—it was still

under that couch cushion. I felt crazy. I couldn’t locate my own self

where I was—It was like that other night, when I was driving and

there was the ammunition store and the phone booth, and I was in

a town where other people lived, not me. I gripped that rock, and

the rain soaked my jeans now, and I waited, I don’t know for what,

just for the right amount of time, the signal inside that it was the

right amount of time, and then I climbed up toward the road and

crossed it so that I would be farther from where he might look.

I ran. My chest was burning with fire from running. I

breathed hard. I prayed I might see my father biking up the road,

but then I realized how silly that was. Him on a wobbly bike to

save me felt as feeble as those policemen on bikes or horses, the

ones you were sure wouldn’t be good for much other than stop-

ping some jaywalking citizen. Even my father, though, would not

take his bike out now, in this pounding rain and wind. He would

stay smartly where he was until he could get a ride back, maybe

from Sylvie Genovese’s, if that’s where he was.

That’s where he was, I was sure of it.

It suddenly appeared like the right answer, even though I had

been moving that direction all along. The lighthouse. The safest

place now, I knew, the safest place in any storm, that column of

stone, and inside the keeper’s house, Sylvie and my father and

Roger, Sylvie’s warm rugs and cups of tea and my father, who

would not let anything bad happen.

* 290 *

Stay

Only, he had let something bad happen. He had let it happen

and didn’t, couldn’t, stop it.

The road was empty—there was no car in sight, not Sylvie’s,

not Christian’s driving slowly past in that rain. It was just me

walking now, walking because I couldn’t run anymore, and the

lights of houses coming on in the dark and the wind whistling

and the sound of the waves crashing hard into rock and some-

thing banging far off in the wind, some door loose on its hinges.

I could not see the lighthouse in the distance and then I could

because the sensors must have gone off, and the beam lit up and

it began to swivel in the sky, and I went toward it. It was a long

way away when not in the car or on a bike, and I was soaked and

started to shiver. A car approached, and I hunched down, and

it sped past, a car I did not know. A cat cried out, one of those

horrible cat cries, a howl. I felt that howl inside me, curling up

from somewhere deep, my own cry. I stood and kept walking,

and then I started to run again because I couldn’t bear the rain

anymore, that night, that road, and the sound of my own steps

on pavement.

I ran up the curved drive to the lighthouse. The visitors’

center parking lot was empty, but, yes, there was Sylvie’s Jeep

and my father’s bike resting against the gate, and yellow lights

blazed upstairs, and in the backdrop was that huge and slowly

swiveling beam.

I caught my breath, thankful that I had made it. My father

would be shocked to see me there, standing on the porch, soaked

and scared. I bent over, rested my hands on my thighs as I let the

fire in my chest subside. It seemed crazy and unreal—the head-

* 291 *

Deb Caletti

lights, running out that back door, Christian’s car. It had been

real
, right? It had been. It was windier up there on the bluff than

it had been on the road. The wind had turned from a whistle to

a loud, spinning howl, and my teeth were chattering, and I felt

so far outside myself that I had a hard time making myself move

to that front door, and I just stood there breathing so hard, my

hands on my knees.

But I was there, and so I rested a moment. And in the small

space of that moment he was in front of me. He was there with

the lighthouse behind him.

“Clara!” Christian called, and his voice caught in the wind

and carried upward, disappearing.

“No,” I said. “No.”

He was soaked, too. A striped cotton shirt, his jeans, his hair

plastered to his head. His face was much thinner than I remem-

bered. His voice, familiar. He was familiar, too. He was still wear-

ing that leather wristband I had given him that one Christmas.

That was the weird thing. I still knew him.

“Stop. Just stop for a minute!”

“Get away from me, Christian.”

“You have nothing to be afraid of, Clara! I need you to know

that. I would never hurt you.”

The rain poured down. I started to cry. “Please, why can’t you

leave me alone?”

“You need to know I would never hurt you!”

“You came to tell me that? You followed me here for that?”

“I can’t believe you would think you needed to run away! You

needed to hide from me? From
me
? Do you think I’m a monster?”

* 292 *

Stay

He stepped toward me.

“No!” I cried. “Dad!” I yelled. My father would hear me. I

was in no danger, with my father just steps away in that house,

upstairs where the yellow light was. The door would fling open,

the police would come. “Dad!”

My voice lifted up in that wind, too. It lifted and drifted and

blew away from that cliff and out to sea.

“You have nothing to be afraid of. It’s me! It’s only me!”

“Why did you follow me?” I was sobbing. My face was wet

with tears and rain, and my nose was running.

“To
talk
to you, Clara. To talk. You won’t talk to me! I need

you to know I would never hurt you. I just want to explain!”

“I don’t want your explanations, don’t you see? I don’t want

them. You may need to give them, but
I don’t want them.
”

He wouldn’t listen, even then. His need was greater than my

will always, always: even as we stood on that bluff, he pressed his

need over mine, like a hand over my mouth.

I should bolt, I thought. My father couldn’t hear me as that rain

pummeled down, but he was right there, if I could reach that door.

But Christian stood before me, and I knew him, he was familiar in

spite of everything, and his arms were out and his palms up as if in

pleading, and I could see there was no shiny knife there.

He saw me soften for that second. He saw it. “Clara,” he

pleaded. He stepped closer to me. “I love you. I would never hurt

you. That’s all I want you to know. That’s all.”

“Okay. I know it. Now go.”

“I loved you. I will always love you. Christ, Clara. We had so

much. Why did you throw it away without giving me a chance?”

* 293 *

Deb Caletti

This was what happened with him, wasn’t it? If you took one

of his words, he gave you a thousand more? If you gave him one

of your own, he would beg for a million? It was a never-ending

need, a pit too deep to see to the bottom of. It was why Captain

Branson said no contact, wasn’t it? Because a single word was

just kindling on a fire, and contact like this was gasoline.

“Please stop.”

“I want you to know I’ve changed. I’m not the person I

was. I’ve learned. A person can learn from their mistakes! I was