Stay (38 page)

these kinds of situations are not often satisfying. The truth is, they can go on and on.

A card, that’s all, nothing threatening. Still—always—a ghost-not-ghost who haunts my

mailbox and my memories, both the good ones and the bad.

* 302 *

“Clara Pea, you’re going to be so pissed,” my father said.

His glasses were at the end of his nose. His laptop was open

in front of him on the table of the beach house. Outside, the day

spread out blue and wide and hopeful.

“What?” I said.

“I know what our mystery host does.”

“You cheated! You looked him up!”

“I’m sorry.” He didn’t look sorry in the least. He looked

pleased. He set his coffee cup down hard. “You’re not gonna

believe it.” He started to chuckle. “You’re not going to believe

what he does.”

“Okay, what?”

“Guess.”

Deb Caletti

Oh, God. This could take a while. He loved games like this.

“Movie producer.”

“Nope.”

“Come on, Dad. There are a million professions. A million.”

He waited.

Shit.

Fine. Whatever. “Actor.” Still, that grin. “
Famous
actor.”

He laughed a great big
ha!
And slammed his palm on the table.

“This is just getting unfair now, because you’re having all the

fun at my expense.”

“Clara Pea, you are whining.”

He was right. Still, I folded my arms.

“Oh, all right,” he said. He stood, pushed his chair back.

Went to the kitchen, opened the drawer. He held up a knife.

One of our mystery host’s really nice ones. Black handle, sharp

blade. Cut through apples like they were butter.

“A knife.” Great. Now we were going to play charades.

He held up another knife. “Another knife,” I said. He held up

yet another one. He was just chuckling like mad now, and I put

my hands on my hips. “Okay! A knife thrower.” Silence. “Circus

performer.”

“Mr. Sharpie,” he said. He clapped his hands together hap-

pily. The words meant nothing to me.

“No idea,” I said.

“Mr. Sharpie?” He looked incredulous that I didn’t know

what he was talking about.

I shook my head. “Obviously an old people thing.”

“Door to door knife sales. Scissors, too. My parents got a

* 304 *

Stay

set as a wedding gift, and it lasted their whole damn life long.

Their whole damn life.”

“Our mystery host sells knives door to door?”

“General manager now. Worked his way up. The whole West

Coast is his territory. California, right? Obviously sold a fuckload

of knives, my friend. A fuckload of knives.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. I felt disappointed. All of the special

things in the house didn’t feel so special anymore. Not like back

when they were a film producer’s things.

“Clara Bean Oates, what? You’re disappointed.” He set the

knives down.

‘Well,
yeah
.”

“No!”

“No?”

“It would have been too obvious, Bean Sprout. Too

expected. Film producer,” he waved his hand as if to whoosh

the distasteful idea away. “
Knife salesman
.” He nodded at the

rightness. “Worked his way up from humble beginnings?

Dashed hopes of a career in film? Bought himself a place like

this on the tip of this incredible peninsula? It’s the real thing,

Pea. Honorable. A true accomplishment. Not some stupid

fantasy. What
is
.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Pea,” he sighed as if I were hopeless. He stared me down,

hard. “We can’t get so wrapped up in our own misconceptions

that we miss the simple beauty of the truth.”

“I’m worried about something,” Finn said.

* 305 *

Deb Caletti

We sat at that table, our table, outside The Cove, at the end of

the dock closest to land.53*

“What’s that?”

We held hands. He rubbed the top of mine with his thumb.

“That after what happened, you’ll be afraid of the water.”

It was true—at the thought of
water
I
remembered suddenly

the weight of my clothes, swallowing those waves splashing in

my face. How cold, cold, cold I was lying in Sylvie’s boat. The

shaking. I would close my eyes and see that oar floating away.

“Our bodies are ninety-eight percent water,” I said.

“Still.” Finn’s eyes looked troubled. “My life is ninety-eight

percent water.”

I looked out at that ocean, waves in, waves out, the ocean

being an ocean, same as it had for a billion years. There were

ghosts there, surely, but too, there were ghosts at that cabin just

outside of town, the William Harvard House, and ghosts, too, at

the Inn, and ghosts on the banks of Greenlake, and in our old

house, even. Ghosts, too, in that telephone booth where I called

to have Christian taken away, and ghosts in the gym where we

met. I thought of skittering down that cliff path, my name carried

down by the wind. “I guess I would have to be afraid of land, too.”

Finn thought about this. “You’d have to be afraid of your car.”

He was right. “The lighthouse,” I said.

“Even right here. This table.”

He was right about that too. We had been watched there. It

53 And, yes, thank God, there were french fries again. A reason for living, right there,

Mother, dear.

* 306 *

Stay

would be hard to find a place without memories hovering around

it. We would have to move to a foreign country. I thought of

Sylvie. It didn’t seem like even that had helped very much.

“But I love this table,” I said.

“I love this table, too,” he said.

“So how do you make it all fit together? How do you take it all

in? The good memories and the bad and all the in-between ones?

The past and the now and the ghosts and the living?” I looked at

Finn. I really needed an answer about this.

“You’re asking the wrong person,” he said.

Still, as I sat there, right then I was full with Finn’s sweet

company and the sun on my back and Gulliver standing by

in his bored but steady way. The water twinkled thoughtfully,

a million tiny diamonds on the pinpoints of waves, and that

smell, that fantastic smell of the sea—when I breathed it in, it

just lifted me right up. “I’m going to keep on loving the water,”

I said.

“I’m glad,” he said. “Because a while back I bet you a trip to

the San Juan Islands if you stayed employed by Sylvie Genovese.

And, well, Clara Oates, it looks like you’re going to make it.”

I went to see Annabelle Aurora. I walked down that path which

was just a path now, in the daylight. I also walked past the house

of retired Colonel Gerard Yancy and saw the boat upturned near

his back deck, one oar stuck up in the sand. I made my way to

Annabelle’s shack. I didn’t know why she had taken this place in

my life, a woman who knew things, a woman who both stood by

you but also who stepped aside, but she had. We were connected,

* 307 *

Deb Caletti

is all. She was the closest thing to family that my father had, and

so she was mine, too.

A caftan—that’s what she wore that time, the bright orange

of a mango, and a long yellow scarf with tasseled ends, her gray

hair curved at her chin. She took my hands.

“You came to the end of the earth, too, for your own reasons.

I am so thankful we didn’t lose you,” she said.

“Annabelle—when I first met Christian, I
knew
. I felt this

important thing happening. Something that was
supposed
to hap-

pen. Love. I went to it. No, worse. I brought
it
to
me
. I’d never

been so sure.”

“Love or need? Love or desire? Love or ghosts, visiting there

in the present? I told you, love isn’t often a pure thing.”

“But I was so
wrong
.”

“Maybe it
was
supposed to happen.”

“But look how it turned out!”

“Just because it turned out bad, doesn’t mean it wasn’t

meant.”

“Dad’s right, then. Fate has a fucking cruel sense of humor.”

“Fate,” she shrugged. She could give or take it, the shrug said.

“We do this, don’t we? Put the things in our path to figure out

how to finally leave them behind? That is often mistaken for love.

But maybe
meant
, yes? Look what you know now.”

“You said this thing about instinct. About going away so that

you could find it,” I said. “About learning to hear and see.”

She nodded.

“That night, on the cliff. I did see. I saw it all so clearly. And

then I didn’t. I mean, I saw what we did, what happened between

* 308 *

Stay

us, what
always
happened between us, but then I got it wrong. I

knew it was in him to kill me or drop himself down those cliffs,

too. No matter what he said, I felt the realness of that. But he

didn’t. He didn’t do either of those things.”

She took my hand, and we walked outside to the small table

on the deck. We sat. Seagulls screeched in the sky, and the long,

low horn of a ship passing blew somewhere in the distance. “Oh,

this is not about
that boy
,” she said. “Listening and seeing—it’s

not about guessing what someone else might
do
. Ah, if we could

do that, this life would be a great deal easier, wouldn’t it?”

I nodded. “It would.”

“The instinct, the seeing and hearing—it’s not about him! It’s

not about fate! It’s not about mysterious forces! It’s about
you
,

Clara. It’s about
you
trusting what
you
feel, hearing the warnings

you
hear. Understanding
your
ghosts. It’s about not telling your-

self anymore that you don’t know what you do know.”

“All right,” I said. “I see.” I think I did see.

“But, dear God, don’t listen to me. I’m an old lady in the

middle of nowhere without a real toilet.”

And then that was that on the subject of Christian Nilsson.

Annabelle made a ginger drink for us. We sipped it as she told

me which plants were edible on this beach. The sea lettuce and

the sea asparagus. The ribbon seaweed.
You could feed yourself
,

she said,
with all that you have right here.

The last days of summer flew too fast out of our hands, the way

time does when you most want to savor it. I spent the rest of the

month working and going to the library and being with Finn.

* 309 *

Deb Caletti

Shakti and her sister drove up and spent a weekend with us, and

my father typed madly and read fat books and brought Sylvie

Genovese thoroughly into both of our lives. I could see their

chemistry, some odd mix of boiling energy and natural connec-

tion that made it work. She had come over one night to cook us

dinner,54* great steaming plates of pasta with a red pepper sauce,

and had left to go home to Roger when my father stopped me

before I headed off to bed.

“The summer is ending, Pea,” he said.

“I know it,” I said. I felt endings everywhere I turned. In the

lighthouse gift shop, in the white room of my bedroom at the

beach house, in the
tip tip tip
sound of my father’s fingers on the

keys of his laptop.

“We need to talk,” he said.

We did. I had decided some things that I needed to tell him.

I sat by him on the couch. “I’ve decided some things,” he

said.

I laughed. “I . . .”

“What?”

“I was just going to say the same thing.”

“You were?” He looked nervous.

“I’ve been scared to tell you,” I said.

“Clara, I don’t want to go back,” he blurted. “I know our life is

there, our house, your friends… We can keep the house, if that’s

what you need. We can do that. You’re an adult now . . . You could

live there on your own. But I want to stay here.”

54 Dad is a great cook, but Sylvie’s meals make his slink off in shame.

* 310 *

Stay

“Oh, God, Dad. I don’t want to go back either. I didn’t know

how to tell you. You keep talking about getting back home—”

“Because I thought you missed it. I know you’ve got Finn and

everything, but you’ve got a whole life there—”

“I applied for a job at the library. You know how I used to

love working at the bookstore. Until I get the whole college thing

sorted out. And there’s this place?”

“Place?” He stopped.

“A room. Don’t laugh. Above the taffy shop.” I waited. This

was the part I was afraid to tell him. “I could afford it.”

His eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. Mine, too. Then they

spilled over. They rolled down my cheeks. “Pea.” He looked sur-

prised, but that kind of surprise that you knew was coming all

along. His voice warbled. “You’re leaving the nest.”

“The new place smells like melting butter.” He laughed, we

both did, but tears were rolling down his own cheeks now. “I’m

gonna be so sick of that smell. I’ll need to visit you all the time,”