Stay With Me
Authors: Garret Freymann-Weyr
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Family, #General, #Stepfamilies, #Social Issues, #Emotions & Feelings, #Social Themes, #Suicide
C
OPYRIGHT
© 2006
BY
G
ARRET
F
REYMANN
-W
EYR
A
LL RIGHTS RESERVED.
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UBLISHED IN THE
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NITED
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TATES BY
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RAPHIA, AN IMPRINT OF
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OUGHTON
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IFFLIN
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OMPANY,
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OSTON,
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ASSACHUSETTS.
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RIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN HARD-
COVER IN THE
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NITED
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TATES BY
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OUGHTON
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IFFLIN
C
OMPANY,
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OSTON, IN
2006.
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OR INFORMATION ABOUT PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE SELECTIONS FROM THIS BOOK, WRITE TO
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ERMISSIONS,
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OUGHTON
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IFFLIN
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OMPANY,
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ARK
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VENUE
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OUTH,
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Y
ORK,
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ORK
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HE TEXT OF THIS BOOK IS SET IN
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ENETIAN.
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IBRARY OF
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ONGRESS
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ATALOCINC-IN-
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UBLICATION
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ATA
F
REYMANN-
W
EYR,
G
ARRET, 1965–
S
TAY WITH ME / BY
G
ARRET
F
REYMANN-
W
EYR.
P. CM.
S
UMMARY:
W
HEN HER SISTER KILLS HERSELF, SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD
L
EILA GOES
LOOKING FOR A REASON AND, INSTEAD, DISCOVERS GREAT LOVE, HER
FAMILY'S TRUE HISTORY, AND WHAT HER OWN PLACE IN IT IS.
ISBN 0-618-88404-1 (
PAPERBACK
)
[1. S
ISTERS
—F
ICTION.
2. S
UICIDE
—F
ICTION.
3.I
NTERPERSONAL RELATIONS
—F
ICTION.
4. N
EW
Y
ORK
(N.Y.)—F
ICTION
.] I. T
ITLE.
PZ7.W5395S
T
2006
[F
IC
]—
DC
22
2005010754
ISBN-13: 978-0618-60571-2 (
HARDCOVER
)
ISBN-13: 978-0618-88404-9 (
PAPERBACK
)
M
ANUFACTURED IN THE
U
NITED
S
TATES OF
A
MERICA
HAD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
B
UT YOU ARE, YOU KNOW, YOU WERE, THE NEAREST THING TO A REAL STORY TO HAPPEN IN MY LIFE.
Renata Adler
OneFor Tara and Teddie,
my First great loves
I
DON'T THINK THIS IS WHERE ANYONE ELSE WOULD BEGIN, BUT IT'S THE EXACT RIGHT PLACE FOR ME.
Before she died, I used to spend time with my father's first wife. We had tea and very thin slices of gingerbread at her apartment on the West Side. Janie, as she insisted I call her, was often away for work (she worked right up until the end, right through chemo, right until she couldn't leave the hospital), and so we had no set time for our meetings. But we had an understanding that when she was in town, she would call me and I would come over.
I suppose it was an unusual arrangement, but I think its unusualness was the very thing that made it appealing to her. For me the visits were important because I hoped Janie would help me to know my two older sisters somewhat better than I did. After all, my own mother had taught me valuable things—carpentry, cleaning up a bloody nose, how to change a tire on the side of a highway. If you knew my mother, you would kind of know me.
I'm not sure Janie taught me what she had taught my sisters, but I did learn little things about them from her. For example, Rebecca rarely returned phone calls, but Clare would stay late at the office until she had read every fax, returned every call, and made a to-do list for the next day. Rebecca liked any and all ice cream but Clare almost never ate dessert.
"And when she does, she does not eat it out of the carton," Janie said during one visit when she'd been too busy to buy cake. Which was why we were eating a half-empty pint of coffee chip with two spoons. Something Rebecca might do, apparently, but never Clare.
Sometimes Janie told me things that had nothing to do with my sisters. Things which sounded useful without my being sure they were. When I asked her about the first date she and Da had, Janie told me that she and Da had been introduced by one of those men whom
everyone
knew. They were at a cocktail party and. Julian (Da's real name) asked if she'd allow him to buy her dinner.
Yes, she said, she would.
At the restaurant, he told her he knew she probably wouldn't order the cheapest thing on the menu for fear of offending him. However, since it was clearly the only good thing on the menu (Janie said it was a cheese and egg dish), he was going to order it and hoped she would too.
"I knew in that moment that I had been right to leave the party with him," Janie told me.
I loved everything about this story. That she was probably dressed up, that he asked permission to buy her dinner and that they both knew a man known by
everyone.
The way Janie had said
everyone
made me think that it meant something else entirely. What I didn't understand was how she could offend Julian by ordering something cheap.
"You never order the cheapest item while on a date," Janie said. "It might make him think you're worried he can't afford to buy you dinner."
It seemed to me that he would notice the price only if he
couldn't
afford to buy you dinner. In any event, my mother had always told me that when I started dating I should split the check so that I would never feel obligated to a man. Or to a boy. Or, as she was careful to put it, to
whomever.
Mom believes that it's best to be open-minded until you have all the facts. Then you can form a judgment. As I immediately did upon hearing Janie's explanation.
"You can't order the cheapest thing on a date?" I asked her, laughing. "That's ridiculous."
"I suppose it is," Janie said. "But you just don't do it."
I felt my sisters had gone out into the world equipped with information I had no idea how to use. Their lives seemed so far removed from mine and I wondered if I could close this gap by absorbing everything Janie said.
I always meant to ask Da who had taught him this ordering rule that I now knew. Only I didn't want to tell him I had been asking Janie about their first date. I didn't really want to remind him that I saw her. Our visits had begun four years ago, when I was twelve and my seventh grade English tearcher had decided I was not
slow
or
lazy
or
unmotivated.
I was not even
stupid.
The right word, it turned out, was
dyslexic.
This means, among other things, that I see letters backwards as easily as forward. That I stand on street corners incapable of telling left from right. That I worry beyond reason over the proper order of things. Over beginnings and ends. I read really slowly and often can't figure out what I've read.
Tell me something and I'll remember it, repeat it, and even write it down, although the spelling might be questionable.
Wednesday
always gives me pause (what's the first
d
there for?). Also any -
ough
words:
enough, though, throughout,
and forget the whole
i
before
e
rule. If I knew when they were pronounced
ay
as in
neighbor
or
weigh,
I wouldn't have a problem in the first place.
Clare and Rebecca also had dyslexia, but theirs was somewhat less crippling than mine. When janie and Julian were still married, he decided that the girls' learning disorders were inherited from Janie.
"I should be grateful he was willing to blame the eating disorders on society," she said.
Clare was anorexic in high school and Rebecca threw up all through college. I'm not impossibly thin like Clare, but I'm thin enough and have the advantage of both liking food and eating it.
News of my dyslexia traveled through
the girls,
as Da and Janie called them, to their mother. As I was now evidence that the dyslexia wasn't her fault, Janie told Rebecca that she owed me a good turn. Was there anything, in particular, Janie wanted to know, that I might want? A sweater, maybe? Perfume? Earrings?
"I'd like to meet your mother," I said to Rebecca, who was the only person to whom I'd ever be able to admit this.
Of the girls, Rebecca was my favorite because her interest in me was, while sporadic, believable. Clare, with an elegant kindness I was sure she'd learned from Janie, let me know that she would prefer a certain distance between us.
Nothing personal, understand,
she seemed to say,
it's simply easier this way.
I understood.
In a way, I was even grateful, because Clare's coolness allowed me to focus on Rebecca. My oldest sister's reputation as the family screwup and lost, secretive soul turned her tiny frame into a figure of importance and authority.
"You want to meet Janie? Wouldn't you like a real present?" she asked me, thinking I was going to hold out for theater tickets. Or a new sweater.
Rebecca was thirty-four at the time, getting divorced, and barely talking to her parents.
"Are you sure?" she asked.
"Yes," I said, surprised that this was not more obvious to everyone.
After all, my father's great love was not with my mother but with theirs. Janie and Julian's marriage didn't just produce my sisters, but a great ruin.
When I found him, he was ruined,
is exactly how my mother puts it. She means that he missed my sisters and was distracted by being lonely and confused. But I think something else was going on.
Da had apparently spent the three years between Janie's leaving and his meeting Mom by working all the time and going to the opera at night. Or staying home on the weekends he didn't have Clare and Rebecca with him and listening to big, sad music. He still has the albums even though we don't have a record player. They're all by Mahler or have the word
requiem
in them.
It's heartbreak music. The kind of heartbreak you get when you love someone who no longer loves you. It's not only the records that make me think love ruined him. Da has, in his study, a shelf of photographs from his life with Janie. They're mostly of the girls, but there's one with Janie in it that's my favorite.