Stay (14 page)

* 104 *

Stay

the decks. I wasn’t a princess in a tower when we stood at the

front end of the ferry watching the city zoom toward us across the

water, Christian’s arms around me from behind.

“Unforgettable,” he would say.

“I know,” I would agree.

It was just after school started again, senior year, when my dad

went to this literary event. Wait, I remember. Book party at Third

Place Books, for . . . What was his name. The guy that does the lit-

erary courtroom novels.19* Christian and I were alone in the house.

I’d made a fire. We’d ordered a pizza, and we were sitting on the

couch, the pizza in the box in front of us on the coffee table. The

fire snapped and popped and made my face hot. We were using

paper towels on the backs of Dad’s magazines for plates.

“Cheese chin,” I said to Christian. I pointed.

“You’re the cheese chin,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to use

a fork.”

“Fork you,” I said, and he laughed.

We kissed a tomato sauce and sausage kiss and it was deli-

cious. Just as delicious as past kisses like the orange juice kiss

and the ice cream sandwich one. We ate and tried to remember

every time we’d ever had a pizza. “Round Table,” I’d said. “I was

on a T-ball team. End of season party. I was maybe six. They gave

us little statues.”

“I can’t picture you playing sports,” he said.

“One season,” I said. “Your turn.”

19 Jeff David Farley. Friend of my father’s. There, I told you there might be another

famous person.

* 105 *

Deb Caletti

“We’re not counting every night my father ordered it in

instead of cooking, right? So . . . Okay. Classroom holiday party

when I was twelve. Mrs. Bonnevier, that year we spent in France.

She paid for it with her own money. I saw her take the bills from

her purse. It seemed sad.”

I nodded. I thought. “My father said we used to go to some-

place called Pizza and Pipes when I was a baby. Him and my

mom and me. They thought it was hilarious. It had some enor-

mous pipe organ in the place. Like, two stories tall. It’s not there

anymore.”

“And you’d think pizza plus enormous musical instruments

would really bring in the crowds,” Christian said.

“Exactly. Okay. Pagliacchi Pizza. In the car, with . . . Wait. It’s

not my turn.”

Christian chewed, swallowed. He looked at me. His face

glowed in the orange light of the fire. I thought he was beautiful.

God, I thought . My eyes would be a hundred years old and still

want to keep looking and looking at him. “With who?”

I felt it, some stone drop inside. I could hear the way his

voice changed. He was still smiling. But I knew I could take some

wrong turn here and he wouldn’t be smiling anymore. The whole

night could be ruined right there. I practically saw the street sign

in front of me.
Dangerous curves aheaD
.

“My
father
. We ate it in the front seat of the car as we drove

home from Portland. Don’t remember why we were there. Just

him trying to shift and eat a big messy all-meat number and wor-

rying about getting in an accident.”

“I thought you were going to say you had it with Dylan.”

* 106 *

Stay

“Nope,” I said. The bad feeling shouted louder. It grew bad-

der and bigger, but my insides were shrinking, shriveling.

“Well, I’m sure you did. Ate pizza. Did lots of things. You

guys were together six months.”

Of course we had. I’d eaten pizza in the car with Dylan,

too, once. After a football game, and he was starved, but we

wanted to be alone. And other times. Once right on that same

couch. He’d been sitting right where Christian was, and we’d

used magazines for plates. I wouldn’t have told Christian that,

though. I wouldn’t have mentioned any of those things. “Not

even,” I said. “Dylan didn’t like pizza. If I’d have eaten pizza

with him, it would have been the worst pizza ever. I’d have

thrown it right up. I’d have had to put pepperonis over my eyes

just to look at it.”

He didn’t laugh. He got quiet. It was very quiet except for the

fire. A log cracked and snapped in half, showing its secret inner

kryptonite. “Christian . . .” I moaned. “Let’s not do this?”

“Do what?”

I took his magazine from him, set it down. I climbed on his

lap. “You’re the only one I ever want to eat pizza with forever-

more,” I said. I plastered a bunch of kisses on his face. “Pizza is

your food from now on. Cornflakes are. Oranges are.”

He turned his mouth away.

“If I ever have to eat pizza with anyone but you, I’ll refuse.

I’ll do like this.” I clasped my mouth shut. I pretended to talk

through it. “I hant bleet hanyflung ike at.”

“Stop,” he said.

“What?” I said. I was pleading a little.

* 107 *

Deb Caletti

“I just can’t stand the thought of your mouth on someone

else’s. Let alone anything
else
.”

I got off his lap. “Yeah? I can’t stand the thought of yours on

Angelie what’s her face’s. Or that other girl.” But I was lying. I

didn’t really think about it much. I couldn’t even remember the

one girl’s name.

“But you see him all the time,” Christian said.

“What do you mean? I never see him,” I said. Another lie.

Dylan was in my Spanish class.

“You probably wish you did.”

“Aaargh!” I pretended to strangle him. Nothing. He just sat

there, wearing his mood like a cape, drawn around himself. We

finished the pizza. We lay down next to each other and kissed, but

it was all layered with hurt and distance, some weird emotional

parfait. I kept trying and trying to reach him. See, I got deep into

it with him. I was right there, too. I didn’t stop it or step out of

it. I felt as desperate to make him stay close, to keep him close,

as he did—love, if that’s what you could call it, was bound up

with some bottomless, clutching need. Tightly bound, so that

you couldn’t tell the need from the love. It got late and Christian

went home. I watched the taillights of his car disappear down the

street. Even the taillights seemed hurt.

That night I lay in bed, listened to my father’s car come into

the garage, listened to him brush his teeth in the bathroom.

Usually I might get up to see him, but I pretended to be asleep.

All at once, my head was busy counting up my lies. I had never

been a liar, but now they rolled off my tongue like lies were a

second language I was suddenly fluent in.

* 108 *

Stay

I was only right there, where the path has turned and you

think you might be lost but aren’t even sure of it yet. The place

in those creepy movies with the couple in the car on a dark night,

a secluded road, where they pull off and they’re making out and

she first hears the twig branch break.

Those lies. I didn’t realize it fully yet, but I guess you could

say I was already in hiding from Christian Nilsson.

* 109 *

By the third day of my new job, I knew I would not be

going to Friday Harbor with Finn Bishop. Some snakes couldn’t

be charmed, and Sylvie Genovese was one of them.

She toured me around the grounds. She took me inside the

lighthouse, up its narrow, endless flight of winding stairs to the

top where the lantern was. But she made it clear she would only

take people up there who she felt were smart enough to be safe.

It is not a play area
, she said to me, wagging her finger as if I had

already used the upper balcony like a jungle gym. She taught me

how to use the cash register, and when I made a mistake, she’d

snap:
Have you been listening? What did I say about this?
She

quizzed me on the reading material. Silly me, I hadn’t remem-

bered the exact date of Captain Bishop’s marriage to Eliza Bishop.

I smiled and chatted with the visitors who came in, but I hadn’t

Stay

moved the tour on quickly enough, and I’d let the children touch

things in the store without watching them. I couldn’t understand

if we were trying to welcome people or drive them away.

I complimented her hair.
This nest?
I praised Roger.
Ah, he

is just a little
demone. I didn’t take lunch. You
have to eat.
I took

lunch.
I like to see devotion to the task.
The only time she seemed

happy was when she’d come in from fishing, after bringing her

little boat out to sea, or working in her garden with Roger sleep-

ing in a spot of sun nearby. You saw her smile then, when she

was alone or had just been alone. I guessed snakes weren’t much

for company. It was so different from Armchair Books, where

the owner, Derek, with his kind eyes and beard, would laugh

and have parties for us and his favorite customers after the store

closed on Thursdays, for no reason. Armchair Books had a fire-

place and posters of Parisian book stalls on the walls, a picture of

an armchair painted on the front window.

I was glad for the moment when Sylvie took her boat keys

off the hook by the door, the ones attached to a foam key chain

so they could float if dropped in water. I’d have an hour’s

peace. If no one came in, I’d dust the cases in the museum

that were filled with old paraffin containers and navigational

instruments, or refill the shelves, or fold the sweatshirts and

T-shirts that were always getting unfolded. I’d make sure there

were lots of choices of sizes available in all styles: the simple

lighthouse image with its name underneath, the lighthouse

with
Bishop Rock Rocks!
in crazy letters, the pigeon head (he

was actually a seagull) with a small lighthouse in the back-

ground, ,
Pigeon Head Point Lighthouse
written
in script. I was

* 111 *

Deb Caletti

glad she didn’t make me wear one. Those T-shirts with the flat

slabs of rubbery images always felt unbearably scratchy and

uncomfortable to me.

When all of that was done, and if there were no visitors any-

where on the premises, I was allowed to sit by the counter and

read, which is what I would do, taking my bookmark from my

latest find from the Bishop Rock Library. I would wonder what

the upstairs of the house was like, where Sylvie Genovese lived.

I could hear her on the phone sometimes, speaking Italian, and

I wondered what brought her here, if she, too, were licking her

wounds. You could see her boat zipping along or bobbing in the

waters out front, her small figure capably steering that motor, her

chin tipped to the sun.

That’s what I was doing, reading, wondering about Sylvie

Genovese as Roger kept guard by the door nearby, when I heard

Sylvie shouting outside. She was agitated and yelling about some-

thing, and Roger leaped up and started to bark ,and I got up too and

ran out, seeing if I could be of help. She’d probably get pissed at me

for trying to help if I did, or for not helping if I didn’t, I thought, but

her voice was too excited not to wonder what was going on.

I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

“Dad?”

My father was sprawled out along the grass on the top of the

cliff. His mouth was twisted in pain and he had twigs and grass

in his hair and a swipe of sand stuck to his face and along one

leg. Sylvie was kneeling beside him sweating madly, her own leg

scratched and bleeding a bit. Roger barked and turned in circles,

doing another badly timed circus trick.

* 112 *

Stay

“You know him? He belongs to you?” Sylvie said in that beau-

tiful voice.

“I wouldn’t exactly say that,” I said.

“Clara,” he said.

“What are you doing?” I asked.
Asked
sounds like I was calm

and reasonable. It was actually sort of a high shriek. Like I didn’t

have enough problems with Sylvie Genovese.

“Visiting Annabelle.” He winced. “I think I broke my ankle.”

“He fell. I had to haul him up.”

I wanted to laugh, but I wasn’t that stupid. I wished I could

have seen
that
—
g
orgeous, small Sylvie Genovese manhandling

poor broken Pops. He had
sand
stuck to the side of his
face
.

A bubble of hysteria rose up, and I tried to swallow it down. I

clapped my hands so that Roger would stop the jumping around

and the barking.

“Roger!” Sylvie said, and he was immediately still. He sat his

little butt right down and looked at her with eager attention, as

if he were a student about to be asked a question he was sure he

knew the answer to. “Go in my bathroom upstairs and get the

medical kit. Under the counter,” she said.

Okay, I’m an idiot, because for a second I thought she was

talking to Roger until I realized she meant me. I ran back inside. I