Stay (37 page)

wrong. How I treated you was wrong.” He stepped even closer.

He reached his arms out, pleading. He could touch me if he

wanted to. I could barely breathe.

“I need to go.”

“Clara. I’ve changed, okay? Just so you know.”

Rain rolled down his face. The way he stood was familiar. The

rhythm of his words. He was near enough, now, for me to feel his

breath. His breath was familiar.

“If you’ve changed, then you’ll understand why you need to

leave.”

“Stop crying, Jesus, listen to me.”

What was happening—it was all feeling further and further

away, not closer. “I don’t want to ever see you again.”

There was a pause, and the lighthouse beam swiveled around,

and he held his arm up to his eyes and so did I. I felt some stupid

possibility, the ever-hope that he would hear me as he needed to,

that this craziness would stop and he would get in his car and

drive away. That’s how crazy I was too, crazy with naiveté and

crazy with hope for the normal and crazy in my desire for other

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people’s reasonableness.
I still believed in reason.
He was proving

me wrong by his presence there, but I didn’t see that. I still hoped

he would turn away; I still believed in that outcome.

And then, like a key turning, a small click, he was in a differ-

ent place. I saw it in his face. It takes some people a million times

to see, but finally it is that millionth time. I saw him clearly, and

me clearly. I saw my own stupid hope, and the patterns that made

him who he was, patterns that would never change, never. But I

could. I could change. I could
see
.

“Because of the sailor? Mr. Pizza? Mr. Fuck
Me
in the Car,

too?”

I bolted, and he grabbed my arm, and I knew I didn’t have

a chance to make it to that door and pound hard enough to be

heard upstairs. I ran to the only other route to safety I knew—that

path to the beach, that steep slope down the cliff where my father

had twisted his ankle. I stumbled and skittered and slid on my

ass, and I can say I was finally fully afraid and fully aware in a

way I had not yet been. Fully afraid, dear God—a fear that stood

up and raged with ugliness and power because I saw,
saw,
that he

did not have a knife but he had his own hands. I scraped my way

down, ripping the skin from my palms and knees and I could see

him above, the light going around again and blinding him.

I reached the ground and ran. I heard him calling me, saying

he was sorry, the word
sorry
carrying on the wind and carrying

again and again.

He was coming, as I knew he would. I heard his foot-

steps, heard him running or, at least, I thought I did. I heard

hard steps on wood, which I could only connect to Christian,

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Christian’s nearness, Christian overtaking me. I did not con-

nect them to what they were—the concerned steps of retired

Colonel Gerard Yancy in his striped pajamas and slippers on

the deck of his beach house, where the wind had carried our

voices and finally dropped them. I thought that Christian had

overtaken me, and I could no longer see with the rain in my

face and my wet hair in my eyes and other visions rolling in

like the storm.

I could not make it to Annabelle’s shack; I could not even

make it to the door of the next house, I was sure. Christian’s

own voice tumbled to me, calling to me with the clarity brought

by the speed and direction of wind, and I did what I had to do.

I would go where he could not reach me. I grabbed that row-

boat and those two oars stuck upright in the sand, the ones that

belonged to retired Colonel Gerard Yancy, only I did not know

they belonged to retired Colonel Gerard Yancy. Some strength

rose up in me like those pictures you see in old children’s books

of sea monsters, rearing their heads from the waters. I grabbed

the wood bow of that boat, felt its faded green paint flake off in

my hand, tossed the oars in. I pulled it across that sand, to the

edge of the water.

I pushed the boat far enough out for it to catch the waves, and

then I waded in with my shoes still on. I was moving in panic.

There was another voice rising now, Colonel Gerard Yancy’s,

although I couldn’t hear it with the wind pounding in my ears.

I had to get away, that’s all I knew, and there was no other away

but this one.

I struggled to get the oars in their oar locks, but my hands

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were shaking too much, and I gave up and set the oars in the

water and began pulling hard. I pulled with such force and panic

that I could feel the muscles in my shoulders sear. A thought

flashed: I was saving my life as my mother had destroyed hers.

The waves were sloshing hard, slapping the boat, spilling

inside. The sea was pulling me farther and farther out, and even

through the slatting rain I could see the shore getting smaller. My

breath was coming so hard that I had to stop, to try to breathe,

to wipe the water from my face, and when I did, I saw the figure

on the shore, retired Colonel George Yancy in his pajamas, and I

saw the other figure, Christian, who had not come to follow me

at all, but who still stood at the top of those cliffs, at the edge near

the lighthouse.

Something shifted in me then—the knowing, the under-

standing of what was really meant to happen next. I knew what

Christian would do, and the sea kept carrying my boat out, and

the waves lapped in, and I felt a despair, a confusion in that

storm, of who I was—my father or my mother. I stopped rowing.

I realized that my fear brought me here, the storm of another’s

emotions. Christian and I had also been in our own boat together,

in a sea of his feelings, and I had stepped in, and I had willingly

given myself up to the waves that carried me out. I had let him

take me up and keep me in the ways he had wanted, and my

father, too, had been taken up, then and for years afterward.

We had let this happen.

The boat bobbed and sloshed, and one of the oars then

slipped into the water, and I tried to reach it, but I couldn’t. I

started to cry as I saw it taken away. I sobbed in despair, and

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Deb Caletti

then I howled, like that cat, like both the mother and her chil-

dren on the doomed
West Hartland
, their grief, my mother’s

grief, my father’s, my own. Water was coming in the boat in

great waves, sloshing over the side, and I cried and tried to carry

it out in my cupped hands, but it was too much for me.

Through the rain I could see Gerard Yancy begin to run, and

then I couldn’t see him anymore. He was too small. The wind

whistled, and the boat carried on those choppy waves and took

more water in, and I thought of my mother lifting herself, her

leg going over the boat; I thought of Christian lifting himself

over that stair rail and of Eliza Bishop climbing those lighthouse

stairs. I was on my knees, bailing and bailing with my hands,

crying, trying to reach the other side of the boat, trying to save

myself, until I leaned too far and the boat caught, and then it went

over, and I was under and my clothes filled with water, heavy,

heavy weights. My head was underwater, and I couldn’t hear

anything but bubbles and watery depth and my nose burned with

the suddenness and cold.

I thrashed and felt the boat near my fingers; I pulled myself

up to breathe but got a mouthful of water. I pulled again; I was

not thinking; my body was only doing what it had to. I fought

the weight of my clothes and the waves splashing against my

face, and then I saw the orange of a life jacket floating nearby.

Those old, summer-camp-type orange life jackets made of

foam, a black strap that went around the waist. I grabbed it and

held and it wasn’t enough to lift me above the waves but was

enough to keep me from going under.

I kicked and fought and held to that stupid piece of foam and

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tried not to think about my mother underwater, how she did not

thrash and fight and find what she needed to hold on to. And

then, after only a moment, there was the rumble of something,

gone as water sloshed into my ears, and then back again. A choke

and rumble, and it was getting louder.

I knew that the man on the beach had started to run, but

there was much I didn’t know. I didn’t know what happened to

Christian. I didn’t know that Finn had called and called my phone

and had come to our house and seen the open door. He had gone

to the lighthouse and found Gerard Yancy pounding and yell-

ing on the door.
A girl, a boat
. He did not wait for my father and

Sylvie to appear—he had instead put the accelerator down and

sped furiously back to
Obsession
, where he realized Jack had the

fucking key on that string around his neck.

It was right, though, that Jack and Finn had finally only

unmoored the boat and were still motoring too far off to save me.

And right, too, that the Coast Guard had been called only after

Gerard Yancy had arrived at the lighthouse. Because it meant that

what I heard, that rumble, was Sylvie and my father racing out to

me in Sylvie’s bold little boat, and it meant that it was Sylvie who

cut the motor where I was clutching that life vest, Sylvie and my

father—who was in that feared boat, out in that feared sea—who

pulled me in. It was right, because Sylvie needed another chance

to save a child, and my father needed another chance to save the

one he loved.

He was sobbing into my wet body, and Sylvie was throwing

a blanket on me, and I was shaking and clutching them. I was

holding on to the ones who cared enough to go out to sea to

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Deb Caletti

bring me back, and they were holding on to the one who wanted

nothing more than that.

Sylvie took my face in one hand. “I suppose now you will be

wanting tomorrow off,” she said coolly. And then she kissed my

forehead with great tenderness, just before she started that motor

again and brought us home.

* 300 *

If my life were a movie, this is what would have

happened: Christian would have climbed the lighthouse steps

and flung himself over the railing, same as Eliza Bishop. Or he

would have pitched himself over the rocks of that cliff, landing

dead and battered at the bottom. But that’s not what happened.

He did not kill me, and he did not kill himself. Still, that night

in the boat I was sure he had; I was as sure he would kill himself

as I’d been previously sure he would never harm me. But I could

never really know either of those things, could I? Even though it

makes us feel better to think so, we can’t predict another person’s

actions, not really. Another person is, at the heart of it, unknow-

able. And if you cannot know a person enough to always guess

what they’re capable of, you certainly cannot know them enough

to hold them in your hands, to control their behavior, to fight,

Deb Caletti

manipulate, cajole or nurse or soothe them into doing what they

should or shouldn’t.

People will do what they will do. The trick is admitting your

own helplessness about that little fact.

Christian fled the moment Dad came running from the house.

He escaped to his car, crying. My father called the police in a fury.

An officer would make a visit to warn him to stay away. Even my

father was sure we would never hear from him again after that. But

two days later, Christian sent a message asking me if I was all right.

As if a text was somehow a smaller and less offensive approach. As

if I might not notice it as much, or protest this diminished form

of outreach.

We went into the city the next day and got a restraining

order. 52*

52 That, you would like to think, was the end of that. A restraining order, you hope,

would give me some sense of peace and safety. Finally, someone is doing something,

here, right? But Captain Branson knew what he was talking about all along. A bundle of

paper is no defense against someone’s will. Protection orders are rational documents

served to irrational people, a sometimes dangerous solution to a problem there is yet

no answer for. I continued to feel uneasy, although I heard nothing from Christian dur-

ing that time.

As I said before, life is not a movie with expected outcomes and tidy endings. Not my

life, anyway. Two months after the restraining order ended, I got a birthday card from

Christian. And I do every year. It’s unsatisfying to you, isn’t it? The lack of a finish? But