Stay (7 page)

He looked into my eyes, and I looked into his. I saw so much

there. I always would. His eyes were a vivid blue, and so clear it

seemed like I could look in there forever and never reach an end.

All that feeling—it seemed like it meant something. Something

huge. You’re supposed to listen to yourself, right? That’s what I

was sure I was doing. What I was hearing—it was so
loud
.

He shot meaning into me with his eyes, and I did the same

back. I looked at his face—full lips, cheekbones. They were

cheekbones I could miss and miss if they went away. I could

miss that voice so much if I didn’t have it with me always.

Sometimes this seems surprising, but people, a person, can feel

that way about you, too. It’s just your regular old self to you, but

to them, they couldn’t imagine not looking at your nose, or your

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Deb Caletti

chin, the daily old chin you don’t even see anymore. It’s hard to

believe, but it’s true. Your old chin can be magic like that, who

would have thought.

“I don’t even know what to say,” he said.

“I almost didn’t go to that game,” I said.

“My friend Evan asked me to hang out that night,” Christian

said. “I almost didn’t go, either.”

We sat there with the enormity of that thought. As I said, our

meeting felt like fate. But like my father says, fate’s got a fucking

sick sense of humor. Fate is a shape-shifter. It is the kindest and

most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than

a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into

something grotesque. You think something is one thing, but then

it’s another.

We got back up. Christian spread out the blanket, and we sat

on it this time. I circled my knees with my arms.

“You are so beautiful,” he said.

I felt beautiful. I’d never felt beautiful before, not really. I

didn’t feel ugly, but I never saw myself like Hailey Denison or

Zoe Faraone, the kind of girls with blond hair to their waists and

stiff, perfect makeup, who only ate rice cakes and half a container

of non-non-nonfat yogurt before throwing the rest away. You

never really saw their insides. I had brown hair, and I was not

thin as a rye crisp. I ate lunch and liked it. Most of the time, I

said what I thought.

“
You
are a million things,” I said.

“Happy?” he said.

I smiled.

* 48 *

Stay

“Completely blown away?” he said. “There’s two. Come here.”

He was stretched out, and I stretched beside him. He traced

the curve of my T-shirt with one finger, along the open neck.

“Did you wear this just for me?” It was cut a little low. I laughed.

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“You must have guys following you all over school, wearing

that,” he said.

I thought it was a compliment. I was sitting there, soaking in

the great ego feed of new love, where your wonderfulness merges

with his wonderfulness, magic dust that creates some sky-high

shiny Christmas tree sparkling with admiration and flattery and

tinsel and lights and a billion, hopeful, unopened presents under-

neath. I just saw it as praise, falling down now like glittering

snowflakes. But it was something else. A drop of poison on that

gathering snow. That moment in the fairy tale when we know

what just happened but the princess doesn’t.

We talked. For hours, it must have been, because the sky got

that sweet, tender yellow tint of a late fall afternoon turning to

evening. We talked about everything—his growing up in various

European cities, his parent’s awful divorce, his financier father

who just moved to Stockholm and who never seemed to call any-

more. How his mom would leave them both for months at a time

ever since he was a baby, traveling for her work, the work she’d

given up now that she’d married his stepfather. The decision they

all made for him to come to America to be permanently with her

now that one of them was “settled.” The ways he and his mother

couldn’t seem to get along. I was driving slowly past his own per-

sonal accident scene, taking it in with a sad, shocked heart: the

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Deb Caletti

crushed car, the trapped bodies. He didn’t deserve anything bad

that ever happened to him. My mental doctor’s bag was out, ready

to save him if he needed it. I held his hand.

We talked about his life now, too. Classes, his love of architec-

ture and science and math and anything with exact outcomes. And

me—how I didn’t know what I wanted to study in college, how the

not knowing pressed; my own dad, my mother, the ways I missed

her. What I remembered—her holding me. Her voice. How I hated

calculus and things with exact outcomes. Even our differences

matched perfectly. We finally got up. We stretched and ached from

sitting in one place, like old people. That’s how long we were there.

We kicked through the layer of orange leaves on the ground,

walked to our cars. We had chosen the same lot, our cars only a

space away, more fate, I was sure. There were a ton of parking lots

in that place, small circles upon circles between trees, and rows

and rows of spaces. We leaned against his car and kissed some

more until my lips were tingly and numb. He plucked a huge

orange leaf from the ground and handed it to me, found another

and held it carefully by its thin stem, something to remember this

by. It was corny, I know. But if you’ve fallen in love, you’ve done

it too, whether you want to admit it or not. You have a worn ticket

stub or a paper napkin or a flower so dry it’s turning to dust. You

experienced magic once, and you want to have a little evidence of

that. You don’t want to forget it.

Of course, you never forget it. We said good-bye, our fin-

gertips trailing away from each other. Even our fingertips were

reluctant to leave.

I started the car. The radio blasted on just as it was when

* 50 *

Stay

I had turned the car off, and the air conditioner, too, and that

seemed strange, because a million years had passed. It was like

that moment in the Narnia books, where Lucy and Susan and

Peter and Edmund come back through the wardrobe after con-

quering the White Witch and meeting Aslan and becoming kings

and queens, only to find themselves children again back in the

room in their uncle’s house where it all began. I had to pee des-

perately, I realized. I was starving. All of the other human needs

had been zapped away under that love spell, but now they were

back. I was back.

I drove home. I was probably unsafe. Driving under a differ-

ent influence. My thoughts were not with that steering wheel and

those mirrors and that four-way stop. I pulled up in front of our

house. When I got out, I could smell that my father had cooked

something fabulous with garlic. I was so hungry. I had never

been that hungry before, I was sure of it.

He was at his desk in his office when I went in. He was tap-

ping the end of a pen against a stack of manuscript pages. He

didn’t keep regular hours.

“Clara Pea,” he said. “You enjoy the raw fish? Man created

fire to cook raw things, remember.”

I was holding that leaf. I was spinning it in a circle by its

stem. “I think I’m falling in love,” I said.

He set his pen down, took his glasses off, leaned back in his

chair. “Ah.”

“I didn’t meet Shakti and everyone for sushi,” I said. It was

time to tell him about Christian, but I also needed some of those

leftovers, that was for sure.

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Deb Caletti

“I see. Well, wonderful. Tell me he’s nothing like Mr. Dick.

I mean
Ricks
.”

“Nothing like,” I said. “
Nothing
.”

“Fabulous,” he said.

And it was. But if fate is a shape-shifter, then love is too. It

can be, anyway, in its most dangerous form. It’s your best day,

and then your worst. It’s your most hope and then your most

despair. Lightness, darkness, it can swing between extremes at

lightning speed—a boat upon the water on the most gorgeous

day, and then the clouds crawl in and the sky turns black and the

sea rages and the boat is lost.

* 52 *

The smell of coffee woke me, and so did those

seagulls, insisting on whatever seagulls insist on. The coffee

meant that my father was likely working. His best ideas, he said,

came just after he was shot through with the glorious speeding

train of caffeine.

I got up and saw that I was right. Dad had set up his laptop on

the kitchen table, which had windows all around it in a half circle.

He was surrounded by dunes and gray sky and yellow beach

grass. His eyes were on that screen like he was watching a movie,

which I guess he was, right there in his own head. He didn’t

notice me in there at all until I opened the refrigerator door.

“You want some coffee, C. P.?”

“You know I don’t drink that stuff.” To me, coffee tasted like

cigarettes, with a dash of milk and sugar.

Deb Caletti

He handed me his cup to be refilled but kept his eyes on the

screen. I looked at the cup.
Toronto Film Festival.

“Hey, did you see?” I asked. I waved the cup around. “More

evidence that the guy’s in the film business?”

But Dad didn’t answer. “What’s that French word for ‘bore-

dom’? Why can’t I think of it?”

I took out a box of cereal, the milk. This was the culinary

decline that happened when Dad was working. “No idea.”

“
Ennui
.” He typed.

“ ‘Bored’ sounds more boring,” I said, but Dad didn’t want to

play. There was only the
tip tip tip
of his laptop keys.

I ate my cereal in silence. The spoon clanked against the

side of the bowl in the quiet. The whole day could be like this.

If I stayed here, I would hear each wave roll in and out and each

footstep of mine and each breath. I would turn pages in my book

and hear too loudly each papery flutter. I could feel the wide emp-

tiness of where we were. Sea upon sea upon sea, endless beach

upon beach, minutes dragging with nothing to do but mourn the

miserable state of my life. Dad had been right.

I got ready, and then I swiped the keys off of the kitchen

counter. “Going to the lighthouse in search of human beings,”

I said.

“Great,” Dad said. He looked up. He actually saw me. He

smiled. The smile was more about the writing going well, prob-

ably, than anything else, but that was okay. “You don’t want to be

too alone out here. Take some money. Buy some lunch.”

“I’ll get you some taffy.”

“Perfect.”

* 54 *

Stay

I got lost going to the lighthouse and had to loop back around

twice to find it. They obviously didn’t believe in signs around

there. Finally, the right road. I could tell someone was home this

time. There was a Jeep out front with the top off. I parked the

Saab in the gravel lot, got out. The clouds hadn’t cleared yet, and

the sky was smeary white, fog whipping around fast like a pissed

off ghost. It was cold. You couldn’t see the top of the lighthouse.

It was missing, vanished in fog.

I turned the knob of the front door and walked in to a hallway

with an old wood floor. It smelled like old wood in there, too, the

mustiness and echo of age. A room to the right held the gift shop.

I could see a cash register with rows of gift cards in front and

shelves of carved miniature lighthouses and sweatshirts and jars

of local foods. To the left was a large room decorated with sepia

prints of the Pigeon Head Point of long ago and glass cases that

held objects—museum stuff, from what I could tell. Telescopes

and maps and who knew what. Antique objects for people to

stroll by and gaze at on rainy days when the beach gave a visitor

nothing else to do. My father would have read every tiny, typed

card. There was a long stairway in front of me, chained off. The

lighthouse keeper must live up there.

I was trying to remember her name. Sounded like it belonged

to a Mafia crime family. Started with an
S
? I pictured some old

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Deb Caletti

lady in stretchy pants. Someone who wouldn’t mind selling snow

globes with seagulls in them for the rest of her remaining life. A

little dog came barreling down the steps. He was white, with a

black spot on his back and cute, folded over ears. He was barking

like he hadn’t seen me in years.

“Well, hi,” I said.

He was jumping up on me, a little circus dog on his hind

legs. You couldn’t look at him and not want to laugh. “Funny

one,” I said to him.

“Roger!” a woman called. A moment later, she appeared on