Stay (2 page)

moved on from
that
moment, when Shakti grabbed my arm

and squeezed. Instead, I watched him as he headed through the

crowd, and he looked back at me and our eyes met again before

he disappeared.

It was already too late. Basically, two springs and two sum-

mers and the sea and the haunting had all already happened.

* 5 *

That was before.

But after, as that second summer approached, my father

decided we needed to leave. It felt too dangerous there. We

rented our house to a researcher doing work at the university.

Something scientific. It was hard to imagine a science guy

in our house, which overflowed with my father’s books and

papers and his collection of ship lanterns and paperweights.

My father would be leaving behind his cherished and tangled

grapevines, which grew over a large arbor in the yard and

which he tended to lovingly with clippers and a careful eye.

We’d be back in time for their ripening, in time for him to

make his home brew wine. I thought my dad drank too much,

for one thing.

I stood in the open doorway of his office, the large old

Stay

French doors swung wide. His reading glasses were on a chain

and hung down on his chest.

“It all seems too big,” I said.

We were trying to hurry, but I couldn’t seem to get going. My

father was shoving things into a box. “Don’t get stuck, Clara Pea.

Get a move on.”

“How do you pack for three months?” I asked him. I’d never

been gone from home that long. Everything about the trip seemed

hard to grasp. My mind felt lately like a building destroyed by a

natural disaster, where all I could do was walk around the rubble

and wonder what I could possibly do next.

“Just bring the things you love most. You’ve got to have

good things around you now, right, Pea? Your favorite shoes,

your favorite sweater. Shirts, T-shirts. You need anything else,

God forbid, we can go shopping.” Dad hated shopping. Malls,

cell phones and reality television—don’t even get him started.

“You bringing that?” I asked. He was wrapping one of his

paperweights, one of the largest, shaped like an old typewriter

and just as heavy.

“I’ll keep it under the bed since I don’t have a baseball bat.”

My stomach dropped. His eyes were bright and he was

grinning, but I thought he might be serious, too. He felt that

same shadow looming that I did. One time I actually drove

too fast and turned down some crazy street because I thought

I was being followed. Looking at Dad then, I felt guilty sud-

denly, or rather,
again
, for this leaving. He had a book due

by the end of the summer. He had every reason to stay here

where he was.

* 7 *

Deb Caletti

“Pea, you know I can write anywhere,” Dad said, reading my

mind. He was good at that. He was someone you couldn’t hide

from. “I could write in the back of a pickup truck driving across

the country. Who could have complaints about the beach, Pea? I

just might want to stay.”

“God, Dad.” I rubbed my forehead. “This is all so strange.”

“It’s good for both of us,” he said, even though there was

nothing good about what was happening. He finished wrap-

ping the paperweight in newspaper and set it in a wide leather

bag. I could see the fat pages of a manuscript there, too, and

a stack of index cards wrapped in a rubber band. “You need

a place you can breathe for a while.
I
need a place you can

breathe for a while.” My father knew about recovering yourself

after you were sure you were lost . He had taken a trip like this

once. Different, though. It was more about grief than guilt,

and it only lasted the two weeks he thought he could be away

from me, since I was young and needed him. I had stayed with

JoJo Dean, a friend of my father’s, as my father mourned my

mother in private.2

“You went away to a beach before,” I reminded him.

“A different beach. Not one I want to go back to.” He closed

the zipper of the bag. “Haul ass, kid,” he said.

And so I did.

2
Yes, this story has a dead mother. Mine. She had a sudden aneurism when I was

barely four. Died before she could even get to a hospital. Dead mothers have become

a story cliché thanks to Disney movies and novel writers. All the dead mothers in

books, you’d think it was a common occurrence. Even Dad’s books have them. But

mine was real. She was no cliché and neither am I.

* 8 *

Stay

* * *

tened into farms and pastures and tulip fields. And then east,

down two-lane roads forested on each side, full of tall evergreens

and dark, mossy places that made the air feel suddenly cool. Little

towns appeared at stoplights, three or four buildings at most, a

church, a café, sparse I wonder-who-lives-here-and-why streets.

And then forest again.

“Do you remember the bridge?” my father asked. The car

smelled like french fries, and the backseat held the crumpled-up

bags from our lunch stop.

I looked around. “Bridge?”

“Not yet. This is one you wouldn’t miss. It’s the bridge over

Deception Pass. We came here a long time ago. I carried you in

a pack down to the beach. After we hiked up to the car again, we

realized you’d lost your sandal. Your mom ran all the way back

down the trail to get it. I said, Leave it, we’ll buy her new ones,

but she ran the two, three miles down there anyway. Came back

with that shoe.” He smiled. “A triumph.”

I smiled, too. The windows were rolled down. He was

shouting a little. He didn’t like air-conditioning when you

could get the smells and feel of the real outside right there in

your face.

“Okay, be ready.”

He was right. Deception Pass—you couldn’t have missed

that bridge spanning those waters. It was almost shocking the

way nature can be so suddenly before you in all its enormity and

beauty. Out of the forest, and then—wow. Just, wow—this deep,

* 9 *

Deb Caletti

steep down-ness, this drop to the sparkling waters of Deception

Pass, a thin bridge spanning the impossible distance.

“Let’s pull over. This is a bridge you have to walk across.”

“Got it. A metaphor, right?” Dad was a writer down to his

cells, and he loved metaphors. Everything was a metaphor. Your

dirty laundry could be one. Unexpected encounters with dog shit,

definitely.

“Ha, I didn’t even think of it,” he said. He’d already unbuck-

led his seat belt and had flung his door open in the small crescent

of gravel that was the lookout point. “Deception Pass. How does

one make
that
crossing, at least permanently?”

“You’re asking
me
?” I said. We wouldn’t be standing there

right then if I understood how to manage deception and my own

self-lies. I stepped outside. I breathed in—the air felt huge. The

blue-gray-green waters that stretched out before us sparkled in

the sun. It smelled great out there. “I keep feeling like we have to

go
. Like we have to
hurry
.”

“We can relax now,” he said. He took a big dramatic breath.

“Ah! This is magnificent, eh? Christ, I should set a book out here.”

He was right. The rock wall that dropped to the water was

sheer and craggy, and as we stepped out onto the narrow footpath

of the bridge itself, my stomach seemed to tumble and fall the

million miles down to the jagged waves below. The landscape was

moody and dangerous. “I can’t look,” I said. It was too far down.

We were safe; our feet were on the solid ground of the bridge and

I gripped the iron rail, but my heart still felt the long, long drop.

“Look right at it. Know you can,” Dad said. “Look right at that

fear. Fear is the biggest bullshitter.”

* 10 *

Stay

This was not just some motivational rah-rah to get me

through what was happening right then. This was how my father

talked a good lot of the time. His words had layers—they went

two or three directions when other people’s words went one. He

was curious and playful and hungry for meaning, and his speech

reflected that. My friends said he sounded like a writer. I didn’t

know what this meant until I stayed over at Annie’s or Emma’s

or Shakti’s houses, where dads either asked you about school or

didn’t say much at all.

You had to walk single file on that bridge, and so I followed

him across, the cars whipping past us on one side, the sheer drop

below us on the other. We made it to the far end, where a match-

ing set of warning signs were posted along the cliffs, as if anyone

would be stupid enough to climb there. I felt a little sick and a

little proud. It had a sort of significance, though I didn’t know

what kind. It had to—you didn’t cross the perilous distance over

Deception without it meaning something.

We got back in the car and wound our way down the island. You

could practically follow the wet and salty air and that tangled

underwater smell right down to the sea. The house was small

and gray and shingled and sat at the tip of the peninsula. In spite

of everything I felt excited, like I wanted to run out and explore

the place, like you do when you’re a kid on vacation. My father

had found the house in the back of
Seattle
magazine, where the

travel ads are. Some guy was renting it out while he was work-

ing in California. We left the car packed and my father unlocked

the front door, and I checked it all out—the small kitchen and

* 11 *

Deb Caletti

the closets and the little white bedroom with white curtains that

would be mine and the bigger paneled bedroom that would be

my father’s. The man who owned the house had good taste—his

shirts were expensive and the cupboard had flavored vinegars and

fancy olives and a bottle of Scotch.

“Something to do with the film industry,” my father guessed.

“California, right? It makes sense.” He was standing by the book-

shelf, the first place he always went to find out about a person.

I looked, too. “
The Elements of Screenwriting
. Elia Kazan:
A

Life
;
The Making of Citizen Kane
. But wait. Zig Ziglar’s
See You at

the Top
?
The Art of Closing Any Deal
? Some sort of businessman?

What do you know about the guy?”

“Not a thing,” my father said, pleased. This was a game that

could last us the three months, easy.

“We could just look him up on the Internet,” I said.

“Cheating!” he said. “Don’t you dare. I’m going to get the

bags. Feel free to gather more clues about our host.”

Instead of gathering more clues, though, I sat down on the

bed in my crisp, clean room. The bed had the kind of sheets

and down comforter you could sleep years in. I wished I could

sleep years, that’s how tired I was. A million years tired. The

sheets smelled good, like spring. I looked out my large win-

dow, trimmed in blue paint. I could see the coastline from my

bed, the blue-gray sea, though that night after dinner, it would

become unbelievably dark out there. The dark of the ocean was

an endless dark.

It started to sink in: no one knew who I was here, and no one

back home knew
where
I was. It was a fantastically freeing feel-

* 12 *

Stay

ing. I could be anyone at all. I could be someone with an entirely

different past, and a wide open future.

You’d imagine with a feeling like that, a person could sleep

easy. I guess I was thinking, though, that if someone were walk-

ing around outside, even right outside my window, you wouldn’t

hear those footsteps in the soft sand.

* 13 *

Of course I went to the next basketball game our

school played against his. The minute I got home that first night, I’d

looked up the game schedule to see when we’d be playing his team

again. I thought about him every day until then. I started having

those conversations with him in my head that you have when you

first meet someone you sense is going to be important in your life.

I told him things about me I thought he should know. That I was a

mostly shy person concealing that fact; too straight, probably. Maybe

even hiding in my own straight person’s closet. Never tried pot and

never wanted to but had several times been to parties and pretended

to drink something I wasn’t really drinking. I read too much. I was

scared of spiders but once was stung by a hundred bees and didn’t

cry. I told him I loved the butter lake you could make in mashed