Stay With Me (14 page)

I can't call him—what on earth would I say—and don't trust my letter-writing skills. For days I walk around in a fog, trying to judge how important knowing the truth is. Whatever it is, it won't bring her back. But if I could figure out how to contact him, maybe I'd feel better about her being gone. Or not.

And then there's this: Eamon does not show up at Acca on Wednesday or the following Monday. I have his phone number but decide against using it. He's probably decided he has enough friends.

Still, I think about him more than I don't. If I'm not careful, I think about him all the time. What would it take to return to the ease of feeling safe and appreciated? The way I did with him. It would take, I decide, being twenty. Better to think of my dead sister than a man whose kiss I will remember forever. Even if he vanishes as completely as Rebecca has.

Instead of studying for exams, I write
Dear Mr. Tilden
and
Dear Adrien
over and over until I think to type
Adrien Tilden
into my computer. Fifty-three hits. All of which indicate he's a professor in the Slavic Languages Department at Johns Hopkins. His name shows up a fair amount along with a Russian poet whom Rebecca loved. Adrien Tilden appears to be one of three people whose entire careers are about translating Anna Akhmatova.

Rebecca's poetry books are in the living room where Clare is doing what she always does in the evenings—paperwork. I cast an eye over the shelves until I find the one holding all of the translated Russian poetry. Adrien Tilden's name is on three of the books. I pull them out and find part of what I'm looking for. On one of the title pages, in beautiful handwriting, for all the world to see, is the inscription
For Rebecca, with deepest appreciation, Adrien Tilden.

Rebecca is here again, doing her routine of
I'm dead, but you can almost see me.

I look at Clare. Now that winter's over, her flannel sushi pajamas are gone (she's wearing boxer shorts and a frilly tank top), but her glasses and messy blonde ponytail are the same. I know I love Clare, but I knew that before Rebecca died. What's different is that I know Clare better now. My still here sister is interesting and, on occasion, hard to understand. But she is here, after all, and I have as much access to her as I need. As I want.

It's unfair of me, but I persist in wanting to know Rebecca more than I want to know Clare. Perhaps it's because I'm certain that the Clare I know is the one Da, Janie, and Rebecca knew as well. Whereas the Rebecca I knew promised me something that she had refused to the others; without saying it directly, my now dead sister let me understand that one day I would know her secrets.

I sit down next to Clare, who looks at her watch.

"Do I need to be making you go to sleep?" she asks. "Raphael says you're going to do really well."

Other people have always been more interested in my exams than I ever have.

"You'd think he was taking them," I say.

"He's not like Da," Clare says. "He doesn't care how you do, but he says you're the smartest of the Abranel girls and it's just a matter of time."

"Time for what?"

"For it to become obvious," Clare says.

"All that's obvious is how much help I need," I say. "Da should probably send money to Raphael as well as to my tutor."

"The last thing he needs is money," Clare says. "He does it because he loves you."

Well, actually, he does it because he loves
you. I leave this as a thought because if I have to tell her that, what is the point? Instead, I hand Clare the book with Adrien Tilden's handwriting in it and ask if she knows him.

"Never heard of him," she says. "But I wasn't the poetry person. Rebecca was really into all this. She even took Russian at some point. I think after college."

"Adrien Tilden knew Rebecca well," I say. "Very well."

"That I doubt," Clare says. "Not even William knew her well."

"You did," I say, but I wonder.

My sisters loved each other, but it wasn't based on their being close so much as it was based on, despite obvious differences, their being the same.

"I knew her within limits," Clare says. "Rather glaring, obvious limits."

And yet, this sameness. It wasn't only because they had the same father
and
mother. It came from years and years of knowing each other just a bit better than anyone else did.

"I saw Adrien Tilden with Rebecca," I say. "And I have this feeling it's important. I can't explain."

"You don't have to explain it," Clare says. "If you need to talk to him, we'll find him."

"There's no point in finding him," I say. "Until I know what to ask. I don't even know what I want him to tell me."

"Well, I've never heard of him and he wasn't at her wedding or the memorial service," Clare says. "So I don't know what he can tell you."

That I don't know either is exactly why it feels so important. I tell Clare about signs and how they make us see what we wish. I say that I wish more than anything that I knew Rebecca better. I amend that with,

"Had known her. For longer or more or closer."

"I think we all wish that impossible wish," Clare says. "But signs are important. We need them. I need them."

"When do you ever need them?" I ask, thinking that when it comes to family facts and secrets she knows most of what I wish I did.

"Well, when you came over on New Year's, you went right to the hotel photographs," Clare says. "I decided that meant you knew what mattered. You were a true Abranel."

I knew they mattered to Da, which is probably why they matter to Clare. For me, they are one more thing that belongs to someone else's story.

"Right then I stopped being nervous," she says. "I knew we would be okay together."

I hadn't thought that Clare was nervous about living with me, but it makes sense. I was as strange to her as she was to me. It's funny what she took as a sign, though. The way I remember that day, she's the one who pointed me in the direction of the lost hotel pictures. I didn't approach the photos on my own, even if Clare remembers it that way.

Exactly why have I decided that Adrien Tilden holds the answers? Because I saw him with my sister? That's not much to go on. Kind of an indirect route to information.

I talked to Eamon because he was sitting at a table near one where Rebecca had been. Look how well that turned out. Now I have another person to miss. Maybe Adrien Tilden is only a sign that it's time for me to know something of my own.

Directly.

Normally I make every effort to steer clear of the whole topic of what has brought me to live with Clare this year. We can easily discuss Rebecca, but not the pills. I will never know a thing if I continue to rely only on what I hear from other people. I count to three. No bravery. Four, five.

"You and Da don't think she had a reason," I say. "Something that made her do it."

My sister takes her barrette out, rearranges her hair, and resnaps the clip.

"I don't think she had a
good
reason," Clare says.

"I don't mean a reason that excuses," I say. "I mean one that explains."

"Look, Leila, I think it's okay if you and I don't agree about ... about what can be explained."

"So you don't think I'm wrong?" I ask. "Wrong to think that it wasn't just because she was sick."

I don't like the word
depressed.
It's ugly-sounding and if depression kills you then
sick
seems more accurate.

"I think ... I think it's such a mess," Clare says.

She gets up off the couch, disappears into the kitchen, and comes back with a bottle of water and a plate of cookies.

"I think we each get to decide what happened," Clare says. "My thinking there was no one reason isn't any better than your wishing you knew that one exact thing."

A statement that will need careful examination before I decide if it's true. I ask Clare if she will help me, when I decide the time is right, to write a letter to Adrien Tilden.

"Of course," she says. "But I don't imagine you would need it."

"Da sends my letters back corrected," I say.

Clare makes a laughing-snort type of sound and water comes out of her nose.

"Is he still using green ink?" she asks.

"Yes," I say, glad to hear he did it to them too.

"I thought Mama beat that out of him," Clare says.

"I guess not," I say.

"When you go out into the world," Clare tells me, "no one you meet will have had a father as oddly interesting as ours. That will make up for some of what he does."

"He is what he is," I say, not meaning to quote Rebecca but knowing this is what she would say if she were sitting here on the couch with us.

"God, is that true," Clare says. "Did he ever read to you at night?"

"Fairy tales," I Say. "The originals. Where Cinderella's sisters cut—"

"You mean hacked," Clare says. "Hacked their heels off to fit into the slipper."

"All that blood," I say. "I had horrible dreams."

"We did too," she says. "Mama finally hid the book."

Clearly not well enough, although I'm glad that by simply being himself Da gave me something to share with Julian and Janie's daughters.

"I'll miss you," I say to Clare. "When I'm in Poland."

"You don't have to say that," she says.

"I know," I say. "But I will."

"It'll be empty here without you," she says. "You've made so much of this easier."

Rebecca has faded from the room, taking Adrien Tilden and Eamon with her. From the living room windows, we can see lights glowing across the Hudson. Clare taps her pen against her glasses and I draw my knees up under my chin.

Eventually, one of us will get up.

I have exams, after all, and Clare, as she does every night, has to wash her face, make up her bed, put her papers away, and drink a glass of water. At some point this summer, I will write to Adrien Tilden. She may end up believing that we can't, in fact, each decide what happened to Rebecca. Especially if those versions contradict one another. But until then, we're together. Not the same—never to be the same—but it's enough that we're each still here.

A
T
A
CCA
, H
AL ASKS ME
what I did to scare off Eamon. Only he calls him
that guy who liked you.

"Nothing," I say. "And he didn't like me."

"Have it your own way," he says. "That guy who you like?"

"It's
whom
you like," I say, sounding for all the world like my father. "And I don't like him."

"So that's why you're looking at the door every time it opens?"

Hal is making fun of me while also letting me know he sees what matters to me. That he's sorry, of course, but would like me to stop looking for Eamon every time someone walks in. In this, Hal and I are united. I too wish I would stop.

And, as soon as my last shift ends, I do. While I'll always love Acca, I'm glad my work here is done. The job was supposed to bring me answers, not more questions.

***

Clare's insisting on a predeparture birthday celebration.

"I have to go to Vienna and then Sweden the day after you come home," she says. "The trip's going to be a nightmare and I don't want you to be a casualty of that."

Clare got promoted at work. Or rather, as she puts it, Edward has given her the chance to fail by putting her in charge of a hotel in Vienna. She says no one is allowed to be happy for her until it's clear she won't mess it up. I try convincing Raphael to turn the dinner they are planning into one for her instead of me.

"I don't think so," he answers. "This
is
the birthday that gets lost. It's not sweet sixteen and you can't vote yet either."

Both Da and Janie used to say it was odd how you could vote or join the army at eighteen but not buy a drink. They didn't think that was right.

"Clare wants to make a fuss over this," Raphael says. "And you have to let her."

"I've always liked fusses," I tell him.

"We'll invite Ben," Raphael says.

"Good," I say. "That'd be good."

***

Now that school is over, the lull between exams and the start of summer plans gives Ben and me a few days to spend time together as we used to. We play cards, listen to music, and look through Ben's collection of industrial design books. We've never read any of them closely, but the diagrams of vacuum cleaners and the insides of the early computers are pretty cool.

Ben's father came across these books on a business trip to Jakarta, where they're printed for an architecture firm. Mr. Greene is a structural engineer and his company does a lot of consulting in Indonesia. During eighth grade, these books seemed like a passport to heaven. Ben and I had this idea that if we could understand those first drafts of good inventions, we'd train our minds to come up with our own brilliant designs.

We've stopped thinking that will happen, but the books are still appealing. Our favorite in the series is an overview of trains with detailed pictures of tracks and steam engines. As we're discussing what could change the world today as much as trains did then, Ben catches hold of the ends of my hair, asking,

"Was it something I did, you know, when we did?"

I look at him wrapping my hair around his fingers. Every serious go-round we had of kissing and everything else would start with his holding my hair. His voice is shaky and I wonder how long he's wanted to ask me about the few days we had of sleeping together.

"It wasn't you," I say. "Of course not."

"It didn't go right," he says. "Did it?"

"That wasn't it," I say. "I mean, I'm better at it by myself, but I..."

Something about the way his breath changes makes me pull back and look at him. Everything in Ben's face has just fallen apart. So now I know. You do not tell someone you have slept with that sex is better without them.

Should I have known this? Can I fix what I've done to him? I know how I felt that day on the sidewalk with Eamon. I felt safe and complete. With Ben, I felt far away, curious, and anxious to please.