The Six Rules of Maybe (24 page)

I thought it had worked for me, looking after everyone else. I thought it had. But it didn’t. Not anymore.

“Don’t ask me,” Jasmine said.

Chapter Nineteen

T
hey just can’t fucking
do
this,” Kevin Frink said. His big face was red. His eyes were squinched. He looked like he might cry.

“Jeez, Kevin. What?” Kevin Frink had rung our doorbell again and again. It was lucky I was the only one home. Zeus would have gone nuts.

“They want her to go to Yale. Those freaky parents of hers. She doesn’t even want to go to Yale. She wants to go to art school. Here.”

“She got into Yale?” I didn’t even think Fiona Saint George ever went to class.

“She’s brilliant, you hear me?
Brill
-iant. Smart enough to fucking know what she fucking wants to do with her life.” It was a hot day, the kind of steamy hot that made it hard to breathe and he was sweating. Big dark rings under the arms of his T-shirt, drops gathering on his forehead.

“God, I’m sorry,” I said. “She’s not going to go, is she?”

He let out a sound. An exhale of protest that might have been the start of a sob. “Does she have a
choice?
Do you know what those people said? They won’t help with her education at all unless she goes there. They used the biggest lie of all time.
For your own good
. WHOSE good? THEIR good. Not HER good. What kind of parents do that, huh? Tell me that.” I’d always had the idea that Kevin’s mother ignored him altogether. Certainly, she wasn’t the parental role model who was part of his activities and interests, supporting his goals of blowing things up. Kevin hit the door frame with his palm. I should have invited him in, but something told me that was a bad idea. I didn’t think we had enough room for that much anger in our house.

“Kevin,” I said. “It’s okay.”

“There’s nothing okay about this. Nothing.”

“She’ll work it out with them.” I’m not sure if I believed that, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

“You know she can’t do that on her own. You know how alone she is. She needs me to help her.”

I remembered the dark hair over Fiona Saint George’s eyes, the chalk paintings of vampire parents. Maybe he had a point. I had thought she needed that help too; it was dark in vampire land. “Yale,” I said. I still couldn’t believe she got in.

“
Would you stop going on about fucking Yale!
” he hissed.

It was the kind of anger that makes you shut up, fast. I felt an eerie, electric shiver go through me. I switched over to some voice I imagined that FBI agents used with kidnappers.

“It’s okay, Kevin. Everything’s going to be okay.”

He looked at me, and right then as he stood sweating on our front porch, I saw the real him down in there. I saw way, way past
that big head and angry eyes and tight fists. He seemed very small and scared. The small and scared that you are when you finally decide to hand your love over only to find out exactly how unsafe that leaves you.

“You’re okay,” I said.

I wasn’t so sure about that at all.

I saw the letter because the mailbox was left open. When I saw it there and saw whom it was addressed to, I felt it was my duty to look further. Call it a fateful intervention by me, caught before the mailman arrived to pick it up and send it on its wrong way.

I ripped it open on the spot.

Buddy—

Why are you ignoring me? Why did you change your e-mail address? I thought we promised never to do that, no matter what.

Buddy, why?

Anger lit in me as quickly as fire on dry wood. I let it fill me, maybe because I also felt something else, some sort of sadness I didn’t want to feel. Some sense of her desperation, when she wasn’t a person whom I truly thought could feel that. It wasn’t just her bad behavior that was letting me down. She was being too human, and there are some people we don’t want to see this in—mothers and older sisters, fathers, people we rely on for some sense of firm ground, because there aren’t many places to go for that. Juliet always had everything, and shouldn’t that mean you sat somewhere beyond despair? I brought the note inside, but she wasn’t there. I wasn’t going to let her off the hook this time.

“Scarlet, is that you?” Hayden called from the living room.

“Yep, it’s me,” I called back.

“Can you give me a hand?”

Hayden’s voice was muffled, and when I went to him, he was hunched behind the TV cabinet; his butt clad in those cargo shorts was the only real visible part of him. I didn’t mind this.

“What’s going on?” I said.

“Behind the cabinet. Can you see this cord I’m wiggling?”

I looked. “Uh-huh.”

“Grab it for me, would you?”

I reached back and caught it.

His head appeared. His hair was all tousled, and one curly lock fell over his forehead. “I thought that Dean was an engineer,” he said. He took the wire from me. “Thanks.”

“He is an engineer. Computer engineer.”

“That’s even worse. Dick wad can’t even hook up a VCR properly. I can’t stand that guy. ‘I think Americans are so pompous and judgmental,’” he said in a high Dean-accented voice, with his cheek against the cabinet.

“You sort of sounded like the queen of England.”

“You should hear my Nixon,” he said.

“I can’t understand what she sees in him. I just can’t.”

“Maybe he’s one of those things people either love or hate, like beets,” he said.

I laughed. “Ha.
You
are the one who notices life, remember, like you told me?”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“I guess we’re an awful lot alike,” he said.

He leaned back behind the cabinet again, and I could hear the
scritching of wires against wood. “There. That should do it. Hey, thanks. My trusty assistant there wasn’t much help.” Zeus was curled up in front of the couch, snoring. He snored like an old man.

“They always ask to go on their break, just when you need them,” I said.

“Ever since he joined the dog union he’s been impossible.” Hayden reappeared again. “Okay, let’s try it.”

He sat down on the couch. I shouldn’t have sat beside him because of how much I wanted to sit beside him, but I did anyway. He picked up the remote and pointed it toward the TV. One of Mrs. Martinelli’s old exercise tapes started up. A dark-haired studly guy appeared; he was on a Hawaiian beach, surrounded by six women on round mats, all with their legs in the air.

“Let me hear you!” the stud said. “Seven, eight, nine, ten. Feel your buttocks burn!”

“No wonder Mrs. Martinelli watches so much TV,” I said.

“I’m sure this got her heart rate up, all right.” The muscled leader was now lunging side to side as if he were in a duel. Robin Hood and his merry Lycra-clad women.

“I’m sure Mom appreciates your help,” I said.

“Take that, Dean Neuhaus,” he said. “Sucker engineer.”

Zeus began to dog-dream growl, accompanied by a half-suppressed dog-dream bark, a funny little
wuf
that made his lips flubber. “Zeus is chasing bad guys in his sleep,” I said.

“He’s a hero in his own mind.”

We watched his furry butterscotch chest go up and down with sleep, as the exercisers on TV squatted down, their arms straight out in front of them.

“Maybe he’s ripping Dean Neuhaus’s pant legs to shreds,” I said.

“Buddy Wilkes’s neck,” Hayden said.

He looked at me and I looked at him, and I couldn’t help it. I took his hand. I held it and I rubbed the back of his hand with my thumb. It was probably the wrong thing to do, but I didn’t care. I wanted to lean over, kiss him. I wanted that bad. I let that thought in, allowed it for just a moment, and it felt good. But for now, I just squeezed his hand. He squeezed back as if it were the most innocent thing in the world. My skin on his—it didn’t feel innocent, not to me.

“It’s really hard to understand,” he said.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said again, and again the words felt echoey and vacant. I’d never wanted to help anyone like I wanted to help him. I could love him the way he deserved to be loved. I wanted to give him so much that it was an actual ache. My heart felt like it was taking up ninety-five percent of my body.

“You’re going to love someone properly, Scarlet. I can tell that.”

I couldn’t speak. Any words I might say were caught in my throat. It seemed possible that my real voice would be locked inside forever.

“God, is it a million degrees in here, or is it just me? Jesus.” He let go, wiped his forehead with the bottom of his T-shirt.

“I’ll open some doors,” I said.

Hayden turned his eyes to the tight bodies on the TV. “I bet that guy’s about eighty now,” he said.

I didn’t wait to talk to Mom about Juliet this time. I would handle this myself, if no one else would. Hayden could get hurt. That baby could. And that baby wasn’t just Juliet’s baby, it was all of ours. I could feel him move under my hand. If you held very still, that baby rolled and turned against your palm. I imagined he was having the most peaceful underwater time he might ever have. No
matter what I felt, at least, at the very, very least, he deserved to be born into a parental land that was not war torn. It seemed to be one of those simple human rights that was so basic that it became impossible, like equality or the pursuit of happiness.

I waited until Juliet got home, until Hayden had taken Zeus with him to do some work on Will Quail’s boat. Juliet was in her old room, going through the clothes she still had in her closet. She wore a pair of shorts low down on her hips, and a T-shirt that stretched so tight that the bottom of her round belly showed underneath. There was a big pile of pants and blouses and skirts on the floor, which I assumed she was getting rid of. Any other time I might have liked to go through it, trying on things that were her but that maybe could be me with some effort. But now I didn’t even want those things.

I flung the envelope her way. The corner of it hit the top, fleshy part of her bare arm and fell to the floor.

“Jesus, Scarlet,” she said. “What are you doing?”

“Question better asked of
you
.” I stood in her doorway. I didn’t even want to be in her room.

“Do you want this?” she asked, before she bent down to see what I’d flung at her. It was a sweatshirt with our school emblem, a tiger, on the front. I’m surprised she was getting rid of it. I’d have thought she’d try to hang on to her glory days as long as possible. Glory days were a pretty simple thing on an island, and even simpler in the sub-island that was high school. They were a whole lot harder to come by out in the big world.

She looked at the envelope in her hand. Her face got red. She just kept staring down at it, at the jagged bits where I’d torn the paper.

“You had no right,” she said softly.

“You have no right,” I said.

“You butt into everyone’s business.”

“Only when I need to. Like now.”

“Need to? Right. You do it because you don’t have your own life. That’s why. That, and a complete lack of confidence and self-esteem. What, the world won’t turn without your help? People won’t fall apart without you.”

Her words stung. “You brought Hayden into our lives. You brought this baby. You made it our business. You can’t just make a mess and think we’re all going to sit around and clean it up.”

“I’m not asking you to clean up anything.”

“We have to watch people get hurt.”

Her eyes blazed. Maybe with anger but maybe, too, with shame. “
We
.”

“Yeah,
we
. Mom and me. You’re playing out your family drama right under our noses.”

She threw the sweatshirt at the top of the pile. “Mom supports me. Mom supports my own decisions. Don’t speak for Mom. You don’t know. At least she remembers that I’m an
adult
. In your mind I’m not supposed to grow up. I’m not supposed to do anything I don’t get
permission for
.”

“Adult? You’ve got to be kidding. It’s the last thing you’re acting like.” I was breathing hard. I looked at her face, the face I’d known for years and years. She was selfish. A selfish person. I’d been second to her first place forever, but now she was making Hayden bow down to her: Hayden, a good person who didn’t deserve it. He shouldn’t have to follow behind her like she had made me do when I was five, carrying the back of her nightgown like she was the princess. “You go on about growing up. You know what I think? You got pregnant so you didn’t
have
to grow up. So people would take care of you. So you could stay in our childhood forever. You’re
afraid
to grow up.”

I hadn’t even known I thought that. But it was clear then. This wasn’t a great big move on her part. It was a way to come home.

Her mouth was slightly open; she didn’t look like the strong person who got everything she wanted all of the time anymore. She wasn’t the person who stood up on a stage while people sat below her and watched. Maybe that person had been too much for her. She had moved all of the pieces around, moved people and their feelings as if they were for her own use only, and now she had gotten herself backed into a corner.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. But her words lacked force. She sat on the edge of her bed and held that envelope.

“Buddy is going to somehow make this
better?
”

“Buddy understands me,” she said.

She disgusted me then. I shook my head at her stupidity. Buddy wasn’t anything true. He treated girls like shit. He was an idea more than a person.

“Buddy’s an excuse not to have anything real,” I said.

She looked pale. Unwell. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at that envelope in her hands.

I had to ask her. I had to. “Buddy’s not …” I didn’t know if I could say it.

“Not what?”

“Buddy’s not Jitter’s father, or anything, is he?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Scarlet,” Juliet spat. “For God’s sake. Just … get out of here, would you? Get.”

And so I did. I got out of there. I left her alone with all the things she wanted and wanted and wanted.

I hadn’t seen Clive Weaver for days. His house sat so quiet, it might
as well have been boarded up. The newspapers gathered on his porch. I sniffed around the outside, hoping I didn’t smell something bad like people always did in the crime books, when the neighbor’s gone missing.