The Six Rules of Maybe (30 page)

I put on my long T-shirt, but kept the light off; I lay on my bed in the dark, propped up against my pillows. The light from the streetlamp shined in and illuminated my room in an eerie glow. The paper cranes rustled and swayed in a small breeze. I heard someone’s wind chime outside.

I watched my clock with growing unease. I heard the television go on and then off again. I waited for Hayden to go outside to smoke, a place I might never join him again, but this never happened. The basement toilet flushed. The house was giving away the secret of his restlessness. I got up and looked down the street for a car—Buddy Wilkes’s, Mom’s, anyone’s—same as I used to when I was small and Mom was late coming home. I would watch and watch and beg
silently for her car to appear, equally sure as not that it would, relief filling me and being replaced with joy as soon as it did. She always seemed surprised how happy we were when she got home. She’d put Neil Diamond on the stereo, and we’d dance.

But that night, the street was so dark and so still, absent of any cars or people or animals coming or going. The heat had tired people. The
SOLD
sign on the Martinellis’ house looked very white under the moon; it looked bold, defying the darkness with only pressboard and a declaration.

I could hear every tick of my clock. It was getting close to midnight, and Mom would be home soon, I was sure.

But then, midnight came and went. Serious worry was shoving out shame for my attention. Mom always came home at midnight, always. I kept getting up every few minutes to look out at the empty street. My worry turned to anger. Maybe they just had too much to celebrate. Mom in her slinky black blouse and Dean Neuhaus with his clean fingernails. Mom’s new diamond on her own finger, her hands not belonging to herself anymore. Maybe she was sleeping off a bottle of champagne beside him.

I wondered if I should call. I imagined her cell phone on his bed stand in a house we’d never even visited. He had children we had never even met. I could call and embarrass myself, intrude when it would no longer do any good. I was good at shoving myself into places where I didn’t belong. There was nothing I could do about any of it, anyway. Helping hadn’t kept me safe. It had been an illusion.
It had done no good, none
, I thought, and it was at that moment, that exact one, that I was thrown back against my bed and to the floor. There was a soul-shattering clash, an explosion, a blast so deep I felt it in my cells, glass raining down, nothing like the toy rocket, although the toy rocket was my first thought. I was on the
floor, and glass was falling around like stars. The sky seemed to open. My window was gone, and the black night was there at my fingertips.

I heard shouting. There seemed to be some sort of fire outside through the frame of my window now absent of glass.

Hayden was shouting. Other people too. I didn’t understand what was happening. Nothing made sense. My window was gone and I was sitting in glass and there seemed to be a fire and people were shouting and that’s all I knew.

“Scarlet!” Hayden was there in the doorway. He was still in his shorts, without his shirt. His hands were on either side of the doorframe, as if the frame itself had just stopped him before he fell in.

“I don’t know what happened,” I said.

“There was a blast across the street,” Hayden said.

This didn’t make sense to me, not yet. Glass was in my hair.

“Your window again,” he said. “Are you okay?”

He lifted me up. He set me on my feet. He looked me over. “You’re okay,” he said.

He saw my shock. He put his arms around me. I felt the skin of his chest against my cheek. “It’s okay, sweetie,” he said. I could feel his care. Real and true care. I wanted to stay there, with him holding me. I was scared. It felt safe with his arms around me.

“What happened?” I said.

“Something exploded across the street,” he said again. He gestured toward the window. “I’m going to go see, okay? If everyone’s all right? Maybe there was some kind of gas explosion. God, we need to see if everyone’s all right.”

I felt dizzy and confused, like I was waking from a dream or maybe was still in one. Maybe this was another dream that had a deeper meaning, a blast, my life as I knew it exploding and
destroyed. But it seemed to be the present moment after all. I could feel Hayden’s fingers grasping mine. I saw my clock, still ticking; saw that nothing that most immediately needed changing—Mom coming home, Juliet, too—had changed. This disaster had happened and they were still gone and we were still waiting even as we ran down the stairs together to the front door.

Zeus was turning circles of excitement and anxiety. Trotting with wild eyes around the coffee table, muscles tensed in fear for what had already gone wrong.

“You stay here, boy,” Hayden said. He tried to make his voice calm, but if I could hear the alarm there then Zeus heard it a hundredfold. Hayden was putting a T-shirt over his head, and I was following him in my bathrobe, although I don’t remember ever putting it on.

He opened the door, and Zeus was there, and I saw him put one hand on Zeus’s forehead to keep him back, but the front door was always a barrier Zeus wanted to get past, always, even when there was nothing urgent beyond it. The beyond was urgent enough for him, but that night even more so, and he pushed with all his force and broke free.

“Goddamnit, Zeus! Not now! Scarlet …”

“I’ve got him,” I said, even as Zeus’s large butterscotch self raced across the street where I could now see a fire burning in some gaping hole where the Saint Georges’ garage had once been. The walls looked frail and papery and blackened, and you could see Mr. Saint George’s few tools on a pegboard just beyond the fire, and a lawn mower, too, ready to be swallowed by flames. I knew what had happened then, knew that Kevin Frink had found a way to what he most wanted, a way that he was most familiar with, matches and detonators and explosions, the destructive reordering of his own and
our own universe.

It hit me, the same as the force that had thrown me across my room, what I had done, what I had contributed to, how this was in good part my fault. Good intentions didn’t even make this forgivable. I had gone where I didn’t belong and set the wrong things in motion. I had tried to give what wasn’t wanted. And I had done it all to make myself feel better, not them. Myself—because it felt better to have a little control over a situation, to feel some power, to move things around for a better outcome. To have fate in your hands instead of the other way around.

Hayden was running and shouting and Clive Weaver was on the lawn in his underwear holding Corky in his protective arms, and Mrs. Saint George was out on her lawn sobbing with Mr. Saint George’s arms around her, as Buster looked worried at their feet. Fiona and Kevin Frink were nowhere in sight. Ally Pete-Robbins held her boys around their shoulders, their eyes wide and blinking as they stood barefoot in their spaceship pajamas, as their father, too, ran across the street to see if he could help. Mrs. Martinelli was in her bathrobe in the driveway, her arm against her eyes from the brightness and growing heat of the flames, and Mr. Martinelli was saying, “
Get back, get back; I used to be a firefighter!
” People were shielding their loved ones, and my loved ones were missing, except for Hayden, running, and Zeus, running across the street as I called after him.

I went after Zeus, who was racing in mad circles around the yards, crazy from everyone else’s fear and his own sudden release. His people were going fast, and so, he too, needed to go fast. He crossed the street and crossed back again, dashed through the Martinellis’ junipers around the Pete-Robbins’s Acura; he flew past Ally Pete-Robbins, and Jacob made an unsuccessful dive for his
collar.

He stopped on the sidewalk across the street. I didn’t want him going near that fire. You could feel the heat of it on your face. I tried to command his stillness with my voice, calling him sternly. He was panting. I had a chance. But then, his head turned suddenly toward the wide street beyond that fire, beyond the licking flames and the crackles and pops and the ash floating in the air. He ran.

You could hear the sound of sirens coming. All I could do was the one thing I’d been asked to do by the man I loved, to help the one good dog I was responsible for, and I went after him.

“Zeus!” I clapped madly. I could hear sirens coming closer now. I imagined a night of deception and of fleeing—Kevin Frink and Fiona Saint George heading off to some unreachable place in his Volkswagen, Juliet fleeing her marriage in Buddy Wilkes’s El Camino, Mom fleeing the stagnation of her life in Dean Neuhaus’s arms. And me fleeing, too, leaving my mistakes behind, mistakes now up in flames, running after Zeus as he rounded the corner far beyond the Pete-Robbins’s house.

“Zeus, PLEASE!” I felt frantic now. I couldn’t get to him—he was always just beyond my grasp. I was worried he would be hit by one of the fire trucks or the ambulance, which I could hear approaching. Zeus had abandoned everything in his fear; his anxiety propelled him forward, forward, around, anywhere, in wild motion. We weren’t on our street anymore. I was in my robe in a stranger’s yard. My voice was hoarse from calling. Lights of houses went on, porch lights, too. I ran through the new bark and freshly seeded lawn of the house where the construction had been going on all summer. My chest was full of fire from running. Zeus was in another backyard and I didn’t know if I could keep up with him much longer.

“Boy!” I pleaded. “Zeus!” The commotion on our street sounded
like a dim roar, but I could smell the destruction in the air, some dark blend of damage and charcoal and melting plastic. Zeus stopped and looked at me, too far for me to catch him, and when I started toward him, he took off again. I was crying now. “Zeus!” He ran two blocks over and disappeared. I called and called him.

I was desperate for the sight of his butterscotch fur, his triangle ears. I was crying his name and could only see him gone forever, gone, could feel the loss of him, and my own failed responsibility to the man who loved him, whom I loved.

The street was empty, just streetlights, and the faraway sound of the place where I lived, the moon so still and forever. He had vanished. No dog in sight. No beloved dog. Just a neighborhood at night.

I bent over. All of it, the whole night, Hayden, that wrong kiss, my sister gone, my mother, Kevin Frink, and Zeus, Zeus, Zeus—it filled me and crushed down hard and I sobbed. Sobbed and sobbed, my chest wracking; I held my stomach. Mom had been so right. Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss. But safety called its own shots, and now I had destroyed things. The things that mattered most to me.

Zeus was gone, and the loss of him felt like the worst thing, the worst. We hadn’t been careful enough. I hadn’t been. You have to be careful with the people you love. It’s the least they deserve.

I wanted to look up and see him there, but that didn’t happen. There was just the gone-ness of him, and the empty street.

I knelt on the sidewalk in my robe under the streetlight, my head in my hands, crying. That’s when I saw the big lumbering form of the Pleasure Way drive up. That’s when Mr. Martinelli opened the door and held out his hand and that’s when I got in. I sat down in
the real leather seat and rode with Mr. Martinelli up and down our streets, calling Zeus’s name through our open windows.

Chapter Twenty-four

Juliet—

Just that, on a crumpled piece of paper. I smoothed it with my hand. I had the same longing, the desire to call a name and have whom you most wanted to see appear. Zeus had been gone for three days, Juliet, too. Hayden looked like a ghost, his skin white and his eyes hollow, and I felt like a ghost, everything of meaning gone and over with.

I watched the street every day, put Zeus’s food bowl in the front yard, his water bowl, too, called his name again and again and listened for the jangling of his tags. I made flyers with a picture I had taken of him, his face eager and looking straight into the camera so that he looked right into your eyes from the page. People needed to see what a good dog he was. I walked our neighborhood, putting up the flyers and calling to him, looking for some movement in the bushes or trees. Every time the phone rang, my heart leaped in hope. Every time I remembered that he was gone, it was like getting the
bad news for the first time—the hurt and realization hit with a force that felt forever new.

I imagined him being taken in by someone, his collar gone, maybe, ripped off on a tree branch. He would be sitting with some new family as they had dinner, wondering where we had gone. Why had we not come and gotten him? Or I imagined him running still, or exhausted, or the worst imagining, scared and alone. He was innocent and vulnerable out there by himself. He could be hungry or tired or thirsty or hurt, and he had no voice to ask for what he needed.

I couldn’t stand that he wouldn’t know how hard we were trying to find him. What if he thought we didn’t care anymore? He might think we had stopped loving him, when we would never, ever be the kind of people, person, who would stop loving him, who would abandon someone who needed us.

“I know she’s fine,” Mom said. She misread my agony, my inability to rest, my ceaseless watching through our living room windows. We
did
know Juliet was fine. She had called from a phone booth and given no explanation other than she needed to be away for a while. As for Mom herself, we didn’t discuss her own disappearance, her arrival at 4:00 a.m. that morning, when she finally came back to the shattered pieces of her neighborhood and her own home, her makeup off and her hair disheveled. She still wasn’t wearing that ring on her hand, though I didn’t care anymore. Fine, go ahead and marry Dean Neuhaus. It didn’t matter anyway. It mattered less who came than who was gone, Hayden most of all.

And Hayden was gone, even if he was still there in our basement room. He was sullen and didn’t eat with us or talk much—his reason and justification for being with us had disappeared, and so he made himself as scarce as possible too, as he waited for Juliet to return. For Zeus to return too. He talked to Mom downstairs in the kitchen
and I listened in. The conversation had only big empty spaces where answers should have been. Mom didn’t know what to do. Hayden didn’t know what to do. We avoided each other, like my kiss was a bad part of town we needed to stay away from. He would stand outside and shake the box of treats Zeus liked. He had lost everything.