The Six Rules of Maybe (34 page)

The letter went on. Morin Jude must have met a terrible fate—she never showed at their meeting in Abidjan. No one seemed to have heard of her, until Mr. Martinelli bribed two government officials to speak. They were then put in contact with an individual from a remote village. A hundred dollars exchanged hands, and that’s when they were finally brought to an abandoned plantation and left, holding only the keys to their new home.

“Can you imagine how much a hundred dollars is to a village like that?” Mom said.

“They traveled across the world to buy an abandoned plantation for a hundred bucks. Do they know?”

“Does it matter?” Mom said. Her eyes danced.

“Not at all,” I said. It was the happiest I’d felt in a long time.

“What a thrill, huh, Scarlet? What a thrill.”

The day that the Martinellis’ first letter arrived, construction began on the Saint Georges’ garage. I recognized the voices of the men and their music. Hits of the seventies.
Midnight at the o-a-sis … Send your camel to be-ed… .
There was always reconstruction going on somewhere. Things that came apart were put together again, never exactly the same.

I had another dream that night. I dreamed Juliet and I were rolling down a grass hill, rolling and laughing, and when we got to the bottom, there were two sets of hands to lift us up, Mom’s hands, and a man’s, too. There was ice cream, and then things went bad. Juliet was crying and reaching out her arms and Mom was crying and there was a red car driving away, and we stood huddled together and Mom was calling and calling a name.

That next morning, I felt a sadness so pure I could almost hold it
in my hands. It had risen to the surface sharp and clear enough that it felt real. I remembered Juliet beside me in the dream. A feeling of us bonded, sisters, the two of us against all things, against the bad stuff around us. Juliet and me, together.

She was still sleeping when I went into her room. There was no butterfly candleholder on her night stand anymore, no trace of Buddy Wilkes. She’d been reading my book
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
, which she’d snitched back from my room and now lay on her floor. One of Hayden’s notes stuck out from the end, used as a bookmark. I shook her shoulder.

She sighed awake, rubbed her eyes. “What time is it?” she said.

“Just eight,” I said.

“For God’s sake, Scarlet. I need my
rest
.” She rolled away from me. I spoke to the back of her head and the curve of her shoulders. I told her about the dream.

“Am I remembering this or not?” I said.

“You’re remembering this,” she said. Her voice was tired.

I thought of Hayden’s note.
I will not leave you like you’ve been left before.
I had thought he meant some boyfriend I didn’t know about. Maybe Hayden had been more right about Juliet all long. “Our father is the one who left you,” I said.

She didn’t know what I meant. “He left
you
, too.”

“I didn’t think I remembered anything,” I said. I was still talking to her shoulders.

“It’s too deep in to ever forget,” she said.

“What do I do now?” I said. “I liked it better when I didn’t know I knew. When I just thought it was something forgotten.”

“I think you’re asking the wrong person for advice,” she said.

I stayed there, kneeling beside her bed. I didn’t know exactly what I wanted from her, or even if she could give it. Finally, she
rolled over again and looked at me. “Look, Scarlet, you’ll go on doing what you’ve always done—you’ll make yourself so necessary that no one’ll ever leave you. Or else, you’ll stop. And I’ll keep making sure no one’ll ever leave me by keeping people away. Or else,
I’ll
stop. Pretty much, that’s all we’ve got as far as choices. You do what you do until you don’t do it anymore.”

It took me a moment to take this in. When it settled inside and found its place, I realized that she was right. Things can look suddenly different, things you’ve seen every day of your life, like when there’s a snowfall and everything that had always been there before looks new. Or when someone who’s been only thinking things finally speaks them. I could give you my theories on everyone—on why my mother was with Dean Neuhaus, on why my sister wanted Buddy Wilkes or why she ended up pregnant. I could tell you why Nicole had self-esteem issues, or why Kevin Frink blew up that garage. But I never could have explained why I kept so close to other people’s business and so far from my own. Not the reason at the heart of things.

The truth struck.

“You love Hayden,” I said.

“It’s that simple,” she said. “And that complicated.”

“Jitter is yours and Hayden’s and you love them both.”

“More than I know what to do with.”

I leaned over and hugged her then, and she pulled me toward her, up beside her on the bed, her round belly against my back, and we lay like that for a while, sisters together, just like a long time ago.

Chapter Twenty-seven

T
he second letter came from the Martinellis.

Dear Annabeth and Scarlet—

The cocoa plants were not cocoa plants at all, and the villa was in terrible disrepair, but neither of us has ever been afraid of hard work….

And then a third….

Dear Annabeth and Scarlet—

We love it here. We hope you’ll come and visit….

I spent more time with Juliet. I went with her and Mom to see Dr. Crosby, to hear the baby’s heartbeat for myself, to see how Jitter
was coming along. As the weather got hotter and she got rounder, she craved lemons and lemonade, and I would bring her frosty glasses and we would sit and talk about baby names and about the time when I was three and stuck a LEGO up my nose, and about the time Juliet was six and locked us and our babysitter outside the house. I learned things about her. She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to stand the pain of labor or wouldn’t be able to soothe the baby, and she hated that she looked like our father and not our mother, and she once had tried to get Gregory Hawthorne, our middle school algebra teacher, to kiss her. I would put my face right close to Jitter and I would say things like, “Listen, you stay in there until you’re good and ready” and “We can’t wait to kiss your baby neck.” I took Juliet’s picture sideways, and she would hold her dress down as flat as possible to show off Jitter in his best light.

Something else happened during those weeks, as summer started to close up shop and pull out fall, turning the edges of leaves orange, turning down the night temperatures, getting the display ready same as the drugstore dragging out all of the stuff for the next holiday. My love for Hayden turned into another kind of love, pieces that were there all along though I hadn’t recognized it. A love for Jitter. The desire for Jitter to have something important that I never had. Hayden was right—the list was harder than it seemed. To know why you wanted something, why you desired a person, the real reasons why, the behind-the-reasons reasons … It could be thorny and layered, the answers hiding in the shadows, submerged even, in some depths too far out of your view. Every night I wished for it under the sky of paper cranes.
Let Jitter have Hayden. Let Jitter have this good father.

“You don’t want to keep doing what you’re doing? Change some
thing. Change one thing,” Juliet said.

“Reilly Ogden,” I said.

She drove me over to Reilly’s house in Mom’s car.
You’ve got to say what you mean and mean what you say,
she had said.
Doubt in your voice is an open door people will shove right through.
She waited in the driver’s seat and I saw that she was keeping her eye on me as I stood on his porch and rang the bell.

Reilly’s mother answered. She was a thick woman with tightly wound hair and she did not meet my eyes. She invited me in, but it wasn’t a real invitation. Reilly was her boy, you could tell.

“Well, it’s about time,” Reilly said.

“Reilly … ,” I said. I remembered Juliet’s words.
Nice is shitty self-protection, Scarlet. You’ve got a right to say who you want and don’t want in your life. Selfishness isn’t always a bad thing, in spite of what you think.

“You didn’t mention my new contacts. They’re blue,” he said. He opened his eyes wide for me to peer into.

“I have something to say to you.”

“Come in,” he said. “We can talk in my room. My mother won’t mind.” He opened the door wider and I could see the edge of a recliner with a remote control on the arm. The sound of some war program from the History channel coming from the living room.

“No,” I said. “Here.”

He ignored me, stepped aside as if I’d come in anyway. He thought I’d do what he wanted because I’d never given him reason to think otherwise.
You can collude with people like that
, Juliet had said,
whether you know it or not. Just by not saying no.
“She’ll make us sandwiches if I ask.”

“Reilly, I want you to hear me. I want you to leave me alone. I don’t want you to talk to me or follow me or come near me at all. I
don’t want to have anything to do with you and I never will. Never.”

“Scarlet,” he said, as if I were being unreasonable.

“Never.
Leave me alone
.”

A bad thing like selfishness could be a good one, and a good one, like kindness, could be bad. I needed both of those things, I understood, in careful measure. So I turned and went back to the car. I left the fried food smells and the recliner and the creepy basement and those blue contacts and I left the ways all of that might make me feel sorry for him. I turned my back on it, so that, finally, finally, I could look after myself.

The bedroom door was closed again, with just the two of them shut away behind it. I could hear intense, muffled voices, the sound of Juliet pleading her case. I thought I heard the word, but maybe I just hoped I had:
Hayden
.

I watched Mom when she came out. She didn’t see me, just went downstairs for the rest of the evening; she sat cross-legged on the floor in front of our coffee table, her scrapbook supplies in front of her. When I went downstairs myself, I saw her there. She had her scissors in her hand and a paper image, which she turned in a careful circle as she cut. She looked at the page, thought, glued. And then she set down her scissors and shut the book.

“Juliet’s leaving,” Mom told me the next morning. I stopped my spoon halfway to my mouth.

“What?”

Mom poured coffee into a cup. “I told her she needed to go back to Portland.”

I’d wanted her to lay down the law with Juliet for as long as I could remember. But not
now. This
wasn’t the time. This was the
worst time possible. “You can’t do that,” I said. Juliet couldn’t leave now. She just couldn’t. We needed her. I needed her. Jitter, our Jitter, was going to be born in ten weeks. “She can’t
leave
.”

“It’s not okay to hide,” Mom said. “She’s got a husband she needs to face. Hayden loves her and that baby. The baby needs a father.”

“Why can’t he come back here?”

“We need to let them work this out on their own. Without us.”

I thought of Hayden, with his kind eyes and strong hands. I thought of his handwriting on a page and his firm grip on Zeus’s collar. I thought of him with that sonogram image; I imagined it tacked up nearby him somewhere, wherever he was now. I thought of Juliet, and Jitter. If letting go, if letting people and things work themselves out in the way that they needed to without your help was the most important thing, then it was also the hardest.

“I need to let her grow up,” Mom said.

Juliet was set to leave the next morning. I figured it was time, as good a time as any, for the end of the Make Hope and Possibilities Happen for Clive Weaver project.

I waited until it was dark. I gathered all of my supplies in a big garbage bag and went out the front door. I laid the bag on the sidewalk, let the treasures pour out.

I stuffed the mailbox first. I crammed so many letters in there, he’d have trouble getting them all out. I left the mailbox door open, let the letters pile up on the door itself, and then gather on the ground underneath in an enormous mound.

And then I went to his big tree. I tied crane upon crane—blue and yellow and pink and white, cranes made out of Yvonne Yolanda’s real estate flyers and clothing catalog, cranes made out
of tire ads and mattress sales and coupons for extra-larges with everything. A dog barked and the Pete-Robbins’s light went on. I imagined Ally Pete-Robbins peeking at me through the slats in her blinds. But I didn’t care. I just filled that tree so that when he woke up, it would look like every good thing possible had happened.

I thought the cry I heard the next morning was one of pain, the sound of a heart ripping from a body, a howl of deep despair. Sobs, after that. The cries came from the front yard. I didn’t even have time to open my eyes and look before Mom yelled from downstairs. “Scarlet? Scarlet, come down! What did you do?”

My heart stopped. No, please, please, no. I imagined the worst, some disaster again, some terrible thing happening because I had wanted to do something good. I ran downstairs without looking out my window. Oh God, what now? Didn’t I ever learn? I heard Mom’s and Juliet’s excited voices. He was dead maybe. The shock had given him a heart attack and he was naked and dead on his lawn.

But when I got downstairs I saw Juliet at the front window in her robe and her sleepy face, and I saw Mom standing in the open front door. I heard the sound again, but the noise wasn’t what I thought.

“Look,” she said.

Mom pointed to what I already knew was there—the tree, full and bright and glorious in the morning light, shimmery with color and surprise, the mail pile as big as an enormous snowfall—and to what I didn’t know was there, Clive Weaver, bent in half, laughing. Laughing so, so hard. He stood straight, looked over at us, his hand in the air to indicate he couldn’t take the slightest bit more humor just yet. His feet were bare in the wet grass, and Corky ran back and forth in high-strung uncertainty.

I put my hand to my mouth. “Surprise, Clive Weaver!” I
shouted. “Surprise for you!” My heart felt so big and wide. You could give and give until it hurt you, give without boundaries or self-protection or reciprocation, give out of fear, and it could leave you empty and depleted and even used. But you could also give out of something very simple—a pure desire—to be kind, and it could double and triple your own joy.