I'll Stay Page 10

  “I’ve hardly talked to her,” Ducky cried. “I feel so bad.”

  See? We were all bad. I wasn’t the only one who wanted to run away.

  “Sometimes I feel so thankful, you know, that it wasn’t me,” she said. “It could’ve been me and I was so drunk and I wouldn’t have even known. Or maybe I would have. But then I feel so guilty for thinking that way.” Giant tears, as big as her pearls, rolled down her tan cheeks.

  “For Christ’s sake, Ducky, why are you crying?” Amy asked. Everyone looked at Ducky. “Tell me you aren’t talking about how sad you are to leave college. Again.”

  “And you’re not sad?” Lynn asked. “I’m so sad that I feel sick.”

  “Well, of course I’m sad, but Ducky’s like a water faucet,” Amy said.

  Ducky tried to smile but her puffy bottom lip rolled over into a pout. They went on to something else, everyone talking at once, everyone wanting to be heard.

  Let her go. I’ll stay.

  I gripped the table and thought of my mother, before she hit it big, when she wasn’t so preoccupied and needy, when we were still in the apartment on Dean Street and she wrote late into the night, every night, at her desk in the living room. My dad, who hadn’t yet left his teaching position at the business school to be her agent, always said, “Shush! She needs space and quiet!” He felt a reverence for her writing; we both did, we helped cultivate it. Many nights I made her favorite tea, tiptoed to her desk and set it in the corner, close enough to reach but far away from the typewriter return. Most times she didn’t look up. But sometimes she said, “Thanks, Clare, you’re a lifeline in the middle of the night!”

  When I was younger, I looked up lifeline in the dictionary: Salvation. Help. Support. Sustenance. I thought about what Logan called me, Claretaker, when I’d screen phone calls while our mother wrote. But did these words truly describe me?

  Look around this table! I helped Ducky that night at Donny’s. I drove Julie to Planned Parenthood. I comforted Amy when her boyfriend broke up with her and listened to Lynn when she dropped out of the nursing program because she flunked chemistry. I knew these secrets because I was discreet, able to tolerate uncomfortable emotions and could be trusted to listen and give advice. I was a shoulder to lean on. A confidant. A person who brought tea with honey. A lifeline.

  And yet how could this be? Maybe together Lee and I could have fought off those guys, maybe even talked them out of it. Instead, I’d panicked and bolted.

  I watched Julie’s throat move up and down as she drank her beer and Amy’s lips stretch into a smile. I felt the heat from Ducky’s thigh. I imagined their hair and fingernails growing, millimeter by millimeter. They were alive and evolving yet somehow I was suddenly frozen in time, suspended in midair, stuck.

  Because I wasn’t the person they thought I was. I wasn’t the person I thought I was, either, and this made me feel sick. I needed to go home. I needed something.

  More heads on the stairs and then there he was, Christopher Mansfield, with his friends. Tall, broad, his hands large and strong—the size of dinner plates—piercing blue eyes, wavy brown hair, long, thick arms that wrapped around and squeezed me. Looking at him, I couldn’t breathe. His eyebrows rose slightly when he saw me, and then he grinned as he led his friends up the ramp to the back room.

  “Woo-hoo, Clare, there he is!” Amy sang. “Did you see how he looked at you?”

  “What’s going on?” Susie asked. “Did you break up with Ben? I don’t get it.”

  “Senioritis,” someone else said.

  I put my hand over my heart. Could they hear the thundering and wanting in my chest? They watched me, waiting for an answer, an explanation, but I didn’t have one. I looked down at my glass, empty again. How many beers had I had, two? Four?

  “He’s a sexy man,” Amy said.

  “Be careful, Clare,” Susie said.

  “Be careful of what?” Lisa asked.

  “He’s just a pretty boy,” someone said. “Ladies’ man to the max.”

  “The ultimate bad boy!” someone else said.

  I poured another beer. Because I’d started to shake and maybe this would help with my nerves. I was going home. Soon. When Lee got here.

  An hour later, maybe two, Christopher was waiting for me as I came out of the bathroom. He wore tight blue jeans and a white polo shirt, snug against his chest, collar turned up. A few hairs leapt out above the buttons. More hair, curly, brown, and hidden under his shirt, stretched down to his navel. I felt that familiar tingling in my thighs.

  “Come with me,” he said in that rich, deep voice.

  If he was the ultimate bad boy, did that make me a bad girl?

  “I have to go home tonight.” I straightened. I’d done it. I’d stood up to him.

  He laughed. “We’re not leaving. Just outside for a smoke.”

  “Oh.” Maybe he didn’t want me to go home with him. Maybe he wanted to tell me that it was over, whatever this was. I was dizzy, my eyes blurring under the lights, the music too loud in my ears. He reached for my hand—as if he could see or feel my unsteadiness—and held it as we started for the stairs.

  It was still too early in the year for the hot days to extend into the nights. Outside, the air was cool and damp and felt as if at any moment rain would pour from the sky. Students were everywhere. Across the street the lights were blazing in the Daily Grind, the coffee house where Lee and I had gone to a few poetry readings. A muscle car, engine revving, charged up to the stop sign near us. I waited for it to gun across the intersection, but it just sat there, its engine grating on my nerves. Just go already!

  Christopher lit a cigarette, inhaled, and then exhaled out of the side of his mouth. The smoke drifted away from us, from me. I’d told him that I didn’t like the smell. I hadn’t told him how sexy he looked as he smoked. He rolled the cigarette between his finger and thumb and leaned against the brick wall. The streetlights and glow from the store windows and bars that lined the street threw patches of day-like light across the sidewalk.

  I felt a nervous flutter in my chest. Would this feeling ever go away? I thought about what Julie or Amy had said in the bar. He’s a pretty boy. Was that all there was? No, I’d seen the books on the desk in his room. Economics. History of Europe, 1750-1820. And Slaughterhouse Five for his Modern American Prose class.

  “Did you decide on a book for your English paper?” Oh, God, I sounded desperate. But at one point we’d talked seriously. Last night? The night before that? This wasn’t all a joke, was it?

  He laughed. “Maybe your mom’s book? Seems appropriate, considering how intimately involved I am with her daughter. Maybe you could give me some insight.”

  I rolled my eyes. He was joking, flirting, teasing. This was what we did.

  “Seriously,” he said. “I might write about her book. By the way, I saw it coming, Whit killing himself at the end. But what I want to know is, who committed suicide in your family?”

  I startled. He was serious. But I didn’t want to talk about my family with him. “Just because she wrote about suicide doesn’t mean she experienced it.”

  He straightened. “Bullshit. Give it up, Miss Vagueness. Who was it?”

  Miss Vagueness? I swallowed. “Well, her grandfather.”

  Christopher crossed his arms and leaned back against the wall again. I looked across the street where a group of girls were laughing as they walked into the Daily Grind. Over the years my mother had talked to us about her grandfather. He was her favorite relative and introduced her to poetry. On her annual summer visits, which she shared with her cousins (including her favorite cousin, Oliver), she read to her grandfather while he mucked the stables. She was crushed when he killed himself.

  “So why Vietnam?” he asked. “Wasn’t he too old for that?”

  I shrugged. He’d been in Europe during the First World War and came back a “changed man,” my mother had said. She believed he was traumatized by what he’d seen, and especially by what he’d had to do, alth
ough he rarely spoke of it. She never talked about this in public and she’d probably deny the connection but I knew she was thinking of him when she wrote about Whit’s suicide.

  But Christopher didn’t need to know any of this.

  He took a long drag, blew the smoke over my shoulder, and grinned. “Know what I was thinking about today? That I liked how flustered you get when I’m taking off your shirt. I hope you’re still like that after we’re married.”

  Ah, now we were back in familiar territory. I rolled my eyes again. “Big flirt should be written in black ink across your forehead.”

  He laughed. “You flirt with me, too.”

  Flirt. Tease. Kiss. Touch. But this wasn’t really me. I wasn’t like this in Brookline or in any of the last four years. This was because we were leaving soon and we’d never see each other again. Most of us would never see each other again. And this was good because I barely recognized myself. I might even hate myself.

  “And I was also thinking that tonight is the night.” He winked at me.

  A group of girls I didn’t know walked toward us. Hi, Christopher! Hey, Chris! He nodded but kept his eyes on me. I felt dizzy and the pavement seemed to shift under me. I needed to stop drinking. Or maybe I needed one more beer to steady myself.

  “Yes, indeed, tonight’s the night.” He leaned into me, his chin close to my cheek but not touching. Grab me! Hold me! A line of sweat rolled down my back.

  “No,” I said. As long as we didn’t go all the way, I wasn’t really betraying Ben. Because this was flirting and touching, not real sex. Christopher and I weren’t having real sex.

  He leaned away from me, flicked the ashes behind him, and looked out across the street. “Of course, we have to figure out what to do about your boyfriend.”

  I sucked in a hot breath. “How do you know about him?”

  “I have my ways.” He pulsed his eyebrows at me but didn’t smile.

  I slumped against the wall next to him. Ben was my boyfriend, even if we hadn’t officially defined our relationship, and this was a betrayal. I was desperate now. “Yeah, well, tell me about your girlfriends?”

  “You have this way of avoiding things by asking questions.”

  Lee was the only other person to call attention to this. It was a habit. All I had to do was pick out pieces of what people said, even if I had no idea what they meant, and ask questions. What was Paris like after the war? What is it about Milton’s Paradise Lost that you like? People were interesting and I learned a lot when I listened. But he was right. This was my way of avoiding personal questions.

  “When we get married, you’re going to have to talk to me,” he said. “You’ll be so satisfied with how I take care of you that you’ll never look at another man.”

  How I take care of you. Has anyone ever taken care of me?

  What a silly thought. My parents took care of me. There was always enough food and money and the orthodontist and hairdresser and did my mother ever take me to the doctor? Did she ever go to a parent-teacher conference? Surely she did because what mother doesn’t take an interest in her daughter’s health and education? I should ask her about this. I should know how many trips to the dentist she made with me.

  I rubbed my neck, my fingers shockingly cold against my hot skin. What did this have to do with anything? Something was wrong with me.

  Suddenly we were in the light of an oncoming car. Christopher’s lips were pressed together and his blue eyes were staring at me so hard that I thought they’d see into my soul. Then he’d know, too, that I wasn’t the person he thought I was. I hadn’t told him about Florida. But I did tell Ben.

  We were talking in bed one night after spring break and the heaviness of the secret (I’d told no one) felt as if it were strangling me until I couldn’t breathe. I wanted relief, I wanted closeness, I wanted him to tell me that I’d done the right thing. As I explained what happened, he tightened his grip until his solid, warm body felt like a cocoon around me. When I finished he said, “For God’s sake, what the hell were you two thinking? You could have gotten killed!”

  I started to cry because he was right. What was I thinking? I felt awful. Why did I tell him?

  Then he began shushing me. “It’s okay. You’re safe now, it’s over. Be thankful it didn’t happen to you. You did the right thing.”

  Yes, I did the right thing. I was safe. Be thankful! Did it matter that I hadn’t told Ben the whole story? That I left some parts out?

  I glanced at Christopher. That heaviness was still there in my chest and head and stomach and up and down my back. I shook out the hair in my eyes and said, “We can’t get married because I’m not staying in the Midwest.”

  He dropped his cigarette, stepped on it with the toe of his brown Top-Sider, and grounded it firmly into the cement. “Me, neither. I got a job in Washington.”

  Ask me to come with you.

  But he didn’t. Nor did he say anything about when we are married or how he’d take care of me or how beautiful I was with my clothes off, lying across his bed with the olive-green comforter and lava lamp on the bureau. Then I was horrified with myself and with what we were doing, with the neediness of wanting this playboy, this fraternity boy, this Big Man on Campus.

  Don’t ask me to go home with you again tonight. I can’t do this.

  Ask me, please, ask me.

  Christopher bent over me, his lips next to my cheek and his eyes on my mouth. With his finger he traced a line up my arm and to my clavicle. He let it linger, drawing circles on the bone. I tried to swallow but my mouth was dry, my tongue stuck to my teeth.

  This was passion. Yes! Lee and I talked about this a lot, where passion came from, how it couldn’t be taught. How she and my mother had it and others didn’t. It was relentless, she said about her film passion, this desire to explain and show what she sees and feels. How ironic and pathetic that I, after all this time, finally found a passion that had absolutely nothing to do with any redeeming talents of my own.

  “Let’s drink a few more beers,” he said as he started for the door.

  No kiss, no crushing hug, no talk of going back to his place. Tears stung my eyes. Silly girl. He was toying with me. Flirting. Keeping me on my toes.

  I started after him but when I heard my name, I turned to see Lee walking toward me. Her hair was down on her shoulders and she wore the long, flowered skirt she’d bought at a street fair last year. As she got closer and I saw her feet in sandals—not those God forsaken worn-out wood clogs—I felt my spirits rise. Look at her, dressed and out of the house. She looked good and, well, normal. Mostly. I glanced back at Christopher but he’d already gone inside.

  “Hey!” I heard the exuberance and relief in my voice. “How was dinner?”

  “Okay.” She took the tip of her tongue over her scar. I knew by how her eyelids drooped that she’d been drinking or smoking. Did she have fun? Maybe she was feeling better. Oh, God, I wanted her to feel better. I would have given anything, right then, to have her back to the way she was before this mess.

  “I have something to tell you.” Her mouth drooped into a frown. “Finally.”

  Then, just like that, I felt sick in my stomach. This was it. We were going to talk about that night. She was going to yell at me for leaving her.

  “I just found out,” she said, “that I got the internship.”

  “What?”

  “The internship. I got it.”

  Before spring break she’d submitted her film about Patricia. With all that had happened, I’d forgotten about it. I felt my mouth open and paused. “Oh. Great!”

  She did it. She was going to New York on a prestigious internship with one of the best documentary filmmakers in the country. She’d probably be great at it because she had real talent. I felt a familiar ping in my chest—what the hell was I going to do?—but no, I wouldn’t dwell on that now.

  She told me that Dr. Hannigan, her advisor, announced it at dinner. “He said they loved my film. The offer is in the mail.”
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  But she wasn’t smiling nor did she seem very excited. She kept batting her eyes, as if she had something in them, and shifting her feet and flicking the side of her skirt with the fingers of her right hand. I thought about earlier today when she’d shouted I’m fine! I said, “Oh, Lee. Well, congratulations.”

  We turned as a noisy truck pulled up to the stop sign across the street, its high beams shining on us. Lee turned away so abruptly that she stumbled. I raised my hand to shield the light but then the truck turned and roared past us, leaving a stench of gasoline and a plume of exhaust.

  “When do you start?” Surely this would turn things around for her?

  She stopped flicking her skirt and wrinkled her forehead as she looked over my shoulder. I looked, too, but I had no idea what she saw.

  “Lee? When do you start?” I asked again.

  “The pay is bad. I don’t know how I’ll do it. They offered me a room in university housing. It’ll be cheaper. I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.”

  “You don’t know what to do about what?”

  “The internship. I won’t know anyone.”

  Since when had that stopped her from doing anything? “Lee, you gotta do this. And you should take the room. This is what you’ve always wanted.”

  “What do you think you’ll do?”

  I had a plan. I was going to apply to graduate school. I would help people. But help people do what? What could I do? That terrible sensation I felt earlier in Nick’s seized me again. Suspended in midair. Stuck. “I don’t know.”

  “I’m so tired. But I can’t sleep. What if I can’t ever sleep again?” She covered her face with her hands. “Can I do this alone?”

  “Oh, Lee.” Then it was gone, all the hope I’d seen in her skirt, sandals, and hair. And I wasn’t sure what she was even asking.

  I thought about a scene in Listen when Whit and Phoebe were in the parking lot outside of a restaurant discussing how lambs are led to slaughter. What they were really talking about, my mother said in speech after speech, was the danger of blind trust in our government during times of war. When I first heard her say this during her speech at the North American Book Award ceremony, I was shocked. If that was what she intended, if the scene was really about war, why didn’t she just write it that way? Why did it have to be hidden in this other scene? At age eleven, I wanted people to be direct, to say and do what they wanted.