Stay (ARC) Read online

  A DVA NCE R E A DER’S COPY — U NCOR R EC TED PROOF

  STAY

  A L S O B Y C A T H E R I N E

  R Y A N H Y D E

  Have You Seen Luis Velez?

  Just After Midnight

  Heaven Adjacent

  The Wake Up

  Allie and Bea

  Say Goodbye for Now

  Leaving Blythe River

  Ask Him Why

  Worthy

  The Language of Hoofbeats

  Pay It Forward: Young Readers Edition

  Take Me with You

  Paw It Forward

  365 Days of Gratitude: Photos from a Beautiful World

  Where We Belong

  Subway Dancer and Other Stories

  Walk Me Home

  Always Chloe and Other Stories

  The Long, Steep Path: Everyday Inspiration from the

  Author of Pay It Forward

  How to Be a Writer in the E-Age: A Self-Help Guide

  When You Were Older

  Don’t Let Me Go

  Jumpstart the World

  Second Hand Heart

  When I Found You

  Diary of a Witness

  The Day I Killed James

  Chasing Windmills

  The Year of My Miraculous Reappearance

  Love in the Present Tense

  Becoming Chloe

  Walter’s Purple Heart

  Electric God/The Hardest Part of Love

  Pay It Forward

  Earthquake Weather and Other Stories

  Funerals for Horses

  STAY

  A Novel

  CATHERINE RYAN HYDE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Lake Union Publishing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Lake Union Publishing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542042406 (hardcover)

  ISBN-10: 1542042402 (hardcover)

  ISBN-13: 9781542042383 (paperback)

  ISBN-10: 1542042380 (paperback)

  Cover design by Shasti O’Leary Soudant

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition

  PART ONE: THEN

  SUMMER 1969

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Tipping Day

  Is it just me, or does everybody have a day in their life

  like the one I’m about to retell? I’m talking about those

  days that act like a fulcrum between everything that came

  before and your brand-new life after.

  It feels a little something like this: When I was a kid, I

  used to like to bust a move on the playground. Boy stuff,

  I suppose. I’d run up to the teeter-totter and jump on the

  “down” seat. The one that was resting in the dirt. Then

  I’d trot up to the middle—the part that sits safely on the

  bar. And then, when I kept going, I’d hit the spot where

  my weight would tip the thing. You know it’s there, you

  anticipate it. You slow your step just a little bit, knowing it’s soon and you’re about to find it. There’s a delicious

  little moment of fear in there, but it’s manageable. Next

  thing you know, you’re being dropped safely back to the

  dirt, but on the other side.

  This day was something like that.

  It was the summer of 1969. I was fourteen.

  * * *

  The day started with a letter from my brother Roy. I

  was always first to the mailbox, and for just that reason.

  3

  Catherine Ryan Hyde

  As soon as I saw that airmail envelope with the APO

  return address—his name scribbled above it: PFC Leroy

  Painter—I felt like there was open space in my chest, a

  lightness for a change. It was always that way.

  I carried it into the house.

  My parents were fighting again.

  Except, really … I don’t even know why I say “again.”

  It was almost more like a “still.” That’s not to say they

  literally fought twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

  My dad went to work on the weekdays, and, let’s face it,

  everybody has to sleep. But it was Saturday morning. They

  were home, and they were awake, so they were fighting.

  I carried the letter upstairs to my room and tried to

  read it.

  It started the way Roy always started his letters to

  me: “Hey buddy.”

  He’d called me Luke all my life, ever since I was born.

  But the previous summer I’d decided I was Lucas. I was

  going to go by Lucas, always, and I insisted. I guess it

  was meant to be a signal to the world that I’d grown up

  and I wanted to be recognized for it. I think it was a hard

  change for Roy to make. I’m not saying he didn’t want to

  call me what I wanted to be called—he wasn’t that kind

  of brother. I just think it didn’t roll off his tongue yet.

  So … buddy.

  Then I tried to read the rest.

  I’d gotten letters from him before with censor marks.

  Or whatever you call them. Standing here now I’d call

  them redactions, but I didn’t know that word at the time.

  Once or twice I’d gotten letters from him with heavy

  black bars over a line or two, like somebody had taken a

  black marker and wiped out a few of my brother’s precious

  4

  Stay

  words home to me. Well … not even “like.” That’s what

  had happened.

  But this letter took redaction into a whole new universe.

  I couldn’t make it out. I didn’t know what he was try-

  ing to say to me, because too much of it was black. Gone.

  It started with complaints about the flies and mosqui-

  toes, especially when he was trying to eat. And then it

  went off in this really serious direction.

  “I know this is kind of upsetting,” it said, “and I’m sorry

  if it’s too much to put on you.” Redaction. “We rolled

  into…” Redaction. “They were our boys. Americans.

  And their bodies were…” Long redaction. “…in the trees,

  upside down…”

  Pretty much from there down it was a sea of black.

  Right up until the last line: “You just can’t unsee a

  thing like that.”

  My stomach tingled and buzzed, thinking about what

  might be under those black bars. I tried and tried to piece

  the narrative together in my brain, but there was just too

  much missing. The army hadn’t left me enough puzzle

  pieces.

  Meanwhile my parents were still fighting downstairs,

  and it was taking a toll on my mental state. A sudden

  crash made me jump. Somebody had thrown something

  breakable. A plate or a vase. Probably my mom. M
y dad

  didn’t have to throw things. He had the weight advantage.

  He was stronger.

  I stared more intensely at the letter. As though that

  had been the problem all along: I just wasn’t looking hard

  enough. But there was nothing left to piece together.

  It reminded me—kind of suddenly, the way a dis-

  jointed thought will hit you out of nowhere—of our late

  5

  Catherine Ryan Hyde

  family dog, Weasel. He’d had this cancerous growth on

  his back leg. The vet had operated twice, but he couldn’t

  get it all. Finally he said he couldn’t do a third operation because there wouldn’t be enough left to stitch together.

  Amazingly, Weasel’s story had a happy ending. His body

  got the best of the cancer, and we don’t know how. He

  just flipped and pinned the damn tumor with his immune

  system, and lived to pass away peacefully of old age.

  I wasn’t sure enough that my brother Roy would have

  a happy ending. Not with all those bullets flying around.

  A couple of months earlier he’d told me one had whizzed

  by so close to his ear that the air of its passing left a tickle he couldn’t seem to shake.

  I dropped the letter suddenly, having reached a break-

  ing point with the noise of the fight. It had been there all along. I had pushed it away. It had pushed back in. Over

  and over. At that moment I lost it. Lost my temper, my

  cool. All sense of reason. I decided it was the noise that

  was keeping me from being able to comprehend what

  Roy was trying to tell me.

  It wasn’t, of course. But it was damned irritating. It

  was also the soundtrack to my young life.

  I stomped out of my room and over to the railing,

  where I stood on the landing and shouted down at them

  with all the voice I could muster.

  “Hey!”

  Silence.

  My mom’s face appeared, staring up at me.

  “What?” she asked. Irritated. “Your father and I are

  trying to work something out.”

  Ha! I thought—and wanted to say. You never work things out. If screaming ever worked anything out, the two of you would understand each other perfectly by now.

  6

  Stay

  “I can’t…,” I began. But the thought stalled along the

  track to wherever it was going. “I’m trying to…”

  But in that moment my anger abandoned me. Just all

  at once like that. I felt deflated. Because it struck me that I could have all the silence in the world and still not know

  what Roy wanted so badly to share with me.

  “What?” she barked, tired of waiting.

  “Nothing,” I said. “I’m going over to Connor’s.”

  * * *

  Connor’s mother answered the door.

  Mrs. Barnes was a woman who had been completely

  abandoned by color. My own mom wore bright red skirts

  or neon yellow blouses, as if she wanted to shock herself—

  and maybe everybody else—into remembering she was

  alive. Connor’s mom must’ve wanted us to forget. Her

  clothes were some kind of grayish tan, not all that different from her skin tone, which was not all that different from

  her long hair worn pulled back into a wide ponytail. It

  reminded me of the old photographs passed down from

  my great-grandmother, taken in the days of sepia tone.

  Except I honestly think the sepia was a stronger color.

  She never smiled. I don’t mean not ever in her life,

  because how could I know that? But in front of me, never.

  And she never looked up or met my eyes. She seemed to

  be speaking to the doormat as she greeted me.

  “Lucas.”

  I honestly wondered how she knew without looking.

  She said my name as though it was a good thing that

  I’d come. But if she was happy to see me, her face didn’t

  know about it.

  “Come in,” she said. “I’ll tell Connor you’re here.”

  7

  Catherine Ryan Hyde

  I followed her down the front hallway toward the stairs.

  A long table lined the hall on my right side, decorated

  with bowls of pine cones and green fir tree boughs. Just

  for a second I reached out to run my finger along it, the

  way I did at home.

  Then I remembered there was no dust.

  In my house there was always a layer of dust on the

  furniture, and I was obsessed with leaving my mark in

  it. Maybe partly as a way of proving I had been there.

  Maybe as a message to my mom that it wouldn’t kill her

  to pick up a rag or a feather duster now and then. But the

  Barneses’ house was relentlessly clean.

  My mind filled with a sudden image. There was some-

  thing heaped on all those surfaces, but it wasn’t dust. It

  was invisible. And it made dust look good in comparison.

  It was … I couldn’t quite get a bead on it at the time,

  and I’m still not sure I’ll choose the right word. Anxiety?

  Desperation?

  I pictured myself picking up some kind of spreading

  tool, like one of those wide putty knives, and smoothing

  off the top of the ugly heaps. Or making them thicker in

  one place or thinner in another. It was just a weird fictional image in my head, but I also think it was some kind of

  red flag for how real that negative energy felt to me.

  I shivered once and shrugged the thoughts away.

  Just as we passed the living room, I saw Connor’s

  father. He was sitting in a stuffed wing chair with his

  head leaned back. He had a folded hand towel over his

  eyes, and on top of it sat a round, pleated ice bag. All the curtains were closed. Even the light in that house, what

  there was of it, seemed to be no color at all.

  “Does he know you’re coming?” Mrs. Barnes asked,

  knocking me back into the moment.

  8

  Stay

  “Um. No. I just decided.”

  There probably should have been more to the sentence

  than that. But there wasn’t.

  “Connor?” she called as we climbed the stairs, her

  voice high and shrill.

  Connor opened the door to his room and stuck his

  head out. And I felt this huge relief. As if I’d been down

  behind enemy lines and he was the first guy I’d seen

  wearing the right uniform. His face softened when he

  saw me. He must have been relieved, too. But I wasn’t

  entirely sure why. Or maybe I knew, but I just didn’t have

  the words for it at the time.

  * * *

  We sat in chairs by his bedroom window, looking out

  over the front yard and the street. We had our feet up on

  the windowsill, but we’d kicked off our sneakers so only

  our socks touched the paint. Mrs. Barnes would’ve had

  a fit if we’d left footprints on the sill.

  I watched him read the letter from Roy. Or, anyway,

  he was staring at it. There wasn’t much there to read.

  He was holding the paper with one hand, his other

  hand brushing over the top of his hair. It was buzzed—

  cut so short that it stuck up on top. He seemed to want

  to play with the fact that he could touch the blunt tips

  of all those hairs.

  We were both wearing jeans
and gray crew socks, but

  his legs were much smaller and more compact than mine.

  It made me feel rangy and a little awkward. Though, to

  be honest, I’d begun admiring my own body by that

  age. Not in any creepy way—just liking the muscles in

  my thighs and upper arms, and the way I could see my

  9

  Catherine Ryan Hyde

  own ribs, but with a sheet of muscle across them, when

  I stood in front of the mirror.

  I was staring at our legs because I didn’t want to stare at

  the letter, or stare at Connor while he stared at the letter.

  “Hmm,” he said.

  “‘Hmm,’ what?”

  “Sounds like he was trying to tell you he saw some-

  thing bad.”

  “Yeah, but what?”

  “No idea.”

  “So I’ll just never know?”

  “I don’t know, Lucas. Maybe you will. Maybe he’ll

  tell you in person.”

  It was a weird thing to say, and I almost called him

  out on it. Like, “Right, I’ll just happen to be in Hanoi

  or Da Nang, and I’ll bump into Roy on a street corner.”

  He hadn’t meant that, of course. He’d probably meant

  when Roy came home. But even that sent my brain in a

  lot of bad directions, because I was beginning to worry

  that Roy might not be coming home. Not everybody’s

  brother was making it back. But there was no way I was

  going to talk about that out loud.

  We didn’t say anything for a long minute, and I was

  bowled over by the silence. Not our silence, the silence

  in the house in general. I wasn’t used to that.

  “It’s so quiet,” I said, my voice a near whisper so as

  not to ruin it.

  “I know,” he said. “I hate it.”

  “How can you hate it? It’s wonderful. You’ve been

  to my house. This is so much better than my parents and

  all that yelling.”

  “At least they’re willing to say things out loud to each

  other.”

  10

  Stay

  “Yeah, but so loud.”

  As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I regretted

  them. It wasn’t funny. I could almost laugh at my parents

  and their battles. Sometimes. But the distance between

  Connor’s parents was the worst thing in his life. It was

  killing him, and I was beginning to see it. I just had no

  idea what to do to help.

  I took the conversation in a whole different direction.

  “You just been sitting here all day like this?”

  “Pretty much,” he said. His voice sounded weighted,