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  “Is that possible?” I asked. But then I didn’t know how to be any clearer than that. I wasn’t sure how to put into words what I thought I meant. “Like . . . even if nothing huge happened?”

  “Anything’s possible. Sure, a person can just be depressed. Maybe his parents grew up hard and they haven’t even begun to heal the insides of themselves. And then yeah, sure. He can grow up hard, too. I don’t know because I don’t know him. But it’s not always about big stuff happening to us. Not as much as people think, anyway. Could just be his brain chemistry or a bunch of little things adding up big.”

  I sat quiet a minute.

  Then I said, “So what do I do?”

  She looked at me like I was crazy. Stone crazy. Like I’d just told her I see flying monkeys or some weird vision like that.

  “What?” I asked, feeling defensive.

  “Well, first of all . . . you obviously weren’t listening yesterday. I told you. You can’t make somebody leave and you can’t make them stay.”

  “You said I couldn’t with you.”

  She sighed. “With anybody. And another thing. You’re looking for advice on keeping a friend alive. So you go to a person who tried suicide a few days ago and might try it again tomorrow. Does that sound like good sense to you?”

  I stood.

  My face was burning as I stared down at her. Partly because she was chastising me for not making good sense. Partly because she’d just told me she might try it again tomorrow.

  “Okay,” I said. “Got it. I’ll go now.”

  But I was only two or three steps into leaving when she stopped me with a single word.

  “Kid.”

  I turned back. Waited.

  “Just be a good friend to him. Might work. Might not. But it’s really the only shot available to you.”

  I didn’t say thank you. I didn’t say anything. Because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to talk to her anymore. It felt like such a minefield, everything that happened when the lady was around. Or even sometimes when she wasn’t around, like that moment with her daughter. When Zoe Dinsmore was involved, things got explosive.

  I just nodded.

  Then I ran home.

  I managed to drag Connor out to the park, but it was a mistake. I knew I should have left well enough alone as soon as we got there and those two guys were there. The ones I beat by a step or two at the track tryout. They were on the other side, on this hilly part of the grass, but it was a small neighborhood park, so they were closer than I would’ve liked. They were playing tackle football with two other guys I had seen but didn’t really know.

  And they were aware of my presence. That much was uncomfortably clear.

  I had my bat along, and a couple of softballs. In case Connor hit one of them out of the park and we never found it. Connor wasn’t what you might call a star athlete, but he did have his moments as a surprisingly good hitter. He swung hard and missed plenty. He was just as likely to strike out as connect with the ball. But when he connected . . . man. His swing was unreal. Home run nearly every time.

  I thought it might be good for him to play at something he was good at for a change. I didn’t think till later that his massive hits might have had something to do with anger boiling up.

  I also hadn’t factored in the guys who were sneering at me.

  “Come on,” I said to Connor. Ignoring them. I handed him the bat. “You’re up first. I’ll pitch you some.”

  I paced off the distance I thought should represent home base to mound.

  When I turned around to face Connor, I was face to face with those two guys. They had abandoned their game and walked over, following me across the grass.

  “Hey, Speedy Gonzales,” one of them said. The one who’d snickered at me for not knowing how to use starting blocks.

  “What?” I said, already not liking the feel of this. Already with a bad sense of where this was headed.

  “See that guy?”

  “What guy?”

  He pointed over to one of the boys in his four-person football game. He had wandered closer, too, and was standing maybe ten steps away. I didn’t know where the fourth guy was. I didn’t see him anymore.

  The guy in question raised his hand and waved at me. Not in a friendly way. More like, “Yeah. Me.”

  “What about him?” I asked, noticing that my throat was feeling tight.

  “His name is Arnie.”

  “That’s nice,” I said, trying to sound casual. I don’t think it was working.

  “He used to have a spot on the track team. But now he doesn’t. Guess why not?”

  I knew why not. It was pretty obvious. The coach had given me a spot and then dropped his slowest guy. It wasn’t my fault that Arnie was his slowest guy. It didn’t make me feel guilty or like I’d done something I shouldn’t have. But that was on the inside. On the outside, I figured I’d better come out with something better than “Who cares?” or “Not my problem.”

  “Look,” I said. “I don’t even want to be on the damn team. It wasn’t my idea to try out. Coach made me. I’m not even going to take the spot come fall. I’m going to get out of it somehow.”

  While I talked, he moved closer to me. Menacingly, like he was trying to intimidate me into backing up.

  Over his shoulder I saw Connor making wild pointing gestures. And I knew what he was trying to tell me. Maybe it was just really good pointing, or maybe it was because I’d known Connor for so long, but I read him loud and clear. There was something behind me.

  My guess was that one of them was crouching down back there, and as Snicker Boy forced me to back up, I’d fall backward over him.

  So I didn’t back up.

  I stood my ground as he got closer and closer. Until his nose was nearly touching mine. I could feel every muscle in my body tight like a drawn bow, but I wasn’t in a complete state of panic. Because I really didn’t think he was going to hurt me. Trip me, make me fall down, laugh at me. Yeah. But there were cars going by. Lots of them. Lots of drivers who lived in this small town. Nobody was going to get seriously hurt.

  “Says you,” he said.

  He seemed to be losing patience with my unwillingness to play the game.

  He took one step back, reached out with the palms of both hands, and pushed me hard in the chest. I flew backward. And, sure enough, his idiot friend was crouched back there. I just kept falling until I was on my back in the grass, staring up at the sky.

  By the time I’d scrambled to my feet, Connor was flying across the grass. And I do mean flying.

  He hit Snicker Boy with his full weight and brought him down, probably more with the element of surprise than anything else. Connor fell with him, fell on top of him. Then he raised himself to his knees and started swinging. Snicker Boy was so caught off guard that all he could really do was try to cover his head with his hands.

  Then one of the other boys pulled Connor off the kid.

  But Connor wasn’t done. Not even close.

  He turned around and started punching the boy in the head. Lefts and rights, both. Over and over.

  Now, I’m not defending those guys. They were idiots. But all they’d wanted to do was cause me to fall on my ass, laugh at me, and then walk away. Nobody—with the exception of Connor—had meant to escalate the thing to this level. But, let’s face facts. You can only punch a guy in the head just so many times before he swings back.

  The guy swung back.

  He connected with Connor’s jaw so hard that I heard it from ten steps away. Connor flew backward and landed in the grass, holding his jaw.

  All four guys laughed at him.

  Then they turned their backs on us and walked off laughing. And that should have been the end of that whole disaster.

  It wasn’t.

  Connor rolled over, launched to his feet, and picked up my bat. And he went after the guys with it.

  It’s times like that it pays to be really fast.

  I caught him with an arm around his waist, and spu
n him around, and brought him down to the grass again. Brought us both down.

  As I did, I looked around for possible assistance. Just my luck. In that moment, there was no one going by.

  I managed to wrestle the bat away from him.

  I looked up to see the boys looking down on us. They had walked part of the way back to stare. And get off one parting shot.

  “Your friend is a freak,” Snicker Boy said. “What the hell’s wrong with him? You oughta keep that freak on a leash.”

  Then they turned and walked away.

  “Is it swollen?” he asked on the walk home, turning his jaw toward me to give me a better view. And leaning in, as if I were half-blind. It was the third time he had asked. “Is it starting to look bruised?”

  “It’s a little swollen,” I said.

  The first two times I had said no. But now it was beginning to swell, and no amount of positive thinking could convince me I was only imagining it. And I wasn’t going to outright lie to him.

  “I just don’t know what I’m supposed to tell my mom,” he said.

  “Maybe she won’t notice. It’s kind of dark in your house.”

  “She’s pretty good at noticing stuff.”

  We walked in silence for a time. I could see his jaw working as he ground his molars together. Maybe he was testing it to see how much it hurt. Maybe he was just grinding his teeth with stress.

  “For me, I don’t even really care,” he said. “But my mom worries about me. She can’t handle it when she thinks I’m not safe.”

  “Can I do anything to help you with telling her?”

  “No!” he said. Shouted, actually. “No, you should go home. It’s better if I talk to her alone.”

  “Tell her it was an accident. We were playing touch football, and you tripped and landed on a rock.”

  “That’s good!” I watched his eyes change. Soften. To something slightly less fierce than a suddenly uncaged jungle animal. “She’ll tell me a billion times to be more careful, but it won’t break her heart like if she thinks somebody hit me. Yeah. Thanks. That’s good.”

  We were almost back at his house, and he stopped dead in the middle of the sidewalk. And I knew he didn’t want me to walk any closer with him. I have no idea how I knew. But I knew. Sometimes, when you’re really good friends with somebody, you just know, and they don’t have to say much out loud.

  I opened my mouth to ask him why he’d gone after those guys the way he did.

  Then I closed it again.

  First of all, he’d done it for me. I hated to sound ungrateful. And, also, though I could not have formed it into coherent words at the time, the truth was painfully clear. Something had popped the cork on a bigger bottle of anger than the situation warranted.

  “Good luck,” I said.

  He looked into my face for a weird length of time. It was starting to feel spooky.

  “Please don’t make me go out anymore,” he said. It was as sincere a plea as I had heard in my young life to that date. “Please?”

  “I won’t. I promise.”

  He walked into his house to face the music, and I walked home to mine. To face the fighting.

  My parents were indeed fighting when I got home, so I locked myself in my room. And I wrote a letter to Roy. Even though I hadn’t heard back from him since my last letter.

  Dear Roy,

  I think this is kind of a weird thing to say to your big brother. And I think, if we were both home and I said this to you, you’d probably laugh at me or hang me up on the coatrack by my shirt or something. But you’re not home. That’s the problem.

  I love you.

  I’m sorry. I just had to say that, because I’ve been thinking about it but I can’t remember if I ever did. Tell you, I mean.

  Be careful, and please come home.

  Your brother,

  Lucas

  Chapter Seven

  I’m Alive

  When I got out there the following morning, Mrs. Dinsmore was nowhere to be found. And the dogs were gone. It was a jolt I felt right down through my gut and below.

  I thought maybe she had put the dogs somewhere and . . . I don’t know. Taken them to the pound, maybe. Or done something to herself and then one of her daughters had . . . Well, it’s hard to recount what I was thinking. It was just a lot of thoughts flying in a lot of directions. All terrible.

  I panicked.

  I started running through the woods, yelling for the dogs. Yelling both of their names. But I had no idea of a direction, so I was more or less running in circles, flipping the hell out. If there was ever a better example of a human imitating a beheaded chicken, I haven’t seen it to this day.

  After a minute or two of that insanity Vermeer appeared out of nowhere and gave me a strange look, with her head tilted. As if to say, “What on earth are you so upset about?”

  Then she turned back into the woods, stopping once to look over her shoulder at me. To see if I was going to follow. I followed, my heart still banging around in my chest.

  She led me back to Rembrandt and Mrs. Dinsmore. The lady was sitting on a little folding chair, on a high hillock of ground that looked down through hundreds of trees at a snippet of the river. She had an artist’s easel in front of her, and she was painting the forest.

  She was a good painter.

  I sat down on the ground next to her, still trying to settle my heart and breathing. She knew I was there. I could tell. But she didn’t look directly at me or say anything. She just painted.

  I liked the way she handled the light.

  The sun was just barely showing behind a sea of leaves. And she had painted that, though the sun was higher in real life than on her canvas. She must’ve been out there working for a long time. The rays extended in a circle, clearer in a few places where gaps in the leaves let them through. It wasn’t perfectly realistic, the way she had painted it. Not exactly like a photograph. It was . . . more somehow. A little more than the real sun. A little bit stylized. But she had certainly captured it.

  “I like the way you do light,” I said.

  At first she only grunted.

  Then she said, “Thanks. What were you yelling about back there?”

  “Oh. I didn’t know where you were. Or where the dogs had gone.”

  “What did you think?”

  “I don’t want to talk about what I thought.”

  I watched her work in silence for a minute, Rembrandt’s big head in my lap.

  “I wrote to my brother,” I said. A minute or two later. “Said what I needed to say.”

  “Good.”

  “I mean, he hasn’t seen it yet. I only just dropped it in the mailbox this morning. It takes forever for mail to get back and forth.”

  “Government work,” she said.

  “I’m not sure what that means.”

  “It means government never works very well.”

  “Oh.”

  Another long silence. I watched her work for more than a minute on one leaf. Just the way the light touched that one leaf out of hundreds. The part of the painting that should have been river was still blank white canvas. I wondered if she didn’t want to paint that part. I wondered if she’d be happier if I went away and left her to work in peace.

  “And I tried to be a good friend to my friend,” I said. “But I didn’t do a very good job of it.”

  “But you tried,” she said.

  I wasn’t sure if I had her full attention or not. It was hard to tell.

  “But the problem was, I tried to get him to do things that would be the right things for me to do. But I don’t think they were the right things for him. I was trying to help him the way I thought he should be helped, but he’s not me.”

  She let her brush hand fall to her side and looked over at me. For the first time that morning. Really studied my face.

  “What?” I said. “Did I say something wrong?”

  “No. Not at all. You just said something very intelligent. Something that puts you ahead
of most of the adults I know.”

  “Oh.” I hadn’t expected anything like a compliment from her, and it caught me off guard. “Why do I do that?”

  “Do what?”

  “Try to take responsibility for everything and fix everybody.”

  “What makes you think I know?”

  “Not sure. You just seem to know things.”

  She sighed. Scratched her nose with the back of her hand, probably to avoid getting paint on her face. “Sometimes when a kid’s got nobody really running things in his life, he’ll decide to take over and take charge of everything. Otherwise the world just seems to be spinning out of control. That seem to hit a note in you?”

  I didn’t want to say how much it did, so I just said, “You know, I could go away and leave you alone if you’d rather just paint in peace.”

  She sighed, and began to pack up her paints into a tote bag by her feet.

  “No, that’s okay. That’s enough for one day anyway. I’ve been out here for hours. Enough is enough.”

  I helped her pack up, and I carried her folding chair. She slung the straps of the tote bag over one shoulder and carried the wet canvas carefully. And we walked back to the cabin together.

  “What will you do with it when you’re done painting it?” I asked.

  “No idea,” she said.

  “I didn’t see any paintings hanging up in the cabin.”

  “I don’t hang them up.”

  “Do you sell them?”

  “Not really. My daughters have a few. There are some out in the shed.”

  I looked up to see that we were almost back at the cabin. And I knew suddenly that I wanted to say something to her. And that it was important. And that I didn’t have very much time. With Mrs. Dinsmore, you never wanted to assume you could tell her tomorrow.

  “I think you should stay,” I said.

  She stopped walking. Shot me an odd look without really turning her head.

  “Stay where?”

  “You know. Not . . . go.”

  “Oh. That kind of stay.”

  “Yeah. That kind of stay.”