Stay With Me Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-seven

  Twenty-eight

  Twenty-nine

  Thirty

  Thirty One

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books By Freymann-Weyr

  COPYRIGHT © 2006 BY GARRET FREYMANN-WEYR

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PUBLISHED IN THE UNITED STATES BY GRAPHIA, AN IMPRINT OF

  HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS. ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN HARD-

  COVER IN THE UNITED STATES BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY, BOSTON, IN 2006.

  FOR INFORMATION ABOUT PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE SELECTIONS FROM THIS BOOK, WRITE TO

  PERMISSIONS, HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY, 215 PARK AVENUE SOUTH,

  NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10003.

  GRAPHIA AND THE GRAPHIA LOGO ARE REGISTERED TRADEMARKS

  OF HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY.

  WWW.HOUGHTONMIFFLINBOOKS.COM

  THE TEXT OF THIS BOOK IS SET IN VENETIAN.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOCINC-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  FREYMANN-WEYR, GARRET, 1965–

  STAY WITH ME / BY GARRET FREYMANN-WEYR.

  P. CM.

  SUMMARY: WHEN HER SISTER KILLS HERSELF, SIXTEEN-YEAR-OLD LEILA GOES

  LOOKING FOR A REASON AND, INSTEAD, DISCOVERS GREAT LOVE, HER

  FAMILY'S TRUE HISTORY, AND WHAT HER OWN PLACE IN IT IS.

  ISBN 0-618-88404-1 (PAPERBACK)

  [1. SISTERS—FICTION. 2. SUICIDE—FICTION. 3.INTERPERSONAL RELATIONS

  —FICTION. 4. NEW YORK (N.Y.)—FICTION.] I. TITLE.

  PZ7.W5395ST 2006

  [FIC]—DC22

  2005010754

  ISBN-13: 978-0618-60571-2 (HARDCOVER)

  ISBN-13: 978-0618-88404-9 (PAPERBACK)

  MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  HAD 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  BUT YOU ARE, YOU KNOW, YOU WERE, THE NEAREST THING TO A REAL STORY TO HAPPEN IN MY LIFE.

  Renata Adler

  For Tara and Teddie,

  my First great loves

  One

  I DON'T THINK THIS IS WHERE ANYONE ELSE WOULD BEGIN, BUT IT'S THE EXACT RIGHT PLACE FOR ME.

  Before she died, I used to spend time with my father's first wife. We had tea and very thin slices of gingerbread at her apartment on the West Side. Janie, as she insisted I call her, was often away for work (she worked right up until the end, right through chemo, right until she couldn't leave the hospital), and so we had no set time for our meetings. But we had an understanding that when she was in town, she would call me and I would come over.

  I suppose it was an unusual arrangement, but I think its unusualness was the very thing that made it appealing to her. For me the visits were important because I hoped Janie would help me to know my two older sisters somewhat better than I did. After all, my own mother had taught me valuable things—carpentry, cleaning up a bloody nose, how to change a tire on the side of a highway. If you knew my mother, you would kind of know me.

  I'm not sure Janie taught me what she had taught my sisters, but I did learn little things about them from her. For example, Rebecca rarely returned phone calls, but Clare would stay late at the office until she had read every fax, returned every call, and made a to-do list for the next day. Rebecca liked any and all ice cream but Clare almost never ate dessert.

  "And when she does, she does not eat it out of the carton," Janie said during one visit when she'd been too busy to buy cake. Which was why we were eating a half-empty pint of coffee chip with two spoons. Something Rebecca might do, apparently, but never Clare.

  Sometimes Janie told me things that had nothing to do with my sisters. Things which sounded useful without my being sure they were. When I asked her about the first date she and Da had, Janie told me that she and Da had been introduced by one of those men whom everyone knew. They were at a cocktail party and. Julian (Da's real name) asked if she'd allow him to buy her dinner.

  Yes, she said, she would.

  At the restaurant, he told her he knew she probably wouldn't order the cheapest thing on the menu for fear of offending him. However, since it was clearly the only good thing on the menu (Janie said it was a cheese and egg dish), he was going to order it and hoped she would too.

  "I knew in that moment that I had been right to leave the party with him," Janie told me.

  I loved everything about this story. That she was probably dressed up, that he asked permission to buy her dinner and that they both knew a man known by everyone. The way Janie had said everyone made me think that it meant something else entirely. What I didn't understand was how she could offend Julian by ordering something cheap.

  "You never order the cheapest item while on a date," Janie said. "It might make him think you're worried he can't afford to buy you dinner."

  It seemed to me that he would notice the price only if he couldn't afford to buy you dinner. In any event, my mother had always told me that when I started dating I should split the check so that I would never feel obligated to a man. Or to a boy. Or, as she was careful to put it, to whomever. Mom believes that it's best to be open-minded until you have all the facts. Then you can form a judgment. As I immediately did upon hearing Janie's explanation.

  "You can't order the cheapest thing on a date?" I asked her, laughing. "That's ridiculous."

  "I suppose it is," Janie said. "But you just don't do it."

  I felt my sisters had gone out into the world equipped with information I had no idea how to use. Their lives seemed so far removed from mine and I wondered if I could close this gap by absorbing everything Janie said.

  I always meant to ask Da who had taught him this ordering rule that I now knew. Only I didn't want to tell him I had been asking Janie about their first date. I didn't really want to remind him that I saw her. Our visits had begun four years ago, when I was twelve and my seventh grade English tearcher had decided I was not slow or lazy or unmotivated. I was not even stupid. The right word, it turned out, was dyslexic.

  This means, among other things, that I see letters backwards as easily as forward. That I stand on street corners incapable of telling left from right. That I worry beyond reason over the proper order of things. Over beginnings and ends. I read really slowly and often can't figure out what I've read.

  Tell me something and I'll remember it, repeat it, and even write it down, although the spelling might be questionable. Wednesday always gives me pause (what's the first d there for?). Also any -ough words: enough, though, throughout, and forget the whole i before e rule. If I knew when they were pronounced ay as in neighbor or weigh, I wouldn't have a problem in the first place.

  Clare and Rebecca also had dyslexia, but theirs was somewhat less crippling than mine. When janie and Julian were still married, he decided that the girls' learning disorders were inherited from Janie.

  "I should be grateful he was willing to blame the eating disorders on society," she said.

  Clare was anorexic in high school and Rebecca threw up all through college. I'm not impossibly thin like
Clare, but I'm thin enough and have the advantage of both liking food and eating it.

  News of my dyslexia traveled through the girls, as Da and Janie called them, to their mother. As I was now evidence that the dyslexia wasn't her fault, Janie told Rebecca that she owed me a good turn. Was there anything, in particular, Janie wanted to know, that I might want? A sweater, maybe? Perfume? Earrings?

  "I'd like to meet your mother," I said to Rebecca, who was the only person to whom I'd ever be able to admit this.

  Of the girls, Rebecca was my favorite because her interest in me was, while sporadic, believable. Clare, with an elegant kindness I was sure she'd learned from Janie, let me know that she would prefer a certain distance between us. Nothing personal, understand, she seemed to say, it's simply easier this way. I understood.

  In a way, I was even grateful, because Clare's coolness allowed me to focus on Rebecca. My oldest sister's reputation as the family screwup and lost, secretive soul turned her tiny frame into a figure of importance and authority.

  "You want to meet Janie? Wouldn't you like a real present?" she asked me, thinking I was going to hold out for theater tickets. Or a new sweater.

  Rebecca was thirty-four at the time, getting divorced, and barely talking to her parents.

  "Are you sure?" she asked.

  "Yes," I said, surprised that this was not more obvious to everyone.

  After all, my father's great love was not with my mother but with theirs. Janie and Julian's marriage didn't just produce my sisters, but a great ruin. When I found him, he was ruined, is exactly how my mother puts it. She means that he missed my sisters and was distracted by being lonely and confused. But I think something else was going on.

  Da had apparently spent the three years between Janie's leaving and his meeting Mom by working all the time and going to the opera at night. Or staying home on the weekends he didn't have Clare and Rebecca with him and listening to big, sad music. He still has the albums even though we don't have a record player. They're all by Mahler or have the word requiem in them.

  It's heartbreak music. The kind of heartbreak you get when you love someone who no longer loves you. It's not only the records that make me think love ruined him. Da has, in his study, a shelf of photographs from his life with Janie. They're mostly of the girls, but there's one with Janie in it that's my favorite.

  Julian and Janie are standing in front of the ocean with Clare between them. Janie is wearing her sunglasses like a headband and Clare has a paper party hat on. Julian's hand is on Janie's shoulder and they're looking down at Clare, but also at each other. Something in my father's expression—a kind of drunken bliss—tells you: here was a great love. A love that was big, sweeping, and, in the end, impossible. But no matter the end, it was here. Right between them.

  Da still got very quiet whenever Janie's name came up and he always put off calling her back when they had to talk about my sisters (a new boyfriend, a job, a medical thing or an apartment). I know he loves my mother. You can hear it in the way he calls her name—letting the I roll slowly into the s of Elsa. But I thought he could love Mom while also still having his great love be Janie. Of course, maybe I was wrong and that great love had vanished the minute they split up.

  Since I had not been there to see or hear it for myself, I felt free to make up certain things. One way or another, I wanted to know the story of before. Then I might feel like less of a stranger when my sisters and my father were together.

  "We aren't strangers," my mother would say. "It's that they were a part of him first. It's not better, it's just first."

  I knew she was right and Da was still with us, while his life with Janie was gone. But it had existed, and in a way, I came from it as much as Clare and Rebecca did. I looked at old photos, at my sisters, and on occasion at Da himself, and easily imagined what had held them and Janie together. Before it flung them apart.

  A great love and a great ruin.

  The very best information I had about Janie and Julian came from Rebecca, who had told me how Da spent the years between his marriages. The great love photograph itself was one Rebecca took on her twelfth birthday. The camera was a present from her parents and the frosting on her cake was, she said, full of sand. When I told Rebecca that yes, I wanted to meet her mother, I must have thought Janie could help me take stories which didn't belong to me and make them mine.

  There were two important stories that Rebecca could not—or would not—help me with. The first concerned two hotels my father's family had owned since the early 1900s. They were lost long before my sisters were born. The hotel in Spain was sold to pay the debts of a gambling cousin. The bigger one in Egypt, where Da grew up, had to be sold when life there for Jews became impossible. The hotel in Alexandria has become a government building, but the one in Barcelona is still open for guests.

  As far as Abranel family history goes, the story of the lost hotels belongs to Clare. She has the only photographs of them and she's the lawyer for a man who owns lots of hotels. She treats hotels like living, breathing things. The happiest I've ever seen her was talking about a contract that would deliver heated towel racks to hotels in Germany. If I told her I loved the lost hotels, that I had plans to visit them one day, she would be offended. They are hers to long for.

  The other story Rebecca wouldn't speak of concerned the wide scars on the insides of her arms, which ran down toward her hands. She'd cut open her wrists two years before I was born and though I knew certain external details of the incident, which is how Da and Clare described it, I didn't know why she did it. Mother said that she doubted Rebecca herself knew, but I was sure there was a reason. An unwritten, secret story that Rebecca was waiting to tell me.

  I certainly didn't think Janie would tell me about the incident, and I knew that the hotels were lost before she ever met my father. But I was anxious to check reality against my imagination. Against a birthday photograph from twenty-plus years ago. I never really knew why Janie agreed to meet me and my parents had no reason to object. It was easily arranged.

  One meeting might have been enough for both of us, but since Janie was a lighting designer and I had recently figured out that plays were made for dyslexics, we developed other reasons for talk and tea and sweets.. Plays have a structure built into them that helps me to keep events and characters straight. So it's easy to keep track of the order. Janie knew a lot about plays and I had a lot of questions. I had joined the drama department's tech crew at school, but it wasn't enough to build the sets. I wanted my ideas to be the ones that got built.

  My mother could and did help me with the actual set building. From her I learned how to work with a blueprint. How to calculate weight and support. To shop for supplies and to let my hands lead me through the process. But Mom could not read a play and see the set.

  Janie could do that. She could immediately see how to close the gap between a great idea and the impossibility of building it. Conversations with Janie were full of How about just a hint of that? or Have you thought of working around this? or Lighting will fix it. I often brought my ideas to Janie and she was the one who taught me never to start designing sets for the entire play.

  "Find a scene," she said. "Or better yet, a corner of a scene. One person's single action. What are they doing and where are they doing it? Build your set on a tiny moment."

  "Just one?" I asked her. "How do you know which to pick?"

  "You start with a detail that most grabs your attention and move out," Janie said. "Don't impose your big idea on the play. For—"

  "For the play itself is the big idea," I said, finishing for her.

  Janie and Da both spoke in absolutes which were easy to remember but required, Rebecca said, more doubt than faith. The girls found my attachment to their mother hilariously peculiar and were forever trying to dilute it just a little. From Rebecca I found out that Janie had greeted the news of my mother's pregnancy by saying, Julian's back-up plan. And Clare told me that her mother had remarked that my name, Leila (from th
e Persian meaning "dark as night"), was pretentious but serviceable.

  I thought Janie's comments were interesting. Up until I heard them, I had worried that I was the one daughter for whom Julian had not planned. Perhaps I was a back-up to my sisters, but since the girls didn't always like Da so much, maybe expanding his plan was smart. And the only thing I had ever had to say about my name was the rather lame I am not a rock song to people who called me Lay-la instead of Lee-la. Besides, as far as I was concerned, after all the time she'd spent talking to me about her work, Janie could pretty much say what she wanted. Clearly my sisters, into their thirties by the time I was ten, had forgotten just how precious attention is from a grownup who is not your parent.

  I asked Janie about leaving my father only once.

  "You look happy in the pictures," I said. "What happened?"

  She was quiet for so long that I thought she was coming up with a polite way to tell me I was being rude. Instead she went to a cabinet in her bookshelves, opened it and poured herself a brandy. She did not add ice. Or water.

  "How does it go? 'Things fall apart,'" she said, once she had sat back down. "Wait, no. Throwing poetry at you is exactly what Julian would do."

  Da does quote poetry rather a lot. I don't mind because, in poems, the meaning doesn't come from the order. And everyone gets confused reading poetry. Not just people like me.

  "When things end, what matters is not that everything's in pieces," Janie finally said. "It's how you decide to carry them."

  I thought that as nonanswers go, this one was pretty cool because she was miles away from saying that when love died, you picked yourself up and made the best of things. That you carried ruin with you was surely something I already knew from watching my father, but it seemed more believable spelled out by Janie.

  It took a while, but I did find the poem. The one that she wouldn't quote. Things fall apart. It's not about divorce or great love; more a certain kind of violence. It's the first thing I think about when the city is attacked. And when Rebecca succeeds in killing herself. Pills this time. No scars, but no surviving either.