The Six Rules of Maybe

I could feel his heart beating in his chest, could smell the clean cotton of his soft green T-shirt. I pulled away, met his eyes. He brought me to him again, and I only felt his lips on my forehead.
    “I will always want the best for you,” he said.
    It was Juliet he loved, Juliet he wanted, Juliet that his heart was full of—as unfair as that seemed, as unworthy as she was, there was another truth besides mine, and that’s the way it was. All the will and desire in the world couldn’t change the facts of a person’s heart. Hope was a beacon but it also had the strength of a bully.
    Hayden got into the truck, slammed the door. He leaned out the window. “Thank you for everything you’ve done for me, Miss Scarlet,” he said.
    There’s that moment before your heart is about to break, when it rushes forward in your chest as if to plead, please, please, don’t. My body felt all heart, so much so that I could barely breathe. Please, I wanted to cry, but no sound came out, my heart was in my throat, too. I could be destroyed right there if he were to turn that key and go.
    But he did turn that key. Over the sound of the truck’s engine, he said, “Tell that fucking ice-cream man to get another job already,” but his voice was cracked and his eyes teary.
    Hayden’s truck wasn’t going to go, wouldn’t, couldn’t back outof that driveway, but it did. It did; it backed out and drove forward down our street. Hayden gave a wave of good-bye out the window, and a loss so great overtook me, sucked me up; I could feel something ripping inside me—grief, loosening its tight hold. The loss was so huge it was bigger than Hayden even, bigger than one human could account for, bigger than every disappointment and every separation, big enough for my father, finally, because at its center was the most hollow and lonely abandonment—long, empty stretches of it, of aloneness, of being left behind by someone bigger than you who filled you, whom you had hoped, hoped, hoped was solid enough to make you feel safe.
    I saw Zeus’s sweet head in the passenger seat disappear as they turned the corner. We didn’t even get to say good-bye.

Chapter Twenty-six
    J uliet returned that very afternoon, as soon as she had called home and found out from our mother that Hayden was gone. She’d used up the last part of her last check from the Grosvenor Hotel, staying in the Tide Away Inn in Anacortes, just on the other side of the ferry.
    I didn’t want to look at her shiny blond hair and her large stomach where she was supposed to be keeping our baby safe. She moved back up to her old room, where I could hear her moving around, settling clothes into her old drawers, putting things back on the dresser where they’d always been. We would sleep right next door to each other, pass each other on the way to and from breakfast and dinner, but I would avoid her. Her presence reminded me of what, who, wasn’t there. It reminded me of what she’d already taken from Jitter. If Hayden was goodness, she was badness and the reason goodness was gone. Juliet felt like the worst kind of intruder, like the one we had let in instead of Hayden, the one who had finally decided toset a match to our house.
    Mom seemed to go on like she had before, working and tending to Juliet, making sure she ate and napped, putting her hands on either side of Juliet’s great belly and watching the rolls of Jitter’s round heel or elbow. But something had changed. Mom was more wary with Juliet; she kept her distance and watched, the way you watch something that you’re unsure of from a slight way off.
    The neighborhood felt colorless, and my sadness made everything feel slow and heavy and without purpose. We didn’t see much of the new neighbors; we only heard the motorcycle rev up and leave to go to work and only smelled the smell of blackberries cooking on a stove and warm wax. I didn’t call Jesse or Nicole or Jasmine or anyone else, and I worked at Quill only two days out of those weeks. I was in the self-imposed exile of sorrow and didn’t feel the energy for anything but the back lawn chair and magazines. I didn’t take pictures, didn’t want to capture anything. My psychology books seemed too much, even—too much understanding and no understanding, too many answers and no real answers.
    I went to Point Perpetua one afternoon. I sat on my rock with the clouds lying low over the sea in front of me. I opened the green bag from Jesse, took out the book with