The Six Rules of Maybe

her house; he followed behind her, their fingertips touching. The Saint Georges were not home, and I imagined the empty house. Orderly rooms. Buster, the sausage-fat bulldog, too lazy to follow them up the stairs. And I stopped my imagining there. They were due their privacy, even in my mind, and I later saw Kevin Frink leave the house with his head down as he zipped up his jacket and headed to his car. He was smiling. The curtains of Fiona Saint George’s room were open just enough for her to watch him drive away.
    The romance between Kevin Frink and Fiona Saint George was going better than I could have ever expected. I was actually happy about it. I didn’t stop to think about the things that might happen when you lit the personal fuse of a Bomb Boy, when you led two breakable people into the dangerous territory that was love.
    If everyone right then was working hard for love, if Hayden was and Nicole and Reilly Ogden and Dean Neuhaus and Kevin Frink, well, I guess I was too. Or working hard not to love. Because that’s what my feelings for Hayden were, love. Wrong or stupid or forever hidden—still, love. I would watch the way his thoughts showed themselves across his face like a movie screen, notice how the sun made his hair turn from brown to gold. He took care of things—fetched cold drinks and watered forgotten plants and noticed when Zeus’s feelings were hurt. Crush was flimsy and unfair and inaccurate. I knew why I loved him.
    The feelings were good and awful at the same time, pressing against my insides, begging to be let out. I knew when you had that particular combination, the sweet and the terrible, the terrible always won out eventually. So I would write postcards and letters for the Clive Weaver project and try not to become distracted by that photograph on my wall—Hayden with his eyes closed and his face full of that moment when we sat on the rocks. I folded paper cranes for Clive Weaver and began to fold them for myself. I stood on my bed and hung them from my ceiling with strings and small bits of tape.
    Sitting on the rock at Point Perpetua, I had felt an ease with Hayden that I was unfamiliar with. But I had been wrong then. I was still on a rope bridge, all right, one with fraying knots and old jute. He was my sister’s husband, and even if she didn’t love him, he wasn’t mine. I could stand on that bridge with all my wants and desires, but beneath me, there were the raging waters and the hard fall of heartbreak.
    One thing I knew, straightforward ease did not cause you to awaken night after night, did not cause you to turn the knob of the front door and walk out to the only place that was really yours, your own truck, so that you could lean against it and feel the comfort of it. Straightforward ease did not cause others to go out after you because they worried, because some part of them wanted to save you, because they knew you deserved better.
    Sometimes we would talk.
    “We are the worst pair of insomniacs,” he said once.
    I nodded, though I’d never had trouble sleeping before, not until he came and I would lie awake and listen for the sound of him, or sometimes, go outside myself first in hopes he might appear. “It’s the curse of the busy head,” I said. “They could make a horror movie with that title.”
    “Too bad busy heads aren’t given mandatory work hours. Nine to five, no overtime,” he said.
    “Otherwise, fired.” I slashed the air.
    “We’ve got to be more strict with our heads.”
    “Absolutely.” I shivered, even though the night was warm. “A mind is a tyrant.” Mine was, anyway. Sometimes, I got so sick of being in my own head, it would have been nice to be anywhere else for a while. I wished for a mind that was peaceful and orderly, like a well-run office. Mine was more like a hospital emergency room.
    The smell of Hayden’s cigarette rose up and wandered off. It was one bad habit he had, a habit Juliet wrongly appreciated. I imagined her curling up to him when he came back to bed, her head on his chest, the smell she liked on his breath.
    “So, what brings you in to see the doctor today,” I said.
    “Hmn. I’m afraid I have a chronic desire to save people.” He put his hand through his curls and they fell back to where they’d been before. He wore cargo shorts low on his hips, the loose, soft-looking sea-green T-shirt he loved. That wedding ring, catching the streetlight.
    “I know about that,” I said. “I’ve got it too. Maybe