The Six Rules of Maybe

it’s catching.”
    “Not catching enough,” he said. He thought about this. We both did. “The need to rescue …” His words drifted off.
    “I know all about it,” I said. It’s you I want to rescue I wanted tosay but didn’t. It was funny. He saw Juliet in need of saving, when he was the one who needed it most of all. Sometimes, I guess, we couldn’t see past our own intentions.
    “I was even a lifeguard in high school.” He shrugged. It was apologetic. God, he looked good in the streetlight on those summer nights.
    “You were?” I tried to picture this. Maybe for a moment I saw myself pretending to drown. “Did you wear that white stuff on your nose?”
    “Nah. Urban lifeguard myth. Mostly I had to tell little kids to walk, not run.”
    The sky was beautiful, and we were both looking at it. Deep, dark, intense white speckles spread out like the grandest present ever. “That’s it, probably,” he said upward, to the night. “See there? Those people we want to save? They’re the intense flashes of fire across our otherwise empty black sky.” He nodded, as if agreeing with his own self. He sounded like one of his notes then. I could almost see the words written in his firm, small handwriting. Was he right about this? I just thought being a rescuer was who I was, and that helping others was the right thing to do. I didn’t like this idea, that there were people who were sky and people who were stars. I think I wanted to someday be a flash of light across a plane of darkness.
    “I don’t know. Maybe we’re just nice people,” I said. “Not boring ones.”
    He leaned down, stubbed out his cigarette on the driveway, showing the long curve of his back. He held the cigarette butt between his fingers, looked around for somewhere to toss it, then tucked it into his T-shirt pocket instead. Hayden never seemed to mind my presence there at night. Actually, he seemed gladwhen I appeared. I wondered if that’s what us rescuers really wanted—that same feeling of protection offered back to us, just once. Maybe I wanted to give Hayden something because of how badly I wanted him to give me something. In my most private thoughts, too, I sometimes felt like Reilly had—I offered something and Hayden took it, and that had to mean something, didn’t it? I repeated rule four of The Five Rules of Maybe over and over. You had to place hope carefully in your hands.
    “Think about it,” Hayden said. “At the center of the most empty, hollow places there’s a vortex of activity and motion … Astronomy 101.”
    “Are you calling us empty?”
    “I’m just saying that maybe we ought to be making our own vortex, you know? Instead of using everyone else’s? I’ve been thinking about this. I don’t even know how to put words to it. But we could stop getting sucked into every available black hole. We could want things.”
    “We do want things.”
    “For ourselves .”
    What I wanted was to circle my fingers around his wrists, to feel his arms around me, to rest my head on his chest, to breathe the smell of night in his hair. That’s what I wanted for myself. He was looking at me, urging me to hear this thought of his, and I did hear then. Want was a shut door, and I opened it just a small bit, just enough to get through, the way you push a door just a bit with your toe when your arms are too full of other things. It’s what the rules said anyway, right? Before you got to rule four about holding hope carefully, you had one and two and three, about belief and pursuit of it, about clear determination. Know what you desire… . Then go .
    At that moment, Clive Weaver came outside. He had rediscovered his robe, thankfully. He shuffled down his walkway and looked down the street as if it were two o’clock when the mail came. He was out there more and more often with us, the people who thought too much during the time when other people rested.
    “Evening,” Clive Weaver said.
    Hayden gave Clive a two-fingered salute in response.
    “I believe I’ve lost Corky,” Clive Weaver said. Corky, Clive Weaver’s little black-and-white dog, was actually sitting upright on their porch step then, smiling. He never usually got to stay up this late.
    “Behind you,” Hayden said.
    “Ah,” Clive Weaver said, as if this were the answer to a great mystery. He looked at Corky for a while. “It’s over faster than you think,” he said finally.
    You could hear crickets off in the blackness somewhere and the sound of