The Six Rules of Maybe

Martinellis’ old movies that had been popular in the 1970s, as he had suggested before. Instead, Hayden said he was going to bed. He walked down the stairs to the basement, but Zeus stayed behind, by my side. He knew when a person neededcomfort. He would never know what a fool I was. “Velvet head,” I whispered to him.
    Finally, I went upstairs. My room felt like a display of my wrong love, still blazing, blazing right then at that moment—the paper cranes, that photo, all the hours I had spent there with feelings that were mine and mine alone. I could feel Hayden’s presence downstairs, awake and waiting for Juliet. I heard him walking around, heard him come upstairs again, heard the worry in his footsteps.
    In my mind I kept seeing Buddy Wilkes, the times he had been at our house. The way he had showed his right to be there—by stretching his legs on the couch, his arm on Juliet’s leg as if to hold her down. And the other times I saw him too. His skin glowing green from the TV left on without any sound, his bare ass leaping into jeans as Mom’s car came down the street. Juliet hooking her bra with one arm behind her back. Nothing tender or romantic or permanent, just zippers and hooks and body parts with other body parts and Juliet seeming distant and preoccupied in the morning. Buddy Wilkes’s cigarette butt in our garden the next day.
    I put on my long T-shirt, but kept the light off; I lay on my bed in the dark, propped up against my pillows. The light from the streetlamp shined in and illuminated my room in an eerie glow. The paper cranes rustled and swayed in a small breeze. I heard someone’s wind chime outside.
    I watched my clock with growing unease. I heard the television go on and then off again. I waited for Hayden to go outside to smoke, a place I might never join him again, but this never happened. The basement toilet flushed. The house was giving away the secret of his restlessness. I got up and looked down the street for a car—Buddy Wilkes’s, Mom’s, anyone’s—same as I used to when I was small and Mom was late coming home. I would watch and watch and begsilently for her car to appear, equally sure as not that it would, relief filling me and being replaced with joy as soon as it did. She always seemed surprised how happy we were when she got home. She’d put Neil Diamond on the stereo, and we’d dance.
    But that night, the street was so dark and so still, absent of any cars or people or animals coming or going. The heat had tired people. The SOLD sign on the Martinellis’ house looked very white under the moon; it looked bold, defying the darkness with only pressboard and a declaration.
    I could hear every tick of my clock. It was getting close to midnight, and Mom would be home soon, I was sure.
    But then, midnight came and went. Serious worry was shoving out shame for my attention. Mom always came home at midnight, always. I kept getting up every few minutes to look out at the empty street. My worry turned to anger. Maybe they just had too much to celebrate. Mom in her slinky black blouse and Dean Neuhaus with his clean fingernails. Mom’s new diamond on her own finger, her hands not belonging to herself anymore. Maybe she was sleeping off a bottle of champagne beside him.
    I wondered if I should call. I imagined her cell phone on his bed stand in a house we’d never even visited. He had children we had never even met. I could call and embarrass myself, intrude when it would no longer do any good. I was good at shoving myself into places where I didn’t belong. There was nothing I could do about any of it, anyway. Helping hadn’t kept me safe. It had been an illusion. It had done no good, none , I thought, and it was at that moment, that exact one, that I was thrown back against my bed and to the floor. There was a soul-shattering clash, an explosion, a blast so deep I felt it in my cells, glass raining down, nothing like the toy rocket, although the toy rocket was my first thought. I was on thefloor, and glass was falling around like stars. The sky seemed to open. My window was gone, and the black night was there at my fingertips.
    I heard shouting. There seemed to be some sort of fire outside through the frame of my window now absent of glass.
    Hayden was shouting. Other people too. I didn’t understand what was happening. Nothing made sense. My window was gone and I was sitting in glass and there seemed to be a fire and people were shouting and that’s all I