Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (14 page)

Elizabeth narrowed her eyes at Cornelia and asked, “So tell me, what do you think of James Taylor?”

Cornelia winced, just a little, but before she could answer, Teo fell through the kitchen door, children all over him. He was flushed and there were leaves in his hair. Piper shot Elizabeth a glance, but Elizabeth was clapping her hands in the air like a flamenco dancer.

“Kids!” she shouted. “Begone! Playroom! Pronto!”

When Piper returned from settling the kids in front of a Dora the Explorer video, Cornelia and Teo were seated at the table. Teo was pouring San Pellegrino, and the green glass of the bottle in his hand made Piper notice his sea glass green eyes. She wondered if Elizabeth noticed, too. Then Piper saw the glass in Teo’s hand. Granny Bebe’s Waterford. Elizabeth didn’t allow most people to
breathe
in the direction of Granny Bebe’s Waterford.
You’d give a handsome man the shirt off your back,
thought Piper, and the thought made her giggle.

“What?” said Elizabeth, turning around. She widened her eyes at Piper for a split second, a signal that meant “He’s amazing.”

“Nothing.”

“Okay, Cornelia,” said Elizabeth, whacking the arm of her chair, “no weaseling out. What’s your position on James Taylor?”

Cornelia bit her bottom lip. “Honestly?”

“Oh, yes,” said Elizabeth. “Honesty is a must.”

“Honestly, I’m not a fan.”

“Did you hear that, Pipe? Cornelia’s not a James fan!”

“Well, who is, Elizabeth?” And before Piper knew what she was doing, she smiled at Cornelia, a natural, guileless, unsardonic smile, and that’s when it hit her that she didn’t dislike her.
Well,
she thought, startled.
Well. It doesn’t mean I like her, either.

“Except,” said Cornelia.

“Except what?” asked Elizabeth.

“There’s one song. About North Carolina. I like it.”

Elizabeth turned to Piper with a triumphant “Ha!”

“It’s like ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree.’ Or Wordsworth’s field of daffodils. Or, oh, you know, Frost’s birch trees. In the same family as those poems. ‘I’d like to get away from earth awhile.’ All that stuff.”

Here we go,
thought Piper with disgust. Wordsworth’s daffodils? What the hell was she talking about? Then she saw Teo looking at her and she blushed, hoping her thoughts hadn’t shown up on her face.

They must have, though, because suddenly Teo was grinning at Piper and saying, “She can’t help it. It’s like a mild form of Tourette’s.”

Amazingly, Cornelia didn’t get angry or embarrassed. She laughed. “All right, all right. You know what I mean. It’s a song about keeping a place in your mind that you can get away to.”

“I do,” said Elizabeth, quietly, “I know exactly what you mean.”

In the stillness that followed this remark, Piper waited.

Cornelia looked straight at Elizabeth with frank compassion in her eyes. “I bet,” she said, and her tone wasn’t pitying or sentimental. It was a tone with which even Piper could not find fault. So maybe Cornelia could do that, then, strike the right note. Maybe she could fill a moment without making it spill over. Piper would not have thought so, but there it was: a good moment. Still, after a few seconds, Piper had to end it. It needed to end.

“Hey, Betts,” she called out, “know what
I
bet? I bet Cornelia was a Talking Heads girl.”

“Cornelia, were you a Talking Heads girl? In college?” demanded Elizabeth.

“Um,” said Cornelia.

Teo laughed. “It’s a band.”

“I
know
it’s a band!”

“My wife was not a Talking Heads girl,” said Teo, talking to Piper and Elizabeth, but looking at Cornelia. A little shiver went through Piper.
There it is,
she thought. His eyes when he looked at his wife, his voice when he said “my wife.” The thing Elizabeth wanted to leave Tom to go find. “My wife has been a walking anachronism for years. Decades. Since she could walk.”

“The guy,” Cornelia continued, “with the Laurence Olivier eyes!”

Elizabeth burst out laughing.

“Oh, yeah, that’s him,” said Teo, dryly. “Who were you listening to in college, Cornelia? Chet Baker, wasn’t it?”

Piper hadn’t seen Elizabeth laugh so freely in months.

“And the big suit!” cried Cornelia. “The
enormous
suit.” With both hands, she traced the shoulders of the enormous suit in the air.

“No, wait, Chet Baker was high school. I remember the poster on your wall. College was…Who was college?”

“College was a lot of people, a lot of—bands. I liked Elvis Costello, remember that?”

“Yeah, yeah. You might have liked Elvis Costello. That sounds like you, sort of. All that wordplay and cleverness. But you
loved
…”

Cornelia dropped her hands in defeat and sighed, “I loved Hoagy Carmichael.”

“Oh, that’s impossible,” gasped Elizabeth, midlaugh. She reached over and squeezed Cornelia’s hand. “Hoagy Carmichael,” she exclaimed, happily. “I don’t even know what that is!”

Here was Elizabeth, flirting with all of them, making new friends as if she had all the time in the world. Piper wasn’t jealous. Faintly, from the playroom, she heard the kids shouting along with Dora,
“Y vámonos!”
Let’s go. Piper touched her hand to her mouth. For the second time in twenty minutes, she caught herself smiling without meaning to smile.

The next morning, Monday morning, Piper woke up early to fry eggs and bacon for her husband, a task she performed infrequently even in the best of times. She hated the way grease lay like a mask on her face, the way her hair kept the odor of bacon for hours. As she’d known it would be, this morning’s frying was more unpleasant than ever. Now the hissing and spitting, the white-and-yellow egg floating on top of the oil set her nerves on edge. But when she placed the plate of food in front of Kyle, she felt a little of her worry, a tiny corner of it, dissolve. There. She was doing it. She was paying attention to her husband. Before she walked away, she kissed the top of his head.

Later, after the kids were at school, Piper sat on the love seat in her living room with her book club’s latest selection open on her lap. It was a book about a small town on the plains of Colorado. She hadn’t attended a book club meeting in months and knew that she would not attend the next one, but she liked the book, even though it was not the sort of book she usually liked. When she read it, without knowing exactly why, she felt quiet and clean. It was a life she would never have and had never wanted: working all day under the sky with your muscles straining and the wind chapping your skin. Now, though, it seemed like something to regret, not living that life. Just then, Piper thought that life seemed like the right kind of loneliness.

Piper jumped at the sound of the doorbell, then closed the book and slid it under a cushion, embarrassed to be reading away the morning. She wriggled her feet back into her loafers, then went to open the door.

Cornelia stood on Piper’s front porch with a sippy cup in her hand and outrageously bright running shoes on her feet. Other than the shoes, though, she looked fairly normal in her jeans and black Patagonia fleece. In fact, standing there in the sun with her big eyes and small, finely cut face, Cornelia was pretty. Piper could give her pretty. The hair was a disaster, of course, a train wreck, but if Cornelia grew it out, she might even verge on very pretty.

Cornelia smiled and held up the sippy cup. “My mother’s rule is that if someone leaves a container, you must return it full. But I was pretty sure we didn’t have the right kind of milk.”

Cornelia’s friendliness threw Piper off and she felt suddenly shy and stiff, unsure of how to behave, a feeling that she knew was familiar but couldn’t place for a second. Then it came to her: she felt like she sometimes used to feel the morning after falling into bed with a stranger. Oh, God, what a stupid, ridiculous idea.

“Oh,” she said briskly, taking the cup. “Well, you do whole before age one and then switch to two percent. After two, kids can get plaques.”

“Really. On their teeth?”

“Arteries,” said Piper.

“I see,” said Cornelia, and she stared blankly at Piper for a moment, then said, “Okay, then. I’ll see you later.”

“Thanks for the cup,” said Piper, and then, as Cornelia started to walk down the steps, she added, “My mother had that rule, too.”

Cornelia turned around.

“I mean, she had it for a while, before she left my dad and ran off with a guy she met at the farmers’ market.”

Piper’s whole body went rigid; she felt like she’d been struck by lightning. Had she really just said that? Out loud, to a woman she didn’t even like?

“I’m…I.” Piper cleared her throat. “What an inappropriate thing to say. Please forget I said it.”

Cornelia looked puzzled, then she said, “Okay. Forgotten.” She paused. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

It wasn’t bad. It was easier than Piper thought it would be. They walked through the neighborhood and then a little way into the park across from the neighborhood. The sky was beautiful between the trees, like scraps of blue silk caught in the nearly bare branches, and Cornelia didn’t mention Piper’s mother and the farmers’-market man once. They made small talk, and Piper excelled at small talk. She felt at home talking small talk, and if she also felt a bit let down, she didn’t think about it.

Then she said, “It seems like you enjoyed New York City. What brought you guys here?”

It was an easy enough question, and Cornelia answered it easily, almost automatically, “Teo took the job.”

“In Philadelphia,” finished Piper.

“Right,” and then Cornelia didn’t stop walking or slow down or stumble, but something shifted in her shoulders or the angle of her body, a tension entered her stride, and she said, “I wasn’t getting pregnant.”

“Oh, okay,” said Piper, in a tone of voice that implied she knew exactly what Cornelia was talking about. And she did. She’d certainly had her share of friends who’d struggled with infertility. Then she had a thought. “But you were in New York. There must be good specialists in New York.”

“There are.” Cornelia kept walking, her eyes focused on the path in front of her. Then she stopped walking. “I wasn’t getting pregnant because I kept going back on the pill.”

She looked at Piper, wide-eyed, as though she’d been startled, then bent down to pick up a stick shaped like a divining rod. “I can’t believe I just told you that,” she said, quietly.

“I had a miscarriage,” Cornelia continued. Her mouth turned down at the corners after she said this, and Piper looked at the ground, not ready to see this woman cry, but when Cornelia spoke again, her voice was steady. “In the fourteenth week.”

“I’m sorry,” said Piper. Motherhood was her territory. Her compassion was real, but Cornelia seemed not to have heard her.

“And then the day after that, the towers came down.” Cornelia tossed the divining rod into the woods and started walking again.

“God,” said Piper.

“It’s not a terrible story,” said Cornelia, quickly. “It’s nothing compared to most of the stories. Teo worked uptown, on the Upper East Side, and we’d just found an apartment near there, but we still lived in Brooklyn. It’s ridiculous to live in Brooklyn and work uptown, I know, but Teo’s great-aunt left him the apartment when she died.”

Piper tried and failed to picture a map of New York in her head. Brooklyn? The place with the brownstones. Was it down at the bottom of the map?

“Was Teo working?”

“He was giving a lecture at a hospital downtown.”

“Oh, no.”

“No, no, I knew he was okay. I don’t watch a lot of TV, but a neighbor came by to tell me what was happening, and right after that the phone rang, and it was Teo. This isn’t about my thinking I’d lost him. This isn’t anywhere close to the category of tragedy. He was fine. He walked home. Like everybody else.”

Cornelia slowed down. She turned her face to Piper and her eyes were frightened looking and her voice was small and hollow. “But his face. He didn’t come inside right away. He leaned against the doorjamb, his whole body leaned. I’ve known him since I was four years old. But his face was so old and tired, it seemed to belong to someone else. My husband’s face, with no light in it.” She paused, then said, “We rallied, like everyone else. We moved to our new apartment, but the miscarriage and that awful day and his face that I couldn’t get out of my head…”

Cornelia laughed a stinging laugh. “I’ve always been kind of a coward, if you want to know the truth. But I wasn’t exactly scared. I just wanted to be someplace else, someplace—boring, I guess.”

“Well, of course you did,” said Piper, and she touched Cornelia’s arm at the elbow, just took hold of her fleece for two seconds then let go, but suddenly everything felt like too much.

“Who could raise children in the city anyway?” Piper scoffed. “There should be a law against it.”

Cornelia sighed and gave Piper a weary smile that Piper had seen on other faces, too, her mother’s, Kyle’s, even Elizabeth’s, one that said “Just when I thought we were getting somewhere.” The smile hurt. Piper cocked her head and frowned thoughtfully at Cornelia.

“Not to change the subject, but have you ever thought of growing your hair? Maybe a little bob?” After Piper said this, she felt much better.

N
INE

G
enerally speaking, Dev wasn’t all that interested in the notion of time travel. Sure, he’d watched reruns of the PBS special, had read a little about wormholes, Hawking’s chronology-projection conjecture, the grandfather paradox, all that stuff, but, while it was interesting enough and even though he got the idea that it was supposed to, it just didn’t set Dev’s brain on fire. Even so, during that bad seventh-grade year at his old school, Dev had definitely fantasized about time travel: zinging Mr. Tripp right between the eyes with one last, devastating, mind-warping remark, then—wham—disappearing, zipping forward into a future where he discovers a cure for Mr. Tripp’s fatal disease just in time to save the man’s crummy little life.

But even as the fantasy played itself out in Dev’s head—Dev tall and solemn in a white coat, emptying a syringe into Mr. Tripp’s shriveled, almost-dead arm, Mr. Tripp simultaneously thanking him and begging for forgiveness with tears pouring down his face, Dev saying simply, quietly, “I’m just doing my job, Mr. Tripp”—Dev had been 99.9 percent certain that it could never happen. He didn’t absolutely rule it out, but if traveling forward in time meant moving faster than—or even almost as fast as the speed of light and Dev was pretty sure that it would have to mean this—then, nope. No way—670,000,000 miles an hour? Nothing, no
matter,
no matter what, could move that fast.

Sometimes, though, Dev got the weird, fantastic feeling that he
had
leaped ahead. He’d sit in his ninth-grade life in a new school, a new town, and feel a whole country’s worth of distance stretch out between himself and his old life, and suddenly seventh grade would seem like ancient, ancient history, a hazy splotch on another coast, in another time zone, and he’d imagine eighth grade, the year that had never happened—and it would’ve been a crap year, he knew that—slipping through a hole in time, spinning downward, vanishing.

No way would he go back. Einstein himself could time-travel into Dev’s room and offer him a million bucks and the Nobel Prize to wiggle through a wormhole with him back to Dev’s seventh-grade year, and Dev would say (very, very respectfully), “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Still, with three months of his new life under his belt (and those three months had gone by at least twice as fast as they would have if he’d stayed in California: relativity in action), Dev could see that there had been one advantage to the old life: invisibility. Once the other kids had stopped buzzing about his confrontation with Mr. Tripp, once Dev had clamped his mouth firmly shut, it was like the atoms of his body had transformed into a substance that failed to reflect light in the visible spectrum. Like light waves traveled right through him. He’d become invisible, a nobody.

Dev was somebody at Liberty Charter. He wasn’t a somebody with a capital
S
like Aidan, but he was a kid people knew, a kid people greeted with grins and fist bumps, or said “Sorry, man” or “My bad” to when they jostled him accidentally in the hallway. People laughed at his jokes, listened to him when he talked, asked him what he’d gotten on tests (then usually groaned or said something like “You
suck
” in a friendly way once he’d told them).

And Dev liked it. He liked being visible. For the most part, visibility beat invisibility,
crushed
invisibility any day of the week. What Dev figured out before long, though, was that when you were visible, people didn’t just talk to you, they also talked
about
you, and this was the downside, the part Dev could definitely do without. Even though no one said anything truly bad about Dev, he disliked being gossiped about. It embarrassed him.

Far worse than the embarrassment, though, was the inaccuracy. In ninth grade at Liberty Charter, Dev discovered that once a story got told enough, the story became the truth no matter how much you tried to set the record straight, and this made Dev crazy. For Dev, records needed to be straight. Facts needed to be provable. Truth needed to be true.

And the true truth was that Lyssa Sorenson was
not
his girlfriend. She couldn’t even accurately be called his friend. But Dev could have shouted himself hoarse pointing this out to people and no one would have believed him, no one but Aidan. In fact, as far as the kids at Charter were concerned, the more Dev told them that Lyssa wasn’t his girlfriend, the more they were certain that she was, and what kind of sense did that make?

She sat next to him in advanced biology. At first she sat there because Dr. Kimani had seated them alphabetically for a few weeks in order to learn their names. After that, she stayed there for reasons Dev could only guess at but that he thought had almost nothing to do with Lyssa’s liking him—it wasn’t clear that she did like him—and everything to do with her trusting him. Or at least with her not trusting anyone else in the class. Lyssa had a secret, Dev knew the secret, Lyssa knew he knew, and she was counting on him to keep it to himself. She had no guarantee that he would, of course, because she’d never talked to him about the secret, not even once, not even to laugh it off or explain it away, and people leaked other people’s secrets all the time, but in this case, Lyssa got lucky. She got seated next to the right boy.

They didn’t sit at desks, but at short tables, just long enough for two people, barely long enough, in fact. Despite being so close, it took Dev a full week to notice, even though he was a noticing kind of guy. Lyssa was that deft, that quick and subtle.

There were three rituals. Dev assumed that there were probably a lot more, outside in the world, and this thought made him feel heavy, waterlogged with compassion, so he tried not to think it. But inside the classroom, there were three: one for sitting down, one for getting up to go someplace else in the room, one for getting up to leave. Each ritual began with Lyssa stacking her book, binder, and spiral notebook precisely in front of her, the edges of the books parallel to the edge of the desk. Then she’d perform whatever combination of finger taps, nose touches, tiny shrugs, and sounds the situation required. The getting-up-to-go-someplace-else-in-the-room ritual was the shortest, the getting-up-to-leave ritual the longest and most complex.

Once Dev began noticing what she was doing, he would take enormous care not to watch her. He’d read or study his notes or talk to Eli Tran, who sat at the table next to theirs. But one day, while he was writing, his pencil broke, just snapped in half, which didn’t happen every day, and, without thinking, he turned to ask Lyssa if she’d ever seen a pencil break like that, right in the middle of ordinary pencil usage, and there she was, her index finger touching her nose, and even when their eyes met, she didn’t stop, didn’t miss a beat: two lifts of her thin shoulders followed by four book taps followed by a whisper-soft clearing of her throat.

What was strange was that even though Dev’s automatic response was to whip around, look anywhere else, he didn’t. His brain was screeching, “Look away, you moron,” but his eyes couldn’t obey. He was like a deer in headlights, frozen by her gaze, although that wasn’t quite right because she was the one who looked scared, terrified even, but he also understood that she wanted him to see her. He had no idea why she’d want that, but whatever she was afraid of, Dev knew it wasn’t him.

So when they were finally allowed to sit wherever they chose, Dev and Lyssa stayed where they were. And when it was time to pick a lab partner, all she had to do was glance at Dev, and before anyone else could speak (because there was always the chance someone else would pick him, since he was pretty excellent at biology), he shot up his hand and said, “I pick Lyssa.”

After all that, it probably should not have surprised Dev when people began teasing him about Lyssa being his girlfriend, but it did surprise him. It bugged him, too.

“I never even thought about her like that,” he’d protested to Aidan, “not for one nanosecond.”

“That’s good,” said Aidan, “because that girl is ten kinds of crazy.”

Dev had shot Aidan a look. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that you can see every bone in her body
through
her clothes, and she’s got fuzz growing all over her, like a freaking peach, and no girl is that skinny without being crazy.” Then he added, “Plus, she’s a ballet dancer. Does it every single day after school is what I heard. And ballet dancers are all psycho.”

“What do you know about ballet dancers?” scoffed Dev.

“It’s a well-known fact. All women are clinically insane, but especially ballet dancers. Psycho. Extremely psycho. Trust me.”

Given Dev’s inside information about Lyssa, he wasn’t exactly in a position to argue this point. No one could call Lyssa’s rituals a sign of good mental health. Sometimes, she would start a ritual over two or three times, making herself get the sequence exactly right before she allowed herself to open her book or get up or whatever. And once, when they were working at a lab table and the fire alarm had sounded and Dr. Kimani had started herding them straight toward the door, calling out, “Don’t stop to get your books, people; just go,” the stricken expression on Lyssa’s face was like nothing Dev had ever seen, and the girl went rigid, stood rooted to the spot like some stiff, skinny tree. Gently, even though he knew people would talk about it later, he’d taken hold of one painfully thin arm and steered her out of the room and through the hallways, her body trembling fast, almost imperceptibly, like a tuning fork, and he’d wanted to ask her, “What do you think will happen? What do you think you’re controlling with all that weird stuff?”

She was crazy, no doubt about it, but privately, Dev realized it was a kind of crazy he could understand, at least a little. The laws of physics, Fibonacci numbers, that ∏r
²
would give you the area of a circle every single time, always and forever: these things reassured Dev. He loved the consistency of the multiplication table, the moment when two sides of an equation balanced. And he believed a lot of people felt that way. Even those chaos-theory guys were actually trying to show that if you took a step back, or two, or a billion and looked at the big picture, chaos wasn’t chaos at all.

Dev thought that probably he and most of the people on the planet wanted the world to make sense and hold together as much as Lyssa did. Maybe the difference was that, deep down, he and most of the rest of the people on the planet believed that it would.

If Aidan were right about Lyssa and right about ballet dancers (although Dev wasn’t ready to accept the psycho-ballet-dancer theory as fact, not without a lot more evidence), Dev wondered if he was also right about women. Probably not. It seemed unlikely that roughly one-half of the human population could be clinically insane (where did Aidan
get
phrases like “clinically insane”?), but given Dev’s recent experiences with his mother and with Lyssa, he couldn’t be sure.

Because if order, pattern, predictability were part of Lake’s job description as a mother—and Dev strongly believed that they were—Lake was falling down on the job. To put it mildly. Lately, Lake made no sense whatsoever. If somehow Lyssa Sorenson woke up to find that her own mother had transmogrified into Lake, within forty-eight hours, the girl’s head would explode, no doubt about it.

Take Cornelia. Dev could tell that his mother liked Cornelia.
Dev
liked Cornelia. Cornelia was cool, and not only because she could quote Robert Frost and talk to Dev without making him feel like a freak show or a lab rat but also because she’d made his mom relax. He even thought she had made his mom happy, that night she’d come to dinner. After he’d gone to bed, he’d heard them talking in the living room, just a distant, indistinct murmur, no words, but he didn’t need to hear words. Without meaning to, Dev seemed to have become a kind of seismograph when it came to his mother’s moods, and from the peaks and valleys of that murmuring, at least what he overheard before he fell asleep, he knew the conversation had been a good one.

But then, a couple of days later, he’d heard his mother on the phone turning down Cornelia’s invitation to Thanksgiving dinner, using the excuse that Dev really looked forward to spending the holiday at home, with just the two of them present. Beyond the fact that this made Dev sound like the world’s whiniest mama’s boy, it was a flat-out lie. Back in California, holiday dinners tended to be pretty informal, but usually there was a crowd: Lake’s restaurant friends; Principal Levy and her husband, Brewster; wayward neighbors; some guy Lake was dating; even people like their mail carrier or the oral hygienist who cleaned Dev’s teeth. Anyone who didn’t have a lot of family nearby or any family at all (and when Dev looked back, he realized how many people they knew fell into these categories) would show up with a big dish of something or a bottle of wine and sit around eating, talking, and yelling at football games.

When Dev confronted Lake with these facts, she didn’t get mad or try to say that Dev had misheard. Instead, she said, “You’re right. The thing is, I think I miss you.
I
wanted it to be just us. I don’t know why I didn’t just tell her that,” with such a sweet, rueful look on her face that Dev didn’t have the heart to stay mad. “Anyway,” Lake had continued, “Cornelia invited us for dinner the night before, and I told her we’d go to that.”

But
then,
when the day before Thanksgiving rolled around, an hour or so before they were supposed to leave for Cornelia’s, Lake began to press her fingers to her eyes and her temples and say that she’d been trying to evade it all day, but here it was: one of her headaches, a bad one, like a siren blaring in her head except without the sound, a comparison that would have interested Dev if he hadn’t been totally thrown for a loop by the next words out of her mouth.