Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (17 page)

“He looks like he owns the place,” said Clare softly.

Suddenly Dev felt too tired to move. He looked back at the silver bike.
If only,
he thought, and the homesick feeling swamped him. If only I were eleven years old. Or eight. If only we were here to see this bike.

He looked at Clare. Her eyes were almost level with his own.

“You’re tall,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

They were still holding hands, but it felt different from the way it had on the bus. Now, they were like two kids lost in the woods. Hansel and Gretel, scared and small, comforting each other. That wasn’t how Dev wanted holding hands with Clare to feel, so deliberately, gently, he let go and walked toward the back of the store.

The man’s back was to them. Dev noticed that his hair was thick and grew in a counterclockwise swirl around a single crown. Dev touched the back of his own head, but dropped his hand as the man turned and saw them. The man’s jaw was square and his eyes were interesting, a blue so pale it was almost white. He smiled.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “What can I help you with today?”

That’s when Dev noticed his name tag.
ED
. Exactly what a guy named Teddy would get called when he got older. Ed Tremain. He heard Clare say, “Oh!” She laid a hand on Dev’s back. Clare had seen the name tag, too.

“Uh, well, actually,” said Dev. His voice came out hoarse and softer than he wanted it to be. He cleared his throat. “I was wondering about the name.”

Puzzled, the man frowned slightly, two deep lines like quotation marks appearing between his eyebrows. He looked down at the bike he’d been about to lift and his face relaxed.

“Gary Fisher,” he said, nodding. Dev saw that the name ran in slashy-looking letters along the bike’s down tube. “A lot of people call Gary the inventor of the mountain bike, which I wouldn’t necessarily agree with. An awful lot of people were modifying bikes on their own back then, in their garages, probably coming up with all the same changes independent of each other.”

Then Ed said a surprising thing. “Like hedgehogs and porcupines. Different times, different places, different—what do you call it—species, but they both ended up with spines. There’s a word for that in science.” He scratched his head, thinking.

“Convergent evolution,” said Dev, solemnly. It was him. It had to be.

“Bingo!” Ed grinned and pointed a finger at Dev. “Anyway, Gary Fisher makes a nice bike, that’s for sure.”

“I bet,” said Dev. “So do you own this store?” Even though Dev already knew the answer, he asked. He had to ask.

“Sure do,” said the man.

Dev looked at Clare, looked back at the man, took a deep breath and said, “I’m Dev,” and then, because Ed’s face didn’t change, he added, “Tremain.”

Dev watched understanding dawn on Ed’s face, but then, to his surprise, the man laughed.

“I get it,” he said. “Here I’m going on about Gary Fisher and evolution, and
that’s
the name you meant. Yeah, I bought the place from Bob Tremain a year ago last December.”

Dev stared at Ed in confusion.

Clare spoke up. “Was he a relative of yours? Are you a Tremain, too?”

“No,” said Ed, “the guy was
old
enough to be my dad, but nope. I’m Ed Buchman.” He put out his hand, and Clare and Dev took turns shaking it. “How about you? You related to old Bob?”

Dev hesitated. “Maybe,” he said finally, lamely. “I think I might be.”

“Is he from around here, do you know?” asked Clare.

“No,” said Ed. “He’d lived here a little while, but Bob’s from somewhere out in the Midwest. Ohio. Michigan. Something like that.”

“Iowa?” suggested Dev.

“Could’ve been.” Ed nodded. “He and June retired to Florida, but they’ve got a couple of kids settled not too far from here. A son in Philly, I think. And a daughter in Baltimore.”

When Dev just stood there, fuzzy brained and tired, not saying anything, Clare finally said, “Well, thanks, Mr. Buchman.”

Dev wanted out of that store, then, about as much as he’d ever wanted out of anywhere, but he was rooted to the spot. Like Lyssa, he thought with irritation, Lyssa at the fire drill.
You lived without knowing your stupid father for almost fourteen years,
he berated himself.
Why does everything have to be such a big deal now?
He pulled himself together before Clare had to take his arm and shuffle him out of the store.

“Yeah, thanks,” he said.

Outside, he took off his jacket and breathed. The bike store was in a strip mall, but with the air in his lungs and on his skin and with the intense blue sky over his head, Dev could have been in Oregon or Montana, some vivid, elemental, rinsed-clean place with mountains towering over him instead of Super Fresh and OfficeMax. He was that glad to be out of the store, and he felt light, as though he’d lifted the tangle of hope, dread, disappointment, and relief out of his chest and left it there, dropped it between the bikes on his way out.

After a moment, Clare touched his shoulder. “Hey, you,” she said. Her eyes searched his face the way, a couple of nights ago, they’d searched the chessboard for the right move. Then she began, carefully, “The son in Philly…”

“I know,” said Dev. “Maybe I’ll try again.” He paused. “I don’t know if I want to, though.” He knew he might feel differently later, but for now, it felt good to be fatherless, to be the same old Dev he’d always been.

He and Clare started walking toward the bus stop, their shadows stretching out ahead of them. Dev watched the girl shadow take the boy shadow’s hand, and he realized that the homesick feeling had disappeared. In its place was a new feeling, too new to have a name.

“How cool would that have been, though?” He shot Clare a sidelong, happy grin. “A dad with a bike shop?”

Clare laughed her jingle-bell laugh, and Dev realized that what he felt was young. He’d been young all his life, of course he had. But now he was aware of it. Every cell, every
electron
of his body felt young: unencumbered, uncluttered, as clean as the clear blue sky.

T
EN

Cornelia

I
t’s highly unlikely that my brother Toby will ever have a George Bailey moment: suicidal on a bridge above roiling water; snow swirling like chaos; his fat, sweet guardian angel teetering on heaven’s edge, set to jump in and save the day. It’s unlikely for all the reasons that would make it unlikely for anyone: one being the dearth of credible evidence supporting the existence of guardian angels; another being the fact that, as I too often have to remind myself, life is life and movies—even classic Capra/Stewart collaborations—are only movies. But Toby caught in a wild-eyed, rock-bottom, George Bailey moment is unlikely for other reasons, as well, reasons that have to do with Toby being Toby.

The boy is just plain buoyant. Hardwired for lightness. Ollie would probably have some impenetrable scientific explanation for this, but even I can tell you that if she stuck Toby’s DNA under some ultra-whizbang, crazy-high-powered microscope (and if such microscopes exist, you can bet Ollie’s got one), she’d find the genetic equivalent of “Life’s a Beach” or maybe “Life’s an Awesome Mountain to Slide Down” stamped on every last gene. And even I can see that being Toby brings with it some distinct evolutionary advantages. Men like my little brother don’t brood or introspect or even sit still much. If they ever do hit rock bottom, it’s only to bounce off it and head skyward.

But
if
Toby’s guardian angel ever did have cause to swoop down and show him what life would be like if he’d never been born, there’s a huge chance that they would find his sister Cornelia in a sorry state. I’ve imagined various possible incarnations of this state, visualized the dreary particulars of each possibility, and all of them are far too dreary to regale you with. But trust me when I say that each imagined incarnation was truly, deeply, and stunningly
sorry
.

Toby is my litmus test. He was probably my litmus test for a very long time, but it wasn’t until one miserable evening at the end of my first and last semester of graduate school that I was fully, blessedly conscious of this. In fact, if I have anything to say about it (and really, who else would?) the Toby Brown version of
It’s a Wonderful Life
would prominently feature a flashback to that very evening.

I was there—on a hilltop surrounded by the plunging gorges, streams, and maple trees of central New York State—to get a Ph.D. in English literature. That’s not true. I was there to read a lot of books and to discuss them with bright, insightful, book-loving people, an expectation that I pretty quickly learned was about as silly as it could be.

Certainly there were other people there who loved books, I’m sure there were, but whoever had notified them ahead of time that loving books was not the point, was, in fact, a hopelessly counterproductive and naive approach to the study of literature, neglected to notify me. It turned out that the point was to dissect a book like a fetal pig in biology class or to break its back with a single sentence or to bust it open like a milkweed pod and say, “See? All along it was only fluff,” and then scatter it into oblivion with one tiny breath.

I’m getting worked up and metaphorical on you. I know I am. But it was a rough time. Nowadays, I want to be smart, but back then, I’m afraid I wanted to
seem
smart, too. I wanted to make a smart impression, so I’d do what everyone else did, no matter how wrong it felt. But one afternoon, after a British literature seminar, I sat alone in the room staring down at my copy of
Howard’s End,
feeling like I’d just stripped the clothes off my grandmother and sent her out wandering in the snow.

After that I stopped talking in class and started dating Jay West, the undisputed star of the program. I dated him because he was the undisputed star of the program, a fact of which I am properly ashamed, and he dated me for reasons that still remain cloudy, although I suspect they had something to do with my resemblance (which existed only in his imagination but which he related in breathy tones to me on more than one occasion) to the actress Winona Ryder.

He wasn’t unattractive. He was handsome in a gaunt, beaky, dark-browed, mop-topped way. In fact, now that I think about it, Jay had precisely the kind of looks that would play beautifully in a black-and-white film.

Imagine the scene. Early December, final exams and papers only just laid to rest. The interior of a noisy, cozy pub with long wooden tables and a stone fireplace; firelight dancing inside wineglasses and throwing shadows around the room. Six graduate students around a table, one particularly slumped, taciturn, and anemic looking (me), and my brother Toby, newly nineteen, fresh out of his first semester of college in Colorado, in town to do some hiking and then drive his nondriving sister (I know how; I just don’t like to) home for Christmas break. And, of course, in the center of everything: Jay, talking,
expounding
on Sylvia Plath and psychopharmacology with the part-genius-prophet, part-Nosferatu fire in his eyes that always accompanied his expounding and that sent English Department women (minus his girlfriend) and some men into varying states of swoon.

“Fuck Prozac. Fuck lithium. Fuck Haldol and clozapine and TCAs and MAOIs. Fuck selective fucking serotonin fucking reuptake inhibitors. Thank
God
Plath was born when she was. If she were around today, we’d pump her full of all manner of shit to keep her ‘happy’ and ‘functional.’ For what? So her kids would grow up with a mommy? That wouldn’t be medicine. It would be barbarism. Because we need
Ariel,
and only a frenzied poet on the brink of suicide could write
Ariel
. We need Plath’s suicide. We need her to stick her head in the oven while her kids sleep upstairs. We need
Ariel
. We
deserve Ariel
more than those kids, more than
any
kid ever deserved a mother.”

I’m not kidding. This is how he talked. Like he was auditioning for the role of Moses in some cheesy, profanity-laced remake of
The Ten Commandments
. Like no one in the whole history of the world had ever considered the positive impact of mental illness on creativity.

“You don’t even like
Ariel
.” I said this. Why I bothered, I have no idea.

“What?”

“You called it thin. And obvious.”

Jay looked as if he’d just found gum on his shoe. Fresh gum.

“I don’t have to
like Ariel
.
Liking
is irrelevant. What’s relevant is the splash and the outward rippling concentric circles of water.
Ariel
may be thin, by my standards. It may be obvious. But it made a splash. I don’t
like
the New Testament particularly. I’m not a believer. But I happen to find it tragic that if Jesus Christ were alive today in the United States of America, he’d end up with a pretty wife, 2.5 kids, and a split-level home in the burbs. He’d be a shoe salesman because we, in all our barbarism, would have
tamed
him with anti-psychotics and lithium and who the fuck knows what else.”

Silence. Then my brother Toby said, “Yeah. But probably we wouldn’t have, like, crucified him.” He grinned and took a big slug of beer.

Jay didn’t laugh good-naturedly. No one did. He didn’t even look at Toby. Instead he looked at me, ruefully, shook his head, and said, “My poor girl.”

I didn’t stop to analyze this inscrutable comment, because first, I was smiling. Then I was laughing, not because Jay was a pompous, ridiculous idiot, not even because what Toby said was really quite funny (quite insightful, too), but out of pure joy. Because right at that moment, I knew I would leave. It would be hard. I wouldn’t do it right away. I would come back from break and tough it out for two more pointless weeks. But there in the bar, I understood with absolute clarity that someday soon I would pack my bags, give up my fellowship, and head for home.

If Toby hadn’t come along, I might have stayed. I had always been an excellent student. In all my life, I had never quit anything nearly as important as graduate school, and when I quit, I fell into a pit—a fairly shallow pit, but a pit nonetheless—of self-recrimination and embarrassment. But eventually, I climbed out and walked away with my soul intact and with a secret weapon in my arsenal, my litmus test: Toby could be—and usually was—exasperating and boneheaded, but he was also exuberant and bighearted, and anyone who could not like him was gone, gone, gone.

Toby was in love.

He sat with his feet and a sweating glass of Gatorade on my new coffee table and described it to me thus: “I was just going along, minding my own business, and the girl blindsided me. A total body slam. I was like, ‘Dude, you’ve
gotta
be kidding me!’”

Lest that flight of rhapsody cause you to pigeonhole Toby a hopeless romantic, let me assure you that while he was—and is—certainly hopeless in numberless ways, he had never been, not in all of his twenty-nine years, in love. Not even a little. Not even in
high school,
if he could be believed, and I’m pretty sure he could.

He’d always dated a lot. A lot-a lot. I have no hard numbers, but my mother’s theory is that when it comes to counting Toby’s girlfriends, it’s best to apply the same method scientists use in estimating populations of okapis or pygmy marmosets or whales: for every one you meet, assume there are three hiding somewhere nearby. (Actually, my mother may be wrong about scientists using this method. It sounds sort of unscientific, but it also sounds sort of right, doesn’t it?) And I’ve met plenty. While there have been a wide variety of types—preppy, crunchy, outdoorsy, athletic, even, occasionally, tattooed and pierced (although not excessively, nothing they couldn’t cover up for a visit from Grandma)—there’s also been a certain uniformity: all were sweet and upbeat, all worshipped the Dave Matthews Band, all were what Toby describes—with profound admiration—as “fun girls.”

Until Miranda.

“Miranda’s a lot like you,” said Toby, throwing a throw pillow at me for emphasis, “except taller. And younger.” He grinned. “And, you know, curvier.”

“I do
not
know,” I said coolly, slipping a coaster underneath the glass of Gatorade. “And I’m fun.”

“You are,” agreed Toby, nodding, “you’re fairly fun. Fun’s just not the point of you.”

As I considered the implications of this, Toby began, “I like to be around Miranda—”

“You love to be around Miranda,” I corrected, gloating.

“Watch it, corndog,” he warned. “But yeah. I love to be around Miranda, it’s
fun
to be around Miranda, but not because she’s fun. Just because she’s…”

“Miranda?” I suggested.

“She’s smart. She’s—what’s the word—
contemplative
. She has these great, chocolate brown, serious eyes, and you can just tell that she’s, like, studying the world, not just cruising around it like a, a…”

“Dune buggy?”

Toby has Windex blue eyes. He rolled them at me now.

“You can take the girl out of Barbie’s Bungalow Beach House but you can’t take Barbie’s Bungalow Beach House out of the girl,” he said, which didn’t quite make sense, but was clever all the same. Fairly clever.

“You were two when I stopped playing with Barbies,” I said. “They must have made quite an impression.”

He ignored this. “And she reads everything. And has excellent taste in, like, everything. Wine, movies, clothes.”

“You’re right,” I said, seriously, “she is a lot like me.”

“Yeah, she even loves those flowers you love. Your favorite. Those big fluffy ones.”

“Miranda loves peonies?” I was touched that my little brother remembered my favorite flower, even if he didn’t, quite. He remembered I
have
a favorite flower. Truth be told, I was touched by the whole conversation. I got up from my chair and walked around the new coffee table in order to kiss Toby on the cheek.

“Peonies. Yeah.” He laughed and pretended to wipe off my kiss. I settled myself down on the sofa next to him.

“Tell me more,” I told him.

So he did. He told me that her name was Miranda Bloom, no middle name. He told me she was Jewish. He told me that she had an older brother named Philip who played the oboe for the Boston Symphony. He told me that she would turn twenty-three the day after Christmas, although he was quick to add that she didn’t celebrate Christmas, which was not terribly surprising to me. He told me that she was studying to be an occupational therapist. He told me that she had grown up in Detroit and, of her own volition, had practiced vegetarianism from the age of six to the age of seventeen and had double-majored in psychology and art history and wore scarves and kept her shoes in the boxes they came in and laughed her brains out at Looney Tunes and looked amazing in a sweater and loved French and Vietnamese food, stinky cheese, chocolate cupcakes, Sancerre, all sushi with the exception of sea urchin, and Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk straight out of the can.

“And you,” I added, “she loves you.”

Toby gave me the faux-suave look he’d been using since he was eleven years old, pretended to twirl his mustachio, and said in horrifyingly accented French,
“Mais oui, ma soeur foufou! Naturellement!”
But I’d seen something skitter across his face right before he said it. Anxiety maybe. Or self-doubt. Either of which would have alarmed me because neither had ever, to my knowledge, skittered across his face before. Somewhere in all this love I’d been hearing about there was a hitch.

“So you and Miranda have been together for how long?”

“For the best seven months of the girl’s life.”

“Seven months,” I said, in what I’m positive was a neutral tone, although I admit that the neutral tone may have been somewhat undermined by my adding, “And you’re moving in.”

“Whoa, sister,” said Toby, pulling in invisible reins. “Aren’t you the girl who took, like, thirty years to figure out you were in love with a guy who’s obviously (a) the greatest and (b) the best-looking human being in the
en
tire history of the world? The girl who didn’t even think he was
attractive
for thirty years? And then married him, like, two days later?”