Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (18 page)

“Twenty-seven years,” I corrected. “And four months later. And, yes, I am that girl.”

It was true. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve known Mateo Sandoval since I was four years old. I’ve
loved
Mateo Sandoval since I was four years old, but until my relatively recent headlong, irrevocable, and utterly unforeseen plunge into being
in
love with him, I had spent years and years nearly oblivious to his charms. I say nearly oblivious because I knew like I knew my own name that he was kind and funny and smart, and I suppose I knew he was handsome—I have eyes, after all—but while these facts existed in my consciousness, they never weaseled their way into my unconscious or under my skin or into my soul or wherever those kinds of facts weasel in order to make your heart race and your breath shorten. Before he became my sun, moon, and stars, Teo was just Teo.

“Your point being?” I asked.

“Maybe you’re not such an expert on timing? Maybe your own sense of timing is a little—what’s the word?”

“Off?”

“Askew.” Toby was teasing me, but I could still see faint footprints of the skittery doubt and worry all over his grinning face, so it didn’t surprise me when he dropped the teasing voice and the grin and said, dolefully, “Anyway.”

“Anyway what?”

He took a breath, gearing up, but then let it out and shrugged. “Anyway, seven months is a loooooong time. Could be a record.”

I looked him in the eye for a few seconds, then said, “That wasn’t what you were going to say. Was it?”

Toby looked back at me. “Nope.”

After a gulp of Gatorade, Toby leaned his curly-haired head to one side, then the other, as though whatever he had to impart required a thoroughly limber neck. He turned to me with a toothy, half-rueful, half-mischievous smile. “She doesn’t exactly know I’m coming.”

The hitch. Not a small hitch either, in my opinion, although you wouldn’t have known it to look at Toby. He laughed.

“Relax, Cornelia. It’s not a big deal.” He rolled his eyes. “You know how women are.”

“No. How are they?”

“When Miranda left for graduate school, she came down with a mild case of ‘I love you, buts.’ It happens.”

I stared at Toby in confusion for several seconds, then said, “Miranda’s pet name for you is Butts?”

Toby is prone to immoderate, explosive laughs. I was only thankful that the question hadn’t hit him midsip or my sofa would have suffered under a deluge of antifreeze-colored sports drink.

“Butts!” spluttered Toby, his face purpling. “Butts! Now that would explain a lot, wouldn’t it?”

He kept laughing. I sighed and looked at my watch.

When the guffawing petered out at last, Toby explained. “‘I love you,
but
I’m only twenty-two.’ ‘I love you,
but
I need some space.’ ‘I love you,
but
I’m not sure I can see a future with you.’ ‘I love you,
but
I need to forage a life for myself first.’ Like that.”

“Forge,” I said, distractedly. If Miranda was saying she wasn’t sure she could see a future with Toby, it didn’t sound like she had a
mild
case of anything. In fact, all those “I love you, buts” seemed to add up to one very large “I don’t love you enough.”

“Sic,” said Toby.

“What?”

“You know, ‘forage [sic].’” He made brackets with his hands. “As in she didn’t really say that. My mistake.”

Part of my brain marveled at the fact that Toby had a working knowledge of “[sic],” but most of it was too busy worrying about his impending heartbreak to notice.

“Butts,” he chuckled, softly, shaking his head in wonder.

I sighed. Miranda Bloom was about to blindside and body-slam this sweet blue-eyed boy again, so hard his teeth would rattle, and he had no idea.

“Toby,” I began, carefully. Then a thought hit me. “Toby, there’s an SUV chockful of your personal belongings sitting in my driveway. You were just planning to show up at her new apartment tonight with all of your…crap?”

Toby winced, ducked his head, then swiveled his eyes up at me with a look I’d seen him use before, a winsome hybrid of sheepish and beseeching. Unlike the rest of the kids in our family, who learned early on how to verbalize our myriad desires (legend has it that my first full sentence was this request for buttered toast: “I want a grilled cheese sandwich with no cheese,” which various family members flaunt as early and damning evidence of my roundabout linguistic style), Toby spoke not more than two intelligible words until he was all of two and a half. Instead, he developed a full-bodied, wordless eloquence, and toddled around emoting like a tiny male Mary Pickford, a talent that remained even after the onset of speech.

Now with a single look he managed to convey something along the lines of “You are—no joke—the world’s coolest sister. I mean, seriously, your generosity and kindness are beyond colossal, and even though in a classic Toby dumb-shit move, I totally neglected to run this by you beforehand, and even though you and Teo just moved into this awesome house and were probably into the idea of some alone time, I sincerely hope that you’ll let me hang out for a while in this my hour of need. Because you rock.”

“Oh, Toby,” I groaned.

“You’ll hardly know I’m here.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Mostly I’ll be, you know, elsewhere, waging my campaign to get Miranda to let me move in. Like a siege. This’ll just be my base camp.”

“What a lovely metaphor.”

“Love is war, right? Oh, and I have a lead on a job in Philly, so consider me a renter.” Toby smiled a smile calculated to melt my heart. I glared, first at his cheeky expression, then at his sweaty Gatorade.
No,
I thought,
no way, not this time, buddy boy.

“No,” I said, shaking my head, “no, no, no, no, no.”

He kept smiling.

“I said no.”

“And this is a no-means-no situation?”

“Yes,” I said vehemently, but of course it wasn’t. When I began to whack the heel of my hand repeatedly against my forehead, Toby tackled me in a bone-crushing hug, crowing, “I knew you’d let me stay, I knew it, I knew it, I knew it…”

“Get off me, you Saint Bernard.”

I pushed him away, and said, “And I’m not letting you stay. I’m only saying I’ll discuss it with Teo.”

“No need,” he said, cheekier than ever, “I caught him on his way out to drive Clare back this morning. He gave an enthusiastic thumbs-up.”

Just as I was commencing to stew and mutter about this, the doorbell rang.

Toby scrambled to his feet, and said quickly, “Uh, and I have, like, one other piece of news? But it can wait.”

At the expression on my face, Toby said, “No, no, it’s good. It’s amazing, actually. You’ll love it. I love it. Right now, though, gotta get the door.”

I stood up and stamped my foot. “Toby, just tell me. Now. This minute,” I commanded.

Toby did not do as he was told. Instead, he bounded over to the door and flung it open. Lake stood there in a purple felt cloche hat, holding a chocolate cake.

“Cool,” exclaimed Toby, wide eyed. “How’d you know it was my birthday?”

“Ah. You must be Toby,” she said dryly, but the way her mouth was twitching at the corners told me that Lake would pass the Toby litmus test with flying colors. “I’m Lake. I think you met my son, Dev.”

“Yeah, right. Dev’s a nice kid. A dim bulb and all, not a lot going on upstairs, but nice.” Toby grinned and held out his arms. “So, Lake, may I take the cake?”

“Oh, please,” I growled at Toby, with a look that said
I am not finished with you by a long shot,
“when in your life have you ever done anything else?”

I was happy to see her. It was a complicated, wary happiness, since the last time I’d set eyes on Lake, her face had swiveled shut and told me lies, but it was happiness all the same. And there was something else, too, some feeling I hadn’t felt toward her before. Not pity, exactly. Call it tenderness. Despite not having known her for long, I’d seen a surprising number of Lakes, and the Lake who stood newly cakeless in my foyer, purple hat in hand, was not one I’d ever seen before.

She seemed to have bigger eyes and to take up less space. Even her hair seemed tamer. And she stood differently. She didn’t stand on the earth as though she owned it, absolutely sturdy, as though a different, better gravity worked on her than on the rest of us. Mostly, though, it was the look in her eyes that had changed. The arch blue burning was gone. Lake looked at me and around my house with this odd combination of worry and eagerness, as though she’d lost something and needed it back, as though she were hoping she might find it there, but was so afraid she wouldn’t that she wasn’t sure she even wanted to look.

It hit me then: Lake needed a friend, probably more than I ever did. She wasn’t desperate (I thought that in her own way, Lake must be as immune to quiet desperation as Toby), but she needed a friend, and her need made her fragile as I’d never imagined she could be. So, with the sudden tenderness tugging on me like a gentle current and because I’ve required enough second chances myself to be a true believer in them, I took three big steps toward Lake, hugged her, sat her down, and made her talk.

It didn’t take much. The story was right there, ready to be given away. Sad and full of loss, but also a love story if I’ve ever heard one.

The story started before Dev was born, with the pre-Dev Lake, a smart, utterly lonely Midwestern girl who’d found herself in the center of a Cinderella tale. “I wasn’t that exceptional. But I grew up in a town where nothing was exceptional. I was it, the point-to girl. As corny as it sounds, I was hope.”

When she was named a National Merit finalist, the local paper did a long, glowing article, with photos of her with her beaming parents—“My SAT scores made the front page, literally”—and followed up with a series of articles tracking Lake through her senior year of high school.

“My father had always been a silent, angry guy. Still waters run deep and shark infested. They’d pop up now and then and bite. But whenever the reporters showed up at our house, the guy became a charmer, the proudest papa you ever saw.”

“What about your mom?”

“She wanted so badly for me to get out, to go somewhere and shine. I think she’d wanted that for me since the day I was born.”

The Sunday before Lake left for Brown, her family’s church had thrown a party for her. “It was supposed to be for all the graduates who were going on to college. There were four of us. Two were going to the community college down the road. The other one, a girl named Beth Wolter, had deferred her acceptance to the state university because she was pregnant. So the party was really for me. Pretty much the whole town came. I hated it and loved it, and I hated that I loved it.”

She’d gotten pregnant with Dev at the end of her sophomore year, except, of course, back then she didn’t know that it was with Dev.

“My boyfriend from home drove all the way out to pick me up. I didn’t tell anyone I was coming. I remember sneaking around the house to the back door like a burglar and seeing my mother’s face through the kitchen window. She was peeling potatoes at the sink, and I just stood there thinking, ‘She doesn’t know. This is the last time I’ll see her when she doesn’t know what I’ve done.’”

When Lake told me the next part, her voice hardened. “It was like a fucking tidal wave had hit our house. I knew it would be bad, but it was so much worse than I’d thought it would be. My dad was a lunatic, of course. I’d expected that. But my mother was a thousand times worse. And what’s so strange is that even while she was saying awful things to me, I understood that she wasn’t disappointed
in
me, like my dad was. She wasn’t thinking about what the neighbors would say. She was disappointed
for
me. God, it was insane: these two conservative, churchgoing people screaming at their upstart liberal daughter to have an abortion.”

After a tiny hesitation, I said, “Can I ask you a question?”

Lake gave a wry smile and said, “The million-dollar question.” She sighed. “I’ve been pro-choice since the day I learned there was such a thing as pro-choice. Way before I went to Brown. And two years before I got pregnant, I was calling Beth Wolter a fool for not having an abortion.”

She took a sip of coffee. “I’ve thought about it a lot over the years. Why I did what I did. And what I think is that growing up, I was always alone. I never felt like I fit in with anyone. My mother told me it was because I was special.” Lake laughed a short, bitter laugh. “The way she described it, it was almost biblical, like I’d slid down a beam of light straight from heaven into this dark, depressed town. I know I was smart. Not as smart as Dev. I never had the fun with it that Dev has, puzzling things out all the time.

“Anyway, I kept waiting for the day I could leave and find
my
place, my people. But when I got to college, it was all rich, beautiful kids. I know it’s not possible, but at the time I could’ve sworn they all knew each other. From summer camp or boarding school or some island where their families all hung out together laughing, with tinkling drinks and white shirts and blond dogs running around.”

“Wasn’t there anyone who you felt at home with?”

Lake looked at me for several long seconds. “There were one or two people who were important to me. Or who I could’ve let become important to me. But it just didn’t happen.”

“Maybe you wanted a reason to leave.”

Lake nodded. “Maybe. It was more than that, though. When I found out I was pregnant, my first thought was ‘Now there will be another person like me.’ That probably isn’t a very ‘healthy’ reason to have a baby.” She shrugged.

Lake had left and never gone back, left with Dev’s father, Teddy, a restless twenty-one-year-old, a nice boy.

“He thought it was an adventure. Get the hell out of Dodge, you know? But after Dev was born, I could tell Teddy was in over his head, and he was the kind of person who would’ve done the right thing until it killed him. But his heart wasn’t in it. So I took Dev and left.”

“Has Dev ever met him?”

Lake shook her head. “I call my mother now and then. Not often. But Dev and I haven’t seen anyone from back home. It just seems easier.”