Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (19 page)

I tried to imagine not seeing my parents for fourteen years, how not seeing them could possibly be easier than seeing them. I failed. But Lake’s parents aren’t my parents. I am not Lake.

Lake looked down at her coffee. When she looked up, the fierceness was back in her eyes. “I just wanted him. I never wanted anything so much in my life.”

I understood this kind of wanting, and because my eyes were suddenly full of stinging tears, I got up from the table and went into the kitchen. When I got back, Lake was in the living room, holding the double-photo frame that sat on our mantel. In both photos, Teo and I are side by side, grinning like demons. One was taken on our wedding day, the other some twenty-five years before.

“The dynamic duo,” I said, smiling.

Lake set the picture down quickly, looking confused. “You two, you’ve been together since you were kids?”

I laughed, “Well, not together-together. We grew up a few houses down from each other. Our parents are best friends, and all of us—Ollie, Toby, Cam, Teo’s sister, Estrella, Teo, and I—we were like one, big, loopy family. But Teo and I took our time falling in love.”

“How much time?”

“It’s just been a few years.” I felt embarrassed by how cozy and sweet this must sound to Lake, how easy. But Lake smiled at me and plopped herself down on my couch.

“It must be—comfortable, being married to someone you’ve known for so long. I bet it feels homey,” she said, “familiar.”

I considered telling her the whole truth, that, yes, it was comfortable; it did feel like the best kind of home. But also how loving Teo could feel anything but familiar, how it could mean walking a fine silver edge between exhilaration and ache, and how there were long moments—entire mornings even—when focusing on just one aspect of him—the back of his hand, the colors in his face, his voice—was all I could manage because the whole of him might overwhelm me. Or how I’d lie in his arms in bed after making love, luminous with gratitude and thinking the words:
I am poured out like water, I am poured, I am poured out, I am poured out like water
.

Even our shared childhood, the parts of Teo’s story I’d carried around with me as casually as I’d carried anything and for as long, could become almost unbearably present and precious to me: that the man on the edge of the bed, putting on his blue shirt in the dark, was once the boy who slept in a tent in his backyard for the week following the death of his grandfather would hit me with all the force of past and present both and make me want to weep.

Or this: As Teo knelt before me with his head in my lap, grieving for our lost pregnancy, time became a telescope closing, and the eleven-year-old kid he’d once been was suddenly right there in the room with us, the boy who’d dragged me out of my warm house and up to the roof to watch the Leonid, his face exultant, counting streaks of light under the miraculous sky.

Could I tell Lake any of this? Would she want to hear it?

I said, “Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t.”

“And your parents,” she said, “all four of them. I bet they’re clamoring for grandchildren.”

“Oh, well, you know,” I said, shrugging.

“So what about it?” she asked. “What’s your timeline?”

I should have told her then. Everything pointed to it. Lake had just told me the story of her life, and I felt closer to her than I ever had. Surely she deserved to hear what I was desperate to tell: the miscarriage at fourteen weeks,
fourteen,
just as we’d gotten the first, risky trimester behind us; blood on the white floor; me doubled over with my arms around myself, trying to hold it in, keep it safe, saying, “It’s okay. I promise. I promise.” I was still bleeding when the towers fell, and I spent weeks afterward torn between consolation and despair: between finding my own loss so small, so feather light and bearable compared to the huge, shattering, manifold losses of that day and feeling—selfishly, I know—that the devastation on television mirrored my own.

Entirely by accident, for reasons I still don’t understand, but that perhaps had something to do with the pure, feral grieving I’d heard on the other side of Piper’s door that afternoon and with her eyes when she looked at Elizabeth, I had turned this story over to Piper. Piper, who didn’t even like me. I’d trusted Piper, and even though she’d shaken off the moment of my trusting her with one toss of her blond head, I found—and I understand this even less—that I didn’t quite regret it.

If I could tell Piper, I could tell Lake.

But I took a deep breath and said, “I don’t know that we have a timeline. Whenever it happens, we’ll be glad.”

We were.

Two days later: pink lines in a plastic window.

All those Annunciation paintings had it right: the descending angel, white lily, cascading light, the woman’s face bespeaking humility, fear, elation, or all three at once. It should be momentous, an announcement accompanied by singing choirs, auroras of gold.

Even a blood test, a doctor striding forth in a lab coat bearing tidings of great joy would feel more fitting.

But however I got the news, I got it.

When Teo got home, I was sitting on the sofa, waiting for him. He sat down next to me, and he must have seen something in my face because he didn’t say anything, just picked up my hand and pressed it against his mouth.

“I’m five feet tall,” I told him. “Will you love me when I’m spherical?”

And there it was, around his face for maybe half a second, an aurora of gold. “Cor,” he said. Latin for heart. A nickname he almost never uses, one so private, it’s almost a secret from us, too. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to love you when you’re spherical.”

He kissed me. I kissed him back.

“So,” I ventured finally, “are we opting for cautious optimism?”

Teo smiled his beautiful smile. “No way. Full speed ahead.”

“Are you sure?”

“Not even optimism. Are you kidding? Jubilation. Incautious jubilation.”

This is why I love my husband.

“Okay, then.” I pressed Teo’s hand to my belly and looked down at it. “You hear that in there? Your father says incautious jubilation, so incautious jubilation it is!”

And it was.

E
LEVEN

I
n the last weeks of Elizabeth’s illness, when she had the presence of mind to want on her own behalf, Piper wanted to remember everything, wanted to store every image, word, and hour, even the bad ones. But time moved so erratically—screeching by; slamming to a whiplashing halt; limping with excruciating slowness, like an injured animal—and there was so little left for sorting or reflection that a lot got lost. Even so, Piper could pinpoint the precise moment at which she and Tom had become allies, a single force: exactly two weeks before Christmas, a pocket of stillness, no words exchanged, two sets of blue eyes locked together over the heads of children.

It had been lullaby time at Elizabeth’s house. Wednesday evening. Kyle had finished work at a reasonable hour, for a change, and was at home putting Carter and Meredith to bed, and Tom was on his way back from taking Elizabeth’s mother, Astrid, to the airport. Over the months, Astrid had come and gone, come and gone, politely, obdurately refusing Tom’s offers to move into the guest room for an “extended stay” (there were no right phrases; “for as long as it takes,” “for the duration,” “until the end,” all wrong). Each visit, Astrid would walk into the house, lightfooted and smiling, be with Elizabeth for hours every day, helping to bathe her on days when she didn’t want to get up, coaxing her to eat, talking and talking, and then after a week or so, would leave looking flat, slack faced, and confused, as though sadness were a drug.

Astrid would be back in a few days, having detoxified among her cats, her friends, her houseplants. Tom would be back any minute. But for the moment, Piper was alone, outside the entryway to what used to be Elizabeth’s dining room, listening to Elizabeth sing to Emma and Peter. Lullaby time was the last ritual, the one Elizabeth clung to with what Piper knew had to be every ounce of stubbornness she had left after the others (afternoon Popsicles, reading aloud, tickle time) had become occasional, then sporadic, then had fallen off altogether. Her voice, as diminished as the rest of her, came out papery, almost tuneless, but Piper didn’t need to hear her to know the song because the song was always the same—“Bridge over Troubled Water”—and so familiar that Piper couldn’t believe all the years she’d spent not realizing that it was about motherhood.

Elizabeth was singing to her children, making promises about laying herself down, and Piper thought,
Of course you would. Don’t you think they know that?
But tangled up with this thought in Piper’s head was another thought: Emma, worrying about whether her mother would fall forward or backward when she died. A sob caught in Piper’s throat.

“I know. That song. It’s rough, isn’t it?”

Piper opened her eyes. Tom stood there in his coat and gloves, concern in his eyes. Ever since Elizabeth had stopped treatment, Tom had changed, thank God. Or changed back. He’d dropped the walking-wounded routine and that awful hangdog helplessness. He’d even gained a little weight. “And a good thing, too,” Piper had told him one morning, giving him a poke to the sternum, “or eventually, I would have had to beat the crap out of you.” They’d laughed, even though they’d both understood that she wasn’t really joking.

“Yeah,” Piper agreed, but she straightened and swiped a forefinger under each eye in a businesslike manner. “Sorry.”

“For what?” asked Tom, quietly. “What could you possibly be apologizing for?” Months ago, Piper had made him agree to stop telling her “Thank you,” and he’d stuck to it. But there were still plenty of times, like right then, when Tom was thinking the words so hard in her direction that he might as well have been shouting them, so she turned abruptly and peeked around the corner at Elizabeth and the kids.

“Looks like they’re finished,” whispered Piper, and she and Tom had walked into the room. But Piper had been wrong. They weren’t finished, not quite.

The children lay pressed against either side of Elizabeth. Her eyes were closed and her face looked not just tired, but extinguished, as it did every night after lullaby time. The ritual exhausted her so much that Piper half wished she’d give it up, just let it go, but she understood why Elizabeth had hung on to it for so long. No matter where Piper was—an airplane, a grocery store—she didn’t even have to close her eyes to conjure up the feeling, a full five-senses memory, of her children in impossibly soft pajamas, fragrant and damp from the bath, radiating heat, their little chugging breaths growing slower and slower the closer they got to sleep.

Emma wasn’t asleep. When Tom and Piper got to the bed, she uncurled herself from around Elizabeth and sat up, her shoulders high and tense, locks of still-damp hair sticking to her cheek. Like blades of grass, thought Piper, smoothing the hair away with her hand. It was an absent, loving gesture, the kind any mother would make, and as she had many times over the months, Piper felt a pang of self-consciousness, touching Elizabeth’s child as though she were Piper’s own, even though Piper and Elizabeth had touched each other’s children this way always, from the very first day of each child’s life.

“What’s up, Em?” asked Tom, smiling at her.

“It’s two weeks until Christmas,” Emma said. Her eyes were round and frightened, and as Piper watched, Emma shivered hard, her arms suddenly covered with goose bumps. Piper felt a rush of compassion. She recognized panic when she saw it. Panic was coursing through this child like electricity.

“That’s right,” said Tom, gently, “it’ll be here before you know it.”

Emma shook her head, adamantly. “No! It’s too long.” She looked at Elizabeth’s face, then looked back, shifting her gaze between Piper and Tom. “I want…I want…” She broke off, but Piper knew what she wanted. Not eternity, not even a year. Two weeks. It was such a small thing for a five-year-old to want, so reasonable and limited. The smallness of Emma’s wish made Piper want to cry.

Piper had looked at Tom, then; their eyes had met and held, and there it was: a resolution, a pact like the ones people seal with blood. Elizabeth was slipping away so quickly—sleeping a lot, knocked out by painkillers or simple exhaustion, not eating much, rarely asking to get out of bed—but she would spend one last Christmas with her family, whatever it took. Tom and Piper would see to it. They would
will
it. Come hell or high water, thought Piper, furiously. Bring it on.

Tom had reached over and lifted Emma into his arms.

“No, it’s not, Em-girl. It’s not too long.” He was talking to his daughter, but looking at Piper, and Piper nodded.

Seinfeld
reruns. Mango sorbet. Carole King’s
Really Rosie
. Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run.” Hugh Grant. Dim lights. Bright lights. Beethoven’s
Moonlight Sonata
. Bing Crosby’s “White Christmas.” The J. Crew catalog. Curtains open. Curtains halfway open. Curtains closed. Chicken broth.
The Grinch Who Stole Christmas.
Bananas. Pink roses. Tom in his brown suede jacket. Emma singing “Jingle Bells.” A cashmere wrap. Candy canes. The smell of frying bacon. The smell of baking sugar cookies.
SpongeBob SquarePants.
Cornelia’s pumpkin bread. Kate’s homemade applesauce.
Law & Order
reruns. Piper reading
Little Women
aloud. Astrid reading
Emma
aloud. Tom doing the crossword puzzle aloud. Evergreen-scented candles. Peppermint tea. Peter in his earflap hat.

Whatever made her smile, seem about to smile, laugh, seem about to laugh, lift her eyebrows, stop crying, sit up, wake up fully, fall asleep quietly, take an interest, tell a story, make a joke, put on lipstick, forget to be angry, feel like talking, feel like eating, feel like drinking, feel like getting out of bed. Piper and Tom would do all of these things, would give her every one over and over. Whatever satisfied her. Whatever made her ask for more.

This was their logic: if it worked once—Piper putting the cashmere wrap around her shoulders, Elizabeth rubbing the softness against her cheek, smiling and saying, “Heaven!”—it could work again. Or: if these things worked individually, they would work even better in combination. Cookies baking in the kitchen,
SpongeBob
on the television, a mug of peppermint tea steaming on the table beside her. Piper reading
Little Women, Moonlight Sonata
in the background, an evergreen-scented candle burning on the windowsill.

It sounded logical. It
was
logical. Piper told herself this, and she defied,
dared
anyone to argue. The hitch was that it wasn’t really true, and, in her deepest places, Piper knew it. In her deepest places, Piper knew that like countless desperate people before her, she—she and Tom together—had begun to practice witchcraft. Piper remembered having done this as a child: if I wear the yellow shirt, it won’t rain on Field Day; if I sleep with my stuffed cat on my left and my teddy bear on my right, I won’t have bad dreams; if I set the table silverware first, plates second, my mother will act like a normal mother. If we watch for what makes Elizabeth feel alive, if we keep careful track, miss nothing, and give her these things again and again, she will not die.

Piper knew that the trick was to stay focused, to never let the goal of keeping Elizabeth alive until Christmas slip—even for an hour—from the forefront of her concentration. To accomplish this, Piper had systematically pulled the distractions from her life like weeds from a garden: volunteer activities, lunches with the girls, playdates, dinners, shopping, and because it was the season for them, holiday parties.

She and Kyle had fought about the parties. Actually, they would have fought about the parties, would have had six separate fights, no doubt, if Kyle had known about all the invitations Piper had declined, but since Piper was careful to dispose of the invitations quickly and quietly, they fought about one party: Kate’s, an annual black-tie, champagne-flooded, no-holds-barred sit-down dinner that felt as close to the kind of party Truman Capote might have attended in his heyday as any party in a fairly distant suburb of a fairly small city anywhere in the country could feel.

Kyle had found the RSVP card with the regrets box checked before Piper had gotten a chance to tuck a personal note into the tiny, engraved, silver-bell-embossed envelope and send it winging its elegant way back to Kate, who might not have been the brightest bulb in the marquee, but who would’ve understood perfectly and instantly why Piper and Kyle could not make it to her Christmas party this particular year.

But Kyle had gotten to the RSVP card first. He’d dropped it dramatically onto Piper’s empty plate one morning, while she was waiting for her toast to pop up (somehow, without meaning to, Piper had begun to eat carbohydrates again), and he’d launched into the most infuriating kind of tirade regarding what he perceived as Piper’s skewed priorities and twisted sense of obligation. The tirade was delivered in measured, quiet tones, but it was a tirade nonetheless, and what made it worse was the way Kyle tried to disguise it, to coat his anger with a fuzzy, blurring concern—like that awful dandelion-fuzz mold that Piper kept finding on food in her refrigerator lately—concern for Piper’s well-being that was so utterly phony it made her want to throw the toaster at him.

She tried to block a lot of what he said, but some of it got through, and Piper’s mind seethed with comebacks.

“Kate’s a terrific person and your best friend.” (With regularity, you call Kate “the brain-dead boob job.” Elizabeth is my best friend.)

“The kids miss you. I miss you.” (How dare you suggest that I’m neglecting the kids? The kids are with me all the time, you stupid shit, which you would know if you were ever home, which you are not, but that’s a whole other conversation. And you don’t miss me; if you missed me, you’d bother to come home from work before nine
P.M.
once in a while, which you don’t, and you’d stop finding reasons to go into the office on the weekends. Furthermore, you probably think that I’ve been too busy to notice these things, but I’ve noticed. I’ve just been too tired to talk to you about them, so you should be glad I’m spending so much time helping Elizabeth and her family because it gets you off the hook, and come to think of it, I’m sure you
are
glad. Lucky you.)

“At some point, your altruism became selfishness, Piper. Yes, that’s what I said, your altruism crossed a line and became selfishness.” (Despite the fact that the thought you just voiced is entirely meaningless, you’re so proud of yourself for having thought it and said it and having included that big word in saying it, that you had to repeat it for emphasis.)

“Your identity is so caught up in all of this that I wonder who you’ll be after Elizabeth is gone.” (I am being a friend. I am doing what a friend does. If you had any real friends, you might understand that. Oh, God, I don’t know who I’ll be either. I have no idea at all.)

“Superwoman Piper saving the day. I hate to say it, but sometimes I think you’re actually enjoying this.” (I am not saving anything. I am taking care of children. I am cooking. I am talking and reading books and watching television with Elizabeth. I am doing one job and then another. Don’t say you hate to say it. You don’t hate to say it. Enjoying this?
Enjoying this?
Fuck you fuck you fuck you.)

“This isn’t normal. This isn’t friendship, whatever you think. This isn’t love.” (You wouldn’t know love if it walked up and slapped you in the face, Kyle.)

Piper didn’t say any of this. She didn’t say anything at all. As Kyle talked, she moved the RSVP card off of her plate, removed her toast from the toaster, spread it with strawberry fruit spread, poured herself coffee, took the plate and coffee to the table, and sat down. When he stopped talking, Piper was holding her coffee cup with both hands because her hands were suddenly cold. All of her was cold. She was chilled and frightened, not by what Kyle had said, but by what she hadn’t said. Her own thoughts sounded very much like the thoughts of a woman who did not love her husband, and this was not the kind of woman Piper could be. We are going through a rough time, she told herself. It happens to everyone. She wanted to say this out loud, but she couldn’t. If she opened her mouth, she might shriek, she might cry. At the very least, her teeth would chatter. After a few seconds, Kyle made a disgusted sound and left the room.