Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (21 page)

Elizabeth saw their faces, too, spread her arms out and tilted her head, in a silent “Ta-da!”

“Wow,” exclaimed Cornelia. “How gorgeous are
you
?”

Teo bent down, kissed Elizabeth’s cheek, smiled, and said, “You’re beautiful,” as though he were just stating a fact. Piper remembered, then, what Teo did for a living. It was easy to forget because he never came to visit as a doctor, only as a neighbor. But he must know about the illusion of wellness and what it meant. Of course he did. When Piper took the bread out of Cornelia’s hands, Cornelia touched Piper’s forearm and said softly, “You okay?” and something somber in her eyes told Piper that Cornelia knew, too.

Piper put the bread on the ginkgo-leaf-shaped breadboard Elizabeth had bought during a trip that she, Tom, Kyle, and Piper had made to Vermont before the kids were born. She remembered how Elizabeth had collected leaves. All those hillsides burning with orange and red, so dazzling it wore you out, and there was Elizabeth preferring the shape, the gradations in color of a single leaf. Piper remembered her sorting the leaves afterward in her hotel room, turning them over and back, carefully placing them on the table before her like a gypsy with tarot cards.

When Elizabeth saw the bread, she grinned and said, “No bread knife, Piper. We’re pulling this sucker apart with our hands.”

The bread was good, which surprised Piper. Cornelia’s pumpkin bread had been good, too, but Piper still had trouble picturing it: this arty, city-type woman with her haircut, scarves, and funky shoes measuring out flour and sugar, brushing on egg yolk.

After a few minutes, Elizabeth measured the bread with her hands and said, “Okay, I’m just eyeballing here, but I believe I’ve eaten six and a half inches of this loaf of bread.”

“For those of you keeping score at home,” said Teo, and he smiled at Piper. The man had a great smile. He wasn’t Piper’s type. His Princeton sweatshirt could have been a thousand years old, and in Piper’s opinion, he desperately needed a haircut, but his smile was out of this world.

“So, Teo,” said Elizabeth, giving him a grin that was evil and flirtatious at the same time.

“Uh-oh,” said Teo.

“Our friend Kate happened to mention that she saw you playing basketball at the Y on Thursday with some of the guys.”

“Since when does Kate work out at the Y?” asked Piper skeptically.

“Since never,” said Elizabeth. “She was at some fund-raising meeting.”

“Yeah, I was there,” said Teo. “Glen Cheever talked me into joining the over-thirty league.”

“The Doc Jocks,” said Cornelia with a delicate wince.

“A bunch of lawyers mopped the floor with us,” said Teo. “Lawyers get more sleep than doctors.”

“Also,” Cornelia reminded him, “your team. It sucks, I believe.”

“Oh, yeah,” agreed Teo, cheerfully, “it does.”

“Kate didn’t mention that.” Elizabeth went on, coyly. “She did mention a certain absence of shirts.”

“Not Teo,” said Cornelia, “he’s not a bare-the-bod kind of guy. More a hide-your-light-under-a-bushel guy.” She mouthed the word “Shy.”

“That’s not what I heard,” sang Elizabeth.

Cornelia looked at Teo with exaggerated shock.

“Cornelia, it was a basketball game. Shirts versus skins. Someone forgot the pinnies.”

“Pinnies?” asked Cornelia. “You wear pinnies?”

“Forget it,” said Teo.

“What
I
heard is that most of those guys had no business being shirtless in public,” said Elizabeth.

“I bet,” snorted Piper.

“What
I
heard is that the only one who really did,” Elizabeth said, smiling sweetly at Teo, “was you.”

Some men look good when they blush, thought Piper, and Teo was one of those men.

“And I don’t know if you know this, Teo,” Elizabeth went on, “but I was originally supposed to be on that fund-raising committee.”

“You were not,” said Piper.

“I think I see where this is going,” said Cornelia with dancing eyes. “He’ll never do it.”

“I
was
supposed to be on that committee,” Elizabeth lied serenely, “and if I hadn’t gotten sick, I’m sure I would have been with Kate when she happened to walk past the open door of the basketball court.”

“It’s a lost cause, Elizabeth,” said Cornelia.

But then, without saying a word, Teo ducked out of his sweatshirt, strode to the center of the kitchen, and put his arms out. “Pass it,” he said to Elizabeth, and she passed him an invisible ball, which he dribbled a few times in a fancy way, then shot.

Piper watched Elizabeth toss back her head, hoot, and clap her hands, and she knew she should feel shocked. It was so inappropriate. A married man performing shirtless in a room, with two married women and his own wife watching and cheering as if they were at some ridiculous bachelorette party. Totally and absurdly,
embarrassingly
inappropriate.

Except that it didn’t feel that way, not even—to Piper’s surprise—to Piper, and looking around, she saw that no one, not even Teo, seemed embarrassed. She would not have believed it six months ago, but maybe there were times when the inappropriate wasn’t inappropriate at all, when it was light and funny and exactly right. When it even held an indescribable loveliness. There’s nothing wrong with this picture, thought Piper. And then she amended the thought: except cancer. The only inappropriate thing in this room is that Elizabeth is sick.

This was the first day of wellness.

On the second day of wellness, Elizabeth held her children all day long, read to them, sang to them, built Lego towers with them, touched their hair and their faces, spread their fingers open and looked at their hands. She told them over and over that they were perfect, that they made her life perfect. She told them that she would love them forever, that she would stay with them, would be invisible but with them, like air. They could talk to her, she told them, and she would listen.

Tom told Piper this afterward, because, for most of that day, Piper stayed at her own house. For reasons she could not fully explain, she kept her children home from school. She had been careful all along to give each one time alone with her every day, but even so, she knew she hadn’t been paying the attention she should. There were days when she would stare at herself in the mirror, and say, “Won’t be winning mother of the year this year, Pipe.”

Mostly she believed that everything would be all right. How could everything not be all right when she loved them so much? But sometimes, especially at night, she worried that she was marking them, changing them, that her concentration on Elizabeth, on Emma and Peter, was opening a loneliness in Carter and Meredith that they would carry around forever. While reading a book to Carter, she pointed to the letter
C,
and said, “Remember this letter that looks like a sideways smile? What do you think that one is?” Then Carter said, “Mommy, I
know
!
C
says
kuh
.
B
says
buh
.
D
says
duh
. You know I know all them!” And Piper felt a rush of panic because she hadn’t known. If I missed this, she thought, what else have I missed?

At about eight that evening, after Carter and Meredith were asleep, Elizabeth called. “I want you, Pipe. Just for a few minutes? Can I send Ginny over?”

She wanted what she’d wanted many times before, the old promises: that Piper help Tom and the children to be happy, that Piper help Emma and Peter to remember her.

She said two other things, new things.

This: “I love you, and I know you, and you’re a different person than you think you are. Bigger and wilder and nicer. Your heart is the best heart in town. Can you please remember that?”

And this: “I know some people want to be alone. But I want everyone there. I want everyone in the house when it happens. Tom, you, Kyle, Ginny, all the kids, my mom, Lena, if she can. I’ll know you’re all there. Even if I don’t seem to know, I’ll know.”

As January began its gray, downward slide into February, Elizabeth began to die in earnest. It lasted three days. As she had wanted, they were all there. Even Kyle came every day after work and spent every night. Not for one second was Elizabeth alone.

What Piper would remember, for the rest of her life, about those three days was the talking, a gold wire of hum running through the house, day and night. They talked to Elizabeth. They took turns. They read to her and sang to her. Tom lay down next to her and whispered the story of the births of both children. They wet her mouth with a damp sponge and touched her hair, her hands, her face. They comforted her. They coaxed her. Astrid sang her lullabies, hymns, and songs by Carly Simon, Roberta Flack, James Taylor. They assured her. They gave her permission to go. Peter threw himself down on the kitchen floor, kicked, and refused to see her, saying, “I don’t like her like that.” But later, when Piper came into the room to give Tom a break, she found Peter curled up like a cat at Elizabeth’s feet, his arms around both her ankles, as Tom told the story of the day he found out he was having a son.

When Piper was entirely alone with Elizabeth, she gave her her secrets. The secret men, the lovers, all through college and until she’d met Kyle. She tried to articulate what she had never articulated before, even to herself: how it wasn’t about power, exactly, not having power over someone, anyway; how, despite what people said about girls who slept with a lot of men, she was sure it wasn’t pathological, a search for a lost father (her father was never truly lost, not even after his wife left him; he merely shrank) or a crazy need for attention (she’d always gotten plenty of attention). She had neither loathed nor disrespected herself. In all those years, she had never felt desperate, never, and even now, she didn’t feel ashamed.

She’d liked it. She’d more than liked it. Each time, she’d felt in possession of a fierce, elemental beauty, lifted, intoxicated by tenderness, free. At the time she’d believed in a distinct difference between herself and the whole category of sluts, tramps, floozies whom she scorned openly and without mercy. Now, just now, as she spoke to Elizabeth, she began to doubt that difference. Not that she considered herself, retrospectively, a slut, but it occurred to her that maybe the others weren’t sluts either. Maybe they’d all had their reasons.

“I’m sorry,” she told Elizabeth, “I don’t know why I never told you before.”

Piper was not with Elizabeth when she died. Although it was midafternoon, she was sleeping in the overstuffed chair in the sunroom, dozing, but about to tumble headlong into real sleep when she heard Astrid call out, “Oh, God, she’s gone. Tom! Piper! She can’t be gone.”

As Piper ran to the dining room, she felt an eerie blend of dread and excitement, like she’d felt when she was a kid about to go off the high dive at the pool. And when she saw Elizabeth, it was like going off the high dive again, except that she didn’t step off into nothing; something broke under her, gave way, and she was falling. She was standing upright, looking at her dead friend, but she was dropping, dropping, dropping. Because Astrid was right, Elizabeth couldn’t be gone. They had known she would go for so long, they had prepared themselves, but what it came to was this: her death was impossible.

Piper had wanted to behave calmly and with dignity, but her heart was like a door slamming repeatedly inside her chest. She cried out, frantically, “Tom!” But when she turned around to find him, there was Kyle, his soft shirt. He pulled her into him, and, helpless, like a child, she went.

What followed, after Elizabeth was gone, when the days were full of tasks, phone calls, and comforting, was a kind of cleanness. After having felt cluttered, clenched, and panicked for so long, Piper felt clean. Not refreshed, but bare and stinging, as though she’d been scoured inside and out. There was so much to do, but every task was finite. There were lists full of things Piper could accomplish and cross off. “There,” she would say, “that’s done.” Occasionally, especially when she held one of the children, she’d feel the unbearable encroaching, and quickly she’d shift her thoughts or set her hands to something else, whatever needed doing, the next thing.

So the day before the funeral, when Kyle came to her as she was preparing for the day ahead and told her he was leaving her, she turned patiently toward him and said, “Not now. I don’t have time.”

“It’s never the right time. I’ve needed to do this for so long, Piper, a really, really long time, and I keep waiting for a space to open up, but you’re always going, going, going.”

Really, really. Going, going, going.
Piper looked at him.

“Elizabeth has been dead for three days,” she said. She turned to the mirror and began to brush blush onto her cheeks.

“I know that. And before that she was dying and before that she was sick, and after the funeral, you’ll be dealing with her kids, our kids, Tom, Astrid, your grief.” He ticked the items of this list off on his fingers.

Piper turned and stopped him. “My grief? Don’t talk about my grief. You don’t know the first thing about it.” Even now, she wasn’t angry.

Kyle threw up his hands. “You’re right. I don’t know the first thing about you. How would I?”

“We’ll talk about this later.”

“I’m leaving the day after the funeral.”

“No, you are not,” said Piper, calmly.

“Piper, I’m in love with someone else.”

“That doesn’t matter.” It was true. She could imagine a time when it would matter, but now the information was nothing. Relative to everything else Piper had felt, learned, and done and to everything she still needed to do, the information that her husband was in love with someone else and wanted to leave her was immaterial, bodiless. In the balance of Piper’s life just then, this moment weighed nothing at all.

Well, look at that,
thought Piper as the moment ended,
that’s done.
She snapped her compact shut, turned, and walked out of the room.

T
WELVE

A
s the back end of the noxious-fume-spewing, banana-hauling eighteen-wheeler came bearing down on Lyssa’s minivan with greater and greater speed, its dingy white rectangle looming dizzingly larger and larger, Dev’s brain did not automatically correct these impressions (“the minivan is actually the accelerating body”; “the truck isn’t changing size, we’re just getting closer”) as it ordinarily would have done and certainly it didn’t wander off on a tangent regarding the Doppler effect, radial velocity, and redshifts as it ordinarily
might
have done. Dev’s brain had other fish to fry. As he sat in the passenger seat with Lyssa behind the wheel and with Aidan in the backseat turning as green as it is possible for a kid with brown skin to turn and, over the kind of dance-club music that you feel with your sternum as much as hear with your ears, hollering, with uncharacteristic profanity, “Slow the fuck down, Lyssa,” part of Dev’s mind was busy choking out the prayer, “Please don’t let this crazy girl kill us. Please let us get to Philadelphia in one piece.” Another part, a quiet, eye-of-the-hurricane part, was thinking how later that night, in an e-mail, he would describe the moment on the highway to Clare.

Ever since the weekend following Thanksgiving, Dev had been leading a Clare-infused life. “You’re obsessed,” Aidan had teased him, but it wasn’t obsession. It wasn’t that thoughts of Clare drove out other thoughts. Okay, so this happened from time to time, once or twice a day, but mostly it was that Dev went about his normal life, except that everything he did or said or thought or read or saw or heard had just a little Clare in it, a tint, a touch, an inflection. She didn’t take over, but she was never absent.

They e-mailed each other every day. They both liked regular, old-school, time-to-get-it-exactly-right e-mail best. But they would have one IM exchange, a short one, at nine o’clock every night. Last night Clare had written, “Right after you read this, go look at the moon, and I will, too.” The moon had been in Dev’s favorite phase, the earliest waxing crescent, a lucent shaving so fragile it looked like if you breathed on it, it would melt, so Dev held his breath, thinking, “Clare is looking at the same moon,” and then, “Even the sky’s different because of Clare,” and then, “Get real, moron; of course the sky’s not different.”

But these days, Dev was figuring out the gap between empirical and experiential knowledge and learning to appreciate both. Empirical: the earth revolves around the sun. Experiential: the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. Empirical: The universe is composed of celestial bodies, hydrogen, radiation, matter that reflects or emits light, matter that does not reflect or emit light, and so forth. Experiential (as far as Dev was concerned, and he knew better than to mention it to anyone else): the night sky had changed; Clare was there, in the moon, in the planets, in the stars, and in the dark matter—invisible, mysterious—between the stars.

Sometimes, though, he went too far. Like recently, he’d been thinking even more than he usually did about quantum nonlocality, the way once two electrons were entangled, you could separate them, shoot them hundreds of thousands of miles in opposite directions, and they’d stay linked: if you set one of them spinning, the other would instantly spin at the same speed in the opposite direction. They weren’t talking to each other; communication was not whizzing back and forth faster than the speed of light. The two particles just existed outside regular reality, outside of spacetime, in a state where distance was meaningless, where distance
wasn’t
. All of which was so cool and hard and bizarre that Dev didn’t blame himself for thinking about it. He didn’t know how anyone who’d heard about it could
not
think about it pretty regularly, like at least once every couple of weeks.

But a few days ago, Dev had gone one step further. Or more like one step backward, one humiliating, mammoth-sized
leap
backward. Tentatively, he’d tried out the thought:
Clare and I are like that. Entangled. In a state where “apart” doesn’t matter,
and suddenly, he was the guy on the edge of a cliff, one foot dangling, a guy in serious need of being yanked back from the void and whacked on the side of the head, which is exactly what, just in the nick of time, Dev did to himself. Once you started making physics metaphorical, applying it to human feelings, you were doomed. You might as well pack it up and head off to the land of the unscientific and hopelessly sappy. Besides, there were moments when “apart” did matter, when the miles between him and Clare took the wind out of Dev like a punch to the solar plexus.

In any case, right then, Clare was lucky that she and Dev lived safely inside the classical, macroscopic physical reality of Newton and Einstein where distance was distance, because the passenger seat of a minivan about to slam smack into the back of a forty-ton banana truck and get crushed like a soda can was, in Dev’s opinion, a very bad place to be.

At the last second, Lyssa braked, swerved to the left, sent the minivan careening and squealing into what was by some miracle an empty lane, and abruptly slowed to thirty-five miles an hour. She glanced witheringly at Dev, turned down the music, then rolled her eyes at Aidan in the rearview mirror.

“God, you guys are totally jumpy,” she said with disdain.

“Uh, yeah,” snorted Aidan, “watching your life pass before your eyes and under the wheels of a tractor-trailer’ll do that. Ever notice those cute white signs on the side of the highway with the cute black numbers on them?”

“My dad says that no one really expects you to go the speed limit. Not even the cops. It’s, like, not even safe?” Lyssa took both hands off the wheel in order to tighten her ponytail, despite the fact that it was already pulling the corners of her eyes oddly upward and appeared to be seriously testing the elasticity of the skin over her temples.

“Jeez,” breathed Dev as the minivan slid over into the next lane of its own accord.

“My dad says even the cops recommend that you drive at an average speed of seventy miles per hour on the highway.”

“I never heard that,” said Aidan, “but you keep driving like that, I’m sure we’ll see a cop soon, and you can ask him.”

“What do you think, Dev?” demanded Lyssa.

“I think your dad probably wasn’t recommending that you achieve the seventy-mile-an-hour average by jumping between one twenty and twenty.”

Lyssa rolled her eyes again. “Stop it already. Are you, like, doing calculus in your head twenty-four seven?”

“You,” said Aidan to Lyssa, “are a crazy person.”

Dev glanced nervously at Lyssa, who was most certainly a crazy person. “Nah. She’s just kind of—distracted.”

“She is clinically insane.”

Lyssa’s eyes met Dev’s. Then, to his surprise, she grinned. “Actually, I’m disordered.”

“My locker is disordered,” said Aidan, “you are clinically insane.”

“You didn’t tell him?” Lyssa said to Dev, as though her behavior in Dr. Kimani’s class were something she and Dev openly acknowledged and discussed on a regular basis.

“No.”

She shrugged and turned the music back up. A car sped by them, blasting its horn. Dev checked out the minivan’s speedometer. Forty miles an hour.

“I’m fine with the word ‘crazy,’ though,” shouted Lyssa, agreeably, over the pounding bass. “Some people aren’t.”

“Lyssa,” said Dev warningly, although he wasn’t sure why he wanted to stop her. It was her secret, after all, and Aidan would keep it to himself, Dev didn’t doubt that. When Dev looked over at Lyssa, he noticed that her eyelashes were coated with black mascara but were almost white at the roots, and he had to look away. He remembered the day of the fire drill, her body shaking, her impossibly frail arm bone through her sweater. I didn’t ask for this, he thought, almost angrily. I don’t want to feel this. I don’t want to know more than I already know.

“What are we talking about here?” called out Aidan, leaning forward and knocking lightly against the back of Dev’s head as though it were a door.

Lyssa turned down the music. Dev’s heart sank.

“I have OCD. Obsessive-compulsive disorder.”

“Oh, yeah,” said Aidan, “my mom has that. She keeps our house crazy clean. Hangs up her clothes by color. Goes ballistic if there’s a crumb on the kitchen counter. All that business.”

“Oh, please,” scoffed Lyssa, “that sounds like OCPD,
if
that. A personality, uh, foible? OCD is an official mental illness. You have to meet these really strict clinical criteria. Like the disordered behavior has to take up more than one hour of any given day.
And
you have to have irrational thoughts and compulsions that you, like,
know
are irrational and still can’t stop.” Dev stared at Lyssa. She sounded proud of herself. You’re not just crazy, he wanted to tell her. You’re crazy
and
weird.

“Like what?” asked Aidan.

“Well, a lot of stuff, but mostly? At school? I worry that I might shout out inappropriate stuff right in the middle of class.”

“What do you mean?” asked Aidan. It was a legitimate question and his voice was nothing but kind, but Dev shot Aidan a look that said, “Can it.” Aidan made a confused face and mouthed, “What?”

Lyssa’s neck turned red. Oh, great, thought Dev, here we go. He wished he had on a baseball cap so he could pull the brim down and disappear under it. Instead, he slunk in his seat and shifted his gaze out the window.

“Weird, um, sexual stuff. Sometimes. Totally inappropriate stuff that I don’t even really think. You don’t want to know.”

Dev was so startled by this that he sat up and turned sideways to look at Aidan. The alarm on Aidan’s face was reassuring. He looked like a person who did not, in fact, want to know. “No, no, you’re right. No need to lay it all out there.”

“So to keep from shouting out, I do these rituals.”

Aidan looked more alarmed. Dev noted that his jaw actually dropped. “Rituals? Like voodoo rituals?”

No one said anything, but then, Dev couldn’t help himself. He knew better than he wanted to know that Lyssa’s disordered mind was no laughing matter, but before he could stop it, a whoop of laughter was flying out of his mouth. Lyssa shot him a narrow-eyed glare, but then she cracked up, too, and within seconds, they were both totally gone, turning purple and sputtering out things like “voodoo dolls” and “disemboweling chickens” between spasms of laughter.

After a few seconds of looking back and forth between Dev and Lyssa, Aidan leaned forward, put a hand on Lyssa’s shoulder, and said with mock seriousness, “Lyssa, I owe you an apology. If I had known you were clinically insane, I never would have called you clinically insane.”

Lyssa laughed harder, stomped enthusiastically on the accelerator, and said, “No problema, dude. It happens all the time!”

They were on their way to Philadelphia to find a man named Tremain.

Aidan and Lyssa knew about Dev’s father theory. Willingly, Dev had given Aidan the whole scoop. Reluctantly, internally kicking himself multiple times, he’d given Lyssa the bare bones.

As soon as Christmas break ended and they were back in school, Dev had told Aidan.

“I don’t know why I didn’t tell you before,” said Dev, eyeing Aidan’s face nervously. “I just kind of didn’t get around to it before I ended up telling Clare.”

Aidan didn’t say anything for a few seconds, but as soon as his face broke into a smile, Dev knew everything was all right.

“Dev,” said Aidan, holding up two fingers of his right hand, “I have two words for you.” He put up the index finger of his left hand. “And one question.”

“Oh, great,” groaned Dev.

“Feminine.” Aidan put down one finger of his right hand. “Wiles.” He put down the other.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Dev, embarrassed, “whatever.”

“They’ll get you every time, man. Feminine wiles will get you
every
time.” Aidan shook his head, world weary. “I know from whence I speak.”

“You just said ‘whence.’”

Aidan waggled his still-upright index finger.

“Okay,” sighed Dev, “what’s the question?”

“You took your
girl
on the
bus
?”

“Shut up,” said Dev, grinning and giving him a shove.

“Okay, okay,” said Aidan, straightening his shirt. “Real question: Why do you want to find him?”

Dev stared at Aidan, stumped.

“I mean,” Aidan continued, “are you just curious? Just want to check him out? Are you mad at him? Do you want to show him how cool you turned out,
not
that you’re cool? Do you want money from him? Do you want him to, you know,
be
your
dad
?”

“I don’t know,” said Dev, slowly. “I guess I didn’t think about why.”

“What are you talking about, dude? You’re always thinking about why. You’re the guy who thinks about why.”

“I know. I guess—I guess I was just thinking that whatever my mom’s up to with him, she doesn’t want me to know. She’d probably just find him and yell at him or talk him into paying for one of those stupid schools and never even tell me about it.”

“And?”

“And I guess I thought that that wasn’t fair. He’s
my
dad.”

His face got hot. As soon as he’d said the words, he realized how babyish they sounded. He could tell Aidan thought so, too. For the first time since they’d met each other, Aidan couldn’t look him in the eye.

“That’s pretty lame, isn’t it?” said Dev, grimacing.

Aidan shrugged.

“Okay. What about this? I want to have a say. I don’t know what I’d do if I found him, and to tell you the truth, I’m not even sure I want to find him. But when I do think about finding him, I think about seeing him, seeing what he looks like, and then deciding whether to talk to him or not. Whether to tell him or not tell him or, you know, walk away forever. Does that make sense?”