Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (23 page)

As Dev watched, the girl at the Starbucks counter tilted her head languidly and gave the man the kind of smirking, eyelashy, intimate smile that not-gay women only ever smile at not-gay men, at least as far as Dev knew, which admittedly wasn’t all that far. Still, when the man stared right at the counter girl’s eyes, deliberately unbuttoned his coat, and slowly smiled back, there was no doubt. Any idiot could tell: they were classic, they were
textbook
two-people-being-not-gay-together. Dev felt a quick little irrational pang of regret. Not only was his potential gay father not his father, he wasn’t even gay.

“You’re late today, Ben,” the girl admonished, “but I saved you an everything bagel.”

“Cool,” said the man who was not Dev’s father. “This must be my lucky day.”

When Dev got home, he found a note from Lake:

Dev read the note once, then read it again. It was an ordinary note. Actually, Dev realized it might not be ordinary as far as notes to kids from moms went, but as far as notes from
his
mom went, it was ordinary, which made what happened when Dev read it for the third time all the more
extra
ordinary. Because what Dev did the third time was cry. Dev hadn’t cried for a long time. Months, definitely. Years, maybe. And while he didn’t fall on the ground and howl, he didn’t merely do some insignificant eye rubbing either. By the time Dev got to the word “safety-conscious,” his eyes were burning; by “insanely,” they were swimming with tears; by “Mom,” the tears were rolling down his face and there were faint, puppylike sounds happening in the vicinity of his Adam’s apple. Other times, Dev would have felt humiliated by all this, but right then, staring down at the note, at the familiar handwriting, jagged and beautiful at the same time, all Dev felt was confusion and a kind of wonder.

I’m sad,
he thought at first.
How did I get to be so sad?

But then it dawned on him that what he was feeling wasn’t just pure sadness, but a guilt/sadness compound, heavy on the guilt. G
₂
S. He’d lived his entire life with his mom, and it had been a good life. It
was
a good life, and the parts that hadn’t been good had had nothing to do with his mom; the bad parts happened
in spite
of her. But while she was out pulling a double shift, Dev had spent the day trying to dig up her secrets, trying to find someone who had, Dev was very sure, never been interested in finding Dev. In fact, by all accounts, Teddy Tremain had never been very interested in Dev at all, not even when they lived in the same house.

Still, Dev missed him. Not all the time or even very often, but now and then, missing would hit Dev, throw him off balance, a sudden, undeniable ache to know his father, how his voice sounded, what his face did when he read the paper or looked at his son. And the missing wasn’t fair; it wasn’t earned. In fact, the missing, the searching, the imagining were so unfair that when you put them all together, they looked a lot like betrayal. Like Dev wasn’t happy with his life. Like Lake wasn’t enough.

Dev stood at the kitchen table crying as he hadn’t cried in years, steeped in guilt and sorrow, gratitude and love, and understood—not like a dawning, but like a punch in the stomach—that everything his mother had done—leaving home and school and Teddy, working as a waitress when she was smarter than anyone Dev knew, moving across the country and then across the country again, staying up late to discuss evolution, physics, genetics, coming home between shifts, bringing lasagna, leaving notes, telling lies, keeping secrets—every single thing had been for him.

“I’m done,” he said out loud. “No more looking. If she wants me to meet him, fine. But I’m done.” Saying this felt solemn and official.

After the crying, Dev sat down at the kitchen table, drained and fragile, like an empty glass. After what seemed like a long time, he got up, called the restaurant, left a message with Angie the hostess that he was home, then went into his room and wrote to Clare about his day.

At the end of the e-mail, he wrote, “I’m finished with all that stuff. Let my mom introduce us. Let
him
find
me
. Yeah, right. I don’t care, though. I mean, come on, the guy didn’t even love me when I was a baby and cute (and I was unbelievably cute). Who needs him?” Then he wrote, “I know what that sounds like. But I don’t. I really don’t need him. I figured that out once and for all.”

Dev thought about knocking on Rafferty’s door, but he was too tired to talk, and he knew Rafferty would want to talk. He was turning out to be a nice enough guy, despite the phony-sounding name, but because he was now Lake’s boyfriend or whatever, he spent a lot of energy “getting to know” Dev, and that evening, Dev wasn’t up for talk, and he absolutely was not up for being known. So he sat with a book about paleontology, an old book he’d read so many times that his exhausted brain could nudge around the familiar ideas without even trying, and he ate the lasagna, demolished it, every last bite, and even with all that food inside him, the delicate empty feeling never went away.

At nine o’clock, he walked into his room to check for Clare’s instant message. He’d check it, he’d write back, then he’d go to bed and let himself fall 90 percent asleep the way he always did, leaving 10 percent to listen for the last piece of the night world to fall into place, the all-clear signal, his mother opening the front door. He was so tired that even his bones were tired; he could feel tiredness all along his spine and inside his ears. But then he saw Clare’s message, and in the same instant that white light and electricity flooded his brain, his heart stood still in his chest.

“Listen, Dev, if he doesn’t love you, it’s because he doesn’t know you. I know you don’t need him to, but if he met you now, he’d definitely love you.”

“How do you know?” he wrote back. He shut his eyes, waiting, the buzz of the computer screen suddenly as noisy as a swarm of bees.

Somewhere in Virginia, in a town cradled by hills, in a room Dev had pictured a hundred times, Clare typed out these words with her hands: “Trust me. I know.”

T
HIRTEEN

Cornelia

W
hen you unexpectedly find yourself a member of a group earmarked for craziness, you can go one of two ways: embrace, indulge, celebrate your newly lunatic identity, or defy it. Because I am in my own puny way a swimmer against the tide and because I’ve always bristled at the concept of women, pregnant or not, as hormone addled, but mainly because, throughout most of my pregnancy, I simply did not feel all that much crazier than usual, I defied it. I was meticulously sane. I made an extra effort to make sense when I spoke; to not weep over fallen cakes, or at the sight of other people’s babies, or at the perfect, ineluctable beauty of a peeled orange; to not rage at the plumber for showing up three hours late. I kept exquisite track of my keys and my appointments. I never got farther than the driveway before discovering I was wearing two different shoes. I only called my husband by the wrong name once.

But as I sat on my front steps, ostensibly enjoying the spring sunshine, like a normal human being, but inwardly subtracting—my mental finger firmly on the rewind button—a fourteen-year-old boy back to a microscopic clump of cells, I had to admit that my behavior might be falling a weensy bit short of sane. Sometimes, though, there’s a fine line between craziness and bliss, between craziness and absolute clarity, so fine that if you were the woman I was that morning, the line might have grown so fine, so transparent and wispy that you would have ceased to realize it existed at all.

If you were the woman I was that early spring, safely tucked into my second trimester like a bird in a nest, triple screen, nuchal translucency, nausea all behind me, if you’d seen the early ultrasound (flashing coin, pulsing star), felt the secret, moth-wing flutters, heard the heartbeat’s gallop, you would have walked through your days looking at people, and thinking, “Somebody’s daughter, somebody’s son,” as stunned as though you were the first person to discover it: that people beget other people, that every person on earth emerged from another person’s body. The UPS man; your neighbor’s blond children; the woman at the gym; sullen-faced skateboard kids in the supermarket parking lot; your own green-eyed, familiar, incomparable husband.

It doesn’t happen often, at least not to ordinary people like I am, the awareness of a miracle glowing just under the skin of the commonplace, and when it happens, you want to pay attention. I sat there with tentative, early spring all around me, that first scattered blooming, that first lemon-lime green resting as fragile as frost on the bushes and trees, and paid attention as hard as I could. If you were the woman I was, the fourteen-year-old boy mulching your flower beds would not have escaped your notice. You would have sat on your front steps in the sun, watching him and imagining the months suspended in fluid and darkness, the arithmetic of the cells, the spiraled genes willing the baby he’d been into being.

As I watched him, Dev took off one of Teo’s old work gloves and pushed his hair out of his eyes.

Boom. From that first microscopic second, it was all set down. Encoded. Ordained,
I thought, awestruck.
Straight brown hair, long fingers, slate blue eyes.

I shook my head at myself. Thank God that the kid, smart as he was, wasn’t clairvoyant or he would have thrown down his rake and run for the hills.

Then Dev startled me by saying, “So, do you ever, like, picture what he’ll look like?” He grinned. “I mean, what
it
will look like. It feels wrong to call it ‘it’ though.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, nodding. “We gave up on pronouns a while back. You can call it Penny if you want. That’s what we call it. Because Penny looked like a little flashing penny in the first ultrasound. Although you could argue that Penny isn’t exactly a gender-neutral name.”

“Oh, yeah, it is,” said Dev, immediately. “Penny Hardaway. He never really came back after his knee blew out, but he’s definitely male.”

I laughed. “That’s exactly what Teo said. Almost to the word.” Then I answered, “I do imagine how Penny will look. A lot. But lately, more than imagining what Penny will be later, I imagine what Penny is now. I wish I could be in there, where the action is.” Because I knew that this might sound silly, even though I was deeply serious, I grinned and shrugged.

But Dev just looked thoughtful and then said, “But you
are
there, right? I mean, you’re the there where Penny is.” He looked up at me and said, “How cool. To be someone’s there,” and the hint of wonder in his eyes told me he’d glimpsed the miraculous inside the ordinary, too. From what I knew of Dev, I would have bet my last dollar that this happened to him a lot more often than it happened to the rest of us.

This boy, I thought. Lake is so lucky, Lake is blessed among women to have this boy.

“You’re right,” I told him, “you got that exactly right.”

Then because I could feel the faint burning behind my eyes and in the back of my throat that meant I was on the verge of embarrassing us both into speechlessness, and because I loved talking to Dev and wanted to keep doing it, I hopped to my feet and said, “I’ll go grab us both some water.”

When I came back, Dev was dumping some more mulch into the flower bed. He thanked me for the water and then drank it the way kids drink, like he’d been wandering in the desert for days. Dev looked down, scooting the velvety, nearly black mulch around with the toe of his sneaker. When he looked up, he said, “Clare told me about Christmas.” And I swear the boy’s face began to shine. I recognized what I saw there: that a person’s name could be infinitely precious, that just saying it could make you feel singled out for glory.

Thus shining, he continued, “How everyone was unbelievably happy when you and Teo told them that you were…” He broke off and I watched him ransack his brain for a word less intimate, less everything else, less
pregnant
than “pregnant.” Finally, he said, “When you told them about Penny.”

“Yep,” I said, softly, remembering, “they were pretty happy.” And then because I knew he was ready to explode with wanting to, I said, “Tell me what else Clare said.”

He stuffed both gloves in his back pocket and sat down on a step a few down from mine, and he started talking in a let-loose, happy way that reminded me of a child on a swing, kicking higher and higher.

“She described everything, how you guys were at the dinner table, all of you. Clare and her mom and her mom’s boyfriend Gordon and your parents and Teo’s parents and your brothers and your sister Ollie and her boyfriend Edmund and you and Teo, and how when you said it, everything got quiet. The talking and the silverware noise stopped. Time stopped. That’s what Clare said.” Dev paused, smiling a private, downward smile. “She said it was one of those moments when people stop time.”

“It was,” I said, “but it didn’t last long. You get dragged back into the temporal realm pretty quickly in the Brown house.”

“That’s what Clare said. She said that it turned into Times Square at midnight on New Year’s. Everyone was up out of their seats all at the same time, hugging and kissing and cheering.”

“And high-fiving and slapping Teo on the back and saying, ‘Well done, dude. Your “boys” came through for you!’”

“Toby, right?”

“Toby
and
Cam,” I corrected drily. “My two little brothers are cut from the same cloth, that cloth being a faded Bob Marley T-shirt.”

Dev laughed. “And Ollie. Clare said even Ollie got tears in her eyes and came over and hugged you.”

“So hard that she almost cracked a rib,” I added. “Ollie has a good heart beating inside her. She just forgets about it most of the time.”

“And your dad just sat there smiling and smiling. Even when he started eating again, he just kept smiling.”

And my mother. For the first five seconds after I broke the news, in the stillness that followed, before she had jumped up to seek out bottles of champagne and to rinse and dry each Waterford flute despite the fact that they were, like everything in her house, spotless and dust free, before she’d busied herself with gathering the proper elements of celebration while everyone else just celebrated, my mother had looked at me with a tenderness so raw and burning that I could almost not bear to see it and could almost not bear it when the five seconds ended and she looked away.

“Clare said she’ll remember it forever, the way joy poured into the room,” said Dev in a quiet voice.

I smiled. My Clare. “Those were her exact words, weren’t they?”

“Yeah,” said Dev, his eyes meeting mine, “she’s always saying stuff like that, isn’t she? Stuff that only she would say.” And even though neither of us moved, even though the same four feet and twenty years that had separated us seconds before still lay between us, we were suddenly right next to each other, inches apart, bumping elbows in the same small boat of loving Clare.

“Yes,” I said.

Dev stood up then. He didn’t jump up embarrassed. He didn’t break the moment. He just stood up and got back to work, and the moment went on. Neither of us said anything, just remained together in a wide quiet that contained the spring and the rustle of the rake in the mulch and the whine of a distant lawn mower and Clare.

After a few minutes, Dev said, “Lucky Penny. All those people who can’t wait for him to show up and be part of the family.” Then he caught himself. “Or her.” He smiled.

I saw the smile, but I also heard the ache that he couldn’t quite keep out of his voice when he said the word “family.”

Oh, Clare,
I thought automatically and with a nearly oracular certainty,
you need to love this boy.

This thought, especially the urgency of it, took me off guard, and I knew as well as anyone how odd it was. Clare was fourteen, after all, an eighth-grader. And I should say that I wasn’t planning out Clare’s future in my head: love, marriage, children. Not exactly, not the nuts and bolts of it. But some things, no matter how unlikely, are just supposed to happen. You know what I mean. Some things just smack of the future and feel part of an overarching rightness. The person-to-be inside me was one of these things. Clare loving Dev was another.

Call it a vision. Intuition. A gut feeling. A revelation. The wish of a hormone-addled, sentimental pregnant woman. Call it whatever you want.

Just do it, Clare.
Part command, part prayer.
Just love him back.

In all ways but one, being pregnant is nothing like contemplating the purchase of a new car.

For most of my life, this bit of wisdom had eluded me because, for most of my life, in addition to being happily or unhappily unpregnant, I’d also been happily, triumphantly carless, but everything you have heard about the suburbs and cars is true: if you live there, you need one. And once you begin to think about buying one, once you’ve gotten to the stage at which you are contemplating buying a specific make and model, what happens is that you who have never noticed cars at all, for whom Sienna has forever been burnt orange, Sonata a piece of music, Tahoe an elopement destination, Touareg nothing on God’s green earth, you begin to see the car everywhere. Volvo station wagons crop up like dandelions on the roadside. Toyota Priuses materialize like worms in spring rain.

I think you see where I’m going with this. When you are pregnant, pregnant women are ubiquitous. I remembered it from the first time: New York City studded with pregnant women, like stars in the firmament, their sway-backed posture, one hand pressed to their lower backs, their secret inward expressions. I would meet their eyes and feel connected to them, and, despite the fact that outwardly, I looked like my same, scrawny self, I believed they sensed it, our identical chosen-ness, our shared participation in biology’s best magic trick.

I remembered afterward, too, when I was walking around emptied and heartsick, how they were still there, all around me, every place I went.

So when Toby came walking through my front door one Sunday morning with a very young, black-haired, solemn, and conspicuously pregnant woman, I was so used to the sight of pregnant women that it took a moment for the fact to sink in.

It was nine thirty, and Teo and I were doing what we did every Sunday morning, eating bagels with all the trimmings; drinking coffee (decaf, alas, for me and Penny); and luxuriating together in the big, fat Sunday
New York Times
the way other people luxuriate in hot baths, trading the Week in Review for the magazine, the front page for the book review, sometimes talking, sometimes reading out loud, but mostly existing in a lazy, gorgeous, coffee-and-caper-scented hush.

Teo and I treasured our Sunday mornings. We indulged in the belief that they were the universe’s gift to us, that the Fates had conspired to arrange our weekly two hours of beatitude. Even Toby seemed to be in on it. He’d gotten a job as comanager of a ski shop that a college friend (Llewellyn Sparks, otherwise known as—what else?—“my boy Sparky”) had opened in Philadelphia, and, Saturdays after work, Toby and Sparky Sparks, those two unlikely instruments of fate, would generally commence carousing in ways that precluded Toby’s making the long drive home and necessitated his sleeping on Sparky’s sofa or floor or, possibly, given their mutual arrested development, upper bunk.

So when Toby sauntered in with the young woman at what was, by his standards, the crack of dawn, and said, “Yo, family members,” my first thought was “No, no, no, I’m right in the middle of the Modern Love column!”

My second thought was “Thank God I’m wearing decent pajamas.”

My third thought was “That must be Miranda, and Toby was right about her chocolate brown eyes.”

And only then did I get around to “Holy shit, she’s pregnant.”

Something similar must have happened to Teo because the first thing he said to Toby, right about the time I was reflecting on my pajamas, was “You’re early, man. What happened? Philadelphia run out of beer last night?”

But a few seconds later, right after Toby said, with a big, gleeful grin, “Check it out, this is Miranda,” I looked at Teo and saw his hand, bagel in tow, frozen midway to his mouth and his face broadcasting such naked shock that I wanted to tell him to get a grip before I realized that my face was doing the same thing.