Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (30 page)

For several bewildered seconds, all Dev could do was stare at the phone, then he shrugged and said, “Nutty,” turned around to walk away, made it about four feet before curiosity got the best of him, turned around again, grabbed the phone, and called
DEVEROUX
back.

A woman answered, picked up after half a ring, and instead of saying hello, said, “Ronnie?” in such a hopeful voice that Dev sort of hated to set her straight.

Feeling vaguely dumb, he said, “Uh, no. I think you must have just called me by mistake. I saw the name on the caller ID and, well, my name’s actually, weirdly enough, Deveroux, uh, Tremain, so I figured I’d call back.” Dev paused, the dumb feeling snowballing at warp speed. “And, you know,
see
.”

The woman didn’t say, “See what?” which would have been a perfectly legitimate question to which Dev had no ready answer, or “Oh, that’s okay,” or “What a fascinating coincidence, Deveroux,” or even, “Jeez, a person can’t even dial a number wrong these days without some yappy kid wasting her time.” For what felt like ages, she didn’t say anything at all. Then, she said, “Oh, oh, oh,” and, to Dev’s abject horror, the woman burst into tears.

After a few seconds, still crying, she said, “The day Ronnie told me she named you that, I just stood in my vegetable garden and cried. I was that relieved. I figured if she really hated me, she wouldn’t have given her son my name.”

Dev had no idea what this meant, but his heart was starting to pound anyway. Pay attention, he told himself without knowing why.

The woman kept talking. Talking and talking, the words tumbling out fast.

“And to think you called because of the name. I almost didn’t change it, and it caused a scandal, I can promise you that. But I did my duty. I stayed married to him, even though I thought about leaving a thousand times, running off to find you and Ronnie and get her to forgive me. But when he died, I just didn’t want the name anymore. I always loved my old name. Laura Deveroux. I thought it sounded like a star out of one of those old movies my mom and I loved to watch together. So I took it back. It’s only been since last December, kind of a Christmas present to myself.”

Find you and Ronnie
. Inside Dev, a light was beginning to dawn, a pale, fragile glow, distant and deep, like the light from a bioluminescent fish in an underground cave.

“Ronnie?” he said. The name came out in all but a whisper.

“Oh, I’m sorry, honey. I can’t seem to remember that. She’s still Ronnie to me.”

She said, “Here I am rambling on and on.”

Then, she said, gently, “I’m your grandmother, Dev, and I have missed you since the day you were born.”

Laura Deveroux. Up until last December, Laura Larrabee, wife of Guy Larrabee.

His grandmother. His
grandmother.

Lake’s mother. More accurately, Ronnie’s mother, since that’s who Lake had been until the day she took off, pregnant, leaving behind her parents, her name, and every single other thing that belonged to her apart from some clothes, the tangle of DNA that was Dev, and Teddy Tremain, who didn’t belong to her all that much, apparently, since she’d left him, too, before long, shed him and a whole life, like a snake sheds its skin: Veronica Lake Larrabee.

Apart from the fact that his grandfather had died last fall, none of this was anything Dev didn’t already know. He even knew that Lake’s first name was Veronica, although he didn’t really connect it with her and hadn’t thought about it in years. But he found that it didn’t matter what he had known before. Now that the information was coming from his actual grandmother, who was probably sitting in some room, her kitchen probably, in her actual house in Iowa, it stunned him. His mother had left and never gone back. She had left her parents behind forever. What a breathtakingly enormous and final thing to do.

But
had
she left them behind?

“Hold on,” said Dev. “You know our number. She talks to you?”

“Not very often.” Laura’s voice began to tremble again. Even shaky, her voice was much younger sounding than Dev would have expected. She didn’t sound like somebody’s grandmother. The words bounced around the interior of his skull, echoing:
Somebody’s grandmother
. His.

“Not so often as I wish she would. And only me, never Guy. She hung up if he answered. But he wouldn’t have talked to her anyway, and that’s a very sad fact. I didn’t even know you all had moved until she called me last fall to say she saw Guy’s obituary in the newspaper.”

“She gets an Iowa newspaper? I don’t think so. I never saw it.”

“Ohio, honey. And no, she reads it on her computer.”

Ohio.

“Right,” said Dev after a beat. “I meant Ohio.”

“Blake’s Tavern, Ohio,” said his grandmother.

“Right,” Dev repeated. “Do you know…I mean, did Lake tell you why we moved here?”

“Something about a school for you. She says you’re a brilliant student, which does not surprise me at all. Not at all.”

“That’s all she said? That’s the only reason she gave?”

“Sure, Dev. Why, honey? Were you thinking there was more to it?”

“I don’t know,” said Dev. Then he just said it. Why shouldn’t he say it? His mother whom he trusted had lied to him about Iowa. He had lived with the lie of Iowa like a little jar of poison for as long as he could remember. How could she let him live like that? In a surge of anger, he threw it out like a rock into a pond. “I think we’re here looking for Teddy.”

But it didn’t make a splash. At least, not the one Dev had expected.

“Teddy Tremain? Why, Dev, Teddy Tremain’s right here in Blake’s Tavern, not two miles down the road from me. He’s been here for going on ten years now. Lake’s known that all along.”

Slowly, Dev walked into the living room and sat down on the floor, thumping his back against the sofa, an unspooling sensation inside his stomach. They were not here to find his father after all. He had been wrong about everything, all this time.

“Teddy took over his father’s heating and air-conditioning business. He’s got three boys of his own now.”

Of his own.

“He’s a nice young man, just like always, which is, I guess, why Ronnie picked him to run off with.”

One sentence, one
word
in one sentence clanging like a wrong note, and there Dev was: on the edge of a vertiginous cliff, his legs shaking. All he had to do was ignore it, the one word, call it a slip of the tongue. Or he could hang up, push a button, and leave the woman on the other end of the line, never go back. Her own daughter had done it. But even as these possibilities spun through Dev’s head, he acknowledged with some bitterness that they weren’t really possibilities. You couldn’t change who you were. He was the guy who doesn’t let it drop, the guy who
asks,
even if the truth might fall on him like a ton of bricks.

In a thin voice he didn’t recognize, Dev asked, “What do you mean, picked?” Right after he said it, he pressed the speaker button on the phone, set it on the rug, a few feet away, then squeezed his eyes shut.

When his grandmother spoke next, her voice filled the room. She told him this: “To run off with and marry. After that older boy she was so crazy about at Princeton left her high and dry. Found out she was pregnant, dropped her flat, and went on his merry way, to law school or medical school, something. The bum.”

He started to say, “You mean Brown,” to correct her, but the words never made it out. She wasn’t wrong. He was the one who was wrong. The one who didn’t know anything at all.

Dev could not believe it, how quickly his life had become one of those Escher drawings in which everything seems to fit together and make sense but in which everything is impossible: water flowing up a flat plain; stairs you climb down and up at the same time; a boy sitting, oblivious, sleeping with his knees tucked in, on a ceiling. His father was not his father. His mother who never lied to him was a liar.

His grandmother kept talking, but Dev wasn’t listening because he was connecting dots. He didn’t really mean to connect them or even want to connect them. It was as though he were sitting on the rug with his palms pressed against his eyes, watching as a picture emerged all on its own, emerged and then grew more detailed by the second, until there it was: a man with a basketball, a tall, lean, long-armed man in an old, loose, gray T-shirt, threadbare and coming apart at the neck.

Orange basketball. Orange letters across the front of the gray shirt.

Princeton.

Teo.

S
IXTEEN

Cornelia

T
echnically speaking, I was not the last person in my family to learn how to swim. Out of the four children and two adults who comprise my family of origin, I was fourth, technically, but only because Cam was in utero and Toby was barely a year old, a good ten months away from being certifiably pool safe. (I jest not; the certificate is pressed between the pages of his meticulously maintained baby book, which also contains the list of words he was able to speak at the time: “no” and “ta,” a version of “helicopter” so truncated it seems more like evidence of maternal wishful thinking than of true linguistic prowess, wouldn’t you agree?)

I was six when I learned. While I would not say that I am obsessed with this particular subject, I’ve done quite a bit of research on it, casual, unobsessed research spanning close to three decades, and my results seem to indicate that, in many families, perhaps even in the vast majority of families, at least among non-island-dwelling peoples, six is a very reasonable age at which to learn to swim.
Many
young children are afraid of being submerged in water. One might even argue, if one were, say, cornered by a gaggle of teasing family members, that the fear of being submerged in water is, at the very least, understandable, and at the very most, evidence of an uncommonly fine-tuned survival instinct. In any case, in most families, there is nothing whatsoever shameful about six.

Needless to say, I did not grow up in most families, but in a family of veritable otters, streamlined and bearing, year-round, for years, an odd, silvery cast to their hair and the faint smell of chemicals. My father, a backstroke specialist, swam at the college level and has a box of medals to prove it. Ollie, of course, began competing at age four, qualified for the Junior Olympics in three events at the mind-numbingly prodigious age of seven and three-quarters, only giving the sport up at age sixteen, after profound agonizing, in order to become a full-time tennis star and future valedictorian. In addition to his much-vaunted ability to conquer the ocean waves, Toby still holds the two-hundred-yard individual medley record at our country club pool, where Cam became the youngest lifeguard and swimming instructor in said pool’s history. Even my tiny, manicured, late-middle-age mother still manages to squeeze in, between her endless philanthropic duties, garden club meetings, golf, tennis, and anal-retentive housekeeping, about 250 laps per week.

In such a family, six was late. Six was
unthinkably
late and cause for, depending on the family member, gentle ribbing, constructive criticism, firm encouragement, and scathing ridicule.

When I finally learned, it was not from the instructors at the Westerly Family Swim School, who had taught not only my siblings, but over half the kids in town and their parents before them. Westerly was a hallowed institution, a kind of fundamentalist church of swim lessons that promised—what else?—salvation, not only from drowning but from a life devoid of confidence and self-respect, and although they approached the second oldest Brown child with the same benign ruthlessness that had proved so successful not only for them but for missionaries throughout history, I was intractable, a lost soul.

My baffled parents gave it the old college try as well, in tandem and individually, even going so far at one point as to bribe me with the plastic model of Misty of Chincoteague that I desired over all other objects in the world. No dice.

When I finally learned, it was from Teo Sandoval, age eight and a half.

It was mid-July, which meant that I had spent a full six weeks in various permutations of pool pariahdom: reading Laura Ingalls books on a lounge chair, playing solitary card games on a beach towel, or dangling my feet in the water watching kids two-thirds my age play Marco Polo and sharks and minnows with glee. On this particular afternoon, I was doing the leg-dangling routine, sitting in my favorite spot, almost directly below the lifeguard stand where the other kids (i.e., Ollie and her henchgirls) would be less likely to taunt me or splash water in my eyes.

I’m not sure how it happened. One minute Teo was cannonballing off the diving board with the other older boys, each dive preceded by a Tarzan yell, each ending with a simultaneous rocketlike surfacing and hair-flinging jerk of the head, and the next minute, he was sitting next to me, saying, “Not to be mean or anything, but you’re missing the whole point of summer.”

I shrugged. “So?”

“So, I bet I can teach you how to swim by the end of the day.”

He did not. It took six days, like Creation, but the miracle isn’t that I learned. After all, I was not uncoordinated. I was a decent soccer player and a crackerjack Chinese jump roper. The miracle is that I ever let him teach me in the first place, that I allowed my three-and-a-half-foot tall, water-wingless body to be coaxed off dry land into four feet of water, held up by nothing more than the skinny brown arms of a rising fourth-grader.

We negotiated the terms first, of course. He promised me that there would be no surprises. He would not dunk my head underwater when I was least expecting it, and he would not, no matter what, let go of me, even if he was certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was ready. And because he had never lied to me before, had never, to my knowledge, lied to anyone (although I should jump in and say that the child Teo was not a saint; lying just wasn’t one of his vices and still isn’t), I believed him.

But the promises alone don’t explain the draining away of the fear, fear that usually defied all rational thinking and snapped me up in its jaws like a great white the second I hit water. The simple, peculiar truth is that with Teo’s hands on me, I was not afraid. By the end of the first day, I could float on my back, one of his hands under my shoulders, the other against my knobby lumbar vertebrae; by the end of the third, I could dog-paddle, his hand propping my solar plexus; on the fifth day, for the first time ever, voluntarily, I put my face in the water, eyes open, and on the sixth day, at my solemn request and in what still ranks as one of the bravest moments of my life, he let go, and I swam, joyfully, like a birthday goldfish wriggling out of a Ziploc bag, a distance of ten feet, from Teo’s arms to the side of the pool.

When I was no longer six years old, when I was a grown woman whose belief in the possibility of safety, while far from shattered, had suffered the inevitable hard hit or two, Teo’s touch did not displace fear as absolutely as it once had. But it was still true that his skin on mine worked a kind of instant, inexplicable, possibly chemical magic. When he touched me, the world fell into alignment—a laying on of hands, a chiropractic of the soul—the threat of drowning evaporated, and hope cast its light. I know this sounds dramatic, but what would you have me do about it? Some things
are
dramatic. Put it this way if you prefer: under Teo’s touch, I could believe in happy endings. Or middles. Or beginnings.

At the start of my thirty-second week, when Dr. Helena Oliver, our high-risk obstetrician, slid the ultrasound wand over the slippery slope of my comically mountainous abdomen, Teo took my hand and pressed into it the usual minor miracle, the infusion of hope. And even though the doctor gave us the very last thing I expected her to give us (the thing she and other doctors had taken meticulous care
not
to give us no matter how ardently I asked for it), namely, the unequivocal assurance that our shiny Penny was out of the woods, I was jubilant, soaring, incandescent with gratitude, but not stunned. Of course our baby would be fine. Of course.

“I’m very pleased with how things look in there,” said Dr. Oliver, her eyes on the screen. “The baby’s on the small side, but not concerningly small, perfectly developed, and your uterus has stretched in such a way that the fibroid is not threatening the placenta at all.”

“Way to go, uterus,” whispered Teo, addressing my belly, his mouth lifting at the corners in a smile so gentle it hurt to see it.

“So we’re out of the woods?” I asked. My eyes filled with tears. Infusion of hope or not, sometimes you just need to hear a thing said.

“The baby is out of the woods,” clarified Dr. Oliver, and then she went on about possible risks to the mother (the mother!) during delivery, but I had stopped listening. The baby was okay. The baby was gorgeously, radiantly okay. The planets swung serenely in their orbits, the ocean tides rose and fell, my uterus had stretched, I held Teo’s hand, and all was right with the world.

Afterward, in the parking garage, as Teo began to open my car door, he changed his mind, turned, fell against me, and pressed his face into the side of my neck.

“I know,” I whispered, twining my fingers in his hair, feeling his eyelashes, the architecture of his face, his warm skin, and from within the hilly country my body had become, the seismic shift of tiny limbs. Of course I knew. It took away my breath, too, how we could take up so little space and yet contain it all, the vast demands, the amplitude of love.

When Teo dropped me off at home, we kissed inside the car like two teenagers, until my mouth felt bruised. Then I went inside and called first my mother, then Teo’s mother, Ingrid, then my friend Linny, letting the joy of these three good women rain down on me, dancing in it Gene Kelly fashion, clicking my heels, twirling giddily around lampposts. After that, I went into Penny’s room to spend a little time alone with my full heart. It was a pretty room, cucumber green, with white furniture, a quilt from Ingrid, my grandmother’s rocking chair, a dresser full of soft clothes. One of my holy places, every last thing in it chosen with love. I folded and unfolded, pressed tiny pajamas and featherlight blankets against my cheeks. If I had been an only slightly different person, I would have fallen to my knees on the white flokati rug Ollie had found for Penny on a trip to Greece. Instead, I rocked in the rocker with my eyes shut, breathing prayers of thanksgiving into the hush.

Afterward, I craved company. Actually, to be specific, I craved Piper’s company, and you don’t need to tell me how crazy that sounds. But like Emily Dickinson says, “The soul selects its own society,” and, apparently, the soul, at least my soul, plays by its own inscrutable rules, because it wasn’t the first time I had wanted Piper. In fact, in her own thorny, generous, improbable way, Piper was becoming as indispensable a friend as I had ever had.

But she wasn’t home, not at home and not at Tom’s house (she had just two days ago given me permission to call her there, jotting down the number on a piece of personalized notebook paper with her name and a pink-petaled daisy in the bottom-right-hand corner, ripping it out and handing it to me with a jaunty nonchalance so studied and so clearly proclaiming, “I have nothing to hide,” that it gave my heart a twinge). Due to my admittedly old-ladyish uneasiness with cell phone culture (you know what I mean, it blurs the boundaries between the /files/69/46/f6946/public/private realms, discourages quiet introspection, results in abominable driving, fills the world with silly noises, et cetera), I try not to pester people when they’re not at home, but I broke my own rule and had started to dial Piper’s cell number when I remembered that she had an appointment that afternoon for several, thankfully unspecified forms of waxing. Although I am not a waxer myself (when I told Piper this, she gave me the sort of look you’d give someone who claimed not to brush her teeth), I could imagine that even a hotshot cell phone user like Piper would prefer not to have a conversation while hair was being systematically ripped from her body.

In my current two-local-friends existence, that left Lake. “The elusive Lake,” Teo called her, or sometimes “your imaginary friend.” He was referring to the fact that, in all the months I had known her and that we had known Dev, he had never met her, had only even spoken to her on the phone a handful of times, but Lake was elusive in other ways as well. She was elusive when she was in the same room with me, as I’ve described, and sometimes, in flashes so fleeting and inexplicable that I could never be sure they had really happened, I thought Teo might be right about the imaginary friend part, too. A barbed glance, an icy pause, a shift in tone of voice, and I would wonder if Lake considered me a friend at all.

But mostly, she was lovely: droll, sly, smart, and affectionate. And mostly, she seemed to think I was lovely, too, so I called her. It was two o’clock. She would be nearly finished with her shift at Vincente’s.

As soon as the hostess handed Lake the phone, she demanded, “Are you hungry?”

“Did Vinny tell you to ask me that?” Despite the many plates of pasta I had annihilated in his presence, Vinny labored under the misapprehension that I was scandalously underfed. “A nibbler,” he would accuse, with hurt in his eyes, “a guinea pig!”

“Who else?” said Lake.

“That baby is crying for some pasta!” Vinny shouted in the background. “Don’t be a stingy mama!”

“No pasta,” I told Lake, groaning, “no garlic.”

“Ah,” she said, sagely, “you’ve entered the indigestion stage. The diminished-appetite stage.”

“Diminished appetite?” shouted Vinny in horror.

“Tell him that’s what happens when someone does headstands on your digestive system all day long.”

Lake laughed and said, “Come over and tell him yourself.”

Once we were sipping our coffees—mine, in a sad oxymoron, a decaf cappuccino—and spooning in the heavenly crema caramella gelato Vinny had forced upon us, I told her my good news about Penny. I hadn’t been sure if I would because while Lake was happy to discuss pregnancy as a general, physical phenomenon, the few times I’d ventured into the realm of the personal and emotional, she had clapped shut like a clam. The last time this had happened, after I’d told her about Teo confessing his secret wish that Penny would be a girl (“I wouldn’t be disappointed with a boy,” he’d quickly clarified, “are you kidding? a son? But right now I’d say it’s sixty-forty, girl”), I’d sworn off disclosing anything close to my heart. But I decided that if Lake could not rejoice in Penny’s emergence from the woods, it was best to know that now and walk away from her forever.