Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (33 page)

“We should probably go,” Clare was saying. “Toby’ll be there any minute with his new baby.”

“No,” said Dev, more sharply than he meant to. “I mean, I can’t. My mom.”

“Shoot,” said Clare, crestfallen. “I thought this was one of the Saturdays she worked.”

“She does,” said Dev, “but when she comes home between shifts, she wants me to be there.” This was not technically a lie, and there was no way he could sit down at a table with Teo and Cornelia and act like everything was normal, but in the beam of Clare’s guileless brown gaze, Dev felt like a world-class jerk. I’m sorry, he thought, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

“I’m sorry,” he said, squeezing Clare’s hand. “But, hey, can you come over later?”

Clare brightened.

“Aidan’s coming over, and there’s, like, this thing I want to tell you both.”

“Oh.” Clare looked startled, then she smiled. “Okay, Mr. Mysterious. I bet I could come over for a little while before dinner. I need to meet my friend Aidan in the flesh, don’t I?”

Dev laughed. The last time Clare had called, Aidan had insisted on talking to her. And talking to her and talking to her and talking to her.

Clare stood up, pulling Dev up after her. When they stood face-to-face, she hugged him.

“Oh, Dev,” she whispered. Then, she smiled. Then, she was gone.

Dev began at the beginning. He hadn’t planned to. He had planned to begin with the phone call from his grandmother, and beginning at the beginning—with his mother, who never went to Brown, at Brown—meant covering ground he had already covered with both Aidan and Clare, but he needed to walk them through his process, step by step (and that’s how it seemed, like a journey, a trek through the freaking Amazon with squawking monkeys swinging by and poison-dart frogs stuck to every tree), so that they could understand. Maybe more than that, he needed his friends to be with him amid all the lies and truth because he felt alone. It was funny how, until this past year, Dev had felt alone basically all the time without caring much or even really noticing, but now alone hurt. Alone felt a lot like lost.

He was nervous, at first, but only until he remembered who Aidan and Clare were, that, as they sat listening (and he loved their identical careful, leaning-in, dark-eyed, serious listening), they were themselves, people Dev knew and who knew him, people he loved and who loved him, although none of them had ever said the word “love.” It was the same kind of remembering that had happened earlier that day with Clare’s bracelet and her voice saying, “Right,” and somewhere in the back of Dev’s brain, a thought flickered, that maybe this would be the key to dealing with everything that would come: to hold people (Teo, Lake, Cornelia) in his mind in their entirety, to resist every impulse to turn them into ideas, to keep them specific no matter what.

But that thought could wait. Dev had a story to tell.

When he got to the part about the phone call, the telling got hard. Just thinking about that day still made Dev feel beat up and sad. After he had exchanged promises with his grandmother—she would not tell his mother she’d talked to Dev; Dev would call her again soon—and hung up, Dev had started to shake like something out of
The Call of the Wild,
like he was freezing to death, and he’d pulled his knees to his chest and put his head down, but the shaking hadn’t stopped. Each lie his mother had told him felt raw, sticky, like a burn, and for the rest of the week, he’d done everything he could not to be alone with her because every single ordinary thing she did or said made him realize even more how much he had lost. The mother he had lived with for fourteen years was gone, and even though she had never truly been the person he’d thought she was, she had been that person to him. He missed her. He hated her for taking herself away from him, but he missed her more than he hated her, and he hated that, too.

Dev was sitting on the living room rug, and now, as he started to slowly re-create the phone call for Clare and Aidan, he realized he’d pulled up his legs and wrapped his arms around them as though the shaking might come back, and, fleetingly, he felt mad enough to punch something. He didn’t want to be this person, vulnerable and folded in on himself and afraid. Before this, he’d been strong. He’d been
happy
. Disgustedly, he unfolded his arms and leaned back on them, stretching out his legs like a guy on the sidelines of a pickup game or a kid just hanging out with his friends.

He had already told them about the basketball playing, Teo in his ratty Princeton T-shirt, and, maybe because this seemed like an aside more than a vital part of the story, they both spoke for the first time since Dev had started talking. Clare had said, smiling, “Whenever people mention Teo’s wardrobe choices, Cornelia says this quote from William James, ‘Wisdom is knowing what to ignore.’” Then she’d added, proudly, “But, yep, that’s Teo: Princeton, then Stanford medical school.” Aidan had shaken his head sympathetically and said, “If only the guy were good looking, he might have a chance in this world.” And part of Dev had wanted to stop right there, just leave the rest alone, but the weight of needing to tell them sat in his chest like cement. Just do it, he told himself, do it fast.

He did. Quickly, in a flat voice, the way some kids read out loud in class, Dev recounted the conversation. There was no need to point out Lake’s lies. He watched each one register on Clare’s and Aidan’s faces; he felt each one knock the wind out of him all over again. Iowa, Teddy, Brown. Dev looked at his friends, their surprise and sympathy deepening, their worry for him growing bigger the longer he talked, and it occurred to him that probably in the history of the world, no one had ever loved two people as much as he loved them. He held their gaze all through the part about Teddy and his family (“three boys of his own”) living in Blake’s Tavern, even through the part when his grandmother said Lake had picked Teddy, and Dev had asked, “What do you mean, picked?”

Then Dev stopped. His mouth felt like a desert. He looked straight at Clare, swallowed hard, and began, “Clare. Please.”

“What, Dev?” she said. “What can I do?”

Please don’t get hurt, he wanted to say. Please don’t freak out. And then he thought,
Please don’t hate Teo,
which surprised him because why should he worry about Teo? But Dev just dropped his head, stared at his knees, and told the rest.

When no one said anything, he looked up. Aidan’s and Clare’s faces hadn’t changed.

Aidan said, “Yo, I know it looks bad for your mom, but I bet she just wanted to leave that old life behind.”

Clare nodded and said, “I bet she started telling people all that stuff before you were even born, and by the time you got old enough to ask questions, that was the story she was used to. Maybe she didn’t really
decide
to lie to you.”

Dev stared at them, confused. No one was freaking out. They were consoling him about Lake, both of them. How had that happened?

A grin shot across Aidan’s face. “Dude, you have a grandma! Pretty cool, right?”

“Yeah,” said Dev, uncertainly.

There was a short silence. Then, Clare said, softly, “So what now? There’s this new guy out there somewhere, right?”

“You think you’ll look for him?” asked Aidan. “I know you said you were done with that, but we were looking for the wrong guy. It’s, like, your dad could be right next door.”

They both sat there, waiting for Dev’s answer. His stomach clenched. Oh, no. Oh,
shit
. They didn’t get it. He had laid everything out for them, and they hadn’t figured it out. It’s because of Teo, Dev understood. In their minds, Teo was so not a guy who could do what Dev’s father had done that they couldn’t even see what was right in front of them.

Dev took a deep breath. “No. Listen. He’s not right next door, but I know where he is. So do you. Think about it.”

Then Aidan blinked and it was like someone hit a switch and threw a spotlight on his face. He stuck both hands on the top of his head and blew out a silent whistle.

“Princeton,” said Aidan. “The guy was going to med school. Aw, man.”

Dev nodded.

“So hold up, this is not a coincidence, right? Your mom made friends with Cornelia on purpose to, what? Like, check them out?”

“That’s what I think,” said Dev, but he wasn’t looking at Aidan anymore. He was watching Clare shake her head and sink back into the sofa cushions, farther and farther back, with a look on her face that told him that no matter how far she backed away from Dev, it wouldn’t be far enough.

Dev stood up. “Clare.”

Clare’s wide, blazing eyes broke Dev’s heart.

“You’re wrong.” She said the words through gritted teeth.

“Clare,” Dev said, pleading, “I know it sounds crazy, but it makes sense.”

“You are wrong,” she repeated.

He took a step toward her, and she put up her hand.

“Don’t.” Then she was on her feet, breathing hard. “Teo would never do that. You don’t know him. He would never get a girl pregnant and then leave her, just dump her like she was nothing.”

“I thought about that,” said Dev, gently. “But this was a long time ago. He was, like, a kid. He was on his way to med school.”

Clare leaned toward him, her fists clenched at her sides. “Never. He would never do it.” She turned her back and started to cry. Dev watched her shoulders quake and put out his hand to stop them, but the second he touched her, she wheeled around.

“You just want to belong to them,” she hissed. “Your mother’s a liar and your father didn’t want you, and you think you can just take Teo and Cornelia away.”

Dev stumbled backward, as though she’d hit him. He had known Clare would be upset, but it had never even occurred to him that she would be mad
at him
. How could he have been so stupid as to worry about her hating Teo? Tears covered Clare’s face, and she was seething with rage—he could almost feel it, coming off her like heat—and she didn’t hate Teo. She hated him.

“He would never keep a secret like that from Cornelia,” gasped Clare. “
Penny
is Teo’s baby.”

Clare looked down at the floor, trying to stop crying, to bring her breathing back to normal. When she looked up at Dev, her eyes held a balance of anger and sadness that was worse than the awful rage, worse than anything Dev had ever seen.

“How could you
do
this?” she asked him.

“Wait,” said Dev. He would try to explain, even though he knew it was too late, even though he had already lost her. “This is something that happened to me. I just put the pieces together because they were there. I didn’t want any of it to happen. I didn’t do this.”

“You still think you’re right? Did you ever think that
maybe
you could be wrong about something?” She turned to Aidan. “Will you take me home? Please.”

Aidan looked from Dev to Clare, then nodded. Clare turned her back. Aidan squeezed Dev’s shoulder on his way out. Then there was the terrible sound of the front door slamming, and Dev was alone.

In the end, it seemed easiest just to get on his bike. Dev didn’t want to do anything, had zero desire to act at all, but sitting around the house with a stomachache, staring at walls, felt too pathetic and too much like waiting, either for something good that would never happen—an e-mail, a phone call, Clare at the door, God showing up with his beard and sandals to say, “Just kidding”—or for the big, unknown
next,
the fallout, the equal and opposite reaction—about which, uncharacteristically, Dev was too anxious to even feel curious.

So he pumped up his tires, jammed on his helmet, and took off toward the steepest hills in town. It turned out to be the right move. Between the mean heat of the sun, the weekend traffic, and his burning leg muscles, Dev had no energy for real thinking. Clare showed up a few times inside his head with her sorrowful, furious eyes, but Dev shook her away and kept moving.

When he got home, the sun squatted low and orange in the sky, Dev was stiff, drenched in sweat, and thirstier than he’d ever been in his life. He poured out and gulped down glass after glass of water, thinking nothing but “replenish,” a lush, wet word he had always liked, a semi-onomatopoeia. Thinking the word was like riding his bike, a way of getting the old Dev back, not the one he’d been before that morning, but the one he’d been back in California, when solitude was business as usual, his best bet.

But his heartbeat when he saw the message light blinking told him that he had a long way to go, or, even worse, that the distance between the past and present Devs was cavernous, unbridgeable, even if he traveled at light speed.

There was no voice mail from Clare. There was one from Aidan, saying he was coming over tomorrow after breakfast, and one from Lake. Dev held the phone away from his ear, but he could still hear Lake’s rasping, familiar voice, checking in, teasing him about Clare, telling him she would see him tonight, signing off with “Miss you, Devvy.” For a hard few seconds, Dev thought that message would be his undoing, the last straw, but he squeezed his eyes shut and told himself, “No, no, no, no, no,” until the tide rising under his ribs subsided, so that it turned out not to be the last straw after all. Dev figured that it had to be the next-to-last, though, the penultimate straw, so even though it was eight thirty and even though Dev had not skipped a meal in forever, he cut his losses, chose the most abstract, challenging, least-connected-to-the-human-world book he owned (one on chaos theory, dense and bristling with math), and went to bed.

He didn’t want to see his mother, so he read for a while and turned off the light. In the dark, the blowup with Clare came back to him, not once, but over and over, like waves on a beach, cresting and crashing, so that when Lake came into his room and said his name, he was wide awake and had to hold himself still and force his breathing to slow until she went away. All night, he felt restless and strange, almost hallucinatory, as if he had a fever, and then, maybe an hour before the sun came up, he searched around for the memory of Mrs. Finney’s yard, found it, and let himself move through it in slow, almost real, time, until he was remembering Clare’s hug, how her arms around him had felt amazing and, at the same time, natural, even familiar, and right at that second, he allowed himself to consider, for the very first time, the possibility that she wasn’t gone for good. Maybe she didn’t hate him. Maybe she would remember who he was, and maybe she would come back.