Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (34 page)

When Aidan showed up, Dev was pretending not to be watching his mother. He was sitting on the sofa with his chaos-theory book, chomping his way through his third brioche from the bag Rafferty had brought over that morning, but over the edge of his book, he was watching Lake. She sat with Rafferty at the little glass-topped table on the back deck drinking iced coffee, barefoot, in a long, loose, faded blue cotton dress with her hair knotted and twisted and stuck through with chopsticks, and she appeared 100 percent relaxed, an uncommon state for Lake, historically speaking, but one Dev had seen her in a lot lately.

I wonder if she loved him, thought Dev, meaning Teo. He wondered if Lake had ever sat, laughing, with one foot casually resting on Teo’s knee. He wondered if they’d ever made a world out of just their two selves and their small, familiar touches and their conversation. It didn’t matter, of course, but Dev wondered anyway.

He was still wondering and watching when Aidan knocked, and, at the sound, he jumped up so fast that his book went flying. He felt as if he’d been caught shoplifting or cheating on a test, neither of which he’d ever actually done in real life.

“Come in,” he shouted, picking up the book and putting it on the coffee table.

To Dev’s vast relief, Aidan didn’t give Dev any searching looks or approach him like Dev might spontaneously combust, the way some people would have. He walked in and his eyes went straight to the white paper bakery bag.

“What?” asked Aidan, pointing. “Doughnuts, bagels, what? I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”

“It’s eight forty-five,” said Dev.

“Like I said,” said Aidan.

Dev tossed Aidan a brioche, which he handily caught and then held close to his face, squinting.

“A bun in a hat,” he said, finally. “Great.”

“It’s a brioche, from some new French bakery down the street.”

Aidan bit the topknot off the brioche and with his mouth full said, “Who are you, Josephine Baker?” which made Dev laugh a creaky laugh, the first one in what felt like decades.

Aidan sat on the rug, polishing off the rest of the brioche.

“So, you ready to spring Lyssa out of the insane asylum?”

“Tomorrow, right?” said Dev, although he’d completely forgotten about this. “And I don’t think you’re supposed to call it that.”

Aidan shrugged. “I’m looking forward to the car ride more than anything. Two hours with Mr. and Mrs. Sorenson.”

Dev had talked to Lyssa in the hospital twice and had been surprised both times by how normal she sounded. Lyssa-normal, but still, she hadn’t sounded drugged or depressed or like someone who would swallow a bottle of pills. During the second conversation, she’d even been chewing gum, which Dev had found especially reassuring. Lyssa had made him promise that he and Aidan would be there on the day she got discharged.

“Some people bring gifts,” she had said, her gum cracking away, “flowers and whatnot. But don’t go overboard.”

Now, Dev asked Aidan, “Did you get her a present?”

“My mom ordered her flowers. They can be from both of us. And I thought we could throw in a copy of
The Bell Jar
.”

“Nice,” said Dev. “Why do you think she wants us to come?”

“She likes us. I think she needs us.”

“She must be desperate if she needs us.”

“Well, she
did
try to commit suicide,” Aidan pointed out.

Dev laughed again and this time it sounded less like the laugh of a ninety-year-old man than the first laugh had.

Then Aidan brushed the crumbs off his shirt and looked Dev in the eye. “She didn’t say anything. On the ride home. Not that you asked.”

“Nothing?”

“Thank you. And she said I seemed like a very nice person.”

“Maybe you should ask her out.”

“Who says I didn’t?”

“She didn’t say she hates me?”

“Look. She was mad, okay? She was, like, startled. But no woman flies that far off the handle unless she has some strong feelings for you.”

“Hatred is a strong feeling,” said Dev, but he felt hope pop its head up fast, like a Whac-a-Mole, and he didn’t try to crush it.

“Trust me. That girl is smitten.”

Dev winced. “Please tell me you’re quoting your great-aunt Gertrude.”

“Hold on. ‘Smitten’ is a cool word.”

“You know it rhymes with kitten, right?”

Aidan made a face as if he were about to ask Dev something.

“What?” asked Dev.

“Never mind. You probably don’t want to talk about it.”

“When does that stop you?”

“You’re right. Okay, so I get that you’re shaken up.” Aidan darted a glance out the sliding glass door. “Your mom lying. The whole paternal-discovery thing. Clare going totally ballistic.”

“Thanks for listing all that.”

“But have you thought about—” Aidan shook his head. “Probably not. Forget it.”

“Just say it.”

“Well, there’s a silver-lining factor, right? I mean, Teo. Did you ever consider that, dadwise, he might be pretty awesome?”

Dev didn’t answer right away. “I guess. Yeah. But I didn’t spend a lot of time on it. He has a family, you know? He has, like, this perfect life. And he never tried to find me.”

“He might have. Your mom changed her name when she married Teddy.”

“Come on,” said Dev. “There are private investigators. There’s the Internet. Anyone can find anyone.”

“So maybe he didn’t try. That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be glad to see you now. You’re an okay kid.”

“Thanks.”

“Seriously. You’re not that bright, but you don’t totally suck at basketball.” Aidan dropped the joking tone, and said, “Are you planning to, uh, mention this to your mom anytime soon? If I were you, I probably would have, like, staged a major confrontation as soon as I found out.”

Dev groaned. “I know. I thought I’d do that, too, and then, I just didn’t. I mean, yeah, I know I have to talk to her about it, but it’s like I want to sometimes and other times, I just want to forget the whole thing. Because it’s hard to picture how it would work. What? Teo and Lake would, like, raise me together? She’d call him and say, ‘Uh, Dev won’t do his homework. Could you come talk to him?’ I don’t think so.”

“I don’t either because you
love
homework.” Aidan shrugged. “I don’t know, but maybe you guys could work it out.”

“Probably not. I’ve been thinking that my mom and I should just leave. It would suck to leave, but maybe we should. Rafferty could come with us, maybe.”

Before Aidan could start talking Dev out of this idea, someone knocked at the door, and Dev’s stupid heart started pounding for about the thirty thousandth time in twenty-four hours.

“You look,” said Dev, hoarsely. “Sneak over and look out the peephole, and tell me if it’s her.”

Aidan ducked and headed for the door. When he put his eye to the peephole, Dev heard him whisper, “Holy shit.”

“It’s Clare,” said Dev.

Aidan turned toward him with saucer eyes and said, “It’s all of them.”

E
IGHTEEN

Cornelia

Here is how I remember it.

The glass bowl of fruit salad is cool between my hands. Aidan opens the door, and we step through it and Dev’s face is all wrong, aghast. Nothing moves but his gray-blue eyes; they dart from me to Teo to Clare to Aidan.

“Are we—early?” I ask.

Dev opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.

Aidan says, “Sort of.” I know he isn’t making a joke. He is simply the kind of boy who answers when an adult asks a question.

Then, there is the shoosh of the sliding glass door opening and Lake steps through, talking to someone over her shoulder.

“Wait till you hear the rest. You won’t be—” She turns, sees us, and stops walking, as though she has smacked into an invisible wall. Her eyes find Teo and widen with what looks like (but could not be; how could it be?) fear.

For a few seconds, the six of us stand, caught in stasis, the air charged with confusion and shock, Teo, Clare, and I frozen with our hands full, like the magi in a wooden nativity. Champagne, stargazer lilies, fruit salad.

Then Teo’s voice says this: “Ronnie?”

I turn my head to look at my husband, who is looking at Lake.

Before Lake can correct him, Clare’s voice, tremulous and wire thin, says, “You
know
her?”

A Braxton Hicks contraction begins to tighten its grip around my middle. It has been happening for weeks, my body’s rehearsals for the big event. Aidan takes the fruit salad out of my hands.

I catch my breath and say, “Clare. Teo. Did you dip into the champagne on the way over or what? This”—I make a flourish with my hand in Lake’s direction—“is Lake.”

“Hold on,” says Teo, still looking at Lake, “Ronnie Larrabee, right? We went to college together.”

I smile apologetically at Lake. “Teo. Honey,” I say, with exaggerated slowness, “you’re mistaken. Lake’s name is Lake, and she went to Brown, where you did not go. Lake, please tell this delusional man what’s what.”

Somewhere in the middle of this, a sound like a sob breaks from the direction of Clare. Her face is stricken. Her hand is over her mouth.

“Hey,” I say to Clare, confused, and suddenly, a voice is slicing the air, a voice so shot through with bitterness that I almost don’t recognize it.

“Go ahead, Mom. Tell us what’s what. How you went to Brown and you’re from Iowa and my dad’s name is Teddy Tremain.”

Automatically, Teo reaches for me, his hand circling my wrist, and I know he understands what I understand: something terrible is happening.

Lake moans, presses a hand to the center of her body, and wilts, her eyes on her son’s furious face. “Oh, Devvy. How did you—?”

“How did I what, Mom?” I know that the sound of his voice is breaking his mother’s heart, because he isn’t even my child and it is breaking mine.

Then Dev rips his glare from his mother and turns it on Teo. “What about you, Teo?” He almost spits the name, which makes no sense at all. Oh, no, I think, no, and then Clare is saying it, yelling it.

“No! Dev, stop!”

“Why don’t you tell us how you know my mom, Teo?” Dev is starting to cry now, slapping away tears, and I feel a rush of sympathy for him because it is awful to be fourteen and crying in front of a roomful of people.

I put my hand over Teo’s, the one that holds my wrist, and look up at his baffled face. “Teo?”

“We dated. Toward the end of my senior year. For a little while. That’s all.”

Dev shakes his head. “That is not all. Tell me the rest.”

“That’s enough, Dev,” says Lake.

“No, Mom. It’s not enough. Don’t you get it? I need to hear the rest.”

Then Clare’s arms are around me, and she is saying she is sorry. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. Let’s go home. Please.” She begins to pull on my arm.

I shake her off and say, “Look. Someone needs to tell me what’s going on.”

“Mom,” demands Dev (how can this be Dev?), turning the word into a harsh bark.

After an empty moment, Lake draws in a breath and says, drearily, “Okay, Dev. Okay.” She turns to me, then. “Teo’s right. We knew each other at Princeton. We dated for maybe three weeks.”

“Why,” I ask Lake, “did you never tell me that?”

Another Braxton Hicks starts its slow squeeze, and Clare sets the lilies on the floor and brings a chair from the dining room. I want to stay standing, with everyone else, but heavily, as deliberately as a Galápagos tortoise—it is the way I do everything these days—I lower myself into the chair.

“Don’t stop, Mom,” orders Dev, but I can tell his anger is faltering, is being diluted with other emotions. “Tell the rest. Tell me why you broke up.”

Lake straightens and, in a Piper-like gesture, smooths her raucous hair.

“I don’t know if I’d call it breaking up. We weren’t really together enough to break up. But we did go our separate ways. For the usual reasons. We weren’t well matched. He was graduating.”

“What else?” Dev raises his voice. “Say it? Would someone just say it?”

“Oh, God,” breathes Lake.

“Teo,” says Dev, desperation in his eyes.

Teo’s voice is gentle. “Dev, I don’t know what you’re asking for.”

“Deveroux,” says Lake, “we will talk about this later.” She addresses the rest of us. “Please. I need some time alone with my son.”

I see Dev’s hands clench into fists.
“Whose son, Mom?”

I get short of breath then, air a shallow, sideways knifing in my chest. The lilies lie on the floor near my feet, their mouths gaping, their odor snaking into the air. You love the smell of lilies, I remind myself as I am lifted on a swell of nausea.

Lake shakes her head at Dev. “Not now. Later. I promise.”

“Dev,” begs Clare.

With eyes like furnaces, Dev watches Clare cry, then scans the other faces in the room.

“Look at all of you. Is it so terrible? Will the fucking world end? Am I that bad?”

“Is what so terrible?” I ask him.

“I’m sorry, Cornelia,” he says.

Dev wipes his face, then takes a step toward Teo. He swallows hard.

“You got her pregnant, and you just walked away from us like it wasn’t your problem. Like we were nothing. And you never tried to find me, ever.”

Colors burn too brightly, and as my heart races, the rest of the world goes into slow motion, and all I can see is Teo’s face shifting, in a series of minute permutations, from stymied to stunned. He shakes his head slowly, slowly, slowly.

“No. That’s not right,” Teo says.

Dev says, “Say it, Mom. Is Teo my father?”

I don’t want the answer, but I am staring at Dev’s face, and I don’t have to hear the answer to know it. My entire abdomen is rigid, and I feel faint, but not so faint that I don’t see what I cannot believe I haven’t seen before: the shape of Dev’s eyes, his cheekbones, his smile, all the resemblances to the face I know better than any face in the world.

We all wait until in a whisper, Lake answers her son (
Whose son?
), “Yes.”

I close my eyes, thinking, breathe breathe breathe. “Teo.”

Teo crouches next to me, cradling my cheek, then sliding his hand to the side of my neck to feel my pulse. “Cornelia. Sweet girl. Is it labor?”

“I don’t think so.” Teo’s face is there, the slant of his eyebrows, the lightly etched parentheses around his mouth, every plane and angle achingly familiar and so beautiful, and I see nothing else. I focus on his green eyes, and wish upon them the way people wish upon shooting stars and dandelion clocks. It is not a brave wish.
Belong to me,
I think. I rest a finger on the dip in his upper lip, then lift it away. “Teo, tell me what all of this means.”

“Breathe,” says Teo in the voice he uses when we’re alone, “it’ll be all right. Just give me some deep breaths.”

Clare sounds faraway. “I only did it because I wanted to show Dev he was wrong. I’m so, so, so sorry.”

“We’ll let these people go home now, Dev. And you and your mom can talk.” It is Rafferty, who has appeared from out of nowhere.

“Were you planning to lie to me for my entire life?” Dev asks Lake.

“Let me talk to you,” Lake pleads. “Devvy, I’ll tell you everything.”

“You know what?” Dev says, raw panic rising in his voice. “I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want any of you. My grandmother said I could live with her. Laura Deveroux. In
Ohio
. I’m gone.”

Dev moves fast toward the door, and that’s when it happens, the thing that, afterward, I will keep seeing happen: Teo jumping to his feet, turning his back in his white polo shirt, going after Dev, leaving me gasping and sick. Leaving Penny. Dev yanks open the door and runs, and Teo would have run after him. I know he would have. But suddenly he is head to head with Lake. Lake is what stops him.

“Excuse me,” says Aidan, shoving past them both. I hear him shouting Dev’s name, then the sound of one car door, another car door, then the engine, starting up, roaring away.

I watch Teo’s back stiffen. “You told him I knew?”

“I didn’t tell him anything. But lies. He’s right. I told him so many lies,” says Lake.

I cannot stand to see it, Lake and Teo, discussing their child. Blood pounds in my temples, and I make a sound, “Oh.” Teo turns. I see the blank look, then see him remembering that I am there. I see Teo remembering his pregnant wife.

“I need to go home,” I tell him, “I can’t process this. I need to go home.”

“Okay. Of course.” Teo moves toward me and puts out his hand. “We’ll go home.”

“No!” I shrink back, one arm across the curve of my stomach, pulling Penny back, too.

And it is as if he has been bitten by a snake. He drops his hand. In thirty years, I have never seen Teo look so hurt, and it is wretched, impossible. But, I can’t be with him just then. I love him; I am lost without him, but I can’t ride next to him in the car.

“I’m sorry. I just can’t.” I swallow. “And, anyway, you need to talk to Lake.”

“I’ll drive you,” says Rafferty. He puts out both his hands and helps me out of the chair. Even though there is no way on earth I am going home without my husband, when Rafferty opens the door, I take Clare’s hand, and the three of us leave Lake and Teo alone to reckon with their past and with the incalculable everything that lies between them.

I was so sure I needed to be alone. Through the silent car ride and the endlessly long walk from Rafferty’s car to my front door, I felt like a person underwater, my lungs bursting, frantic to break the surface and emerge into a still, dry solitude. I had it planned: a kind but perfunctory collection of sentences for Clare (“I love you. None of this is your fault. I need to be alone for a little while now”) and then a mad dash for the bedroom, shut door, drawn blinds, closed eyes. Cut off and floating, like an astronaut in an escape pod. I believed that utter aloneness was my only hope, but when I turned to Clare to issue the perfunctory sentences and saw the stark misery on her face, I got what I
really
needed, a shot of empathy—my only hope—and just in the nick of time.

We sat together, her legs tucked in, her head on my shoulder, and after her apologies to me had spun themselves out, despite all my assurances that she was blameless, I said, “Tell me what happened with Dev.”

She described their months of e-mails and phone calls, about seeing him in Mrs. Finney’s backyard. Yes, Clare was fourteen years old, still part child, but the thing that cut its jagged, yearning way across her voice was love.

“You know what he said? He said that being away from me is less like being away from a person than being away from other people is. I don’t know anyone else who would say something like that. And he was right. When we were apart, I missed him all the time, but he didn’t feel faraway. He felt closer than the kids at school.”

She lifted her head and looked at me. “It’s like with you and Teo, when I’m in Virginia and you’re here. Exactly the same.” She dropped her eyes. “Well, pretty much the same.”

“Certain people are like that, I guess. They’re together no matter where they are. They just belong to each other.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “Except not anymore. I ruined it.”

“Oh, Clare. Don’t say that. It’s not the kind of thing you can ruin.” Less than an hour ago, I would have bet my life on this. You still can, I told myself fiercely, you still would.

“You don’t know how mean I was. Dev trusted me, and I was horrible to him. But he was only telling me what his grandmother told him. About Teo knowing.”

“Maybe that’s what Lake told her mother.” It was so hard to say Lake’s name, but not impossible. I was in no way ready to discuss any of this, but in the context of being there for Clare, I could do it, and this realization filled me with relief.

“I told him that he just wanted to claim you and Teo because his own family was a mess. I know I made him feel awful. And I’m so sorry. I should never have said that because that’s exactly how I felt when my family was a mess. Back when I met you guys. I wanted to belong to you, too.”

“I know, honey. You didn’t mean to hurt Dev.”

Clare shook her head. “No, I did. Or maybe not. I just wanted it all to be a lie. I was scared.” She wiped her eyes, and said in a small voice, “And maybe, just for a second, I was jealous. Because you and Teo are mine.”

“Nothing will change that.”

“I know that now, but right then, I guess I wasn’t really thinking straight. I couldn’t stand what he’d said about Teo knowing and walking away. Teo would never do that.”

“No.”

She fixed the light of her brown eyes on me. “And that’s what really matters, right? That the part about Teo knowing was a lie.”

I couldn’t answer. Instead, I looped Clare’s hair behind one ear and kissed her cheek. Her damp lashes flared in starry spikes around her eyes. She moved away from me a little, stretched out her brown legs, and stood up, a long streamer of a girl, unfurling. Oh, Clare, I thought, you are so grown up, and the pang of sadness I felt became the engine of a train, pulling all the other sadnesses after it. Teo is the father of another woman’s child, I thought. Teo has a son with Lake. All this time, every second, Teo and Lake have had a son.