Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (35 page)

“That’s what makes me believe that everything will work out in the end.” Clare’s smile dawned, sweet and winsome and brave. “Because if Teo is Teo, then nothing can be that bad. And he is. He’s the same man we’ve always known.”

It was my cue. Don’t you think I know that? It was my moment to rally, to grin and say, “You bet he is, kid!” I should have risen up in glory, lip stiff, head high, Jean Arthur wisecracks tripping off my tongue, arrow straight and backed by a radiant sky, and believe me, I have wanted to be the scrappy heroine as much as anyone. But when the occasion presented itself, with Clare standing above me, her faith as resplendent as a full-blown trumpet flower, I did not rise to it. I did not shine or seize the day or set an example for others. I remained on my sofa, broken and small, sadness pulling me down and down and down. I squeezed Clare’s hand and said, “Thank you, honey.” It was a cop-out, a botched line, wrong, wrong, wrong, and the worst part was that I was too tired to care.

I wish I could tell you that things got better after that. Things? That
I
got better after that. I wish I could tell you that I spent the hours before Teo came home to me wrestling my fears and jealousies into the ground or engaged in a cool, Socratic dialogue with my best self, so that by the time he stood in the doorway of Penny’s room, his hands in his pockets, his face crossed with wonder, weariness, sorrow, and other emotions I could only imagine, I greeted him with a brave heart and a tranquil mind.

But if I learned anything from this whole experience (and I learned plenty), it’s that, when it comes to scrappy heroism, I am not the quickest study in the world. I am not the slowest, either, I don’t imagine. It took approximately forty-eight hours, fifty-six, if you count sleep time, although neither Teo nor I did much sleeping. For fifty-six hours, I dragged the two of us through a mire of misery. I was petty and frightened, mean and reptilian, for which I will never stop being sorry, and even when the turnaround came, there was no radiant backdrop, no triumphant music.

What saved me from myself? Nothing extraordinary, no stunning revelation or near-death experience. What saved me is what saves most people. You know what I’m talking about. The usual.

Teo found me in Penny’s room, rocking in my grandmother’s chair and reading Penny a book in what I hoped was a soothing voice. I was trying to be a serene ecosystem, to quiet my slamming heart, modulate my breathing, stem the flow of adrenaline or epinephrine or plain bad energy, whatever my poor Penny had likely been swimming in for far too many hours.

And it was very nearly working. The room was dim except for the sunlight leaking around the edges of the closed curtains; apart from my voice and the homey creak of the rocker, the house was still; and the book was one I’d loved for years and years, the story of a bat who wants to be a poet. The bat reads his poem to a chipmunk, and I read it to Penny, a poem that starts with a birth, shifts into moonlight, and ends, like everything for children, with sleep: “‘All the bright day, as the mother sleeps, /She folds her wings about her sleeping child.’”

I read this, and just after I said the word “child,” a tiny, round, pearl gray, illuminated space opened up in the day, and my sadness began to subside, and this lasted maybe a minute. What ended it was a series of sounds that, until that moment, had only ever made me happy, tires on asphalt, a key in the door, a step on the stairs, the sounds of Teo coming home.

He didn’t speak at first, merely stood in the doorway watching me. For an ungainly moment, I was overcome with shyness, but I knew that every second I spent not looking at him hurt him, so I looked, and there he was. My tense, tired man, his bones under his skin, his complicated eyes.

Listen: I never see my husband from a distance, ever; I experience him as human every single time. It sounds like nothing, the way that I’m explaining it, but I am with him differently than I am with other people. Immediacy comprises most of how I love him. Total immersion. What I want you to understand is that this didn’t change, not as I sat in Penny’s room searching his face, not through the fifty-six hours of hell I was about to put him through. I loved him the way I always love him, the whole time, and I can’t figure out if this makes my behavior more egregious or less, but in any case, I’m not asking for forgiveness. I just wanted you to know.

As I watched him watch me, I saw his face clear, like a cloud lifting, and he smiled with just the corners of his eyes, and said, “Two weeks.”

I slid my hand over the great, taut curve of my belly and nodded.

Teo said, “Cornelia,” and it amazed me, as it always amazes me, how he can make my name hold so much.

“It’s true, isn’t it?” I said, which brought the cloud back down, but I had to ask.

“Yes.”

He walked across the room and sat on the floor near the rocking chair.

“I liked our life the way it was when we woke up this morning,” I told him. “I loved everything about it.”

My hand lay palm down on my belly, and with one finger, Teo traced around it, dipping carefully into the valleys between each finger, like a kindergartner drawing an outline with a crayon, a way to touch me and Penny at the same time. Then he turned my hand over and pressed two fingers to my pulse point.

“Is it beating?” I asked.

“I love you,” he said, and smiled, “for your beauty.” It was a private joke, one dating from the very beginning of our being in love, and I knew what he was telling me, that the important parts of our lives hadn’t changed and wouldn’t change, and for one, split, crossroads second, there was a chance for me to be good, to avert pain and suffering, to believe him. But I didn’t take that chance because suddenly I was furious. Fury hit me like a hurricane, and I reeled.

Through gritted teeth, I eked out, “You
love
me? That’s it?”

Teo has always been a man who fights fire with quiet, and he didn’t say anything now, just removed his fingers from my wrist, rested his elbows on his bent knees, his hands loosely clasped, and never took his eyes off mine.

“I won’t share you,” I told him, “I don’t know how to share you.”

“I don’t know how to do any of this.”

I realized that I had expected him to say he was sorry, although it was unclear even to me exactly what he had to be sorry for. The fact that he didn’t say it made me angrier.

“Tell me about you and Ronnie. In college.”

“You need that? Now?”

“Tell me.” I glanced around our baby’s green-and-white room. “But not in here.”

“It’s not that sordid, Cornelia.”

“Where’s Clare?”

“Reading in the hammock. She called Toby. She wants to stay with him for a few days, to give us a chance to be—alone.” The word “alone” swayed under a load of irony. I wasn’t the only one who could get mad.

“She feels terrible about this,” said Teo.

“I know. But none of it is
her
fault.”

I got up and walked into our bedroom, where the sight of our bed made me want to throw myself down on it and wail, but I just lowered myself into the armchair. It was not a comfortable chair, too deep for me, so that I couldn’t lean back and still rest my feet on the ground, but it was the only chair in the room. Teo sat on the bed, his back against the headboard, and despite my rage, I ached for the distance between our two bodies.

“Tell me.”

“Jesus, Cornelia. I met her at a party.”

“Tell me.”

Teo’s eyes said, “Please, don’t do this.” Then, when I didn’t say anything else, he shifted his tone into neutral.

“We were in the basement of some eating club. I was leaving because people were way too drunk, and anyone could tell it would end badly. She was leaving at the same time, and we talked on our way out. Her friends were still inside, so I walked her back to her dorm room. When we got there, we drank a cup of coffee.”

“Did you spend the night?”

Teo gave me a cold stare. “No. We saw each other a handful of times, but it never got serious. I was a senior. I guess I was already halfway out the door.”

“So it was, what? A fling?”

“It was
college
. Remember college? How does this help?”

I drew myself as upright as I could, under the circumstances. “The roof just got blown off of my life because a woman from your past showed up and pretended to be my friend,
cultivated
a friendship with me deliberately. She stalked us. You know that, right? And now she is screwing up the world I had ready for my baby, so I would really like to know precisely what I’m dealing with here.”

“But these questions. Why do you need to know about our relationship? You think she wants me? She wants to get back together, after fourteen, fifteen years? That’s crazy.”

Our relationship
.

“How would I know what she wants? She lied to me every time she opened her mouth. I don’t honestly think that I’m the one who’s crazy here, but I’m sorry for putting you in the position of having to defend her.”

Teo shook his head. “Stop this, Cornelia.”

“Finish your story.”

“We dated, if you can call it that.”

“You slept together. Obviously.”

“We spent two, maybe three nights together.”

“Consecutive nights?”

“Are you really asking me that?”

“So what happened?”

“Nothing happened. To tell you the truth, I don’t remember it that clearly, but I think I just told her that I felt like it wasn’t going anywhere.”

“Why?”

“She was smart and interesting, but not, as it turned out, in a way that actually interested me. She was angry and sort of—dislocated. And sad. And I just didn’t like her that much.”

“In other words, you had meaningless sex with her and then dumped her.” Even through my haze of anger, I knew this was going too far.

“Yes!” Teo said this so loudly, I jumped. “I’m an asshole, okay? Is that what you want to hear? So it wasn’t a shining moment. So I fooled around with someone I couldn’t see a future with. Did you never do that? I was twenty-two. But, hey, it looks like I’m going to be made to take responsibility for my actions, so you can feel good about that.”

His anger was so justified that it blew mine out like a birthday candle. He was right; there was no reason for me to know all of this. He had been answering my questions in good faith, when all I’d been doing was punishing him.

“I’m sorry, Teo. I get mad when I get scared. Forgive me.”

Without meeting my eyes, Teo said, quietly, “I know you’re scared. I hate it that this is hurting you, and I will do whatever I can to help you. But you know what?”

“What?”

“This is happening to me, too.”

Shame engulfed me, then, because until Teo stated this very obvious fact, it hadn’t been obvious to me at all. I got up from the chair and sat down on the bed a few feet from him. I was too ashamed to touch him.

“I didn’t even ask you how you felt,” I said, bleakly. “Oh, Teo.”

Finally, he looked at me, with a ghost of a smile. “You still could.”

“How do you feel?” I shivered and wrapped my arms around myself. Maybe that’s why I hadn’t asked. I was afraid to know the answer.

“You know the way you looked at me when I said I’d take you home?”

“Oh, God. I’m sorry for that, too. I was—beside myself.”

“You looked at me like you didn’t know me. Like I’d turned into someone else.”

I started to apologize again, and he reached out and put his hand over mine on the bed. “It’s okay. I only bring it up because that’s how I felt when I found out, like I didn’t know who I was.”

“Do you feel like that still?”

He hesitated, then smiled. “I know I’m the guy who loves you, which is a lot to know.”

“Good.” I knew he wasn’t finished. Just stop there, I thought. That’s everything.

“But all this time, I’ve had a son. A
son
.” A shimmer of awe slid across his face.

“Don’t say that,” I whispered, harshly, the world blurring with tears.

“How can I not say it?” His voice hardened. “She should have told me.”

“What would you have done?”

“I don’t know, but she should have given me the chance to figure it out.”

I pressed my hands to the sides of my head. “No, no, no.”

“I need you. I need to be able to talk to you about this.”

“I can’t hear you wanting a different life. I won’t listen.”

Teo grabbed both of my hands and held them in his. “A different life? Cornelia. Look at me.” Reluctantly, I looked. “Do you really think I could ever not want you and our baby?”

It was a low moment, a desolate, howling-wind moment. I heard wolves at the door. Because the question wasn’t sarcastic. It wasn’t rhetorical. That this man I had loved my entire life was asking me this, with urgency and seriousness, scared me as nothing else that day had scared me. For a few dizzy seconds, our life felt so provisional, pieced together out of plywood and glue.

“How did we get here?” I asked Teo.

“Answer me.” He tightened his grip on my hands. His face flushed in the manner it always did: twin dark pink swatches burning down the centers of his cheeks, from the top of his cheekbones to a centimeter above his jawline. A memory flew at me: Dev’s face, flushing in precisely that way.

“No. You love us. I know that.” I pulled my hands away. “But I just want things to be the way they were. I want you to want that, too. And you don’t, do you?”

“But things can’t go back to the way they were.”

“Of course they can’t. But I want us to be together in
wanting
them to.”

It was a petulant, childish thing to want. I see that now. Maybe I even saw that then, but it didn’t make me want it any less.

Teo took a long time to answer. Finally, he said, carefully, “Listen. I love the life we woke up with, too. And I don’t know how to be anyone’s father except Penny’s. But I missed out on Dev’s entire childhood, and I can never change that. Is it so bad for me to feel like I’ve lost something?”

Remember, fifty-six hours. Just because I wasn’t mad at Teo anymore didn’t mean I was about to exhibit a shred of nobility.

“You should feel what you feel,” I said, turning my face, “but right now, I can’t hear about it.”