Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (39 page)

E
PILOGUE

TEN MONTHS LATER

Cornelia

W
e are all here, in our backyard, noisy under the tulip tree and the wash of blue sky and the white party tent we rented for the day of our baby’s christening. I say “our baby,” mine and Teo’s, but really Rose is everybody’s baby. She walks through the party the way she walks through the world, making her headlong, wobbling way, not brushing a pants leg or grabbing a skirt for balance without a palm resting on her warm head or someone kneeling to greet her, eye to eye. Now that she’s mobile, if she’s held, she won’t stay for long, except with Toby, who lifts her only to toss her—flying child against the bright sky—or tickle her or turn her upside down, her pink skirt flopping to bell around her head, like the belled blossoms of the tulip tree, as though she is just another living bloom in springtime, which of course she is. Lucky baby.

We are all lucky today. It is one of the days when we make it look easy, and trust me when I tell you that we have our hard days, too. Hard weeks. But I’ve found that if you insist on goodwill, if everyone insists on it together, goodwill comes. I’ve found that love can be a decision. Forgiveness, too.

Clare and Dev are radiant against the white backs of the Adirondack chairs. Dev is stretching out his long legs so that Rose can climb them, scramble up them like a squirrel, and all the children are like squirrels, scurrying past, crisscrossing through the forest of adults. Jasper on all fours, Emma, Peter, Carter, Meredith with her hands full of cookies, Rafferty’s daughter, Molly (newly back in Lake’s life, Rafferty keeps to the edge of the crowd, uncertain if he’s there to stay). The children are loud: piping, screeching, chattering like jays. Ollie’s baby is due next month; he will add his voice to the rest. She sits under the white tent, feigning grumpiness the way she always does when she’s happy, a demeanor she’ll drop once she and Dev get started talking science, unraveling the sticky mysteries of genes.

Now Rose zigzags toward me, throws her pretty arms around my leg, and allows me to lift her. With the weight of her against my hip, with her face near mine, I am perfectly balanced, as firmly planted on the earth as I had ever hoped to be. My baby has my nose and chin, but the rest of her face is Teo’s, his eyes, his forehead, his smile, which are also Dev’s eyes, forehead, and smile. The resemblances don’t stop there. She has Toby’s daring and Piper’s imperiousness, Clare’s sweetness and my father’s laugh, Ingrid Sandoval’s glamour and my mother’s straight back, my temper and Lake’s stubbornness. She spots something else she wants and begins to wriggle in my arms. I put her down and she is off.

Piper unlinks her arm from Tom’s (she’s told me how she cannot stop touching him, her hand on his forearm, his shirt collar, a finger hooked around a belt loop; “It’s ridiculous. It’ll drive the poor man crazy,” she said, not believing it for a second) and walks toward me across the yard, her Delft blue eyes matching the scarf around her neck, not a wrinkle in her linen dress. Last week, she and Tom put both their houses on the market, and put a bid on another one in our neighborhood.

“Were you tempted to leave town?” I’d asked her. “Start fresh someplace else?”

“Hell, no,” she’d scoffed.

Now she says, “I think we know the real reason Lake decided not to move.” Her tone is pure Piper, approving and disapproving at the same time. “That woman is head over heels for your little girl.”

It’s true. Love can be a decision, but Lake did not decide to fall in love with Rose. She was ambushed, swamped. I saw it on her face in the hospital. “A total body slam,” as my poetic brother would say. I will never forget that morning: Dev holding his sister, time standing still. None of us was going anywhere.

Lake is winding one of Rose’s silvery curls around her finger (the blondness, the curls, are a genetic improbability, Ollie tells me, and likely won’t be around for long, temporary gifts, babyhood’s sleights of hand). It’s a thing that Lake has given me and I have given her: permission to love each other’s children, a free pass. She reserves her territoriality, her assertions of parental primacy, for Teo, who for all his quietude and kindness, can be as fierce as anyone. What saves them every time, what drives them into truces, compromises, and listening, is Dev, tall, brave boy, who wants them both, wants them with his father’s generosity and his mother’s grit, and a deep, smart, sweet-souled decency that is uniquely his.

Teo presses his lips to the back of my neck, then whispers, “Isn’t she beautiful?” and I know the “she” he means. For my husband, there is one she. One he, too. This morning, under the dim, soaring ceiling of the church, I heard Dev tell Rose, “Let’s find Dad.” He caught my eye after he said it, and his shy smile lit the room. “I call him that all the time in my head now,” he told me. I will tell this to Teo tonight, in bed, where we’ll be alone but for our houseful of people, people in every room: Clare, Viviana, Clare’s new father Gordon, Teo’s parents, my parents, Rose sleeping her fragrant sleep a few feet away. “We’ll get hotel rooms,” everyone had offered, but we told them all, “No. Stay.”

Sometimes, I think I would like to have us under one roof, all of us, everybody here, which makes no sense, of course. No house is big enough to hold us, with all of our tensions, all our wariness and histories. But imagine the nights, those separate breathings, everyone within my reach and safe, everyone together.

I stand here on this spring day in the center of my life. Chaos, din, and beauty. For a moment, I am still. Then “Cornelia,” cuts across the noise, and because one of them is calling me, I go.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am so grateful to the following people:

Brilliant agent and true friend Jennifer Carlson, whose instincts, heart, and good sense never stop amazing me;

My editor, Laurie Chittenden, kind, tenacious, and wise, for making me feel that my books and I were born under a lucky star;

Everyone at Morrow, especially Lisa Gallagher, Lynn Grady, Will Hinton, Tavia Kowalchuck, Debbie Stier, Sharyn Rosenblum, Dee Dee DeBartlo, Emily Fink, and Mike Brennan;

Susan Davis, Dan Fertel, Annie Pilson (seeker of blooming hydrangeas, mellow light, and the perfect shot), and my sister Kristina de los Santos, the sharp and generous early readers without whom I could not do, with additional thanks to Michael Pilson, Rebecca Schamess, and Molly Spruance;

Phineas Pilson, who now talks a blue streak but who inspired the toddler version of Toby Brown;

Andrea Nakayama and Sara Clay Goodman, who so generously corresponded with me regarding illness and hospice care; Drs. Dan Fertel and Arturo de los Santos, for help with all things medical; and Rebecca Kraus, for the aspirin bottle story;

My parents, Arturo and Mary de los Santos, whose love and support mean everything to me;

And those to whom it is my shining luck to belong: my children Charles and Annabel Teague, fierce, funny, and smart, and my husband, David Teague, whose many gifts include changing the way time moves.

About the Author

An award-winning poet and bestselling author with a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing,
MARISA DE LOS SANTOS
lives in Wilmington, Delaware, with her husband and children. She’s the author of the bestseller
Love Walked In.

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Also by Marisa de los Santos

Love Walked In

Credits

Jacket design by James L. Iacobelli

Jacket photograph by Duane Rieder/Getty Images

Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

BELONG TO ME. Copyright © 2008 by Marisa de los Santos. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

ePub Edition © FEBRUARY 2008 ISBN: 9780061797682

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Table of Contents

Cover

TitlePage

Contents

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About The Author

Other Books by Marisa de los Santos

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher