Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (8 page)

“Not a case of ‘biological didn’t bother,’ though. My biological dad—the African-American dad—bothered as long as he could. Then he went to work at this new job at some fancy engineering firm in New York?” Aidan paused for effect. “Dropped dead. Aneurysm. Imagine that? Twenty-eight years old; new, handsome, genius son at home; first day on the job and wham.”

Right then, Dev and Aidan both stopped what they were doing and looked at the ground and the sky for a few seconds because even if death happened to someone you never knew sixteen years ago, it still deserved a pause. You couldn’t just keep jamming leaves into a bag, not if you were Dev and Aidan. If Dev had been wearing a hat, he would’ve at least considered taking it off. As it was, he stood, quiet, feeling the burn of fresh, cold air in his chest.

“Sorry about that,” he said finally. “I mean, sorry for him.”

“Yeah,” said Aidan, picking up an armful of leaves. “Pretty interesting story, right?”

“Pretty interesting,” Dev agreed. Then he said, “But it still doesn’t explain ‘bananas.’”

After Aidan finished throwing armfuls of leaves at Dev and they’d raked the leaves back up, and after Mrs. Finney, the elderly woman whose yard they were working in, came out with giant blue mugs of very hot chocolate, Dev told Aidan, “I never knew my dad either.”

It wasn’t something he told people. He didn’t care if they knew; he just didn’t tell them. For a simple statement of fact, the sentence was surprisingly hard to say, and immediately, weirdly, Dev felt older and somehow remote, like a stranger, a guy the real Dev might see sitting alone at a bus stop or something and feel sorry for. To bring himself back to himself, Dev did the first dumb kid thing he could think of, which was to take a searing gulp of hot chocolate and yelp, “Yow!” The lonely stranger vanished, but just for good measure, Dev hung out his tongue, Saint Bernard fashion, and fanned it with his hand.

“Hence the name: hot chocolate,” said Aidan, drily. “So what happened? He walk out or something?”

Dev wished he had a tidy, prepackaged story like Aidan’s to hand over, all the edges worn smooth with use. He thought about what his mom told him when he was worked up and trying to tell her something: begin at the beginning.

“Okay. My mom? She’s really smart, like crazy smart,” began Dev.

“Smart DNA?” joked Aidan. “You?”

“Shut up,” said Dev, “and drink your cocoa. Seriously, she grew up in this tiny, nowhere town in Iowa, and she was the smartest kid to be born in that town in, like, a thousand years. She got a scholarship to Brown University, which was so amazing because hardly anyone in her graduating class even went to college.”

“Old geezers sitting on their front porch saying, ‘You hear about that little Tremain girl? She’s taking her genius self to the big leagues,’” said Aidan.

“Her name wasn’t Tremain yet, but right. And she did. She went. But then, at the end of her sophomore year, she and this guy from back home…Her high school boyfriend. Uh, he would come visit her. And, well, she got, like—” Dev broke off, red-hot embarrassment flooding his face and running down his neck, which was stupid because, come on, Aidan’s mother and everyone’s mother had done it with some guy at some point, right?

“Pregnant?” supplied Aidan. “In the family way? Knocked up?
Avec bébé?
”

“Yes,” said Dev, “all of the above. She couldn’t go home because everyone was mad and disappointed and whatever. So she and my dad, Teddy Tremain, they ran away, went someplace out west, and got married.”

“And Teddy couldn’t take the desert heat and ran home.”

“He didn’t run,” Dev said. “Well, he probably would have, but she ran first. Not home, though. Just away.”

Aidan swirled the nearly black circle of liquid at the bottom of his hot chocolate, then said, quietly, “Was he a bad man?”

Dev had wondered this himself, wondered so much that, years ago, he’d finally asked his mother. He told Aidan what his mother had told him. “Not a bad man. Not a man, though. Teddy Tremain was a child. My mom said it wasn’t that he didn’t want me, exactly; he just didn’t want to grow up. So right after I was born, she took off.”

“Whoa,” said Aidan, after a pause. “And that was that. You never see him?”

“No,” said Dev. “It’s not a big deal, though. I mean, sometimes I wish I had
a
dad, but not necessarily
that
dad. It’d be easier for my mom if there was another person around to help.”

“Easier for you, too?” asked Aidan. His eyes were kind, lucid, and so dark they appeared to be without pupils or else looked like they were all pupil, which, with Aidan, seemed more plausible: windows, wide open, so the light could pour in.

“Anyway, I don’t even know where he is,” said Dev, and abruptly he jumped up and brushed off his jeans. He needed to get away from the conversation fast, not because he’d told too much truth, which was probably what Aidan thought, but because he hadn’t told enough.

Aidan had befriended Dev and given him a job. Lying to this good, funny, clear-eyed kid was like getting invited to a clean, bright house and stomping all over it with muddy shoes, and that last sentence, the one about not knowing where his father was, Dev was pretty sure it was a lie.

It happened the way Dev imagined all theories happened: first, there were pieces, scattered and separate; then someone figured out that the pieces
were
pieces; then someone put the pieces together.

The first piece was the secret itself. The why of their being in that particular town at that particular time, a why that, for a while, had taken a few baby steps back from the forefront of Dev’s mind, because no matter what had brought them to it, the town felt more right than any other place ever had. So why ask why? At heart, though, Dev was anything but a “Why ask why?” guy, and if moving to the town was a gift horse, eventually Dev, being Dev, would not only look it in the mouth, but would also perform a CAT scan on it and a DNA analysis.

What he was positive of was that the secret was big. Monumentally big. Lake wouldn’t guard it so closely if it weren’t big because while Lake wasn’t especially a teller—a talker, yes, a teller, not especially—generally, she only kept secrets that belonged to her (and she was keeping secrets; you could just tell), which was fine with Dev. But, in all fairness, this particular secret belonged to Dev, too, and when it came to Dev, Lake was fair. Until this secret came along, Lake was as fair as moms get.

The second piece was the town house. The town house was nice. Not fancy, but with three bedrooms, a real dining room instead of just a kitchen, and with floors made of a blond wood that sunlight slid across like melted butter. And it wasn’t in some cut-off, gated “community” like town houses Dev was used to, but sat on a quiet tree-lined street, the last house in a row of ten. Even if Dev hadn’t seen the rental agreement, he would’ve known that the town house was way more than they could afford, even though Lake, who always worried about money, didn’t seem worried now.

But Dev might not have thought of the town house as a piece of anything at all if he hadn’t found the envelopes. Two envelopes, big ones. They came from schools, one in Miami and one in Los Angeles, and inside were fat, slick brochures full of pictures of kids: kids in white lab coats, test tubes and beakers gleaming around them; kids in front of enormous computer screens; kids playing violins; kids reading books under palm trees. Not just any kids, but gifted kids, because that’s who these schools were for. The crème de la crème, according to the Los Angeles brochure, and the too-rich phrase made Dev queasy.

Dev could tell from the pictures, from the weight and gloss of the brochures and the thick, creamy paper of the applications, that the schools were expensive, probably superexpensive, that even with a “partial, need-based scholarship” Dev wouldn’t be able to go. Not that he wanted to go. He didn’t want to be at the Melton School, which had “an aura of specialness that emanates from the children themselves,” and he didn’t much care about “maximizing his unique gifts.” (Neither brochure even mentioned basketball.) He wanted to stay where he was.

Besides, he couldn’t imagine himself or Lake living in either of those cities, under all that hard sunshine with suntanned rich people everywhere you turned. The Berkeley papers must have done a heck of a number on Lake for her to even consider it.

The Berkeley papers. The secret. The bigness of the secret. The town house. The schools.

Dev stared at the brochures for a long time, feeling the pieces inching toward each other, feeling a theory take shape. Lake had dragged them to a town Dev had never heard of for no reason she would share. She was breaking all her own rules, dipping into their tiny savings to pay rent. She was making crazy-expensive plans.

And then Dev had it. Lake must be expecting to have money, and she was expecting to find the money here. If Lake, who never took a dime from anyone, was expecting money, it must be money someone owed her. Or money someone owed Dev.

Dev touched his hair, spread his hands open in front of him, ran a finger along his eyebrow, and thought about his cells, every cell containing a nucleus, every nucleus containing two strands of DNA, the double helices coding Dev, Dev, Dev. He thought about Aidan saying “biological didn’t bother.” Did strands of DNA make someone owe? Did people belong to people because of what lay tangled in their cells?

Dev didn’t know what he thought about these questions, but he thought he knew what Lake thought. He was almost sure.

But the night after the day of raking leaves with Aidan, Dev wasn’t thinking about these questions. He wasn’t thinking that somewhere in the dark town outside his room, among all the squares of light, was a square belonging to his father. He had thought about it, a lot. But that night Dev lay stretched out in his bed, letting gravity pull his pleasantly aching body down, down into the mattress, and he thought about the poster hanging over his headboard, a photograph of the Milky Way swirling its shining arms.

In large ways, Dev had always felt located. Many times he’d stood on a sidewalk or a patch of grass and felt his place in the universe: third planet from the sun, on the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy, two-thirds of the way out from its center, in the Virgo super-cluster, in the continuum of time and space. He’d planted his feet and closed his eyes and tried to feel the motion of the earth.

But now, Dev realized he felt located in small ways, too: in school hallways, and sitting on the hard ground in Mrs. Finney’s yard talking to Aidan, and falling asleep in his bed with Lake in the next room, reading. Dev belonged to these places; he fit. He imagined he could hear the click of himself snapping into place.

He pictured the black dot on the map again. Not very long ago, Dev had believed in the dot’s randomness, but now the dot was houses, friends, trees, poems, fiery leaves snagged in his rake, his bike wheels on asphalt. He imagined the dot grown larger and printed with the words on his Milky Way poster:
YOU ARE HERE
.

“I’m here,” Dev thought, and then he fell asleep.

S
IX

W
hen Piper turned eight years old, Piper’s grandmother—the good grandmother, her father’s mother—had given her a box. The box was made of wood, glass-smooth and dark, was lined with strawberry-colored velvet, and in the center of its heavy lid was a silver rectangle engraved with Piper’s initials. Piper bore a breathless love for the box and never touched it without reverence. Even though Piper understood that she was too old to believe in magic, Piper believed that it was a magic box, and that the magic lay in the sound it made when she shut it. Not a click but a soft, smoky thunk, like the sound of a moth hitting a window, a toe shoe on a wood floor.

While the box was meant to hold jewelry, almost as soon as she got it, without planning it out beforehand, Piper made the box a container for anger, sorrow, and wishes. For example, if Piper got mad at her mother, as she often did, she’d go to her room, open the box, whisper her rage into it, close her eyes, and—sliding her fingers slowly out from under it—let the lid fall. As soon as she heard the sound, the sound that meant the box was as closed as anything ever got, as closed as a pharaoh’s tomb, she could walk away, lightened and able to love her mother as a daughter should.

In utter secrecy, Piper performed this ritual for years—“leaving it in the box” she called it—and then, in her early twenties, she made herself stop. When she left her parents’ home for good, she left the box behind.

Now, boxless and facing the unbearable sadness of losing Elizabeth, Piper had a word.

Fine.

Fine. Fine. Fine.
Fine
.

If, over the years, Piper had not developed a vehement and frequently professed contempt for all things New Age (a heading under which she corralled crystals, chiropractors, ESP, yoga, Dr. Andrew Weil/Deepak Chopra (in her mind they were, literally, the same person), aromatic candles—excepting cinnamon and vanilla holiday candles—echinacea, singer/songwriter music, and the entire country of India), she might have called “Fine” her mantra. In fact, she didn’t call “Fine” anything at all, but she said it, sometimes audibly, sometimes under her breath, many times a day, her top teeth digging hard into her lower lip with each
F
sound, and every time she said it, she felt its power.

Before anything else, before it held grief or anger, the word held guilt.

It was Piper who had talked Elizabeth into giving the new protocol a try. “At least a try,” Piper had said, and moments later had admonished, “Give yourself a fighting chance, Elizabeth.” Afterward, Piper had felt ashamed of having said this, of having implied that Elizabeth wasn’t a fighter, but at least she’d stuck to her resolution not to add, “You owe it to your children.”

In fact, Piper hadn’t breathed a word about Elizabeth’s children, although they were as present as if they’d been sitting in the room, side by side, their round hazel eyes full of listening. The only other person actually sitting in the room had been Tom, and Tom hadn’t mentioned the children either. The three of them had sat at one end of Elizabeth’s long dining room table, speaking in calm, reasonable tones. Even Tom had shrugged off his tragic demeanor and had brought a steady voice, a nearly neutral face to the discussion. His boardroom face, thought Piper, approvingly, and the whole conversation had the tenor of a business meeting, except that they were discussing the body of one of the participants, what its chances were, the level of suffering it could be expected to endure.

“We know it might make you sick,” Tom had said gently. “The doctors have told us that’s likely. But there’s also the chance that it won’t be so bad. And you could stop. At any time, if it’s too much, you could just say, ‘Enough.’”

But no matter how quietly they addressed one another, no matter how mellow and civilized the room appeared—the artichoke-print fabric of the window treatments, sun resting on the russet-colored walls—the fact remained that it was two against one.

A couple of weeks later, in a moment far removed from that conversation, Elizabeth, clenched with nausea, would raise panicked, confused, wholly unaccusatory eyes to Piper—the eyes of an injured animal—and rasp through cracked lips, “I feel like a battered wife,” and names for what Piper and Tom had been in that dining room would come to Piper on an ice-cold wave of guilt: “Bullies.” “Thugs.”

It was this same wave of guilt that had swept Piper into Cornelia’s house to have Teo confirm Piper’s greatest fear: that Elizabeth’s new protocol and its attendant misery were pointless, had always been pointless, and should end.

The night after her conversation with Teo, Piper was wrenched awake by the sound of her own gasping sobs, and as she sat up, methodically smoothing her hair in the dark room, turning the ends under with shaking fingers, the single word had arrived suddenly, like a small, heavy object placed in her hand. Not “Everything’s fine,” a phrase to soothe a child. The magic of the word was not transformative; “fine” made nothing fine. However, the word was capacious, a receptacle—like a trap in a drain—for every emotion that made moving out of one moment and into the next impossible for Piper.

Piper said it, whispered it into the darkness, then again in the direction of her husband, who lay sleeping with his back to Piper and didn’t stir. Her hands went still and dropped from her hair to her lap. Then, Piper turned, slid her cold feet into her boiled-wool slippers, got out of bed, and descended two flights of stairs to the basement in search of a cardboard box.

When Piper walked to Elizabeth’s house the next morning, the cardboard box contained an expensive and hard-to-find brand of stainless-steel cleaner; a cellophane package of sponges; a five-pound free-range chicken, uncooked; a sack of miniature Yukon golds; fresh rosemary; a lemon; and two vast, sweet Walla-Walla onions. The box was heavy, but Piper stepped with certainty, shoulders squared under her quilted jacket. Meredith walked a few steps ahead, carrying, with exquisite care, a second lemon.

When the two of them arrived at the Donahues’ back door, through the wall of kitchen windows shining like a waterfall in the morning sun, Piper caught sight of Elizabeth’s son, Peter, sitting at the table in a blue vinyl art apron, gluing pieces of colored felt onto other pieces of colored felt. Next to him sat what appeared to be an ordinary middle-aged woman, but who, Piper had reason to know, was, in fact, a coup, a gem, a bona fide
goldmine
of a babysitter: a fit, college-educated, native-English-speaking, nonsmoking, fifty-year-old retired art teacher. A grandmother whose daughter had recently remarried and packed the grandchildren off to Cleveland.

Piper had reason to know this because she had initiated and carried out the Donahues’ search for a sitter herself. Piper had discovered Ginny Phipps. Ginny Phipps. Even her name was perfect: sensible but fun, like Mary Poppins. Now, as Piper peeked through the window, she saw Ginny touch a finger to Peter’s nose. Peter giggled.

I did this, Piper thought.
At least I did
this
right.
Then she looked at Meredith, smiled, and said, “Okay, then.” Still smiling, Piper kicked lightly at the French door with the toe of one red driving moc.

“Hands full!” Piper explained cheerfully as Ginny answered the door. “Thanks a million, Ginny!”

Ginny smiled and made a move to take the box, but Piper said, “No, no. I’m fine. You shoo.”

She settled the box on the kitchen counter, lifted out the chicken, and walked to the refrigerator, pausing to examine the expanse of stainless-steel door and to cluck once with annoyance before opening it and settling the chicken on the bottom shelf. Then she washed her hands, soaping them copiously and scrubbing her fingers, consciously setting a good example for the others, in case they were watching.

With a crisp motion, Piper ripped off one square of paper towel and almost dropped it, surprised by its coarseness, its flimsiness. Not Elizabeth’s usual brand. Piper drew in a breath, feeling a headache, silvery and flickering, like a Fourth of July sparkler, begin to sizzle behind her eyes. She and Elizabeth were of one mind about paper towels: they should be as close to cloth as any paper could be. She stared at the towel for a moment, then crumpled it in one hand.

With the other hand, she slid open the trash can disguised as a cabinet and tossed in the towel. “Fine,” she said, and shoved the trash can back out of sight.

“Sorry. Did you say something?” Ginny asked.

Piper turned toward her, briskly slapping her palms on the fronts of her thighs, feeling the sting through her jeans. Ginny was leaning over, settling Meredith into a second booster chair. A wing of Ginny’s hair fell forward, and, absently, Piper noticed that the hair, gray and gleaming, nearly matched the kitchen’s stainless-steel appliances. It was shinier than the appliances. Meredith reached out one hand and gently batted it.

“Well. I think I’ll just run up and say hi to Mrs. Donahue.” Piper looked down at Meredith. “Is that okay with you?”

“Oh, fine,” said Ginny, with a reassuring wave of her hand. “Not to worry. I’m happy to watch them both.”

Piper had been speaking to Meredith. Abruptly, she shifted her gaze to Ginny, then blinked. “Oh,” she said after a beat. “Super! I so appreciate it.”

As she walked up the stairs toward Elizabeth’s bedroom, a grand master suite with room for a love seat, an armchair, and the delicate mahogany secrétaire that had been in Elizabeth’s family for generations, Piper felt her headache’s hard glittering intensify. Last time she’d been in this room, Elizabeth had talked for a few minutes, then slid into a restless, twisting nap, making occasional low, whimpering sounds that Piper could feel in the back of her own throat.

But when Piper reached the top of the stairs, she saw that Elizabeth’s door was standing wide open. Music was playing. Elizabeth’s bed was empty and so faultlessly made that it looked like a bed in a showroom, the satin and velvet throw pillows gorgeously heaped. Elizabeth had always had a soft spot for sumptuous bedding and a knack for unstudied elegance. Even now, Piper felt a stab of envy. When it came to home décor, Elizabeth was like those Frenchwomen who casually pinned up their hair and wound scarves around their necks in a manner that said, “Yes, this is perfect, and, no, you will never learn to do it.”

Piper shook off this thought and took a step into the room. All the window shades were fully raised and the air danced with dust motes. She stood for a moment, confused, dazzled, staring at the empty bed, sunlight and James Taylor washing over her.

“Don’t look so shocked. It’s one of the privileges of having cancer: you get to stop pretending to be cool.” Elizabeth’s voice, followed by Elizabeth’s laugh, a real laugh, ordinary and miraculous. Piper’s startled heart seemed to bump against her ribs and she pressed both hands to her chest.

“What?” she gasped, turning toward the sound.

Elizabeth sat in a corner of the love seat, her feet tucked under her, her hair still damp from showering. Piper saw that there wasn’t a lot of color in her face, but her eyes looked more like her eyes than they had in a long time. Elizabeth wore the Juicy Couture sweat suit she’d bought herself as a joke for her last birthday, a bright pink velour talisman to ward off growing old.

“Hey, you,” said Piper, plopping herself down in the armchair.

Elizabeth flashed a smile and shimmied her shoulders a little to the music.

“‘Stop pretending to be cool.’ Oh, you mean James Taylor?” Piper rolled her eyes. “I don’t think even cancer gets you off the hook for that.”

“Oh, come on,” said Elizabeth, “listen.” She tilted back her chin and closed her eyes, like a person letting rain fall on her face.

Piper closed her eyes, too. She listened. The headache began to waver and dim.

“Admit it. It’s beautiful.”

“Shhh,” said Piper.

Because it was. It was beautiful. The guitar and the man’s voice, both, were plainly beautiful, as austere and clear as the morning itself, as sitting in the room with Elizabeth, the two of them given over to listening. He was singing about going to Carolina, and it struck Piper as the purest, most unsentimental song she’d ever heard; even the sadness felt simple, scrubbed clean.

Because Piper wanted the song to never end, she spoke before it did.

“Yep,” she agreed quietly, “it’s a good song.”

“Yep,” echoed Elizabeth. And then, “My mom used to listen to James Taylor all the time. James Taylor, John Denver, Carly Simon, and what’s her name with the hair. Boy, that stuff was contagious. Mom-music. My sisters and I still call it that. I remember catching my dad singing ‘Annie’s Song’ while he changed the oil in the car.”

“My mom,” began Piper, then she stopped.

Elizabeth waited. Then she snapped her fingers. “Carole King. She’s the one with the hair.”

Piper thought about how her own mother had really been two mothers, the one before Marybeth Pringle had moved in next door and the one after. If the pre-Marybeth mother had listened to music, Piper couldn’t remember a single song. In fact, whenever Piper recalled that mother, and she didn’t do it often, she thought of her as steeped in silence, a wooden, distant woman with an unsmiling face.

The post-Marybeth mother, the one who grew her hair long, wore jangling jewelry, neglected her housework, and let Piper’s older brother George and his friends smoke pot in the rec room, had listened to music all the time. Piper remembered her swaying around the kitchen or lying on lounge chairs in the backyard with Marybeth, both of them ridiculous in bikinis. Music had played then, loud and constant, but Piper couldn’t remember anything about it. While Piper had not liked the pre-Marybeth mother much either (had craved her approval, had stored up every act or word of affection like treasure, but had never really liked her), the post-Marybeth mother had been worse because she was the mother who left. Because everything about her mother after Marybeth came had been weird and stupid and wrong, Piper knew the music had been, too.

“Anyway,” said Piper, “music doesn’t make a person cool or not cool.”