The Precious One (10 page)

It was at the beginning of the third loop that the past swept in like a tide. There was my friend Abigail’s screen porch where we used to look at magazines and eat chips until we were sick. There was the Baxters’ big side yard, site of the World’s Greatest Secret Bike Ramp that Marcus and his friend Porter would put up during the day when the Baxters and their neighbors were at work and take down before they got home and that stopped being both secret and a bike ramp after one wild Thursday in July when the casualties included two broken collarbones (one of them Marcus’s) and a concussion. There was the tree-swing tree, the lemonade stand corner. There was the cul-de-sac where we’d have the Memorial Day block party, with the entire neighborhood, kids and adults, eventually being together in the dark because everyone had summer zinging through their veins and didn’t want to go home.

I remembered the girl who had walked home down these sidewalks countless summer evenings, the world, the whole of the world, effervescent with fireflies, raucous with cicada song, threaded through with the clean scent of honeysuckle; porch lights and kitchen lights and streetlights blooming on around her; every house familiar and strange
in the deepening blue-gray dark; and I knew that I was still that girl. Nothing here needed reclaiming because it had never stopped being mine. Then, I turned down Linvilla and parked in front of my house.

I got out and walked around. At first, I was amazed at how much the same it looked: same white trim and black shutters, same stacked stone retaining walls around the flowerbeds; same clematis vine, now flowerless of course, over the arbor entrance to the backyard, same brass mailbox fixed to the bricks next to the front door. But after a few minutes, small changes began to jump out at me. Marcus’s basketball hoop above the garage door was gone. So were the redwood picnic table and the blue scallop shell birdbath. The pineapple door knocker was still there, but the door was painted red instead of black, and the weeping Japanese maple Marcus and I had planted for our mother one Mother’s Day still wept under its freight of crimson laciness, but it had gone from tiny and Bonsai-like, to tall and sculptural. How could that have happened? As I looked at the maple, the finely cut leaves blurred on the black boughs, and I was crying.

Look, I’m not saying I had a perfect childhood. There was Marcus, who started sneaking out of the house when we were thirteen to drive around in cars with older kids or to hang out on the rocky banks of the Brandywine River, leaving me to lie awake, imagining the awful ways he might get hurt or killed, until he sneaked back in just before dawn. There was my mother, funny, creative, demanding in a good way, her love the sky we lived under, but failing again and again to stand up to Wilson nearly enough.

And of course, there was Wilson. My father had haunted the peripheries of my life in this house, never remembering the names of my friends, never attending a single Memorial Day block party. Maybe he’d sat with us at the redwood picnic table in the backyard and eaten buttered corn, thick slabs of salted tomato, and barbecued chicken, but I couldn’t remember a single time. On the occasions when his indifference to or his disdain for us pierced through the fabric of our daily lives, it stung me. His bouts of plain meanness broke my heart. But
the upside to having a not-very-nice father who mostly wasn’t around was that, well, he mostly wasn’t around. If there was always a part of me—a hidden, broken part—yearning for him, most of me went about my days like any kid: my life was pure immediacy, was whatever was right there in front of me. And most of what had been in front of me was good.

But good or bad, it had been mine. No, not “had been.” Was. Still was. Is.

The color of a door, the shape of a tree, these things mattered. I had carried them around with me for decades. Even now that they were gone, changed beyond recognition, they were still with me—still
were
me—just the way they had always been.

Oh, Wilson, even you must have a door, a tree of your own
.

Wilson wanted me to begin his book with his graduate school years, but how could you write the story of a person’s life without including his childhood? You couldn’t, plain and simple. I got back into my car, sat there, and decided: a good, truly professional ghostwriter seeks out the story her client wants told and tells it, but when it came to Wilson, I would look for the story
I
needed to hear. If Wilson hated me for it, and he probably would, so be it. But maybe—even though I wasn’t doing it for this reason and even though I knew it wouldn’t make him hate me any less—maybe it would turn out that Wilson needed to hear that story, too.

T
HE TIME I GOT
lost at the science museum used to be just an ordinary memory, one thing that happened. It wasn’t even especially good or even that much of a memory, since I’d hardly thought about the incident since it happened. I wished it could have stayed that way, insignificant, lost in the clutter of everything else, but after my father’s second conversation with Eustacia, which was really their third, since their second took place while I was at school, the memory stirred, shook itself loose, and demanded that I take its full measure.

I was six, I think. I suspect that people who grow up going to actual school have a better sense of how old they were when things happened because there are just more markers, the start of middle school, the summer after fifth grade, and so forth. I led mainly a markerless existence, but I’m nearly positive that I had just turned six. It was winter, January maybe; I remember being hot inside my new red duffel coat with the fur-edged hood, hot in that rosy-cheeked, hair-stuck-to-your-forehead, baked bread way that you get in winter when you’re six. My father had advised me to leave the coat at the museum’s coat check,
but I had loved it too much to part with it, so I spent the day wearing the coat open and half off my shoulders, the toggles dangling.

At this museum, they have a giant heart, plastic or metal or something, two stories high, and you can walk through it, if you’re willing to wait in line on a crowded day. The day we went, it was very crowded, and my father refused to wait, not just because the line was long, but because he thought the heart wasn’t educational enough to make the wait worth it. He said, “It is little more than a playground toy, child,” which was possibly true, but all I knew is that I desperately wanted inside it.

I didn’t beg or cry. At six, it was already abundantly clear to me that begging and crying, while often successful means of getting my way with Muddy, would get pointedly ignored by my father. I didn’t plan to do anything at all except walk away in bitter disappointment, but then my father had me sit on a bench while he went to make a phone call, and the pull of the heart was irresistible. I didn’t mean to actually leave. I only thought to slip off the metal bench and go snag a quick look at the thing in all its dark-pink and violet magnificence, and then slip back on before my father even knew I was gone.

But as soon as I saw the heart, I forgot everything else. What were biplanes dangling from the ceiling or stuffed animals glaring from their shadowbox worlds of trees and rocks compared to a great heart beating like the life force it was right there in the center of everything? I got in line.

The boy in front of me yelled, “We’re blood! We’re disgusting red blood!”

I tugged his sleeve and shook my head. “No, we haven’t gone through the lungs yet. We’re blue, not red.”

“Shut up, stupid,” said the boy.

He touched one of my toggles, his eyes widening.

“They look like animal teeth,” he whispered.

“They are animal teeth,” I told him.

He turned around, chastened. But as soon as we were inside, the
boy might as well have become invisible; that’s how wondrously alone I felt inside the heart. With the swoosh of blood reverberating around me, I explored the ventricles, the atria, the pumping lungs, climbed stairs to the aorta, running my palms along the heart’s mottled walls. When I went back a few years later, I was stunned to discover that the heart didn’t actually move. That day, I could’ve sworn the walls heaved with a muscular clench and release, propelling me onward. The boy was right: we were the blood, and it was thrilling.

I allowed myself just four trips through, four because of the four chambers of the heart, because I didn’t want to dilute the magic by too much repetition. I should have gone back to the bench, then, but, under the spell of the heart, I forgot. I made my way around the rest of the museum, consulting the map in my pocket, touching what there was to touch, and reading the informative signs, just as my father would’ve wanted. In the weather room, as I was watching a video about tornadoes, a man approached me and asked if I were alone, and I gave him a superior stare and said, “How could I be here by myself? I’m six. I’m with my father,” and the man smiled, said, “Got it!,” and went away.

After maybe an hour had gone by, I was standing next to another girl and learning about gravity when a woman, presumably the girl’s mother, rushed up and grabbed her by the arm.

“Lucy! Where in the hell have you been? I was just about to get the guards to look for you!” Lucy’s mother was red-faced, almost crying, and it suddenly hit me, as I stood there watching that woman, that my father could be worried, too. I had just started getting scared, looking around me, fiddling anxiously with my coat toggles, when he appeared from behind a pillar.

I didn’t throw my arms around him, even though I thought about it, just took his hand and said, “I’m sorry I got lost.”

“You?” said my father. “Why you were never lost for a second. I have been following you all the while, watching for what you would do, and I must say that, apart from playing in that blasted giant heart, you made excellent use of your time.”

“Thank you, Daddy,” I said.

“Let us get a refreshment and hear what you have learned in your wanderings, my little adventuress,” he said and took me to the snack bar for a chocolate milk.

And that was all. Nothing much. One field trip among many, except for the chocolate milk, which was not a typical beverage for me, and which tasted like true, blue, bona fide heaven.

But some ten years later, when I had the occasion to recall this day, I realized that it was remarkable, even, to use a drastically overused—especially by my schoolmates—word, amazing. Because until I saw that mother take her daughter by the arm, it hadn’t occurred to me to be afraid. I didn’t even feel a twinge of guilt until later that night and then only because of how much I had enjoyed the giant heart, despite its glaring lack of educational value.

Here’s the thing: even though I didn’t know he was there all the time, trailing me, I
knew
. I felt
with
him, watched over, safe, not a bit lost, and, moreover, he knew that I would feel that way. Because that’s the way things had always been, every day. So there you have it: the trip was a metaphor for my life, although for all those years, I wouldn’t have thought to say that or even to think it because when things just are the way they are, you don’t see the metaphor, you merely live it.

Until one day, you don’t.

He called her “my daughter.” And if I thought I’d been feeling alone at school, well, it was nothing compared to what I felt when I heard him say those words. I stood on the vast plain of my loneliness, the wind pouring across it, flattening the grass, chilling me to the bone. Scratch that. Too melodramatic. But it was almost that bad.

They were talking about the book. At first, I was gleeful to know about the book, since it made Eustacia into little more than a means to an end, the hired help, and solved the mystery of why he’d ever invited her into our home in the first place. The wretched woman was even taking notes in a yellow legal pad, for heaven’s sake, a delightful sight. My whole family was there to see it, although I suspect that my
mother, who was bustling around serving iced tea and arranging fresh flowers on my father’s nightstand, was really there to keep an eye on me. Not that she was on Eustacia’s side! Perish the thought. But I knew she feared I might slip and be rude, and my mother, when she stops to think about such things as manners, has an acute allergy to rudeness.

“Now, tell me again, where did you go to boarding school? I seem to have forgotten,” said Eustacia, looking up from her pad. Her eyebrows gave her a look of mischief because they were dark and slightly jagged, like seagull wings, and so symmetrical that I wondered if she penciled them, though, to be honest, despite her sordid past, she didn’t seem like the type.

Her question was a ploy, of course, pure nosiness, since I’m sure he had never shared such information with her in the first place. If I didn’t know where he had gone to boarding school, how could she? My father, naturally, wasn’t fooled for a second, nor did he seem to be at all beguiled by the brows. He dismissed her question with a flick of his hand.

“I could have learned as much anywhere as I did there, such was my intellect and determination. I do not intend to give the place credit for my achievements with some cheap form of—what do you call it—product placement!”

Eustacia shrugged and said, “Okey-doke,” knowing full well, as she did so, that my father hated both shrugging and stupid, baby-talk phrases like “okey-doke.” Good God: okey-doke! In my father’s room!

“I had my lawyer draw up a document,” said my father, and then, to my mother, “Caro, if you would be so kind.”

My mother took the manila envelope off the little writing desk near the window, unclasped the metal clasp on the envelope, and handed it to him. Before he could ask, she had retrieved his reading glasses from his bedside table and placed them in his outstretched hand.

“Thank you,” he said, slipping on the round, black-rimmed glasses. He looked wonderful in them, like Winston Churchill, but leaner and with more hair. He slid the creamy pages from the envelope and surveyed them.

“This document will vouchsafe your access to whatever documents we may need for our research, Eustacia,” he said. “University files and so forth. You will want my teaching schedules, my student rosters, whatever papers of mine that might be on display or in archives. Photographs, possibly. Whatever I should deem necessary as our process unfolds.”

He handed her the papers and took out another one. From where I sat at the head of his bed, I could see it was a personal letter, typed, with his signature, a bit shakier looking than usual, but commanding nonetheless, in black ink.

“As for obtaining interviews with my former students and colleagues, or, I daresay anyone at all, I believe this letter will smooth your way, open all doors. In it, I explain our project.”

Every “our” felt like a tiny barb to my soul. However, I understood that in order to encourage Eustacia to do her best, my father had to make her at least feel like she was part of it all. What came next, though . . .

He began to read from the page, and, oh, how the man could charm with language! His heartiness, his wit, his
largeness
, all of it was there. Here was a person who should be writing his own book, all by himself. Oh, if only he had the stamina. Damn that heart attack, anyway!

But then he got to this part: “‘I give you absolute leave and, indeed, entreat you to offer up your time and thoughts regarding my intellectual journey to my daughter, Eustacia Cleary, whom I assure you is most trustworthy,’” and—
schwomp
—a mudslide of sadness engulfed me. Reflexively, I grabbed the edge of the bed, and the document and the manila envelope, which had been lying on my father’s lap, slid onto the floor, which was ghastly, of course, but worse than that, my father broke off midsentence and pressed a hand to his heart, to his
heart
.

“Willow! You gave me quite a start. I had nearly forgotten you were there. Are you all right?”

Cheeks and eyes burning, I leaned over to pick up the papers, and murmured, “Sorry, Daddy.”

“If you are bored, there is no need for you to stay,” said my father, coolly.

But I did stay and endured every last word of their conversation, and it was later that night, while I lay awake in bed, that I unpacked the day at the science museum, laid out all the pieces and saw them with new eyes, especially my father’s smile when he found me, his Willow, his girl who had always been safe and never been lost, until now.

THE NEXT MORNING
,
I
understood for the first time that the nightmarish thing about school was also the best thing about school: morning came and you had to go. No matter what, no matter how dark your dark night of the soul, there it was before you, inescapable and regular as the tide, pulling you out into the world, bathed, dressed, hair tied up in a knot, backpack strapped on for dear life.

I wore my new Patagonia down jacket, light as a feather and springleaf green, even though the weather was a little too warm for it. It was the first significant clothing purchase I had made as a school-going person, and I had bought it specifically because I had seen girls at school wear similar jackets. Bec Lansing had one in winter white, for example, and even her blistering hatred of me could not dim the fact that she looked marvelous in it. Never fear! I had too much dignity to slavishly follow every Webley School trend, but I wasn’t stupid either. All societies have their totems, their rituals, their idioms, their costumes. I began to see that, for reasons too complex for me to bother to parse out, some were off-limits to me. I could wear slim dark jeans and scarves but not Ugg boots, Converse sneakers, or dangly earrings. I would sound like an idiot saying “Whassup?” or greeting my friends with a jovial “Hey, bitches” (and not only because I had no friends), but I could say “Hey” instead of “Good morning.” And I could wear a damn jacket. Anyway, I liked it, and green was my color. When your father, who has almost died (and that was ever hanging over me, his almost-death) and who has thrown you to the wolves without a second thought, starts calling another person “my daughter,” you wear your favorite color to school; you just do.

Thus armored, I made for Mr. Insley’s classroom.

School was still awkward, lonely, and bleak, but there was something peculiarly reassuring about this. At least, it was consistent, which is far more than I could say for my home life. And I suppose it wasn’t quite as bad as it had been. My friendless state persisted, naturally, both because of the power of Bec but also, if I’m honest, because I just didn’t try very hard, but a few people acknowledged me in the hallways, now. A few even said my name. It’s astonishing how agreeable that can feel, being in a crowd of people and hearing your name. The first time it happened, I was so touched that I fled to a restroom stall and fought back tears. Being acknowledged, singled out, named, these things made a difference. And of course, thank the high heavens, every day at school, there was Mr. Insley, who made the biggest difference of all.