The Precious One (11 page)

Today, when I walked into English, he must have sensed my dejection because he gave me a private smile and whispered, “Courage!” There’s something about that word; it pulls your shoulders back, makes your blood quicken in your veins! I found my seat, whipped out my notebook, sat tall, pencil in hand, ready. But then Mr. Insley gave us our
Middlemarch
project assignment, and all my bravery fell to ruin.

It wasn’t the project itself, which was of the interesting and open-ended variety I liked best. We were asked to choose a scene or scenes from
Middlemarch
that we saw as iconic, as saying something big and overarching about the book, its time period, or some other time period, or as saying something—some universal truth—about our own lives. Then, we were told to rework the scene, twist it, turn it into another form of art: a video, a scene from a play, a collage, an aria, a piece of musical theater, a rap (I knew what a rap was, never you worry), or anything that struck us as the right form for our ideas. As soon as I heard this list, I predicted, silently, that a good third of the class would choose collage because it was so easy. (I could hear my father intone, “No thing is easy if it is done well,” which is absolutely true.) And that not a single soul in that room (myself included) would compose and
sing an aria. Accompanying or following the piece of art would be an oral presentation, explaining the meaning of the thing to the class, just in case they didn’t get it.

No, it was a good assignment. Perhaps it was a testament to my extreme nerdiness, a trait the existence of which I’d only recently become aware both in the world and in myself, that even before Mr. Insley had finished explaining the assignment and passing around the handout, I was mentally shuffling through scenes in the book, my excitement mounting with every new thought. Because what a book it was! So many plots, each spinning like a plate on the tip of a stick. So many characters, breathtakingly complicated and alive, and all so entangled with one another! And then there was the big, outside world—history, politics, social class, gender roles—surrounding it all like a thick troposphere and permeating even the slightest look, gesture, or touch between people, even the briefest conversation.

I was so busy with the mental scene shuffling that I almost missed what Mr. Insley said next, but one word came whizzing toward me like a stone: group. Oh, in the name of all that is holy:
group
! Group work, hell of the blackest, grimmest kind. The arguing, the everlasting shifting of blame and responsibility, the shirking, and false credit taking, and
time wasting
. It’s true that my knowledge of group work derived from exactly two experiences: a world religions project with my homeschooling group (I’d done all the research and writing, while Mary Beth Coe had sung hymns; whirled, allegedly, like a dervish; served a bowl of
charoset
minus the nuts because of allergies and minus the wine because alcohol was for sinners, and read an excerpt from
The Tao of Pooh
); and an experiment that involved testing an unknown sample for the presence of bismuth with my two lab partners in AP chemistry.

But even if there were some alternate universe in which it were possible for students to work in harmony, each ably, cheerfully shouldering his or her part of the load, there would still remain the most hellish part of the hell of group work: choosing the groups. Or, more accurately, being chosen. Or, most accurately,
not
being chosen. After
living almost my entire life in a state of perpetual chosenness, my knowledge of this derived only from the AP chem class, but it was knowledge, stone-cold, irrefutable, all the same.

By the time I had descended upon the Webley School, lab partners had already been assigned, so I was in the ignominious position of having to play third wheel to an existing group. The teacher, Mrs. Harbottle, stood me up in the front of the room, like a cow at auction, and asked for a group to volunteer to take me on. Suffice it to say, there were no bidders. Finally, when my face felt hot enough to burst into flames, Mrs. Harbottle sighed and said, “Amanda Simon, Joe Cho, make room for a third at your table.”

I would have supposed Mr. Insley to be too sensitive to even assign group work, much less to leave the group-making up to the students, but, after explaining the assignment, he made some vague chopping motions with his hand, said, “No more than three to a group. Divide yourselves!,” and sat.

Then, a kind of miracle happened. Before my body could go completely rigid, before my face could fully make the shift from hot to blazing, someone sitting behind me was tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “Hey, Willow, want to work with me?”

It couldn’t have been who it seemed to be, Luka Bailey-Song, tall, golden-brown, spiky-haired Luka with his long dark eyes, his high, teardrop-shaped cheekbones smooth as sand dunes. Luka who glided, wide shoulders like a sail, down the very center of the hallways, greeted by everyone, his hands slapped, his fists bumped, his name said over and over and over. Luka whom I was sure despised me, especially after he’d caught me—no, not caught, why would I say caught?—
seen
me spending lunch break in Mr. Insley’s room. Bec’s Luka.

But when I turned around, that’s exactly who it was. And maybe he only wanted me because I was smart, although he was obviously really smart himself, despite all his efforts to make it not obvious. Or maybe it would turn out to be a trick, a mean joke between him and Bec, but right then, as I turned to face him and he gave me a friendly half smile,
what it felt like was an entirely good, unexpected thing. A boon. A gift.

I said yes. Actually, I eked out a squeaky “Sure,” and I didn’t regret it. Not even when I saw Bec’s face, stunned and disgusted and, as they say, royally pissed, a phrase that made particular sense when applied to Bec, since everything she did was royal. She didn’t matter. Nothing else mattered except that I’d been picked. I was not dangling like a broken kite from a branch. I sat in my chair and thanked the gods on their mountaintop, the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, thanked every blessed thing under the sun for Luka Bailey-Song.

It wasn’t until I saw Mr. Insley, his look of—what was it? Disappointment? Betrayal?—and remembered the open dislike he’d shown Luka that day at lunch, that I felt a pang of regret. And still when Luka stopped me on my way out of class to get my phone number and give me his, so that we could “you know, make a plan,” it didn’t even matter that I had to give him my home number, which was my only number, nor that he had to scribble his down on the back of my notebook, since I had no cell phone in which to save it. Chosenness bubbled and fizzed and filled me like a vessel once again. I smiled all the way to my locker and beyond.

At lunchtime, when I arrived at Mr. Insley’s door, he didn’t get up from his desk. He gave me a fleeting, sideways glance and said, “Sorry, Willow, I’m skipping lunch today, too much grading.”

His voice was cold, impersonal. I stood, shocked. When the shock began to be replaced by panic, I stammered out, “Oh, I’m—I’m sorry.”

Mr. Insley slowly raised his eyes from the paper he was reading and regarded me as if across an immense distance.

“Why?” he asked, with his eyebrows raised high on his John Keats brow.

“I-I don’t know,” I said, and I felt so confused, because truly I was sorry and truly I did not know why.

“I see,” he said, drily. He went back to his work, leaving me feeling like I’d failed, mightily. I wasn’t sure what I had been tested on; but I knew in my bones that I had just gotten a great, big, red “F.”

I turned and left, and just as I was closing the door behind me, I suddenly had the thought,
Everything is slipping away from me
. It was like slamming into a wall. Shaken, I rushed back into the classroom.

“Mr. Insley?” I said, my voice quavering.

He raised his head. There was a pink patch on his left cheek from where he’d been leaning it, heavily, against his palm. Somehow, this strengthened my resolve.

“Yes?”

“I have decided that I would like you to teach me how to drive,” I said, lifting my chin and trying to look spunky. “If the offer still stands, that is.”

His face thawed, all the edges softening; his smile arrived bit by bit, like a sunrise.

“That’s my girl!” he said.

THAT NIGHT
,
I SPIED
on Eustacia again. I hardly knew myself, that’s how fearless I felt as I made my way stealthily across the lawn. Before I got to the pool house, a sound cut across the night, her laugh, which was no tinkling affair, as I might have expected from such a person, but a rich, bronzy ringing. She was sitting in the rocker on the pool-house porch. I dropped into a crouch behind a bush not ten feet away from where she sat. Slowing my breathing, I tried to become one with the bush, with the night sounds, and the enfolding darkness.

“No, Mom,” she said, presumably into her cell phone. “I haven’t seen him. Not in the flesh, anyway. Possibly just to torture myself, I brought a shoebox of old photos from high school. Let me tell you, there’s been some pretty heavy-duty nostalgia going on here in the pool house.”

The laugh again. I felt a twinge of something akin to envy. Just akin, mind you, since I was constitutionally unable to covet anything Eustacia had. But her tone when she spoke to her mother; it was just so easy, so
chummy
. And who, oh who, was this “him”? The teenage pregnancy
billboard flashed into my mind. Surely, even the most pathetic person in the world would not carry around a box of pictures of the cad who had brought such shame down upon her.

“Yeah, it’s true,” Eustacia went on, with a sigh. “He was one beautiful kid. Okay, stop. Stop! It was forever ago. Hey, I have more willpower than you think, lady. How’s this: if I should happen to run into him, you’ll be the first to know. Yes, even before Mako and Trill. I swear it.”

Who were Mako and Trill? Rely on Eustacia to have acquaintances with stupid names. But there was such fondness in her voice for the “beautiful kid” that I got butterflies in my stomach and pressed my hands to the space below my ribs to make the soft wing beats stop.

“Okay, I’ll talk to you later. But, hey, one more thing. Do you remember the name of Wilson’s boarding school?”

I balled my hands into fists. The nerve! The gall!

“Yeah, I don’t think I ever knew it, either. It’s a little odd, isn’t it? How much we don’t know about him? And what’s even odder that it never seemed odd to us, did it? I mean, I know everything about you. Oh yes, I do! Ha ha. Anyway, I asked him yesterday, about the school, but he wouldn’t tell me. Oh, well. ’Night, Mama. I love you, too.”

“You don’t know him at all,” I whispered, triumphantly, into the bush. “And you never will. Never, ever.”

THE NEXT EVENING
,
AFTER
I finished my homework, I told my mother that I was going for a long run.

My beloved Muddy smiled her soft smile and kissed my forehead.

“Well, I think that’s a grand idea, darling,” she said. “It’ll do you good.”

I thought about Eustacia on the phone with her mother, and I wondered what it would be like, talking like that, so relaxed and open. Maybe I would try it, one of these days, but not this day.

“I might even miss dinner,” I told her.

“No worries. I’ll keep something warm for you. Just keep to the lighted paths and the neighborhoods, the way you always do.”

“I will.”

I ran to the appointed spot, the parking lot of the nearby state park. By the time I got there, it was already growing dark, but I could see Mr. Insley’s car. For a second, I stopped in my tracks and cast a single look over my shoulder in the direction of home, balanced between what lay behind and what lay ahead. Then, I filled my lungs with night air and ran toward the car.

O
NE MORNING
,
I WOKE
up and walked outside to find a portable ballet barre standing on the patch of grass in front of the pool house, and for a few sleepy seconds, it felt like a miracle, like I’d wished the thing into being. I’d been at Wilson’s house for a little more than a week and despite daily moments of prickly, occasionally excruciating, awkwardness, I was settling in. I liked being back in my hometown, and the pool house was tiny, light filled, and sitting smack in the center of autumn gorgeousness and pearly, bird-song-inflected quiet. But I missed ballet. I’d gone on some power walks (I am allergic to running), and had taken a complimentary yoga class at a studio a few miles away, but the fact was that, after so many years of dance, I carried ballet around in my body—arabesques, développés, and pirouettes residing deep and restlessly inside every muscle, bone, and tendon—and I needed to let it loose on a regular basis in order to feel normal.

I set my coffee mug down on the porch and slid my hand along the smooth barre. It was a little low for me, but I could adjust it later. Facing it, I did a few pliés and relevés in first and second position, and even in my pajamas with grass tickling my feet, it felt lovely.

“I bought it for Willow years ago, but she never really used it.”

I whirled around, startled. Caro stood there smiling in sage-green pajamas, her hair wrestled into a wild ponytail on top of her head. She cradled her own mug of coffee between her long-fingered hands. I noticed that her bare, moon-pale skin was remarkably unlined, but that her eyes looked exhausted and there was weariness in the slope of her shoulders. She resembled the tall sunflowers that drooped against the pool-house wall behind her, and it occurred to me to wonder if Caro might be unwell. I hoped not. The woman had to stay healthy, if for no other reason than that Willow needed one parent around who wasn’t bedridden and wasn’t Wilson.

“Thank you, but—you lugged it all the way over here?” I asked, eyeing her thin frame.

Caro laughed. “I’m stronger than I look, but also I took it apart, brought the pieces over, and then reassembled it. It was quite easy, actually.”

“And very nice of you,” I said.

She waved this off, and said, “I know the pool house is small, but if you move some things around, there’s room for barre work, I think. We’ve got some CDs you can use, too, if you want.”

“Thank you. Did you dance?”

She gave a sheepish chuckle.

“My mother signed me up, but I was uncoordinated and much too dreamy. I’m pretty sure I got kicked out, although no one ever actually told me that. All I know is I was six when I started and six when I stopped.”

“So it was a short-lived career,” I said, smiling. “Obviously, you had other talents.”

“I guess,” she said.

“Thank you for the barre. I keep thinking I’ll look for a class to take, but I never seem to do it. If I don’t dance, I get antsy.”

“I knew you would be feeling that way,” she said.

She said this so simply and assuredly and didn’t follow up with
any sort of explanation, as though it were just a natural thing to understand something as personal as this about your husband’s estranged daughter, a woman you’d barely met and hadn’t set eyes on in years. Years ago, my mother had settled on the word
dotty
to describe Caro, mostly in order to displace the myriad, far meaner adjectives Marcus had employed, but I’d been noticing since I got to Wilson’s, how there were moments when the fluttery distraction and tremulousness blew away like smoke to reveal charm and an almost uncanny perceptiveness. It was a long leap from “dotty” to a word like
intuitive
, but in Caro’s case, it seemed a natural one, although as she reminded me just a few seconds later, if you could leap from one to the other, you could also leap back. Right after her insight about the ballet barre, Caro launched herself, landed, froglike, on “dotty,” and sat there, blinking at me with her colossal green eyes.

“You know what, I’ve got some breakfast stuff over there,” she said, gesturing extravagantly with her mug. The coffee sloshed over the side and onto her hand, but she didn’t seem to notice, which I hoped meant that it wasn’t hot. A woman who could fail to realize she was being scalded was probably not someone who should be employing a glassblowing torch on a daily basis. She waved her free hand. “Outside the house, on the, um, table.”

Even though the house wasn’t visible from where I stood, just to be a good sport, I cast a look in its general direction.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, don’t let me keep you. Thanks for the barre. I really appreciate it.”

She blushed and laid a hand against her throat.

“I meant to ask if you would like to join me. Sorry, I forgot to say that part. I get flustered when I invite people to do things they might not want to do.”

Maybe because I’m a sucker for candor and self-deprecation or maybe because I was actually starting to like this person who had ignited the combustion of my family all those years ago, I said, “But I do want to.”

Caro beamed.

“Good! There’s apple coffee cake that, thankfully, I didn’t make myself.”

As we made our way to the flagstone patio behind the house, I caught a glimpse of a building I hadn’t noticed before, tucked into a copse of silver birches in a far corner of the garden, a weathered brown, barnlike structure, the linear birch trunks glowing white against it. I stopped and pointed.

“Is that your studio?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Caro. She spun around, her eyes lit with hopefulness, and stood there for a few seconds, breathing. I could see the effort on her face, which I assumed meant she was beating back fluster and dottiness, and it must have worked because when she extended the invitation, her voice was steady. “Would you—like to see it?”

“I’d love to.”

Her smile was so openly delighted, and I was touched at how much this place meant to her, how glad she was to share it with someone. She took my hand, and for an alarmed moment, I thought she was going to hold it and lead me through the trees like something out of a fairy tale, but she just gave it a quick squeeze and let it go. I watched her striding, slender, pale, and birchlike, through the birches, anticipation and energy suffusing every step, and it occurred to me that I had no idea what it was like to really be an artist, to have making things sit in the very center of your world. But when we got to the door of the studio, it was locked, and all the energy vanished. Caro leaned her back against the door.

“I guess Willow forgot to unlock it before she went to school,” she murmured.

“Don’t you have the key?”

She turned her face away.

“No. Wilson used to, but now Willow does.”

This wasn’t an explanation (what grown woman doesn’t have a key to her own studio?), but I said, “I see,” and because she was just standing
there, looking so wilted and downcast, I gave her a light punch on the shoulder and said, “Race you to the patio!”

Caro gave me a startled glance, said, “Aw, no thanks, Eustacia,” in the same defeated voice, dropped her mug into the grass, and took off like a shot. The woman was faster than I ever would’ve suspected and had the advantage of not being barefoot, but I made a pretty good push there at the end, and we hit the edge of the patio in what I swear was a photo finish.

The coffee cake was thick with apple chunks and so buttery it was damp. There was milk instead of cream for the coffee, which is what I like. The orange juice was fresh and made me think of Trillium the way everything to do with oranges always does. As Caro and I sat eating, sunlight sluiced the yard; the sky went aquamarine; the trees and bushes kindled against it; and there was just no way on earth not to be filled with a sense of expansiveness and well-being.

Which is maybe why when Caro asked me if I’d seen any of my old friends since I’d arrived in town, I said, “No, but I’m thinking of looking up Ben Ransom.”

There were a host of excellent, rock-solid reasons for me not to have said this, ever, to Caro. For one thing, the topic of Ben Ransom was my hallowed ground, not to be trod casually with a near stranger. For another, the story of our breakup—and Caro’s husband’s heartless role in it—was still, after all these years, tender as a new bruise. And for a third, I was sure that Caro had heard some version of the Ben part of my life that was so Wilson-twisted as to be horribly unflattering to me and, what was much more important, to Ben. But somehow right then, none of that mattered. I said his name, released it into the air of the yard, and it felt so lovely to have it there, hovering in the bright sky like something weightless and winged.

As it turned out, Caro knew almost nothing about Ben—let alone the crashing end we’d come to at Wilson’s hands—either that or she was awfully good at pretending, but she didn’t seem at all like a person who would be. Probably Wilson had not thought the story was important
enough or he had not wanted to sully his new family with sordid tales of his first one. But I told her about Ben anyway, not about the breakup, but about him. Frankly, she was the best listener I had ever met, better even than Trillium, who would sometimes catch hold of a random sentence I’d spoken and run with it, tugging the conversation in a wild direction, before I was really finished. Better even than Ben himself, who used to give me so much space to speak that he was almost too quiet at times, too hands off. Caro nudged, prompted, questioned, all with clear-eyed interest and a pliant receptivity. I would’ve bet that this was the same way she made her art—gently bending and shaping, staying watchful, taking her cues from the glass itself.

“What made him special?” she asked, at one point, so I told her how, for Valentine’s Day, instead of candy, he gave me a box of heart-shaped things: stones, shells, leaves he’d collected back in the fall and pressed inside a dictionary. I told her how I’d be studying and find, highlighted on a page of my book, words or parts of words and phrases that together made funny sentences, like “It is the best year for elephant fishing” or “Put a big, blue beetle in your milk.” I told her how he worshipped Carl Linnaeus and was crazy for the names of things, and how when we’d go hiking, he would hand them over to me, like weird little gifts. A bumblebee became
Bombus pensylvanicus
. A robin became
Turdus migratorius
. The foamy yellow stuff in the dirt became “dog vomit slime mold.”

“Yes,” said Caro, with a touch of impatience. “Those things are beautiful, partly because he knew you’d like them before you knew. But they’re extras. What was essential?”

No one had ever asked me this question before.

“It wasn’t just that I could be myself around him,” I said, carefully. “It was that I couldn’t
not
. I couldn’t tell half-truths or dissemble or tell white lies or overdramatize, all of which pretty well describes how I interacted with other boyfriends. I mean, it was high school. One day, Ben asked me to make a pact with him to never say anything we didn’t mean.”

I remembered this moment so clearly. We were at Ben’s house doing math, sitting at opposite sides of the kitchen table, and his dad was cooking. Bolognese sauce simmered on the stove, and bread was baking, and if there is a heaven, I swear it will smell exactly like that kitchen, and Ben’s dad was singing while he cooked, the way he always did, which was loudly, badly, and with unconstrained joy. I’m pretty sure it was “Kodachrome,” but it might have been anything off
The Essential Paul Simon
. Anyway, he hit a wrong note, and Ben and I looked at each other, like we always did at the especially bad singing moments, and Ben said, just the way he’d say anything, not especially solemnly, “How about we promise to never, ever say anything to each other that we don’t mean? Not even if it seems like a small lie and not even if we think it would make the other person happy to hear it.”

I put down my calculator, sat up straight, and considered his proposal.

“What if it’s something that we’re ninety percent sure we mean but we’re not a hundred percent sure?” I said. It seemed important to completely nail down the details.

“Right. We say that. We don’t just fudge that last ten percent. Ever. Deal?”

“Deal,” I said.

I stretched my hand across the books and papers, and we shook on it.

“It was the easiest promise I ever made,” I told Caro.

“You kept it?” she asked. “Both of you?”

“Yes.”

“How extraordinary,” she said. “No wonder he was the love of your life.”

At no time had I ever said to her that Ben was the love of my life. Apart from Trillium, I’d never told anyone that, although I figured my mom and Marcus knew it without being told. It took me aback, frankly, how—just like that, without fanfare, in the same tone she’d used to say the coffee cake had apples in it—Caro had pronounced one
of the great truths of my life. I could hear Marcus in my head, mad at her presumptuousness, her overstepping, saying, “Jesus, Taize, she doesn’t even know you,” and, for a few seconds, I considered getting indignant. But what was the point?

“I know,” was all I said, and the two of us sat there with that between us. After a few seconds, though, shyness hit me, and I looked around, searching for something else to say.

“This yard is perfect, you know,” I said. “Really beautiful.”

Caro smiled. “Thank you, although I don’t think I followed any of the rules of garden layout. This place is just the product of my whim.”

“Are there rules of garden layout?”

She laughed. “See, that’s something I should know, and I have no idea! But all the colors are mixed up, and fancy flowers are cheek-by-jowl with lowbrow ones. Those sunflowers by the pool house, for instance, I think have no business here at all, they’re so big and gangly, but I adore sunflowers, the really towering ones. Wilson thinks they’re awful.”

Thunk. Into the middle of our morning, there plopped Wilson. I stiffened, but Caro didn’t seem to notice.

“But I remind him,” she went on, “that he left the yard to me. Well, all except the front yard. He oversaw the planting of all those—” She broke off.