The Precious One (12 page)

“Willows,” I finished. “Willows for Willow.”

Caro nodded, reddening. “Yes, right after she was born.”

There was a silence, during which we both looked into our cups of coffee.

Then, Caro said, “I think he fell in love with willow trees when he was a teenager at Banfield. Apparently, they had some huge, old ones on the campus.”

I was so busy trying (and failing) to imagine Wilson, my father, falling in love with trees that it took a moment for me to realize what else she had said. I lifted my eyes from my coffee.

“Banfield?”

“Academy,” she said, distractedly, fiddling with her fork.

Banfield Academy.

I stared at Caro with a shock that she didn’t register because she was gazing absently at what was left of her cake, and as I watched her, a thought dawned. I considered the patio table set for two. I considered the little porcelain pitcher of milk and recalled that just the day before, I had mentioned to her that I liked milk instead of cream or half-and-half in my coffee. Caro’s invitation to breakfast had seemed impromptu, but was it possible that the entire morning, beginning with the ballet barre, had been leading up to this revelation? And if it had,
why
? “Don’t be stupid,” I could hear Marcus say. “She’s Wilson’s minion for life. It was just another of her brain-dead episodes.” But I wasn’t so sure.

Caro took another bite of coffee cake and smiled up at the treetops. Her expression was unreadable, as smooth as glass.

BANFIELD ACADEMY TURNED OUT
to be in New Jersey, not far from Princeton, which meant it was only an hour and a half away, and somehow this floored me, not just that Wilson’s school was so close, but that it had been there all along, while Marcus and I had been growing up on Linvilla Road, totally oblivious to its existence.
You’d think we would have sensed it
, I thought, which was obviously ridiculous. Still, I couldn’t shake the proximity eeriness. It was like discovering that the neighbor who’d lived down the road from you your entire childhood was actually a secret agent. Okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, but it was unsettling all the same.

I decided to go, of course. Wilson would have been outraged at the very idea, but for once, his opinion was irrelevant to me. I was interested neither in obeying nor defying him; I just wanted to be in a place that had been Wilson’s before he was Wilson. When I told Marcus this, he said, “Wilson was always Wilson. Trust me on this.”

“No, no,” I told him. “Think about it: Wilson is fundamentally un-young; a fourteen-year-old Wilson is a physical impossibility. Like a giant microbe. Or a tiny blue whale. He had to have been someone else at some point.”

“You’re wrong. But that’s okay. You should definitely check out the school anyway. Take pictures. Get copies of his report cards, especially the bad ones. Come back wearing a Banfield sweatshirt.”

“You’re evil.”

“Hell, buy him his own Banfield sweatshirt. And one for the Spawn. Jeez, don’t forget one for the Spawn!”

Even though I knew Wilson would never allow me to put Banfield Academy in the book, I looked forward to visiting it and embarking, for once, on a real quest for information. So far, my research for the book had consisted of two breathtakingly boring phone conversations with other scientists in his field who were happy to use the subject of Wilson’s brilliant scientific work as a launching pad for a description of their own; five e-mails to set up phone calls; and one lunch with a former student of Wilson’s, a woman in her thirties who called him, with tears in her eyes, “my mentor” and waxed lyrical about his support and kindness in a way that should’ve warmed my heart but that instead made me feel like crap. How was it that he could be so generous to everyone but me, my mother, and Marcus?

In any case, I was chomping at the bit to uncover something beyond hero worship. So the morning after my breakfast with Caro, I donned my standard grown-up, semiboring, professional, trust-inspiring outfit (camel-colored pants, black suede ballet flats, a black cashmere sweater, and a string of pearls), slid the documents giving me access to Wilson’s personal records into my professional, trust-inspiring red leather satchel, programmed my car’s GPS with the address of Banfield Academy, and hit the road.

My GPS had a clipped, aristocratic way of giving me instructions that I found nigh impossible to disobey (my old boyfriend Leo had dubbed the voice “Robo Hepburn”), but when it came time to turn
right onto the highway, I ignored the voice, kept going straight, then went left, then right until, before I knew it, I was pulling into the gravel parking lot of Ransom’s Garden World. As much as I’d considered what I would do when I got there—and that wasn’t much at all—I figured I would sit in my car for a few minutes and just soak the place in.

But while I was doing just that, I couldn’t help myself. If it were only the beauty that called me—and it was all so sumptuously pretty, so abundant, with heaped brilliance everywhere, every pot running over with an exuberance of saturated golds, velvety greens, dusky magentas and pinks, and every shade of orange—mums, dahlias, succulents, sedum, ornamental peppers and cabbages, gourds tucked here and there, vines cascading over every edge—I might have been able to resist, however regretfully. But the trouble was that I saw Mr. Ransom, Ben’s dad, in all of it, in every display, every pot—his sensibility, his eye, his touch, his humor, his kindness, if that makes any sense—and I missed him so sharply that, after a couple of minutes, I was scrambling out of my car to find him.

He was in the back lot, behind the cottage shop, pushing a wheelbarrow full of rich black soil. I remembered that soil, so dark and luscious-looking you wanted to eat it. Because I saw him before he saw me, I had a moment to really take him in, and what I saw hurt. He looked like someone who had been through a hellish time, scarecrow thin inside his plaid shirt and gardening apron and old, so old, more than seventeen years’ worth of old, his face under his Ransom’s cap not so much lined as crumpled.

When he saw me, confusion crossed his face, vanished, and he went completely still. So did I. I wanted to run right over to him, but I felt suddenly nervous. Without a word, carefully, Mr. Ransom let go of the wheelbarrow handles, took off his gloves, tossed them onto the mound of soil, walked closer to me, and said, his voice tinged with amazement, “Taisy.”

“Hi, Mr. Ransom,” I said.

He took off his hat and stuffed it in his apron pocket. I wanted to run and hug him, but I wasn’t sure if he’d want me to. He had always liked me a lot, made me feel welcome every second I’d been in his life, but I knew he loved nobody like he loved Ben. It had been one of my favorite things about him. And I was the person who’d stomped on Ben’s heart and—or so it must have seemed to Mr. Ransom—left without a backward glance.

“Well, it’s nice to see you. Are you home or just passing through?”

“Visiting, I guess,” I said. I gazed around me and breathed in the smell of the place. “But right this second, it kind of feels like being home.”

He smiled. “You always did like this place.”

I realized I was right on the edge of crying. More than I didn’t want this man to hate me, I didn’t want him—I could not bear for him—to think it had been easy for me to walk away from him or his store or his son. I burst out with, “I looked back.”

Mr. Ransom said, nodding, “Oh.” But he was just being nice. He stopped nodding. “Actually, I’m not sure what you mean.”

My face was hot. My eyes stung.

“I know it probably looked like I just walked away and never looked back, but I want you to know I looked back all the time.”

His face softened. “I never thought anything else,” he said.

“I’m sorry I didn’t keep in touch.”

Mr. Ransom held up his hand to stop me. “Hey, it was a long time ago. And you sent me that note once you were settled in down south, which meant a lot. I guess I never told you that, though.”

He didn’t apologize for this, and I didn’t expect him to. I knew why he hadn’t written back; he was too busy being up to his ears in the mess I’d left behind. I can only imagine how long it had taken him to forgive me for what I’d done—if he’d forgiven me at all. I wondered if he knew about the flood of letters I’d sent Ben. I hoped so, but I wasn’t about to tell him.

“So what have you been up to all these years,” he said, “and what brings you back?”

And there was a flash of the old Mr. Ransom. He was a quiet man most of the time, but, even so, he managed to say exactly what was on his mind, a quality that would have made many people insufferable. He gestured to a cast-iron garden bench nearby, took out his cap, gave the already clean seat a few swipes with it, and waited for me to sit before settling in beside me. The fact that he cared enough to ask filled me with gratitude. I was so glad about it that I laughed.

“What?”

“You always did cut to the chase.”

“All right,” he said, “fill me in.”

I told him about the writing, which he already knew about (“Saw you on one of those morning shows with your friend Trillium. She’s an intriguing person, isn’t she?”), about Marcus, and my mom, and, in a Herculean display of self-restraint, I mentioned just once that I was single, but I made sure to say it slowly and clearly. All the same, I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me. We talked for a while more, and, after an interval of silence when Mr. Ransom seemed to be deciding whether to say something or not, he told me, “Ben’s not married yet, either. As a matter of fact, he just broke off his engagement with a girl in Wisconsin before he moved back here.”

“Oh,” I said. It was all I could manage what with my heart pogo-sticking under my ribs.

“I can’t say I was surprised about the breakup,” said Mr. Ransom, but he didn’t explain why, and I thought it would be overstepping to ask. Anyway, I wasn’t interested in Ben’s fiancée, at least not right at that moment. I was only interested in Ben.

“So Ben’s back? To stay?”

Mr. Ransom grinned. “Now who’s cutting to the chase?”

“I am,” I said, grinning back.

“He’s renting right now but says he’s looking for a house to buy. He came home eight months ago, right after my second wife, Bobbie, got cancer.”

“Oh, Mr. Ransom, I’m so sorry,” I said and before I knew it, I was
taking his hand. It occurred to me that I hadn’t held my sick father’s hand, or touched him at all, even casually, since I’d been staying at his house. In fact, in the two years Mr. Ransom and I had been in each other’s lives, I’d probably touched him more than I’d touched my own father in my entire lifetime.

“Thank you,” he said. “We had eight good years. She was sick for just three months and went down fast once she was diagnosed. Ben took over for me here, so I could take care of her. Bobbie got to be at home with her cats and books and things right up until the last few days, and it meant the world. It really did.”

He shut his eyes and took a few deep breaths, smiling in a way that meant he was remembering. I waited, and eventually, he opened his eyes and swiped at them with his thumbs. I did the same to mine.

“I’m glad,” I said. “I bet Ben didn’t think twice about coming.”

“No, he didn’t. Also, he was glad for some time to think. He’d been teaching botany at the university out there in Wisconsin, but even before I called him about Bobbie, he said he was thinking of trying something new.”

“Really?” I said. “Why?”

“He claims he had no gift for teaching. I’m not sure I believe that. But he says he hated university politics, and that I can believe.”

“Me, too.”

“I’m back running this place, but Ben still helps most days, whenever he can. He enrolled himself in the professional gardener program at the university here. Most of his learning is hands on over at Windward, though. You remember how he loved that place, even as a boy.”

Windward, the botanical gardens just over the state line in Pennsylvania, a gorgeous place. Ben and I had walked through the vast glass conservatories and the exquisitely maintained outdoor gardens more times than I could count, and I still had a picture of us, arms around each other, grinning to beat the band, in front of one of the water lily pools. I would get transported by the grandeur—color and lushness rising up on every side, hanging from the ceilings, the fountains
and fruit trees—but Ben went for the details, the tiny, speckled clown face of an orchid, the tight snail-like spirals of a fiddlehead fern, the odd, oily smell of the silvery plants in the desert room. It made me happy to think of Ben working there. In fact—Banfield Academy be damned—I could have spent the day just like that: sitting with Mr. Ransom on that garden bench in his store and picturing Ben at Windward Gardens. But that’s not how it worked out.

I saw the dogs first, impossibly tiny Yorkies, two silky gold and blue-gray mops springing across the lot, and they looked so much like Ben’s dogs Busby and Jed, the ones he’d brought with him when he came to live with his dad back in high school, that I turned to Mr. Ransom in surprise, but he only had eyes for the dogs.

Then they were upon us, bouncing up Mr. Ransom’s shins, their stubby tails wildly tick-tocking. He lifted the bigger one onto his lap and a kiss-fest ensued. I remembered that this was also how Mr. Ransom had always been, generally low-key but prone to bursts of free and easy, slightly goofy joy. I was so happy to see he hadn’t lost that.

The smaller dog placed one paw on my shoe and turned his doll face upward. His nose was a shiny black triangle, and his eyelashes were an inch long, so I picked him up—he was light as a lunch sack full of feathers—and set him on my knee, and he gave my chin a single decorous flick with his tongue.

“Ah! The elusive Pidwit kiss!” said Mr. Ransom with a hoot. “He doesn’t give those away every day.”

“Pidwit,” I said. “That’s what Ben used to call Piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh. His mom told me that.”

“He wasn’t even two. Dragged that stuffed pig around everywhere. And this,” said Mr. Ransom, planting a kiss on the other dog’s head, “is Roo.”

Roo had eyes like Audrey Hepburn, one up ear, one down ear, and a toothy grin. Really and truly, the dog was smiling.