The Precious One (13 page)

“No offense, but he doesn’t look much like a kangaroo to me,” I said.

Then, a voice from a few feet away said, “It’s because of the way he hops through tall grass.”

Ben.
Ben
. I knew it was Ben because it couldn’t have been anyone else in the world.

A shiver ran down the back of my neck, and Pidwit turned his head to give me a deep brown, doe-eyed look of concern. I touched the tip of my nose to his, mostly because his nose was so tempting, but also to buy myself time, after which I lifted my head and looked straight into the eyes of Ben Ransom.

“He was doing it when I went to pick him up from the breeder,” said Ben.

“Hopping?” I said.

“Yeah. Actually, he looked more like a dolphin leaping through waves, but right after I saw him, I met Pidwit, who was obviously a Pidwit.”

“Obviously,” I said. “So then Roo made more sense than . . .”

“Flipper,” supplied Ben.

I wanted to say something witty, but after that first, brief wave of coherence, the only thing inside my head was
you you you you you
, hooting like a crazy owl.

“Well,” said Ben, after a short silence. “This is unexpected.”

I swallowed hard, tried to smile, but managed only to clench my teeth.

“I’m going to go feed these dogs,” said Mr. Ransom, standing and lifting Pidwit from my lap. He tucked him under his left arm like a football. Roo was tucked under his right.

“I fed them earlier,” said Ben.

“He calls that food?” Mr. Ransom said to the dogs. “That crunchy guinea pig garbage? You’re carnivores, aren’t you? You need meat.” He nodded at me. “Good to see you, Taisy,” he said and started off toward the cottage.

“I don’t think they eat poached chicken in the wild, Dad,” said Ben.

“Like he knows,” said Mr. Ransom to the dogs and then, over his shoulder. “You tell him, Taisy!”

Ben shot his father a look of exasperation that wouldn’t have fooled a baby. How moving I’d always found it, the way, even as a teenager, Ben had adored his dad.

“Okay, tell me,” said Ben, eyebrows up. “You think they eat poached chicken in the wild?”

I considered this. While I considered it, I considered him, tried to take in as much of him as I could. He was a leaner, starker version of himself, less red-cheeked. Some cute boys age into boyish, faintly silly-looking men, their prettiness gone all to seed. But maybe because Ben had never looked that boyish, even as a boy, he seemed to have grown into a truer version of himself, as though this man had been inside of him all along, biding his time, waiting to emerge. His dark hair was cropped short, and I missed its falling on his forehead, but I liked how now there was less to distract you from his black eyes and all the craftsmanship of his face. And, oh, that sharply cut divot in his lip was the same as ever.

“Do they eat poached chicken in the wild? That’s your question. They’re Yorkies,” I said. “Are they
in
the wild? Not just your Yorkies, but any Yorkies? Ever?”

Then, for the first time in seventeen years, Ben Ransom smiled at me, and his smile was what it always had been, a sudden, reckless, white-light event that took over his entire face. Smiles like that aren’t just pleasant, they’re inspiring; they make you want to deserve them. Ben’s smile sent courage charging through me.

“Listen,” I said, fervently. “I have to go somewhere. Will you come with me?”

He should have said yes. I should have held out my hand, and he should have grabbed it, and together we should’ve run to my car and spent the next several hours intermittently pouring out our hearts and being quiet together, and asking for forgiveness and telling each other there was never anything to forgive, so that by the time we got back
home, our fresh start would have spread out all around us like a field we stood in. I wanted it so much that I could see it happening. I just held my breath, waiting for the yes.

But Ben didn’t say it. His smile fell away, became so gone that it was like it had never been there at all.

“Just like that?” he said, with an edge in his voice. “Is that what you thought would happen?”

“No! I mean, yes.” I sighed. “I just thought we could talk.”

Ben rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand in a gesture so familiar I wanted to cry.

“You can’t just show up like this. I haven’t seen you in seventeen years, and you know what? I was pretty sure I’d never see you again.”

“Really? But didn’t you ever want to? I know I wanted to see you.”

It was a risk, but there is a time for naked honesty, and I was hoping that this was that time. Ben took another step backward and said, coldly, “So that’s why you came back? To see me.”

I wanted so badly to shout yes, but we’d sworn to always tell each other the truth. What would happen to our fresh start if I kicked it off with a lie? How would I ever deserve it?
Oh, let the dogs come back
, I thought, miserably, staring down at the ground.
Let things be funny and easy the way they were before I ruined them
.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

When I looked up, he was walking away.

I ALMOST DIDN
’
T GO
to Banfield. What the hell did it matter where Wilson had gone to school? The man had ruined my life, plain and simple, and learning who he’d been before he did it wouldn’t change that. But I realized that if I went back to the pool house, all I would do is play the meeting with Ben over and over inside my head, feeling more and more sorry for myself, and just the image of my tearstained, thirty-five-year-old self, lying on Wilson’s blue couch in Wilson’s pool house, mourning Ben like a schoolgirl was so humiliating, reeked so
completely of failure that it made me want to scream. So instead I drove, dry-eyed and trying for fierceness, turning up the music until the only voice that could break through the din wasn’t Wilson’s or Ben’s or even my own, but Robo Hepburn’s, telling me, without a trace of emotion or uncertainty, her tone as barren as the moon, exactly where to go.

THE SCHOOL WASN
’
T NEARLY
as grand as I thought it would be, no spires or domes casting shadows or declaring their majestic shapes against the sky, but its stone buildings were old enough and weathered enough to be dignified and to offset the samples of ’70s architecture that had sprung up among them. The kids wore jeans and fleeces, not uniforms or coats and ties, and they whizzed by on bikes or clacked along the brick walkways on skateboards, both of which they abandoned on the grass outside the entrances to the buildings when they went in to their classes.

I tried to imagine the place as Wilson would have known it, erasing the newer buildings, shrinking the trees, slicking down the hair of the boys who walked by, but the present was too insistent, too young and loud and alive. As I walked around, following the map I’d printed out online, I could imagine being one of those skateboard kids, jostling into the classroom with my friends, sitting down at my desk red-faced and breathless, a little sweaty, yanking the earbuds out of my ears, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine Wilson. I went to the library, to the science building, to the oldest dormitory I could find, searching high and low for Wilson’s high school ghost, but he was nowhere to be found.

At the main administrative office, I showed the secretary, Edwina Cook, Wilson’s letter and the paper from his lawyer and asked if I might see whatever records they still had of his time there, and lo and behold, the documents worked. Edwina Cook was a sturdy, capable-
looking woman, with unexpectedly long, red nails. When she finished reading the documents, she clapped her hands.

“A book! How exciting! And what a father you’ve got!” she said. “We’re still in the process of digitizing the old paper files, but I think we’ve gotten all the way up to sixties.”

Her nails clicked, lightning fast, on the computer keys.

“There! I think I’ve got everything for Wilson Cleary. Isn’t much, but you’re welcome to it. You want me to print copies?”

“Please,” I said.

There was his transcript: difficult-sounding classes, straight As, class rank 1. None of which surprised me. And there was his work/study contract, which surprised me a little. Apparently, Wilson had put himself through school by doing whatever needed doing: serving food in the cafeteria, helping the groundskeeper, shelving books in the library. Wilson in an apron? Ladling mashed potatoes onto his schoolmates’ plates? If the past Wilson had been anything like the one I knew, he must have been writhing with ire and humiliation for four straight years.

Wait.
Four straight years?
I looked back at the records and noticed for the first time that they didn’t span four years, but two, his junior and senior. There was nothing from his freshman and sophomore years, and, then, I noticed something odder, still: no home address on any of it. The work/study contracts extended through the summer. It was as though Wilson had lived at the school. And where were his parents’ names? I leafed carefully through the sheets of paper. Nowhere. I went back to Edwina.

“You know, I’m quite sure that my father was here for all four years, but I’m not finding anything for his first two. Would you mind checking again?”

Looking just a tad annoyed at my questioning her thoroughness, she checked.
Clickety click click click
. Nothing.

“Can you check by social security number?” I asked.

“I don’t think the school used them back then,” she said. “I don’t know if minors even were issued them in the fifties. I suspect not.”

“Oh,” I said, downcast.

“Now don’t you get discouraged,” she chirped. “I’m sure we can figure this out. I’m one of those who likes a knotty problem.”

I smiled at her. I liked this knotty-problem-liking Edwina Cook, clicks and all.

“I’ll bet you are,” I said.

She scooped up the sheaf of papers and read them with hawklike attention, narrowing her eyes.

“Aha!” she cried, making me jump.

“What?”

“Looks like they assigned every student an identification number. I’ll try searching by that.”

Clicks. Fifteen minutes later, the first two years of Wilson’s prep school education were sliding out of the printer.

“Voilà!” said Edwina and handed them over. “It was the name change that got me.”

“Name change?”

“Looks like he must have done it the summer between his sophomore and junior years. You didn’t know?”

I shook my head, spreading the new sheets down on the table, trying to understand what Edwina was telling me, and there it was: Wilson Ravenel.
Well, I’ll be damned, Marcus had been wrong; Wilson
had
been a different person when he was fourteen and fifteen, and presumably for all the years before that
.

“I wonder why,” I said.

Edwina shrugged. “Guess you can ask him, right?”

Wrong.

“You know,” I said, slowly, “one thing that happened around that time is that his parents died.”

“Oh, how awful, honey,” said Edwina. She clucked her tongue. “Such a tough age to lose a parent, let alone both.”

“I know. There was a car accident. He doesn’t really talk about it.”

We sat in thoughtful silence, and then, Edwina said, “You never know, do you? How that kind of thing would affect a kid.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, a bereaved child, dropping his parents’ last name like that. You wouldn’t think it, would you?”

Edwina was right. It seemed heartless even for Wilson. I could hear Marcus saying,
Nothing is too heartless for Wilson
. But still, it didn’t make sense.

“Well, I’ll leave you alone with that stuff for a bit,” said Edwina, patting my hand.

“Thanks.”

Out the window, I could see a lone boy walking, his skateboard under his arm. He looked lost in thought, oblivious to his surroundings, solitary and yet also content, and I wondered if that was what it had been like here for Wilson Ravenel (Had anyone called him Will? Had “Will” used contractions?), back before his parents died and he was reincarnated as Wilson Cleary. I hoped so. When the kid was out of sight, I went back to reading, so distractedly, my mind still with the thinking boy out the window, that I almost didn’t see them. Two names. In wonder, I ran a shaky finger over them. Walter and Helen Ravenel. Wilson’s parents, my grandparents. And an address.

W
HEN I WAS A
child, my father was a devotee of the historical marker, those metal, hump-topped rectangular signs you find standing in fields or along roads or affixed to buildings. He was the kind of person who stops and reads what lots of others just pass by, even if it means pulling over on the highway with cars whizzing past or stopping dead on a city sidewalk when you’re already late for the symphony or an IMAX film about the Galapagos. As secretly impatient as I’d gotten with this over the years, I have to admit that it is rather nifty, the way the past and the present can bump up against each other: the stop on the Underground Railroad cozying up to the sneaker store; the birthplace of the famous sculptor reborn as a windowless nightclub called Tits for Tats (!).

Equally nifty is the way knowledge can lead to more knowledge. For instance, after a quick but harrowing highway stop in Chancellorsville, Virginia, I was inspired to research Stonewall Jackson’s left arm, which, according to the marker, had been amputated there on the battlefield. I found out that the arm had been given its own Christian burial, only to be stolen from its resting place by Union soldiers and
spirited off to parts unknown, and this became a jumping-off point for a project on burial rituals and grave robbery through the ages, a project that gave me nightmares for weeks, but that smacked of brilliance, if I do say so myself.

With such an upbringing, it’s probably not strange that I had played a game for years in which I erected imaginary historical markers along my own life’s path. All right, maybe that is strange. I mean, for a while there, when I was nine or ten, I even started writing them down in a notebook, pencil drawings of painstakingly lettered, hump-topped signs announcing such events as: “
WILLOW CLEARY
’
S FINAL BALLET RECITAL
.
HERE ON THIS STAGE IN JUNE OF HER TENTH YEAR
,
WILLOW
,
DRESSED AS A PANSY
,
DANCED HER FINAL DANCE TO
“
ALL IN THE GOLDEN AFTERNOON
”
FROM
ALICE IN WONDERLAND
.
BECAUSE SHE WAS SO SAD ABOUT HAVING TO QUIT BALLET
,
SHE SLIPPED AND FELL DURING THE CHAINES TURNS
,
BUT HER MOTHER SAID NO ONE NOTICED
.” At Bethany Beach, Delaware: “
WILLOW CLEARY GOES INTO THE OCEAN FOR THE FIRST TIME
”; in front of the two-headed human fetus suspended in a jar at the Mutter Museum of medical oddities in Philadelphia: “
WILLOW CLEARY DISGRACES HERSELF AND HER FATHER BY BURSTING INTO TEARS IN FRONT OF EVERYONE
”; and in the hallway outside of my father’s office: “
WILLOW CLEARY SAYS HORRIBLE THINGS TO HER FATHER ABOUT HAVING TO QUIT CROSS
-
COUNTRY AND ALMOST KILLS HIM
.”

Actually, I never wrote that last one down. For one thing, by the time it happened, I no longer kept the notebook. For another, to have to see it written out that way would have smashed my guilty heart to flinders.

I hadn’t played the historical marker game for ages, of course, but if I still had, I would have mentally stuck a big shiny sign in the manicured grass beneath the giant oak tree in the south field of the Webley School, one that read:
WILLOW CLEARY
,
AGED SIXTEEN
,
HAS HER FIRST
-
EVER ARGUMENT WITH A BOY HER AGE
—
AND WINS
. At least, I thought I won. Luka might have had a different take on the outcome, but even he couldn’t have denied that, at the very least, I held my own.

The argument was about Dorothea Brooke, one of the central characters
in
Middlemarch
. If you haven’t read it, you should, but here’s really all you need to know to understand our argument: Dorothea is a wealthy, beautiful young woman barely out of her teens who dreams of doing something big and world-changing, so, despite her family’s horrified disapproval, she marries a much older, unhandsome, emotionally detached scholar named Edward Casaubon, whom she deeply admires, with the thought that she will help him finish his “great” work, which has something to do with religion, and send it out into the world for the benefit of all; the marriage is a failure, mostly because Casaubon isn’t very interested in finishing his book or in having a wife, and after the sickly Casaubon dies, Dorothea admits to herself that she is in love with her friend, Casaubon’s young, handsome cousin Will Ladislaw, who has loved her all along; and even though no one approves of this suitor, either (because Will is not rich and Dorothea is), she marries him and lives happily ever after.

I adore Dorothea. Adore! Which is how the argument got started.

It was one of those out-of-nowhere, brilliant, orange and cobalt fall afternoons, so Luka and I decided to talk about our English project outside, instead of in the library. At first, the decision appeared to have all the makings of a disaster because for a few long, agonizing seconds, I could not for the life of me figure out how to
be on the ground
without looking like an idiot. Should I sit cross-legged? Legs stretched out? Legs tucked under? Or like Luka, knees bent, elbows propped on them? My mind and heart raced. Finally, I opted for a sideways, bent-legged position that instantly mortified me because it was so
girlish
, like some nauseatingly prissy version of that statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid who sits on a rock, minus the partial fish tail. So I shifted to having my legs stretched out in front of me, remembering a split second too late that in fitted black pants, my storky appendages would look exactly like ebony chopsticks, but then I simply couldn’t shift yet again because
nothing
could look worse than writhing around on the ground, twisting myself into shapes like a crazed origami person. I cursed my legs, along with my pathetic self-consciousness,
and the afternoon might have gone to hell in a handbasket except that as soon as we got started talking about the book, I forgot all about how I was sitting and just sat.

“So,” said Luka, “what did you think of the book?”

It was one of those thrilling, exasperating, impossibly wide-open questions to which there are far, far too many responses, but I had to try to answer it. I owed as much to the book, to George Eliot, and to Luka for choosing me, so I took a deep breath and gave it a go.

“Well, for one thing, I found it interesting how Eliot is so distant one minute, and then so intimate the next, and at one point it hit me that this style really mirrored the story because there are these large, public issues at stake and then there are the characters’ relationships, and the two don’t stay separate at all, when you think about it. They overlap all the time. Um, another thought I had was that there was a lot of attention paid to women’s looks. I admit that I haven’t really come to any conclusions about what Eliot was doing with this, but there’s the fact that the most beautiful woman, Rosamond Vincy, had the worst values and the plainest woman, Mary Garth, had the best, but then, of course, there’s Dorothea who is definitely beautiful, but not in your typical . . .”

At about this time, I caught sight of Luka’s face, which was bemused and also twitchy around the mouth in a way that clearly meant he was trying not to laugh. Obviously, I should have died of embarrassment if for no other reason that, when it came to interacting with kids at school, dying of embarrassment was my fallback response, but for some reason, maybe because he was still somehow coming across as nice, I didn’t. I cut off midsentence, lifted my eyebrows, and said, “Am I amusing you?”

He grinned with one side of his mouth. “When I asked what you thought of the book? I was really just asking if you liked it.”

“Ohhhhh.” I grinned back. “I did like it. I loved it, in fact. How about you?”

I would have supposed Luka to be too cool to truly consider a question
like this, much less give a serious answer, but he tipped his disheveled-haired head to one side and appeared for all the world to contemplate. It occurred to me for the first time that there might be some lofty echelon of coolness that allowed a person to forget about cool and act interested in what he found interesting. Who knew? What I didn’t know about coolness could fill a book even longer than
Middlemarch
.

Luka said, “Yeah, I liked it. It was funny, which I definitely did not expect. There were some caricatures, obviously, but a lot of the characters were down to earth and cool. Fred, Mr. Farebrother, Celia, Mary Garth. I liked how Will wasn’t some perfect guy and was actually kind of directionless for most of the book. But, God,
Dorothea
.” He made what I can only describe as a vomit face. I had the fleeting thought that if you could be handsome while making a vomit face, you had to be pretty handsome, but my next thought was
What?

“
What?
” I said, narrowing my eyes at him. “You didn’t like Dorothea?”

“Ugh. She was so annoying. Didn’t you think she was insanely annoying?”

Let me be clear. I don’t think you have to like characters in order to love them. I love a lot of characters with whom I would never want to, as my peers say, hang. Hamlet, for one. Practically every single character in
Wuthering Heights
, for another. But Dorothea Brooke? Dorothea Brooke I liked and loved and admired and cherished. She just tries so hard to be a good person. How can you not love that? I set my jaw.

“No one,” I said, “could be annoyed by such a person as Dorothea Brooke. She’s so pure-hearted and generous and
nice
.”

Luka had the nerve to roll his eyes.

“Come on. She thinks she’s better than everyone, except for Casaubon who is clearly a loser. Everyone she knows tries to talk her out of marrying the old guy, but she thinks she’s smarter than all of them.”

“She
is
smarter than all of them!”

“You’re saying she was right to marry him?”

“Okay, no. Obviously, that was a bad decision, but she made it for
the right reasons. She wanted to devote herself to something beautiful and important. And all those other people, yes, maybe they were trying to talk her into doing the right thing, but for all the wrong reasons.”

“They thought he was a pompous ass, which he was.”

“They made fun of the way he
blinks
, for heaven’s sake. Do you really think someone shouldn’t marry a person because other people don’t like the way he blinks?”

Luka shook his head. “If he weren’t a pompous ass, if he were a nice guy, probably they wouldn’t have made fun of him like that.”

This took me aback for a moment because it hadn’t occurred to me before. But as soon as Luka said what he said, it seemed true, even, maybe, universally so. If you liked a person, or if you loved him, you didn’t mind his physical imperfections. Someone’s narrow shoulders or knobby wrists or slightly bugged eyes, for instance, might even endear him to you more. But if you disliked someone, well, it was all grist for the meanness mill. Truth be told, once I’d noticed Bec Lansing’s vaguely round cheeks, her one physical glitch, I’d mentally hissed “chipmunk” at her every time I saw her, with glorious satisfaction.

“True,” I conceded.

“Tell me this: Do you think Dorothea actually thought Casaubon was hot? The guy had
moles
.”

“So?”

“White moles. Two of them. On his face.”

“So?”

“On his
face
. With hairs growing out of them.”

I shrugged.

“Willow.” Luka leaned toward me. “Hairs. Moles with hairs.”

I had to laugh at this. “All right. So he wasn’t hot, even to Dorothea.”

It should be noted that I had never before used “hot” as a descriptor for a human being and, prior to this conversation, would have sworn I never would.

“But Dorothea was thinking of less superficial things than hotness,” I said and immediately thought
Do people
say
hotness?

Luka gave me another bemused but friendly look. “Uh, yeah. Sure they do.”

“What?”

“You just asked if people say hotness, and they do.”

For the love of God, I had said it out loud. How had that happened? Was it possible there was a fine line between comfortable and pathological and that, after ten minutes with this boy, I’d already crossed it? Perhaps because I had done exactly that, I decided not to worry about it. I shrugged. “Oh,” I said. “Well, thanks for letting me know.”

“No problem. So admit it: Dorothea thought she was above physical attraction, but she was wrong. If you’re dating a person, if you’re
marrying
a person, hotness matters. It’s fundamental.”

I looked at Luka there on this grass, with his shoulders, his white, square, straight teeth, his long black eyes, the leaf shadows on his honey-colored skin. I thought,
You’re not exactly a disinterested party when it comes to that particular subject, are you?
But this time, I made damn sure I only said it inside my head.

“Fine,” I said. “Yes, she made a mistake.”

Luka leaned his head back, looked up at the canopy of oak leaves. “Yeah, it’s almost always a mistake for a young person to be with an old person.”

For the first time during our conversation, I felt a hot rush of embarrassment, which made no sense, since I had never “been” with anyone, much less a person who would remotely qualify as old. But I shoved the embarrassment aside and got back to the business of defending Dorothea.

“But that doesn’t make her annoying. She made a mistake because she was idealistic and naive; that could happen to a lot of people.”

“True,” said Luka, still staring up at the tree, “that it could happen to a lot of people. False that it doesn’t make her annoying.”

“But listen,” I said. “She could’ve run home when she realized what a louse Casaubon was, but she stuck by him. Why are you smiling like that? Standing by one’s commitment is noble!”

“‘Louse,’” said Luka, with a short but real laugh. “Nice word choice.”

“Thank you. Now admit that I’m right.”

“I was rooting for her to dump the guy, but, yeah, I guess sticking with him was noble.”