The Precious One (20 page)

For Wilson, pregnant, unmarried girls—or teenaged girls who had sex and were thus in danger of becoming pregnant, unmarried girls—were in the same category as people who went to vo-tech schools or had careers in retail. That his daughter would deliberately place herself in such company made her stupid, and, in Wilson’s moral (amoral) universe, being stupid was the most unforgivable sin of all.

When he caught us, he yelled something at me along those lines. He didn’t call me names, since only stupid people had to resort to name-calling, but he said my behavior was idiotic, a disgrace, an embarrassment, that of a common tramp (“whorish” came later, right before Marcus, my mom, and I left for North Carolina). I’m not sure if it was “tramp” or “idiotic” that caused Ben to snap, but suddenly he was leaping up and standing between me and Wilson, which put him maybe three feet from my father, and even though Ben didn’t do so much as raise his hand, Wilson—and this is critical—flinched. He stepped back, two steps, and as soon as he did that, showed fear, there, in front of witnesses, I understood that he would hate Ben, and possibly me, too, for the rest of his days.

“Don’t talk to Taisy like that,” Ben said. “She doesn’t deserve it.”

Wilson puffed up like a bullfrog.

“You!” he bellowed. “You have evidently decided she ‘deserves’ to be the fallow field for your wild oats. How manly of you. I am sure you
make your father proud. And when she is a high school dropout dandling a bastard child on her knee, will she have deserved that as well?”

I held my breath, waiting for Ben to slap Wilson down with his own ugly words—
wild oats, bastard child
—and I think he was just about to, when he turned his head and looked at me. I should have given him the thumbs-up; I should have blurted out the words myself. Marcus and I had decided to tell our mother about Caro, so all of it would come to light soon enough anyway. What I should not have done, should not even have thought of doing, was protect Wilson. But that’s just what I did. I gave the slightest shake of my head and whispered, “Don’t,” and after a beat, Ben nodded. Oh, if only I’d let him say it! If he’d said that, screamed at Wilson, called him a hypocrite and a cheat, told how he’d seen him at the museum with his own eyes, maybe he would not have said what he said next, what he said
instead
, and maybe our lives—Ben’s and mine—would have turned out so differently.

He began like this: “Dr. Cleary, how could you know nothing about your daughter? You’ve lived with her all these years. You’re her father, for God’s sake, and you don’t have a clue who she is.”

His dark gaze was translucent, unwavering. His composure took my breath away. Ben had always harbored reserves of quietude, but he could lose it like anyone else when he was pushed. Now, his serenity gave him a kind of magnificence, while at the very same time, it made my heart sink because I knew—and I knew that Wilson knew—that Ben’s composure shamed my father more surely than those two stumbling, flinching steps backward ever had. Rudyard Kipling was one of Wilson’s heroes. I’d been hearing it all my life: “If you can keep your head, when all about you are losing theirs . . .” Temper was for toddlers; yelling was for drunks and street punks. If Wilson had a book of life rules, “Composure wins every time” would be right there at the top.

He turned ten shades of red. A vein bulged in his forehead. He looked at me, and said, in the ugliest, most venomous voice imaginable, “I know exactly who you are.”

“She’s my wife.” My husband’s voice was like water falling through a shaft of sun.

God, it was as though some epic battle of good versus evil were being enacted in that living room. Wilson so red and bloated and old and cruel, Ben so pale and straight and noble and young.

But in the end, Wilson won.

At this point in the telling, Willow forgot herself, hit the tile-top table with the flat of her hand and yelped, “What? How?”

I rubbed my eyes.

“He made us annul the marriage,” I said, drearily.

“He did? On what grounds?”

Was that indignation I heard in her voice? Was it possible that Willow, a chip off the old Wilson block if ever there was one, was on my side? But no sooner had I thought this than the ice queen came back. Ice queen with a generous dollop of nasty.

“I mean, I thought you could only annul marriages when they weren’t consummated, which yours obviously was,” she said, her tone making my and Ben’s single night of conjugal bliss sound like a visit to a brothel.

Oh, that girl.

I cleared my throat. “‘The Court shall enter a decree of annulment of a marriage entered into under any of the following circumstances,’” I quoted, and then said, “One party being unable or unwilling to consummate the marriage was just one of them. I think there were six others.”

“Oh,” said Willow.

“‘One or both parties entered into the marriage under duress exercised by the other party’ is the one Wilson wanted me to use.”

“He wanted you to say you were forced?”

“Yes, by Ben. I wouldn’t do it. Finally, I agreed to ‘One or both parties entered into the marriage as a jest or dare.’”

Just saying it made me want to die of shame.

“Oh,” said Willow. “Gosh.”

We sat in silence, both of us running our forefingers down the little grouted channels between the tiles on the table.

“But wait,” said Willow, looking up at me.

“What?”

“Why would you agree to anything? You were eighteen, right? Eighteen means you were an adult, so how could Wilson
make
you get an annulment?”

A question to break your heart. A sinkhole of question that could swallow you body and soul.

“I wanted to keep the peace,” I said, and yes, there was a shrill note of pleading in my voice. “And I didn’t think it would be the end. I thought the annulment would be a formality, and that we’d stay together, and just get married again, later, when we were older. I tried to make Ben understand that.”

“But you didn’t,” said Willow the Ice Queen. “You didn’t get married again and you didn’t make Ben understand.”

I shook my head. “No! He was so angry at me. I didn’t think he’d react that way. As soon as I told him what I had agreed to, what I had been
made
to agree to, he shut me out, stopped answering his door, stopped answering my calls. It was wrenching.”

I swiped at my eyes.

“But you know, I think I could have won him back, gotten him to understand, eventually, but—” I broke off.

“But what?”

Willow’s face, between the two heavy curtains of bright hair, was pale and all eyes. She looked so heartbreakingly young.

Carefully, I said, “But then, in the space of a week, my family combusted. My mother left Wilson and took me and Marcus to live in North Carolina. All that week, I tried everything I could think of to reach Ben, but I never could. And then we were gone, and, for a year, even after we were both in college, I wrote him letters, but he didn’t answer any of them.”

Willow said, crisply, with a toss of her head, “Well, did you really expect him to?”

“Yes,” I said, simply.

“Hmpf,” she sniffed. Then, she got up from the table and walked to the door.

“I have to go,” she said, with her back to me.

“Willow, I did the wrong thing. Obviously. I’ve regretted it so bitterly for so many years. But I was not much older than you are now, and it was
Wilson
.”

If anyone could understand the power that those last three words contained, it was surely Willow, and suddenly, I wanted her understanding so much it hurt. I had betrayed the person I loved most in all the world, smashed my own heart and all my hopes to smithereens because Wilson had told me to, and, heaven help me, I wanted there to be one person on the face of the earth who understood why I’d done it.

“You know what it’s like to be Wilson’s daughter, and you also know—I’m sure you know—what it’s like to be in love. If you’d been in my place,” I said, “what would you have done?”

She turned around, and I could see the struggle on her face: True Love versus Wilson. But I’d been there, hadn’t I? I knew what she would choose.

“You want to know what I think?” she asked.

I nodded.

“I think,” she said, savagely, “that if you didn’t love Ben enough to stay married to him no matter what, then you didn’t love him enough, period. So maybe you were right to leave.”

I fell back, stunned. She spun on her heel, tore open the door, and walked out, but in two seconds, she was back.

“I take that back. You weren’t right. You were a fool.”

She slammed the door so hard, it shook the windows in their frames.

THE NEXT MORNING
,
AS
soon as the sky made its first, almost imperceptible, shift from black to blackish gray, I called Ben.

“Taisy,” he said, and his fuzzy, just-woken-up voice saying my name sent a streak of heat through my body.

“I know. I’m relentless,” I said.

“Hey, I wouldn’t say that,” he said, with a husky laugh. The laugh gave me courage.

“No, I mean that’s my plan, to be relentless.”

“Your plan.”

“To hound you. I’m a good hounder. I’ll dog you, as well, if necessary. Why do all those stalker verbs have to do with dogs? Other animals hunt better than dogs, right?”

“Well, there’s badger. You could badger me.”

“Badgers are sissies.”

“They’re vicious, when provoked. Plus, they have these special jaws so that they can bite something and hold on forever,” said my fact-loving Ben.

“Badgers have short, little legs and stripes. Stripes! How could they be vicious?”

“Tigers have stripes.”

“And long legs. Which settles it: I’ll tiger you, if necessary. I have a lot of tigering tricks up my sleeve.”

A quiet fell during which I strained to hear him breathe. When he finally spoke, his voice was serious and gentle. “So what is it you’re tigering me relentlessly for?”

The kindness in his voice pierced me. It was the tone of someone who is about to burst your bubble but really, really doesn’t want to.

All of you
, I wanted to tell him.
Body, soul, every day of the rest of your life
.

“A second chance,” I said.

“At what?”

“Us,” I said, impatiently. “What else?”

“Taisy, listen.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t have to say anything right now.”

“I need to,” he said.

“Really? Can you just not?” My eyes filled with tears.

“I’m sorry, but I have to tell you this. I can’t go back.”

“So we won’t. We’ll start fresh, right here.”

“I can’t get back together with you,” he said. “I just can’t.”

I set the phone on the table in front of me, shut my eyes, and breathed long breaths. After a few seconds, I picked the phone back up. “So that’s it? We’ll just walk back out of each other’s lives forever? You’re that mad at me?”

“No, I—” Ben hesitated and I knew right then—in the space of that pause—that he couldn’t do it. He could not tell me to go away for good. Hope unfurled inside me.

“What about this?” I said, quickly. “What if I relentlessly tiger you to be my friend? We were always friends, right? Even when we were in love, we were friends, too.”

“Yes.”

“Yes, we were friends? Or yes, I can relentlessly tiger you to be my friend?”

He laughed. I could hear him saying the word before he said it: “Both.”

“All right, then you’ve got yourself a deal. Now, can I tell you my second reason for calling?”

“At five thirty
A
.
M
.,” he reminded me.

“Right.”

“Your first reason being to tell me that you’re relentless?”

“Yes.”

“Just for the record, I would have believed you at seven o’clock
A
.
M
. just as much. Seriously. Seven thirty even.”

“So noted. But my second reason for calling was to ask you to go on a drive with me.”

“So you finally got your driver’s license.”

“Is that a yes?”

“Where are we going?”

“If I tell you that, you might not agree to come. In fact, you almost definitely would not.”

“Way to sell it, tiger,” he said.

ACCORDING TO ROBO HEPBURN
, it would take two and a half hours to get to Wilson’s childhood home. I’d considered not telling Ben where we were going, at least until we got there, but practically as soon as he sat down in the passenger seat, he said, “This trip is Wilson-related, right?”

“Hold on a second.”

I started the car and my tires squealed as we flew out of the driveway. Not until we were headed down the road, did I say, “Yes, it’s Wilson-related.”

“You took off like a cannonball, didn’t you? And now you’re going, what?” He leaned toward me to check the speedometer, the side of his head nearly brushing my cheek. I touched the spot on my face he had almost touched. “Twelve miles over the speed limit?”

“I did and I am.”

“Banking on the fact that I won’t want to jump out of a moving vehicle, huh?” The corners of his mouth curled up. “Smart move.”

“Thank you.”

In as few words and with as much nonchalance as possible, I told Ben about the book and about how I was chasing down Wilson’s invisible childhood. I hoped I sounded like a sassy, hard-boiled reporter from a 1940s comedy and not like a daughter desperate for her father’s approval. Apart from smiling at “the life story of a mind, if you will” rendered in my best Wilson voice, the long “i” in “mind” stretched out like melted Stilton, Ben stayed quiet, looking out the windshield, his profile unreadable.

Once I had finished, he didn’t ask me any questions about Wilson. He said, “Tell me about being a ghostwriter.” So I told him about Trillium,
my first ghostee, how magical it felt, falling into someone else’s psyche. I told him about my secret weapon: the right question.

“The first time I discovered it, I was writing Trillium’s story, and I was stuck.”

“You mean you didn’t know what part to tell next?”

“Sort of. But it was more like I was stuck outside of her personality, like I’d been in and gotten locked out and needed to find the right rock, the one with the key under it, so I could get back. I didn’t panic. She panicked enough for both of us, but I just waited for the rock to show itself, and then it did. I called her in the dead of night and said, ‘I just need to know: What was the first gift you were given that you truly believed you couldn’t live without?’ and after a tiny, breath-sized pause, she said, ‘My Trixie Belden books, five of them from a lady whose house my mother cleaned. I was nine.’ And I pictured Trixie, girl sleuth, blond and curly-haired and irrepressible, with her gang of cute friends, her Westchester County farmhouse, her funny brothers and sparkly-eyed parents, and . . . click!”