The Precious One (28 page)

“Still, look how she’s staring so blankly. Look at her mouth. She looks dead.”

“You have a point,” he said, leaning closer to the picture. “And no wonder, since Lizzie nearly died herself while it was being painted.”

“Really?”

“Well, she got quite sick, anyway. Millais painted the setting on the banks of the Hogs Mill River in Surrey, but when it came time to render the figure, he had Lizzie lie for hours, completely dressed, in a bathtub full of water. Since it was winter, he used lamps to heat the water, and, at one point, he was so intent on his work that he let the lamps go out. She got chilled and consequently, fell ill.”

Even though I was almost positive that getting chilled did not make people sick, viruses and bacteria did, I didn’t mention this, since it was beside the point. The point was that the painter believed the cold would make her sick and at the very least knew it would make her wretchedly uncomfortable, and still he didn’t take more care about the lamps. As if in commiseration with Lizzie, a chill ran over my scalp.

“That’s abominable,” I said, vehemently.

“Willow,” said Mr. Insley, with dismay. “Do you think so?”

“Yes. Horrible.”

“But I always found it wonderful, to be so caught up with your artistic process, so thoroughly in the grip of your muse that you forget everything else. And Lizzie, to lie in the cold water, maybe for hours, to sacrifice herself that way . . . You don’t find it wonderful?”

Slowly, like a snake uncoiling, I rose and turned to face him.

“I don’t want to do this anymore,” I said.

His eyes snapped open wide. “No? Well, by all means let’s go back down and finish dinner.”

I shook my head. “I don’t love you, Mr. Insley,” I said, flatly. “It’s what I came to say.”

The muscles in his cheeks slackened with shock.

“But you’re mine. I’m yours.”

“No,” I said. “I’m sixteen. I wasn’t made for you.” It was an odd thing to say, but it seemed to me to be perfectly accurate.

His jaw tightened; the skin on his face also tightened, which made him look older, bonier, spinsterish. A few minutes ago, I might have felt pained for him, trying to be so manly and looking like this, but I had moved to a cool, firm place beyond compassion.

“Willow, what have I done to deserve this?”

“It’s not what you’ve done. It’s who you are.”

He made a disgusted face. “Who I am? Dear God, don’t tell me you’re saying what we have together isn’t
right
? Have they crawled inside your head?”

“No one has crawled inside my head.
I
am saying that we’re not right. I don’t exactly mean morally, although, who can tell? Maybe that’s part of it. But there’s just a basic wrongness about us. We don’t fit.”

“Into the provincial world, you mean? Oh, Willow, I am so disappointed in you.”

These words had always comprised the worst thing anyone could
say to me. On the rare occasions my father had done so, they had cut me to my marrowbones. Now, from Mr. Insley, the words were a tiny pinch, an annoyance like a mosquito bite or a burr in my sock.

“We don’t fit—together or into the world,” I said.

“No? Let me show you something,” he said, reaching his hand toward me.

I didn’t take it, but when he dropped it and walked to the window at the far end of the room, I followed. He switched off the overhead light and pointed down at the backyard.

“Go on,” he said, “look.” He stepped back so that I could.

It was dark but cloudless, a crystalline evening, and there was enough moonlight and streetlight for me to see it: dead grass—grass killed—in the shape of a number. 16.

“Oh!” I said, with a gasp.

“You’re right that we don’t fit into the world,” Mr. Insley murmured from inches, centimeters behind me, his face nearly nestled in my hair. “
That
is the world, a sad, black-souled, benighted, jealous person dragging weed killer into my yard in order to threaten what he doesn’t understand. That will always be the world.”

He lifted my hair and dropped a dry, feathery kiss onto the place where my neck met my shoulder.

“I’ll do my damnedest to protect you from that world, I swear it. And together, we’ll turn away from it and make our own.”

As soon as he said that, a possibility came charging out of the darkness to hit me, head-on. I stiffened.

“Did you say protect me?” I asked.

He kissed me again, this time higher up on my neck.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Cling to me, darling, delicate, moonlit girl. I’ll gather you in. I’ll keep you safe.”

My mind wanted to race, but I forced it to slow down, to be methodical; it was important.
The whiteboard message; the one in my notebook to which he had supposedly gotten a twin I never saw; the message in his sandwich
.

Cling to me
.

Every time, after every anonymous message, I had done exactly that. Even that last time, when I was staunchly resolved to run away from him forever, I ran toward instead. And here I was. I’d been duped, played.

The word came out of me like a breath, “You.”

“Yes,” he said, hoarsely. “I.”

I shut my eyes, briefly, then turned around and forced a smile. “You know, I think it’s time—”

For me to go home, to get away, to get as far away from you as I can
. But suddenly, I was scared, scared that he might not let me leave, that if I ran, he might chase me. I could not bear to be chased, grabbed.

“I think it’s time we went down and finished dinner,” I said, through my smile. And then, because I saw his face fall, possibly because he was thinking of the bed in the room just down the hall (God, I hoped not!), I gritted my soul, if not my teeth, and added, “By the fire. It’s so cozy down there.”

Thank goodness, his expression turned fond, and he winked and said, “As you wish, my lady.”

As we walked out into the hallway, my heart was racing so hard that I couldn’t think. I needed to calm down, devise a plan, so I said, “But first, may I?,” and gestured toward the hallway bathroom.

“But of course,” he said, gallantly, with a small bow. “I’ll be downstairs.”

Once inside the cramped room, I sat on the edge of the tub, my head in my hands. I could hear things, Mr. Insley walking around, singing something, banging dishes, and because I had turned into a raw nerve, the slightest noises making me flinch, I reached over and switched on the overhead fan. It was one of the old sort that sounds like a helicopter about to take off, except louder, noisome white noise if I’d ever heard it, but once I’d gotten over being startled out of my skin, I found that the fan did the trick. I could hear nothing outside of that bathroom.

For the first minute or so, all I did was curse myself for leaving my
parka, with the cell phone in it, on the back of my chair downstairs, since I could, right that instant, have been calling the cab company, the number of which I’d plugged into my phone, and hiring my getaway car. I tried to remember if there’d been a phone in Mr. Insley’s office, but I didn’t think so, and the only number I had off the top of my head was my home number, which even in these dire straits, I was loath to use.
Quit your useless whining
, I told myself, sternly,
and your childish panicking, and for God’s sake, think!

I thought and, after a long time, here is what I came up with, my not-so-grand plan: I would feign illness, stomach cramps, possible food poisoning, or—better still—appendicitis.
Left side,
I reminded myself,
left, left, left
. I considered insisting to Mr. Insley that I needed an ambulance—now, there was a getaway car for you!—but decided against it. What would I possibly say to Muddy when she had to come to the hospital to pick me up? So—not bad enough for 911 but bad enough so that he would have to take me home right away.
Put on a show,
I told myself.
After all, Willow, acting is something you can actually do. Remember the film you made with Luka!

Luka. Luka.
Luka
.

Oh, gosh. Just holding his name, those two shining syllables, in my mind was enough to carve a hole in the ghastly moment. I could look out of the hole and see a place beyond, sunlit and green.
You will get through this,
the name told me. I closed my eyes and saw him. Luka, swimming. Luka, nudging me with his shoulder, as we walked down the hallway. Luka, telling me how I made people want to be better. Luka, eating lunch with me under our tree. If you’re lucky, your moment of truth happens on a mountaintop or on the windswept moors or even in a well-appointed drawing room with someone playing the pianoforte in the background, but mine plodded up a dingy staircase and down a dim hallway to find me in this cramped, roaring, godforsaken bathroom, and thank heaven it did. I sat there, hunkered down on the edge of the bathtub, flabbergasted at how blind I had been. Distracted by Mr. Insley, I had missed the whole point of these past three months.
It was like reading a book and only noticing the punctuation. It was like trekking all the way to the North Pole only to fail to see the aurora borealis rippling the sky because you are too busy staring at a patch of dingy snow.

“Luka,” I whispered, “I have been a fool. But I promise I will do better just as soon as I get myself out of this godforsaken house.”

I practiced pained faces in the mirror. I gasped and pressed my palm to the lower left side of my abdomen. I doubled over. I knew that I was staying a ridiculously long time in the bathroom and wondered that Mr. Insley hadn’t come up to knock on the door. But I told myself that the long stay would only bolster my claim of illness. I straightened, gave myself a thumbs-up in the mirror, then opened the door, and was instantly thrown back by the thick smell of smoke. Had something gone wrong with the fireplace?

And then:
whoosh
,
whoosh,
and a reverberating banging, as though someone were backstage at a play, making thunder sounds with a piece of sheet metal. What fresh hell was this? I glimpsed an orange glow coming from Mr. Insley’s office and stumbled down the hall and through the room to the window that looked out on the backyard. Good God, the yard
was
fresh hell! I watched, frozen with a kind of eerie, detached fascination. Flames carpeted the grass around the boat shed, and the shed itself was a tunnel of fire, smoke pouring out of it. It swayed like a ship on a stormy sea, and then there was a terrific
boom,
and, before my eyes, the structure, makeshift and flimsy to begin with, pitched sideways and collapsed. Sparks fountained crazily, metal and burning pieces of debris flew across the grass toward the house.
The house!
The house I was standing in. In an instant, my fascination turned to horror, and I tore out of the room and down the stairs.

“Mr. Insley!” I half shouted, half sobbed. “Get out, get out of the house!” But he was nowhere to be seen.

I dashed into the living room, where the fireplace fire was smoldering lazily. Outside the back window, I could see the seething yard.

“Mr. Insley!” I screamed again. I snatched my parka from the back
of the chair and was about to run out the front door, when the thought struck me that maybe he was in the backyard. I hadn’t seen him from the window, but maybe he was trying to put out the fire and needed help. Maybe he was hurt out there. I ran through the kitchen, and with my heart pounding, stepped outside. Heat, stinging smoke, a rushing sound, and a profusion of orange light met me. I peered into the yard and didn’t see Mr. Insley anywhere, but I called his name once, before I noticed that the deck on which I was standing had caught fire at one end. With tears running down my face, I ran back through the house and pitched myself wildly out the open front door.

The front yard was amazingly quiet and cold. A siren started up, its faraway whine spiraling in the crisp air, and I saw a few of Mr. Insley’s neighbors start to come out of their houses. I stood for a moment on the edge of his yard, unsure of where to run, when I spotted him on the other side of the road, standing under a streetlamp.
He just ran, he didn’t even come pound on the bathroom door or try to get me out,
I thought, fleetingly, and just as I thought it, he saw me. Our eyes met, and I waited for him to run over to me, but instead, he started mouthing
Go, go,
and making low, discreet shooing motions with his hands.
He doesn’t want anyone to know I was here,
I thought, and because I wanted it probably even less than he did, I started running away as fast as I could run, which, as I believe I’ve mentioned, was fast.

I got well clear of his neighborhood and had gone maybe a half mile more when the fire trucks came rumbling and wailing toward me, and without thinking, I jumped off the shoulder of the road into the shallow ditch next to it and lay there, my eyes squeezed shut, my hands clamped over my ears, until they’d passed. Then, I was crying, hard gusting sobs each of which stuck in my chest before it hit the air. I couldn’t have stopped if I tried, but I didn’t try, just waited for the sobbing to be done with me. It took a long time, and afterward, I ached from head to toe.

I sat up, took out my phone, and called Taisy.

“Hello? Willow?”

I didn’t even say hi, just, “Can you come get me? Please?”

“Of course, I can! But are you okay?”

“I don’t know. Yes.”

“Okay, sweetheart, just tell me where you are.”

I looked frantically around me: trees and road, no signs. When I tried to recall even Mr. Insley’s street name, my mind went blank, and I had thrown away the paper with his address on it as soon as I’d gotten to his house because I couldn’t stand to have it on my person a second longer. I shut my eyes, trying to remember what it had said.

“Oh, God!” I cried. “I don’t know!”

“That’s all right. Listen to me. Are you listening?”

I nodded before I realized she couldn’t see me. “Yes.”

“Are you in a safe place?”

For the first time, I realized I wasn’t. A ditch next to a dark street, cars whizzing by every couple of minutes. But I turned and looked into the slice of woods farther back from the road. The looming trees could have been scary, but maybe because I’d recently been terrified out of my wits, they weren’t. They looked ordinary and calm. I stood up and walked into them and leaned against the biggest trunk.