The Precious One (5 page)

It wasn’t until we got to our room, a high-ceilinged, draperied
lushness of cream, coral, and marigold, that I cut loose on my brother. This part remains mostly a blur, but I do remember this:

Me (howling):
“You had to ruin it the way you ruin everything!”

Marcus (yelling):
“He acted like you weren’t even there!”

Me:
“He wanted us there!”

Marcus:
“No, he didn’t. He hates us!”

Me:
“He doesn’t hate me! He
invited
me!”

And then the very worst moment of all:

Marcus:
“He didn’t want to. It was all Caro. Caro
made
him invite us. She
told
me!”

Me (sobbing, hoarse, broken):
“Liar.”

But I knew he wasn’t lying.

Later, after Marcus threw up in the bathroom for an hour, after all of us had showered and lay clean and bone-tired and awake between the opulent bedclothes in the opulent darkness, my mother and I sharing one bed, Marcus in the other, Marcus said, “I’m sorry, Taize.”

“Me, too,” I said.

“And don’t get mad again, but you have to get rid of it.”

“What?”

Marcus said, “The idea that he’ll ever love us or want us back.”

My mother stayed still, silent, but I could feel her listening, waiting to see what I would say next.

“He’s our father,” I said.

It wasn’t a rebuttal. It wasn’t anything but a statement of fact. Marcus didn’t say he wasn’t our father. No one said anything more. We just let the statement hang there in the air, until it was gone, absorbed into the velvet dark.

T
HE STORY OF HOW
I almost killed my father starts like this: I wanted to run. Is that so terrible? If there is one thing I have in abundance, it’s legs, and I wanted to use them. They are long, and somehow, they know how to move. My entire body knows. I’m a decent tennis player, and I think I could have been a decent ballet dancer, if I hadn’t been made to quit when I was ten, but when I run, my body stops being a grouping of parts and becomes a single thing. A fluidity. A living, breathing verb.

Sports had always been part of my father’s plan. He believed in a life of action, in all that “your body is a temple” business. He would quote Thoreau: “We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.” Plus, he had a poorly hidden and scathing contempt for fat people.

When I was a young child, I had swim and tennis lessons at the country club, even though we never stayed for lunch afterward, and I played soccer on a team, which I adored, even though I was breathtakingly bad, and I took ballet classes twice a week for years. But by the time I was ten and a half, I was removed from the group lessons (my fellow swimmers and tennis players had no manners), from the
soccer team (my teammates had no manners), from ballet class (“a breeding ground for neurotics and exhibitionists”). When we moved to our new house, my father had a tennis court built in the backyard and hired a private coach. He set up a ballet barre and a mirror in the basement. He also built a lap pool. And he started to take me running with him.

I liked the tennis coach, a six-foot-tall Australian woman with an accent thick and salty as Vegemite, but I hated the tournaments, and so after a drawn-out campaign, I was allowed to quit when I was fourteen. After a few lame attempts at giving myself a ballet class (which is a lot harder and more boring than you might think), I quit that, too. I never did laps in the lap pool, since I have always found being underwater scary and isolating (the blood in my ears roaring!), although I never confessed this weakness to my father. But I loved the running.

Don’t get me wrong; I wasn’t some prodigy. Not bound for stardom. I was good, though, and I guess I knew it, but for me, being good was not the point. The point was cutting through the air,
using
the air, the way I used the ground. The point was joy. Who cared about good when there was joy like that?

I’ll tell you who cared, my father. He was thrilled, pleased as Punch that I was good. He bought a fancy stopwatch. He bought a fancy pedometer. He kept charts. I think this was why, in the end, he could not resist allowing me to be on the team—he wanted to see me race.

I found out about the team from a girl in my homeschooling group, Mary Ruth Coe. We weren’t exactly friends. She was so quiet that in the first month I knew her, I privately diagnosed her with a host of disorders, including expressive aphasia and stress-induced apraxia—my father was fascinated by neuroscience and taught me a lot about it—but she turned out to just be cripplingly shy. There was the added difficulty of her being of the variety of homeschooler who does not, as Ms. Shay would so eloquently put it a couple of years later, embrace the sciences. But she was the only girl my age in the very small homeschooling group that I began attending, spottily, reluctantly, and always accompanied
by my father, when I was thirteen, so we became some makeshift version of friends.

While her parents and my father had nothing else in common, they shared the belief in the body as temple, and because there is a law in our state that lets homeschoolers participate on public high school athletic teams, Mary Ruth’s parents insisted that Mary Ruth join the cross-country team at the local high school. It wasn’t the Webley School, which was private, but Thomas L. Mann High, named not after the writer but a local nineteenth-century gunpowder manufacturer, whose middle name turned out to be Lionel. In an unusually long and passionate verbal burst, Mary Ruth told me all about it. She raged. She sobbed. It was heartbreaking, actually, and I had to agree that making this poor, scared, pigeon-toed, gawky girl join a high school cross-country team was bordering on cruel and unusual punishment.

She begged me to ask my father to let me join, too, and even though I didn’t really care about running competitively, I went ahead and asked just so I could tell her that I had, fully expecting him to refuse me. When he said he would consider it, I almost fell over, and when he came back later and said, “All right, then. Let us see how you fare, my thoroughbred,” I spent a full twenty seconds being as speechless as Mary Ruth at her most speechless.

Then lo and behold, I liked it. A lot, in fact. If I only out and out loved it in moments, it was because only in moments did I feel a hundred percent part of the team, a hundred percent
not
like an outsider looking in. But the other kids were much nicer than I had expected; at worst, they were a little indifferent. No one was mean, which is saying something because—let’s face it—Mary Ruth and I weren’t your typical high school students. We shared virtually no cultural common ground with the other kids, although if I say that I shared more of it than Mary Ruth did and would have fared better socially if I’d been on my own, I’m not being mean, just honest.

All right, I’m being mean
and
honest. Mary Ruth Coe was a thousand-pound, sopping wet social albatross around my neck. If
anyone besides me spoke a word to her, she went pop-eyed, beet-red, and mute, at which point I usually jumped in to answer for her, a task I resented, heartily. What made matters worse was that while I’m fairly sure it had never occurred to Mary Ruth to be a racist, she seemed especially nervous around the black kids on the team. Once, when the African-American team captain, a girl named Naomi Patton, asked her what other sports she played, Mary Ruth was so petrified that on top of the usual response, she turned to me, stricken, grabbed my forearm, and hung on like death, until I gazed wearily at Naomi, whose expression was already turning from friendly to cold, and told her that Mary Ruth had been raised on a regimen of mostly calisthenics, mostly in her backyard, from which she had rarely strayed. All of which was true, even though it wasn’t particularly nice of me to say it.

Luckily, Mary Ruth was a tragically bad runner, so once practice began, and her groans from the pre-workout stretching—the one time in the afternoon when she had no trouble vocalizing—had stopped echoing through the treetops, I considered my homeschooler solidarity duty done, took off like a rocket, and never looked back.

There were a dozen or so of us at the front of the group, and while we ran, oh gosh, we became something. Maybe we weren’t exactly friends, although I’m no expert on friendship. But we were easy with each other. We chatted or rather the others chatted about their lives—boys, parents, tests—and I listened but not in an uncomfortable, fish-out-of-water way, and I tossed in a comment from time to time. Sometimes, I even got a laugh. Most days, we sang songs from something called
Mamma Mia
, which turned out to be Coach Anderson’s favorite Broadway musical. I’d never seen it, of course, but when it comes to songs, I’m a quick study, and after a couple of weeks, I was belting out “Take a Chance on Me” with the best of them. As corny as it sounds, running together like that, our differences fell away. Maybe we weren’t friends, but we were teammates, which was close enough for me.

And meets were special, too, the “good lucks” at the start, the oranges and watermelon slices we ate afterward, spitting seeds into the
grass, the way we cheered each other into the finish, shouting each other’s names. At these times, cheering like that, I was not Willow Cleary or anyone in particular, nothing but another yelling voice. It’s odd isn’t it? How good that felt. I acted casual, at least I think I did, but I wanted to pack away every high five into my duffel and carry them around with me forever.

I ran with the team for two seasons, and then, in late August, just a week before our practices were set to start in what would’ve been my junior year if I were someone who went to normal school, my father and I were in a bookstore, and we saw Kelsey Banks, one of my teammates. Actually, I saw her first, in profile, and the second she turned around and saw me, too, in a flash, I also saw the writing on the wall. With Kelsey’s big blue eyes looking into mine, a smile already starting on her face, and my father two steps behind me, I was like Cassandra: I could see the future, every awful bit, and could not do a blessed thing to change it.

My first instinct was to run, to wheel around and go flying like a lunatic out of the store, but before I could, Kelsey was hugging me. Or doing her best to hug me, hindered as she was by her pregnant belly, which looked for all the world like a basketball stuffed under her shirt, the rest of her as girl-skinny as ever.

My father met my eyes, briefly, one hard, laser beam glance, before he relaxed into his usual hale-fellow-well-met demeanor, even going so far as to clap Kelsey on the back and cheerily boom, “‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well!’”

But I knew that all would be anything but. He didn’t say a word about Kelsey on the way home in the car, expounding instead on Julian of Norwich, a fourteenth-century Christian mystic after his own heart, being optimistic, practical, and British. I had heard him expound on Julian before and had always pictured her as a nice Englishwoman talking about her encounters with God while pouring tea and wearing sensible shoes. I tried to find an opening to offhandedly mention that
I hardly knew Kelsey, that we had never especially been friends, and that she was not a person in whose footsteps I would
ever
stoop to follow, and to also remind him that she wouldn’t even be on the team this year for obvious reasons, but the Dame Julian quotations were flying fast and furious, and I never got the chance.

For the next few days, I did my best to avoid my father, even though I knew that it was useless, that my fate had been sealed the moment Kelsey had turned and seen me, her arms full of breastfeeding books. Then, one morning, as I was walking by his office, he appeared in the doorway, snagged me lightly by the elbow, and said, “A word, my dear?”

The word, in a word, was
no
of course. He went on for several minutes about the sad moral state of America’s youth, and ended with, “It is as clear to me as I am sure it is to you, Willow, that the cross-country team is no place for a sensible, self-respecting girl. I suspected as much when you asked to join; I harbored deep reservations, but you were so adamant that I allowed it, which I regret. I take full responsibility for putting you in harm’s way, child, and ask that you forgive me.” His tone was contrite; ditto his smile.

I would like to pause here in order to state for the record that I’d gotten angry with my father before. I had disagreed with him, even vehemently. He wasn’t a dictator, and I wasn’t a mindless puppet. Far from it. But if there was a governing rule in our household, it was: civility always. Temper was for toddlers and the great unwashed. Yelling was for drunks and street punks.

But the second my father told me I could not be on the cross-country team, I understood that I wanted to be on that team more than I had ever wanted anything in my life, and I started to get so mad, madder and madder and madder, until I was boiling with rage. And then,
then
my father patted my cheek and said, “There’s a good girl.”

I screeched. I stormed and spit venom. I called him name after name and accused him of vile things: injustice, cruelty, kidnapping, imprisonment. I shouted that he was ruining my life and that I hated
him. If my mother had overheard, if she hadn’t been in her studio in the back of our garden, she would have thought an insane stranger had broken into our house because I never screamed at my father like that. When he tried to take me gently by the shoulders, I pushed him away. I pushed my father.

And then I ran out of the room and out of the house, and if I could’ve run straight out of the world, I swear I would have. No place was far enough. But because I had run out the back door into our big, fenced-in backyard, my options were limited. I ended up at the pool house, threw open the door, and threw myself onto the sofa where I sobbed until the chambray under my face was soaking. It wasn’t even noon, but I fell asleep. If only I hadn’t. If only I had stopped crying and quickly made my guilty way back to the house, I might have found him before it happened and apologized and made it not happen. But I fell asleep.

I found him in his office, on the floor next to his desk. I thought he was dead. I can’t bear to say any more, but I could live a thousand years and never forget it, not the horrible stillness of his face, not a single detail.

ON MY FATHER
’
S FIRST
day home from the hospital after his surgery, when he told me he thought it best that I enroll at the Webley School, I nodded.

Every day, when I ran up to his room ready to beg to leave school and come home, and he asked me if I had had a good day, I smiled and said yes.

And on the day that I got home and he told me that he had called Eustacia Cleary, my sister who had
never
been my sister, the Other Daughter who was
not
his daughter, the disgrace, the bad one, and had invited her, along with my brother who was
not
my brother, to visit us, and that Marcus had refused the invitation but Eustacia had accepted it, I wanted to shout no, that we didn’t need her, that he must be crazy
to have done such a thing, but all I said was, “Eustacia. Oh. Well. All right, Daddy.”

Tell me, what else could I do? I had almost killed the man, my only father. I knew I wouldn’t get a second reprieve.

What’s funny is that it took that hideous day for me to see it, the thing I could never escape even if I wanted to (and I’m not saying I wanted to), the thing that had always, every day of my life, been true: I, Willow Cleary, was responsible for my father’s heart.