The Precious One (9 page)

I couldn’t have blamed him if he’d turned tail and run. I hoped he would, in fact. But he sat down next to me on the step, put a firm hand on my quaking shoulder, gave it a comradely squeeze, and whispered, “Courage, Willow, courage!,” which was so kind that I cried even harder. Once the waterworks began to slow, Mr. Insley said, “Skipped lunch, did you?”

I choked out, “The cafeteria—I-I can’t face it.”

I was right on the edge of telling all: how Bec hated me with a fiery hate and made other people hate me, how one time, when I sat down, an entire lunch table had gotten up in blank-faced unison and walked
away, how those who didn’t hate me felt sorry for me and how their pity stuck in my throat like a bone. But, as socially hopeless as I was, I knew enough about teenagers to know that there was nothing on God’s green earth more despicable than a tattletale.

“No, of course you can’t,” Mr. Insley said, matter-of-factly. “What could be duller than a high school cafeteria? I find the teacher’s lounge equally numbing. Which is why I eat my lunch alone at my desk. The company’s better by far, if I do say so myself.”

I smiled at this, wiped my face, and finally got up my nerve to look him in the eye. Mr. Insley’s face was so close to mine that I could see a place on his chin he’d missed while shaving and the tiny dark blue flecks in his light blue eyes. A little shiver of alarm ran through me. At least, I thought it was alarm right then. Later, I would realize that it couldn’t have been. Probably, it was just surprise; in my sheltered life, I had seen so few faces that close up. I just wasn’t used to it. Anyway, two seconds later, Mr. Insley was taking his hand from my shoulder and standing up, and everything was normal.

“Listen,” he said. “Not that this stairwell isn’t a lovely dining spot, but should you ever decide to make a change, I’d be honored to have you eat with me in my classroom. I believe we share the same lunch period.”

It was such a nice thing to offer that I almost felt like crying again, but I cleared my throat and said, jokingly, “Careful! I might just take you up on that.”

His smile was so convivial that if it didn’t exactly beautify that stairwell, it at least sloughed away a couple layers of hideousness, and it fell upon my upturned face like a ray of sun.

“I sincerely hope you do, Willow,” he said.

And so it began. The happiness and the looking forward to the happiness and the remembering the happiness. My daily half hour of silver lining; oh, I’d fill my pockets with it, then pull it out later, at home, wind it around myself like Christmas tree lights, and just bask in the glow. We talked. For a total of two and a half hours each week, we
floated high above everything petty and tiresome and mean on a magic carpet of conversation.

Mr. Insley told me about his Ph.D., how he didn’t have it yet because he refused to rush through his dissertation on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the work was just too important. He told me about the childhood summers he’d spent at his grandparents’ lake house in New Jersey, how the bullfrogs’ croaking was the most peaceful music on earth. He told me how to bake sourdough bread, which was a lot more interesting than you might think. He told me that he regretted never having learned to play piano, but that he felt himself to be a musician nonetheless because of how he experienced, in his very bones, the music other people played. Once, he read aloud to me a long poem called “The Blessed Damozel” about a beautiful dead woman leaning out over the edge of heaven and longing for her lover, who was still alive, to come to her. I didn’t understand some of it and I thought the ending of it was too sad, but Mr. Insley’s voice was thrilling—husky and low and charged with emotion. I was so moved I couldn’t eat even a bite of my curried chicken salad.

I kept it all, stored it up, not just the words we said but the long lines of Mr. Insley’s face; his animated eyes; his fingers pushing back his hair; the way he’d twist his wrist to make his watch slide side to side when he got excited about something. These memories fortified me in my hours of need. They took some of the scorch out of Bec’s glares, made trips to the school restrooms less harrowing, helped me worry less about my father’s heart. And when Eustacia came to try to upset the already shaky applecart of my life, well, they helped me then, too.

Then, the day after Eustacia arrived, something happened. Mr. Insley and I had just sat down at his desk to have lunch, he on one side, I on the other, like always, when a boy opened the door of Mr. Insley’s classroom, took three steps into the room, and stopped. I recognized him from English class. Luka Bailey-Song, Bec’s friend.

“Ah, Mr. Bailey-Song,” said Mr. Insley. “Your revised paper, I presume.”

Mr. Insley stood up and held out his hand to take the paper, but Luka didn’t walk over to give it to him. He merely stood there, tall and sort of caramel colored, with his hair sticking out in all directions, and looked, not at Mr. Insley, but at me, right at me. And the strangest thing happened, which was that for a few seconds, it was like Mr. Insley wasn’t there at all. Luka regarded me with the oddest expression on his face, an expression I couldn’t name but that I recognized because it was so much like the one Eustacia had given me in my father’s room the day before, a mix of pity and concern, and it was as though he and I were caught, like two burrs, in the fabric of something, although I couldn’t say what, and if none of this makes much sense to you, well, it made even less to me.

But all I know is that I suddenly felt ashamed to be sitting there. My cheeks flushed hot, and I stood up so fast I knocked my lunch bag to the floor. That’s when Mr. Insley seemed to reappear, strode over to Luka, and snatched the paper, almost violently, from his hand. Luka didn’t give so much as a start of surprise at this. All that happened was that his black eyes stopped looking at me and shifted to Mr. Insley instead, and suddenly, they were the ones who were inexplicably linked, snagged like burrs, and I was the one who wasn’t there anymore.

“Giving Willow a little extra help, huh?” said Luka.

One corner of Mr. Insley’s mouth turned up. His eyes narrowed.

“More like enrichment I’d call it,” Mr. Insley said, coolly.

Even though my cheeks still burned, I shivered.

“Would you like to join us?” I don’t know why I said it. The words just tumbled out.

Never taking his eyes off Mr. Insley, Luka shrugged and said, “Maybe next time.”

And he left, shutting the door behind him.

It should have been nothing. It
was
nothing. But, for no reason I could name, what it felt like was the end of my lunches with Mr. Insley, which meant it was the end of everything, all my happiness, my glittering silver lining ground to dust. Slowly, like an old woman, I bent over,
picked my lunch bag up from off the floor, and pressed it hopelessly against my chest, as the world lurched sideways on its axis.

Then, beautifully, effortlessly, Mr. Insley set everything right. So much better than right! He came over, gently took the lunch bag from my hands, and started unpacking it, taking out the pieces of my lunch and setting them on his desk. My thermos, my knife and fork, my paper napkin. When he got to my apple, he rubbed it against his shirt and laughed the best laugh, a long, loose string of musical notes.

“Well played!” he said. “It was brilliant, a truly brilliant move, asking him to join us.”

I had no idea why what I’d said was brilliant, and I didn’t understand why my apple in his hand, against his chest should have been the most stirring, the most intimate sight I’d ever seen. What I did know was this: at that moment, Mr. Insley and I became an
us
.

He handed me the apple, shook his head, and said, “Oof! Sometimes, this place just feels so
narrow
, like such a small, confining, predictable world, don’t you think?”

I didn’t really. To me, school felt vast, as dense, wide, wild, and tangled as a jungle. But I said, “Yes.”

“Do you ever just want to get away? Just jump in the car and drive and drive?”

“I don’t know how,” I said. “To drive, I mean.”

“Ah,” said Mr. Insley. “Well, maybe someone should teach you.”

He rapped the desk with his knuckles and grinned, his face full of mischief and adventure. “Maybe even
I
.”

I KNEW IT COULDN
’
T
really happen. My father would never in a hundred million years allow it, but just the thought of Mr. Insley teaching me how to drive an actual car, the simple existence of that idea in the world, made me feel stronger, freer, more reckless, like a wild pony on the plains.

That night, full of this recklessness and wide awake, I crept out of bed and down the stairs, used the key I wore on a thin chain around my neck to open the back door’s deadbolt, and walked out into the chilly autumn air. For a second, I stared up at the stars scattered like spilled salt, and then I stole across the yard like a thief toward the pool house. Its windows were squares of light; Eustacia was awake. I hadn’t spent much time in the yard at night. It was different, more outdoors-like somehow, full of rustling, cold smells, bizarre shapes, and shadows. Exhilarating. Right on the edge of scary. The grass prickled under my bare feet. Something hooted. Against the pool house’s pale stucco exterior, the dying sunflowers looked so much like Giacometti sculptures I’d seen at the Met, so jagged and lonesome, that I almost turned around and ran back to the house.

Buck up, old girl
, I told myself,
you, even you, can walk across your own damn yard without turning chicken
.
And you have to see who she is, who she
really
is when nobody’s around. Forewarned is forearmed!

I inched, my back and palms pressed against the pool-house wall, toward the nearest window, then slowly, slowly, peered inside.

Eustacia sat on the chambray sofa, with her legs stretched out, a plate of salad balanced on her lap, a book in one hand, a fork in the other. I tried to make out what was in the salad, but couldn’t quite. Bits of red and yellow. Maybe peppers. And was that goat cheese? Feta? And what about the book? Oh, why hadn’t I brought binoculars? Her hair lay neatly on her shoulders, sleek mahogany brown, shiny where the light rested on it. For some reason, that hair was my undoing. I gasped, turned away, leaned hard against the wall with my eyes squeezed shut.

How do I explain? For so long, she had been almost no one, and now she was a person, a real, honest-to-goodness, detailed person, in pale blue pajama pants and a gray cardigan sweater, setting her fork carefully onto her plate, so she could turn a page. She was
right here
, with her hair and her hands doing things and her lungs breathing air
and her brain reading words. It was unbearably ordinary and unbearably strange. And it sent a tremor through my entire life.

I turned back and looked again. She was moving, changing position. She put the book facedown, open, on the table, and—even in my awed, befuddled state—I felt a tiny twinge of satisfaction, since putting down a book this way was forbidden in our household (bad for the spine!). She didn’t belong! No, she didn’t! But then I saw the cover:
Little Women
, a battered copy that we kept in the little, motley collection of books in the pool house. I had never read that particular copy and hadn’t thought about how we came to own it, but when I saw Eustacia holding it there in the pool house, I knew, in an instant, that it had been hers, something she’d forgotten when she left all those years ago.

Except now rose the possibility that she’d never really left, that pieces of her had been here all along. Maybe my father even carried some of those pieces around. No, not maybe. Even if he didn’t want to, even if I didn’t want him to, even if he would never admit it, he did.

I once had a life I knew everything about.

Do you ever just want to get away? Just jump in the car and drive and drive?

“Yes.” I said the word out loud, gave it to the dying sunflowers and the huge sky, and then I said it all the way back across the yard: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

J
UST TO BE PETTY
, I showed up six minutes late to my 9:30
A
.
M
. conversation appointment with Wilson. Afterward, I decided to wander around the grounds of his house, which I had to admit were ravishing, and call Marcus.

He answered the phone by saying, “You’re alive,” and then added, “For now, I mean.”

“You’re leaving me three messages an hour. You’re obsessed.”

“No, I’m not.”

“You’re not bombarding me with messages or you’re not obsessed?”

“Both. Neither.”

I sat down on a bench next to a flame-red, breathy pouf of a tree, set my phone on speaker, made sure the coast was clear, said, “In chronological order, beginning at least two hours before I even got here,” and began to read aloud Marcus’s texts, some of which were spaced minutes apart, some hours, and none of which I’d bothered to reply to.

“Are you there yet?”

“How about now?”

“How about now?”

“Is he dead yet?”

“How about now?”

“How about now?”

“Now?”

“Now?”

“Now?”

“Idea: swap out nitroglycerin capsules for Ritalin.”

“The Spawn will definitely have a stockpile of Ritalin.”

[Link to
New York Times
article about Ritalin titled “Risky Rise of the Good-Grade Pill.”]

“No, you’re right. Adderall is much hipper!”

“Only the hippest for the nater poster!”

“Idea: Swap out nitroglycerin capsules for Adderall.”

“Hold up. Does Adderall come in capsule form? Will ask long-suffering Jane to check.”

“Long-suffering Jane says YUP!”

“Okay, okay, forget Adderall. Ecstasy?”

“Okay, okay. Viagra?”

“Viagra? No. Jeez. No. God.”

“Is he dead yet?”

“Does he keep his heart in a jar on the mantel?”

“Bedside table?”

“I bet he had it bronzed.”

“He had it bronzed, right?”

“I bet it’s two sizes too small.”

“Taize, Taize, are you there?”

“Taize, Taize, are you dead?”

“The Spawn killed you, didn’t she? Damn that Spawn!”

“You’re dead, right?”

“Right?”

“Don’t tell me.”

“You are, though. Right?”

I clicked off the speaker and put the phone back against my ear.

“Mako, you’re an idiot,” I said.

“Wait, I wrote that I was an idiot?” said Marcus.

I waited.

“I’m not,” he said. “I’m concerned. You’re in the lion’s den, the belly of the beast.”

“
I’m
concerned. All this texting is going to get you fired.”

“Yeah, it might. If I actually had a boss.”

“Remember, there’s always another glorified two-bit backroom bookie out there waiting to step into your shoes.”

“I can’t hear you,” he said. “I have a cigarette in my ear.”

It was an old joke. Once, when Wilson was in Chapel Hill for a speaking engagement, I’d met him for coffee in the lobby of his hotel. Actually, it was a sneak attack. A friend of mine at the university had forwarded me an e-mail announcing his talk, I’d figured out where he was staying, and I had lain in wait until he showed up. Anyway, at some point, I’d lassoed the conversation and yanked it in the direction of Marcus. I knew Wilson would never ask about him, and while there may have been some tiny part of me that believed Wilson really did, deep down, want to know about his only son, mostly I’m afraid I wanted to throw Marcus’s success in his face. Because Marcus was living the dream. Actually, it wasn’t my dream, and I’m not even completely sure it was Marcus’s, but it was a dreamy dream, replete with a fancy Wall Street office, model-quality girlfriends, and a steel and hardwood apartment shimmering high above the city streets.

Marcus was something called a derivatives trader, which did not, to my mild astonishment, have anything to do with calculus. Whatever the job was, he was apparently awfully good at it, and I really wanted Wilson to know that Marcus, whom he’d always deemed a hopeless failure, was awfully good at something. But when I told Wilson about Marcus’s job, casually tossing in a few details about his material success, Wilson sneered and said, “Ostentatious trappings aside, do not you be fooled, Eustacia. He may not have a cigarette behind his ear or
a ratty mustache, but your brother is nothing but a glorified, two-bit, backroom bookie.”

When I told this to Marcus, he’d laughed and said, “Actually, that description’s pretty accurate, except for the cigarette, which is always right here behind the old ear, lit.”

“It’s not you,” I’d told Marcus, comfortingly, even though he was clearly not the one in need of comforting. “Well, okay, it is you. But it’s not just you that got Wilson so riled up and alliterative. It’s the filthy lucre thing. Wilson thinks making lots of money is unseemly.”

The irony of this, of course, was that Wilson had made quite a lot of money himself, by inventing a process, something to do with bonding dye to DNA molecules. On the only occasion I had ever seen him acknowledge his financial success—in an interview I’d watched online—he’d talked about it the way you’d talk about a freakish and rather unpleasant accident, as though he’d just been moseying along and suddenly fallen—oh no!—into a hole full of money. According to Marcus, though, it was widely regarded as impossible for scholars affiliated with a university to personally make money from their discoveries. Such a thing could only have been accomplished through the most scrupulous record keeping, foresight, Machiavellian plotting, and legal loophole-slipping imaginable. In short, Wilson had gotten rich on purpose.

“You should see the yard I’m sitting in,” I told Marcus. “You should see his house. You should see his
pool house
, for crap’s sake.”

“Actually, I shouldn’t. Neither should you. No one should ever see Wilson or his house or his pool house. So—what does he want?”

I shifted irritably on the bench, yanked a leaf off the little tree, just out of spite. It burned, perfect and reproachful, a cochineal teardrop, on my palm.

“Why would you think he wanted something? Maybe he just wanted to see me after his near-death experience. Maybe he had a change of heart after his, um, change of heart.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, he did have a proposal for me.”

“Don’t do it.”

“You don’t even know what it is.”

“You already said yes,” said Marcus, with extravagant weariness. “Taisy, Taisy, Taisy.”

“Wrong.”

“Shut up.”

“Wrong.”

“Hold on. You said no? You refused Wilson Cleary? Don’t move. I need to call the
New York Times
. Wait, that’s what long-suffering Jane is for. Jane! Call the
New York Times
! Pronto!”

“You’re hilarious. It was a business proposition, if you really want to know. I said I’d think about it.”

“Oh, jeez. He wants you to write the story of his life.”

It was true, or almost. Wilson’s exact words had been: “Not an autobiography in the usual mode, but an adventure tale! About my intellectual journey, my scholarship, my teaching. The life story of a
mind
, if you will.”

I’d ignored this and told him, “You know, it could take a while. I’d be starting from scratch, since I know exactly two facts about your childhood. Not even your childhood. I know nothing about that. I know exactly two facts about your, uh, youth, I guess.”

The two facts were that he had put himself through boarding school and that while he was there, his parents had died in a car crash. I couldn’t even remember how I knew; I’m sure Wilson never told me. Yet I carried these facts around with me always, not just carried them, but cherished them, coddled them and watered them like the two, rare, fragile, living things they were: proof—despite all evidence to the contrary—that Wilson was human.

“Childhood!” Wilson scoffed. “Youth! Who cares about such things? I want you to start with graduate school, of course.”

“Wasn’t your mind extraordinary in childhood, too?” I’d asked.

“No one is truly interesting until he is in graduate school,” pronounced Wilson.

Note: I had never gone to graduate school.

After I told all this to Marcus, he said, “So that’s why he invited you.”

I’d had this same identical thought myself, and still, it hurt to hear Marcus say it, which is probably why I blurted out, “He could’ve asked anyone! Another writer, some biographer with a way bigger name than mine. But he didn’t. He asked
me
.”

It had to mean something that he’d asked me.

Quietly, Marcus said, “So is that the idea? A father/daughter venture? A daughter’s up-close, daughterly take on her father’s extraordinary mind?”

I tossed the red leaf away and pulled my sweater around me.

“He doesn’t want your name on it, does he?” said Marcus.

I sighed. Might as well tell all. It had never made any sense to keep things from Marcus.

“He wants to dictate most of it. He said, ‘You will be the pen!’ And the researcher, too, I guess. He has a long list of former colleagues, students, scientists I need to contact. For quotes. About his
mind
.”

“The
pen
? You need to tell him to go to hell. You know that, right?”

To my credit, I did not bleat, “But, still, he asked meeee!,” even though I wanted to.

I let the impulse pass and changed the subject. “She’s pretty, you know. Intriguing, even. I mean, she’s about ten feet tall, has this cloud of cayenne pepper hair, dresses like an adult, talks like Wilson, God help her, and hates my guts. Seriously, she spits venom at me with her eyes, but there’s something about her that sort of tugs at my heart. The poor girl is probably getting eaten alive in high school, for one thing.”

Marcus didn’t say anything for a long time, even though I knew he was still there, so I sat, closed my eyes, and just
smelled
Wilson’s yard.
It smelled dark brown and rooty, tangy as the inside of a pumpkin, wistful, just exactly the way fall is supposed to smell.

“Taize. You are . . . ,” began Marcus.

“I know what you’re going to say,” I jumped in. “An idiot. A pushover. A doormat. A sap.”

“Nice,” said my brother. “I was going to say nice.”

I DROVE TO OUR
old house. I hadn’t wanted to go there. Or, to put it more accurately, I hadn’t wanted to want to. The day before I’d left home for Wilson’s, I’d sworn up and down to Trillium that wild horses couldn’t drag me anywhere near the place.

“Even if you set aside the fact that last time I was there, I practically got run out on a rail,” I’d told her, “it just plain wasn’t mine anymore. If those walls could’ve talked, well, they wouldn’t have had a thing to say to me.”

“Don’t be crazy,” said Trillium. “Of course, you’ll go! That house is your childhood; the inside of your head looks like that house, am I right? Furniture, rugs, light fixtures, even the damn doormat.”

“No.”

“Okay. I’ll say a word, you tell me what you picture.”

“You’re making a big deal out of this, and it’s not one.”

“Kitchen.”

I didn’t answer.

“You flashed to the kitchen in that house, am I right? The white tile backsplash, the little knobs on the cabinets, the yellow curtains in the window, and how the coffeemaker sat in the corner by the toaster.”

“Pale green tile and no curtains, just the big casement window over the sink, eight panes of glass in each window,” I said, “and a jade plant in a cobalt pot with a matching saucer on the sill. I mean, maybe it wasn’t the same jade plant all those years, but it seemed like it.”

“See?”

“So?”

“So reclaim it, baby.”

“I don’t need it,” I told her. “I’ve made other places home since then.”

“I know you have, but all of us need all the homes we can get. Trust me on this. Go!”

Yes, all right, I went, but up until I was actually almost there, I was really only driving to drive. It was something I did quite a lot back home, just getting in the car and going. It wasn’t mindless driving, exactly. I obeyed the speed limits, more or less, stayed on my side of the yellow line. I even made deliberate choices about where I was going, but they were choices guided by an instinctiveness that possibly verged on paranoid delusion: turning left because of the oak tree that looked like a gnarled human hand, or right because the street was called Candelaria, or keeping to the road I was on because it was bordered for miles by a forsythia hedge so riotously yellow, so unreasonably dense that I wanted to climb right in and live there.

Five miles west of Wilson’s house, the roads shrank and the trees got bigger, fields spread wide and shone like lakes in the sun, and old stone houses cropped up everywhere, each accompanied by a second stone house, a quirky, peaked-roof structure, tiny as a gnome den. That I knew they were springhouses didn’t make them any less wonderful. I could have driven for hours more, but it was just after the second covered bridge, boards thundering under my tires, that I began to feel pulled, as though my car weren’t driving forward but were simply tethered to the long line of road and were being reeled inexorably into the past.

Even so, I didn’t drive straight to our old house. Instead, I took a few turns around our neighborhood. A century ago, the place had been a fairgrounds, and what had been the oval horse racing track was now an oval-shaped loop of street. As the neighborhood grew—because it was the kind of neighborhood that had come into being over time, not the kind that springs up in a single year—the loop became
crisscrossed with other, littler streets, including Linvilla Road, the one we used to live on.

I made the loop three times. The first time, I just let myself relax into the rhythm of the place, its colors and quiet and small movements: squirrels, birds, a man painting shutters, a woman walking beside a kid on a tricycle.

By the second loop, the neighborhood’s familiar prettiness started to emerge: the stalwart lampposts; the trees lining the streets, their fallen leaves a brilliant litter on the black asphalt; the mishmash of stone and brick houses—Tudor cottages, Georgians with their chimneys sticking up like ears, even a sly touch of Gothic here and there—each house slate-roofed, sturdy, and snug among its thinning stands of autumn flowers on its swatch of lawn.