Love Walked In (20 page)

“Who wouldn’t need Teo?” said Clare. “He’s needable.”

Cornelia twinkled her eyes at Clare. “Now, now, Clare, you mustn’t let men drive you to mangling the English language, no matter how sweet they are.”

“Not men, just Teo.” Clare laughed. “OK, what’s a better word?”

“How about necessary?” Cornelia said. “Teo is necessary.”

At that moment, the front door slammed. Teo trotted into the kitchen, panting, and immediately bent over with his hands on his knees. When he caught his breath, he stood up, then sat on the floor with his back against the wall. He wore a red sweatshirt with
STANFORD
in white letters across the front. He was red-cheeked, and his eyes sparkled. Clare stared. He looks exactly like a rose, she thought, which instantly struck her as funny. She chuckled.

“What?” Teo said to the two staring people.

“Were your ears burning?” asked Cornelia. Teo cupped his hands over his ears.

“They’re burning now. My whole head is burning. I think that’s a good sign, because two minutes ago my whole head was numb.”

“Which, I believe, would make you a numbskull,” said Cornelia.

“Wouldn’t be the first time,” said Teo, shrugging. “Where’s Martin?”

“Martin’s showering, I think. Or probably shaving by now. Showering, shaving, two things you might consider, Sandoval. And your hair is crying out for a decent barber. Screaming out. Actually, at this point, an indecent barber would do.” Cornelia’s tone was light as a feather, but Clare noticed that when she talked about her father, she didn’t meet anyone’s eyes.

“Stop trying to make me over,” said Teo, standing up. “It can’t be done.” He lifted what was left of Cornelia’s pie in his fingers and shoved the whole thing in his mouth.

“Barbarian,” said Cornelia primly, touching her napkin to the corners of her lips.

Clare heard her father coming down the stairs, his shoes heavy on the bare wood. It’s the day after Christmas, she thought with disgust. Hasn’t he ever heard of sneakers?

But when her father walked into the kitchen, she felt sorry for being so hard on him, even if it was only to herself. Inside his sweater and wool pants he seemed smaller, and his eyes looked shadowed and dark in his pale face, as though he hadn’t slept at all. She wondered how long he’d driven around thinking about Cornelia, and even though Cornelia would break up with him before long, Clare guessed, she was glad he didn’t know what Cornelia had said last night in the yard. Clare remembered that sad, desperate note in her voice when she’d told Teo, “I just want to get away from him.” Just thinking about her father hearing that made Clare shiver.

“Martin,” said Cornelia, and something about the way she said it made Clare wonder if she’d been thinking the same thing.

“Good morning, all. Ah, I was wondering where those pies had gotten to,” he said. Even his voice was smaller.

Clare stood up. “We turned them into breakfast, Dad. Do you want pumpkin or apple?”

He smiled at her, into her eyes, and then said, “I’ll have what you had, Sparrow.”

Teo stood up. “Somewhere around here, there’s a shower with my name on it.”

“Make it a long one,” called Cornelia, holding her nose as Teo sprinted out of the room.

“Teo does not smell!” said Clare to Cornelia with mock indignation.

“He was too frozen to smell much, at first, but as he began to thaw…” She took hold of her nose again.

“It appears that love isn’t just blind, it dulls the olfactory nerves too,” teased Clare’s father.

Clare felt mildly shocked that her father had even noticed her crush on Teo. Of course, Cornelia may have pointed it out to him. But this morning, in his new smallness, with his sparkle dimmed, his edges drooping, her father seemed softer toward Clare. He seemed to notice her more than he usually did. She blushed a little at the thought that he knew she had a crush, which made her consider the fact that until that moment, she hadn’t cared if Cornelia and Linny and even Teo knew. Not so long ago, being with people who knew such a fact would have embarrassed her mightily. But the atmosphere Teo and Cornelia carried around with them was playful, affectionate, and, what else? Accepting. When Clare entered this atmosphere, she felt free, as though what she thought and said were just fine.

“I don’t think love is blind,” said Cornelia in a hushed tone, and Clare’s father turned toward her abruptly. “True love is probably the most clear-eyed state of being there is.”

Clare’s father looked intently into his coffee cup, as though there were an answer to what Cornelia had said inside it.

“Maybe you’re right. Maybe with true love, you see and you love anyway,” he said finally. Then he shifted tones. “Who coined that phrase, by the way? ‘Love is blind.’”

“Oh, Shakespeare, probably. At least, it’s in Shakespeare, but it may have been something people said, a whatchamacallit. Not idiom. A commonplace?”

“I believe the technical term is ‘something people said,’” said Clare’s father, growing just a fraction brighter. At least, it seemed that way to Clare. A fraction? She tried to remember what you measured light in. A watt?

“Like ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,’” said Cornelia, which Clare didn’t get at all. Right away, though, her father brightened a bit more.

“Exactly. Did Mozart compose it or did he just write variations of an existing folk song?”

“I believe the technical term is ‘something people already sang,’” joked Cornelia, and her smile wasn’t her usual smile, but Clare’s father didn’t appear to notice. Or maybe he was just glad to be talking like they were, batting a feathery subject back and forth. Like badminton, thought Clare, and wished she could say it out loud because it was a good simile. Oh, it popped into her head: a lumen. A lumen, right?

But even as she thought about how to measure light and her father and Cornelia talked about “Twinkle, Twinkle,” Clare could feel the presence of seriousness and worry. It was as though another conversation, the real one, lurked underneath, like a riptide in the ocean. What Clare saw in Cornelia’s face told her Cornelia felt this too. Cornelia at the kitchen table, her head in her arms flashed into Clare’s mind; she’d help Cornelia, if she could.

“Maybe we should leave today,” said Clare, “and go back to Philadelphia.” Out of this house, Cornelia wouldn’t have to see Clare’s father so much. They would live at their own apartments. She would stay with Cornelia, of course.

“Maybe we should.” Cornelia’s voice loosened with relief, which made Clare proud. She’d helped. “If you’re ready. Oh, and after tomorrow morning, you and I will be on our own for a few days. Your father leaves for London tomorrow.”

Clare felt buoyant at the news, but she tried not to let it show.

“I’ll just be gone a few days,” said her father. He paused, then said, “Unless you want me to stay, Clare. If you do, I can postpone the trip.”

Cornelia darted him a startled glance; for a few seconds, she seemed confused, as though she couldn’t decide what to think of this offer.

“That’s OK, Dad. You can take the trip,” said Clare. “I think I’ll just go write a new note for Mom.”

After she wrote the note, she started back toward the kitchen, then stopped. Upstairs, over the sound of water running, Teo hummed a song Clare didn’t know. He was shaving, probably. Then Clare walked back to the kitchen as silently as she could and looked in. Spying again.

Her father had moved to a chair next to Cornelia’s, and he leaned in toward her. “Keep the faith is what I want to say,” said her father in a pained voice. “If you have any faith left in me.”

“I’m trying, Martin,” said Cornelia. Her mouth pulled down at its corners after she said it.

Clare’s father picked up Cornelia’s hand and stared at it; with his other hand, he touched each of her fingers, as though he were counting them. Then, hoarsely, he said, “May I?” Cornelia nodded, and Clare’s father kissed the back of her hand, then turned it over and kissed the center of her palm, holding her palm against his mouth for a long time. Clare pressed her own hands to her heart. Afterward, she slipped out and sat in the living room, sorting out her ideas about what she’d seen.

What she came to was that even if someone wasn’t perfect or even especially good, you couldn’t dismiss the love they felt. Love was always love; it had a rightness all its own, even if the person feeling the love was full of wrongness. Cornelia had said that her father had ignored a child’s cries for help. Even a man who would do this could be in love, with a love that mattered. Sitting upright in her living room, in a hundred-year-old chair, Clare trembled in the face of this truth she’d discovered all on her own, and she felt ancient and part of life.

Teo found her sitting like that. He entered the room quietly and said her name. When she looked up at him, she saw that his hair still shone wet from his shower and that his face was clean-shaven and golden-brown. Gosh, she almost said aloud, talk about lumens.

Before Teo left, he shook Clare’s father’s hand. Then he leaned over and kissed Cornelia on both cheeks. “Isn’t that how they do it at your café?” he said with a grin. Cornelia nodded, but she took hold of Teo’s coat sleeve, and Clare saw a flash of what might have been panic on her face. “I’ll see you soon,” said Teo firmly, and Cornelia let go.

“Want to walk me out, Clare?” asked Teo, and Clare did, of course. Teo offered his arm, and Clare took it and practically danced out the door. In her other hand, she held a brown paper bag, something for Teo to take with him.

As they stood by Teo’s car, Clare took her gift to him out of the bag. It was the story she’d written; she’d done her best to smooth out the cover.

“I made it for my mom for Christmas,” said Clare simply.

“You should save it for her,” said Teo. He slipped a loose strand of hair behind Clare’s ear.

“I can make her another one. This is for you and Cornelia. To share. So you’ll have to bring it back when it’s her turn.” Clare paused. “And I think it should be her turn soon, OK?”

“OK. Thank you.” Teo smiled, then he handed Clare a folded slip of paper, “Here’s my number. You call me whenever you feel like it, all right?”

Clare nodded, holding the paper with both hands.

Teo stared up at Clare’s house for a second, then said, “Clare, you think you could do something for me?”

Clare bounced on her toes a little. She would do anything. “Anything,” she said.

“Call me if you need me. And call me if you think…If Cornelia seems to be in trouble, call me then, too. Would you do that?”

“I promise,” said Clare solemnly. Then, quickly, before she could chicken out, she kissed Teo’s smooth, brown cheek.

In her father’s car, on the way back into the city, Clare wrote in her journal and her father and Cornelia talked. They stuck to broad, impersonal subjects. Their voices rippled smoothly over the surface of movies first, most of which Clare had never seen, and then poetry—the Metaphysicals, whatever they were, and Emily Dickinson, whose name brought to Clare’s mind the image of a fly buzzing on a windowsill, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Auden and other names Clare didn’t know. Only once did Cornelia’s voice turn serious and reflective.

“It’s true. I have a long history of prizing irony. Irony and cleverness. Overprizing, I think,” she said.

“No worries,” said Clare’s father casually. “One can never prize irony and cleverness enough.”

“You can, though. I’m starting to think you can. The older I get, the more I love Whitman.”

Clare remembered a man talking to a blade of grass. Remembered, also, a rest stop on the New Jersey turnpike. “I celebrate myself and sing myself!” her mother always called out when they passed the sign. Oh, Mommy, Clare thought. Come home.

“Whitman can be very clever,” said Clare’s father.

“Of course,” said Cornelia, impatiently. “But cleverness isn’t the point. No one ever loved Whitman for his cleverness. His heart is the point, and his enormous generosity, and his exuberance.” She sounded furious.

“Better reasons to love someone, you think? Better characteristics to be loved for,” said Clare’s father, sounding suddenly weary, weighed-down. What are they talking about, Clare wondered.

“Martin, don’t think…” Cornelia sighed. “I didn’t mean to get carried away. Or snippy. OK? I’m just talking about poetry. Poetry rattles me sometimes. It turns me into a beast. OK?” She lifted her hand to touch his knee, but hesitated. He took the hovering hand and held it.

“OK,” said Clare’s father. “Even when you’re a beast, you’re not really a beastly beast.” He seemed happy again.

It doesn’t take much to make him feel better, thought Clare. Then she wrote it in her journal. After it, she wrote, “He needs to believe that she loves him back.”

There’s
a kind of tenderness that’s only possible in the predawn hours, a blue-gray, lonely tenderness that comes from dim lights and sleepiness and immense quiet. A kind of tenderness and a kind of hope. I’ve always found it hard to feel angry in the half-hour before the sun comes up, and when Martin came to my door to say good-bye the morning after we returned to Philadelphia, I didn’t feel anything close to anger. It’s not that I’d forgotten the way he’d cut Clare loose, abandoned her to her sick mother and her fear. I hadn’t forgotten a single thing. But when I saw him standing in my doorway, his face was so pale, so stripped bare of sophistication and sparkle, like the face of a child, he hardly looked like himself. Or maybe he looked so much like himself that I hardly recognized him. For the first time ever, I saw Martin and didn’t see his handsomeness; I only saw that he was human.

Then Clare came out of the bedroom, and Martin said, “Hey, there, Sparrow,” and his voice sounded just the way he looked, naked and sad, and he held out his hand to her.

When she walked over, he put his hands on her shoulders and kissed the top of her head, then her cheek. I could see the astonishment in her eyes.

“Sparrow, I was wrong not to listen to you when you called to say your mother was behaving strangely.” He paused. I could hear Clare’s breath quicken.

“I’m sorry for not listening. And for not helping.”

Clare’s body tensed, and I could tell how confused she was. This wasn’t how her father talked to her; it just wasn’t. She stood rigid and stock-still in her pajamas, and I was tempted to jump in, to explain or break the moment, but I didn’t. After a long time, Clare managed a nod. Then she said, “I’ll see you when you get back, Dad,” and she turned and walked back into the bedroom.

Martin watched her go, and when he kept watching for a few seconds after she’d disappeared from view, I couldn’t help it: I took his hand. He turned but didn’t come closer to me, and we stood like two people shaking hands, sealing a pact across a stream of running water.

“While I’m gone, will you think about us? About whether you can see your way to giving us another chance?” His voice broke, which was almost enough to break my resolve, too, and send me rushing into his arms. Almost, but not quite.

“Martin” was all I said.

“I don’t deserve you. But I want to become someone who does,” he said.

“And Clare?” I flared. “Do you want to become someone who deserves Clare?”

“Yes. I want that.” He looked at me with a gaze that was half-plea, half-challenge. “Will you help me?”

No seemed to be the wrong answer to this, but so did yes.

“Please think about it,” he said, but he didn’t sound very hopeful.

“Yes. OK, Martin. I’ll think about it.” I sighed and immediately wished I hadn’t because the sigh made my words sound impatient and probably insincere, as well. His hand inside mine was warm and real; I could feel the bones in it. I thought about what I’d said to Teo about pretending to work on my relationship with Martin, and I understood that if I wasn’t going to break it off with him, I couldn’t just pretend, no matter how hopeless it seemed. “No, Martin, I mean it. I’ll think about it.”

Then he nodded, kissed me fiercely on the mouth, and left.

All
that day, Martin’s good-byes hovered over Clare and me. What we needed was hours alone with our thoughts, but because we were together, we spent our time as quietly as we could. Clare read and wrote in her notebook, and I read and dusted and cleaned my kitchen. In the afternoon I did laundry, and Clare helped me fold it, and I could tell she liked doing this for the same reasons I did: the clothes fresh as bread in their baskets, warm in our hands, the neat stacks and full closets afterward. Then, that evening, Clare and I went to Linny’s to eat her specialty dish, spaghetti and meatballs, and to let her funny talk and big, kind spirit fill in our lonely spaces. Linny moves around the world with such firm, certain steps, being with her can make you forget your own confusion, at least for a little while. Then Clare and I walked home together through bustling, noisy streets and went to bed.

At five o’clock the next morning, I woke up. My apartment door stood open. Clare was gone.

Do
I have to describe it to you? The white-hot, pounding panic; the breath rising to a wail; the desperate, out-loud prayers? Everyone knows this moment, and if you don’t know it, you will. We’ve all seen it. The mother on the beach, the father in the department store, the baby-sitter in the park who only turned her back for three seconds, just three seconds, and what we all know is that no matter how briefly the moment lasts, it’s always endless. And even if the child is just chasing a seagull or hiding in a clothes rack or petting a dog a few feet away, for that endless moment, the child is gone forever.

It took me twenty minutes to find her. Twenty minutes of running through the dark city like a madwoman, making deals with God and the devil, cursing myself, and calling out “Clare” over and over. The calling is the worst part: You throw the name into the air and hear how already it’s becoming impersonal, just another sound in the world, and you only half-believe it will ever attach itself to anyone—your anyone—again.

She was wearing the fur coat and sitting at an empty, chained-up café table, feeding something to a pigeon. I sobbed out her name and tore across the street to kneel before her in a cold puddle of streetlamp light, patting her face and her arms, making sure she was real and unbroken.

When I could breathe enough to speak, I said, “What happened? What happened to you?”

“I went for a walk,” Clare said, and the calm contained in her eyes and her voice should have done nothing but reassure me; I know that. Relief should have fallen from the sky like spring rain, and I should have hugged Clare and taken her home.

But that’s not what I did. What you have to remember is that I’d organized my life in such a fashion that I’d never had to take much responsibility for other people, for their well-being or their whereabouts. I’d never had anyone to keep track of, so I’d never had anyone to lose, and if you’ve never had anyone to lose, you don’t know the proper way to behave once you’ve found her. Which is just an excuse, of course, because although I didn’t know, I could have imagined the proper way to behave.

But I didn’t. My imagination failed. The predawn magic failed me too. I’d been so scared, so stretched thin with fear, and I snapped. I got mad. I got furious. I leaped to my feet and paced and yelled, and I only wish I could say that I’ve forgotten what I yelled, but I remember every awful word.

“What were you thinking? What the hell were you thinking? I woke up and you were gone and I’ve been running screaming through the freezing cold streets and, oh God, what if I hadn’t found you? Anything could’ve happened to you out here. Anything! What is the matter with you? What is the
matter
with you?”

“I’m sorry,” Clare began in a small voice. But I cut her off. And then I said the worst thing of all, the worst thing I could have said.

“I knew it. I knew I shouldn’t have gotten myself into this. I must have been out of my mind to think I could do this.”

And as angry as I was, I truly didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I didn’t mean I didn’t want her.

Clare stood up, then. I could see her body shaking inside the coat, but her voice was so steady it was chilling.

“Don’t do it, then,” she said, viciously. “Just leave me alone.”

She took off the fur coat and threw it on the ground in front of me. “Take this if you’re so freezing cold. I don’t want it. I hate all of you anyway.”

And she took off running.

When I caught up with her, we were in Rittenhouse Square. Clare was sitting on a park bench, and I sat down next to her, keeping a couple of feet of space between us. She didn’t look at me.

The colored globes of Christmas lights hung in the trees above us like little worlds, and I could see a few lit windows in the buildings around the square, shadows moving behind curtains. Away from the bench I sat on with Clare, people were making coffee, stepping into hot showers, letting themselves ease into the winter day that lay untouched before them.

Still not looking at me, Clare spoke and what she said scared me more than waking up to find her gone: “I wanted to disappear.”

“Clare,” I said bleakly.

“No, I mean, I wanted to know what it was like to just leave. I wondered…”

“What?” I asked.

“I wondered what would happen to me if I were all alone. Like, if no one knew where I was or who I was, would I still be me? Or would I be someone else?”

“And what happened?” I asked, with a full heart. “Were you still you?”

“Yes.” She sighed. “I started worrying that you’d wake up before I got back,” and suddenly the hard bitterness I’d heard under the streetlamp was back in Clare’s voice. “That’s how I knew I was still me. Because I worried about scaring you, and because I wanted to go back.”

For a second, I thought her anger was for me, but when I saw her face—that battered, betrayed look in her eyes—I understood.

“You think your mother isn’t worrying about you?”

Clare squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head. “She isn’t. She left and forgot me. Like my father always does. If my mom were worried, she’d come back.”

My own words from minutes before echoed in my head:
What is the matter with you?
How could I have yelled at this girl for walking out and leaving me? Who in the world had been more walked-out-on than Clare? I slid over next to her and wrapped the big coat around us both.

“Cornelia?” Clare said finally, “I want to tell you something, but I’m afraid to.”

“Don’t be afraid, honey,” I told her, with my hand on her smooth hair.

“Sometimes, I’m so mad at her for leaving,” whispered Clare. “It makes my stomach hurt. Sometimes, I hate her.”

After she said it, I could feel her body relax, as though she’d been straining to hold on to a heavy weight and had finally put it down. Her breathing slowed, like a person falling asleep, but her eyes were open.

“Did you think that if you told that to anyone, your mother wouldn’t come back?” I asked her, and she stared into the dark and nodded.

“Telling the truth about how you feel is good. Good and honest and brave.”

She nodded again.

I said, “Clare, I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“That’s OK,” she said.

“I was scared I’d lost you,” I told her. “And being with you is the best thing I’ve ever gotten to do.”

She didn’t say anything. Then she smiled. “You’re wearing your pajamas.”

I looked down at myself and nodded. “Yep, I am.”

“So we’d better hurry up and go home.”

That
night, when Martin called, I decided to be good and honest and brave too. I decided to tell him the truth about how I felt.

“Martin,” I said gently, “I’ve thought about it, and I don’t think I can be in love with you.”

“Oh,” he said, and I heard the breath catch in his throat. “I really hoped you could be.”

“I hoped so too,” I said.

“There’s no chance at all?” he asked, and his voice staggered over the words.

I started to cry. “I don’t think there is,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” he said kindly. “Don’t be sorry, Cornelia. I appreciate your trying.” He was such a gentleman.

“Martin, I have to say something else.”

“Something else?”

I took a deep breath. “Clare. She needs me. She’s so full of hurt. She needs me.”

“Oh.”

After a silence, Martin said, “You were afraid to tell me that you don’t love me because you were afraid I wouldn’t let you see Clare anymore.”

I couldn’t speak.

“Oh, Cornelia.” Martin sighed.

“It isn’t just that she needs me, Martin. She needs us both. Earlier today. Well, earlier today, I saw how big a job it is to keep her safe, to keep her fears at bay. One person can’t do that for her alone. I know I can’t, anyway.”

“You want us to take care of Clare together?” he asked, and there was a note of hope in his voice when he said “together” that made me nervous, but I knew as well as anyone how hope hangs on. He’d hang on to hope a little while more, no matter what I said to him.

Maybe I took the easy way out. I don’t know. Maybe I should have told Martin, then and there, not to hope, that we’d never be together the way he wanted. But later, I’d be glad I hadn’t told him this. Later and forever after, when I remembered that conversation, I’d be glad I hadn’t told him anything but “Yes.”