Love Walked In (26 page)

They started walking, but then Cornelia stopped. As she paused, everything seemed to pause, lightly, like an evening on tiptoe, the trees still and listening.

“You’re such a brave girl, Clare, do you know that? I love that about you.” She dropped her eyes for a second, looking down at Clare’s hand; she took the hand and squeezed it. When she looked back at Clare’s face, her expression was happy and sad, both, an in-between, twilight expression for an in-between half-lit hour. “I love
you
,” she said. “You should know that.”

At that moment, Clare didn’t feel at all like a girl rattling around inside a shaken-up life; under the slate-blue sky and its scattered early stars, what she felt was lucky and so glad to be herself. The words were right there, where they’d been waiting. “I love you, too,” she said.

Sometimes
a house can sit there for years, in desperate need of having its roof blown off, and then out of nowhere, there’s a little
whoosh,
and the dang thing is gone, blown off and spinning away, first a black speck, then the blue sky closing over it as though it were never there. And the people inside, what do they do when it’s gone? Probably, it varies from house to house, but when the house was the Browns’ and the
whoosh
was a Christmas card no bigger than my hand, they did this:

“Jesus Christ,” wailed my father, pacing the kitchen, nearly in tears, and this from a man for whom “Jesus Christ” is the limit; one man’s “Jesus Christ” is another man’s “Jesus Mother
fuck
ittohell Christ,” and my father is that first man. “Jesus Christ! This’ll kill Rudy. I’ll tell you that. It’ll kill him.”

“It’s totally her fault,” fumed Toby, holding a soccer ball and punching it. “She thinks she can just
change
her mind. Like, ‘OK, I changed my mind.
See
ya.’”

Cam shoved a cookie the size of a dessert plate into his mouth and sputtered, crumb-ily, “She’s a woman! What’d you expect! Women are so fucking—whimsical.” And this impressed me, I have to say, impressed me twice, once because of the both-parents-present expletive and again because of the word “whimsical,” which I’d have sworn the boy didn’t know. That’s how far he’s been pushed, I thought, driven to S.A.T. prep course vocabulary from some ten years back. Hats off to you, Mr. Kaplan.

Clare sat at the table, also snacking, but looking less like a nice girl chewing a cookie and more like the proverbial cat who’s sinking her eye-teeth into the proverbial canary. All smug satisfaction. I think I even saw her lick her chops, afterward.

I’d been working in Mrs. Goldberg’s attic for hours and, all unsuspectingly, had walked in on a world gone mad. I turned to the one person in the room who appeared, more or less, to be functioning normally. The cords in her neck were stretched a bit tightly, but other than that, she looked as calm and collected as ever.

“Mom, what in God’s name is going on?” I asked, and she had the presence of mind to give me a reproving stare, as though “God’s name” didn’t pale to near-invisibility next to “fucking” and “Jesus Christ.” Still, I took it as a good sign.

She handed me a card in an envelope.

“There’s a way to do a thing, if it needs to be done,” she said tersely. “And this was not the way.”

I looked the envelope over, then took out the card, a Christmas card, belated by nearly three weeks. A card from my sister, Ollie. The lateness was no surprise. The surprise was that she’d sent a card at all. And, in all fairness, this particular little card had an excuse for being late. It came from the Galapagos Islands.

“The
Westermarck effect,” said Teo drearily.

As soon as I’d been able to breathe normally, I’d called him.

The Westermarck effect was how Ollie had explained her leaving, explained in person to Teo, which was decent of her because leaving a note was much more her style, as evidenced by the Christmas card. She’d given him only twenty-four hours’ notice, though, before hopping on a plane, which seemed somewhat less decent to me. But who am I to judge?

I thought for a moment.

“Oh, right, that thing where a butterfly flaps its wings in one country and sets off a tornado halfway around the world,” I said.

“That would be the butterfly effect,” Teo said, and the smile I heard in his voice came as a vast relief, although it was somewhat disappointing to shelve my image of a heedless lepidopteran in Beijing—a blue swallowtail is what I’d been picturing, for no particular reason—giving a flutter and creating in Brooklyn a mighty breeze that blew Ollie clean out the door of her apartment and into the well-muscled arms of Edmund Battle. I thought about the uproar and discombobulation I’d just left downstairs. Chaos theory, indeed.

“The Westermarck effect is some built-in mechanism we all have to keep us from marrying our own siblings.”

“Oh. But you and Ollie aren’t siblings…Are you?” Suddenly, anything seemed possible.

“No, Cornelia, we’re not.” Teo’s voice was dry as dust. “But according to the theory, because most males and females who grow up together are siblings, all males and females who spend their childhoods together are programmed not to be sexually attracted to each other. It’s instinct.”

No, it most certainly is not, I was on the verge of yelling. Dr. Westermarck and the scientific method be damned! I imagined marching into a lab somewhere, Teo in tow, and offering myself up as living disproof of this cockamamie theory. “Look!” I’d shout, victoriously, “I can’t keep my hands off him!” And just thinking about my hands on him turned my face hot and my breath shallow because, I’m not sure if I mentioned it before, but in addition to being in love with Teo, I was also practically radioactive with desire for him, in danger of spontaneously combusting, of sending up my own miniature mushroom cloud at the mere sound of his voice.

“Do you believe that?” I asked, seriously. There was a long pause on the other end. I almost jumped headfirst into the pause with an inchoate tumble of verbiage maligning Westermarck, the know-nothing bastard, the dastardly fraud, and his bullshit effect, but I restrained myself.

“What I believe is that I was a goddamn idiot to marry a woman I wasn’t in love with.” Teo’s voice was so flat, so deflated, that I couldn’t even feel a flicker of joy at the news he’d just given me. Besides, if he had any sense, and he had plenty, barking up the Brown family tree again was about the last thing Teo Sandoval would ever do. Westermarck effect or not, why would anyone chance it?

As we sat there in our own separate unhappinesses not saying anything, I began to consider what I hadn’t so far considered: that if Ollie had left weeks and weeks ago, then Teo, the very soul of honesty, had, for weeks and weeks, been living a lie, living some of it right alongside me, alongside me and Clare both. Cooking in my apartment and out sitting in the Adirondack chairs in Clare’s yard and driving in his car, the lie had been with us the whole time, like an extra person, a stranger we couldn’t see. The thought made me cringe, but I decided to save the “Why didn’t you tell me?” This conversation would be about Teo’s hurt, not mine.

“Cornelia, I meant to tell you,” said Teo finally. “I
came
there to tell you, that day in the café.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry about explaining.”

“But when I got to you, so much was happening. Clare and Martin. And then the accident. How could I bother you with my trivial, asinine…shit?” If Teo, who, under normal circumstances, was the last person to undermine the importance of anything remotely important, was calling the dissolution of his marriage “shit,” he was in pretty bad shape.

“Oh, Teo.” I sighed.

“But that’s just an excuse, I think. You would have made room for my stupid mess. I know that about you. You would’ve listened.”

“I would’ve. I’d listen now, too.” Now and for the rest of my life, to whatever you have to say. Just try me.

“I know. Forget what I said about not wanting to bother you. That sounds—I don’t know—noble. And I wasn’t noble.” He almost spat the word “noble.” Teo sounded so disgusted with himself, I could hardly bear to hear it. “I was glad to plunge myself into other people’s heartache, to tell you the truth. Remember when you said it was easy for me to come in and be a hero to Clare?”

“Teo,” I said, alarmed. “You know I didn’t mean that.”

“You didn’t, but you were right. It was easy to come in and feel like I could help, like I could fix something. I was so sick of myself and of Ollie. All of it. Nothing there I could fix”—he made a bitter sound—“and nothing worth fixing.”

“What happens now?” It would have been kinder, I know, to allow him to direct the course of the conversation, but I couldn’t help myself.

“Divorce,” said Teo bleakly. “Which is no picnic in New York. No such thing as nobody’s fault in New York. Either I have to say terrible things about Ollie or she has to say terrible things about me, and then it could be over fast. That’s what Ollie wants. Or…” Teo seemed to just give out, too tired to go on, but I would not be deterred.

“Or?”

“Or we separate, live apart a year and, at the end of the year, our separation quietly becomes a divorce.”

“You want to do that, don’t you?” Of course he did. Goddamn, goddamn integrity. Jeez, Teo.

“I hate the idea of our blaming each other. On record. It was a mistake we made together.”

“How did it happen? Can I ask that? How did you and Ollie end up together?” Because if you’re going to act like a hard-nosed investigative reporter, the kind people call intrepid when what they really mean is detestable, you may as well go all the way.

“Right after Edmund left, Ollie and I ran into each other in Midtown. We’ve known each other forever, you know? We like each other. We never pretended to be in love. Ollie was through with true love; she thought she was, anyway.”

“And what about you? Were you through with true love?” God, I was relentless. But I needed to know.

“No, not exactly. But I felt pretty sure that the right woman—the real thing, I guess—wasn’t going to…happen. And I was disgusted with the person ‘casual relationships’ were turning me into.” His quotation marks around that phrase just sizzled with bitterness; I could hear them. I’d felt it too, that dating, having some fun, playing the field were euphemisms for as Machiavellian a game as was ever invented. In such a game, no one’s soul was safe. Then he added, vehemently, “And I was
sick
of sick people.”

He paused, like a child who’d just said something awful and was waiting for someone to start yelling. I didn’t yell. When he spoke next, his voice was calmer.

“Ollie said that people marry for love all the time, and it goes up in smoke. We thought, why not take a chance; maybe the love would come later. Ollie cited all these cases of countries with arranged marriages that worked out fine.”

I had to smile at the word “cited.” Ollie was always and forever Ollie.

“You went into it with the spirit of adventure,” I said encouragingly. And I could imagine how it happened, how they got caught up in that sense of adventure. Let’s go for it! Birds do it, bees do it, even educated fleas do it. I could see wanting to be part of life in all its coupling and ongoingness; lately, in fact, I’d become something of an expert on that kind of wanting.

“I’ll sure as hell never do that again,” he bit out. “We said that, that it was an adventure. But really, we were just reckless. Thorough, though. We managed to hurt every single person who cares about us. I don’t think we left anyone out.” He paused, then he said with icy resolution in his voice, “My days of taking chances are over.”

My tattered heart sank into my shoes then, for if ever, oh, ever a risk there was, Cornelia Brown was one because. Because, because, because, because, because.

Ollie’s sister. Teo’s childhood pal. If he was through taking chances, there was no chance for me.

As
soon as we hung up, I remembered something. Seconds later, I called him again.

“Cornelia,” he said as soon as he picked up, even though I knew there was no little screen on his phone telling him who was calling. We both hated those screens. He thought they violated people’s privacy. What if a person started to call, then had a change of heart? I just disdained the screens as yet another means of sucking the mystery from life.

“Teo,” I began and was instantly incredibly self-conscious. “I just…well, I wondered…I—” I groaned, inwardly, and started over. “You said you came to Philadelphia to tell me about you and Ollie. Why? Why me and no one else?” You can probably see why I had to ask this, why I had no choice but to ask it. What would you have done?

“Because you’re my…” Oh, God, what? My heart lodged itself in the very back of my throat and squatted there, pounding. “My pair of clear eyes.”

Oh.

I considered. “Pair of clear eyes” is not the same as “heart’s desire,” but it is something. “You’re like an MRI, you know? I was sort of—bogged down in it all. I wanted you to help me understand it, to tell me how bad or not bad the damage was.”

“Oh,” I said. “OK.”

He laughed. “I’ll be honest, I wanted you to take one look and tell me it wasn’t that bad.”

I took a breath. Lost cause or not, I’d make my pitch.

“You want to know what I see, now?”

“We’re on the phone, Cornelia.”

“I know. I’m that good. I can see you when you’re not here.” Around every corner and every time I close my eyes, Teo.

“And what do you see now?”

“Bruising. Pretty deep, but I’ve seen worse. And you want to know what else?”

“What else?”

“I see a man who has a little chance-taking left in him. A man who should keep the faith.”

There was a pause.

“Good night, Cornelia,” said Teo in his voice.

Just that. Nothing more.

“Good night.”

Good night, sweet Teo, good night, good night. Good-bye.

It
never rains, but it pours. A solid, serviceable idiom if ever there was one, and it was about to pour like gangbusters directly into the Browns’ newly roofless house, leaving all of us drenched.

That evening, my mother took Clare over to the Sandovals’ house. A diplomatic mission, likely, although I didn’t think it would be necessary. Civilized people don’t blame parents for their daughter’s behavior, no matter how feckless or adulterous, and the Sandovals were nothing if not civilized. And Teo had no doubt called them posthaste to deliver the news that, New York law notwithstanding, his and Ollie’s split was a clear case of no-fault, which, when you think about it, actually means both of their faults, thus getting Ollie at least partway off the hook. Plus, and more important than all the rest, Ingrid and Rudy loved Ellie and B, and Ellie and B loved them right back.

My mother came home after about an hour, but Clare stayed for dinner.