Love Walked In (29 page)

“Our problem, too. I could never know him well enough.” How odd, I thought, to be talking to Martin’s ex-wife about him—odd, but at the same time entirely natural. “And he didn’t love Clare enough. I couldn’t live with that.”

“I couldn’t either. I hated him for it for a long time.” Nothing shocking about that. The marvel was that she didn’t hate him, still.

“You know, it’s funny,” I said. “I tried so hard to fall in love with Martin. And then,
boom
, without trying at all, I fell in love with Clare.” I’d been about to say, “And Teo, too,” but I caught myself in time.

“Clare and who else?” said Viviana, to my amazement. There was challenge in her voice. I stared at her. Medicated or not, this woman was sharp, a fact I suddenly knew she wanted me to know.

“I’m sorry,” she said, not sounding sorry. “I shouldn’t have asked that. But you are in love with someone besides Clare.” It wasn’t remotely a question.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said finally.

She smiled at me. “Love always matters,” she said.

I was in no position to argue.

Teo
found Clare and her mother in the garden. Clare had been showing her mother the bushes she’d pruned, those sad clusters of sticks.

“It seems funny to call them bushes, though,” Clare had said. “There’s just nothing bushy about them.”

Her mother had laughed, and Clare felt the old pride she’d always felt when she could make her mother laugh, but even as that old pride filled her, the experience of feeling it was nothing like what it used to be. Clare decided that it was like going to a house where you’d always lived and finding strange furniture in it and being afraid to sit down.

Clare remembered how her mother had described her illness, not like she was swinging between two poles, but like, all at the same time, she was feeling ways that, together, made no sense. That’s sort of how Clare felt with her mother now, ever since she’d come back. Clare could be so happy and, all the while, under the happiness drifted a wariness and an unease and a desire to get away. Clare couldn’t stand it that she felt like getting away from her mother, but she couldn’t deny it. There were times when she wanted to open the door, start running, and not stop.

So when Teo came around the corner in the coat they’d picked out together, Clare was overcome with gladness at the sight of him. When he hugged her, her eyes filled, and she hung on for a few seconds longer than she ordinarily would have to let the tears disappear into the softness of his coat.

“Teo,” she said, letting go of him, “this is my mom, Viviana. Mom, this is Teo.”

“I’ve heard so much about you,” said Clare’s mother warmly, reaching out to shake his hand.

“Welcome back.” Teo smiled.

Clare watched them together, standing in the winter sun, under the same blue sky: her mother and Teo with his smile curling up at the corners and his green eyes in his brown face. That’s how she used to look, thought Clare. Not exactly, of course, but as though sunlight didn’t just fall on her but also came out of her.

Teo could marry my mother, she thought suddenly. Then Teo would be my father. But before she got any further, another idea appeared, even more suddenly, like a wind whisking fog away from something that had been there all along: Cornelia loves Teo.

Clare didn’t know how she knew this—or maybe there were so many tiny reasons for her knowing that she couldn’t even name them—but as soon as the thought came to her, she saw it was absolute truth. And here was another truth: If Cornelia loved Teo, and she did, then they should be together. They had to be together. She wondered what they were waiting for.

“I thought Clare might want to go for a walk. But we can do it later,” said Teo.

“I think you should do it now,” said Clare’s mother. “I think that’s a good idea. If you want to, Clare.”

Clare bounced up and down on her toes. “Yes, I do. I want to.”

Her mother laughed. “I figured that you did.”

When they were alone, walking down the Browns’ driveway, Teo said, “My mom likes you a lot. She liked the way you ate her pancakes.”

“I know,” said Clare. “She said I reminded her of Cornelia. I thought it was really great that she said that. Does Cornelia know you’re here?”

“No,” said Teo. “Ellie said she was over at Mrs. Goldberg’s house. Cornelia’s house now, I guess. I talked to Ellie and B for a while. I had some explaining to do.” He looked uncomfortable.

“I know about Ollie,” Clare said tentatively, aware that she was stepping out into grown-up territory, onto ground strewn with grown-up mistakes: loveless marriages, other men, runaway wives, divorce like a storm on the way. As she walked, she imagined that the ground under her feet even felt different. Different but steady. She decided to go further. “You’ll probably feel better soon,” she ventured. “I mean, you seem kind of fine.”

“What a mess,” said Teo, kicking a rock off the sidewalk. “I’ll probably feel like an idiot for a hundred years. But you’re right, I am kind of fine.”

He smiled at her and added, “Thanks,” and Clare felt a quick pulse of exhilaration. From the first minute she’d met Teo, she’d needed him, and that was a usual sort of needing: a child going to an adult for comfort. But if she was comforting him now, that meant something different, didn’t it? Clare knew it did. She looked happily down the path of sidewalk before them, long and bright white beside its row of trees. If she could comfort him, they were friends.

Clare pointed to a maple in someone’s yard—the Wangs’ yard, she remembered—although she couldn’t remember if the Wangs still lived there. “That’s where Cornelia got her first kiss.”

Teo looked at her, startled, then grinned. “She told you about that?” Something about the way he said it made Clare give him a sharp glance. Oh, she thought. Cornelia had told her about the kiss, but not who’d given it to her.

“Yep,” Clare said. “She said it was the best kiss she’s ever had.” The lie came out of nowhere, and Clare wondered if she’d feel bad about it later.

“Really,” said Teo, startled again. Then he added, “That’s difficult to believe.”

“No, she really said it,” said Clare quickly.

“OK,” said Teo, narrowing his eyes at her for a second. “But I didn’t mean that. I just meant it’s hard to believe that some kiss you got from another kid when you were fourteen would be the best one of your life.”

“Sometimes, hard-to-believe things are true,” Clare said. “Lots of times.”

Then she said, “Cornelia’s working really hard on Mrs. Goldberg’s attic. She’s on the computer all the time, looking stuff up about the silver and crystal and everything. Did you know Mrs. Goldberg has a silver nutcracker with a squirrel on it that probably used to belong to Robert E. Lee?”

Teo laughed. “No, I don’t think I did know that.”

“She looks up other stuff too. Like, oh—you know—that Westermarck thing?”

“Yeah,” said Teo slowly, not looking at her.

“She found out Ollie was wrong. If you meet a person after the age of three, even if you grow up with them, the effect doesn’t happen. It only happens if you meet them
before
you’re three.”

Teo stopped walking. “You’re kidding.” His brow was furrowed. Then it unfurrowed, and he started walking again. “That’s exactly the kind of information Ollie never gets wrong. I think she probably just told me that so I wouldn’t feel bad.”

Clare didn’t think she liked the sound of that. She didn’t want him to like Ollie
more
because she’d lied.

“I don’t know why Cornelia was so interested to find that out. I mean, she seemed very excited. Very. Isn’t that weird?” This was somewhere in the vicinity of the truth, although Cornelia hadn’t actually said a word to Clare about looking up the Westermarck effect on the computer. Clare had found a printed-out page with a star drawn in ink next to the part about before three years old. Surely a star meant Cornelia was excited.

Teo didn’t say anything, and when Clare looked at him, she saw that there were streaks of pink burning in his cheeks. Clare breathed in and touched her hands to her own face. Then Teo looked Clare right in the eye. “You know what? I never believed in the Westermarck effect anyway. I knew it wasn’t true.”

They walked for a few minutes, not talking.

“Teo,” said Clare, “did you love growing up here? Because I think I would’ve loved growing up here.”

Teo leaned back against the pretty, mottled cream-and-brown trunk of a sycamore tree and looked up into its branches. “It was great, actually.” His voice was thoughtful. “Everyone sort of took care of each other, which doesn’t always happen in a neighborhood. We were lucky.”

“I like thinking about you and Cornelia being kids here. Sometimes, I walk down the street and just imagine it.” She gazed around. “In a place like this, what happened with me and my mom? It wouldn’t have happened.”

Teo said gently, “People get sick everywhere, Clare.”

“But there would’ve been someone for me to tell, if we’d lived here. Someone might have been able to help us before she ended up leaving.”

“Maybe so,” said Teo simply.

Clare took a few steps closer to him. “Teo, my mom showed me these pills she has to take. They make her stay well. That’s why she showed me because she wanted me to understand that she could stay well now. And she said that as soon as we got back home, she’d find a good doctor she could talk to. She showed me the pills to make me feel better.” Clare clasped her hands together. “But they were so small, those pills. It scared me how small they were. Do you know what I mean?”

Teo said, “Yeah, Clare, I think I do.”

Clare’s eyes filled with tears. “I don’t want to be alone with her. I don’t want to go home and have us be alone again, like we were. But if I tell her that, it’ll make her so sad. I know it will.”

Teo put an arm around Clare’s shoulders. “Sometimes, you just have to say exactly what you feel.”

“You do?” said Clare. She pressed her cheek against his coat.

“In certain situations, you can’t worry about how people will react. You just have to be as honest as you can and let what happens afterward happen.”

For
dinner that night, there was beef stew and a thick braid of homemade bread, glossy with brushed-on egg yolk. Clare had brushed on the egg yolk herself; in fact, she had helped make every dish. When Ellie had praised her chopping, she’d glowed.

Teo had ended up spending the whole afternoon at the Browns’ house, first talking to Clare’s mother on the front porch, both of them watching Toby and Cam teach Clare how to play hacky sack, and then, after Cornelia got home, sitting with her at the kitchen table, talking while Clare and Ellie cooked.

Even as she’d chopped onions and peeled potatoes and chatted with Ellie, Clare had watched Cornelia and Teo together as carefully as she could. To her own surprise, she found herself thinking of Ollie on the island Cornelia had told her about—Ollie watching the birds, their hops and wing-flutters and the curves of their beaks. I’m watching love, she thought, her heart beating fast. What does being in love look like? What does it make you do?

Clare wished she had her notebook. Notice everything, she told herself, like a scientist. Blinks and breaths and head turns. The pitch of Cornelia’s voice, the motion of her hands, the pauses in her speech. Love was mixed up in all of it, like gold in a pan of sand. Sift. Sort. Pay attention.

Mostly, Cornelia and Teo seemed like their usual selves. But Clare had noticed Cornelia when she’d first walked up to find Teo sitting on the porch, how instantly not just her mouth, but her entire body seemed to smile. Was this how she always smiled at Teo? Clare tried to remember. Clare thought she’d seen her mother notice it too, and when Cornelia kissed Teo’s cheek and messed up his hair with her hand like he was a little boy, Clare had seen her mother lock eyes with Cornelia for a second with an expression on her face that Clare recognized. “I know what you’re up to,” the expression said.

At the kitchen table, Cornelia and Teo kept space between each other and didn’t touch. Clare looked at the space. She wondered if the air between Teo and Cornelia felt different from usual air, if it felt different to Cornelia, maybe warmer, or if maybe Cornelia were filling up the air with something no one could see.

And then, as she held a peeled potato as smooth as an egg in her hand, Clare saw it: the fleeting, unguarded look on Cornelia’s face when Teo turned to say something to Ellie. Cornelia gazed with intensity at Teo’s profile or maybe the side of his neck. There, Clare thought. Love. And she felt her own cheeks flush at the sight.

Clare
waited until dessert to say what she had to say. When everyone had a mouthful of lemon pound cake, Clare spoke up. “Today, I decided about a few things. Actually, I’ve been thinking about them for a while, but today, I decided to tell all of you”—she took a breath—“what I’ve been thinking.”

Clare’s eyes met Teo’s, and he didn’t nod or say anything, but he crinkled the corner of his eyes at her which, for some reason, made her decide to stand up. She stood there, beside her chair, with all the faces before her and felt like she did when she had to give a report at school. Nervous in an excited, electric kind of way.

“I’m so glad my mom’s back.” Clare turned to her mother, who smiled at her, even though her eyes looked worried. “Mom, I missed you so much, and I knew you’d come back. Or, most of the time, I knew. And I want to be with you every day, just like always.”

Clare felt her voice get choked-up, so she waited for a few seconds. No one seemed to mind. “But, I’m afraid to be alone with you, back at home. When you were sick, I would lie awake, listening, scared of what you might be doing. And even though you’re well right now, I know I would do that again. Just lie there, listening with that bad feeling.”

“And, I’m sorry, Mom, I don’t want to hurt your feelings”—Clare looked at Cornelia, who had tears in her big, tilted eyes—“but I would miss Cornelia too much.” The tears spilled over onto Cornelia’s cheeks, and Clare saw Toby, who sat next to Cornelia, put his arm along the back of her chair.

“And I love this place. It’s the best place I’ve ever been. So, I decided that I want to live here forever. In Mrs. Goldberg’s house. With my mom and Cornelia.” Clare fixed her gaze on the cake at the center of the table, so that she wouldn’t have to even try to read the faces of the people around it. “That’s what would make me happy. So just think about it, please.”

She sat back down and smoothed her napkin back into her lap. No one spoke for at least a full minute. And when someone finally did, it wasn’t Cornelia or Clare’s mother, but Ellie. In her clear voice, she said, “Well, and I was just thinking today while we were cooking that I could make a call or two and get Clare into St. Anne’s just like that.” She snapped her fingers. As Cornelia and Clare’s mother and the whole table stared at her, Ellie broke off a forkful of cake and lifted it.

“Just in case,” she said brightly, “Clare ends up staying.” With a smile and with everyone still staring, she popped the forkful of cake into her mouth.