Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me (4 page)

Oh, God,
thought Piper, trying to shake off the memory with a slight shake of her head,
what is wrong with me?

This was her first official night as a Tallyrand parent; on one side of her sat her husband in the blue-verging-on-purple shirt she’d bought him for his birthday; on the other side sat the drooping scarecrow who was once the handsome, capable husband of her sick best friend, the drooping scarecrow who had hired a thirteen-year-old to care for his children, as though their mother weren’t right there, at home, with them. “You can’t be trusted anymore,” he might as well have told Elizabeth. “You’re already gone.” And here Piper sat, almost shaking with longing to touch a man she’d slept with a handful of times ages ago, a man she’d barely known and had never, not for one second, not even in her imagination, loved.

Leave,
she told the back,
you have no business being here.

“Resist the urge to push,” one teacher was saying—not Carter’s teacher, Carter’s was the younger, curly-haired one. Distractedly, Piper noticed that the teacher who spoke was wearing a pair of Taryn Rose sandals. Piper had tried on the same sandal in white at the beginning of the summer and had nixed it as too expensive. The teacher had chosen the red patent. Piper would never have chosen the red patent. The teacher continued, “What’s most important at this stage is getting them to feel at home with books.”

Listen to this, Piper told herself, reading readiness is important. Reading readiness is
crucial
. She tried to think of her son’s face, the cornflower blue eyes she found unspeakably beautiful. Whenever Piper read to him, she’d look down to find him watching her. “Look at the book, sweetheart,” she’d prompt him, gently. “What do you think that pig there is thinking?” Or sometimes, “This letter’s an
A
. I think it looks kind of like a tent. Do you think it looks kind of like a tent?”

Carter was intelligent, Piper knew that. But his intelligence wasn’t the kind that drew attention to itself. He wasn’t a show-off. Piper believed that Carter knew all his letters by sight, but, honestly, there were moments when he’d regard the alphabet refrigerator magnets so blankly, she couldn’t be positive. When the Tallyrand acceptance letter had arrived, she’d gone into the walk-in pantry and sobbed with relief. Whenever Piper thought about this moment, she would touch a hand to her ribs, remembering how the sobbing had made them ache.

“Let them know that books are their friends,” the teacher was saying, and Piper repeated the words under her breath.

Piper didn’t discover the reason for the ophthalmologist’s back’s sudden appearance until the following afternoon. She and Elizabeth were sitting in the big sunroom off Elizabeth’s big dining room, an unusual spot for them. Their usual spot was the kitchen, of course. As with all of Piper’s adult friendships, hers and Elizabeth’s took the form of a long string of conversations in kitchens. On playgrounds and at poolsides, too, but everything real, everything monumental between them had happened in kitchens. And Elizabeth’s kitchen was gorgeous since the remodeling last year. They’d knocked down a wall, gutted the old butler’s pantry, and gone high-end with everything: Sub-Zero, Viking, hardwood cabinets, Italian tile, and magnificent black granite countertops. The custom, built-in wine cooler loomed almost six feet high.

Piper and Kyle had been privately skeptical of the expense. Supposedly, kitchen improvements paid for themselves at resale, but Piper and Kyle had their doubts. Still, Piper couldn’t argue with the kitchen’s beauty, especially the new windows—nearly the whole back wall was windows—the way the abundance of light deepened the honey color of the floors and set the countertops flashing with secret glints of pearl and blue. At certain times of day, the light appeared to billow into and expand the room, like air filling a balloon. If Piper had been in the habit of taking inventory of such things, she’d have realized that Elizabeth’s kitchen was her favorite place on earth.

But when she’d arrived at Elizabeth’s house that afternoon, Elizabeth’s “Come on in, Pipe” had come from the sunroom instead, a room that, despite its name, was rather dim and cool due to the enormous (and, in Piper’s opinion, ridiculously, even horrifyingly, overgrown) rhododendrons that bordered the exterior of the room on two sides.

Elizabeth reclined in a white armchair, her hair—the hair she’d been so grateful to keep—unbrushed and loose on her shoulders, her feet propped on the matching ottoman. The chair and ottoman represented an overstuffed style of furniture that Piper had always disliked, finding it bloated and mushroomy. Elizabeth looked frail in the huge chair, but as soon as Piper noticed this, she reminded herself that a fat, stupid chair like that would make anyone look small. She felt a twitch of annoyance, two twitches, one at Elizabeth for owning such a chair, and another at Elizabeth for sitting in it.

“It’s a gazillion degrees out there, Betts,” Piper said. “If I don’t have iced tea running down my throat in two minutes, I will pass out.”

Elizabeth smiled wanly and gestured in the direction of the kitchen. “Go for it.”

“Okay, well, come on,” said Piper, her annoyance mounting. “Come with me and have some, too. I’ll grab a handful of that mint out of the backyard.”

Piper extended her hand to help Elizabeth out of the chair, and Elizabeth took it, but she didn’t pull herself up. She just held Piper’s hand in hers and looked at Piper with an uncommonly sweet, tired affection in her eyes. Somehow, it was the last kind of look Piper wanted to see. No, she thought. She wanted Elizabeth out of that chair. She wanted Elizabeth to have iced tea in the kitchen. She gave her hand a tug, but Elizabeth shook her head.

“You go ahead,” she said in a quiet, firm voice.
That’s more like it,
thought Piper, releasing her friend’s hand. Elizabeth was famous for her stubborn streak.

When Piper got back with her drink, Elizabeth was sitting up in the chair with her legs Indian style instead of stretched out on the ottoman and with her hair smoothed back into a ponytail. Piper felt like singing at the sight of her. She set the glasses of iced tea down on the coffee table, then pulled the ottoman several feet away from the chair, out of Elizabeth’s reach, and sat down on it, crossing her own legs.

“Crisscross applesauce,” she said, giddily.

“I have a bone to pick with you, lady,” said Elizabeth, narrowing her eyes. “You’ve been holding back about our new neighbor. Time to come clean.”

“What do you mean holding back?”

Piper had told Elizabeth about the cocktail party, about Cornelia’s ludicrously skimpy black dress and condescending jokes, the way she’d thrown her supposed sophistication in everyone’s faces. “And she had Carter’s exact haircut, I swear to God. And four-inch-high ‘do-me’ shoes.” “Fuck-me” is what she’d meant, but Piper only ever swore in her head. If she had been being completely honest, she’d have had to retract the bit about the shoes. Yes, they were high, but they were understated enough in other ways, little pale gold sandals with thin straps. But Piper could tweak a detail here and there if she felt like it, couldn’t she? She wasn’t a reporter for the
New York Times,
was she?

“I
mean
the hunky husband! What else would I mean?” Elizabeth removed the lemon wedge from the lip of her glass and threw it at Piper. “Holdout!”

“Oh, him,” said Piper, laughing and, in a single motion, scooping the lemon wedge off Elizabeth’s antique Persian and tossing it in the wastepaper basket in the corner of the room.

“Yes, him. Parvee Patel-Price nearly had a heart attack this morning. She dropped off some food for us on her way to work…”

“Don’t tell me,” interrupted Piper. “A casserole.” Parvee Patel-Price was famous for her dinner parties, which the unsuspecting attended fearing or hoping for exotic Indian fare, curry or maybe some of that homemade cheese, and at which she invariably served American dinner-table cuisine circa 1972.

“Baked tuna-cheddar spaghetti, God bless her, chock full of cream of mushroom soup,” said Elizabeth, grinning. “And a bag of groceries along with it, which she somehow managed to drop on the way up my front walk, just as the new hunk in town was coming back from his early-morning run. He helped her pick up the groceries and carry them in. The man was in my kitchen!”

“Mateo,” said Piper. “Although he seems to go by Teo. Dr. Teo Sandoval. He’s an ophthalmologist.”

“Huh,” said Elizabeth, frowning. “I heard he was an oncologist.”

Piper flushed.
Oh,
she thought,
oh my.
She took two sips of iced tea.

“That’s what I meant to say,” she said, finally. “I’m not sure I’d call him a hunk, though.”

“Really? Parvee was practically hyperventilating.”

“Oh, he’s certainly attractive. Kind of tall and model-y looking. Blondish brown hair and tan skin and green eyes. Or maybe they’re blue.” Green. Definitely green.

Elizabeth snorted and rolled her eyes. “Oh, one of those tall, model-y types.”

“You know what I mean. Almost too pretty? And sort of exotic. Not my type.” She shrugged, dismissively. It was true, at least officially. Her official type had always been WASPy and solid and corporate, even in high school, even in
junior
high. Men like Kyle, whose handsomeness was foursquare and daily. Unofficially, secretly, her tastes leaned toward the gorgeous and glowing. Her secret men had always been formidably beautiful, another quality that marked them as happily separate from her real, day-lit life.

Piper felt unsettled by the idea that Cornelia’s husband had triggered the memory of the ophthalmologist’s back. But the ophthalmologist and all the others were from a very long time ago. It wasn’t as though she wanted them now. It wasn’t as though she were jealous of anything Cornelia had.

“Is his wife beautiful, too?” asked Elizabeth.

“Oh, she’s got a pretty face, I guess,” said Piper, her tone under-cutting the assessment. “But she’s the size of an eight-year-old and built like one, too, and her eyes are too big for her face, and her head’s too big for her body.”

“A Powerpuff Girl!” crowed Elizabeth.

“Exactly,” said Piper. She loved it when Elizabeth talked smack about people. They looked at each other and burst into giggles.

When their laughter dwindled and Piper was wiping her eyes, she found Elizabeth smiling at her, some of that wistful sweetness from earlier creeping back into her gaze.

“I love you, Pipe.” Elizabeth almost whispered it. Piper held her breath. She and Elizabeth did not say “I love you” to each other.

“The cancer’s spreading.” Elizabeth said the words as though they were any words. Almost before she had finished saying them, Piper was shaking her head, firmly.

Piper stopped shaking her head, let her breath out, and said coolly, “The cancer is not spreading.”

“Piper.”

“Did Dr. Firestone tell you that? The man is seventy if he’s a day. They took out your ovaries, Elizabeth,
and
your uterus. Remember?” Elizabeth flinched, but Piper wasn’t about to stop talking.

“There’s nowhere for the cancer to spread from or to. You’ve been on chemo for months.” Piper felt her voice getting louder and harder. “The
cancer
is
gone
.”

“They did a scan. I had pain in my hip, so they did a scan.” There was a pleading note in Elizabeth’s voice now.

“I knew you should’ve gone to Penn. Or Hopkins! What were you thinking, dealing with these local yokels?” Piper stood up, nodding her head decisively. “We are calling Hopkins
today
!”

“Piper.” Elizabeth closed her eyes. “Piper, please sit down.”

“So, tell me,” Piper said, acidly. “What does your Dr. Firestone propose to do about this?”

There was a long silence. Elizabeth leaned her head back and looked at the ceiling. When she looked back at Piper, there were tears on her face.
Oh, stop it,
Piper thought.
You stop that.

“It’s a team, Piper. They have a cancer team. And they said we could try a more powerful protocol along with radiation. But—” She broke off and took a deep, sobbing breath.

“But what?” snapped Piper.

“They said it might buy me a few months.” Elizabeth’s voice was suddenly quiet and steady. “They said the side effects could be severe. I told them no.”

Piper felt as if her breath had been vacuumed out of her body with a
whoosh
. In her chest, where the air used to be, a bird was beating its wings as hard as it could. She tried to speak and, after a moment, discovered that she was opening and shutting her mouth.
Like a goddamn fish,
she thought,
like a goddamn fish out of water.
She clamped her lips shut.

Elizabeth sat perfectly still and upright in her chair. The circles under her eyes were as dark as bruises, and Piper had a crazy urge to get her makeup bag out of her purse and cover them up. The dark circles, Elizabeth’s thinness, the way Elizabeth sat, waiting for her to say something, all of it made Piper furious.

“Oh, so you’re giving up? Is that it?” Mean. Piper felt so mean. She started to walk out of the room.

“Piper,” said Elizabeth in a voice that was almost a wail. When Piper turned toward her, she saw that Elizabeth’s hand was stretched out, reaching for her.

“Do I have to remind you that you have two children who need you?” said Piper. She stood in the doorway to the room and pointed a finger at Elizabeth. “You are such a coward, Elizabeth. And you are
not
giving up.”

Piper walked as fast as she could to Elizabeth’s front door, and before the door had even slammed shut behind her, she was running.

T
HREE

D
ev Tremain wasn’t Sarah Chang or Gregory R. Smith or Toby “Karl” Rosenberg. He sure as hell wasn’t Pablo Picasso or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Bobby Fischer. And forget about A.E., whose name he couldn’t even bring himself to say because it was one he’d been called way too many times in way too many tones of voice. Privately, Dev felt kind of sorry for A.E. because he’d gone from being the flesh-and-blood guy who pretty much figured out what made the whole physical universe tick to being a metaphor: the generic, universal symbol for genius. Like flesh and blood didn’t matter. Like the theory of relativity wasn’t enough.

Dev Tremain wasn’t a genius, not a genius-genius, although from the way Lake was acting, you wouldn’t have known that. Lake Tremain was Dev’s mother, and from the way she’d loaded up the car and taken off like a bat out of Hades, you’d think he was Sarah, Gregory R., and Toby “Karl” rolled into one; you’d think he’d gotten into Juilliard at the age of six, graduated from college at the age of thirteen, and learned to write Japanese from a sake bottle before he turned five years old. Those kids were freaks ( Japanese from a sake bottle?
A sake bottle?
) and Dev wasn’t a freak, definitely not freak material, not even close.

When he thought about those kids being freaks, though, he immediately also thought,
No offense,
because those kids couldn’t help being so freakishly smart or gifted or whatever, the same way Dev couldn’t help being highly, but unfreakishly, smart. He didn’t know how it had happened to them, but he did know that not one of them had asked for it.

But at the moment, as he sat in the backseat of his mom’s 1988 Honda Civic, thirteen years old, deep into his Discman, Green Day pounding into his head, fingers drumming hard on the book in front of him, more than smart or anything else, Dev was mad. It had been a pretty rotten year for him. A crap year. Seventh grade. Seventh grade was at least partly why he and his mother were wherever they were—Kentucky, maybe?—instead of back in their little apartment in their little nowhere California town.

Even though Dev had lived most of his life in that town, leaving it was not what made him angry. Dev was glad to leave, more than glad. The truth was that it had taken a full one hundred miles for Dev to finally unknot, a hundred miles for him to breathe like a normal person again. He’d just been sitting there in the car when he’d felt this opening sensation, like there was suddenly more space between each of his ribs, and although he hadn’t changed position, his slouch suddenly felt like a slouch, true and easy. So he’d looked up to check how far they’d gone and, weirdly enough, it’d been one hundred miles exactly.

Dev amused himself with the idea that the town, or more specifically, Dev’s school had a kind of atmosphere of tension and dread around it that stretched out a hundred miles in every direction and that Dev had escaped, punched out of that atmosphere like a rocket into clear, breathable air. This wasn’t true, of course, although Dev didn’t rule out that there might be some real reason for the one hundred miles, and that if Dev had more information about space and time or maybe about physiology, he might be able to figure the reason out.

Anyway, Dev would love it if he never saw that town again. He wasn’t mad at Lake for taking them out of the town. He wasn’t even mad that she’d given him less than two weeks’ notice that they were leaving, because if she’d tossed his duffel bag to him in the middle of dinner one night, said, “We’re out of here,” and headed for the door, he would’ve gladly gulped down his milk and gone.

Dev was mad, Dev was
fuming
because his mother wouldn’t give him a straight and complete answer to his question of why they were leaving, and he was fuming because she wouldn’t give him any answer at all as to why, with the whole country spread out before them, they were making a beeline for some suburb of Philadelphia, as small and random a black dot as there was on the entire map. For Dev, the more mysterious and complex an idea the better; he loved unpacking a difficult theory, working to understand how it all fit together. But Dev wanted two things in the world to be as utterly straightforward and unmysterious as possible: one was music, the other was his mother.

Dev glanced down at the open book on his lap, at the sentence under his thrumming fingers: “Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress.” The music in his head didn’t grow fainter, but it slipped slightly into the background to clear out a space for the sentence. Evolution, now there was an idea you could really sink your teeth into. Dev’s list of heroes was fairly constantly rearranging itself, but Charles Darwin was definitely up there, way up. What thrilled Dev about Darwin was that he hadn’t employed esoteric equations or fancy gadgets to accomplish what he’d accomplished, but had done what all human beings do, more or less. He’d walked around the world looking at the things in it, but because of what he’d chosen to look at and because of the kind of attention he’d paid, he’d come up with an idea so rich and dazzling, it had made everyone see life in a new way.

But if you tried to trace Dev’s seventh-grade trouble to a single source, that source would be Darwin. To be precise, the source would be the idea that lay strong and still under Dev’s beating fingers, that evolution wasn’t moving toward any pinnacle or toward anything at all. But blaming that idea wasn’t entirely fair because trouble had been waiting for Dev; he’d felt it as soon as he’d walked through the door of his new junior high. Trouble had been like a ten-ton sleeping monster curled up somewhere in the vicinity of Dev’s locker; the theory of evolution had just been the noise that woke it up.

It had happened at the start of the second week of school, the first week of real school, since the first calendar week had been a combination of getting-to-know-you games, passing out gym uniforms, and seething chaos. On Monday of the second week of school, Mr. Tripp had entered Dev’s biology class, tossed his books dramatically on the desk in front of him, turned his back to the class, and written EVOLUTION on the chalkboard in letters nearly a foot high.

Then Mr. Tripp had spun around and demanded, “Do you people know why we can sit in this room today and talk about the theory of evolution?”

Dev considered saying something about the separation of church and state, but decided that Mr. Tripp probably wanted to answer his own question.

Mr. Tripp turned around and smacked the word on the board, then boomed, “Evolution!”

Like the rest of the kids in the room, Dev wasn’t sure if Mr. Tripp was answering his own question or if he was just repeating part of the question, so, like the rest of the kids, Dev kept quiet.

“Evolution is why we’re able to sit here and discuss evolution!” Mr. Tripp went on. “Monkeys can’t discuss evolution. Goldfish can’t discuss evolution. You know why?”

Of course they all knew why. Everyone knew why goldfish couldn’t discuss evolution. Probably every kid in the room, at least every kid who’d stayed tuned in up to this point, was listing the reasons in her or his head: hard to talk underwater, no books about evolution available to goldfish. Just for starters. But no one opened her or his mouth. Clearly, the guy was on a roll; no one was stupid enough to get in his way. Yet.

“Because they haven’t evolved enough! Human beings are the most evolved animals on the planet—and we
are
animals, make no mistake!” Mr. Tripp’s finger was stabbing the air and his forehead was beginning to glisten. He took a deep breath. “Human beings are the
pinnacle
of evolution!”

And even now, even after everything that had happened afterward, Dev was glad he’d ignored all the signals—and the signals were as loud and clear as spinning red lights and that repeated foghorn-type blaring that Dev assumed happens in nuclear plants at the start of a meltdown—that he should keep his mouth completely, possibly permanently shut. Even now, he was glad he’d spoken up. Because this was
Darwin
they were talking about.

Still, he had hesitated before raising his hand because he’d felt a little bad for Mr. Tripp. What Dev would figure out very soon thereafter was that all that bluster and drama, that bad imitation of Robin Williams in one of his inspiring-mentor roles stemmed from the fact that Mr. Tripp was a self-important, histrionic, humorless jerk. A class A windbag. But Dev didn’t know this, yet. Just then, the possibility still existed that Mr. Tripp was honestly trying to inspire them, and one look around the room told Dev that none of the students in it was going to be jumping on top of a desk to spout poetry anytime soon, himself included. Still, this was
science
class. If no one spoke up, all the kids who were paying attention to Mr. Tripp would walk out of science class thinking something was scientific fact that wasn’t.

Dev raised his hand, although from the startled, pained expression on Mr. Tripp’s face you would’ve thought Dev had thrown a spitball at him instead.

“Do we have a question?” asked Mr. Tripp.

“Well, not really a question,” said Dev. “But I don’t think that’s right, what you said.”

“Excuse me?” Mr. Tripp walked around from behind his desk and stood just a foot or two in front of Dev. Dev noticed that Mr. Tripp’s short-sleeved button-down shirt was getting dark under the arms.

“I mean, definitely, the part’s right about humans being the only species that can formulate an idea like the theory of evolution. If Darwin had been a goldfish, forget about it.” Dev smiled at Mr. Tripp, as a few other kids in the class laughed, but to put it mildly, the smile and the laughter didn’t lighten up the atmosphere in the room. Dev felt his own palms starting to sweat, but he kept talking.

“Well, you can sort of see how people might think that humans are the pinnacle of evolution because we have high reasoning and creativity and supercomplex brains. I think a lot of people think that, in fact.”

“But not you,” said Mr. Tripp sarcastically. “And you would be?”

“Dev,” said Dev, suddenly feeling exhausted. “But, okay, the goal of evolution isn’t complexity or high reasoning. Evolution is about having certain traits that enable you to survive changes by adapting to them, period. That’s a huge simplification, but if you want to talk about winners and losers in evolution, the winners are the ones who survive change, not the ones who have the most complex brains or who communicate with language. Or whatever.”

Now, every single person in the room was paying attention, and not the kind of attention people pay to someone who is saying something interesting. The kind of attention people pay to the guy who falls in the shark tank.

“And you know this because you spent your summer reading
The Origin of the Species
?” Mr. Tripp had raised his eyebrow and looked around the room at the other kids, as though they were all sharing a joke. But what Mr. Tripp said hit a nerve for Dev, a big nerve, and suddenly he surged way past caring what they all thought. For the record, he wouldn’t
stay
past caring; but at that moment, he’d only been able to think about Darwin.

“No, see, that’s just it. It’s not
The Origin of the Species
. Not ‘
the
species.’ Just species. All species. It’s not about us. We think we’re the center of everything because we’re smarter than other animals, but even that’s not fair because we invented the whole idea of ‘smart’ and we decided smart means the thing that we are. When you think about it, whales are smarter than we are when it comes to surviving in the deep ocean, right?”

Dev had felt himself getting increasingly worked up, and some small part of him was aware that getting worked up about biology was not a way to make friends, not in the seventh grade anyway. But some things were more important than people liking you. Darwin, humility, and respect. Dev had been thinking about all this stuff a lot, and as corny as it sounded, he felt a kind of team spirit, a connection with all the survivors, with every living thing that had gotten this far. Team spirit mattered, right? Dev believed that it did.

“Well, I see that at least one of us has decided that smart is the thing that he is,” said Mr. Tripp, which made Dev hate him. Mr. Tripp looked down at his roll book. “Aha. Deveroux Tremain.”

And then Mr. Tripp had done a shocking thing. In front of the whole class, he’d said, “Oh, I was warned about you, Mr. Tremain. We all had a little sit-down about you before school started.” Mr. Tripp had begun walking around the room, addressing the other students in the class. “Mr. Tremain’s mommy and his elementary school principal decided to come on out and tell us all how special Mr. Tremain is, about how he deserves special treatment.” He’d circled the room and come back to stand in front of Dev again. “Now maybe I’m not as smart as you are, Dev. I didn’t reread the Constitution on my summer vacation, and no doubt you did.” What Dev saw in the teacher’s eyes was pure hatred. “But last time I checked, this was a democracy. Which means no one, not even Mr. Einstein here, I mean Mr. Tremain, deserves special treatment.”

Naturally, that had been it for Dev, the end. He knew Mr. Tripp had been way out of control, that saying what he’d said in front of everyone was not only evil, but maybe also against the rules, some kind of violation of Dev’s right to academic privacy maybe. Dev knew that if he’d reported Mr. Tripp, the man might have gotten into some kind of hot water. But Dev felt defeated in a way he’d never felt in his life; no matter what they did to Mr. Tripp—and Dev didn’t think they’d actually fire him—the hour in that classroom had doomed Dev.