The Precious One (19 page)

Eustacia leaned her head a little to the side and smiled, a friendly, slightly puzzled smile like one might give an okapi at the zoo, a smile that said,
I am inclined to like you, even if I’m not sure whether you are a giraffe or a zebra
. If I were being honest, I would have to say that, while I am not a particular fan of the dimple, a somewhat nice one flashed in her left cheek when she did so. Even so, it was maddening how often, when I tried to put her off or freeze her out, she simply appeared not to notice. Either her smiles were some subtle form of mockery or she was woefully oblivious to social cues. That she could be so presumptuous, so overstepping as to actually
like
me, well, it was too annoying a possibility to consider.

But given what happened next, I was forced to consider it. Damn it all.

The show came to what I had to admit was a satisfying end, with the bad guys caught and Foyle as unflappable, and, yes, as reassuring, as anyone could ever be, and it was lovely, except that, with Foyle and the rest gone, Eustacia and I were alone, with a post-television silence that she would surely, before long, want to fill with conversation, because she was just that type. I sat there, toying with a cookie, and hoping against hope that she would not bring up the subject of my mother’s somnambulism, thinking, with all my strength, the words
Don’t bring up Muddy, don’t bring up Muddy, don’t bring up Muddy
, so that when she said, nervously, the dimple appearing and vanishing in her nervous cheek, “There’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about,” my heart dropped like a shot goose.

“Oh?” I said, icily. For a girl who had spent most of her life in the presence of people she liked, when it came to the cold, aloof tone of voice, I seemed to be a natural, if I do say so myself.

To my dismay, she walked over and sat in the chair opposite mine at the white tile-top table. The overhead light falling on her hair made it so shiny, it was irritating. You needed sunglasses just to look at the woman. And, as she sat there, considering how she would word whatever overstepping thing she had to say to me about my mother, the dimple flashed on and off, on and off, like a hazard light.
Outrageous presumptuousness ahead
warned the dimple. I steeled myself accordingly.

“Okay,” she said, “there’s probably no way to say this that isn’t wildly awkward, and you may well have other people in your life that you can talk to about this sort of thing, and if you do, wonderful, but just in case you don’t, I wanted to say—”

She stopped for breath.

I lifted my eyebrows, as cool as a cucumber—gosh, I was devastatingly good at that—waiting.

She laughed and shook her head.

“Well, that was a melodramatic, if rambling, opening, wasn’t it?” she said.

Under completely, radically other circumstances, if we were two complete strangers, maybe, who had bumped into each other on a street corner, I could see how her manner might be disarming.

She slapped the table with her two hands.

“All right. Here it is: it’s a totally natural thing to be your age and to meet someone you’re attracted to and who’s attracted to you. I mean, young love can be a beautiful thing. A lucky, lucky, beautiful thing.”

I allowed myself a moment of relief that she wasn’t going to talk about Muddy’s somnambulism, and then I popped open the floodgates and let the outrage fill my soul.
Young love
, indeed! I stared at her with as blistering a gaze as I could muster, which was very, very blistering. But she went on. She
went on
! And as she did, with each word that tumbled
from her lips, my blood got hotter and hotter until, by the time she finally shut up, it was out and out boiling.

“But it can also be confusing or overwhelming,” she said, “and you might have questions or just things you want to talk over with someone, a sympathetic, unjudgmental listener, someone who has been in your shoes, and I just want you to know that I’m here.”

I gathered myself, trying to keep my voice calm, but I’m afraid it trembled anyway.

“In my shoes,” I said, with my hands balled into fists and my teeth clenched so hard my molars ached. “My? Shoes?”

Eustacia’s dimple vanished. “Okay, maybe this was a bad idea,” she said.

I rose slowly from my seat at that stupid, godforsaken table, that relic of a dingy and bygone era, and said, “What could you possibly know about my shoes? I am capable of feelings that you wouldn’t know the first thing about.”

She didn’t blanch or quail or stammer out an apology. Instead, she gave me the okapi smile! My God, the woman must be mad.

“I know it seems that way, that no one in the history of humankind has ever experienced what you’re experiencing,” she said, “and I guess no one has, quite. Everyone’s first love is unique. But there really is common ground.”

“What . . .” My voice was truly quaking now, with rage. “What common ground could we possibly have? If I belong to someone—and I’m not saying I do—it’s heart and soul. Like Jane belongs to Rochester! Nobly. Completely.”

Eustacia’s lashy eyes went soft in a way that made no sense, and she was nodding her head, understandingly. Oh, that nod, that condescending nod. It made me snap.

“You don’t know anything!” I spat. “For you, at my age, it was just sex! It was sordid. That’s why my father got so disgusted with you and made you leave!”

Eustacia went stiff as a board, and her eyes flared like torches. Her voice, though, damn her, was steady as that British detective’s.

“You know all about me, do you?” she said.

“Yes! Some stupid boy got you pregnant and dumped you, and my father wouldn’t stand for it, and he threw you out! You and your entire sordid family!”

Silence. A red-hot, pulsing silence. It beat like a bass drum in that little room.

When she spoke next, I saw that I was not the only one with a gift for the icy tone. “Is that what he told you?”

I faltered. I wanted to lie, but why should I dissemble like a common criminal? I wasn’t the one who had done something disgraceful. Also, I couldn’t have Eustacia go around thinking that my father had considered her story worthy of telling.

“No,” I said, tossing my head. “Not in so many words. But that’s immaterial. I know. I’ve known for a long time.”

“Sit down, Willow,” she said, every syllable an icicle, jabbing.

I sat. I shouldn’t have. I don’t know why I did. But my body lowered itself into the chair.

“I did not get pregnant,” said Eustacia. “But I did have sex with the person I loved. Once. And only after.”

I didn’t care to hear her lies, not one whit, but maybe she had cast a spell over me like the witch she was because the next thing I said was, “After—what?”

Her dark eyes were full of fiery anger, so distilled and so perfectly contained that if I hadn’t known better, I might have mistaken it for calm.

“After I married him,” she said.

I
DIDN
’
T GIVE HER THE
whole story because I didn’t give her the whole why. Despite telling her more than I’d ever told anyone, lighting truth after truth after truth like candles, in the end, I left certain ones standing in the dark, unlit. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t hold back much, despite her stubborn jaw and glowering stare. And I did give her the real, overarching why, my most precious thing, which was that Ben Ransom and I were the Dog Star, the brightest, surest light, the one that found me every time I turned my eyes to the sky. You could navigate your life by a light like that. Could? You’d be crazy not to.

No, what I didn’t give her was the rest of the why, the nitty-gritty, why-then, why-so-sudden why. Why didn’t we wait? Why did we decide, on a rainy late September evening, to get secretly married a week later, two days after my eighteenth birthday, at a Clerk of the Peace in Georgetown, Delaware? This why wasn’t precious or pure or so big you could fit an entire life inside of it, like the other one. It was small. It had a name. Two names, really. Three, if you counted Willow, and while she wasn’t even in the world yet, she counted all the same. So there it was, the other why: Wilson, Caro, and Willow.

It was Ben who discovered them. He was on the first field trip of his senior year: a Cezanne exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art with his French class. His assignment was to find a painting and write an essay in French, analyzing it, so instead of taking a group tour, the students were free to roam around with friends or alone so that, when inspiration struck, they could park themselves in front of a painting to take notes. Which was a good thing because it meant that when Ben came upon my father and his paramour paramouring on a bench in front of
The Bathers
, he was only with two other guys and so did not have to bear witness to an entire tour group of teenagers gawking at my father’s public display of adultery.

Not that any of them knew my father. They didn’t even know me, since when Ben came to live with his dad (for no other reason than that he liked his dad and wanted to get in a few good years with him before he went off to college), he didn’t transfer, but kept going to his Quaker school in Pennsylvania. Still, if you have to come upon your girlfriend’s father canoodling with his jailbait-looking (Caro was twenty-two), immensely pregnant gal pal in front of a gargantuan painting of naked French people, it’s better not to have an audience.

Later that night, after Ben told me and I was telling Marcus, Marcus cut into my tearful, scattered, raw-throated exposition by saying, “Oh, shit, were they
making out
? God, don’t tell me that. Because you know what? That’s nauseating. Dad is, like,
old
. And
Dad
. ”

“Not exactly making out,” I said, with a sob. “Worse.”

Marcus’s eyes widened. “Worse? Wait. They weren’t having sex, were they? Oh, Jesus, they were, weren’t they? Some kind of old guy, pregnant lady, clothes-mostly-on, public sex? How the hell did Ben not rip his own eyes right out of his head after seeing a thing like that?”

“Not sex,” I said, bursting into fresh tears. “Worse.”

“Worse than public sex in front of a French impressionist painting in a major American museum?” asked Marcus. “Holy shit. What? Cannibalism? Were they, like, eating human brains straight out of the skull because otherwise . . .”

“Stop it,” I said, covering my face. “He was whispering to her and running his hand back and forth over her giant belly, and smiling, and
crying
!” I wailed.

Marcus went still. “Crying? Dad was crying?”

I nodded with mute misery.

“Hold on,” said Marcus. “Is Ben sure?”

“He said there were tears pouring down his cheeks. It was serious crying. And he was smiling at the same time.”

“Maniacally? Like he was deranged?”

My answer came out as a whisper. “Happily. Like he was happy.”

But even if I had told Willow this why, I don’t know if I could really have explained it. The cause and effect was there: because I found out my father had a pregnant much younger girlfriend who made him happy enough to weep with joyful abandon in a public place, when he had, to my knowledge, previously never wept for any reason anywhere ever, thus ensuring, with every tear and belly stroke, the end of our family as we knew it, I decided, the very next night, to ask Ben to marry me in a week, as soon as I turned eighteen, which was exactly one month after he had turned eighteen.

But as for the reasons for the cause and effect? Blurry. Complicated. I wasn’t—and I’ve thought about this a lot—acting out of some childish revenge impulse. I wasn’t punishing Wilson. I wasn’t doing it to send him a message or to get a reaction or even to get his attention; I really, truly wasn’t. My wanting to marry Ben right then and there, in high school, when even I had to admit it didn’t make much logical sense, had not much to do with Wilson at all. Maybe I wanted to create my own family, since my other one was combusting. Maybe I wanted something solid to hold on to or something that was irrevocably mine. Maybe I wanted to show myself that I wasn’t damaged by Wilson’s betrayal, that I still believed in love. I think what I mostly felt was that I wanted balance: to counter Wilson’s sneaky, traitorous act with one that was beautiful and brave and lasting.

But I didn’t say any of this to Willow. In my head, I could hear
Marcus prodding me, chiding me:
Tell her. Tell her that not you but dear old Muddy was the one whose boyfriend got her knocked up. Tell her that Wilson was a liar and cheat. Tell her she was a redheaded bastard, born before Wilson and Mom’s divorce was even close to final. It’s your chance. You don’t owe any of them anything. God, don’t be a sap, Taisy
.

But I could not do it. Wouldn’t do it. Not for love or money or revenge or even because it might have done Willow some good. Because it really might have. She was so sure that her father was a paragon, more god than human, and who knew better than I the perils of worshipping Wilson Cleary? And the girl had been raised to think that her family was better than everything, finer than the outside world, that the only way to live righteously was to keep walls between herself and this world or to look down on it from a great height, and that was no good either, was it? But it didn’t matter. Maybe Willow would figure it out on her own, do the math, put together the timeline. I half hoped she would. But she wouldn’t hear it from me. I could not sit there and look into that child’s face and tell her that Wilson, that her family, all of them were just exactly as human as everyone else.

So I told her about how I had sat with Ben on his tiny front porch at dusk, holding his hand, watching the paw-soft rain fall on the grass, and asked him to marry me, and how afterward, he had sat very, very still, not saying anything, as I made my pitch: we would keep it a secret, live in our separate houses until graduation, and then go to the same college and wait until it felt right and then tell everyone and have a real wedding, or not; it didn’t matter. I was going on and on, telling him how we would know we belonged to each other, how it wouldn’t change anything, how it would change everything, when he said, “Yes.”

“Yes? Really? You want to?”

He looked at me with his clear black eyes and said, “If you want to, I want to.”

“No,” I said, disappointed. “I don’t want you to do it just to make me happy.”

“Well, that sounds to me like a good enough reason to do anything, but that’s not what I meant.”

“Okay. So what did you mean?”

He brought his brows together, thinking. I loved it that he was a person who liked to puzzle things out. I loved watching it.

“It’s weird,” he said, finally. “The way it makes so much sense to me that I don’t know how to explain it. It’s just—if you want something, I want to give it to you. Or more like, if you want something from me, that something is the thing I want to give you. Because you want it. They’re two sides of the same coin.” He shook his head, frustrated.

I smiled into the rainy yard.
I will marry this person and have him near me forever
. I kissed him, and he kissed me back, distractedly, because he was still thinking. He pulled away.

“Look, how about this,” he said, excitedly. “Reverse it. If you want to give me something, it’s something I want. Automatically. By definition. Because it’s you.”

I kissed the underside of his wrist and pondered.

“I get it,” I said, smiling at him.

“Ha! You do? Well, since you’re the only one who would, I’d better marry you.”

“You’d better snap me up quick,” I agreed.

The morning I turned eighteen, we made excuses to our parents and schools and went to get our marriage license. We drove (Ben drove; Wilson’s rule was that Marcus and I couldn’t drive until after we turned eighteen, making me the only kid I knew who had a marriage license before I had a driver’s license) to a Clerk of the Peace in the next county so that we didn’t have to worry about running into someone we knew. We got there an hour before the office opened and were back at school before lunch. Twenty-four hours later, on Friday, October 4, having waited for the requisite period of time and done all manner of lying and fancy footwork with our parents and schools, we were back in the clerk’s office.

It was eighty-five degrees outside, so I wore a sleeveless white eyelet sundress and sandals. Ben had given me a bouquet of purple freesia, and when we walked into the office, the clerk, a woman named Ada Wayne, closed her eyes and said, “Oh, those flowers smell like a happy future to me,” and I hugged her. The ceremony was a blur after that, except for Ben, who came through my senses more and more sharply, until he was the most vivid, most tangible, plainly
there
thing I’d ever seen or heard or touched, and he stayed that way for the rest of the day and night, the first night we’d ever spend together.

Our parents weren’t expecting us home until the next morning (more fancy footwork), so we drove to the beach. Since it was past Labor Day, there were no lifeguards, but the ocean was full of people. Ben went in, but the water was too cold for me, so I stood on the sand and watched him, bouncing on my toes with joy and at the same time full of awestruck solemnity, thinking,
This is how it will always be: all these people, parents and children, old couples and teenagers, land, sky, and water, wind, grit, weather, and a taste on my tongue, going on and on, and always, in the midst of everything, shining out from the rest
, my
person, the one who can pick me out, know me, find my face in crowds, hear my voice over other voices, who will look at the ocean and say that speck is my speck—for year and years and years
.

I told Willow that. I also told her that we spent the night in a hotel we could just barely afford, with an old-fashioned elevator, buttery sheets, chocolates on our pillows, and a view of the ocean. I had already told her that we’d had sex once, after we were married, although that isn’t technically accurate, even though we did have just the one night together. But I didn’t give her details. God, no. Can you imagine?

I didn’t tell her about the first time, how new we felt to each other, how the easy comradeship, the months and months of dating fell off like a husk and left us so unfamiliar, elemental, so thin-skinned that I was right on the edge of (but never tipping over into) scared. His mouth burned wherever it touched me, and I forgot to be smart, funny, nice; I forgot everything about myself. And then, the second time, all
of it came back. Every tiny piece of history, the dancing gourds, the dogs watching us kiss, every math problem, study session, meal, walk, inside joke, every daily act of friendship and offhanded, ordinary kindness was right there with us, and, maybe that sounds crazy, but all I know is I had never before been so generous or felt so blessed, and in the seventeen years to follow, I never would again.

That last bit, the generous and blessed part, I did tell Willow because I needed her to understand that being with Ben mattered.
You don’t have to defend yourself to her
, I could hear Marcus say,
Who cares what she thinks?
But I did have to, and I did care. Having lies about me and Ben out there, alive in the world, had felt wrong to me for seventeen years. I couldn’t change Wilson’s view of us, but maybe I could change Willow’s, and even if I couldn’t, just trying had to be the right thing: countering a lie with the beautiful truth.

I don’t know if she bought it, but I think she did, at least a little. Her eyes stayed angry, but the rest of her betrayed her. She leaned closer, her jaw and hands loosened, her lips relaxed, and when I paused, steeling myself to tell the rest, she said, “So you got married. But you’re not married now, are you? How’s that?,” which struck me as a mean way of saying, “I want to know what happened next.”

Wilson is what happened, the way he always did.

He caught us. The fact that we were fully clothed and not doing anything but kissing—okay, lying down kissing on the living room sofa in the dark, but still—didn’t make a bit of difference.

We weren’t in the habit of hanging out—much less making out—at my house, mostly because of Wilson, but on this night, we thought we had the house to ourselves, at least for a few hours. We were wrong.

You have to understand that there was no morality in Wilson’s seemingly moral outrage, not one scrap. Even before I knew about his rampant philandering (because I found out later, from my mother and Marcus, that Caro was not the first), I knew that he didn’t think much about right and wrong, at least not Right and Wrong, capitalized and absolute.

No, what passed for a value system for Wilson was plain old snobbery. Cheating was wrong because only stupid people had to cheat. Beating people up was wrong because if you couldn’t win with your wits alone, you were stupid. The vast majority of wrong things were wrong simply because to do them lumped you in with the lowbrow and the tasteless, the great unwashed. Gambling, stealing, doing drugs, driving drunk: unsavory crimes committed by unsavory types, people who wore bill caps, drove cheap cars in which they smoked with their children in the backseat, ate fried food out of bags, and overplucked their eyebrows, who watched television shows with laugh tracks, and had not gone to graduate school.