The Precious One (3 page)

But getting back to the hand-raising.

My English teacher, Mr. Insley, was restless, a strider, boldly cutting a path around the perimeters of the rectangular room so that focusing on him usually meant swiveling your neck around until it cricked, something that most of the students didn’t bother to do. Narrow shouldered and slim in his tweed jacket, with fine, pale brown, backswept hair, he looked like John Keats, only taller and less tubercular and not forever leaning his chin on his hand as though his neck were too flimsy to hold up his head on its own. On the contrary, Mr. Insley seemed to bristle with energy. When he posed a particularly important question to the class, he would wave one long, skinny finger in the air and stare at us with what could only be called fervor.

I would not have thought that someone could get so impassioned about
Pride and Prejudice
.
Wuthering Heights
, yes,
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
, sure, but
Pride and Prejudice
, well, no, not necessarily. I adore Austen. Adore! Who could read
P and P
without wanting to be Elizabeth Bennet, with her fine eyes and sharp wit? Who wouldn’t want to take an elegant turn around a drawing room or sit with a straight back at a writing desk, composing a letter? But to cant forward, the way Mr. Insley was doing, flushed and burning eyed, to ask the quaking-voiced question
“In your opinion, did Elizabeth Bennet marry Darcy for his money?,” seemed a little much, a little out of place. Out of place but—I admit it—stirring. In spite of itself, my pulse quickened.

But no one answered the question. I glanced around the room to see if any of my fellow students (I was still stunned at the fact that I
had
fellow students) seemed on the verge of answering. No. Nothing. Clock ticking, ticking. Still nothing. To behold Mr. Insley standing in the front of the room, John Brown-like, practically on fire, his chest rising and falling beneath the thin striped cotton of his dress shirt, was like seeing Mark Antony giving his speech over Caesar’s body while all the Romans doodled and stared at the ceiling. Unbearable.

Which I guess is why before I truly understood what was happening, it had happened: my hand was up. On the end of my very long arm, my hand seemed high, high in the air, like a motherless bird in a nest, exposed to wind and weather and my classmates’ unreadable gazes.

For a moment, Mr. Insley looked startled, and then he smiled at me and said, without so much as a glance at his seating chart, “
Willow
.” He made my name sound like music, like a two-syllable poem. Oh my, his voice. His voice was the most heartening thing that had happened to me in a week.

“Yes,” I said.
Yes, I was Willow. Yes, yes
.

He kept smiling. I realized my hand was still in the air and brought it down to rest in the palm of my other hand. Mr. Insley’s smile turned from just glad to glad and encouraging, and I realized that, in the presence of this smile, in the presence of his whole presence, my nervousness had vanished. My entire body, including my brain, felt deliciously relaxed. It was like one of those moments in a play where the spotlight falls on two characters in the center of the stage, while everything that isn’t them freezes, goes black, disappears.

“Yes,” I repeated, with assurance. “Elizabeth was a product of her time and in an awkward position, socially. Like most women back then, she didn’t have a lot of choices. She was the daughter of a gentleman, so she couldn’t very well get a job, but because of the entailment, she
could expect almost no income of her own. Her only hope of keeping up or improving her manner of living and social position was to marry a man, a gentleman preferably, not a tradesman, with money. Someone like Fitzwilliam Darcy.”

Mr. Insley was nodding, looking more like Keats than ever, and contemplating me for all he was worth, his eyes swimming with thoughts. I sat completely still, feeling like a Grecian urn, a nightingale.

“Excellent answer, Willow,” he said. “Very insightful. Beautifully articulated. Thank you.”

I swear his approval lifted me right off the ground, desk and all. But then a voice slashed the air like a bullwhip and yanked me back to earth with a crash.

“
God
, that is just so wrong.”

Even as I was turning around to see who’d said it, I knew. Bec Lansing. Hair a liquid fall of coffee-colored silk. Huge dark eyes. Mouth like a poppy. A riveting girl, a girl who shot sparks and walked in beauty like the night. I hadn’t spent much time with groups of people my own age, but I’d recognized the queen the first second I saw her, and something inside me had instinctively bowed down.

“Bec,” said Mr. Insley, sharply, “are you sharing a differing viewpoint?”

She didn’t acknowledge that he’d spoken. She had eyes—long lashed, coal black—for no one but me, and the hate I saw in them made me gasp.

“To say that she
married
him for his
money
? That’s just so sad. So cold. She
loved
him!”

“No, I know—” I began.

“You
don’t
know!” snapped Bec. “Which is just really sad.”

Bec looked about as sad as a cobra.

“I-I think she loved him, too. I don’t think she married him
only
for his money.”

For the record, this was true. Of course, Elizabeth loved Darcy. My
heart ached with their love for each other every single time I read the book.

“Sure,” said Bec, with a sneer. “Sure, you do. Way to backpedal.”

I felt paralyzed, like I really had been bitten by a snake.

“That’ll do,” said Mr. Insley.

But it wasn’t until the boy sitting next to Bec slid his foot a few inches across the floor and tapped it against her puffy, caramel-colored boot that she turned away from me. She looked at the boy, who gave her an almost imperceptible smile and an even less perceptible shrug, as if to say,
It’s not worth it
. The entire exchange took no more than three seconds. I turned around and slid down in my seat, my heart simultaneously sinking and pounding.

“Class is dismissed,” said Mr. Insley. “First five chapters of
Middlemarch
for Monday.”

Amid the cacophony of groans, I slid my books into my new backpack (I had ditched the extra-large tote bag after the first day of school) and got unsteadily to my feet. I wasn’t used to people hating me. Oh, God, I wasn’t used to people at all. I fiddled with the zipper on my backpack, allowing time for Bec to get out the door and, I hoped, down the hallway and far, far away before I left. On my slumped and defeated way past his desk, Mr. Insley caught my eye and smiled again.

“Chin up,” he said, softly. “It will only get easier.”

Oh, how he sounded like my father! I lifted my chin.

“‘Keep calm and carry on,’” I said, with a snap in my voice.

“Atta girl!” He winked.

This time, I didn’t hold back. I stood up as straight as my heavy backpack would allow and saluted, and without missing a beat, Mr. Insley saluted back.

MY STIFF-UPPER-LIP ATTITUDE STOOD
by me out the door, down the hall, and through an entire double period of AP chemistry, and then, just inside the door to the bathroom, it took one look at the band of
hair-brushing, lip-glossing girls lined up before the mirror and fled. I stood all alone, feeling like a stork who’s crash-landed into a flock of gleaming jays. They preened. They chattered. At least, until they noticed me standing there. Then: deadly silence; brush- and applicator-holding hands frozen midstroke; an exchange of knowing looks. God, those knowing looks. I’d been seeing them all week. What
could it be
that they all knew? There in that restroom, it hit me that I had not a hope in hell of ever finding out.

I eked out a twitch of a smile before I practically fell into the bathroom stall. To my horror, the chattering did not restart, and because I couldn’t imagine anything more soul-killing than to fill that void with the sound of my bodily functions, I sat there, in no small mental and physical discomfort, waiting. Eventually, I heard them filing out, but before the door was closed, one of them hissed, “Frigid!”; another barked, “Bitch!”; and another sang out, “Get it, Zany Blainey.” I figured I had Bec’s outburst in English to thank for the first comment, didn’t know what I’d done to deserve the second, and didn’t need to have even the faintest idea of what the third meant to know that it spelled my doom.

That afternoon, when my mother picked me up (do I even need to say that I had no driver’s license?), I spent the ride home the way I’d spend every one for days and weeks afterward, formulating sentences that I would say to my father the
split second
I got home. Some days, the sentences were a hotheaded jumble, other days cool and even and perfectly shaped, stacked one on top of the other like rows of bricks. On the worst days, they were hardly more than a wail. But they all had at their heart the same idea:
How could you?

Because my father had to have known that I wasn’t made for this. How could he not, when he was the one who had made me? Scratch that. Creepy. Pygmalion-esque. Not what I mean. Look, I was my own person. But my father had shaped the world that shaped me as carefully, as completely—and yes, as lovingly—as my mother shaped her glass frost flowers and seaweed forests and corals and aurorae borealis (if
that’s, in fact, what any of her sculptures were meant to be). He gave me a world where everything was beautiful, noble, nutritious, and pure, a life from which everything coarse, crass, ugly, or just plain dumb had been strained out and thrown away. No television! No pop music! No magazines! No sleepovers! No high fructose corn syrup! No unsupervised Internet surfing! No—God, no! Are you
kidding
?—social networking!

Only to throw me into high school at the age of sixteen?

Do you know the story of the dodo bird? It lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean for who knows how many centuries, happy as a clam. Somewhere along the line, it lost the ability to fly, or to be more accurate, dumped the ability to fly like the extra baggage it was. Why waste energy on wings when there was nothing to fly from? No predators, no mammals at all on Mauritius. It ate windfall fruit. It was big, about three feet high, and by bird standards, quite zaftig, over forty pounds. It nested and laid its eggs on the ground. It was placid and fearless. Why bother having a quick fear response when there was nothing to be afraid of? No need for flight or fight. In short, the dodo was perfectly suited to its world, a tubby, hook-beaked perfect citizen.

And then the universe played a mean joke on the dodo: human beings. First the Portuguese, then the Dutch. They killed the fat, friendly, unsuspecting dodos for food. Their monkeys, pigs, and rat stowaways gobbled dodo eggs like popcorn. Everything that had made the dodos successful inhabitants of Mauritius for so long now made them sitting ducks. In eighty years, they were kaput. Gone. Every last one.

I think you see where I’m going with this.
I
was perfectly suited to my world, too. I
was
. I was flourishing, damn it. And the thing is, no invaders landed on my shores. Worse, the person I trusted most ripped me out of my world and, with nothing even close to a real explanation, plopped me into a new one, where suddenly everything about me was wrong.

My clothes. My hair. The way I talked. My taste in
everything
. The food I brought in my lunch. The bag I brought my lunch in. Wrong,
wrong. I didn’t know how to talk to people. I didn’t know how to find a seat in the cafeteria. I didn’t know how to raise my damn hand. The dodo held out for eighty years. I knew I wouldn’t last eight months.

What kind of father makes his daughter a sitting dodo?

I knew exactly what to say to him. He had always told me that, in teaching me, he wasn’t preparing me for college (although there was never any doubt that I would go to college). He wasn’t paving the way for others to teach me. No, sir. He was teaching me to do what the only real scholars in history had ever done: teach myself. So here was my pitch: I wanted to come home because I wanted to try going it on my own. Until he was well enough to teach me again, I wanted to pull myself up by my bootstraps, summon my pioneer spirit, and teach myself. It was a foolproof argument because how could my father argue with the pioneer spirit? Or with his own, inarguable wisdom?

But he never got the chance. Every day, on every ride home from school, I planned how I would say these things to my father. And every day, I didn’t.

He looked so sick, for one thing, not just pale but dingy, like old glue. And he was whispery. And shrunken. And much, much, much too old. Looking at him, it was easy to forget what I had always known: my father was never going to die. Even so, I might have said it all anyway. I might have planted my feet and looked him squarely in his tired, dull eyes and argued my case with a clear voice and a lot of quotes by people he admired. Except. Oh, except!

Except that what I knew, what I could never escape, what sat like a rock—not just a rock but a molten, seething, blistering rock, if you can imagine such a rock—inside my chest was this: It was all my fault. All. And at my lowest moments, I believed there was no punishment awful enough to balance what I’d done.

T
HE LAST TIME I
’
D
been to my father’s house, it was December, three days after what had been the best Christmas my mom, Marcus, and I had spent in as long as I could remember. It wasn’t the first Christmas after “the combustion” as we had taken to calling it, “separation” being far too bland a term for what had befallen our family. Despite all our best efforts, that first Christmas had been grim beyond saving, a kind of nuclear winter: the three of us still so raw and stinging, tripping over one another in a blank-walled, rented apartment; all of us working part-time jobs we detested; my mother edgy from nights spent studying for the North Carolina bar exam instead of sleeping; Marcus and I making our lonely, resentful, anonymous ways toward graduation at our enormous new high school.

But the second Christmas, the one right before we embarked on the first and seemingly final visit to the home of my father and his new family, had been good. Very good. It had been downright merry, a fact that took all three of us by surprise. That fall, we had moved from the dreary apartment to a tidy little Craftsman-style frosted petit four of a house, butter-yellow and white with tall windows, a porch,
and trees in the yard. My mom had gotten the kind of tireless-lawyer-with-a-heart-of-gold job she had always wanted, and Marcus and I were in college—mine just down the road, his at a rival school a few hours away in Virginia. It had turned out that college suited us. After a two-week-long mourning period, at least on my end, even being apart from each other for the first time ever seemed to suit us. Unpaired, we were pure potential, free agents. Marcus wasn’t the smart but smart-aleck wayward brother; I was not the goody-two-shoes-but-for-one-cataclysmic-error sister. We could feel those four years stretched out before us, wide open, white as linen.

Still, when Christmas break rolled around, we were happy to see each other. In fact, I was giddy about the whole thing, suffused with holiday spirit, and even Marcus, who didn’t go in for giddiness, kept committing spontaneous, weirdly unsarcastic acts like buying and then stringing the porch with white twinkle lights. We spent Christmas Day at our house with the large, loud, motley family my mother had acquired in the year or so since she had moved back to her childhood town: her father, our Grampa Pete; her high school best friend, Wiley, and his partner, Jack; the family next door—a surgeon, her stay-at-home-dad husband, and their two kids; the young couple who owned a gelato place in town; Mrs. Wickett, my mother’s fourth-grade math teacher and her tiny, guitar-playing husband. We feasted on beef tenderloin and a bewildering array of pies. We told stories and laughed. We—and I am not kidding—
sang carols in front of the fire
. It was corny and Capra-esque and beyond beautiful.

Three days later, we went to my father’s house, where the joy came to a screeching halt.

It might not have been so bad if my father’s house had not, at that point, been
our
house, the one in which we had lived back when we were a family. The new family in the old house, my wallpaper on Willow’s wall, felt just plain cruel. Although in truth, it’s hard to imagine that day being any less bad or any more bad than it was because the whole thing felt fated, like it was all meant to be and all meant to be
just exactly—to the loudest insult and the smallest teardrop—as bad as it was. I know I’m not explaining it very well. It was like that
As You Like It
quote: my father’s house was a stage and we were merely players, trapped in a play written by someone a whole lot less funny and bighearted than William Shakespeare. Even as we made our way up the familiar brick sidewalk to the familiar door, I heard doom in every step.

We walked single file—my mother, me, Marcus—each of us holding a wrapped gift.

“Like the effing adoration of the effing magi,” Marcus mumbled.

Even though I know she knew how much effort it had taken Marcus to not say the actual f-word, my mother shot him a black look over her shoulder. But then she began to hum a slow, funereal version of “We Three Kings.” By the time we got to the front door, we were all humming it. It was a nice moment, but when it ended, there we stood, staring at the black door, the brass pineapple door knocker.

“You bought that door knocker,” I said to my mother.

“Did I?” She lifted her chin and smiled a smile at me that was meant to be sly but quavered, a smile that made me want to beat the crap out of Wilson. “I don’t remember.”

Then, like the visitor she was, she grabbed the pineapple and knocked.

I braced myself for the sight of my father’s face, for the sound of his voice, but I was in no way ready for either, particularly since, during our last face-to-face encounter, he had called me a whore. Even as I stood on that doorstep and thought this, I could hear Wilson’s voice inside my head, correcting me:
I never name-call, Eustacia. I was merely reflecting upon your behavior
. Which was true enough. His exact words:
You have managed to behave in a manner simultaneously whorish and infantile. Quite an accomplishment
. When I was eighteen, “whorish” had felt like the adjective equivalent of being pushed down a flight of stairs. At thirty-five, it still felt pretty bad.

But I stood on his threshold and reminded myself that he wanted
us there, now. He had invited us. You don’t invite a person to your house if you don’t miss her, do you? When I think today about that eighteen-year-old, deluded-by-hope girl that I was, I’m torn between wanting to hug her and wanting to slap her silly.

As it turned out, Caroline was the one to answer the door. Caroline-called-Caro, called Caro by my
father
, who was generally an outspoken eschewer of nicknames. Caro Bloch, now Caro Cleary, mother of Willow, wife of Wilson.

I had only met her twice before, and then as now, she struck me as oddly immaterial. Or maybe I mean something more like under-materialized. Caro just seemed less
there
than most people, as though she were composed chiefly of air and distractedness. In any case, as she stood there in the doorway in her emerald-green dress, with her startled eyes, her painful thinness and thicket of hair, I found her, as I had in the past, impossible to hate.

No one spoke. Caro just stood gazing at us, and we just gazed back, except for Marcus, who shoved one hand into his coat pocket and stared down the road, wary and faintly squinting, like a guy in a cowboy movie who sees a cloud of dust on the horizon. This all went on for so long that it began to seem possible that we would never go in at all, that we would just stand there, shivering and listening to the sound of the cars going by out on the main road and to the noise of our own breathing until the sky above us went black and the streetlamps flared.

“So,” I blurted out, “do the Russos still live next door?”

With my peripheral vision, I saw Marcus drop his head back as though he’d been punched unconscious.

“What?” said Caro, eyes widening, voice breathless.

“Joelle and Sam? Their three kids? Or wait, two kids.”

“Two?” asked Caro.

“Well, I mean, they still have three. At least, I assume they do. But Abigail got married the summer after we, um, relocated. At least, I assume she—” Marcus kicked my heel with the toe of his sneaker, and I stopped talking.

Caro gave a start of recognition. I would have said that it was not possible for her to open her eyes any wider than they were already open, but then, lemurlike, she did. “Oh! You mean the woman who brought the pink hat and the casserole after Willow was born!”

Marcus snorted. “Yeah, that’s the one.”

I knew my mother would chastise him for being rude later, but the sarcasm seemed to jar Caro out of her vagueness. Her eyes shrank; she smiled.

“Sorry,” she said. “Between my studio and the baby, I guess I haven’t spent much time getting to know the neighbors.”

“Eggplant,” I said, softly, to myself. “Eggplant parmesan.”

The thought of it made my chest ache for all that we’d left behind. At that moment, I believed I would have given years of my life for one forkful of sweet Mrs. Russo’s eggplant parm.

“Yes!” said Caro, happily. “That’s right. I remember being able to eat it. I don’t eat meat.”

No shit you don’t eat meat. You don’t eat anything
. I could hear the words in my head as clearly as if Marcus had said them out loud, but he just barely lifted his eyebrows at me and kept quiet.

“Caroline,” said my mother, “may we come in?”

“Oh my goodness, of course,” said Caro. “What am I thinking?”

This time, Marcus grumbled, “You’re not,” but in such a low voice that Caro didn’t hear it. She stepped back, opening the door, and we all filed past.

“May I take your coats?” she asked, holding out her matchstick arms.

It was a moment of truth. We exchanged glances, and when my mother gave a slight nod, we all set down our gifts, took off our coats, and turned them over to Caro—even Marcus, although he made sure to do it with the air of a detainee forced to give up his passport—and were, officially, there.

Instead of taking our coats to the closet there in the front hall, Caro flitted away toward the back of the house, leaving us where we stood.

“Check that out,” said Marcus, nodding toward the wall behind us.

My mother and I turned. There, on the wall above the round claw-foot hall table that had always stood there, was a mounted sculpture made of glass: a cluster of roundish shapes in watery shades of blue and green, so delicate you’d think a breath would dissolve them.

“It’s beautiful,” I admitted. “It must be one of Caro’s.”

“Yeah,” said Marcus. “Remember how it used to be us?”

When we lived there, in that spot had hung a large framed black-and-white photograph that my mother had taken when Marcus and I were about six. The two of us sitting in an armchair, me in profile, speaking to him, Marcus with his head bent, his face not smiling but about to smile, listening.

“Before we all get too indignant,” said my mother, “let’s remember that I took it with us when we left. It’s hanging in the living room at home.”

Marcus grinned and shrugged. “Still—symbolic. Symbolic, right?”

My mother smacked him gently on the head, just as Caro reappeared.

“Oh!” Caro gasped.

“Child abuse,” said Marcus. “Alert the authorities.”

Caro blinked rapidly, her long lashes all aflutter, and then she smiled.

“I will,” she said. “But wouldn’t you like to see the baby first?”

“Uhh,” began Marcus.

I jumped in with, “Of course, we would. Definitely.”

“She’s in the nursery,” said Caro, glancing at her watch. “I believe she’s just woken up from her nap. Regular sleep schedules are really incredibly important.”

“Great,” I said, without any real sense of which one of Caro’s statements I was approving of.

“Well, then!” Caro exclaimed, then swiveled around, and walked rapidly toward the staircase.

“Where’s Dad?” I whispered to Marcus, as we watched her begin to mount the stairs.

Marcus shrugged and whispered, “I don’t know. Hell?”

On the fourth step, Caro turned and said, “Aren’t you coming?”

“Coming?” asked my mother. “You mean upstairs?”

“Well, yes,” said Caro, surprised. “To the nursery. The nursery is upstairs, of course.”

“Of course,” said Marcus.

“Maybe it would be better if we waited here for you to bring her down?” said my mother.

Caro shook her head and said, “No, I don’t think that would work. Playtime begins right after naptime.”

“Oh,” said my mother.

“Please come,” said Caro. “It’s just up the stairs.”

She pointed, and, dutifully, we looked in the direction she was pointing, as though we hadn’t each climbed those stairs thousands of times. Then, we followed her, right hands on the banister, presents tucked under our free arms.

Before I saw the baby or the crib or my father, I saw the wallpaper, pale green, with a pattern of white apple blossoms. I had chosen it when I was seven years old, had sat with my mother, paging through the thick book of samples. I remember feeling the gorgeous weight of it: the first decision I had ever made that would have palpable, lasting impact. For years, the wallpaper had made me feel safe and special, like a girl in a book sleeping in a cottage. Now, the sight of it hurt, more on behalf of the girl I had been than the girl I was, but it hurt all the same.

I heard his voice before I saw him.

“Willow, my Willow,” the voice sang out. “You have visitors!”

The room was ablaze with sun, and because the rug, the wedding-veil gauzy curtains, and every item of furniture in the room was white, for a second, I was snowblind. Even after my eyes adjusted, I didn’t see my father immediately because he was sitting on the floor.

My father. Sitting on the
floor
. Sitting on the floor
cross-legged
.
Indian
-style. And I knew in an instant that I had never before seen
my father sit on the floor in this or in any other position. Seeing it now felt so strange, so personal that it was almost indecent. I turned my face away and saw Marcus. He was staring at my father with the same cringing bewilderment I felt. My mother wasn’t looking at my father at all, but at something on the other side of the room.

“You’re sitting on the floor,” said Marcus.

“Yes,” said my father, with a magisterial nod of his leonine head. “Forgive me for not getting up to greet you. I am playing.”

The floor was littered with blond wooden blocks.

“It’s floor time,” explained Caro, “originally developed for children with autism but highly beneficial for typical learners, as well.”

She looked at her husband, who nodded again.

“Or exceptional ones, as the case may be,” said Wilson. “In playing on the floor, eye to eye, I follow her lead. I enter her world, instead of towering above it.”

I’m sure it goes without saying that our father had never entered my or Marcus’s world. If it had ever occurred to him to try, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, and even when Marcus had outgrown him by two inches, my father still managed to tower over our lives, looking down on us, when he bothered to look, from a tremendous height. He would not have had it any other way.