Belong to Me

by Marisa de los Santos

  Telling Clare was right. It just was.

  Three seconds after he finished telling her, though, Cornelia walked into the room and said, “Your mom called, Dev, to say it was time to come home. I’ll only agree to release you, though, if you solemnly vow to come back soon.”

  “How soon?” demanded Clare. “Tomorrow soon?”

  Dev looked at the floor and smiled. “Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving.”

  “Right,” said Cornelia. “And Dev and Lake have dinner plans.”

  “Do they have dessert plans?” asked Clare.

  Cornelia looked carefully from Clare to Dev, then said, smiling, “I most sincerely hope not.”

  For a second, no one said anything, and then Cornelia said to Dev, “Toby’ll take you. He’s outside right now popping your front wheel off.” At Dev’s look of alarm, she added, “Which is one of the few things the boy knows how to do. When it comes to bikes, snowboards, skis, surfboards, my baby brother’s your man. That’s about it, though. So, do we have your solemn vow? You’ll come back soon?”

  Dev raised his right hand and slapped his left onto an invisible stack of Bibles.

  After Cornelia left, Clare turned to Dev, took hold of his forearm, and whispered, “I bet your theory about your dad is right. But you need to come back so we can figure it out.”

  Dev focused on the sensation of her hand on his arm, memorizing the pressure of each finger individually. “I’ll come back. But what do we need to figure out? I mean, as a theory, it’s pretty figured out, right?”

  Clare gave her head a small, impatient toss. “Not the theory. The theory’s solid. Your dad’s here, somewhere.” She squeezed his arm. Her face was inches from his and so smooth it looked like someone had polished it. “The question is: what are we going to do about it?”

  “Yeah,” Dev nodded, “I’ll come back.” Dev was nodding, he was answering her, but all the while, Clare’s last sentence was bouncing around the inside of his head and his heart was pounding in his chest and he was thinking how weird it was—good weird, miracle weird, even—that one word, one puny pronoun could be the single best sound he’d ever heard in his life.

  If it hadn’t been for Clare’s phone call, Thanksgiving would have been a complete bust. Thanksgiving and the day after that and the day after that, a line of busted days stretching who knows how far into Dev’s future. Because Lake said no. What was more infuriating was that she didn’t just say no, that they couldn’t go to Cornelia’s for dessert on Thanksgiving Day, she said they couldn’t go because she’d invited someone to have dessert with them. Mr. Pleat from next door, a regular-looking man who’d said hi to Dev a few times, talked to him about stuff like his bike, the weather. After Lake’s headache had faded, she’d ended up having a long conversation with Mr. Pleat over the low rail that separated their back deck from his. He’d always struck Dev as a nice enough man, but suddenly Dev and every atom of Dev’s being wished he’d spontaneously combust. His name was Rafferty.

  “Rafferty Pleat?” Dev had practically spat. “That name’s totally fake. The guy’s probably in witness protection.”

  “If he is, he didn’t mention it,” replied Lake, coolly. “He’s a contractor. He rehabs old houses, and his wife threw him out six months ago and they’re currently embroiled in a hideous legal battle because she wants to move to Florida with their four-year-old daughter, so you might consider directing a little compassion his way.”

  Man, his mom could fast-talk when she wanted to.

  “Besides,” she added, “some would say that a person named Deveroux Tremain doesn’t have a leg to stand on when it comes to calling other people’s names outlandish.”

  Dev could have pointed out that (a) he hadn’t exactly named himself, and (b) at no time had he ever used the word “outlandish,” but instead he said, in his most self-satisfied voice, even though he wasn’t feeling satisfied at all, “So now you have to explain to Cornelia that you can’t come to her house for dessert because you’re inviting someone else for dessert when you already told her that you wanted the two of us to spend Thanksgiving alone. Have you thought about that, Mom?”

  Apparently, Lake had thought about it because the next thing she did was dial Cornelia’s number and tell her precisely that in a warm, friendly voice and with a heavy emphasis on Mr. Fake-Name’s sad aloneness that made Dev want to throw up.

  If five minutes after Lake had hung up with Cornelia, the phone hadn’t rung, Thanksgiving would have sucked. If Dev had come out of his room to eat dinner at all (and he probably would have, since the image of his mother eating turkey and stuffing all by herself would have been impossible for him to swallow, no matter how furious he was at her), the relentless grimness of the meal would have been eclipsed only by the relentless grimness of dessert with Rafferty Pleat. But the phone did ring, and while no phone call could have erased the Molotov cocktail of maternal craziness and outrageous injustice Lake had thrown at Dev, this one came pretty freaking close. It was Clare.

  She said, “Two questions. First, can you come over Saturday?”

  “Yes,” Dev said without hesitation. Lake and ten herds of wild horses could not stop him from going. He waited for the second question, thinking please please please let her say something like, “Have you been thinking about me as much as I’ve been thinking about you?” which would have embarrassed the hell out of Dev, but in the best possible way.

  “Second, do you know how the buses work around here?”

  “Uh, no,” admitted Dev. “But I can find out. Why?”

  “I looked in the phone book,” said Clare, “and I have two words for you.”

  “What are they?”

  Her voice rose and rippled with excitement. “Dev, I really think this could be it!”

  “You do?”

  “I do. I truly, truly do.”

  “Tell me.” In the short silence that followed, Dev held his breath, wanting to hear her breathe or cough, not wanting to miss anything.

  Then, slowly, with a pause between the words, Clare told him: “Tremain Cycles.”

  “What will you do if it’s him?”

  The bus was smotheringly hot, and the driver had obviously skipped the day they’d covered gradual stops and starts in driving school, but Dev didn’t mind. If he and Clare had been racing over the plains in a covered wagon, pursued by ravenous wolves, he wouldn’t have minded either. But the bus was nice, sun falling across them, the world outside a long blur of brown, green, and blue. Clare sat next to him, so close that a piece of her hair, like a shining ribbon, rested on his shoulder, and Dev held as still as he could, as though the hair were a dragonfly, some small, light thing he didn’t want to startle away.

  Her question caught him off guard, and he realized he’d almost forgotten where they were going.

  “I mean,” she continued, “I was wondering what you want to happen. Or if you want anything to happen.” Her voice sounded worried, so Dev turned and looked at her. She was fiddling with the zipper of her jacket.

  “I guess I’m not sure what I want,” he said.

  When her eyes met his, they were worried, too. “But you want to be here, right?”

  “Right.” He smiled, but she didn’t smile back.

  “I mean, you want to do this, don’t you? Because that bike shop, it was right there in the phone book, in the business white pages, and you didn’t find it. After I got off the phone with you on Thursday, I thought about that, how if you didn’t find it, it could only have been because you didn’t look for it.”

  “Oh,” said Dev, “I see what you mean.” He saw what she meant, and what he wondered was why he hadn’t thought about that before. For days and days, he’d walked around with his theory, not doing anything, but as soon as Clare had told him about the bike store, he’d wanted to go. He’d wanted to look for his father.

  “I started to worry that”—Clare broke off, blushing—“that maybe you only came because you wanted to see, or you wanted to be with…” She stopped talk
ing.

  “With you.” Dev just said it. He knew it would change everything, but he said it anyway.

  “Because we could have done something else,” Clare said, quickly. “We still could.”

  Dev considered this for a while. Then he said, “Here’s what I think.”

  “What?”

  “I think I always wanted to look for him, and maybe if I hadn’t met you, I would have told Aidan everything. I thought about telling him, but I never did. Maybe I would have, though, whenever it felt like the right time, and he would have gone with me. I don’t know.” Dev ran his hand through his hair impatiently. Just talk, he thought, just say what you have to say.

  “I wanted to find him,” Dev said, slowly and quietly, “I just didn’t want to do it by myself.”

  Suddenly, Clare smiled and said, teasingly, “Maybe you were waiting for me to show up.”

  Dev found himself looking down, then, and there was Clare’s hand, her long fingers and short nails. First he was looking at it, then he was holding it, such a natural transition that a full four seconds passed before he comprehended what he’d done, but then his heart started ticking like a time bomb, and a giant black wrecking ball of panic came swinging toward him fast. He felt like the kid in the museum who doesn’t even realize he’s reached out and touched the painting until he hears the alarm and feels the guard’s big hands on his shoulders.

  But before he could pull his hand away and go shooting down a bottomless pit of apologies and humiliation, Clare’s hand was shifting inside his, and then their palms were pressed together, their fingers interlocked—Clare, Dev, Clare, Dev, Clare, Dev, et cetera—and nothing, not one thing was wrong with that.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Dev saw that Clare was looking straight ahead with a small, thoughtful smile on her face. He didn’t turn to her. He didn’t speak. For the rest of the ride, Dev sat there holding Clare’s hand and thinking, Clare’s hand is connected to the rest of Clare, which felt like a revelation, like the best news he’d ever heard.

  The bike was a beauty. Fifteen pounds of aerodynamics and carbon fiber, a composite so unimaginably light and strong that they made satellites out of it. Dev traced the lean, seamless silver tubing with his eyes, thinking of all the science, all the work and imagination that had gone into making this single perfect object. Dev didn’t want to own the bike; he had no use for it, but as he looked at it, he felt a piercing, nameless longing filling him, and suddenly he thought about Plato, whom Ms. Enright had just had them read. Maybe Dev’s soul remembered this bike from the realm of pure forms; maybe this bike made his soul homesick. Oh, shut up, Dev told himself. Could you be normal for, like, two seconds? But the longing didn’t go away.

  With effort, Dev shifted his gaze off the bike and swept it slowly over the bike shop. Bikes stood in rows and hung gleaming from the walls and ceiling. It was hard to tell the employees from the customers, but eventually, Dev figured out that the guys wearing oversized, long-sleeved white polo shirts were salespeople. Saleskids.

  “Let’s go,” he whispered to Clare, “they’re all about eleven years old.”

  Clare drew in her breath and nodded toward the back of the store. A tall, brown-haired man was lifting bikes onto one of the wall racks. He wore a white shirt, too, but he was older, maybe forty, and he moved like a person in charge.

  “He looks like he owns the place,” said Clare softly.

  Suddenly Dev felt too tired to move. He looked back at the silver bike. If only, he thought, and the homesick feeling swamped him. If only I were eleven years old. Or eight. If only we were here to see this bike.

  He looked at Clare. Her eyes were almost level with his own.

  “You’re tall,” he said.

  “I know,” she said.

  They were still holding hands, but it felt different from the way it had on the bus. Now, they were like two kids lost in the woods. Hansel and Gretel, scared and small, comforting each other. That wasn’t how Dev wanted holding hands with Clare to feel, so deliberately, gently, he let go and walked toward the back of the store.

  The man’s back was to them. Dev noticed that his hair was thick and grew in a counterclockwise swirl around a single crown. Dev touched the back of his own head, but dropped his hand as the man turned and saw them. The man’s jaw was square and his eyes were interesting, a blue so pale it was almost white. He smiled.

  “Hey, guys,” he said. “What can I help you with today?”

  That’s when Dev noticed his name tag. ED. Exactly what a guy named Teddy would get called when he got older. Ed Tremain. He heard Clare say, “Oh!” She laid a hand on Dev’s back. Clare had seen the name tag, too.

  “Uh, well, actually,” said Dev. His voice came out hoarse and softer than he wanted it to be. He cleared his throat. “I was wondering about the name.”

  Puzzled, the man frowned slightly, two deep lines like quotation marks appearing between his eyebrows. He looked down at the bike he’d been about to lift and his face relaxed.

  “Gary Fisher,” he said, nodding. Dev saw that the name ran in slashy-looking letters along the bike’s down tube. “A lot of people call Gary the inventor of the mountain bike, which I wouldn’t necessarily agree with. An awful lot of people were modifying bikes on their own back then, in their garages, probably coming up with all the same changes independent of each other.”

  Then Ed said a surprising thing. “Like hedgehogs and porcupines. Different times, different places, different—what do you call it—species, but they both ended up with spines. There’s a word for that in science.” He scratched his head, thinking.

  “Convergent evolution,” said Dev, solemnly. It was him. It had to be.

  “Bingo!” Ed grinned and pointed a finger at Dev. “Anyway, Gary Fisher makes a nice bike, that’s for sure.”

  “I bet,” said Dev. “So do you own this store?” Even though Dev already knew the answer, he asked. He had to ask.

  “Sure do,” said the man.

  Dev looked at Clare, looked back at the man, took a deep breath and said, “I’m Dev,” and then, because Ed’s face didn’t change, he added, “Tremain.”

  Dev watched understanding dawn on Ed’s face, but then, to his surprise, the man laughed.

  “I get it,” he said. “Here I’m going on about Gary Fisher and evolution, and that’s the name you meant. Yeah, I bought the place from Bob Tremain a year ago last December.”

  Dev stared at Ed in confusion.

  Clare spoke up. “Was he a relative of yours? Are you a Tremain, too?”

  “No,” said Ed, “the guy was old enough to be my dad, but nope. I’m Ed Buchman.” He put out his hand, and Clare and Dev took turns shaking it. “How about you? You related to old Bob?”

  Dev hesitated. “Maybe,” he said finally, lamely. “I think I might be.”

  “Is he from around here, do you know?” asked Clare.

  “No,” said Ed. “He’d lived here a little while, but Bob’s from somewhere out in the Midwest. Ohio. Michigan. Something like that.”

  “Iowa?” suggested Dev.

  “Could’ve been.” Ed nodded. “He and June retired to Florida, but they’ve got a couple of kids settled not too far from here. A son in Philly, I think. And a daughter in Baltimore.”

  When Dev just stood there, fuzzy brained and tired, not saying anything, Clare finally said, “Well, thanks, Mr. Buchman.”

  Dev wanted out of that store, then, about as much as he’d ever wanted out of anywhere, but he was rooted to the spot. Like Lyssa, he thought with irritation, Lyssa at the fire drill. You lived without knowing your stupid father for almost fourteen years, he berated himself. Why does everything have to be such a big deal now? He pulled himself together before Clare had to take his arm and shuffle him out of the store.

  “Yeah, thanks,” he said.

  Outside, he took off his jacket and breathed. The bike store was in a strip mall, but with the air in his lungs and on his skin and with the intense blue sky over his head, D
ev could have been in Oregon or Montana, some vivid, elemental, rinsed-clean place with mountains towering over him instead of Super Fresh and OfficeMax. He was that glad to be out of the store, and he felt light, as though he’d lifted the tangle of hope, dread, disappointment, and relief out of his chest and left it there, dropped it between the bikes on his way out.

  After a moment, Clare touched his shoulder. “Hey, you,” she said. Her eyes searched his face the way, a couple of nights ago, they’d searched the chessboard for the right move. Then she began, carefully, “The son in Philly…”

  “I know,” said Dev. “Maybe I’ll try again.” He paused. “I don’t know if I want to, though.” He knew he might feel differently later, but for now, it felt good to be fatherless, to be the same old Dev he’d always been.

  He and Clare started walking toward the bus stop, their shadows stretching out ahead of them. Dev watched the girl shadow take the boy shadow’s hand, and he realized that the homesick feeling had disappeared. In its place was a new feeling, too new to have a name.

  “How cool would that have been, though?” He shot Clare a sidelong, happy grin. “A dad with a bike shop?”

  Clare laughed her jingle-bell laugh, and Dev realized that what he felt was young. He’d been young all his life, of course he had. But now he was aware of it. Every cell, every electron of his body felt young: unencumbered, uncluttered, as clean as the clear blue sky.

  TEN

  Cornelia

  It’s highly unlikely that my brother Toby will ever have a George Bailey moment: suicidal on a bridge above roiling water; snow swirling like chaos; his fat, sweet guardian angel teetering on heaven’s edge, set to jump in and save the day. It’s unlikely for all the reasons that would make it unlikely for anyone: one being the dearth of credible evidence supporting the existence of guardian angels; another being the fact that, as I too often have to remind myself, life is life and movies—even classic Capra/Stewart collaborations—are only movies. But Toby caught in a wild-eyed, rock-bottom, George Bailey moment is unlikely for other reasons, as well, reasons that have to do with Toby being Toby.