Belong to Me

by Marisa de los Santos

  When Piper nodded, Kate turned, opened the door, Piper and Kyle followed her inside, and the change happened. Piper was present for the hug, but as soon as she stepped over the threshold of Kate’s house, steeling herself for the onslaught of voices, music, and lights, a strange sensation overtook her. She felt weightless, flickering, transparent, and like she was watching everything through gauze. When people spoke to her, their voices seemed to come from a great distance.

  So when Parvee Patel exclaimed, “You’re so thin! What’s your secret?” Piper did not feel like yanking out a fistful of Parvee’s hair and saying, “A dying friend. You should get one,” as she would have felt like doing under normal circumstances. She just smiled. (It was true, Piper had noticed it when she put on her black dress and found it loose. For the first time in her life, she had lost weight without knowing it, and, also for the first time, she had discovered she’d lost weight without caring.)

  Dutifully, she collected gossip. Megan was pregnant at forty and was having neither CVS nor amnio. Jilly Keyes had reconnected online with her high school boyfriend, an attorney-to-the-B-liststars, and had moved to L.A. to marry him. The Lowerys had stunned everyone by scrapping their plans to remodel their kitchen. Thad Ramsey’s oldest son from his first marriage had gotten thrown out of college for cheating. Joshy Bray had almost gotten thrown out of kindergarten for cutting off a classmate’s ponytail, but his father had won him an eleventh-hour reprieve with a large and well-timed donation to Tallyrand’s annual fund. The Howards’ country-house roof had leaked in the last big rain and while their antique four-poster had suffered damage, their (small, minor, but still) N. C. Wyeth had not. Margot Cleary had new lips; Amory Weiss had new breasts; Sydney Overton was spider vein free and loving it.

  Through all of these conversations, the floating, absent sensation never left Piper. Several times, she thought bemusedly, Who are these people? and found it astonishing that not long ago they had been hers, a tribe the female half of which she had—there was no getting around it—presided over. She felt like a ghost, as though people might walk right through her, as though she were the one who had died. (Although no one has died, she reminded herself.) While she didn’t miss this world, she saw from the way people looked at her—her dress, her hair, the newly visible butterfly of bones below her clavicle—and from the way they listened to her speak that she could still, at any time, step back into it, regain her old position, and the thought was comforting.

  All evening, she felt Kyle’s approval, and that was comforting, too. While they spent most of the party in separate conversations and were not seated together at dinner, she was constantly aware of his presence in the room, just as she was always aware of her children when they were in a public space. Now and then, as they always had, she and Kyle would catch each other’s eyes and smile carefully calibrated smiles, ones that said things like “I’m fine,” “Wait till you hear this,” or “Rescue me.” Earlier, they’d gotten dressed in silence, and he had neglected to tell her that she looked beautiful, but she saw that everything was all right now or almost all right. Nothing had been lost that couldn’t be regained.

  So the party was not a disaster. But as soon as the sole of Piper’s Stuart Weitzman satin sandal touched Kate’s front porch, the floating sensation vanished, Piper slid back into her body with a thud, and she nearly ran to the car, where, at Kyle’s request, she had left her cell phone. There were three messages from Tom, one for each hour of the party, as he’d promised, the third of which had come in just ten minutes before. Elizabeth had eaten some of the egg strata her mother had made at her request (it had been a Sunday brunch staple all through Elizabeth’s childhood), and had watched The Grinch with the kids, had done lullaby time, and had fallen asleep afterward.

  In the most recent message, Tom said, “Elizabeth’s sleeping fine. No agitation or yelling out. Before she fell asleep, she asked me if you carried your satin Kate Spade something bag with the something feathers to the party tonight. So if you could report on that tomorrow, we’d all appreciate it.”

  Tomorrow. Piper closed her eyes and repeated the word inside her head, letting it unfold slowly, heavily, like a prayer: to-mor-row.

  “Well?” asked Kyle, as she flipped the phone shut.

  “She’s alive,” said Piper.

  She died, of course. Not before Christmas. And not the day after Christmas, although Piper had woken in a panic at four A.M. on the twenty-sixth, certain that she’d somehow blown it, that all her bargaining for Christmas, Christmas, Christmas had been misunderstood by whomever or whatever she’d been bargaining with; “Christmas at least” is what she should have said. “Christmas for starters.”

  But Elizabeth lived through December and into the New Year, and for two days in late January, she appeared to be ready to live forever.

  Cornelia and Teo dropped by on the first day. They’d come, separately and together, several times since that first visit, and once Cornelia and Elizabeth had watched a black-and-white movie that featured a man, a woman, a leopard, a dinosaur bone, and a lot of falling down. Piper had never liked black-and-white movies, but while she watched almost none of it and did not even know what it was called, she loved the movie because it had made Elizabeth behave like Elizabeth, laughing and calling out advice, warnings, fashion tips to the people on the screen.

  Today, Cornelia and Teo brought a fat, gorgeous-smelling braid of homemade bread, still warm from the oven, and a ramekin of whipped honey butter.

  That morning, Elizabeth had showered and dressed in the downstairs bathroom before Tom had even come down. She had told Tom that she had considered going upstairs, she’d felt that strong, but she hadn’t wanted to wake up the kids. When Tom told Piper this in one of their quick update conversations on the back steps, she’d given an involuntary shudder and he’d nodded his understanding. Despite the drugs Elizabeth took to strengthen her bones, they were still frighteningly fragile, porous from the secondary bone cancer. A fall could be disastrous.

  Tom had taken the kids to a birthday party. He hadn’t wanted to go or to take the children away from Elizabeth when she was feeling so well, but she’d told him to go, go.

  “She told me, ‘I’ll be here when you get back.’ She was laughing, and I realized that that’s what she wants from us, to act like this will last. But I’ll be back in two hours max.” He took off the glasses that until recently Piper hadn’t even known he owned (“Kept falling asleep with my contacts in during my nights with Elizabeth,” he’d explained, “I’d wake up with the things glued to my eyes”), and rubbed his eyes.

  “You’re not sleeping much at all, are you?” asked Piper.

  “I’m fine. I lay down for a couple of hours last night,” he said, then he shook his head. “But now I keep thinking, ‘Man, what if she’d fallen in the shower?’ And I can just see it, see her falling. I shouldn’t have left her. I should have stayed downstairs.”

  But sitting at the kitchen table in black yoga pants and the dark red cashmere sweater Tom had given her for Christmas, Elizabeth appeared less breakable than she had in months. Her eyes and skin were brighter, as though a light inside her body had been relit, and when she lifted her glass, pushed back her hair, her movements were suffused with a grace that Piper recognized as the simple absence of exhaustion. When Cornelia and Teo walked through the back door and saw her, Piper watched their faces register surprise, then delight, and for a moment, she felt glad that they didn’t know what she herself knew: that this is the way it happened sometimes, a day or two of wellness right before the end, like a mirage in the desert.

  Elizabeth saw their faces, too, spread her arms out and tilted her head, in a silent “Ta-da!”

  “Wow,” exclaimed Cornelia. “How gorgeous are you?”

  Teo bent down, kissed Elizabeth’s cheek, smiled, and said, “You’re beautiful,” as though he were just stating a fact. Piper remembered, then, what Teo did for a living. It was easy to forget because he never came to visit as a doctor,
only as a neighbor. But he must know about the illusion of wellness and what it meant. Of course he did. When Piper took the bread out of Cornelia’s hands, Cornelia touched Piper’s forearm and said softly, “You okay?” and something somber in her eyes told Piper that Cornelia knew, too.

  Piper put the bread on the ginkgo-leaf-shaped breadboard Elizabeth had bought during a trip that she, Tom, Kyle, and Piper had made to Vermont before the kids were born. She remembered how Elizabeth had collected leaves. All those hillsides burning with orange and red, so dazzling it wore you out, and there was Elizabeth preferring the shape, the gradations in color of a single leaf. Piper remembered her sorting the leaves afterward in her hotel room, turning them over and back, carefully placing them on the table before her like a gypsy with tarot cards.

  When Elizabeth saw the bread, she grinned and said, “No bread knife, Piper. We’re pulling this sucker apart with our hands.”

  The bread was good, which surprised Piper. Cornelia’s pumpkin bread had been good, too, but Piper still had trouble picturing it: this arty, city-type woman with her haircut, scarves, and funky shoes measuring out flour and sugar, brushing on egg yolk.

  After a few minutes, Elizabeth measured the bread with her hands and said, “Okay, I’m just eyeballing here, but I believe I’ve eaten six and a half inches of this loaf of bread.”

  “For those of you keeping score at home,” said Teo, and he smiled at Piper. The man had a great smile. He wasn’t Piper’s type. His Princeton sweatshirt could have been a thousand years old, and in Piper’s opinion, he desperately needed a haircut, but his smile was out of this world.

  “So, Teo,” said Elizabeth, giving him a grin that was evil and flirtatious at the same time.

  “Uh-oh,” said Teo.

  “Our friend Kate happened to mention that she saw you playing basketball at the Y on Thursday with some of the guys.”

  “Since when does Kate work out at the Y?” asked Piper skeptically.

  “Since never,” said Elizabeth. “She was at some fund-raising meeting.”

  “Yeah, I was there,” said Teo. “Glen Cheever talked me into joining the over-thirty league.”

  “The Doc Jocks,” said Cornelia with a delicate wince.

  “A bunch of lawyers mopped the floor with us,” said Teo. “Lawyers get more sleep than doctors.”

  “Also,” Cornelia reminded him, “your team. It sucks, I believe.”

  “Oh, yeah,” agreed Teo, cheerfully, “it does.”

  “Kate didn’t mention that.” Elizabeth went on, coyly. “She did mention a certain absence of shirts.”

  “Not Teo,” said Cornelia, “he’s not a bare-the-bod kind of guy. More a hide-your-light-under-a-bushel guy.” She mouthed the word “Shy.”

  “That’s not what I heard,” sang Elizabeth.

  Cornelia looked at Teo with exaggerated shock.

  “Cornelia, it was a basketball game. Shirts versus skins. Someone forgot the pinnies.”

  “Pinnies?” asked Cornelia. “You wear pinnies?”

  “Forget it,” said Teo.

  “What I heard is that most of those guys had no business being shirtless in public,” said Elizabeth.

  “I bet,” snorted Piper.

  “What I heard is that the only one who really did,” Elizabeth said, smiling sweetly at Teo, “was you.”

  Some men look good when they blush, thought Piper, and Teo was one of those men.

  “And I don’t know if you know this, Teo,” Elizabeth went on, “but I was originally supposed to be on that fund-raising committee.”

  “You were not,” said Piper.

  “I think I see where this is going,” said Cornelia with dancing eyes. “He’ll never do it.”

  “I was supposed to be on that committee,” Elizabeth lied serenely, “and if I hadn’t gotten sick, I’m sure I would have been with Kate when she happened to walk past the open door of the basketball court.”

  “It’s a lost cause, Elizabeth,” said Cornelia.

  But then, without saying a word, Teo ducked out of his sweatshirt, strode to the center of the kitchen, and put his arms out. “Pass it,” he said to Elizabeth, and she passed him an invisible ball, which he dribbled a few times in a fancy way, then shot.

  Piper watched Elizabeth toss back her head, hoot, and clap her hands, and she knew she should feel shocked. It was so inappropriate. A married man performing shirtless in a room, with two married women and his own wife watching and cheering as if they were at some ridiculous bachelorette party. Totally and absurdly, embarrassingly inappropriate.

  Except that it didn’t feel that way, not even—to Piper’s surprise—to Piper, and looking around, she saw that no one, not even Teo, seemed embarrassed. She would not have believed it six months ago, but maybe there were times when the inappropriate wasn’t inappropriate at all, when it was light and funny and exactly right. When it even held an indescribable loveliness. There’s nothing wrong with this picture, thought Piper. And then she amended the thought: except cancer. The only inappropriate thing in this room is that Elizabeth is sick.

  This was the first day of wellness.

  On the second day of wellness, Elizabeth held her children all day long, read to them, sang to them, built Lego towers with them, touched their hair and their faces, spread their fingers open and looked at their hands. She told them over and over that they were perfect, that they made her life perfect. She told them that she would love them forever, that she would stay with them, would be invisible but with them, like air. They could talk to her, she told them, and she would listen.

  Tom told Piper this afterward, because, for most of that day, Piper stayed at her own house. For reasons she could not fully explain, she kept her children home from school. She had been careful all along to give each one time alone with her every day, but even so, she knew she hadn’t been paying the attention she should. There were days when she would stare at herself in the mirror, and say, “Won’t be winning mother of the year this year, Pipe.”

  Mostly she believed that everything would be all right. How could everything not be all right when she loved them so much? But sometimes, especially at night, she worried that she was marking them, changing them, that her concentration on Elizabeth, on Emma and Peter, was opening a loneliness in Carter and Meredith that they would carry around forever. While reading a book to Carter, she pointed to the letter C, and said, “Remember this letter that looks like a sideways smile? What do you think that one is?” Then Carter said, “Mommy, I know! C says kuh. B says buh. D says duh. You know I know all them!” And Piper felt a rush of panic because she hadn’t known. If I missed this, she thought, what else have I missed?

  At about eight that evening, after Carter and Meredith were asleep, Elizabeth called. “I want you, Pipe. Just for a few minutes? Can I send Ginny over?”

  She wanted what she’d wanted many times before, the old promises: that Piper help Tom and the children to be happy, that Piper help Emma and Peter to remember her.

  She said two other things, new things.

  This: “I love you, and I know you, and you’re a different person than you think you are. Bigger and wilder and nicer. Your heart is the best heart in town. Can you please remember that?”

  And this: “I know some people want to be alone. But I want everyone there. I want everyone in the house when it happens. Tom, you, Kyle, Ginny, all the kids, my mom, Lena, if she can. I’ll know you’re all there. Even if I don’t seem to know, I’ll know.”

  As January began its gray, downward slide into February, Elizabeth began to die in earnest. It lasted three days. As she had wanted, they were all there. Even Kyle came every day after work and spent every night. Not for one second was Elizabeth alone.

  What Piper would remember, for the rest of her life, about those three days was the talking, a gold wire of hum running through the house, day and night. They talked to Elizabeth. They took turns. They read to her and sang to her. Tom lay down next to her and whispered the story of t
he births of both children. They wet her mouth with a damp sponge and touched her hair, her hands, her face. They comforted her. They coaxed her. Astrid sang her lullabies, hymns, and songs by Carly Simon, Roberta Flack, James Taylor. They assured her. They gave her permission to go. Peter threw himself down on the kitchen floor, kicked, and refused to see her, saying, “I don’t like her like that.” But later, when Piper came into the room to give Tom a break, she found Peter curled up like a cat at Elizabeth’s feet, his arms around both her ankles, as Tom told the story of the day he found out he was having a son.

  When Piper was entirely alone with Elizabeth, she gave her her secrets. The secret men, the lovers, all through college and until she’d met Kyle. She tried to articulate what she had never articulated before, even to herself: how it wasn’t about power, exactly, not having power over someone, anyway; how, despite what people said about girls who slept with a lot of men, she was sure it wasn’t pathological, a search for a lost father (her father was never truly lost, not even after his wife left him; he merely shrank) or a crazy need for attention (she’d always gotten plenty of attention). She had neither loathed nor disrespected herself. In all those years, she had never felt desperate, never, and even now, she didn’t feel ashamed.

  She’d liked it. She’d more than liked it. Each time, she’d felt in possession of a fierce, elemental beauty, lifted, intoxicated by tenderness, free. At the time she’d believed in a distinct difference between herself and the whole category of sluts, tramps, floozies whom she scorned openly and without mercy. Now, just now, as she spoke to Elizabeth, she began to doubt that difference. Not that she considered herself, retrospectively, a slut, but it occurred to her that maybe the others weren’t sluts either. Maybe they’d all had their reasons.

  “I’m sorry,” she told Elizabeth, “I don’t know why I never told you before.”

  Piper was not with Elizabeth when she died. Although it was midafternoon, she was sleeping in the overstuffed chair in the sunroom, dozing, but about to tumble headlong into real sleep when she heard Astrid call out, “Oh, God, she’s gone. Tom! Piper! She can’t be gone.”