Belong to Me

by Marisa de los Santos

  He almost dropped the hose, and then he looked down at his hand holding it, wanting to turn it off, to stop the noise and glitter of the water before his overloaded senses collapsed into chaos, but having no idea how. “Lift your thumb,” ordered a faint, tinny voice inside his head, “and don’t be a bonehead.” When he turned back to Clare, she was maybe six feet away, not a hologram or a mirage, but not exactly Clare either, a girl with a short khaki skirt and swinging hair and long brown legs, the kind of girl you wanted to look at forever but could never actually talk to. Dev only managed to look for a few seconds because he was distracted by his heart, which had turned into a woodpecker inside his chest and was banging away at his sternum. You are an idiot, he told himself. You are standing here frozen like a five-foot-eleven asshole garden gnome.

  When he looked up again, she was next to him and had coalesced completely into herself, Clare made manifest, regarding him from under her long, straight brows and smiling not only with her mouth, it seemed to Dev, but with her black eyelashes and the angles of her shoulders, and all the layers of brown inside her eyes.

  “Hey,” she said.

  “Hey.” It was like trying to stare at the sun. Dev dropped his gaze to the defunct hose, tossed the hose onto the grass, and wiped his hand on his shorts, but when he looked back at Clare, the idea of shaking her hand like she was the freaking president or somebody’s dad seemed totally insane. A hug was obviously the way to go, the only drawback being that if that much of him touched that much of her, his brain would explode. Still, not touching her was the most insane idea of all. Dev wished there were a leaf in Clare’s hair so that he could pull it out, and because this was, hands down, the corniest wish he’d ever wished in his life (and he’d wished some pretty corny things over the last seven months), he grinned and shook his head in disbelief.

  “What?” asked Clare.

  “I just—” said Dev. He shook his head again. “I just can’t believe you’re here.”

  “I can’t either.”

  “And the really weird thing is that I kind of don’t know what to do.”

  “Me, either. But you’re glad, right?” She blushed but kept her eyes on his. “I mean, I’m glad.”

  “Glad?” Dev pretended to think about it.

  Clare laughed, and Dev’s lungs pulled in their first real breath of the day. It had to be over eighty degrees out, but the air in Dev’s chest felt cool and sweet, almost Alpine. So maybe this is how we do it, he thought with relief. Joke around like normal human beings.

  Clare lifted her hand to slide her hair behind her ear and something sparkled, and, reflexively, Dev reached out and caught her hand on its way down, lightly, just letting it fall into his palm. Clare gave a small gasp, and the two of them stood still for a split second, looking at her hand, before Dev said, “What’s this?”

  “Looks like a hand,” said Clare.

  “Ha-ha,” said Dev. He touched the bracelet on her wrist, silver, with a single charm, a bird. “This.”

  “An eighth-grade graduation gift from my mom,” said Clare, “It’s a—” She paused.

  “Sparrow,” finished Dev, quietly. Clare-o the sparrow, Clare’s father’s name for her, the man who had left when she was two and died before he and Clare had really gotten to know each other.

  “Right,” said Clare, and the tiny catch of sadness in her voice unlatched something in Dev so that all the things he had stored up about Clare from their months of e-mailing—what hurt her and made her happy; the stuff she’d lost and hoped for; every small, interesting idea, everything funny and sad and specific and real—came rushing out to attach themselves to the girl who stood next to Dev in Mrs. Finney’s backyard. When he looked into her eyes next, he gave a start of recognition. He held her pretty hand—smooth on the outside, rough on the inside from field hockey and tennis—and saw the Clare he knew, the one who had figured out how to make her father part of her life, to love him even though he was dead and had never really, as far as she could tell, loved her.

  There you are, Dev thought, and it was suddenly the easiest thing in the world to keep holding Clare’s hand, walk with her over to the shade of Mrs. Finney’s back steps, and sit down beside her.

  They talked, about the wacky, brilliant Emily Dickinson poems they’d decided to read and discuss together (“Pretty geeky?” Dev had asked, after proposing the poetry plan; “Absolutely,” Clare had agreed, happily), about Lyssa in the hospital, and Clare’s mother’s engagement, and how a full month stretched out before them, clean and open, like new snow. They sat so close that their legs touched. Clare smelled like white soap and mint and something buttery, like caramel, although Dev wondered if he was just imagining that part because of the color of her skin.

  Dev loved talking to Clare, but all the time they talked, he looked at her and wondered what he had wondered before, about museum guards and Inuits: how you got used to so much beauty or if you ever did. Like how a person could just go about his ordinary life—salmon fishing, dogsled driving, or whatever—with the northern lights hanging in the sky above his head.

  Because you saturated sight, and I had no more eyes, Dev thought, suddenly, so that when he leaned in to kiss Clare, they were still there, Emily’s odd words and the giant, blazing curtains of auroral light, but two seconds in, and Dev wasn’t thinking about them anymore. He wasn’t thinking at all, really, was just aware of Clare’s mouth against his mouth, her cheek against his hand, and it wasn’t like the meeting of solar wind and a magnetic field or like electron entanglement or like a binary star or like any theory of relativity, special or general. There was matter, and there was energy, and something definitely happened to time, but Einstein was nowhere in sight, and it wasn’t like anything else in the world.

  After the kiss, they spent a few taut, silent seconds with their eyes locked, and just when it all threatened to feel like too much, Clare’s face blossomed into a total reflection of how Dev felt: happy in a little-kid, verging-on-goofy way. Dev had to laugh at his own weirdness. He had just performed what could be considered the most adult act of his life so far, and here he was, feeling like a ten-year-old kid who had just gotten off an awesome roller coaster. Weirder still was that it didn’t seem weird, at all. It seemed like exactly the right way to feel.

  “Well, that was pretty great,” Clare said, knocking her shoulder against Dev’s.

  “You think?” he said, knocking her back.

  “What do you think?” she demanded.

  Dev scratched his head, then said, “I think it definitely did not suck.”

  “Thanks,” said Clare, rolling her eyes. “Remind me why I missed you so much.”

  He gathered a handful of her hair and tugged. He couldn’t stop smiling.

  “I missed you, too.”

  “Good.”

  “But being away from you isn’t that bad.”

  “That’s nice, Dev.”

  “No, I mean that being away from you isn’t as much like being away from a person as being away from most people is. If you get what I mean.”

  Clare tilted her head, one finger on her chin, considering this. “I think I do. Which is kind of scary.”

  “But you know what?”

  “Being with me is better?” She leaned forward, menacingly, until their foreheads were touching. “Choose your words carefully.”

  “Yes.”

  “Good choice.”

  With Clare’s mouth this close to his, it was impossible not to strongly consider kissing her again, even though Dev suspected that asking for anything more at this point might be interpreted (by God, the universe, whoever presided over these things) as a lack of appreciation for what had already happened, and Dev felt appreciative in every bone of his body. Still, Clare’s hair hung in glossy, sunlit curtains on either side of her face and the tips of their noses were almost touching, and the right thereness of Clare seemed to have a gravitational pull of its own (and, of course, technically, Clare did have such a pull, if you believed Sir
Isaac Newton), and Dev was just beginning to question who he was to argue with gravity when Clare said, “I’m supposed to be inviting you to lunch.”

  Dev leaned back a few inches. “What?”

  “I had strict instructions from Teo and Cornelia to bring you home for lunch. But I got distracted.”

  Dev smiled at this, but as soon as Clare said Teo’s name, the perfect moment ended, rounded itself off and detached itself, like a bubble from a wand, so that it floated a little distance away, self-contained and separate. Dev would find out later, and soon, that it wasn’t like a bubble at all. The memory of the kiss would turn out to be more like a marble, shining, rock hard, and durable, so that what would amaze Dev the most about that day was not how fast a good thing could go bad, but how a good thing could get tumbled around in a god-awful mess of confusion and anger, but stay clean and pure and whole in his mind. Something for him to keep.

  For now, Clare was still there, and Dev was still happy, but Dev’s secret had slid between them, so that now Dev saw Clare the way he’d been seeing everyone for days, as if he were looking at her through a pane of glass.

  He would tell her. He hated having a secret from her, and at least three times over the past week, he had even gotten as far as sitting down at his computer and beginning the e-mail. “Hey, Clare,” he’d written, “I figured something out about my dad,” or “I don’t know the right way to say this,” or “Here’s my latest theory,” even though he didn’t really consider it just a theory anymore. Dev had known that he could hit delete, bail out on the e-mail at any time, and probably would, but, still, he never could bring himself to get any further than the opening sentence. Dev was scared and not just of telling Clare. He was other things besides scared, too, and he hadn’t even come close to sorting out everything he felt, but he saw it straight ahead, inches away, the point of no return, the end of life as he knew it, and he was scared the way he hadn’t been scared in years and years, the kind of scared that made you want to put your hands over your ears, squeeze your eyes shut, and wait for it to be over.

  “We should probably go,” Clare was saying. “Toby’ll be there any minute with his new baby.”

  “No,” said Dev, more sharply than he meant to. “I mean, I can’t. My mom.”

  “Shoot,” said Clare, crestfallen. “I thought this was one of the Saturdays she worked.”

  “She does,” said Dev, “but when she comes home between shifts, she wants me to be there.” This was not technically a lie, and there was no way he could sit down at a table with Teo and Cornelia and act like everything was normal, but in the beam of Clare’s guileless brown gaze, Dev felt like a world-class jerk. I’m sorry, he thought, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, squeezing Clare’s hand. “But, hey, can you come over later?”

  Clare brightened.

  “Aidan’s coming over, and there’s, like, this thing I want to tell you both.”

  “Oh.” Clare looked startled, then she smiled. “Okay, Mr. Mysterious. I bet I could come over for a little while before dinner. I need to meet my friend Aidan in the flesh, don’t I?”

  Dev laughed. The last time Clare had called, Aidan had insisted on talking to her. And talking to her and talking to her and talking to her.

  Clare stood up, pulling Dev up after her. When they stood face-to-face, she hugged him.

  “Oh, Dev,” she whispered. Then, she smiled. Then, she was gone.

  Dev began at the beginning. He hadn’t planned to. He had planned to begin with the phone call from his grandmother, and beginning at the beginning—with his mother, who never went to Brown, at Brown—meant covering ground he had already covered with both Aidan and Clare, but he needed to walk them through his process, step by step (and that’s how it seemed, like a journey, a trek through the freaking Amazon with squawking monkeys swinging by and poison-dart frogs stuck to every tree), so that they could understand. Maybe more than that, he needed his friends to be with him amid all the lies and truth because he felt alone. It was funny how, until this past year, Dev had felt alone basically all the time without caring much or even really noticing, but now alone hurt. Alone felt a lot like lost.

  He was nervous, at first, but only until he remembered who Aidan and Clare were, that, as they sat listening (and he loved their identical careful, leaning-in, dark-eyed, serious listening), they were themselves, people Dev knew and who knew him, people he loved and who loved him, although none of them had ever said the word “love.” It was the same kind of remembering that had happened earlier that day with Clare’s bracelet and her voice saying, “Right,” and somewhere in the back of Dev’s brain, a thought flickered, that maybe this would be the key to dealing with everything that would come: to hold people (Teo, Lake, Cornelia) in his mind in their entirety, to resist every impulse to turn them into ideas, to keep them specific no matter what.

  But that thought could wait. Dev had a story to tell.

  When he got to the part about the phone call, the telling got hard. Just thinking about that day still made Dev feel beat up and sad. After he had exchanged promises with his grandmother—she would not tell his mother she’d talked to Dev; Dev would call her again soon—and hung up, Dev had started to shake like something out of The Call of the Wild, like he was freezing to death, and he’d pulled his knees to his chest and put his head down, but the shaking hadn’t stopped. Each lie his mother had told him felt raw, sticky, like a burn, and for the rest of the week, he’d done everything he could not to be alone with her because every single ordinary thing she did or said made him realize even more how much he had lost. The mother he had lived with for fourteen years was gone, and even though she had never truly been the person he’d thought she was, she had been that person to him. He missed her. He hated her for taking herself away from him, but he missed her more than he hated her, and he hated that, too.

  Dev was sitting on the living room rug, and now, as he started to slowly re-create the phone call for Clare and Aidan, he realized he’d pulled up his legs and wrapped his arms around them as though the shaking might come back, and, fleetingly, he felt mad enough to punch something. He didn’t want to be this person, vulnerable and folded in on himself and afraid. Before this, he’d been strong. He’d been happy. Disgustedly, he unfolded his arms and leaned back on them, stretching out his legs like a guy on the sidelines of a pickup game or a kid just hanging out with his friends.

  He had already told them about the basketball playing, Teo in his ratty Princeton T-shirt, and, maybe because this seemed like an aside more than a vital part of the story, they both spoke for the first time since Dev had started talking. Clare had said, smiling, “Whenever people mention Teo’s wardrobe choices, Cornelia says this quote from William James, ‘Wisdom is knowing what to ignore.’” Then she’d added, proudly, “But, yep, that’s Teo: Princeton, then Stanford medical school.” Aidan had shaken his head sympathetically and said, “If only the guy were good looking, he might have a chance in this world.” And part of Dev had wanted to stop right there, just leave the rest alone, but the weight of needing to tell them sat in his chest like cement. Just do it, he told himself, do it fast.

  He did. Quickly, in a flat voice, the way some kids read out loud in class, Dev recounted the conversation. There was no need to point out Lake’s lies. He watched each one register on Clare’s and Aidan’s faces; he felt each one knock the wind out of him all over again. Iowa, Teddy, Brown. Dev looked at his friends, their surprise and sympathy deepening, their worry for him growing bigger the longer he talked, and it occurred to him that probably in the history of the world, no one had ever loved two people as much as he loved them. He held their gaze all through the part about Teddy and his family (“three boys of his own”) living in Blake’s Tavern, even through the part when his grandmother said Lake had picked Teddy, and Dev had asked, “What do you mean, picked?”

  Then Dev stopped. His mouth felt like a desert. He looked straight at Clare, swallowed hard
, and began, “Clare. Please.”

  “What, Dev?” she said. “What can I do?”

  Please don’t get hurt, he wanted to say. Please don’t freak out. And then he thought, Please don’t hate Teo, which surprised him because why should he worry about Teo? But Dev just dropped his head, stared at his knees, and told the rest.

  When no one said anything, he looked up. Aidan’s and Clare’s faces hadn’t changed.

  Aidan said, “Yo, I know it looks bad for your mom, but I bet she just wanted to leave that old life behind.”

  Clare nodded and said, “I bet she started telling people all that stuff before you were even born, and by the time you got old enough to ask questions, that was the story she was used to. Maybe she didn’t really decide to lie to you.”

  Dev stared at them, confused. No one was freaking out. They were consoling him about Lake, both of them. How had that happened?

  A grin shot across Aidan’s face. “Dude, you have a grandma! Pretty cool, right?”

  “Yeah,” said Dev, uncertainly.

  There was a short silence. Then, Clare said, softly, “So what now? There’s this new guy out there somewhere, right?”

  “You think you’ll look for him?” asked Aidan. “I know you said you were done with that, but we were looking for the wrong guy. It’s, like, your dad could be right next door.”

  They both sat there, waiting for Dev’s answer. His stomach clenched. Oh, no. Oh, shit. They didn’t get it. He had laid everything out for them, and they hadn’t figured it out. It’s because of Teo, Dev understood. In their minds, Teo was so not a guy who could do what Dev’s father had done that they couldn’t even see what was right in front of them.

  Dev took a deep breath. “No. Listen. He’s not right next door, but I know where he is. So do you. Think about it.”

  Then Aidan blinked and it was like someone hit a switch and threw a spotlight on his face. He stuck both hands on the top of his head and blew out a silent whistle.