“Princeton,” said Aidan. “The guy was going to med school. Aw, man.”
Dev nodded.
“So hold up, this is not a coincidence, right? Your mom made friends with Cornelia on purpose to, what? Like, check them out?”
“That’s what I think,” said Dev, but he wasn’t looking at Aidan anymore. He was watching Clare shake her head and sink back into the sofa cushions, farther and farther back, with a look on her face that told him that no matter how far she backed away from Dev, it wouldn’t be far enough.
Dev stood up. “Clare.”
Clare’s wide, blazing eyes broke Dev’s heart.
“You’re wrong.” She said the words through gritted teeth.
“Clare,” Dev said, pleading, “I know it sounds crazy, but it makes sense.”
“You are wrong,” she repeated.
He took a step toward her, and she put up her hand.
“Don’t.” Then she was on her feet, breathing hard. “Teo would never do that. You don’t know him. He would never get a girl pregnant and then leave her, just dump her like she was nothing.”
“I thought about that,” said Dev, gently. “But this was a long time ago. He was, like, a kid. He was on his way to med school.”
Clare leaned toward him, her fists clenched at her sides. “Never. He would never do it.” She turned her back and started to cry. Dev watched her shoulders quake and put out his hand to stop them, but the second he touched her, she wheeled around.
“You just want to belong to them,” she hissed. “Your mother’s a liar and your father didn’t want you, and you think you can just take Teo and Cornelia away.”
Dev stumbled backward, as though she’d hit him. He had known Clare would be upset, but it had never even occurred to him that she would be mad at him. How could he have been so stupid as to worry about her hating Teo? Tears covered Clare’s face, and she was seething with rage—he could almost feel it, coming off her like heat—and she didn’t hate Teo. She hated him.
“He would never keep a secret like that from Cornelia,” gasped Clare. “Penny is Teo’s baby.”
Clare looked down at the floor, trying to stop crying, to bring her breathing back to normal. When she looked up at Dev, her eyes held a balance of anger and sadness that was worse than the awful rage, worse than anything Dev had ever seen.
“How could you do this?” she asked him.
“Wait,” said Dev. He would try to explain, even though he knew it was too late, even though he had already lost her. “This is something that happened to me. I just put the pieces together because they were there. I didn’t want any of it to happen. I didn’t do this.”
“You still think you’re right? Did you ever think that maybe you could be wrong about something?” She turned to Aidan. “Will you take me home? Please.”
Aidan looked from Dev to Clare, then nodded. Clare turned her back. Aidan squeezed Dev’s shoulder on his way out. Then there was the terrible sound of the front door slamming, and Dev was alone.
In the end, it seemed easiest just to get on his bike. Dev didn’t want to do anything, had zero desire to act at all, but sitting around the house with a stomachache, staring at walls, felt too pathetic and too much like waiting, either for something good that would never happen—an e-mail, a phone call, Clare at the door, God showing up with his beard and sandals to say, “Just kidding”—or for the big, unknown next, the fallout, the equal and opposite reaction—about which, uncharacteristically, Dev was too anxious to even feel curious.
So he pumped up his tires, jammed on his helmet, and took off toward the steepest hills in town. It turned out to be the right move. Between the mean heat of the sun, the weekend traffic, and his burning leg muscles, Dev had no energy for real thinking. Clare showed up a few times inside his head with her sorrowful, furious eyes, but Dev shook her away and kept moving.
When he got home, the sun squatted low and orange in the sky, Dev was stiff, drenched in sweat, and thirstier than he’d ever been in his life. He poured out and gulped down glass after glass of water, thinking nothing but “replenish,” a lush, wet word he had always liked, a semi-onomatopoeia. Thinking the word was like riding his bike, a way of getting the old Dev back, not the one he’d been before that morning, but the one he’d been back in California, when solitude was business as usual, his best bet.
But his heartbeat when he saw the message light blinking told him that he had a long way to go, or, even worse, that the distance between the past and present Devs was cavernous, unbridgeable, even if he traveled at light speed.
There was no voice mail from Clare. There was one from Aidan, saying he was coming over tomorrow after breakfast, and one from Lake. Dev held the phone away from his ear, but he could still hear Lake’s rasping, familiar voice, checking in, teasing him about Clare, telling him she would see him tonight, signing off with “Miss you, Devvy.” For a hard few seconds, Dev thought that message would be his undoing, the last straw, but he squeezed his eyes shut and told himself, “No, no, no, no, no,” until the tide rising under his ribs subsided, so that it turned out not to be the last straw after all. Dev figured that it had to be the next-to-last, though, the penultimate straw, so even though it was eight thirty and even though Dev had not skipped a meal in forever, he cut his losses, chose the most abstract, challenging, least-connected-to-the-human-world book he owned (one on chaos theory, dense and bristling with math), and went to bed.
He didn’t want to see his mother, so he read for a while and turned off the light. In the dark, the blowup with Clare came back to him, not once, but over and over, like waves on a beach, cresting and crashing, so that when Lake came into his room and said his name, he was wide awake and had to hold himself still and force his breathing to slow until she went away. All night, he felt restless and strange, almost hallucinatory, as if he had a fever, and then, maybe an hour before the sun came up, he searched around for the memory of Mrs. Finney’s yard, found it, and let himself move through it in slow, almost real, time, until he was remembering Clare’s hug, how her arms around him had felt amazing and, at the same time, natural, even familiar, and right at that second, he allowed himself to consider, for the very first time, the possibility that she wasn’t gone for good. Maybe she didn’t hate him. Maybe she would remember who he was, and maybe she would come back.
When Aidan showed up, Dev was pretending not to be watching his mother. He was sitting on the sofa with his chaos-theory book, chomping his way through his third brioche from the bag Rafferty had brought over that morning, but over the edge of his book, he was watching Lake. She sat with Rafferty at the little glass-topped table on the back deck drinking iced coffee, barefoot, in a long, loose, faded blue cotton dress with her hair knotted and twisted and stuck through with chopsticks, and she appeared 100 percent relaxed, an uncommon state for Lake, historically speaking, but one Dev had seen her in a lot lately.
I wonder if she loved him, thought Dev, meaning Teo. He wondered if Lake had ever sat, laughing, with one foot casually resting on Teo’s knee. He wondered if they’d ever made a world out of just their two selves and their small, familiar touches and their conversation. It didn’t matter, of course, but Dev wondered anyway.
He was still wondering and watching when Aidan knocked, and, at the sound, he jumped up so fast that his book went flying. He felt as if he’d been caught shoplifting or cheating on a test, neither of which he’d ever actually done in real life.
“Come in,” he shouted, picking up the book and putting it on the coffee table.
To Dev’s vast relief, Aidan didn’t give Dev any searching looks or approach him like Dev might spontaneously combust, the way some people would have. He walked in and his eyes went straight to the white paper bakery bag.
“What?” asked Aidan, pointing. “Doughnuts, bagels, what? I haven’t eaten since breakfast.”
“It’s eight forty-five,” said Dev.
“Like I said,” said Aidan.
Dev tossed Aidan a brioc
he, which he handily caught and then held close to his face, squinting.
“A bun in a hat,” he said, finally. “Great.”
“It’s a brioche, from some new French bakery down the street.”
Aidan bit the topknot off the brioche and with his mouth full said, “Who are you, Josephine Baker?” which made Dev laugh a creaky laugh, the first one in what felt like decades.
Aidan sat on the rug, polishing off the rest of the brioche.
“So, you ready to spring Lyssa out of the insane asylum?”
“Tomorrow, right?” said Dev, although he’d completely forgotten about this. “And I don’t think you’re supposed to call it that.”
Aidan shrugged. “I’m looking forward to the car ride more than anything. Two hours with Mr. and Mrs. Sorenson.”
Dev had talked to Lyssa in the hospital twice and had been surprised both times by how normal she sounded. Lyssa-normal, but still, she hadn’t sounded drugged or depressed or like someone who would swallow a bottle of pills. During the second conversation, she’d even been chewing gum, which Dev had found especially reassuring. Lyssa had made him promise that he and Aidan would be there on the day she got discharged.
“Some people bring gifts,” she had said, her gum cracking away, “flowers and whatnot. But don’t go overboard.”
Now, Dev asked Aidan, “Did you get her a present?”
“My mom ordered her flowers. They can be from both of us. And I thought we could throw in a copy of The Bell Jar.”
“Nice,” said Dev. “Why do you think she wants us to come?”
“She likes us. I think she needs us.”
“She must be desperate if she needs us.”
“Well, she did try to commit suicide,” Aidan pointed out.
Dev laughed again and this time it sounded less like the laugh of a ninety-year-old man than the first laugh had.
Then Aidan brushed the crumbs off his shirt and looked Dev in the eye. “She didn’t say anything. On the ride home. Not that you asked.”
“Nothing?”
“Thank you. And she said I seemed like a very nice person.”
“Maybe you should ask her out.”
“Who says I didn’t?”
“She didn’t say she hates me?”
“Look. She was mad, okay? She was, like, startled. But no woman flies that far off the handle unless she has some strong feelings for you.”
“Hatred is a strong feeling,” said Dev, but he felt hope pop its head up fast, like a Whac-a-Mole, and he didn’t try to crush it.
“Trust me. That girl is smitten.”
Dev winced. “Please tell me you’re quoting your great-aunt Gertrude.”
“Hold on. ‘Smitten’ is a cool word.”
“You know it rhymes with kitten, right?”
Aidan made a face as if he were about to ask Dev something.
“What?” asked Dev.
“Never mind. You probably don’t want to talk about it.”
“When does that stop you?”
“You’re right. Okay, so I get that you’re shaken up.” Aidan darted a glance out the sliding glass door. “Your mom lying. The whole paternal-discovery thing. Clare going totally ballistic.”
“Thanks for listing all that.”
“But have you thought about—” Aidan shook his head. “Probably not. Forget it.”
“Just say it.”
“Well, there’s a silver-lining factor, right? I mean, Teo. Did you ever consider that, dadwise, he might be pretty awesome?”
Dev didn’t answer right away. “I guess. Yeah. But I didn’t spend a lot of time on it. He has a family, you know? He has, like, this perfect life. And he never tried to find me.”
“He might have. Your mom changed her name when she married Teddy.”
“Come on,” said Dev. “There are private investigators. There’s the Internet. Anyone can find anyone.”
“So maybe he didn’t try. That doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be glad to see you now. You’re an okay kid.”
“Thanks.”
“Seriously. You’re not that bright, but you don’t totally suck at basketball.” Aidan dropped the joking tone, and said, “Are you planning to, uh, mention this to your mom anytime soon? If I were you, I probably would have, like, staged a major confrontation as soon as I found out.”
Dev groaned. “I know. I thought I’d do that, too, and then, I just didn’t. I mean, yeah, I know I have to talk to her about it, but it’s like I want to sometimes and other times, I just want to forget the whole thing. Because it’s hard to picture how it would work. What? Teo and Lake would, like, raise me together? She’d call him and say, ‘Uh, Dev won’t do his homework. Could you come talk to him?’ I don’t think so.”
“I don’t either because you love homework.” Aidan shrugged. “I don’t know, but maybe you guys could work it out.”
“Probably not. I’ve been thinking that my mom and I should just leave. It would suck to leave, but maybe we should. Rafferty could come with us, maybe.”
Before Aidan could start talking Dev out of this idea, someone knocked at the door, and Dev’s stupid heart started pounding for about the thirty thousandth time in twenty-four hours.
“You look,” said Dev, hoarsely. “Sneak over and look out the peephole, and tell me if it’s her.”
Aidan ducked and headed for the door. When he put his eye to the peephole, Dev heard him whisper, “Holy shit.”
“It’s Clare,” said Dev.
Aidan turned toward him with saucer eyes and said, “It’s all of them.”
EIGHTEEN
Cornelia
Here is how I remember it.
The glass bowl of fruit salad is cool between my hands. Aidan opens the door, and we step through it and Dev’s face is all wrong, aghast. Nothing moves but his gray-blue eyes; they dart from me to Teo to Clare to Aidan.
“Are we—early?” I ask.
Dev opens his mouth, but nothing comes out.
Aidan says, “Sort of.” I know he isn’t making a joke. He is simply the kind of boy who answers when an adult asks a question.
Then, there is the shoosh of the sliding glass door opening and Lake steps through, talking to someone over her shoulder.
“Wait till you hear the rest. You won’t be—” She turns, sees us, and stops walking, as though she has smacked into an invisible wall. Her eyes find Teo and widen with what looks like (but could not be; how could it be?) fear.
For a few seconds, the six of us stand, caught in stasis, the air charged with confusion and shock, Teo, Clare, and I frozen with our hands full, like the magi in a wooden nativity. Champagne, stargazer lilies, fruit salad.
Then Teo’s voice says this: “Ronnie?”
I turn my head to look at my husband, who is looking at Lake.
Before Lake can correct him, Clare’s voice, tremulous and wire thin, says, “You know her?”
A Braxton Hicks contraction begins to tighten its grip around my middle. It has been happening for weeks, my body’s rehearsals for the big event. Aidan takes the fruit salad out of my hands.
I catch my breath and say, “Clare. Teo. Did you dip into the champagne on the way over or what? This”—I make a flourish with my hand in Lake’s direction—“is Lake.”
“Hold on,” says Teo, still looking at Lake, “Ronnie Larrabee, right? We went to college together.”
I smile apologetically at Lake. “Teo. Honey,” I say, with exaggerated slowness, “you’re mistaken. Lake’s name is Lake, and she went to Brown, where you did not go. Lake, please tell this delusional man what’s what.”
Somewhere in the middle of this, a sound like a sob breaks from the direction of Clare. Her face is stricken. Her hand is over her mouth.
“Hey,” I say to Clare, confused, and suddenly, a voice is slicing the air, a voice so shot through with bitterness that I almost don’t recognize it.
“Go ahead, Mom. Tell us what’s what. How you went to Brown and you’re from Iowa and my dad�
�s name is Teddy Tremain.”
Automatically, Teo reaches for me, his hand circling my wrist, and I know he understands what I understand: something terrible is happening.
Lake moans, presses a hand to the center of her body, and wilts, her eyes on her son’s furious face. “Oh, Devvy. How did you—?”
“How did I what, Mom?” I know that the sound of his voice is breaking his mother’s heart, because he isn’t even my child and it is breaking mine.
Then Dev rips his glare from his mother and turns it on Teo. “What about you, Teo?” He almost spits the name, which makes no sense at all. Oh, no, I think, no, and then Clare is saying it, yelling it.
“No! Dev, stop!”
“Why don’t you tell us how you know my mom, Teo?” Dev is starting to cry now, slapping away tears, and I feel a rush of sympathy for him because it is awful to be fourteen and crying in front of a roomful of people.
I put my hand over Teo’s, the one that holds my wrist, and look up at his baffled face. “Teo?”
“We dated. Toward the end of my senior year. For a little while. That’s all.”
Dev shakes his head. “That is not all. Tell me the rest.”
“That’s enough, Dev,” says Lake.
“No, Mom. It’s not enough. Don’t you get it? I need to hear the rest.”
Then Clare’s arms are around me, and she is saying she is sorry. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. Let’s go home. Please.” She begins to pull on my arm.
I shake her off and say, “Look. Someone needs to tell me what’s going on.”
“Mom,” demands Dev (how can this be Dev?), turning the word into a harsh bark.
After an empty moment, Lake draws in a breath and says, drearily, “Okay, Dev. Okay.” She turns to me, then. “Teo’s right. We knew each other at Princeton. We dated for maybe three weeks.”
“Why,” I ask Lake, “did you never tell me that?”
Another Braxton Hicks starts its slow squeeze, and Clare sets the lilies on the floor and brings a chair from the dining room. I want to stay standing, with everyone else, but heavily, as deliberately as a Galápagos tortoise—it is the way I do everything these days—I lower myself into the chair.
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