The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

  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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Taisy

  THE 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 b
lank-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.

  “Ma
y 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.”