The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

  “I guess Willow forgot to unlock it before she went to school,” she murmured.

  “Don’t you have the key?”

  She turned her face away.

  “No. Wilson used to, but now Willow does.”

  This wasn’t an explanation (what grown woman doesn’t have a key to her own studio?), but I said, “I see,” and because she was just standing there, looking so wilted and downcast, I gave her a light punch on the shoulder and said, “Race you to the patio!”

  Caro gave me a startled glance, said, “Aw, no thanks, Eustacia,” in the same defeated voice, dropped her mug into the grass, and took off like a shot. The woman was faster than I ever would’ve suspected and had the advantage of not being barefoot, but I made a pretty good push there at the end, and we hit the edge of the patio in what I swear was a photo finish.

  The coffee cake was thick with apple chunks and so buttery it was damp. There was milk instead of cream for the coffee, which is what I like. The orange juice was fresh and made me think of Trillium the way everything to do with oranges always does. As Caro and I sat eating, sunlight sluiced the yard; the sky went aquamarine; the trees and bushes kindled against it; and there was just no way on earth not to be filled with a sense of expansiveness and well-being.

  Which is maybe why when Caro asked me if I’d seen any of my old friends since I’d arrived in town, I said, “No, but I’m thinking of looking up Ben Ransom.”

  There were a host of excellent, rock-solid reasons for me not to have said this, ever, to Caro. For one thing, the topic of Ben Ransom was my hallowed ground, not to be trod casually with a near stranger. For another, the story of our breakup—and Caro’s husband’s heartless role in it—was still, after all these years, tender as a new bruise. And for a third, I was sure that Caro had heard some version of the Ben part of my life that was so Wilson-twisted as to be horribly unflattering to me and, what was much more important, to Ben. But somehow right then, none of that mattered. I said his name, released it into the air of the yard, and it felt so lovely to have it there, hovering in the bright sky like something weightless and winged.

  As it turned out, Caro knew almost nothing about Ben—let alone the crashing end we’d come to at Wilson’s hands—either that or she was awfully good at pretending, but she didn’t seem at all like a person who would be. Probably Wilson had not thought the story was important enough or he had not wanted to sully his new family with sordid tales of his first one. But I told her about Ben anyway, not about the breakup, but about him. Frankly, she was the best listener I had ever met, better even than Trillium, who would sometimes catch hold of a random sentence I’d spoken and run with it, tugging the conversation in a wild direction, before I was really finished. Better even than Ben himself, who used to give me so much space to speak that he was almost too quiet at times, too hands off. Caro nudged, prompted, questioned, all with clear-eyed interest and a pliant receptivity. I would’ve bet that this was the same way she made her art—gently bending and shaping, staying watchful, taking her cues from the glass itself.

  “What made him special?” she asked, at one point, so I told her how, for Valentine’s Day, instead of candy, he gave me a box of heart-shaped things: stones, shells, leaves he’d collected back in the fall and pressed inside a dictionary. I told her how I’d be studying and find, highlighted on a page of my book, words or parts of words and phrases that together made funny sentences, like “It is the best year for elephant fishing” or “Put a big, blue beetle in your milk.” I told her how he worshipped Carl Linnaeus and was crazy for the names of things, and how when we’d go hiking, he would hand them over to me, like weird little gifts. A bumblebee became Bombus pensylvanicus. A robin became Turdus migratorius. The foamy yellow stuff in the dirt became “dog vomit slime mold.”

  “Yes,” said Caro, with a touch of impatience. “Those things are beautiful, partly because he knew you’d like them before you knew. But they’re extras. What was essential?”

  No one had ever asked me this question before.

  “It wasn’t just that I could be myself around him,” I said, carefully. “It was that I couldn’t not. I couldn’t tell half-truths or dissemble or tell white lies or overdramatize, all of which pretty well describes how I interacted with other boyfriends. I mean, it was high school. One day, Ben asked me to make a pact with him to never say anything we didn’t mean.”

  I remembered this moment so clearly. We were at Ben’s house doing math, sitting at opposite sides of the kitchen table, and his dad was cooking. Bolognese sauce simmered on the stove, and bread was baking, and if there is a heaven, I swear it will smell exactly like that kitchen, and Ben’s dad was singing while he cooked, the way he always did, which was loudly, badly, and with unconstrained joy. I’m pretty sure it was “Kodachrome,” but it might have been anything off The Essential Paul Simon. Anyway, he hit a wrong note, and Ben and I looked at each other, like we always did at the especially bad singing moments, and Ben said, just the way he’d say anything, not especially solemnly, “How about we promise to never, ever say anything to each other that we don’t mean? Not even if it seems like a small lie and not even if we think it would make the other person happy to hear it.”

  I put down my calculator, sat up straight, and considered his proposal.

  “What if it’s something that we’re ninety percent sure we mean but we’re not a hundred percent sure?” I said. It seemed important to completely nail down the details.

  “Right. We say that. We don’t just fudge that last ten percent. Ever. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I said.

  I stretched my hand across the books and papers, and we shook on it.

  “It was the easiest promise I ever made,” I told Caro.

  “You kept it?” she asked. “Both of you?”

  “Yes.”

  “How extraordinary,” she said. “No wonder he was the love of your life.”

  At no time had I ever said to her that Ben was the love of my life. Apart from Trillium, I’d never told anyone that, although I figured my mom and Marcus knew it without being told. It took me aback, frankly, how—just like that, without fanfare, in the same tone she’d used to say the coffee cake had apples in it—Caro had pronounced one of the great truths of my life. I could hear Marcus in my head, mad at her presumptuousness, her overstepping, saying, “Jesus, Taize, she doesn’t even know you,” and, for a few seconds, I considered getting indignant. But what was the point?

  “I know,” was all I said, and the two of us sat there with that between us. After a few seconds, though, shyness hit me, and I looked around, searching for something else to say.

  “This yard is perfect, you know,” I said. “Really beautiful.”

  Caro smiled. “Thank you, although I don’t think I followed any of the rules of garden layout. This place is just the product of my whim.”

  “Are there rules of garden layout?”

  She laughed. “See, that’s something I should know, and I have no idea! But all the colors are mixed up, and fancy flowers are cheek-by-jowl with lowbrow ones. Those sunflowers by the pool house, for instance, I think have no business here at all, they’re so big and gangly, but I adore sunflowers, the really towering ones. Wilson thinks they’re awful.”

  Thunk. Into the middle of our morning, there plopped Wilson. I stiffened, but Caro didn’t seem to notice.

  “But I remind him,” she went on, “that he left the yard to me. Well, all except the front yard. He oversaw the planting of all those—” She broke off.

  “Willows,” I finished. “Willows for Willow.”

  Caro nodded, reddening. “Yes, right after she was born.”

  There was a silence, during which we both looked into our cups of coffee.

  Then, Caro said, “I think he fell in love with willow trees when he was a teenager at Banfield. Apparently, they had some huge, old ones on the campus.”

  I was so busy trying (and failing) to imagine Wilson, my father, falling in love with
trees that it took a moment for me to realize what else she had said. I lifted my eyes from my coffee.

  “Banfield?”

  “Academy,” she said, distractedly, fiddling with her fork.

  Banfield Academy.

  I stared at Caro with a shock that she didn’t register because she was gazing absently at what was left of her cake, and as I watched her, a thought dawned. I considered the patio table set for two. I considered the little porcelain pitcher of milk and recalled that just the day before, I had mentioned to her that I liked milk instead of cream or half-and-half in my coffee. Caro’s invitation to breakfast had seemed impromptu, but was it possible that the entire morning, beginning with the ballet barre, had been leading up to this revelation? And if it had, why? “Don’t be stupid,” I could hear Marcus say. “She’s Wilson’s minion for life. It was just another of her brain-dead episodes.” But I wasn’t so sure.

  Caro took another bite of coffee cake and smiled up at the treetops. Her expression was unreadable, as smooth as glass.

  BANFIELD ACADEMY TURNED OUT to be in New Jersey, not far from Princeton, which meant it was only an hour and a half away, and somehow this floored me, not just that Wilson’s school was so close, but that it had been there all along, while Marcus and I had been growing up on Linvilla Road, totally oblivious to its existence. You’d think we would have sensed it, I thought, which was obviously ridiculous. Still, I couldn’t shake the proximity eeriness. It was like discovering that the neighbor who’d lived down the road from you your entire childhood was actually a secret agent. Okay, maybe it wasn’t exactly like that, but it was unsettling all the same.

  I decided to go, of course. Wilson would have been outraged at the very idea, but for once, his opinion was irrelevant to me. I was interested neither in obeying nor defying him; I just wanted to be in a place that had been Wilson’s before he was Wilson. When I told Marcus this, he said, “Wilson was always Wilson. Trust me on this.”

  “No, no,” I told him. “Think about it: Wilson is fundamentally un-young; a fourteen-year-old Wilson is a physical impossibility. Like a giant microbe. Or a tiny blue whale. He had to have been someone else at some point.”

  “You’re wrong. But that’s okay. You should definitely check out the school anyway. Take pictures. Get copies of his report cards, especially the bad ones. Come back wearing a Banfield sweatshirt.”

  “You’re evil.”

  “Hell, buy him his own Banfield sweatshirt. And one for the Spawn. Jeez, don’t forget one for the Spawn!”

  Even though I knew Wilson would never allow me to put Banfield Academy in the book, I looked forward to visiting it and embarking, for once, on a real quest for information. So far, my research for the book had consisted of two breathtakingly boring phone conversations with other scientists in his field who were happy to use the subject of Wilson’s brilliant scientific work as a launching pad for a description of their own; five e-mails to set up phone calls; and one lunch with a former student of Wilson’s, a woman in her thirties who called him, with tears in her eyes, “my mentor” and waxed lyrical about his support and kindness in a way that should’ve warmed my heart but that instead made me feel like crap. How was it that he could be so generous to everyone but me, my mother, and Marcus?

  In any case, I was chomping at the bit to uncover something beyond hero worship. So the morning after my breakfast with Caro, I donned my standard grown-up, semiboring, professional, trust-inspiring outfit (camel-colored pants, black suede ballet flats, a black cashmere sweater, and a string of pearls), slid the documents giving me access to Wilson’s personal records into my professional, trust-inspiring red leather satchel, programmed my car’s GPS with the address of Banfield Academy, and hit the road.

  My GPS had a clipped, aristocratic way of giving me instructions that I found nigh impossible to disobey (my old boyfriend Leo had dubbed the voice “Robo Hepburn”), but when it came time to turn right onto the highway, I ignored the voice, kept going straight, then went left, then right until, before I knew it, I was pulling into the gravel parking lot of Ransom’s Garden World. As much as I’d considered what I would do when I got there—and that wasn’t much at all—I figured I would sit in my car for a few minutes and just soak the place in.

  But while I was doing just that, I couldn’t help myself. If it were only the beauty that called me—and it was all so sumptuously pretty, so abundant, with heaped brilliance everywhere, every pot running over with an exuberance of saturated golds, velvety greens, dusky magentas and pinks, and every shade of orange—mums, dahlias, succulents, sedum, ornamental peppers and cabbages, gourds tucked here and there, vines cascading over every edge—I might have been able to resist, however regretfully. But the trouble was that I saw Mr. Ransom, Ben’s dad, in all of it, in every display, every pot—his sensibility, his eye, his touch, his humor, his kindness, if that makes any sense—and I missed him so sharply that, after a couple of minutes, I was scrambling out of my car to find him.

  He was in the back lot, behind the cottage shop, pushing a wheelbarrow full of rich black soil. I remembered that soil, so dark and luscious-looking you wanted to eat it. Because I saw him before he saw me, I had a moment to really take him in, and what I saw hurt. He looked like someone who had been through a hellish time, scarecrow thin inside his plaid shirt and gardening apron and old, so old, more than seventeen years’ worth of old, his face under his Ransom’s cap not so much lined as crumpled.

  When he saw me, confusion crossed his face, vanished, and he went completely still. So did I. I wanted to run right over to him, but I felt suddenly nervous. Without a word, carefully, Mr. Ransom let go of the wheelbarrow handles, took off his gloves, tossed them onto the mound of soil, walked closer to me, and said, his voice tinged with amazement, “Taisy.”

  “Hi, Mr. Ransom,” I said.

  He took off his hat and stuffed it in his apron pocket. I wanted to run and hug him, but I wasn’t sure if he’d want me to. He had always liked me a lot, made me feel welcome every second I’d been in his life, but I knew he loved nobody like he loved Ben. It had been one of my favorite things about him. And I was the person who’d stomped on Ben’s heart and—or so it must have seemed to Mr. Ransom—left without a backward glance.

  “Well, it’s nice to see you. Are you home or just passing through?”

  “Visiting, I guess,” I said. I gazed around me and breathed in the smell of the place. “But right this second, it kind of feels like being home.”

  He smiled. “You always did like this place.”

  I realized I was right on the edge of crying. More than I didn’t want this man to hate me, I didn’t want him—I could not bear for him—to think it had been easy for me to walk away from him or his store or his son. I burst out with, “I looked back.”

  Mr. Ransom said, nodding, “Oh.” But he was just being nice. He stopped nodding. “Actually, I’m not sure what you mean.”

  My face was hot. My eyes stung.

  “I know it probably looked like I just walked away and never looked back, but I want you to know I looked back all the time.”

  His face softened. “I never thought anything else,” he said.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t keep in touch.”

  Mr. Ransom held up his hand to stop me. “Hey, it was a long time ago. And you sent me that note once you were settled in down south, which meant a lot. I guess I never told you that, though.”

  He didn’t apologize for this, and I didn’t expect him to. I knew why he hadn’t written back; he was too busy being up to his ears in the mess I’d left behind. I can only imagine how long it had taken him to forgive me for what I’d done—if he’d forgiven me at all. I wondered if he knew about the flood of letters I’d sent Ben. I hoped so, but I wasn’t about to tell him.

  “So what have you been up to all these years,” he said, “and what brings you back?”

  And there was a flash of the old Mr. Ransom. He was a quiet man most of the time, but, even so, he managed t
o say exactly what was on his mind, a quality that would have made many people insufferable. He gestured to a cast-iron garden bench nearby, took out his cap, gave the already clean seat a few swipes with it, and waited for me to sit before settling in beside me. The fact that he cared enough to ask filled me with gratitude. I was so glad about it that I laughed.

  “What?”

  “You always did cut to the chase.”

  “All right,” he said, “fill me in.”

  I told him about the writing, which he already knew about (“Saw you on one of those morning shows with your friend Trillium. She’s an intriguing person, isn’t she?”), about Marcus, and my mom, and, in a Herculean display of self-restraint, I mentioned just once that I was single, but I made sure to say it slowly and clearly. All the same, I wasn’t sure if he’d heard me. We talked for a while more, and, after an interval of silence when Mr. Ransom seemed to be deciding whether to say something or not, he told me, “Ben’s not married yet, either. As a matter of fact, he just broke off his engagement with a girl in Wisconsin before he moved back here.”

  “Oh,” I said. It was all I could manage what with my heart pogo-sticking under my ribs.

  “I can’t say I was surprised about the breakup,” said Mr. Ransom, but he didn’t explain why, and I thought it would be overstepping to ask. Anyway, I wasn’t interested in Ben’s fiancée, at least not right at that moment. I was only interested in Ben.

  “So Ben’s back? To stay?”

  Mr. Ransom grinned. “Now who’s cutting to the chase?”

  “I am,” I said, grinning back.

  “He’s renting right now but says he’s looking for a house to buy. He came home eight months ago, right after my second wife, Bobbie, got cancer.”

  “Oh, Mr. Ransom, I’m so sorry,” I said and before I knew it, I was taking his hand. It occurred to me that I hadn’t held my sick father’s hand, or touched him at all, even casually, since I’d been staying at his house. In fact, in the two years Mr. Ransom and I had been in each other’s lives, I’d probably touched him more than I’d touched my own father in my entire lifetime.