The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

  “Right.”

  “Your first reason being to tell me that you’re relentless?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just for the record, I would have believed you at seven o’clock A.M. just as much. Seriously. Seven thirty even.”

  “So noted. But my second reason for calling was to ask you to go on a drive with me.”

  “So you finally got your driver’s license.”

  “Is that a yes?”

  “Where are we going?”

  “If I tell you that, you might not agree to come. In fact, you almost definitely would not.”

  “Way to sell it, tiger,” he said.

  ACCORDING TO ROBO HEPBURN, it would take two and a half hours to get to Wilson’s childhood home. I’d considered not telling Ben where we were going, at least until we got there, but practically as soon as he sat down in the passenger seat, he said, “This trip is Wilson-related, right?”

  “Hold on a second.”

  I started the car and my tires squealed as we flew out of the driveway. Not until we were headed down the road, did I say, “Yes, it’s Wilson-related.”

  “You took off like a cannonball, didn’t you? And now you’re going, what?” He leaned toward me to check the speedometer, the side of his head nearly brushing my cheek. I touched the spot on my face he had almost touched. “Twelve miles over the speed limit?”

  “I did and I am.”

  “Banking on the fact that I won’t want to jump out of a moving vehicle, huh?” The corners of his mouth curled up. “Smart move.”

  “Thank you.”

  In as few words and with as much nonchalance as possible, I told Ben about the book and about how I was chasing down Wilson’s invisible childhood. I hoped I sounded like a sassy, hard-boiled reporter from a 1940s comedy and not like a daughter desperate for her father’s approval. Apart from smiling at “the life story of a mind, if you will” rendered in my best Wilson voice, the long “i” in “mind” stretched out like melted Stilton, Ben stayed quiet, looking out the windshield, his profile unreadable.

  Once I had finished, he didn’t ask me any questions about Wilson. He said, “Tell me about being a ghostwriter.” So I told him about Trillium, my first ghostee, how magical it felt, falling into someone else’s psyche. I told him about my secret weapon: the right question.

  “The first time I discovered it, I was writing Trillium’s story, and I was stuck.”

  “You mean you didn’t know what part to tell next?”

  “Sort of. But it was more like I was stuck outside of her personality, like I’d been in and gotten locked out and needed to find the right rock, the one with the key under it, so I could get back. I didn’t panic. She panicked enough for both of us, but I just waited for the rock to show itself, and then it did. I called her in the dead of night and said, ‘I just need to know: What was the first gift you were given that you truly believed you couldn’t live without?’ and after a tiny, breath-sized pause, she said, ‘My Trixie Belden books, five of them from a lady whose house my mother cleaned. I was nine.’ And I pictured Trixie, girl sleuth, blond and curly-haired and irrepressible, with her gang of cute friends, her Westchester County farmhouse, her funny brothers and sparkly-eyed parents, and . . . click!”

  Ben wasn’t looking out the window anymore. As I told him this, he looked at me, nodding, his face sharp with attention. He’d always liked anything about how minds work. And sure enough, he said, “That’s really cool. You always did have an interesting brain.” It was better than if he’d called me beautiful.

  “Okay, how about if I try it out on you,” I said, challengingly.

  He shrugged. “Sure. Why not?”

  “Let me think.” I peered at him through narrowed eyes. He peered back.

  “Got it,” I said. “Are you ready?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why did you break off your engagement?”

  Ben tipped his head back and laughed.

  “What?” I said.

  “Trillium gets the best gift question, and I get this?”

  “I don’t choose the question,” I explained, serenely. “The question chooses me.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I waited.

  Finally, Ben said, “She kept expecting me to use plant metaphors in conversation.”

  “What?”

  “She was one of those women who have a highly romanticized view of botanists.”

  “There are women like that?”

  Ben’s eyes were twinkling like the entire Milky Way. “Oh, yeah. Are you kidding me? The plant thing makes a certain kind of woman crazy.”

  “So—what? She expected you to say things like ‘Your eyes are the color of a baobab tree. Your lips are the color of a pokeberry’?”

  “Pokeberries are black. And poisonous,” Ben pointed out.

  “Well, it’s a good thing you broke up with her then, isn’t it?”

  Ben shook his head, his smile filling the car. It occurred to me that I could actually do this friendship thing. It wasn’t my first choice, but if friendship meant riding next to Ben, bantering back and forth, making him smile, I could do it. For a while anyway.

  “That’s not the real reason, is it?” I said.

  “No. Well, that was annoying, but the real reason, I guess, is that, when Bobbie got sick, I had to come home, and there was nothing really keeping her there because she travels for work, but she wouldn’t leave.”

  “She wouldn’t leave Wisconsin for you?”

  “Nope.”

  “I mean, no offense to Wisconsin, but it isn’t exactly Paris, is it?”

  “It is not. She wouldn’t leave, and I wouldn’t beg her to—it didn’t really occur to me at the time, to be honest—but also, I wouldn’t stay. Or promise to come back. And I think that tells you something. If you can leave so easily, maybe it means you should.”

  And after he said this, I heard Willow’s voice from last night inside my head: If you didn’t love Ben enough to stay married to him no matter what, then you didn’t love him enough, period.

  “Can I tell you something that Willow said to me last night, after I told her the story of us, back when we were eighteen?”

  I heard Ben breathe in. “You told her about that? I didn’t realize you guys had heart-to-hearts.”

  “It’s a recent development,” I said. “Can I tell you what she said?”

  “I—guess?”

  I told him. When I glanced at him, he was staring out the windshield again, his cheeks reddening.

  “Well,” he said. “This conversation has taken an unexpected turn.”

  “It must be my interesting brain at work again.”

  He didn’t smile.

  “Here’s the thing, though. She was right,” I said, quietly. “I would never have admitted that before, not up until last night. I blamed Wilson. I blamed my mother for making us move away. I blamed myself, for a thousand things, but never for not loving you enough. It’s true, though. I loved you so much. I’m pretty sure I loved you enough to jump in front of a train for you, but not enough to tell my father to go to hell. And I am so sorry for that.”

  He looked at me and scrubbed at his hair with his fingers, thoughtfully.

  “It means a lot that you said that to me,” he said. “Thanks.”

  I nodded and then added, “I’m much better at telling him to go to hell now. Just, you know, for the record.”

  A ghost of a grin. “So noted,” he said.

  WILSON’S CHILDHOOD HOME WAS a brick Cape Cod with two peaked dormer windows, a screen door, and a front stoop. It was perched at the top of a gently sloped front yard, was neither large nor tiny, shabby nor fine, a plain, sturdy, ordinary house in a plain, sturdy, ordinary neighborhood. There was an orange pumpkin on the stoop and, hanging on the front door, a decorative fall wreath that Wilson would have loathed with every bone in his body.

  “It’s so—ordinary,” I said. “So middle-class American.”

  “Yeah, no wonder Wilson
tried to erase it from his permanent record,” said Ben. “I’m amazed he didn’t have the place bulldozed.”

  I bristled. “Well, there’s also the fact that both his parents were killed while they lived in that house.”

  Ben’s face hardened a little. I groaned.

  “I’m defending him,” I said, wearily.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything.”

  I gave his arm a tug. “No! You should say what you want to me. And of course, you’re right. Wilson would rather have been raised anywhere, a Bangladeshi slum, the heart of the Amazon rain forest, anywhere but in that perfectly pleasant house.”

  Ben didn’t answer.

  I said, “Slavish devotion is a hard habit to break. But I swear I’m working on it.”

  “Okay,” said Ben, but he didn’t look convinced.

  “I am,” I said. “You don’t get it. How could you? Your dad is the best man I know.”

  “Well, I can’t argue with that, but . . .”

  “You grew up with that dad and a great mom and a great stepfather, all of whom thought you were the sun and moon. I spent my life trying to get my father to think there was one thing special about me, and you were adored without lifting a finger. Good grief, listen to me. No, don’t. Shut up, Taisy, you jealous brat. Ugh.”

  “Not ugh,” said Ben.

  “I don’t really mean the part about lifting a finger. You were thoughtful and smart and hardworking and loving. God, you were Super Son. I just mean—oh, shut up, Taisy, you big, fat whiner.”

  “Hey, you’re definitely not big. Or fat. And I see your point about me and my dad versus you and yours.”

  “That’s not my real point. My real point is that I’m trying to change, to get free of him.”

  “Maybe,” Ben said, “but look where we are. I want what you’re saying to be true as much as you do, but what about this project? What about your being here because Wilson called you? The only reason we’re together now is because of that phone call.”

  “Would you really describe us as together?” I said, perking up.

  “Taisy.”

  “You’re right; we’re only together because Wilson called me. But does that matter? I mean, not to be a jerk, but you didn’t exactly call me, either. Ever. In seventeen years.”

  “No, I didn’t.” I waited for him to explain why or to tell me about all the times he’d wanted to over the years, but he didn’t say anything else. His silence stung, but I plunged ahead.

  “But listen, today? What we’re doing? It’s not about Wilson. It’s for me. I can’t explain why, exactly, but I need to understand how he became the man he turned out to be.”

  Ben said, slowly, “Maybe he was just born that way, Taize. Some people are.”

  I nodded. “Trust me. I have seriously considered that he might be a sociopath. I’ve taken a lot of comfort in that possibility, actually. Marcus thinks he is. But you should see that man with Willow. He loves her. So what went so wrong that he had to turn into an old man before he figured out how to love someone?”

  “You’ve got me there.”

  “Would you really describe me as having got you?”

  Ben smiled and shook his head at me.

  “As I friend, I meant,” I said.

  “You’re relentless,” he said.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  THERE WAS ONLY ONE funeral home in town, Philpott’s, a grand, Georgian affair with white pillars and a circular drive.

  “Now, this is the kind of place Wilson wishes he’d been raised in,” I said. “Minus the dead bodies. Or not.”

  “To the funeral home born,” said Ben.

  I wanted to find out where my grandparents were buried. I’d brought two bouquets of orange dahlias to place on their graves.

  A man named Robert Philpott took us into his somber high-ceilinged, oak-paneled office, where we sat in somber black chairs. Even the desktop computer was black; I wondered if they’d had it specially made. The only bright thing in the place was Robert Philpott’s hair, which was so riotously red it seemed to shed light, like a bonfire. It struck me as a good idea, that hair; I imagined it would make even the recently bereaved feel a little happier.

  “We’ve computerized all our records,” said Robert Philpott, in a low, velvety voice, his manicured fingers hitting the computer keys almost soundlessly, as if hush had become second nature to him. “Walter Wilson Ravenel, January 1979. Helen Kittle Ravenel, 1999.”

  I stared at Robert Philpott, blankly.

  “Wait, that can’t be right. They died in an accident on the same day. It must have been around 1958.”

  Robert Philpott’s velvety voice got a little less velvety. “I’m quite sure that our records are correct. We treat the deceased with the utmost care, their records included.”

  “But this means that they were alive during my lifetime,” I said.

  For some reason, the thought made me shiver. Ben slipped his arm around the back of my chair. I remembered the office at Banfield Academy, Edwina Cook’s fancy nails clicking away at the keys, calling up surprises from Wilson’s past. It was so strange, all these hard drives out there, harboring facts about my father’s life, facts he’d sawed off like dead wood and thrown away.

  “Is there maybe another way you could check?” Ben asked. “Do you have the original records?”

  Robert Philpott’s face went cold under his fiery hair.

  “We kept them, naturally, but in a separate storage facility to which I do not have immediate access. But I can check the obituaries. My mother clips them from the paper and keeps them.”

  “How nice of her,” I said.

  “Our work is human work, Ms. Cleary,” said Robert Philpott, softening. “We remind ourselves as often as we can that the deceased aren’t just names. They had lives just as we do.”

  “That’s lovely,” I said because it was.

  “Excuse me; I will get my assistant to locate the right album.”

  He disappeared out the heavy oak door, which resealed itself behind him as soundlessly as an envelope.

  “You okay?” asked Ben.

  “Who lies about their parents’ tragic deaths?”

  “There must be a reason for it,” he said. “I mean, I can’t imagine what it is, but there must be.”

  “Thanks,” I told him.

  Robert Philpott made his silent return, bearing a thick leather photo album.

  “Jacob is still locating your grandfather’s obituary, but here is Helen Ravenel’s.”

  She had died after a brief illness fourteen years ago. Even Willow was alive fourteen years ago. I wondered if Helen Kittle Ravenel knew, as she went about her daily life in her brick Cape Cod, that she had three grandchildren, one of them not three hours away.

  The obituary was a blur; I would need to make a copy of it to take with me and read later. But one sentence jumped out: “Helen Ravenel is survived by a son and a daughter, Barbara Ravenel Volkman, of Philadelphia, son-in-law George Volkman, and their three children, Walter, Samuel, and Thomas.”

  Correction: Helen had six grandchildren.

  And Wilson had a sister.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Willow

  ON THE DAY WE showed our Middlemarch video to the class, even Luka was nervous. I could tell by the way he kept adjusting the knot of his tie. We had agreed to dress up, and I’ll tell you that Luka walking down the halls in a coat and tie was the Webley equivalent of a victory parade. People, male and female alike, applauded, wolf whistled, catcalled, pretended to swoon, reached out to touch him and then acted like their fingers were burned.

  “God,” I growled at him under my breath, “it’s like you’re Henry V and you just won the damn Battle of Agincourt when all you did was put on a blue jacket.”

  “Come on, Cleary,” he said, with a grin. “Don’t you think I look even a little dapper?”

  “I think you look dapper,” I said, coolly. “I don’t think you just beat the stuffing out of the entire Fren
ch army.”

  “‘We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,’” he intoned, pumping his fist in the air.

  If Luka thought he could impress me by quoting Shakespeare, well, he was right, the infuriating boy. I sniffed and rolled my eyes.

  “You look great, by the way,” he said, giving me one of his walking-down-the-hall nudges. I had eschewed my usual high school student disguise in favor of an emerald-green knit dress, black tights, and black ankle boots. My legs looked like pipe cleaners, but the color was unquestionably good on me.

  I said, “Thank you. I can tell our peers agree with you, given all the wolf whistles my appearance is eliciting.”

  Luka tucked in his lips and pretended to put his pinkies in his mouth.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “Not all of us need our egos stroked by such obvious and pedestrian public displays.”

  When we got to class, I was nervous, too. I know because I caught myself fidgeting with my hair, what my father called my “tell.” I used to do it only when I played chess or took a test. In recent months, I did it maddeningly often, particularly in the presence of Mr. Insley. Luka and I were nervous not because we didn’t think our project was good. It’s that we thought it was tremendous, brilliant even, and we really wanted everyone to agree.

  The evening before, in the same study room in the public library where we’d shot the video, we had sat side by side and watched it. It was the first time I’d seen it since Luka had done the editing, and afterward, what can only be called euphoria abounded. We high-fived each other. We clapped our water bottles together. Luka had even engaged me in a victory dance, a kind of jitterbug pas de deux that was happily short-lived but made me laugh until I was out of breath.

  The film was composed of interviews, characters talking against a backdrop, although since Luka had seen the light at last regarding the disembodied interviewer’s voice, you never actually heard the questions; they were merely (brilliantly!) implied in the answers. We stuck mostly to using dialogue from the novel itself, with tweaks here and there, although, at times, we took the poetic license of putting the novel’s narrative voice into the mouths of the characters. Luka and I played all the characters, he the males, I the females. We didn’t wear costumes, just black shirts, and we put signs around our necks with the name of whomever we were portraying: Dorothea’s uncle, her sister, the strapping Sir James Chettam, the busybody Mrs. Cadwallader, Casaubon, Dorothea’s true love Will Ladislaw, Dorothea herself. Luka was wonderful, a really good actor even though he said he liked all the other parts of the project better.