The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

  I sat in silence, considering this. What we had just done, there against the door, had certainly been physical, but I hadn’t felt violated. I’d felt like my blood had been turned, magically, in an instant, to hot maple syrup.

  “No,” I agreed. “That has nothing do with us.”

  “I won’t lie to you, though,” said Mr. Insley. And stopped.

  “What?”

  “No, I can’t tell you,” he said, shutting his eyes. “Forgive me for bringing it up.”

  “Please,” I said.

  His eyes met mine. If powder blue eyes can be said to smolder, his were.

  “I have imagined you in my bed,” he said. “Your milky shoulders against my sheets, your glorious hair spread across my pillow.”

  My mouth went dry.

  “Have you imagined the same?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Ah. Does the idea repel you?” His voice was so gentle.

  I shook my head again.

  “Does it frighten you?” He leaned very, very close, awaiting my answer, eagerly.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I can live with that,” he said, nodding. “Darling Willow, you must know that I would never push you, not the smallest nudge.”

  “I know,” I said. “But thank you for saying so.”

  “Come to my house this weekend,” he said, squeezing my hand so hard it hurt.

  And, oh God, what a stupid roller-coaster of a girl I was because, yes, I had just been turning to molten sugar in his embrace, and yes, when my being in his bed was just a wistful, floating desire of his, I was, as my peers said, into it, sort of, anyway. Now, though, post-embrace, my head clear once again, by which I mean again full of my usual confusion, and with the prospect of going to Mr. Insley’s house wherein the aforementioned bed no doubt abided being no longer a dream but an actual invitation, I floundered. Stop. Let me clarify that. I didn’t flip around, uncertain; I lay flat on the bottom of the ocean, staring blankly up with my two eyes, and did not want to go. What I wanted was to run seven miles, or sit and talk to my father about who was more admirable, Winston Churchill or Theodore Roosevelt, or make something amazing, like a film or something, with a good friend.

  But there was Mr. Insley, asking me to come the way he did everything: passionately, every piece of him leaping into animation.

  “I don’t think I should,” I said, more weakly than I meant to.

  “Should? No, most certainly you should not; you should go to school, do homework, joke with your peers, go to the mall. But what does ‘should’ have to do with someone like you? You are above ‘should,’ my girl.”

  “It’s just—my father hasn’t been well, and I know it’s not something he would want me to do.”

  Mr. Insley laid a hand on my hair.

  “My dear Willow, your father knows better than anyone that you are not a typical young woman. He’s groomed you to be singular, extraordinary, a dove among pigeons. I think we would like each other, your father and I; I think—at the risk of sounding arrogant—I am exactly the kind of man he’s been preparing you for.”

  Had my father been preparing me for any kind of man? The idea took me off guard. Maybe. He was practical, after all; he knew I would marry someone someday. I guess. But it was not something we had discussed. I thought about Taisy and Ben, how he had forced their annulment at eighteen. But I was not Taisy, and Ben was not Mr. Insley.

  “I haven’t thought about that much,” I said, “but I think he would say I was too young right now.”

  As soon as I’d said it, I realized my mistake. Age was the last thing I should have mentioned. I braced myself, awaiting Mr. Insley’s white-lipped rage, but it did not surface. He sat very still for a few seconds, and then gave me a smile.

  “I am sorry to be presumptuous, but is it possible that you underestimate him?”

  Certainly, this was the first time I had been accused of that.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I guess I am asking: Do you think your father would want you to date?”

  He said the word like he was spitting out a piece of rancid meat. And to be honest, I could imagine my father saying it in just the same way.

  “Go to dances in the gym?” Mr. Insley went on. “Would he want you to sit in movie theaters eating greasy, yellow popcorn or go to basketball games in a Webley red sweatshirt? Do you think he—Wilson Cleary—would want you to be the girlfriend of a teenaged boy?”

  To this last question, probably to all of them but definitely to the last, there was one, resounding answer: No.

  “Come to see me, Willow,” said Mr. Insley, cupping my face in his hand. “We were made for this.”

  I gripped the edge of the desk. The muscles in my chest were so tight. This wise, ardent man had saved me from the ugly stairwell, from the cafeteria, from hallways full of people who hated me. He had taught me how to drive. When he was near, I felt shining and iconic, like I wasn’t so much myself, Willow in her boots and parka, as I was a girl in a book—Dorothea or Catherine Earnshaw—or a woman in a painting.

  “You are spun out of moonlight, Willow,” he whispered. “You are poetry.”

  There, for one flashing second, unbidden, was Luka, throwing a pretzel at me under the oak tree. I blinked him away. Mr. Insley’s face, full of passion, was inches from mine.

  If you say no, you will lose him.

  “Yes,” I told him, “I’ll come.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Taisy

  I CALLED BEN AND ASKED him to have dinner with me. To be precise, I called and asked if I could cook him dinner at his house. One friend cooking dinner for another.

  After a few beats, he said, “Sure. Why not?,” and his nonchalance only broke my heart a little.

  “We’ve demonstrated that we can talk while on the move,” I said. “Walking, riding in cars. I thought why not see if we can have a conversation while sitting?”

  “I feel like the polite thing to say would be, ‘No, I’ll cook,’” he said, “but, uh, over the years, my cooking skills haven’t evolved at the same rate as, say, my fashion sense.”

  “Oh. Wow.”

  “Hey, my fashion sense isn’t that bad. It’s just not that fashionable.”

  “You prefer a classic look.”

  “Thank you.”

  “And I’m even pretty sure that those khaki pants you wore the other day were not the same ones you had in high school.”

  “Are you kidding?” he scoffed. “I threw those out months ago.”

  “So about the cooking. I did offer to cook, but I also invited myself over to your house. Obviously, these two things cancel each other out, which means for you to offer to cook would be overkill, politeness-wise.”

  “That’s a relief. But I might be able to score some dessert from my dad. He’s back in the kitchen with a vengeance.”

  “Perfect.” When I said the word, I tried to make my tone voluminous enough to cover the dessert, Ben’s dad, Ben’s dad being back in the kitchen, and Ben himself, who most certainly was.

  THAT DAY, I GOT a letter. Caro left it on the pool-house porch, with a note that said, “Hi, Taisy. This came for you. Love, Caro.” Oh, but the mystery that was Caro never stopped deepening! I hadn’t even known that she knew my nickname. Marcus and my mom had possibly called me that during the visit-from-hell on Willow’s first birthday, but Caro had surely never heard it since, and here she was getting even the spelling right. And then there was that “Love.”

  The letter was a mystery, too. Hardly anyone knew I was here, and Trillium, my mom, and Marcus either called or texted me every day. I’d had my mail sent to my mom’s, but she would’ve told me if she were forwarding something here. Besides, the sender had addressed the letter to “Eustacia.” Exactly three people in the world called me that, and one of them apparently didn’t anymore. The envelope had a typed label, no return address, and was so light it might have been empty.

  It wasn’t, alas. Inside, was a note th
at said: “Dear Eustacia—You should ask your sister Willow how things are going at school. It’s not my place to tell you what’s going on, but I’m not talking about her grades. Sincerely, A Friend.” It sent a shudder up my spine. The message wasn’t made up of letters cut from magazines—it was just a printout, Helvetica type—but it felt as ominous as if it had been. I wondered if it had to do with Luka; I hoped not. The two of them had looked so happy and at ease out in front of the school that day. Still he was both a high school kid and ridiculously good-looking, which could be—but wasn’t always—a recipe for trouble. Or could the trouble have to do with girls? High school girls made fascist dictators look like dewy-eyed cocker spaniels; everyone knew that. And then I remembered the man Ben had seen Willow with, the one who had impressed him as both older and a creep. Willow didn’t seem to go much of anywhere apart from school, unless you counted the occasional stop at an English pub with creepy old men. Could the man have something to do with school; could the note have something to do with that man? My head fizzed with possibilities, all of them awful.

  When I went out to buy cooking supplies for dinner at Ben’s, I made a split-second decision and a quick stop: I bought Willow a cell phone and added it to my plan, an act of audacious overstepping that would enrage Wilson, if he found out about it. And there was a chance he might. My relationship with Willow was improving, mainly in that it now seemed almost to be a relationship, but it was still shifting and slippery and subject to pitfalls, particularly if you considered that the last time we’d really spoken, she’d called me a fool. So there was a decent possibility that she would take the phone straight to Wilson, but I was willing to risk it.

  That evening, before I drove to Ben’s, I walked across the yard and went in through the back door of the main house. Key ownership notwithstanding, I still felt anything but at home in Wilson’s house, so I had hoped to find Caro and ask her permission to chat with Willow. But Caro was nowhere in sight. The downstairs seemed to be empty, in fact, so after a few humiliating false starts—foot on step, foot off step, turn around, turn back—I made my way up the stairs, only to face a hallway lined with four doors, all shut. Because I’d visited him there, I knew the one on the end was Wilson’s room. I scanned the others for clues, but they were all bare. No playful WILLOW’S ROOM—KEEP OUT sign to aid me. No white message board, doodled over with flowers or song quotes. No girlish scarf tied around the doorknob. As I stood there, on the edge of losing my nerve, the door at the end of the hallway opened and there stood Wilson.

  “Eustacia!” he said, startled. His eyes fairly boggled at the sight of me, but quickly, he collected himself, tightening the belt of his dressing gown with a firm tug. “Was there some matter you wanted to discuss with me? I am busy at the moment, but I would be happy to send for you at a more convenient time.”

  “Uh, actually, no,” I said. “I came to see Willow.”

  Wilson was so surprised by this, he began to sputter, and the sputter became a full-blown cough. When the spasm had passed, he said, “Did you send word that you were coming?”

  I laughed. I couldn’t help it. It was a good thing Wilson’s house was gated and set so far back from the main road because God help the Girl Scout who showed up unannounced selling cookies. “By what? Errand boy? Carrier pigeon?”

  Behind me, a door opened. I turned around, and there was Willow, her light brown eyes wide open and round as quarters. Evidently the wonder of my showing up unexpectedly would never cease.

  “Taisy?” she said.

  “Hi, Willow,” I said. “I was hoping for a quick chat with you.”

  “Oh!” she said. She glanced at her father. “Daddy, are you all right? I heard you coughing.”

  Wilson waved off her concern. “Right as rain, child,” he said, heartily, and then with a grand “Carry on then!” went back into his room and shut the door.

  Willow turned her attention back to me, and, now that I had a head-on view of her, I noticed how tired she looked, tired and maybe also unhappy, her usually sharp eyes listless, her queenly bearing all gone to wilt.

  “Hey,” I said, quietly. “Do you have a minute?”

  She nodded, then opened the door to her room, and stepped back to let me enter. “Please come in.”

  Willow’s room was lovely, like something out of a magazine, but, like her door, it was eerily devoid of anything suggesting a sixteen-year-old lived in it. Of course, I wouldn’t have expected lava lamps or boy band posters. But there was no bulletin board tacked with photos; no stack of magazines on the bedside table; no bin of makeup supplies; no landline phone; no coat stand decked with scarves, hats, and hoodies; not an iPod dock or CD player in sight.

  The walls were cool gray with a hint of violet, and nearly all of one of them was taken up with a bookshelf full of hardcovers, the spines perfectly aligned. On the wall opposite the bed hung a long glass sculpture that looked, sort of, like overlapping, translucent scallop shells in shades of blue and purple, and from the center of the ceiling dangled a chandelier of what looked, sort of, like an upside down bouquet of calla lilies caught in a rain shower. Both were unmistakably Caro creations and unmistakably ravishing. In one corner of the room, near the big window, was a dark rose armchair covered in velvet. Willow gestured to it and said, “Would you like to sit down?”

  I sat. She turned her desk chair around and sat, too, so that she was more or less facing me.

  “I have something for you,” I said. “I thought it might come in handy, now that you’re going to school and everything.”

  “Oh?” she said, vaguely. “Well, that was nice of you.”

  Maybe I’d caught her off guard by coming to her room or maybe the trouble at school to which the letter had referred was getting to her, but she seemed more open, less imperious than I’d ever seen her.

  I held out the tidy white box with the phone in it, and she didn’t recoil at the sight, but simply reached out and took it.

  “It’s a phone,” she said, quietly, and then, like she was trying out the phrase, she added, “A smartphone.”

  “Open it up,” I suggested.

  As she did this, I could see the sheer niftiness of the packaging working its magic on her. The phone was a slip of silver and shone like a rectangle of moonlight as she turned it over in her hands. Oh, the persuasiveness of exquisitely designed inanimate objects! She pushed the button and the screen lit up like Times Square.

  She sat still, staring down at it, and I braced myself for her to thrust it back at me or to toss a disparaging remark (“Cell phones are causing human relationships to wither on the vine, Eustacia, don’t you know that?”), but instead, she lifted her chin and said, wonderingly, “Is it hard to learn how to use?”

  “Easy as pie,” I told her. “And I have an account at the online store I can give you the password for, in case you want to order any extra apps.”

  “Oh,” she said, confusion crossing her face. “Apps.”

  “Why don’t you read the instructions and then ask me if you have any questions? I’m no techie, but together, we can probably figure out whatever it is.”

  She hesitated, then gave the phone another quick glance, and nodded.

  “Also. I, uh, put my number in the contacts, in case you ever need it,” I told her, trying to sound casual. “You can call any time, if you find yourself in need of a ride or, well, anything at all. And if you never have a reason to call or would prefer not to, no worries there. I just thought . . .” I trailed off.

  “Okay,” she said, gravely. “Thank you.”

  Her thank-you was followed by a tiny, glimmering smile. It disappeared almost as soon as it arrived, but it left me feeling closer to Willow, as though my gift and her smile had worked to clear a small circle of space in which we could sit and be normal with each other. If there was ever a time to ask her how things were going at school, I suppose it would have been then, but the circle felt fragile as frost, like a breath could make it disappear. So I said, “Well, good, then,
” and put my hands on the arms of the chair.

  But before I quite got to my feet, Willow said, her face pinking, the words tumbling out, “Eustacia, I’m sorry I said that the other night, about you and Ben. In the pool house.”

  I froze, crouched in midrise, then dropped back into the chair.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “You don’t need to apologize.”

  She shook her head. “No, I do. You see, I don’t really know anything about love. Not nearly enough to have any business judging someone else.” She mustered a weary, flat-eyed smile. “In fact, I’m rather muddled on the subject. Like, hopelessly maybe.”

  I smiled back. “You know what, though? You were right about me and Ben. I didn’t love him enough back then to deserve to keep him. I never understood that until you said it. And I apologized to him the very next day.”

  “Really? Did he forgive you?”

  “I think he might have. But there’s a big gap between forgiving someone and giving them another chance.”

  Willow considered this. “I guess he would have to believe that this time you would love him enough.” Then, as if catching herself, she added, “Um, right?”

  “Right. He would. And I would.”

  “You would?”

  “Actually, I already do. But that doesn’t mean I can convince him. In fact, I’m beginning to think I never will. We’re friends, though, and that’s something.”

  “I bet you can,” she said. Not a trace of guile or animosity. Nothing in her face or tone suggested, for instance, that I would let my sordid, slutty wiles do the convincing. Her lack of meanness and disapproval was positively scaring me. Whatever had taken the wind out of her sails had done so with a vengeance. There was also the possibility that she was just starting to like me, and maybe that was true, too, but there was no trace of the white goddess, the upright, scorching-eyed Willow who had always been. Something had happened.