The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

  His eyes went big and angry. “I was broken,” he almost shouted. “I never believed in anyone the way I believed in you. And you threw me away.”

  “But I didn’t! I always loved you. I was broken, too. If you’d read my letters, you would have known that.”

  “You left. That’s what matters. You signed a paper saying that our marriage was a joke, and you left. It doesn’t matter if you loved me while you did it. Maybe it even makes it worse.”

  I didn’t think this was right, but I wasn’t sure. What I knew is that he loved me, now.

  “You love me,” I said.

  “Don’t.”

  “However you felt about me before now, you love me. Right this second.”

  His jaw tightened in a way that I knew meant he was furious. He said, “Remember when you said that I hadn’t exactly called you, ever, in seventeen years?”

  “Yes.”

  “I never would have. If you hadn’t shown up, I would have lived the rest of my life without ever seeing you again. That’s what I wanted.”

  “Now you’re just being mean.”

  “It’s true. And I should have shut this down the day I saw you sitting on the bench in the nursery with my dad.”

  I stood, reeling. But eventually, I gathered my wits about me. I thought about what Ben had said.

  “But you didn’t,” I told him. He turned his face away.

  “But you didn’t,” I repeated. “Why not? Did you ever ask yourself that?”

  “Stop.”

  “If you’d really put it all away, why did you care so much about never seeing me again?”

  “Stop.”

  “Tell me you don’t love me.”

  Ben glared at me.

  “I did awful things,” I said. “I was a coward who did not deserve you. But I deserve you now. And you’re the one who’s a coward.”

  “I’m leaving.”

  I don’t know what would have happened next; maybe he would have left; maybe we would have stood there fighting for hours and then he would have left, but what did happen was a voice, high and scared, flying in from the direction of the house: “Taisy! Taisy! Taisy!”

  “Oh, no,” I whispered. “She never calls me that.”

  I took off hard across the yard, with Ben right behind me.

  Willow was standing there in sweatpants and a T-shirt, no coat, hair like a wildfire around her frightened face.

  “Honey, what is it?”

  “I promise I was paying attention,” she cried. “It wasn’t even late! I was doing homework in my room. I never lock the doors this early.”

  I put my arms around her.

  “Shh,” I said. “Nothing is your fault. What happened?”

  “She was reading on the sofa, but she must have fallen asleep. She would have told me if she had to go someplace. She wouldn’t have just left!”

  “She left?”

  “Her car’s gone. Please don’t call 911. Please. I don’t know what they’ll do. She can only have been gone a few minutes! Just find her!”

  “Willow, listen to me,” I said. “You stay here in case she comes back. I’ll go with Ben in my car.”

  I turned. He was already nodding and walking backward, in the direction of the driveway.

  “Ben?” said Willow. She saw him, then, and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “Stay here!”

  Once we were in the car, I filled Ben in, as much as I could, about Caro’s sleepwalking.

  “She’s asleep, but she can operate a car,” he said. “That’s amazing. Scary, but amazing.”

  “I’ve been reading up on parasomnia,” I said. “It’s rare but not that rare. Most people grow out of it, I think. Anyway, it’s fascinating how the brain works. Parasomniacs have been known to cook, drive, even have conversations, all while they’re asleep.”

  “You know, I’d forgotten this until now, but I had a housemate in college whose younger brother was a sleepeater. Apparently, once he ate a whole package of bacon, uncooked. He visited a couple of times, and when he was awake, he was a really normal guy, not especially deep or troubled or anything.”

  “A whole package,” I said, with a shudder. “Yeesh.”

  We talked like we hadn’t practically been screaming at each other just a few minutes before. But our fight was still there, hovering, and I’m not sure how long we could have gone on ignoring it, but it didn’t take long to find Caro. Her car was about a mile down the road, pulled over on the shoulder with the engine off.

  “Wow,” said Ben, as we pulled up behind her. “She even turned on the hazard lights.”

  Ben waited in my car, ready to drive it back to Wilson’s if everything was all right. When I got to Caro’s car, I could see her sitting with her hands resting lightly on the steering wheel. She looked up when I opened the passenger door but not at me. I had read that it was better to wake sleepwalkers with a loud noise instead of shaking them, so I said her name loudly. Nothing happened until the fifth time. She jumped in her seat, and then I watched her eyes uncloud, recognition dawning.

  “Taisy,” she said, confused.

  “Hey there, Caro. Everything is all right.”

  She rubbed her temples, straightened, and looked around her.

  “Oh, no.” Her big eyes filled with tears.

  “It’s okay. You’re half a mile from home. How about we head back there now?”

  “No one got hurt?” she asked.

  “No one at all. Everyone is fine. Look at you, you’re even wearing your seat belt.”

  “So I am.”

  “Come on, let’s go home, shall we? Willow will be so happy to see you.”

  Caro winced as though she’d been stung, and I instantly regretted bringing up Willow.

  “My poor girl,” said Caro.

  “Listen,” I said. “Why don’t we switch places, and I’ll drive us home?”

  I got out, walked around to her door, and opened it. Slowly, she got out, and when she was standing, she looked so lost and frail and shivering that I hugged her, and, with unexpected strength, she hugged back. Over her shoulder, I waved to Ben, and he nodded and drove away.

  Before I started the car, she said, “Wait. Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.”

  Her face wasn’t frightened anymore, just dreadfully tired. “Taisy, would you ever consider staying?”

  I stared at her. “You mean permanently?”

  “I don’t mean in our house,” she said, quickly. “Just—nearby.” She sighed. “I know you have a life. And I know I have no right, that I am the last person who has the right to ask you for anything.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, not anymore.” I smiled, ruefully. “But Marcus would.”

  “And he would be right. I just thought that maybe it hadn’t occurred to you, the idea of staying here, and that if—and only if, God, of course!—you thought it might make you happy, we would be so glad.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Caro gave me a gentle, baffled look, as though my question were slightly crazy.

  “Because you make all of us better, of course. Especially Willow. And the longer you are here, the more I can’t imagine you ever leaving, and not because you rescue me from my ridiculous nocturnal ramblings, either.”

  “No?”

  She smiled. “Well, that’s nice, of course. But mostly it’s because you are what’s been missing. You wake us all up, you expand our world, especially Willow’s. And I know that those are selfish reasons.”

  I suppose they were selfish, and, honestly, I felt guilty about not feeling more resentful. Or resentful at all. Marcus would hate that, but, for better or worse, I wasn’t Marcus. It wasn’t just that I liked being needed; it’s that I liked being needed by Caro and Willow. I was even beginning to suspect that I needed them, too.

  I said, “I’m not sure that Willow needs me, but she does need more people in her life. She needs a bigger world.”

  “She needs you an
d more people.”

  I didn’t say anything for a long time.

  “I can’t promise to stay,” I said. “And I want you to know that if I did, it would not be for Wilson. To be blunt, I’m finished with trying to make him love me. I don’t need that anymore. I don’t think I even want it, especially.”

  This last statement was a bit of a stretch, but the rest felt true. I waited for her to fly to his defense, or to reassure me that, deep down, my father cared deeply about me, but she just gave me a tired smile and said, “Good.” I absorbed this and found it didn’t hurt much.

  “You should also know,” I went on, “that if I became part of Willow’s family, it wouldn’t stop with me.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Caro.

  Our eyes met and held.

  “I mean—what if we were to crack this thing wide open?” I said. “Invite everyone in.”

  Radiance broke through her exhaustion. “Oh, Taisy, that is exactly what I was hoping we would do.”

  When we got back to the house, my car was parked in the circle. Ben’s was gone.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Willow

  EVER SINCE THAT FIRST trip to Mr. Insley’s house, I had been checking in with myself several times a day, monitoring how much I loved him, like a nurse checking the vital signs of a patient, and what I found was that the patient was still alive but fading a little more each day, presenting with an increasingly thready pulse, labored breathing, and—oh, this simile is just too morbid! Here it was: I loved him the way you love someone you’ve once loved desperately, and to whom you will be forever grateful for saving you from death by loneliness and for making you feel pretty and smart when you most needed it, and who has a sad, dark house, a dissertation that will never be finished, and a boat that will never see the water. In short, I did not want to sail away with him (a good thing, considering the boat), and I did not want to kiss him anymore ever, but I did want him to be happy, three things I realized I needed to tell him before our relationship went any further. Scratch that. Three things I needed to tell him in order to stop our relationship dead in its tracks. For good. It would be nice to stay on congenial terms with him, too, of course, and even nicer to get the A in English that I rightfully deserved.

  I had already tried twice that week. On Monday, I’d stayed after class to ask if we could talk at lunch, and mischievously, he’d said, “No, our next conversation will be at my house over dinner or not at all!,” and when I went to his room at lunchtime, sure enough, he wasn’t there. On Tuesday, he handed back a paper to me with “A word, after class” written at the top, a form of communication he had used before, so I’d stayed, and, as soon as everyone was gone, Luka shooting me a quick backward glance as he walked out, Mr. Insley said, sorrowfully, “Willow, I fear our lunches must come to an end, at least for a while,” words that, not long before, would have slammed down on me like a heel and ground my soul to dust. Now, I felt a rush of light-headed relief that I tried my darnedest to hide.

  “Why?” I asked, gravely.

  From the inside pocket of his jacket, he slid a folded piece of notebook paper stained with what looked like yellow paint, unfolded it, slowly, and held it open for me to see. I AM WATCHING YOU, it said, in thick black lettering.

  “At lunch yesterday, as I was eating in the teachers’ lounge, I found it inside my sandwich. I bit into it, actually.”

  Mustard. I was struck by the desire to laugh, but then worry quenched it.

  “Did anyone see it?” I asked.

  “No,” he said, with a touch of coldness, as though my question were insulting.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, reflexively. “Of course not.”

  “But I’m afraid this might mean that our anonymous prude is not a student after all. Or that we have more than one prude on our trail.”

  “What? Why?”

  “My lunch languishes, poor thing, all day in the teachers’ lounge refrigerator, an old, only semi-clean appliance to which the student body has no access.”

  “Oh,” I said, somewhat blankly. Oddly, even though I had seen the other messages and been disturbed by the language of them, I had somehow never fully absorbed that they were the handiwork of a true-blue, individual person, which was stupid of me. Maybe out of sheer denial or because the world of high school was so new and big and baffling to me, I’d instead attributed the messages to a vast, faceless culture of adolescent meanness. Now, it hit me that whoever had sent the notes was real and had possibly not merely seen me with Mr. Insley and thrown out blind, if unsavory, innuendos, but had maybe truly been watching us. And the idea of that person’s being an adult chilled me to the bone.

  “Who?” I asked, even though I mostly did not want to know. “Who would do that?”

  Mr. Insley shrugged. “As I think I’ve indicated, just as you feel yourself to be an entirely different species from your peers, so am I not cut from the same dull cloth—intellectually and in myriad other ways—as many of my so-called colleagues. They are small and narrow people, and, frankly, they resent me. So it could have been any of them, but if I had to guess, I would say the insufferable Ms. Janine Shay.”

  Ms. Shay? Even though I could imagine that she disapproved of Mr. Insley and could even imagine that she’d been keeping an eye on the two of us, I simply could not picture her balancing on a chair to write those colossal black letters on the whiteboard or stuffing a note into a sandwich.

  Mr. Insley regarded me with mournful blue eyes. “Alas, my Willow, it feels more and more as though we are each other’s only ballast in a provincial and narrow-minded sea. And, oh how I will miss our lunches!”

  “But maybe we could have just one more?” I said, with a sinking heart and a glance at the clock. “I was hoping to talk about something with you. It’s quite important, and there’s no time now. I have to get to class.”

  “Can’t be done,” he said, wistfully. “Someone may be watching us even now.”

  Startled, I darted a glance at the doorway. Because it was almost time for the next class, the crowds in the hallway were thinning. People were flying noisily by, but no one was stopping. No face leered around the doorjamb.

  He tapped me on the chin and gave me a playful grin, one eyebrow raised. “No, I’m afraid you have no choice but to come to my house for dinner. There’s nothing else to be done!”

  “But I don’t see how I can,” I said.

  I noticed that the smile stayed on his mouth but disappeared from the rest of his face. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

  That night, I thought about writing him a letter, but, somehow, I could not bear the possibility of its existing, lingering—a concrete fact—in the world after our relationship had ended.

  So the next day, when Mr. Insley handed back my graded The Portrait of a Lady quiz (which, incidentally, I aced), and I saw written at the top: “Tomorrow at 6:00, Chez B.I.,” I stared at the words for a long moment, and then, with a sigh of resignation, folded the paper in two. I nodded to Mr. Insley on the way out the door and threw the quiz into the first hallway trashcan I found.

  Now, in my room, I tied my shoes, stood up, and surveyed myself in the mirror. Unlike the day of the drive in the country, I was in full teenager regalia: ponytail; skinny, dark jeans; a cropped, fitted striped sweater with a long tank top underneath; and—heaven help me—sneakers of a variety called Chuck Taylor that I’d purchased during a shopping trip with Muddy the evening before. I’d planned on the red version, but, at the eleventh hour, my heart failed me, and I bought dark blue, low tops, not high. Even so, I hardly recognized myself. The whole kit and kaboodle screamed, as it was meant to, I am a callow sixteen-year-old, practically a babe in arms, and much too young for a thirty-year-old man in battered wingtips and raveled tweed. I can’t say I hated the way I looked, which took me off guard. As I left my room, there was even a new, youthful spring in my step; I damned near skipped.

  My father was in his room, where he’d been spending more time lately, rec
overing from the attack of pericarditis, and as luck would have it, my mother was attending a meeting of the local Artists Guild, so I left without telling a soul where I was going, a first for me. Muddy’s meeting included dinner and would take several hours, by which time I planned to be safely home and free as a sneaker-shod bird. I had expected to have a full-blown case of the butterflies, but I was cool as a cucumber as I zipped my cell phone into the pocket of my parka, slipped out the door, and ran lightly down my long driveway to the street, where the cab I’d called (another first!) was waiting.

  I hit a weak moment when Mr. Insley opened his wretched front door. His smile was so guileless and hopeful, and he didn’t throw himself upon me and wrestle me into an embrace, but merely leaned over and planted a comradely kiss on my cheek.

  “Darling girl, how lovely you look!” he said.

  I stepped inside. His house looked better this time, still dim, but less cluttered and with lighted candles set here and there. I could see firelight doing a golden dance on the living room walls, and the house smelled golden as well, like apples and cloves and cinnamon. Mr. Insley started to help me off with my coat, but I remembered the cell phone in my pocket and suddenly felt that I did not want it too far out of my reach. I gave an ostentatious shiver.

  “I’ll keep it on for a while, if you don’t mind. I’m one of those people who takes a ridiculously long time to warm up.”

  He smiled. “It comes from being so slender,” he said. “We will do our best to fatten you up tonight, but first, let me give you some mulled cider. Nothing warms in quite the same way.”

  “That must be what smells good,” I said.

  “Smells and is,” he said, ladling some into a cut glass mug. For a single man with a moth-eaten carpet runner, Mr. Insley had some very nice crockery.

  “What a pretty glass,” I remarked.

  “It was my grandmother’s,” he said. I wondered if he meant the grandmother who owned the lake house in New Jersey, but the possibility of her being dead and passing down her glassware made me so sad that I couldn’t even ask. How Mr. Insley had cherished his summers at that house! I understood right then that this was going to be harder than I thought. Sitting in your room, planning how you would break it off—cleanly, surgically—with a person was a very different thing from his standing before you, with his carefully ironed shirt, his childhood stories, the special drink he’d made, his pretty glass mugs from his possibly dead and beloved grandmother. It could break your heart: people becoming, in the blink of an eye, so dreadfully human.