The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

  Just as they had the day in Ransom’s Garden World, the dogs appeared first, Roo bounding with his tongue out and tiny Pidwit elegant as a high-stepping pony. With the sort of squeal I would not have thought my sister capable of, Willow scrambled around after them, to their boundless delight. Next came Mr. Ransom, and then Ben, bearing a flower arrangement that covered almost his entire face. When he set it down on the kitchen table, our eyes met and he gave me a sheepish smile and a shrug that could have meant I love you with all my heart and soul but also could have meant a lot of other things, like If the pilgrims and Indians could cook dinner together, so can two old friends.

  “Hey,” he said, lowering his brows. “Are you okay?”

  “I think so,” I said, “now that Roo and Pidwit are here.”

  “No, I meant—” He gestured to my hand.

  “Oh, right,” I said. “Hey, what could be more romantic than greeting you with a giant wad of blood-soaked gauze?”

  He gave me his northern lights smile. “I can’t think of single thing,” he said.

  ALL TOLD, THERE WERE seven of us—Mom, Caro, Ben, Mr. Ransom, Willow, Luka, and I—nine if you counted Pidwit and Roo, which of course we did. We baked pies, pie after pie. Pumpkin, apple, pumpkin chiffon, caramel apple, apple crumb, pecan, chocolate chess, and a pear and cranberry tart. My mother and Caro worked on the crusts, with Caro expertly cutting out leaf shapes and lattices, freehand. Mr. Ransom made the fillings. Ben cored and peeled and sliced, and once I’d stopped bleeding, I helped him. Everyone talked around the two of us; the kitchen was full of noise, but Ben and I were quiet, a stillness at the center of things. Any other time, our lack of conversation might have worried me, but, somehow, it felt natural, like, after all the strife and emotion, we’d agreed to take a breather. It was good just to have him there, to watch his hands peel apples.

  Willow didn’t even bother trying to tear herself away from the dogs, cooing and baby-talking to beat the band, her dignity and reserve gone completely up in smoke at the sight of their black noses. She and Luka played with them, inside and out in the garden. When Caro and I looked out the back window, we saw them on one of the benches: Willow sitting, talking; Luka lying on his back with his head on her lap; and the dogs curled up, Roo on Luka’s chest, Pidwit on his stomach.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Beautiful,” said Caro.

  That morning, before anyone had arrived, Caro had said, “Just enjoy yourselves; leave Wilson to me,” and now and then, during the pie-making, she would disappear upstairs, with food and drink. At some point, I wandered out into the yard and called Marcus.

  “You should’ve come today. It’s nice, and Wilson is holed up in his room like a hibernating bear; it’s like he’s not even here.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t push it, buddy. I may not come at all,” Marcus growled.

  I wasn’t worried. He’d ended the conversation in which I’d invited him the very same way, and then, an hour later, I’d gotten a call from the best hotel in town notifying me that Marcus Cleary was reserving—and footing the bill for—a small block of rooms for himself and my out-of-town guests, and they wondered if I had any special requests. It wasn’t lost on me that it was the same hotel we’d stayed at during the god-awful post-Christmas trip all those years ago. That was my Marcus: generous and sardonic, I’ve-got-your-back-Taize and No-human-being-should-have-to-sleep-under-Wilson-Cleary’s-roof all in a single gesture.

  “Ben’s here,” I told him.

  “Well, march him upstairs to say hi to Wilson already. That should be enough to blow up that bum ticker, and then we’ll really have something to be thankful for.”

  “Way to have the holiday spirit, mister,” I said.

  “Good job about Ben, by the way. I’m just going to pretend to myself that he was your secret motive for going up there all along. It makes me like you more.”

  “The Ben thing is still kind of up in the air, but you like me plenty. Have I mentioned how grateful I am that you’re coming?”

  “Don’t get too grateful; I still might not.”

  “Okay,” I said. “See you tomorrow, Mako.”

  “See you tomorrow, Taize.”

  AT FOUR O’CLOCK, THE doorbell rang. Willow ran to answer it, Pidwit in her arms. I heard the creak of the door, I heard Willow say, “Hello, may I help you?” and then, glory of glories, I heard a voice sing out, “Look at that face! And you! So tall and lithe, but I guess you’d have to be with a name like Willow. Oh, and your hair! It’s like a choir of angels, sweetheart.” I dropped my paring knife and ran for the foyer, and there she was, all fur coat and updo and luminosity to rival the sun’s.

  “Trill!”

  “Darling!”

  An extravagance of hugs.

  “But I thought you couldn’t come? What about the Hawaiian getaway with what’s his name?”

  “I lied!” she said, jubilantly. “I dumped what’s his name a week ago. I just wanted to surprise you.”

  “I am now officially in a state of bliss,” I told her.

  When she saw Ben, she said, “Well, hello, handsome! Same red, windburned lips. Same fisherman’s sweater and corduroy trousers.”

  Without so much as a confused look or a glance at his jeans and long-sleeved gray T-shirt, Ben grinned and said, “Hey, Trillium. Nice to meet you.”

  When everyone had gone to the hotel or, in the case of Luka and Mr. Ransom, home, and it was just Ben, Willow, Caro, and I cleaning up, Willow came to Ben, a dog in the crook of each arm, and said, “I don’t want to put you on the spot, but could I be so bold as to ask if your dogs could please spend the night here? We would love to host them, and you’ll be here early tomorrow to help cook anyway, and you did bring that small container of food so I can feed them, and they could sleep in my room.” As if in cahoots with her, the dogs gazed at her rapt face, adoringly. “Or, if you think they wouldn’t like to stay all night, could they just be here with me while you go hang out with Taisy in the pool house? It would be so extraordinarily wonderful, but I will understand if you’d rather not.”

  Ben looked from Willow, to the dogs, to me, to Caro, and back to Willow. “Uh, they’d be fine here, but are you sure? Sometimes, in the middle of the night, they dig pretend holes to sleep in, and they’re very—thorough diggers. It can go on for quite a while.”

  The expression on Willow’s face suggested that she had been waiting her entire life to be awakened by the pretend thorough digging of Pidwit and Roo. “Did you hear that, you tiny, wittle sweethearts?” she baby-talked to them. “You’re staying, you’re staying! It’s my second sleepover!”

  “Thank you,” said Caro to Ben and she put her slender arms around him and hugged him.

  On the way over to the pool house, Ben said, “Man, you should’ve shown up that first day with a couple of puppies. Willow would’ve been putty in your hands.”

  I sniffed and said, “‘While you go hang out with Taisy in the pool house,’ indeed.”

  “What?” said Ben.

  “I believe we just witnessed a conspiracy in action.”

  “To get the dogs to spend the night, you mean?”

  “That and to make it so that you didn’t have to go home tonight and so that we could be alone.”

  Ben said, “Caro and Willow? They’d do that?”

  I felt myself blushing, but I kept my tone matter-of-fact. “Willow is in love and thinks everyone else should be, too. Although she may have just been an unwitting pawn in Caro’s plot because Caro is a plotter from way back, a shaper of other people’s destinies. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that she was the one who first suggested that Wilson invite me here.”

  “Really? She seems sort of distracted.”

  “She’s the puppeteer. We are the puppets. Luckily, she’s a nice puppeteer with only her puppets’ best interests at heart.”

  Slowly, Ben said, “And she thinks it would be in our best interest for me to spend the night with you in the pool house.” />
  “Okay, that sounds creepy. I think she thought we would have things to talk about, and I think she thought it would be nice if we had plenty of time to do it.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think we should talk and maybe have a glass of wine and then watch the Planet Earth with the weird, deep sea creatures. Have you seen that one?”

  Ben laughed. “Not recently. But if there’s a Dumbo octopus, you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  ON THE PORCH, BEN grabbed my hand, and I spun around to face him.

  “You knew I would come,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

  “Yes. I wasn’t positive it would be today, but I knew you would.”

  “How?”

  Carefully, as though my life depended on doing it right, I ran my finger along his zygomatic arch. “Remember those fights we’d have back in high school?”

  “We had some pretty good ones.”

  “Well, most of the time, I’d be flying around, screeching and stomping, while you stayed annoyingly calm.”

  “I wouldn’t say annoyingly calm. I’d just say calm.”

  “You’d be wrong. But anyway, there were a few times you got really mad, and I’m talking about eyes-blazing-like-bonfires-voice-booming mad, the way you were the other night in this garden, and do you know what all those times had in common?”

  I waited while Ben puzzled this out. It was a lovely thing to watch: his eyes alive with thinking and then all at once lit with understanding.

  “Okay,” he said, abruptly, “let’s go inside.”

  “Say it. Say what made you really and truly mad.”

  “I really want to see that Dumbo octopus.”

  I waited. Ben picked up my hand, pressed his mouth to my palm, and said, “What made me really and truly mad was when I knew you were right.”

  I took his face between my hands, and our kiss was not a trip down memory lane. We weren’t Ben and Taisy, sixteen years old and leaning against that tree in his neighborhood. The kiss wasn’t at all, not one thing, like coming home. It was new. Unprecedented. Groundbreaking, and I didn’t care just then exactly what ground we were breaking. I didn’t need to know what our being together meant, where we were headed. Conversation could wait. The Dumbo octopus could wait. I had been aching for seventeen years to get my hands on this man. We hardly made it through the door before I was unbuttoning his shirt.

  But because I was who I was, I couldn’t quite give way without clearing a few things up, and this was crazy because all I wanted was for it never to end: the muscles of his bare back shifting like continents under my hands, his mouth in a slow slide down the exact center of my body, every nerve ending raw and singing, especially the ones in the places he hadn’t touched yet, anticipation edging out everything else, lapping like a tide at my ability to think, to speak, pulling language and logic out to sea, until there were only two words left, and, instead of letting them go, at the last second, I caught them. I said them: “Ben, wait.”

  In an instant, he stopped and rested his cheek against my hipbone, his breath stammering against my skin. When it slowed enough, he said, “Are you okay?”

  I slid my fingers into his hair. “I just need to say something.”

  I waited for him to pull away, but he didn’t. He pressed his mouth once into the hollow beneath my hip and then, never taking his hands off me, he moved up to lay his head on the pillow next to mine.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “I just realized that I need you to know what this means to me.”

  “Taisy.” He kissed my shoulder and my neck, and then propped his head up on his elbow so that his face was all I could see, a Ben-sky. “Let me tell you what I think it means, first.”

  “Okay, but—”

  He kissed the corner of my mouth. “If we do this, it will mean that you won’t be able to leave me. Not just that it would break your heart, but that you will not be able to do it.”

  “That’s right,” I said, awed at his prescience, although I guess I shouldn’t have been. When it came to reading my mind, Ben had always been a close second to my mother and Marcus.

  “I know it’s right, not because I can read your mind,” he said, “but because that’s what it means to me.”

  Tears filled my eyes. “But I lied about us, and I ended our marriage, and I left you.”

  “And I gave up on you, pushed even memories of you away. I never read your letters, and you were right when you told me that was cruel. All that was my version of lying and leaving.”

  I saw it then, how guilt had no place in this bed or our lives. If we wanted to step from this moment into our future, to wake up every morning in wonder, we both had to let it go. Could it possibly be that easy? I looked up at Ben, who was here with me after so many years. His eyes alone loved me the way no one else ever had; they made me want to give him everything he could ever want. Yes, I thought it could be just exactly that easy.

  “There’s no other way to do this except to stop being mad at ourselves and at each other for all the mistakes we made,” I said. “Once and for all.”

  “I will if you will.”

  I rolled over, lay on top of my true love Ben, and kissed him. “I just did,” I said.

  WILSON’S DINING ROOM TABLE was as long and shiny as a lap pool, but even it wasn’t big enough to accommodate what my brother had labeled, “The Cleary Family Thanksgiving Dinner to End All Cleary Family Thanksgiving Dinners, If We’re Lucky,” so Ben and his dad carried the kitchen table into the dining room and stuck it at the end of the big one. By the time Caro and Trillium covered both with gold tablecloths, set them with the china, crystal, and silver, and spaced the candles and centerpieces just so, you could hardly tell where one table ended and the other began. As I stood surveying the glittering room, Trillium came up and put her arm around me.

  “Looks like a family dinner to me,” she said.

  “Am I crazy to do this?” I asked.

  “You’re you to do this,” she said, kissing my cheek. “It’ll be good. Have faith.”

  At five o’clock, Marcus arrived, with his hair newly cut and wearing a pumpkin-colored checked shirt under a brown jacket. Before I took him in to see everyone, I pulled him aside. “You look great,” I told him. “Like something out of a magazine. Thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me. I look great effortlessly. Is everyone here?”

  “Not yet, and I’m sure Wilson will descend upon us at the last minute, so he can make an entrance.” I hugged him. “Willow is so nervous to meet you. Be nice, okay? She’s your sister, you know.”

  “I have too many sisters already,” grumbled Marcus, but not before I saw something flicker across his face. He fiddled with his jacket cuffs, a sure sign. Marvel of marvels, Marcus was nervous, too.

  When I took him into the kitchen and everyone greeted him, Ben shaking his hand, Trillium planting a kiss squarely on his mouth, the way she always did, Willow was nowhere to be found.

  “She and Luka slipped out into the garden,” whispered Caro in my ear. “She needs a moment to gather herself, I think. But she’ll be back.”

  In a few minutes, there she was, skirting around the room, shy as a fawn, stealing glances at Marcus when she thought no one was looking. Once, she came up behind me and whispered, “He looks like you. Your hair and your eyebrows and your smiles.”

  “Everyone says that,” I said, and because she sounded a touch forlorn, I added, “I think he looks a little like you, too.”

  “Truly?”

  I had said it before I realized it was true, but now I could see it. “The way you’re both so tall and lean. And you have narrower faces than I do.”

  The two of them were so skittery that I never found a moment when they were close enough to each other for me to introduce them, and then, while I was filling water glasses, Luka said, “Come look,” and he led me into the kitchen, and there they were, my brother and sister, standing where the kitchen table used to be, talking. They still looked painfully
shy; Willow had her hands clasped behind her back, like a schoolgirl in a movie, and Marcus was messing with his cuffs, but it was a start.

  At 5:20, Barbara called to say they were stuck in traffic and would be late and to start without them. At 5:45, we began putting the food on the table. At six, every glass was filled, every candle was lit, Vince Guaraldi’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” swirled quietly in the air like snowflakes, and Wilson was nowhere to be seen.

  “He’ll be here,” said Willow. “He promised me, and he never breaks his promises.”

  Now that I thought about it, I realized he had never broken a promise to me, either, if only because he had never, as far back as I could remember, made one. But I didn’t say this to Willow.

  At 6:15, we had all made our way into the dining room and were milling around, drinks in hand, admiring the food, when Wilson appeared in the entranceway. He was glowing with health and as immaculately turned out as ever. In fact, he was wearing an actual ascot, which I knew would make Marcus nearly delirious with mean-spirited joy. A hush fell on the room, not a reverent one, although Wilson possibly thought so, but the kind that is made up of collective unease about what to do next. Even Willow seemed to freeze, and it occurred to me that not a single person in that room, not even the ones in his immediate family—his immediate second family, that is—was unreservedly glad to see him.

  Then, Luka, God bless him, left Willow’s side, walked across the room with his long legs to Wilson, held out his hand, and said, “Hi, Dr. Cleary, I’m Willow’s friend Luka Bailey-Song.”

  For a shaky moment, Wilson merely looked at him, and my heart went out to Willow, who had her hands clasped under her chin, as though she were praying, and then Wilson shook Luka’s hand and said, gruffly, “Well, you’re a tall one, aren’t you?”

  “And still growing.” Luka’s smile would have disarmed a grizzly bear, but Wilson stayed granite-faced.

  Some of the others, including Ben, started stirring, setting down their glasses, moving vaguely in the direction of Wilson, but before the stirrings could develop into a full-fledged receiving line, Caro glided, with luminous grace, over to Wilson’s side, took his hand, and said, “Shall we ask everyone to sit, darling? The dinner is all ready.” Wilson’s face softened for an instant as he looked at Caro, before he gave a leisurely, kingly lift of his shoulder and said, “As you wish, Caro.”