Belong to Me: A Novel

by Marisa de los Santos

  “Hands full!” Piper explained cheerfully as Ginny answered the door. “Thanks a million, Ginny!”

  Ginny smiled and made a move to take the box, but Piper said, “No, no. I’m fine. You shoo.”

  She settled the box on the kitchen counter, lifted out the chicken, and walked to the refrigerator, pausing to examine the expanse of stainless-steel door and to cluck once with annoyance before opening it and settling the chicken on the bottom shelf. Then she washed her hands, soaping them copiously and scrubbing her fingers, consciously setting a good example for the others, in case they were watching.

  With a crisp motion, Piper ripped off one square of paper towel and almost dropped it, surprised by its coarseness, its flimsiness. Not Elizabeth’s usual brand. Piper drew in a breath, feeling a headache, silvery and flickering, like a Fourth of July sparkler, begin to sizzle behind her eyes. She and Elizabeth were of one mind about paper towels: they should be as close to cloth as any paper could be. She stared at the towel for a moment, then crumpled it in one hand.

  With the other hand, she slid open the trash can disguised as a cabinet and tossed in the towel. “Fine,” she said, and shoved the trash can back out of sight.

  “Sorry. Did you say something?” Ginny asked.

  Piper turned toward her, briskly slapping her palms on the fronts of her thighs, feeling the sting through her jeans. Ginny was leaning over, settling Meredith into a second booster chair. A wing of Ginny’s hair fell forward, and, absently, Piper noticed that the hair, gray and gleaming, nearly matched the kitchen’s stainless-steel appliances. It was shinier than the appliances. Meredith reached out one hand and gently batted it.

  “Well. I think I’ll just run up and say hi to Mrs. Donahue.” Piper looked down at Meredith. “Is that okay with you?”

  “Oh, fine,” said Ginny, with a reassuring wave of her hand. “Not to worry. I’m happy to watch them both.”

  Piper had been speaking to Meredith. Abruptly, she shifted her gaze to Ginny, then blinked. “Oh,” she said after a beat. “Super! I so appreciate it.”

  As she walked up the stairs toward Elizabeth’s bedroom, a grand master suite with room for a love seat, an armchair, and the delicate mahogany secrétaire that had been in Elizabeth’s family for generations, Piper felt her headache’s hard glittering intensify. Last time she’d been in this room, Elizabeth had talked for a few minutes, then slid into a restless, twisting nap, making occasional low, whimpering sounds that Piper could feel in the back of her own throat.

  But when Piper reached the top of the stairs, she saw that Elizabeth’s door was standing wide open. Music was playing. Elizabeth’s bed was empty and so faultlessly made that it looked like a bed in a showroom, the satin and velvet throw pillows gorgeously heaped. Elizabeth had always had a soft spot for sumptuous bedding and a knack for unstudied elegance. Even now, Piper felt a stab of envy. When it came to home décor, Elizabeth was like those Frenchwomen who casually pinned up their hair and wound scarves around their necks in a manner that said, “Yes, this is perfect, and, no, you will never learn to do it.”

  Piper shook off this thought and took a step into the room. All the window shades were fully raised and the air danced with dust motes. She stood for a moment, confused, dazzled, staring at the empty bed, sunlight and James Taylor washing over her.

  “Don’t look so shocked. It’s one of the privileges of having cancer: you get to stop pretending to be cool.” Elizabeth’s voice, followed by Elizabeth’s laugh, a real laugh, ordinary and miraculous. Piper’s startled heart seemed to bump against her ribs and she pressed both hands to her chest.

  “What?” she gasped, turning toward the sound.

  Elizabeth sat in a corner of the love seat, her feet tucked under her, her hair still damp from showering. Piper saw that there wasn’t a lot of color in her face, but her eyes looked more like her eyes than they had in a long time. Elizabeth wore the Juicy Couture sweat suit she’d bought herself as a joke for her last birthday, a bright pink velour talisman to ward off growing old.

  “Hey, you,” said Piper, plopping herself down in the armchair.

  Elizabeth flashed a smile and shimmied her shoulders a little to the music.

  “‘Stop pretending to be cool.’ Oh, you mean James Taylor?” Piper rolled her eyes. “I don’t think even cancer gets you off the hook for that.”

  “Oh, come on,” said Elizabeth, “listen.” She tilted back her chin and closed her eyes, like a person letting rain fall on her face.

  Piper closed her eyes, too. She listened. The headache began to waver and dim.

  “Admit it. It’s beautiful.”

  “Shhh,” said Piper.

  Because it was. It was beautiful. The guitar and the man’s voice, both, were plainly beautiful, as austere and clear as the morning itself, as sitting in the room with Elizabeth, the two of them given over to listening. He was singing about going to Carolina, and it struck Piper as the purest, most unsentimental song she’d ever heard; even the sadness felt simple, scrubbed clean.

  Because Piper wanted the song to never end, she spoke before it did.

  “Yep,” she agreed quietly, “it’s a good song.”

  “Yep,” echoed Elizabeth. And then, “My mom used to listen to James Taylor all the time. James Taylor, John Denver, Carly Simon, and what’s her name with the hair. Boy, that stuff was contagious. Mom-music. My sisters and I still call it that. I remember catching my dad singing ‘Annie’s Song’ while he changed the oil in the car.”

  “My mom,” began Piper, then she stopped.

  Elizabeth waited. Then she snapped her fingers. “Carole King. She’s the one with the hair.”

  Piper thought about how her own mother had really been two mothers, the one before Marybeth Pringle had moved in next door and the one after. If the pre-Marybeth mother had listened to music, Piper couldn’t remember a single song. In fact, whenever Piper recalled that mother, and she didn’t do it often, she thought of her as steeped in silence, a wooden, distant woman with an unsmiling face.

  The post-Marybeth mother, the one who grew her hair long, wore jangling jewelry, neglected her housework, and let Piper’s older brother George and his friends smoke pot in the rec room, had listened to music all the time. Piper remembered her swaying around the kitchen or lying on lounge chairs in the backyard with Marybeth, both of them ridiculous in bikinis. Music had played then, loud and constant, but Piper couldn’t remember anything about it. While Piper had not liked the pre-Marybeth mother much either (had craved her approval, had stored up every act or word of affection like treasure, but had never really liked her), the post-Marybeth mother had been worse because she was the mother who left. Because everything about her mother after Marybeth came had been weird and stupid and wrong, Piper knew the music had been, too.

  “Anyway,” said Piper, “music doesn’t make a person cool or not cool.”

  “Oh, please!” Elizabeth almost shrieked. “What about high school? What about college? Piper, you are so wrong.”

  “I am so not wrong.”

  Elizabeth thought for a second. “Okay, if you were blond, beautiful, and queen of the world, maybe, maybe the music you liked didn’t matter, but for the rest of us, trust me. It mattered.”

  “You were beautiful. I’ve seen the pictures.”

  “I was cute.”

  Piper shrugged, as if there were no difference between beautiful and cute, when of course there was. Looking at Elizabeth’s face now, though, Piper could see that all the cute was gone, that a dry, pale angularity had taken over. Piper felt sadness rise around her. Fine, she thought.

  “You know what, though,” said Piper, “I was popular—there’s no two ways about that—but I was never really cool. Not like the Talking Heads girls. You remember the Talking Heads girls?” Piper and Elizabeth had not gone to the same college, but it didn’t matter. Everyone knew the Talking Heads girls.

  “Oh, yeah. With their little lopsided haircuts. And those black leggings under skirt
s. Boys loved those girls.”

  The two sat without speaking, remembering and listening to James Taylor sing about Mexico. Then Piper said, “I went to see Teo Sandoval yesterday, like I told you I was going to. I took him your chart.”

  Elizabeth’s expression of mild thoughtfulness didn’t even shift. “Don’t tell me,” she said. Her voice was soft, but it was a command. “I mean, it’s fine that you went. But don’t tell me what he said.”

  “But—”

  “I stopped. Almost a week ago. I wanted to stop, so I stopped.”

  Upon hearing this, in spite of everything she knew, in spite of what she’d waited hours and hours to tell Elizabeth, Piper’s first thought was to say, “No, you can’t stop. You cannot. You have to keep fighting this.”

  Piper didn’t say this. Instead, she dropped her head and looked down at her lap. “I’m so sorry. I’m sorry for pressuring you into—” Elizabeth cut her off again.

  “Piper,” she said. She waited for Piper to meet her eyes. “I know you think you and Tom talked me into it. But you didn’t. Or maybe you did. But not in the way you think. I wanted to do it. The thing is…” Elizabeth paused and Piper held her breath. The whole room seemed to hold its breath.

  Elizabeth smiled. “The thing is, it’s okay to do something just because the people you love want you to. Sometimes that’s a good enough reason.”

  Piper stared at her.

  “You hear me?” asked Elizabeth.

  Piper nodded, her eyes stinging. How could she ever be without this person?

  “Listen, Betts,” she said, finally, “I hate to break this to you, but I think that girl Graciela hired to help her clean your house?”

  “Mindy?”

  “I think Mindy’s been using 409 on your stainless appliances. In fact, I’m almost positive.”

  Elizabeth’s laugh was the best, most alive sound in the world. When she could speak, she said, still laughing, “Now, that is the worst news I’ve heard all year.”

  Piper cleaned the appliances, of course, rubbed the silken cleaner over every inch, then polished with small circular motions until her wrist began to ache. Afterward, after she’d picked up Carter and Elizabeth’s daughter, Emma, from school, stopping on the way to buy paper towels and two bunches of remarkable, nearly red lilies, one for the kitchen table, one for Elizabeth’s room, and after she’d trimmed the stems and put the flowers in water, after she’d fed the children apple slices and peanut butter at Elizabeth’s kitchen table, Piper baked the chicken, filling the rooms of Elizabeth’s house with its gold-tinged aroma.

  As she performed these tasks, Piper had a sense that they were more than tasks, that they were the edge of something large that would unfold, pushing its way into the future. As Piper tidied Emma’s ponytails, wiped peanut butter off Peter’s chin, assembled potatoes and wedges of onion around the chicken, she understood that she would go on to fill days and weeks with helping, would wake up mornings feeling the day’s emptiness, how it stood waiting to be filled with duties the way you’d fill a jar with coins.

  But what also began that day, without Piper deciding or even knowing, was a kind of campaign, a gathering of forces. Against—what?—cancer? Maybe death itself, although Piper would have recoiled in disgust at the melodrama of waging a campaign against either one, would likely have recoiled at the whole idea of waging a campaign at all. “Oh, please,” she would have sneered, “get over yourself.”

  Still, there were moments over the next few weeks when what could only be called defiance ran into and through her body like a current.

  One gray morning, Piper opened the door to two young men delivering a hospital bed. She’d been expecting them. The men were nice, polite, and they didn’t just drop off the bed, but placed it in the space Tom and Piper had made for it in the dining room the night before, angling the bed per Piper’s instructions, in such a way that Elizabeth would receive the morning sun.

  But even though the men were nice, Piper hated them. She hated their big hands and their baseball caps. Their leather work boots—laced halfway up and the exact color of a Twinkie—made her want to scream. Mostly, she hated that they were strangers, strangers bearing witness to the private, shattering truth that a person in the house could no longer climb stairs and to the deeper, more private truth that the sick person desired to be downstairs in the heart of her home, among the people she loved.

  While testing the workings of the bed, one of the men had said, admiringly, “It’s fully motorized. Top of the line,” and Piper had wanted to wring his neck, clobber him with his own clipboard. “Top of the line,” as though the family were lucky to have such a bed in their house, as though Elizabeth should count her lucky stars.

  After the men left, Piper went into the kitchen and made a Bundt cake, buttery and full of apples, redolent of cinnamon. Elizabeth’s favorite. As she cracked the eggs, she whispered between clenched teeth, addressing no one and nothing she could name, “Fine. Fine. You did that. It’s done. Elizabeth will sleep in the goddamn dining room. But this?” Piper almost threw the cupful of sugar into the bowl. “This you can’t do a thing about.”

  She meant the cake. She meant the act of making it and the way it would turn out to be exactly right, a small, tangible victory. Piper stirred and stirred and stirred, saying with her whole body, “There is a limit. There is a limit to what can be taken away.”

  What truly surprised Piper, what she would look back on years later with wonder, wasn’t the fury or the defiance. Instead, it was the peace.

  It seemed impossible that you could stand in a kitchen making hot chocolate and grilled-cheese sandwiches with your best friend dying in the next room, the voices of her children tangled up with the voices of your own, that you could butter bread and watch, through the window, the trees relinquishing their leaves and hear the silvery tumble of water into a kettle, and be suddenly aware that what resided at the heart of every shape and sound was peace. A rightness hovering above all that was wrong, shimmering, like heat rising from a street in summer.

  It seemed impossible, but it wasn’t. Piper stood inside those moments and understood, as deeply as she’d ever understood anything, that living with Elizabeth’s dying was the truest thing to ever happen to her. “Right here, right now.” She thought again and again, “Right here, right now.”

  As with all things involving the care, feeding, and sleep times of small children, the period of Elizabeth’s dying quickly fell into something close to a regular schedule. The most regular element in the schedule, its anchor, was that on weekday mornings, Tom and Piper woke their respective children early, got them dressed, and Tom dropped Emma and Peter off at Piper’s house for breakfast. After that, the rhythm of a particular day shifted according to Elizabeth’s needs, her levels of fatigue and pain.

  For instance, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, Piper took all four children to school, then shopped, ran errands, or squeezed in a kickboxing class before picking up the little ones at their preschool, phoning the Donahues’ house on the drive back to see if Elizabeth were up to having the children at her house. When she was, Piper would take them there, feed them lunch, and await the twelve-thirty arrival of Ginny Phipps. When Elizabeth needed quiet, Piper would take Peter and Meredith to her own house, and Ginny would arrive and play with them there, while Piper left to pick up Carter and Emma at Tallyrand.

  On these days, the children might stay at Piper’s house all day, making mobiles out of sticks, fishing line, and autumn leaves or baking sugar cookies with Ginny, running around the yard, heaped like puppies on the family room floor watching the Wiggles, singing along at the tops of their lungs. Sometimes, Peter, who still napped, would fall asleep amid the noise, and Piper would carry him to Meredith’s crib, pausing in the gray, feathery-edged dimness of the room to touch his hair or the creases the carpet had left on his cheek.

  But often Elizabeth wanted them at her house, wanted them all, hungry for voices, bodies, and motion. Tom mounted a television in
one corner of the dining room, up high so that Elizabeth could see it, and the children would array themselves around her, curled or sprawled on the bed or floor, tangled up in the big armchair, both confused and enchanted by the oddity of television in the dining room. Elizabeth would watch the children watching TV and Piper would watch her watch them.

  What mystified Piper was that, most of the time, Elizabeth even seemed to welcome the presence of the strangers, to drink them in, too. Because her house was trafficked through by strangers now, daily: a shockingly young doctor, home health aides, nurses. When Piper or Tom wasn’t with Elizabeth, and sometimes even when one of them was, a stranger was present. Some of the strangers were quiet, some spoke almost constantly. One made Elizabeth laugh by talking back to the guests on Oprah or The Today Show the way Elizabeth and Piper always did: “Oh, get off your high horse, mister!” or “Newsflash: that red turtleneck makes you look straight-up fat.”

  No matter what their hands were busy doing, if Elizabeth was awake, the hospice workers kept as much eye contact with her as possible, as though to affirm, “You are here. You are not just a body damaged by illness. You are Elizabeth,” which made Piper want to weep with gratitude. In fact, Piper alternated between wanting to embrace the hospice workers (an impulse on which she never acted) and wanting them to disappear from the face of the earth.

  “Hospice,” a strangely delicate, weightless word, Piper noticed, one that could be either whisper or hiss.

  One night after Carter and Meredith were in bed, Piper sat at her kitchen table with Kyle’s laptop open before her. Because many of Elizabeth’s friends had asked Piper what they could do to help, Piper had decided to create a system of dinner drop-offs. While it would have been easy enough to ask people to cook main dishes that would freeze well and to bring them whenever they chose, Piper thought that freshly prepared, still-warm dishes would taste better, and she believed emphatically that each main dish should be accompanied by a healthy, vegetable-based side dish. Additionally, she wanted to build variety into the system, to avoid the potentially demoralizing effects of, say, evening upon evening of pasta.