Belong to Me: A Novel

by Marisa de los Santos

  I nodded, taking his word for it.

  “But maybe seeing what he saw made Robert Frost sad or dark or whatever because he was already sad and dark to begin with.”

  Wow. Wow, right?

  My first impulse was to cheer, to hoist Dev onto my shoulders and parade him through the streets, but I didn’t want to embarrass him, so instead I said, “I always thought that about Frost. No matter what people think, he’s as good at staring at the void as anyone. Better. So you’re thinking that a sonnet is a way of distilling a big idea or emotion until it fits in a tiny box.”

  “Right. Like with ‘Design,’ Frost is worried that there is no design, no shape to what happens, so he does what he knows how to do: he puts the worry into a poem that has a small, really definite shape. Fourteen lines. All that stuff.” Dev looked up at me with his white and sudden smile. “Sorry if I’m not explaining this that well. I just thought of it.”

  “Oh, I’d say you’re doing a pretty decent job.” I smiled back at him. “Pretty decent. For just having thought of it and all.”

  Suddenly, Dev looked sheepish. “I’ve been talking a lot, right?” Dev swiveled his fork around his plate. He caught the fork tines on the edge of a lettuce leaf and flopped the leaf over so that it covered his pile of olives.

  “A lot,” agreed Lake, nodding emphatically, curls hopping and shimmying. “Talking a lot and treating your olives like nuclear waste. Why, may I ask?”

  Dev rolled his eyes, made a horrific gagging face, and—just like that—he was all-boy, all thirteen-year-old.

  “I told you before, Mom. Give me an olive and all I think is eyeball, eyeball, eyeball.”

  Lake told me a story about aspirin.

  “It was Dev’s third birthday,” she began. “We’d had a party. A few other mothers, maybe five kids total, but somehow it turned into a circus. One kid started screaming about the cake being vanilla, and it was like a string of firecrackers going off. Boom boom boom. In two minutes, they were all completely out of their minds, including Dev.”

  Lake sat cross-legged at one end of her sofa, a throw pillow in her lap; I sat cross-legged at the other. We drank hot tea out of the kind of thick white mugs that are a joy to hold. Lake laughed.

  “Especially Dev. So all the mothers left with these howling, convulsing wolverines dangling from their arms, and I put Dev down for a nap. He’d pretty much given up naps by then, but I tucked him in and told him I had a splitting headache, which was true, and was going to take a nap, too, in my room.”

  Lake paused. Her living room was brightly lit, but remembering worked like candlelight on Lake’s face, softening its lines.

  “So I’m lying there, almost asleep, and suddenly there’s Dev, standing next to the bed, holding out his palm. And when I look at it, I see that he’s handing me something, two tiny white somethings, and then it hits me that they’re aspirin. And I sit up and grab them and grab his hand, and I’m shouting at him, ‘Oh my God, how many did you eat, how many were in the bottle, was it a new bottle, I have to call 911.’ He’s so calm, standing there.”

  She paused again, gazing down at the pillow in her lap, one finger tracing the pattern of its fabric, and I could tell she was seeing his face, exactly as he’d looked that day. In spite of myself, I felt a longing so keen it was almost envy, and a partially healed-over hurt inside me began to ache.

  “He said, patiently, ‘I didn’t take any. I don’t have a headache. You have a headache.’ I couldn’t quite comprehend what he was saying. I said, ‘You climbed up on the sink?’ He nodded. I said, ‘Are you sure you didn’t take any?’ even though for some reason I knew he was telling the truth. I was so relieved. I hugged him so hard that he said, ‘Ow.’ Then I thought about the bottle of aspirin, and I asked him, ‘How did you get the pills out of the bottle?’”

  Lake smiled and shook her head. “The look he gave me. Like that was such a ridiculous question. And he said, ‘It was on the lid.’ ‘What was on the lid?’ I asked him.”

  I was so busy being amazed that a child of three could be so thoughtful that I almost didn’t understand what Lake was saying. Then, I understood.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  She grinned. “He said, ‘Push down and turn.’”

  Lake told me a story about stealing library books.

  “Two of them. One was a history of physics. The other was about sonar. He wrote in them, all over them, in the margins, on the inside of the back cover, taking notes. I remember he wrote, ‘He saw his wife’s bones! Cool!’ next to a section on Röntgen. He was in fourth grade. Old enough to know better than to write in library books.”

  “What did you do when you found them?” I asked.

  “I didn’t find them,” said Lake, “he brought them to me. He was crying. He’d gotten so excited that he forgot they were library books. I said, ‘You forgot twice?’ And he had. I could tell he had. He was a pretty rule-abiding kid. Still is. He was so upset when he realized what he’d done.

  “That was one of our seriously broke periods. I let him keep the books and, when I got the notice from the library, I told the librarian I had no idea what they were talking about. I told her I’d definitely returned the books a week ago. I could tell she didn’t quite believe me, but she knew a little bit about Dev. She cut me a break.”

  Lake sighed. “Sometimes I felt like his brain was this hungry, pacing animal, and I had to keep throwing it chunks of meat.”

  Lake told me a story about Dev’s seventh-grade science teacher, and, suddenly, her voice was pure acid, burning, burning. Burning a hole in the moment and back through the tissue of time to that teacher standing in his classroom, pouring cruelty down on the person Lake loved the most.

  I thought, She’d kill that man, if she could. And that’s when it came to me: Demeter. Threatening, laying waste, making terrible bargains. Doing whatever it took to drag her child out of hell.

  I told Lake about Clare.

  Although as soon as I’d begun telling her, I wished I hadn’t because up until that moment, our conversation had been the best possible kind of new-friend conversation. Do you know what I mean? We talked like two old friends, while still being happily conscious of the sparkle of newness shining on the surfaces of us and all we said.

  But the moment I brought up Clare, it was as though someone had hit a switch, a spotlight had come on, and we sat there blinking at each other in the stark, arctic light, two strangers, our shadows thrown, looming and separate, onto the wall behind us. I’m not sure why that happened, but it happened.

  “I have a thirteen-year-old in my life, too,” I began, and boom: Lake’s eyebrows flew up her forehead in an expression I could not name. Skepticism? Shock? Scorn? Ordinary friendly interest disguised as skepticism, shock, or scorn? I hoped for this last, but when Lake spoke, her voice contained a note of something equally hard to pin down, but something that could not in a million years be mistaken for ordinary friendly interest.

  “I didn’t realize you and your husband had children,” she said, and the words surprised me, like a slap. I’d told her earlier in the evening that my husband and I did not have children, and in Lake’s mouth, the words “your husband” sounded like an accusation. Tension began zinging back and forth across the three feet of space that separated us. You could almost hear it.

  “We don’t,” I said carefully, “not yet. I thought I’d told you that.”

  I waited, feeling the moment teetering on an edge. To my relief, Lake’s face relaxed, her eyebrows settling down like blackbirds landing on a telephone line.

  “I’m sorry,” she said with a rueful smile. “Of course you did.”

  I kept waiting.

  “I think sometimes,” Lake sighed, “sometimes I feel a little sorry for myself. Or maybe I always feel a little sorry for myself and it just surfaces now and then. The struggling-single-mom-of-a-teenager thing. Like no one else in the world has ever gone through it. I’m sorry I snapped at you.”

  I soft
ened then, because I could see that: loving your son ferociously but longing, now and then, for a different life, that longing popping out in short, bitter bursts. I thought about how Lake must see me: a woman her age, happily married, jobless (for now), childless (oh, childless), my life resting—however uneasily—on my green, regularly mown patch of the upper-middle class.

  “I feel my own luck,” I wanted to tell her, “I live in gratitude.” Also, “I wasn’t always the person you see now.” And finally, “I have lost things I will never stop missing.”

  Instead I said, “Don’t be sorry. You’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to be a mother.” I smiled. “And it’s good for me to get snapped at now and then,” which was—and is—the god’s honest truth, although that didn’t mean the snapping didn’t sting. I felt it still, a tingling spot of pain.

  “Tell me about your thirteen-year-old,” said Lake.

  I almost didn’t. I liked Lake, I understood why she’d bristled at the idea of my knowing what it was like to be a mother, I wanted to be her friend. But I almost didn’t tell her about Clare because Clare Hobbes is a subject I hold as close to my heart as any. That’s not quite what I mean, “close to my heart.” Clare and her mother live in Virginia, down the street from my parents, but Clare just as surely lives in my heart, and, I don’t know about you, but I don’t go around revealing what’s in my heart to just anyone. I wasn’t sure I trusted Lake. I was pretty sure, but not as sure as I’d been a few minutes earlier.

  I thought about Dev, though, about Lake’s love circling him like a ring of fire, about how she’d decided to let me in. And I hope you won’t think I’m a hopeless nut job when I tell you that, sitting on Lake’s couch, I also thought, fleetingly, of Søren Kierkegaard, about whom I know next to nothing but who pops unbidden into my head from time to time, looking, disconcertingly and inaccurately, like Hans Christian Andersen and saying something like this: rational thought is as holey as a moth-eaten sweater; at some point, girl, you need to take a leap of faith. He’s talking about religion, but I’d say the same is true for friendship, the two having never been that far apart in my mind.

  So I leaped. I told Lake about Clare. “I wanted to be her mother.” That’s part of what I said.

  I met Clare two years ago when she was eleven and in trouble. In a short span of time, she’d lost her mother and her father, and while her mother came back, her father never did. Her mother, Viviana, was sick with bipolar disorder, and one bad day, she stopped her car and dropped Clare off by the side of the road, by the side of the road and into my life.

  “And my life got bigger,” I told Lake. “With Clare in it, my life got really, really big. Big and real and good.”

  “So you wanted her to stay in it.” Lake nodded, with so much understanding on her face, I could’ve hugged her.

  “During that stretch of time when Clare and I were—going it alone, I would’ve given anything, done anything to bring her mother back. And then she came back…” I broke off. When it comes to Clare, sometimes, the past isn’t past. The past can get as present as any present ever was, so near that I feel its breath.

  “But you’re still close?” asked Lake.

  “We are.” I brightened. “In fact, she’s coming for Thanksgiving.” I brightened more. “And here’s an idea: you and Dev join us.”

  Lake opened her mouth, then shut it, then smiled a small smile. She did not speak.

  “Teo would love to have you. He’s a more-the-merrier guy from way back. And Clare and Dev would get along like gangbusters, I can almost guarantee it.”

  Lake still didn’t speak.

  “Whatever gangbusters are,” I added, as a way of giving her a bit more time to reply.

  Lake didn’t reply, not even to speculate as to the origins of the term “gangbusters.” Instead, she sat there, smiling that small, small inscrutable smile, like Mona Lisa herself, although I must say that until that moment, I’d never found Mona Lisa’s smile particularly interesting or even particularly a smile. Looking at Lake, I understood what probably everyone else already knows about the woman in that painting: we are drawn to her not because of what the smile gives us but because it gives nothing. We are waiting to get past the smile. We are waiting—we’ve spent centuries waiting—for the woman to speak.

  Even though I’m more comfortable with silence than some people are, Lake seemed so poised to give Mona a run for her money that a speech got busy assembling itself in my head, a speech beginning with promises of homemade cranberry sauce and oyster stuffing and culminating in loving descriptions of my grandmother’s butter-twist roll recipe. It was a decent speech (who could resist any invitation involving the phrase “butter-twist”?), but delivering it would have made me feel more like a used-car salesman than I had in ages, so I was thankful when Lake spoke up first.

  “You’re so nice to offer,” she said, slowly. “But Dev and I, it’s been just the two of us for so many holidays that the whole family thing…The whole other people’s family thing. Well.” She paused, a pause I feared would grow into another enigmatic and potentially multicentury silence but did not.

  “Can I talk to Dev and let you know?”

  Of course I said, “Of course.”

  I breathed an inaudible sigh of relief that Lake and I had emerged from that moment intact, but I shouldn’t have. Because a few seconds later she sat there in front of me and, with lightning speed and without moving a muscle, flat-out disappeared.

  Wait. That’s not exactly what happened. It’s important that I get this right.

  Look, my first real conversation with Lake leaped and plunged and stalled and sneaked up on me as much as any first real conversation I’ve had in my conversational history, so I hope you’ll see the sense in my zipping briefly into left field as I describe what happened next, the weird thing that happened to Lake’s face, and will forgive whatever annoyance the zipping may cause. If you can’t, well, you wouldn’t be the first.

  But, please, try this:

  When my friend Linny decided to pursue photography with her whole, sweet, capacious, hard-beating heart rather than with half a heart, as her grandfather before her had done to his everlasting regret, this same grandfather, Poppy Phil, gave her a camera.

  The camera was a stunner. I have loved many an inanimate object. I have a long history of coveting soup ladles, cloche hats, black 1950s desk telephones, bentwood rocking chairs, Macintosh computers, and every single art nouveau sign I have ever seen. I once almost stole a silver-and-glass spaceship-shaped tabletop cigarette lighter from my neighbor’s apartment even though I don’t smoke, and I have never glimpsed an Airstream trailer without getting a lump in my throat.

  But I’ve always been a sucker for externals alone: the shape, the shine, what the surface suggests to my palm. So mechanically disinclined it’s verging on criminal, I never understood the beauty of an object’s workings until Linny sat my reluctant self down one day and showed me her camera. Within fifteen minutes, I had fallen hard for the whole gadgety, eyelike nature of the thing: a tiny piece of glass slowing, bending, organizing light—light—into your grandmother, the Grand Canyon, the begonia on the windowsill, the film keeping the image like a secret. Grandmother, canyon, begonia tucked neatly into the sleek black box, like bugs in a jar. My mind boggled.

  But the part of the camera that made my heart sing the loudest, the niftiest of the nifty was the iris: the mechanism behind the lens that swivels open and swivels closed, or almost closed, to control the amount of light. Part whirlpool, part metal-petaled flower, blossoming, unblossoming.

  After I said “Of course” to Lake, I said this: “Since you don’t have family nearby, what made you decide to move here, if you don’t mind my asking?” And like most people who end a question that way, I assumed Lake would not mind my asking. It seemed a natural question, after all.

  Lake didn’t shift her gaze or twitch a lip, and her eyebrows floated serenely above her eyes. Truly, her face changed in no nameable way, but�
��and I’m describing this as best I can—before the word “asking” was out of my mouth, Lake’s mechanical iris whirled shut with a nearly audible shoop, leaving an aperture so narrow, nothing, not even light, could get through. She didn’t shut down. She just shut. It was plain spooky.

  When she answered my question, she was a woman speaking from behind a wall, and I knew as well as I knew anything that her answer was a lie.

  “Steffi Levy, the principal at Dev’s elementary school, a good friend to both of us, knew someone on the board of the charter school here, where Dev goes now. She helped him get in.”

  The lie came out whole but awkward, like a new shirt you wear without bothering to launder it first (Teo Sandoval has been known to do this), stiff and creased in all the wrong places. A rehearsed lie making its first public debut.

  I can’t stand lies. Probably no one can. Probably everyone is, to varying degrees, allergic to them, both spiritually and physically. Lies make me feel low and ignoble, and also itchy, like there’s sand under my skin. The only thing that feels worse than hearing a lie is telling one. For a few seconds, I was too uncomfortable in my own skin to speak. I just sat there. Then Lake the shape-shifting woman shifted again.

  “What about you, city girl?” she asked, affectionately, crinkling the corners of her eyes. “What made you leave the city? How’d you end up in this one-horse, three-mall, no-spaghetti-puttanesca-serving town?”

  There were two possible answers to this question: one for strangers, one for friends. Lake sat smiling at me and lifting the brown Betty teapot, offering me more, but I could still envision the blades of the iris flashing closed and I could still feel the lie prickling along my arms, so I placed my hand over the mouth of my mug and said, “No thanks, I’ve had enough.”

  Then I told Lake, “Teo took a job at a hospital in Philly, and I’m applying to some schools in the opposite direction, so we picked a midway point.” I shrugged an insouciant, brows-lifted, Holly Golightly shrug. “And here we are.”