Belong to Me: A Novel

by Marisa de los Santos

  My voice was crystal clear and carried in it the suggestion of a laugh. I met Lake’s flame-blue gaze as easily, as steadily as you please. But despite my belief in leaps of faith and even though I knew it would make me feel like a traitor and a thief, I handed her the stranger’s answer, the one so partial you could never call it truth.

  EIGHT

  Piper was reading to the kids when Elizabeth called.

  “I’m reading to the kids,” Piper told Elizabeth, and instantly cringed at what she heard in her own voice: the snag in rhythm, the pause before the phrase “the kids.” Piper blinked her eyes hard in a brief prayer that Elizabeth hadn’t heard it, too. The pause had been tiny, heartbeat size, and Piper was pretty sure it hadn’t been noticeable. But Elizabeth had been Piper’s best friend for years; she was fine-tuned to notice the unnoticeable.

  Carter and Emma had been born two weeks apart, and they’d been their separate names for perhaps the first two months. “Carter and Emma,” Piper, Elizabeth, Kyle, and Tom would say, “Carter and Emma love the ceiling fan.” “Carter and Emma hate the Baby-Björn.” Very quickly, however, Carter and Emma became “the babies.”

  “Come see the babies.” Elizabeth and Piper must have said those words or words like them to each other hundreds of times, so often that the moments blurred and were lost the way the ordinary always blurs and is lost. But recently Piper found herself recalling individual instances, holding each one vivid and sharp inside her head.

  “You’ve gotta come see the babies.” They were at Piper’s house. The babies must have been about three months old. Piper remembered Elizabeth in a loose blue shirt, running in from the living room, her face dewy (the nursing months were particularly kind to Elizabeth’s skin, both times) and awestruck, and she remembered how they’d knelt eagerly on the floor to look at the babies, who had fallen asleep, side by side under the arches of the baby gym.

  Piper and Elizabeth looked at the babies’ crescent eyes and newborn otherworldliness, smiles and frowns skimming over their sleeping features like the shadows of birds over the surface of a pond. Then they looked at each other and smiled, and Elizabeth said, “Can you believe how lucky we are?” And what Piper understood only in retrospect was that the luck they felt wasn’t just at having such perfect children, but at having each other. It was one of the biggest things between them, to have been mothers together back when every little thing was a miracle.

  Later, the babies became the kids and Meredith and Peter became the babies. Now, all four were “the kids,” an umbrella of a phrase with the children tucked safely underneath it, and this was luck, too. “You are loved by your two parents,” the phrase said, “And by two adults who are not your parents,” and also, “You have each other.” When Piper said, “I’m reading to the kids,” Elizabeth knew, they all knew, that she didn’t just mean Carter and Meredith.

  But now the phrase wasn’t natural. It was deliberate, a decision. Elizabeth would die soon, so the children weren’t under one umbrella anymore; they didn’t share the same luck. When Piper watched Emma and Peter playing—Emma lining up stuffed animals and dolls, making an audience, or Peter playing trucks in the cold yard, with his red cheeks and tiny fog of breath—for the first time ever, they looked lonely, set apart by everything they were about to lose.

  “Can you get someone to watch them for a sec?” said Elizabeth. “I need to talk to you.” The urgency charging her voice frightened Piper. Was this it? Would Elizabeth know if this was it?

  As she had several times over the last few weeks, Piper thought about her friend Kate, who got blinding, nightmarish migraines, each of which was preceded by what Kate called an “aura.” For five or ten minutes before the headache engulfed her, Kate was beset by feelings of panic and dizziness, colors got dimmer, silver zigzags like lightning bolts danced in her peripheral vision. Naturally Piper couldn’t even think the word “aura” without wincing, but she wondered if death had an aura. Would Elizabeth get a warning? Would she feel death rolling toward her like a train or a storm?

  “What’s up?” Piper kept her voice steady, but fear knotted inside her chest, crowding out her lungs. She stood up and walked out of the room, away from the children. She stood at her front window, looking out, distracting herself, trying to place some distance between herself and whatever Elizabeth was about to say. Cornelia and Teo were in their front yard raking leaves, Teo with long, easy strokes, Cornelia with intensity and precision. Short people always try too hard, thought Piper.

  “I sent Tom out on some errands,” said Elizabeth. “I want to talk to you alone. Call Mrs. Finney to watch the kids.”

  Piper watched Cornelia shake her rake, frown, and then carefully pick the remaining speared, intractable leaves off the tines and place them on the pile.

  “Mrs. Finney’s in Florida,” Piper said, nervously. “Or New Mexico. I can’t remember. Wherever her son Aaron lives now. Aaron, right? Or is it Adam? Phoenix, maybe. One of those hot, dry—”

  “Piper!” Elizabeth’s impatience made Piper’s heart beat so fast she couldn’t think. Her mouth formed the words “fine, fine, fine, fine.”

  “Betts,” she whispered, “are you okay?”

  Elizabeth groaned, a theatrical, exasperated groan, and Piper drew in a long, deep breath. A person wouldn’t groan like that if she were about to die.

  “I’m not dying, if that’s what you’re asking. Not right this second. But it’s not like I have a lot of time to fool around.”

  “Okay, I’ll call someone to watch the kids.”

  “Someone close.”

  “Cancer is making you bossy.” Piper breathed and breathed. The breathing felt so good, she almost laughed out loud. “As your friend, I feel I should tell you that. I’ll call Carrie.”

  “Whoever, Pipe. Tom won’t live at the grocery store.”

  Piper hung up and leaned against the wall for a few seconds with her eyes closed, empty-headed, drinking in air. Then she called Carrie Lucas, who lived down the street. The answering machine came on, and Carrie’s cheerful voice telling her exactly how to leave a message made Piper want to scream. After the beep. Really, Carrie? After the beep? Are you sure? With her thumb, Piper viciously mashed down the button on the phone without leaving a message, her whole body longing to slam a receiver. She seethed. “Why is every damn phone in this house portable?”

  She glanced out the window again at Cornelia and Teo.

  “Kids,” she shouted, “I’m running across the street for two secs. I’ll be right back.”

  Piper found Elizabeth in the kitchen. She was sitting in the armchair that Tom sometimes carried in from the dining room because the wooden kitchen chairs hurt Elizabeth’s back. Piper searched Elizabeth’s face and was relieved to find it free of the hard-etched lines and tightness that meant real pain. The anti-inflammatory drugs were working, then, all by themselves. They might not work forever. The doctor said Elizabeth would probably need opiates before long, but these were working for now, and, as Elizabeth said, “for now” was good enough for her. These days, it was even good enough for Piper.

  In fact, Elizabeth looked better than pain free. Elizabeth looked like Elizabeth. All that urgency, and here she sat, inhabiting her body with certainty and calm.

  “Do you remember when Tom and I trained for that half marathon? Back before Emma was born?”

  Piper did remember. For six months, Elizabeth had lived in a world fitted out with PowerBars, designer water, wicking fabrics, neon running shoes, plastic watches, and its own peculiar vocabulary. Piper imagined that she felt like a person must feel whose best friend joins a cult or develops a recreational drug habit. You couldn’t have paid Piper to become a runner, and she found most of the accoutrements highly distasteful ( plastic watches?), but she felt left out all the same. Piper recalled a beach trip with Elizabeth, watching her sit in her beach chair with her smug brown calves and her Runner’s World magazine and having a mad urge to yank the magazine away and pitch it into the sea.

>   Could Elizabeth have known how Piper felt? Was that what this conversation was about?

  Piper nodded. “I remember how great your legs looked.”

  “Wrong,” snapped Elizabeth, pointing at Piper. “You are so wrong. My legs looked awesome!”

  “Okay,” shrugged Piper, “I’ll give you awesome.”

  Elizabeth grinned, a grin that slowly shifted into a smile with distance in it and something besides happiness. Not sadness, thought Piper, and she searched her mind for the word.

  “Tom and I would stretch together and plan out our route, talk about whether we were up for hills that day or whatever.”

  Wistful, thought Piper, surprising herself. Now, where did that come from? Piper knew for a fact that she had never spoken the word “wistful” in her life. But there it was: Elizabeth’s smile was wistful.

  “And sometimes, while we were running, Tom would drop back to watch me and then catch up and say something like, ‘I thought your stride was looking a little short. Your hamstrings tight?’ I loved that.”

  “You did?” asked Piper.

  “Yes. I did. It’s hard to explain why.” She paused. “The running just belonged to us. We were in it together. And we were equals.”

  “Oh,” said Piper, and Elizabeth must have heard the boredom in her voice because she darted her a look.

  “No, not like that. I’m not talking about feminism, Piper. We were just…” She hooked her forefingers together emphatically.

  “We were closer than we’d ever been.” She paused. “And I knew it. I didn’t just realize it afterward. I got to know it while it was happening, which doesn’t always happen.”

  “Well, great,” said Piper brightly, “that’s super.”

  Elizabeth continued, “What I didn’t know was that it was the closest we would ever be.”

  “What?” There was nothing wrong with Elizabeth’s marriage. It was as solid a marriage as anyone’s, for God’s sake, as solid as Piper’s own.

  “That’s crazy, Betts. You and Tom are fine. You have two beautiful children and a beautiful home. You and Tom are happy!” Piper heard the anger in her own voice.

  Elizabeth sat up in the armchair and, with her hands on her knees, leaned toward Piper. “Here’s what I need to tell you: two weeks before I got diagnosed, I asked Tom to move out.”

  Almost before Elizabeth had gotten those words out, Piper was saying, flatly, “I do not believe that.”

  “I wasn’t in love with him anymore.”

  “Oh, give me a break, Elizabeth. People say that all the time. In love. Not in love. We’re not teenagers, in case you haven’t noticed. We have lives.”

  “We used to be in love,” Elizabeth insisted. “When we were training for that race, we’d come home from a run totally exhausted, but we were pulling off each other’s clothes before we were even through the door.”

  In a flash, Piper had a sense memory: yanking a shirt over someone’s head, sticky skin, the taste of salt. “Oh, that’s what you’re talking about. That’s not love,” Piper pointed out, coolly. “We’ve all done that, but that is not love.”

  In fact, Piper and Kyle had never pulled off each other’s clothes before they’d gotten through the door. She thought about Kyle’s hand on her lower back, under her shirt, the way he’d slip his fingers just a few inches inside the waistband of her pants. Or the way she’d come up behind him and rub his shoulders. Although they hadn’t used them lately, Kyle and Piper had signals, which was just the way they liked it. Piper believed signals were civilized and a sign of mutual respect.

  Elizabeth sighed. “Piper, I’m trying to tell you something about me and Tom. I need you to listen.”

  “Okay.”

  But Elizabeth didn’t speak for what felt like a long time. Then she said, “I never ran that race. Remember? I found out I was pregnant with Emma, and we decided it wasn’t good for the baby. And then we had Emma, and nothing was the same.”

  “Children don’t ruin marriages,” Piper pointed out, firmly. Elizabeth did not seem to hear her.

  “We fell into these roles, Tom and I. He went to work. I took care of the baby. We became—a household. Do you know what I mean?”

  Piper just nodded. Of course she knew what Elizabeth meant. What she didn’t understand was why that was anything to be unhappy about. Roles were natural in a family, essential. There was nothing wrong with a household. Wrong? When done right—a well-constructed schedule, flowers on the table, fun built into every day, the proper division of labor—a household was like that domed thing in Arizona. A biosphere. A small and perfect world.

  “Which I guess could have been okay, except that I was mad at him about it.” And then Elizabeth began to list the reasons she was mad, and Piper didn’t exactly tune out, but she didn’t need to be fully tuned in either because the list was the same as everyone’s list. Piper and every one of Piper’s friends had the same complaints; their voices bristled with the same indignation. He never gets up in the middle of the night. He goes on a trip and brings the two-year-old a football and the four-year-old an Elmo. He can’t pack a baby bag to save his life. He fails to pare and slice the children’s apples. He fails to cut the itchy tags out of the children’s clothes. Who hadn’t had that conversation a hundred times? It was a real conversation every time, too, but nothing changed. Change wasn’t the point. The point was to recite the litany and feel better afterward. Everyone knew that, including Elizabeth.

  Suddenly Piper said, “You’re not telling me the real reason you threw him out.”

  Elizabeth looked startled, then she blushed. Uh-oh, thought Piper.

  “No. I’m not.” She blushed more. Elizabeth was not usually a blusher; Piper had always envied this.

  “I met someone,” Elizabeth blurted out.

  Piper recoiled, and before she could stop it, she was hearing her mother’s voice, brassy and triumphant, her mother telling her father, “I met someone. Someone who makes me feel alive.” Trite, stupid, selfish words. Oh, no, thought Piper, not Elizabeth. Anyone else, but I need to keep Elizabeth.

  “Don’t look like that,” said Elizabeth, her face still dark pink. “I didn’t sleep with him.”

  “Oh, thank God.” Piper’s eyes were stinging.

  “I met him at yoga,” said Elizabeth. “And we had coffee a couple times a week. First at this little funky, awful coffee place for art kids, and then at his house. He was divorced.”

  “You went to his house? When you were supposed to be at yoga?” Yoga, thought Piper. What kind of man goes to yoga?

  “We kissed exactly four times,” said Elizabeth, and in spite of all the blushing, the happiness in her voice was unmistakable. “He had this little wrought-iron table in his kitchen, and we held hands across it all the time.”

  Then she laughed. “But it was hot hand-holding.”

  “Elizabeth!” But Piper found that she was laughing, too. Four kisses and hand-holding. Piper wanted with her whole soul to hang on to Elizabeth until time ran out. She could laugh about four kisses and hand-holding.

  When their laughter ended, Piper said, “So you were going to leave Tom for hand-holding man?”

  “Mike,” corrected Elizabeth.

  “Mike?” The name was all wrong. Once Elizabeth had shown Piper some yoga poses. What business did a guy named Mike have doing downward dog in those loose black pants and, what? A tank top? Piper gave an involuntary shudder.

  “I wasn’t in love with Mike,” sighed Elizabeth, “but Mike reminded me to want to be in love. He reminded me that passion is one of the necessities of life.”

  With difficulty, Piper repressed a snort of disgust. Passion. A word from a romance novel. Swarthy men. Corseted women with rivers of blond hair and high, heaving breasts, round and white like softballs. No one had breasts like that.

  “I disagree,” said Piper. “Of course, you’re entitled to your opinion, but passion is sloppy and over the top and immature, and, anyway, it doesn’t last. You don’t build a life o
n it. Passion makes people lose their heads.” Piper’s own mother, for example, had lost her head and left her sweet, hardworking husband alone in his big house with his kids.

  “But everyone deserves that! I wanted to lose my head at least a little every day.” Elizabeth closed her eyes and hugged herself with her own arms. “I don’t regret wanting that. But I regret how I did it. I didn’t tell Tom about Mike. I blamed him for everything. I told him he was selfish and a workaholic. I accused him of neglect. I remember screaming that word at him, and that’s the worst thing anyone can say to Tom.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “He got mad. Then he got sad. He begged me to go to counseling with him, but I said it was way too late for that. Maybe it wasn’t, but it’s like once I decided to divorce Tom, I got so energized by the idea of a new life that I forgot everything else.”

  “I can’t imagine being divorced,” said Piper, keeping her voice as nonjudgmental as possible. In truth, she wasn’t feeling judgmental, not at that particular moment. It was a simple statement of fact. “Think about Jilly Keyes.”

  Three years ago, Jilly’s husband, Chad, had taken her to Melt, the upscale fondue restaurant in town, in order to break the news that he’d been transferred to Switzerland, and that it was nothing personal, but he believed the transfer was a sign that their marriage was over. It was an opportunity, he’d reportedly told her, a challenge to start fresh in a new country, and he had to rise to that challenge. He owed it to himself.

  Although Piper had received the story third- or fourth-hand, she knew precisely what his voice had sounded like when he’d dropped this bombshell: pompous, exuberant. A challenge, as though leaving his marriage made him Christopher Columbus or that rich guy who kept trying to circle the globe in a goddamn balloon. Chad Keyes was a grade-A ass. A fondue restaurant? A restaurant, any restaurant, was a hideous breakup venue. But fondue? Imagine life as you know it ending over a pot of liquid cheese.