Belong to Me: A Novel

by Marisa de los Santos

  Cornelia’s friendliness threw Piper off and she felt suddenly shy and stiff, unsure of how to behave, a feeling that she knew was familiar but couldn’t place for a second. Then it came to her: she felt like she sometimes used to feel the morning after falling into bed with a stranger. Oh, God, what a stupid, ridiculous idea.

  “Oh,” she said briskly, taking the cup. “Well, you do whole before age one and then switch to two percent. After two, kids can get plaques.”

  “Really. On their teeth?”

  “Arteries,” said Piper.

  “I see,” said Cornelia, and she stared blankly at Piper for a moment, then said, “Okay, then. I’ll see you later.”

  “Thanks for the cup,” said Piper, and then, as Cornelia started to walk down the steps, she added, “My mother had that rule, too.”

  Cornelia turned around.

  “I mean, she had it for a while, before she left my dad and ran off with a guy she met at the farmers’ market.”

  Piper’s whole body went rigid; she felt like she’d been struck by lightning. Had she really just said that? Out loud, to a woman she didn’t even like?

  “I’m…I.” Piper cleared her throat. “What an inappropriate thing to say. Please forget I said it.”

  Cornelia looked puzzled, then she said, “Okay. Forgotten.” She paused. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

  It wasn’t bad. It was easier than Piper thought it would be. They walked through the neighborhood and then a little way into the park across from the neighborhood. The sky was beautiful between the trees, like scraps of blue silk caught in the nearly bare branches, and Cornelia didn’t mention Piper’s mother and the farmers’-market man once. They made small talk, and Piper excelled at small talk. She felt at home talking small talk, and if she also felt a bit let down, she didn’t think about it.

  Then she said, “It seems like you enjoyed New York City. What brought you guys here?”

  It was an easy enough question, and Cornelia answered it easily, almost automatically, “Teo took the job.”

  “In Philadelphia,” finished Piper.

  “Right,” and then Cornelia didn’t stop walking or slow down or stumble, but something shifted in her shoulders or the angle of her body, a tension entered her stride, and she said, “I wasn’t getting pregnant.”

  “Oh, okay,” said Piper, in a tone of voice that implied she knew exactly what Cornelia was talking about. And she did. She’d certainly had her share of friends who’d struggled with infertility. Then she had a thought. “But you were in New York. There must be good specialists in New York.”

  “There are.” Cornelia kept walking, her eyes focused on the path in front of her. Then she stopped walking. “I wasn’t getting pregnant because I kept going back on the pill.”

  She looked at Piper, wide-eyed, as though she’d been startled, then bent down to pick up a stick shaped like a divining rod. “I can’t believe I just told you that,” she said, quietly.

  “I had a miscarriage,” Cornelia continued. Her mouth turned down at the corners after she said this, and Piper looked at the ground, not ready to see this woman cry, but when Cornelia spoke again, her voice was steady. “In the fourteenth week.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Piper. Motherhood was her territory. Her compassion was real, but Cornelia seemed not to have heard her.

  “And then the day after that, the towers came down.” Cornelia tossed the divining rod into the woods and started walking again.

  “God,” said Piper.

  “It’s not a terrible story,” said Cornelia, quickly. “It’s nothing compared to most of the stories. Teo worked uptown, on the Upper East Side, and we’d just found an apartment near there, but we still lived in Brooklyn. It’s ridiculous to live in Brooklyn and work uptown, I know, but Teo’s great-aunt left him the apartment when she died.”

  Piper tried and failed to picture a map of New York in her head. Brooklyn? The place with the brownstones. Was it down at the bottom of the map?

  “Was Teo working?”

  “He was giving a lecture at a hospital downtown.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “No, no, I knew he was okay. I don’t watch a lot of TV, but a neighbor came by to tell me what was happening, and right after that the phone rang, and it was Teo. This isn’t about my thinking I’d lost him. This isn’t anywhere close to the category of tragedy. He was fine. He walked home. Like everybody else.”

  Cornelia slowed down. She turned her face to Piper and her eyes were frightened looking and her voice was small and hollow. “But his face. He didn’t come inside right away. He leaned against the doorjamb, his whole body leaned. I’ve known him since I was four years old. But his face was so old and tired, it seemed to belong to someone else. My husband’s face, with no light in it.” She paused, then said, “We rallied, like everyone else. We moved to our new apartment, but the miscarriage and that awful day and his face that I couldn’t get out of my head…”

  Cornelia laughed a stinging laugh. “I’ve always been kind of a coward, if you want to know the truth. But I wasn’t exactly scared. I just wanted to be someplace else, someplace—boring, I guess.”

  “Well, of course you did,” said Piper, and she touched Cornelia’s arm at the elbow, just took hold of her fleece for two seconds then let go, but suddenly everything felt like too much.

  “Who could raise children in the city anyway?” Piper scoffed. “There should be a law against it.”

  Cornelia sighed and gave Piper a weary smile that Piper had seen on other faces, too, her mother’s, Kyle’s, even Elizabeth’s, one that said “Just when I thought we were getting somewhere.” The smile hurt. Piper cocked her head and frowned thoughtfully at Cornelia.

  “Not to change the subject, but have you ever thought of growing your hair? Maybe a little bob?” After Piper said this, she felt much better.

  NINE

  No, this trick won’t work…How on earth are you ever going to explain in terms of chemistry and physics so important a biological phenomenon as first love?

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  Generally speaking, Dev wasn’t all that interested in the notion of time travel. Sure, he’d watched reruns of the PBS special, had read a little about wormholes, Hawking’s chronology-projection conjecture, the grandfather paradox, all that stuff, but, while it was interesting enough and even though he got the idea that it was supposed to, it just didn’t set Dev’s brain on fire. Even so, during that bad seventh-grade year at his old school, Dev had definitely fantasized about time travel: zinging Mr. Tripp right between the eyes with one last, devastating, mind-warping remark, then—wham—disappearing, zipping forward into a future where he discovers a cure for Mr. Tripp’s fatal disease just in time to save the man’s crummy little life.

  But even as the fantasy played itself out in Dev’s head—Dev tall and solemn in a white coat, emptying a syringe into Mr. Tripp’s shriveled, almost-dead arm, Mr. Tripp simultaneously thanking him and begging for forgiveness with tears pouring down his face, Dev saying simply, quietly, “I’m just doing my job, Mr. Tripp”—Dev had been 99.9 percent certain that it could never happen. He didn’t absolutely rule it out, but if traveling forward in time meant moving faster than—or even almost as fast as the speed of light and Dev was pretty sure that it would have to mean this—then, nope. No way—670,000,000 miles an hour? Nothing, no matter, no matter what, could move that fast.

  Sometimes, though, Dev got the weird, fantastic feeling that he had leaped ahead. He’d sit in his ninth-grade life in a new school, a new town, and feel a whole country’s worth of distance stretch out between himself and his old life, and suddenly seventh grade would seem like ancient, ancient history, a hazy splotch on another coast, in another time zone, and he’d imagine eighth grade, the year that had never happened—and it would’ve been a crap year, he knew that—slipping through a hole in time, spinning downward, vanishing.

  No way would he go back. Einstein himself could time-travel into Dev’s room an
d offer him a million bucks and the Nobel Prize to wiggle through a wormhole with him back to Dev’s seventh-grade year, and Dev would say (very, very respectfully), “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  Still, with three months of his new life under his belt (and those three months had gone by at least twice as fast as they would have if he’d stayed in California: relativity in action), Dev could see that there had been one advantage to the old life: invisibility. Once the other kids had stopped buzzing about his confrontation with Mr. Tripp, once Dev had clamped his mouth firmly shut, it was like the atoms of his body had transformed into a substance that failed to reflect light in the visible spectrum. Like light waves traveled right through him. He’d become invisible, a nobody.

  Dev was somebody at Liberty Charter. He wasn’t a somebody with a capital S like Aidan, but he was a kid people knew, a kid people greeted with grins and fist bumps, or said “Sorry, man” or “My bad” to when they jostled him accidentally in the hallway. People laughed at his jokes, listened to him when he talked, asked him what he’d gotten on tests (then usually groaned or said something like “You suck” in a friendly way once he’d told them).

  And Dev liked it. He liked being visible. For the most part, visibility beat invisibility, crushed invisibility any day of the week. What Dev figured out before long, though, was that when you were visible, people didn’t just talk to you, they also talked about you, and this was the downside, the part Dev could definitely do without. Even though no one said anything truly bad about Dev, he disliked being gossiped about. It embarrassed him.

  Far worse than the embarrassment, though, was the inaccuracy. In ninth grade at Liberty Charter, Dev discovered that once a story got told enough, the story became the truth no matter how much you tried to set the record straight, and this made Dev crazy. For Dev, records needed to be straight. Facts needed to be provable. Truth needed to be true.

  And the true truth was that Lyssa Sorenson was not his girlfriend. She couldn’t even accurately be called his friend. But Dev could have shouted himself hoarse pointing this out to people and no one would have believed him, no one but Aidan. In fact, as far as the kids at Charter were concerned, the more Dev told them that Lyssa wasn’t his girlfriend, the more they were certain that she was, and what kind of sense did that make?

  She sat next to him in advanced biology. At first she sat there because Dr. Kimani had seated them alphabetically for a few weeks in order to learn their names. After that, she stayed there for reasons Dev could only guess at but that he thought had almost nothing to do with Lyssa’s liking him—it wasn’t clear that she did like him—and everything to do with her trusting him. Or at least with her not trusting anyone else in the class. Lyssa had a secret, Dev knew the secret, Lyssa knew he knew, and she was counting on him to keep it to himself. She had no guarantee that he would, of course, because she’d never talked to him about the secret, not even once, not even to laugh it off or explain it away, and people leaked other people’s secrets all the time, but in this case, Lyssa got lucky. She got seated next to the right boy.

  They didn’t sit at desks, but at short tables, just long enough for two people, barely long enough, in fact. Despite being so close, it took Dev a full week to notice, even though he was a noticing kind of guy. Lyssa was that deft, that quick and subtle.

  There were three rituals. Dev assumed that there were probably a lot more, outside in the world, and this thought made him feel heavy, waterlogged with compassion, so he tried not to think it. But inside the classroom, there were three: one for sitting down, one for getting up to go someplace else in the room, one for getting up to leave. Each ritual began with Lyssa stacking her book, binder, and spiral notebook precisely in front of her, the edges of the books parallel to the edge of the desk. Then she’d perform whatever combination of finger taps, nose touches, tiny shrugs, and sounds the situation required. The getting-up-to-go-someplace-else-in-the-room ritual was the shortest, the getting-up-to-leave ritual the longest and most complex.

  Once Dev began noticing what she was doing, he would take enormous care not to watch her. He’d read or study his notes or talk to Eli Tran, who sat at the table next to theirs. But one day, while he was writing, his pencil broke, just snapped in half, which didn’t happen every day, and, without thinking, he turned to ask Lyssa if she’d ever seen a pencil break like that, right in the middle of ordinary pencil usage, and there she was, her index finger touching her nose, and even when their eyes met, she didn’t stop, didn’t miss a beat: two lifts of her thin shoulders followed by four book taps followed by a whisper-soft clearing of her throat.

  What was strange was that even though Dev’s automatic response was to whip around, look anywhere else, he didn’t. His brain was screeching, “Look away, you moron,” but his eyes couldn’t obey. He was like a deer in headlights, frozen by her gaze, although that wasn’t quite right because she was the one who looked scared, terrified even, but he also understood that she wanted him to see her. He had no idea why she’d want that, but whatever she was afraid of, Dev knew it wasn’t him.

  So when they were finally allowed to sit wherever they chose, Dev and Lyssa stayed where they were. And when it was time to pick a lab partner, all she had to do was glance at Dev, and before anyone else could speak (because there was always the chance someone else would pick him, since he was pretty excellent at biology), he shot up his hand and said, “I pick Lyssa.”

  After all that, it probably should not have surprised Dev when people began teasing him about Lyssa being his girlfriend, but it did surprise him. It bugged him, too.

  “I never even thought about her like that,” he’d protested to Aidan, “not for one nanosecond.”

  “That’s good,” said Aidan, “because that girl is ten kinds of crazy.”

  Dev had shot Aidan a look. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you can see every bone in her body through her clothes, and she’s got fuzz growing all over her, like a freaking peach, and no girl is that skinny without being crazy.” Then he added, “Plus, she’s a ballet dancer. Does it every single day after school is what I heard. And ballet dancers are all psycho.”

  “What do you know about ballet dancers?” scoffed Dev.

  “It’s a well-known fact. All women are clinically insane, but especially ballet dancers. Psycho. Extremely psycho. Trust me.”

  Given Dev’s inside information about Lyssa, he wasn’t exactly in a position to argue this point. No one could call Lyssa’s rituals a sign of good mental health. Sometimes, she would start a ritual over two or three times, making herself get the sequence exactly right before she allowed herself to open her book or get up or whatever. And once, when they were working at a lab table and the fire alarm had sounded and Dr. Kimani had started herding them straight toward the door, calling out, “Don’t stop to get your books, people; just go,” the stricken expression on Lyssa’s face was like nothing Dev had ever seen, and the girl went rigid, stood rooted to the spot like some stiff, skinny tree. Gently, even though he knew people would talk about it later, he’d taken hold of one painfully thin arm and steered her out of the room and through the hallways, her body trembling fast, almost imperceptibly, like a tuning fork, and he’d wanted to ask her, “What do you think will happen? What do you think you’re controlling with all that weird stuff?”

  She was crazy, no doubt about it, but privately, Dev realized it was a kind of crazy he could understand, at least a little. The laws of physics, Fibonacci numbers, that ∏r2 would give you the area of a circle every single time, always and forever: these things reassured Dev. He loved the consistency of the multiplication table, the moment when two sides of an equation balanced. And he believed a lot of people felt that way. Even those chaos-theory guys were actually trying to show that if you took a step back, or two, or a billion and looked at the big picture, chaos wasn’t chaos at all.

  Dev thought that probably he and most of the people on the planet wanted the world to make sense and hold together as m
uch as Lyssa did. Maybe the difference was that, deep down, he and most of the rest of the people on the planet believed that it would.

  If Aidan were right about Lyssa and right about ballet dancers (although Dev wasn’t ready to accept the psycho-ballet-dancer theory as fact, not without a lot more evidence), Dev wondered if he was also right about women. Probably not. It seemed unlikely that roughly one-half of the human population could be clinically insane (where did Aidan get phrases like “clinically insane”?), but given Dev’s recent experiences with his mother and with Lyssa, he couldn’t be sure.

  Because if order, pattern, predictability were part of Lake’s job description as a mother—and Dev strongly believed that they were—Lake was falling down on the job. To put it mildly. Lately, Lake made no sense whatsoever. If somehow Lyssa Sorenson woke up to find that her own mother had transmogrified into Lake, within forty-eight hours, the girl’s head would explode, no doubt about it.

  Take Cornelia. Dev could tell that his mother liked Cornelia. Dev liked Cornelia. Cornelia was cool, and not only because she could quote Robert Frost and talk to Dev without making him feel like a freak show or a lab rat but also because she’d made his mom relax. He even thought she had made his mom happy, that night she’d come to dinner. After he’d gone to bed, he’d heard them talking in the living room, just a distant, indistinct murmur, no words, but he didn’t need to hear words. Without meaning to, Dev seemed to have become a kind of seismograph when it came to his mother’s moods, and from the peaks and valleys of that murmuring, at least what he overheard before he fell asleep, he knew the conversation had been a good one.

  But then, a couple of days later, he’d heard his mother on the phone turning down Cornelia’s invitation to Thanksgiving dinner, using the excuse that Dev really looked forward to spending the holiday at home, with just the two of them present. Beyond the fact that this made Dev sound like the world’s whiniest mama’s boy, it was a flat-out lie. Back in California, holiday dinners tended to be pretty informal, but usually there was a crowd: Lake’s restaurant friends; Principal Levy and her husband, Brewster; wayward neighbors; some guy Lake was dating; even people like their mail carrier or the oral hygienist who cleaned Dev’s teeth. Anyone who didn’t have a lot of family nearby or any family at all (and when Dev looked back, he realized how many people they knew fell into these categories) would show up with a big dish of something or a bottle of wine and sit around eating, talking, and yelling at football games.