You’re his daughter, I told myself. Daughters have keys to their fathers’ houses all the time. They use these keys to open the doors of their fathers’ houses all the time. But of course, I never had, not in seventeen years, so I stood on that front porch, helplessly a-roil, wanting to be able to use the key without having it feel momentous. God, why did everything to do with Wilson have to be so fraught? I considered leaving the apples on the porch, and that’s what decided it for me: the only thing worse than using your key to open your father’s door and having it be momentous was to have using the key be so momentous that you couldn’t even bring yourself to do it. I stuck the key in the damn keyhole and turned it.
The house was so quiet that my footfalls echoing on the marble floor were thunderous, and I almost left the bag on the hall table and walked out, but if I chickened out now, I would never forgive myself. With a growl of exasperation, I shoved my key ring in my jacket pocket, shifted the apple bag from one arm to the other, and made a beeline for the kitchen. When I got there, I found a big blue glass bowl on the marble countertop that held just two piebald bananas and that seemed to be waiting for me. I pushed the bananas to one side and filled the rest of the bowl with my apples. There I was in Wilson’s house, taking liberties, and, oh crap, it felt good.
I was so busy with this that it wasn’t until I was settling the last apple into the bowl that I saw Caro. On the kitchen table, next to a bowl of what appeared to be the same butternut soup with mushrooms, a tub of which I’d just bought for myself at the gourmet grocery, lay what first registered to my brain as some kind of wild-haired creature—an oversized very long-haired guinea pig perhaps—but which turned out to be Caro’s head. It wasn’t resting on her folded arms or even on one hand; her left cheek lay directly on the tabletop, her hands out of sight under the table. As soon as I figured out it was her, I thought, Oh thank God none of her hair ended up in the soup. Hot on the heels of that came, Please, please, please don’t let her be dead!
As I beat my hasty way over to her, I banged my hip on the edge of the counter and hissed, “Shit!,” and I guess the word or the hiss of it broke through Caro’s consciousness in a way that the crackle of the paper bag and the plop of the apples into the bowl had not because she lifted her head with a start, pressed her palms to her eyes briefly, and then stared at me, blinking so blankly that I wondered if she might be drunk or worse.
Dear God, I thought, Willow already has Wilson, with all his Wilsonness plus a bum heart, for a father. She does not need a drunk for a mother.
But after a few seconds, Caro’s eyes began to clear and her face firmed up around the edges the way people’s eyes and faces do when they wake up from a deep sleep, and Caro looked around her, down at her soup, up at me, and smiled, “Golly damn,” she said. “You caught me napping.”
Napping. As though everyone just settles in for a nap with their head practically inside their soup bowl.
“I’m sorry,” I said, quickly. “I just found some Staymans at the grocery store and thought I’d bring them in for you. I almost left them at the door, but, you know, I had that key you gave me, I guess it was a few days ago, six days or something, and I thought . . .” I trailed off at long last and just nodded sideways at the bowl of apples.
“How thoughtful,” said Caro. “Oh, I’m afraid I’ve startled you. You see, I’ve never been a very good sleeper. It’s just a case of bad genes, which, thank goodness, I did not pass down to Willow. Anyway, when I can’t sleep at night, I fear I’m prone to catnaps.”
Cats curled up in a splash of sun. Cats didn’t drop down, mid-lunch, as though struck by a thunderbolt.
“My friend Trillium calls them ‘power naps,’” I said, playing along. “It’s amazing how she’ll just tip her head back anywhere and sleep hard for fifteen minutes and then wake up refreshed.”
Caro grabbed little bunches of her hair on either side of her head and pulled them away from her face in what I assumed was the curly-haired equivalent of running your hands through your hair.
“I’m afraid I don’t feel quite so refreshed after my naps. It takes me a while to get my feet back under me, I guess.”
Suddenly, catching sight of the giant, antique-looking wall clock, she hit her fist on the table so hard her soup bowl rattled. “Damn!”
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I’m supposed to be in the car right now, on my way to pick up Willow. She’s taken to staying after school to work on a project with a classmate for English. Usually, she stays longer, sometimes for a few hours, but she has a big math test to study for. She asked me to pick her up in front of the school at four o’clock.”
I glanced at the clock. 3:55.
“If you leave now, you should only be a few minutes late. Can you just text her and let her know you’re on your way?”
Caro looked at me, startled.
“Oh, no. She doesn’t have a cell phone. Wilson thinks they cause human relationships to wither on the vine. And, you know, she never needed one back when she was always at home.”
Oh, brother. Cell phones? Wilson could wither a human relationship with his tone of voice alone, as I had reason to know. Oh, but poor Willow, in high school without a phone!
“Aha. Well, I’m sure she won’t worry if you’re a few minutes late, will she?”
Caro sighed and, with that sigh, energy seemed to rush from her body. Her eyelids drooped, her shoulders sagged, and, suddenly, she looked far less awake than she had just seconds before.
“As I mentioned, it takes me a bit of time to regroup after a nap. I know it sounds crazy,” she said, with a wan smile, “but I’m not sure I should be behind a wheel. I don’t suppose you have time? She said she’d be waiting right outside the school.”
“Oh! Me. Well, sure. Of course. I know where Webley is. I’ll go right now.”
As I drove, I wondered about Caro. She’d certainly seemed energetic enough when she was banging the table and saying, “Damn!” And weariness had fallen over her so fast, like someone had flicked a switch. Had she done the flicking herself? Had she seen me and made the split-second decision that I should be the one to pick up Willow? But why? I remembered the apple cake breakfast, her slip about Wilson’s boarding school. Was it possible that Caro was a case of still waters—no, not still, but rippling, eddying, hazy, meandering waters—running deep?
Because she wasn’t expecting my car, I got a chance to idle at the curb for a few minutes, watching Willow when she didn’t know I was watching, something I’d never done before. For one thing, I just plain didn’t see her much; for another, when I did, she was all wariness, on full red alert but also disdainful, as though I were some lowly bug that just might sting. Now, watching her unobserved, I was surprised at what I saw. She sat on one of the benches that lined the sidewalk leading up to the front door of the school. All the benches were dedicated to someone, with little brass plaques saying to whom, and I happened to know that Willow’s was the Dotty Pikkels bench. Allie Pham, a ballet friend of mine who’d gone to Webley, had received her first kiss on that bench from a lacrosse player named Stan Manley, and Allie had written “I love you, Dotty Pikkels” all over her notebooks for an entire semester until Stan the Man broke up with her and she scratched out all the “loves” and turned them to “hates.”
Now, Willow sat on Dotty Pikkels, twirling one end of her scarf in her hand, her hair blazing, her coat open, and, stretched out on the ground at her feet, leaning back on his hands, his long legs out in front of him, was a boy. Even from a distance, I could tell he was beautiful, part-Asian probably, great shoulders, hair standing up in jags, a smile like an angel’s. The way he sat, all that thoughtless grace, taking up space with such fluid assurance, reminded me of Trillium, and I knew it was good to be this kid the same way it was good to be Trillium. I’d pictured Willow in high school as a fish out of water, pictured her walking miserably down the crowded hallways, being left out and lost, but here she was, all teasing, chatty volubility, shak
ing her finger at a handsome boy like it was the most natural thing in the world.
As soon as she noticed me, though, she stiffened, and you could just see it, her going from open to shut, closing her personality like someone closing an umbrella. But I could see the fear in her eyes even before she opened the car door.
“Is my mother okay?” she said. “Did something happen? Is she at home?”
She clutched her backpack to her chest, and I wondered if it were to stop herself from shaking, and for the umpteenth time since I met her, I wanted to fold her into a deep hug.
“She’s at home and fine,” I said, quickly, “just a little tired. She was taking a power nap and hadn’t quite woken up from it when I happened to see her, so she asked me to come get you. No big deal.”
“You saw her? Asleep?”
Willow’s dismay was palpable. How could it matter so much if I’d found her mother sleeping?
“Well, yeah, but she woke up and we talked. She’s fine.”
“Where?”
“Where was she sleeping, you mean?”
Willow gave a tense nod.
“Um, I found these apples she liked at the market, so I came inside to leave them in the kitchen, and I saw her at the table.”
I waited—anxiously, hopefully—for Willow to ask exactly how I’d gained entry to her house, but all she did was close her eyes, her body going limp with relief.
“Oh, she was inside,” she murmured, then caught herself, and straightened. “It’s just that once I found her asleep on the garden bench, which is no big deal, of course. She’s an artist, and sometimes she loses track of time at night and forgets to sleep, which I think is a common thing for artists. Completely normal and understandable. But I just wouldn’t want her to fall asleep outside now, when it’s getting colder and everything.”
“Oh. Well, if it were really cold, she probably wouldn’t get comfortable enough to fall asleep anyway, right?”
Now that her fears were put to rest, all her hauteur came back. Willow gave me a blatant you-have-no-idea-what-you’re-talking-about look, then shrugged and stared out of the window.
“So is that the boy you were working with?” I asked.
“Who said I was working with a boy?” said Willow, coldly, still looking out the window.
“No one. Your mother said you were staying after school to work on a project with a partner, so I guess what I meant was is that boy the person you were working with on your project.”
“Oh. In that case, yes.”
If there was a gene for smugness, she’d inherited it straight from Wilson, down to the last tiny, exasperating snippet of DNA. But I would take the high road if it killed me.
“Looks like you were setting him straight on something,” I said, with a laugh.
“How do you mean?”
“You can tell,” I said, “even from a distance, when two people are arguing. It’s in their posture, their facial expressions, the way one of them, say, wags her finger at the other. The two of you were the spitting image of people having a friendly argument.”
She shrugged. “Oh.”
“And you were the spitting image of the person who was winning.”
For a moment, I thought she’d smile, but she bit it back and shrugged again. She had the teenager shrug down pat, slight twitch of the shoulder, even slighter sideways jerk of the head, as though even in belittling you, she would not waste precious energy. I wanted to tell her, though, that three shrugs in as many minutes was overkill; it revealed her as the amateur she was. It was a petty thing to want, I knew, and instantly, I felt ashamed of myself. As punishment for my pettiness, I would say something that she could really sink her smug teeth into.
“Anyway, he was cute.”
I tossed the sentence out there like a wounded seal, and sharklike, she couldn’t resist, turning away from the window to regard me, contempt in every feature. Right then, although she looked nothing like Wilson, she looked exactly like Wilson.
“‘Cute.’ I’m afraid I don’t know what that means. I didn’t exactly grow up in a household in which we bandied about words like ‘cute.’”
What sixteen-year-old girl bandied about phrases like “bandied about”? Still, ouch. But she wasn’t finished.
“So I can’t actually speak to Luka’s cuteness or lack thereof, except to say that if Luka is actually cute or anything along such lines, I haven’t noticed.”
What I noticed is the way she inserted his name into that sentence, twice, even though I knew she couldn’t possibly have wanted me to know what it was. She said it because she couldn’t help herself, because she just liked saying it, because saying it made him a little bit more hers every time she did it. Probably she didn’t realize any of this yet; maybe she wouldn’t admit it to herself for a long time, but I knew. I’d been there.
Ben, lips pressed together at the beginning, open in the middle, tongue on the roof of my mouth at the end.
Been there? Ha. I was still there, heaven help me. I stole a glance at Willow who had spent her life so cherished, so boxed up and restrained and watched over in her pretty, tiny, high-walled world. What would happen when she let her feelings loose upon that world? I imagined them running rampant, trampling the garden, jumping the walls or burning them to the ground.
Heaven help you, too, Willow, I thought.
IN MY RUSH TO pick up Willow, I’d left my cell phone in the pool house, and when I got back, after she’d shot me a terse “thank you” and sailed through the front door while I walked around the house to the backyard, there was a message from Ben. Since I didn’t have his number, I didn’t know it was from Ben, but his first words were “Hey, Taisy, this is Ben,” and they knocked the breath clean out of me. When I’d more or less recovered, I listened a second time. There was no way not to hear the awkwardness in his voice, but it didn’t matter. He’d called.
“Hey, Taisy, this is Ben. I was hoping you might have time to talk soon. I’m headed over to my dad’s to drop off some groceries and do a little work in the yard, but I’ll have my phone. I’ll be around later, too. Okay, thanks. Take care.”
I was about to call him back, my finger was actually hovering over his number, but instead, I headed out the door. I could have driven to Ben’s father’s house in my sleep, which was a good thing, since, rocked by the aftershocks of hearing Ben’s voice saying he wanted to talk to me, I wasn’t exactly at my most focused. In fifteen minutes, I was there. The old green Ransom’s Garden World pickup truck was in the driveway, but there was no sign of Ben. I stood in the yard just looking at the place. The house was small, old, and with its irregular brickwork, teeming window boxes, funny stone chimney, twisty-boughed trees, and leaded glass windows, it looked as it always had, like something out of a fairy tale.
I pressed my thumb to the brass doorbell button and listened, with closed eyes, to the familiar off-key, two-note chime. It had driven Mr. Ransom nuts, that chime, since, his less than stellar singing voice notwithstanding, he had a good ear, but, now, I was happy that he’d never had it fixed. I heard footsteps inside the house, and the door opened, and there was Ben. He wore jeans, a frayed Middlebury sweatshirt, running shoes, and a look of surprise. It wasn’t elation, which I would have preferred, but since the last time I’d seen him, he had walked away from me mad, I would take it. He rocked back on his heels as though the sight of me had thrown him off balance.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
“I was, uh, just unloading some groceries.” He hooked his thumb in the direction of the kitchen.
“I see.”
“Yeah, my dad used to be a big grocery shopper, loved it. You might remember that. But once Bobbie got sick, I don’t know, I guess he got out of the habit of shopping. Just wanted to stick close to home. So I started doing it for him.”
“Oh no, I hope he’s still cooking. He always loved that.”
Ben smiled. “Yeah, he’s just getting back to it. Made his special meatballs just t
he other day, in fact. Oh, and he’s started complaining about my shopping, which seems like a good sign. I got the wrong brand of tomato paste, apparently, last time I went, so I think pretty soon, he’ll fire me and get back to doing it himself.”
“Good,” I said. “He told me about Bobbie. Sounds like he went through the wringer. I’m so glad he’s feeling more like himself.”
Ben nodded, thoughtfully. “He and Bobbie were something. I mean, I could have sworn that people didn’t come much more buoyant than my dad, but I think Bobbie had him beat. Together, they were—” He broke off, took a breath, and shook his head. “Sorry.”
“Why?”
He gave a wry smile. “From groceries to death to true love in the first two minutes of our first conversation in seventeen years.”
“Our second, actually,” I said, and immediately winced. “I probably shouldn’t have brought up that first conversation, should I have?”
“Yep. That one was a bust, no thanks to me. I shouldn’t have walked away.”
“Well, I wasn’t exactly tactful, asking you out of the clear blue sky to take off in the car with me.”
“I guess it took me off guard. Just a little.”
“You know, I never could be tactful around you. I am around other people, I’m pretty sure. But when I was with you, it was like I knew my mind better than I do when I’m with anyone else, but I forget to hold back or edit. I just blurt out whatever I’m thinking.”
When I looked up at Ben, I could see that without moving at all, he’d pulled back from me.
“And look at how I just did the very thing I was talking about,” I added, lamely.
His eyes warmed ever so slightly. “Oh, yeah? I didn’t notice.”
“I switched to present tense halfway, through, too, didn’t I?”
“Possibly,” he said, with a flicker of a smile, but then he added, “Forget about it,” in a way that made me think he really wanted to.
“For crying out loud,” I said, “I am too awkward to live.”
The Precious One Page 16