“Thank you,” he said. “We had eight good years. She was sick for just three months and went down fast once she was diagnosed. Ben took over for me here, so I could take care of her. Bobbie got to be at home with her cats and books and things right up until the last few days, and it meant the world. It really did.”
He shut his eyes and took a few deep breaths, smiling in a way that meant he was remembering. I waited, and eventually, he opened his eyes and swiped at them with his thumbs. I did the same to mine.
“I’m glad,” I said. “I bet Ben didn’t think twice about coming.”
“No, he didn’t. Also, he was glad for some time to think. He’d been teaching botany at the university out there in Wisconsin, but even before I called him about Bobbie, he said he was thinking of trying something new.”
“Really?” I said. “Why?”
“He claims he had no gift for teaching. I’m not sure I believe that. But he says he hated university politics, and that I can believe.”
“Me, too.”
“I’m back running this place, but Ben still helps most days, whenever he can. He enrolled himself in the professional gardener program at the university here. Most of his learning is hands on over at Windward, though. You remember how he loved that place, even as a boy.”
Windward, the botanical gardens just over the state line in Pennsylvania, a gorgeous place. Ben and I had walked through the vast glass conservatories and the exquisitely maintained outdoor gardens more times than I could count, and I still had a picture of us, arms around each other, grinning to beat the band, in front of one of the water lily pools. I would get transported by the grandeur—color and lushness rising up on every side, hanging from the ceilings, the fountains and fruit trees—but Ben went for the details, the tiny, speckled clown face of an orchid, the tight snail-like spirals of a fiddlehead fern, the odd, oily smell of the silvery plants in the desert room. It made me happy to think of Ben working there. In fact—Banfield Academy be damned—I could have spent the day just like that: sitting with Mr. Ransom on that garden bench in his store and picturing Ben at Windward Gardens. But that’s not how it worked out.
I saw the dogs first, impossibly tiny Yorkies, two silky gold and blue-gray mops springing across the lot, and they looked so much like Ben’s dogs Busby and Jed, the ones he’d brought with him when he came to live with his dad back in high school, that I turned to Mr. Ransom in surprise, but he only had eyes for the dogs.
Then they were upon us, bouncing up Mr. Ransom’s shins, their stubby tails wildly tick-tocking. He lifted the bigger one onto his lap and a kiss-fest ensued. I remembered that this was also how Mr. Ransom had always been, generally low-key but prone to bursts of free and easy, slightly goofy joy. I was so happy to see he hadn’t lost that.
The smaller dog placed one paw on my shoe and turned his doll face upward. His nose was a shiny black triangle, and his eyelashes were an inch long, so I picked him up—he was light as a lunch sack full of feathers—and set him on my knee, and he gave my chin a single decorous flick with his tongue.
“Ah! The elusive Pidwit kiss!” said Mr. Ransom with a hoot. “He doesn’t give those away every day.”
“Pidwit,” I said. “That’s what Ben used to call Piglet from Winnie-the-Pooh. His mom told me that.”
“He wasn’t even two. Dragged that stuffed pig around everywhere. And this,” said Mr. Ransom, planting a kiss on the other dog’s head, “is Roo.”
Roo had eyes like Audrey Hepburn, one up ear, one down ear, and a toothy grin. Really and truly, the dog was smiling.
“No offense, but he doesn’t look much like a kangaroo to me,” I said.
Then, a voice from a few feet away said, “It’s because of the way he hops through tall grass.”
Ben. Ben. I knew it was Ben because it couldn’t have been anyone else in the world.
A shiver ran down the back of my neck, and Pidwit turned his head to give me a deep brown, doe-eyed look of concern. I touched the tip of my nose to his, mostly because his nose was so tempting, but also to buy myself time, after which I lifted my head and looked straight into the eyes of Ben Ransom.
“He was doing it when I went to pick him up from the breeder,” said Ben.
“Hopping?” I said.
“Yeah. Actually, he looked more like a dolphin leaping through waves, but right after I saw him, I met Pidwit, who was obviously a Pidwit.”
“Obviously,” I said. “So then Roo made more sense than . . .”
“Flipper,” supplied Ben.
I wanted to say something witty, but after that first, brief wave of coherence, the only thing inside my head was you you you you you, hooting like a crazy owl.
“Well,” said Ben, after a short silence. “This is unexpected.”
I swallowed hard, tried to smile, but managed only to clench my teeth.
“I’m going to go feed these dogs,” said Mr. Ransom, standing and lifting Pidwit from my lap. He tucked him under his left arm like a football. Roo was tucked under his right.
“I fed them earlier,” said Ben.
“He calls that food?” Mr. Ransom said to the dogs. “That crunchy guinea pig garbage? You’re carnivores, aren’t you? You need meat.” He nodded at me. “Good to see you, Taisy,” he said and started off toward the cottage.
“I don’t think they eat poached chicken in the wild, Dad,” said Ben.
“Like he knows,” said Mr. Ransom to the dogs and then, over his shoulder. “You tell him, Taisy!”
Ben shot his father a look of exasperation that wouldn’t have fooled a baby. How moving I’d always found it, the way, even as a teenager, Ben had adored his dad.
“Okay, tell me,” said Ben, eyebrows up. “You think they eat poached chicken in the wild?”
I considered this. While I considered it, I considered him, tried to take in as much of him as I could. He was a leaner, starker version of himself, less red-cheeked. Some cute boys age into boyish, faintly silly-looking men, their prettiness gone all to seed. But maybe because Ben had never looked that boyish, even as a boy, he seemed to have grown into a truer version of himself, as though this man had been inside of him all along, biding his time, waiting to emerge. His dark hair was cropped short, and I missed its falling on his forehead, but I liked how now there was less to distract you from his black eyes and all the craftsmanship of his face. And, oh, that sharply cut divot in his lip was the same as ever.
“Do they eat poached chicken in the wild? That’s your question. They’re Yorkies,” I said. “Are they in the wild? Not just your Yorkies, but any Yorkies? Ever?”
Then, for the first time in seventeen years, Ben Ransom smiled at me, and his smile was what it always had been, a sudden, reckless, white-light event that took over his entire face. Smiles like that aren’t just pleasant, they’re inspiring; they make you want to deserve them. Ben’s smile sent courage charging through me.
“Listen,” I said, fervently. “I have to go somewhere. Will you come with me?”
He should have said yes. I should have held out my hand, and he should have grabbed it, and together we should’ve run to my car and spent the next several hours intermittently pouring out our hearts and being quiet together, and asking for forgiveness and telling each other there was never anything to forgive, so that by the time we got back home, our fresh start would have spread out all around us like a field we stood in. I wanted it so much that I could see it happening. I just held my breath, waiting for the yes.
But Ben didn’t say it. His smile fell away, became so gone that it was like it had never been there at all.
“Just like that?” he said, with an edge in his voice. “Is that what you thought would happen?”
“No! I mean, yes.” I sighed. “I just thought we could talk.”
Ben rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand in a gesture so familiar I wanted to cry.
“You can’t just show up like this. I haven’t seen you in seventeen years, and you know what? I was pretty s
ure I’d never see you again.”
“Really? But didn’t you ever want to? I know I wanted to see you.”
It was a risk, but there is a time for naked honesty, and I was hoping that this was that time. Ben took another step backward and said, coldly, “So that’s why you came back? To see me.”
I wanted so badly to shout yes, but we’d sworn to always tell each other the truth. What would happen to our fresh start if I kicked it off with a lie? How would I ever deserve it? Oh, let the dogs come back, I thought, miserably, staring down at the ground. Let things be funny and easy the way they were before I ruined them.
“That’s what I thought,” he said.
When I looked up, he was walking away.
I ALMOST DIDN’T GO to Banfield. What the hell did it matter where Wilson had gone to school? The man had ruined my life, plain and simple, and learning who he’d been before he did it wouldn’t change that. But I realized that if I went back to the pool house, all I would do is play the meeting with Ben over and over inside my head, feeling more and more sorry for myself, and just the image of my tearstained, thirty-five-year-old self, lying on Wilson’s blue couch in Wilson’s pool house, mourning Ben like a schoolgirl was so humiliating, reeked so completely of failure that it made me want to scream. So instead I drove, dry-eyed and trying for fierceness, turning up the music until the only voice that could break through the din wasn’t Wilson’s or Ben’s or even my own, but Robo Hepburn’s, telling me, without a trace of emotion or uncertainty, her tone as barren as the moon, exactly where to go.
THE SCHOOL WASN’T NEARLY as grand as I thought it would be, no spires or domes casting shadows or declaring their majestic shapes against the sky, but its stone buildings were old enough and weathered enough to be dignified and to offset the samples of ’70s architecture that had sprung up among them. The kids wore jeans and fleeces, not uniforms or coats and ties, and they whizzed by on bikes or clacked along the brick walkways on skateboards, both of which they abandoned on the grass outside the entrances to the buildings when they went in to their classes.
I tried to imagine the place as Wilson would have known it, erasing the newer buildings, shrinking the trees, slicking down the hair of the boys who walked by, but the present was too insistent, too young and loud and alive. As I walked around, following the map I’d printed out online, I could imagine being one of those skateboard kids, jostling into the classroom with my friends, sitting down at my desk red-faced and breathless, a little sweaty, yanking the earbuds out of my ears, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, imagine Wilson. I went to the library, to the science building, to the oldest dormitory I could find, searching high and low for Wilson’s high school ghost, but he was nowhere to be found.
At the main administrative office, I showed the secretary, Edwina Cook, Wilson’s letter and the paper from his lawyer and asked if I might see whatever records they still had of his time there, and lo and behold, the documents worked. Edwina Cook was a sturdy, capable-looking woman, with unexpectedly long, red nails. When she finished reading the documents, she clapped her hands.
“A book! How exciting! And what a father you’ve got!” she said. “We’re still in the process of digitizing the old paper files, but I think we’ve gotten all the way up to sixties.”
Her nails clicked, lightning fast, on the computer keys.
“There! I think I’ve got everything for Wilson Cleary. Isn’t much, but you’re welcome to it. You want me to print copies?”
“Please,” I said.
There was his transcript: difficult-sounding classes, straight As, class rank 1. None of which surprised me. And there was his work/study contract, which surprised me a little. Apparently, Wilson had put himself through school by doing whatever needed doing: serving food in the cafeteria, helping the groundskeeper, shelving books in the library. Wilson in an apron? Ladling mashed potatoes onto his schoolmates’ plates? If the past Wilson had been anything like the one I knew, he must have been writhing with ire and humiliation for four straight years.
Wait. Four straight years? I looked back at the records and noticed for the first time that they didn’t span four years, but two, his junior and senior. There was nothing from his freshman and sophomore years, and, then, I noticed something odder, still: no home address on any of it. The work/study contracts extended through the summer. It was as though Wilson had lived at the school. And where were his parents’ names? I leafed carefully through the sheets of paper. Nowhere. I went back to Edwina.
“You know, I’m quite sure that my father was here for all four years, but I’m not finding anything for his first two. Would you mind checking again?”
Looking just a tad annoyed at my questioning her thoroughness, she checked. Clickety click click click. Nothing.
“Can you check by social security number?” I asked.
“I don’t think the school used them back then,” she said. “I don’t know if minors even were issued them in the fifties. I suspect not.”
“Oh,” I said, downcast.
“Now don’t you get discouraged,” she chirped. “I’m sure we can figure this out. I’m one of those who likes a knotty problem.”
I smiled at her. I liked this knotty-problem-liking Edwina Cook, clicks and all.
“I’ll bet you are,” I said.
She scooped up the sheaf of papers and read them with hawklike attention, narrowing her eyes.
“Aha!” she cried, making me jump.
“What?”
“Looks like they assigned every student an identification number. I’ll try searching by that.”
Clicks. Fifteen minutes later, the first two years of Wilson’s prep school education were sliding out of the printer.
“Voilà!” said Edwina and handed them over. “It was the name change that got me.”
“Name change?”
“Looks like he must have done it the summer between his sophomore and junior years. You didn’t know?”
I shook my head, spreading the new sheets down on the table, trying to understand what Edwina was telling me, and there it was: Wilson Ravenel. Well, I’ll be damned, Marcus had been wrong; Wilson had been a different person when he was fourteen and fifteen, and presumably for all the years before that.
“I wonder why,” I said.
Edwina shrugged. “Guess you can ask him, right?”
Wrong.
“You know,” I said, slowly, “one thing that happened around that time is that his parents died.”
“Oh, how awful, honey,” said Edwina. She clucked her tongue. “Such a tough age to lose a parent, let alone both.”
“I know. There was a car accident. He doesn’t really talk about it.”
We sat in thoughtful silence, and then, Edwina said, “You never know, do you? How that kind of thing would affect a kid.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, a bereaved child, dropping his parents’ last name like that. You wouldn’t think it, would you?”
Edwina was right. It seemed heartless even for Wilson. I could hear Marcus saying, Nothing is too heartless for Wilson. But still, it didn’t make sense.
“Well, I’ll leave you alone with that stuff for a bit,” said Edwina, patting my hand.
“Thanks.”
Out the window, I could see a lone boy walking, his skateboard under his arm. He looked lost in thought, oblivious to his surroundings, solitary and yet also content, and I wondered if that was what it had been like here for Wilson Ravenel (Had anyone called him Will? Had “Will” used contractions?), back before his parents died and he was reincarnated as Wilson Cleary. I hoped so. When the kid was out of sight, I went back to reading, so distractedly, my mind still with the thinking boy out the window, that I almost didn’t see them. Two names. In wonder, I ran a shaky finger over them. Walter and Helen Ravenel. Wilson’s parents, my grandparents. And an address.
CHAPTER TEN
Willow
WHEN I WAS A child, my father was a devotee of the histo
rical marker, those metal, hump-topped rectangular signs you find standing in fields or along roads or affixed to buildings. He was the kind of person who stops and reads what lots of others just pass by, even if it means pulling over on the highway with cars whizzing past or stopping dead on a city sidewalk when you’re already late for the symphony or an IMAX film about the Galapagos. As secretly impatient as I’d gotten with this over the years, I have to admit that it is rather nifty, the way the past and the present can bump up against each other: the stop on the Underground Railroad cozying up to the sneaker store; the birthplace of the famous sculptor reborn as a windowless nightclub called Tits for Tats (!).
Equally nifty is the way knowledge can lead to more knowledge. For instance, after a quick but harrowing highway stop in Chancellorsville, Virginia, I was inspired to research Stonewall Jackson’s left arm, which, according to the marker, had been amputated there on the battlefield. I found out that the arm had been given its own Christian burial, only to be stolen from its resting place by Union soldiers and spirited off to parts unknown, and this became a jumping-off point for a project on burial rituals and grave robbery through the ages, a project that gave me nightmares for weeks, but that smacked of brilliance, if I do say so myself.
With such an upbringing, it’s probably not strange that I had played a game for years in which I erected imaginary historical markers along my own life’s path. All right, maybe that is strange. I mean, for a while there, when I was nine or ten, I even started writing them down in a notebook, pencil drawings of painstakingly lettered, hump-topped signs announcing such events as: “WILLOW CLEARY’S FINAL BALLET RECITAL. HERE ON THIS STAGE IN JUNE OF HER TENTH YEAR, WILLOW, DRESSED AS A PANSY, DANCED HER FINAL DANCE TO “ALL IN THE GOLDEN AFTERNOON” FROM ALICE IN WONDERLAND. BECAUSE SHE WAS SO SAD ABOUT HAVING TO QUIT BALLET, SHE SLIPPED AND FELL DURING THE CHAINES TURNS, BUT HER MOTHER SAID NO ONE NOTICED.” At Bethany Beach, Delaware: “WILLOW CLEARY GOES INTO THE OCEAN FOR THE FIRST TIME”; in front of the two-headed human fetus suspended in a jar at the Mutter Museum of medical oddities in Philadelphia: “WILLOW CLEARY DISGRACES HERSELF AND HER FATHER BY BURSTING INTO TEARS IN FRONT OF EVERYONE”; and in the hallway outside of my father’s office: “WILLOW CLEARY SAYS HORRIBLE THINGS TO HER FATHER ABOUT HAVING TO QUIT CROSS-COUNTRY AND ALMOST KILLS HIM.”
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