The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

  “Willow,” Mr. Insley said, his eyes locking with mine, “I think—and I hope you’ll agree with me—that we’re ready to go further.”

  My heartbeat broke into a gallop, and a little tinny buzzing started in my ears that might have been fear and might have been joy.

  “Oh. I. Um, well, that’s fine,” I managed to say. “I mean, yes, that sounds like a good idea.”

  “Excellent! We’ve stuck to parking lots and short jaunts, but I think we should take the plunge and go for a real ride.”

  Twin waves of relief and disappointment washed over me, and I couldn’t for the life of me say which was the bigger of the two. I smiled.

  “You really think I’m ready?”

  Mr. Insley’s prominent, light blue eyes twinkled at me, full of the spirit of adventure.

  “I do! But we’ll need a sizable block of time. Any chance you can get away this Saturday? Is there perhaps something you could tell your parents?”

  I nodded my best sharp, saucy, can-do, WAC officer nod.

  “You bet,” I said.

  “Good,” he said, giving my arm a squeeze and leaning closer to me. “Grand. How about eleven A.M. at the park? Are you sure you’re game?”

  When Mr. Insley looked at me that way, so rapt, waiting with bated breath for my answer, I felt more special, more interesting than I ever had in my life. The man could have suggested anything, a balloon ride across the Pacific, a whirl on the flying trapeze, and I would have agreed to it with all of my heart.

  “The gamest!” I said.

  His face changed again, then, grew—I didn’t just imagine it—tender, unmistakably tender.

  “That’s my girl,” he said, softly, and as I walked down the shoulder of the road toward home, outwardly walking, but inwardly dancing, leaping, flying, these last words of his went off like fireworks, like bursting blossoms of pure light, over and over again inside my head.

  Oh, I was his girl. Was I ever.

  I DIDN’T KEEP A diary, and if I did, I would not have dared to write about the days that had passed since the first time I’d met Mr. Insley in the park, but the driving lessons, all four of them, each more bright and precious than the last, were written on my soul as surely as anything ever had been. In fact, my soul held two versions of every lesson, the long and the short. I had stored every detail and, at night when I’d go to bed, I would take the long versions out, unfurl them, one by one, and bask in every second, every word and glance. But each lesson also contained a moment or two, high points, jewel-like, utterly full, supersaturated, and when I had less time, when I was sitting at dinner, say, or in class, I would release this shorter, highlight version, let it fly across my memory like a comet.

  One: My foot on the gas pedal, jerking the car forward like a racehorse out of the gate. Slamming on the brake, so that both our heads bobbed hard. Humiliation rising in my chest and then Mr. Insley’s splendid laugh ringing through the darkness, making everything, every single thing in the world, all right.

  Two: Right after school, pale, intermittent sunlight wafting through the car windows. Seeing Mr. Insley with new, shy, excited eyes because he is wearing aviator sunglasses and a flannel newsboy cap. After we practice driving all around the parking lot, we park and sit on the hood of his car, drinking coffee from a thermos he’s brought; he gives me the cup, drinks from the thermos itself. Steam hovers over my cup like a tiny ghost, and the sun disappears behind a cloud, and I shiver, and Mr. Insley takes my scarf from my lap, winds it carefully, two times, around my neck, and I see myself in his sunglasses, and he says, “There.”

  Three: We practice backing up, parking, using the turn signal. When I look into the rearview mirror, I can feel him watching me, and his gaze is like something hot pressed to my cheek, the side of my neck. Sitting atop the car afterward, the hood warm through my jeans, he asks if I’m happy. I cradle my coffee in both hands, tip my face to the sky, and say, “Yes. I love driving with you,” when what I really mean is “I love driving and you.” He says, “Good. I do, too, but I meant in general.” “In general, I don’t know. Not ever as happy as this.” He says, “If it is not overstepping to say so, sometimes, I feel that you’re a trapped bird, waiting to be set free.” I realize, the second he says it, that I do feel that way. I look at him, thinking Set me free. He smiles, reaches out, lifts a lock of my hair, and says, “And oh, what feathers. In all my thirty years, I’ve never seen hair like yours.”

  Four: We go for a longer ride, a few miles down the road and back. I’m scared, gripping the wheel hard, but also thrilled at his faith in me. When we get back to the parking lot, I get out and spin in circles, laughing with joy. Driving is awful and miraculous, and I am good at it. He catches me by the hand, and I think—oh, good God, please—he is going to pull me to him, and then he grins and gives me a hearty handshake of congratulations. “Thank you so much for teaching me, Mr. Insley,” I say, and he keeps hold of my hand, touches the tip of my nose with two fingers, and says, “Please. Call me Blaine.”

  ON SATURDAY MORNING, EVEN though I wasn’t scheduled to meet Mr. Insley until eleven, I told my mother I was doing homework with some “school friends” (Ha, an oxymoron if ever there was one!) at a nearby coffee shop at eight thirty. I told her we would eat breakfast together and then head to the library to study, and that one of them would drop me off later in the afternoon. Muddy was so happy about this, her face all aglow at the thought of my having friends at school (“Breakfasting together! How chummy!”), and so eager to accommodate me, even offering to drop me at the coffee shop, that my stomach tightened with guilt. Although I had been lying to her fairly regularly lately, this lie was especially elaborate and so felt especially wrong. But there was nothing for it; I had to get out of the house early, before my father woke up and wanted to see me because if lying to Muddy was hard, lying to my father, as he lay in bed, still slow-moving, hoarse, and creased from sleep, would’ve been unbearable. No, scratch that. Not unbearable. I would have borne it because I would have borne anything to buy precious hours with Mr. Insley, but the guilt would have burned like coals of fire.

  I need to stop here in order to state for the record that I would have given anything to speed my father’s recovery and that I cherished, with all my heart, every sign that he was getting better. When I came home from school and went to his room to find him out of bed, sitting at his writing desk or in his red velvet armchair, safely encased in the cone of light from the bronze gooseneck floor lamp, a book in his lap, I was filled with gratitude. I wanted him to be his old self, I did, I did, I did, but I had to admit that the fact of his not being quite there yet made meeting up with Mr. Insley much simpler than it would have been. Or, rather, than it would be, when my father got better. But I would cross that bridge when I came to it.

  The coffee shop was a couple of miles away from the state park parking lot, and running it would have taken me no time at all. But for once I had the chance to meet Mr. Insley without being either sweaty or school-day disheveled, and I’d dressed with special care that morning. The secret truth is that I love clothes. I’d known my share of the homespun variety of homeschooled kids, the ones who wear long skirts, jumpers, flannel clogs, and Guatemalan pullovers and have their uncut hair hanging in braids, but I had never been one of them. Good gracious, no. I’d never perused a fashion magazine, not even in the grocery line or dentist’s office, but whenever my family went on field trips to New York City, I paid careful attention to every woman who walked by. My father would have considered such an interest shockingly unintellectual, but luckily, he loathed shopping, and my mother gave me mostly free rein, so I had quite a wardrobe, at least until I’d started dumbing it down for high school in order to survive.

  But Mr. Insley had called me an “old soul” more than once; I didn’t have to dress like a teenager for him. We were going for a drive in the country, so I wore dark brown wool trousers, a cashmere-mohair blend sweater the color and weightlessness of cream, and a caramel-colored suede jacke
t. Mr. Insley brought so much to our relationship, experience, wit, erudition; the least I could do was look nice.

  As perfect as our times together had been, I felt in my bones that today would be different, special, even momentous. A turning point. With each step along the road toward the state park, this feeling deepened, and as soon as I caught sight of Mr. Insley, leaning against the driver’s side door in his hat and sunglasses, and a tweed overcoat I’d never seen before, I knew I was right. He didn’t wave, just watched my every step, until I was just a few feet away, and then he moved toward me, took both my hands, and, oh, dear Lord in heaven, kissed me on both cheeks, first the right, then the left.

  “Willow,” he said, “you look like the very incarnation of autumn.”

  In my addled state, I blurted out, “Oh, so do you!,” which was mortifying, but only briefly, because it made Mr. Insley break into one of his glorious, heal-all laughs.

  The drive was long and harrowing, all narrow, winding, shoulderless, country roads lined with trees and fields and, sometimes, ditches that seemed deep as moats. More than once, as I hung like death to the steering wheel, my eyes riveted on the road, I found that I’d forgotten to breathe, and all the while, Mr. Insley talked, told me how a cousin with a green pickup truck had taught him to drive on exactly these kinds of roads, out near his grandparents’ lake house, when he was thirteen years old. There’d been scrapes, near misses, a flood, an encounter with the police and a bear, all driving related, everything happening in that one summer, which was possibly the best of his life, and his stories were fascinating, they really were, but I was focusing too hard on the road to say more than “oh” in response to them, which made me feel sort of vacuous, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was Mr. Insley’s trust in me, and I didn’t let him down, but when we finally pulled into the parking lot of a stone tavern called the Union Jack, I nearly cried with relief that the drive was over.

  “You were marvelous, Willow!” said Mr. Insley, gleefully.

  “Thank you,” I said, blushing. I considered adding “Blaine” but somehow just couldn’t. As much as I had loved his having asked me to call him by his first name, as much as I was dying to do so, I found that, when push came to shove, I couldn’t swing it. I’d tried practicing at home, in my room, but even there, “Blaine” felt desperately clumsy in my mouth. Because Mr. Insley looked faintly pained whenever I called him “Mr. Insley,” for the moment, I called him nothing at all and hoped he didn’t notice.

  The tavern was ancient, crowded, and cozy, with wooden beams, dark wainscoting, wide-plank floors, a fireplace, and a mind-boggling row of beer taps at the bar. Mr. Insley ordered a Guinness, and somehow, this made alarm bells go off in my head, although I didn’t quite understand why. Maybe only because it meant I would have to be the one to drive home, which probably would have happened anyway.

  “And another for the lady?” said the waitress, with what looked very like a wicked gleam in her eye but might not have been. She might actually have thought I was old enough!

  “No, thank you,” I said, with a touch of hauteur. “Just a cup of Darjeeling, if you’ve got it, with cream.”

  “Good enough,” said the waitress, with a wink.

  Because he wanted me to have the full English tavern experience, Mr. Insley ordered an insane amount of food: bangers and mash, Yorkshire pudding, fish and chips, toad in the hole, Welsh rarebit. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that in deference to my Anglophile father, English tavern food was the single cuisine my mother had mastered, despite the fact that, being a vegetarian, she could eat almost none of it. I believed it was a testament to my parents’ love for each other that bangers and mash was my mother’s specialty; we’d had it just three nights ago.

  I was too agitated, in a good way, to eat much, but that was all right. Just being there with Mr. Insley was like the best kind of dream. Within those dark, close, firelit walls, we were in our own world, one that existed outside of time and light-years away from the Webley School. The two of us were one with the crowd and also above it, like an old world prince and princess in disguise, experiencing the life of commoners, and loving every minute. I talked more than usual, mostly about books, since my daily life was certainly too mundane for such an occasion, and if I say so myself, I sounded the way I’d always wanted to when I talked to Mr. Insley, star-bright and wise beyond my years.

  When we’d eaten all we could, and the waitress was retrieving our check, and I was feeling the first tremors of sadness that our time in that place was ending, the high point happened, shining and perfect: Mr. Insley grabbed my hand under the table, and said, “I can’t help but tell you that I think you’re fantastic, Willow. I hope that’s all right.”

  Beyond words, I pressed my lips together, nodded, and held fast to his long, thin, somewhat jumpy hand (it was as though all his wonderful, feverish energy were concentrated in that one hand), wanting to memorize every nuance of it, every bone and tendon.

  “You know what I’d like?” he said, leaning in until our faces were inches apart. “I would like to show you the boat I’m building.”

  I had not expected him to say this, probably because I hadn’t known he was building a boat or even that he was the sort of person who built things. He seemed sort of not to be, actually. But as soon as his words had sunk in, I realized how romantic they were.

  “Oh, I’d love that,” I said.

  “It’s at my house. That is, it’s in a shed just behind my house. The house isn’t much, really, small, even a little shabby. I rented it merely for the shed, which the old owner used to store his collection of motorcycles. The shed is nearly as big as the house and just right for boat building. Will you come sometime? Soon?”

  “Yes,” I said. That yes felt so big, bigger than a promise.

  Mr. Insley started to say something else, then dropped his eyes. When he looked at me again, there were spots of pink burning in each of his cheeks.

  “I’ll just say it. Lately, for weeks, when I think of sailing away in that boat, I imagine you with me, the wind tousling your magnificent hair. Isn’t that silly?”

  I was so moved by this that my eyes smarted with tears.

  “Oh no,” I said. “Not silly at all.”

  The spell of that tavern was so strong that, although it dimmed when we walked out into the afternoon light, it didn’t disappear. We floated in its golden cloud down the walkway and all the way to the car, and it was still there when Mr. Insley came close to me, opened my hand, put the car keys into it, closed my fingers, and then, oh glory of glories, pressed his lips roughly against my knuckles, letting them linger there for one, two, three, four seconds. What ran through me, down my arm, up my neck, and across my scalp was a current of what I knew was love.

  As Mr. Insley was lifting his face away, over his shoulder, I caught sight of a man. He was standing next to his own car, brazenly watching us, his black brows quizzical below the cuff of his knit cap. I couldn’t see his eyes through his sunglasses, runner’s glasses, the kind that wrap around, but I didn’t need to see them to feel them boring into me. Us. Under that gaze, the tavern magic vanished, and, in its absence, I faltered, nervousness tightening my chest, but then, all by myself, no magic necessary, I lifted my chin and shot the man a smile of pure triumph. Stare all you want, I wanted to tell him, and you’ll still never understand love like this. But he turned away before I got the chance.

  This time, driving all the long, twisting road home, even as the clouds thickened and the sky got so dark I had to turn the headlights on, I wasn’t scared at all.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Taisy

  I HAD THE KEY TO my father’s house for six days before I used it. The practical reason for this was that, just a few steps from the circular front drive, there was a break in the cypress hedge that led straight into the backyard, so I could get from my car to the pool house without stepping foot in the main house at all. The less practical reason was that, while I am ordinarily a person
who resists injecting symbolism into real-life events on the grounds that doing so is usually self-serving and always corny, I found it impossible to even think the words the key to my father’s house, without doing exactly that. After nearly two decades of being locked out, Taisy Cleary had the key to her father’s house. In a moment she had never expected to experience and would never forget, Taisy Cleary was given the key to her father’s house. Taisy Cleary grasped the key to her father’s house in her hand and knew that nothing would ever be the same again. And so forth.

  The fact that Caro, not Wilson, had given me the key diluted the symbolism a bit, as did the fact that, when she gave it to me, she explained, very apologetically, that the key did not allow absolute access to the house because, while it unlocked the regular locks, it did not unlock the deadbolts, quickly adding that they only used the deadbolts at night and that Willow unlocked them as soon as she woke up in the morning. But even diluted, the symbolism persisted: possessing the key to my father’s house meant so much to me that it was just sad. So, in order to avoid confronting this fact, I avoided using the damn thing altogether.

  But then I was at the gourmet grocery store one afternoon, saw a lone crate of Stayman winesap apples—dull, dark red, spotty, far appleier looking than the glossy heaps of Red Delicious—and remembered Caro mentioning that she loved them, so I bought her a sackful. When I got home, I walked around to the pool house as usual, put my groceries away, and walked back to the front door bearing my lone sack of apples. I tried the door, found it was locked, swore, and stood there like a lump on a log, roiling with emotion, not the least of which was disgust for the fact that I was roiling with emotion.