The Precious One

by Marisa de los Santos

Ben should have laughed at this, but he didn’t, and we stood there, not looking each other in the eye. I found myself staring at Ben’s running shoes, which were bright orange and extremely high-tech. I remembered how Ben had always loved to run. I flashed back to his face after a high school track meet, his cheeks streaked brilliant pink in the spring air.

  Finally, he said, “I’m a pretty nice guy, letting you stand out here in the cold. You want to come in?”

  I glanced over his shoulder, into the house. I had been so happy there, as happy as I’d ever been anywhere. Oh, hell, happier.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I was always so comfortable in that house. If I got inside it again, I might start blurting crap out right and left, and scare you off forever. You think?”

  Another tiny thaw. “Well, I guess that’s a possibility.”

  Then, we lapsed into a stilted silence. Oh, this dance of back-and-forth, comfortable, uncomfortable, Ben opening the door a chink, then shutting it, was playing havoc with my nerves. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders, shake him, and say, “Just give in! Just like me, like me, like me!”

  “You called me,” I reminded him. “How’d you get my number?”

  To my boundless relief, Ben chuckled. “I’m not sure. Wait, didn’t you leave a message at the store? Or two? Or, hold on, was it four?”

  “Three,” I said. “I wanted to apologize for the lack of tact thing in our first conversation.”

  “No need for that. But thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  We stood, finally looking right at each other. I was drinking him in, every detail—the way his eyebrows were thick but so tidy, as though they’d been combed, the way his neck moved when he swallowed—as unobtrusively as I could, and I hoped he was doing the same to me, but I sort of doubted it. Mostly, he had the aspect of a person who wasn’t sure what to say next.

  Finally, I said, “So did you call to talk about anything in particular? It’s okay if you didn’t, of course, if you just wanted to catch up or whatever.”

  Ben snapped to, and his face grew serious, his eyes narrowing and turning down at the corners the way they did when he was worried. Uh-oh, I thought.

  “Actually, there was something. It’s about Willow.”

  I jumped at the sound of Ben saying her name; it was so strange, like two worlds colliding.

  “Do you know Willow?” I asked.

  “Not really. I’ve seen her run, though. I’ve done a few races since I’ve been back home, 5Ks, 10Ks. She’s good.”

  “How did you know it was her?”

  He gave a half grin. “The sight of Wilson cheering his head off on the sidelines was pretty hard to miss.”

  “Wow. Wilson? Cheering?”

  “I know. Crazy.”

  “Very crazy.”

  He shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.

  “You sure you don’t want to come in?” he asked.

  I glanced into the house again and felt that I would have given almost anything to be inside it, curled up at one end of the fat sofa or tucked, with my legs under me, in the leather armchair.

  “Here’s the thing,” I said. “This house is the one place—and I’ve thought about this a lot, so I’m pretty sure I’m right—it’s the one place where nothing bad ever happened to me. And I was nice here. It was so easy to be my nicest self in this house.”

  “Oh,” said Ben. “Well. I’ll tell my dad that. He’ll like it.” He didn’t say he liked it, and I saw that his eyes had shifted back to neutral.

  “So, anyway,” I said, quickly, “I’d really like to keep it that way, with not one negative association, and from the look on your face, I’m pretty sure this thing to do with Willow is a thing to worry about.”

  “Okay, so you want to take a walk instead?” he asked.

  “Sure. You need to get a jacket?”

  His eyes twinkled; I know people always say that, but only black eyes truly twinkle, and Ben’s eyes were truly black. He shook his head.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’re still the person who thinks everyone should get a jacket,” he said.

  This one slender, tossed-off sentence came to me like a gift. Ben remembered things about me. I could feel myself beaming. We started walking.

  “You know, this may be nothing,” said Ben, “I hope so, but the other day—a Saturday, I drove to this English pub to meet a friend for a beer.”

  A flutter went through me when he said “friend.” I wanted to ask about the friend, but I’d put a moratorium on blurting stuff out, at least for the duration of this walk, and I could think of no tactful way to ask, “What was the gender of this friend? Was she pretty? And how close, on a scale of one to ten, would you say the two of you are?” Anyway, I’d noticed that, in spite of his worry, now that Ben was talking about the present—or at least the recent past—instead of our past, the stiffness had gone out of his voice and his shoulders. I wanted to keep it that way.

  “And I pulled into the parking lot,” he went on, “and got out of my car, and was just about to head inside when I saw Willow.”

  “You saw Willow in the parking lot of a pub? That’s weird. If Wilson were up and around, well, English pubs have to be right up his nutty Anglophile alley, but Caro doesn’t seem like the type. She’s a vegetarian, for one thing. Do English people even eat vegetables?”

  “If they do, you never hear about it, but, no, she wasn’t with Caro.”

  “Oh.”

  “She was with this guy, a much older guy.”

  “What? Are you sure?”

  Ben rubbed his forehead with his palm. “Okay, not absolutely sure. I didn’t really see him because his back was mostly to me, and he was wearing a cap, but there was something about the way he moved. And his hands, they looked somehow older. Not old, just like an adult’s hands. I saw his right hand really clearly when he touched her.”

  I came to a dead stop.

  “He touched her? How do you mean?”

  “No, sorry. All he did was lift her hand and kiss it. Nothing creepy. Except.”

  Frightened, I turned to face him. “Except what?”

  “I can’t explain it. These are all just impressions, but even though it wasn’t technically creepy, it was creepy. I’ve tried to figure out why. Maybe it was the way he seemed so proprietary or maybe it was the age difference, or what I thought was the age difference. I just know that my first instinct was to pull him away from her.”

  “Why didn’t you? Wait. I didn’t mean to sound like you should have or anything. I just wonder what stopped you.”

  “Well, for one thing, it was a kiss on the hand. That’s it. And for another, before I could do anything, she saw me.”

  “Really? What did she do?”

  “She just gave me this smile, and it wasn’t only self-possessed. It was—”

  “Smug?”

  “Queenly,” said Ben. “She looked like the exact opposite of someone in trouble.”

  “But you’re still worried?”

  “She’s, what, sixteen, seventeen?”

  “Sixteen.”

  “At sixteen, you can be in trouble and not even know it.”

  We kept walking. Ahead I could see the side of a blue house. Mrs. Pando. She’d always come running out with cookies for the dogs, not dog treats, but actual chocolate chip cookies, and we’d take them from her and say we’d give them to them later for dessert and then we’d eat them ourselves.

  “Mrs. Pando,” I said and then winced. For a second, I’d forgotten to stick to the here and now. I braced myself for Ben to ignore me or to get distant, but maybe he’d forgotten, too, because he said, easily, “I wonder if she ever figured out that dogs can’t eat chocolate.”

  “Oh, God, I hope not,” I said.

  “Me, too.”

  “Was he tall?” I asked. “The guy?”

  “Not short. Taller than Willow. Probably not as tall as I am.”

  “Tan?”

  �
��Not that I noticed.”

  “Huh. Well, I saw Willow with this kid the other day, a boy from her English class, probably about her age, which would make him old enough to drive, assuming he has parents who aren’t Wilson.”

  “He was tall? And tan?”

  “He looked tall, although he was sitting down at the time. But, yes, definitely tan. Maybe half Chinese or Korean? And beautiful.”

  Ben gave me an amused look.

  “I know. Now who’s being creepy?” I said. “No, but, really, his beauty wasn’t of special interest to me. It was just an unavoidable fact.”

  “Did they seem to be together?”

  “It’s possible. They were talking in this very animated way. But they seemed more like friends who are meant to be together and somewhere deep down want to be and will be one day, but who just don’t know it yet.”

  “You could tell all that just from seeing them talk to each other?”

  “I’m a woman,” I said. “We’re fine-tuned that way.”

  “Got it.”

  “So could it have been him? Luka?”

  “I can’t swear it wasn’t. Unfortunately, I never saw the blinding beauty of his face.”

  “Ah. That is unfortunate. What about the car? Was it a teenager car?”

  Ben stopped walking to think. “You know what? It was. It was some kind of Japanese sedan. Older model. A Toyota, I think. Not in great shape.”

  “Aha. The kind of car that used to be the family car before the family got a new one and gave the old beat-up one to the teenager.”

  “I guess. I hope you’re right. It seems like sort of an odd place for two teenagers to have a lunch date on a Saturday afternoon, but maybe.”

  “Remember Willow’s not your typical teenager,” I said. “She’s been molded by the biggest Winston Churchill fan to ever wear round glasses.”

  Ben laughed. His face when he laughed gave Luka’s, gave anyone’s a run for its money. How I wanted to touch it, just tuck a finger into the divot in his lip. But we kept walking, and that’s when I noticed how close we were to the tree. The Tree. It was just around the next curve in the sidewalk. The tree against which I had leaned when Ben kissed me for the first time. It had been late evening; we were walking the dogs; the streetlights were burning. We’d stopped to talk under the tree, and Ben had kissed me, and when we finished kissing—and it took a long time—we looked down and saw the dogs, sitting side by side and staring gravely up at us with their violet-shaped faces.

  If I saw that tree, if I were to walk close to it, with Ben next to me, I might fall to the ground beneath it and cry; I might climb into it and refuse to come down; I might lean against its broad trunk and wait for what would probably—oh please not probably—what would possibly never come again. I knew I should stop, turn around, run away, but I couldn’t do it. With the past, in all its lost, exquisite sweetness, hurtling toward me, I kept walking.

  I was two sidewalk squares ahead of Ben before I realized he’d stopped. I turned around. Ben was looking at his watch.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” he said, hurriedly, “but I really have to get back.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Are you okay to walk back by yourself?” he asked.

  “Yeah, sure. See you later. Thanks for telling me about Willow.”

  “No problem.” He jogged backward a few steps. “Okay, then.”

  He turned and slipped into a graceful lope, running shoes flashing. I stood alone on the sidewalk, watching him, trying not to watch him, until he was out of sight, and then waited another minute just to be sure he was back inside the house. Then, I walked back to my car and drove to Wilson’s.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Willow

  I AM FLOATING ON THE surface of a pond, weightless, air skimming my face, my hair fanning out around me. Flowers drift through my open fingers; my dress billows like a jellyfish around my legs. Boughs and flower stalks bend in from the edges of the pond, an everywhere of emerald green, and through branches, fragments of blue sky. I am so calm. Utterly, utterly light. Then, a voice begins to speak. I can’t understand the words because my ears are mostly underwater, but I know the voice is Mr. Insley’s. He must be sitting near the edge of the pond, but I don’t see him. At first, I struggle to hear what he is saying, but the water is so pleasant, and I don’t want to work at anything, so after a while, I stop trying. I hear thunder, but I’m not really scared, just a little. There is no current; I don’t travel, just float. I feel something stirring under the water, something big displacing the water, swimming under me, and I think, That should be scary, but it isn’t. Mr. Insley’s voice gets louder, more insistent, but I still can’t understand what he’s saying because the thunder gets louder, too. Almost soundlessly, Luka’s head and shoulders emerge from the water’s surface, and I turn to look at him. He streams silvery water; droplets shine on his eyelashes and the tops of his cheeks. He is so bright that I close my eyes and strain to hear what Mr. Insley is saying; I know it’s something important. But the sound of his voice turns into a banging sound. Bang, bang, bang.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  I woke up with a start. The thunder was real; rain was starting on the roof, swishing against the tiles. The slapping was real, too. My blood turned to ice water. Oh, dear God, the back screen door! I clutched at the deadbolt key hanging from a chain around my neck, my fingers cold against my breastbone, and then, I leaped out of bed so fast I knocked over the lamp on my nightstand, and half stumbled down the stairs, my breath a sharp in-and-out of oh no oh no oh no. The kitchen was a mess, dunes of flour on the countertops, sugar gritty under my feet, but, this time, no burners were on, no gas smell filled the kitchen, thank heaven for that. I ran out the door, then ran back, and closed it firmly, praying that the sound of its banging hadn’t already woken up my father.

  “Muddy!” I called, my voice high and urgent, a needle of sound against the blurry backdrop of rain. “Muddy, Muddy!”

  The yard was so dark, but out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of something pale, far away near the pool house, and a voice came across the grass: “I have her, Willow. Over here.” Eustacia. I ran as fast as I could, which was fast.

  The two of them were standing under a tree, and even in the dark, I recognized the abstraction in my mother’s eyes. Her wet pajamas clung to her body, making her look so frail that it pained me to see, but at least her face was tranquil.

  “I can’t remember where I left it,” she said, looking in my direction, if not exactly at me. “But that’s okay.”

  “Of course, it’s okay,” I said, quietly. “You’ll find it in the morning.”

  Gently, I took her by the shoulders and led her to the pool-house porch, where it was dry. She sat in the rocker but didn’t rock, just folded her hands in her lap and looked at them. When I turned around, I found Eustacia standing at the bottom of the porch steps. She opened her mouth to speak.

  “It’s not what you think,” I whispered, ferociously, from the top step. “She’s not crazy. Don’t you dare even think it.”

  Eustacia regarded me, her eyes wide in her wet face and full of what looked far too much like pity but that could have been—but probably wasn’t—ordinary kindness.

  “Willow,” she said.

  “Don’t!”

  “Don’t what?”

  I stabbed my finger in her direction.

  “Don’t feel sorry for her. Or for any of us. Why are you even getting involved in this anyway? It’s family business.”

  Eustacia’s lips tightened.

  “You know what? It’s a really stupid time for the two of us to argue, but there’s really no need to treat me like the enemy here. I heard her. I came outside. If you think I shouldn’t have, tough shit, kid.”

  “Talking profanity like a common street punk,” I said. “How unsurprising.”

  My belligerence was childish, uncalled for, unfair, but—oh, wow—it felt good. Still, deep down inside, a tiny voice was whispering the truth,
that the only blameworthy person here was I. Eustacia shook her head, sighing.

  “Fine. Now, don’t you think we should put her back to bed? Or she could lie down here at the pool house.”

  “No.”

  “Your mother is soaked to the bone, Willow. And by the way, I don’t think she’s crazy. I think she’s sleeping and that it would be better for her to do it in bed.”

  “She wouldn’t like to wake up here.”

  “Well, then, walk her back to the house before she wakes up. How long does this usually last?”

  “Sometimes a few minutes, sometimes a lot longer. She doesn’t do it very often. Only when she’s having a really long bad-sleep streak. Insomnia makes it happen, but that’s not her fault. Some people just can’t sleep as well as other people. Most of the time, though, she’s absolutely fine.”

  I walked my mother down the porch steps, the architecture of her shoulders and back—the beams and buttresses that held my mother upright—feeling heartbreakingly breakable against my arm, and started off with her across the lawn.

  “Do you want help?” asked Eustacia.

  “No.”

  I glanced back at her. She was still standing there, looking small under the big tree, buffeted by wind, but strong and straight, her arms wrapped around herself. I wasn’t warming to her or anything, but I could not deny that the woman had excellent posture.

  “Thank you,” I added, and I saw her nod.

  ONCE MY MOTHER WAS safely under the quilts in the guest room where she’d been sleeping since my father’s heart attack, and I’d cleaned up the kitchen as best I could without being too noisy, I lay flat on my back in my own bed. Tears of relief and guilt slid down my temples and into my hair. Ever since my father’s surgery, it had been my job, my sacred duty, to lock the deadbolts at night, and I’d never once forgotten. Thank God I’d locked the one on my mother’s studio door earlier that evening, but just because I deserved it, I imagined her in there, barefoot in her pajamas, shards of glass all around her, her mind shrouded in that strange lucid/cloudy twilit state. Imagined her turning on the glassblowing torch, the dagger of blue flame. I’m so sorry, Muddy, so so so so sorry.