Love Walked In (18 page)

“It was a butterfly. But it flew away at the last minute,” explained Clare, and as she stared at the photograph, smiling a little secret smile at the memory, she didn’t look like a conquering heroine in a novel, but like a very, very little girl—much younger than eleven. I wanted to hug her, but I held back. I know when a moment doesn’t belong to me.

So,
even though Clare spent the day being as solid and cheerful as I’d ever seen her, I knew being back in her house meant her mother felt to her both more present and more absent. Even I half expected Viviana to walk through the door, so what must Clare have been feeling?

It didn’t happen just as the carving knife was poised to cut. Our bird was already sliced, distributed, and being tucked away by all four of us. And the music on the stereo wasn’t “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” but the Vienna Boys’ Choir sending “Silent Night” in German lofting into the air on their luminous voices. But the moment felt absolutely like a moment, and not just in retrospect, I don’t think. Clare had just discovered that I’d adored L. M. Montgomery’s
Anne
series as a child, and she may as well have discovered a diamond mine, her face was so radiant. I felt like I’d accomplished something pretty fabulous, even though all I did was read some books twenty years ago. Clare actually clapped her hands and was staring at me raptly when into this lull in conversation came a knock at the door.

Everyone froze, turned to look at the door, then turned back to look at one another, electrified. If we were animals, our fur would’ve been standing on end. It occurred to no one that Viviana would’ve been unlikely to knock at her own front door, least of all to Clare, who was sitting bolt upright with her arms crossed—clutching each other—across her chest and was breathing so hard I could hear it over the music.

Then, she flew to the door, threw it open, and took several steps back. A man in his late twenties or so, with longish hair, Ben Franklin glasses, and a ski jacket, stood there, looking very surprised. At the same time Martin stood and said, “Lloyd!” Clare made a terrible choking sound, and both Teo and I were up and out of our seats. He got to her first and put an arm around her hunched shoulders, but she wrenched free and tore out of the room. We heard her run up the stairs and looked at each other.

“Let her be alone?” asked Teo, and I nodded. For a little while, we’d let her be alone. It was hard to know what to do because, here in this house, we were interlopers, the wrong people, no matter how much she liked us.

Martin said, “Come in, Lloyd,” in a tired voice, and Lloyd stepped inside and shut the door, but made no move to take off his coat, and no one asked him to, not even Martin, for whom impeccable manners are a kind of reflex.

“Sorry to show up like this, folks. Christmas and all. Drive by the house now and then, just to check. Saw the lights on.” Lloyd didn’t look like any hard-boiled detective I’d ever seen, but he talked like one, sort of. Choppy phrasing. Absence of the personal pronoun.

“Of course,” said Martin. “Lloyd, this is Cornelia Brown and Teo Sandoval. My daughter, Clare, opened the door for you. She’s been bearing up remarkably well, but it’s a difficult time.”

“Nothing new to report. No mail delivery. She must’ve had it stopped. Saw a couple of people come to the door here.” Lloyd took a spiral notebook from somewhere and flipped it open. “Lady with a kid about Clare’s age. Drove a Ford Expedition. Black. Pennsylvania plates. Tall lady in a white Mercedes. Left a plate of cookies and a card. ‘Merry Christmas. I’m spending New Year’s in Barbados with Zach. Remember him? Cable guy? Tom Cruise look-alike? Seth’s minding the store. I’ll call when I get back. Love, Sissy.’” Most people could not maintain an utterly expressionless monotone while speaking the phrase “Tom Cruise look-alike,” but Lloyd was not most people.

“Sugar or chocolate chip?” I asked, because I’d been standing there mutely and feeling a bit idiotic about it. Unsurprisingly, the question left me feeling as idiotic as ever, but it did jolt Lloyd into using a fully formed sentence.

“They were sugar cookies shaped like Christmas trees and stars. Decorated with icing,” he said and blushed. “I…well, I thought…if they sat here, they might attract, you know, bugs and animals and such.”

While I nodded, inwardly speculating as to what “and such” might refer (street urchins, carnivorous plants?), Martin patted Lloyd on the shoulder with a reassuring chuckle. “Absolutely right, Lloyd, I appreciate that. Well, you’ll keep me posted, I expect.”

Lloyd flipped his notebook shut and nodded, tucking in his lips and jutting out his lower jaw slightly in that, you-bet, TV-sheriff kind of way. Then he left, and Martin, Teo, and I just stood there, uncertain of what to do next.

“Is everyone finished eating?” Teo finally said and, because it would have been ridiculous to go back to the table and start eating as though nothing had happened, and also because we’d probably all lost our appetites, we said yes.

Teo went into the kitchen, and I began to pick up plates from the table when Martin said, “Can we talk a minute?”

“Sure,” I said, feeling unaccountably nervous, and then called out, “Teo, I’ll help in a sec, OK?”

Martin led me by the hand into the library—a warm, oak-paneled room—and we sat down on the leather sofa. Then he took two plane tickets out of the breast pocket of his jacket and handed them to me. They were to London.

“These were meant to be my Christmas gift to you, Cornelia, the trip you turned down the day I met you.” He smiled at me. “I have some business there and in Paris, but I’ll finish every day by late afternoon. I thought we’d take a couple of days in each city.”

I sat looking at the tickets, letting myself imagine, for a few seconds, what the trip would’ve been like. Glorious, I allowed myself to think. I would’ve brought along my doubts about Martin’s ability to connect (and please take that word “connect” as it was intended—strictly in the spirit of E. M. Forster, whom I revere, rather than as a reflection of our self-help, men-are-from-Mars, etcetera, culture), but surely he’d have put them to rest in Paris, the city where lovers are practically required by law to bare their souls, right? But even as I thought it, the thought turned wan and listless and drifted away like smoke. It seemed forever ago, the ante-Clare era and, as romantic as that era was, I couldn’t wish it back without wishing Clare away, which just wasn’t possible. I sighed and looked up at Martin.

“You could still go with me. A colleague of mine has a college-aged daughter who would stay with Clare; she’s very reliable”—he must have seen the expression on my face—“but I’m sure it’s a bad time to leave Clare with someone she doesn’t know.”

“It’s impossible,” I said simply, and then I had a thought. “Did you say I could still go
with
you?”

Martin nodded, staring right into my eyes instead of dropping his gaze with shame, which he surely should’ve done.

“You’re not still going?” I asked, and even then he just held steady.

“I tried to get out of it, but there’s just no one else they can send. I leave the day after tomorrow,” he said. Then he began, “I hate it that I have to ask this,” and he left it there, not asking.

There was nothing else to do. I said, “I can take a few days off. I’ll stay with Clare. Here or at my apartment, whichever she wants. Although if we stay here, we’ll have to come up with an excuse as to why I’m with her instead of Viviana. But, Martin…”

His composure broke then, didn’t break dramatically, but cracked perceptibly, “Cornelia, she doesn’t want me. Anyone could tell that.” He rubbed his forehead with his hand.

“Don’t you think I know that the time for me to be there for Clare passed by long ago? I missed it. I had a hundred chances, and I missed them all. Now, I’m is no help to her. If anything, I make things worse.” I’d never seen Martin so unhappy. There was nothing I could say to make him feel better. Every last thing he’d just said was true.

“I’ll stay with her. You know I’ll stay,” I put my arms around him, tightly, and we sat like that for a long time. I wasn’t in love with him, and I believed it was good for him to be feeling this particular hurt. But to understand that you’ve blown it, that you can never fix it is one of the worst feelings ever. I wouldn’t leave him alone with that.

When
we went into the kitchen, Teo had put all the food away and was washing the china by hand. I scooted him out of the way with one hip and took over. Martin picked up a towel and began to dry.

“I checked on Clare. She was asleep on what I’m guessing is her mother’s bed. I took off her shoes and covered her with a quilt. She didn’t flutter an eyelash.” Teo leaned against the silvery expanse of refrigerator door and ran his hand through his hair.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not among those whose worlds are rocked by the sight of Mateo Sandoval. However, I will say that the hair through which he ran his hand is a kind of gold-inflected brown, which is somewhat unexpected, given the fact that the hand itself, along with the rest of his skin is a slightly lighter, not ungolden-y caramel color, and these factors combined with the clear green eyes (a steadfast rather than a changeable green), fine health, and a tendency to flush give Teo a kind of overall vividness that one doesn’t encounter every day. I only bring this up to say that anyone who spends any kind of time with Teo quickly recognizes that this—let’s call it radiance for lack of a better word—increases and diminishes with Teo’s moods. The radiance serves as a kind of barometer for Teo’s emotional state and is an especially useful tool because, unlike some people I know and am, Teo doesn’t spend a great deal of time describing his emotional states, especially when the states aren’t so happy.

As Teo leaned against the refrigerator door, he was almost not glowing at all. I wondered if maybe he was worried about more than just Clare. Maybe he was missing his wife. Maybe he’d been working too hard. I promised myself I’d ask him about it as soon as we were alone. But because the next time we were alone, I was caught in maelstrom of personal turmoil, I’m sorry to say this was a promise I didn’t keep.

“I hope she sleeps for a long time,” said Martin. “She needs it.”

“She does. It wasn’t just what happened, Lloyd showing up. She’s been storing up exhaustion for weeks and weeks,” I said and told Teo about the list in her room.

“Jesus,” Teo said, and his voice was so concerned it was on the edge of being angry. “How the hell did she manage all that? You know, she told me about that list, or some version of it. She sat in a diner the day after her eleventh birthday, which both she and her mother completely forgot, and wrote down a plan for every day.”

Martin put down the plate he’d been drying. “I wish she hadn’t felt like she had to keep her mother’s illness a secret. She could have told someone. It would’ve made life so much easier for her. She could’ve told me.”

That’s
when it happened, when the whole house of cards I’d been keeping upright through sheer force of will, along with generous doses of avoidance and denial, came tumbling down with a
whoosh
. And there was no moment of portent, as there had been before Lloyd showed up, no lull before the storm, nothing to herald the coming of what was undeniably as bitter an end as anything ever came to.

After Martin spoke, Teo said two words: “She did.”

I turned around, a wet plate still in my hand. Teo wasn’t leaning against the refrigerator anymore. He was standing up straight, not in a challenging way. He had his hands in the pockets of his jeans, and he had a strange look on his face, as though his own words had taken him off guard.

Martin just stared at Teo, but I saw his face turning red, which was new. When he spoke, he stammered, which was new as well.

“Cornelia, I—I—uh…” he said, and then stopped.

“Teo,” I said slowly, “what do you mean? Tell me what you mean.”

When Teo spoke, it was to Martin, not to me, which, when I thought about it later, I understood was a gesture of respect to Martin. He wouldn’t talk about Martin in the third person while they stood in the same room. “Clare called you. Weeks ago, maybe longer than that. She told you about her mother’s erratic behavior, the buying sprees, the strange hours she’d started keeping. Clare told you how her mother took her out of school and said things to her that scared her. She told you she thought her mother was sick.”

Martin turned to me. “What she told me, it didn’t sound bad, it didn’t sound like what it was.”

My hands were shaking, and I thought, oh, God, I’m going to drop this plate, so I turned and dropped it into the sink. It hit the bottom of the marble sink and cracked in two. I could see the pieces through the soapy water.

Without looking away from the broken plate, I said, “Martin, did she tell you she was scared?”

“Yes. Sure, she said that, but I didn’t understand how difficult things were. Not even close. She told me all these little details—towels, wine, cookbooks. Maybe I added them up wrong, but I really didn’t believe there was anything terrible going on.”

That’s when every warm feeling I had for Martin, every happy memory and good thought, rose up out of my body and left me—whisked themselves away like ghosts. As crazy as it sounds, I felt them leave. They wouldn’t stay gone, not all of them, but as I stood there at the sink, I felt the space where they used to be: a cold place in the center of my chest. I shuddered.

“Cornelia, please,” Martin said.

“You knew she was scared,” I said. “That’s all you needed to know. Who cares if it didn’t make sense to you? She was asking you for help. That alone should’ve told you she was desperate. It
did
tell you. She came to you for help and you turned her down.”

I started crying then. “No wonder,” I said. “No wonder she didn’t tell anyone else. She probably thought no one would listen.”

Martin came to me and took me gently by the arms. Over his shoulder, I watched Teo turn and leave us.