The Precious One (16 page)

“‘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 the 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.”

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.”