The Precious One (17 page)

“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.

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
.

After a long while, I stopped crying and remembered my dream, not the part about Luka, which wasn’t important—of course, he
would
be swimming, the water rat—but the part about Mr. Insley. I wondered if this was what being in love would always be like, dreaming inscrutable dreams about your beloved and forgetting your duties because your head was so full of him, him, him that everything else was crowded
out. I hoped not. If I could not take care of the people in this house, I was a brute, an ingrate of the first water, unforgivable.

And if Mr. Insley were that present in my mind when I was away from him, well, it was nothing compared to how he was when I was with him. He was a whirlpool, pulling me in; a high wire on which I walked with the ground so far below, everyone else tiny as ants; a narrow, twisting, breathtaking road. Intoxicating. Exhausting. Sometimes, after we’d spent time together, my muscles actually ached from my being so—I don’t know—hyperawake, so tightly coiled. And nervous. Nervous in the best possible way but still nervous, waiting for his reactions, for the next thing he would say or do, wanting so much to say or do the right things back. Maybe someday, I would settle in, remember how to breathe like a normal person in his presence. I loved the way things were, but I didn’t see how they could go on like this forever, and I wanted them to. I swear I wanted our love to last forever and ever and ever.

THE NEXT MORNING
,
I
was so tired, tired in that way that makes you feel like you have a fever, like you’ve lost a layer of skin, like you’d vibrate like a violin string if someone touched you. Almost as soon as I got to school, someone did touch me, didn’t just touch but knocked into me so hard I dropped my books, and I didn’t just vibrate, I was seized by a minor inner earthquake.

“God, watch where you’re going, spaz!” said Bec.

I didn’t ignore her and crouch down to gather up my books, as I might have on another day. Buzzing and prickly and full of earthquake, I took two steps in Bec’s direction, stood stock-still, and stared her in the eye.

“What?” she spat.

“Why?” I asked. My voice seemed to come from a cool place at the exact center of my body and was almost perfectly flat, all inquiry, not a trace of whine or accusation.

“Why, what?” she said, tossing around amused glances to her flat-ironed entourage.

“Why do you hate me?” It was the voice of someone merely interested, calm as stone.

Something happened then. I don’t know why, maybe because of what I’d asked or the way I’d asked or just my—for once—failure to be afraid of her, but something altered in Bec, a wall fell down or a curtain went up or
something
so that what suddenly stared back at me was naked, her true face, her underface, stripped bare of sarcasm and scorn, and what I saw in it, raw as a scrape, was a child’s kind of hurt, sorrow mixed with confusion. It didn’t last. Before I could take two breaths, the old face slid down like a garage door.

“Hate you?” she said, with a sneer. “Seriously? Why would anyone bother to hate
you
?”

She and her friends walked away, laughing, and, sapped, I turned around to pick up my books, but they weren’t on the floor anymore. Luka stood there, holding them.

“Nice friend you’ve got there,” I growled at him, breaching the unspoken rule in our friendship that we did not mention Bec to each other, ever.

If he heard me, he didn’t show it. He said, “Let’s go. Why aren’t your books in your backpack, anyway? You haven’t even gone to your locker yet, have you?”

“No. I was looking over some things in the car on the way here. But just because someone’s holding her books does not mean she deserves to have them knocked to the floor.”

I reached out my arms to take the books from him, but he ignored me again. I’ll say that for Luka, he was good at ignoring. He started walking in the direction of my locker, and then stood there, leaning against the one next to mine, handing me my books, one by one, as I sorted through what I needed for class.

“We need to work on the project, really break the whole thing down, interview by interview,” he said.

Luka and I were making a film about Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon, a pseudodocumentary.

“I still think you’re wrong about never showing the interviewer. No one likes a disembodied voice,” I said. “Disembodied voices are sinister.” I flashed back to Mr. Insley’s voice in my dream. But, no, that was completely different.

“Nope, nope, nope. Not wrong. But we can talk about it later. It’s sunny. How about we sit outside under the tree during lunch and work on it?”

I shut my locker door.

“We’re not allowed to sit outside during lunch.”

“Actually, we are,” said Luka.

I thought about myself hunkered down in that hideous stairwell, gobbling, when I could have been outside on a bench during lunch period like a normal person.
But then Mr. Insley wouldn’t have found you
, I reminded myself,
and where would you be now?

“Liar,” I said.

“I never lie,” said Luka.

“Really,” I said, skeptically. “Never?”

“Really,” he said, seriously. “Never.”

“Luka, if we were allowed to eat outside,” I said, “why wouldn’t I know that?”

We started walking.

“Uh, because you don’t know a lot of things, especially about school?”

I pretended to trip him. He pretended to stumble.

“Anyway, I can’t,” I said. “I have other plans.”

I was eating with Mr. Insley, just as I always did, but I didn’t tell Luka that. I didn’t care if he knew—because he probably did know—I just didn’t want to talk about it with him.

“So cancel them,” he said.

“Nope,” I said, lightly. It may have been the first time in my life I’d said “nope.” I liked it. The word popped in the air like a soap bubble.

“All right, so meet me after school under the aforementioned tree.”

I was driving with Mr. Insley after school. We no longer called our meetings “lessons”; I’d graduated to just “driving.”

“Can’t,” I said, airily. “Plans.”

“Come on, Willow,” he said, nudging me with his shoulder.

If I had a large sum of money, I’d bet it all that most girls at Webley would have folded like a starry-eyed house of cards at one of Luka Bailey-Song’s nudges, but I was not most girls. Instead of folding, I yawned, colossally, only remembering to cover my mouth at the tail end of it.

“Oh, am I boring you?” asked Luka.

“Can you keep a secret?” I asked.

“Yeah. I never tell my friends’ secrets.”

“You never lie, and you never tell your friends’ secrets.”

“Right.”

“Well, if that’s true, how very honorable of you,” I said. “But what if you have to lie in order to keep someone’s secret? Hmmm, Mr. Honorable? What then?”

“I don’t lie. But if a friend’s secret is part of the truth, I just don’t tell the whole truth.”

“Which is different from lying.”

“It is,” said Luka. “Totally.”

“I’m unconvinced, but no matter. The secret is that my mother is a somnambulist.” I don’t know why I wanted to tell him, since I had never voluntarily told a single soul, had in fact gone to some lengths to protect her by keeping it a secret, but for some peculiar reason, telling Luka did not feel like I was betraying my mother or my family or anyone.

“Wow.”

“It means she’s a sleepwalker.”

Luka shot me a look. “I know what it means. I’m smart, remember?”

“Oh, right. Forgot. Except that she doesn’t just walk; sometimes
she bakes or talks. Once she got in the car and started the engine, but she woke up before she drove it.”