The Precious One (33 page)

“What do you think?”

“I think we should talk and maybe have a glass of wine and then watch the
Planet Earth
with the weird, deep sea creatures. Have you seen that one?”

Ben laughed. “Not recently. But if there’s a Dumbo octopus, you’ve got yourself a deal.”

ON THE PORCH
,
BEN
grabbed my hand, and I spun around to face him.

“You knew I would come,” he said. “Didn’t you?”

“Yes. I wasn’t positive it would be today, but I knew you would.”

“How?”

Carefully, as though my life depended on doing it right, I ran my finger along his zygomatic arch. “Remember those fights we’d have back in high school?”

“We had some pretty good ones.”

“Well, most of the time, I’d be flying around, screeching and stomping, while you stayed annoyingly calm.”

“I wouldn’t say
annoyingly
calm. I’d just say calm.”

“You’d be wrong. But anyway, there were a few times you got really mad, and I’m talking about eyes-blazing-like-bonfires-voice-booming mad, the way you were the other night in this garden, and do you know what all those times had in common?”

I waited while Ben puzzled this out. It was a lovely thing to watch: his eyes alive with thinking and then all at once lit with understanding.

“Okay,” he said, abruptly, “let’s go inside.”

“Say it. Say what made you really and truly mad.”

“I really want to see that Dumbo octopus.”

I waited. Ben picked up my hand, pressed his mouth to my palm, and said, “What made me really and truly mad was when I knew you were right.”

I took his face between my hands, and our kiss was not a trip down memory lane. We weren’t Ben and Taisy, sixteen years old and leaning against that tree in his neighborhood. The kiss wasn’t at all, not one thing, like coming home. It was new. Unprecedented. Groundbreaking, and I didn’t care just then exactly what ground we were breaking. I didn’t need to know what our being together meant, where we were headed. Conversation could wait. The Dumbo octopus could wait. I had been aching for seventeen years to get my hands on this man. We hardly made it through the door before I was unbuttoning his shirt.

But because I was who I was, I couldn’t quite give way without clearing a few things up, and this was crazy because all I wanted was for it never to end: the muscles of his bare back shifting like continents under my hands, his mouth in a slow slide down the exact center of my body, every nerve ending raw and singing, especially the ones in the places he hadn’t touched yet, anticipation edging out everything else, lapping like a tide at my ability to think, to speak, pulling language and logic out to sea, until there were only two words left, and, instead of letting them go, at the last second, I caught them. I said them: “Ben, wait.”

In an instant, he stopped and rested his cheek against my hipbone,
his breath stammering against my skin. When it slowed enough, he said, “Are you okay?”

I slid my fingers into his hair. “I just need to say something.”

I waited for him to pull away, but he didn’t. He pressed his mouth once into the hollow beneath my hip and then, never taking his hands off me, he moved up to lay his head on the pillow next to mine.

“Tell me,” he said.

“I just realized that I need you to know what this means to me.”

“Taisy.” He kissed my shoulder and my neck, and then propped his head up on his elbow so that his face was all I could see, a Ben-sky. “Let me tell you what I think it means, first.”

“Okay, but—”

He kissed the corner of my mouth. “If we do this, it will mean that you won’t be able to leave me. Not just that it would break your heart, but that you will not be able to do it.”

“That’s right,” I said, awed at his prescience, although I guess I shouldn’t have been. When it came to reading my mind, Ben had always been a close second to my mother and Marcus.

“I know it’s right, not because I can read your mind,” he said, “but because that’s what it means to me.”

Tears filled my eyes. “But I lied about us, and I ended our marriage, and I left you.”

“And I gave up on you, pushed even memories of you away. I never read your letters, and you were right when you told me that was cruel. All that was my version of lying and leaving.”

I saw it then, how guilt had no place in this bed or our lives. If we wanted to step from this moment into our future, to wake up every morning in wonder, we both had to let it go. Could it possibly be that easy? I looked up at Ben, who was here with me after so many years. His eyes alone loved me the way no one else ever had; they made me want to give him everything he could ever want. Yes, I thought it could be just exactly that easy.

“There’s no other way to do this except to stop being mad at ourselves
and at each other for all the mistakes we made,” I said. “Once and for all.”

“I will if you will.”

I rolled over, lay on top of my true love Ben, and kissed him. “I just did,” I said.

WILSON
’
S DINING ROOM TABLE
was as long and shiny as a lap pool, but even it wasn’t big enough to accommodate what my brother had labeled, “The Cleary Family Thanksgiving Dinner to End All Cleary Family Thanksgiving Dinners, If We’re Lucky,” so Ben and his dad carried the kitchen table into the dining room and stuck it at the end of the big one. By the time Caro and Trillium covered both with gold tablecloths, set them with the china, crystal, and silver, and spaced the candles and centerpieces just so, you could hardly tell where one table ended and the other began. As I stood surveying the glittering room, Trillium came up and put her arm around me.

“Looks like a family dinner to me,” she said.

“Am I crazy to do this?” I asked.

“You’re
you
to do this,” she said, kissing my cheek. “It’ll be good. Have faith.”

At five o’clock, Marcus arrived, with his hair newly cut and wearing a pumpkin-colored checked shirt under a brown jacket. Before I took him in to see everyone, I pulled him aside. “You look great,” I told him. “Like something out of a magazine. Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me. I look great effortlessly. Is everyone here?”

“Not yet, and I’m sure Wilson will descend upon us at the last minute, so he can make an entrance.” I hugged him. “Willow is so nervous to meet you. Be nice, okay? She’s your sister, you know.”

“I have too many sisters already,” grumbled Marcus, but not before I saw something flicker across his face. He fiddled with his jacket cuffs, a sure sign. Marvel of marvels, Marcus was nervous, too.

When I took him into the kitchen and everyone greeted him, Ben
shaking his hand, Trillium planting a kiss squarely on his mouth, the way she always did, Willow was nowhere to be found.

“She and Luka slipped out into the garden,” whispered Caro in my ear. “She needs a moment to gather herself, I think. But she’ll be back.”

In a few minutes, there she was, skirting around the room, shy as a fawn, stealing glances at Marcus when she thought no one was looking. Once, she came up behind me and whispered, “He looks like you. Your hair and your eyebrows and your smiles.”

“Everyone says that,” I said, and because she sounded a touch forlorn, I added, “I think he looks a little like you, too.”

“Truly?”

I had said it before I realized it was true, but now I could see it. “The way you’re both so tall and lean. And you have narrower faces than I do.”

The two of them were so skittery that I never found a moment when they were close enough to each other for me to introduce them, and then, while I was filling water glasses, Luka said, “Come look,” and he led me into the kitchen, and there they were, my brother and sister, standing where the kitchen table used to be, talking. They still looked painfully shy; Willow had her hands clasped behind her back, like a schoolgirl in a movie, and Marcus was messing with his cuffs, but it was a start.

At 5:20, Barbara called to say they were stuck in traffic and would be late and to start without them. At 5:45, we began putting the food on the table. At six, every glass was filled, every candle was lit, Vince Guaraldi’s “A Charlie Brown Christmas” swirled quietly in the air like snowflakes, and Wilson was nowhere to be seen.

“He’ll be here,” said Willow. “He promised me, and he never breaks his promises.”

Now that I thought about it, I realized he had never broken a promise to me, either, if only because he had never, as far back as I could remember, made one. But I didn’t say this to Willow.

At 6:15, we had all made our way into the dining room and were milling around, drinks in hand, admiring the food, when Wilson appeared in the entranceway. He was glowing with health and as immaculately turned out as ever. In fact, he was wearing an actual ascot, which I knew would make Marcus nearly delirious with mean-spirited joy. A hush fell on the room, not a reverent one, although Wilson possibly thought so, but the kind that is made up of collective unease about what to do next. Even Willow seemed to freeze, and it occurred to me that not a single person in that room, not even the ones in his immediate family—his immediate
second
family, that is—was unreservedly glad to see him.

Then, Luka, God bless him, left Willow’s side, walked across the room with his long legs to Wilson, held out his hand, and said, “Hi, Dr. Cleary, I’m Willow’s friend Luka Bailey-Song.”

For a shaky moment, Wilson merely looked at him, and my heart went out to Willow, who had her hands clasped under her chin, as though she were praying, and then Wilson shook Luka’s hand and said, gruffly, “Well, you’re a tall one, aren’t you?”

“And still growing.” Luka’s smile would have disarmed a grizzly bear, but Wilson stayed granite-faced.

Some of the others, including Ben, started stirring, setting down their glasses, moving vaguely in the direction of Wilson, but before the stirrings could develop into a full-fledged receiving line, Caro glided, with luminous grace, over to Wilson’s side, took his hand, and said, “Shall we ask everyone to sit, darling? The dinner is all ready.” Wilson’s face softened for an instant as he looked at Caro, before he gave a leisurely, kingly lift of his shoulder and said, “As you wish, Caro.”

We sat. Even though I wasn’t a believer in place cards, when we’d found out that Barbara and her husband, George, would be late, we had created a seating arrangement that mixed the two empty seats in with the rest, in the hopes of making them less conspicuous. But I took care to keep Ben next to me, both so that I could put my hand on his leg under the table and because I’d seen the flash of naked hatred in
Wilson’s eyes when he’d first caught sight of him and wanted to guard him against the attack I knew was coming.

Wilson took his time lashing out. I had forgotten that about him, how when it came to anger, he could be patient, choose his moment. He sat stony as an Easter Island moai at the head of the table, not touching his food, only his eyes moving as he watched us all. Somehow, to my gratitude, everyone made conversation and ate as though there weren’t a glowering silence at the center of the dinner party. When we were well into eating, when Luka, in fact, was on to his second helping, Wilson tapped his knife against his water glass, waited for the chatter to subside, and said, with gusto and a sneer, “Thank you for your attention. At all but the most informal dinner party, it is customary for the host to rise before the meal commences, say a few words of welcome, and to thank his guests for coming. I have not done so, and I fear you must think me remiss. Therefore, in the interest of preserving my reputation as an observer of niceties, I want to state that I am not the host of this event.”

As if someone had disputed this assertion, he nodded, convivially, and said, “Oh, yes! It’s quite true!”

Willow’s face across the table had gone deathly pale, her lips trembling.
Damn you, Wilson!

He went on. “Despite the fact that this is my house, and I sit here at the head of my table, I invited none of you. I would not, in point of fact, have chosen to dine with a single person in this room, apart from my wife and daughter, Willow.”

He slung his straight razor gaze in my direction. “If anyone is shirking her duty, it must be Eustacia, since I believe it was she who put together this rather unlikely guest list.”

As soon as he had started to speak, Ben had grabbed my hand under the table, but while I was always grateful to touch him, I found I didn’t need the moral support.

“I did,” I said, simply.

And then, clear as a bell, Willow: “So did I.”

And Caro, very quietly, “And I.”

I saw Marcus lift his head and look sharply from one to the other, with frank admiration, but Wilson gave no sign that he’d heard them. His eyes stayed on me.

“You gave us leave to do as we liked,” I told him. “Have you forgotten?”

“I humored Willow in her wish to have a family gathering. But clearly, that is not what this is.”

“Oh, but it is,” I said. “It can’t shock you that my definition of family is broader than yours, Wilson, since yours is so narrow as to exclude two of your biological offspring.”

“Let us not pretend anymore,” he said, “that there was any point to this farcical evening beyond creating a situation that you hoped would—what?—embarrass me, put me in my place?”

“Because it’s all about you, Wilson,” said Marcus.

“No, Daddy!” said Willow. “We never meant to do that!”

Wilson smiled at her. “Not you, dearest.”

“None of us! I wanted this! I wanted everyone who is here to be here.”

Ignoring her, Wilson turned his attention back to me. “Tell me about that person next to you . . .” He flicked his fingers in the direction of Ben without looking at him. “He is in your life in what capacity?”

“A permanent one,” said Ben.

Only now did Wilson’s face begin to redden and with alarming speed. It was like a time-lapse film of a ripening strawberry. Slowly, he rose from his chair.

“Then, Eustacia, you are no longer invited to be part of my daughter’s life.”

Willow leaped to her feet. “Yes, she is! I invite her!” She looked pleadingly at me. “Not that you need an invitation.”