The Precious One (15 page)

The coffee shop was a couple of miles away from the state park parking lot, and running it would have taken me no time at all. But for once I had the chance to meet Mr. Insley without being either sweaty or school-day disheveled, and I’d dressed with special care that morning. The secret truth is that I love clothes. I’d known my share of the homespun variety of homeschooled kids, the ones who wear long skirts, jumpers, flannel clogs, and Guatemalan pullovers and have their uncut hair hanging in braids, but I had never been one of them. Good gracious, no. I’d never perused a fashion magazine, not even in the grocery line or dentist’s office, but whenever my family went on field trips to New York City, I paid careful attention to every woman who walked by. My father would have considered such an interest shockingly unintellectual, but luckily, he loathed shopping, and my mother gave me mostly free rein, so I had quite a wardrobe, at least until I’d started dumbing it down for high school in order to survive.

But Mr. Insley had called me an “old soul” more than once; I didn’t have to dress like a teenager for him. We were going for a drive in the country, so I wore dark brown wool trousers, a cashmere-mohair blend sweater the color and weightlessness of cream, and a caramel-colored suede jacket. Mr. Insley brought so much to our relationship, experience, wit, erudition; the least I could do was look nice.

As perfect as our times together had been, I felt in my bones that
today would be different, special, even momentous. A turning point. With each step along the road toward the state park, this feeling deepened, and as soon as I caught sight of Mr. Insley, leaning against the driver’s side door in his hat and sunglasses, and a tweed overcoat I’d never seen before, I knew I was right. He didn’t wave, just watched my every step, until I was just a few feet away, and then he moved toward me, took both my hands, and, oh, dear Lord in heaven, kissed me on both cheeks, first the right, then the left.

“Willow,” he said, “you look like the very incarnation of autumn.”

In my addled state, I blurted out, “Oh, so do you!,” which was mortifying, but only briefly, because it made Mr. Insley break into one of his glorious, heal-all laughs.

The drive was long and harrowing, all narrow, winding, shoulderless, country roads lined with trees and fields and, sometimes, ditches that seemed deep as moats. More than once, as I hung like death to the steering wheel, my eyes riveted on the road, I found that I’d forgotten to breathe, and all the while, Mr. Insley talked, told me how a cousin with a green pickup truck had taught him to drive on exactly these kinds of roads, out near his grandparents’ lake house, when he was thirteen years old. There’d been scrapes, near misses, a flood, an encounter with the police and a bear, all driving related, everything happening in that one summer, which was possibly the best of his life, and his stories were fascinating, they really were, but I was focusing too hard on the road to say more than “oh” in response to them, which made me feel sort of vacuous, but it didn’t really matter. What mattered was Mr. Insley’s trust in me, and I didn’t let him down, but when we finally pulled into the parking lot of a stone tavern called the Union Jack, I nearly cried with relief that the drive was over.

“You were marvelous, Willow!” said Mr. Insley, gleefully.

“Thank you,” I said, blushing. I considered adding “Blaine” but somehow just couldn’t. As much as I had loved his having asked me to call him by his first name, as much as I was dying to do so, I found that, when push came to shove, I couldn’t swing it. I’d tried practicing
at home, in my room, but even there, “Blaine” felt desperately clumsy in my mouth. Because Mr. Insley looked faintly pained whenever I called him “Mr. Insley,” for the moment, I called him nothing at all and hoped he didn’t notice.

The tavern was ancient, crowded, and cozy, with wooden beams, dark wainscoting, wide-plank floors, a fireplace, and a mind-boggling row of beer taps at the bar. Mr. Insley ordered a Guinness, and somehow, this made alarm bells go off in my head, although I didn’t quite understand why. Maybe only because it meant I would have to be the one to drive home, which probably would have happened anyway.

“And another for the lady?” said the waitress, with what looked very like a wicked gleam in her eye but might not have been. She might actually have thought I was old enough!

“No, thank you,” I said, with a touch of hauteur. “Just a cup of Darjeeling, if you’ve got it, with cream.”

“Good enough,” said the waitress, with a wink.

Because he wanted me to have the full English tavern experience, Mr. Insley ordered an insane amount of food: bangers and mash, Yorkshire pudding, fish and chips, toad in the hole, Welsh rarebit. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that in deference to my Anglophile father, English tavern food was the single cuisine my mother had mastered, despite the fact that, being a vegetarian, she could eat almost none of it. I believed it was a testament to my parents’ love for each other that bangers and mash was my mother’s specialty; we’d had it just three nights ago.

I was too agitated, in a good way, to eat much, but that was all right. Just being there with Mr. Insley was like the best kind of dream. Within those dark, close, firelit walls, we were in our own world, one that existed outside of time and light-years away from the Webley School. The two of us were one with the crowd and also above it, like an old world prince and princess in disguise, experiencing the life of commoners, and loving every minute. I talked more than usual, mostly about books, since my daily life was certainly too mundane for such an occasion,
and if I say so myself, I sounded the way I’d always wanted to when I talked to Mr. Insley, star-bright and wise beyond my years.

When we’d eaten all we could, and the waitress was retrieving our check, and I was feeling the first tremors of sadness that our time in that place was ending, the high point happened, shining and perfect: Mr. Insley grabbed my hand under the table, and said, “I can’t help but tell you that I think you’re fantastic, Willow. I hope that’s all right.”

Beyond words, I pressed my lips together, nodded, and held fast to his long, thin, somewhat jumpy hand (it was as though all his wonderful, feverish energy were concentrated in that one hand), wanting to memorize every nuance of it, every bone and tendon.

“You know what I’d like?” he said, leaning in until our faces were inches apart. “I would like to show you the boat I’m building.”

I had not expected him to say this, probably because I hadn’t known he was building a boat or even that he was the sort of person who built things. He seemed sort of not to be, actually. But as soon as his words had sunk in, I realized how romantic they were.

“Oh, I’d love that,” I said.

“It’s at my house. That is, it’s in a shed just behind my house. The house isn’t much, really, small, even a little shabby. I rented it merely for the shed, which the old owner used to store his collection of motorcycles. The shed is nearly as big as the house and just right for boat building. Will you come sometime? Soon?”

“Yes,” I said. That yes felt so big, bigger than a promise.

Mr. Insley started to say something else, then dropped his eyes. When he looked at me again, there were spots of pink burning in each of his cheeks.

“I’ll just say it. Lately, for weeks, when I think of sailing away in that boat, I imagine you with me, the wind tousling your magnificent hair. Isn’t that silly?”

I was so moved by this that my eyes smarted with tears.

“Oh no,” I said. “Not silly at all.”

The spell of that tavern was so strong that, although it dimmed
when we walked out into the afternoon light, it didn’t disappear. We floated in its golden cloud down the walkway and all the way to the car, and it was still there when Mr. Insley came close to me, opened my hand, put the car keys into it, closed my fingers, and then, oh glory of glories, pressed his lips roughly against my knuckles, letting them linger there for one, two, three, four seconds. What ran through me, down my arm, up my neck, and across my scalp was a current of what I knew was love.

As Mr. Insley was lifting his face away, over his shoulder, I caught sight of a man. He was standing next to his own car, brazenly watching us, his black brows quizzical below the cuff of his knit cap. I couldn’t see his eyes through his sunglasses, runner’s glasses, the kind that wrap around, but I didn’t need to see them to feel them boring into me. Us. Under that gaze, the tavern magic vanished, and, in its absence, I faltered, nervousness tightening my chest, but then, all by myself, no magic necessary, I lifted my chin and shot the man a smile of pure triumph.
Stare all you want
, I wanted to tell him,
and you’ll still never understand love like this
. But he turned away before I got the chance.

This time, driving all the long, twisting road home, even as the clouds thickened and the sky got so dark I had to turn the headlights on, I wasn’t scared at all.

I
HAD THE KEY TO
my father’s house for six days before I used it. The practical reason for this was that, just a few steps from the circular front drive, there was a break in the cypress hedge that led straight into the backyard, so I could get from my car to the pool house without stepping foot in the main house at all. The less practical reason was that, while I am ordinarily a person who resists injecting symbolism into real-life events on the grounds that doing so is usually self-serving and always corny, I found it impossible to even think the words
the key to my father’s house
, without doing exactly that.
After nearly two decades of being locked out, Taisy Cleary had the key to her father’s house. In a moment she had never expected to experience and would never forget, Taisy Cleary was given the key to her father’s house
.
Taisy Cleary grasped the key to her father’s house in her hand and knew that nothing would ever be the same again
. And so forth.

The fact that Caro, not Wilson, had given me the key diluted the symbolism a bit, as did the fact that, when she gave it to me, she explained, very apologetically, that the key did not allow absolute access to the house because, while it unlocked the regular locks, it did not
unlock the deadbolts, quickly adding that they only used the deadbolts at night and that Willow unlocked them as soon as she woke up in the morning. But even diluted, the symbolism persisted: possessing the key to my father’s house meant so much to me that it was just sad. So, in order to avoid confronting this fact, I avoided using the damn thing altogether.

But then I was at the gourmet grocery store one afternoon, saw a lone crate of Stayman winesap apples—dull, dark red, spotty, far appleier looking than the glossy heaps of Red Delicious—and remembered Caro mentioning that she loved them, so I bought her a sackful. When I got home, I walked around to the pool house as usual, put my groceries away, and walked back to the front door bearing my lone sack of apples. I tried the door, found it was locked, swore, and stood there like a lump on a log, roiling with emotion, not the least of which was disgust for the fact that I was roiling with emotion.

You’re his daughter
, I told myself.
Daughters have keys to their fathers’ houses all the time. They use these keys to open the doors of their fathers’ houses all the time
. But of course, I never had, not in seventeen years, so I stood on that front porch, helplessly a-roil, wanting to be able to use the key without having it feel momentous. God,
why
did everything to do with Wilson have to be so fraught? I considered leaving the apples on the porch, and that’s what decided it for me: the only thing worse than using your key to open your father’s door and having it be momentous was to have using the key be so momentous that you couldn’t even bring yourself to do it. I stuck the key in the damn keyhole and turned it.

The house was so quiet that my footfalls echoing on the marble floor were thunderous, and I almost left the bag on the hall table and walked out, but if I chickened out now, I would never forgive myself. With a growl of exasperation, I shoved my key ring in my jacket pocket, shifted the apple bag from one arm to the other, and made a beeline for the kitchen. When I got there, I found a big blue glass bowl on the
marble countertop that held just two piebald bananas and that seemed to be waiting for me. I pushed the bananas to one side and filled the rest of the bowl with my apples. There I was in Wilson’s house, taking liberties, and, oh
crap
, it felt good.

I was so busy with this that it wasn’t until I was settling the last apple into the bowl that I saw Caro. On the kitchen table, next to a bowl of what appeared to be the same butternut soup with mushrooms, a tub of which I’d just bought for myself at the gourmet grocery, lay what first registered to my brain as some kind of wild-haired creature—an oversized very long-haired guinea pig perhaps—but which turned out to be Caro’s head. It wasn’t resting on her folded arms or even on one hand; her left cheek lay directly on the tabletop, her hands out of sight under the table. As soon as I figured out it was her, I thought,
Oh thank God none of her hair ended up in the soup
. Hot on the heels of that came,
Please, please, please don’t let her be dead!

As I beat my hasty way over to her, I banged my hip on the edge of the counter and hissed, “Shit!,” and I guess the word or the hiss of it broke through Caro’s consciousness in a way that the crackle of the paper bag and the plop of the apples into the bowl had not because she lifted her head with a start, pressed her palms to her eyes briefly, and then stared at me, blinking so blankly that I wondered if she might be drunk or worse.

Dear God
, I thought,
Willow already has Wilson, with all his Wilsonness plus a bum heart, for a father. She does not need a drunk for a mother
.

But after a few seconds, Caro’s eyes began to clear and her face firmed up around the edges the way people’s eyes and faces do when they wake up from a deep sleep, and Caro looked around her, down at her soup, up at me, and smiled, “Golly damn,” she said. “You caught me napping.”

Napping. As though everyone just settles in for a nap with their head practically inside their soup bowl.

“I’m sorry,” I said, quickly. “I just found some Staymans at the
grocery store and thought I’d bring them in for you. I almost left them at the door, but, you know, I had that key you gave me, I guess it was a few days ago, six days or something, and I thought . . .” I trailed off at long last and just nodded sideways at the bowl of apples.

“How thoughtful,” said Caro. “Oh, I’m afraid I’ve startled you. You see, I’ve never been a very good sleeper. It’s just a case of bad genes, which, thank goodness, I did not pass down to Willow. Anyway, when I can’t sleep at night, I fear I’m prone to catnaps.”

Cats curled up in a splash of sun. Cats didn’t drop down, mid-lunch, as though struck by a thunderbolt.

“My friend Trillium calls them ‘power naps,’” I said, playing along. “It’s amazing how she’ll just tip her head back anywhere and sleep hard for fifteen minutes and then wake up refreshed.”

Caro grabbed little bunches of her hair on either side of her head and pulled them away from her face in what I assumed was the curly-haired equivalent of running your hands through your hair.

“I’m afraid I don’t feel quite so refreshed after my naps. It takes me a while to get my feet back under me, I guess.”

Suddenly, catching sight of the giant, antique-looking wall clock, she hit her fist on the table so hard her soup bowl rattled. “Damn!”

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m supposed to be in the car right now, on my way to pick up Willow. She’s taken to staying after school to work on a project with a classmate for English. Usually, she stays longer, sometimes for a few hours, but she has a big math test to study for. She asked me to pick her up in front of the school at four o’clock.”

I glanced at the clock. 3:55.

“If you leave now, you should only be a few minutes late. Can you just text her and let her know you’re on your way?”

Caro looked at me, startled.

“Oh, no. She doesn’t have a cell phone. Wilson thinks they cause human relationships to wither on the vine. And, you know, she never needed one back when she was always at home.”

Oh, brother. Cell phones? Wilson could wither a human relationship with his tone of voice alone, as I had reason to know. Oh, but poor Willow, in high school without a phone!

“Aha. Well, I’m sure she won’t worry if you’re a few minutes late, will she?”

Caro sighed and, with that sigh, energy seemed to rush from her body. Her eyelids drooped, her shoulders sagged, and, suddenly, she looked far less awake than she had just seconds before.

“As I mentioned, it takes me a bit of time to regroup after a nap. I know it sounds crazy,” she said, with a wan smile, “but I’m not sure I should be behind a wheel. I don’t suppose you have time? She said she’d be waiting right outside the school.”

“Oh! Me. Well, sure. Of course. I know where Webley is. I’ll go right now.”

As I drove, I wondered about Caro. She’d certainly seemed energetic enough when she was banging the table and saying, “Damn!” And weariness had fallen over her so fast, like someone had flicked a switch. Had she done the flicking herself? Had she seen me and made the split-second decision that I should be the one to pick up Willow? But why? I remembered the apple cake breakfast, her slip about Wilson’s boarding school. Was it possible that Caro was a case of still waters—no, not still, but rippling, eddying, hazy, meandering waters—running deep?

Because she wasn’t expecting my car, I got a chance to idle at the curb for a few minutes, watching Willow when she didn’t know I was watching, something I’d never done before. For one thing, I just plain didn’t see her much; for another, when I did, she was all wariness, on full red alert but also disdainful, as though I were some lowly bug that just might sting. Now, watching her unobserved, I was surprised at what I saw. She sat on one of the benches that lined the sidewalk leading up to the front door of the school. All the benches were dedicated to someone, with little brass plaques saying to whom, and I happened to know that Willow’s was the Dotty Pikkels bench. Allie Pham, a ballet
friend of mine who’d gone to Webley, had received her first kiss on that bench from a lacrosse player named Stan Manley, and Allie had written “I love you, Dotty Pikkels” all over her notebooks for an entire semester until Stan the Man broke up with her and she scratched out all the “loves” and turned them to “hates.”

Now, Willow sat on Dotty Pikkels, twirling one end of her scarf in her hand, her hair blazing, her coat open, and, stretched out on the ground at her feet, leaning back on his hands, his long legs out in front of him, was a boy. Even from a distance, I could tell he was beautiful, part-Asian probably, great shoulders, hair standing up in jags, a smile like an angel’s. The way he sat, all that thoughtless grace, taking up space with such fluid assurance, reminded me of Trillium, and I knew it was good to be this kid the same way it was good to be Trillium. I’d pictured Willow in high school as a fish out of water, pictured her walking miserably down the crowded hallways, being left out and lost, but here she was, all teasing, chatty volubility, shaking her finger at a handsome boy like it was the most natural thing in the world.

As soon as she noticed me, though, she stiffened, and you could just see it, her going from open to shut, closing her personality like someone closing an umbrella. But I could see the fear in her eyes even before she opened the car door.

“Is my mother okay?” she said. “Did something happen? Is she at home?”

She clutched her backpack to her chest, and I wondered if it were to stop herself from shaking, and for the umpteenth time since I met her, I wanted to fold her into a deep hug.

“She’s at home and fine,” I said, quickly, “just a little tired. She was taking a power nap and hadn’t quite woken up from it when I happened to see her, so she asked me to come get you. No big deal.”

“You saw her? Asleep?”

Willow’s dismay was palpable. How could it matter so much if I’d found her mother sleeping?

“Well, yeah, but she woke up and we talked. She’s fine.”

“Where?”

“Where was she sleeping, you mean?”

Willow gave a tense nod.

“Um, I found these apples she liked at the market, so I came inside to leave them in the kitchen, and I saw her at the table.”

I waited—anxiously, hopefully—for Willow to ask exactly how I’d gained entry to her house, but all she did was close her eyes, her body going limp with relief.

“Oh, she was inside,” she murmured, then caught herself, and straightened. “It’s just that once I found her asleep on the garden bench, which is no big deal, of course. She’s an artist, and sometimes she loses track of time at night and forgets to sleep, which I think is a common thing for artists. Completely normal and understandable. But I just wouldn’t want her to fall asleep outside now, when it’s getting colder and everything.”

“Oh. Well, if it were really cold, she probably wouldn’t get comfortable enough to fall asleep anyway, right?”

Now that her fears were put to rest, all her hauteur came back. Willow gave me a blatant you-have-no-idea-what-you’re-talking-about look, then shrugged and stared out of the window.

“So is that the boy you were working with?” I asked.

“Who said I was working with a boy?” said Willow, coldly, still looking out the window.

“No one. Your mother said you were staying after school to work on a project with a partner, so I guess what I meant was is that boy the
person
you were working with on your project.”

“Oh. In that case, yes.”

If there was a gene for smugness, she’d inherited it straight from Wilson, down to the last tiny, exasperating snippet of DNA. But I would take the high road if it killed me.

“Looks like you were setting him straight on something,” I said, with a laugh.

“How do you mean?”

“You can tell,” I said, “even from a distance, when two people are arguing. It’s in their posture, their facial expressions, the way one of them, say, wags her finger at the other. The two of you were the spitting image of people having a friendly argument.”

She shrugged. “Oh.”

“And you were the spitting image of the person who was winning.”

For a moment, I thought she’d smile, but she bit it back and shrugged again. She had the teenager shrug down pat, slight twitch of the shoulder, even slighter sideways jerk of the head, as though even in belittling you, she would not waste precious energy. I wanted to tell her, though, that three shrugs in as many minutes was overkill; it revealed her as the amateur she was. It was a petty thing to want, I knew, and instantly, I felt ashamed of myself. As punishment for my pettiness, I would say something that she could really sink her smug teeth into.

“Anyway, he was cute.”

I tossed the sentence out there like a wounded seal, and sharklike, she couldn’t resist, turning away from the window to regard me, contempt in every feature. Right then, although she looked nothing like Wilson, she looked exactly like Wilson.