The Precious One (25 page)

Before I could open the front door of my house, Taisy did, which is how I knew, right away, that something was terribly wrong. I froze, clamped a hand over my mouth. Taisy touched my shoulder.

“Hey,” she said. “Don’t look like that. It’s okay.”

“Did he die?” I asked, bleakly.

Her eyes widened. “No! No, no, no, no, no, of course not. He had some chest pains, and your mom thought it best to call an ambulance, but it’s probably nothing. She’s at the hospital with him.”

Then, heaven help me, I burst into tears, long, clawing sobs that burned my chest.

“It’s all my fault! I should have been here,” I almost shrieked. “I should have been here.”

Taisy led me into the house and sat me down on the living room sofa, keeping her arms around me. I could not help it: I leaned my face against her sweater and cried my heart out.

“Hey, hey,” Taisy said, soothingly. “None of this is your fault. How could it be?”

“I-I lost focus. Like with the door, when Muddy went out into the rain. I let things distract me.”

“Oh, Willow, honey,” she said. “You’ve been bombarded with so much change in the past few months. You’re handling it beautifully, beyond what anyone could expect.”

I shook my head. “No, you don’t know!” I wailed. “You don’t know how I have let him down.”

“You have to stop that,” said Taisy. “You are a sixteen-year-old. You’re supposed to focus on your own life. And you’re supposed to make mistakes. Don’t you know that?”

“No one is ever supposed to make mistakes,” I said, gasping.

“Now, I’m sorry,” she said, firmly, “but that is just wrong.”

I didn’t really believe her, but being held felt so nice. Taisy and I sat like that for a long time, so long that, outside, the sun set; darkness filled the windows. I may even have slept a little. When the phone rang, I sprang up and ran for the kitchen. It was Muddy.

“It’s fine, darling girl,” she told me. “It wasn’t another heart attack, just some inflammation around his heart that sometimes happens after surgery. He’s taking medicine and will come home tomorrow.”

I dropped into a kitchen chair, relief pouring through me. I gave Taisy the thumbs-up. She smiled, and I smiled back, and weirdly, this wasn’t weird at all.

After Taisy had gone back to the pool house, I went up to my room, sat on my bed, and felt steady, more like I was home, truly home, all of me right here, than I had in a long time. Then, I took out my phone, and quickly, before I could stop myself or analyze why, I called Luka.

“Hello?” he said.

“This is Willow,” I said. “You are the official recipient of my first cell-phone call.”

“Well, well, well,” he said. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Cleary. How does it feel?”

There was a laugh in his voice. Satellites and cell-phone towers catapulted that voice across the sky, bouncing it from star to star to star. Luka’s voice—and mine, answering.

“Wonderful,” I said.

I
DON’
T KNOW WHETHER IT
was because I’d seen the extraordinarily ordinary house she’d grown up in or because I expected someone Wilson had rejected to seem more, well,
rejected
(and, yes, I know how ironic that is, coming from me), but, whatever the reason, Wilson’s sister, Barbara, was a shock. A chic shock. A long, black licorice whip of a woman with cat’s-eye glasses, blood-red lips, and a steel-gray, mathematically precise bob. Even her house was intimidating, a Society Hill row house, early-eighteenth-century Georgian on the outside, midcentury Modern on the inside, with that indefinable something that even people who don’t have any of their own recognize as style. The kind of place that makes you glad you wore mascara and the Trillium boots and even gladder that you brought a friend, especially one who flung open his (pretty black) eyes and bit his knuckle in faux terror as soon as Barbara turned her back to lead us into the house.

As soon as she got us inside, she turned and said, severely, one elegant finger elegantly raised, “I have not been waiting for this moment. I want to be clear on that point. I stopped giving a damn about Wilson over fifty years ago. But since this moment has arrived anyway, I am
extremely happy to see you,” and she encased me in a genial, if angular, hug.

“Thank you,” I said, “for letting me come.”

I had contacted her through her website “B. Ravenel Volkman Interior Architecture,” a stark, black-and-white, bare-bones page with just an e-mail address and a phone number, an insider sort of website, one for a business that doesn’t sell itself because it assumes you are already sold. I e-mailed, briefly describing who I was and asking if I might meet with her, and she’d sent back one word—“Fine”—a date and time, and her home address.

Now, she said, “First I feed you; then we talk, but only if you agree not to put anything I say into a book.”

I must have looked taken aback because she said, “I looked you up, naturally. I know you’re a not-so-ghostly ghostwriter. If you are doing a book on Wilson, I cannot in conscience be part of it. Are you?”

“No,” I said.

Ben gave me a sharp look, but I wasn’t lying. For some time now, I had been toying with the idea of telling Wilson he would be better off with another writer, but right then, sitting in his sister’s house, I decided for sure.

“He hired me to write one, but I realize now that I can’t write the book he wants me to write. Frankly, all I’ve done is research the parts of his life he’s expressly ordered me to steer clear of.”

“Why?” Her face was spare and hard and scary-wonderful, like Georgia O’Keeffe’s or Martha Graham’s. There was nothing to do in the face of such a face but tell the unvarnished truth.

“We’ve been more or less estranged since I was eighteen, and, even before that, we were never close. Nothing even close to close. I want to understand what made him the man he is.”

“For your own benefit?” Her eyes were fiery. “Or his?”

“Mine.”

She smiled. “All right, then.”

She fed us espresso in tiny black cups and lemon ricotta cookies
on square black plates. And when she had drained her cup, she began to talk. She was a mesmerizing speaker, her facial features full of fine-tuned eloquence, her right hand moving like a dancer at the end of her wrist, the rest of her still and taut.

“My father was an accountant who wished he were a mathematician. He loved numbers; they were the only thing for which he had any affection, as far as I could detect. He wasn’t a kind man. Now, I see that his bitter disappointment in himself and his life warped him. He was smart enough, but not brilliant, and he hated that. When I was a child, though, I just thought he was plain mean. Because he was mean, especially to Wilson.”

Barbara shook her head and shrugged, with such languid grace that it looked like a piece of choreography. “Some fathers like that would have seen their second chance in a child like Wilson. They would have basked in reflected genius and trumpeted the boy’s every achievement to the world. I know this isn’t a good way to parent, but it would have been better than what my father did to Wilson.”

“He undermined him?” I asked.

“At every turn. He mocked his achievements, reveled in his failures, although there weren’t many of those. And I’m talking about from as far back as I can remember.”

“That’s rotten,” said Ben.

“Yes,” said Barbara. “That’s just the word for what it was.”

“What about your mother?” I asked.

“My mother was the sort who kept her mouth shut. I think she was cowed by my father. I certainly was. A lot of people were.”

“Wilson, too?” I asked, trying to imagine Wilson being cowed by anything.

“No, I don’t think so. Although it was impossible to say what was going on inside Wilson’s head. Maybe he was hurt; maybe he secretly wanted my father’s approval. The older I get, the more I see this as likely. On the outside, though, he seemed to despise my parents, roundly.”

“Always?” I asked.

“Possibly,” said Barbara drily. “I’m four years younger and only caught on to it when I was six or thereabouts, but even then Wilson had the air of someone who was capable of despising precociously.”

At this, Ben’s lips twitched into a wry smile.

“Ah,” said Barbara to Ben. “I take it you know him.”

“Knew,” said Ben. “I’m pretty sure he despised me, too.”

Barbara shrugged. “What can you do? What can anyone do with a person like that?”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I adored him,” said Barbara.

“Oh,” I said, startled. “So did I.”

She gave me a sharp look. “I got over it, with effort. How about you?”

“I’m working on it,” I said. “Getting close, I think.”

“Excellent,” she said. “Possibly it was just a way of protecting himself against my father, but Wilson’s problem seemed to be that he was so smart that he thought smart was everything, which is terribly wrong, of course.”

“Did he have friends?” I asked.

“He didn’t do well with other kids, although no one bullied him. We didn’t talk much about bullying back then, not like people do now, even though it happened all the time. But Wilson was too big for his age, maybe, and too un-invested for the bullies to truly take an interest. It’s hard to hurt someone who doesn’t give a damn about you. At the time, I couldn’t tell for sure, but, when I look back, I see that he was lonely, lonely without realizing it, which might be the worst kind of loneliness of all.”

“He had you, though,” I said.

“He did, such as it was. A long time ago, when my first grandchild was a toddler, I began to hear my son and his wife use this term ‘parallel play,’ and I realized that’s what Wilson and I did, even though he didn’t play in the traditional sense. He read or wrote in his notebook
or performed scientific experiments, while, nearby, I colored or played with jacks or Tinkertoys or dolls. Later, I mostly drew. I loved to draw. He would let me be near, but he never asked to see my pictures. He only looked at them when I showed them to him. And then—”

She broke off and her fingers curled into a soft near fist, as if she were holding something tiny and breakable.

“What?” I asked.

“He changed, got colder, angrier, even more distant. I believe he hated us. He was gone or in his room almost all the time. It was the summer before he started eighth grade.”

“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”

Sorrow filled her face, and she seemed about to explain, but she just popped open her fingers in a single-handed, shoulderless shrug.

“He went through a rough patch I suppose you could say. In any case, that year, he applied to boarding school. Did it all himself, researched schools, picked one, filled out all the paperwork, interviewed with a local alumnus, applied for financial assistance, got my parents to agree to it all, packed his things. He even wanted to take the train, but, for some reason, my parents insisted on driving him. I went along. We didn’t stay for more than an hour, didn’t attend the parent reception or go on the tour. It was clear that Wilson couldn’t wait for us to leave. I sobbed all the way home in the car.”

“You were, what? Ten? That must have been awful.”

She smiled. “Tragic. I would never have admitted it to myself, but I think I knew he was gone for good.”

Carefully, I said, “I visited the school and looked up his records. I saw that he changed his name before eleventh grade. And stopped listing a home address.”

“Oh, yes. That’s when he emancipated himself. At an honor student function, he met a member of the school’s board of directors, a man named Cleary. He was rich. He didn’t adopt Wilson, was more a benefactor, like something out of Dickens. I guess Wilson changed his last name in order to honor him because he was never actually a
member of the man’s family. I don’t even know how much time they spent together. But apparently, as difficult as he was, Wilson could charm people when he needed to.”

“He still does,” I said.

“I don’t doubt it,” said Barbara. “The school gave him a stipend on top of his full scholarship and enrolled him in work-study. It had to have taken some finagling, as well as some string-pulling on the part of Cleary, who was a very fancy attorney, but, at sixteen, Wilson was able to demonstrate enough financial independence to get legally free of my parents. And that was it.”

“It?” said Ben. “You mean, he never came home after that?”

“Never. Not one time.”

“Really? Your parents agreed to that, even your mother? She didn’t fight him on it? She didn’t try to get him back?” he asked.

There was my Ben, full of the bewilderment of one who’s been adored by at least two, sometimes three, sometimes
four
parents his entire life. But I got it. Or, if I didn’t quite get it, I wasn’t stunned. I knew how easily some people could let go of their children.

“You know, I think my mother admired him for it, at first,” said Barbara, “took it as a sign of his independence. I’m sure my father was jealous because he was jealous of everything Wilson did, but he was also probably glad to be rid of him. However, no one can ever quite know what’s going on inside other people’s hearts, especially when they’re closed-off people like my parents were, and I never talked to them about it, not directly. But, no, they didn’t fight for him. When my father died, it was the first time I ever saw my mother cry about Wilson, and it was mostly out of anger. She wondered what kind of person would fail to show up at his father’s funeral. He didn’t so much as send a note.”

“What about you?” I asked. “Did you fight for him?”

“I wrote him letters, sent him drawings I’d made, and when I was older, over the years, I tried to get in touch with him now and then. Never in person—I’d grown too proud for that—but I wrote him at
the university, called him a few times. The one time I persuaded him to speak with me—I was twenty-one, about to get married, and I suppose I felt a surge of family feeling or something—he told me to let the past go. So I did. He erased me, and I erased him back.”

“Why do you think he did it?” I asked.

Her eyes flashed scorn, and for a moment, I could see a trace of Wilson.

“Well, that much seems obvious. We didn’t fit into his story,” she said.

“Yes, but why not make you a footnote, a two-sentence paragraph?” I said. “I’ve thought about this, and I still cannot figure out why he had to erase you. He told my mother that your parents had died in a car accident when he was at boarding school. He never even mentioned a sister. Why?”

Her dancing hand dropped to her lap and she sat, thinking. Then, slowly, she said, “The boy he had been, up until he was twelve and grew hateful, would not have gone so far, I don’t think. He would have left and stayed away. He might never have spoken to my father again, but he would not have cut us off like a diseased limb.”

“Did someone—hurt him?” I asked.

Barbara said, gravely, “Abuse, you mean. Physical or sexual. No. Nothing like that. But he was damaged all the same.”

Again, I knew that she was holding something back. I waited, but she didn’t say anything more. Presumably, she had been harboring this piece of Wilson’s story, which was also her story, for decades. Who was I to try to wrench it from her now?

“Still,” she said, hotly, “people have wretched things happen in childhood and they grow up. They grow past them. Nothing can justify the way Wilson, the adult Wilson, behaved toward a sister who did nothing, God help her, but love him.”

She glanced at her wristwatch, a plain, heavy face on a wide black strap.

“I fear I must leave in a few minutes to meet my husband for dinner. He’s just getting out of a meeting, now.”

“Your husband?” I said. For some reason, despite the fact of her three children, the thought of her being married startled me.

She smiled, luminously, and it was as though every edge she had softened. Whatever had warped Wilson into a failure at loving his fellow man hadn’t warped Barbara. “My sweet George,” she said. “Forty-five years.”

Then, she looked straight at me and said, teasingly, wrinkling her sculptural nose, “I triumphed, you see. One can be dumped by the great and terrible Wilson and still live a happy life.”

“That’s my plan, too,” I said. I glanced at Ben, who gave me an encouraging grin and a thumbs-up.

Just before we left, I asked to go to the bathroom, mostly so that I could see more of Barbara’s marvelous house. Luckily, the powder room was at the back of the house, which meant that, on my way to it, I got to walk through a study, and the dining room, and the butler’s pantry, and the kitchen. The place was perfection, every inch. It was on my way back through the dining room that I noticed: first, the wall hanging—wild and delicately spiny, like a cluster of sea urchins made of glass—and second, the chandelier over the table—hundreds of minute iridescent blue and silver glass droplets pouring like rain from a circle of steel. As I was staring up at it, the lights in its center came on, making me gasp. Barbara stood there, by the switch.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s one of hers.”