The Precious One Read online

  “Great,” I said, without any real sense of which one of Caro’s statements I was approving of.

  “Well, then!” Caro exclaimed, then swiveled around, and walked rapidly toward the staircase.

  “Where’s Dad?” I whispered to Marcus, as we watched her begin to mount the stairs.

  Marcus shrugged and whispered, “I don’t know. Hell?”

  On the fourth step, Caro turned and said, “Aren’t you coming?”

  “Coming?” asked my mother. “You mean upstairs?”

  “Well, yes,” said Caro, surprised. “To the nursery. The nursery is upstairs, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Marcus.

  “Maybe it would be better if we waited here for you to bring her down?” said my mother.

  Caro shook her head and said, “No, I don’t think that would work. Playtime begins right after naptime.”

  “Oh,” said my mother.

  “Please come,” said Caro. “It’s just up the stairs.”

  She pointed, and, dutifully, we looked in the direction she was pointing, as though we hadn’t each climbed those stairs thousands of times. Then, we followed her, right hands on the banister, presents tucked under our free arms.

  Before I saw the baby or the crib or my father, I saw the wallpaper, pale green, with a pattern of white apple blossoms. I had chosen it when I was seven years old, had sat with my mother, paging through the thick book of samples. I remember feeling the gorgeous weight of it: the first decision I had ever made that would have palpable, lasting impact. For years, the wallpaper had made me feel safe and special, like a girl in a book sleeping in a cottage. Now, the sight of it hurt, more on behalf of the girl I had been than the girl I was, but it hurt all the same.

  I heard his voice before I saw him.

  “Willow, my Willow,” the voice sang out. “You have visitors!”

  The room was ablaze with sun, and because the rug, the wedding-veil gauzy curtains, and every item of furniture in the room was white, for a second, I was snowblind. Even after my eyes adjusted, I didn’t see my father immediately because he was sitting on the floor.

  My father. Sitting on the floor. Sitting on the floor cross-legged. Indian-style. And I knew in an instant that I had never before seen my father sit on the floor in this or in any other position. Seeing it now felt so strange, so personal that it was almost indecent. I turned my face away and saw Marcus. He was staring at my father with the same cringing bewilderment I felt. My mother wasn’t looking at my father at all, but at something on the other side of the room.

  “You’re sitting on the floor,” said Marcus.

  “Yes,” said my father, with a magisterial nod of his leonine head. “Forgive me for not getting up to greet you. I am playing.”

  The floor was littered with blond wooden blocks.

  “It’s floor time,” explained Caro, “originally developed for children with autism but highly beneficial for typical learners, as well.”

  She looked at her husband, who nodded again.

  “Or exceptional ones, as the case may be,” said Wilson. “In playing on the floor, eye to eye, I follow her lead. I enter her world, instead of towering above it.”

  I’m sure it goes without saying that our father had never entered my or Marcus’s world. If it had ever occurred to him to try, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle, and even when Marcus had outgrown him by two inches, my father still managed to tower over our lives, looking down on us, when he bothered to look, from a tremendous height. He would not have had it any other way.

  I stood and tried to absorb the new floor-sitting Wilson, the Wilson who played, when before my eyes, he turned into yet another Wilson. He softened and grew radiant and smiled a slow-spreading smile that wasn’t knowing or show-offy or cruel. That smile was the purest thing I’d ever seen him do.

  In unison, Caro, Marcus, and I all swept our attention to the other side of the room where my mother’s had been the whole time. Next to a tiny white table and chairs stood a tiny white tent. Pushing back the tiny tent flap was a tiny hand. Next came a flash of auburn curls, flaming against the white, and then the rest emerged, barefooted and with a stride that was steady with just a touch of Frankenstein. Arms out, Willow made her way toward her father.

  Sister, I thought, suddenly and with wonderment. After a lifetime of thinking only brother brother brother, the word was a revelation.

  But Wilson didn’t say “sister.” I realized he never had. And in the fifteen years to follow, he never would. What he said was, “Behold the birthday girl! Willow Cleary, aged one year!”

  And with a shriek of joy, she tumbled into his arms.

  SOMEWHERE TOWARD THE END of the demonstration that followed, Marcus disappeared. I couldn’t blame him (although later that day, after everything that happened, I did blame him, vehemently and at the top of my lungs) because what unfolded was at best annoying and at worst something close to creepy. We did not play with Willow. We didn’t even really watch her play. Instead, it was as though my father were a field biologist newly returned from the wild and unveiling a hitherto undiscovered species to the Royal Society. There was no PowerPoint (I’m not even sure if they had PowerPoints back then). None of us wore white coats. But it was a presentation all the same.

  “At a year old, she has seventeen words.” One by one, in response to a verbal prompt or to Wilson pointing to a picture in a book, she said them.

  “She performs all the motions to ‘Wheels on the Bus.’” To Wilson’s full-throated rendition of the song, she performed them.

  “She can build a tower of three blocks.” She built it.

  “She has been pointing, for months.” She pointed, expertly.

  “She can point to her major body parts, when asked to do so.” Toes, check. Nose, check. Hair, check. Eyes, check. Elbow, check. Abdomen (yes, abdomen; no tummies or bellies in the Cleary household), check.

  “She is in the eightieth percentile for height, weight, and head circumference.” She pointed to her perfectly proportioned head.

  I could not have walked out of that room if I tried, caught as I was smack-dab between fascination and revulsion. But when Wilson said, “She has a remarkably high instep,” and lifted her foot in the air, even I had to avert my eyes.

  Still, it wasn’t as clinical, as strange and borderline-dehumanizing as it sounds. For one thing, Caro had the grace to be embarrassed, laughingly embarrassed, but embarrassed all the same. She teased Wilson, and the ease between them was so authentic it startled me. And for another thing, throughout the whole demonstration, what shone through every word Wilson spoke, what illuminated every dramatic hand gesture and grandiose phrase was, unmistakably, love. Love simple and sweet. For the first time ever, I watched Wilson interact with another human being without having anything close to the upper hand. Even as her father displayed her like a cocker spaniel at Westminster, Willow was clearly the one in charge.

  I would be jealous later. I would be hit hard by jealousy the second we walked out of the sunlit room that was no longer, in any way, mine. But while I was in it, watching the two of them, I was only awestruck.

  IT MIGHT HAVE GONE on that way: my father throwing his new family in our faces, never asking us a single question about our lives, Marcus stonily silent, my mother holding her head high, me feeling more and more humiliated, more and more invisible, until it was time to take our quiet and bitter leave of that place. But Marcus got drunk.

  I’d seen him drunk before, of course, stumbling home—to this very house—after a party, stupid and reeking of beer, although I hadn’t seen him like that in a long time. After we moved, friendless and also determined not to make my mother’s life any harder than it already was, Marcus had behaved himself, and in college, where most kids went wild, he had done the opposite, becoming the serious student, the designated driver. Back in high school before the combustion, though, apart from a few scary episodes (a trip to the hospital to have his stomach pumped, a camping trip in which he’d wandered o
ff and had to be rescued), Marcus had mostly been a fun drunk, goofy and voluble, even charming. He would fall down, slapstick-style, would sing dumb songs, and make jokes so unfunny they were funny.

  But that day at Wilson’s house, Marcus wasn’t charming. He was narrow-eyed, venomous, and loud, a transformation that did not occur right away, although I knew, as soon as we walked downstairs and into the kitchen and I saw him sitting at the table, that it wasn’t iced tea inside his large plastic tumbler. I looked to see if my mother had noticed, but her face bore the faintly smiling, tuned-out look of a person who was pretending she was someplace else. I loved my mother with all my heart, but it was hard to forgive: her downshift into a kind of slow, half-awake gear when things around her got tough. She’d done it for years, long before the combustion, especially at moments when Wilson was at his worst. I felt a kind of hollow disappointment at seeing it now, post-combustion, post-mom-taking-charge-of-her-life. How easy it was, here in this house, for her, for all of us to slide back into our old roles.

  Caro had laid out lunch, a basket of sliced baguette and dishes of fancy salads like curried chicken, spicy sesame green bean, roasted vegetable, and one made of artichoke hearts, chickpeas, arugula, and feta cheese. I didn’t see any bags or plastic containers, but I knew that the salads had all come from the gourmet grocery down the street. The artichoke heart one had always been my favorite. Now, awash in jealousy and homesickness, I couldn’t decide what I wanted more, to cradle the bowl to my chest or to throw the damn thing across the room.

  I glanced up, saw Marcus watching me, and gave him one of the two-eyed winks we’d been giving each other since we were practically babies, long before we could manage the regular one-eyed kind. I attempted a smile. The last thing any of us needed was Marcus picking up on my unhappiness and getting angrier than he already was. But instead of winking back, he shook his head to show he wasn’t fooled.

  “Mako,” I whispered. “Eat some lunch.”

  “I’m drinking my dinner, darlin’,” he whisper-drawled. For some reason, times of stress always brought out the cowboy in my brother.

  “Bad idea, cowpoke.”

  He made a shooing motion with his hand and said, “Git along, little dogie.”

  I filled plates for both of us and set his before him with a little more oomph than necessary, trying, as I leaned over, to get a whiff of whatever filled his cup, but he grinned and covered it with his hand.

  Eventually, we were all seated around the table watching Willow, who was enthroned in a pristine white high chair at the right hand of her father. She ate whole-wheat crackers, pieces of soft-cooked organic carrot, and cubes of white, unprocessed cheese, bringing her extraordinary pincer grasp and well-beyond-age-level hand/mouth coordination to bear on every task. After a long couple of minutes of this, Marcus picked up a green bean in his own pincer grasp, pointed it at me, and said, loudly, “Taisy, have you told your father about your first-semester grades?”

  I stiffened. Here we go.

  “We won’t get our grade reports until after break,” I mumbled.

  “Yet, you know your grades. Remember how you told me and Mom your grades?”

  I shrugged and tried, without success, to swallow my sense of foreboding along with a forkful of chicken salad.

  Marcus pointed the bean at our mother.

  “Mom, you remember Taisy telling you about her first-semester grades, right?”

  “Of course, I remember,” said my mother, distractedly.

  Marcus pointed the bean at Wilson.

  “Wilson,” he said, loudly. Everything seemed to freeze for a second. It was the first time either of us had ever called him Wilson. “Wilson, I think you should ask your daughter Taisy to tell you her first-semester grades.”

  Wilson put down his fork, his face expressionless but beginning to flush. It was a tell, that flushing. His eyes and voice stayed perfectly cool almost always, but when he got mad, his face went red, the madder, the redder. Just now, it was champagne pink, but I had a heart-sinking suspicion that, before all was said and done, it would hit burgundy.

  “I fail to see how your sister’s grades, or yours for that matter, would be any of my concern at this point,” he said. He might as well have slapped me.

  “Introduction to Literature I, A; Shakespeare, A; Advanced Conversational French, A . . .” Marcus reeled off the rest of my report card, throwing A after A like poisoned darts.

  My father didn’t react. He didn’t even glance in my direction. Marcus took a gulp from his tumbler.

  “Taisy!” said Marcus. “Speak French for Wilson.”

  I shut my eyes. “No.”

  “Yeah, that what’s his name, Baudelaire thing you recited for me and Mom. The thing from the evil flower thing. Wilson, your daughter Taisy here is way above the eightieth percentile in both French and Baudelaire.”

  I didn’t have to look at Wilson to know that at “eightieth percentile” his face went the color of cranberry sauce.

  “And she’s back to taking ballet. Did you know that, Wilson? Taize, get up and show Wilson that move you did the other day.” Marcus made a twirling motion with the green bean. “That triple pimpernel.”

  “Pirouette,” I said, quietly, to Marcus. “Stop.”

  Marcus shook his head at me sadly, then a flick of his wrist and the green bean was airborne. Probably in my horror-struck state I only imagined it, but I believed I could see the bean moving in slow motion, arcing end over end until it bopped lightly against Wilson’s crimson, rage-trembling cheek and fell to his lap. At that moment, it seemed to me that anything could happen. The sky could crack open. The house could go up in flames. The hand of God could scoop up Marcus and toss him into a bottomless pit.

  Instead, what happened was a giggle. A trill of a giggle that turned into a long musical belly laugh, a deep and goldeny burbling brook of laughter. We all stared at Willow, all of us except Wilson, who, in a motion so unthinkingly protective it bruised my heart, reached out his hand and placed it on the top of his baby’s head but never took his eyes off Marcus.

  “Get out of my house,” he said, with icy calm. “Take your drunken insolence out of my house and away from my child.”

  Marcus stood up, draining his tumbler and raising it as though to throw it at Wilson, too. When Wilson put his arm in front of his face to ward off the blow, Marcus laughed.

  “Psych!” he said. He peered into the tumbler and laughed again, a hard sound. “‘My child.’” His imitation of Wilson’s voice was uncanny. “You are one sociopathic shit, Wilson.”

  Then, he dropped the tumbler on the table, where it bounced against a pot of tired-looking paperwhites, gave our father the finger, and strode, staggering only slightly, out of the room. I heard the back door slam.

  The air in the room felt simultaneously electric and freezing cold. I drew my arms around myself, slipping my hands inside my sweater sleeves, and was seized by a powerful urge to get out, get the hell out of that room. Before I could move, however, someone else did. Caro, whom I had almost forgotten was there. With an audible flutter of breath, she stood and, hair billowing like a storm cloud, dashed out of the room. The back door slammed again. It was the most surreal part of that surreal day: Caro, of all people, going after Marcus.

  “My God, Wilson.” My mother’s voice. Angry. Pitying, too.

  Wilson smirked and waved ostentatiously in the direction of the backyard. “That out there is your handiwork, Katharine. Congratulate yourself!”

  “‘Handiwork?’” said my mother. “He’s your son.”

  Wilson grunted out an ugly laugh. “He is a joke. A bad one. And one of your making. I should never have entrusted anything to you.”

  I wanted her to scream at him, to claw him with her nails until the blood flowed. And at the exact same time, I wanted him to notice me, to say something nice about me, like that he knew I was different from Marcus. My entire body was waiting for it, leaning into the table, straining to hear it.

 
“Marcus,” said my mother, firmly (was that a smile?), “will be fine. So will Taisy. I have never doubted that. But you. The state of your soul makes me shudder.”

  “Ah, well, do not you worry about me. No need to shudder for me,” he mocked, pressing his hands to his heart.

  “Not for you.” My mother bent her gaze to the little girl in the high chair, happily dropping carrots onto the floor and watching them fall. “For her.”

  Wilson’s face turned so dark, I wondered if he might have a heart attack right there. He sputtered with rage, unable, for the first time ever as far as I knew, to put words together.

  Finally, he blurted, “Out. All of you.”

  “Yes.” My mother turned, rested her hand against my cheek, and said, “My beautiful child, I believe it’s time to go.”

  WE HARDLY SPOKE ON the way back to the hotel. I stared blindly out the windshield, nauseated by the smell of the rental car, not even noticing the familiar streets and buildings and houses we passed on our way downtown. Marcus sprawled in the backseat, drumming his fingers on the window, humming a song I didn’t even try to make out.

  The hotel was the fanciest in town, a gold-encrusted, Gilded Age glory full of mosaic floors, coffered ceilings, and famous paintings. Because we had lived so nearby, we had never stayed there, even though I’d always wanted to. Now, it was much too expensive, even for just one night, but our mother had given it to us as a Christmas gift. A treat. Maybe she had also meant it as a retreat, post-visit, as though she had expected the worst, as though splendor, if there were enough of it, could counterbalance rage and grief.

  It wasn’t until we got to our room, a high-ceilinged, draperied lushness of cream, coral, and marigold, that I cut loose on my brother. This part remains mostly a blur, but I do remember this:

  Me (howling): “You had to ruin it the way you ruin everything!”

  Marcus (yelling): “He acted like you weren’t even there!”

  Me: “He wanted us there!”