Belong to Me: A Novel Read online

  Consequently, the schedule of dinners had become a three-part package: a cover letter describing the system and including the particular culinary likes and dislikes of the Donahue family members (no pimiento, no sesame oil, no smoked fish, et cetera); a schedule of who would bring dinner, one to two hours prior to the six P.M. dinner hour, on which days; and a phone-number list so that the dinner providers could consult previous dinner providers as to what they’d brought so as not to duplicate recent menus.

  When Piper had been working at this for about half an hour, Kyle pulled out the chair next to hers and sat down. Glancing quickly sideways, Piper saw Kyle’s hands clasped on the table in a formal manner. Oh, for God’s sake, she thought, whatever it is, not now.

  “Piper,” he said, quietly.

  “Two secs,” said Piper, although she knew it would be much longer.

  “Piper,” Kyle said, “we need to talk.”

  Piper heard the intensely serious note in his voice. The intensely serious note irritated her. The nights that followed the days of caring for Elizabeth’s home and family in addition to her own fell into two categories: wired, almost feverish nights when the energy refused to leave Piper’s body, or hollowed-out nights. This was a hollowed-out night.

  “Hey, Kyle,” said Piper, knitting her brows at the computer screen, “can you show me how to do that program again? You know. Whatsit. The table thing. Um, the, oh gosh…”

  “Spreadsheet,” Kyle supplied, enunciating the word with a precision that managed to convey patience and impatience at the same time. Then he reached over and closed the laptop.

  “Why.” She leveled a deliberately expressionless stare at him. “Did you do that?”

  “Piper,” he began again, his voice softening, “we have to talk. You know we do.”

  This surprised Piper, the assumption that she knew what was coming. She had no idea. She merely looked at him, waiting.

  “Look, Piper, I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a long time, but you’re never—”

  “Don’t say it,” she said, cutting him off. “Don’t say I’m never here. You are never here.”

  Kyle sighed and looked down at his laced fingers, nodding. “You know, that’s true. I haven’t been spending a lot of time here lately.” He looked up at her. “Don’t you ever wonder why?”

  Suddenly, Piper felt rocked by exhaustion, by the need for sleep. Her head felt heavy on her neck. “I don’t know,” she said, searching for the answer he wanted, the one that would end the conversation and allow her to go to bed. “Maybe? Maybe I wonder?”

  Kyle made a huffing, exasperated sound and squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head as though in disbelief, then popping his eyes open. Like something out of Looney Tunes, Piper thought. She cringed away from him, pressing her shoulder blades hard against her chair back.

  “Maybe? Maybe?” Kyle shouted the words.

  “Can we do this another time, Kyle?” Piper’s voice was small. “Please.”

  Kyle unclasped his hands and dropped them onto the table, fingers splayed. He sat that way for so long that Piper began to think he was finished, but as soon as she started to rise from her chair, he said, “I’m not happy, Piper. I am just not—happy.”

  Kyle wasn’t happy. He was just not happy. The words echoed around the hollow places inside Piper—happy, happy—and then, she wasn’t tired anymore, and the hollow places weren’t empty anymore; they were flash-flooded with fury. She didn’t know if she wanted to slap her husband or throw her head back and laugh. Kyle wasn’t happy. Kyle wasn’t happy.

  Scraping together what self-control she could find, Piper drew in a breath and met Kyle’s eyes. “Today.” She took another breath. “Today Emma climbed into my lap so that she could whisper in my ear. She said, ‘I’m glad Mommy is in bed all the time now because I was worried about whether she would fall forward or backward when she died. I didn’t want her to get hurt.’”

  For a moment, Piper wondered if she really had slapped Kyle. He looked like a man who’d been slapped. Then his whole body, beginning with his shoulders, seemed to deflate. He stood up and turned to leave. Without turning back to Piper, he said in a flat voice, “Sometimes I think you love Elizabeth more than you love any of us.”

  Piper watched his back as he left the room, his white shirt. Then she watched the spot where the shirt had been, stunned into trembling by what she was thinking. The thought had all the force of fact: Not more than any of you. Not more than Carter and Meredith. But more than you. I love her more than I love you.

  SEVEN

  Cornelia

  An e-mail from my sister, Ollie:

  This falls outside the purview of my expertise, but as I see it, the problem with you, Cornelia, is that, in managing the stressors in your new environment, you’re relying on the “fight-or-flight” response, a biobehavioral pattern that was long assumed to apply to both men and women. The new and well-supported thinking on this subject suggests that, in fact, women more readily and effectively cope with stress through “tend-and-befriend” behavior, which, like most behaviors, is undoubtedly the result of evolutionary pressures.

  This was just the teaser, the catchy little prelude to a three-page, single-spaced missive the upshot of which seemed to be that, in moments of stress, rather than growing combative or withdrawing, the fittest women have survived by employing a coping strategy that involves caring for their young; creating supportive relationships with other women; or both.

  Tend-and-befriend. Get it?

  If you can, put aside the fact that anyone who begins a letter of sisterly concern with the words “This falls outside the purview of my expertise…,” continues with the words “…the problem with you, Cornelia…,” and ends with a bibliography and a list titled “Suggestions for Further Reading” has bigger problems than I could ever dream of having.

  Put aside the rampant use of the passive voice, of which “a biobehavioral pattern that was long assumed” is just the first of many examples. Who assumed? You? Because I’ll tell you right now, I assumed nothing of the sort.

  Put aside the dubious wisdom of advising a woman whose chief complaint is being unable, for the first time in her life, to make a single female friend that the solution to her problem, since she has no offspring to tend (although I’ll give Ollie this: if I had an offspring, you can bet your last dollar that tending her or him would have made me feel a hundred percent better, a thousand percent better), is to make a female friend, preferably many female friends, that her salvation lies in creating a tightly woven network of nurturing, sustaining female friends.

  Put aside the fact that Ollie waited nearly a month to send this e-mail after getting mine, by which time her advice was verging on obsolete. (Although, to be fair, I should point out that a month in Ollie time is roughly equivalent to a week in regular human time, so that, while she was tardy no matter how you slice it, she really wasn’t obscenely tardy.)

  And finally, put aside the fact that I never solicited her advice in the first place. In fact, I was careful to do anything but solicit her advice. A simple “I feel your pain, sister” would’ve suited me fine.

  If you can find it in your heart to put aside all of the above—and I don’t blame you if you can’t since I, who, for reasons mysterious even to me (habit? DNA? evolutionary pressures?), love the woman and understand that despite all of the above, she loves me, too, barely managed it myself—what you’ll get is an uncluttered view of an exasperating but inescapable truth: Ollie was right.

  Lake invited me over for dinner. Actually, I invited her over for dinner, but before I quite had a handle on what was happening, she’d whisked the invitation out of my hands and flipped it neatly on its head, so that I suddenly found myself thanking her and asking her what I could bring and she found herself saying, “My pleasure,” and “Not a thing,” a “not a thing” that I assumed included Teo, since she knew he existed and didn’t mention him. I also knew he existed and didn’t mention him, both because she didn�
�t and also because, though my love for Teo is boundless and eternal and so forth, women cannot live on husbands alone. I wanted a girls’ night. I did, I did, I did.

  And about five seconds after I stepped into Lake’s house, just after I’d traded my armful of dahlias—shaggy, yam orange, and glorious—for a glassful of plummy Chilean cabernet, I felt my body begin to empty of stress. To empty of stress and to fill with what my sister, God love her, would doubtless identify as a rush of estrogen-enhanced oxytocin accompanied by shots of serotonin and dopamine, but what felt to my hopelessly right-brained brain an awful lot like well-being accompanied by ease.

  Heavenly smells and an Ella and Louis duet wafted from the kitchen.

  “Come in the kitchen and save me from myself,” moaned Lake.

  She was barefoot and had her hair twisted up into a fabulously untidy knot, a damp, fabulously untidy knot. Even pinned up, the hair seemed to be alive, damp curls making their escape, leaping and corkscrewing in improbable directions. In the crook of one arm she held the dahlias, in her other hand she held a gorgeous head of Boston Bibb, celadon green and as ruffled as an Elizabethan collar.

  Looking at her, I had to smile because a hostess who greets her dinner guest with wet hair, a glass of wine, and a head of lettuce is my kind of hostess, and also because, standing there, the flowers flaming, Lake looked like something out of Greek mythology, a harvest goddess, maybe. A life force.

  “I’ve got this slab of triple crème sitting on my countertop that’s half the size it was an hour ago,” she wailed.

  The sense of well-being spread down to my fingertips, to the ends of my hair. I laughed.

  “Sounds bad,” I told her. “Sounds like I got here just in time.”

  Demeter.

  The name came to me a couple of hours later. Demeter, Greek goddess of the harvest, although at the moment the name popped into my head, I wasn’t thinking of Demeter the harvest goddess. I was thinking instead of Demeter the mother, the one who stalked the world, wild-eyed, searching for her lost child, a blazing torch in her hand, her fury loosing famine on the world.

  Because Lake had a child. Lake had a son. Dev.

  I was thunderstruck.

  He ate dinner with us, Dev did, and even as he sat before me, a flesh-and-blood boy picking the olives from a gargantuan mound of chicken tagine before devouring it with a thirteen-year-old boy’s passionless efficiency, the thunderstruck feeling never left. If anything, it became more striking, more thunderous.

  I wasn’t surprised that Lake had a son. I’d been expecting a son. “Come to dinner at my house,” Lake had said. “You can meet my son, Dev.”

  I was surprised that Dev was thirteen, but even if Lake had told me ahead of time, I would have been no better prepared for Dev, because calling Dev a “thirteen-year-old boy” was kind of like calling Emily Dickinson “a brunette” or Ben Franklin “the inventor of the swim fin.”

  He looked like a thirteen-year-old boy. His features seemed to be less mismatched and more fully baked than my two younger brothers’ had at that age, although, when I think about it, the early teen years may have been particularly unkind to Cam and Toby. They’re fine now, but Toby, for instance, walked around with what was manifestly someone else’s chin and nose until well into his fifteenth year. Dev wasn’t pretty, but his face, grounded by his mother’s square jaw, made a kind of sense, and his smile, when I finally saw it, turned out to be startlingly lovely, like a flock of white birds suddenly landing in your front yard. But he walked like a thirteen-year-old boy, loping and jointless, and when he sat, he sat like one.

  We talked about poetry.

  It began with Lake asking Dev the classic dinner-table question, “Anything good happen in school today?” And because Cam’s and Toby’s answers to this question had almost invariably included descriptions—gleeful and in Technicolor—of some poor kid’s vomiting in a hallway, I put down my glass of wine and braced myself.

  Lucky I did, too, because the next thing Dev did was think for a second and then say, “Well, actually, we had this pretty cool discussion about sonnets in Ms. Enright’s class.”

  I have some experience with thirteen-year-old boys and sonnets. Actually, I had one experience with one thirteen-year-old boy and one sonnet over twenty years ago. He was John Spencer Cropp, the only kid in the eighth grade who was shorter than I was, which likely means he was the shortest eighth-grader in school, possibly state, history. And even though I couldn’t bring myself to so much as hold John Spencer’s hand, which was much smaller than mine, sawed-off-looking really, and sweaty, he was the closest thing to a boyfriend I had before I hit the age of sixteen and dated an exchange student from France with cigarette breath and a girl’s name.

  John Spencer wrote me a sonnet, and rather than simply slipping it into my backpack or passing it to me in class, he mailed it to me, mailed it in a nine-by-twelve-inch envelope so that it came to me flat and, as his enclosed note indicated, suitable for framing.

  The sonnet, “I Love You, Cornelia,” began: “Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink,” and ended “I might be driven to sell your love for peace, /Or trade the memory of this night for food /It well may be. I do not think I would,” and I still regard it as one of the loveliest love poems in existence, for which I’ve always wanted to thank John Spencer Cropp, who grew up to become one of the youngest and smallest state senators in Virginia history. Of course, I’d like to thank Edna St. Vincent Millay as well, since she was nice enough to write it.

  Before I knew about Edna, right after I’d received the poem, I showed it to my sister, Ollie, who honked out a derisive laugh and said, “John Spencer Cropp wears socks with flip-flops. Don’t be a dipshit, Cornelia,” and I had to admit that a similar, though more gently worded, thought had been niggling around in the back of my brain, too. Sadly, these doubts were confirmed later that day when John Spencer quoted the poem to me dramatically over the phone and pronounced “food” so that it rhymed with “would” and then followed up by saying, “This poem’s in a special form you inspired me to make up. It’s called a sonnay.”

  Here’s what Dev said:

  “So, I guess that the word ‘sonnet’ comes from sonnetto, which means ‘little song’ in Italian? But I don’t think a sonnet’s that much like a song. It’s so short, and it just doesn’t feel like a song. You can usually get songs just by listening once because they’re, like, all airy, and there’s just no air between the lines of a sonnet, you know?”

  I did know. I knew because I had been reading sonnets for twenty-plus years, held a B.A. in English from a prestigious (although not superprestigious) university, and had even gone so far as to attend a Ph.D. program in literature, if only for a single semester. How Dev knew I couldn’t imagine, but if my fellow students, if my professors in grad school had brought half of Dev’s keenness and wonder to the task of examining literature, if their faces had looked like Christmas morning as they’d talked about sonnets, who knows? I might have stayed for the whole shebang.

  “So what do you think a better name would be?” I asked him, which I thought was an original, evocative question, but the casual manner with which Dev grabbed it and took off running told me it wasn’t that original after all. A glance at Lake, though, the expression on her face as she looked back at me, told me that with the question, I’d passed some kind of test.

  “I’ve been thinking ‘little box,’ which probably sounds weird, but I noticed that sonnets are usually about something big. A big feeling or a big idea. Like, we read this one called ‘Design’ by Robert Frost? And he starts by describing three things clustered together: a white spider, on top of a white flower, holding a dead white moth. And he thinks the combination of these things is really creepy because they all make him think about death.”

  “‘Assorted characters of death and blight,’” I quoted, and as soon as I said this, Dev’s glowing face glowed harder, brighter, eyes starry and a crimson stain running down the centers of his cheeks, and I felt
as proud as if I’d written the words myself.

  “Right, right, so you know it! Awesome! And then the poem starts to wonder how these three things that aren’t usually white—because that kind of flower is always blue—ended up together, and at the end, the poem can’t decide what’s worse: the idea of malevolent forces out there, um, ‘a design of darkness’ or the idea that it’s just an ugly coincidence, like there’s no plan out there at all. There’s just randomness.”

  He paused, new thoughts flickering over his face and being born inside his dark blue eyes, then took a bite of couscous, chewing and swallowing it carefully. If Dev could rush along full tilt, his ideas zipping ahead, it seemed he could also slow down and allow a thought to form. I could almost see it forming, folding and pleating itself, like origami paper, into something intricate and surprising.

  “So all that’s a big idea,” he continued finally. “But you know what? Maybe it’s not just a poem about an idea. I think it’s a poem about a person, too. One individual, human guy.”

  “You do?” I asked, truly intrigued. In fact, I was as intrigued as I’d been in a long time, intrigued and comfortable, both. Ollie’s tend-and-befriend theory didn’t include a word about discussing poetry with a teenage boy, but it should have. I felt as entirely at home in that moment as I had anywhere outside my own house.

  “Yeah,” said Dev. “If I’d found those three white things together, I know I wouldn’t have thought all that stuff. I wouldn’t have thought it was dark or about death. I bet I would’ve thought it was cool. Something amazing. Especially how the genes of the flower carried some mutation that made it different from the others. Because without mutations, there’s no evolution, right?”