Belong to Me: A Novel Read online

  “Don’t tell me,” interrupted Piper. “A casserole.” Parvee Patel-Price was famous for her dinner parties, which the unsuspecting attended fearing or hoping for exotic Indian fare, curry or maybe some of that homemade cheese, and at which she invariably served American dinner-table cuisine circa 1972.

  “Baked tuna-cheddar spaghetti, God bless her, chock full of cream of mushroom soup,” said Elizabeth, grinning. “And a bag of groceries along with it, which she somehow managed to drop on the way up my front walk, just as the new hunk in town was coming back from his early-morning run. He helped her pick up the groceries and carry them in. The man was in my kitchen!”

  “Mateo,” said Piper. “Although he seems to go by Teo. Dr. Teo Sandoval. He’s an ophthalmologist.”

  “Huh,” said Elizabeth, frowning. “I heard he was an oncologist.”

  Piper flushed. Oh, she thought, oh my. She took two sips of iced tea.

  “That’s what I meant to say,” she said, finally. “I’m not sure I’d call him a hunk, though.”

  “Really? Parvee was practically hyperventilating.”

  “Oh, he’s certainly attractive. Kind of tall and model-y looking. Blondish brown hair and tan skin and green eyes. Or maybe they’re blue.” Green. Definitely green.

  Elizabeth snorted and rolled her eyes. “Oh, one of those tall, model-y types.”

  “You know what I mean. Almost too pretty? And sort of exotic. Not my type.” She shrugged, dismissively. It was true, at least officially. Her official type had always been WASPy and solid and corporate, even in high school, even in junior high. Men like Kyle, whose handsomeness was foursquare and daily. Unofficially, secretly, her tastes leaned toward the gorgeous and glowing. Her secret men had always been formidably beautiful, another quality that marked them as happily separate from her real, day-lit life.

  Piper felt unsettled by the idea that Cornelia’s husband had triggered the memory of the ophthalmologist’s back. But the ophthalmologist and all the others were from a very long time ago. It wasn’t as though she wanted them now. It wasn’t as though she were jealous of anything Cornelia had.

  “Is his wife beautiful, too?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Oh, she’s got a pretty face, I guess,” said Piper, her tone under-cutting the assessment. “But she’s the size of an eight-year-old and built like one, too, and her eyes are too big for her face, and her head’s too big for her body.”

  “A Powerpuff Girl!” crowed Elizabeth.

  “Exactly,” said Piper. She loved it when Elizabeth talked smack about people. They looked at each other and burst into giggles.

  When their laughter dwindled and Piper was wiping her eyes, she found Elizabeth smiling at her, some of that wistful sweetness from earlier creeping back into her gaze.

  “I love you, Pipe.” Elizabeth almost whispered it. Piper held her breath. She and Elizabeth did not say “I love you” to each other.

  “The cancer’s spreading.” Elizabeth said the words as though they were any words. Almost before she had finished saying them, Piper was shaking her head, firmly.

  Piper stopped shaking her head, let her breath out, and said coolly, “The cancer is not spreading.”

  “Piper.”

  “Did Dr. Firestone tell you that? The man is seventy if he’s a day. They took out your ovaries, Elizabeth, and your uterus. Remember?” Elizabeth flinched, but Piper wasn’t about to stop talking.

  “There’s nowhere for the cancer to spread from or to. You’ve been on chemo for months.” Piper felt her voice getting louder and harder. “The cancer is gone.”

  “They did a scan. I had pain in my hip, so they did a scan.” There was a pleading note in Elizabeth’s voice now.

  “I knew you should’ve gone to Penn. Or Hopkins! What were you thinking, dealing with these local yokels?” Piper stood up, nodding her head decisively. “We are calling Hopkins today!”

  “Piper.” Elizabeth closed her eyes. “Piper, please sit down.”

  “So, tell me,” Piper said, acidly. “What does your Dr. Firestone propose to do about this?”

  There was a long silence. Elizabeth leaned her head back and looked at the ceiling. When she looked back at Piper, there were tears on her face. Oh, stop it, Piper thought. You stop that.

  “It’s a team, Piper. They have a cancer team. And they said we could try a more powerful protocol along with radiation. But—” She broke off and took a deep, sobbing breath.

  “But what?” snapped Piper.

  “They said it might buy me a few months.” Elizabeth’s voice was suddenly quiet and steady. “They said the side effects could be severe. I told them no.”

  Piper felt as if her breath had been vacuumed out of her body with a whoosh. In her chest, where the air used to be, a bird was beating its wings as hard as it could. She tried to speak and, after a moment, discovered that she was opening and shutting her mouth. Like a goddamn fish, she thought, like a goddamn fish out of water. She clamped her lips shut.

  Elizabeth sat perfectly still and upright in her chair. The circles under her eyes were as dark as bruises, and Piper had a crazy urge to get her makeup bag out of her purse and cover them up. The dark circles, Elizabeth’s thinness, the way Elizabeth sat, waiting for her to say something, all of it made Piper furious.

  “Oh, so you’re giving up? Is that it?” Mean. Piper felt so mean. She started to walk out of the room.

  “Piper,” said Elizabeth in a voice that was almost a wail. When Piper turned toward her, she saw that Elizabeth’s hand was stretched out, reaching for her.

  “Do I have to remind you that you have two children who need you?” said Piper. She stood in the doorway to the room and pointed a finger at Elizabeth. “You are such a coward, Elizabeth. And you are not giving up.”

  Piper walked as fast as she could to Elizabeth’s front door, and before the door had even slammed shut behind her, she was running.

  THREE

  …[T]he human species is by no means the pinnacle of evolution. Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress. Natural selection is simply the process by which life-forms change to suit the myriad opportunities afforded by the physical environment and by other life-forms.

  —MATT RIDLEY,

  Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters

  Dev Tremain wasn’t Sarah Chang or Gregory R. Smith or Toby “Karl” Rosenberg. He sure as hell wasn’t Pablo Picasso or Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart or Bobby Fischer. And forget about A.E., whose name he couldn’t even bring himself to say because it was one he’d been called way too many times in way too many tones of voice. Privately, Dev felt kind of sorry for A.E. because he’d gone from being the flesh-and-blood guy who pretty much figured out what made the whole physical universe tick to being a metaphor: the generic, universal symbol for genius. Like flesh and blood didn’t matter. Like the theory of relativity wasn’t enough.

  Dev Tremain wasn’t a genius, not a genius-genius, although from the way Lake was acting, you wouldn’t have known that. Lake Tremain was Dev’s mother, and from the way she’d loaded up the car and taken off like a bat out of Hades, you’d think he was Sarah, Gregory R., and Toby “Karl” rolled into one; you’d think he’d gotten into Juilliard at the age of six, graduated from college at the age of thirteen, and learned to write Japanese from a sake bottle before he turned five years old. Those kids were freaks ( Japanese from a sake bottle? A sake bottle?) and Dev wasn’t a freak, definitely not freak material, not even close.

  When he thought about those kids being freaks, though, he immediately also thought, No offense, because those kids couldn’t help being so freakishly smart or gifted or whatever, the same way Dev couldn’t help being highly, but unfreakishly, smart. He didn’t know how it had happened to them, but he did know that not one of them had asked for it.

  But at the moment, as he sat in the backseat of his mom’s 1988 Honda Civic, thirteen years old, deep into his Discman, Green Day pounding into his head, fingers dru
mming hard on the book in front of him, more than smart or anything else, Dev was mad. It had been a pretty rotten year for him. A crap year. Seventh grade. Seventh grade was at least partly why he and his mother were wherever they were—Kentucky, maybe?—instead of back in their little apartment in their little nowhere California town.

  Even though Dev had lived most of his life in that town, leaving it was not what made him angry. Dev was glad to leave, more than glad. The truth was that it had taken a full one hundred miles for Dev to finally unknot, a hundred miles for him to breathe like a normal person again. He’d just been sitting there in the car when he’d felt this opening sensation, like there was suddenly more space between each of his ribs, and although he hadn’t changed position, his slouch suddenly felt like a slouch, true and easy. So he’d looked up to check how far they’d gone and, weirdly enough, it’d been one hundred miles exactly.

  Dev amused himself with the idea that the town, or more specifically, Dev’s school had a kind of atmosphere of tension and dread around it that stretched out a hundred miles in every direction and that Dev had escaped, punched out of that atmosphere like a rocket into clear, breathable air. This wasn’t true, of course, although Dev didn’t rule out that there might be some real reason for the one hundred miles, and that if Dev had more information about space and time or maybe about physiology, he might be able to figure the reason out.

  Anyway, Dev would love it if he never saw that town again. He wasn’t mad at Lake for taking them out of the town. He wasn’t even mad that she’d given him less than two weeks’ notice that they were leaving, because if she’d tossed his duffel bag to him in the middle of dinner one night, said, “We’re out of here,” and headed for the door, he would’ve gladly gulped down his milk and gone.

  Dev was mad, Dev was fuming because his mother wouldn’t give him a straight and complete answer to his question of why they were leaving, and he was fuming because she wouldn’t give him any answer at all as to why, with the whole country spread out before them, they were making a beeline for some suburb of Philadelphia, as small and random a black dot as there was on the entire map. For Dev, the more mysterious and complex an idea the better; he loved unpacking a difficult theory, working to understand how it all fit together. But Dev wanted two things in the world to be as utterly straightforward and unmysterious as possible: one was music, the other was his mother.

  Dev glanced down at the open book on his lap, at the sentence under his thrumming fingers: “Evolution has no pinnacle and there is no such thing as evolutionary progress.” The music in his head didn’t grow fainter, but it slipped slightly into the background to clear out a space for the sentence. Evolution, now there was an idea you could really sink your teeth into. Dev’s list of heroes was fairly constantly rearranging itself, but Charles Darwin was definitely up there, way up. What thrilled Dev about Darwin was that he hadn’t employed esoteric equations or fancy gadgets to accomplish what he’d accomplished, but had done what all human beings do, more or less. He’d walked around the world looking at the things in it, but because of what he’d chosen to look at and because of the kind of attention he’d paid, he’d come up with an idea so rich and dazzling, it had made everyone see life in a new way.

  But if you tried to trace Dev’s seventh-grade trouble to a single source, that source would be Darwin. To be precise, the source would be the idea that lay strong and still under Dev’s beating fingers, that evolution wasn’t moving toward any pinnacle or toward anything at all. But blaming that idea wasn’t entirely fair because trouble had been waiting for Dev; he’d felt it as soon as he’d walked through the door of his new junior high. Trouble had been like a ten-ton sleeping monster curled up somewhere in the vicinity of Dev’s locker; the theory of evolution had just been the noise that woke it up.

  It had happened at the start of the second week of school, the first week of real school, since the first calendar week had been a combination of getting-to-know-you games, passing out gym uniforms, and seething chaos. On Monday of the second week of school, Mr. Tripp had entered Dev’s biology class, tossed his books dramatically on the desk in front of him, turned his back to the class, and written EVOLUTION on the chalkboard in letters nearly a foot high.

  Then Mr. Tripp had spun around and demanded, “Do you people know why we can sit in this room today and talk about the theory of evolution?”

  Dev considered saying something about the separation of church and state, but decided that Mr. Tripp probably wanted to answer his own question.

  Mr. Tripp turned around and smacked the word on the board, then boomed, “Evolution!”

  Like the rest of the kids in the room, Dev wasn’t sure if Mr. Tripp was answering his own question or if he was just repeating part of the question, so, like the rest of the kids, Dev kept quiet.

  “Evolution is why we’re able to sit here and discuss evolution!” Mr. Tripp went on. “Monkeys can’t discuss evolution. Goldfish can’t discuss evolution. You know why?”

  Of course they all knew why. Everyone knew why goldfish couldn’t discuss evolution. Probably every kid in the room, at least every kid who’d stayed tuned in up to this point, was listing the reasons in her or his head: hard to talk underwater, no books about evolution available to goldfish. Just for starters. But no one opened her or his mouth. Clearly, the guy was on a roll; no one was stupid enough to get in his way. Yet.

  “Because they haven’t evolved enough! Human beings are the most evolved animals on the planet—and we are animals, make no mistake!” Mr. Tripp’s finger was stabbing the air and his forehead was beginning to glisten. He took a deep breath. “Human beings are the pinnacle of evolution!”

  And even now, even after everything that had happened afterward, Dev was glad he’d ignored all the signals—and the signals were as loud and clear as spinning red lights and that repeated foghorn-type blaring that Dev assumed happens in nuclear plants at the start of a meltdown—that he should keep his mouth completely, possibly permanently shut. Even now, he was glad he’d spoken up. Because this was Darwin they were talking about.

  Still, he had hesitated before raising his hand because he’d felt a little bad for Mr. Tripp. What Dev would figure out very soon thereafter was that all that bluster and drama, that bad imitation of Robin Williams in one of his inspiring-mentor roles stemmed from the fact that Mr. Tripp was a self-important, histrionic, humorless jerk. A class A windbag. But Dev didn’t know this, yet. Just then, the possibility still existed that Mr. Tripp was honestly trying to inspire them, and one look around the room told Dev that none of the students in it was going to be jumping on top of a desk to spout poetry anytime soon, himself included. Still, this was science class. If no one spoke up, all the kids who were paying attention to Mr. Tripp would walk out of science class thinking something was scientific fact that wasn’t.

  Dev raised his hand, although from the startled, pained expression on Mr. Tripp’s face you would’ve thought Dev had thrown a spitball at him instead.

  “Do we have a question?” asked Mr. Tripp.

  “Well, not really a question,” said Dev. “But I don’t think that’s right, what you said.”

  “Excuse me?” Mr. Tripp walked around from behind his desk and stood just a foot or two in front of Dev. Dev noticed that Mr. Tripp’s short-sleeved button-down shirt was getting dark under the arms.

  “I mean, definitely, the part’s right about humans being the only species that can formulate an idea like the theory of evolution. If Darwin had been a goldfish, forget about it.” Dev smiled at Mr. Tripp, as a few other kids in the class laughed, but to put it mildly, the smile and the laughter didn’t lighten up the atmosphere in the room. Dev felt his own palms starting to sweat, but he kept talking.

  “Well, you can sort of see how people might think that humans are the pinnacle of evolution because we have high reasoning and creativity and supercomplex brains. I think a lot of people think that, in fact.”

  “But not you,” said Mr. Tripp sarca
stically. “And you would be?”

  “Dev,” said Dev, suddenly feeling exhausted. “But, okay, the goal of evolution isn’t complexity or high reasoning. Evolution is about having certain traits that enable you to survive changes by adapting to them, period. That’s a huge simplification, but if you want to talk about winners and losers in evolution, the winners are the ones who survive change, not the ones who have the most complex brains or who communicate with language. Or whatever.”

  Now, every single person in the room was paying attention, and not the kind of attention people pay to someone who is saying something interesting. The kind of attention people pay to the guy who falls in the shark tank.

  “And you know this because you spent your summer reading The Origin of the Species?” Mr. Tripp had raised his eyebrow and looked around the room at the other kids, as though they were all sharing a joke. But what Mr. Tripp said hit a nerve for Dev, a big nerve, and suddenly he surged way past caring what they all thought. For the record, he wouldn’t stay past caring; but at that moment, he’d only been able to think about Darwin.

  “No, see, that’s just it. It’s not The Origin of the Species. Not ‘the species.’ Just species. All species. It’s not about us. We think we’re the center of everything because we’re smarter than other animals, but even that’s not fair because we invented the whole idea of ‘smart’ and we decided smart means the thing that we are. When you think about it, whales are smarter than we are when it comes to surviving in the deep ocean, right?”

  Dev had felt himself getting increasingly worked up, and some small part of him was aware that getting worked up about biology was not a way to make friends, not in the seventh grade anyway. But some things were more important than people liking you. Darwin, humility, and respect. Dev had been thinking about all this stuff a lot, and as corny as it sounded, he felt a kind of team spirit, a connection with all the survivors, with every living thing that had gotten this far. Team spirit mattered, right? Dev believed that it did.