The Precious One Read online

  Afterward, in the sedate dressing room, she bestowed hoots, high fives, and bear hugs on us all. Coming from anyone else, this would likely have gone over like a ton of bricks, but because it was Trillium, we felt something akin to blessed. When she turned to me, caught both my hands in hers, and said, “Your ankles and feet are so gorgeous, they make me want to lie down and cry. Will you have coffee?,” it didn’t occur to me to say anything but, “Yes!”

  That coffee led to more coffee, and then drinks, and dinners, and at every get-together, we talked, mostly about Trillium. Not because she was tedious or self-centered, but because at the particular moment I met her, when it came to the story of her life, Trillium was a woman on fire. This hadn’t always been so. For most of her adult life, Trillium had never talked much about her past.

  “It wasn’t because of shame,” she was quick to tell me, resting one long-nailed hand on my arm, “but because I was so softhearted about it. It was so much mine, like a child.”

  But then there came what she refers to as “The Dark Night of the Orange” (which became the title of the introductory chapter of her book), the winter night on which, after decades of devout citrus avoidance, she had come home from a boring date to find a package on her doorstep, a thank-you gift from a student for whom she’d written a letter of recommendation. The box was packed with navel oranges, a dozen, each tucked tenderly inside its individual square cardboard nest of paper grass. They were perfect, softball sized, and so profoundly orange they seemed to give off their own light.

  “They were still cold from sitting on my porch all day. And all I can say is that it came over me that I had to eat one. I couldn’t not.”

  One bite, that first brilliant burst on her tongue, and there it was, all of it, in full color and surround sound, beginning with Trillium at three years old in the orange grove, screaming inside a cloud of bees.

  Her story filled her; she teemed with it. Two days later, she came to her first ballet class (as a child, she had always wanted to take ballet, had fashioned tutus out of every available material, trash bags, newspapers), and met me, and handed over, in great gleaming swaths, the story of her life. To say we were bonding doesn’t cover it; we were bound: she couldn’t not tell and I couldn’t not hear. It was like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” except that no birds were killed, and the telling was nothing but beautiful for the teller and the listener.

  I laughed. I cried. Sometimes, hours or days after I’d last seen Trillium, some tiny, jewel-colored piece of story would come winging toward me out of the blue, and I would laugh or cry again.

  The story itself was classic Americana, a gritty, sublime, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps tale, punctuated by moments of terror, of heartbreak, of joy and luck and shining grace. Her mother, Elena, was a migrant fruit picker, sixteen years old when Trillium was born; her father was—if you can believe it—the son of a plantation owner, a college kid named Packham Boyd who got Elena pregnant over fall break and then went back to school without a backward glance.

  Through a combination of smarts, looks, audacity, luck, and an ineffable iridescent effervescence that I would come to call Trilliuminosity, Trill had scratched, scrambled, finessed, floated, and earned her way from fruit picker to Ivy Leaguer to bond trader to revered university professor and inspirational speaker to—and here’s where I came in—bestselling writer.

  Her story was good. Supergood. Much better than most, but one morning, about two days after she’d finished, after all those hours of telling—and the hours stretched over months—I realized, with a jolt, that it wasn’t so different, on its face, from others we’ve all heard. Rags to riches. The triumph of the human spirit. Et cetera. What made the story special, what made it thrilling and irresistible was Trillium herself: the cadence of her throaty voice, her leaping mind, the way she’d throw words out like handfuls of confetti one minute, and select them, one by careful one, the next. Trillium spoke with her whole body; sentences shot out the tips of her long fingers, ran off her like rain.

  I told her to write her story down. I was a writer myself, a freelance business writer and editor. I worked for corporations and law firms, mostly, got occasional work from one of the nearby universities or hospitals. It was a far cry from the kind of writing I’d always hoped to do, but, honestly, I liked it. There was something satisfying about taking raw, messy material, no matter how bland it might be, and giving it shape, rhythm, clarity, a dash of razzle-dazzle. On good days, I like to think I even gave it a little poetry. It was something that had always made me happy, putting words on a page in an order that pleased me. Even writing grocery lists was a small, contained joy; sometimes, I’d add items I didn’t need—lemons, figs, buttermilk—just because I liked the words, and then I’d buy them because they were on the list and that’s what the list was for.

  But Trillium, as it turned out, with her gold mine of a story and her gift for bringing it to life, hated to write, had only ever done so in school, under duress, and at the last minute.

  “There’s nobody there,” she groaned, referring to the writing process. “It’s so dull and lifeless and cold, like the tundra.”

  “Actually, there’s plenty of life on the tundra, if you look,” I told her.

  “You! You and your Planet Earth. Like what, for example?”

  It’s true; I was and am an enormous fan of the BBC series, while Trillium was a die-hard speciesist, adored almost everything that involved people, no matter how questionable (theme parks, reality television, jury duty), and almost nothing that did not.

  “Shrubs,” I offered in my best David Attenborough voice. “And sedge. A veritable ocean of sedge. So much sedge that the sedge can be seen from space.”

  In the end, she talked; I wrote. When I brought her the first chapter, the one about the bees, she read it, then sat down on the floor and burst into tears.

  After a couple of minutes, when she could speak, she said, “It’s like living it all over again. It’s sheer and unadulterated perfect gorgeousness. It’s genius! It’s me—it’s so me!”

  She wiped her eyes, caught her breath, and then said, “But the pancakes, the ones at the hospital, they were blueberry, not chocolate chip. Big, fat, purple splotches in the pancakes. I thought I told you that. Purple. And, oh! You need to include how the epinephrine made me shake, my whole body trembling like a leaf. Not like a leaf! When do leaves actually tremble? Like something else. Something trembly. I’m sure you’ll think of it.”

  This would turn out to be our process: she talked, I wrote, she read, cried, gushed, called me a genius, swore my writing was perfection, and then ordered changes. It was exhilarating. I had never loved any job more.

  I discovered that I had a gift for capturing people with words. Wait, capturing is wrong. More like channeling. I might have been a ghostwriter, but I was the one who was haunted. When I wrote, I was ten times more Trillium than I was myself. When I got stuck, I exercised more patience than I had maybe ever, waiting for the right question to come to me (What was the best gift you ever got as a kid? Who is your favorite March sister?). When it did, I’d ask Trillium the question and her answer would unstick me, reveal the path I needed to take.

  Trillium’s book sold like hotcakes, stayed on the New York Times bestseller list enough weeks to choke a goat, as Trillium liked to say. After that, I ditched the business writing and became a ghostwriter for real, and the right question became my secret weapon, my ace in the hole. It never stopped amazing me, how the tiniest fact, once discovered, could pop open a window with a vista-sized view of a person’s inner world. How you could learn, for example, that a person had had six dogs in his lifetime, all named Boxer, even though none of them was a boxer, and—boom—there you were, standing smack in the middle of at least an acre of the man’s soul.

  But getting back to rule number five of the follow-up to her memoir: Trillium Shippey’s Life RULES!

  The second after I finished telling Trillium, in one, long manic rush of words
, about my impending visit to my father’s house and all the accompanying anxieties, layer upon layer of anxiety, an anxiety trifle, she said, “Okay, I’ll be at your house in five minutes. Meanwhile, here is what you need to do.”

  Her voice dropped, got soft and rhythmic, like a rocking cradle. “Close your eyes and draw a magic circle in the sand. Inside the circle are clear air, sunlight, birds singing. Nothing bad can enter the circle, not one bad memory, not one fear for the future, not one regret, not one perceived personal shortcoming.”

  “Thank you for ‘perceived,’” I told her.

  “You’re welcome. Be quiet. Now, step into the circle, really picture yourself doing it. One leg, the other leg. And once you’re in the center, simply be. Root yourself. Let the peace soak into you, all the way into the marrow of your bones. Soak and soak and soak. Is it soaking in?”

  And, you know, it really sort of was.

  The next thing I knew, we were at the mall.

  While it may be hard to maintain a sense of bone-marrow-saturated peace at malls, I mostly like them. They suit me, particularly as I am a mission shopper. If it’s a black dress I need, I start at one end of the mall and go store to store, methodically trying on one dress after the next, leaving no stone unturned, spurred ever onward by the possibility that the perfect black dress, the oh-my-God-you-are-the-spitting-image-of-Audrey-Hepburn dress (even though Audrey would naturally never spit) might be waiting, a shining sleeve of night sky on a hanger, in the very next shop.

  But going shopping with Trillium is something else altogether. “Shopping” is far too prosaic a word. She’s more like one of those people who lead expeditions into rain forests, seeking out new kinds of orchids or thumb-sized lacquered tree frogs or cures for cancer. It’s amazing, how she’ll walk into a store, zero in on, say, a rhinestone headband, lift it to eye level, gingerly, using just her fingertips, and begin to describe its virtues, the individually clasped stones—five prongs!—the woven silver vines of metal, all in such hushed, wonderfilled tones that you forget that the thing costs $11.99, that you are standing in a teenybopper store with a display of Cat in the Hat hats to your right and boy band lunch boxes to your left. All you see is a tiny thing of beauty, a delicate, dew-jeweled spiderweb of loveliness.

  The mission was to find a father/daughter/stepsister/stepmother (although, as always, Caro felt like an afterthought, someone I had to remind myself was part of the picture) reunion outfit. I wouldn’t go so far as to get an entire new wardrobe. Wilson would have to see me in jeans eventually, despite his bone-deep loathing of them. But the initial meeting outfit seemed especially crucial. I needed to look accomplished, pretty, smart, grown-up, offhandedly chic, emotionally independent, and as though I weren’t trying at all.

  The first thing Trillium found for me was a pair of leather shorts. And while they weren’t especially short and weren’t especially tight and could indeed be worn with black tights and a silk blouse, and while I do like to wear clothing that shows off my legs, since they seem to be the part of my body that is best hanging in there, the leather shorts were leather and shorts, and, as I reminded Trillium, my father had once, not so long ago, called me “whorish.”

  “Seventeen years ago,” singsonged Trillium, turning down the waistband. “Look at how immaculately they’re lined. You don’t see a lining like that every day. And the seams!”

  “Lining, seams, blah blah blah. No.”

  “Oh, you!” She gave me a grandma-style cheek pinch. “How about this: you forget about pleasing him? Let your outfit scream, ‘Go to hell, ya big bossy galoot!’”

  I did a little internal squirming at this because, obviously, Trillium was right. “Go to hell, ya big bossy galoot” had always been the appropriate response to Wilson, and I hadn’t given it anywhere close to often enough. When I had, there’d always been a thrill of satisfaction—and a lot of high-fiving from Marcus. But the thought of doing it now, with the anxiety trifle growing more layered by the minute, just made me tired.

  “Don’t want to give the man another heart attack,” I mumbled.

  Trillium raised an eyebrow at me.

  I sighed. “Okay. For the time being, I’m in path-of-least-resistance mode.”

  Trillium considered this for a moment, then nodded. “So be it.”

  We found some narrow, charcoal gray, almost black (“but much wittier than black” according to Trill) pants made of some kind of smooth, non-itchy, stretch wool (“like wool when it dreams it’s silk; this puts the ‘fab’ in fabric!”) and a loose ruby-red cashmere sweater with an open neck (“perfect for the dark-haired girl who what she lacks in cup size makes up for in collarbone gorgeousness”). After I swore on my life to wear a certain pair of flat-soled, black, knee-high boots that Trillium had bought for me for my last birthday (she has a habit of giving gifts so extravagant that you must protest, even though they are so perfect that you sort of hate to), I said, “Are we allowed to eat now?” And we were.

  Never one to mince words, as soon as we had placed our order, Trillium leaned in and said, “Okay, let’s talk about ‘whorish.’”

  The waiter, a skinny handsome boy with Tin Tin hair, began, with grave nonchalance, to whistle, never taking his eyes off his notebook, before walking away, “Moon River” trailing in the air behind him.

  I sighed. “Wilson never name-calls. He just uses hideous adjectives and stabs people with them.”

  Trillium made a gnat-swatting motion. “Pfft! Who cares about Wilson? What I want to know is: who was the boy?”

  For a few seconds, I ceased to breathe. Then, I began whistling “Moon River.”

  “Nooooooo you don’t,” said Trill. “Where there’s a father saying ‘whorish,’ there’s a boy. Spill it, missy.”

  I opened my mouth. Shut it.

  Trillium reached for my hand. “Hold on. The boy wasn’t a bad one, was he? He didn’t abuse you or something?”

  I shook my head. “He was good.”

  My mouth was dry. My heart was marbles in a tin can that someone was shaking.

  “Name?” asked Trillium.

  “Ben Ransom.” The tin can shook harder. Clatter, clatter, clatter. After all this time, all it took was saying his name.

  “Tall or short?”

  “Tallish.”

  “Outstanding facial feature?”

  I shut my eyes, and there he was. I made my way down his face. Dark hair; dark brows; black eyes; fair, flushy skin; cheekbones tilting up; nose tilting down; deep, v-shaped divot in his upper lip.

  “I don’t know.” It was almost a whisper.

  I opened my eyes to see Trillium smiling.

  “So it’s like that, is it?” she said.

  I shrugged. “It was. Seventeen years ago.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  I shrugged again, shrug overkill. “You know what he looked like? He looked like a guy who should wear corduroy trousers, boots, and a fisherman sweater and maybe some kind of brown jacket, and live in Wales. Or something.”

  “You’ve been to Wales?” asked Trillium.

  “I have not been to Wales.”

  “Did he wear all those things?”

  “Of course not. He was in high school. I just mean he looked sort of, or gave the general impression of being—forget it.”

  “Windburned? Tousle haired? With those pink lips that look chapped but aren’t?”

  I stared at her.

  She did a victory dance.

  “Don’t get carried away,” I told her. “Sometimes they actually were chapped.”

  “You. Must. Tell. Me.” She signaled the waiter. “We will get wine, and then you will tell me everything!”

  In the end, I didn’t tell her everything. Apart from Marcus and my mom, I trusted no one as much as I trusted Trillium, but there were some parts of the story that had been stowed away in the dimmest, dustiest corner of my mind for so long that just thinking about pulling them out into the light of day hurt. What I ended up giving her was the story of how we met
. I told it carefully and hoped for—what’s the word I want? Synecdoche. I wanted that small part to stand for something bigger, if not the whole story of me and Ben, then the essence of it.

  And because, if you’re going to tell the story or even just part of the story of the love of your life, you should begin with solemnity and maybe even a little pomp and circumstance, I began like this: “In all my life, I’ve loved just three men. One was only a boy, so maybe he doesn’t even count, except that he did and does, and he wasn’t an ‘only’ anything, ever. He was Ben Ransom, the love of my life.”

  IT STARTED THE WAY a lot of things in tenth grade started, with Itzy Wolcraft shrieking across the cafeteria. Marcus and I had attended the same school since prekindergarten, private, paid for by Wilson but chosen by my mother, so it was a good place, tough on academics and community service but easy on things like dress code and cafeteria shrieking. In this instance, Itzy’s shrieks were so high-pitched, so nearly hysterical that they sounded first like undifferentiated noise, then, as she got closer, like an insane and vaguely Japanese chant—“Hagai aga nurshi”—before, at long last, resolving themselves into, “Hot guy at the nursery; hot guy at the nursery; hot guy at the nursery.”

  The afternoon before, Itzy had gotten in trouble for a C- on a math test and, in addition to losing her phone privileges (which happened a lot, hence her frequent episodes of piercing cafeteria gossip mongering), she had been forced to accompany her mother to Ransom’s Garden World to buy fall yard decorating supplies, “mums and pumpkins and hay and corn husky thingies and such.”

  “And I was sitting in one of those big white chairs, the wooden ones with the flat armrests, where you are in no way supposed to sit because there’s a sign saying PLEASE DO NOT SIT, when this totally beautiful wavy-haired guy just materialized from behind some rubber trees or something, and I swear to God I was paralyzed, like momentarily frozen in place, until I saw that he was wearing one of those man-aprons with RANSOM’S across the chest part and carrying a humongous pumpkin that was possibly diseased because it was totally covered with barnacles or possibly plant tumors and was completely disgusting, but luckily he had those leathery or cloth or something gloves on, which anyway I realized meant that he worked there, and so no doubt knew that I was sitting illegally, so I started to, you know, scramble to my feet, and you’ll never guess what he said.”