The Precious One Read online

  It was all I could do not to shoot my father a look of surprise at this, since, at his last appointment, his doctor had told him that he could resume moderate physical activity whenever he felt strong enough. This probably did not include raking leaves, of course, but if my father had ever once raked leaves under the fall sunshine or any other sunshine, I’d never seen it. The yard service did that. But after a second or two, I recognized the true message behind my father’s not quite true statement: his personal health or lack thereof was none of Eustacia’s damn business. Bully for you, Daddy, I thought. Way to shut her up!

  Except that she didn’t shut up. Eustacia sat down in the armchair next to my father’s bed and yammered on about the arrangements she’d had to make in order to be there, the book she’d put on hold, the redirection of her mail to her mother’s address, the college student she’d hired to house-sit. As if she were put out! As if she were the one doing the favor! Well, if she expected my father to thank her for going to the trouble of coming, she was very much mistaken.

  “If your point is that you have a life, Eustacia,” said my father with twinkly-eyed dryness, “consider it taken.”

  The odd thing is that she didn’t get mad at this. She just paused a moment, regarding him, and then laughed.

  “You know, I suppose that was my point,” she said.

  “And you are probably next going to ask how long I would like you to stay.”

  “I may have been leading up to that,” she said, smiling.

  “I think we should, as the saying goes, play that one by ear,” said my father.

  Eustacia’s face lost a bit of its geniality, but her tone stayed light.

  “I’ll only play until I’m ready to stop,” she said. “But I can be flexible, for the moment.”

  “Good,” said my father. “Now, in terms of your lodgings, there are two options: one of the guest rooms or the pool house.”

  “Pool house?”

  Ha! My father despised questions like “Pool house?”

  “It is by the pool,” he said.

  “Clever place for it,” said Eustacia.

  Sarcasm. She dared!

  “I think you will find that it is rather nicely appointed. There is a full bath and a small but functional kitchen. A daybed, a sofa, a television, a tile-top table with four chairs.”

  Ooh, he was selling it! Telling her, in so many words, that she was an intruder, an interloper, that she did not belong under the same roof as his family. It took everything I had to mask my satisfaction!

  Then, this happened.

  Eustacia said, “Not the white, tile-top table from the old sunporch?”

  My father said, “Yes, but the chairs are new. You will remember how the old ones were rickety even then.”

  I could not have been more stunned if he’d hit me.

  At this moment, my mother appeared in the doorway. I saw her before the other two did, her startled glance, her lips pressing together in disapproval. She didn’t think I should be there. She thought I should’ve led Eustacia to my father’s room and then gone to my own to do homework as I’d told her I would. Maybe I shouldn’t have lied. But I knew she wouldn’t understand—how could she not understand?—that someone had to stand guard.

  “Well, this is nice,” she said, brightly.

  “Please join us,” said Eustacia, standing.

  As if the room belonged to her.

  “No, no,” said my mother. “I was just looking for Willow. Willow, I’d love to have your help with something downstairs.”

  At this, I froze, panic rising in my chest. Leave? Oh, but I couldn’t leave! No, no, no, no. I scrambled around for a way to turn my mother down without seeming rude. I couldn’t seem rude to my mother in front of Eustacia. But I would leave her alone with my father over my own dead body.

  Eustacia turned her face away from my mother and, even though she gave me no more than a quick glance, I saw something come into her eyes at the sight of me, a softness I didn’t understand. It was there and gone so fast I might have imagined it, as she turned back to Muddy and said, “Actually, would you mind showing me to the pool house first? It sounds like the perfect place for me to stay.”

  “Oh, of course!” said Muddy. She turned to my father and her eyes turned tender, as they always did when she looked at him. “Do you need anything, darling?”

  My father smiled and said, “I am content, Caro. Please do show Eustacia to the pool house.”

  Eustacia knows she doesn’t belong, I thought triumphantly. She knows that all the stupid tile-table, sunporch memories in the world don’t make her belong under our roof.

  “Nice to see you, Wilson,” said Eustacia, briskly. “I’ll talk to you later.”

  Go, I thought, be gone! She almost made it out the door. She was two steps away. But before she was quite gone, my father said, “Eustacia. Once you are settled in, perhaps tomorrow morning after breakfast, I would like to speak with you.”

  Good God. Tomorrow morning after breakfast, I would be at school.

  “Oh,” said Eustacia.

  Her eyes flickered in my direction.

  “Tomorrow morning,” she said, shrugging. “Or afternoon. No need to make a formal appointment now that I’m here, right?”

  “Morning,” said my father, firmly. “I have something rather important to propose.”

  “You do?” I blurted out.

  My father despised questions like “You do?” He ignored me.

  “Shall we say nine thirty?” he asked Eustacia.

  Say no, say no, say no, say no.

  No one ever said no to Wilson Cleary; saying no to him was almost always the wrongheaded thing to do; but I knew that if anyone could, if anyone would, it would be Eustacia.

  But Eustacia sighed and—damn her—said, “Yes.”

  WHAT I MISSED MOST about my old life was that there had never been dread, not true, blue, ice-in-your-chest dread. There hadn’t even been much worry. Mostly, my old life was smooth as a silk, each hour, day, week slipping easily into the next.

  The flip side of the old life was that there had been also almost no eagerness. Wait, I don’t mean that. Sure, I’d looked forward to things: new books, field trips with my parents, summer tomatoes, running at dusk, snow. But when everything is pleasant, nothing leaps out of the darkness, flashing silver like the moon, and announces itself as extraordinary. Nothing dazzles you so much that you get short of breath wanting more of it. To employ a cliché, what I learned is that in order to have a silver lining, you need clouds, and my new life had plenty of those, clouds upon clouds upon clouds.

  What my new life also had—cue the fireworks and the soaring music!—was lunch with Mr. Insley. The silverest silver lining you would ever wish for.

  The story of our lunches began where such stories often begin: at rock bottom—except that, since Eustacia had yet to drop into my world like a ticking bomb, I only thought it was rock bottom. Still, it was bleak enough and maybe the bleakest part was the setting: the east wing stairwell of the Webley School.

  As I may have mentioned, Webley was a private school, although I found that no one called it that. They called it, and schools like it, “independent,” no doubt because “private” sounded too exclusive (which of course Webley was) and also somehow full of secrets (it was that, too), whereas “independent” conjured images of freedom and power. Ha ha ha groan. But despite its independent state, its high-tech, high-ceilinged classrooms, and its noble, oak-paneled, marble-floored foyer, Webley harbored, within its bowels, pockets of pure desolation, and the worst spot of all was the east wing stairwell, stuffed away behind an unmarked door in the darkest corner of the main building. A word to the wise: if you ever want to create a truly grisly, soul-killing place, choose Band-Aid beige with black freckles for its floor, paint its walls smoker’s lung gray, and make it smell like cherry mouth rinse at the dentist’s office. Such a place is no place to be; certainly, it is no place to sit down and eat food, but that is exactly what I wa
s doing when Mr. Insley found me.

  Truth: I wasn’t just eating, I was shoveling forkfuls of lamb vindaloo and brown rice into my mouth as fast as I could shovel. I couldn’t help it, I tell you. I was hungry! It was nearly two in the afternoon, and, as had become my habit, I’d spent lunch period in the library where eating was strictly forbidden. Most days, I could wait until after school to eat. Stick-to-your-bones breakfasts were part of our household religion, but that morning, I’d slept through my alarm clock, and my mother, after a bad night, had slept through hers. Consequently, I’d run out of the house without eating a thing. So, after finishing my history test with time to spare, I asked to go to the bathroom, tucked my lunch bag unobtrusively under my arm, and made a break for the east wing stairwell, praying hard that no one would walk in and find me.

  I was nearly finished when: footsteps in the hallway, door creaking, a man saying, “Willow?”

  Even though I knew, in an instant, his voice, his scuffed brown wingtips, his very pant cuffs, I didn’t raise my head to look at him. How could I ever look at him again? To be caught mid-gobble, hunched like an animal over my sad thermal food container in the ugliest stairwell on the planet? Oh, I wanted to die. Instead, I did something much worse. I swallowed my food, stabbed my fork into my vindaloo, covered my face with my hands, and burst into tears.

  I couldn’t have blamed him if he’d turned tail and run. I hoped he would, in fact. But he sat down next to me on the step, put a firm hand on my quaking shoulder, gave it a comradely squeeze, and whispered, “Courage, Willow, courage!,” which was so kind that I cried even harder. Once the waterworks began to slow, Mr. Insley said, “Skipped lunch, did you?”

  I choked out, “The cafeteria—I-I can’t face it.”

  I was right on the edge of telling all: how Bec hated me with a fiery hate and made other people hate me, how one time, when I sat down, an entire lunch table had gotten up in blank-faced unison and walked away, how those who didn’t hate me felt sorry for me and how their pity stuck in my throat like a bone. But, as socially hopeless as I was, I knew enough about teenagers to know that there was nothing on God’s green earth more despicable than a tattletale.

  “No, of course you can’t,” Mr. Insley said, matter-of-factly. “What could be duller than a high school cafeteria? I find the teacher’s lounge equally numbing. Which is why I eat my lunch alone at my desk. The company’s better by far, if I do say so myself.”

  I smiled at this, wiped my face, and finally got up my nerve to look him in the eye. Mr. Insley’s face was so close to mine that I could see a place on his chin he’d missed while shaving and the tiny dark blue flecks in his light blue eyes. A little shiver of alarm ran through me. At least, I thought it was alarm right then. Later, I would realize that it couldn’t have been. Probably, it was just surprise; in my sheltered life, I had seen so few faces that close up. I just wasn’t used to it. Anyway, two seconds later, Mr. Insley was taking his hand from my shoulder and standing up, and everything was normal.

  “Listen,” he said. “Not that this stairwell isn’t a lovely dining spot, but should you ever decide to make a change, I’d be honored to have you eat with me in my classroom. I believe we share the same lunch period.”

  It was such a nice thing to offer that I almost felt like crying again, but I cleared my throat and said, jokingly, “Careful! I might just take you up on that.”

  His smile was so convivial that if it didn’t exactly beautify that stairwell, it at least sloughed away a couple layers of hideousness, and it fell upon my upturned face like a ray of sun.

  “I sincerely hope you do, Willow,” he said.

  And so it began. The happiness and the looking forward to the happiness and the remembering the happiness. My daily half hour of silver lining; oh, I’d fill my pockets with it, then pull it out later, at home, wind it around myself like Christmas tree lights, and just bask in the glow. We talked. For a total of two and a half hours each week, we floated high above everything petty and tiresome and mean on a magic carpet of conversation.

  Mr. Insley told me about his Ph.D., how he didn’t have it yet because he refused to rush through his dissertation on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the work was just too important. He told me about the childhood summers he’d spent at his grandparents’ lake house in New Jersey, how the bullfrogs’ croaking was the most peaceful music on earth. He told me how to bake sourdough bread, which was a lot more interesting than you might think. He told me that he regretted never having learned to play piano, but that he felt himself to be a musician nonetheless because of how he experienced, in his very bones, the music other people played. Once, he read aloud to me a long poem called “The Blessed Damozel” about a beautiful dead woman leaning out over the edge of heaven and longing for her lover, who was still alive, to come to her. I didn’t understand some of it and I thought the ending of it was too sad, but Mr. Insley’s voice was thrilling—husky and low and charged with emotion. I was so moved I couldn’t eat even a bite of my curried chicken salad.

  I kept it all, stored it up, not just the words we said but the long lines of Mr. Insley’s face; his animated eyes; his fingers pushing back his hair; the way he’d twist his wrist to make his watch slide side to side when he got excited about something. These memories fortified me in my hours of need. They took some of the scorch out of Bec’s glares, made trips to the school restrooms less harrowing, helped me worry less about my father’s heart. And when Eustacia came to try to upset the already shaky applecart of my life, well, they helped me then, too.

  Then, the day after Eustacia arrived, something happened. Mr. Insley and I had just sat down at his desk to have lunch, he on one side, I on the other, like always, when a boy opened the door of Mr. Insley’s classroom, took three steps into the room, and stopped. I recognized him from English class. Luka Bailey-Song, Bec’s friend.

  “Ah, Mr. Bailey-Song,” said Mr. Insley. “Your revised paper, I presume.”

  Mr. Insley stood up and held out his hand to take the paper, but Luka didn’t walk over to give it to him. He merely stood there, tall and sort of caramel colored, with his hair sticking out in all directions, and looked, not at Mr. Insley, but at me, right at me. And the strangest thing happened, which was that for a few seconds, it was like Mr. Insley wasn’t there at all. Luka regarded me with the oddest expression on his face, an expression I couldn’t name but that I recognized because it was so much like the one Eustacia had given me in my father’s room the day before, a mix of pity and concern, and it was as though he and I were caught, like two burrs, in the fabric of something, although I couldn’t say what, and if none of this makes much sense to you, well, it made even less to me.

  But all I know is that I suddenly felt ashamed to be sitting there. My cheeks flushed hot, and I stood up so fast I knocked my lunch bag to the floor. That’s when Mr. Insley seemed to reappear, strode over to Luka, and snatched the paper, almost violently, from his hand. Luka didn’t give so much as a start of surprise at this. All that happened was that his black eyes stopped looking at me and shifted to Mr. Insley instead, and suddenly, they were the ones who were inexplicably linked, snagged like burrs, and I was the one who wasn’t there anymore.

  “Giving Willow a little extra help, huh?” said Luka.

  One corner of Mr. Insley’s mouth turned up. His eyes narrowed.

  “More like enrichment I’d call it,” Mr. Insley said, coolly.

  Even though my cheeks still burned, I shivered.

  “Would you like to join us?” I don’t know why I said it. The words just tumbled out.

  Never taking his eyes off Mr. Insley, Luka shrugged and said, “Maybe next time.”

  And he left, shutting the door behind him.

  It should have been nothing. It was nothing. But, for no reason I could name, what it felt like was the end of my lunches with Mr. Insley, which meant it was the end of everything, all my happiness, my glittering silver lining ground to dust. Slowly, like an old woman, I bent over, picked
my lunch bag up from off the floor, and pressed it hopelessly against my chest, as the world lurched sideways on its axis.

  Then, beautifully, effortlessly, Mr. Insley set everything right. So much better than right! He came over, gently took the lunch bag from my hands, and started unpacking it, taking out the pieces of my lunch and setting them on his desk. My thermos, my knife and fork, my paper napkin. When he got to my apple, he rubbed it against his shirt and laughed the best laugh, a long, loose string of musical notes.

  “Well played!” he said. “It was brilliant, a truly brilliant move, asking him to join us.”

  I had no idea why what I’d said was brilliant, and I didn’t understand why my apple in his hand, against his chest should have been the most stirring, the most intimate sight I’d ever seen. What I did know was this: at that moment, Mr. Insley and I became an us.

  He handed me the apple, shook his head, and said, “Oof! Sometimes, this place just feels so narrow, like such a small, confining, predictable world, don’t you think?”

  I didn’t really. To me, school felt vast, as dense, wide, wild, and tangled as a jungle. But I said, “Yes.”

  “Do you ever just want to get away? Just jump in the car and drive and drive?”

  “I don’t know how,” I said. “To drive, I mean.”

  “Ah,” said Mr. Insley. “Well, maybe someone should teach you.”

  He rapped the desk with his knuckles and grinned, his face full of mischief and adventure. “Maybe even I.”

  I KNEW IT COULDN’T really happen. My father would never in a hundred million years allow it, but just the thought of Mr. Insley teaching me how to drive an actual car, the simple existence of that idea in the world, made me feel stronger, freer, more reckless, like a wild pony on the plains.

  That night, full of this recklessness and wide awake, I crept out of bed and down the stairs, used the key I wore on a thin chain around my neck to open the back door’s deadbolt, and walked out into the chilly autumn air. For a second, I stared up at the stars scattered like spilled salt, and then I stole across the yard like a thief toward the pool house. Its windows were squares of light; Eustacia was awake. I hadn’t spent much time in the yard at night. It was different, more outdoors-like somehow, full of rustling, cold smells, bizarre shapes, and shadows. Exhilarating. Right on the edge of scary. The grass prickled under my bare feet. Something hooted. Against the pool house’s pale stucco exterior, the dying sunflowers looked so much like Giacometti sculptures I’d seen at the Met, so jagged and lonesome, that I almost turned around and ran back to the house.