“Don’t stop, Mom,” orders Dev, but I can tell his anger is faltering, is being diluted with other emotions. “Tell the rest. Tell me why you broke up.”
Lake straightens and, in a Piper-like gesture, smooths her raucous hair.
“I don’t know if I’d call it breaking up. We weren’t really together enough to break up. But we did go our separate ways. For the usual reasons. We weren’t well matched. He was graduating.”
“What else?” Dev raises his voice. “Say it? Would someone just say it?”
“Oh, God,” breathes Lake.
“Teo,” says Dev, desperation in his eyes.
Teo’s voice is gentle. “Dev, I don’t know what you’re asking for.”
“Deveroux,” says Lake, “we will talk about this later.” She addresses the rest of us. “Please. I need some time alone with my son.”
I see Dev’s hands clench into fists. “Whose son, Mom?”
I get short of breath then, air a shallow, sideways knifing in my chest. The lilies lie on the floor near my feet, their mouths gaping, their odor snaking into the air. You love the smell of lilies, I remind myself as I am lifted on a swell of nausea.
Lake shakes her head at Dev. “Not now. Later. I promise.”
“Dev,” begs Clare.
With eyes like furnaces, Dev watches Clare cry, then scans the other faces in the room.
“Look at all of you. Is it so terrible? Will the fucking world end? Am I that bad?”
“Is what so terrible?” I ask him.
“I’m sorry, Cornelia,” he says.
Dev wipes his face, then takes a step toward Teo. He swallows hard.
“You got her pregnant, and you just walked away from us like it wasn’t your problem. Like we were nothing. And you never tried to find me, ever.”
Colors burn too brightly, and as my heart races, the rest of the world goes into slow motion, and all I can see is Teo’s face shifting, in a series of minute permutations, from stymied to stunned. He shakes his head slowly, slowly, slowly.
“No. That’s not right,” Teo says.
Dev says, “Say it, Mom. Is Teo my father?”
I don’t want the answer, but I am staring at Dev’s face, and I don’t have to hear the answer to know it. My entire abdomen is rigid, and I feel faint, but not so faint that I don’t see what I cannot believe I haven’t seen before: the shape of Dev’s eyes, his cheekbones, his smile, all the resemblances to the face I know better than any face in the world.
We all wait until in a whisper, Lake answers her son (Whose son?), “Yes.”
I close my eyes, thinking, breathe breathe breathe. “Teo.”
Teo crouches next to me, cradling my cheek, then sliding his hand to the side of my neck to feel my pulse. “Cornelia. Sweet girl. Is it labor?”
“I don’t think so.” Teo’s face is there, the slant of his eyebrows, the lightly etched parentheses around his mouth, every plane and angle achingly familiar and so beautiful, and I see nothing else. I focus on his green eyes, and wish upon them the way people wish upon shooting stars and dandelion clocks. It is not a brave wish. Belong to me, I think. I rest a finger on the dip in his upper lip, then lift it away. “Teo, tell me what all of this means.”
“Breathe,” says Teo in the voice he uses when we’re alone, “it’ll be all right. Just give me some deep breaths.”
Clare sounds faraway. “I only did it because I wanted to show Dev he was wrong. I’m so, so, so sorry.”
“We’ll let these people go home now, Dev. And you and your mom can talk.” It is Rafferty, who has appeared from out of nowhere.
“Were you planning to lie to me for my entire life?” Dev asks Lake.
“Let me talk to you,” Lake pleads. “Devvy, I’ll tell you everything.”
“You know what?” Dev says, raw panic rising in his voice. “I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want any of you. My grandmother said I could live with her. Laura Deveroux. In Ohio. I’m gone.”
Dev moves fast toward the door, and that’s when it happens, the thing that, afterward, I will keep seeing happen: Teo jumping to his feet, turning his back in his white polo shirt, going after Dev, leaving me gasping and sick. Leaving Penny. Dev yanks open the door and runs, and Teo would have run after him. I know he would have. But suddenly he is head to head with Lake. Lake is what stops him.
“Excuse me,” says Aidan, shoving past them both. I hear him shouting Dev’s name, then the sound of one car door, another car door, then the engine, starting up, roaring away.
I watch Teo’s back stiffen. “You told him I knew?”
“I didn’t tell him anything. But lies. He’s right. I told him so many lies,” says Lake.
I cannot stand to see it, Lake and Teo, discussing their child. Blood pounds in my temples, and I make a sound, “Oh.” Teo turns. I see the blank look, then see him remembering that I am there. I see Teo remembering his pregnant wife.
“I need to go home,” I tell him, “I can’t process this. I need to go home.”
“Okay. Of course.” Teo moves toward me and puts out his hand. “We’ll go home.”
“No!” I shrink back, one arm across the curve of my stomach, pulling Penny back, too.
And it is as if he has been bitten by a snake. He drops his hand. In thirty years, I have never seen Teo look so hurt, and it is wretched, impossible. But, I can’t be with him just then. I love him; I am lost without him, but I can’t ride next to him in the car.
“I’m sorry. I just can’t.” I swallow. “And, anyway, you need to talk to Lake.”
“I’ll drive you,” says Rafferty. He puts out both his hands and helps me out of the chair. Even though there is no way on earth I am going home without my husband, when Rafferty opens the door, I take Clare’s hand, and the three of us leave Lake and Teo alone to reckon with their past and with the incalculable everything that lies between them.
I was so sure I needed to be alone. Through the silent car ride and the endlessly long walk from Rafferty’s car to my front door, I felt like a person underwater, my lungs bursting, frantic to break the surface and emerge into a still, dry solitude. I had it planned: a kind but perfunctory collection of sentences for Clare (“I love you. None of this is your fault. I need to be alone for a little while now”) and then a mad dash for the bedroom, shut door, drawn blinds, closed eyes. Cut off and floating, like an astronaut in an escape pod. I believed that utter aloneness was my only hope, but when I turned to Clare to issue the perfunctory sentences and saw the stark misery on her face, I got what I really needed, a shot of empathy—my only hope—and just in the nick of time.
We sat together, her legs tucked in, her head on my shoulder, and after her apologies to me had spun themselves out, despite all my assurances that she was blameless, I said, “Tell me what happened with Dev.”
She described their months of e-mails and phone calls, about seeing him in Mrs. Finney’s backyard. Yes, Clare was fourteen years old, still part child, but the thing that cut its jagged, yearning way across her voice was love.
“You know what he said? He said that being away from me is less like being away from a person than being away from other people is. I don’t know anyone else who would say something like that. And he was right. When we were apart, I missed him all the time, but he didn’t feel faraway. He felt closer than the kids at school.”
She lifted her head and looked at me. “It’s like with you and Teo, when I’m in Virginia and you’re here. Exactly the same.” She dropped her eyes. “Well, pretty much the same.”
“Certain people are like that, I guess. They’re together no matter where they are. They just belong to each other.”
Her eyes filled with tears. “Except not anymore. I ruined it.”
“Oh, Clare. Don’t say that. It’s not the kind of thing you can ruin.” Less than an hour ago, I would have bet my life on this. You still can, I told myself fiercely, you still would.
“You don’t know how mean I was. Dev trusted me,
and I was horrible to him. But he was only telling me what his grandmother told him. About Teo knowing.”
“Maybe that’s what Lake told her mother.” It was so hard to say Lake’s name, but not impossible. I was in no way ready to discuss any of this, but in the context of being there for Clare, I could do it, and this realization filled me with relief.
“I told him that he just wanted to claim you and Teo because his own family was a mess. I know I made him feel awful. And I’m so sorry. I should never have said that because that’s exactly how I felt when my family was a mess. Back when I met you guys. I wanted to belong to you, too.”
“I know, honey. You didn’t mean to hurt Dev.”
Clare shook her head. “No, I did. Or maybe not. I just wanted it all to be a lie. I was scared.” She wiped her eyes, and said in a small voice, “And maybe, just for a second, I was jealous. Because you and Teo are mine.”
“Nothing will change that.”
“I know that now, but right then, I guess I wasn’t really thinking straight. I couldn’t stand what he’d said about Teo knowing and walking away. Teo would never do that.”
“No.”
She fixed the light of her brown eyes on me. “And that’s what really matters, right? That the part about Teo knowing was a lie.”
I couldn’t answer. Instead, I looped Clare’s hair behind one ear and kissed her cheek. Her damp lashes flared in starry spikes around her eyes. She moved away from me a little, stretched out her brown legs, and stood up, a long streamer of a girl, unfurling. Oh, Clare, I thought, you are so grown up, and the pang of sadness I felt became the engine of a train, pulling all the other sadnesses after it. Teo is the father of another woman’s child, I thought. Teo has a son with Lake. All this time, every second, Teo and Lake have had a son.
“That’s what makes me believe that everything will work out in the end.” Clare’s smile dawned, sweet and winsome and brave. “Because if Teo is Teo, then nothing can be that bad. And he is. He’s the same man we’ve always known.”
It was my cue. Don’t you think I know that? It was my moment to rally, to grin and say, “You bet he is, kid!” I should have risen up in glory, lip stiff, head high, Jean Arthur wisecracks tripping off my tongue, arrow straight and backed by a radiant sky, and believe me, I have wanted to be the scrappy heroine as much as anyone. But when the occasion presented itself, with Clare standing above me, her faith as resplendent as a full-blown trumpet flower, I did not rise to it. I did not shine or seize the day or set an example for others. I remained on my sofa, broken and small, sadness pulling me down and down and down. I squeezed Clare’s hand and said, “Thank you, honey.” It was a cop-out, a botched line, wrong, wrong, wrong, and the worst part was that I was too tired to care.
I wish I could tell you that things got better after that. Things? That I got better after that. I wish I could tell you that I spent the hours before Teo came home to me wrestling my fears and jealousies into the ground or engaged in a cool, Socratic dialogue with my best self, so that by the time he stood in the doorway of Penny’s room, his hands in his pockets, his face crossed with wonder, weariness, sorrow, and other emotions I could only imagine, I greeted him with a brave heart and a tranquil mind.
But if I learned anything from this whole experience (and I learned plenty), it’s that, when it comes to scrappy heroism, I am not the quickest study in the world. I am not the slowest, either, I don’t imagine. It took approximately forty-eight hours, fifty-six, if you count sleep time, although neither Teo nor I did much sleeping. For fifty-six hours, I dragged the two of us through a mire of misery. I was petty and frightened, mean and reptilian, for which I will never stop being sorry, and even when the turnaround came, there was no radiant backdrop, no triumphant music.
What saved me from myself? Nothing extraordinary, no stunning revelation or near-death experience. What saved me is what saves most people. You know what I’m talking about. The usual.
Teo found me in Penny’s room, rocking in my grandmother’s chair and reading Penny a book in what I hoped was a soothing voice. I was trying to be a serene ecosystem, to quiet my slamming heart, modulate my breathing, stem the flow of adrenaline or epinephrine or plain bad energy, whatever my poor Penny had likely been swimming in for far too many hours.
And it was very nearly working. The room was dim except for the sunlight leaking around the edges of the closed curtains; apart from my voice and the homey creak of the rocker, the house was still; and the book was one I’d loved for years and years, the story of a bat who wants to be a poet. The bat reads his poem to a chipmunk, and I read it to Penny, a poem that starts with a birth, shifts into moonlight, and ends, like everything for children, with sleep: “‘All the bright day, as the mother sleeps, /She folds her wings about her sleeping child.’”
I read this, and just after I said the word “child,” a tiny, round, pearl gray, illuminated space opened up in the day, and my sadness began to subside, and this lasted maybe a minute. What ended it was a series of sounds that, until that moment, had only ever made me happy, tires on asphalt, a key in the door, a step on the stairs, the sounds of Teo coming home.
He didn’t speak at first, merely stood in the doorway watching me. For an ungainly moment, I was overcome with shyness, but I knew that every second I spent not looking at him hurt him, so I looked, and there he was. My tense, tired man, his bones under his skin, his complicated eyes.
Listen: I never see my husband from a distance, ever; I experience him as human every single time. It sounds like nothing, the way that I’m explaining it, but I am with him differently than I am with other people. Immediacy comprises most of how I love him. Total immersion. What I want you to understand is that this didn’t change, not as I sat in Penny’s room searching his face, not through the fifty-six hours of hell I was about to put him through. I loved him the way I always love him, the whole time, and I can’t figure out if this makes my behavior more egregious or less, but in any case, I’m not asking for forgiveness. I just wanted you to know.
As I watched him watch me, I saw his face clear, like a cloud lifting, and he smiled with just the corners of his eyes, and said, “Two weeks.”
I slid my hand over the great, taut curve of my belly and nodded.
Teo said, “Cornelia,” and it amazed me, as it always amazes me, how he can make my name hold so much.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” I said, which brought the cloud back down, but I had to ask.
“Yes.”
He walked across the room and sat on the floor near the rocking chair.
“I liked our life the way it was when we woke up this morning,” I told him. “I loved everything about it.”
My hand lay palm down on my belly, and with one finger, Teo traced around it, dipping carefully into the valleys between each finger, like a kindergartner drawing an outline with a crayon, a way to touch me and Penny at the same time. Then he turned my hand over and pressed two fingers to my pulse point.
“Is it beating?” I asked.
“I love you,” he said, and smiled, “for your beauty.” It was a private joke, one dating from the very beginning of our being in love, and I knew what he was telling me, that the important parts of our lives hadn’t changed and wouldn’t change, and for one, split, crossroads second, there was a chance for me to be good, to avert pain and suffering, to believe him. But I didn’t take that chance because suddenly I was furious. Fury hit me like a hurricane, and I reeled.
Through gritted teeth, I eked out, “You love me? That’s it?”
Teo has always been a man who fights fire with quiet, and he didn’t say anything now, just removed his fingers from my wrist, rested his elbows on his bent knees, his hands loosely clasped, and never took his eyes off mine.
“I won’t share you,” I told him, “I don’t know how to share you.”
“I don’t know how to do any of this.”
I realized that I had expected him to say he was sorry, although it was unclear even
to me exactly what he had to be sorry for. The fact that he didn’t say it made me angrier.
“Tell me about you and Ronnie. In college.”
“You need that? Now?”
“Tell me.” I glanced around our baby’s green-and-white room. “But not in here.”
“It’s not that sordid, Cornelia.”
“Where’s Clare?”
“Reading in the hammock. She called Toby. She wants to stay with him for a few days, to give us a chance to be—alone.” The word “alone” swayed under a load of irony. I wasn’t the only one who could get mad.
“She feels terrible about this,” said Teo.
“I know. But none of it is her fault.”
I got up and walked into our bedroom, where the sight of our bed made me want to throw myself down on it and wail, but I just lowered myself into the armchair. It was not a comfortable chair, too deep for me, so that I couldn’t lean back and still rest my feet on the ground, but it was the only chair in the room. Teo sat on the bed, his back against the headboard, and despite my rage, I ached for the distance between our two bodies.
“Tell me.”
“Jesus, Cornelia. I met her at a party.”
“Tell me.”
Teo’s eyes said, “Please, don’t do this.” Then, when I didn’t say anything else, he shifted his tone into neutral.
“We were in the basement of some eating club. I was leaving because people were way too drunk, and anyone could tell it would end badly. She was leaving at the same time, and we talked on our way out. Her friends were still inside, so I walked her back to her dorm room. When we got there, we drank a cup of coffee.”
“Did you spend the night?”
Teo gave me a cold stare. “No. We saw each other a handful of times, but it never got serious. I was a senior. I guess I was already halfway out the door.”
“So it was, what? A fling?”
“It was college. Remember college? How does this help?”