Because the sight of her scared him, he decided to believe, at first, that she was faking, going for the sympathy vote, so that when she looked up from the corner of the sofa (where she sat doing what—no book, no phone, television off, not even a glass of iced tea), and asked, “What can I say to you?” in a small, small, dust-mote-sized voice, Dev dropped into a chair across the room from her and gave her an injured, sarcastic, “How am I supposed to know?”
Lake’s eyes flooded with tears, but she just sat looking at Dev, not wiping her eyes or turning her face, crying without will or energy, crying as though she just leaked tears, like a broken faucet, instead of being a person who almost never cried at all.
“Do you hate me?” she asked him.
“That’s not a fair question,” said Dev. “It’s not either/or. If I say no, that doesn’t mean everything is fine.”
The tears kept slithering down her face.
Dev remembered what Lyssa had said to him about intentions, and he asked, “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why everything. What else?” He didn’t want her to cry harder but he felt impatient. Where was the quick, sharp-tongued mother when he needed her? “Why did you do what you did?”
For a long time, she didn’t answer. Finally, she pulled the neck of her T-shirt up and wiped her face. Thank God, thought Dev.
“For so long, I swear I thought we were better off separate from the past. I lied to you to protect you.”
“From what?”
“From people who never wanted you to be born, I guess. I hated everyone who didn’t want you the way I wanted you.”
“But he didn’t know. Teo.”
“No, I never told him. He didn’t love me. I couldn’t take the chance that he’d stay with us out of a sense of obligation.”
This struck Dev as unjust, but he decided to let it go. Let Teo deal with that one.
“But you could have told me the truth about it all, once you decided to move out here. Did that even occur to you? You just stuck me in the car and drove me across the country, like a pet dog or something. Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I had to find out what they were like. I thought I had to, anyway. I hadn’t seen Teo since we were both kids. What if I told you and you got excited to meet him and he turned out to be no good?”
“Then I would have been disappointed. So what? A lot of people are disappointed by their parents.”
Lake flinched at this, and Dev held his breath, but she didn’t start crying again.
“What if he was dangerous?” she asked.
“I thought about that. But at some point you must have decided that he wasn’t because you sent me over there, right? By myself? That’s the worst part.”
“What? You think I put you in danger? Dev, I really believed—”
“No. You let me get to know them, you let me like them, under false pretenses. I hate that. It’s like you made liars out of all of us.”
“You’re right.” Lake said, nodding. “That was a bad decision. Once I had checked them out, I should have told you who they were. I guess I wanted to see how you reacted to him, both of them, before you knew about—the connection. And I wanted them to see how great you were—how great you are—before I told them who you were.”
Anger surged in Dev’s chest, but he was still freaked out by her lost, dilated eyes, so he kept his voice low. “You treated us like a science experiment, or like, like puppets. You wanted to manipulate everything. Don’t you know that you can’t do that to people, Mom?”
To Dev’s horror, Lake cupped her hand over her mouth and began to sob.
“I’m sorry,” said Dev, drawing back, “but I need to tell you what I think.”
Lake shook her head and worked to catch her breath. At last, she said in a ramshackle voice, “It’s just that you called me ‘Mom.’”
“Oh,” said Dev, but this was more than he could stand. He jumped to his feet, needing to get away from this defeated woman who was nothing like his mother, and mumbling something about his room, he walked out.
He lay down on his bed and pulled his pillow up around his ears, but he could hear Lake crying again, hard, and the sound made him feel doomed, like the sound of her crying was the sound of the end of the world, so he got up to find her.
She sat at the kitchen table, her head on her crossed arms, her shoulders heaving, and Dev felt a flare of anger at her for turning things around so that he was comforting her, but more than he was angry, more than anything else, he wanted her to stop crying and feel better. He pulled out the chair next to hers and sat down.
“Please stop, Mom.”
Her face was still buried in her arms when she said, “I have lost all of you. Cornelia. Rafferty. You, most of all.”
“Rafferty?”
Lake raised her head. “He couldn’t stomach the lies, and why should he? His ex-wife lied to him and now I have. He says he needs time apart, to think, but I don’t believe he’ll be back.”
Dev looked at his mother, at her trembling jaw and her train-wreck eyes. He breathed in and tried to clear his head of anger, annoyance, fear, everything that might stop him from saying what he needed to say. He searched inside himself for kindness and found it, right where it always was.
“You haven’t lost me. I’m here, right?”
Lake’s face went perfectly still. “Can you forgive me?”
“Mom, this isn’t a one-conversation deal. It’ll take a while to fix, don’t you think?”
“Yes, I know it will. But I just wonder if you think a time will come when you can forgive me.”
“I don’t know.” Dev shrugged. “Probably. Knowing me.”
His mother’s smile seemed to sweep through the room like the beam from a lighthouse.
“But I have to say this, okay?”
Lake nodded.
“I don’t know if I can ever trust you. Forgiving is different from trusting.”
“I will never lie to you again, Dev, not even to protect you. I swear to God.”
Dev didn’t nod. He couldn’t say okay because really, everything wasn’t okay, and if he didn’t trust her—and he didn’t—then how could he believe what she had just said?
But he could say this: “What happened, it doesn’t erase everything else.”
“What do you mean?”
“You’ve been—” He stopped. “As my mom, you’ve done a lot of right things, more than I can count. The bad stuff is there and it isn’t going away, but it just sort of sits alongside the rest. It doesn’t cancel the rest out.”
The gratitude on her face was too much. He knew she wanted to touch him or wanted him to touch her, would settle for any kind of touch, no matter how slight, but her desperation just made him feel worse, especially because he couldn’t do what she wanted.
“I’m pretty tired,” he said.
Lake sat up straighter and gave him an only partway broken-hearted smile. “All right. You go to bed, then, Devvy.”
At nine o’clock, Dev sat down at his desk to find an instant message from Clare. Staring at the words across the glow of his computer screen, Dev believed he knew how Galileo must have felt discovering the moons of Jupiter.
“I am so sorry for all the terrible things I said to you, Dev. Most people would not want to hear from me and wouldn’t even read this, and I’m afraid that you might feel that way, but I also know that you aren’t like most people. So I have to think there’s a chance that you will want to and a chance that you would read this, and even if you don’t, I just need to write it because it would be very, very wrong having those terrible, mean things be the last words I say to you. I was scared and jealous, and I felt like you were stealing something from me, even though I know that you would never, ever do that. I’m sorry. I see now that what you did was so brave. That’s what I want to say most of all. You are brave and good. I feel like I’ve known you all my life. Longer than that. I hope one of these days I get to do more than just miss you, Dev. (It make
s me feel better just to write your name.) Love, Clare.”
Love, thought Dev. Love. He rested two fingers against the word on the screen.
“I’m here, Clare,” began Dev, “and it makes me feel better to write your name, too.”
Later, as Dev lay in bed thinking about nothing but Clare, he heard his mother talking and walked out into the hallway to listen. She wasn’t crying, but her voice was tremulous, rippled over with unhappiness. Shit, what now? thought Dev, leaning his back against the wall. He closed his eyes, listening, concentrating, trying to fill in the silences that were the other side of the conversation.
“Of course he likes them, Mom. They’re good people.”
[“Why do you say that like it’s a bad thing? Don’t you want him to like them?”]
“Of course I want him to like them. I want whatever makes him happy. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. It’s been just the two of us all these years. How can I share him now?”
[“I thought you said you would do whatever Dev wants. Don’t you think he deserves to have a relationship with his father?”]
“Yeah, Mom, I think he and Teo deserve to know each other, and I’m not saying I won’t let that happen. I’m only saying it’ll hurt. A lot.” Lake’s voice became almost savage with unhappiness. “What if he wants to live with them?”
[“You don’t really think he would want that, do you?”]
“I don’t know. He might. He doesn’t trust me anymore.” Lake began crying again, quietly this time. “You know what I wish for? Some distance. Physical distance. Not that much, a few hours maybe? I want to be the full-time parent, and I know that’s selfish, but it kills me to think of losing him. I mean it. It would kill me.”
As Dev and Clare stood on the front steps of Cornelia and Teo’s house, just before Clare put her hand on the knob and pushed the door open, Dev almost refused to go through with it. His heart was thudding, nervousness was twisting itself into Gordian knots inside his stomach, and he strongly considered grabbing Clare’s hand and taking off for whatever place there was in the world (and Dev had little faith, at this point, that such a place existed) where his life wouldn’t feel like one momentous moment after the next. A place where crossing the threshold of a house was an ordinary, undramatic act, symbolic of nothing. Dev looked down at his sneakers. He wanted to be a kid in sneakers, period. Was that so much to ask?
But when they did cross over and were standing inside the front hallway of the house, the foyer or vestibule or whatever the heck it was called (and Dev busied himself for a few seconds, searching for the proper word), it seemed briefly (for maybe twenty heartbeats) that the moment might be unmomentous after all. Teo and Cornelia weren’t standing just inside the door, serious faced and poised in attitudes of anticipation like characters in a movie. Instead, they were clattering around in other parts of the house, and just as Clare reached for Dev’s hand and squeezed it, Cornelia called out from the kitchen, “Guys, is that you?” (because their coming there was not a surprise, no more surprises), and she appeared with a dish towel in her hand, just before Teo kind of trotted down the stairs in a way that was normal and fast and unceremonious.
Okay, thought Dev, maybe it’ll be fine, maybe it’ll be normal. But when they were all four standing in the front hall together, Dev felt their connections web-spinning through the air between them, drawing them together with sticky threads: you’re my father, you’re my father’s wife, my stepmother (stepmother?), pregnant with my half brother or half sister (although weirdly, this was the least complicated part and gave Dev a pure jolt of joy every time he thought about it: my brother, my sister), and you’re the girl I love (it’s true) who is like a daughter to my father and my father’s wife, which makes you kind of a sister although no way are you my sister, are you kidding?
Dev was out of breath and couldn’t think of what to say beyond “Get me out of here,” which would have been entirely inappropriate, obviously, and maybe no one else could either because for a long time, lifetimes, eons, at least ten seconds, no one spoke a word.
Then a grin cut across Teo’s face, and he said, “So, Dev, how’s your summer so far?”
Dev could have flopped backward onto the ground, the way he did after an especially long bike ride, he was that relieved, that exhausted, but he just grinned back, shrugged, and said, “Pretty uneventful.”
Then he looked at Cornelia, who was folding the dish towel into a tiny square, and asked, “How’s Penny?”
“Huge,” said Cornelia, “and preparing for arrival, which really can’t come soon enough, in my opinion.” Her tone was chipper and joking, but there was so much gentleness in her eyes when she looked at Dev that he felt his own eyes start to sting in a dangerous way. He swallowed and looked at the floor, and suddenly, Cornelia was there, her hand on his arm, smiling up at him.
“We all got thrown for a loop, didn’t we?” she said, softly.
All Dev could do was nod.
“You most of all,” she finished, and this was so surprising, was such a nice thing to say, especially to a guy who had shown up in her life like a spy or a grenade that, even though she was an adult and Dev wasn’t particularly a kisser, Dev leaned down (she was so small) and kissed her cheek.
“Now, why don’t you come in?” she said. “Let me feed you something.”
Dev said, “Uh, I don’t think I’ll stay. I mean, not this time.”
After a beat, Teo said, “Then, next time.”
“Yeah,” said Dev, and he glanced at Clare. “And there will definitely be a next time. If that’s all right, I mean.”
Teo smiled. “A next time sounds great.”
“But I wanted to say something.”
He looked at Clare again, and saw that her eyes were filling up with tears, but she smiled encouragingly.
“Go ahead, Dev,” she said.
“Well, I know you guys must be really mad at my mom. I would be if I were you. I’m pretty mad myself, actually. But she’s, like, my mom, you know?”
Teo nodded.
“Of course she is,” said Cornelia.
“And she’s a mess, right now. She feels bad about what she did, I promise she does.”
“She told us,” said Teo.
“The thing is, she’s scared of losing me, and I can’t really stand for her to be scared of that. She deserves a lot of things, but not that.” He paused. “So I’ve been thinking—and I haven’t even told her this—but I’ve been thinking that maybe we should live somewhere…else.”
Dev saw Teo’s face tense.
Cornelia said, “Oh, Dev.”
Then Teo took a few steps toward Dev, stopped, and put his hands in his pockets as though he didn’t know what else to do with them. Dev saw that Teo was choked up, his jaw clenching and unclenching, and for the first time, it occurred to Dev that maybe, for Teo, Dev wasn’t just an intrusion or even a situation to accept and handle with grace. Maybe Teo wanted to be his father. With wonder, Dev felt the sere, brown, vacant-lot piece of himself that had been waiting for his father to want him mist over with green, like a yard in springtime.
Clare made a hurt sound, ran over to Teo, and put her arms around him. “Not that far away. And not forever,” she said. “He doesn’t mean he’ll never come here.”
“Yeah?” said Teo, looking over Clare’s head at Dev. His eyes were green.
My father, thought Dev.