Marisa de los Santos - Belong to Me by Marisa de los Santos Page A

poster hanging over his headboard, a photograph of the Milky Way swirling its shining arms.
    In large ways, Dev had always felt located. Many times he’d stood on a sidewalk or a patch of grass and felt his place in the universe: third planet from the sun, on the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy, two-thirds of the way out from its center, in the Virgo super-cluster, in the continuum of time and space. He’d planted his feet and closed his eyes and tried to feel the motion of the earth.
    But now, Dev realized he felt located in small ways, too: in school hallways, and sitting on the hard ground in Mrs. Finney’s yard talking to Aidan, and falling asleep in his bed with Lake in the next room, reading. Dev belonged to these places; he fit. He imagined he could hear the click of himself snapping into place.
    He pictured the black dot on the map again. Not very long ago, Dev had believed in the dot’s randomness, but now the dot was houses, friends, trees, poems, fiery leaves snagged in his rake, his bike wheels on asphalt. He imagined the dot grown larger and printed with the words on his Milky Way poster: YOU ARE HERE .
    “I’m here,” Dev thought, and then he fell asleep.
    S IX
    W hen Piper turned eight years old, Piper’s grandmother—the good grandmother, her father’s mother—had given her a box. The box was made of wood, glass-smooth and dark, was lined with strawberry-colored velvet, and in the center of its heavy lid was a silver rectangle engraved with Piper’s initials. Piper bore a breathless love for the box and never touched it without reverence. Even though Piper understood that she was too old to believe in magic, Piper believed that it was a magic box, and that the magic lay in the sound it made when she shut it. Not a click but a soft, smoky thunk, like the sound of a moth hitting a window, a toe shoe on a wood floor.
    While the box was meant to hold jewelry, almost as soon as she got it, without planning it out beforehand, Piper made the box a container for anger, sorrow, and wishes. For example, if Piper got mad at her mother, as she often did, she’d go to her room, open the box, whisper her rage into it, close her eyes, and—sliding her fingers slowly out from under it—let the lid fall. As soon as she heard the sound, the sound that meant the box was as closed as anything ever got, as closed as a pharaoh’s tomb, she could walk away, lightened and able to love her mother as a daughter should.
    In utter secrecy, Piper performed this ritual for years—“leaving it in the box” she called it—and then, in her early twenties, she made herself stop. When she left her parents’ home for good, she left the box behind.

    Now, boxless and facing the unbearable sadness of losing Elizabeth, Piper had a word.
    Fine.
    Fine. Fine. Fine. Fine .
    If, over the years, Piper had not developed a vehement and frequently professed contempt for all things New Age (a heading under which she corralled crystals, chiropractors, ESP, yoga, Dr. Andrew Weil/Deepak Chopra (in her mind they were, literally, the same person), aromatic candles—excepting cinnamon and vanilla holiday candles—echinacea, singer/songwriter music, and the entire country of India), she might have called “Fine” her mantra. In fact, she didn’t call “Fine” anything at all, but she said it, sometimes audibly, sometimes under her breath, many times a day, her top teeth digging hard into her lower lip with each F sound, and every time she said it, she felt its power.

    Before anything else, before it held grief or anger, the word held guilt.
    It was Piper who had talked Elizabeth into giving the new protocol a try. “At least a try,” Piper had said, and moments later had admonished, “Give yourself a fighting chance, Elizabeth.” Afterward, Piper had felt ashamed of having said this, of having implied that Elizabeth wasn’t a fighter, but at least she’d stuck to her resolution not to add, “You owe it to your children.”
    In