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

fact, Piper hadn’t breathed a word about Elizabeth’s children, although they were as present as if they’d been sitting in the room, side by side, their round hazel eyes full of listening. The only other person actually sitting in the room had been Tom, and Tom hadn’t mentioned the children either. The three of them had sat at one end of Elizabeth’s long dining room table, speaking in calm, reasonable tones. Even Tom had shrugged off his tragic demeanor and had brought a steady voice, a nearly neutral face to the discussion. His boardroom face, thought Piper, approvingly, and the whole conversation had the tenor of a business meeting, except that they were discussing the body of one of the participants, what its chances were, the level of suffering it could be expected to endure.
    “We know it might make you sick,” Tom had said gently. “The doctors have told us that’s likely. But there’s also the chance that it won’t be so bad. And you could stop. At any time, if it’s too much, you could just say, ‘Enough.’”
    But no matter how quietly they addressed one another, no matter how mellow and civilized the room appeared—the artichoke-print fabric of the window treatments, sun resting on the russet-colored walls—the fact remained that it was two against one.
    A couple of weeks later, in a moment far removed from that conversation, Elizabeth, clenched with nausea, would raise panicked, confused, wholly unaccusatory eyes to Piper—the eyes of an injured animal—and rasp through cracked lips, “I feel like a battered wife,” and names for what Piper and Tom had been in that dining room would come to Piper on an ice-cold wave of guilt: “Bullies.” “Thugs.”
    It was this same wave of guilt that had swept Piper into Cornelia’s house to have Teo confirm Piper’s greatest fear: that Elizabeth’s new protocol and its attendant misery were pointless, had always been pointless, and should end.
    The night after her conversation with Teo, Piper was wrenched awake by the sound of her own gasping sobs, and as she sat up, methodically smoothing her hair in the dark room, turning the ends under with shaking fingers, the single word had arrived suddenly, like a small, heavy object placed in her hand. Not “Everything’s fine,” a phrase to soothe a child. The magic of the word was not transformative; “fine” made nothing fine. However, the word was capacious, a receptacle—like a trap in a drain—for every emotion that made moving out of one moment and into the next impossible for Piper.
    Piper said it, whispered it into the darkness, then again in the direction of her husband, who lay sleeping with his back to Piper and didn’t stir. Her hands went still and dropped from her hair to her lap. Then, Piper turned, slid her cold feet into her boiled-wool slippers, got out of bed, and descended two flights of stairs to the basement in search of a cardboard box.

    When Piper walked to Elizabeth’s house the next morning, the cardboard box contained an expensive and hard-to-find brand of stainless-steel cleaner; a cellophane package of sponges; a five-pound free-range chicken, uncooked; a sack of miniature Yukon golds; fresh rosemary; a lemon; and two vast, sweet Walla-Walla onions. The box was heavy, but Piper stepped with certainty, shoulders squared under her quilted jacket. Meredith walked a few steps ahead, carrying, with exquisite care, a second lemon.
    When the two of them arrived at the Donahues’ back door, through the wall of kitchen windows shining like a waterfall in the morning sun, Piper caught sight of Elizabeth’s son, Peter, sitting at the table in a blue vinyl art apron, gluing pieces of colored felt onto other pieces of colored felt. Next to him sat what appeared to be an ordinary middle-aged woman, but who, Piper had reason to know, was, in fact, a coup, a gem, a bona fide goldmine of a babysitter: a fit, college-educated, native-English-speaking, nonsmoking, fifty-year-old