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Authors: Marisa de los Santos
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face, not a single detail.
ON MY FATHER ’ S FIRST day home from the hospital after his surgery, when he told me he thought it best that I enroll at the Webley School, I nodded.
Every day, when I ran up to his room ready to beg to leave school and come home, and he asked me if I had had a good day, I smiled and said yes.
And on the day that I got home and he told me that he had called Eustacia Cleary, my sister who had never been my sister, the Other Daughter who was not his daughter, the disgrace, the bad one, and had invited her, along with my brother who was not my brother, to visit us, and that Marcus had refused the invitation but Eustacia had accepted it, I wanted to shout no, that we didn’t need her, that he must be crazyto have done such a thing, but all I said was, “Eustacia. Oh. Well. All right, Daddy.”
Tell me, what else could I do? I had almost killed the man, my only father. I knew I wouldn’t get a second reprieve.
What’s funny is that it took that hideous day for me to see it, the thing I could never escape even if I wanted to (and I’m not saying I wanted to), the thing that had always, every day of my life, been true: I, Willow Cleary, was responsible for my father’s heart.
CHAPTER FIVE
Taisy
M Y FRIEND TRILLIUM ’ S FIFTH life rule was that every woman must have one friend for whom a lunch-and-shopping trip is always the solution, no matter what the problem might be.
While many of us have life rules, even if they are, as in my own case, so flexible as to hardly count as rules at all—things like “Never, ever lie, unless it’s to spare someone’s feelings or to weasel out of something you really don’t want to do, but only if not doing that something will not result in bodily or even psychic harm to another human being, unless that human being is exceptionally mean in which case minor psychic harm is permissible”—my friend Trillium had gone so far as to collect her rules in an actual rulebook and get it published, not just here in the United States but in so many other countries that we eventually stopped keeping track. It was a handy, pocket-sized (or handbag-sized, since Trillium has another rule about never, ever carrying things in your pockets), bright turquoise, spiral-bound volume titled Trillium Shippey’s Life RULES! The little book had flown off the shelves and onto bestseller lists, helped along by multiple talk-show appearances and NPR interviews, each more drop-dead charming thanthe last, as well as by countless starry-eyed and unsolicited celebrity endorsements along the lines of “Trillium, will you be my BFF? #puregoddessgenius” @AnneHath on Twitter.”
Trillium was my most famous friend, and while you wouldn’t have to be very famous at all to fill that particular niche, she was. Was, is, and no doubt always will be because Trillium Shippey—from her name to her laugh to her pinup girl curves—is different from the rest of us, built for fame the way Michael Phelps was built for swimming. I would say that I knew her when, except that I doubt very seriously that there was ever a moment in Trillium’s life when she wasn’t palpably, obviously a celebrity; she was just one that had yet to do the thing she was celebrated for. I lucked into her, although she would say she lucked into me. She was my best friend. She was also my first ghostee, and I was her ghost.
We met at an adult ballet class, a true hodgepodge. There were a couple of former professional dancers, long on limbs, neck, and thoroughbred skittishness; some mothers with varying degrees of experience who were killing time while their little sons and daughters took class in another studio; a few men, including Dr. Simon, my dentist; some true beginners; a trio of luminous women in their sixties who had been dancing more or less consistently for fifty years and who knew everything about ballet; and a few students like me, women whose growing up had been steeped in ballet and who had failed to
ON MY FATHER ’ S FIRST day home from the hospital after his surgery, when he told me he thought it best that I enroll at the Webley School, I nodded.
Every day, when I ran up to his room ready to beg to leave school and come home, and he asked me if I had had a good day, I smiled and said yes.
And on the day that I got home and he told me that he had called Eustacia Cleary, my sister who had never been my sister, the Other Daughter who was not his daughter, the disgrace, the bad one, and had invited her, along with my brother who was not my brother, to visit us, and that Marcus had refused the invitation but Eustacia had accepted it, I wanted to shout no, that we didn’t need her, that he must be crazyto have done such a thing, but all I said was, “Eustacia. Oh. Well. All right, Daddy.”
Tell me, what else could I do? I had almost killed the man, my only father. I knew I wouldn’t get a second reprieve.
What’s funny is that it took that hideous day for me to see it, the thing I could never escape even if I wanted to (and I’m not saying I wanted to), the thing that had always, every day of my life, been true: I, Willow Cleary, was responsible for my father’s heart.
CHAPTER FIVE
Taisy
M Y FRIEND TRILLIUM ’ S FIFTH life rule was that every woman must have one friend for whom a lunch-and-shopping trip is always the solution, no matter what the problem might be.
While many of us have life rules, even if they are, as in my own case, so flexible as to hardly count as rules at all—things like “Never, ever lie, unless it’s to spare someone’s feelings or to weasel out of something you really don’t want to do, but only if not doing that something will not result in bodily or even psychic harm to another human being, unless that human being is exceptionally mean in which case minor psychic harm is permissible”—my friend Trillium had gone so far as to collect her rules in an actual rulebook and get it published, not just here in the United States but in so many other countries that we eventually stopped keeping track. It was a handy, pocket-sized (or handbag-sized, since Trillium has another rule about never, ever carrying things in your pockets), bright turquoise, spiral-bound volume titled Trillium Shippey’s Life RULES! The little book had flown off the shelves and onto bestseller lists, helped along by multiple talk-show appearances and NPR interviews, each more drop-dead charming thanthe last, as well as by countless starry-eyed and unsolicited celebrity endorsements along the lines of “Trillium, will you be my BFF? #puregoddessgenius” @AnneHath on Twitter.”
Trillium was my most famous friend, and while you wouldn’t have to be very famous at all to fill that particular niche, she was. Was, is, and no doubt always will be because Trillium Shippey—from her name to her laugh to her pinup girl curves—is different from the rest of us, built for fame the way Michael Phelps was built for swimming. I would say that I knew her when, except that I doubt very seriously that there was ever a moment in Trillium’s life when she wasn’t palpably, obviously a celebrity; she was just one that had yet to do the thing she was celebrated for. I lucked into her, although she would say she lucked into me. She was my best friend. She was also my first ghostee, and I was her ghost.
We met at an adult ballet class, a true hodgepodge. There were a couple of former professional dancers, long on limbs, neck, and thoroughbred skittishness; some mothers with varying degrees of experience who were killing time while their little sons and daughters took class in another studio; a few men, including Dr. Simon, my dentist; some true beginners; a trio of luminous women in their sixties who had been dancing more or less consistently for fifty years and who knew everything about ballet; and a few students like me, women whose growing up had been steeped in ballet and who had failed to
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