The One That I Want Read online

  The next day, the fourth morning of the new school year, the radio alarm bounces me alert, and I listen to the DJs spar back and forth, and then the traffic guy comes on, and then the news, and then I hear the date, September 7: it has been two months exactly since Tyler left me. Because even though he didn’t leave me back on his fishing trip when he announced that Jamie Rosato just wanted to feel things out, well, let’s be honest, yes, that’s when he left me. July 7. That’s when it all started to unspool. An entire two months have slid by while I’ve been swimming underwater, rendering myself nearly sightless, almost deaf. It’s been easier this way, anesthetizing myself to the world.

  I flip off the radio, the too-cheery DJs fraying my nerves. I try to remember my to-do list for today: prom … maybe? CJ’s application … perhaps? There really is nothing. Just a muddy fuzz that comes when you plunge your head underneath the deep end and sink toward the bottom.

  But it’s not just that—there’s more, on this date. Oh yeah. It’s also the anniversary of my mother’s death. Darcy will implore me to visit the cemetery today, and I will go, of course, and I will remember, despite everything, that I still have a life, that actually, Tyler or not, I can continue to spiral until I suffocate under my own misery, or I can find a way, impossible as that might seem, to hack off the anchors that are holding me hostage and swim toward shore.

  The house is at rest as I pad through it toward the kitchen. My father moved back home, when? Yesterday? The day before? Last week? I shake my head because it’s all jumbled together. He has been sober for more than sixty days now, a small milestone but a milestone nevertheless, and though he stayed here three weeks longer than necessary, Darcy finally drove him back to our childhood house after I begged off of it, too exhausted after a day of toiling with other people’s problems to celebrate my father’s attempt to wrestle his own. Darcy did it without complaint, while I lingered at my bedroom window and watched them go. Without me as a buffer between the two of them, they’d somehow managed to wave white flags. She begrudgingly sat with him at dinners long after I’d pleaded fatigue, and later, if I got up to use the bathroom, I’d hear an occasional guffaw from the den where they were watching some godforsaken reality show that they both seemed to delight in.

  I start up the coffeepot, and it hisses in reply. It has been two months, two months! And still, I am here, spinning in circles, drowning in my grief.

  Two months is nothing, it’s a blip, a passing cloud, certainly not enough time to mourn the vestiges of a lifetime—that is what I’d tell Susanna if she were me. But she’s not, and I am. Whatever Ashley Simmons unlocked in me, and certainly, it was something—rage, fearlessness, honesty—I’m still Tilly Farmer, God damn it! I watch the drip-drip-drip of the browned water slipping into the pot, and I can almost feel those things—that rage, that honesty—awakened again, broiling inside of my intestines. Shit or get off the pot, Tilly Farmer! Pull your act together! Get over your self-pity, whatever else Tyler eff-ing Farmer has destroyed in you! You’ve wasted enough time on that. If I listen closely enough, I could swear that I’m hearing Ashley, even though, quite obviously, I’m not.

  I reach for a mug, lift its steaming contents to my lips, and swallow grandly, the coffee awakening my senses. It is time for a change, for a new path, a new way of thinking. Yes, maybe it’s finally now time.

  seventeen

  As it turned out, the date, September 7, was familiar for more than just marking the two-month anniversary of the implosion of my marriage and because of my mother. Oooh yeah, I remember, as I pull into the WHS parking lot and spy a large trailer with the Westlake Hospital icon painted on the side. The blood drive. I’d chosen the day intentionally, a way to memorialize my mom.

  It was actually Luanne’s idea, last May: she thought, what better way to kick off the year, to get the kids involved in their own health and in responsibility for our fellow citizens, than to ask them to donate a pint and receive a chocolate chip cookie in return. Tyler, too, had encouraged the idea before he left me. When I told him about it way back when, he smiled and kissed my palm before turning back to his cereal and ESPN.

  “You do make this world a better place,” he said. “That school is lucky to have you.”

  At the time, I watched him shovel in his Frosted Flakes and thought that I could say the same of him, how lucky I felt to call him mine. Now, I flip off the engine to the SUV and stride toward the blood drive trailer, and I can’t help but wonder if Tyler was already planning his exit back then, tossing out generic compliments but never turning to look me square in the eye as he said them. Maybe I should have seen it, I consider, because Tyler was many things, but a good liar was never one of them.

  The breeze kicks up, one of those last-gasp-of-summer embraces, and it warms my shoulders, my collarbone, my core. Two months into this maze of loneliness, and yes, it dawns on me that perhaps I could have seen it, not just in my premonition, but in Tyler’s distance, in the way he was slowly creeping away from me, the ant who discovered a way out of the farm when he saw the light up above.

  The trailer door is ajar, so I step inside. Every chair is full; no surprise, really. Students are given a pass from class if they opt to donate, and I spot CJ in the last seat, closest to the cookie station. Johnny Hutchinson is next to her, and they’re giggling back and forth, the pulsing red tubes at their inner elbows no deterrent to teenage hormones. She sees me and smiles wide, sunshine in her eyes, and I suppose that one of the many things I missed over the past two months was that they’d gotten back together, despite her protests that he was too small-town, that anything about Westlake was too small-town for her.

  A nurse motions for me to have a seat, so I do. The door hinges squeak, and two sophomores amble in, cameras swinging from their necks. Eli, oh, God, Eli, tails them, shooing them inside farther, until they are a compact huddle in the nose of the trailer, reminding me of a cluster of cells, pressed together, looking for room to expand.

  I swivel toward the nurse, eyeing her, hoping she’ll usher me toward the back so I do not have to face him and have him ask me about the rumors that run rampant through the halls like last winter’s flu, so I do not have to consider that even now, two months later, I’m irked at the thought of his girlfriend, even while knowing that I can’t care, shouldn’t care, because I’m still married, God damn it! But the nurse is focused on finding the vein in Reggie Valdez’s left arm and pays me no mind.

  “Hey, Tilly!” Eli says over the shoulders of one of his students. “You donating blood?” I nod and press the apples of my cheeks upward, too fatigued for a real smile. He returns my nod. “We’re taking pictures for the yearbook.”

  “You’re dedicating an entire page in the yearbook to the blood drive?”

  “For the community service page. We’ll see what we get and then decide. Better to have taken it now than wish that we had it when the time comes.”

  I nod again and think, as I always do these days, of Tyler. Two years into our marriage, I asked him if maybe we could start trying for kids. Susie’s twins were nudging toward their first birthday, and I began to feel that itch, the tug toward motherhood, even though I was going to night school to earn my master’s degree and the two of us were barely eking by on Tyler’s sales commissions from the store and my day job as the assistant to the principal. I raised the subject one Sunday morning when we had the whole day in front of us, nowhere to be, no one to answer to. We stretched out in bed, and Tyler read the paper, and I rested on his shoulder, and suddenly, the words flew out of me, that I was ready to be a mother.

  “If not now, then when?” I still remember saying to Tyler when he glanced down at me, crumpling the paper into his lap, his face already an answer.

  “We’re so young,” he replied, and he was right, we were. But I didn’t want to be like his mother, aching and creaky by the time our children were in high school, and I told him I’d always wanted a daughter, whom I would name Margaret, after my mom.

  He smiled at
me when I said that. Even now, as I sit in the blood drive trailer, I can remember that smile—tender, kind, complacent. He wasn’t ready, he told me, but he would be soon. He leaned over and kissed the top of my head, and I knew that he meant it—well, I thought that he meant it, anyway.

  I watch the crimson sludge drain from Reggie Valdez’s inner arm and understand fully why Eli is here. He is covering his bases, just like I should have done, rather than loiter around assuming someone else, my husband, would step up to the plate.

  “Have you shot anything lately?” Eli asks me now, scooting around his yearbook staff. The trailer isn’t meant to accommodate the lot of us, so he is squished too closely to me, and I feel like the spider in my office who has run out of crevices in which to hide when the sole of my shoe hovers above.

  I tilt my face, unsure of his question, wishing I could ease back a few extra inches. Have I shot anything lately? Only my husband if he’d ever get his ass back in town!

  “Photos,” he clarifies, jabbing a finger toward his Nikon and then emitting an easy laugh. “Have you shot any photos lately?”

  “Oh. No.” My life has fallen off a cliff, and snapping pictures is hardly the first thing on my mind. Much less the stories that those photos might lay out for me and only me to see.

  “Here.” He whisks the camera strap over his head, grabs my hand, and shoves the camera in. “Your turn.”

  “Thanks anyway,” I say, shoving it back toward him.

  “Nope,” he says, shaking his head. “It’s yours for the day. I don’t need it; you do.”

  I jut my chin out in protest because I don’t want anyone taking care of me, Eli Matthews! But before I can make this clear, he steps back, past his students, and shuffles down the steps.

  “Here’s your assignment,” he calls to me. “I want documentation of the blood drive, and then I want candids from around the school. You can have them on my desk by end of day next Friday.”

  The door slams shut, and his yearbook staff stand there awkwardly, eyeing me, wondering just what the hell that was about. They toss glances between them, trying to assess what has transpired between the substitute art teacher and the guidance counselor who looks like she hasn’t slept in three weeks (she hasn’t), hasn’t eaten a green vegetable in a month (ditto), and might be on the cusp of a mental breakdown (entirely likely).

  I am too tired to chase after him and set him straight, even though I know I should, even though it is the anniversary of my mother’s death, and she’d never want me to wilt, to cower as I have so easily, too easily. Even though I have resolved, this very morning, to buck up, pull myself together. Maybe tomorrow. Yes, maybe then. But for today, I slump in my chair, sigh, and simply wait my turn. Soon enough, the nurse hails me over and tells me to sit back, exhale, and relax. This will only hurt a pinch, she assures me, so I close my eyes, breathe, and let her drain me of one pint more.

  Susanna turns thirty-three three days later, and we convene for a potluck dinner at her house once the twins have gone down. Darcy tags along, and I’ve called Ashley to see if she, too, would like to join us, because I am tired of the misplaced, judgmental compassion and the whispers and the glances at CVS, those “Poor Tilly Farmer” sidelong glares, like my entire existence should depend on my husband, even though, yes, let’s be honest, most of my existence did, whether I realized it at the time or not.

  So I have invited Ashley along tonight because she is certainly one who will cast me no pity, and besides, she’s also the only one who knows my secret: that I can see things, even if I no longer opt to see them. And yeah, she’s the very person who did this to me, but now, it’s done, and part of me feels grateful to have her ear, her confidence.

  She arrives with a box of Dunkin’ Donuts, the best she could do, she says, after her mother had a bad spell. Ashley’s mom is dying. She told me this two weeks ago when she dropped by the house to ensure that I wasn’t slitting my wrists in the bathtub. I wasn’t. I had instead crawled home from work early, stared at the empty answering machine, considered tequila but opted merely to flatten myself against the kitchen floor and gaze at the ceiling. Ashley found me there forty minutes later.

  “My mother is dying,” she said that night, an attempt to shock me out of this, to figuratively shake me by the shoulders and say, “Your husband is not everything, you dolt.” But all she did was remind me of my own mother dying, and that life is short and you should surround yourself with the people who love you. Which circled me right back to Tyler. Whom I’d have called if I didn’t hate him so much.

  Susanna uncorks a bottle of wine, pouring full, sparkling glasses for each of us. We down them nearly whole, too quickly, and Darcy, in a turtleneck and burgundy corduroy jumper, just like she used to wear when she was little, circles around Susie’s kitchen island for refills.

  Susie raises her glass.

  “To thirty-three,” she says. “God help me, may it be a better year than thirty-two.”

  “I’ll drink to that,” I say as the four of us clink our glasses together and swallow deeply again, the merlot already softening us.

  “Well, I have news!” I wave my free hand in the air. “Tyler’s coming back in a few weeks to get his stuff. He texted me today.”

  “He texted you?” Ashley says.

  “Indeed.” I nod. “He texted me. Welcome to the twenty-first century, in which your asshole husband doesn’t have to actually speak with you for months on end.”

  Susie’s shoulders begin to shake, her back toward me as she slices thick pieces of lasagna on the counter. When she turns, her face is distorted with the sick humor of it all.

  “You have to got be kidding me,” she says. “He seriously sent you a fucking text?”

  I giggle because we all know that I’m not kidding her, that there’s nothing to joke about when your husband sends you a two-line, hackneyed text declaring, essentially, that your marriage will be over when he returns in October to retrieve all of his crap, but the alcohol is like armor now, and what the hell, anyway.

  “I know, what a prick,” I say.

  “To pricks!” Darcy interjects, so we clink our glasses together again and drain them once more.

  “Now there’s something I can certainly drink to,” Susanna says, gesturing us toward the table. “So you know what? Come stay with me for that weekend when he comes back,” she says, dishing a tong-full of salad onto our plates. “Don’t give him the satisfaction of being there.”

  “You should give him something,” Ashley says, “though, yeah, satisfaction is definitely not it.”

  “A pole up his ass,” Darcy offers helpfully.

  “I’ll think about it,” I say.

  “About the pole?” Darcy asks.

  “About staying here.”

  “Too bad. He could really use that pole,” she answers.

  “The pole not withstanding, I think that he should have to look me in the eye and tell me it’s over,” I say, testing out a piece of lettuce, the likes of which my digestive tract hasn’t seen in weeks. “I want him to at least have to do that.”

  “He’s such a weasel, that brother-in-law of mine, ex-brother-in-law of mine,” Darcy says. “What a douche. All I know is he better not show up here and beg for you back.”

  For a fleeting second, I almost pipe up and say that of course I want him to show up and beg for me back, but I can read their faces—even in my slightly murky two-glasses-of-wine state, I can tell there will be hell from them if I so much as utter this sentiment, so I stuff down some lasagna and bob my head in agreement.

  “I say that all men are assholes,” Ashley declares, rising to open another bottle.

  “I always thought you were a lesbian,” Darcy says. “It now seems to be confirmed.”

  Susie laughs so unexpectedly that tiny pieces of tomato-covered pasta fly out of her mouth onto her arm.

  “I’m not a lesbian!” Ashley says, struggling with the cork. “Though trust me, I’ve long considered it. Like it wouldn’t be eas
ier to be in a relationship with one of you guys.”

  “No offense,” I say. “But I wouldn’t date you. Too brooding.”

  “Me neither,” says Susanna. “But then again, I actually might have a prospect with a penis, so I’ll take him by default.”

  “I might date you,” Darcy adds. “Check back later.”

  Ashley wins her battle with the cork and tops off our glasses.

  “Um, rewind, missy,” I say to Susanna. “Who is this prospect and why am I just hearing about it now?”

  “Because it just happened. This afternoon in the teacher’s lounge. Scotty Hughes came up to me and asked if I want to get coffee sometime.”

  “Scotty Hughes, the lunchroom guy?” I ask, confused, then consider it. I suppose that could have been him, the man backstage in my vision.

  “Yup, I know, random,” she says, wiping the corner of her lips with the butt of her hand, too loose now to care about a napkin. “I said no. Too soon.”

  “It’s not too soon!” I say, now more sure of what I’ve seen, piecing it together—his build, his hair. Yes, that was probably Scotty Hughes.

  “Seriously, get back on that horse,” Ashley says.

  “I thought all men were assholes?” Susie asks.

  “Not if they’re cute and asking you out,” she explains, like this makes sense, which, to us, in our current state, it sort of does, so we nod as if she’s offering the wisdom of a Zen master. We chew our lasagna, mulling the possibility.

  Later, we’ve lost track of the refills and the room is wobbly. For the first time in months, surrounded by their generosity, their fury on my behalf, I can feel it—that power that Ashley let loose in me, the strength, the truthfulness in my guts. We park on Susie’s living room floor, our heads resting on couch pillows, and we cast our eyes up toward the ceiling as if we were kids again, staring at the stars. Ashley opens the doughnuts, and I lay on my back, sucking on a chocolate Munchkin, its crunchy sweetness blending better than expected with the residue of merlot still on my tongue.