The One That I Want Read online

  “I didn’t forget,” I lie. “I had a busy day. You know that the fair is the school’s big fund-raising opportunity.” Not to mention the Arc de Triomphe. Why focus on her birthday when there is the Arc de Triomphe? I think. “And I’m busy with the school musical,” I add after a pause, like that might impress her, like I should even attempt to impress her.

  “Whatever,” she says, unimpressed. “It’s not as if it’s Mom’s birthday every day or anything.”

  I flop my shoulders, unwilling to take Darcy’s bait, as Tyler unlocks the front door and goes inside, abandoning me to mop up the mess. The screen bangs shut, and Darcy bites her cuticles while she waits for me to amend my wrongdoing. A pang of sympathy for my baby sister assaults me.

  “Look, it’s still light out. Let me run to the bathroom, and we’ll go, okay?”

  “Okay.” She pouts, reminding me of how petulant she was as a child, how quickly her mood could turn from sunny to cloudy to completely tornadic with no warning at all.

  “I’ll be in your car.” She rises, her dirty blond ponytail swaying back and forth, and I notice how skinny she’s gotten while she’s been in L.A. Her shorts drip off her hipbones; her breasts are no bigger than buds; her legs are gawky and slim, like a baby deer’s.

  The car door thumps shut behind her, Darcy symbolically shouting, “Screw you!” and I plod inside to the front hall bathroom and tug down my underpants to check the giant-sized maxi pad, which is still clear, unmarred.

  I stand upright and glance in the mirror, and then look closer because something seems off. The pallor of my skin has a hint of gray underneath it, and the shadows under my eyes are an ominous shade of yellow. Heatstroke, I think, leaning over the sink to splash water on my peaked cheeks. I wipe off the lingering drops, dab my face with a towel, and when I gaze anew at my reflection, I see something even odder, something really out-of-body, freaking-me-the-hell-out strange: Ashley Simmons, with her coffee-colored eyes and layered black hair, staring back at me.

  Jesus Christ! My heart nearly detonates inside my chest, and I squeal, jumping back, the hinges of my knees colliding with the toilet. I step toward the mirror once more, then double-bat my lashes, and, poof, with that blink, she’s gone, just a figment of the memory of my afternoon. I stare again, just to be sure, but no, no, it’s just me, grayish, sickly me, with a pissed-off sister in her SUV and her stomach churning at the thought of a failed conception. I shake it off with a quick flutter of my head. Heatstroke hallucinations. I remind myself to Google the symptoms later.

  The car horn honks, snapping me to, and I picture Darcy sitting out there, impatient, her left leg bouncing, her irritation skyrocketing.

  “Ty,” I shout to his den. I know he’s already absorbed in the Mariners game and won’t notice my absence for at least an hour. We fall into this pattern every April and stretch it out until at least September, maybe October if the playoffs look like a possibility: Ty retreating to the TV to catch whatever game he can find, me enjoying the solitary bit of quiet time after a day of demands that are never once reciprocated, surfing over online picture galleries, pretending like I might actually pick up a camera again, my photography career derailed much like Ty’s baseball aspirations, though for very different reasons.

  “We’re leaving!” I shout even louder, hoping to make it above the fray of the Mariners crowd. But I hear nothing, so I grab the car keys from the entryway table, close the front door firmly behind me, and join Darcy in the car. We are off to visit our mother.

  Westlake, population 81,000, has forever been a town on the cusp, a town whose sparkly name always belied its more dilapidated reality. Ask most residents, and they’ll tell you that our city is only one lucky break away from prosperity. One great apple-harvesting season or one new factory opening, and the gods would rain down on us. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. Most of us never made our way out of here, content with our lot in life, maybe not the best lot, but still, we’re grateful for what we’ve got. The sign at our city limit that greets travelers, most of whom scamper through without a glance back on their way west to Seattle or east to Boise, implores, WELCOME TO WESTLAKE! STOP AND STAY FOR A WHILE. But none of them do. None of them do stay. It’s the rest of us who stick.

  Darcy was an exception in many ways. For one, she actually left. I begged her not to go, and I watched my father’s face wash with a mix of admiration and heartbreak when she packed up her Toyota and drove off, literally, into the sunset, but there was never any rationalizing with Darcy. So we let her go and hoped that she would find what she was looking for. Or at the very least (and maybe we hoped this more than anything), that she would come back to us.

  For two, Darcy and I, along with our middle sister, Luanne, were fortunate, if you could take the sum of our collective history and actually see it positively, which I choose to do. My father’s store was never impacted by a winter that froze too many crops or a Boeing plant layoff that landed some of our neighbors on the unemployment line. People always craved a new TV, their biweekly paycheck be damned, always needed a new refrigerator when theirs sputtered to an out-of-nowhere death in the middle of August. For many years, early on and then again later, when he recovered from his self-destruction, my father has been a man about town. A member of the Elks Club, a sponsor of a Little League team, a beloved, gregarious bear with a riotous laugh and a moderately supple bank account that afforded Darcy that Toyota and Tyler and me our two-bedroom-plus-den colonial, which my dad bestowed on us as our wedding gift.

  Tonight, Darcy and I weave past the faded homes, which grow increasingly bleak the farther we trail from my own neighborhood—their front porches dotted with American flags and drying laundry—and I try to forge a bridge with my sister.

  “How long are you here for?” I ask, hoping she’ll say forever, hoping that she’ll finally abandon this incessant need for freedom, for something “bigger than here!” (Her words, not mine.)

  “Just another week,” she says, her eyes like lasers out the window.

  “You’re at Dante’s?” I ask.

  “Uh-huh,” she says. “He has a great piano. I can play all night.” Dante Smiley, born Daniel Smiley, changed his name during a passing Goth phase in ninth grade, and the moniker stuck, though he’s now a staid paralegal at the attorney’s office in the strip mall next to Target, and occasionally moonlights as a drummer in Murphy’s Law, a not-even-good-enough-to-be-deemed-garage band that manages monthly-or-so gigs at bars around town. Darcy gutted him the summer of their senior year when she announced she was leaving for Berklee College in Boston in September and had no intention of staying faithful to their two-year romance. And now, whenever she’s back, he flings open his door with a salty mix of hope, redemption, and second chances. The guidance counselor in me thinks he’s perilously naïve, while the sunshiny optimist in me admires his romanticism.

  “How’s it going in L.A., then?” I ask.

  “Fine,” she answers.

  “Any closer to a record deal?” I say gently, as this is usually the point in our conversation when Darcy’s temper sparks like a blowtorch.

  She sighs and glances over at me. “Please, Till, I’m tired. Can we not do this now? I’d like to just respect the moment.”

  I nod and smile at my sister, so heartbreakingly young at twenty-three, with so much to unearth. She smiles back, though her eyes are lush with sadness, and it’s all I can do not to release the steering wheel and smother her with every ounce of myself.

  “Did you call Lulu to meet us?” I flick on the blinker to signal a right turn down the long lane leading us to our mom. The sun lets off a sudden, last-gasp flare for the evening, and both of us reach to lower the windshield shade, moving together like synchronized swimmers.

  “She went by earlier,” Darcy says without rancor. “She was working tonight.”

  “And did you touch base with Dad?” I hold my breath.

  “He doesn’t know I’m back.”

  I pull into the park
ing lot and kill the engine.

  “Darcy.” I meet her gray eyes and affect a tone I hope she doesn’t find patronizing. “You should’ve called him.”

  “Would’ve, should’ve, could’ve,” she says, opening the passenger door and grabbing the almost-wilting irises. “Welcome to life. Now let’s get on with it.”

  Darcy leads the way through the maze of headstones. Dusk has settled into darkness, and the caretaker, lurking but never seen, has thought to flip on the slightly too-bright lights, which give the cemetery a shiny sense of false daylight, and the overhead beams bounce off the headstones and the sad reminders of the tragedies that inevitably await all of us. We tread through the winding path in silence, an old habit from Darcy’s childhood when she still believed in ghosts and always shushed Luanne and me if we chattered, the better to keep the spirits away. Sometimes the air wafts with the scent of cut grass or heavy rain, but today it smells of mulch, of dirt, the sign that someone else’s family recently laid a loved one to rest.

  As I approach her headstone, with a solitary bouquet of roses resting at its foot, I unconsciously slow down with a complicated mix of dread, respect, and the sense that even after so many years, I never quite get used to the words MARGARET EVERETT, BELOVED MOTHER, WIFE, AND TEACHER, carved into the granite, staring out at me, unable to respond to all of the things I’ve told them in the fifteen years since she’s been gone.

  “Oh, Mom.” Darcy plunks cross-legged, swooping down into herself like a comma, while I stand behind her and give them their moment. From my view, she reminds me so much of the child she used to be, sitting out here for hours, just eight years old, imploring our mother to come back, eyes full of tears I didn’t even know she still had.

  “Happy birthday,” Darcy whispers, her head bowed to her chest, and I step back even farther, too embarrassed to intrude on whatever secrets Darcy will pass on to the only person who could ever seem to tame her.

  When she finishes, I move forward to have a quiet moment with my thoughts and my mother, whose departure left its scars on me as well. When she first died, I visited all the time. I asked her how to cope with my father, who had begun to drink himself into a blind stupor, left with a household full of too much estrogen—and communication skills that were stunted as best—and I’d share how I was doing all that I could to shield Darcy from the agony of what had now become our life. When Ty and I started dating, just a month after she passed, I sat for hours, pulling grass up with my fingers and casting it about, pouring out all the details of heady, teenage love.

  But eventually, time found a way to move on. I headed to college in the next town over and spent my weekends visiting Ty, who’d been handed a baseball scholarship to the University of Washington. As the years went by, I still visited my mother, but life also got in the way, which is what I always thought she’d want for me anyway. Weekly visits turned into monthly, and soon monthly turned into special holidays, and sure, I missed her so terribly at times that it felt like my heart had been exorcised, but I also found a way to move beyond it. Burrowed safe in the enclave of Westlake, where life repeated itself like Groundhog Day—no rapid movements, no figurative earthquakes that sent damaging fault lines through our world—I found a way to mostly feel complete.

  Darcy, though, never forgot. Never let time get the better of her. She marked my mom’s milestones and dates like they were her own, boomeranging back to Westlake seemingly at random, though it was never actually at random, because it was always for an anniversary of Mom’s death or her diagnosis or her wedding date or, like today, her birthday, and then fleeing as soon as the town started to infest her psyche, as it inevitably would.

  The crickets, who must not mind the heat, have taken up residence on the lawn, playing their night music that serves as our only background noise. The cemetery is deserted: everyone is still at the carnival or at the minor league game at the stadium in Tarryville or settling in for a night of Deal or No Deal. I wish my mother the happiest of birthdays and run my hand lovingly over the smooth stone of her resting place, and wish, as I always do when I actually take the time to visit, that somehow things had been different, that someone had told us way back when that her intestinal cramps and her bloating and her general malaise hadn’t merely been what she figured as simply a weak stomach. That someone had had the foresight, a map of the future, to intuit that no, it wasn’t a genetically lousy digestive tract. That, in fact, it was ovarian cancer, and that by the time she was diagnosed, there was really no time left at all. Four months, two of which were spent mostly sleeping, borderline unconscious. Why didn’t someone have that map? I think. Why couldn’t someone have seen it coming?

  I consider it briefly, as my fingers run themselves over the etchings of her headstone, MARGARET EVERETT, in and out of the M, and then the A, and then the R, how different all of our lives might have been if someone had known better, if someone could have seen the future.

  But then I come back into myself and remember how much I love my life, how much I love my husband, how elated I am at my own shot to be a mother, and how grateful I am that we all, mostly, came through it as well as could be hoped. My father is sober. Luanne has coasted as if it never happened. Darcy, well, maybe not Darcy.

  “Dad obviously didn’t come today,” Darcy says as we head toward the parking lot. “The only flowers were Lulu’s.”

  “He’s in Mexico,” I answer, before realizing my mistake.

  “He went to Mexico during Mom’s birthday? God, he’s an asshole.”

  “Darce, to be fair, it was a long time ago.” Shit, shut up, Tilly!

  She stops abruptly, just before the parking lot, and turns toward me, that look—Ugh, do not give me that look, baby sister—of righteous indignation, of over-the-top roiled anger that explodes from her like a speeding tornado.

  “You do not get to imply that this shouldn’t be important!” She wiggles a finger toward me, her words echoing in the emptied lot. “This is Mom! This is her birthday, for God’s sake! Dad should be here. We should all fucking be here. Together. As a family. Not in Mexico lounging on the beach like an eff-ing whale!”

  “Darcy, I was only trying to say that Dad’s moved on. It doesn’t mean that he doesn’t love her or remember her! It just means that we all have our lives to live.”

  “Mom doesn’t!” she cries, a needling way to shame me into conceding to her.

  “Oh, come on,” I say, instantly angry. “Like I don’t know that! Like I really don’t know that she’s gone! For God’s sake, Darcy, if anyone knows that, it’s me!”

  “Oh, here we go,” she says, disdain dripping from her edges. “Oh, I forgot. You won the prize on martyrdom.”

  She brushes past me across the lot, flipping her cell to her ear, then remembers it’s dead. But because she is Darcy, because she will not relinquish even a moment of weakness, she just shoves the phone in her pocket and keeps walking, without even a glance behind.

  “Darcy, come on,” I shout to her fading figure. “You’re not going to walk back to Dante’s! It’s at least three miles!”

  She doesn’t answer, just turns the corner onto the main road, leaving me to scamper into the Explorer and chase after her. I pull up next to her, rolling down the window, trying to appease her.

  “Darcy, get in. I didn’t mean it like you think I did.”

  “Yes, you did,” she answers. “You think we should just all move on and get over it, and I’m sorry, but I think you suck.” Her voice is weighted dead.

  “Darce, please. Let’s not do this today.”

  “Too late,” she says, stubborn to the end. “Honestly, get out of my face. You ruined this for me.”

  “I ruined this for you? God, could you be any more melodramatic?” The car is rolling slowly along now, and I check the rearview mirror to be sure that no one is nosing up behind me. “Grow up, Darcy. Just freaking grow up. We all have lives to live, futures to look forward to. That takes nothing away from Mom!”

  “Yeah, well, good l
uck to you then.” She spins on her heels and darts into the parking lot of the Exxon station by the side of the road. I call after her—“Darcy, get back here! We are not finished!”—but she tucks herself into a phone booth, fishes a quarter from her pocket, and punches a number into the phone.

  “Darcy!” I try one last time, but my voice just reverberates in the car. And even if she could hear me, she wouldn’t listen anyway. So I shake my head, gun the gas, and fly down the road. Darcy will find her way back home with or without me. She always does.

  three

  Tyler is deep into slumber when I crack open the den door. He’s fallen asleep with the game still on—he’s been doing this nearly every night these days: collapsing here on the couch, too lazy to haul himself upstairs.

  “Ty.” I try to shake him awake. “Ty, get up for a sec.”

  He grunts and his eyelashes flutter, but he is too far gone to rouse now. So I unfold a blanket from the hall closet and carry it over to him, wrapping him like a newborn. I flick off the TV and then the light, but the room doesn’t quite fall black. Tyler’s breath is patterned, measured now, and I stare at my husband, the one boy whom I’ve loved for just about forever, and I marvel at how he is mine. His brown-black hair still thick on his head; his tanned cheeks that never fade, even in the coldest of months; his broad, defined torso still as agile as it was when he was the star shortstop. He will make such a capable father, this I know; his bear-paw hands will swallow up his child with his love. I want to wake him to bitch about my irritation with Darcy—how she always makes it about herself, how she refuses to cut any of us any slack—and also to beckon him to come even out the weight on our mattress, tether me like a buoy.

  I move to kiss him good night, that last flicker of a moment of our evening together, when I’m seized with a cramp in my foot. It shoots through me like a lit wick, before I can even think to grab on to something steady, exploding through my temples, and then, blam, it’s gone. Stars splay themselves on the back of my eyelids, and my gag reflex kicks in as I choke back suffocating air.