The One That I Want Page 6

  It’s only then that I remember my father. Oh crap.

  Darcy has never quite meshed with our dad, or maybe it was vice versa, but more likely not. But my mother, either consciously or unconsciously recognizing this, quickly made Darcy her favorite, a fact we all just tacitly accepted. She was the one who was blessed with my mom’s gift for music, and they’d spend hours pressed against each other on the piano bench, playing in harmony, playing solo, or just giggling with their shared love of melody. And when she died, well, surely, any child would be scarred at the loss of her mother at such a young age, but for Darcy, it was a pox that has never been erased. That my father compounded her alienation with his drinking was, in her mind, unforgivable.

  The screen door bangs against the frame, and we shuffle inside, the wheels of Darcy’s suitcase squeaking along the hallway. Before I can even think of what I’m going to say, how I’m going to explain this to her, and what could possibly temper her anger at my father, he walks out to greet us. He is wearing Tyler’s faded hunter-green robe and carrying a glass of what I know is water but also suspect might be vodka, just because, well, it’s the sort of thing you worry about when your off-the-wagon father moves back in with you.

  “Darcy!” His arms open into a wide embrace as he pulls her in closely. “I wasn’t expecting you. Did you just get into town?” He says this with the nonchalance of a man who has mastered the art of overlooking the obvious: that he is standing in my foyer in my husband’s robe, with his hair askew, his undershirt dank, a purple welt under his eye, hoping against all rational hope that people around him won’t point out the myriad of problems with this picture.

  “You need a shower,” she says, wiggling her way out of his hug like a worm down the sidewalk. She steps back and stares at him. “What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing here?” he asks back, and winks at her. Actually winks at her.

  “Darcy,” I say quickly. “Dad is staying with us for a while. Tyler’s on his fishing trip, so I wanted the company. Why don’t you go put your stuff in the den?”

  She squints at our dad, then looks from him, to me, to him again.

  “Why does he look messed up?” she asks me, with her eyes still pinned on him.

  “Messed up how?” I say, fervently wishing that my father had taken my suggestion to shower this morning, when it appears that he actually slept the whole day through.

  “Puffy eyes, gross skin,” she says, her words like steel. “Like he’s recovering from a bender.” She isn’t dumb, this sister of mine. We long ago learned to recognize the signs.

  “Darcy.” My dad starts to speak, then, surprisingly, chokes on his words. His hands flop listlessly at his sides, reminding me of dying, gasping fish.

  “Oh, fuck me,” she says as the transparency of the situation clicks into place. “I cannot believe you!”

  “Darce.” I touch her elbow gently. “Take your suitcase to the spare bedroom.”

  She hesitates, eyeballing my father with vitriol, fury that I haven’t witnessed since she left for Berklee, intent on never casting a second glance back. I see Darcy consider her options—return to Dante’s, camp out at the airport, buy a new ticket that she can’t afford—before she realizes the certainty of her situation: she’s stuck. She grabs for the handle of her suitcase, and then, squeak, squeak, squeak, I hear her carelessly dragging it, the contents of her life, down the hall.

  She’s stuck, I say to myself.

  And then surprisingly, despite the fireworks, despite the possibility of hope in my womb, despite everything, an alien, tiny germ of a voice, that same one that’s been tailing my psyche since I blacked out on my bedroom floor, echoes back, Aren’t we all?

  six

  My father’s house is musty—a mildewed cloud hovers over the living room—like someone hasn’t slept here in weeks, or, at the very least, someone hasn’t cared enough to tend to the housekeeping details that comprise the basics of domestic hygiene. A tower of unread newspapers has fallen like playing cards in the foyer. A mountain of letters—shoved into the mail slot and ignored—has amassed on the floor; an overflowing pile of garbage tumbles from the kitchen trash can. Mostly, though, the house looks dead, unlived in. Why didn’t Adie call me? At the very least she could have called me.

  My irritation rises up, a tiny pebble rubbing against my sole, uncomfortable, present, impossible to ignore. I’m starting to feel like the Incredible Hulk: one minute entirely normal, the next minute turning green with anger, ripping off my shirt, and storming down the streets in search of a brawl. Or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Maybe one of them.

  I nab several wayward socks that are squashed next to the baseboard, trying to remember who is who—which one goes crazy? Jekyll? Hyde? I can’t decide. I throw the socks against the couch, where they land with a pitiful thwop.

  Dad still lives in our childhood home. It’s too big a house for him now, with its five bedrooms and its pool out back that mostly stays covered the year through. Adrianna wanted to sell it; she tried to convince him to buy one of the condos in the new complex that had been built a few years back near the mall with the Penneys in it. New construction wasn’t too common for Westlake, and mostly, those condos sat empty. My dad kept telling Adie that he was waiting for the price to drop, but Luanne and I always knew that she’d never get him to move, even if he won one of the damn things for free.

  I run my fingers over the wallpaper in the kitchen. My mother applied it herself, just before she got sick. We all piled into the car and went to the décor store, and oh, did it take hours upon hours for us to agree. Finally, Darcy flipped the page to a creamy paper with tiny green and pink flowers that swirled in such a way that they almost looked as if they were dancing. We huddled around our baby sister to get a view of it and then fell into a bubble of silence. “This is it!” Darcy shouted, and we murmured our approval. And then, soon after, the diagnosis came, and even though our kitchen looked much the same as it had before the gutting news, nothing, of course, was ever the same. Even those tiny pirouetting flowers seemed to lose their bounce.

  I tuck the strewn garbage back into the can and then flip the lights off and tread down to the basement for a suitcase to stow enough of my father’s clothes to last the month. The too-steep steps creak as I gingerly make my way down, my hand grasping the cool cement wall. The main lighting long ago burned out, so I tug the rusty brass chain that swings near the bottom of the stairs and click on the solitary lightbulb for illumination. My eyes take a moment to adjust to the dimness.

  The dank underbelly of the house is a compilation of my father’s life. Despite the passing years, he hasn’t had the stomach to part with many of my mother’s belongings; instead, on the one-year anniversary of her death, Luanne and I finally picked up the actual pieces, stowing the bulk of her closet in cardboard boxes that we then dutifully hauled down here. Darcy was out cruising the neighborhood on her bike, and my dad was mourning at Shecky’s, a bar within walking distance of our home that has long since closed.

  I haven’t ventured down to the basement in years, and now the boxes are all stacked just as they were from ages before, my teenage handwriting scrawled on the sides: “Sweaters,” “Coats,” “Shoes.”

  In the half light, I navigate through the archives. “Shirts.” “Jeans.” “Pants.” All tucked away in a time capsule, like if he never gave it away, she might still somehow make it back to claim it. I spot another box behind one that says “Misc.” and recognize not my own handwriting, but that of my mother.

  “Tilly’s photo stuff.” A rush of heat rises in my cheeks, the memory of her frail, beaten shell of a self, insistent on taking me shopping for a new camera, and then that same afternoon, when we plopped on the floor in my room, loading the old gear and some old pictures into this very box, the idea to organize my photos and equipment, not to part with it forever. But later, only weeks later, she passed, and with so many other more pressing matters to deal with, I slipped down to the basement and slid t
he box to the very back corner, where it sat hidden, untouched until now. That second camera, the one she bought for me on a summer morning before she died, smashed one day when it tumbled out of my car, a crack like a storybook lightning bolt right through the lens, and I never worked up the nerve to ask my dad for a new one. A new camera seemed infantile when the very skeleton of my world was shattering.

  A fat film of grime has spread itself across the top of the box. My nose sucks in the dust and just as I’m repressing a sneeze, my cell vibrates in my pocket.

  Tyler. Finally. I haven’t heard from him since he dropped off the radar and into Nolan Green’s parents’ lake cabin two days ago.

  “Hey, what’s up?” I say, unsnapping my phone and tucking it under my shoulder as I separate the musty cardboard flaps of the box and look inside. Urine-colored newspaper, balled up and decaying, peers back at me.

  “Sorry I haven’t called,” he says. “Reception up here is spotty. And we’ve been on the lake most of the time anyway. You should have seen what I hauled in yesterday. It’s on ice. I’ll bring it back for the weekend.”

  I plunge my hands under the newspaper and feel something smooth.

  “How’s your dad?” Ty continues.

  “So-so.” I pause, only half-focused on the conversation, because, truth told, I never enjoy the newly gutted fish that Tyler totes home with him, with their glassy eyeballs and their tiny bones that inevitably poke into my gums when least expected.

  What is this? My fingers shimmy beneath the surface and tug out a stack of black and white eight-by-tens.

  “How are you?” Ty asks.

  “Fine,” I say. “A little tired, but fine.” I start to tell him about Luanne, but the line crackles, and I hear his voice lob in and out, “Hel—lo, hel—lo, Til, hel—lo?”

  “I’m here!” I say loudly, my voice reverberating off the damp walls.

  “I can hear you,” he says, clearly now. “So, yeah, anyway, I caught this incredible bass, and oh my God, you won’t believe the stories Nolan has about the team now.” Nolan, because he was never quite good enough to play for the minors, just barely qualified for the bench of the UW team in college and now works in the back office, recruiting new prospects, new hopes, new blood to invigorate them.

  Distractedly, because there were few things I cared less about than Nolan Green—who once got so totally wasted in college that he passed out naked next to me while I was already asleep in Tyler’s bed and didn’t have the decency to apologize the next morning when I rolled over and snuggled with him for a good five minutes until I realized the difference—I flip through the eight-by-tens to a shot of my high school crew that I took down by the lake. It must have been July, maybe early August: Susanna and Austin and Elizabeth Childs, whom I now run into at the post office, and Darren Lewis, who enlisted in the army and came home from Iraq a hollowed-out shell of a man, and of course, Tyler, in board shorts, with his arms flung open in a victory stance. In the background, the lake is a metal gray, with streaks of summer sun bouncing off the ripples. I stare at the sixteen-year-old Tyler and remember the pangs of longing that I had for him that summer. How our friendship evolved into something more for me, and how we’d all convene at the dock after our shifts ended at our summer jobs, and how I’d watch him, as surreptitiously as possible, hoping that one afternoon he’d discover the same pangs inside of him.

  “But it’s pretty awesome here,” he says. “Pretty amazing. Just mostly solitude. Good time to be alone with my thoughts.”

  “I’m sure.” I roll my eyes. As if Nolan Green ever found the solitude in anything.

  And then, out of nowhere, I feel it: the cramp building from my little toe. Oh, shit, I think, as the pain snakes its way through my limbs—worming up from my calf to my thigh to my bowels and clamping around my heart until it shoots into my brain, and I feel like my head might implode into a hundred thousand little pieces.

  “Ty!” I say, though it is nothing more than a whoosh of a whisper, and I pray that he can hear me, pray that somehow, he can snap me out of this, snap me back to the present, eradicate the temple-splitting pain. But then it feels like water is filling my ears and the dim basement walls are asphyxiating the air in my lungs, and then I feel the cool concrete floor against my cheek, and I close my eyes and block out the hurt, and then, I feel nothing at all.

  The rain is pit-pat, pit-pattering off of the roof of the SUV, which is parked in the driveway, adjacent to a U-Haul, whose back door is flung open and is half-stuffed with mismatched cardboard boxes and one gray, fraying duffel bag that I recognize as Tyler’s from college. To be honest, I didn’t even realize that he still owned it. He must have dumped it in the back of the hall closet when we moved in, and I must have overlooked it through the years.

  I am on our sidewalk, staring at the house, the driveway from the outside in. I run my hand through my hair and notice, startlingly, that though the air is pregnant with moisture, I’m dry, bone-dry, an apparition in this reality.

  Our front door swings ajar and Austin emerges, carrying yet another box. He waddles to the U-Haul, drops it with a grunt, then leans against the vehicle to catch his breath. Tyler comes out a second later, his hands empty, and surveys the truck.

  “Alright,” he says to Austin, then zips up his puffy down coat, one that I bought for him last winter. “We’re done. Thanks, man.”

  They slap each other high fives and then readjust their baseball caps in unison. It’s then that I notice that Austin’s ring finger is stripped of his wedding band, a tiny and yet enormous naked symbol of where I am, of when I am, and what’s transpired, and suddenly, I’m acutely aware that I’ve once again been thrust into the future, into a time warp that hasn’t yet unfolded.

  Moving? I think. God damn it, we’re moving! How on earth are we moving and where on earth are we moving to? I tangibly feel my blood race, and I wonder how Tyler got me to agree, what promises he must have made for me to cave, to make such an enormous concession. Maybe it’s because I am pregnant, I consider. Maybe I got pregnant, and we need a bigger house. I peer down to my stomach, to see if it has pillowed, but no, I am still the me from the past, not the me from the future, so there are no clues to be found. And besides, I remember almost as quickly, this house is perfectly adequate for a family of three, and even if it weren’t, it’s not like we could afford something bigger anyway.

  I stare at the front door and hope that I will soon see myself waddle down the steps, toting a cup of hot tea, maybe chocolate chip cookies for their hard labor, signs that I am happy to leave this place—this house? this town—that I won’t resent Tyler for the disruption to my perfectly planned life. But there is no movement at the entryway, nothing but torpedoing water spilling from the gutters onto the porch.

  Tyler and Austin ease themselves on the edge of the U-Haul, despite the rain, and both emit long, exhausted sighs. Tyler is just a few feet away from me, and I so want to call out to him, ask him for some answers. What the hell, I think, and give it a go. “Ty-ler!” But when I do, when I do call for him, of course, he doesn’t turn toward me, can’t hear me, can’t see me. I shout his name three times and then quit, defeated. And then I try one last time, screaming, “Tyler,” throwing the weight of my body behind it, and he flinches, yes, I see him flinch, and I wonder if I’m on to something. But then they stand and head inside, and I am once again left alone with only this open truck bed and the rain, pit-patting its way around my bubble.

  Suddenly, the door flies open, and Darcy races out. She is wearing old leggings and flip-flops that must leave her toes instantly frigid, and though she needs a jacket in this dreary, freezing rain, she’s wearing only a sweatshirt. She flips her hoodie over her now dark purple hair and wipes her smeared mascara, making more of a mess down her cheeks than before. There is a stain down the front of her, wet and blotted, and it reminds me of a Rorschach test. She rushes past me, so close that she nearly brushes right against me, and I smell the unmistakable scent of vodka. I try to re
ach out to her, to grab her forearm and cling tight, but of course, I am helpless, and soon, she has fled down the driveway, down the road, gone.

  I turn back and stare at the contents of the truck, of my life, so tidy, so easily mobile, and as the drops accelerate from a passing steel cloud, thundering down in sheets upon sheets, I wonder if it is possible that I might actually drown.

  seven

  “Jesus, Tilly, wake up!” Someone is rubbing pepper beneath my nose, and a burning sensation sparks up through my nostrils.

  “Ow! Stop, stop!” I wave my hands in front of my face and push myself into a sitting position. The back of my head is pulsing, and I run my hands over my scalp; a monstrous welt is growing like an infected zit. My eyes are paperweights, but I force them open to find Susanna and Darcy crouched beside me.

  “What are you doing here?” I say; my voice is sandpaper.

  “We have to get you to the hospital,” Susie says.

  My eyes scurry around me. What is going on? What the hell is happening? Slowly, my memory clicks on. Why is Tyler packing up our house? I swallow hard, my lunch, a drive-through hamburger, reappearing in my throat. Oh, no. This can’t be good. The memory of the first time this happened crests through me: my visions of my father and how I somehow saw the future that hadn’t yet un-spooled itself. No, no, this is probably nothing. Yes, no, it’s nothing. Maybe it’s a coincidence. Two blackouts, two visions. I fight back my gag reflex for the second time.

  Darcy rubs the nape of my neck, a feeble attempt to soothe me.

  Then I consider something more alarming: the vision itself. Tyler. The boxes. Why would I dream that we’re moving? We’re moving? We can’t be moving! No, no, NO. This must be a fluke, must be some weird sort of hormonal reaction perhaps related to being pregnant. Yes! Yes, that’s it! I am pregnant, and as a result, my brain is spinning off the deep end.

  “I think I might be pregnant,” I say. “I’m thinking that my hormones have gone haywire, and I bet it’s just that I’m pregnant! It’s happened before.” Yes, it must be because I am pregnant, because what else could it be? That I can somehow intuit the future? Suddenly, I remember Ashley and her stupid, insipid, self-righteous prophecies. Shit. I exhale. No, no, I am pregnant. That is it! That. Is. It.