The One That I Want (10 page)

“It’s not such a big deal, CJ,” I say. “We’re way ahead of the game. It’s only July; that’s why we’re doing this so early. There are loads of places to volunteer, and if you start ASAP, you can include it on your app.”

“I barely have time to squeeze in my shift at the restaurant. How the hell am I going to manage this?” She shakes her head. “It’s like everyone is conspiring against me to keep me here.”

And what’s so wrong with here?
I want to shout.
Why does everyone seem so intent on going anywhere but here? Darcy! CJ! My own freaking husband!

“We’ll make it work,” I say, a false confidence in my voice. “I’ll make some calls, you make some calls. This is doable.”

She pauses. “Johnny dumped me.” Her throat catches.

“I’m sorry, CJ.” I reach over and pat her knee. To the best of my recollection, she’s been dating the basketball forward since late last spring.

“It doesn’t matter.” She shrugs, belying her crumpled cheeks, her scrunched nose, staving off her breakdown. “Ms. F, you have to get me out of here. I can’t be stuck. I can’t be stuck here with Johnny Hutchinson and his stupid friends, and this life in this stupid town.”

We’re all stuck
, I think again.

“You won’t get stuck,” I say reassuringly, as much for her sake as for mine. “You’ll get into college, CJ, even if for some reason it’s not Wesleyan.”

“I can’t be,” she whispers. “I can’t be stuck.” Then she looks at me with alarm and says, “No offense, Ms. F. I think you’re awesome.”

“None taken,” I say, perplexed a moment, until I realize that, in fact, I symbolize the very thing she’s fleeing.

“Anyway”—she sighs—“I’ll see you next week for auditions
and for prom-committee meeting right after.” She smacks a plastic, empty smile on her face. “Which dessert to order, which punch to make. Good times.”

“It
is
good times. Did you see the e-mail I sent around about the Arc de Triomphe?” I grin—genuinely this time—drunk on the memory of my own prom, me in a powder blue dress, Ty in his dad’s tuxedo, slow-dancing to “I Will Always Love You,” with the lights in the gym spinning, a wine cooler warming my senses.

“I did,” she says, pushing up her own smile that never quite meets the rims of her eyes. “You’re right; it’ll be amazing.”

After CJ turns out the door, I try to refocus on other work, on busywork, but I keep replaying her pitying, despairing gaze. “I’m not stuck. I’m
not
stuck.” I say it over and over again, a leftover habit from childhood when I thought that if you repeated something enough times, you could somehow make it true.

I stare out my side window onto the playing field, which will sit empty, quiet, and untouched until the softball team tramples it this afternoon. I run my hand down to my belly. A sign, an inkling, a hope. A chance for Tyler and me to become invincible. Because, despite what I’ve been telling myself—yes, maybe, if I really dig into it—I can acknowledge the fissures. His discontent. But Tyler and I were already supposed to be invincible. From the very first time that he kissed me—we’d all had a few beers and had broken into the football field to blow off some steam on a crisp September night—I knew that we were invincible. I’d been pining for him all summer, the well of emotion catching me off guard.

We’d been friends since elementary school. My mother was barely hanging on. He’d just broken up with Claire Addleman, who was a co-cheerleader and to whom I thus owed friendship
fidelity. And yet, we’d kick our feet off the dock of the lake or we’d huddle together at a bonfire in the late hours of the evening, and none of that mattered, especially not my mom. In the little bubble that I inflated around us, Tyler shielded me from all of the anguish that crashed down upon me as soon as I ventured outside of his protection. So when we lay down on the football field, staring at the clear night and its crystalline sky, and he pressed closer to me, and then rolled his head sideways and then took his hand to move my chin toward his, and then molded his mouth over mine, I knew that it was forever. That bubble, rising around us, washing everything else away.

I knew that we were lucky to meet so young, to avoid the mistakes that some of our friends made: pregnant in high school; divorced at twenty-six; miserable—like Austin—until you make that cataclysmic mistake that shows you that you don’t really know what misery is until your wife emotionally castrates you and kicks your ass out. It wasn’t that it was easy for Tyler and me—the weekends in college driving back and forth, the drunken frat party temptations, the fact that we had to grow up together rather than meeting when maybe each of us already knew who we were separately. But we did it, we endured, in spite of it all.

The bell clangs, tugging me out of the memory.

We’re all stuck
, I think again, picking up the phone to check in with Ty, hoping to reach him and say,
I might be pregnant, and please, I wish you were here and not up at Nolan Green’s parents’ lake house, and didn’t feel so far away
. But I’m sent to voice mail, an empty greeting that offers little reassurance that he is out there, missing me too.

A spider suddenly winds its way up the leg of my desk and onto my prom files. I fleetingly consider granting it reprieve, returning it to its wayward family outside, but instead, I reach down, remove my sandal, and
smack
, gone, it is gone.

Darcy, always easily distracted, has nearly forgotten her well-intentioned, sisterly determination as we amble down the hallway during lunch period toward the girls’ locker room, the pregnancy test concealed in my hand.

“God, it’s scary how little it’s changed,” she says, eyeing the placards above the gym upon which various team captains’ names are carved. She bites into the peanut butter sandwich I packed her this morning and swirls her tongue over her teeth when the bread lodges itself in her molars.

“You only graduated five years ago. How much did you expect things to change in five years?” I say, my mind on a million other things.

“Don’t kid yourself. This place is, like, frozen in a time warp,” she answers, one finger mining for stuck bread.

I hold open the door to the locker room, and she saunters in, head bobbing every which way, absorbing all the tiny memories that she thought she left behind.

“Jesus.” She inhales. “Do you know I nearly lost my virginity in here?”

“No,” I say. “And that’s probably something you can keep to yourself.” I walk by the first stall, clogged with toilet paper, and into the next, then latch it behind me. My fingers tremble as I peel back the box flap, then unwrap the stick that could deliver the news of all that I’ve ever hoped for. My perfect baby. My perfect husband. My perfect life.

I read the instructions twice, and both times, they assure me that even though I’m barely late, if late at all, this perfect combination of science and technology can determine if I’m pregnant
even before I know it myself!
And then, with Darcy still muttering under her breath in the background, I squat, aim, and fire.

“You okay in there?” she says, shifting gears like a trucker, one moment consumed with her personal angst, then next, nothing but open concern for her older sister.

“Fine,” I answer, staring down at the plastic fortune-teller, watching the water line to see if, by maybe a little touch of magic, it ebbs from a clear demarcation to something sort of pink, something sort of life-changing. “Just waiting.”

Her footsteps tap over to me, so I can see the nose of her dilapidated black sneakers poke under the door. She slaps her hand up on the outside of the stall.

“Whatever happens, Til, it’s not the end of the world,” she says. My sister, ever the pessimistic pragmatist.

“Of course it’s not,” I mutter, focused on that damn pink line. “Watch the clock out there, tell me when three minutes have passed.”

“Will do,” she answers, and then we both fall silent, the seconds moving forward, though I feel like I might be frozen in time. Finally, Darcy exhales and says, gently, kindly, “Time’s up,” and though my eyes haven’t strayed from the pregnancy test, I still force myself to look again, as if I might have missed something while I fixated on it for the last 180 seconds.

But no. It’s empty. The same as it was in the box on the shelf at CVS. No perfect baby inside of me, no perfect husband to call and share in the joyous news. I’m surprised at the depth of my disappointment, at the gutting pang that echoes all the way into my bowels. I hold my hand gently on the door, mirroring Darcy, intuiting her resolve, thankful for her company, until finally, my mind grants my body reprieve, and I find the will to step forward, to step all the way the hell out of there.

“Come on,” Darcy says, grabbing my elbow four minutes later, her solemn mood replaced by a forcefully sunny one. “It’s not the end of everything. Let’s go cheer up.”

She hangs a left down the hall and steers toward the music lab, the place she ensconced herself through much of her high school years. Sometimes, she’d lose track of the hours, and before she had her driver’s license, I’d be dispatched to pick her up. I’d head toward the room and hear her playing long before I saw her, the melody weaving and whispering, booming and beckoning, her angst, of which she had so much, dissolving under the ivory keys. My mother always said she had a gift, but none of us really gave it much merit. We indulged Darcy’s endless hours of playing because to see her there, on the bench huddled over the lip of the piano, she morphed into someone so different: someone who hadn’t been scarred by all that she’d been scarred by. She was rounder, softer, rapt, and innocent all at once. But a gift? It was only when she was offered a full scholarship to Berklee that we understood just how precious her talent was. The letter arrived in the mail, and she held it up and said, “I told you so.” And then she walked out the front door, most likely to Dante’s, and it occurred to me just then that what should have been a triumphant moment in Darcy’s life was instead yet another hollow one. Even now, five years later, I remember so clearly wishing in that broken minute that I had known, that I had paid more attention to her talent, nurtured it rather than overlooking it, embraced it rather than assuming it was simply one more complicated yet maybe not quite remarkable attribute of Darcy.

“So you’re really gonna do
Grease?”
She strides into the dilapidated music room.

“Yeah, I think so. It’ll be fun. Like when Susie and I were seniors.”

“Not exactly groundbreaking,” she says.

“Why does it have to be groundbreaking?” I retort. “It’s just a musical. It’s just supposed to be fun.”

She shrugs. “It’s just boring. That’s all. Typical Westlake.”

“Hey.” I bite. “I love it here.”

“Of course you do,” she says, pulling out a piano bench and plunking down. “Of course you do.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning nothing ever changes,” she says, and then her fingers curve over the keys and her shoulders melt into her upper back and her entire body shifts, almost imperceptibly, into an alter ego of sorts.

I want to dig back at her, but I clamp down because I know she can’t help herself, that she’s simply wired to rebel against the straight and narrow, against the choices I’ve built my life upon. And anyway, she is lost in her music.

It’s a tune I don’t recognize, likely one of her own. She hums under her breath, and I lean into the wall and watch her, this contradiction in the flesh. Her music weaves its way into me, too, transports me to a time when Tyler and I had just married, heady with lust and assuredness and hope for everything that had yet to unfold. Our bubble still intact. On weeknights, we’d sometimes convene at my dad’s house. Luanne would rush back from nursing school, and Tyler would pick up a six-pack after his shift at the store. After my dad grilled T-bones out in the yard, the scent of broiled, barbecued meat loitering through the back windows, Darcy would polish off a bowl of ice cream and play for us. Sometimes it was jazz, sometimes it was Mozart, sometimes it was improv—the melodies taking shape per her mood, offering us insight into whatever was going on inside of that tangled mind of hers—and we’d all recline in my dad’s living room, sink into the
cushiness of the couch, and listen. In those cloudless moments, it was easy to think that life could be sunny forever. Or could be sunny again. Maybe that’s what it was: that if you pieced everything back closely enough, you wouldn’t actually notice the seams that exposed themselves when it all had ripped apart.