The One That I Want (25 page)

“Hey, are you in charge of this?” He holds up the cream invitation and laughs. “Because I had a few questions about the dress requirements: beret,
oui
or
non?”

“Non,”
I say. “Very much a
non
.”

“Cool,” he answers. “Because I don’t even know where I’d get one of those around here.” He falls onto the purple couch. “So have you checked out those pictures yet? From homecoming?”

I shake my head no. After that night I’d spent honing in on my
self-portrait, I didn’t trust myself anymore—it felt too reckless, too much like I was testing fate, testing myself.

“Okay, well, sometime, when you’re ready, come find me,” Eli says, rising from the couch as quickly as he sat. “I’d love to see them.”

“Sure,” I reply, after he’s already moved out the door, down the hall, a spiral that can’t be pinned down. “When I’m ready. I’ll come find you.”

The hospital has that eerie quietness that all hospitals have. Nurses speak in hushed tones, waiting families lean into each other and whisper closely, as if talking aloud would disrupt the placid overtone of calm that silence brings, even though in reality, the silence is more unnerving than anything. Whenever a doctor rushes by, barking in full voice, everyone swivels to see who is marring the quiet, like that bark might mean that someone else’s loved one is dying, while yours, who is only spoken about in those soothing tones, is holding steady.

I am standing at the nurses’ station, waiting on CJ. Luanne is working this shift, so she has paged CJ, and I am picking at a defeated-looking fruit salad that she got at the cafeteria. I pop a purple grape into my mouth and puncture it with my back teeth.

The phone rings at the station, and Lulu pulls it to her ear. “Be right back,” she says, then darts down a fluorescent-lit hallway, the soles of her sneakers squeaking like a dry-erase board against the tiled floor, her expanding stomach pressing against her scrubs.

“Tilly!” I hear a voice behind me and expect to see CJ but find Ashley instead. “What are you doing here?” She smiles wearily,
and though it’s only been a few weeks since I’ve seen her, her cheeks hang more gauntly, her jeans sag on her hips.

“Oh, I had to sign a form for a student. Make sure she was actually working here for her college application.” I sigh because there are about a million places I’d rather be than here, though if I were to actually consider it, I couldn’t name one of them. Is there such a thing as wanting to be elsewhere without being anywhere at all? Perhaps invisible. Yes, maybe I would like to be invisible. “How’s your mom?” I ask finally.

“More or less the same.” Her waffle-sleeved T-shirt drowns her frail frame. She’s a different person entirely than when I mistakenly found my way into her tent, when she altered everything for me, maybe even for the both of us.

Ashley lowers her voice, her eyes aflood. “When you saw … what you saw, do you know, well,
when
you saw it? How much longer we have? How much longer
she
has?”

I shake my head no. “I’m sorry, I wish I did. I’ve been trying to make sense of it …” I don’t finish the thought, because looking at her now, I can’t bear to lie to her. I haven’t been trying to make sense of it, because nothing about anything makes sense anymore.

“Eh, it’s okay. I figured. But I wanted to ask anyway.” Her face is a mask of hollow grief.

“Ashley?” a familiar voice calls from around the corner. She and I turn in unison. “Ashley?”

My father rounds into the hallway, and even though I knew it,
knew that he’d present himself
, I’m still stunned, shell-shocked. That’s the slippery thing about seeing the future and then finding yourself in it: you never really know when you’ve caught up, when exactly you’re
there
. Only that one day, you will be.

“What are you doing here?” we say to each other simultaneously, then sputter with explanations, talking over each other.

“She’s asking for you,” he says finally, to Ashley, not me, and she gives me a little apologetic shrug, averts her eyes from my dad, and scampers away, gone.

“I know what I’m doing here,” I say after I can no longer hear her footsteps. “But what the hell are
you
here for?” Because even though I know that
of course
he’s at the hospital in the future—which is now the present—I still don’t understand why.

“We were friends a long time ago,” my dad says, his words catching. “I started coming by to keep her company.”

“Keep Ashley company?” I ask.

“Valerie. Ashley’s mother.”

My eyes form a squint. “You come down here and keep Valerie company?”

He flicks his head to one side, my father’s typical nonexplanation explanation, his metaphorical way of saying,
Let’s just let that go
. The pieces of my vision start to fall into place, even though I haven’t asked them to: my dad, ghostly, shaken, hands on the glass of the hospital room window as Ashley rushes toward her mother’s bedside. She was asking him, my father—not the doctor with the Twix—about the prognosis. About her own mother’s prognosis? The more the puzzle starts to click, the more it comes undone.

“I never knew you were friendly, at least beyond the usual neighborly stuff,” I say, my doubts hanging on like static cling.

“I know this comes as a surprise to you, Tilly, but there are a lot of things that you never knew.”

Clarity
. Ashley’s prophecy echoes throughout me.

I start to reply, but just then CJ circles into the hallway, waving her hand in my direction, flagging me back toward the nurses’ station, where I will sign her last form and grant her freedom, freedom so far away from Westlake. My father turns and disappears around a corner.

“Did you know that Dad was here?” I ask Luanne at the desk, where she is perusing charts and entering information on the computer.

“Hmmm, what?” she asks, not really listening.

“Dad, did you know that he comes by to keep Ashley’s mom company?”

She looks up at me, still typing, a bluffer’s tell.

“Uh.” She pauses as her thoughts catch up with her fingers. “Um, yes.” The clicking on the keyboard ends. “Yeah, he’s come by a few times.”

“Don’t you think that’s weird?” I hand the signed forms back to CJ, who has been staring at the wall, trying to pretend she’s not intruding, trying to pretend that while I came down here under the guise of being her guidance counselor, I seem like the one who could use an outstretched hand right about now. “See ya tomorrow,” she whispers, and saunters off.

“Look, I don’t know,” Luanne says, and I think,
Of course you don’t, because you never do!
then immediately regret my spitefulness. “But I have a lot of work here, Till, so …”

I nod and blow her a kiss good-bye, then start toward the elevator, but am pulled instead toward Valerie. I know where to find her, of course, because I have already seen it, and just as anticipated, her room is tucked in the shadows of the vending machines. Ashley is sitting by her mother’s bedside, her mom asleep after just a fleeting few minutes of consciousness, so when I appear in front of the glass, Ashley hops up and joins me outside.

“I know you think it’s strange.” She circumvents me. The circles under her eyes are no longer circles; they’re carved-out half moons that completely alter the structure of her face. She reminds me of one of the dementors from Harry Potter, which seems like a particularly cruel judgment, but there it is all the same. “B-but … I know this is weird…,” she stutters. “Look, I’m alone here,
doing my best, so when he came down and offered some support, I took it.”

“I don’t think it’s strange that you accepted it,” I say softly, empathetically, because, after all, despite everything that has happened to me lately, I still understand human nature, still grasp how despair and pain and anger and failure can help define a person. “I just think it’s strange that he offered at all.”

“I know that too,” she says, her words a sigh. “It’s complicated.”

“How?” A simple question.

“It’s too much to get into right now,” she says, rubbing her temples as if I’m giving her a migraine, as if this whole thing is causing her mind to implode, when I think, spiteful again,
I have a right to have a migraine of my own!
“You’re a smart girl, Tilly. You’ll figure it out, you’ll see. You have everything you need to figure it out.”

Before I can ask her what that can possibly mean, a nurse pops up from behind me and murmurs something about blood pressure and medicine and IVs to Ashley, who absorbs this information like a medical student and, without even so much as a good-bye, retreats to her mother’s room to oversee the process.

I stand there, for how long I don’t know, watching them tend to her mom, Ashley’s hand resting on her mother’s forehead, a tender sign of devotion. I could stay there forever, the passive observer, watching as a life literally unfolds in front of me. But then, the paging system blares out an emergency, and I turn to head on my way, down the darkened corridor, back to the parking lot, wondering just what the hell it is that Ashley thinks I have the power to see.

T
yler arrived on Friday but doesn’t make his way to our house until late this morning. I have changed the locks on the front door at Susanna’s suggestion—unnecessary, perhaps, but just vengeful enough to send a message—so he rings the bell twice before I grant him entry inside. I have taken the time this morning to pull myself together, like a needle stitching up a ripped, jagged seam. A lingering shower, a squirt of perfume, a puff of blush, and a jade turtleneck that Tyler once told me made my eyes look like Easter eggs, bright and shiny and welcoming. I stare in the mirror as I blow-dry my hair until it lays flat against itself, spun golden thread, and try to resolve why I’m working myself into immaculate perfection: whether I want him to plead with me to allow him back or whether I want him to die of regret, right there on the front porch. Probably a little of both, I decide, before dropping my wedding band in my jewelry box. I still wear it every day, but today, no, I wouldn’t today.

It is still raining when he arrives, though the forecasters have called for the first snow of the season once the afternoon skies darken, and when I open the door, my stomach is a pit of fiery nerves, my sweat glands marching forward like a mutinous army.

“Hey,” he says, and swallows.

“Hey,” I hear myself reply, though I feel as if I’m having an out-of-body experience. Tyler has cut his hair short, shorter than it’s been since college, and it makes him look both younger and older at the same time, like the kid he used to be and a retired military officer who spends his days barking at his poor wife because he has no one else to order around.

We stand there flanking each other, me, mostly paralyzed, him, I don’t know what because I no longer know him, until he finally steps across the divide and hugs me. I want to reciprocate; I can hear my brain willing me to lift my arms and throw them around him, hug him close and smell his neck and convince him that he has made
the biggest mistake of his life!
But instead I feel frozen, so he hugs my limp body, until he releases me, and I slide aside so he can come in.

“Austin is coming over in a few.” He makes his way to the kitchen. This is the first real thing my estranged husband says to me after three months apart.
“Austin is coming over in a few.”

“Okay,” I answer, trailing him. His boots leave wet spots on the wood floor, and I slide my socked feet over them, sopping up the imprints with each step.

He opens the fridge, like this is still his home.

“Where’s all the beer?”

“It’s eleven thirty in the morning,” I say. “And I threw it all out, remember?”
Of course you don’t remember, because you were never present in the first place!

He closes the fridge and sighs, leaning his back against the stove. His hands grip the top, just by the cusp of the burners, and his knuckles turn white. “Tilly, look, I know that I’m an asshole. I’m sorry for how I did this.” He can’t find the guts to look at me, so instead, he focuses on the floor.

“Are you happier now?” I ask, pressing back tears of terror, of
loneliness, of a million other things that I doubt I could ever look back on and articulate.

His eyes make their way toward mine, slowly, but eventually, as he takes in the question.

“I think so.” He pauses. “I’m figuring it out. I’m not sure I really know what happiness is, anyway.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I snap, my rage overtaking my grief. “You know damn well what happiness is. You’re just choosing to complicate it for yourself!”

“I know you find this hard to believe, Tilly,” he says flatly, “but I don’t. We don’t all just walk around with this intuitive idea that the world is shiny.”

Fury soars through me at his presumptuousness, my heartbeat a mirror for my anger.
None of this is intuitive! I have waited for happiness to come to me because I know that it is out there; I know that it is something I have earned! Every cell has wanted to quit, to say, “Well, screw you, happiness, you’ve certainly worked your lot on me,” but I have forced myself not to crumble when faced with bleakness! I have forced myself to believe that happiness isn’t in permanent remission for me!
How does he not get this?

I take three steps toward him, raise my open hand, and slap him across the face. His head jerks to the side, and when he turns back toward me, I can make out the red finger marks from his chin to his cheekbone. There is life in there yet.

“You’re right,” I say, my voice dead, my pulse throbbing. “You don’t know anything about happiness.”

The doorbell rings, and Tyler whispers, “Austin,” just as I say, “Susanna,” and because he doesn’t move, because he looks as if he’s been nailed to the stove like a crucifix, I stomp through the foyer and fling open the door to find Austin standing there like a matted dog, his hands thrust in his pockets, his forlorn face already telling the story of how little any of us want to embark down
this path, how little any of us anticipated that our lives would spin so far out of our control.