The One That I Want (30 page)

I reread CJ’s application one last time before moving on to the next one. Yes, she is ready. She will soar out of Westlake and probably never glance behind her to doubt herself. Why hadn’t I ever done that? Why had I always assumed that if I played it safe, tucked my life into my palm, that I could protect us all from the destruction that could seep into the cracks, under my pores, and into my bloodstream anyway?

I lose track of time as I filter through the files, all stuffed with hopes of a better future. My neck muscles flare, begging me for a reprieve, but I want to be done with these heady declarations that there is life outside of Westlake. Not because I no longer believe it. I do now. I can see this now. But because they are also constant reminders
of the road I ignored, the road I didn’t think to take when I had the possibility.

A knock on the door releases me from my haze.

“I saw your light on,” Eli says. He has called three times since Darcy’s catastrophe, but I’ve been too swallowed up with everything to phone him back.

“What are you doing here?” I say, smiling widely because, both in spite of and because of everything, I am happy to see him. My neck relaxes, my shoulders spread, bursting the wads of tension that are scrunched up inside of me, and I wave him in. “Didn’t you hear it’s a snow day?”

“Eh, sledding’s overrated,” he says, waving his hand, falling on the couch. “No, actually, I just had some shots I wanted to check out. I don’t have the setup at home that we have here.” He pauses. “How’s your sister?”

I share the details, and he tilts his head and listens, watching me intently as I speak, so I tuck my hair behind my ears, embarrassed, and look away.

“How’d everything go with your houseguest, um, who was she?” I ask, unsure why I’m asking since Tyler is back now, though completely sure why I’m asking all the same.

“You can ask, you know,” he says, laughing. “Yes, she was my ex-girlfriend. I think I told you about her a while ago—
Kenya girl
—and yes, she’s gone now. We just had some stuff to resolve.” He bounces his head. “It’s resolved.”

“Okay,” I say, the air hanging between us. “Hey, can I ask you something else?”

“Anything.”

“Your friend, the one from the avalanche. What happened to him?”

“He didn’t make it.” Eli’s chin drops slightly toward his chest,
a subtle sign that we all carry burdens, anchors that can pull us under the depths.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “Did you ever go back up? I mean, did you ever go climbing again after that?”

“I did.” He leans back into the couch as if the memory is releasing him. He stares at the halogen lights on the ceiling. “I went back up once, a few months later. Only once, though, and probably never again.”

“Why?” I probe, a simple question that begs a complicated answer.

“Because I didn’t want the mountain to beat me,” he says, not complicated at all. “I didn’t want it to win. There are enough things in life where it will. But this one, I couldn’t. I couldn’t let it. It had already taken enough.”

I push my chair back and move to him now, sinking next to him on my faded purple couch and laying my head against his chest, where I can hear his heart beat a steady beat, like a metronome on my mother’s old piano. We sit there as the second hand circles the clock, in comfortable, easy silence, each of us bearing our wounds, only one of us already versed in how to sew them all the way back up.

Later, after Eli has left and after I have managed to doze on my couch, I stride out the emptied hallway of the school that I have wrapped up my identity in so completely. I peer into the music room that once provided Darcy salvation and say a hushed, fervent prayer that she will one day be strong enough to find her way back. Not to here, of course, but back to her music, her antidote. After a lifetime of wanting to pin her down, of wanting her to stay, I realize that not all of us can be rooted so easily. Nor should we be. Yes, let her find her way back, wherever that might be.

I swing into the locker room, where I peed on that stick and saw that lonely solitary line, and where I was sure that I had lost everything, every link to my husband, every hope for the future. I linger outside the art room, which is locked now, but to which I have the key. I stand outside anyway, wondering how I abandoned it all—my passion for photography, my love of a crisp, captured moment—but then I remember exactly how I abandoned it, of course: for Darcy, for my family, for my father. I lost myself for them, which we all have to do every once in a while but probably shouldn’t forever.

On Friday, a small percentage, but a percentage nevertheless, of Westlake’s students will press their tongues against the lips of envelopes, paste on the proper postage, and send their dreams out into the world, hoping that someone will honor them. They haven’t abandoned those dreams; they haven’t abandoned themselves. They all have problems, maybe not mine, but problems all the same. Maybe their parents are broke, maybe they only occasionally have hot water, maybe their fathers are trying to kick a meth habit. Maybe their grandparents are serving as surrogate parents or their jeans are worn thin from too many siblings and hand-me-downs. Or maybe their friend died up on the frozen mountain under a wall of snow. But they’re still climbing back up. They aren’t going to let the mountain beat them. I have. I understand this now. I have. I’ve spent my life ushering these braver souls out into the world while finding shelter in their shadows. This isn’t a life. This is a refuge.

On my way toward the car, I stop to linger in front of the trophy case, the one with the newspaper clipping from Tyler’s championship game, with the team photo—him the star shortstop—tacked up next to it. I find myself in the picture from the paper: there I am, in my cheerleader uniform, taut, beaming, so much potential yet untapped. I look at my seventeen-year-old self and
wonder what I would say to her now, not just as me, but also as her guidance counselor, and as someone who has been given a little more insight into the future than she thought possible.

I would tell her, I think, standing here in the hallway, as I feel the damp spread of tears across my cheeks, that life is limitless, that fear is conquerable, that if you stay concealed in the shadows, you’ll never be seen. That spending the better part of your days trying to fix people might be admirable; no, in fact, it
is
admirable, but only when you’re not doing so to avoid fixing yourself. You can plug up all the holes in a boat, after all, but if you never learn how to navigate choppy waters, you still may drown. I would tell her that dreams can be small, but they are still dreams, even if it is to taste an escargot in Paris or snap a timeless image of the Eiffel Tower or run down the Champs-Elysées, gaping at the too-expensive stores, the night air on your back, the lights and the stars and the electricity palpably charging around you. Even, I realize, as I stare at Tyler’s grinning adolescent face, if it is to coach a college team to victory because you’ll never again feel the snap of the bat and the rush from the cheer of the crowd and the dry dirt against your cheek as you slide into home plate.

I would tell her many things, I think, before I finally steer myself away. Mostly, I’d tell her that it isn’t too late. That the years are long and the road is winding and that dreams float out there to be captured, but only if you’re brave enough to reach up and grasp them.

T
yler is watching basketball when I unlock the front door. I can hear it in the den, and I should go to him, tell him that I am back and ask what he would like for dinner, but instead, I make my way upstairs, toward the bedroom. He has been home for only two weeks and already, I can feel us slipping back to where we used to be. Which might have been okay before. Before all of this. But now, it is not okay at all, not even a tiny sliver of okay. He’s come back into our bed—this is a change—but the rest of it, it’s all too familiar, all a little suffocating. The way he crowds himself into the bathroom in the morning to shave, when I had grown accustomed to steaming up the mirror alone; the way, even with all of this, that he asks me what’s for dinner, as if he couldn’t stop at Boston Market and take care of that one small task; the way he feverishly watches the sports channels, with Austin glued to his ear, the two of them bantering about scores and errors and
Oh man, how could he have missed that shot!
when the world outside us has just proven that none of this shit matters.

I kick off my shoes and wilt into a heap on the floor, rubbing the arches of my feet, scooting toward my bureau. I open the bottom drawer, the photographic contents of my life spilling forth,
just as I did before my first flash-forward, before everything unraveled. Before.

I weed through the mess until I find it. That perfect image of my family just before my mom got sick. Of us on our front porch, radiating happiness, radiating love, me flying back into the picture with abandon, my face askew as I throw myself toward my family before the click goes off and freeze-frames the moment. This utopic shot that I’ve only now learned was nothing but a mask, a façade that, had I dug any deeper, would have given way under my prodding.

Darcy confessed this to me yesterday after Dante left from his daily visit, when she finally had some strength and when we’d gotten through our sad rash of jokes about her eight-toed life.

“I wish you wouldn’t be so morbid,” I said.

“It’s not morbid,” she laughed. “It’s the opposite of morbid. I’m going to have eight toes, Tilly, and if I can’t laugh about that, what the hell am I going to laugh about?”

“I suppose you’re right.” I smiled and then laughed a little myself. “Funny how you’ve suddenly become the optimist between us.”

“Not suddenly,” she pointed out. “It’s taken a while.”

It turned out that her memory was just fine, unaffected by her night spent under the blanket of snow. So she told me everything: that she had caught my father and Valerie when she was eight, just before Mom’s diagnosis, just as we were snapping that picture on the front porch. My mother had hurriedly dropped her off at the store because she was late for a piano lesson at a student’s house, so Darcy did what she always did: headed to my dad’s office for a Coke. Only she didn’t find a Coke. She found, instead, my father with his hands up Valerie’s blouse, pressed up against the very refrigerator that Darcy was seeking.

“Please note that this cured me of my soda habit until college,” she said dryly.

“How can you find this in any way funny?” I asked.

“Oh, Till, I don’t know. I was so fucking pissed for so fucking long … even just a few weeks ago …” She trailed off. “And now I’ll have eight toes … I got so angry that I chugged a bottle of vodka, walked through the woods, passed out, and now … I’ll have eight toes. Forever. That can’t be undone.”

I nodded, because maybe I could understand how this helps her let go, and she continued.

The adults in question were understandably horrified and assured Darcy that she hadn’t seen what she thought she’d seen. That there was a spider up Valerie’s shirt, and she was squirming so fitfully that my dad had to help her squash it before it plunged its teeth into her skin. Darcy smiled and drank three Cokes just to shut them up, and then Valerie made a big show of buying a new VCR and left out the front door, her skirt still askew.

“Dad asked me not to tell Mom because he said it would only worry her, that the store was infested with spiders,” Darcy said as a nurse came in to check her IV. “I didn’t believe him, but I knew that telling Mom would destroy her anyway. I mean, I was only eight, but you still know these things.” She paused, reconsidering, sucking down a sip of water from a straw on her bedside table. “I don’t know. I never knew if it was the right thing or not.”

While she recounted the story, I did the mental math. If Darcy had caught them when she was eight, and Ashley had somehow learned of the affair when we were twelve, this was more than a short-term fling. This was a five-year fling, minimum, because who knew if he actually ended it when his youngest daughter walked in and was forced to bear the weight of his secret, of his narcissim. My fury with my father reared itself all over again, my
anger rising with the blood in the back of my neck, in the throb behind my ears.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked softly. “You could have at least told me.”

She mulls her words.

“Mom got sick, and you had so much to deal with.” She gazed at me generously, kindly, and I wondered how I’d missed it all these years. “I thought it was one small thing I could to do help, knowing that you were doing all of the rest.”

I looked at her, brave and smart and protective of me, her big sister, and framed her right there in my mind.
Click
. Yes, I wanted to capture that moment indelibly.

Now, I sit on my bedroom floor, on a dreary night in November, with my husband downstairs listening to basketball, and I stare at that picture from that day on the porch, which now rings so false that it may as well be someone else’s family, may as well be a Photoshopped version like the ones I see from Eli’s class.

I pull the photo toward me and kiss my mother’s face, because she, after so many years, did not deserve this, would not want to see us fractured every which way like this. And then I rip it, the image of our perfect quintet, calmly, concisely, into tiny, glorious pieces that dot my rug like confetti, as if I just threw myself a party. I abandon it there for now; tomorrow, maybe I will tape it together, maybe I will toss it in the outside garbage to be ushered to the dump.

And then I rise to my feet, climb into my bed, and spiral into sleep.

In the morning—
surprise!
—I find Tyler snoring on the couch. Here we are back again, stuck. I nudge him on the shoulder, but he just grunts and rolls to his other side.

Darcy is expecting me. She is being released today, and Dante and I will be the ones to wheel her home. The television is still on from the night before, muted, the scenes from yesterday’s games flashing behind me, the scroll on the bottom sliding along, as if a hockey game or a basketball injury might actually be breaking news.