The One That I Want (11 page)

I watch her now, folded over the piano keys, and want to shake her from her trance. I want to pull her up and scream, “Don’t you understand that if nothing changes, nothing will ever go astray!” But then she starts in on some bass notes, like a harbinger of my frustration, and I realize that of course it’s too late; everything has already twisted loose, even if I can’t pinpoint where or why or how it even began.

The door beside me jiggers open, and a lanky man sporting faded cords that fall low on his hips moseys in. He doesn’t see me, just Darcy, who takes no notice of him, so he rechecks a paper he holds in his hand and shuffles around in a semicircle, like a broken compass, lost.

“Can I help you?” I whisper.

He pushes his tortoiseshell glasses up the bridge of his nose and flits his free hand through his cropped, burnished blond hair.

“I’m sorry,” he says in a muted tone echoing mine, and then he smiles, a white, wide, beckoning beam. “I’m looking for the art room. Kelsey in the front office drew me a little map.” He holds up his crumpled piece of paper. “But I think I’ve missed it.”

“Oh, I can show you,” I say. “Follow me.” I slip out the door and click it closed behind us. The door has been soundproofed, so, just like that,
poof
, Darcy and her music evaporate.

“She’s amazing,” he says, gesturing behind us.

“She is,” I say with a grin that I then let slide, that solitary pink line and the hopes I’d placed on its invisible twin pressing
into my mind. “Um, if you don’t mind my asking, who are you?” I start toward the direction of the arts room.

“Oh, apologies.” He extends his right hand. “I’m Eli Matthews. Taking over for Mr. Ransom for the summer and into the fall.”

“Oh, I forgot!” I say, reciprocating his shake. Mr. Ransom, the arts teacher at Westlake for over thirty-five years, has taken leave to tend to his wife, who was recently diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “Well, welcome to Westlake High. I’m Tilly. The guidance counselor.”

“Ah, the guidance counselor. You always know what’s up with everyone. You’re the one I have to get an in with.” He smiles again, and I’m immediately at ease, leaving my shadowing gloom behind me.

We turn a corner to the farthest room in the right wing of the school. The bell bleats above us, and doors down the hall all spring open, teenagers swarming like bees from the hive.

“Well, this is it,” I say. I jimmy the knob, but it sticks. I bend down to eyeball the tiny widget next to the knob that used to automatically unlock the door from the outside. “Give me a second. When I went here, I figured out how to break in.” I rotate my neck to crane up at him. “I spent a lot of time back here until my senior year.”

“Art nerd?” he says jokingly.

“Closet art nerd, I guess. Recovering art nerd, maybe. More like a cheerleader,” I say. The lock won’t give.

“Keys,” he says, tapping my back and tugging them from his pants pocket. He wiggles his eyebrows as if he has just the cure for what ails me. Oh, Jesus, like he might have anything
close
to the cure for what ails me.

The bell rings again, indicating five minutes until next period,
and I remember Darcy, lost in her haze of melodies in the music lab.

“I better go,” I say. “Glad you found it.”

“Glad you helped,” he says as the bolt unclicks itself.

“Anytime,” I answer, doing my best to reciprocate his cheer, and then head on my way.
Of course I helped
, I think.
That’s what I do
.

T
yler calls and wakes me the next morning. I am dreaming that I’m pregnant, that my belly is round as a watermelon, my breasts like swollen gourds, my cheeks rose-petal pink, and that Tyler and I are still perfect. My cell vibrates on my abdomen. I fell asleep waiting for him to call, with my hands cupping my stomach, my phone tucked inside my palms.

“Hey,” I croak.

“It’s nine thirty. I woke you?”

I swivel to face the nightstand and my alarm clock. “I haven’t been feeling well. I guess I slept in. Didn’t have to work today.”

“Sorry,” he says. “Everything okay?”

I think of the failed pregnancy test.
No
.

“Yes,” I say. “Everything’s fine. How’s fishing?”

“Good, great, so good we thought we’d stay through Sunday if you don’t mind. I don’t have to be back at the store until next week.”

“Oh, I thought we could spend the weekend together.” I close my eyes because they seem better suited to being shut right now.

“I know …” He pauses, waiting for me to make it easier on
him. “It’s just, you know, prime trout season. They’re practically jumping out of the lake for us.”

“Okay.” I sigh. “Sure, it’s just a few days.” I throw my free hand over my face, wishing I could block out the light entirely.

“Awesome. I love you.” He hesitates, his voice catching. “Um, listen, there’s also something else.” He coughs twice, which doesn’t sound like a real cough, more like he’s biding his time. “So, yeah, um, Jamie Rosato called.”

I sit up quickly, too quickly, and my bedroom spins at the back of my eyes.
Jamie Rosato!
He and Tyler played together at the UW, back before Tyler blew out his left ACL and never fully recovered, watching his sure-thing prospect for the majors, or at the very least the minors, dissipate in one agonizing slide to home gone wrong.

“He called, you know, like he does every year, and wanted me to come out and take a look. Their assistant fielding coach just quit to go to Oregon State.” He wavers, waiting for my response, of which I have none because I am too busy trying to process this, trying to figure out why the hell this feels a little too close to déjà vu when I know,
I know
, that, other than discussing Jamie Rosato’s annual phone call in which he tries to get Tyler to move to Seattle and coach at the UW, we have never had
this—this exact—
conversation before.

“So, um, the thing is,” Tyler continues, “I think this year, I might consider it. Consider going. You know, maybe take a trip to Seattle and see what they say.”

“We can’t move to Seattle!” I squeak, finally having found my voice.

“I never said anything about moving to Seattle,” he says, a little too composed, like he envisioned this conversation and already has his answers, his bullets, wedged inside his armor. “I just, you know, want to go see what they’re offering.”

My mouth is dry, too dry, my rotten morning breath sticky on my tongue, and I can’t answer, can’t speak.

“Till? Tilly? Are you there?”

“I’m here,” I say, feeling like I might be sick, feeling like I might just puke all over this perfect crisp white comforter in my perfect bedroom in my perfect house, minus my perfect freaking stupid husband. I start to launch into him, my newfound temper anxious to be test-driven, but he’s already beaten me to the punch, cut me off before I can steer us down that road.

“It’s not a big deal. Not like I’ve committed to anything,” he repeats. “But listen, we’re driving into town for some tackle. The line gets shitty here. We’ll talk about this on Sunday, I promise.” His voice cuts in and out on those last few words,
I promise
, more like,
I p—om—is
, but I know what he’s saying, even though I don’t believe him, don’t believe one single word out of his stinking mouth.

The line goes dead, and I hurl the phone to the other side of the bed, where it lands on his pillow, then somersaults off to the floor.

Slowly, then very very quickly, the events, the visions, this sickness that is eating away at me, these germs of anger and of honesty that are flaring inside of me, crystallize in my mind.
No, no, no, of course I’m not pregnant! That would have been way too easy. How could I have been so stupid? How could I have kept telling myself these stupid, stupid fucking lies, deluding myself like being pregnant was the answer to anything!

I replay my dream about my father and how I somehow intuited the events that had yet to happen, and then I consider Tyler and that U-Haul and the boxes toting the anthology of our lives, and it is all too clear what has happened. Ashley Simmons—her insidious, duplicitous, wan, sweaty face—flashes in my mind, and I am sure,
I am as certain as I have been about anything:
she
changed something inside of me, virtually
promised
, with that smug tone of voice and omniscient mumbo-jumbo, that she was going to alter me, alter my destiny!
Is this what she did? Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!
I want to vomit, I want to punch something, I want to fly up and roar and rip someone’s face off. Instead, I grab a pillow and slam it down, which makes a pathetic thud on the bed, nothing at all representative of my fear, of my bafflement, of my anger at what she has done.
It was Ashley Simmons and her idiotic judgments of my life! With that subtle smile of condescension! “I’m giving you clarity,” she said! Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit!

This isn’t clarity
, I think.
This is a curse
.

It’s only later, much later, long after I’ve thrown a mishmash of clothes over my jittery limbs, long after I’ve hurled the SUV down the driveway and am on my way, long after I’ve replayed Tyler’s words and my vision and then his words again, that I stop to wonder what the most cursed part of this is: that I have started to see the future, or the future that I have started to see.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack
.

My knuckles have gone white from the force with which I am pounding on Ashley Simmons’ front door. The best part of living in a town like Westlake is that even at 9:30
A.M
., you are always able to track someone down via the local gossip grapevine. One call to Susanna, who made one call to Eleanor Franklin, who then made one call to Alyson Martin, and by the time I was done with my coffee, Ashley’s address—a run-down apartment complex three blocks from the high school—was mine. She lives on the second floor, the guardrail rusty and rain-faded, with a view of the Dumpster in the parking lot. The air just outside her door smells like pot, a tiny cartoonlike mushroom cloud of marijuana fumes.

Thwack. Thwack. Thwack
.

I hear a rustling from inside and someone distantly muttering, “Hang on, Jesus Christ,” and then two locks unlatch, and the door swings open.

“What the hell time is it?” she says, her hair matted into a giant knotty ponytail smack on top of her head, like Pebbles from the Flintstones, her face smeared with yesterday’s makeup. When she glances up to see me, though, her expression evolves from chagrined to delighted, as if there is no one she’d rather greet on this early summer morning than me. “Silly Tilly Everett! I was almost expecting you!”

From two feet away, I can smell her breath, like meat left out two days too long.

“A)
Stop calling me that. And
B)
whatever you did to me,
undo
it,” I seethe.
There it is, that seed of vitriol that is spreading inside of me, that venomous bug that she unleashed when she cast her spell. Stupid, stinking Ashley Simmons!

“Impressive,” she says, as if transcribing my thoughts. “I didn’t know you had this in you. Sweet Tilly Everett. I’ve never even heard of you losing your temper.” She smiles, cunningly, knowingly. “Never once during cheerleading practice, never once during student council, never once … ever!” She giggles, accelerating my discontent to a perilous, dangerous threshold.

“I’m serious, Ashley! You’re messing with my brain, with my
life
, and you need to fix it!” The urge to throttle her nearly overcomes me.

“I didn’t
do
anything, Tilly.” She pouts. “I just opened up some things for you. Whatever’s happening, it’s all because of you.” She pauses and lowers her voice. “So, what exactly is happening?”

“I’m seeing the future! I’m seeing into the goddamn future!”
Sweat has started to pool in my armpits; I can feel my T-shirt, ten years old, from a sorority party, cling to the sides of my body.

“And what do you see?” she asks calmly, the mirror opposite of my unraveling. “What is it that has so unnerved you that you insisted on coming over here so pissed off and waking me at this ungodly hour?”

“Okay, first of all, it’s ten o’clock in the morning,” I hiss, and three pieces of spittle erupt from my mouth. “And second of all, I am seeing … things … not good things … things that
I don’t want to goddamn see!”

“Well, how is that my fault?” She shrugs, and I want to belt her, take my fist and shove it right down her throat.

“I want to take my fist and shove it right down your throat,” I say, to which she cackles. “What’s so goddamn funny?” I scream. “Because this isn’t funny at all to me!”

At the ruckus, her neighbor’s two locks unlatch, and a heavy-set man in a greasy white tank top pokes his head out his door. The light bounces off his shiny bald head, and I squint my eyes.

“You okay?” he says to Ashley. She nods, and he nods in return, and then
slam, latch, latch
, two locks are secured right back up, insulating him from the world, from his psychotic next-door neighbor or maybe just her psychotic visitor.

“I just—” she says, her laughter now aborted, though it still mocks me in the cusps of her smile, “I honestly didn’t know that you could be this angry with
anyone
. Did you?”

I actually stop to consider it.
No, no, I’m not this angry. I am not the person who shoves her fists down people’s throats. Those are the kids who end up on my couch, those are the kids whom I fix, who look to me as an example, for God’s sake!

“So help me, Ashley, if you screw things up for me, I will track you down and make you regret it,” I say, tugging at the hem of my
shirt, now pocked with abdomen sweat. The humidity is clinging to my temples, my hairline, my belly button, my wrists.

She laughs again, a high-pitched, hysterical yelp, as if anything about this is remotely amusing. “Tilly, you realize that you’re only seeing what’s going to come. This has nothing to do with me or what I’ve done. Come on, lighten up. I didn’t change anything. I didn’t
alter
a single damn thing. It was just clarity, that’s all.” She smiles, pulling her gums back to reveal perfectly aligned, crisply white teeth, a sign betraying her middle-class childhood, complete with orthodontia and parents who cared enough to correct her overbite in the first place.