The One That I Want (17 page)

I come to instantly this time, gasping for oxygen, my blood tick-tocking in my neck. My hands still clutch the chair, palms clammy, knuckles white. Slowly, I find my breath—in, out, in, out—and steady my vision, tweaking my vertigo until the floor is flat and the walls aren’t rolling like funhouse mirrors. I have to concentrate to stand, but eventually I do find my way upright, though my legs still feel brittle, breakable almost. As I turn to leave, I hear rustling in the next room.

“You okay?” Eli says, appearing before me, his arms overloaded with drafting paper, his hands stuffed with pencils and brushes.

My face flushes to what I am certain is cherry tomato, the deepest of sunburn red.

“Fine,
fine!”
I say a little too hysterically.

He cocks an eyebrow.

“You don’t look fine,” he says.

“Just hungover,” I respond, waving a hand in front of me, hoping I don’t betray my anxiety.
Who are you dating??
I want to scream.
Why do I care??
I want to scream louder.

“The camera, don’t forget it.” He drops the supplies and tugs the Nikon free from the computer cord. “From what I could see last night, you still have the touch.”

I nod, my throat too dry to answer.

“So come back,” he says, taking my hand and placing the camera in it. “Shoot some more and come back.”

“I will,” I finally say, then turn to go, suddenly too shy to meet his eyes.
You bet your ass I’ll be back
, my inner voice yells, though a wiser part of me knows that Ty is coming home on Saturday and when he does, he’s taking me with him, and that I might never find my way back again.

T
yler’s flight is twenty minutes late, thanks to a passing thunderstorm, proving the weather forecasters only partially right—it has turned cooler, but the sweeping rains are too stubborn to push west. I’ve forgotten to call ahead, so I’m stuck at Westlake’s tiny commuter airport with nothing but stale coffee and Muzak overhead to keep me company. The blue pleather chair at his gate is stiff but comfortable, and I prop my feet up in front of me, watching the sporadic flights come and go, shooting off into the sky, soaring through the dusk, and then growing smaller until they disappear entirely.

I have rehearsed what I will say to him. I will tell him that we can compromise: that I can’t leave until my father is healthy, until I am pregnant, but when we have tackled both of those hurdles, then yes, I will uncover the strength to vacate the only home I have ever truly known. I’ll look at him, and I’ll find the courage to say these things, even though every cell, every instinct in me will revolt. But I don’t know what else to do.
I can’t change the future; I may as well change my perception of it
.

I mentioned it to Susanna yesterday, during our first rehearsal/working lunch with CJ, which went about as well as could
be expected, with Midge Miller, who is about one hundred years old and has been teaching piano for seven decades, filling in for Darcy, who had decided that she might be too good for this “high school musical shit.”

“Do you even have a choice about it?” Susanna said quietly, as CJ or Midge, it was tough to tell, stumbled over the melody for “Hopelessly Devoted to You.” “I mean, listen, I can’t tell you how relieved I am to have made a decision about Austin, but still … you and Tyler? I mean, really, there’s no other option. You guys can’t split up. You have to go with him.”

I looked at her, chewing my tuna sandwich, forcing it down, and realized that I never knew that maybe Susanna wasn’t happy with Austin, with her lot. I knew she was sarcastic and biting and maybe a little jagged around the edges, but relieved that her marriage was over? No, I’d never have expected that. And then I also realized with certainty that I couldn’t be like her, that she was right: I simply didn’t have the stomach to start something new, because Tyler was all I’d ever known and that was something worth fighting for. Yes, the heat of my jealousy over Eli and his girlfriend has been worming through me, like a parasite eating away my intestines, like an illness I can’t eradicate, but
that is fleeting, that will pass
, I tell myself; it’s just a shard of misplaced emotion from a lonely wife whose bedrock is cracking beneath her. And yeah, maybe I don’t know who I am without Tyler, but maybe I don’t want to know, either.

He asked me if this is the life that I want.
“Yes. Of course, this is the life that I want,”
I replied, and still, it holds true. So I will tell Tyler today, as I told Susanna yesterday, that we’ll find a compromise, even though it’s not really a compromise if you’re the only one giving something up.

I am practicing my speech in the airport, watching a prop plane hover for a landing, when the loudspeaker overhead tweets
with feedback. His plane is here, the woman announces above me. Arrival of flight 284 from Seattle. Tyler is back.

My speech echoes through my mind as I toss the sour coffee in the garbage, press the wrinkles from my shirt, and wait for Tyler to stroll through the gate. I will look at him, at the only man whom I have ever loved, and I will defy my better judgment of who I am and what I can handle, and I will tell him that someday soon, we will make this work, make that coaching job a reality.

My stomach roils, and my heartbeat accelerates, and then, the door opens and the passengers make their way off. It is a small plane, a commuter, so there are no more than a dozen wayward travelers—not many people find the need to stop in Westlake.

I see a harried mother and her balled-fisted, sweaty toddler, and then I see a pork-bellied man whose polo doesn’t cover his paunch. They amble through the gate door, followed by an assortment of Westlake’s own: I wave to Teddy Carver, who makes weekly trips to Seattle to visit his sick mother in her nursing home because Westlake’s couldn’t provide her adequate care, and nod hello to a woman I always see at Albertson’s yet have never actually spoken with.

Eventually the flow of passengers slows, and the solitary flight attendant disembarks, rolling her suitcase behind her, headed to a local motel until she can turn around and get the hell out of here.

“Excuse me,” I say, stepping in front of her. “My husband was supposed to be on this flight. Is there anyone else still on board?”

“No, sweetie,” she says, though she looks about my age, only swathed in too much foundation and excessive blush. “That’s it. We did have one cancelation at the last minute, though.” She shrugs. “Maybe you should call him and see.”

She waves her fuchsia nails and heads off, the wheels of her bag scraping against the linoleum floor. My pulse flares in my forehead as I turn to stare out the picture window, out into the wide
open steel-colored sky, simultaneously empty and layered with a blanket of dull clouds, and though I should pick up my phone and call Tyler, instead I stand there frozen, as desolate as the sky, struck with immediate clarity.
Clarity!

Damn you, Ashley Simmons
.

Tyler is gone, I now realize, and he’s not coming back. He is building his life—a new life—without me, without this town, and without the past that I was certain would carry us on its shoulders into the sunset of the our future. We aren’t moving. He is.

A
shley Simmons has agreed to meet me for breakfast on Monday morning. I have told Susanna that she and Darcy—who, after a supposed spectacularly wretched rehearsal with Murphy’s Law, is willing to lower herself to playing high school piano once again—can handle the “Summer Lovin’ ” choreography today, its side-to-side shuffles and its snap, snap, snapping beat, and I’ve e-mailed the prom committee that I’ll be taking the week off. The Eiffel Tower, the freaking idiotic Arc de Triomphe can wait.

I’ve spent the better part of the weekend burrowed underneath the covers of our bed,
my
bed, as the plural no longer seems to apply, mourning the vestiges of my marriage. Susanna came by with rum and varied triumphant epitaphs about how men are mostly synonymous with assholes and how women could certainly survive without them, were it not for their sperm, but her rantings, accurate as they might have been in my specific situation, couldn’t lift me from my cocoon of despair. Darcy joined us in bed, our trio pressed against my headboard, as we watched season one of
Alias
, which Susie had rented to try to give me a shock of estrogen-boosted adrenaline. Needless to say, it didn’t.

Tyler sent me an e-mail late Friday night, a perfect capper to this whole fucking debacle.

“An e-mail!” Susie huffed from behind my computer as we reread it together. “A piece-of-shit e-mail!” she scoffed, her anger palpable for the both of us.

I was too shocked to be angry, too numb to have the energy for rage. So Susie and Darcy made up for me, plotting vengeance,
smearing his constitution, threatening him at every turn, as if they’d ever go through with any of it.

“Let’s chop his balls off,” Darcy sneered.

“Maim his throwing arm,” Susie suggested while they both nursed tumblers of rum.

True to his word, he did call me three times on Sunday, and on the third, I nearly picked up, but instead, Darcy intervened and tossed my cell straight across the room.

“I will not have you begging him to come back or telling him that your suitcase is packed to join him!” she said, refilling her glass and then mine. I nodded because I knew that she knew that this was exactly what I would do: scrape the true bottom of my dignity
—pleading with a man who announced his decision to likely vacate our marriage in an e-mail
—and so I let her hold my backbone sturdy when I wasn’t able to do so myself.

But by the time I woke on Monday morning, I was angry; I was very, very angry. That seed of venom, planted on that day at the fairgrounds, spreading within me. I’d left Tyler a long, expansive, expletive-filled voice mail the night before, full of words I didn’t realize I even knew—
“You are such a motherfucking shitbag, a goddamn cocksucker!”
—bursting with rage that had slowly been brewing. And the truth was, it felt strangely out-of-body good—this fiery ball of anger, the release of it out into the world. But it wasn’t enough—getting so pissed off that my ears burned. I needed more: more answers, more control, more understanding of what the hell was happening to me. And best I figured, like it or not, I needed Ashley Simmons’ help.

She wanders into the Back Street Diner looking like she’s just tumbled out of bed, a look that isn’t so different from mine, with my eyes marshmallow puffy and my hair unwashed since Saturday. Darcy had implored me to take a shower, but my tiny act of rebellion—
No, I will not tend to my personal hygiene, and eff you
,
Tyler
!—provided some sort of intangible satisfaction, and as I swirl my black coffee while Ashley orders her own, I consider how long I might be able to go without bathing.
What sort of record could I set to let Tyler know that he has totally pilloried me, to understand the destruction that he has caused?

The air smells like refried grease, a side effect of the sloppy omelets they serve, and the scent, in combination with my coffee, turns my stomach into a twisting siphon, as if my digestive tract is attempting to physically purge my angst.

“No offense,” Ashley says after she requests a stack of pancakes and a side of eggs over easy, “but you look like death.”

“Tyler left me,” I say plainly. “Which I suppose you already know.”

“I didn’t know,” she responds, her face filled with genuine astonishment. “How would I have known?”

“Because of what you can do!”
I whisper.
“Because of what you did to me!”

Ashley giggles, an annoying trait left over from childhood that I suddenly remember. Her way of filling the quiet while she composes her thoughts.

“Tilly, I told you the other day. I didn’t really do much.
You’re
the one who is doing everything.”

“Cut the shit, Ashley,” I bark, then sip my coffee to calm myself, because she’s not the one who betrayed me by leaving. She’s just the one who showed me that he would. “Listen, whatever you did to me … I’m
seeing
things that are going to happen …” I pause, because I’m not quite sure what I’m asking.

“Can I ask you a question?” she says, as a non-answer.

“Why not,” I snap, steadying myself for yet another one of her long-winded, cagey probes on why I ever believed that marriage, that Tyler, should be my salvation. The bell at the front counter dings continuously, a sign of a ready order, and the clanging is
worming its way under my sinuses, back behind my eyes, a fleck of an oncoming migraine.

“Back in middle school, why did we stop being friends?”

“What? I don’t know,” I answer, and then consider it. “Didn’t we just outgrow each other? You went one way, and I went the other. Why? What difference does it make?”

“I guess none.” She shrugs. “But back then, it made a difference to me. I thought we were like sisters, and then … then I guess things got hard for me, and I looked up, and you were gone.”

“I wasn’t gone! I never got the sense that you wanted me there in the first place,” I say. “I remember you mocking us, thinking that we were inconsequential. Cheerleaders. You hated us.”