The One That I Want (19 page)

“Listen,” he says. “You can’t do this. Getting drunk and sleeping through your life is not an option. Not for you.”

“It was good enough for you.”

“You’re not me,” he says, placing his hands over mine.

“I need Tyler to come back,” I say. “I can’t do this if Tyler doesn’t come back.”

“Well, he’s not coming back,” my dad offers. “At least not right now.”

I vaguely remember calling Ty just after I peeled out of the school parking lot on Wednesday, already on my way to the liquor store before heading home. He picked it up on the second ring.

“Really?” I started with. “This is what you’re going to do to me? Really?”

He sighed. “Hi, Till.” I heard him suck in his breath. “I’m sorry.”

“You said that already in your e-mail. In your
e-mail.”

“I can’t come home.” He said it so softly I had to mentally replay it to be sure that I’d heard it correctly.

“You certainly
can
come home! You’re choosing not to come home! But
I’m
here! Your wife! Your marriage! Your life!”

“I need to do this, Tilly. I tried to tell you that.” He paused.
“And I’m truly sorry that I’m hurting you. I wish you could understand it, how I feel, how I’ve felt.”

“This is our marriage, Tyler!”
I flew into the strip mall parking lot, the tires squeaking on the pavement below, and dove into a spot, hitting the brakes too late, so the SUV bounced off the concrete sidewalk.

“You think I don’t know that?” he yelled back. “You think this was easy for me? You think that I wouldn’t choose to go back and figure out a different life?”

“A different life?” I asked, my breath spinning away from me, my heart expanding, exploding in my chest cavity.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said, more gently.

I didn’t answer, because I could tell that this wasn’t going to end well, that the more he confessed, the more I’d understand the extent of his discontent, and I’d already heard more than my psyche could bear.

“That’s not what I meant,” he repeated. “I just meant … I do wish I’d gotten a handle on this sooner. I should have told you. I guess I should have told you, but now it feels too late. I feel better here, clearer here.”

“Shut up!”
I screamed. “Just shut up! Just stop fucking talking!”

So he did, and then I did, and then I stuffed the phone into the glove compartment, walked into the liquor store, and proceeded to buy the extra-extra-large tequila bottle.

And now, my father is crouched on my bedroom floor, trying to implore me to reconstruct a life that I don’t recognize, a life that I have no interest in inhabiting.

“Tilly, here’s the thing,” my dad says, lifting my chin so I have no choice but to meet him square on. “It’s easy to become like me. It’s a lot harder not to. But this? This isn’t you, this isn’t who you want to be. You know that.”

I nod, exhausted, drunk tears spilling forward.

“Come on,” he says, rising and offering me his open palm. “Let’s get you showered, and then let’s get you some food, and then let’s figure out a plan.”

Every cell in my being wants to shove itself back under the comforter, wants to numb itself with more tequila.
More tequila, please!
I can practically hear them begging in my ear. But my dad’s hand is outstretched, so I grab it and stand with him, then shuffle slowly to the bath.

“I don’t know who I am without you,”
Tyler told me. Yes, well, sometimes, I guess you’ve got no other option than to find out.

A month slips by in a haze that feels both nascent and never-ending. I wake up, I find some way to wade through my day, some way not to fall over under the weight of my exhaustion, under the oppressive sadness that tails me like a black shadow, then drive straight home and dive into bed.
Grease
has come together better than I could have hoped for, the prom is cruising along effortlessly, and yet, I can’t get myself to care, can’t convince myself that any of this
matters
, which would be funny, if it weren’t so unfunny, because that’s all that mattered before. Before.

Tyler and I have spoken twice, once when he asked me to send him some clothes, again when he called to thank me for the care package and announce that he’d be back around the end of October to collect the rest of his things.

So there it was. Permanent. He mentioned this casually, like it wasn’t the most catastrophic chasm to ever carve itself into his life, and I listened to him and wondered how the same act could define two people so differently.

But I did as he asked. I flung open his closet door while Darcy
muttered behind me, parked on the bed, and told me to set the bulk of his clothes ablaze in a bonfire in the front yard instead of honoring his request. I gently picked out his polos, his khakis, lovingly folded a few sweatshirts, rolled up his oxfords so they wouldn’t wrinkle. I was still angry, to be sure, but I was so tired, just so goddamn tired, that the fight had been vaporized right out of me.

School kicks off after Labor Day, and what is usually my favorite time of year—those early days before the delinquents have proven that they once again can’t keep their smart-ass mouths shut, before the panicked skirmish to finalize college applications or community college plans, when everything is still tinged with hope and newness and possibility—offers nothing but gloom.

“I know I’m not normally one to say it,” Susanna says while we approve wardrobe fittings after school on the third day back. “But you need to buck up.”

“Touché,” I answer, fingering Wally’s a-little-too-Elvis-y-to-be-Danny-Zuko-but-we-have-to-settle-for-what-we-can-get leather jacket. I’m wondering if there’s any way I can find something less, I don’t know, cabaret club, until I realize that he wears this
in my vision
, whether I like it or not, so I just let my hands fall limp and squat onto a nearby folding chair.

“Hey, at least I’m trying,” she says, and I nod because at least she is. She and Austin are working with a mediator to settle things as amicably as possible, which isn’t so possible when one party is still beside herself that the other disappointed her to such depths, but she’s right, she’s trying. “To be honest, though,” Susie continues, grabbing a needle and thread to sew the hem of CJ’s impossibly snug pleather pants for the finale, for when Sandra Dee has made her full transformation, “I do sort of wonder if I’m going to be alone forever.”

I remember her quiet corner on opening night, her hands a bow around someone else’s waist, and smile at her with as much love as I can muster, and assure her that she won’t be.

“Me, on the other hand …” I trail off.

“Hey, no one has said a word about divorce between you two yet,” she tuts. Which is true. But no one hasn’t said a word about it either. And I suspect that one day soon, Tyler will, and then I’ll crumble like a shoreline being washed out to sea. “You know what?” she continues. “You should go grab that fancy camera the cute art boy gave you.”

“Not happening,” I interject.

“Whatever, you still should,” she says, ripping the hem out now with her teeth. “Document this, you know?”

“What? Our sad-sack selves trying to put up a musical?”

“No, our sad-sack selves making a comeback from the assholes we were probably too good for in the first place.”

“I admire your positivity,” I say before I skulk down the left stage stairs.
(“Stage left!” Wally corrected me yesterday. “That’s stage left, not left stage, Ms. Farmer, which I’d expect you to know by now.”)
“But I’d rather stick to my own brand of self-pity.”

“That’s not the Tilly Farmer I know,” she calls out to me. Which is true, I think, as I exit the auditorium,
but maybe this one was biding its time inside of me the whole time, a cancer waiting to spring
.

Susanna was right, of course, that I’d probably get a boost out of documenting our work, but I’ve put aside the camera for now. I avoid Eli in the hallways, though he always waves with the joviality that makes him so likable, occasionally knocks on my door and pokes his head through to say hello, and I inevitably feign busywork. His was my last flash-forward, intentionally so. After I met with Ashley, and then after it was clear that Tyler wasn’t coming
back, it became all the more clear that whatever it was that I was seeing was written in indelible ink, and it felt like too much of a burden, to know what the future would bring and not be able to do one damn thing about it. I returned the camera two weeks ago when he was out on his lunch break.

The next day, the fourth morning of the new school year, the radio alarm bounces me alert, and I listen to the DJs spar back and forth, and then the traffic guy comes on, and then the news, and then I hear the date, September 7: it has been two months exactly since Tyler left me. Because even though he didn’t leave me back on his fishing trip when he announced that Jamie Rosato just wanted to feel things out, well, let’s be honest, yes, that’s when he left me. July 7. That’s when it all started to unspool. An entire two months have slid by while I’ve been swimming underwater, rendering myself nearly sightless, almost deaf. It’s been easier this way, anesthetizing myself to the world.

I flip off the radio, the too-cheery DJs fraying my nerves. I try to remember my to-do list for today: prom … maybe? CJ’s application … perhaps? There really is nothing. Just a muddy fuzz that comes when you plunge your head underneath the deep end and sink toward the bottom.

But it’s not just that—there’s more, on this date.
Oh yeah
. It’s also the anniversary of my mother’s death. Darcy will implore me to visit the cemetery today, and I will go, of course, and I will remember, despite everything, that I still have a life, that actually, Tyler or not, I can continue to spiral until I suffocate under my own misery, or I can find a way, impossible as that might seem, to hack off the anchors that are holding me hostage and swim toward shore.

The house is at rest as I pad through it toward the kitchen. My father moved back home, when? Yesterday? The day before? Last week? I shake my head because it’s all jumbled together. He has been sober for more than sixty days now, a small milestone but a milestone nevertheless, and though he stayed here three weeks longer than necessary, Darcy finally drove him back to our childhood house after I begged off of it, too exhausted after a day of toiling with other people’s problems to celebrate my father’s attempt to wrestle his own. Darcy did it without complaint, while I lingered at my bedroom window and watched them go. Without me as a buffer between the two of them, they’d somehow managed to wave white flags. She begrudgingly sat with him at dinners long after I’d pleaded fatigue, and later, if I got up to use the bathroom, I’d hear an occasional guffaw from the den where they were watching some godforsaken reality show that they both seemed to delight in.

I start up the coffeepot, and it hisses in reply. It has been two months,
two months!
And still, I am here, spinning in circles, drowning in my grief.

Two months is nothing, it’s a blip, a passing cloud, certainly not enough time to mourn the vestiges of a lifetime—that is what I’d tell Susanna if she were me. But she’s not, and I am. Whatever Ashley Simmons unlocked in me, and certainly, it was something—rage, fearlessness, honesty—I’m still Tilly Farmer, God damn it! I watch the drip-drip-drip of the browned water slipping into the pot, and I can almost feel those things—that rage, that honesty—awakened again, broiling inside of my intestines.
Shit or get off the pot, Tilly Farmer! Pull your act together! Get over your self-pity, whatever else Tyler eff-ing Farmer has destroyed in you! You’ve wasted enough time on
that
. If I listen closely enough, I could swear that I’m hearing Ashley, even though, quite obviously, I’m not.

I reach for a mug, lift its steaming contents to my lips, and swallow grandly, the coffee awakening my senses. It is time for a change, for a new path, a new way of thinking. Yes, maybe it’s finally now time.

A
s it turned out, the date, September 7, was familiar for more than just marking the two-month anniversary of the implosion of my marriage and because of my mother.
Oooh yeah
, I remember, as I pull into the WHS parking lot and spy a large trailer with the Westlake Hospital icon painted on the side. The blood drive. I’d chosen the day intentionally, a way to memorialize my mom.

It was actually Luanne’s idea, last May: she thought, what better way to kick off the year, to get the kids involved in their own health and in responsibility for our fellow citizens, than to ask them to donate a pint and receive a chocolate chip cookie in return. Tyler, too, had encouraged the idea before he left me. When I told him about it way back when, he smiled and kissed my palm before turning back to his cereal and ESPN.

“You do make this world a better place,” he said. “That school is lucky to have you.”

At the time, I watched him shovel in his Frosted Flakes and thought that I could say the same of him, how lucky I felt to call him mine. Now, I flip off the engine to the SUV and stride toward the blood drive trailer, and I can’t help but wonder if Tyler was already planning his exit back then, tossing out generic compliments
but never turning to look me square in the eye as he said them. Maybe I should have seen it, I consider, because Tyler was many things, but a good liar was never one of them.

The breeze kicks up, one of those last-gasp-of-summer embraces, and it warms my shoulders, my collarbone, my core. Two months into this maze of loneliness, and yes, it dawns on me that perhaps I could have seen it, not just in my premonition, but in Tyler’s distance, in the way he was slowly creeping away from me, the ant who discovered a way out of the farm when he saw the light up above.

The trailer door is ajar, so I step inside. Every chair is full; no surprise, really. Students are given a pass from class if they opt to donate, and I spot CJ in the last seat, closest to the cookie station. Johnny Hutchinson is next to her, and they’re giggling back and forth, the pulsing red tubes at their inner elbows no deterrent to teenage hormones. She sees me and smiles wide, sunshine in her eyes, and I suppose that one of the many things I missed over the past two months was that they’d gotten back together, despite her protests that he was too small-town, that anything about Westlake was too small-town for her.