The One That I Want (27 page)

“Do you think you should check up on Darcy? Make sure she’s alright?” Susanna says finally.

I’m still too angry to chase after her, though a niggling part of me knows that I should. Knows that I’m just as guilty for establishing my caretaker role as she is for accepting it, and now, rather than blame her for not putting me first, I should surrender to the
fact that she is mad and vengeful and probably needs her big sister more than ever.

“I’m sure she’s at Dante’s,” I say, the crust of the pizza lodging in my throat. I reach for a Coke to wash it down.

Just as I say this, the phone rings. “Her.” I roll my eyes and hand the receiver to Susanna. “Answer it. I don’t want to deal.”

“Hello?” Susie crunches the phone between her neck and her shoulder so she can reach for another slice. “Yeah, hey.” Her eyebrows dart, making sharp angles toward her nose. “No … no … we haven’t seen her.” She looks at me, her face flashing with concern. “Okay, yeah … I’ll tell her. Yeah, we’ll let you know. We’ll give you a call back.”

“What’s that about?” I say, picking at the errant cheese specks on my plate.

“Dante. He wanted to know if we knew where Darcy was. She was supposed to show up for an audition and didn’t. I guess the manager at Oliver’s arranged for some sort of potential opening tour act.”

“Did he try her cell?” I ask. “She pulls this shit all the time, you know.”

“He sounded concerned,” Susie says. “Tried her cell, tried everyone they know. No one’s seen her. And he said she was really excited about this, that she wouldn’t have missed it.”

“Well, I don’t know,” I say, rising to dump my paper plate in the garbage. “Her battery’s probably dead and she probably doesn’t give a crap anyway, that she stood people up, that people are running around looking for her.”

“Till,” Susie says softly, the legs of her chair squeaking as she swivels to face me. “That’s not fair. That’s not who Darcy is now.”

“Well that’s how I see her,” I answer, even though I know this isn’t entirely true.

“She’s been good to you. She stayed here to make sure that
you had someone. She didn’t have to do that. The
old
Darcy wouldn’t have done that.”

I consider this for a moment, and it resonates. She’s right. Whether or not I am furious over today, and I am, Darcy isn’t the little sister she was when she showed up on my porch steps in July, willful and self-righteous and pissed off that the world had inevitably failed her. She has helped protect me, though, as I stare at our kitchen floor, at
my
kitchen floor now that Tyler is nearly gone, I am surprised to realize that we can only protect each other from so much.

Darcy, my little baby sister, has shed her skin and grown into something more. Now I am the one who needs to do the same.

“Okay,” I say to Susanna with a nod. “I might know where she is. Come on, let’s go.”

I grab the keys from the counter, leaving the pizza box open, the contents half-eaten, already fermenting. Because there are burdens that we bear together, and then there are burdens that we have to bear alone, but even those, the ones that we must forge ourselves, are easier to shoulder when we can sense the firm assuredness of our sister, of our friends, standing right beside us, holding us up in case we falter.

The snow is coming down now, the cooler air swarming over Westlake, turning those rain pellets into something more treacherous.

“I can’t remember it snowing like this in October,” Susie says. “It’s not even winter yet! Christ.”

“It’ll be a long one,” I concur, focused on the road.

I’ve never liked winter, never been one for snowfall, even though it’s Tyler’s favorite time of year. He finds the snow peaceful, comforting, while I always wonder if I’ll slip and fall, suffocating myself underneath a blanket of whiteness. I didn’t tell him this: it
would belie my sunnier nature, so instead, I just complained about the frigid temperatures of the season. But if I had been honest, I would have said this: that winter frightens me, that it can eat up and spit out the more fragile among us, leaving only the strong to survive.

I drive slowly, the windshield wipers whipping furiously to bat back the fat flakes that are pounding the front window. In the trunk, a litter of Tyler’s belongings, which he has left behind this afternoon, occasionally rattle as I coast over a speed bump or ease to a halt, reminding me of the literal and metaphorical heft of what I’m carrying around.

“You think she’s here?” Susanna says, breaking the quiet.

“I don’t know where else she would be,” I answer, hoping that I am both right and wrong. Right, because I want to pull her tight, apologize, and bring her home. Wrong, because it is perilous outside, and no one should be left out in the elements now, much less my sister in her flimsy, vodka-covered sweatshirt and leggings.

The city around us has virtually shut down, a ghost town. The forecasters, for once, were correct, and Westlake’s residents had been wise to heed their warnings. At least six inches, maybe up to a foot, depending on which way the winds blew, they said. We coast past darkened storefronts and quieted taverns, and I wonder if I can get Tyler to shovel the walkway before he leaves tomorrow, but quickly flush the idea.
No, I will shovel it myself
, I think, flicking on my blinker to make the turn down the long road that will take us there. A small victory, but a victory nevertheless. This I can handle. This I can do.

I abort the engine in the empty parking lot. There are no tire tracks, no footprints. The snow is already piling on the windshield, and as we step down to the ground, our feet sink in, the flakes covering the noses of our boots. Soon, we’ll be ankle deep.

“It’s freezing out here,” Susanna says, her breath a cloud shooting out, then disappearing, in front of her. “Come on, let’s hustle.”

We shuffle down the path as fast as the slippery foot bed allows. The lights are on, glaring as always, but with the snow falling nearly sideways, visibility is almost nil. We hold our gloved hands in front of our faces for protection, like we’re blocking out the sunshine of a glorious day instead of just the opposite.

The headstones, too, are amassing inches, teetering untouched mini-mountains of flakes. If the snow pours hard enough, some of the words, the dedications, the names and dates and meanings, will be swallowed up, concealed so one headstone will resemble the other, each of them anonymous symbols of loss.

“Down here,” I pant, pointing the way, the snow exhausting my thighs, taxing my concentration lest I lose my footing.

We descend the hill, the trees looming above us with their heavy, deadened branches, the sky a blanket of tumbling white. I see my mother’s gravestone and break into a run, despite knowing better, despite the ground that might slay me at any moment.

“Darcy!” I yell. “Darcy?” I yell louder.

My blood courses through every limb, every digit, every extremity. I run fast, faster, and the snow gives way, such that just before I reach my mother’s resting place, I am sliding, careening toward her headstone, which I collide into with a thump.

Susanna tails me, catching up from behind.

“Shit,” she says, succinct, accurate, the epitome.

We both cast around for Darcy, for any signs of life, but we are in a graveyard, after all, and if flesh and blood is what we’re looking for, we certainly won’t find it here. I push my hand against my mom’s headstone and wearily rise.

“Darcy!” I scream one last time, because I don’t know what
else to do. This is the only place I thought she might be, the only safe haven I could think of.

I sigh and without warning, purging, violent tears appear, tears for this whole thing, this whole shitbag of a mess. They streak down my frozen face, and though I can’t feel them, I know that they are there. I wipe them away with the back of my glove, snot congealing in my nostrils, my lashes sticking together like iced meringues. Susanna huddles close to me and rubs my back until finally the tears abate.

“I’m numb,” I say, starting back toward the car loaded up with the remnants of my marriage.

“Who isn’t?” she responds.

“Good point,” I say.

“So what now?”

Now there’s a question to which, for once in my life, I have no answer.

T
here is no word from Darcy by the time Susanna leaves the next morning to retrieve the twins from Austin. Dante has rung me twice by 7:15
A.M
., after making a second wave of calls to their friends, to the bars that stayed open last night despite the storm, to anyone he can think of. I checked with school security and she wasn’t in the music room, protecting herself behind the safety of piano keys. The bus station has closed because of the weather, and I’d already thought to confirm with the airport, which also shuttered its doors at the first prediction of the storm. I had to be sure, though, because it would be like Darcy, like the old Darcy, to flee straight out of town, a caged bird set free, at the first—well, maybe not first, but certainly at the most arduous—signs of trouble. I have phoned Luanne, who checked the hospital, and spoken with my father, who sounded questionably sober but swore not only that he had not heard from her but that he hadn’t touched a drink, which I asked him in passing, not because it was my primary concern of the moment.

I am on my third cup of coffee when Ashley dials me, on a break from her mother’s deathbed, to lighten my mood about Tyler’s return and unleash a rash of man-hating insults. I stop her
midsentence to explain what has happened. That Darcy is gone, and no one knows where to find her.

She falls silent, and I say, “Hello, hello, Ashley, are you still there?”

“I’m here,” she answers, her voice simultaneously more hollow and yet more firm.

“Anyway, sorry, I’m just venting. How’s your mom?”

“You know where she is.” I can hear the hospital paging system announce itself in the background.

“Your mom? Yes, I know where she is. I’m sorry for that,” I say, embarrassed at myself for pouring out my problems to someone who already has them by the barrelful.

“No.
Darcy
. You know where she is.”

“I don’t. I wish I did, but I don’t!” My voice catches.

“You do. Think about it hard enough, and you do.” Someone says something to her, and she muffles the phone, then returns. “Look, I have to go. Call me later. Think about it. Trust me.
Trust yourself
. You’ll find her.”

The phone goes dead, static electricity in my ear, and I sink into the couch and contemplate her words.
“Think about it. Trust me
. Trust yourself.” My eyes scan my broken living room, littered with debris from Tyler’s packing. Discarded balls of shipping tape, scattered broken bits of cardboard boxes, a few errant coins. I move to the mantel, covered with pictures of my old life that I haven’t had the heart or the stomach to take down. Tyler and I at our wedding; Tyler and I at Susanna’s wedding; Tyler and I at his championship game our senior year. I pick that one up, run my fingers over our faces—collectively so innocent, so wrapped up in the possibility of life—and then I promptly chuck it with every last ounce of strength I have, with every bit of muscle mass in my frail, tired body, toward the fireplace.

It shatters with a crack and then slips to the floor, shards every which way, fragments shooting clear toward the rug.

The picture, though, remains intact. It stares up at me upside down, leaning askew against the bricks. I can barely recognize either of us from this angle, though there we are, smiling giddily at the camera.

“Think about it. Trust me
. Trust yourself.”

“Oh my God,” I say aloud. “Oh my God, oh my God.” I race out of the room, bound up the stairs, and burst into my bedroom in search of my bag. Eli’s camera is hidden in the depths, cast aside since homecoming and our day in the woods. My fingers vibrate as I tug it out from below my checkbook, below my breath mints, below the prom invitation, below a few wadded-up memos from school that I barely bothered to read.

I power up my laptop, plug in the Nikon, and wait for it to whirl to life.

Yes, I will trust myself
, I think as I start to scan through the photos, scan for any signs of where Darcy might be and how I might save her, even though I’ve given up on saving anyone as of late.

I pause on my last shot from the homecoming concert. Darcy is taking a curtsy, the sunlight radiating down on her, her cheeks pressed so high in her wide, beckoning smile that I fall in love with my baby sister all over again. I turned on the flash, unnecessary but all the more illuminating, so the picture is golden, shiny, perfect. I stare and stare and wait for it to come, to come take me, to come rescue me so that I can rescue her.

I feel it now. That pain in my toe, the seizing cramping that overtakes my calves, then my thighs, then my abdomen, then the clutch around my heart, then the breath that seems to press against my lungs, and then, finally, my mind, my brain, my synapses.

“Trust me
. Trust yourself.” Yes, maybe I can.