The One That I Want (8 page)

My irritation rises up, a tiny pebble rubbing against my sole, uncomfortable, present, impossible to ignore. I’m starting to feel like the Incredible Hulk: one minute entirely normal, the next minute turning green with anger, ripping off my shirt, and storming down the streets in search of a brawl. Or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Maybe one of them.

I nab several wayward socks that are squashed next to the baseboard, trying to remember who is who—which one goes crazy? Jekyll? Hyde? I can’t decide. I throw the socks against the couch, where they land with a pitiful thwop.

Dad still lives in our childhood home. It’s too big a house for him now, with its five bedrooms and its pool out back that mostly stays covered the year through. Adrianna wanted to sell it; she tried to convince him to buy one of the condos in the new complex that had been built a few years back near the mall with the Penneys in it. New construction wasn’t too common for Westlake, and mostly, those condos sat empty. My dad kept telling Adie that he was waiting for the price to drop, but Luanne and I always knew that she’d never get him to move, even if he won one of the damn things for free.

I run my fingers over the wallpaper in the kitchen. My mother applied it herself, just before she got sick. We all piled into the car and went to the décor store, and oh, did it take hours upon hours for us to agree. Finally, Darcy flipped the page to a creamy paper with tiny green and pink flowers that swirled in such a way that they almost looked as if they were dancing. We huddled around our baby sister to get a view of it and then fell into a bubble of silence. “This is it!” Darcy shouted, and we murmured our approval. And then, soon after, the diagnosis came, and even though our kitchen looked much the same as it had before the gutting news, nothing, of course, was ever the same. Even those tiny pirouetting flowers seemed to lose their bounce.

I tuck the strewn garbage back into the can and then flip the lights off and tread down to the basement for a suitcase to stow enough of my father’s clothes to last the month. The too-steep steps creak as I gingerly make my way down, my hand grasping the cool cement wall. The main lighting long ago burned out, so I tug the rusty brass chain that swings near the bottom of the stairs and click on the solitary lightbulb for illumination. My eyes take a moment to adjust to the dimness.

The dank underbelly of the house is a compilation of my father’s life. Despite the passing years, he hasn’t had the stomach to
part with many of my mother’s belongings; instead, on the one-year anniversary of her death, Luanne and I finally picked up the actual pieces, stowing the bulk of her closet in cardboard boxes that we then dutifully hauled down here. Darcy was out cruising the neighborhood on her bike, and my dad was mourning at Shecky’s, a bar within walking distance of our home that has long since closed.

I haven’t ventured down to the basement in years, and now the boxes are all stacked just as they were from ages before, my teenage handwriting scrawled on the sides:
“Sweaters,” “Coats,” “Shoes.”

In the half light, I navigate through the archives.
“Shirts.” “Jeans.” “Pants.”
All tucked away in a time capsule, like if he never gave it away, she might still somehow make it back to claim it. I spot another box behind one that says
“Misc.”
and recognize not my own handwriting, but that of my mother.

“Tilly’s photo stuff.”
A rush of heat rises in my cheeks, the memory of her frail, beaten shell of a self, insistent on taking me shopping for a new camera, and then that same afternoon, when we plopped on the floor in my room, loading the old gear and some old pictures into this very box, the idea to organize my photos and equipment, not to part with it forever. But later, only weeks later, she passed, and with so many other more pressing matters to deal with, I slipped down to the basement and slid the box to the very back corner, where it sat hidden, untouched until now. That second camera, the one she bought for me on a summer morning before she died, smashed one day when it tumbled out of my car, a crack like a storybook lightning bolt right through the lens, and I never worked up the nerve to ask my dad for a new one. A new camera seemed infantile when the very skeleton of my world was shattering.

A fat film of grime has spread itself across the top of the box.
My nose sucks in the dust and just as I’m repressing a sneeze, my cell vibrates in my pocket.

Tyler. Finally
. I haven’t heard from him since he dropped off the radar and into Nolan Green’s parents’ lake cabin two days ago.

“Hey, what’s up?” I say, unsnapping my phone and tucking it under my shoulder as I separate the musty cardboard flaps of the box and look inside. Urine-colored newspaper, balled up and decaying, peers back at me.

“Sorry I haven’t called,” he says. “Reception up here is spotty. And we’ve been on the lake most of the time anyway. You should have
seen
what I hauled in yesterday. It’s on ice. I’ll bring it back for the weekend.”

I plunge my hands under the newspaper and feel something smooth.

“How’s your dad?” Ty continues.

“So-so.” I pause, only half-focused on the conversation, because, truth told, I never enjoy the newly gutted fish that Tyler totes home with him, with their glassy eyeballs and their tiny bones that inevitably poke into my gums when least expected.

What is this?
My fingers shimmy beneath the surface and tug out a stack of black and white eight-by-tens.

“How are you?” Ty asks.

“Fine,” I say. “A little tired, but fine.” I start to tell him about Luanne, but the line crackles, and I hear his voice lob in and out,
“Hel—lo, hel—lo, Til, hel—lo?”

“I’m here!” I say loudly, my voice reverberating off the damp walls.

“I can hear you,” he says, clearly now. “So, yeah, anyway, I caught this incredible bass, and oh my God, you won’t believe the stories Nolan has about the team now.” Nolan, because he was never quite good enough to play for the minors, just barely qualified for the bench of the UW team in college and now works in the
back office, recruiting new prospects, new hopes, new blood to invigorate them.

Distractedly, because there were few things I cared less about than Nolan Green—who once got so totally wasted in college that he passed out naked next to me while I was already asleep in Tyler’s bed and didn’t have the decency to apologize the next morning when I rolled over and snuggled with him for a good five minutes until I realized the difference—I flip through the eight-by-tens to a shot of my high school crew that I took down by the lake. It must have been July, maybe early August: Susanna and Austin and Elizabeth Childs, whom I now run into at the post office, and Darren Lewis, who enlisted in the army and came home from Iraq a hollowed-out shell of a man, and of course, Tyler, in board shorts, with his arms flung open in a victory stance. In the background, the lake is a metal gray, with streaks of summer sun bouncing off the ripples. I stare at the sixteen-year-old Tyler and remember the pangs of longing that I had for him that summer. How our friendship evolved into something more for me, and how we’d all convene at the dock after our shifts ended at our summer jobs, and how I’d watch him, as surreptitiously as possible, hoping that one afternoon he’d discover the same pangs inside of him.

“But it’s pretty awesome here,” he says. “Pretty amazing. Just mostly solitude. Good time to be alone with my thoughts.”

“I’m sure.” I roll my eyes. As if Nolan Green ever found the solitude in anything.

And then, out of nowhere, I feel it: the cramp building from my little toe.
Oh, shit
, I think, as the pain snakes its way through my limbs—worming up from my calf to my thigh to my bowels and clamping around my heart until it shoots into my brain, and I feel like my head might implode into a hundred thousand little pieces.

“Ty!” I say, though it is nothing more than a whoosh of a
whisper, and I pray that he can hear me, pray that somehow, he can snap me out of this, snap me back to the present, eradicate the temple-splitting pain. But then it feels like water is filling my ears and the dim basement walls are asphyxiating the air in my lungs, and then I feel the cool concrete floor against my cheek, and I close my eyes and block out the hurt, and then, I feel nothing at all.