The One That I Want (28 page)

I jolt awake in front of my computer. I check the clock and have lost only fifteen minutes, though I’m so spent that I feel like I’ve been sucked into a time warp that has shaved off months, years even. I want to rescue her myself, but I know that even I have limits. I will need someone strong, someone capable, someone who can haul her out of the woods without hurting us both.

I reach for the phone and frantically dial Austin’s apartment, but it rings four times and clicks onto his answering machine. I try again—
Wake up!
—but am met with the same result. “Uh, hey, this is Austin. You know what to do.”
Beep!

“Tyler! Austin! Wake up! Darcy’s in trouble, and I need your help.
Wake the hell up!”
I scream into the phone, then linger to see if they do indeed pick up, but no one clicks on the line, so I slam the receiver down and call Tyler’s cell. I’m shot straight into voice mail and am instantly pissed, ragingly pissed, because I know that they are dead weight on the couch, recovering from a three-beers-too-many night while my baby sister withers away in the woods behind my house.

I pause and regroup. Reliable. Capable. My list of men with these characteristics has shrunk to just about zero. But then I think of one more. Yes, there is still one, and he will be awake because, like me, he never sleeps, and he will come because, like me, he wants to matter. I reach for the phone and call the only other person I can think of who might make a difference. Eli.

W
e find her exactly where I knew we would find her. Eli has thought to call an ambulance that is minutes behind us, and he has also thought to bring blankets. I am toting her winter jacket, which I found balled up at the foot of the guest room bed, and though she is not conscious, she is breathing steadily, and that, Eli says—and I believe him, because he says it like he knows about this sort of thing—can make all the difference. He deems her strong enough to go, then he lifts her in his arms, reminding me of a painting of a savior I once had to study in Sunday school.

As we descend through the woods, toward his old BMW, which he has parked in such haste that it is abutting the curb, and toward the waiting medics, I feel the veil of my guilt descend. If only I’d taken the time to try to uncover the pieces, to glue the puzzle back together. If only I hadn’t been too selfish—and skittish—to look at those pictures, to know what the fates might hold for her. But I didn’t, and I hadn’t, and now, it had come to this.

We trail the ambulance and race to the hospital, where Luanne runs up and pulls me tight, then retreats to call my father. Ashley appears from a side corridor to give me a strong embrace, a
sign of confidence that I’ve found a way to finally seek clarity, to use the gift she’s bestowed.

Eli retrieves coffee from the cafeteria and we sit in a cocoon of silence, amidst the blaring cacophony of the emergency room. Doctors are yelling, sirens occasionally whirl outside, angry family members bitch at the administrative staff for not yet admitting their loved ones, for making them wait out their pain in the indignity of these stupid maroon plastic chairs, even though they are mostly in a terrified panic that their husbands or fathers or wives ignored the newscasters’ reports to stay home and take refuge, and instead insisted on driving in this treacherous weather and eventually landed themselves here.
None of us ever really stop to consider that the worst can actually happen to us
, I think. We always assume that it will be this guy or the other guy, but never us. And then your tires give way on the patchy back road, and an hour later, they find your car flipped in a pasture. This is how life works. Why don’t any of us ever learn?

The doctors have rushed Darcy back behind flapping doors that bear a red sign reading
HOSPITAL STAFF ONLY!
so the only thing left to do is wait. I made out words like “acute hypothermia” and “severe frostbite,” and Eli told me that they were probably trying to raise her body temperature, to cook her from the inside out, though he used kinder words than those.

“How do you know all of this?” I ask.

“A vacation in the Andes a few years ago with my best friend.” His head drops just a nudge. “It … well, there were some problems.” He starts to say more but catches himself when he gets to the part about a small avalanche. I can see him watching me, watching my fear rise, so he aborts his story and instead rubs my hand. “Better told another time,” he says. “We have enough sad stories for now. Let’s think of better ones.”

I rest my head on his shoulder because I feel like it might
teeter off of my neck under its own weight, and I close my eyes and try to think of better ones but come up blank. I am slipping into that transcendent state, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, when I hear my name shouted from across the room.

I snap open my eyes to see Tyler, trailed by Austin, rushing toward me. They are wearing the same clothes as yesterday, and when he kneels down to hug me, he reeks of old hops and cigarettes. His Westlake Wizards baseball hat covers his matted, in-need-of-a-shower hair, and when he rises, standing in front of me, he reminds me so much, too much, of one of my students. A kid who never grew up. A man-child who never rose to the occasion of adulthood, of everything that adulthood asks of you. Four months ago, this is what I might have loved about him. Now, I cock my head and wonder.

Eli clears his throat and introductions are made: Eli squinting his eyes and assessing; Tyler oblivious to it all, to the undercurrent, the innuendo, the strange man who helped rescue my sister when my husband could not.

“Listen, I should go,” Eli says, kissing my cheek. “I have a houseguest, and she doesn’t know anyone in town.” His words falter.
The girlfriend
, I think, though I don’t ask. It doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter enough to ask, because whoever she is, I called him, and he came, and that was enough to ask of him for now.

“Thank you,
thank you,”
I say again and again because I cannot think of a better way to say it. Tears build and then spill over.

“I’ll check in later, once my friend gets a flight out of here,” he says. The snow had let up by the time we found Darcy, so maybe the town, the airport, the roads, the stores would open back up. Or maybe not. Maybe his guest would be stuck here along with the rest of us.
We’re all a little stuck
, I think, giving Eli a final hug, watching him lope down the hall to the exit, his lanky torso, his confident stride.

Tyler takes Eli’s place on the row of chairs, my actual husband, who has failed me, swapping in for my surrogate one, who has not. He links his hand into mine, and turns my face to meet his own, and runs his fingers over my long blond strands, and then presses his lips to the tip of my nose, which is what he used to do way back when, before everything.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and I fight to hold his gaze, to not look away, because I’m not even sure that I want to hear this, not even sure what he’s sorry for. There is so much.

“Okay.” I nod, the easiest answer. I am too exhausted for any other complications.

“I’ll stay,” he says, after I have broken our stare and am focused on the ER doors in front of me, willing a doctor to emerge and promise us that she will be fine, that I didn’t get there too late, that my selfishness wasn’t her undoing. “I’ll stay,” he repeats when I don’t respond.

“Thanks. My dad should be here soon. So the company would be nice. At least until he’s here.” My eyes are frozen on those damn doors.
Please open and bring us good news!

“No, listen, look at me.” Something in his voice forces me from my trance.
“I’ll stay
. Here. With you. In Westlake.” He hesitates, aware of the weight of his words, of how they are flying against everything that he has done, and undone, in the past four months. “At least until Darcy is better. They don’t need me back right away anyway for the off-season. How about that? Let’s start with that.”

I nod.
Okay
. I don’t really want to think about it now. But yes, at least until Darcy is better. Yes, let’s start with that.

My father and Luanne insist that I head home at dusk.

“Go shower, go get some sleep,” he says, acting like the parent
he is. “I’ll stay here for now. She probably won’t wake up tonight anyway.” His throat catches, his eyes instantly glistening. I know that the only person perhaps more eviscerated by this than I am is he, so he tries to absorb some of my pain, my guilt, sopping it up like a sponge, and for once, I let him. We are both complicit in this. And we both know it to be true.

The doctors have informed us that Darcy is in a coma, which sounds more severe than it really is, they said.

“We have every reason to believe that she will recover,” they said. “That she will wake up in the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, and we’ll take it from there.”

“Take it from there—what does that mean?” I asked one of them, the one who looked the oldest, the most experienced, the one who might have the answers.

“It means that sometimes there are lingering effects from hypothermia—memory loss and such—that we can’t predict until she wakes,” he said, and I felt my insides crumble at the idea that Darcy might not return to us the same way she went. “There was also severe frostbite,” the doctor added, as if this was an afterthought. “Her fingers and toes sustained some damage, her toes more so. When she wakes up, we’ll see if she has the full span of movement. She may need therapy to regain it all. Stay here in the rehab wing for a while.”

I let out a little scream, an anguished cry, because of all the things to strip Darcy of, her hands, her lifeblood, would be the cruelest. Luanne shushed me and told me not to worry, that she sees things like this all the time, but I couldn’t tell if she was just being her usual clueless self or if, for once, I should actually take heed and believe her.

My dad smushes me into a taxi, and soon after I’ve made it home, Tyler shows up with a duffel bag. I’ve already changed into my pajamas, and I let him in wordlessly, then pad upstairs to the
bedroom, so drained that my legs nearly give way halfway up the steps. I sink under my sheets, hoping that sleep will heed my call.

The door creaks open just as I am slipping away, and the mattress shakes beside me. I turn to find Tyler in my bed—our bed—as though he didn’t vacate it three, nearly four, months ago, and really, many months before that.

“Hey,” he says. “Is this okay?”

I press my lips together to form something of a smile, though I have no idea if it’s okay, no idea what to think at all. But my husband is back, and he wants to sleep in our bed, so I accept it and try not to think too much. I am so very, very tired, but he moves on top of me, and then kisses me, tenderly, softly, like he has missed me as much as I’ve missed him, so I muster some strength to kiss him in return. His lips come toward me faster, more desperately, and soon, the movements come naturally. We’ve been doing this, after all, since we were nearly children.

Afterward, Tyler rolls over and slips quickly into a steady, sound slumber. But me, no. I can’t sleep, though all logic dictates that I should, that with my husband back beside me and the two of us tucked so securely in our bed, just like the old days, that surely, sleep should beckon. But it doesn’t. So I just stare at the ceiling, listening to the rise and fall of Tyler’s breath, waiting for morning, waiting for tomorrow, waiting for what it will bring.

T
here is good news and bad news the next morning at the hospital when Tyler drops me off. He’ll join me after making a rash of calls to the UW, explaining the circumstances, working out the details, details that we haven’t discussed, but he’ll assess them first with his bosses, then assess them with me. “Fine,” I tell him when he suggests this tactic. “Whatever works,” I say, closing the car door in the hospital’s drop-off zone, already flushing the conversation, ready to move on to something more critical. The good news is that Darcy is showing signs of waking up; the bad news is that Ashley’s mother is slipping away.

I check in on Darcy but am quickly scooted out of the room by a hovering nurse, so I meander the halls until I find my father, staring into the glass to Valerie’s room, Ashley crumpled on the floor by the vending machines. Just as I knew I would, though I’m still never quite sure how these visions will unfold. Only that they will. I overhear Ashley asking, “How is she?” just as I approach and watch my father’s limp shoulders flop, his face turning toward her, an empty voice answering, “They don’t know everything yet.”
Darcy, he was talking about Darcy
.

Machines blare suddenly from inside the room, and Ashley
bolts up and through the door, letting it slam behind her. My father, as I’d seen him do once before, slaps his hands up against the window in a naked display of grief.

The beeping stops as quickly as it started, and I move toward my dad, rubbing his back as a way of hello. He turns and clutches me so tightly that I am nearly smothered, his shirt scented with sweaty fatigue, his breath the odor of the hospital’s egg sandwich.

“I’ll go sit with your sister for a while,” he says, releasing me. It’s obvious that he doesn’t know what to do with himself, that if he goes home, he may drink himself into an unconscious stupor, so he stays here and tries to make himself useful. I agree that he should go sit with her, even though I know the nurses will probably turn him away at her door, but I want a moment with Ashley.

She emerges from her mother’s room—the doctors have taken over, trying to give her mom a few more days, though the hours are growing shorter—and falls into me, a hug of sorts, really more of a cry to be held up.

“So you figured it out,” she says after a moment, pushing back and reaching my eyes. “Figured out what I meant.”

“I did,” I say. “Though it took me too long. I should have gotten there sooner.”

“You were never the fastest learner,” she says, ribbing me, which feels both so inappropriate given the circumstances and so utterly Ashley that I can’t help but laugh. To know that despite everything, despite
all of this
, she can still shovel it out at me. She pauses, more words on her tongue. “And the rest of it? Did you figure that out too?”