The One That I Want (3 page)

“Let me read you,” she says. “You never let me in high school, and now’s the time. I can feel it.”

“Um, that’s okay.” I pause. “I have a pretty great life.”

Her face morphs into a sneer. “You always thought that. You were always oblivious.”

“I’m not oblivious!” I say, instantly defensive. “I love my life. I married Tyler, by the way. We’re trying for kids.”

“As if that’s the answer to anything. As if Tyler and a baby are the answers to anything,” she says, moving behind her makeshift table.

“Well, I think they are,” I say. “Not that I’m looking for answers.” I stop, annoyed at myself. “What’s your point, Ashley?”

“My point, Silly Tilly, is that you need a little clarity, a little insight. And I’d like to help you get it.” I wish she would stop calling me that, stop making me feel like I’m nine again.

“Sit,” she commands, gesturing to a weather-beaten chair in front of her table. Inexplicably, I obey. She walks over with a glass bowl of water, two small candles, a vial of gray powder, and what appears to be some sort of vegetable root.

She drops in the chair opposite me, all of the lines on her face
pointing downward, the sweat pooling above her lip into round, beady drops, and interlaces her fingers into mine, then closes her eyes. I wonder if I should follow her example, so I press my eyes shut, but then I open them again when she whisks her hands back from me, as if she received an electric jolt.

“Oh,” she says with a firework of alarm. “Oh my.” Then she smiles as if to mask her horror, reminding me exactly of the Cheshire cat. “I always knew there was something special about you, Tilly Everett.” She reaches for a set of matches on the corner of the table and lights the tea candles.

Farmer
, I want to correct her.
It’s Tilly Farmer now. Tyler and I got married and we’re having a baby, and that’s all I need in the word to make me happy!

“Tell me the most important thing about yourself, something that I wouldn’t know, something that maybe no one knows,” she says, her tone guttural, ghostly almost, a shell of what it was before.

“I don’t have any secrets,” I say without hesitation. “I said it before—I love my life. There’s nothing to hide.”

“Everyone has something to hide,” she says, meeting my eyes roundly.

“Well, I don’t. I’m happy. That’s all that matters,” I reply, half-wishing I’d never agreed to this in the first place.
Yes, why did you agree to this in the first place?

She grunts in response, indicating absolutely nothing, and sprinkles the charcoal-like powder into my hands, tugging my arms closer, nearly pulling the elbows straight from the sockets and ignoring my protests of discomfort. She presses the vegetable root into my palms, inhaling and exhaling sharply. The scent of the incense mixes with her stale breath and the charred aroma from the powder, and I’m overcome with pulsing nausea, which winds
its way up from the core of my stomach, and I swallow hard, certain I’m going to vomit. But then, just as I’m on the cusp of heaving, she pulls the root off my hands and dips the tips of my fingers in the bowl of cool water, and the sensation passes.

“Oh!” she says again, her voice a mix of alarm and euphoria, her eyes fiery as she stares, bearing down, boring into me.

“What?
Oh
, what?” I say, matching her panic because all at once, this seems a little too real, a little more creepy than I bargained for. I can feel the baby hairs on my arms prickling, at full attention. “Did you see my future?”

Don’t be ridiculous, Tilly!
I think.
No one can actually see the future
. Blood rushes to my cheeks, a visual confession of embarrassment at the stupidity of my question.

“It doesn’t work like that, Tilly.” She smiles, though it’s all teeth, the affection gone.

“What do you mean? You said you could tell my fortune. So what is it?”
Leave! Just get up and leave. Ashley Simmons is a train wreck who can derail anyone who gets in her track
.

“Sometimes I can see something, other times, something else presents itself,” she says, as if this is an answer to anything. “You might not understand.”

“I don’t,” I say. “Honestly, Ashley, is this some sort of karmic payback because we weren’t friends in high school or something?” I stand to leave.

“Sit down,” she commands. “I’m not done. And not everything is about high school, Tilly.”

Her bark surprises me, and my knees buckle into the seat.

“Close your eyes,” she says. I hear her scurry behind me and then feel her rubbing that root of God-knows-what over my temples, then into the base of my neck, where my blood palpably beats. Her hands form a web over my scalp, and her fingers press,
like staples, into tiny points along my forehead. I hear a vertebra pop in my spine, and my equilibrium is disrupted, and even behind the veil of darkness in my eyes, I feel myself spinning, being pulled down by gravity to the straw-covered makeshift floor.

But then she whips her hands off of me, and my vertigo is gone, whisked away, and when I open my eyes, the tent around me looks different, brighter, clearer in a way that I can’t define at all.

“Now
, we’re done,” she says through a heavy, broken breath. Sweat stains splatter across the collar of her shirt. “I won’t charge you. Consider this a gift.”

“A gift of what?” I ask. “You haven’t told me anything.”

“A gift of clarity, Tilly. It’s what I always thought you needed.”

“I don’t get this at all,” I say, rising to go, my legs unsteady below me.

“You will,” she says. “You will get it, I’m sure.” Then she moves to disappear behind her curtain without so much as a formal good-bye. “You’ll understand soon enough, and then the next time you see me, you’ll thank me for being so generous.”

I start to reply, but she is gone. So I fling aside the fabric opening to the tent, squint my eyes to adjust to the sunlight, and head off in search of Tyler, already intent on shaking off Ashley Simmons, her ominous prophecies, the idea that she could somehow intuit the future, my future.

As if!
I snort to myself.
Give me a break!
I think as I meander by the carousel, ignoring my shaking fingers, my anxiety flaring like a rocket grenade.

I scavenge around the grounds, putting it behind me.

Never once does it occur to me that Ashley Simmons might be on to something, might be the very thing that will unhinge me from the present and send me down a slippery slope of time.

T
wo hours later, just before the sun finally begins to tuck itself behind the horizon and grant us a small reprieve from the suffocation of steamy air, Ty and I have reunited near the Skee-Ball machines, and having gorged ourselves on turkey drumsticks and popcorn, we make our way back home.

As Ty drives, we wind our way through the town whose back roads, faded awnings, and seasonal crosswind scents are as familiar to me as a second skin. Past the elementary school where Susie and I spawned our sisterhood, past the Chevrolet dealership where my father bought me my first car, past the Italian restaurant that CJ’s father has run since she was a baby, past the electronics store that my dad opened before I was born and nearly lost when he drank too much to know the difference between a washer and a dryer. Ty and I fall into a comfortable silence, the silence that is born from knowing each other for two decades, and I calculate how quickly we’ll be home so I can check to see if the pad in my underwear is still spotless.

I know that I shouldn’t be so obsessed. Ty tries to reassure me every time I really come undone over it, over another month of failed opportunity. He’ll say,
“Everything happens for a reason
,
babe,”
which I know he means to be endearing, but it sort of irritates me all the same.
As if everything in my life has happened for a reason!
What an idiotic notion. As if I wouldn’t rewind so much of it if I could. But I can’t, and I know this, and I have lived my life knowing this, so whenever he espouses such things, I wrap my palm around the curve of his cheek and thank him. Because at the root of it, he’s only doing his best.

Ty turns down our cul-de-sac, its elm trees bursting with flourishing leaves, sporadic wildflowers at their trunks, occasional tangled rosebushes nestled beside them, and as we coast into the driveway, I spot my youngest sister parked on our front steps, a bouquet of irises in her hand.

“Oh, damn it,” I say, unsnapping my seat belt and opening the door in one fluid motion, the crest of air-conditioned comfort sucked dry immediately.

“What’s she doing here?” Ty kills the engine.

“We forgot.” I turn to look at him, but I can tell he has no recollection. “My mom’s birthday. We totally forgot.”

“Oh, shit,” he says, though it’s more of a sigh than an actual lament, and he readjusts his baseball hat, a microscopic delaying technique before we face the enemy. We both disembark from the giant steps of our Ford Explorer, bought used and at a discount, and drop onto the graveled ground.

“I’ve been waiting here for two goddamned hours,” Darcy snaps as a greeting. “Do you know how long two goddamned hours can be when you’re sitting by yourself with nothing to do?”

“Why didn’t you call me?” I ask.

“Phone’s dead.” She shrugs.
Of course it is
, I think. Darcy never goes anywhere adequately prepared or equipped for the circumstances. “Besides,” she continues, “I can’t believe you forgot.”

“I didn’t forget,” I lie. “I had a busy day. You know that the
fair is the school’s big fund-raising opportunity.”
Not to mention the Arc de Triomphe. Why focus on her birthday when there is the Arc de Triomphe?
I think. “And I’m busy with the school musical,” I add after a pause, like that might impress her, like I should even attempt to impress her.

“Whatever,” she says, unimpressed. “It’s not as if it’s Mom’s birthday every day or anything.”

I flop my shoulders, unwilling to take Darcy’s bait, as Tyler unlocks the front door and goes inside, abandoning me to mop up the mess. The screen bangs shut, and Darcy bites her cuticles while she waits for me to amend my wrongdoing. A pang of sympathy for my baby sister assaults me.

“Look, it’s still light out. Let me run to the bathroom, and we’ll go, okay?”

“Okay.” She pouts, reminding me of how petulant she was as a child, how quickly her mood could turn from sunny to cloudy to completely tornadic with no warning at all.

“I’ll be in your car.” She rises, her dirty blond ponytail swaying back and forth, and I notice how skinny she’s gotten while she’s been in L.A. Her shorts drip off her hipbones; her breasts are no bigger than buds; her legs are gawky and slim, like a baby deer’s.

The car door thumps shut behind her, Darcy symbolically shouting,
“Screw you!”
and I plod inside to the front hall bathroom and tug down my underpants to check the giant-sized maxi pad, which is still clear, unmarred.

I stand upright and glance in the mirror, and then look closer because something seems off. The pallor of my skin has a hint of gray underneath it, and the shadows under my eyes are an ominous shade of yellow.
Heatstroke
, I think, leaning over the sink to splash water on my peaked cheeks. I wipe off the lingering drops,
dab my face with a towel, and when I gaze anew at my reflection, I see something even odder, something really out-of-body, freaking-me-the-hell-out strange: Ashley Simmons, with her coffee-colored eyes and layered black hair, staring back at me.

Jesus Christ!
My heart nearly detonates inside my chest, and I squeal, jumping back, the hinges of my knees colliding with the toilet. I step toward the mirror once more, then double-bat my lashes, and,
poof
, with that blink, she’s gone, just a figment of the memory of my afternoon. I stare again, just to be sure, but no, no, it’s just me, grayish, sickly me, with a pissed-off sister in her SUV and her stomach churning at the thought of a failed conception. I shake it off with a quick flutter of my head.
Heatstroke hallucinations
. I remind myself to Google the symptoms later.

The car horn honks, snapping me to, and I picture Darcy sitting out there, impatient, her left leg bouncing, her irritation skyrocketing.

“Ty,” I shout to his den. I know he’s already absorbed in the Mariners game and won’t notice my absence for at least an hour. We fall into this pattern every April and stretch it out until at least September, maybe October if the playoffs look like a possibility: Ty retreating to the TV to catch whatever game he can find, me enjoying the solitary bit of quiet time after a day of demands that are never once reciprocated, surfing over online picture galleries, pretending like I might actually pick up a camera again, my photography career derailed much like Ty’s baseball aspirations, though for very different reasons.

“We’re leaving!” I shout even louder, hoping to make it above the fray of the Mariners crowd. But I hear nothing, so I grab the car keys from the entryway table, close the front door firmly behind me, and join Darcy in the car. We are off to visit our mother.