The One That I Want (7 page)

It is not the sturdiest of plans, I realize on Monday night, as I navigate the SUV to Susanna’s to retrieve her and the twins for the Fourth of July fireworks show, but it is the compromise we can all live with for now. I still haven’t spoken to Darcy. Even though I know that she won’t wave her white flag and that eventually I’ll need to wave mine, I still can’t stomach it.
I’ll call her tomorrow
, I think, just like I told myself yesterday.
I’ll call her and pretend that this didn’t happen, and we’ll all move on, and eventually, I’ll find a way to tell her about Dad
. This is how it’s always worked, yet I’m annoyed at myself for the concession. Or maybe just at the concession itself. Who knows?

I beep the horn and the twins jet from the house. Susie lumbers after them, like she might rather be in bed, though I’m happy to see that her hair is washed, brushed shiny, a dollop of lipstick and blush spread across her face.

“We have to make a decision, you know,” I say to her, once the kids are safely buckled in and we’re speeding down Route 72 toward the lake.

“Shhh,” she says, casting a quick glance behind her. “I don’t want to talk about Austin in front of them.”

“No, not a decision about
him
, a decision about the musical. Which one. Anderson needs to know by Friday.”

“Oh,” she answers, like she’s contemplating a million reasons why she should back out. “Well, I don’t really care.” She pauses. “Whatever you think will be the most fun.”

I glance over at her before flicking my eyes back toward the road. My best friend. No, she hasn’t had a little fun with much in a while. The boys are yammering to each other behind us, and Susie just sighs, stares out the window, looking like she’d like to sink into the seat and
whoosh
, be invisible.

When she first discovered Austin’s indiscretion, I had to talk her down from maiming him. Now, as the reality has seeped in, as
she’s discovered that she might not be made of enough grace to forgive him, and, with this discovery, realized this thing might shatter every last vision of her future, she’s shifted from angry to broken. Not vengeful, not grief-stricken. Just broken.

“Then I vote for
Grease,”
I say, hoping I can bolster her. “Remember how much fun it was senior year?”

She shrugs.

“Come on,” I say. “It’s time to anoint a new Sandra Dee. You can pass over the crown.” I pull off the highway, turning down the bumpy dirt road toward the lake. The same road I drove down a million times back in high school, our summers spent working the day shift at the grocery store, at the diner, at a local construction job, the nights spent building bonfires and sipping wine coolers and listening to Pearl Jam on the dock.

“I think I’d be passing over the spandex pants, actually,” she says, smiling. “Like I could ever fit into those again. God, yeah, okay, that
was
fun.” She pauses, awash in the memory of
Grease
and of everything that has come after, as we turn into the clearing that opens to the lake. “Okay, why not. I could use a distraction.”

“There are worse things you could do.” I grin, giddy, shutting down the engine.

“Enough,” she says at my
Grease
reference, tugging the twins from their car seats and stepping out into the night, though she laughs in spite of herself.

Though there are easily several hundred people gathered, I spot Luanne flagging us down almost immediately. Her hand flap-flap-flaps, her skinny arm waving us over. Charlie, her three-year-old, sits on her foot, munching on a cheese sandwich, and Ben, her husband, stands to kiss us hello.

“Hey,” she says breathlessly as Susie goes about spreading a
blanket and unpacking a picnic dinner of peanut butter sandwiches and Oreos for the kids. “Come here.” She tugs my wrist, dragging me away from the fray.

Luanne and I look almost exactly the same. Smoky blue eyes that are set about two millimeters too far apart, small rounded noses that we inherited from my mother, milky skin that burns on the spot without sunscreen but, as I learned in high school, can be nurtured into just the right type of tan. Yet, despite our resemblance, she is subtly prettier than I am. Her features fold into each other more smoothly; the lines around her eyes have yet to seep in. Though the lines around my eyes have been earned over the years. She never had to do the heavy lifting.

“First of all, how’s Dad?” she says.

I’d called Luanne after the barbecue and broken the news, but only after she swore not to tell Darcy, not to honor the sister code of always sharing secrets. As the middle one, Luanne had a buffer on either end of her when Mom died and Dad spiraled into an alcoholic haze. She kept going to soccer practice or taking her extra biology lab because I was busy writing checks for the bills that my father would forget to pay or dashing to the store when we ran out of toilet paper or reading
Nancy Drew
with Darcy come bedtime, when my dad was “still at work,” though presumably, in retrospect, he was at a bar instead.

Luanne, as expected, absorbed the latest news with the even-keeledness of a middle child.
“Let me know what I can do to help,”
she said, as if he’d come down with a bad spell of allergies.
“Maybe I can come over and talk with him,”
she said, her professional nursing tone on full display. I could hear Charlie clamoring for her in the background and Ben shushing him until Mommy was off the phone, and I was certain that as soon as we hung up, Luanne would be just fine. Yet another disaster that she’d review
from the outside in, while her older sister stuck herself smack in the middle of the chaos and buffed it clean.

“Sober,” I say with a shrug. Which he is. Home and sober and taking up residence on the den couch, watching the Mariners game, plopping right into the dent that Tyler left this morning. “We’ll see.”

I’ve already written off my dream, my
freaky premonition-like
dream, as nothing more than coincidence. I’ve heard about this before: that if you really home in on someone, on their energy, their body language, their patterns, you might somehow develop a sixth sense, intuit the future or what they might say next or what they’re thinking. Which is, I supposed when I thought about it last night while trying to fall asleep,
exactly what must have happened with my father
. And as far as this seed of anger? This breeding irritation with the world?
Well, I mean
, come on,
who wouldn’t be a little put out
, I think,
a little damn pissed off at things, even if it’s entirely against her nature to be so?

“Okay, good,” Luanne says, an afterthought, like the bow has already been tied around my father’s recovery. An electric pulse of annoyance surges through me. “So listen, I have news. I’m pregnant.”

“Oh, Lulu, that is so, so
wonderful!”
I pull her toward me, clutching her tight, then pushing her back to take a look. “You’re not showing yet.”

“I’m only five weeks,” she says, her voice a whisper, right as the announcer, Steven Sommerfield, who runs the local radio station, steps up to the mike and declares the festivities nearly ready to begin, and I have to lean in closer to hear her. “So don’t say anything just yet. I just got the blood work back today.”

“Five weeks! Oh my gosh,” I say, louder now, above the din. “I might be pregnant too, actually!” Casually, though, like I haven’t been running to the bathroom and checking my underwear
every other hour in the past two days. My period is due any day.

“Wait,
what?”
She squeals. “You’re pregnant too?!”

“No, no. I mean, I guess I could be.”

“That would be
amazing,”
she says, kissing my cheek, squeezing my hand. “Wouldn’t Mom just love that?”

I smile openly at her, because that is my middle sister—so seemingly simple and then out-of-nowhere deep. Before I can answer, a thundering
boom
explodes above our heads, crystal lights forming a layered flower soaring in the sky, then twinkling down, fading, fading, fading into nothing.

Darcy is planted on my front steps when I pull into my driveway after dropping Susanna and the twins back at home.

“What?” I bark, still angry, that bass note of disharmony beating in me, alive, present. I reach in the backseat to lug a grocery bag I’d earlier forgotten. “Is this your peace offering or something?”

“Fine,” she says flatly, standing and holding up her open palms. “Yes, I’m sorry. Get over it.” She hesitates. “Also, I have to crash here.”

“Of course,” I say. “Always with the catch.” I trudge up the porch, the bag full of canned beans and peas and corn, cramping my left bicep.

“Look,
I’m sorry,”
she says. “Jesus.” We both know it’s not like me to hold the grudge, to make her work hard for her contrition. But the sticky anger isn’t letting go. I push past her. “Come on, please? I had to pack up from Dante’s, so I just need to stay here a few days before I head back to L.A. My ticket isn’t for another week, or trust me, I’d be out of here.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, Darcy! Pull it together!” I drop the
bag—too hard—by my feet, and the cans clang together, a cymbal punctuating my thoughts. “I mean, look at you! What are you doing with your life?”

Her eyes flare and she steps backward, as if the force from my unexpected ire has literally propelled her away, and
bam!
She trips over the suitcase that I’m just now noticing and is on her ass in a second.

“Shit!” Darcy yells.

I chew the inside of my lip, willing my pulse—a metronome in my neck—to slow.
What is wrong with you, Tilly Farmer?
I think, at the exact moment that Darcy shoots me a
What bug crawled up your ass?
look. Finally, when I’m certain that I won’t resort to physical harm, I exhale and sit down next to her.

“What happened?” I sigh.

She wipes her dirtied palms on her shorts. “Eh, I slept with him last night.” She looks up at me, all wide-eyed and innocent, like she didn’t know that Dante has been pining for this since she bolted to Berklee. “Turns out, I probably shouldn’t have. He told me he still loved me.” She shrugs.

“Oh,
Darcy,”
I say, exasperated, too tired for a you-should-have-known-better lecture, my rage finally poofing out of me. “Fine. Come on.”

It’s only then that I remember my father.
Oh crap
.

Darcy has never quite meshed with our dad, or maybe it was vice versa, but more likely not. But my mother, either consciously or unconsciously recognizing this, quickly made Darcy her favorite, a fact we all just tacitly accepted. She was the one who was blessed with my mom’s gift for music, and they’d spend hours pressed against each other on the piano bench, playing in harmony, playing solo, or just giggling with their shared love of melody. And when she died, well, surely, any child would be scarred at the loss of her mother at such a young age, but for Darcy, it was a pox that has
never been erased. That my father compounded her alienation with his drinking was, in her mind, unforgivable.

The screen door bangs against the frame, and we shuffle inside, the wheels of Darcy’s suitcase squeaking along the hallway. Before I can even think of what I’m going to say, how I’m going to explain this to her, and what could possibly temper her anger at my father, he walks out to greet us. He is wearing Tyler’s faded hunter-green robe and carrying a glass of what I know is water but also suspect might be vodka, just because, well, it’s the sort of thing you worry about when your off-the-wagon father moves back in with you.

“Darcy!” His arms open into a wide embrace as he pulls her in closely. “I wasn’t expecting you. Did you just get into town?” He says this with the nonchalance of a man who has mastered the art of overlooking the obvious: that he is standing in my foyer in my husband’s robe, with his hair askew, his undershirt dank, a purple welt under his eye, hoping against all rational hope that people around him won’t point out the myriad of problems with this picture.

“You need a shower,” she says, wiggling her way out of his hug like a worm down the sidewalk. She steps back and stares at him. “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” he asks back, and winks at her. Actually winks at her.

“Darcy,” I say quickly. “Dad is staying with us for a while. Tyler’s on his fishing trip, so I wanted the company. Why don’t you go put your stuff in the den?”

She squints at our dad, then looks from him, to me, to him again.

“Why does he look messed up?” she asks me, with her eyes still pinned on him.

“Messed up how?” I say, fervently wishing that my father had
taken my suggestion to shower this morning, when it appears that he actually slept the whole day through.

“Puffy eyes, gross skin,” she says, her words like steel. “Like he’s recovering from a bender.” She isn’t dumb, this sister of mine. We long ago learned to recognize the signs.

“Darcy.” My dad starts to speak, then, surprisingly, chokes on his words. His hands flop listlessly at his sides, reminding me of dying, gasping fish.

“Oh, fuck me,” she says as the transparency of the situation clicks into place. “I cannot believe you!”

“Darce.” I touch her elbow gently. “Take your suitcase to the spare bedroom.”

She hesitates, eyeballing my father with vitriol, fury that I haven’t witnessed since she left for Berklee, intent on never casting a second glance back. I see Darcy consider her options—return to Dante’s, camp out at the airport, buy a new ticket that she can’t afford—before she realizes the certainty of her situation: she’s stuck. She grabs for the handle of her suitcase, and then,
squeak, squeak, squeak
, I hear her carelessly dragging it, the contents of her life, down the hall.

She’s stuck
, I say to myself.

And then surprisingly, despite the fireworks, despite the possibility of hope in my womb, despite everything, an alien, tiny germ of a voice, that same one that’s been tailing my psyche since I blacked out on my bedroom floor, echoes back,
Aren’t we all?

M
y father’s house is musty—a mildewed cloud hovers over the living room—like someone hasn’t slept here in weeks, or, at the very least, someone hasn’t cared enough to tend to the housekeeping details that comprise the basics of domestic hygiene. A tower of unread newspapers has fallen like playing cards in the foyer. A mountain of letters—shoved into the mail slot and ignored—has amassed on the floor; an overflowing pile of garbage tumbles from the kitchen trash can. Mostly, though, the house looks dead, unlived in.
Why didn’t Adie call me? At the very least she could have called me
.