What I Want

by LN Cronk

  “I put the groceries in the back seat, and I held out my arms for her to come to me so that I could put her back into her booster seat. She reached toward me and then . . .”

  She paused.

  “Someone hit us from behind,” she said, her voice emotionless. “It was an elderly man . . . he accidentally stepped on the gas instead of the brakes. He didn’t hit us all that hard, but it pushed us into the concrete post that was in front of us and . . .”

  She paused again.

  “It was the airbag,” she finally said. She waited for a long moment before she was able to go on. “One second she was reaching her arms out to me and the next . . .”

  She shook her head as if to clear it.

  “It was . . . horrific,” she said quietly. “Stuart was knocked unconscious – he doesn’t remember anything. But I remember everything. No matter what I do, I’ll never forget what I saw. I see it in my mind every day.”

  I wanted to cry, or throw up, or bolt from the room. Instead I managed to say, “I’m so sorry.”

  She nodded and turned to face me. Her eyes slowly focused as if she was just becoming aware once again that I was there. Her detachment seemed to fade away, and the next time she spoke, her voice had emotion in it again.

  “I’m sorry about earlier,” she said.

  “No,” I answered, shaking my head. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s just that,” she went on, “sometimes I kind of have a hard time feeling sorry for people when . . .”

  “When they don’t really have anything to complain about?” I suggested.

  She gave me something that approached a smile.

  “I’m not saying you don’t have anything to complain about,” she said kindly. “I know that things have been hard for you and–”

  “No,” I interrupted. “They haven’t. Not really. I’ve got a great life – you’re right. I don’t have anything to complain about.”

  She looked at me for a moment as if she were trying to decide if I was just humoring her. I think she finally decided that I wasn’t.

  “All I was trying to say earlier,” she finished, looking at me with something that was even closer to a smile, “is that I can kind of see why Grace might feel a bit resentful. I’m not saying that she has any right to be so mean to you or anything, but I just was hoping that you could try to put yourself in her shoes for a minute.”

  I nodded.

  “And I’m sorry I got so upset earlier,” she said.

  “I’m sorry I made you upset.”

  “You didn’t.”

  She gave me a real smile.

  “Goodnight, Marco,” she said, patting my hand and standing up.

  “Goodnight, Josie.”

  That night I lay awake, stretched out on my bed, for a very long time, thinking about Jamie, a little girl I had never even met, and thinking about how truly precious life is.

  And how short.

  I wondered if I was really living the life that I wanted to live, and then I decided that no, I wasn’t. Not really.

  And it was there – lying on my bed that night – that I decided I was going to make some changes.

  ~ ~ ~

  THE NEXT MORNING I got up and cooked chocolate chip pancakes.

  “What’s the occasion?” Josette asked when she wandered out of her bedroom and saw that the little table in the kitchen that we never used was suddenly set for two.

  “Life is short,” I answered, pulling out a chair for her.

  She gave me a little smile and took a seat.

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about what you told me last night,” I said, putting a plate and a glass down in front of her.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah.” I handed her a fork. “I decided that I’m going to talk to Grace.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” I nodded as she poured herself some water.

  “What are you going to tell her?”

  “That I love her,” I said, “and that I’m glad she’s my sister.”

  Josette looked at me skeptically.

  “I am,” I insisted, spearing two pancakes and putting them on her plate.

  “Well good,” Josette said, giving me another smile as she picked up her glass.

  “I’ve decided something else, too,” I went on, sliding the syrup toward her.

  “What’s that?” she asked, taking a sip of water.

  “I’m going to ask Bizzy to marry me.”

  Josette choked and grabbed for a napkin.

  “Because of what I told you last night?” she asked in disbelief, wiping her mouth.

  “Life is short,” I reminded her.

  “It is short,” she agreed, “but I didn’t mean that you had to go and get married.”

  “But I want to get married,” I said. “Bizzy is smart and funny and talented and beautiful, and I wanted to ask her to marry me before I even moved here, but I didn’t.”

  Josette looked at me expectantly.

  “I don’t want to wait anymore,” I explained.

  “Are you going to move?” she asked, looking mildly alarmed.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head, “but there’s no reason we can’t go ahead and get engaged and then get married as soon as we’re both through with school. Right?”

  “I don’t know.” Josette shrugged. “She’s your girlfriend.” She picked up the syrup and then added, “But it sounds good to me.”

  ~ ~ ~

  GRACE’S WEDDING WAS less than two months away, so I started ring shopping immediately. I went to seven different jewelry stores and looked at hundreds of rings.

  Actually I didn’t just look at them . . . I felt them.

  I asked to hold each one. Ring after ring. I held them in my hands and I closed my eyes and I tried to imagine how each one would feel to Bizzy.

  More than one jeweler gave me an odd look, but I found that I suddenly didn’t really care anymore what people thought of me. Ever since my conversation with Josette, my priorities had changed. Suddenly I knew what was important and what wasn’t. I knew what I really wanted in life, and I wasn’t afraid to go after it anymore.

  I was filled with something that I’d never known before . . . a feeling so foreign to me that I almost couldn’t identify it, but after a while I figured out what it was.

  Self-confidence.

  I found lots of rings that looked beautiful, but they didn’t particularly feel beautiful, and I found some rings that felt beautiful but didn’t particularly look beautiful.

  I know that it may not seem important how Bizzy’s ring looked since she wasn’t even going to be able to see it, but I wanted her to be able to hear in people’s voices just how beautiful it was when they saw it, when they told her how beautiful it was and when they told her how much they loved it.

  I finally found one with a band of delicate, tapered swirls that trapped a large diamond. There was an interlocking wedding band that went with it, made completely of tiny diamonds and flaring out into swirls all its own.

  It was almost perfect.

  “What don’t you like about it?” Josette asked after I told her all about it that evening.

  “It’s silver,” I said.

  “Silver?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Silver’s cheap. I don’t want to get her anything cheap.”

  “How much was it?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I quit asking prices after about the four hundredth ring. I just want to find the right one, but I’m figuring if it was silver it was cheap.”

  “If it was covered in diamonds,” she frowned, “I doubt that it was made out of silver. Do you think maybe it was white gold?”

  “White gold?” I asked. “What’s that?”

  The next day Josette met me at the jewelry store during her lunch hour, and I showed her the ring.

  “Oh, Marco,” she gushed. “It’s gorgeous!”

  That was the kind of thing I wanted Bizzy to hear when she showed it to people.

&nb
sp; “Can I help you two with something?” a voice asked from behind the counter.

  “Is that white gold?” Josette asked, pointing down at the ring as the salesman opened door to the display case.

  “No ma’am,” he said as he reached into the case, pulled it out, and handed it to her. “This is platinum.”

  “Platinum?” I whispered quietly to Josette as she slipped the set onto her finger and held her hand up in front of her to admire it. “Is that good?”

  “Yes, it’s good, you idiot!” she said, elbowing me in the ribs. “You’re going to wish this was silver once you find out how much platinum costs!”

  And that was how I found the perfect ring for Bizzy.

  ~ ~ ~

  IN ADDITION TO spending a lot of time thinking about what I wanted in life, I also spent a lot of time during the next few weeks thinking about marriage. I meant everything I’d told Josette about Bizzy – about how she was smart and fun and talented and beautiful. Any guy would be lucky to have Bizzy and I couldn’t imagine ever not wanting to be with her . . .

  But at the same time I thought about all the things that could happen between the two of us over the next sixty or seventy years, and I thought about all the people who uttered the line ’Til death do you part but who parted way before that . . .

  And I wondered.

  “Can I ask you a question?” I asked Josette one night after our game show had ended.

  “Sure.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “What?”

  “Why did you and Stuart get divorced?”

  “We’re not divorced yet,” she said. “You have to be separated for a year in Australia before you can get divorced.”

  “Oh.”

  “But I can tell you why we’re getting divorced.”

  “Okay.”

  She paused for a moment.

  “Losing a child is the worst thing you can go through,” she said. “Something like that can either drive you closer together or push you further apart.”

  I nodded.

  “It actually drove us closer together,” she said.

  I looked at her questioningly.

  “But it also drives you closer to God,” she said, “or further away from Him. I don’t think it’s possible to stay in the same place once you go through something like that.”

  I nodded again and waited for her to go on.

  “My faith really grew because of what happened with Jamie,” she said. “I think I had to rely on Him or I wasn’t going to be able to get through. I’m so much closer to Him now than I was before and I don’t know how I could have gotten through everything without Him, but . . .”

  Her voice trailed off.

  “But Stuart’s mad at God,” she finally said. “Or he doesn’t believe in God anymore, or something. I’m not sure. He refuses to talk about it.”

  “Oh,” I said quietly.

  “And so me growing closer to God, and him growing farther away . . . it made it so that the two of us couldn’t connect on anything anymore. It got to be that the only thing we had in common anymore was the fact that we’d lost Jamie . . . and somehow that wasn’t enough.”

  She paused and lowered her eyes.

  “And then he found someone he could connect with,” she went on, giving her shoulders a little shrug and looking back up at me. “I came home for lunch one day and found them in bed together. It’s not like I surprised him or anything – I came home for lunch all the time. I think he wanted to get caught.”

  “Oh,” I repeated.

  “I told him we needed to go to a marriage counselor and he said he didn’t want to. He said he wants to be with her. He says he loves her.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “So,” she said with another shrug, “I got a hotel room and then I went to the community board at the student union to try to find a place to live and there was nothing there and then you came along with your little piece of paper and now here I am . . . sleeping on your futon every night.”

  I looked at her sympathetically.

  “You and Bizzy are going to be fine,” she smiled reassuringly, reaching out to pat my arm. “As long as both of you put God at the center of your marriage and concentrate on what He wants, the two of you aren’t going to have any problems.”

  I nodded at her again.

  “It’s when one of you stops worrying about what God wants,” she said, “that the problems start.”

  ~ ~ ~

  MY PLAN WAS to propose to Bizzy at either the rehearsal dinner or the reception. When I ran my idea by Josette, however, I didn’t get past the part about dropping the ring into Bizzy’s champagne glass before she stopped me dead in my tracks.

  “No, no, no,” she said, shaking her head.

  “What?”

  “Well, first of all,” she said, holding up her thumb. “That’s not original at all.”

  I looked at her.

  “Second of all,” she extended a finger so that it joined her outstretched thumb, “the last thing you want is for her to swallow that ring.”

  I pursed my lips.

  “Third of all,” she put another finger out, “the rehearsal dinner and reception are Grace’s big days. Remember how we talked about the fact that Grace is probably resentful of you stealing attention away from her all the time? Do you really think she wants everybody gushing over you and Bizzy on her big day?”

  I was already convinced, but she stuck another finger out anyway and went on.

  “Plus Bizzy deserves her own special day, too. Not one that she needs to share with someone else.”

  “Okay–”

  “And,” she interrupted, holding all five fingers out now and shaking them for emphasis, “it needs to be done in private . . . just the two of you. Something romantic.”

  “Okay,” I agreed again, nodding, and I was glad when she didn’t start in with the fingers on her other hand.

  ~ ~ ~

  BEFORE THE WEDDING, Grace was playing the role of Bridezilla as if she’d invented it. She was immediately mad at me when I arrived in California because I rented a BMW convertible for the week and she insisted that I was trying to steal her thunder. (Imagine how ticked she would have been if I’d proposed to Bizzy in front of all of her wedding guests or something like I had originally planned.)

  Oh, Josie, you are a wise woman.

  Of course I hadn’t rented the car to make Grace mad – I hadn’t even considered the fact that it might make her mad. I just wanted Bizzy to feel the rush of the wind in her hair, hear the scream of the engine, enjoy the smell and feel of the leather seats.

  Yeah. That’s why.

  Anyway, Bizzy and I were both going to be in Monterey for six days, and when I found her I wrapped my arms around her and I kissed her and then I held her tight. It had been almost a year since I’d seen her and that had been far too long. I couldn’t wait until Grace’s wedding was over so that the two of us could start planning ours.

  It’s easier to imagine having a heartfelt moment with someone than it is to actually have a heartfelt moment . . . especially when that someone (who should be concentrating on something like, oh, say . . . getting married) still takes time to go out of her way to embarrass you in front of everybody. Especially when that someone still insists on tormenting you even though you haven’t done anything to them and even though you’re trying to be nice to them. Especially when that someone is Grace.

  By the time the rehearsal dinner was over on Friday night I had pretty much given up on the idea of talking to Grace. That night, however, I thought once again about Jamie and I thought about how short life was and I thought about how I would really feel if something were to ever happen to Grace . . .

  And so I made up my mind – one more time – that I was going to try to talk to her.

  The next day I waited until just before Dad was set to walk her down the aisle. When I stuck my head in the parlor and asked Grace to step out into the hall to ta
lk to me for a minute, she started shrieking at me that I was supposed to be sitting down already. With my newfound confidence, however, I held my ground and insisted that she come out and talk to me. Reluctantly she joined me in the hall, standing before me, and looking not unpretty, in a glittery white gown.

  “What?” she demanded, stomping her foot.

  “I just want to tell you that I love you,” I said.

  She eyed me suspiciously and I put my hands on her arms.

  I looked steadily into her eyes.

  “I know it was hard on you to grow up with me as your brother,” I began carefully. “Mom and Dad always had to do so much to take care of me and I’m sure it must have felt to you like I was always getting all the attention all the time.”

  She didn’t say anything, but her face softened.

  “And I’m sorry,” I went on. “I mean, obviously I couldn’t help it or anything, but I’m sorry that they had to spend so much time with me.”

  She pursed her lips and swallowed hard.

  “And I just wanted to say that I’m really glad you’re my sister,” I said, leaning forward and giving her a kiss on the cheek. “And I love you, okay?”

  She nodded at me as I pulled away from her and I saw tears in her eyes.

  “Now go get married,” I said, and I steered her back toward the parlor.

  Bizzy and I were both going to be in California for three more days, and we were already planning to spend the entire day after the wedding with one another. I dropped her off at her room the evening of the wedding, kissing her lips gently and telling her to be sure to wear her bathing suit under her clothes the next day.

  “Where are we going?” she wanted to know.

  “Big Sur,” I answered.

  Big Sur is located south of Monterey and we took Highway 1, south past Carmel. I let Bizzy know when we got to the beginning of Bixby Bridge and I told her when we had reached the end, because I wanted her to know how long it was and I wanted her to know how high up we were and I wanted her to know that she was on one of the most famous bridges in the world.