Susie laughs harder, and so do I. Until we finally calm ourselves, and she reaches over and squeezes my hand.
“Well,” she says. “At least you know that you left your mark.”
When we get back home, Tyler and Austin have begun to load up the U-Haul, which he’ll attach to the SUV. He and I have agreed that he’ll take the SUV back to Seattle, one of the few logistical details we’ve actually discussed, and I’ll buy a sedan with some of our savings, coupled with the thousand-dollar signing bonus he received. I don’t need the extra space anymore, now that it’s clear there won’t be baby seats in the back, playdates to rush to, and the car just reminds me of that void—one void among too many—so I’d rather get rid of it anyway.
I feel a flash of déjà vu as I watch them lug his boxes outside, the steady rain already soaking them, their baseball caps bobbing down the path toward the driveway.
There are voices shouting in my kitchen, so I drop my umbrella by the door, shake off my coat, and pad inside to find Darcy, who has dyed her hair purple since I last saw her, and my father at full throttle.
“What is going on?” I yell to get their attention.
“Oh, Tilly,” my dad says, startled. “I came by for moral support. Wanted to be here in case you needed me.”
“Thank you.” I nod. “But what’s the screaming about?”
“I found this!” Darcy yells. “This piece of bullshit in your pantry!” She shakes a half-empty bottle of vodka in her right hand.
“Calm down,” I say. “Whose is that? It’s not mine.” I try to assert my guidance counselor voice but discover that it has nearly left me entirely, like that was just a part I used to play that I no longer remember how to embody.
“It’s a bottle Dad stashed here!” Darcy’s face is pomegranate red, the rounds of her cheeks pronounced, her eyes popping out ever so conspicuously, like a wasp’s.
“Why did you keep a bottle here, Dad?” I turn toward him. “I cleaned this house out. And you’re not drinking.”
“Because he’s not really sober!” Darcy says. “I knew it! I knew this would goddamn happen!”
“Now, listen.” My dad’s rage erupts. “I am certainly sober! You are still my daughter, and you don’t have the right to talk to me like this!”
“Will you two just shut up?” I yell above their din. “And somebody please start telling me what is going on here?”
“Fine.” Darcy pouts, throwing herself into a dining chair, her hand still clutching the bottle. “I got home from Dante’s this morning and wanted some cranberry juice, so I started going through the pantry. And I found this.” She shakes the bottle like she wants to strangle it. “I knew it wasn’t yours—I remember that you threw everything out—and then Dad showed up and I asked him, and he denied it, and then he didn’t deny it, and now it’s just more of the same bullshit, bullshit, bullshit!”
“Dad?”
“So look,” he says sheepishly. “I admit that I kept one bottle hidden here, in the back of the pantry, just in case.”
“Just in case of what?” I ask, both stunned and furious at once.
“I don’t know,” he answers. “Just in case.” I glance at Darcy, but she just flares her eyes wider, as if to say, Don’t ask me, oh, and by the way, I told you so!
“Just in case of what?” I demand again.
“Just in case he decides that one day, he wants to go off and be a gigantic fuckup just like he’s always been!” Darcy interjects, because she can’t help herself. “And just to be sure—to be very, very clear that you have zero, zero chance of ever drinking this again, I’ll take care of it myself.” And then, to really make her point, she swivels off the top, pours the remaining vodka down her open mouth, and swallows. She misses the last ounce, which flies onto her sweatshirt and slowly spreads out to a messy, wide stain. Just as I knew it would if I’d really thought about it—my vision and the Rorschach blob. It takes her at least five giant-sized gulps to polish off the bottle, and I can tell that she is so desperate to prove herself here that she is willfully fighting the urge to gag it all back up.
“Jesus Christ, Darcy,” my dad says, defeated.
“Go fuck yourself,” she answers, her words already flying behind her as she flees out the front door, into the frozen rain, past Tyler and Austin, who are loading up the remnants of my former life. From the driveway, she yells, “I’m tired of keeping your secrets only to have you fail me every time you have the chance to prove yourself.”
“What’s that about?” I ask, a triage nurse, unsure which wound to stitch up first.
“I’m not drinking again, Tilly,” my dad says, unanswering, his face open with the fear of unknown repercussions. “Please believe me.”
I stare at my dad for a beat, then another, and am suddenly as angry as I’ve ever been. At him, at Darcy, at Tyler, for bringing this fucking mess into my house, into my life, in the one moment when I have asked nothing from anyone but hoped, without even recognizing it, that they’d be selfless enough to offer themselves for everything that I had once given them.
“Just stop it,” I say, disgust showering my voice. “Just stop it! Clean yourself up. Get treatment. Not the kind of treatment where you need a bottle around ‘just in case.’ Be there for me. Be there for your daughters. Start being a goddamn father. Because I can’t be your daughter until you start acting your part too.”
“That’s not fair,” he starts to protest. “These past two months …” But his words fade along with his nerve, because he knows that two months of competent parenting cannot compensate for the years of failure. Tears swell and then roll down his face, but I don’t stay to comfort him. Instead, I stride up the stairs two by two, slam my door, and fall flat on my bed, tugging the pillows over my head, trying to shut it out, all of it, every last bit. It’s only when I pull myself up and set the pillows back in their proper place that I realize that Tyler has packed up everything—his winter clothes, his summer clothes, his shoes, his ties, his belts, his baseball hat collection that he’s been amassing since before we even wrapped ourselves up with each other.
I look over at his closet, and it is empty, open, a coffin without a body. I rise and then throw myself inside, folding my limbs onto themselves on the dusty hardwood floor. Above me, the silver poles are naked; beside me, the shelves are lined with nothing but air. A tangle of lonely wire hangers swing from what was once his shirt rack. I lean back and exhale, broken, barren, the quiet overtaking me now. I nudge the door nearly closed with my right foot and then close my eyes, wishing this slice of darkness could swallow me up forever, wishing it could actually swallow me whole.
twenty-three
Darcy hasn’t returned by the time my pizza arrives. Susanna has vowed to stay the night, just like we used to when we were ten and Ashley was still part of our triangle, and we’d titter until the early hours when our bodies would lull themselves to sleep despite our best efforts. Back when the only thing we had to worry about was learning how to French kiss or how far to roll up our jeans. In fact, I invited Ashley tonight, but she begged off. Her mother was now barely lucid, and she couldn’t leave her now, not in these last waning moments. I understood more than I wished to and tried to block out the memories of my mother’s final haunting moments when we hung up the phone.
My mom’s death was quick, though not painless. The cruelest part of it all, if I could ever pinpoint the cruelest part, was that at the last hour, we thought she’d been granted a reprieve. The chemotherapy was working, even though the doctors were sure that it wouldn’t. But her tumors were shrinking, and our hope was swelling like a rising wave, and the doctors murmured things like, “It’s too early to say for certain, but things are looking cautiously optimistic,” or, “She might be one of those long odds; she certainly has the spirit for it,” as if spirit counts for anything, as if spirit is enough to beat back cancer’s call. But her tumors were indeed shrinking, and her white blood cell count was steering itself back toward normal, and though we
were told not to be too hopeful, that was, of course, impossible, because when you are nine or fifteen or seventeen and your mother is a shrunken shell of herself in a hospital bed, the only thing that you have left to buoy you is hope. Because you don’t yet know that the world can be cold and illogical and operate without any reason or compassion. These are lessons that would come later, should come later, though not for us. They came too soon.
But my mother was on the upswing. The doctors had stymied the cancer in her abdomen, slowed it in her bones, eviscerated it in the original spot: her ovaries, the very place she nurtured us to life. We heard the news, and though my father was down at the store, the four of us, all girls, cheered in our wallpapered kitchen, raising mugs of chamomile tea and clinking them, tiny chimes of triumph. No one in our house was a tea drinker before my mom got sick, but then it became one of the few things she could stomach without vomiting back up, so we learned to love it.
We had a good week, then another, and then my mom collapsed one Sunday afternoon on the front porch. My dad was still working—it was Labor Day sale season—so I screamed to Darcy, “Get into the station wagon!” and Luanne and I heaved up my mother, curling her limp arms around our shoulders, and raced to the hospital. It wasn’t long after that. The cancer had swerved into her brain, and there was no stopping it from there. It ate up her cells, ate up her mind, and soon, ate her up entirely. We all were there when she went, and I like to think she let herself go because she knew that we’d be okay. That I’d insist that we’d be okay, because I understood that this was the weight of my inheritance. I’d promised her late one night when she was sleeping, still in our house, not yet at the hospital. I crawled into bed with her, warmed myself under the comforter, stroked her hair, and whispered that I’d make it all okay. I wanted so badly to end her pain that I figured I’d do anything, say anything, to make it right, even if it meant giving her up, giving up the only thing I never wanted to part with.
Until now. Now I didn’t want to part with Tyler either, but life lessons stick, even if I tried to cast them off, tried to pretend that they didn’t. Life can be cruel and bitter and nonsensical. And as I try to stuff down a slice of pepperoni with my oldest friend, while my other oldest friend whom I’ve found my way back to prepares to bury her mother, I realize that lessons are meant to be learned, honored even, or else you can spend your life running so far from them that you erect a false existence around the very thing you should be embracing.
“Life sucks,” I say to Susie.
“It can,” she agrees, wiping the grease from her chin with the back of her hand. “But it won’t forever.”
“I’m not sure I believe you.”
“You’re the optimist among us.” Susie laughs. “If you don’t believe me, then we’re really screwed.” She pauses. “I sort of really like Scotty Hughes. I know, well, I know that you weren’t always so thrilled about me leaving Austin …”
I wave a hand. “That was my own crap. About Tyler and me. You know, about how maybe I didn’t want things to ever change, and if you and Austin could …” I shrug, and she nods, the both of us getting it.
“Do you think you should check up on Darcy? Make sure she’s alright?” Susanna says finally.
I’m still too angry to chase after her, though a niggling part of me knows that I should. Knows that I’m just as guilty for establishing my caretaker role as she is for accepting it, and now, rather than blame her for not putting me first, I should surrender to the fact that she is mad and vengeful and probably needs her big sister more than ever.
“I’m sure she’s at Dante’s,” I say, the crust of the pizza lodging in my throat. I reach for a Coke to wash it down.
Just as I say this, the phone rings. “Her.” I roll my eyes and hand the receiver to Susanna. “Answer it. I don’t want to deal.”
“Hello?” Susie crunches the phone between her neck and her shoulder so she can reach for another slice. “Yeah, hey.” Her eyebrows dart, making sharp angles toward her nose. “No … no … we haven’t seen her.” She looks at me, her face flashing with concern. “Okay, yeah … I’ll tell her. Yeah, we’ll let you know. We’ll give you a call back.”
“What’s that about?” I say, picking at the errant cheese specks on my plate.
“Dante. He wanted to know if we knew where Darcy was. She was supposed to show up for an audition and didn’t. I guess the manager at Oliver’s arranged for some sort of potential opening tour act.”
“Did he try her cell?” I ask. “She pulls this shit all the time, you know.”
“He sounded concerned,” Susie says. “Tried her cell, tried everyone they know. No one’s seen her. And he said she was really excited about this, that she wouldn’t have missed it.”
“Well, I don’t know,” I say, rising to dump my paper plate in the garbage. “Her battery’s probably dead and she probably doesn’t give a crap anyway, that she stood people up, that people are running around looking for her.”
“Till,” Susie says softly, the legs of her chair squeaking as she swivels to face me. “That’s not fair. That’s not who Darcy is now.”
“Well that’s how I see her,” I answer, even though I know this isn’t entirely true.
“She’s been good to you. She stayed here to make sure that you had someone. She didn’t have to do that. The old Darcy wouldn’t have done that.”
I consider this for a moment, and it resonates. She’s right. Whether or not I am furious over today, and I am, Darcy isn’t the little sister she was when she showed up on my porch steps in July, willful and self-righteous and pissed off that the world had inevitably failed her. She has helped protect me, though, as I stare at our kitchen floor, at my kitchen floor now that Tyler is nearly gone, I am surprised to realize that we can only protect each other from so much.
Darcy, my little baby sister, has shed her skin and grown into something more. Now I am the one who needs to do the same.
“Okay,” I say to Susanna with a nod. “I might know where she is. Come on, let’s go.”
I grab the keys from the counter, leaving the pizza box open, the contents half-eaten, already fermenting. Because there are burdens that we bear together, and then there are burdens that we have to bear alone, but even those, the ones that we must forge ourselves, are easier to shoulder when we can sense the firm assuredness of our sister, of our friends, standing right beside us, holding us up in case we falter.
The snow is coming down now, the cooler air swarming over Westlake, turning those rain pellets into something more treacherous.
“I can’t remember it snowing like this in October,” Susie says. “It’s not even winter yet! Christ.”
“It’ll be a long one,” I concur, focused on the road.
I’ve never liked winter, never been one for snowfall, even though it’s Tyler’s favorite time of year. He finds the snow peaceful, comforting, while I always wonder if I’ll slip and fall, suffocating myself underneath a blanket of whiteness. I didn’t tell him this: it would belie my sunnier nature, so instead, I just complained about the frigid temperatures of the season. But if I had been honest, I would have said this: that winter frightens me, that it can eat up and spit out the more fragile among us, leaving only the strong to survive.
I drive slowly, the windshield wipers whipping furiously to bat back the fat flakes that are pounding the front window. In the trunk, a litter of Tyler’s belongings, which he has left behind this afternoon, occasionally rattle as I coast over a speed bump or ease to a halt, reminding me of the literal and metaphorical heft of what I’m carrying around.
“You think she’s here?” Susanna says, breaking the quiet.
“I don’t know where else she would be,” I answer, hoping that I am both right and wrong. Right, because I want to pull her tight, apologize, and bring her home. Wrong, because it is perilous outside, and no one should be left out in the elements now, much less my sister in her flimsy, vodka-covered sweatshirt and leggings.
The cit
y around us has virtually shut down, a ghost town. The forecasters, for once, were correct, and Westlake’s residents had been wise to heed their warnings. At least six inches, maybe up to a foot, depending on which way the winds blew, they said. We coast past darkened storefronts and quieted taverns, and I wonder if I can get Tyler to shovel the walkway before he leaves tomorrow, but quickly flush the idea. No, I will shovel it myself, I think, flicking on my blinker to make the turn down the long road that will take us there. A small victory, but a victory nevertheless. This I can handle. This I can do.
I abort the engine in the empty parking lot. There are no tire tracks, no footprints. The snow is already piling on the windshield, and as we step down to the ground, our feet sink in, the flakes covering the noses of our boots. Soon, we’ll be ankle deep.
“It’s freezing out here,” Susanna says, her breath a cloud shooting out, then disappearing, in front of her. “Come on, let’s hustle.”
We shuffle down the path as fast as the slippery foot bed allows. The lights are on, glaring as always, but with the snow falling nearly sideways, visibility is almost nil. We hold our gloved hands in front of our faces for protection, like we’re blocking out the sunshine of a glorious day instead of just the opposite.
The headstones, too, are amassing inches, teetering untouched mini-mountains of flakes. If the snow pours hard enough, some of the words, the dedications, the names and dates and meanings, will be swallowed up, concealed so one headstone will resemble the other, each of them anonymous symbols of loss.
“Down here,” I pant, pointing the way, the snow exhausting my thighs, taxing my concentration lest I lose my footing.
We descend the hill, the trees looming above us with their heavy, deadened branches, the sky a blanket of tumbling white. I see my mother’s gravestone and break into a run, despite knowing better, despite the ground that might slay me at any moment.
The One That I Want Page 20
