“Okay.” His voice comes out croaky, like he’d rather be asleep. I’m sure that he would be. “I’ll be here, no problem.”
“No, that’s not it.” I shake my head and exhale, because this is both easier and harder than I anticipated. I wish I’d thought it through, hadn’t acted quite so on impulse, if only so I could have the right words, the perfect words to honor him, to honor us, to honor myself and what I’m about to do. “When I get home … you don’t have to be here. You can go back to Seattle. It’s okay. You can leave.”
“No, no, what are you talking about? Of course I’ll stay.”
“That’s not what I’m saying,” I answer. “I’m saying that maybe you should go. That I was wrong before when I accused you of not knowing what happiness was.” He scrunches his face, unsure, confused, wondering if this is some sort of trap. “I think you do know what happiness is, and it’s not here, not for you. And I don’t think that you being here is what my happiness is either.”
He nods, then shakes his head, then nods again, trying to digest this.
“But I thought that this is what you wanted. I thought that this would make you happy.”
I shrug and offer a flimsy smile. “Turns out that maybe I didn’t understand what happiness was either.” In this moment, I let my smile run wider, truer, because Tyler Farmer is all I have ever known, and I have loved him so fiercely that I can’t believe I’m willing to give him up. And yet, I can also believe that now, with everything, I might be brave enough to try. I run my hands over his sleepy eyes, his satin cheeks. “I have loved you since before I even knew it was possible to love someone this way, Tyler Farmer. That won’t change. But let’s go now, away from each other, and see what other sorts of happiness we might find on our own. Because we tried together, and it’s just not here anymore.”
Two slippery tears coast down his perfect face, and then, down my own. He kisses me fully, for the gift I have given him—not just him, myself too—and then I rise, let my hands ebb from his, and slide out away from the shadows.
“I don’t know who I am without you.” My car door slams and I race down the road toward Darcy. Maybe, actually, now I do.
thirty
Ashley and Susanna gather in my kitchen the next afternoon. Darcy is asleep in the guest room, which isn’t much of a guest room anymore, more likely her permanent room, at least as permanent as she’ll ever allow something to be. Tyler is gone, was gone when I got home from the hospital late last night. He left me a note saying he’d call when he reached Seattle, and he probably will, and that will be fine. But I won’t hover near the phone, won’t frantically check my e-mail if he doesn’t. That will be fine too. There is life out there, both after and before, and it’s time to embrace that.
Ashley pulls a towel over my neck and shoulders, securing it in the back, as I perch on my mother’s old dining chair.
“You sure you want to do this?” Susanna asks. It’s only three o’clock, but we are drinking cabernet because, though it flies in the face of logic, I feel like celebrating. Ashley gamely came when I called; she had spent the better part of the past week sifting through her mother’s belongings and with the task nearly finished, she didn’t know how to spend her time.
“I mean, what am I supposed to do now?” she says, scissors in one hand, wineglass in the other. “I’ve spent so long taking care of her that I feel like it’s all I know how to do.”
“You’ll figure it out,” I say, both because I can relate and because I know that she will. Ashley Simmons has been a lot of things, but a defeatist in the face of adversity was never one of them. This I see now; this I admire.
“I haven’t done this in a while,” she admits, placing the glass on the table, running her fingers through my silky yellow hair. “Are you sure?”
“I am.” I nod. “I’d like to try something new, you know? Why not? It can always grow back.” I think of Darcy’s two toes, and how they won’t, and then remember that she has already forgiven me, didn’t even think that I was accountable, even though I knew that I was. But I also know I can’t hold on to this for always. Because guilt, I realize, is nothing more than a prison to keep us trapped from doing what we really want. What will really bring us happiness. So I am trying to let go of that, release a few other boulders from my past.
“Okay, here we go. Don’t blame me if you don’t like it,” Ashley says. “I got my beautician certificate, like, three years after high school.” We all laugh because, oh God, does that feel like so long ago.
“It’s something I have to do,” I say, because it is something I have to do. I have realized that though I can’t change the future, that doesn’t mean that I can’t change my circumstances to fit that future, to reach for the promise of what I’m hoping for. I sat in the bleachers and yearned to be that woman who swayed with Eli under the spinning dim lights of the prom, and by God, who’s to say that it couldn’t be me?
Ashley starts in the back, snipping and snipping, and layering and cutting, parsing exactly, like an artist carving a sculpture. I stare down at my kitchen floor, the strands amassing, amazed already at how much lighter I feel, how long I’ve been that blond cheerleader with her star shortstop husband, and how desperately I’d like to resemble something else now.
I’ve tasked Susanna with the Nikon—she’s not a pro but is certainly capable enough of pointing and clicking—because I want this documented, down on record, captured forever, the day that I shed my skin.
When Ashley’s done, I smooth my fingers over my naked neck, feeling exposed, self-conscious but excited too, exhilarated, probably how Darcy feels when she takes the stage or when someone lingers a little too long on her beauty. I feel like someone else entirely. Which, I consider, when I finally have the nerve to peek in the mirror, shifting from angle to angle, in awe of the transition that I have made, is likely the whole point.
Luanne knocks on my door later that evening, her winter coat bursting, reminding me of the Pillsbury doughboy, and gasps, a good gasp, when she sees me.
“Oh my God!” she says, filtering her fingers through my hair without asking, the familiarity that only siblings can have. “I didn’t even recognize you.”
I don’t tell her that I’ll take this as a compliment and simply usher her inside with a grin.
“Dad’s in the car,” she says, refusing a seat when I offer it. “He’d like to come in, explain himself. Then I’m taking him to the treatment center.”
“What treatment center?”
“Darcy didn’t tell you?” I shake my head no. “We spoke to him,” Lulu says. “He came by the hospital the other day before you checked her out …”
“I didn’t see him there,” I interrupt.
“No, you wouldn’t have.” She purses her lips together, as resolute as I’ve ever seen her. “He’s been coordinating it with me so you wouldn’t have to see him.”
I’m momentarily grateful that even though there are a million reasons to find my father despicable, he at least has the grace to let me mourn my shattered vision of our family without interference.
“So anyway,” she says, jangling her keys. “Darcy and I confronted him, said we could no longer have contact if he didn’t heal himself completely. Not half-assed, not on his own.” Her fingers fold into a fist, swallowing up the noise. “He balked at first, but he saw how serious we were, so he agreed. He’s going back.”
I try to find words but have none, so I stare at the floor, then raise my eyes to my middle sister, amazed that she, the one who always coasted, and Darcy, the one who was too angry to care in the first place, have been able to do what I have never been. Force my father’s hand, insist that he do right by us, climb the mountain even under threat of an avalanche.
“Thank you,” I whisper finally.
“It’s nothing to thank me for,” she answers. “It’s just what had to be done. Not for you. For Dad.”
“But you did it because I couldn’t. You did it so that I didn’t have to.”
She sighs and leans back, resting her head against the cupboard, gazing toward the ceiling fan.
“You know, Till, Darcy told me what she told you. And she told me that you thought she should have confided in you about Dad’s affair so that you could have resolved it.” She looks at me now, tenderly, after thirty years of sisterhood. “But you couldn’t have. You really probably couldn’t have. You never had to do all of this, take care of everything. She and I would have been okay shouldering some of it if you’d let us, if you’d asked.”
I shrug, because I don’t know that I believe her, and even if I did, there’s nothing to be done about it now. That’s how it was, that’s how we created and structured the hierarchy of our lives—and maybe going forward, we’ll all be a little wiser, a little more intuitive, a little quicker to nurse the bruises of the ones we call our family, even if sometimes they are the ones to inflict those very welts.
The car horn honks outside, and we both startle.
“Dad,” Lulu states. “He’s probably getting cold. I wouldn’t let him leave the engine running in case he had second thoughts.”
She wiggles the keys in the air and giggles, and so, so do I. I walk her to the door, and she says, “You sure? You don’t want to come out and say something?”
“I’m sure,” I say, because I am. Maybe sometime soon, maybe even sooner than I anticipate, but for now, I stand on the front porch and watch her go, the freezing air cutting through my pajamas, filling my lungs, invigorating the bare skin on the nape of my neck. I stay there long after their car lights have petered out down the road, and then I move to the porch swing. In all of the years that the swing has been with us, I have never once perched on it in the dead of winter. So I sit, and I admire the view, in spite of my nearly numb fingers and my cheeks aflame with cold. I rock and I rock, absorbing the still night of the only place I have ever thought to call home, reminding me that it is so sweet to be out here, sensitive, alive, peering at my old world with fresh new eyes.
thirty-one
The Arc de Triomphe is a wonder to behold. This is my first thought when I enter the gym on prom night. I have seen it before, of course, in my premonitions, which I’ve had no more of and according to Ashley may never have, now that I’ve learned to control them rather than vice versa. But in real life, the faux Arc is more regal, more gallant than I could have hoped for. The prom committee, which I’ve helmed in name only the past few months, has outdone themselves. Miniature Eiffel Towers swing from the ceiling; dancing, twinkling lights circle the edges of the walls. A city of lights. Right here in Westlake.
I stand outside the clanging gym doors before going in, before stepping over that threshold. This is the first prom I’ve ever attended alone. I considered this as I dressed this evening, pulling up my satin shoulder strap, running my fingers over my exposed collarbone, stepping back in front of the mirror that was once Tyler’s too, but that I now fill for the both of us.
I ordered a new dress off the Internet. It’s well out of my budget, but I don’t care. It’s a deep red, reminding me of the color of the fall leaves during the season that my mother died, but in a warm, comforting way, and when I surfed past it on the computer, procrastinating on my way to look for graduate programs, I knew it would be perfect. Perfect on my skinnier frame that would soon fill out thanks to a renewed appetite and beer nights with Susie and Ashley; perfect because I didn’t know when I’d have the chance again to dress up with the excitement of a sixteen-year-old who was insightful enough to be grateful that she was sixteen no longer. Besides, I couldn’t even think of wearing one of the other dresses stuffed upstairs in my closet, one of the ones I’d worn before. Before. Everything now was either before or after. I was choosing after. The more uncertain choice, to be sure, but also the one that wedged open a new window for possibilities.
I’d popped into the guest room before leaving to show myself off to Darcy. She was sleeping when I went to twirl in front of her, a well-earned, solid rest, so I let her be.
We’d settled into a quiet pattern together. Her hands hadn’t regained full functioning yet, but they were on their way, and, in fact, so was she. The demos she and Dante had cut had nabbed the attention of a few prime producers, and though she couldn’t play for them just yet, one day soon, she would. The two of them would fly out of Westlake, together, on to brighter skies and untapped dreams, refusing to cower in the face of everything, after everything. After.
“Funny, isn’t it?” she said one night when we were working through her rehab exercises. “How I always thought I was a solo act, but it turns out that I was more of a duet.” I laughed along with her because it was indeed funny, especially when I’d turned out to be just the opposite.
And now, the Arc de Triomphe is glorious, and after a moment of reverence, I push the doors open, and I step inside.
The gym is pulsing, throbbing with frenzied teenagers, their hormones hopping, their senses likely dulled and heightened all at once thanks to spiked punch or their flasks tucked in their inside pockets. I wave at a few, stopping to hug CJ. Johnny Hutchinson has dumped her again; I heard the whispers through the grapevine last week. So, as expected, she wallows in the corner, her breasts exploding over a bouquet of yellow flowers sewn atop her bustline. A ploy, no doubt, designed to lure Johnny Hutchinson back in, though I hope for her sake that the mission fails, because he will be one more thing that she’ll wonder if she should regret leaving behind.
“You’ll be fine; go have fun,” I say to her after we pull back from our embrace.
“He’s an asshole,” she says, her bottom lip jutting out.
“Maybe.” I shrug. “But you’ll be fine either way. A lot of them are assholes. A lot of them aren’t. It doesn’t really matter. You don’t define yourself by it.”
I push through the din, making my way toward the DJ and the drink station when I spot Eli. Though nearly everyone else is in a rented tuxedo, he dons instead a dark navy suit, a rich lavender tie, a magnificent aberration in a flock of sheep. He smiles widely, the edges of his eyes folding like a fan, and flags me over, then whistles when I approach.
“Wow,” he says. “I must insist on buying you a drink. But only if some ambiguous fruit-flavored punch will do.”
“I accept,” I say, laughing. “Clearly, this is your first prom, because you learn to love the stuff. I think I crave it the rest of the year. Oh, and it’s free.”
“Indeed it is my first, my virgin experience.” He nods. “Well, first prom since I was seventeen, to be fair. I’m hoping this one turns out a little better.” We weave toward the nonalcoholic bar, and I wrinkle my brow in question. “Let’s just say that a few too many rum and Cokes were not my friend that night … nor my date’s, actually. God, she was pissed at me.” He shakes his head. “Man, I haven’t thought about this stuff in forever.”
Funny, I think, because I used to think about it all the time.
Before we can scoop out our punch, the DJ clicks to a new song, a slow song, one that transports me back, too far back, to before. Whitney Houston blares out from the speakers. If I should stay, I will only be in your way.
“Oh my God.” Eli scoffs, rolling his eyes. “Do you remember this?”
“I do.” I nod, not just because I danced to it with Tyler, but because the DJ somehow seemed to play it every year since. I’d hear it and drag Ty to the dance floor, and throw my arms over his shoulders, swaying to the rhythm, reenacting our time from when we were seventeen, from before.
“I think it’s some sort of understood Prom Song.” I giggle. “I actually think I used to love this song. You know, the meaning—‘And I will always love you,’ and all of that. Back then, it seemed pretty deep.”
“Come on,” he says, running his finger down my arm, twirling me before I can think otherwise, and beckoning me to the center of the room. “Let’s make the most of it.”
He pulls me toward him firmly, confidently, placing his hand on the small of my back like it simply fits th
ere. I lean into his chest, and he smells like maple syrup. I rest my head against his shoulder, like I have done before, and close my eyes and inhale the sweetness. This is what I can do for now, this is what I can offer, this is my first step back up the mountain.
When the song ends, I kiss his cheek, and we walk off, fingers almost intertwined, something unspoken between us, something silent and building, which is just as we need it to be for now.
We find ourselves on the bleachers, where I wordlessly lace my hand into his, and he, in turn, doesn’t flinch, doesn’t pull away, though I suspect that his baser instinct might be to do so. He is a wanderer after all.
“This is probably my last prom,” I say. I am swallowing it up, absorbing it, with an equal mix of sadness, euphoria, and yes, nostalgia, too. There is still space for nostalgia, even with everything that has happened. He looks toward me with surprise. “I’m applying to graduate school.” I pause. “I think. For photography.”
“This is a good thing for you, Tilly Farmer,” he says, holding my hand steady.
“It is. Turns out that maybe I’m not the best guidance counselor. Or maybe being a guidance counselor isn’t best for me,” I answer, because both are true. “You probably won’t be around here much longer anyway.”
“Through the spring,” he says, turning back to watch the beat of swaying bodies. “They offered me a full-time position, but we’ll see. I haven’t made up my mind.”
“I can’t imagine that Westlake is where you want to stay forever.”
“No, probably not forever,” he says, leaning into his knees, still clasping my hand. “But it’s pretty alright for now.”
“I bought a ticket to Paris,” I say, aglow when obvious pride washes across his face. He is the first person I’ve told. I did it on instinct, on a whim, the same night I bought my dress. “For April, during spring break.”
The One That I Want Page 24
