This Is What I Want

by Craig Lancaster

  “I gotta be downtown tonight,” he said.

  “The hell you do.” He flinched at how pissed off she was at that idea. “You want me to tie you down to that bed? I’ll do it.”

  He clutched her around the waist. “Rowr,” he purred. “That sounds like an offer.”

  “Don’t be silly. That’s definitely on the restricted list until you heal up.” She laughed, though. That was a good sign.

  “Thank you for today,” he said.

  “For what?”

  “For being there.”

  She wriggled out of his grasp. “Where else would I be? Now get to bed.”

  MAMA

  I’d sometimes sit in that old house, just me in the recliner, listening to the white noise of the television, and I’d stare straight into the ceiling fan, my eyes sinking into the white glow of the lamp underneath, the whipping blades casting shadows around the room, and I’d fixate on it, until my eyes started to play tricks on me. The lamp would melt, seeping down walls and across the ceiling, and the fan blades would distort and wilt like the clocks on the branch in that painting.

  It never occurred to me, Lord, that you were giving me a glimpse of what lay beyond—a way of recognizing it when my time finally came, according to your boundless wisdom and grace. I thought I was just an old, bored woman, but you’ve shown me now that you had a plan and a time for me, and that my worldly wishes would not move you to it until you were ready for me. Thank you, Lord. I, too, am ready, and I can hear you saying, “Grandma, I love you . . .”

  Her eyelids flickered and then lifted, and a young man’s face came into sharp relief.

  “Samuel?”

  “Hi, Grandma. We were just leaving.”

  A young woman peeked out from behind Samuel and waved to her.

  “Who’s we?” Blanche asked.

  “You remember Megan. Megan Riley.”

  “No,” Blanche said. “I don’t. Forgive an old lady, my dear.”

  “No problem,” Megan said.

  Blanche grunted and tried to slide herself into a sitting position on the hospital bed. The effort left her expended, and she waited for piped-in renewal from the nosepiece. As her breathing settled and the room came into greater focus, she could mourn the unfairness of it all. A dream about the light, the first she could remember in her waking hours, was just a tease. Here she was, still in a world that didn’t hold much for her anymore, still an old lady with a compromised set of lungs, still an afterthought—and one who had to suffer such mean-nothings as “no problem,” on top of it.

  Even as she cataloged her grievances with the status quo, the immediate past began to reboot.

  “Where’s your father?” she asked.

  “He went home.”

  “Home?”

  “Yes. He’s dinged up, but all right.”

  “And your Uncle Henrik?”

  “Dinged up, too. And in jail.”

  With no time to catch herself, Blanche began weeping, and the girl, Megan, came and sat down beside her, holding her hand. Samuel stood his ground and rubbed his hands together. “Do you know what happened, Grandma?”

  “Yes. I saw it.”

  “I can’t believe it. Nobody can.”

  Blanche raked her bottom lip with her teeth and said nothing to that. What could she say? She hadn’t seen it coming, either, and she alone had been privy to Henrik’s most frightening tirades these past few days. She could now rue her own sense of self-importance, the hubris that she’d somehow be able to control him and veer him away from his self-destructive impulses. When he’d fallen at her feet, crying, she thought she’d found a way to get at the thinking part of him, a way of making him see the trouble ahead if he kept pushing. She’d read that badly wrong, and now the situation was infinitely more complex.

  “Your Uncle Henrik has a sick mind,” she said at last.

  “To say the absolute least. He got messed up pretty good. Mayor even got in a shot. Kicked him in the ribs and broke one of them, I heard.”

  “That’s not exactly something to celebrate, is it?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Blanche changed tacks. “What time is it?”

  Samuel opened his phone. “Quarter after seven.”

  “How long have I been asleep?”

  “A couple of hours. Doctor says he wants you to stay a few days.”

  “That’s preposterous,” she said. “I’m fine.”

  “Just telling you what he thinks.”

  “Well, I’ll take it up with him, believe me.” She gave Megan a wink. “Now do me a favor, would you?”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Go find me a pen and some paper. If I’m going to be stuck in here, I ought to at least entertain myself.”

  “OK.” Samuel stepped out of the room on his errand, and Blanche took up matters with Megan.

  “Now tell me,” she said. “Are you and my grandson friends?”

  “We were, I guess. A long time ago. I used to date him back in high school. I’ve actually met you, you know.”

  “I know. I remember now. You came to my house for Thanksgiving.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “You’ve changed.”

  “Well, it’s been nearly eleven years.”

  “Yes,” Blanche said. “I suppose it has. You’ll forgive me being direct with this—”

  “Yes?”

  “I’m wondering what your interest is in him now.”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Oh?”

  “Not really. I only saw him again today.”

  Blanche waited for a fresh shot of air. Samuel returned before she could get to it.

  “Nurses had some paper. But they want you to sleep, too,” he said.

  “I will. Now you two get on back to town. I’ll be fine.”

  “You’re sure?” he asked.

  “Yes. Go.”

  Samuel opened the door and motioned for Megan to join him. She pushed herself up, and gave Blanche a quizzical look.

  “You children have fun.”

  Once they were out the door, Blanche went to work. She hefted the dinner tray across her lap, fashioning a writing desk, and then she began to put words to paper. She’d gone as far as vanity could take her with Henrik, and that hadn’t served anybody—him and Sam least of all. She was an old, foolish, vain-hearted woman, she told herself, and she should have stepped into this years ago and made a clean division of it. She’d do that right now, while she still had the time.

  One last detail occurred to her, and Blanche pressed the nurse call button on her bed.

  The door opened presently.

  “Yes, Mrs. Kelvig?”

  “I’m sorry to bother you,” Blanche said. “Do you have an envelope I could have?”

  “Of course. I’ll get you one.”

  Blanche turned back to the job at hand.

  She began to write: In the event of my death . . .

  NORBY

  Norby and Megan settled into a couple of plastic chairs on the sidewalk outside Jordy Rusch’s tattoo studio, far enough down the street that the warbling from the rhinestone cowboy up on stage didn’t crowd out their conversation.

  They’d ridden back from Sidney mostly in silence, the only deviation into conversation Megan’s question about coming downtown. Norby figured that would be preferable to sitting in the house another night, listening to the stamping of little feet on the floor and enduring another viewing of that Pixar flick with the theme song he couldn’t shake once it got in his head.

  Now, they drank beer from plastic cups, courtesy of the Double Musky, and swatted at interloping mosquitoes. Megan picked at the edges of conversation.

  “She asked me what my intentions are,” she said.

  “Get out of
here.”

  “Seriously. Am I supposed to have intentions?”

  Norby took a pull from his cup. “It would probably be better if you didn’t.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing.”

  She pitched forward in her chair, demanding an audience. “Don’t give me that.”

  Norby drained his cup, then he held it up and stared into the bottom, as if he might have missed a drop.

  “Do you want to go for a drive?” he asked.

  They leaned against the fence at the edge of the Grandview railroad bridge. Across the river, the water-colored badlands faded in the dusk light, while swimmers below plied the evening waters of the Yellowstone. Norby breathed in, letting the aqua flush of the river bottom sweep into his nostrils.

  “Do you remember when I came back from basketball camp that last summer we were in school?”

  “Yes.”

  “We came up here that first night I was back. Do you remember that?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “I remember it well.” He tightened his grip on the fencing and leaned back. “That’s the first time I tried to break up with you. I was too chickenshit to do it.”

  Megan’s voice caught, as if strangled at the source, and then she released the words one by one. “OK, I remember. You were acting weird. You wouldn’t kiss me.”

  “I didn’t want to kiss you.”

  “Don’t be mean.”

  “I’m not trying to be mean. I’m trying to tell you something.”

  He began to explain himself, but she cut him off.

  “I knew,” she said.

  “You did?”

  “Well, no, not then. Then, I was invested in a different idea. But you know, Samuel, I’ve had a lot of time to think about—”

  “Norby.”

  “Huh?”

  “I go by Norby now.”

  “Why?”

  “Not for any good reason. Let me tell you a few things, OK? I want to.”

  “OK.”

  So began the unloading and unpacking of things Norby had held close for a decade.

  “We were in Salt Lake for basketball camp,” he told her. “Rich Buckner and I were roommates. Some things happened.”

  “What things?”

  He looked at her, purse-lipped.

  “Oh.”

  “It was my first time,” he said. “But I’d known for a while, you know? I just didn’t know what I knew, if that makes any sense.”

  “So Rich was—”

  “No, I don’t think so. Not like I am. He was curious, and we did some stuff, and when we came back, I thought, well, how do I deal with this now? I don’t want to make it bigger than it was, but it was like a part of the world I didn’t know existed had opened up to me, you know? I didn’t want to go back to how things were.”

  “I see. So I represented a big problem for you.”

  Norby looked at her. She was stung. No denying that. She was also standing there, waiting for him. She was a good friend, then and now. He wished he’d recognized that sooner.

  “I thought if Rich and I could, I don’t know, come out together, that would be easier. I wasn’t stupid. People were going to have stuff to say no matter what. But everybody liked Rich, so I thought . . .”

  “Yeah. I can see that. But come on. In Grandview? I don’t see it.”

  Norby turned and rested his back against the fence. “Anyway, it didn’t happen. Rich got mad when I asked him. He said what happened in Salt Lake—hell of a place for that, huh?—was just what it was. He told me he’d kick my ass if I said anything, so of course I didn’t. And then, you know . . .” He trailed off. A few years after graduation, Rich had been on a cargo plane that crashed in Afghanistan, and was among the twenty-nine losses. He had a hero’s funeral in Grandview, and Norby’s story got buried with him.

  “What did your parents say? I mean, you have told them, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What did they say?”

  “Not much. Dad, I don’t think he wants to believe it. He’s trying, you know, but it’s just surface stuff. Mom gets it, I think.”

  “Moms usually do.”

  Norby knelt and worked a stone out of the long-abandoned rail bed. He threw it overhand, hard, out across the river, and it landed with a satisfying kerplunk.

  “I’m not sure why I told you all this.”

  “Funny,” Megan said. “I’d say you owed it to me.”

  He looked at her. She smiled, but he could see she wasn’t kidding.

  “Maybe I do,” he said. “Yeah, yeah, I do. I don’t know that, if I could go back in time, I’d do anything differently. I don’t know. Maybe I wouldn’t have just quit playing. I didn’t think I could be at basketball practice every day with Rich, knowing what happened, knowing I couldn’t say anything. It seemed like the path of least resistance.”

  She reached out and touched his arm.

  “Was it, though?”

  He turned back to the water. He didn’t have an answer to that—at least, not one he cared to give flight. She leaned into him, and he slipped his arm across her shoulders.

  On the drive back to town, he gave an account of Norby and came to a decision: it was time to let that go, too.

  “I plucked it clean out of the air,” he said. “When I left for Missoula, you know, I was all about new beginnings, new definitions, all that stuff. It was a name other than the one I’d had my whole life. And then, honest to God, it just sort of became what I responded to. I wonder if that’s how it works with celebrities. I mean, Cary Grant.” At the invocation of the name, he growled like a cat, launching Megan into a peal of laughter. “The guy’s name was Archibald. At what point did he stop turning around if somebody said, ‘Hey, Archie’? That’s the way it was with me. If somebody had said ‘Samuel,’ I don’t know if I’d have even realized it was my name.”

  “I worked with a guy in Billings named Dikran,” Megan said.

  “Mmmmmmm. Dikran,” he said, punctuating the first syllable and growling again, and she punched him in the arm.

  “Armenian guy,” she said. “Nice guy. Went by Greg. As would anybody.”

  “So, this Dikran, is he single?”

  “Shut up, Norby.”

  OMAR

  The sophomore girls lost their interest in Omar and Gabe when they heard that there wouldn’t be any beer, and Omar stood firm on that point, because his mother had made the stakes clear enough: If she smelled even a whiff of alcohol on him in the morning, he could kiss any unsupervised time good-bye for the rest of his natural born life. “You think I can’t make you go to MSU Billings?” she’d said. “Come home stinking of beer and I’ll show you what I can do. You won’t get any closer to Los Angeles than your TV.”

  He had to take notice of the threat, no matter how much he thought she might be bluffing, because LA was continually on his mind. He hadn’t heard from the Bruins coach lately, but they were in what the NCAA called a “dead period,” where contact with recruits was verboten. The coach had said he’d stick to the letter of the law, but he’d winked when he said that. Omar was getting a lot of e-mail from people outside the basketball program—alumni and other people who had some connection to UCLA—telling him what a great place it was. “I looked you up on the Internet,” they’d say. “Hope you come play for the Bruins.” They weren’t the only ones doing it. He heard from alums at Duke and Syracuse and a lot of other places, too. And he’d talked to his coach in Grandview, who told him to play it cool, like he was trying to get the cutest girl in school to go to prom with him. Let the teams make their pitches, he’d said. Omar knew he’d probably go to New York and North Carolina on official visits, just to keep things interesting and fun, but he also knew he’d already cast his heart for LA.

  “What do you want to do?�
�� Gabe asked as they stood outside the Country Basket. “You want to go back to my place?”

  Omar shook his head.

  “What then?”

  Omar wasn’t sure. He just knew that he was done with the ordinary. He’d had this sense, in a way he couldn’t articulate to Gabe, that nothing was going to be the same after he climbed down from the railroad bridge with Clarissa. About the only thing the beer had been good for was giving him a reprieve from thoughts of her and what was coming Monday. Gabe had been a reliable friend. He’d even said he’d borrow his parents’ car and drive out to Fort Peck on Monday, just so he didn’t cross paths with Omar’s mom. But Omar figured everybody had his limits, and he didn’t see Gabe as someone who would understand the complexities of Omar’s mind. Even Omar himself didn’t understand it. He wanted to be reckless and wild and outside the boundaries that had been erected for him, and still he kept being returned—or returning of his own volition—to the roles he’d rather reject. The dutiful son. The helpful ex-boyfriend. The steadfast friend.

  John Rexford’s Mustang, jammed full of a quorum of football players, sped by on Main Street, then hooked a left into the houses on the west side of town.

  Omar pointed after them. “Let’s see what those guys are up to.”

  “No way.”

  “Don’t be a chickenshit, man.”

  “I’m not,” Gabe said. “There are four of them and two of us. They’ve got a car, and we don’t. It doesn’t sound like much fun to me.”

  “Whatever, man. I’m going.” Omar started to jog in the direction Rexford had taken. He crossed the street, then turned and jogged backward a few paces while he looked at Gabe, imploring.

  “Shit,” his friend said, and then he ran to catch up.

  Rexford had the horsepower, but even in a small town like Grandview, he was stuck with operating on established roads. Omar and Gabe faced no such restrictions. By cutting through alleyways and backyards and moving through the neighborhoods at diagonals, they managed to triangulate the football players’ heading and plant themselves in a burned-out ditch on the western edge of town, maybe fifty feet from where Rexford and his friends were picking their way through a grown-over backyard.