We Want What We Want

by Alix Ohlin

  Like a lot of my father’s schemes this one both backfired, and didn’t. When confronted with the photographs, my mother was so angry that she ripped them up and left: him, us, town. We never saw her again. He got custody, and Nicole and I lost our mother, whom we spent the rest of our teen years idolizing as a free spirit who threw off the shackles of the ordinary world. She was our hero, despite having abandoned us, and every time we defied our father, which was often, we did so in her name.

  At a certain point, though, I saw how foolish this was—which is to say, I grew up—and came to appreciate our father and his dogged affection for us, which endured the rocky years of our adolescence and was still there, waiting, when we became adults. After I went away to school and came back home (returning to work at the Blue Dragon, as if my education had never happened), I often had dinner with him and his girlfriend, Noriko, who was a stylish, successful real estate agent and whom both my father and I thought could probably do a lot better than him.

  Nicole struggled more than I did. She inherited our mother’s dark brown hair and her restlessness and her love of attention. At nineteen she went off to Los Angeles, wanting to be famous. And she sort of succeeded; she appeared on one of those reality shows where she competed alongside twenty other reasonably good-looking girls for the attention of a man with highly defined abs and no personality. When she didn’t win, she came home, in debt and with a drinking problem, and got a job as a kindergarten teacher. She was the most famous person in our town, and people often turned to look when they recognized her at the gas station or the grocery store.

  There was no party Nicole wouldn’t go to. She had a string of short relationships, if you could call them that, and she often stumbled over to my apartment on a Sunday morning, still wearing her clothes from the night before, to complain and confess. She wanted me to make her eggs and tell her to straighten up. She had become our mother, and I our father, the two of us performing a script that had been written before we were born. It didn’t feel fair to me, and I told her so; we fought, and then the following Sunday she’d show up again, and of course, I’d let her in.

  It was nine o’clock on an April Sunday when the doorbell rang, which was early for Nicole, but I’d been up for hours, drinking coffee and reading the real estate section of The New York Times. Moving to the city was a fantasy so long ingrained in me that I couldn’t let it go, though I had lost any intention of actually doing it. It was an unusually warm spring after an unusually cold winter, and the cardinals and robins were singing loudly, as if both pleased and alarmed by the extremities of temperature.

  At my front door stood Sam Postelthwaite. He was an old man now, thinner, his cheeks sunken and wrinkled like a deflated balloon, but I still knew him instantly. He was wearing tan pants and a blue plaid shirt and holding something in his hands. For a second, I thought it was the manila envelope he’d brought to my father all those years ago, and I frowned and said, “Is this about my mother?” and he said, “No.”

  I saw then that he was holding a woman’s purse, which was light brown and expensive and which I had given to Nicole the previous year for Christmas, and I said, “Is she all right?” and he said, “I’m here to take you to the hospital,” and I nodded and got dressed. I suppose it was odd that I didn’t ask him anything else. I knew the situation must be horrible, and that soon I would be required to face that horror in its entirety. When I was ready to go, he showed me to his car, a Ford Taurus that smelled like French fries, and I sat in the passenger seat with my sister’s purse in my lap. My mind wouldn’t go to her, not yet. Instead it kept dwelling on the strangeness of my being driven to the hospital by Sam Postelthwaite. “Why are you the one who came to get me?” I asked him.

  “Your father was worried about your sister. He asked me to keep an eye on her, so I’ve been doing that. Trying to, anyway.”

  I glanced at him, then out the window, at the quiet streets with budding trees, the drab early grass just starting to recover from the weight of snow. We’d been pummeled that year.

  “Your father and I have been friends for many years,” Sam Postelthwaite said, answering a question I hadn’t asked.

  “Is he already at the hospital?”

  “No,” he said, which was also strange; but he didn’t elaborate. We rode the rest of the way in silence, and then he pulled up in front of the hospital and didn’t park, and I understood he wasn’t coming in, whether because he had somewhere else to be, or didn’t think he was invited, or for some other reason that I couldn’t possibly calculate. The whole morning felt beyond my calculation. I opened the door. “Good luck,” he said, and drove away while I was still standing in the parking lot.

  * * *

  —

  The woman at the reception desk had gone to school with my mother, and when I was a teenager I sometimes babysat her son; that’s the kind of town this is. When she saw me she said my name and tutted sympathetically and told me that my sister was in the ICU on the third floor. Upstairs, I followed the signs to my sister’s room. She lay with her eyes closed, breathing through a respirator. Her left arm was in a cast, and the right one was hooked up to an IV. The hospital gown they’d given her was too big and slipping off one shoulder; it almost looked lewd, and instinctively I reached over and pulled it up. “Nick,” I said.

  “She don’t hear you,” a voice said behind me, and I turned to see a man sitting in a chair. I’d been so focused on Nicole that I hadn’t even noticed him, even though he was quite imposing, and, when he stood up, well over six feet tall.

  “I’m Lord,” he said. “You must be Amber.” He was wearing a blue T-shirt and dark jeans and a thick cluster of necklaces; one of them was made of shark teeth, and another one had a gold cross. His hair was in tight glossy cornrows. He reached out a hand, but I didn’t take it. I didn’t mean to be rude, or maybe I did; I’d never heard Nicole mention his name.

  I turned back to Nicole, placing a hand on her arm.

  “She’s under sedation,” said the man. “It’s standard, they said.”

  “Standard for what?”

  “A contrecoup lesion,” he said. “That’s when the brain gets jammed against the inside of the skull. They sedate the patient while waiting for the swelling to go down.”

  “I see,” I said, though I didn’t. Inside I was already blaming him, whoever he was, already organizing the categories in my mind. Nicole: the victim. Lord: a mistake she’d live to regret. All my sister’s friends were delinquents.

  “They think she was hit by a car,” he said. “Walking home last night. They called me because mine was the most recent number on her phone. We talked most nights before she went to sleep.”

  “I’m sorry, who are you again?”

  Lord faced me across my sister’s bed. “A friend.”

  There was too much mystery to him, to this. I left the room and tried to flag down a nurse, but they all strode past me busily, shaking their heads and not making eye contact as if I were begging for change, and I was left in front of the nurse’s station, starting to cry angry, confused tears.

  Just then a pair of arms circled me, and a voice I knew said, “Hush, hush.” It was Noriko. We’d never hugged before—Noriko, my father had once explained to me, “does not enjoy casual bodily contact”—and this more than anything made me grasp, all at once, the gravity of the situation. I stopped crying, and asked her where my father was. She just shook her head and held my left hand in hers, firmly, and then pulled me in the direction of Nicole’s room. There, she exchanged introductions with Lord and summoned a doctor, who gave us a weary, terse recap of Nicole’s condition: a traumatic brain injury, prognosis unknown. For the moment, drugs would keep her from moving. It was important that she remain immobile while her brain healed. I asked the doctor if we should speak to Nicole, and he said, “Sure,” in a dismissive tone that made me hate him, and then he left the room.

&nb
sp; Lord rubbed his eyes, like a tired child. I told him, “You don’t have to stay, you know,” and only when he flinched did I perceive what a mean thing it was to say. I just didn’t know him, he was a stranger to me, and I was full up with strangeness, that day.

  “I’m going to stay,” he said quietly, and I shrugged.

  Outside the door a shadow loomed, disappeared, passed by again, and then there was a quiet knock. I slipped outside to see Kevin Hewey, who was a police officer, waiting for me with a notebook and a wincing expression designed, I guess, to convey sympathy. In high school Kevin had been good-looking and a bully, and I was pleased to note that he was losing his hair.

  “Hey Amber,” he said. “How you holding up?”

  I was irritated by his concern. Kevin and his fellow cops would sometimes come into the bar and get rowdily drunk and make lewd comments, on top of which they were mediocre tippers. “Never better,” I said.

  He didn’t even register it. “I need to take a statement from you if you’ve got a minute.”

  I told him I didn’t know anything about what had happened, and he nodded his chin at the door. “Who’s that?” he said.

  “Some friend of Nicole’s,” I said.

  “Was he with her last night?”

  “I don’t think so, but you’d have to ask him,” I said.

  Kevin frowned. “I don’t recognize him,” he said. He made to open the door, and I stopped him with a hand to his arm.

  “Do you think you can find the person who hit her?” I said.

  He gave me his wince-face again. “We’ll do everything we can.”

  Then Lord came out of the room, closing the door gently behind him, and Kevin’s demeanor changed instantly. “Sir,” he said, “could you step this way?”

  Lord nodded. “Of course,” he said mildly.

  Kevin led him past the nurses’ station to a bench in the hallway; I assumed he wanted to make Lord sit down because Lord was so much taller than he was. I couldn’t hear what he asked, but I could see Lord shake his head, over and over. I remembered, watching them, that Kevin’s brother Stu had taken Nicole to the junior prom. They’d gotten high in the parking lot and stumbled so badly, walking up the steps to the gymnasium, that the principal wouldn’t let them in. I didn’t know where Stu was now. Lord stood up then and Kevin barked at him—no other word for it—“Sit down, sir!” Lord sat down.

  “Is everything okay?” I said.

  Kevin glanced from Lord back to me, then nodded. “Don’t go far,” he said to Lord, and then gave me his card. I thought it was sort of funny he had a card. It said officer kevin hewey, and below that the number of the police station, which anyone in town would have known to call already. Lord and I watched him walk off, saying nothing.

  We spent the rest of that day, and all that evening, at the hospital, until the nurses kicked us out. Noriko and I—Lord slipped off separately, without saying goodbye—took the elevator downstairs and walked out to the parking lot together. The night was clear, the stars hectic in the sky.

  I asked her where my father was.

  I’d called his cell phone three times and each time it went straight to voice mail. Then I turned my attention back to my sister, to silently willing her recovery, which felt like the more pressing task. In the parking lot, Noriko held her car keys in one hand and her purse in the other. I was still holding Nicole’s. Noriko and I liked each other—I was pretty sure—but we rarely spent time together just the two of us, and we didn’t share confidences. She and my father had been together five years. They’d met when he bought some rental property on the edge of town, based on a rumor that a tech company was going to be expanding to our area; he was convinced that a boom was about to begin. The boom never happened, and half the rentals were empty; but he’d met Noriko, so it was, we all felt, a net gain. I knew little of her life before they met; she had a grown son in Seattle who visited once a year, in summer, during which time my father and Noriko did not sleep over at each other’s houses. The son was a lab tech at a fertility clinic; he spent his days measuring hormones in blood. “These women think they can wait forever and still have kids,” he’d told me once, rolling his eyes. “That’s not the reality.” I wasn’t a fan of his.

  “Your father is very upset,” Noriko said now. “He can’t handle seeing Nicole in this condition.”

  “Can’t handle it?” I said. It didn’t make sense to me. Our father had raised us on his own after our mother left; he bought us tampons and bras and didn’t flinch when we screamed at him that our lives were ruined, because as teenagers we always thought our lives were being ruined. When I needed money for school he refinanced the house, and when I came home from school and went right back to waitressing, he didn’t ask for any of it back.

  “It reminds him too much of your mother leaving,” Noriko said, “which was very traumatic for him.”

  “Noriko,” I said. “His daughter is in the hospital. You agree that it’s crazy that he didn’t come, right? I mean.”

  “Of course I do.” She opened the door to her car. “People can surprise you with their weakness, can’t they?” she said. She hugged me again, awkwardly, with both the purses between us, then got into her car and drove away. I sat in my own car, rifling through my sister’s bag, which I hadn’t thought to do earlier. There was nothing of note in it: her driver’s license, lip gloss, a pack of cigarettes. Her phone, which was dead.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning I drove to my father’s house. He’d bought a small condo—Noriko also serving as the agent—and Nicole and I had helped him decorate it. None of us wanted the things that had been in our old house, and we laughed with a sort of hysteria as we took truckloads of knickknacks and old clothes and sports equipment to Goodwill. The theme for our father’s condo, we decided, would be Clint Eastwood Unwinds at Home. At the same Goodwill we picked up some pictures of old gas stations and restaurants, which I framed to look arty. Nicole found some throw pillows with horses on them. Our father laughed, but he liked it, or he said he did, anyway.

  Now he came to the door wearing a dark blue bathrobe and let me in without speaking. In the kitchen, he poured me a cup of coffee and listened while I harangued him. He just kept shaking his head. A few strands of his comb-over stood up on his head, waving slightly, like aquarium plants. It made him look wild, but his eyes were distant and dull.

  “I’m going to need you to be understanding of this, Amber,” he finally said. “I’m going to need you to find some room in your heart.”

  This was not the way he usually spoke. It was not the way anyone I knew spoke. I put my undrunk coffee down on his counter with a clunk, and it splashed. “If you care about her, you’ll come with me right now.”

  “I do care,” he said, “and no.”

  On my way out the door I passed Noriko coming in; she widened her eyes in a question and I rolled mine in answer. She pressed her lips together. I stood on the front porch for a minute after she entered, listening; but all I heard was silence.

  * * *

  —

  When I got to the hospital the only other person there was Lord. My sister looked the same, the same hushed pump from the respirator guiding her breath. A nurse came to check her and make notations on the chart.

  “Such a beautiful girl,” she said to me. “I used to watch her on that show. Couldn’t believe it when he chose Courtney instead.”

  “Courtney was a bitch and a nympho,” I said, and she looked startled and left hastily.

  Behind me, Lord snorted.

  “Well, I mean, come on,” I said.

  On the nightstand next to Nicole’s bed I set out the things I’d brought: a CD player, some music she liked, a scented candle, some copies of People and Us Weekly. Nicole loved celebrity gossip. When she was in LA she was forever texting me about seeing somebody famous at the
grocery store and what they had in their carts. After she came back home, broken and broke, I tried to cheer her up by taking her shopping at the mall, the big one an hour away, and she got so bummed out by it that we just turned around and came home. This whole life was her second choice.

  Having Lord in the room made me self-conscious, but I wanted Nicole to know that I was there, so I read the magazines out loud to her, describing what people were wearing in the pictures, what they were buying at Trader Joe’s. Who looked good and who was too fat or too thin. Every once in a while I’d glance over at Lord; he was reclining in the chair, which was too small for him, looking up at the ceiling. He seemed to be listening. For all I knew he was also a celebrity gossip fan. After a while my voice wore out and I took a break.

  “Do you mind?” Lord said, and I shrugged.

  He moved closer to Nicole and clasped his palms together. It took me a while to realize that he was praying. Our family had never gone to church—a total disinterest in religion was one of the few things our parents had in common—and I felt ill at ease. I went down to the cafeteria and got something to eat, and when I came back, Lord was standing in the hallway, doing a series of stretches. He was a big guy, solidly muscled, and when he reached his arms over his head he practically touched the ceiling. When he saw me, he dropped them back down.

  “How did you meet Nicole, anyway?” I asked him.

  The pause before he answered made me suspicious. “It was at the Lutheran church,” he said.

  “Nicole didn’t go to church.”

  “Not usually, no,” he said.

  His presence made no sense to me. At first I’d thought he was one of her party friends, or a sometime or would-be boyfriend, and now I had no idea who he was, except an unwelcome guest at my sister’s trauma. A rubbernecker.