“I’m serious, Ashley! You’re messing with my brain, with my life, and you need to fix it!” The urge to throttle her nearly overcomes me.
“I didn’t do anything, Tilly.” She pouts. “I just opened up some things for you. Whatever’s happening, it’s all because of you.” She pauses and lowers her voice. “So, what exactly is happening?”
“I’m seeing the future! I’m seeing into the goddamn future!” Sweat has started to pool in my armpits; I can feel my T-shirt, ten years old, from a sorority party, cling to the sides of my body.
“And what do you see?” she asks calmly, the mirror opposite of my unraveling. “What is it that has so unnerved you that you insisted on coming over here so pissed off and waking me at this ungodly hour?”
“Okay, first of all, it’s ten o’clock in the morning,” I hiss, and three pieces of spittle erupt from my mouth. “And second of all, I am seeing … things … not good things … things that I don’t want to goddamn see!”
“Well, how is that my fault?” She shrugs, and I want to belt her, take my fist and shove it right down her throat.
“I want to take my fist and shove it right down your throat,” I say, to which she cackles. “What’s so goddamn funny?” I scream. “Because this isn’t funny at all to me!”
At the ruckus, her neighbor’s two locks unlatch, and a heavy-set man in a greasy white tank top pokes his head out his door. The light bounces off his shiny bald head, and I squint my eyes.
“You okay?” he says to Ashley. She nods, and he nods in return, and then slam, latch, latch, two locks are secured right back up, insulating him from the world, from his psychotic next-door neighbor or maybe just her psychotic visitor.
“I just—” she says, her laughter now aborted, though it still mocks me in the cusps of her smile, “I honestly didn’t know that you could be this angry with anyone. Did you?”
I actually stop to consider it. No, no, I’m not this angry. I am not the person who shoves her fists down people’s throats. Those are the kids who end up on my couch, those are the kids whom I fix, who look to me as an example, for God’s sake!
“So help me, Ashley, if you screw things up for me, I will track you down and make you regret it,” I say, tugging at the hem of my shirt, now pocked with abdomen sweat. The humidity is clinging to my temples, my hairline, my belly button, my wrists.
She laughs again, a high-pitched, hysterical yelp, as if anything about this is remotely amusing. “Tilly, you realize that you’re only seeing what’s going to come. This has nothing to do with me or what I’ve done. Come on, lighten up. I didn’t change anything. I didn’t alter a single damn thing. It was just clarity, that’s all.” She smiles, pulling her gums back to reveal perfectly aligned, crisply white teeth, a sign betraying her middle-class childhood, complete with orthodontia and parents who cared enough to correct her overbite in the first place.
“We’re not done with this,” I say, turning to head down the stairs.
“I’ll see you around.” She waves, flashing her purple-painted nails, lingering in her doorway, watching me go. “And why not enjoy it? Why not use this, you know, to give you some insights, instead of getting so fucking, you know, in my face about it?”
I haul myself into the driver’s seat, slamming my door as a response, then cast my gaze back at her one last time. She’s still there, that clownish smile plastered on her face, a harbinger—a noose around my neck—that follows me long after I’ve sped out of the parking lot and gone on my way.
ten
Later that afternoon, Susanna and I are on our way to finalize the Grease decision with Principal Anderson; he bounced us yesterday due to a last-minute budget meeting with the district superintendent, and maybe twenty-four hours ago, I would have cared a bit more about getting this shindig off the ground, about greased lightning!, but now, today, with my life literally flashing in front of me, this is just about the last thing on my to-do list. But I already lectured Susanna on the phone last weekend: “I cannot stand to watch you sit around for one more second feeling sorry for yourself,” which is exactly how and why I showered off the invisible cloak of juju stink from Ashley’s and have landed in my car, headed toward Westlake High to discuss a silly revival of a musical that I really didn’t give two shits about in the first place. Well, actually, in the first place, I did. But now, in the second place—in this newly carved, less idealized afterplace—no, I really don’t.
Darcy, because she has nothing better to do now that she is home and pissed off at everyone or has pissed everyone off, hops in the backseat and joins us.
“So Tyler called,” I say to Susie, who is staring but not really looking out the window. “He said that Jamie Rosato called. Wants him to come out for a recruiting trip.”
“Ugh, sweetie, I forgot. I heard.” She reaches over to touch my shoulder. “You okay?”
“You heard? How’d you hear?” I stare at her for a beat too long, then turn back to the road, swerving to stay in my lane.
“I, um.” She nibbles her index-finger cuticle. “Austin told me?” She phrases it more like a question than the statement of fact that it is.
“Austin told you that Jamie Rosato called Tyler? When? When did he tell you?”
“Um, yesterday? I think.” She pauses. “I’m sorry, I should have called. I’ve been so flaky these days. I know.”
“Wait, he told you yesterday? Tyler just called me this morning!” I snap off the radio to be sure that I’m translating this correctly. “How did Austin know before I did?”
“Uh-oh,” Darcy says from the backseat, suddenly interested.
Susie gnashes into her cuticle even further, her giveaway for her little white lies, ever since she was six.
“Susanna Nichols, I am your best friend,” I say, flipping on my blinker, trying to focus on the road, changing lanes without careening right into poor Jessica Hughes, whose dented maroon Honda Civic just pulled up next to mine, likely on her way to her pharmacist shift at the drugstore. “And you better tell me right this very minute what the hell is going on.”
“She means it.” Darcy pipes in from the peanut gallery. “Do you hear her? She practically pummeled me the other day on the front porch. She’s like Rambo these days.”
“Well, I do mean it!” I huff. “I’m pretty goddamn pissed off right now.”
Susanna does a double-take at me, and Darcy offers a puzzled glance that I catch in the rearview mirror. “What?” I continue. “I don’t have the right to be a little fucking pissed?”
“You do,” Susie says. “We’re just not used to hearing it, that’s all.” She sighs, a purging, what-the-hell sort of sigh. “Okay, well, Austin swore that I wasn’t allowed to tell you, but I guess Ty’s been feeling a little antsy here in Westlake, and I guess that’s why he called Jamie a few days ago to ask about a job.”
“Jamie called him,” I say, correcting her.
“Um.” She hesitates. “Okay.”
My stomach plunges like an unhinged elevator and something intangible clicks into place. “I guess that’s why he called Jamie a few days ago to ask about a job.” He called Jamie about the job. The words replay around my brain, circling and circling, trying to make sense of themselves, but they cannot. He called Jamie about the job.
“Why would he do that? Why would he possibly do that and lie to me?” I turn off Route 43 toward the school, like a plane on autopilot, driving without even realizing where I’m going, driving without stopping to even think, because if I were to stop and think, I’d pull the hell out of there, pull far the hell away from here, where the truth is suddenly revealing itself to be nothing like what I thought it was, and flee. “Why didn’t he tell me? Why am I hearing this third-hand from Austin?”
“I don’t know….” I feel her eyeing me from the passenger seat. “He mentioned it to me casually, then said to keep it to myself. I didn’t really think to ask more. I’m sorry. I should have. I’ve just been preoccupied.”
“He’s an as
shole,” Darcy chimes in.
“Shut it, Darcy,” I say, and her eyes flare, but she does.
“So you and Austin are talking now,” I say to Susie, exhaling, trying—desperately—to pick this news up and set it aside, distract myself from the gravity of the moment, because the weight of it is simply too much. “That’s a good thing, Suse,” I add, because I can’t help myself.
“Sort of, I guess.” Susanna shrugs, her seat belt shifting on her shoulder. “I made the mistake of pouring him a glass of wine last night when he dropped the kids off, and he took it as some sort of invitation. He tried to make out with me.” She erupts into staccato, vibrant laughter, as if there were anything funny about the idea of her estranged husband, the one man she’d devoted herself to since high school graduation, making a pass at her in their old kitchen. But because I am so desperate to taste a morsel of distorted joy, I join her, my eyes focused on the road, the rest of my face cramping with pained, unrelenting, sick, ironic glee. She doubles over, tears running from her eyes, at the inanity of the situation, and I picture Austin, with his brash swagger and his mauling hands, trying to paw Susanna over a glass of Chardonnay, falsely convincing himself that he ever stood a chance. Even Darcy joins in, because while there is nothing truly funny about any of this, our laughter is infectious, like a plague.
“Man, remember a time when the only thing in the world we wanted was to make out with those guys?” I inhale at the memory of driving down to the lake with Ty and pressing myself up against him in his truck, or of lingering on my porch, eking out one last minute before my curfew, tasting his salty mouth in mine, and suddenly, here in my old SUV with my broken best friend and my lost, wounded sister, nothing is funny at all. We all clip our laughter, as if a suction cup inhaled the levity right out of us. “But anyway, try to remember that time, Susie. Maybe you can forgive him.” Because if they can be okay, maybe we can also, all of us, the four of us, be okay, I think, until I hear Ashley Simmons, a tick in my ear. “Silly Tilly Everett! Like husbands and babies are the answers to anything!”
“Hey, listen, you guys will figure this out. Us? I don’t know,” Susie says, flipping the radio back on, just as I pull up to school. “Seattle isn’t so far. You can do weekends, and then he can be here for the off-season.”
I don’t answer, because while I don’t know much about what is unraveling, I do know that I’m not interested in sharing a life with my husband solely in the off-season. The question, I mull to myself as we step toward Principal Anderson’s office and Darcy takes a left down the east hall toward the music room, is why my husband doesn’t know this, and if he does—and I’m certain he does—why he’s moving forward anyway.
When Darcy and I arrive home, after Anderson agrees on Grease, rolling his eyes and seeming like he’d rather be anywhere than bartering his options for a high school musical, my father is planted on my front porch swing. Ironic, I think. It was, after all, this very swing on which I first discovered the depths of his drinking when I was seventeen and he was numb to the world around him, a beached whale listing ever so slightly back and forth, while I ushered my eight-year-old sister—home from school early with a raging stomach flu—past him and upstairs, where she’d be none the wiser.
When Dad bought this house for Tyler and me, he also bequeathed us the swing from my childhood home, a memento of his lingering love for my mother, of the memories they built nurturing their marriage during quiet twilights over their many years together. Of course, it’s a memento of a hell of a lot more—at least to me—but I’ve found a way to bury those memories, and yet today, they pop out, uninvited, a champagne cork in a silent room. He waves to us, and Darcy, still strapped in her seat belt, grunts in reply.
“What are you going to do about him?” she asks.
“Keep him here for now. Until Ty gets back and we can form a plan,” I answer, quieting the engine, enjoying a gasp of silence. “He seems a little better, though,” I add.
“It’s been, like, half a week,” she says, scorn drenching her words.
“And he hasn’t touched a drink. That’s something.”
“So this is the plan? Count the days that he hasn’t been drinking and hope that it keeps up?” She hurls open the passenger-side door but makes no move to get out, so eventually the alarm starts dinging, a sharp, constant beat that worms its way into my temples. I think of Tyler with each beep—Beep-Tyler! Beep-Tyler! Beep-Tyler!—and try to consider how I can talk him out of this ridiculousness, how I can change the future, turn the clock back, only not turning the clock back, turning it ahead or sideways or something! What can I do to shift everything so that what I saw won’t be what I’m forced to see when it actually happens?
“Shall we?” I say to Darcy when the beeping gets to be too much, and then together we purge ourselves with expansive, cleansing breaths, each for our own reasons, unsnap our seat belts in unison, and slog inside. Darcy shuffles down the walk ahead of me, her feet sliding over the crimson bricks, in no hurry to greet our father, when the front door opens and Dante emerges from behind it.
“Shit,” I hear her whisper, loudly enough that he likely hears it too.
“Hey,” he says, offering her a weary, half-cocked grin. “Your dad told me you’d be here soon, so I waited it out.”
“How’d you know where I was?” Darcy stops abruptly at the bottom step, and I nearly collide with her.
“Pretty obvious.” He shrugs, then stares at his beaten navy Converse. Darcy offers nothing, no reciprocating words to ease his discomfort.
“Hey, Dante,” I say finally from over Darcy’s shoulder, then brush past her to kiss his pallid cheek. “It’s been a while. Nice to see you. Want to stay for dinner?” I can almost sense Darcy impaling me from behind at the suggestion.
“Oh, no thanks, Tilly. But thank you. I actually have rehearsal tonight.” He scuffs his toes against the porch railing; his eyes wander up to meet mine, then dart away.
“How’s the band going?” my father chimes in. I’d forgotten he was there, and given the way that Darcy shivers when he speaks, so too had she.
“Good, good, thank you, Mr. Everett. That’s actually why I’m here.” He focuses on Darcy, and I notice how easily he’s able to match her gaze, as if she’s the tonic that soothes him. “I left you four messages,” he says.
“Battery’s dead.” She shrugs, and now she’s the one who’s discombobulated, whose hands duck into her pockets because she doesn’t know where else to put them, whose nervous tick of chewing her bottom lip reveals itself.
“Well, whatever. We have a gig next Wednesday night.”
“I can’t make it,” she says too quickly.
“Yeah, I figured as much. That wasn’t what I was saying. I thought you might want to play it,” he says, exasperated. “It’s a good gig—Oliver’s—and you could fill the place. We’d split the money.” He pauses. “Which I know you could use.”
She turns her right foot inward and considers it.
“You should do it, Darce. I’ll round up my Elks buddies and we’ll make a night of it,” my dad says.
“You’re not stepping foot in a bar!” she snaps, a little too virulently, a little too exposed.
“She’s right, Dad,” I say as he excuses himself inside.
“Look, Darcy, I know why you didn’t call me back,” Dante says.
Rather than respond, she offers him a hard stare and then thumps up the wooden plank steps and glides past both of us.
“This isn’t about you and me,” he says, sighing. “We need to fill the house if we want them to ask us back. And besides, you never met an audience you didn’t like.”
“Fine,” she says, turning back toward him. “I’ll do it. Just don’t think I’m sleeping with you again afterward.” The metal slams against the door frame, and Dante turns a deep shade of crimson.
“Don’t worry,” I say. “I hear much worse in my office at school.”
He sighs. “This wasn’t about her and me,” he says,
as if the more times he repeats it, the likelier it is I’ll believe it. Or he will. I know that trick, oh yeah, do I know that trick. As if he couldn’t have passed up a gig or found someone else to play with. As if I haven’t watched him painfully pine for her, excusing her various misdeeds, her stormy behavior, her dismissive attention, for the better part of their adult, or nearly adult, lives. We’re not too different, Dante and I, I realize.
“I’m sorry,” I say, rubbing his shoulder before heading up the stairs myself.
“Not your fault.” He shakes his head and offers a pathetic sliver of a smile. That’s true, it’s not. I consider. And yet here I am, like always, apologizing.
“I’ll see you Wednesday,” I say from the door. “We won’t miss it.”
“Tyler will make it?” he says, without a sniff of a motive, without any complicated meaning behind it. “I heard he’s being recruited at the UW.”
“You heard?” I ask, my surprise betraying me. I didn’t even realize I used “we.” “I.” “I” is what I meant, of course. I won’t miss it. Though Tyler won’t miss it either. We. I. Us. Two. One. Does it really matter?
“Everyone knows.” Dante shrugs. “Pretty awesome. Coaching for UW.”
“Word travels fast,” I say, my vision reverberating: the U-Haul, the packing, the boxes, the damp, depressing beat of the steady rain. What can I do to rewind that? What can I do to make that record skip, throw it off course?
“You know this town.” He shrugs. I nod because I do. There are no secrets here. “Anyway, still pretty awesome. And I don’t even care about stuff like that. I hope it works out for you guys.” He strides toward the street. “Anyway, thanks. See you Wednesday.”
His skinny frame lopes down the block, fading smaller, then smaller still, until I see his doll-sized figure exit on a side street. Though of course, I remind myself, it’s not an exit at all. Not out of here, anyway. We’re all stuck. For once, maybe Darcy is right.
eleven
On Saturday, I wake up to my underwear sagging—clinging and uncomfortable—and as I mope to the bathroom, I know this can mean only one thing. I tug down my underwear and yes, there it is, a quarter-sized stain, ruby red and nearly a perfect circle, reminding me, irrationally, of cranberry sauce. Because, I suppose, as I splash cool water over my cheeks and stare at myself for a beat too long in the mirror—my puffy, exhausted eyes, my sallow cheeks—a Thanksgiving side dish is much easier to stomach, figuratively, of course.
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