“Your life is here,” he says quietly.
“My life is your life,” I cry. But he pales when I say this, the color sliding from his cheeks, his chest visibly tight. He sighs and rubs his hands over his face, then slinks toward the bathroom, the door closing firmly behind him, the lock latch spinning, clicking into place.
Tyler and I never fight anymore. We used to, sure, in our early days, but now it’s so much easier not to. Tyler’s fighting technique back then was the silent treatment, while mine was to glide by our hiccup without even so much as an acknowledgment—If I pretend not to see it, maybe it won’t exist in the first place. Or something like that. I thought it added up to something sort of like that. But suddenly, now, it feels like I shifted the rules of our agreement, of our détente, and I stand alone in our room, unsure of what to do now, now that I no longer have that ability to strap on the blinders that ironically helped us navigate our way.
Finally, the door unlatches. Ty emerges, walks silently toward me, and pulls me next to him on the bed.
“Till, here’s the thing,” he says, looking straight into my eyes, resolved. “I’m thirty-two.”
“I know,” I say. “Like I don’t know that you’re thirty-two.”
“I’m thirty-two and I’ve been here nearly all my life … and I cannot wake up another morning and know that this is all there is for me.”
“What are you talking about? We’re trying to have a baby! That’s what there is for you.” My rage is abating like a punctured balloon.
“That’s not it. Listen to me.” He shakes his head. “I was supposed to be something great. I was supposed to set the world on fire. And … and … and now, I sell mountain bikes to people who can’t afford them and who will never use them anyway. That is what I do: sell bathing suits to mothers for their aqua-aerobics. Do you think this is how I wanted things to go? Can’t you see that this isn’t how I wanted things to go? Can’t you give me that?”
“But we have a great life,” I say, pleading now. “I love our life.”
“I know.” He nods. “I know you do.”
“Isn’t that enough?” Nothing is making sense; his words are annihilating everything. How is that not enough? It is more than enough for me! Why can’t I stop things? Anger has ceded ground to panic, and the room feels too close, claustrophobic, the air around me shoving its way down my throat.
“The thing is, Till—” He inhales sharply. “The thing is, is that I don’t know who I am without you. Without this town.”
So what? I think, but instead I say, “Don’t be ridiculous! You’re the same guy I fell in love with at sixteen. The same guy everyone here loves.”
“But that’s just it,” he answers, and two real tears roll down from each eye, like sperm swimming free. “I don’t want to be that same guy.” He pauses. “Don’t you ever feel this way? Don’t you ever feel the tiniest bit confined?”
I stare at him. Who are you?
“No,” I say firmly. “I don’t. What is there to feel confined about? Why would I need to know who I am without you? I know who I am with you, and that’s what matters.”
“I think other things matter too. I think it matters that we’re able to define ourselves outside of our marriage.” He shrugs. “I … I just can’t do it anymore.”
“Do what? Our marriage?” The anxiety is spinning freely, cascading, a crescendo. What is happening here? Just what in the hell is going on? I wake up one morning and my father is a drunk and my husband wants us to move and my best friend is making out with a man she’s not married to, and I can suddenly see this without actually seeing it! Ashley Simmons’ voice replays itself, an echo in my inner ear. “A gift of clarity, Tilly. It’s what I always thought you needed.” Screw you, Ashley Simmons, screw you and your ridiculous prophecies!
“No, no, no,” he says. His eyes rise to mine, then drop all over again. “Well, I don’t know. It’s this, just this. All of this!” He flaps his arms in a wild circle. “This life, this town, this same old shit, different day. We’ve done this before, been through all of this before. Your dad turning up drunk, your sister crashing on our couch.” He stops to pull together the thread of his thought. “I need some air, you know.” He looks at me now, fully. “It’s only a week. It’s just a scouting trip. We’ll figure something else out. Something where we’re both happy. Where we both feel satisfied.”
I want to respond. I want to say, How the hell did I not know you weren’t satisfied? Where is this coming from? What the fuck is wrong with you? But I find that my words are tucked somewhere inside, frozen in the back of my throat, unable to free themselves to ask what needs to be asked. Back to the old Tilly, who thought if she never confronted anything, maybe she’d never have to fight it in the first place.
We sit in the unnerving silence, and I hear the tick-tick-tick of the hall grandfather clock, until finally Tyler says, “Tilly, I love you. But do you ever stop to think about whether you’re happy? Not just on the surface, but deep down, are you really, really happy? Whether this is really the life that you want?”
“Yes,” I answer quickly, rising to leave before he can see me shatter. “Of course this is the life that I want!”
I rush into the hallway bathroom and plop on the toilet, coiling into myself like a fetus. Because his question stings me in a way I didn’t even realize I was capable of being stung. Because happiness isn’t a goal, isn’t something I strive for. It simply is. My life is happiness; I choose for my life to be happiness, whatever that means, however that is defined. If someone were to ask me if I were happy, I would answer without hesitation, yes. That flicker of a moment of consideration is one flicker too many, a frozen beat that doesn’t need to be mulled: why bother? This is my life. This is happiness. The two are one and the same. This, since I was sixteen and my mother died, is what I did, how I functioned, how I constructed everything around me; as sure as I breathed, I was happy. This is the life that I want, the one that I want. How is it that my husband doesn’t know that?
I tread water through the auditions on Wednesday. Yes, I nod at Susanna, Wally Lambert was excellent if a little bitchy about Darcy’s piano playing, which he deemed too “three-quarter time, which threw me off the second chorus,” and Yes, it goes without saying that CJ will play Sandra Dee. But Susie seems to be enjoying herself well enough, and for this, I’m glad. I ask her again to reconsider forgiving Austin, but she shakes her head no and yells, “Next!” which I know she means for the next auditioner but also uses it as a capper on her life. Okay, I nod, point taken. I’m too broken to argue.
Outside, the clouds are closing in, pregnant, full, poised to explode with torrential rains that our neighboring crops so desperately thirst for, that our pores, so exhausted from the unrelenting heat, will be thankful for.
After Susanna and I have agreed on the casting, I send her home, toting Darcy along with her.
“Thank God,” Darcy says with an extra-zealous roll of her eyes. “Finally, release me already! I have a real show to get ready for.”
I wave them off and then sink into my office chair, the shadow from the impending storm so low it hovers outside my window, a mirror of my mood.
Tyler and I have barely spoken since I dropped him at the airport. I’ve tried to call him, but he’s always on the field or with their ace freshman shortstop or being taken out for beer and wings with the staff. (“I can barely hear you,” he shouted last night. “Did you say you got some cereal?” when, in fact, I had finally announced that I got my period.) And when he did find some quiet time, it was always after I’d fitfully forced myself into sleep, too haunted by the gravity of everything—my father, my visions, my marriage—to really slumber soundly, but annoyed all the same when he called and shook me from my half-dreaming state.
But he’s coming back on Saturday, and I’ve resolved that I will figure out a way to make him stay, find an answer for his feelings of stagnation and a compelling reason for him not to uproot us to Seattle.
T
he box from my father’s basement is nestled under my desk. I packed it into the SUV after my vision of Susanna, lugging its dusty contents up the stairs, tucking it beneath the back-row passenger seat. Now that I have a vague idea of how this whole thing works, I need more answers, need to dig deeper into the how, the what, the why. For someone who has spent a lifetime answering other people’s questions instead of asking my own, this newfound curiosity feels insatiable, powerful almost, a germ in my stomach that’s spreading inside of me, hungry and alive.
I wrestle the box to the sofa, and it lands with a soft thump, stirring up a light puff of pollutants and dust that unkempt teenagers have left in their wake. Tiny fragments of crumbs tumble to the floor, and I kick them underneath the couch for the janitors to deal with later.
A cracking clap of thunder explodes outside, and out of nowhere pellets of rain begin to pound the window, flying droplets eking their way inside the open frame and dripping down the back wall toward the radiator. I drop the stack of photos on a pillow—the ones from that summer, the one with Tyler in his board shorts and his arms held aloft, triumphant—and gingerly unwrap each element of the camera, placing them ever so carefully back on my desk. Here is one lens. And here is another. And here is the flash that I’d sometimes use in the day, just to overexpose the shot and give everything an awesome burst of light, such that it looked angelic, heavenly almost. I turn the lenses over in my hands, shifting the focus wheels—click, click, click—accelerating them until the sounds become meditative, transcendent, and I remember the calm that this ritual used to provide.
Click-click-click. Then faster. Click-click-click-click-click.
I spin the wheels over and over, replaying how easily irritated I was with Tyler when I reached him last night at the bar, with Quiet Riot playing in the background and half-drunk men hooting at some stupid baseball game on the bar TV. I’d mentioned my period but hadn’t even told him about the depressing, demoralizing failed pregnancy test and how he was so far checked out of our life—listening to Quiet Riot over pitchers of beer!—that I had to sit on the toilet in the girls’ locker room, with my baby sister hovering outside the door, and embrace her generosity because my husband, the man who should have been beside me, wasn’t there.
Click-click-click. The camera lens spins easily in my hands. How is it possible that I’ve spent half my life with a man who now seems to be veering so far off course from what I—we—had planned? Click-click-click. I can see into the future now, but how could I not have seen this coming a long time ago? Click-click-click.
Someone clears his throat behind me.
“Sorry, bad time?”
I snap my head up and find Eli Matthews hovering in the door frame, his hands shoved in his pockets, his shoulders curved downward, shaving two inches off of his six-foot frame.
“W-what? Oh, no, hey,” I stutter. “Sorry, just thinking about something.”
“Everything okay?” he asks, stepping inside just a nudge. His brow furrows in concern, and I press back a tornado of tears at the way he has read me so quickly, so effortlessly. No, nothing is okay! Nothing at all!
“Fine,” I say, setting the focus lens down on my desk, batting my left hand. “Just … lost in a thought.”
“Wow, old-school camera!” he says. “I haven’t seen one of these in quite a while.”
“You shoot?” I ask, then remember my premonition of the musical. Right, of course he shoots.
“Went to grad school for it, actually,” he replies, moving closer to finger the lens. “Now, I teach in between paying gigs, whenever I can get them.”
“So that’s how you ended up here? We don’t get a lot of new blood in Westlake.”
“Yeah.” He smiles. “So I’ve gathered. When I said I’d take the job—I was down in Portland shooting a few things for their paper when the agency called—I could tell they were a little surprised.” He shrugs. “But I kind of like it here. People are friendly.”
“We are,” I say in agreement, wondering how one even begins to find a paying photography job, much less make a life of it. Not that it sounded like much of a life for me. It sounded like the life of a nomad.
“But this camera … no one uses this anymore. It’s all digital. I used to love the darkroom, but gone are those days.”
“We don’t have a darkroom anymore?”
“Not that I’ve been told,” he says. “Just a few computers now. Sad, isn’t it?”
“I guess it’s time for a new model,” I answer, moving back behind my desk.
“I have a digital one I’m happy to lend you,” he says. “Give it a test drive before you spring for the real deal.”
“I’d love it,” I say politely, though the thought of relearning what was once so inherent feels burdensome, and I already know that I likely won’t follow through.
“I’ll bring it in tomorrow,” he says. He smiles that open, freeing smile, and something opens in me too.
“Why don’t you bring it tonight?” I hear myself saying unexpectedly. “My sister is playing at Oliver’s. The bar off of Downing Alley? Why don’t you join us?”
He shrugs a happy shrug. “I’ve got no plans. I’ll be there.”
“Sounds good.” I feel my cheeks flush pink.
“Oh, I forgot,” he says after turning to leave, then turning back again. “The entire reason I stopped by in the first place.” He fishes in his pocket and hands me a solitary key. “I had a copy made to the art room. So you’re never locked out again.”
He rests it on the edge of my desk and with a flick of his hand, waves good-bye. After he goes, I clasp it in my palm, wrapping my fingers around so tightly I can feel the honed brass edges embed themselves into my flesh. Finally, I uncurl my hand and look downward. There, right inside my lifelines, are tiny pockmarks, nipping little indents, that alter the look of my palm entirely, shifting the smooth surface to something rougher, something a little more daring, something that might be in need of repair but might be worth exploring anyway.
The skies are cloudless by later evening, the flooding on the streets the only sign of the day’s unrest. A respite from the storms, which, the forecaster warned on the six o’clock news, are going to trail us all week, just before another slamming heat wave spills our way from back east.
By the time Susanna, Luanne, and I arrive at Oliver’s, the bar is a virtual replica of Darcy’s high school yearbook. Nearly every booth is taken, so we ensconce ourselves at a table to the left of the stage with a shoddy view and an oversized speaker sure to muddy our inner ears. Smoke puffs like cirrus clouds; the nubile among us suck on cigarettes that they are too young to yet give up. The creaky wood floor is sticky, beer soaked, a distant reminder of the basement of Ty’s fraternity, the stench of spilled alcohol wafting upward.
I think of Ty and his return home Saturday. How I will wait for him with his favorite meal, spaghetti carbonara, and pretend that I don’t know that he’s going to rescind on his promise, that it won’t be just a week, that he will ask me to abandon Westlake, move to Seattle, because our marriage should trump everything. Maybe it should, I think. But maybe, also, it shouldn’t, an unexpected consideration echoes just as loudly. I will try to pretend that I don’t still remember how Tyler had promised me that we could stay in Westlake forever, how after I nursed Darcy’s fragile psyche back to as close as it could ever get to normal, when she finally started sleeping through the nights again, keeping her nightmares at bay, Tyler swore to me that we’d never have to leave my family, never let them go unguarded on my watch. Because I was out with Tyler that night, the night that Darcy, just ten years old, tucked herself into her blackened closet and held her breath as the meth head sifted through her room, through her life, in search of something he could pawn off as valuable, and she was hoping, furiously, that he wouldn’t find her, hear her whimper, and do something much worse.
I should have been there. Of course I should have been there, but I was instead steaming the windows of Tyler’s truck, screwi
ng his brains out for those few summer months when we were at last together again in between our college semesters, and so, when Darcy finally reached me on the phone at Tyler’s—after failing to rouse dad from his stupor on the couch—so hysterical I could barely understand her, and when I finally collected her at home, both of us shaking, her more fragile than I realized was still possible, I made Tyler promise. And he, rattled and pale, promised himself equally. Promised that we’d be in Westlake forever. That I’d be here to watch over them, over everyone, so no one, my little sister most of all, would ever feel so violated, so utterly neglected again. That Darcy eventually left didn’t change anything, at least not to me. Tyler knows that Westlake is my balm, is the glue that keeps me whole. And yet he wants to leave anyway.
Tina Sacrow, who was three years behind me at State, strides over to take our order, breaking me free from the memory.
“Congrats,” she says, after scribbling down my Coors Light and Susanna’s margarita, straight up.
“I’m pretty proud of her,” I answer. “She’s never actually played a gig in Westlake before.”
“Oh, I meant on Tyler and the new job,” she answers over her shoulder, already on her way to make the rounds.
I stare at the peanut bowl on the table and feel my temples twitch.
“Just wait to talk to him when he gets back,” Lulu says, intuiting my thoughts, though she’s already told me that if given the chance, she’d move to Seattle in the flash of a second. Which of course she would say, I thought yesterday when I told her how sick this whole thing made me, how I wanted to puke my guts out, but by then she’d switched to discussing her morning sickness, her tender breasts, her already too-tight pants. Which only reminded me of how we stood on the opposite sides of the chasm, how my insides were seeping out onto a full tampon while she was busy gestating. You’re not me. You’re not the one who made the promise to take care of everything! I thought before hanging up.
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