“Darcy!” I yell. “Darcy?” I yell louder.
My blood courses through every limb, every digit, every extremity. I run fast, faster, and the snow gives way, such that just before I reach my mother’s resting place, I am sliding, careening toward her headstone, which I collide into with a thump.
Susanna tails me, catching up from behind.
“Shit,” she says, succinct, accurate, the epitome.
We both cast around for Darcy, for any signs of life, but we are in a graveyard, after all, and if flesh and blood is what we’re looking for, we certainly won’t find it here. I push my hand against my mom’s headstone and wearily rise.
“Darcy!” I scream one last time, because I don’t know what else to do. This is the only place I thought she might be, the only safe haven I could think of.
I sigh and without warning, purging, violent tears appear, tears for this whole thing, this whole shitbag of a mess. They streak down my frozen face, and though I can’t feel them, I know that they are there. I wipe them away with the back of my glove, snot congealing in my nostrils, my lashes sticking together like iced meringues. Susanna huddles close to me and rubs my back until finally the tears abate.
“I’m numb,” I say, starting back toward the car loaded up with the remnants of my marriage.
“Who isn’t?” she responds.
“Good point,” I say.
“So what now?”
Now there’s a question to which, for once in my life, I have no answer.
twenty-four
There is no word from Darcy by the time Susanna leaves the next morning to retrieve the twins from Austin. Dante has rung me twice by 7:15 A.M., after making a second wave of calls to their friends, to the bars that stayed open last night despite the storm, to anyone he can think of. I checked with school security and she wasn’t in the music room, protecting herself behind the safety of piano keys. The bus station has closed because of the weather, and I’d already thought to confirm with the airport, which also shuttered its doors at the first prediction of the storm. I had to be sure, though, because it would be like Darcy, like the old Darcy, to flee straight out of town, a caged bird set free, at the first—well, maybe not first, but certainly at the most arduous—signs of trouble. I have phoned Luanne, who checked the hospital, and spoken with my father, who sounded questionably sober but swore not only that he had not heard from her but that he hadn’t touched a drink, which I asked him in passing, not because it was my primary concern of the moment.
I am on my third cup of coffee when Ashley dials me, on a break from her mother’s deathbed, to lighten my mood about Tyler’s return and unleash a rash of man-hating insults. I stop her midsentence to explain what has happened. That Darcy is gone, and no one knows where to find her.
She falls silent, and I say, “Hello, hello, Ashley, are you still there?”
“I’m here,” she answers, her voice simultaneously more hollow and yet more firm.
“Anyway, sorry, I’m just venting. How’s your mom?”
“You know where she is.” I can hear the hospital paging system announce itself in the background.
“Your mom? Yes, I know where she is. I’m sorry for that,” I say, embarrassed at myself for pouring out my problems to someone who already has them by the barrelful.
“No. Darcy. You know where she is.”
“I don’t. I wish I did, but I don’t!” My voice catches.
“You do. Think about it hard enough, and you do.” Someone says something to her, and she muffles the phone, then returns. “Look, I have to go. Call me later. Think about it. Trust me. Trust yourself. You’ll find her.”
The phone goes dead, static electricity in my ear, and I sink into the couch and contemplate her words. “Think about it. Trust me. Trust yourself.” My eyes scan my broken living room, littered with debris from Tyler’s packing. Discarded balls of shipping tape, scattered broken bits of cardboard boxes, a few errant coins. I move to the mantel, covered with pictures of my old life that I haven’t had the heart or the stomach to take down. Tyler and I at our wedding; Tyler and I at Susanna’s wedding; Tyler and I at his championship game our senior year. I pick that one up, run my fingers over our faces—collectively so innocent, so wrapped up in the possibility of life—and then I promptly chuck it with every last ounce of strength I have, with every bit of muscle mass in my frail, tired body, toward the fireplace.
It shatters with a crack and then slips to the floor, shards every which way, fragments shooting clear toward the rug.
The picture, though, remains intact. It stares up at me upside down, leaning askew against the bricks. I can barely recognize either of us from this angle, though there we are, smiling giddily at the camera.
“Think about it. Trust me. Trust yourself.”
“Oh my God,” I say aloud. “Oh my God, oh my God.” I race out of the room, bound up the stairs, and burst into my bedroom in search of my bag. Eli’s camera is hidden in the depths, cast aside since homecoming and our day in the woods. My fingers vibrate as I tug it out from below my checkbook, below my breath mints, below the prom invitation, below a few wadded-up memos from school that I barely bothered to read.
I power up my laptop, plug in the Nikon, and wait for it to whirl to life.
Yes, I will trust myself, I think as I start to scan through the photos, scan for any signs of where Darcy might be and how I might save her, even though I’ve given up on saving anyone as of late.
I pause on my last shot from the homecoming concert. Darcy is taking a curtsy, the sunlight radiating down on her, her cheeks pressed so high in her wide, beckoning smile that I fall in love with my baby sister all over again. I turned on the flash, unnecessary but all the more illuminating, so the picture is golden, shiny, perfect. I stare and stare and wait for it to come, to come take me, to come rescue me so that I can rescue her.
I feel it now. That pain in my toe, the seizing cramping that overtakes my calves, then my thighs, then my abdomen, then the clutch around my heart, then the breath that seems to press against my lungs, and then, finally, my mind, my brain, my synapses.
“Trust me. Trust yourself.” Yes, maybe I can.
The first difference I notice is that I am not frozen, that my legs aren’t paralyzed as they have been in the past. That somehow, I am controlling it, instead of it controlling me, and so, my feet are weaving in and out of fallen branches, over frozen snow. It is cold—I know this from the puffs of breath that cloud around me as I hike—though I am not cold. Because I am not really here, I am simply moving through space, moving through time, moving through someone else’s life.
These woods are familiar. I stop, planting my boots into the newly fallen snow, and glance around, searching for signs, for bearings. For a moment, I believe that I am back in the same woods as on that day with Eli, but the slope of the hill is less steep, the thicket of trees more dense. Then it comes to me, rushing back to me, with surprise. Surprise that I hadn’t thought of it before, surprise that she would still remember this, because, after all, she was so young. Just nine.
These are the woods, of course, that we used to try to save my mother. As if snapping stolen moments of nature could nurse her back to life. Back when you are nine or even seventeen, you believe in magic, in a healing balm that can make your family complete. Because you don’t know what else to do. And you don’t know yet what else life can do.
But Darcy knows now, and even so, she has wound her way back here. Back to the hidden path that we used to take, up to the tree by the running stream that will now be both dry and frozen, where one day we unwrapped our sandwiches, and guzzled lemonade from thermoses that I’d packed, and in a fit of illicit abandon, carved our initials into a tree. She asked me if Mom would get better, and I told her that I had hope that she would, and then she asked me, in a tiny voice, what would happen if she didn’t. And I didn’t answer, though even now, I remember that I told myself, but didn’t dare to say it aloud, I will take care of her. But I di
stracted her with the knife, and then the carving, and she didn’t bring it up again. And just a few hours later, before we’d even had time to develop our pictures, my mother collapsed on the front porch, and that was the end of that. That was the end of all of it. I hadn’t been back since.
My legs pick up speed, moving below me, jumping over brush, flying over broken logs. I know where she is. Of course, I know where she is. I am the only one who would, and I am the only one who can find her now, who can save her.
Though it has been years, the trees look the same, the paths weaving a familiar pattern, and soon, there she is—I can see a trickle of her purple sweatshirt the same hue as her hair, and then her face, too pale, nearly blue, leaning against the tree, against that very tree. Our initials have been overgrown; the tree’s bark has shed and renewed itself in the last dozen years, and even though we once etched something indelible there, it turns out that you can never be sure what is permanent, what will stick, and what will fade even when you are so certain that it won’t.
“Darcy!” I scream, tears thundering down. “Darcy!” I yell again, arriving in front of her, assessing the damage. Her legs buried in snow, her hands plunged in her pockets as though that might keep her warm.
I scream again and again, but of course she can’t hear me, either because I am a ghost or because she is too far gone, so I find a way to focus back into myself, to force myself into lucidness, into the present day—Trust me, trust yourself—and then, because I am controlling it; it is not controlling me, I snap out of this alternate world and back into my own. Back into my own world, where I might have a chance to save her.
I jolt awake in front of my computer. I check the clock and have lost only fifteen minutes, though I’m so spent that I feel like I’ve been sucked into a time warp that has shaved off months, years even. I want to rescue her myself, but I know that even I have limits. I will need someone strong, someone capable, someone who can haul her out of the woods without hurting us both.
I reach for the phone and frantically dial Austin’s apartment, but it rings four times and clicks onto his answering machine. I try again—Wake up!—but am met with the same result. “Uh, hey, this is Austin. You know what to do.” Beep!
“Tyler! Austin! Wake up! Darcy’s in trouble, and I need your help. Wake the hell up!” I scream into the phone, then linger to see if they do indeed pick up, but no one clicks on the line, so I slam the receiver down and call Tyler’s cell. I’m shot straight into voice mail and am instantly pissed, ragingly pissed, because I know that they are dead weight on the couch, recovering from a three-beers-too-many night while my baby sister withers away in the woods behind my house.
I pause and regroup. Reliable. Capable. My list of men with these characteristics has shrunk to just about zero. But then I think of one more. Yes, there is still one, and he will be awake because, like me, he never sleeps, and he will come because, like me, he wants to matter. I reach for the phone and call the only other person I can think of who might make a difference. Eli.
twenty-five
We find her exactly where I knew we would find her. Eli has thought to call an ambulance that is minutes behind us, and he has also thought to bring blankets. I am toting her winter jacket, which I found balled up at the foot of the guest room bed, and though she is not conscious, she is breathing steadily, and that, Eli says—and I believe him, because he says it like he knows about this sort of thing—can make all the difference. He deems her strong enough to go, then he lifts her in his arms, reminding me of a painting of a savior I once had to study in Sunday school.
As we descend through the woods, toward his old BMW, which he has parked in such haste that it is abutting the curb, and toward the waiting medics, I feel the veil of my guilt descend. If only I’d taken the time to try to uncover the pieces, to glue the puzzle back together. If only I hadn’t been too selfish—and skittish—to look at those pictures, to know what the fates might hold for her. But I didn’t, and I hadn’t, and now, it had come to this.
We trail the ambulance and race to the hospital, where Luanne runs up and pulls me tight, then retreats to call my father. Ashley appears from a side corridor to give me a strong embrace, a sign of confidence that I’ve found a way to finally seek clarity, to use the gift she’s bestowed.
Eli retrieves coffee from the cafeteria and we sit in a cocoon of silence, amidst the blaring cacophony of the emergency room. Doctors are yelling, sirens occasionally whirl outside, angry family members bitch at the administrative staff for not yet admitting their loved ones, for making them wait out their pain in the indignity of these stupid maroon plastic chairs, even though they are mostly in a terrified panic that their husbands or fathers or wives ignored the newscasters’ reports to stay home and take refuge, and instead insisted on driving in this treacherous weather and eventually landed themselves here. None of us ever really stop to consider that the worst can actually happen to us, I think. We always assume that it will be this guy or the other guy, but never us. And then your tires give way on the patchy back road, and an hour later, they find your car flipped in a pasture. This is how life works. Why don’t any of us ever learn?
The doctors have rushed Darcy back behind flapping doors that bear a red sign reading HOSPITAL STAFF ONLY! so the only thing left to do is wait. I made out words like “acute hypothermia” and “severe frostbite,” and Eli told me that they were probably trying to raise her body temperature, to cook her from the inside out, though he used kinder words than those.
“How do you know all of this?” I ask.
“A vacation in the Andes a few years ago with my best friend.” His head drops just a nudge. “It … well, there were some problems.” He starts to say more but catches himself when he gets to the part about a small avalanche. I can see him watching me, watching my fear rise, so he aborts his story and instead rubs my hand. “Better told another time,” he says. “We have enough sad stories for now. Let’s think of better ones.”
I rest my head on his shoulder because I feel like it might teeter off of my neck under its own weight, and I close my eyes and try to think of better ones but come up blank. I am slipping into that transcendent state, somewhere between wakefulness and sleep, when I hear my name shouted from across the room.
I snap open my eyes to see Tyler, trailed by Austin, rushing toward me. They are wearing the same clothes as yesterday, and when he kneels down to hug me, he reeks of old hops and cigarettes. His Westlake Wizards baseball hat covers his matted, in-need-of-a-shower hair, and when he rises, standing in front of me, he reminds me so much, too much, of one of my students. A kid who never grew up. A man-child who never rose to the occasion of adulthood, of everything that adulthood asks of you. Four months ago, this is what I might have loved about him. Now, I cock my head and wonder.
Eli clears his throat and introductions are made: Eli squinting his eyes and assessing; Tyler oblivious to it all, to the undercurrent, the innuendo, the strange man who helped rescue my sister when my husband could not.
“Listen, I should go,” Eli says, kissing my cheek. “I have a houseguest, and she doesn’t know anyone in town.” His words falter. The girlfriend, I think, though I don’t ask. It doesn’t matter; it doesn’t matter enough to ask, because whoever she is, I called him, and he came, and that was enough to ask of him for now.
“Thank you, thank you,” I say again and again because I cannot think of a better way to say it. Tears build and then spill over.
“I’ll check in later, once my friend gets a flight out of here,” he says. The snow had let up by the time we found Darcy, so maybe the town, the airport, the roads, the stores would open back up. Or maybe not. Maybe his guest would be stuck here along with the rest of us. We’re all a little stuck, I think, giving Eli a final hug, watching him lope down the hall to the exit, his lanky torso, his confident stride.
Tyler takes Eli’s place on the row of chairs, my actual husband, who has failed me, swapping in for my surrogate one, who has not. He
links his hand into mine, and turns my face to meet his own, and runs his fingers over my long blond strands, and then presses his lips to the tip of my nose, which is what he used to do way back when, before everything.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and I fight to hold his gaze, to not look away, because I’m not even sure that I want to hear this, not even sure what he’s sorry for. There is so much.
“Okay.” I nod, the easiest answer. I am too exhausted for any other complications.
“I’ll stay,” he says, after I have broken our stare and am focused on the ER doors in front of me, willing a doctor to emerge and promise us that she will be fine, that I didn’t get there too late, that my selfishness wasn’t her undoing. “I’ll stay,” he repeats when I don’t respond.
“Thanks. My dad should be here soon. So the company would be nice. At least until he’s here.” My eyes are frozen on those damn doors. Please open and bring us good news!
“No, listen, look at me.” Something in his voice forces me from my trance. “I’ll stay. Here. With you. In Westlake.” He hesitates, aware of the weight of his words, of how they are flying against everything that he has done, and undone, in the past four months. “At least until Darcy is better. They don’t need me back right away anyway for the off-season. How about that? Let’s start with that.”
I nod. Okay. I don’t really want to think about it now. But yes, at least until Darcy is better. Yes, let’s start with that.
My father and Luanne insist that I head home at dusk.
“Go shower, go get some sleep,” he says, acting like the parent he is. “I’ll stay here for now. She probably won’t wake up tonight anyway.” His throat catches, his eyes instantly glistening. I know that the only person perhaps more eviscerated by this than I am is he, so he tries to absorb some of my pain, my guilt, sopping it up like a sponge, and for once, I let him. We are both complicit in this. And we both know it to be true.
The One That I Want Page 21