Free The One That I Want by Allison Winn Scotch

anniversary of her death, Luanne and I finally picked up the actual pieces, stowing the bulk of her closet in cardboard boxes that we then dutifully hauled down here. Darcy was out cruising the neighborhood on her bike, and my dad was mourning at Shecky’s, a bar within walking distance of our home that has long since closed.
    I haven’t ventured down to the basement in years, and now the boxes are all stacked just as they were from ages before, my teenage handwriting scrawled on the sides:
“Sweaters,” “Coats,” “Shoes.”
    In the half light, I navigate through the archives.
“Shirts.” “Jeans.” “Pants.”
All tucked away in a time capsule, like if he never gave it away, she might still somehow make it back to claim it. I spot another box behind one that says
“Misc.”
and recognize not my own handwriting, but that of my mother.
    “Tilly’s photo stuff.”
A rush of heat rises in my cheeks, the memory of her frail, beaten shell of a self, insistent on taking me shopping for a new camera, and then that same afternoon, when we plopped on the floor in my room, loading the old gear and some old pictures into this very box, the idea to organize my photos and equipment, not to part with it forever. But later, only weeks later, she passed, and with so many other more pressing matters to deal with, I slipped down to the basement and slid the box to the very back corner, where it sat hidden, untouched until now. That second camera, the one she bought for me on a summer morning before she died, smashed one day when it tumbled out of my car, a crack like a storybook lightning bolt right through the lens, and I never worked up the nerve to ask my dad for a new one. A new camera seemed infantile when the very skeleton of my world was shattering.
    A fat film of grime has spread itself across the top of the box.My nose sucks in the dust and just as I’m repressing a sneeze, my cell vibrates in my pocket.
    Tyler. Finally
. I haven’t heard from him since he dropped off the radar and into Nolan Green’s parents’ lake cabin two days ago.
    “Hey, what’s up?” I say, unsnapping my phone and tucking it under my shoulder as I separate the musty cardboard flaps of the box and look inside. Urine-colored newspaper, balled up and decaying, peers back at me.
    “Sorry I haven’t called,” he says. “Reception up here is spotty. And we’ve been on the lake most of the time anyway. You should have
seen
what I hauled in yesterday. It’s on ice. I’ll bring it back for the weekend.”
    I plunge my hands under the newspaper and feel something smooth.
    “How’s your dad?” Ty continues.
    “So-so.” I pause, only half-focused on the conversation, because, truth told, I never enjoy the newly gutted fish that Tyler totes home with him, with their glassy eyeballs and their tiny bones that inevitably poke into my gums when least expected.
    What is this?
My fingers shimmy beneath the surface and tug out a stack of black and white eight-by-tens.
    “How are you?” Ty asks.
    “Fine,” I say. “A little tired, but fine.” I start to tell him about Luanne, but the line crackles, and I hear his voice lob in and out,
“Hel—lo, hel—lo, Til, hel—lo?”
    “I’m here!” I say loudly, my voice reverberating off the damp walls.
    “I can hear you,” he says, clearly now. “So, yeah, anyway, I caught this incredible bass, and oh my God, you won’t believe the stories Nolan has about the team now.” Nolan, because he was never quite good enough to play for the minors, just barely qualified for the bench of the UW team in college and now works in theback office, recruiting new prospects, new hopes, new blood to invigorate them.
    Distractedly, because there were few things I cared less about than Nolan Green—who once got so totally wasted in college that he passed out naked next to me while I was already asleep in Tyler’s bed and didn’t have the decency to apologize the next morning when I rolled over and snuggled