Free The One That I Want by Allison Winn Scotch Page A

with him for a good five minutes until I realized the difference—I flip through the eight-by-tens to a shot of my high school crew that I took down by the lake. It must have been July, maybe early August: Susanna and Austin and Elizabeth Childs, whom I now run into at the post office, and Darren Lewis, who enlisted in the army and came home from Iraq a hollowed-out shell of a man, and of course, Tyler, in board shorts, with his arms flung open in a victory stance. In the background, the lake is a metal gray, with streaks of summer sun bouncing off the ripples. I stare at the sixteen-year-old Tyler and remember the pangs of longing that I had for him that summer. How our friendship evolved into something more for me, and how we’d all convene at the dock after our shifts ended at our summer jobs, and how I’d watch him, as surreptitiously as possible, hoping that one afternoon he’d discover the same pangs inside of him.
    “But it’s pretty awesome here,” he says. “Pretty amazing. Just mostly solitude. Good time to be alone with my thoughts.”
    “I’m sure.” I roll my eyes. As if Nolan Green ever found the solitude in anything.
    And then, out of nowhere, I feel it: the cramp building from my little toe.
Oh, shit
, I think, as the pain snakes its way through my limbs—worming up from my calf to my thigh to my bowels and clamping around my heart until it shoots into my brain, and I feel like my head might implode into a hundred thousand little pieces.
    “Ty!” I say, though it is nothing more than a whoosh of awhisper, and I pray that he can hear me, pray that somehow, he can snap me out of this, snap me back to the present, eradicate the temple-splitting pain. But then it feels like water is filling my ears and the dim basement walls are asphyxiating the air in my lungs, and then I feel the cool concrete floor against my cheek, and I close my eyes and block out the hurt, and then, I feel nothing at all.
    The rain is pit-pat, pit-pattering off of the roof of the SUV, which is parked in the driveway, adjacent to a U-Haul, whose back door is flung open and is half-stuffed with mismatched cardboard boxes and one gray, fraying duffel bag that I recognize as Tyler’s from college. To be honest, I didn’t even realize that he still owned it. He must have dumped it in the back of the hall closet when we moved in, and I must have overlooked it through the years
.
    I am on our sidewalk, staring at the house, the driveway from the outside in. I run my hand through my hair and notice, startlingly, that though the air is pregnant with moisture, I’m dry, bone-dry, an apparition in this reality
.
    Our front door swings ajar and Austin emerges, carrying yet another box. He waddles to the U-Haul, drops it with a grunt, then leans against the vehicle to catch his breath. Tyler comes out a second later, his hands empty, and surveys the truck
.
    “Alright,” he says to Austin, then zips up his puffy down coat, one that I bought for him last winter. “We’re done. Thanks, man.”
    They slap each other high fives and then readjust their baseball caps in unison. It’s then that I notice that Austin’s ring finger is stripped of his wedding band, a tiny and yet enormous naked symbol of where I am, of
when
I am, and
what’s transpired, and suddenly, I’m acutely aware that I’ve once again been thrust into the future, into a time warp that hasn’t yet unfolded
.
    Moving?
I think
. God damn it, we’re moving! How on earth are we moving and where on earth are we moving to?
I tangibly feel my blood race, and I wonder how Tyler got me to agree, what promises he must have made for me to cave, to make such an enormous concession
. Maybe it’s because I am pregnant,
I consider
. Maybe I got pregnant, and we need a bigger house.
I peer down to my stomach, to see if it has pillowed, but no, I am still the me from the past, not the me from the future, so there are no clues to be found. And besides, I remember almost as quickly,