The Gap Year

NOVEMBER 4, 2009



Tyler and I went to the quarry yesterday and again today.

I tell Mom that I have a new friend, Shaniqua, and I am going to her house every day after school. To work on a physics project. Study for a Spanish test. Swim in her pool. I tell her that Shaniqua’s father is an obstetrician and her mother is a lawyer. As expected, Mom is so thrilled that I have not only a friend, but an African American friend, that she doesn’t ask any questions. Like what Shaniqua’s last name or phone number is. Or where she lives. Or how, exactly, I met the Huxtables.

Here are the things Tyler and I do not talk about: College. Football. Our “plans for the future.” His dad. My dad. His mom. My mom. Why he lives with Coach Hines. How weird it is that he is hanging out with me.

Here are the things Tyler and I do talk about: Whether you can double-punch on old VW Beetles in Slug-a-Bug or just on convertibles. Whether Mister Rogers or Sesame Street was better. The best way to pull a Band-Aid off. Whopper or Big Mac? Worst sore throat you ever had. Worst sunburn. Best way to keep fireflies alive in a jar. Whether my feet with the creepy middle toe freakishly longer than the big toe are grosser than his feet with the disgusting permanently yellow big toenail.

Here are the things Tyler and I do at the quarry: play.

No one would believe that that is all we do. That Tyler Moldenhauer would take a girl, an ordinary girl no one remembers knowing, to the quarry and just play like a couple of kids. We jump off the cliff holding hands and hang in the air, suspended in sunlight. We dive under and float in the metallic water, suspended among the glittering bits that sparkle around us like we are swimming through the Milky Way.

Halloween was last Saturday. I try to remember how many years it was hot when I trick-or-treated and how many times I wore a parka over my costume. It seems about fifty-fifty that the weather will hold. I don’t want the warm weather to ever end. I want to stay suspended with Tyler forever.





FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010



Since I don’t have the energy or money for anything other than the first convenience store we pass, we pick up a suitcase of Milwaukee’s Best, which meets my very exacting standards of being available, alcoholic, and cheap, and head to my house. I fill a cooler with ice, plant the beer in it, and Dori, Pretz, and I install ourselves on the front porch.

Something about the day’s combo platter of shocks has left me boneless. Semicoagulated in a rocking chair with my feet planted on either side of the cooler, by the time I’ve drained my first Beast in one long glug, I am wondering why I don’t do this more often. Just sit out on my own goddamn front porch and take the world in.

Next to the great room and the theoretically great schools, the porch—sweeping across the front of the house, raised up above the street by seven broad, concrete steps—was this house’s biggest selling point. As the Realtor showed Martin and me around, I imagined Aubrey and her little friends—sweet, pigtailed girls—coloring on the porch, cooled on a hot summer day by breezes rolling up the sloping yard, while I served lemonade to their mothers. I bought two rockers and a glider and figured I’d keep adding seating once our porch became the spot where everyone gathered on lazy evenings to share kindly gossip and watch the kids chase fireflies through the endless summer nights.

Who was I channeling? Aunt Bee?

We moved in and I found out that, although, yes, there were kids galore, none of them ever had a single unscheduled moment. On summer evenings and every other second they weren’t in school, they were getting tutored or coached or enriched. None of them walked or rode bikes the five blocks to the blue-ribbon elementary school. The only social interaction I enjoyed on my porch was catching glimpses of kids strapped into minivans while they waited for the garage door to go up before they disappeared inside. This was mostly because, though the appearance of a stranger made antennae bristle as if a red ant had wandered into our black ant colony, every parent in Parkhaven Country believed they were one unguarded moment away from seeing their offspring on the back of a milk carton.

I pass a beer to Dori and methodically start in on my second.

“On the bright side,” Dori says, “you can sell the house now.”

I give a little snort to indicate how impossible that is.

“No, seriously. What’s stopping you? You sell the McMansion, get some adorable, tiny little place. Maybe not actually in the city, but close to signs of intelligent life. Why not?”

For a lovely ten, maybe twenty seconds, selling the house seems like an actual possibility. All it takes, however, to remind me why that is impossible is to lift my butt cheeks off the rocker. Which I do when I reach for cerveza tres. Just this slight change in my viewing angle allows me to look up and down the street and see seven For Sale signs planted in seven yards. Three of them are being circled by the foreclosure vultures. Every time there’s another round of layoffs at the computer-chip factory or the price of gas goes up and those commutes into the city become more expensive, another sign appears.

Dori leans forward, follows my gaze, and sees what I see. “Oh, yeah. Forgot about that little detail.”

After a malt-enriched meditative moment, I muse, “I read this book about a British expedition in 1845 to explore the Northwest Passage. Or, actually, not a book so much as a book review. In any case, this expedition sailed into the Canadian Arctic looking for the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They couldn’t find it. But the captain was a stubborn, classic male-answer-syndrome guy who would never admit he was wrong, so he refused to let them turn back. Winter set in. By the time the captain admitted he might possibly have been the teensiest bit wrong, massive planks of ice had frozen their boat in place and escape was impossible. All the men died hideous deaths—starvation, exposure, scurvy. They found corpses with black tongues, which showed that a lot of them had succumbed to lead poisoning. There were knife marks on some of the bones. Which meant cannibalism.”

“What’s the title? I need a fun summer beach read.”

“I’m like that expedition. I waited too long. I am frozen in place.”

Dori stands. “Well, much as I’d love to stick around and tenderize, then eat you, Gary’s waiting and I need to pick up a few things. If you know what I mean.”

She bumps her eyebrows up and down. I do not need the hubba-hubba signal to know that what she means is that she and her beau are going to stick a variety of preordained items into each other’s orifices. What she really means is that she is a wild, lascivious lady of untrammeled wants and desires who cannot be tamed into suburban beigeness. Since she’s mentioned it before, I know that one of the things she will be picking up is lactose-free whipping cream, because dairy does unmentionable things to Gary’s bowels. I would never tell Dori this, but no matter how many ball gags and gel-filled dildos might be involved, once your partner is apprising you of his or her digestive inconveniences, you’ve moved out of untrammeled territory.

“Are you going to be all right?” Dori asks, pulling the keys to her Toyota RAV4 parked in the driveway from her pocket.

“Is there an alternative?”

“I’ll stay if you want me to.”

“No, go. I’m just going to sit here, get drunk, and wait for the phone to ring.”

Dori leans down, gives me a hug, and, for a couple of seconds, I cling to her. She whispers in my ear, “You raised a great kid, Cam. She was great before this happened. She’ll be great when it’s all over. She is going to have a great life. A great big, wonderful, happy life.”

“Thanks. Twyla too.” I reseal our covenant of denial and wishful thinking by adding the obligatory, “They’re just on their own timetables.”





NOVEMBER 5, 2009



On Thursday the first cold front of the year blows in. At the quarry a chilly wind pebbles the surface of the water. We jump in anyway. And play until our lips turn blue. We drive home with the heater on full blast. The windows steam up from the cold air outside and our wet clothes inside.

It is obvious by now that Tyler is not attracted to me and that is fine. Most likely he is gay and squelching rumors by taking a girl out to the quarry. A girl that none of his friends will ever talk to. I don’t care. Our suspended moments are better than any of the so-called sexual encounters I’ve had where I did things that I made myself believe I wanted to do. Then worried whether I was doing them the right way and whether my body was good enough. My whole life Mom has drilled into me that sex is all natural and beautiful and nothing to be ashamed of.

Playing with Tyler at the quarry feels the way she always told me that sex was supposed to feel.





FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010



Dori’s departure stirs Pretzels. She hobbles to the edge of the high porch and sniffs, her black nose twitching as she picks up the scent of a squirrel she can no longer see. Some ancestral synapse is triggered by the smell; she growls her muted, grumbling growl and her legs twitch.

“Steps, girl! Steps!” I yell, remembering Black Ice Night. I jump up and lead Pretzels to the stairs at the middle of the porch. Once she’s positioned in front of them, I hoist up her arthritic hindquarters, and as she puts one trembling front paw down, then another, I help her down to what remains of the grass. She settles onto a sunny patch and pokes her nose into the breeze.

I return to the porch and watch my sweet old girl. She drops her big head onto her front paws and discovers a black-and-white mockingbird feather lying in the grass beside her. After chewing on it for a bit, she picks it up, waves it around in the air as if she’s conducting a tiny orchestra, lets it fall, rediscovers it a moment later, snaps the feather up, and starts conducting all over again.

With Dori gone, I am free to play my favorite game, Time Travel. I return to my last Christmas with Martin and replay the way it really happened: Two-year-old Aubrey unwrapped BeeBee and hugged her to her chest. I hugged Martin to mine and pleaded to know what I had to do to keep our marriage together. He told me, “Join Next and raise our daughter as a Nextarian.”

Aided by my fourth Milwaukee’s Best, I rewrite that history into an alternate reality in which, instead of my informing my husband that he had gone totally f*cking insane and that my child would be raised in his science-fiction pyramid scheme of a cult over my dead body, and him then walking out of our lives, I say, “Hallelujah, sign me up, baby!” And Martin, Aubrey, and I live happily ever after in this and the next ninety-nine incarnations.

In the Beer Five alternate version of reality, I respond by finding the most bloodthirsty hellhound of a divorce lawyer ever created in the cyborg attorney lab, so that when Martin comes to the table flanked by a couple of Next’s legal pit bulls, and announces that he has signed over all his worldly assets and basically indentured himself for all eternity, in exchange for “the church’s extraordinary generosity” in putting a big chunk down on the Parkhaven house and setting up an irrevocable trust that will fund Aubrey’s college tuition, provided he never has any contact, whatsoever, with either of us again, my goons would have taken Martin to the mat. Or at the very least written a document that couldn’t be codiciled into irrelevance.

The Beer Six version of history, oddly, takes me back to an unusually clear-eyed replaying of events pretty much exactly as they happened. I got pregnant. We bought this house. I began my suburban exile. I quit my nursing job in my sixth month. Martin was miserable at his job in the city, where programming, a skill he’d developed as a hobby, an intriguing mental challenge to supplement his interest in systems of logic, had become his whole life, the thing he could do that made money.

Then “some guy” at work told him about Next. From the beginning, Martin was open about his interest and committed to getting me involved with him. At that point, I knew nothing about Next except that a few starlets with more silicon than gray matter were ardent followers. But I could see that Martin was benefiting from it. At first in ways that I actually liked. Though he was home less and less, when he was here there was more and more of him. Just as my belly was swelling, Martin began filling his body in a way he never had before. He’d always been tall, but for the first time he seemed tall. And he’d always had a deep voice, but before Next he’d modulated it, swallowing his words so that I’d have to lean in close to hear what he said. His timidity had forced me to make more and more of the decisions—like having a child and buying this house—for both of us.

After a few months of Next, though, Martin the Soft-spoken was transformed into a Rush Limbaugh clone. Suddenly his every utterance was delivered in a bone-rattling bellow with a majesty and volume that reverberated off the high ceiling of the great room. His new assurance made everything he said sound obvious and irrefutable, like he was explaining gravity and I was an idiot if I didn’t agree.

Which is why, when I was eight months pregnant and he said, “Cam, the best thing you could do for yourself and our child is to go to the Hub and take the basic Next course,” I agreed. “The Hub” was the converted nursing home that “the congregation” met in for classes and exorbitantly expensive “counseling sessions.” It was where Martin had taken to spending all his lunch hours and most evenings except for the few when I put my foot down and made him stay home and do something like assemble the crib, whereupon he’d act like a teenager who’d been grounded. So I thought, Why not? I tried to look upon it as something we could do together, a shared interest like salsa-dancing lessons or a wine-tasting class.

The course turned out to be two parts assertiveness training combined with one part three-year-old’s birthday party. We had staring contests in which the first to blink was the loser. We played Simon Says and took turns ordering other class members to “Go stand on the chair!” “Jump up and down!” “Go drink out of the aquarium!” The entire time our trainer kept yelling that if Next technology was not causing us to be filled with “bright surges of energy” and “connecting with our own power source,” we should leave. Walk out. Right that very moment. Then the class, champing like hounds on the hunt, waited for the backsliders among us to reveal themselves. It was a canny crowd-control intimidation tactic. Each time you didn’t have enough gumption to declare yourself an infidel by walking out, you were, essentially, doubling down on Next; you were publicly announcing, “I believe.”

For our final challenge, the trainer took away all our money and commanded us to go out into the city and use our newly honed mastery over time, space, and the unenlightened boobs of the non-Next world to get something for free.

I drove to the nearest convenience store; bought an Almond Joy with the five-dollar bill I’d slipped into my bra; went to the library; discovered that all material about Next was kept under lock and key, since adherents considered it their sacred duty to steal or destroy anything negative about the church; gave the librarian my driver’s license to hold while I perused what books and articles they’d been able to replace; researched Next; concluded that it was one Spanish Inquisition away from being the most dangerous group ever to pass itself off as a religion and that I had to save Martin and our unborn child from its patent idiocy.

When Martin came home that night—late as usual because he’d had to attend “muster” at the Hub—I expressed the belief that he was being brainwashed by a dangerous nutball cult and demanded that he quit. Now. For me. For our child. For us.

“Cam, how do I make you open your eyes?” he’d asked, his own eyes glittering the way they always did after a session at the Hub. He spoke quickly, with a hint of mania. By that time, even his smell had changed. It was sharper, almost acrid. “I want my life to be a masterpiece. I want your life to be a masterpiece. I want the life we create together with the child we have created together to be a masterpiece. Next has the tech to give us that.”

“Martin, Next is a scam. A giant, snake-oil-drenched scam.”

With all ten fingers, Martin pointed to his eyes and demanded, “Is this a scam?”

“Martin, your vision was never that bad to start with.”

“But bad enough that I needed glasses when I drove. I ran Opt Tech and look.” He indicated his glasses-free face. “Do I wear glasses anymore when I drive?”

“No, but that doesn’t prove to me that you no longer need them. In fact, I might be endangering my life and the life of our unborn child every time I get in a car with you.”

He shook his head at that, more sad than angry. “There is something worse than not being able to see, Cam. Imagining that you can see when you are totally blind.”

“Oh, my aching ass. Did you really just say that?” I laughed. Laughing was a mistake.

“You dismiss Next at your own peril,” Martin intoned in the Old Testament voice he’d developed. “And the peril of our entire planet. I know this for an absolute, indisputable fact: The only way we will survive as a species is if we all learn and implement Next tech as expeditiously as possible.”

“Martin, please, I need you. Our child needs you. Come back to us. Quit Next.”

“If I had a kidney disease would you beg me to stop doing dialysis?”

“You don’t have a kidney disease.”

“I might as well. Without Next I’d be just as useless to you, to myself, and to our child.”

We argued until dawn. I dragged out all the articles about Next that I’d Xeroxed, along with warnings about tactics cults use to brainwash converts and separate them from their families. Martin tossed back brainwashed-cult rantings that separated us more and more.

In very short order, we became a virulently hostile interfaith couple, Martin turning from me to protect the bright jewel that was the beliefs I ridiculed. Me hanging on, clinging to the hope that the instant his child was placed in his arms, Martin would come back to us.

I was pregnant through one of the hottest summers on record. At night, I stopped sleeping. During the day, I sat on our porch and pretended to work on the online course I was taking to upgrade my nursing diploma to a bachelor’s-in-nursing degree. But every time my eyes hit terms like “concepts of management” or “collaboration with an interdisciplinary team,” they glazed over. My grandmother Bobbi Mac had died that spring, and all I wanted was to be with her and her nurse buddies in North Africa. With Pee Wee, Speedy, Slats, but especially I wanted to be with Crazy Mac. I wanted nursing to be having a gang of friends who put on talent contests and watched out for one another. Mostly, though, I wanted to walk into a room where a person was hurting and make it better. Right away. Not after “collaborating with an interdisciplinary team.”

I might have stuck it out with nursing if I hadn’t been pregnant. Or not in despair. Or not lonelier than I’d ever been, trapped out in the suburbs where the one person I knew had turned into a stranger. But I was pregnant, lonely, and in despair, so instead of studying, I sat on the porch and rocked, like I am rocking now, while Martin spent his days in the city working at a job he hated and his evenings at a place he loved more than me, and I watched our new suburban lawn parch and turn to straw.

Right after the delivery, when Martin and I were alone in my hospital room for the first time since two became three, he picked up our child, and the love that flooded his face was so undeniable that I knew the spell had been broken: Martin had been returned to me. To us.

He cooed to our child, bounced her gently, sniffed her head. We decided to call her Aubrey after a song that Martin used to sing to me because it was about a “not so very ordinary girl or name.” Aubrey’s eyes flickered beneath blue lids closed tight against a painfully overlit world as he stroked her head. I thought we were going to be all right.

But Aubrey had colic and screamed eighteen hours a day. Martin begged me to allow him to take her to “a practitioner” at the Hub. “We do astonishing work with gastro issues,” he said, but all I noticed was that he said “we” when he talked about Next, and I couldn’t recall the last time he’d used “we” when he talked about us.

Martin spent more and more time at the Hub. In addition to sleeping, I stopped eating and having rational thoughts.

When I sobbed through Aubrey’s twelve-month well-baby visit, the pediatrician sent me to a psychiatrist who put me on Lexapro. Clearly, I was too far gone for Lexa-amateur. Martin promised that if I swallowed the same fistfuls of Next-produced vitamins and supplements that he did, I would have no need for the “lobotomy in a bottle” dispensed by psychiatrists. I suggested that he was a deranged lunatic who should either stop actively torturing me or get the hell out of my life.

Martin begged me to try to understand. He bared his soul. He wept. We had desperate, amazing sex that I thought signaled a new beginning, but was actually a long good-bye. By Aubrey’s second birthday, Martin was in the process of turning over all his worldly possessions to Next. At the divorce hearing, I learned that it was an extraordinary concession on “the church’s” part to let Martin hold out enough money to put a big chunk down on the house and set up the college trust fund. Of course, Next made Martin promise in return that he would have no further contact with Aubrey or me. And if he ever did, that would lead automatically to the forfeiture of the trust. And, for the next sixteen years, there had been no contact.

It is obvious now, though, that he and Aubrey had been in contact. Just one more of the apparently limitless things my daughter did last year that I knew nothing about.





NOVEMBER 6, 2009



Friday is cold enough that Tyler wears his corduroy jacket and we don’t jump in the water. We take chunks of limestone and scrape powdery outlines of each other into the flat slabs of black granite at the top of the quarry. We do a crime scene story, each of us changing positions and taking turns outlining the other.

We start with our dead bodies. Corpse outlines. Then we draw our victims’ bloody fight. We keep adding scenes, backing the story up in time. The last scene we draw, which is really the first, where it all starts, is a kiss. I lie down on my side first and Tyler draws around me, being especially careful to trace my profile as I lean forward, head tilted up. Then he lies down. I trace around his back, his butt. I reposition his head and trace his profile. Limestone powder dusts his jacket, his jeans, his chin. My fingers touch his lips as I outline them. In the drawing our lips meet.

We step back and look at the whole story wobbling across the uneven surfaces. I try to figure out which one of us made it into a lovers’ quarrel but can’t. It is like the Ouija board, where the answer just magically comes out of two hands touching. Maybe he was imagining that he was outlining a guy. That’s fine. I had my own imaginings.

Tyler takes the back route home, a narrow, twisty road that used to be lined with farms and small ranches but is now deserted. We are deep in the country when he points to a road with weeds growing up through the cracks that has an old rusty mailbox beside it and says, “I used to live down a road like that one.”

“You did?” I try not to sound too interested. He never talks about growing up and I don’t want to scare him away from telling me stuff.

He glances in the rearview as if the only way he is ever going to look at that mailbox is if it is far behind him. He watches until it is lost in the darkness, until he has a safe head start on it; then he says, “Yeah,” in a way that makes me know that that is all he is going to say.

We slide onto the freeway. He turns on his player. Carrie Underwood. In a million years, I never would have imagined that I’d be driving around in a pickup truck with a gay football player who likes Carrie Underwood. And that it would be more fun than anything else I have ever done in my life.

I try to sound casual as I lift one of the crutches stowed behind us and go, “You’re not using these anymore.”

“I never really needed them that much. I kind of strung this out a little.” He pauses. “But Coach says I have to come back to practice Monday, though, or he won’t play me in the game next Friday. So—”

I rush to save us both from embarrassment. “No problem. It’s cool. It was fun. Maybe we’ll hang out again sometime.”

“Sometime? Uh, yeah. Like at practice Monday. I mean, if you want to.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, ‘really.’ Why not?”

“I don’t know. Guess I thought that what happens at the quarry would stay at the quarry.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know. I just did. The quarry … You know. It’s the quarry.”

“Yeah. I wish my whole life could be the quarry. Just simple like that. Like we could all be some primitive tribe that existed at the quarry hunting and gathering and shit.”

“I know. Like you either kill the rabbit and eat or you starve. That day. Just that day. Not like, ‘Oh, I have to figure out a whole strategy for eating for the rest of my entire life. And I’d better be hunting at only the most exclusive hunting spots or the whole tribe will think I’m a big fat loser.’ ”

“That’s exactly it. Puke, you’re amazing. You are exactly who I thought you’d be right from the beginning.”

“What? What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I guess it means I’m psychic.”

Tyler won’t tell me anything more about who he thought I’d be, just nods, happy about being psychic or right or whatever, then stares out at the landscape like he is trying to figure out how to turn it all into one big quarry.

Tyler has been dropping me off at the corner for the past week so that I can tell Mom that I walked home from Shaniqua’s house. He stops a block from my house and, before I get out, asks, “So? Monday? Practice?”

I have my hand on the door handle. I want to be simple. I want to be the one simple thing in his life, but I can’t not ask. “Not that it matters one way or another. I mean, I seriously don’t care. But, just for curiosity, why are you hanging out with me?”

He faces me, turns the engine off. “I don’t know. You’re fun. I liked it when you busted me for macking on you.”

“You mean when you were all, ‘Hey, baby, I’m Tyler Moldenhauer,’ that time at the attendance counter?”

“Yeah. You treated me like such a creeper. That cracked me up. In fact, the first thing I ever heard you say cracked me up.”

“You mean, after I puked on you?”

“Oh, that was hilarious too. No doubt. But, no, before that. The first time I noticed you I was like, What is different in this picture? Oh right, one girl doesn’t have a giant feather protruding from the side of her head. Then that band director dude—”

“Shupe.”

“Yeah, that dee bag. Such a jarhead wannabe. He is yelling at you that ‘it’s Semper Fi!’ and you come back at him in this total Parris Island DI voice, ‘Not Semper I, sir!’ That cracked me up. And he completely did not get it. No one on the team got it. I got it.”

“So I didn’t have to puke on you to get you to notice me?”

“Hells to the no.” He goes into his skeevy playboy act. “I had my eye on you, girl.”

I play-flirt back at him, purring, “Mmm. Tell me more, my fine playa manwhore.” It is exactly like being with Javier, the gay kid who was my only real friend last summer at Lark Hill. We loved to pretend in front of the other counselors that I had a giant crush on him and no idea that he was gay. It was fun to mess with them, to have some designated representative come over to me and whisper, “We’re worried about you, Aubrey. You do know that Javier is gay, don’t you?” Then I’d pretend to be shocked and in mad love denial and say, “Gay? No! My Javier is not gay! He’s just theatrical!”

I play-slap at Tyler, just like I used to do with Javier, and he jokes back, “How could I resist. You were like the palest person I had ever seen. What did you do all summer? Sleep in a coffin? I thought you were an albino. And that was so sexy.”

“You did not just call me an albino!” I windmill a flurry of bunny pats onto his chest. It is like slapping a saddle.

He raises his hands in front of his chest and I slap at those. “I just had to see those white-rat red eyes up close. Find out what lab you escaped from.”

I accelerate my attack. He squeezes his eyes shut and squeals. It seems irrelevant whether he is gay or not and I kiss him.

Tyler’s eyes spring open. For a fraction of a second, I think he is going to kiss me back. But he doesn’t and I want to blurt out that I know he is gay and I didn’t expect him to kiss me and let’s just pretend I didn’t do that.

He drops his arms. “You are a nice person, A to the J.”

“Nice! That is such an insult. Nice is the most boring thing anyone can be.”

“No, believe me. Nice is not an insult.”

“Well, I’m not that nice.”

“Yeah, you are. You’re so nice that you don’t even know how nice you are, which is why I better make you leave right now.”

I walk home in a state that ping-pongs between ecstasy and utter humiliation. Inside the house Mom ambushes me and asks, “Why don’t you bring Shaniqua over here sometime?”

“Oh, she has to babysit. She’s got two little sisters who fight all the time. And a brother who’s got dyslexia.”

“Bring them all over. Give me a time. I won’t schedule any consultations and I’ll help her watch the little ones.”

“Mom, you always do this.”

“Do what?”

“Try to take my friends over.”

I see the same question going through her mind that is going through mine: What friends? Knowing that she would never actually say the words, I escape before she can figure out another way to grill me.

I am all the way in my room, closing the door, when she yells out, “Peninsula sent you something! It’s from the housing office!” Her voice startles me. I’d already forgotten that she was there. And I haven’t thought once about Peninsula since our trip. I pretend I didn’t hear her, shut and lock the door, and go back to remembering how Tyler’s lips felt on mine.





FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010



Thinking of how Martin and Aubrey have been plotting behind my back does me in. I dig out Aubrey’s pink boom box from elementary school, find her favorite CD—the sound track from Toy Story 2—select “When She Loved Me,” hit “play,” then “repeat.” I am gravid with grief and this song is the Pitocin I need to deliver. As Sarah McLachlan sings in her aching mezzosoprano, “When somebody loved me …” I bury my face in Aubrey’s pillow just the way I imagined I’d do after she’d left for college to build a bright future and I was missing her. Except that now she’s gone from my life and there is no college, no building of a bright future, to comfort me.

She is just gone and my “next” seems empty indeed.

The first time I heard “When She Loved Me,” Aubrey was sitting on my lap because movies on big screens scared and overwhelmed her. She tolerated the frantic action adventures of all the boy toys—Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Mr. Potato Head—but she came to life when Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl doll appeared on-screen. I felt her grow lighter on my lap as she strained toward the screen, drawn into the tale of how Jessie the doll had once been loved by a little girl, Emily. As the years passed, though, Emily grew up, dolls were replaced by nail polish, and Jessie, crumpled and lonely beneath Emily’s bed, was forgotten. I’d thought it was adorable when, after the movie, Aubrey had rushed from the car to her room, found BeeBee, whom she’d been neglecting, and spent the next hour brushing the Puffalump’s purple hair, fastening it with tiny plastic barrettes, talking to the doll the entire time.

I was so certain that I would remember every adorable thing that she’d said that day that I didn’t write it down. And now I can’t recall a single word.

When somebody loved me.

Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl’s song washes over me, the lyrics like a horoscope, a fortune cookie I opened years ago and should have paid more attention to. I agree wholeheartedly with Jessie as she sings about how everything was beautiful when Emily loved her and she had the power to dry her tears. When Jessie the doll sings that every hour she spent with Emily lives within her heart, but that now she is left alone, waiting for the day when Emily would say again that she would always love her, it is my song.

Feeling deeply, satisfyingly sorry for myself is a luxury that I’ve had no time to indulge for the past sixteen years. I am snuggling in to enjoy it when I suddenly switch from grieving about Aubrey abandoning me to remembering when my own mother had the power to dry my tears. When had I abandoned her? When she became ill? When I hit puberty? When my grandmother appeared with her more vibrant version of life? If my mother hadn’t died, would we both have ridden out adolescence until the day when I returned and said that I would always love her?

When Jessie sings about how she stayed the same, but Emily began to drift away, “she,” the one drifting away, becomes Martin. But I am still Jessie and everyone I have ever loved has drifted away and a cartoon movie about discarded toys has become the template of my entire life and I am just going to blubber about it for a while.

I gather Aubrey’s pillow—still smelling like her special “volumizing” conditioner—BeeBee, and Pretzels into my arms and hug them to me. As I am noticing that one part of my bouquet of loss needs a bath and a visit to the vet to get her teeth cleaned, thin shafts of reflected light stream in from the window and play across the wall.

I release pillow, pooch, and Puffalump, and peek outside to trace the source of this heavenly host–esque illumination just as an extraordinary and extraordinarily silent vehicle pulls up to the front curb. The car is silver, stately, and opulent. It looks as out of place on this street as a brontosaurus. Though I’ve never actually seen one, I identify this car immediately: a Bentley. I am equally certain that I know only one person on earth who might be driving such a vehicle: Martin.