The Gap Year

FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010



As he strides across my desiccated front lawn, phone pressed to his right ear, Martin tilts his head toward his left shoulder, the thumb and forefinger of that hand plucking at his sideburn. He made that same gesture the first time he listened to me on the train in Morocco. Seeing it now is like a smell, a song, that plunges you directly back into a perfectly preserved moment. I am young again, nearly as young as Aubrey, and Martin and I are lovers and he smells like bread and sunshine and I want to keep touching him until my fingerprints wear off. And suddenly it is not a memory. It is happening that very second. I start to understand what Dori was telling me about crack cocaine, and order my ridiculous brain to behave.

Down the street some jerk starts a leaf blower and the utterly unique Martin of my youth disappears. Left behind is a generic middle-aged man with a receding hairline in a rumpled suit strutting around my front yard like Kaiser Wilhelm. The leaf blower roars, blocking out Martin’s bombastic voice.

He snaps his phone shut, strides down the sloping yard to the Bentley, and leans into the open window. A second later, the back door opens and a man in his late forties steps out. I squint to see if it’s a movie star. But Martin’s passenger is just some skinny guy with an alcoholic’s pooch of a gut and a weathered face that looks as if he might have spent time living on the street. Martin fishes a set of car keys out of his pocket, dangles them in one hand as he holds his other hand out. The guy reaches around under the back of his shirt and withdraws an envelope from the waistband of his pants. At the same moment the man slaps the envelope into Martin’s hand, Martin drops the keys onto his outstretched palm.

The leaf blower stops. The man gets into the driver’s seat, points a finger at Martin, says, “Okay, then,” in a phlegmy rumble, and starts the car.

In the Next voice, Martin booms, “One last thing.” He tosses his cell phone in the open window. “Wherever you’re headed, and I really don’t want to know, make a lot of calls.”

“Will do.”

The car glides away as silently as it arrived. Martin climbs up the hill, up the porch steps, flops back down on the glider, pops another beer, sucks it down, opens the envelope, takes a slender portion from the stack of bills therein, holds them up—“Every cent I now have in the world”—folds them into his shirt pocket, then hands the rest to me. The limp bills are still sweaty and warm.

“You just sold a car that doesn’t belong to you.”

“Didn’t exactly get blue-book on it, but under the circumstances …”

“I assume that the car is on its way to a buyer who doesn’t care about things like title and insurance.”

“I didn’t go into specifics.”

“How do you even know someone like that?”

“Oh, Cam, the variety of human beings I have been required to deal with over the past sixteen years would astonish you. It takes a lot of very dirty people to keep a religion looking clean.”

“Next isn’t going to be very happy about car theft.”

“That will actually be fairly far down on a long list of things that church management is not happy about. And ‘theft’? After sixteen years of unpaid labor? I’d say they owe me a fleet of Bentleys.”

Martin retakes his spot on the glider, grabs another beer, and we sit in silence, working our way through the suitcase like it is a job. We watch the owners of the houses around us come home from work. Their vehicles return, metal garage doors clang open, car or truck disappears. The rooftops meld into a darkening silhouette against the navy blue sky. When the black crown of the surrounding rooftops blends entirely into the night, first the streetlights, then my paranoid neighbors’ crime lights come on. They illuminate my house and all the surrounding houses like a movie set.

“So,” I ask, “why did you really give Aubrey the money?”

Martin looks down at his hands. His right nostril twitches. It unnerves me that he and Aubrey have the same “tell.” As with Aubrey, it means that he wants to say something, but that it is hard and he worries about how I will take it. And that, quite possibly, he’ll tell a lie instead. Except that after Next, he stopped lying. How can a person who is always right tell a lie, since everything out of his mouth has to be true?

He snorts, holds his beer can up to toast me. “Oh, Cam, you could always see right through me, couldn’t you?”

“No. I could never do that.”

“Well, it’s true that I did want to get Aubrey as much money as possible as fast as I could before I left Next, but also …” He drops the searing laser gaze he’d learned in Next and stares at the beer in his hand as if he were trying to remember what its function is, and mumbles something I can’t hear. His voice has softened back to the one I knew before Next entered his life and turned him into a blowhard a*shole.

“What? I didn’t catch that. What did you say?”

He looks back up at me. “I said I gave my daughter the money because I wanted her to like me.”

The barometric pressure seems to drop just as it does in my classroom when I tell the truth, and all I can say is, “Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh.’ We’d been communicating on Facebook for a few months. I really felt as if we were starting to know each other. Then right around Thanksgiving, it stopped. She wouldn’t answer any of my messages. Wouldn’t explain what was going on. We were really connecting, then it was just over. I was out. It made me frantic. You’re laughing at me again.”

“Sorry, I am so not laughing at you. This is a with-you-not-at-you laugh, believe me. I’m trying not to say, ‘Welcome to my world,’ but welcome to my world.”

For one moment we are parents together and I get a glimpse of how nice it would have been to have an ally.

Martin leans back, pushes the hair that has fallen forward out of his face. He used to be vain about his beautiful, curly hair, using more products than I ever did, arranging it just so before we went out, obsessing about which stylist cut it best. Now that it’s thin on top and what curls remain have turned the color of dry garden mulch, he no longer seems to care. Which, in many ways, is more attractive than the overtended curls were.

“Happy Aubrey’s birthday,” he says. He holds his can up. I tap mine against it.

We watch nighthawks dart jagged patterns around the crime lights as they chase insects. Martin finishes his beer, places the can carefully on the porch, slaps his palms against the top of his thighs like a farmer about to get up and go finish the plowing, and asks, “You want to tell me where Aubrey is?”





NOVEMBER 18, 2009



Boundaries. After Mom finds out that there is no Shaniqua, but that there is a Tyler and that she isn’t going to meet him, she suddenly tries to be strict and is all about boundaries. And consequences.

Oddly, though, it is as if her actual physical mass decreases in direct proportion to her volume, so that the more she yells, the smaller she becomes. It is the reversed-binocular thing. The bigger a presence she tries to be in my life, the farther away she recedes. She has now become so distant that she could have been a Polly Pocket. A tiny doll who believes that boundaries and consequences and threats are as powerful as one minute with Tyler.

She tells me how she worries about me all the time. How everything she does is for me. How she moved to Parkhaven for me.

I say, “I never asked you to make me your whole, entire life.”

That knocks the wind out of her so completely that she stops screaming and threatening and her chin quivers and I feel like total dog shit.

10:43 P.M. NOVEMBER 18, 2009



=Hey, you’re back. Fantastic. I’ve missed hearing from you.



=Sorry, Mom keeps taking the laptop away.



=Any reason?



=I’m sure she thinks there is but, no, not really. OK, I actually, really need you to tell me why you left Mom and me.



=Whew, Aubrey, that’s a biggie.



=Uh, no kidding. Try being the one who got left.



=It’s so complicated. It’s taken me 16 years to even start to figure that out.



=Yeah, fine, but in those 16 years, I was a kid growing up, and everyone was always telling me, “It’s not your fault. You had nothing to do with it.” And, surprise! Kind of a bitch to grow up thinking you are completely not a factor in your own father’s life.



=Aubrey, sweetheart. I can’t begin to tell you how hard it was for me to leave you and how much I’ve thought about you over the years.



=OK. I’m gonna go feed Pretz now. Or something.



=Wait. Wait. You’re right. You deserve to know as much as I know. Where do I start? I was born scared. Maybe it’s that simple. Your grandparents didn’t do anything or not do anything to make me that way. I just was. I have always been scared.



=Like worried about everything all the time and can’t sleep, then worried about not sleeping?



=You too?



=Yeah. Thanks for the genes. Keep going.



=It was like walking through life on stilts. Everyone else had their feet planted safely on the ground and I was teetering around way up high, terrified, certain that I was going to come clattering down to earth at any second.



=And you’re going around thinking that that’s just the way it is.



=Oh, sweetheart, I hope that’s not how it is for you.



=A little. Not so much anymore. I’ve kind of figured out how to get my feet on the ground. Deal with the teeters or whatever. Keep going.



=When I was a kid, I believed that everyone around me was just a lot braver than I was. I didn’t know back then that no one else was up on stilts. I thought that my mother was screaming inside when she turned off my Archies cartoons and told me to go outside and play. I thought she was like me and could only breathe when she was watching TV and that she was training me to be tough too. So I went outside and watched and waited for the birds to mass on the clothesline and peck me to death or for zombies to rise from the flower beds.



=Or for home invaders to swarm in your bedroom window. Or for your mother to lose it and drive right off the flyover on the way to school.



=Yeah. Today they would have poured every pill in the medicine chest down me, but back then I got sent to the nice lady who asked me to draw pictures of a house, then tell her why I put my father and mother and little brother in one window and me off alone in a different window.



=I should have gone to that lady.



=Why, Aubrey?



=Also, “complicated.” GTG.





FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010



Cam?” Martin asks again. “Are you going to tell me where Aubrey is?”

I guess Martin can read my tells as well as I can read his. The Cape Cod/badminton scenario was never going to work. “I was hoping you might know.”

“You really don’t know where she is?”

Martin’s alarm offends me. It pretends that this is the only, the first, the worst, of all the crises I’ve faced alone over the past sixteen years. Maybe it is the worst, but it is far from the first.

“You’re the one who funded her disappearance.”

“ ‘Disappearance’?” He actually has the audacity to jump from his seat, to spring into action as if this, this were the decisive moment. “I knew something was not right.” The glider jerks spastically behind him.

“ ‘Disappearance’ is too strong a word.”

“What’s going on? Why are you sitting there? What do we need to do?”

We. Two humans united to protect the one they created. For sixteen years I ached to be a plural.

“Is she not returning your calls either?” he asks.

I don’t answer. What right does he have to know one single thing about Aubrey and me?

He answers his own question. “Of course not. And the boyfriend? Tyler? He’s not answering either, I assume.”

Tyler? He knows about Tyler?

“And her friends? His friends?”

I stare at him with annoyance rapidly accelerating toward the homicidal.

“I’m sorry. That was stupid. I’m sure you’ve called them. And checked the food truck. It’s probably not even worth calling Peninsula to see if she’s registered.”

My temples throb from the hostile, bitter, sardonic responses I bite back. I am both furious that he has such an unearned connection with Aubrey, yet hanging on to the hope that he might be the connection to pull her back to me. So, for Aubrey, I summon Zen Mama and admit what I’ve known for a long time: “She doesn’t want to go to college.”

“She has to go to college.” He states it as an indisputable fact, just the way he had after we came home from looking at this house and I showed him the lousy test scores from Sycamore Heights Elementary. And the insane tuition rates at the private schools. Only then had he finally agreed that we should move because “our child has to go to the best school.” These two moments are an equation that balances perfectly. In both halves, he is a father who loves his daughter more than anyone else on earth. Loves her more than me. More than himself. It is the intervening years that make no sense.

“We’ll locate her and I’ll talk to her.” He announces this with a finality that makes me want to weep.

“Oh, Martin, where have you been for the past sixteen years?”

“Going into the past sixteen years is not going to help Aubrey today. What do we do right now? At this moment in time?”

“God, still with the recycled Buddhism. Okay, Martin, you tell me what we do at this moment in time. Because at this moment in time, if she has one friend I could call and pump for information I don’t know who it is. At this moment in time, even if I could get Aubrey to actually take one of my calls, what do I say to her? At this moment in time, do I take something away from her? I haven’t had anything she wants since I took the laptop away. Do I threaten her? With what? Kicking her out of the house when she’s got a loser boyfriend who’s dying for her to move in with him?”

The glider wobbles as he sits back down. “What can I do? How do I help our daughter?”

“How about not abandon us when our daughter was two years old? How about be here when our daughter got septicemia and I had to drip melted Popsicles into her mouth for a week so she wouldn’t die of dehydration? How about be the person with a deep voice who would take the phone and tell our daughter that this discussion is over and to get her little butt home right now? How about be the person who drank beer instead of Diet Coke and didn’t worry about eating fries and hamburgers? Who didn’t resonate and twang to every tiny mood swing, whose periods weren’t synchronized with hers so you’re both PMSing at the exact same hysterical time? Huh, could you do that? Could you help our daughter that way?”

“Every feeling you have is legitimate and justified—”

“Like I need you to tell me that.”

“And we should spend a few months exploring every one of—”

“You should spend a few months staked out spread-eagled on a fire-ant hill with honey dripped on your balls.” Saying this cheers me up in a way that the six-pack-plus has not. It makes me giddy to blurt out whatever comes into my mind. It lightens me so much, in fact, that I celebrate by popping another top and tossing in, “You are such a colossal fraud.”

“You’re right. You are absolutely right.”

Again, for a second, I have a gender-change level of discombobulation at hearing Martin making such an un-Nextian admission. One of Next’s favorite indictments that Martin used to hurl at me was that my “downfall” was that I was “invested in being right.” I denied it and tried to expunge the very concepts of right and wrong from my thinking. But I seize upon it now like a vegetarian backsliding with a bucket of KFC.

“Oh, I know that I am right. I am right and you are wrong and everything wrong with our daughter is your fault.” Staking a position. Ascribing blame. Gluttony, lust, greed, this is all the most delicious sins rolled into one.

Martin nods in solemn agreement. “A lot of truth there. Possibly the whole truth. It was stupid of me not to question her more. But when she called that first time … Hearing her grown-up voice …” He shakes his head at the memory. “God, Cam, it was exactly like talking to you. Her voice. It’s your voice. It was powerful. Hearing the voice of someone you love so much after all those years. It was like …”

He stops, but I know exactly what that was like. I guess this is what would be called a Pyrrhic victory. At almost any time in the past sixteen years, hearing him admit how much the sound of my voice, even channeled through our daughter, still affected him would have felt like winning. Today, it’s close to irrelevant.

Pretzels whines, reminding me that her dinner is late. I start to get up, but my legs don’t want to cooperate. Martin is at my side, steadying me. “I don’t drink,” I say. “I haven’t become a sad alcoholic divorcée.”

“I know that.”

“I haven’t drunk this much beer since high school.”

“I know, Cam. Here, let me help you.” He takes my arm and helps me to the bedroom we once shared, stopping at the door to let me careen the rest of the way by myself.

“Can you feed …?” I wave toward Pretzels, then collapse on the bed.

“Sure,” he agrees.

I give a noncommittal grunt. He shuts the door. The last thought I have before passing out is: Aubrey?