The Gap Year

DECEMBER 12, 2009



I snuggle up next to Tyler and we watch the last wisps of the sunset like a happy old couple tuning in their favorite show. Finally, the darkness outside pulls us from our secret underwater world, back to the surface, back into the room. That and Tyler’s stomach growling.

I switch on the bedside lamp. Tyler slugs his gut as if to knock the growl out. But it just keeps growling. “OK, Aubrey Jean, two problems. We haven’t eaten since last night, and you have to call your mom. I’m gonna go out and solve the first one.”

He gets out of bed. I notice his crotch and say, “I can’t believe I ever thought you were gay.”

He looks down at himself, laughs. “What do you think now?”

“Not. Not gay. I also thought you might be a secret Christian with an abstinence pledge.”

“All true. I am a secret gay Christian.” He pulls his jeans on.

“My other theory was that you might want me to spank you or put on an animal costume.”

“Girl, you are a freak.” He grabs his keys off the nightstand and grips them between his lips. They jingle as he hops from one foot to the other, tugging on his boots. Not bothering with a shirt, he throws on his jacket, points to me as he opens the door. “Call your mom.”

“She’ll just scream and tell me I have to come home.”

He points again and gives me a stern look, the way a strict father would. I hold up my phone in surrender.

“Call her. Then get out the hairbrush and antlers and be ready for me when I get back.”

After he leaves, I sit on the bed hugging my knees for a long time. My lips are tender, sore and soft from being kissed. My hair smells like him and like the smell we made together. When I shower, I wish I could save every drop of water that streams away. That I could distill it and bottle the essence to have forever.

Then I call my mom.

Tyler comes back holding a red-and-white pizza box with drinks in thirty-two-ounce cups and a bouquet of flowers balanced on top. He gives me the flowers. They are your average grocery-store bouquet, chrysanthemums, carnations dyed blue, leathery ferns. They are more beautiful than the aurora borealis sunset.

He holds the box out to me like a snooty waiter as he kicks the door closed with his foot. “Mademoiselle ordered the Grease and Dough Lovers Special.” He is happier than I’ve ever seen him. Bringing me pizza, taking care of me, makes him happy.

He notices my face. “What’s wrong?”

I put my nose next to a droopy daisy and pretend that it has a smell. “My mom.”

He puts the box and drinks down. “What?”

“I think she’s serious. If I don’t come home, she’s seriously going to call the cops.”

“Shit. I thought we’d get to sleep together tonight. You know, sleep.”

“Yeah, me too. I guess we’d better leave. This would mess up your scholarships, wouldn’t it? Scare off the recruiters if they hear?”

Tyler snorts and smiles with one side of his mouth. “Yeah, I’m really worried about recruiters and scholarships.”

“You don’t care?”

“Me?” He taps his chest, looks behind himself, acts like I’m talking to someone else. “A.J., I told you, I am done. So this? Going back? This is totally your decision. But I like that your mom’s freaked out and ready to call the cops. She’s protecting you. That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

“Can you eat and drive?”

“Can’t hardly digest without a steering wheel in my hand.”

I slide my legs out from under the covers. My feet touching the dirty carpet brings me back to earth and I sag. Thinking of returning to Parkhaven, to school, to my mom makes me more tired than I have ever been in my life.

“We’ll have other nights together. We’ll have years together.”

“We will?”

“We will.” Tyler takes my hands, hauls me to my feet. “Now show me some hustle, Lightsey!”

Instead, I put my arms around his neck, say, “Tyler Bronco Moldenhauer, I love you.”

Tyler puts his hands on either side of my face. “Aubrey Jade Lightsey, I love you.”

“You know my name.”

“I knew your name before you were born.”

It is cheesy. But sometimes cheesy can be true.





SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010



Without taking his eyes off Aubrey, Martin tells me, “She moves like you. Graceful and determined. Knows exactly what she’s doing.”

Though I can’t conjure up any such moments of certainty, I have accepted that, somehow, Martin and Aubrey believe that I always knew what I wanted and was implacable in getting it. “She has your eyes.”

“I thought she might. From the Facebook photos. Everything else is you, though. Thank God.”

“She’d love to meet you.” I point to the trailer. “There’s no one there.”

“No. This isn’t the right time for that. This is her time. Can we stay here for a while longer? Just watch her?”

“Sure, Martin. Of course.”

We spy on them from our hidden spot for a long time until Martin says, “Be right back,” and ducks into the clothing store behind us. I assume he’s going to search out a restroom, but through the store window I watch him charm the owner into letting him use her computer.

On the square, the businesses all around close. One by one, the lights in the card store, the tile store, the coffee shop go out; the owners emerge and stroll down the block to line up and buy dinner from the newcomers to Parkhaven Square. They’re obviously a tight group. They chat amiably, joke with one another as they carry their food to the tables chained to the tall oaks, then eat and visit as the sun sets and the day starts to cool.

Martin is back by my side when Aubrey opens the trailer’s door. As she stoops through the low doorway and puts her foot onto the metal step, her new neighbors, the other business owners, hold up their cups and the paper trays of the food Aubrey made, and cheer her. Tyler hangs back at the open doorway, letting Aubrey have her moment.

Martin whispers to me as if Aubrey were near enough to hear, “This area, very good location. Very underserved. Ripe for exactly what she’s doing.”

All I can think is that I’m watching a thirty-thousand-dollar party.

“Can you believe she did this all by herself? She’s so intrepid, isn’t she?”

“I still haven’t gotten past the lying and fraud.”

“We’ll deal with that.”

I don’t know how I feel about him saying “we,” but I don’t comment, and Martin never stops gazing at his daughter.

A pair of young men, one wearing a fedora, both in short-sleeved Western shirts, hurries past us, heading toward the trailer. They stare into iPhones as if they were holding Geiger counters that will lead them to the places that are hot.

“I knew it,” Martin says. “I knew that the foodies would be all over this.”

One of the young men pauses to read the name off a street sign, then works his thumbs, checking the spelling of the street as he enters that information.

Martin nods gleefully at the busy thumbs. “Let the Tweets begin.”

I point a finger behind me at the clothing store computer he had borrowed earlier. “Did you …?”

“Yep. Got the word out. The kids’ complete lack of business savvy actually works in their favor with the cognoscenti. Foodies live for a discovery like this.”

The kids. He called them “the kids.”

He was right. More clumps arrive. They’re mostly young with interesting haircuts, all of them eager, filled with purpose. Like shoppers on Black Friday, rushing to get a cut-rate laptop, they hurry to the order window, eat their food, discuss, trade bites, begin texting. A little while later, more clumps arrive.

We keep up our stakeout as it grows dark and the twinkle lights really do seem festive shining down on tables full of customers. After each new surge, Tyler comes out and wipes some menu item off the dry-erase board that we are too far away to read.

“Oh, that is fantastic,” Martin says. “They’re running out of food.”

“That’s good? Seems like poor planning to me.”

“No, it’s really good. Foodies love scarce and hard-to-get only slightly more than they love exotic. Hey, look, they’re taking menus with them.”

It’s true; almost everyone grabs a menu from the rack outside the order window. When a couple hustles past us—both of them in thick, black, dorky-chic glasses—Martin asks if he could have one of the menus they’ve taken.

“It’s my daughter’s place,” he explains. “But we don’t want to intrude on her big night.”

The young woman hands him a menu, tells him that the food is “surprisingly imaginative” and that they’re coming back. “Soon.”

Martin and I read the menu together. At the top of the sheet is the name “FalaFellows.”

“FalaFellows?” I say out loud.

I read and reread the menu my daughter has created. In addition to daily specials like coffee-braised brisket and chicken and dumplings, their mainstay is falafel, a salad with blood oranges, and mint tea.

“What a hodgepodge,” I conclude. “They might get a few first-night curiosity seekers, but all the people around here really want is burgers.”

“Cam, don’t you see?” Martin stares at me both amazed and exasperated. “Don’t you get it?”

“Get what?”

“Those are the foods we ate in North Africa.”

“Well, yeah. North African food and then a random assortment of other things.”

Flabbergasted, he says, “Camille, our daughter is making the foods we ate when we fell in love.”

The aromas of cumin, garlic, onion, cilantro, and chickpeas overtake me, overtake my anger and disappointment. For a long time I watch Aubrey moving inside the trailer, lit up like an actress onstage, and I experiment with this feeling of being offstage, of not having the leading role in her life. It hurts. College must have been invented to ease parents’ pain, an institution devoted to helping everyone separate at the same time.

Martin betrays no mixed emotions; he is openly smitten. He beams the sort of paternal pride I wanted so badly to see on the face beside me at every Christmas pageant and band concert I ever attended by myself. It is so clear that he loves her the way I do—insanely—that I say, “I miss her.”

“Of course you do.”

“She’ll never be little again.”

“No, she never will.”

“She’ll never grow up with a father.”

“She won’t.”

“This part is over.”

“But a new part is starting.”

“I’m not ready for the old one to end. I never taught her to change a tire.”

“Cell phones.”

“She has no idea how to check for a tripped switch in the fuse box.”

“Google.”

“God, look at her.” Like so much else that seems to be happening without my permission, tears start running down my face. I squeegee them away. “I didn’t even think she was listening. I thought she hated my stories. Shit, I thought she hated cooking. What else don’t I know about the person I love the most in the whole world?”

“You know all the important stuff.”

“But this?” I hold my hand out to indicate the entire world that my daughter has created without my knowledge.

Martin asks, “Do the roots know the tree that grows above them?”

I wrinkle my eyebrows in warning and he hurries to add, “That’s not from Next.”

“In that case, it’s not a bad metaphor.”

“Okay, it is from Next.”

“You, Martin Lightsey, you are such a jackass!”

“Oh, we have firmly established my jackassnificence already, haven’t we?”

I laugh. Martin could always make me laugh.

I want him to hold me. I want for us to have raised the daughter we’re watching over now. I want for us to have raised her together amid a happy bounty of friends and families.

But laughing … laughing transports me to a place that is neither before nor after sixteen years ago but only right now, watching our beautiful girl dancing in the spotlight, doing what makes her happy.

Laughing is good. For right now, this one, singular moment, laughing is enough.





MONDAY, JANUARY 17, 2011



My biceps quiver from carrying a thirty-pound box of produce. I crunch across the frozen earth and pause, momentarily blinded by both the cloud of my breath, frozen in the early-morning air, and by the long, shaggy bangs that I forgot to pin back hanging down over my eyes. I rest the heavy box of exotic lettuces, hothouse heritage tomatoes, and high-dollar oranges on the tops of my thighs, catch my breath, and try to flip the damn bangs out of my eyes.

Up ahead is the back of the trailer. The door at the end is open and I can hear the clack of a metal spoon against a metal bowl, the thump of the big cutting board being lowered onto the counter, the murmur of requests, the morning chitchat of a business waking up.

All the trash cans behind the trailer are full, which means that business was booming yesterday. There are more red-and-white Coke cups strewn about than the Styrofoam cups they use for the hot mint tea: a clue that high school customers must have outnumbered the galloping gourmets, those intrepid Tweeters willing to travel for the hot new thing who have continued to create a following for FalaFellows since the opening five months ago.

Aubrey and Tyler also added “Ty-Mo’s” to the business’s name which, somehow, made the strange terrorist food more acceptable, so that all the fans of the biggest football hero Parkhaven ever produced, along with jocks and princesses, past and present, started coming. They joined the emo kids and alternative crowd who are drawn to sample delights from the land of hookahs and hashish. And for the first time in Parkhaven history, those two elements are sitting down and eating mashed chickpeas together.

Aubrey called this morning in a panic because her produce order wasn’t ready when she went to pick it up, and time to get the lunch prep done was running out. It is MLK Day, and that means that a lot of the food bloggers have the day off and have already written that they are making the trek out to “the ’burbs.” So, Aubrey had pleaded, could I please, please, please, please, please bring the order by on my way to work?

Every month that Aubrey has been in business seems to add another “please” to her requests. I had initially been stunned by just one. Five in a row seems like a minor miracle. At Christmas she’d come over and we’d made cookies. Six kinds. The Snicker Doodles had sold surprisingly well. I suggested that we sell chocolate-dipped strawberries at Valentine’s. She loved the idea.

Every week, Tyler drops by and gives me 10 percent of what they made. He and Aubrey rent a garage apartment and spend almost nothing. Tyler has surprised me in many ways. He seems to have no material needs. And he’s able to fix anything. I’ve been tempted to ask them to move in with me but have resisted. I’ve come to look on this as Aubrey’s gap year. One that, it appears, I’m not going to have to pay for.

I heft the box of produce up again, lug it as far as the closest table, and drop it. Tyler can take it from here.

I start to yell for Tyler when the pleasant hum from the trailer stops and Tyler, his voice bristling with sudden anger, explodes, “No! You’re kidding! You think we’d even be in business if I hadn’t put my name out there? You think half of Parkhaven High is coming because of refried bean balls?”

“Wow, that is such a shitty thing to say,” Aubrey snaps back. “What happened to building a dream together? Doing this the way we wanted to do it?”

I consider leaving the box and sneaking away, but the edges of the lettuce are already starting to turn black.

“The way we want? Try the way your father wants.”

“What does my father have to do with this?”

“Pretty much everything. You have let him, a guy who ditched you when you were two years old, totally change you.”

“I am not letting my father change me.”

“Okay, whatever you say, but every time you have one of your little meetings with him, you come back with some new grand plan.”

“Tyler, he knows how to start businesses. How to build a customer base. He helped one of the people he counseled start a chain of food trailers in L.A. Plus, P.S., he’s my father. We’re catching up on sixteen years.”

I’ve seen how much Martin loves helping his daughter. And, it’s true: All of his advice has been good. He really does know how to build and run a business.

“And that’s fine, Aubs, it really is.”

I try to recall when Aubrey stopped being A.J.

“I totally respect that. He’s a cool guy and all. Getting the foodies to come out. Writing about us. That is cool. I mean, a shitload of work for, I’m not sure, a lot of payoff, but it’s cool.”

“Tyler, every idea he’s given us has worked. It was his idea to put your name out there. Can we talk about this later?”

“ ‘Later’? There is no ‘later’ anymore, now that you’re taking classes three nights a week. Then either doing homework or with your dad the rest of the time.”

“Where is this coming from? You always said you supported me taking classes. One of us has to get some business skills if we ever want to grow this business.”

“Right, and the biology class you’re taking is going to help us how?”

“I’m getting prerequisites out of the way. You can’t just waltz into the business courses.”

“What was wrong with us just going out to the sites? We had guaranteed customers. A set menu. A set food order. Easy. Breezy.”

“You’re kidding. Tell me you are not seriously saying that we should be out on some construction site nuking crap food for the tool belts?”

“So this is better? Making bean burritos for hipsters?”

“You said you loved my falafel.”

“ ‘Love’? How is it possible to ‘love’ refried beans?”

“God, condescend much? Tyler, this is what I want to do. I like this. I’m good at it, and people—people who know—recognize that I’m good at it. We’re getting a buzz going. Look, we have got to get back to work. We are never going to be ready for lunch rush.”

Tyler mutters something I can’t hear and, for a second, the breath sticks in my chest.

“No, Tyler, seriously, I mean it, we have got to get back to work. Now!”

“Mmm, I like it when you get all boss-lady on me. You are definitely getting my buzz going.”

“Tyler, no! Stop it!”

Aubrey laughs and the tension pressing in on me disappears.

“Ty, no, we can’t.”

“Oh, you know that we can.”

“We’re behind already.”

“Did you just say you want it from behind? Because we can definitely go there.”

“We’re not off in the middle of nowhere anymore at some construction site. Someone might hear us.”

“Then you’re going to have to not scream so much.”

“We’ll have to bleach the counters again.”

“Call me Mr. Clean.”

The trailer door slams shut. I leave the box of produce on a table. The lettuce will survive. I hurry now. I’m late for work.



Driving to the hospital, I stop at the four-way sign beside Parkhaven High. The marching band was picked to compete in the Grand National Marching Band competition to be held next month in Sarasota. Consequently, Shupe has them all out trooping up and down the frozen field. The white plumes on their tricornered hats bounce and sparkle in the chilly sunshine and, instead of wishing I hadn’t teased Aubrey about the hat, I just remember how happy she was swinging along behind her clarinet, part of that jolly feathered beast.

I drive away slowly, angling my side-view mirror so that I can watch the band. Captured within the silver frame of the mirror, the marchers shrink and motion blurs as I leave them behind. Soon the bright plumes become an indistinct fuzz, like the down of all baby birds. Like the soft, vulnerable fluff of the young that is bound to be shed even if the mama bird frets over the loss of every single gossamer puff.



At Parkhaven Medical Center the tall glass doors slide open and a cloud of warmth whooshes out as I step inside. The vast expanse of travertine flooring between the two banks of elevators is congested, and I have to navigate around a middle-aged woman crimping her step to match her mother’s, who is struggling with an aluminum walker. Once free of the crush at the door, I hurry past the information desk, the gift shop, the waiting area. The smell of enchiladas coming from the cafeteria makes me consider ditching the bagel smeared with peanut butter I brought for lunch.

I pass the public areas and veer off onto a hallway that opens into the old part of the hospital. The travertine gives way to beige linoleum. Fluorescent fixtures buzz overhead. I dig for the key to my office. My new office. It took two months to talk admin into setting aside what used to be a supply closet so Janis, the other LC, and I could have an office, but in the end we won.

I hang up the big, pillowy jacket that Aubrey rejected and I’ve adopted, delighted to finally have a truly warm jacket, lock my purse in an empty file drawer, and log in on the hospital’s system. I am hunting for the day’s census sheet when Janis bursts in gripping a bakery bag in one hand and holding out a clipboard with the other. “This what you’re looking for?” She is wearing, of course, animal-print scrubs. Cheetah, I think.

I take the clipboard, nod at the bag in her hand. “That looks dangerous.”

“It’s from the short fren in twenty-four twelve.” Janis uses our shorthand for “frenulum,” the bit of skin tethering the tongue to the floor of the mouth. When it’s too short, it can hobble the tongue, making nursing hard.

Janis extracts a chocolate-chip cookie the size of a minipizza from the white bag and breaks it in two. I take half, hold it up, and wonder, “Why do our patients never express gratitude through a nice bowl of edamame? Maybe a perfect cantaloupe?” After the first bite, I answer my own question, “Okay, that’s why. Because love runs on sugar and butter. What have we got?”

We review the census sheets together. Everyone that Janis has already seen that morning is highlighted in blue. Those who still need attention are highlighted in yellow.

Janis rushes through them in her haste to ask, “So?”

“So what?” I echo, knowing exactly what she’s referring to.

“So, last night? Martin? Details?”

Before I have to dodge her question, Janis’s cell rings. She checks the number and groans. “If that boy forgot his homework or lunch or head again, I will scream.” She slides the phone open and murmurs to her nine-year-old son, “Hey, punkin, what’s up?”

I wave the cookie in the general direction of the hospital’s Mother/Baby Unit upstairs, signaling that I’m heading to work. Janis nods, covers the phone, orders me, “Details. Tomorrow. You have to tell me everything.”

I nod, pretending that I will, and leave Janis asking her son, “Okay, so if you’re ‘three thousand percent’ certain that put your book report in your backpack, is there a chance you left it on the bus?”



The morning after Aubrey’s grand opening five months ago, I woke up refreshed from the first really good night’s sleep I’d gotten since she met Tyler. I walked into the great room and wondered why I had stopped allowing myself to appreciate the glorious light streaming in. I brewed a cup of Earl Grey tea, returned to the room that I now found, indeed, great, sat on the sofa, and watched a Milky Way of dust motes float through the radiance. Each particle was so precise and perfect, it was as if I’d had the prescription in my glasses strengthened.

The celestial stream whirled past and I thought about how I’d stopped drinking coffee. Bobbi Mac had gotten me hooked when I was ten. Just a few tablespoons in the morning with lots of milk and sugar, “to get the heart started.” In Europe, Martin and I had bonded over coffee, me proving to him how inherently sophisticated I was by learning to drink it the way he did, without the three spoons of sugar and half a pitcher of cream that I liked. In Sycamore Heights, coffee became a fetish—arabica, robusta, Jamaican Blue Mountain. I could not have imagined life without coffee any more than I could have imagined life without Martin.

And then, from the instant his sperm seduced my egg, coffee sickened me. One morning I craved it; the very next the smell nauseated me. Coffee became one more thing that Martin and I no longer had in common. In my fifth month, I tried to reclaim that bond and drank a cup of Kona Peaberry. I threw up longer and harder than I had during the morning-sickness months and never repeated the experiment.

Sipping Earl Grey in the great room that morning last August, I thought about Martin, about the life he had denied me, and I waited to be kneecapped by the rage and the sense of betrayal that usually skulked along with the topic. As with coffee, though, my craving for such a dark brew had vanished overnight.

Late that afternoon, Martin took a cab from the Candlewood Suites where he’d taken a long-term rental, stood on my porch, and very solemnly asked me out to dinner.

“How about a walk?” I suggested. “Maybe we can work up to dinner.”

Martin had let out the smallest exhalation. Just enough that I could see that he was sufficiently nervous to be relieved. “A walk would be good.”

We ambled around the Parkhaven reservoir and Martin asked, “Remember coming here? Pushing Aubrey in her stroller? How she used to say ‘dug’ for ‘duck’?”

The answer I would have given him on any day of the past sixteen years would have been a dark, rich house blend of rage, grievance, and sarcasm. No, there are just so many happy family memories to draw on that I lose track. Or, wounded and accusing, I would have demanded, What about all the times I was out here alone and she held her arms out to every male over ten and under seventy and said, “Daddy”? And the walk would have been ruined.

But that day, on what turned out to be the first of many walks, I just said yes, I did remember, and was happy to have someone by my side who also remembered that our daughter used to say “dugs” for “ducks.”



I step out of the elevator on the fifth floor, the Mother/Baby Unit. Beneath the odors of cleansers and sanitizers, machines and humans, I always catch a whiff of caramel. Though no one else I’ve ever pointed it out to can discern the sweet fragrance, I smell the caramel scent I first noticed on Aubrey’s breath, exhaled on the milky breath of all the nursing infants on this floor.

One of my favorite maternity nurses, Celeste, a stocky Latina with the biceps of a Rumanian weight lifter, is at the nurses’ station. “Cute top,” Celeste trills. “You got a hot date after work?”

“If you consider Martin coming over to replace the hot-water heater a date, then yes, I have a date.”

“I do!”

Like Janis, like the rest of my coworkers, like Dori, Celeste wants more “details” about Martin and me. They want to know what it means that I am “dating” my ex-husband, the father of my child, a man who once palled around with movie stars and who now spends his evenings repairing my hot-water heater and his days counseling a growing list of ex-Nextarians who, like Martin, hate the organization but still believe in “the tech.” He makes a living working with some of them in person, many more around the country by phone, on Skype. Apparently in this underground railroad of “neXters,” Martin has become Sojourner Truth.

I don’t pry. I accept his life the way I’ve learned to accept Aubrey’s. The way I accept the walks we take around the reservoir; the dinners we make together and eat in the great room at the long dining table; the trip he’s planning because he wants to show me Sanibel Island in Florida; the sex—I accept it all. I can’t recall consciously deciding to trick time, but that is what has happened. Somehow Martin and I, instead of being leashed for all eternity to what happened sixteen years ago, instead of that being the huge Before and After defining my life, have been set free. Sometimes he’s the boy I met on the train. Mostly, though, he’s a man I like being with who took a different route than I did to arrive back at us together.

None of this can be boiled down into a coworker-ready sound bite. Celeste’s eagerness to move me from the perplexing limbo of a friend who may or may not be sleeping with her ex-husband into a known state of couplehood makes me understand how Aubrey felt when I grilled her about Tyler: It’s too soon. I don’t know. I might never know. And since I can’t not be with him, it doesn’t matter.

Dori, meanwhile, acts like she predicted the whole thing. “I told you,” she reminds me regularly. “Didn’t I tell you about the rekindled romance? Plus, remember: They’re incredibly successful, these reunited relationships.”

“Yeah, the mutual-delusion thing,” I tell her, not adding what a big fan of delusion I’ve become.

Celeste, seeing that no “details” will be forthcoming, chirps, “Cute top. I love flutter sleeves. My shoulders are too broad for tops like that.”

“Not true. Look at Michelle Obama. Show off the big guns.”

“Well, some of us have to wear scrubs.”

I gauge how much of a barbed edge there is in Celeste’s comment. When I stopped wearing scrubs to work some of the nurses became grumpy about my defection from the ranks. I was called in to human resources and “counseled” that street clothes were “unprofessional.” I had responded that “professional” was the last thing that a brand-new mom oozing colostrum and amniotic fluid and tears needed. If they were unhappy about my performance, I’d talk about that; otherwise, I had patients to see.

I guess I was feeling sassy because Martin was doing the same kinds of magical things on the Web for me and my practice that he had done for Aubrey and FalaFellows and I had more new patients than I could handle. If the hospital wanted to fire me, fine. But I was through wearing scrubs.

As I leave the nurses’ station, I flap my arms so that my sleeves become tiny wings, rising and falling against my shoulders, carrying me away. Celeste can laugh or not, as she chooses. She laughs.

The first patient on my list is Ruth Lange. Outside Ruth’s room, I study the notes left by the labor-and-delivery nurse. Ruth, twenty-six years old, had a baby boy, Levi, her first child, last night at 9:23. Levi was forty-one weeks at delivery and a brawny nine pounds, six ounces. I check Ruth’s height and weight, five-four, 118 pounds, and wince: big baby, little mom. I note the number of poops, pees, minutes spent nursing, drop what’s left of the cookie in the trash, hit the hand sanitizer, and shoulder the door open.

“I love that positioning,” I announce the instant I step in the room and see Ruth holding Levi in a nice, comfy cross-cradle. Ruth is propped up in bed, her surgical gown open, exposing both breasts, a paperback copy of the New Testament open beside her. For a pale blond, Ruth’s nipples are large and dark, with mud-puppy speckling at the edges. The deep blue veins running beneath her skin please me; good vascularization means a good milk supply. I’m not happy that Ruth is in bed, but we’ll get to that in a second.

I introduce myself, ask, “May I?” and slip a finger in where Levi’s toothless gums meet Ruth’s nipple. “Oh, that is a good, deep latch.”

Dad is seated at a small table on the other side of the room, playing a video game on his laptop. He’s hunched over, keeping the volume low, but the sound of his feverish clicking combined with mechanized beeps and explosions and a voice commanding, “Bring it on, alien scumwad!” still echoes through the room.

It always baffles me when anyone around a newborn, barely dry after their swim from the other side, is not entranced by the only miracle they will ever be part of, yet I have witnessed more celestial voyagers welcomed into this world with Nelly ringtones and WWE SmackDown than I can count. Trying to ignore the destruction of a distant galaxy, I concentrate on Levi working steadily at Ruth’s breast and hear the happy pattern I always want to hear—suck, suck, gasp, swallow. Suck, suck, gasp, swallow.

“Oh, this boy knows what to do.” I lift the well-upholstered arm Levi rests lightly on Ruth’s breast and let it droop back down. “See that? See how floppy it is? A hungry baby won’t do that. A hungry baby keeps his fist balled up tight next to his face.”

Ruth beams at her extraordinary son. Never has there been a baby like this.

“Are you feeling some good cramping?”

Ruth pulls her gaze from her baby and looks up at me. She has the sweet, besotted expression of a new mother insanely in love with her baby. “What?”

“Do you need to change your pad after you nurse?”

She nods.

“Good, your uterus is contracting. That’s good.”

Ruth dips her head, smiles at Levi as he grips her index finger. “He was turned around. They had to do a third-degree episiotomy.”

“Oh, no. Baby.”

Ruth gives a glum nod. “The doctor stuck the forceps in there and pulled him out.”

“In that case, we have to get you into a better feeding position. Dad. Dad!” The father glances up from the computer screen, looks around the room, wondering why someone is calling for his father; then there is the stunned, scared look when he remembers.

“What’s your name, hon?” I ask him.

“Eric.”

“Eric …” A series of explosions burst from his video game. “Do you mind?” I waggle a finger toward the laptop. Eric snaps it shut, and the otherworldly calm a room with an infant in it can take on settles over us. “Let’s get Ruth into a more comfortable position.”

I wedge my finger between Levi’s mouth and Ruth’s breast. The suction breaks with a slurpy pop. I lift Levi away and, no matter how many hundreds of newborns I hold each year, this baby becomes Aubrey, with her furze of golden down like a halo around her head, and I am holding her again for the first time.

The father, his eyes skittering about, stands by and watches as his wife tries to lower herself into the chair.

“Eric, lend Ruth some of that upper-body strength.”

Eric snaps to and helps Ruth. Awkwardly, he pokes pillows into all the wrong spots. I throw out a problem I know he can solve: “We need to get the weight off that incision. The higher you can get those knees, the better.”

He rushes to haul over the chair he’d been sitting on to play video games and gently raises Ruth’s feet onto it.

I nod. “Eric, that looks good.” I make serious eye contact with him and give him his assignment: “No bed feeds at home, okay?”

“Not a problem. We’ve got this really great recliner.”

“Good.” I tell Eric to wash his hands. When he finishes, I place his son in his arms. Eric tenses, holds his breath, but the stunned, disengaged look has vanished, along with my fears about the newest of my fathers. Like all of them, he just needs to know what to do. Once it was saving the world from invading aliens and now it will be raising a fine son. Levi starts fussing and Eric glances up, panicked.

“Put your pinkie in Levi’s mouth.”

Eric looks to Ruth. Nestled onto her pillows, regal as a queen, she nods her permission.

Eric slips the end of his little finger into Levi’s mouth, and his eyes pop when he feels his son apply himself to his pinkie.

“That is intense, isn’t it?”

The new father nods, surrendering completely to the terrifying power of the life he created.

“There’s your low-tech pacifier. You’ll need that. Ruth won’t want to hear Levi screaming when she goes to the bathroom. Number two is the dread of every small mom who has had a giant baby. All right, Ruth, are you ready?”

Again the queen-mother nod and Eric, careful as a bomb squad, lowers the baby into his wife’s arms.

When Levi is snuggled in, I coach, “Ruth, bring his chin in deep. Make sure his lower lip is out.”

I watch for a few minutes, jot down some notes, tell the new father, “Eric, set up the perfect spot for chair feedings. Keep the weight off that incision. See to it that Ruth has plenty to drink. Mostly water. Be there to take over when Ruth needs to rest.”

I head for the door. “I’m not worried about you three,” I say, pushing the door open with my back, but they are too engrossed in the new family they are creating to notice my benediction.

Out in the hall, Celeste calls to me, “Mom in twenty thirty-four asked for a consult.”

I check my list. “I don’t have her down. Did she take a class or something?”

“Didn’t mention it. I think she’s just another Cam fan. She demanded in no uncertain terms that she had to see you and only you. Very ‘empowered,’ ” Celeste adds, hooking quote marks around the word. “Certainly fits your fan-club profile.”

“Get out,” I protest, but it’s true. For the past few months, I’ve been even more passionate than I already was about all mothers getting what they want. My students, in turn, seem to have become equally passionate that I be part of that. The recent appearance of this “fan club” has helped me do my job the way I truly want to do it. “What ‘profile’?” I ask Celeste.

“You know, tattoos, had to remove a piercing from a very tender place for delivery. And, uh, incidentally, ow. Anyway, you know, one of yours.”

One of mine.

“Sorry, haven’t even finished charting her yet. Basics are prima gravida. Five, fourteen. Not eating.”

“Thanks.” I hurry off, knowing that 2034 is a first-time mom who had a scrawny five-pound, fourteen-ounce baby that doesn’t want to nurse. Outside her room, I rub in sanitizer, shove the door open with my hip, and meet my next patient.

The new mother—young, painfully young; lovely copper-colored hair twisted into dreadlocks that droop from her head like a jester’s cap; plump arms sleeved with tattoos of anime princesses and a wizard trailing stardust—has her head down and doesn’t notice me enter. Her breasts, rosy as Pink Lady apples, are exposed, offered to the infant in her arms. She lifts her head. Fairy wings beat in my memory and a little girl with a voice like Ethel Merman, as dreamy as she was brassy, looks up at me. My head fills with the smell of cinnamon, sugar, and butter from the endless pieces of cinnamon toast with the crusts cut off that I made for her and Aubrey to eat.

“Twyla, you came home.”

Twyla nods, holds her free arm out to me, and I hug Dori’s daughter and Dori’s granddaughter. Twyla smells of labor, the hard, painful work of dragging a new soul onto this earth. Her baby smells like the reward. Running beneath both those scents is a fragrance as essential as newly cut wood that defined Twyla for me from the instant I first put my nose into her auburn curls a dozen years ago.

“You have a baby.”

“Yeah, you pretty much have to have one to get in here.” Twyla has grown into her husky voice; it fits her now. “I remembered that this is where you worked. I waited until my baby was already coming, so they had to admit me. I wanted to get her started right.”

“Can I have a look?”

She nods, and, gently, I peel the soft flannel of the receiving blanket away from Twyla’s daughter’s face. She has given birth to a fairy baby as enchanted as the ones she and Aubrey once pretended to be. Her tiny lips are a perfect Gummi Bear pucker of cherry. Her squinted eyes twitch as she follows the dreams of a newborn waking to an unimaginably alien life.

“Oh, Twyla,” I whisper. “She’s beautiful.”

A princess released momentarily from an evil spell, Twyla sheds the jittery rage she had once been armored in and glows with a simple serene radiance.

“What’s her name?”

Tenderly as if she were stroking a soap bubble, Twyla runs the backs of her fingernails against her baby’s cheek. “Aubrey. I always liked that name.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Doesn’t she remind you of Aubrey? The way she used to be? All shy and delicate.”

“She does.”

“I know she’ll change, but who she is, right now, that’s never really going to change, right?”

I think how whole and entire every newborn I’ve ever seen has been. The ones who enter the world, mouths open, howling, ready to devour whatever life brings their way. The ones who question and hold back. Aubrey showed me everything I needed to know about her from the first instant we met. Though it will take me what is left of my life to fully understand what that was, Aubrey was Aubrey from her first breath.

I tell Twyla, “No, that’s never really going to change. Does your mom know you’re here?”

“Uh-uh. I can’t deal with her energy right now. She’s so hectic. Does Aubrey still say ‘hectic’ all the time?”

Before I can answer, Twyla announces, “I’m going to be the kind of mom you were.”

“What kind of mom was I?”

“Calm. You were always calm. Calm Cam.”

“Cammando”? Now this? Calm Cam? I can’t recall one moment of calmness while Aubrey was growing up that I didn’t fake.

“You probably want to know what happened with my dad,” Twyla goes on. “I left there months ago. He’s an a*shole. My mom got that much right.”

“So you’ve …”

“Pretty much been on the street.”

“Oh, Twyla.”

“Then there was this little niblet.” She lowers her nose to baby Aubrey’s head, closes her eyes, and breathes. “So I went to Snowflakes, this Christian adoption agency. I had to tell them that if they didn’t take me, I’d get an abortion. They still wouldn’t let me in, though, until I signed a paper promising that I’d give my baby up to a ‘fit Christian family.’ That was fair. Seven months ago? I shouldn’t have been raising an iguana. In fact, I tried to raise an iguana.”

“So what happened?”

“He died.”

“Not the iguana. The adoption.”

“Oh, right, like I was ever going to let that happen.” Twyla is her old, brash self as she gives a snort of derision. “No, they thought they had this ultratight security system. All high-tech James Bond and everything. Locked us in at night. But it was a joke. I stayed until I was ready. Until my baby was ready. Had all the extra dairy and folic acid and prenatal care you could dream of. Read every book they had. Just soaked it all up, then left when it was time to come back here.”

Aubrey mewls weakly. Twyla tenses and places the newborn’s mouth over her nipple. The scrawny infant simply lies quietly in Twyla’s arms, her lovely goldfish lips barely resting on her mother’s breast. I help Twyla express a drop of the first milk, so thick that I always think of it as nectar.

“That’s colostrum, right?”

“Yes, it is,” I answer, tucking Aubrey’s head down to encourage her to latch. “Come on, baby girl. The umbilical cord is gone; this is how we eat now.”

“You need this,” Twyla coos to her child. “This will give you all my very best antibodies and immunoglobulins and help you get rid of that nasty meconium.”

I remember what a smart girl Twyla was, able to sing entire songs after hearing them once.

Aubrey shows no interest in nursing. Twyla glances up, a spike of panic bringing back the familiar jitteriness, and asks, “Colostrum is the best thing to prevent jaundice, isn’t it? If she doesn’t nurse, her bilirubin levels are going to get dangerously high and the nurses will make me give her formula.”

“You’ve been doing your homework. Sweetie, don’t worry. Your nipples are just a little inverted is all.”

“I know,” Twyla moans. “I’ve got innie nips. I knew this wasn’t going to work. The nurse told me they’d put her on formula if she didn’t start. I’m going to have to feed her out of a can. Dori didn’t nurse me and look what happened. It’s ruined. It’s all ruined.”

“Twyla, nothing is ruined. This baby is going to nurse. Come on. The bed is a hard place to start. You’re both healthy. Let’s sit up in a chair and feel healthy and strong.”

When Twyla is comfortably roosted on a chair, I settle Aubrey into her arms and notice how worryingly dry her lips are. Infants become dehydrated in such a short amount of time. Aubrey’s whimpers begin to take on a shrill, dire edge as hunger sharpens.

Though nothing ever flusters me at work, this is different. This is Twyla. And a baby named Aubrey. So, though I make a show of sauntering out in a way that I hope projects calm assurance, once outside Twyla’s door, I race to the supply closet and paw madly through the small plastic bins until I find a feeding pack. I grab a pumping machine and push it in front of me back to the room. Aubrey is blubbering by the time I return.

“Look, she’s given up,” Twyla wails. Aubrey is huddled against her; her hands with their matching bracelets of flaking skin are fisted up next to her face.

I hold up a nipple shield. “You are about to become an outie, Mama.” I poke the cone inward, press it against Twyla’s breast, then pop it out. Her nipple, sucked into the shield, comes with it.

“All right, now we’ll just get you hooked up here.” In less than a minute, I’ve pumped out ten ccs of colostrum.

“Now, I don’t do this very often, but for Aubrey’s namesake …” I peel the rubber band off the feeding pack, tear into the plastic wrap, fit a small, curved plastic tip onto a syringe, and use it to suck up some of Twyla’s milk. Then, like feeding a baby bird, I squirt a few drops into Aubrey’s mouth.

The milk dribbles untasted over her lips and I start to worry. I imagine the doctors, nurses, teachers, counselors, every authority that Twyla will encounter from here on out. How they will take one look at her and see nothing but young, unmarried, tattooed, and they will dismiss her. They aren’t going to realize that Twyla knows about folic acid and meconium. That she can sing the entire sound track from Moulin Rouge. They’ll automatically assume she’s not up to the challenge. They’ll peg her as a mom who’d use formula. And their beginning—mother and daughter—will be marred.

“No.” I say the word out loud. Twyla, who did not have so many of the things that a dreamy, fairy-winged little girl like her should have had, must have this.

I pluck the cap off Aubrey’s head and beating there is the part left unarmored, the fontanel. “Wake up, little one.” I chafe my knuckles against the rose petal of her ear.

Twyla stops my hand. “What are you doing?”

“She has to wake up and eat.”

I worry her ear some more and Aubrey scrunches her face up.

“You’re hurting her.”

I squirt two more drops of colostrum into Aubrey’s mouth. She retreats farther from the assault of light and noise and liquid. I jiggle her diaper, the tiny body within a rustle of motion. “Sorry, schnooks, it’s time to go to work. Life begins now. It’s hard, I know; it’s hard.”

“Don’t.” Twyla grabs my hand. “Call the nurse. She doesn’t know what to do. Don’t ask her to do something she doesn’t know how to do.”

“She knows,” I coo to Aubrey. “You know what to do, don’t you?”

I tickle Aubrey’s armpit. “Hey, boo-boo. I know you want to go home, back to where it was dark and warm and safe and you didn’t have to work for a living. I wish that was a choice, but it’s not.”

I make Twyla shift to a football hold, take Aubrey’s shirt off, tickle her back, but she only squinches up more tightly against this assault. There will be so many hard things in this child’s life and I haven’t been able to hold the first one off. Out of pure stubbornness, I give Aubrey one last hummingbird sip of milk.

Her lower lip trembles. The fragile hinging of her jaw shifts.

“Twyla, look, she’s swallowing.”

I rush to snug Aubrey tight up against Twyla’s breast and let the next squirt trickle down over her nipple and into the baby’s mouth. Her lips contract into the tiniest of smacks.

“She likes it.” Twyla is tremulous.

As she swallows a few more drops, I whisper to my child’s namesake, “The first of untold numbers of sweet things you will taste in this life.” It is my blessing. Laying out a trail of milk drops, I lure Aubrey to Twyla’s nipple.

“Line her up. Skin to skin,” I coach, snuggling the whisper of a body against her mother’s. “Wait for what looks like a yawn. There. There it is.” Aubrey opens her mouth and I nudge her between the shoulder blades, pushing her open mouth onto Twyla’s nipple.

“Oh, lovely. That is a picture-perfect latch. Your daughter is a genius.”

The baby sucks. Aubrey’s chin bobs rhythmically against Twyla’s breast.

“Is it working?” Twyla asks. “Is anything coming out?”

“Listen.”

The only sound in the universe for the next few seconds is the satisfied suck-suck-gasp-swallow of Twyla’s daughter.

“I’m feeding her,” Twyla marvels. “I’m feeding my baby.”

“Yes, you are.”

A strangled yip of a sob escapes Twyla. “I thought she hated me. She doesn’t hate me.” Twyla finally relaxes and strokes her daughter’s face, the top of her head where the beat of life remains visible, and I remember the first time I held Aubrey and touched that emblem of her vulnerability. I made a pact in that instant. The same one that my mother, Rose, with all her heart and as best she knew how, had made when she first held me. The same one that Bobbi Mac made more than six decades ago and that Aubrey will one day make: You will be mine forever and I will never let anything hurt you.

Twyla strokes her child’s hair and declares fiercely, “I am going to be the best f*cking mother there ever was.”

I tell the little girl who sang answers to questions about waffles, “You’ll be the best mother you know how to be. Just like your mother was the best mother she knew how to be and wasn’t always. Just like you won’t always be. So forgive her, Twyla, okay? Forgive your mother, forgive everyone, but most of all, forgive yourself. Okay, sweetie?”

Twyla doesn’t answer. She will do everything right; she is certain of it. Everything her mother did, she will do the opposite and it will all be right. We watch in silence as her daughter sips her first meal.

Without lifting her eyes from her daughter’s face, Twyla asks, “How is Aubrey?”

As I consider the answer to that question, the conversation I’d overheard outside the trailer plays and replays in my mind. Tyler’s voice. Aubrey’s. Tyler’s. Aubrey’s. Gradually, the words blur away. In their place, I hear the language of tones and tenors, pitches and accents that Aubrey and I taught each other. Translated into that language I hear a young woman gathering strength to burst from the silver chrysalis that contains her now.

I tell Twyla all about what her old friend is doing.

“Wow,” she says. “I was certain that Aubrey would be all, ‘Go, college’!”

“Certain and humans,” I muse. “Such a hard mix.”

“Oh, look,” Twyla exclaims. Aubrey has started sucking ferociously. “She’s really going for it now!” With food in her minuscule stomach, Aubrey becomes a different baby, a baby who applies herself to the job at hand with exactly the sort of determined energy she will need to be One Shot’s Never Enough’s granddaughter.

When Aubrey’s walnut of a fist finally unclenches, then droops to the side and her head lolls back, I put a full, fed, contented baby in the bassinet beside Twyla’s bed and they both sleep.

Out in the hall, I call Dori and tell her that Twyla is back. I tell her that her daughter is safe and that she is a grandmother.

“They’re sleeping now, so you have time to collect yourself. Be calm when you come.”

Dori is sobbing too hard to answer. I tell her I’ll wait for her outside.

Later, as I watch for Dori in the pickup/dropoff zone, the cold wind blows my hair around my head. I dig in my pocket, find the rubber band I pulled off Twyla’s feeding kit, and use it to slick the tangling hair into a ponytail. For the first time since I cut the ill-advised bangs, they smooth back neatly with all the rest of my hair.

It feels great to have those damn Mamie Eisenhower bangs out of my eyes.