The Gap Year

AUGUST 12, 2009



Back home, I help Pretzels to her feet so she can hobble with me and we both head for my room, where I plop down on my bed with the laptop and Google “Tyler Moldenhauer.” Someone has made a fan page for him on Facebook. He hasn’t posted any comments, but he is tagged in dozens of photos.

The pictures of him on the field, face hidden behind a helmet, bring back his smell, like the ocean on a cold day. I watch and rewatch a video of him zigzagging through a field of players, vanishing so quickly that they lunge after him and grab nothing but air.

But there is one photo I keep going back to. In it he has his helmet off and is laughing with his mouth wide open; his tongue is hanging out a little, and he looks like every smirking jock a*shole I’ve ever hated.

What is wrong with me? My type is, has always been, reedy art boys. The first crushes I ever had were on Jack White and Adrien Brody. Stick-figure boys. Though that was back when Twyla and I were friends. And, come to think of it, Adrien and Jack were both more her crushes than mine. Still, I can’t like Tyler Moldenhauer. A jock? Mom would flip out.

Just to get my mind off this whole ridiculous thing, I click over to my Facebook page and see that I have one friend request. Before I check who it is my heart bumps. Tyler? Already? Tyler Moldenhauer wants to be my friend? Is this one of those Twilight Bella/Edward things where we don’t even really have to talk because just my scent alone drives him more insane than any other woman’s in all his centuries of vampire existence?

I recall that my scent was bagel vomit, click on the Friend Requests icon, and see a name that I don’t recognize: Alex Well, which means that “Alex Well” is some clever business that targets teens through social media. No doubt “Alex Well” has some unlimited texting offer for me, since, of course, all teen girls just live for unlimited texting. And lip gloss. Earn Lip Gloss Using Our Unlimited Texting Plan!

I don’t confirm the request, but, just to see what kind of scam Facebook thinks I should be targeted for, I click on the bogus name. Expecting to be taken to a page hectic with offers and great news about a great product and giveaways if I confirm the friend request, I am surprised to end up looking at a page with nothing on it except for the dippy white cutout of a person with that curlicue hairdo against Facebook’s blue-gray background. Alex Well has no friends. Not one. Nothing is filled in. Birthday, Hometown, Current City, Relationship Status, they’ve all been left blank. In his Info section there is no contact information, no groups he is a member of, no pages he follows. They are all blank.

The only information on his wall is a status update next to the curlicued photo that says:


11:56 A.M. AUGUST 12, 2009

Hello, Aubrey. Thank you more than I can say for coming this far. I used a fake name because I didn’t know how you would respond to seeing my real name. More than anything in the world, I would like to know you. Even if it is just this. Just messages on Facebook. I can think of a thousand reasons why you wouldn’t confirm this. But I hope you will. This is Martin, your dad.

I can’t say how long I sit on my bed staring at those three letters. D-A-D. The way, when you are standing on a skyscraper and you think you might—just accidentally—jump off, I start feeling like I might—just accidentally—hit the little “Respond to Friend Request” button. So I step away from the edge and slam the laptop shut.

I lift my gaze to the teddy bears that Mom and Dad (D-A-D!) stenciled along the top of the walls before I was even born. I love thinking of them doing that together. Me still inside Mom, listening to them laughing. Maybe Dad painted a dot on Mom’s nose like in those old movies when husbands thought their wives were just so cute.

So much is exploding inside of me that I feel like a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s in the microwave. Too much has happened all at once. I stagnated for years with nothing happening, and now, all in one day, too much is happening.

I open the laptop, go back to Facebook, back to “Alex Well’s” page. I stare at the little box next to a faceless cartoon that is now a faceless cartoon of my father, and read and reread “Respond to Friend Request” roughly a million times. Then, like she always does, Pretzels—who can’t hear anything, but somehow manages to hear the refrigerator opening and the garage door going up, grumbles—and starts struggling to her feet.

This is my signal that Mom is home. I quickly sign out of Facebook. She can’t know about the message. Thinking about my dad makes her so sad. And me going away to college next year is stressing her. I can tell by the way she stares at me so much more now that she’s imagining being here without me. If she knew about this? Dad contacting me? It would upset her so much.

A few seconds later, she rattles the knob of my door, yells when she can’t open it, “Why is this door locked!”

“Why do you never knock!”

“Open the door!”

“I’m taking a nap!”

“I need my laptop to see how many I’ve got registered for my class tomorrow!”

Amazingly, it appears that her Siamese twin, Dori, hasn’t told her yet about picking me up from school. I crack the door a few inches, just enough to hand the laptop out. “I don’t see why I can’t have my own laptop. They’re not that expensive.”

“That is a discretionary item.”

This is her way of saying that I have to use the money I made working as a counselor at Lark Hill. “I would except that I don’t want to go to school naked, and, P.S., most mothers don’t count clothes as ‘discretionary’ items. For your information, Parkhaven is not clothing-optional.”

She gives me Hurt Look Number 85. I hate Number 85, which translates to I am trying not to cry because I got totally screwed in the divorce and don’t make enough to buy us all the stuff we need. I am suddenly so sick of knowing what every twitch of her face means that I want to scream. I try to close the door, but she has her foot wedged into it.

“How was band camp?” she asks in her fake, ultracalm voice, which means that she wants to scream at me but she is such a superior being that she won’t descend to that level. My level.

“Fine.”

The foot does not move. “Did you reconnect with your band friends? Wren? Amelia? You haven’t seen them all summer.”

Great, now I am getting Anxious Look Number 113, which means Why don’t you have any friends? Exactly what is the precise nature of your loserhood?

“Yeah.”

“And?”

“They’re fine.”

“What did they do this summer?”

“We didn’t really talk about it.”

“So? Was it blazing hot out there?”

I can think of no nonsarcastic answer.

“Is Shupe still a jerk?”

“No, he had a lobotomy and he’s a prince of a fellow.”

Mom laughs too hard at that, rewarding me for joking with her. Then, her eyebrows all crinkled up high and happy, she waits for me to say more. I have nothing.

“Anything else happen today?”

I pick through the avalanche of unbelievable things that happened today and try to grab on to one that she can handle. There isn’t one. I can’t even make something up. I’ve been at parties—everyone drinking, smoking weed—and listened to girls step out onto the patio, then chat happily with their moms about how they’re watching True Blood at Olivia’s house and can they spend the night? Then Olivia calls her mom and asks the same thing, then they both get wasted and stay out all night. I could never have gotten away with that with Mom. She knows me too well. One word and she would have been all, “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” She can literally read my mind. Obviously, until today there wasn’t much I cared if she read. She even bragged about it: “Aubrey and I don’t have any secrets from each other.”

Tone, I guess. The words aren’t even that important; she just knows me so well that if I open my mouth, if I say one, single word now, it’ll be, “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” So I can’t open my mouth.

When I don’t speak, she gives me the look that is under all the other looks. It is so basic it doesn’t even have a number. It is just Hunger, and if I pause even long enough to translate that one, it will eat me alive.

She finally shakes her head, allows me to shut the door, and I have a few minutes of peace. I know it won’t last. I know that, at that very moment, she’s checking in with her twin, and the instant that Dori tells her about the “heatstroke” she’ll be all over me.

Which she is. A few minutes later, she bursts back into my room with eighteen different drinks including Pedialyte, which she must have had left over from when I had measles.

“Oh, hon, why didn’t you tell me? I’m so sorry that I snapped at you.” She perches on the edge of the bed next to me. When she feels my forehead, her hand is cool against my skin and makes me feel like I am really sick.

“Baby, you’re hot. I’m going to see if I can get you in to see Dr. Queng.”

Yeah, I really want to sit in a waiting room with a big LEGO table and an American Girl video playing to see the pediatrician who set my arm when I broke it falling off the deck in Twyla’s backyard. “No, Mom, I’m fine. Really.”

“We can just go to emergency walk-in. I’m sure I can get them to work you in.”

Mom knows every nurse in Parkhaven and they all love her so much that I always kind of get treated like a celebrity when I’m sick. Which I usually like. But not today. “Mom, how many times do I have to tell you? I’m fine. I just need to rest. I know my own body.”

“OK, hon. OK.” She sticks a giant glass of ice water with a bendy straw poking out into my hands and I sip while she goes into nurse mode and arranges my covers, fluffing them up so that they float back down on me all cool and neat. I love nurse mode. She folds the sheet over the light blanket so that my chin touches only soft cotton. I feel tiny and taken care of. She’s about to leave, then stops and says, “Your lips look dry.”

I hold up the ice water.

She puts the back of her hand on my cheek. It feels so good I have to fight the desire to nuzzle against it. So good that, for a second, I almost think I can spend the whole, entire rest of my life riding the Teacups.





AUGUST 13, 2009



Early the next morning, Mom bursts into my room wearing her gray scrubs. She hates scrubs and says that the hospitals where she consults might be able to force her to wear them, but they can’t force her to wear ones that are pink or have bunny prints. In a lot of ways, Mom is kind of badass.

Without a word, she puts her palm on my forehead. Instead of cool and nice, though, it now feels damp and gooshy, like it could melt right into my skin if she kept it there long enough. “You feel warm.” Then she does her ultra-annoying thing of telling me how I feel. “You’re not any better. I’m staying home.”

“No. I’m fine, Mom.” I make my voice hit the right tone: sick enough not to go to band camp but not sick enough for Dr. Queng. “Really. You go on. You’ve got patients waiting for you.” Luckily, at that exact moment one of the many alarms Mom has set on her phone goes off.

“Shit, I’m going to be late! Call me if you start to feel worse.” She rushes out, stops, tells me, “Just call me anyway, OK?”

I promise I will, and then—score!—I have the house and the laptop all to myself. I can think about my dad with no fear that someone will burst through the door without even knocking, demanding to know what I am doing and when I am going to unload the dishwasher.

From under the bed, I pull out the scrapbook Mom made for me of every photo she could collect of my father. She called it the Book of Palms. The name is supposed to be a joke because he has his hand up, shielding some famous person’s face in most of the photos. I think there might be a Book of Palms in the Bible. I never asked. Mom likes to pretend that I’ve lost interest in my father. That it upset me to hear about him. Actually, I stopped mentioning him when I saw how much it upset her. By that time, though, she wasn’t my only source of information. For the past few years, I’ve been Googling my father’s Next name constantly.

I open the laptop and check my Google alerts to see if there is anything new. There isn’t. There hasn’t been anything on the Internet about my father for months.

“My father.” I don’t even know what punctuation mark to put after those two words. Lots of exclamation points!!! One lonely question mark? I need a cartoon balloon with every symbol available in it. Something that stands for stunned/terrified/pissed off/excited/depressed/happy/mad.

I go to Facebook and stare at his friend request until it starts pulsing and glowing like it is radioactive. I close the laptop, get back in bed, and pull the covers up so that just the soft cotton is touching my chin.