The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  “Maybe you should just go ahead and tap Wren. Or Amelia. They both know the drills as well as I do.”

  “What? You told me that you’d only need a week to recover.”

  “Well, yeah. That was the initial diagnosis. But the doctor says it’s more serious than he thought at first. One more degree and there would have been permanent brain damage.” Three years of working in the attendance office is paying off. I know exactly what to say and even how to say it to make a teacher start worrying about lawsuits. I squint like both the sun and his questions are making my head hurt.

  Shupe bounces a little on the balls of his puffy white shoes, and I go on even whisperier, as if all the talking is wearing me out. “Actually, the doctor says that I might never regain the ability to regulate my body temperature.” I slump a bit to help him imagine me with a pointer strapped to my head, blowing into a tube to control my wheelchair.

  Shupe exhales and puts his hands together like he is going to ask me to pray with him. But he just looks over his shoulder at the mob scene, winces when LeKeefe Johnson yells, “Left face!” and all the returning people go left and smash into all the freshmen who have turned right. “When did they stop teaching left and right? Is that too much to ask of our educational system?” He stands up. “We could really use you out there, Lightsey.”

  “OK, Mr. Shupe.” I pretend to try to struggle to my feet, letting my head flop as I do.

  “No, no. Keep your place.” He waves his hands over his head to signal LeKeefe to stop, orders me, “Get well,” and runs off without even asking to see the doctor’s note that I’d carefully forged using the wide variety of forms I have amassed while working in attendance. I guess that after three straight years of my not being anything—not emo, not Christian, not prep, not jock, not ghetto, not punk, not hipster, not skank, not prude, just a half-assed band geek—no one can believe I’d do anything so well defined as lie. I like my new superpower.

  Out on the field, Shupe yells, “Band! Ten-HUT!”

  LeKeefe tweets his whistle, holds his right foot up high, and orders, “Mark time! Mark … AND!” He brings his foot down, trying to get everyone to hit the first beat together. They don’t. They really don’t.

  “T-bones, arc it up! Arc it up!” Mr. Shupe runs onto the field to make certain that the trombones do the choreography perfectly so that, from the stands at halftime, they will all look like very talented ants forming into triangles and figure eights.

  The brass players are swinging their instruments up and down, the drummers twirling their big, padded sticks with each beat, everyone just working it as hard as they can.

  Do any of them even know that they are playing “Fat Bottomed Girls” by Queen? Have they watched the YouTube video of Freddie Mercury? I did, and from that moment on, all I could ever think about when we played that song was this skinny guy in a stretchy unitard thing singing about how fat-bottomed girls make the rockin’ world go round. You can’t erase that image and get back into believing that you and Wren Acevedo and LeKeefe Johnson and Amelia O’Dell and all your other band friends are really, secretly cool any more than you can believe that girls of any bottom size made Mr. Mercury’s rockin’ world go ’round. You just can’t.

  The football field is still empty, but the aluminum bleachers set up next to it are filling in with the girls who Mom and Dori call the Parkhaven Princesses. They are all wearing Nike running shorts, flip-flops, and weirdly uncool T-shirts that they make look cool. And, somehow in the swampy humidity, they all have hair straight and shiny as Christmas tinsel. Flatiron hair. My whole life Mom has told me that I am “just as good as any of those Parkhaven Princesses.” Which, until she mentioned it, I had never really considered, but the instant she made a point of telling me I was just as good as them, I saw that the whole question was open to debate and she was cheering me on because I was on the losing team.

  I suddenly wonder why I ever hated these girls and realize that I don’t. I never did. My mother does. Dori did. Or they hate whoever their version of them was in their high schools. But why should I hate them or idolize them or feel anything at all about them? They are just being who they were born to be. Exactly like I, only child of a semideranged, quasi-hippie single mom, am being who I was born to be.

  Everyone on the bleachers claps when the team runs out. The players have on their video-game-predator pads and helmets. Tyler is so encased in plastic that all I can identify is his number. The only sound is a clatter when the players ram together.

  In the end, it doesn’t matter that I have worn a skirt. Tyler never looks my way once. Which is good. I am dressed all wrong.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2010

  I grab the Diet Cherry 7UP, dump most of the can into a glass—a giveaway from the breast-feeding conference I attended last March, inscribed with the proclamation, I AM A LACTIVIST!—dig out a half-finished bottle of merlot, pour a healthy jolt in, and hope that the chemical cherry taste and aspartame will be enough to sweeten the vinegar tang of the old wine. Since Dori isn’t around to slug me on the arm, I need at least a modest buzz to disrupt my current cycle of regrets.

  I take the drink and settle into my usual spot on the sofa where I’ve sat up more nights than I care to recall listening for the rumble of Tyler’s truck. To take my mind off my fear that this will be one of the nights when Aubrey doesn’t return, I listen to my messages. The first one is from Simone, who reminds me that I saw her late last week in the hospital after her delivery. The message breaks up but sounds frantic enough that I call right back.

  “Thank God you called!”

  When someone asks why I do the work that I do, that’s what I should tell them. Those four words. “Thank God you called.” How many people ever get to hear that at their jobs? Her problem is engorgement. I walk her through expressing by hand. “That should help soften the breast a little. The nipple won’t be so flat and little Joaquin”—as usual I remember the baby’s name—“will be able to get a good latch.”

  “My mother-in-law says I should use cabbage leaves.”

  “Great idea if you’re making cabbage rolls, but there’s really no evidence that they work any better than a nice cold compress. An ice pack will help with tissue swelling.” I tell her that it’s safe to use acetaminophen or Advil.

  I know Simone will be fine, but she’s still uncertain and pleads, “Could you come over tomorrow?”

  “I’d love to, but my daughter’s leaving for college and I’ve had to clear my schedule for a few days to help her tie up some loose ends.” I promise to check back as soon as Aubrey is safely winging her way toward a bright and shiny future.

  “College,” the new mom whimpers while Joaquin cries in the background. “Will we ever make it that far?”

  “Blink twice, Simone.”

  She laughs. Always a good sign. I give her my colleague Janis’s number. “If Joaquin is not drinking like a frat boy by tomorrow, Janis can help you.” I think about Janis, who I split shifts at the hospital with—late thirties, married, two sons, kind eyes, an inexplicable affection for animal prints—and am relieved that there is finally another competent lactation consultant in Parkhaven who can fill in for me.

  I hang up and notice that among the many things annoying me are the misbegotten Betty Page bangs I’m trying to grow out. They’ve reached the sheepdog stage and are driving me crazy. I pin them back before I return the rest of the calls.

  The calls—each one so absorbingly unique, yet all variations of problems I’ve dealt with hundreds of times before—occupy me so completely that a couple of hours slip by before I finish the last one, switch the light off, and stretch out on the couch to listen in the dark for what I want to hear most: Aubrey coming home.

  As I strain to detect the muffled squeak of the front door being quietly opened, I drift into the cozy place that floats on the outskirts of actual sleep. Memory overtakes me with the vividness of a dream, and I am back with Martin in our sweet little duplex in Sycamore Heights. We are eating
the dinner we’ve spent a couple of happy hours making together—chiles rellenos with raisins and pecans stuffed into the peppers—on the postage stamp–size deck behind our rented house. We have recently discovered that there are other white wines besides chardonnay and that they are all delicious with chiles rellenos. It is sunset. Swallows dip through the air chasing late-spring insects. The smell of newly cut grass wafts over to us. Someone across the alley is playing Lucinda Williams’s new CD. We are cocooned in the simple opulence of being together.

  Most mothers say that the happiest moment of their lives was when their child was born. Aubrey’s birth was the most intense moment of my life. But happiest? My pick for pure, simple happiness would be on that deck with Martin. I will never understand how, if he’d been even a fraction as contented as I was, he could voluntarily have given up that feeling.

  I jerk fully awake, force the dream-memory aside, and listen for any sound that might indicate that Aubrey has come home. But the snuffling whistles of Pretzels snoring at my feet are all that disturb the utter silence.

  My mother hovered and clung more than any helicopter mom that was ever invented after her. But even she couldn’t control any of the most important events in my life. She couldn’t control that she died young, and she couldn’t control who I fell in love with. My future was decided on that train in Morocco when I fell in love with Martin.

  I pray that my daughter’s future has not already been decided. That it wasn’t decided twelve months ago, at the start of her senior year, when my business finally really took off and I was gone all the time and I didn’t intervene when I should have. I pray that Aubrey won’t pay the price for my negligence. That she will come home tonight and have the life she was meant to have.

  AUGUST 26, 2009

  The entire first week of school is a weird limbo zone. My old life is pretty much over, but what I am heading for is mooshy and vague. At the same time, the feeling that Tyler’s face can pop out at me at any second is sharp. That and thinking about my dad getting in touch with me are these random adrenaline spikes in the endless boredom.

  So I come home and, as usual since Mom’s business has gotten so busy, there is nothing decent to eat. She calls, but I don’t answer, and she leaves a voice mail saying there is some kind of population explosion and she will have to stay late at the hospital. Which is fine except for the lack of edibles and me being starved, since I was too nervous at lunch to eat.

  I make some cinnamon toast and watch while the butter melts and the cinnamon sugar turns all bubbly under the broiler. I take it out, put both pieces on a plate, pour a glass of milk. Consume. Suck butter-sugar from my fingers. Repeat.

  Then, without any planning at all, I get the laptop out, go to Facebook, and, like pulling a Band-Aid off with one fast rip, I confirm my father’s friend request.

  I have barely begun to believe that I’ve actually done it when Facebook makes the bloopy sound it does to alert you that someone wants to chat.

  Chat?

  I hadn’t considered the possibility of chat. Since I’ve already jumped off the cliff, though, I click on his message, and keep on falling while the first real words my father has communicated to me in sixteen years appear on the screen.

  4:34 P.M. AUGUST 26, 2009

  =Aubrey, hello. Thank you for confirming me.

  I come so close to slamming the laptop shut and calling Mom and telling her everything. About Dad. About Tyler. Everything. But I know that if I hesitate for one second I will freeze up and this will turn into an impossibly big deal, and I’ll never do it, so I just dive in and start writing whatever pops into my head.

  =How could I not after I went to your page and saw that, essentially, you’d set it up just to be friends with me?

  =God bless Facebook! Because of my situation here, it’s the only way I could contact you without being monitored.

  =Monitored?

  =Long story. Not what I want to talk to you about. What I want to talk to you about is YOU!

  =OK …

  =Seriously, I want to know everything about you. What music, books, movies you like. Which ones you hate. What your favorite subject is in school. Everything. Aubrey, I’ve missed so much. We have so much to catch up on.

  =Oops. I hear the garage door going up. Mom’s home. We share this laptop, so I have to shut this down and log out. Sorry. GTG.

  I quickly sign out, because I don’t actually Got To Go. I actually have GTB, Got To Breathe. Breathing. Something that pretty much stopped the instant that chat box blooped open.

  I don’t know how long I spend reading and rereading what he wrote and what I wrote back, but it startles me when Mom pounds on my door, yelling, “Hey, punkalunk! There’s groceries in the car. Can you at least get the ice cream and milk in? I’ve got to pee like a racehorse.”

  Thanks for the image.

  I open my door. As she sprints to the bathroom, she yells back at me, “How was your day?”

  “Fine.”

  She stops dead in her tracks and studies me. One word. One single word and she knows. I am certain that she knows about me chatting with Dad. “What happened?”

  “Nothing! God! I’m sorry my life is so boring.”

  She laser-scans me, gathering clues.

  “Groceries,” I say, and rush out to the garage, to the safety beyond her force field.

  FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010

  I’m asleep on the couch when Pretzels, whimpering patiently by the patio door, wakes me. My first thought is, It’s Aubrey’s birthday. When I hear the sound of water rushing through the pipes in the slab beneath my feet I almost burst into tears of joy: Aubrey is home.

  I help Pretzels out the patio door, then rush to the kitchen to make a Happy Birthday breakfast of Miggy Moo. While butter bubbles in the frying pan, I press a Mickey Mouse cookie cutter into a piece of bread to make a big-eared bread cutout that I slide into the pan and break an egg into. This breakfast will make up for last year, when I was gone too much and not paying enough attention. It will atone for all the dry Cheerios eaten from a Tupperware container as she was strapped into a car seat driving to day care. It will redeem all the salt and grease abominations picked up from McDonald’s on the way to drop her off at school. It will counteract an entire adolescence of breakfasts that Aubrey slept through. It will welcome my daughter into her eighteenth year of life and send her off to college.

  Aubrey named this creation when she was eighteen months old, back when I was a stay-at-home mom who still had a husband and time to make special breakfasts. Aubrey was with me in the kitchen, strapped into the blue plastic high chair that Martin called the Space Pod. With the intensity of a heart surgeon, she was occupied chasing bits of pear, slippery as goldfish, around the tray. When I put the Mickey Mouse cutout toast filled with egg on the high chair tray, Aubrey had gazed up at me, her mouth rounded in a perfect O of awed amazement. Then I’d painted eyes and a big smile on the egg Mickey with a bottle of ketchup and, dazzled by my magical skills, Aubrey had cooed, “Miggy Moo.”

  Why hadn’t I made Miggy Moo for my daughter every day of her life?

  “Where’s my inhaler?” Aubrey bursts into the kitchen, sucking in broken, staccato breaths that pull her pale, freckled shoulders up to her ears and scoop out shadowed hollows behind her collarbones.

  I squelch my desire to sing “Happy Birthday,” jump up and down, hug her, and congratulate her for coming home; I know she’s short on sleep and that makes her grouchy. Plus she’s told me repeatedly that she doesn’t want me to do anything for her birthday. Cool as a double agent trying to act normal, I answer casually, “There’s an extra inhaler in my purse.”

  As she dumps out a flurry of old grocery receipts, wadded-up tissues, and an assortment of nonworking pens, I analyze Aubrey’s face. I check her color and listen to her breathing to gauge how serious the attack is. For a moment, all I register is her beauty. The simple, luminescent beauty of youth, the beauty of her being mine and still being under my roof. I comple
te my analysis and exhale. This is a serious attack of annoyance more than asthma.

  Aubrey is wearing an old T-shirt of Tyler’s and one of the many pairs of ridiculously overpriced Nike shorts she inexplicably squandered her Lark Hill money on during her senior year. Her hair is squashed down on one side and feathers up in a cock’s comb on the other. We used to laugh at the comical forms her baby-fine hair took during the night. But it’s been a long time since we laughed together about much of anything, and it certainly doesn’t appear as if we’ll start this morning.

  Still, whether she likes it or not, I hug my baby and whisper, “Happy birthday, sweetheart.”

  For just a second, she relaxes into my embrace and I am certain that we have reached a turning point. That it is all going to be fine. Really fine. But then I add, “We’ll head over to the bank right after we eat,” and she stiffens and pirouettes out of my arms. At least she didn’t refuse. Right after we claim the money, I’ll take her to Best Buy and see what kind of laptop I can afford. A girl going away to college, a birthday girl, needs her own laptop. I’ll pick up a cake while we’re out. Maybe set up a farewell dinner and see if she’ll invite Tyler over.

  When she can’t find an inhaler in my purse, she rummages through hers, pulling out three kinds of lip gloss, several tiny bottles of hand sanitizer, a white bib apron with coffee stains dribbled down the front, and more keys than most janitors carry. All held together by a chain with Tyler’s senior picture in a small pewter frame in the shape of half a heart. Of course, Tyler carries the other half.

  An inhaler finally rattles out. Aubrey shakes it, huffs on it a couple times, and her shoulders relax. Without a word, she brushes past me, tears my list of college reminders off the magnetic pad on the front of the fridge, and on a clean sheet writes, “Refill inhalers!!!!”