by Sarah Bird
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 b
oth 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?
NOVEMBER 21, 2009
At Paige’s house, we watch Tyler’s favorite movie, Never Back Down, about a football star who moves to a new school and becomes a champion freestyle fighter. Colt O’Connor, the tight end who says that the person he’d most like to have dinner with would be Megan Fox, is there too, since he and Paige are kind of together now. So are Madison and Cody Chandler, the leprechaun ghetto wannabe.
That whole group hasn’t accepted me so much as they put up with me because of Tyler. I don’t feel any more or less out of place with them than I do anywhere else. Being with Tyler is its own space. Whenever I am with him I am exactly where I am supposed to be. Plus, I like thinking about the mad sex that they imagine Tyler and I are having.
We are all flopped around on Paige’s long leather sectional couch like puppies in a litter, lying on top of one another, legs hanging over the back of the couch, half our bodies sliding over onto the floor. Tyler is semispooning me from behind but not really touching me. Then the star executes a flying kick to someone’s face, Cody bellows, “Oh no, you dinnit!” and Tyler laughs in a way that presses his crotch firmly against my butt.
He is hard. Like, industrial-strength hard.
Is it because of the freestyle fighter in the movie who has an amazing body? Or me?
“Hey, Ty-Mo!” Paige’s father comes in and we all sit up. Mr. Winslow is a project manager on big construction sites. He and Madison’s father are in a group that trains for marathons together. I gather that all the marathon training is causing trouble at Madison’s house. Madison’s eyes are always red like she’s been crying and I heard her say something about staying at her father’s place, like maybe he’s not living at home anymore.
Tyler stretches like he is working the kinks out of his back, casually grabs a pillow, and drops it onto his lap. Mr. Winslow is holding a platter of chicken wings in one hand. He balls the other into a fist and holds it out to Tyler, who obligingly bumps it, then takes a wing.
“What’s shakin’ with the recruiters?”
“Not much.”
“Not what I hear. I hear those scouts have been out there watching you since preseason scrimmage.”
“There’s been some interest.”
“Yeah, like they’re flying you all over. So what are you thinking? Southeastern State?”
“Southeastern’s a good school.”
“Goddamn effing great school’s what it is.”
“So you’re a Timber Wolf?”
Mr. Winslow holds his hand up like a paw and growls like what I assume is a timber wolf.
Tyler tips his forefinger toward Mr. Winslow. “Go, Wolves.”
“The athletic director was a Pike with me. I’ll put in a good word for you. Not that you need it, but can’t hurt.”
Tyler nods. “Can’t hurt.”
Mr. Winslow puts the platter down. “I’m going to send him an e-mail right now.”
“Cool.”
After he leaves Cody says, “You didn’t tell me you were going with Southeastern.”
Tyler tosses the untouched wing back on the platter. “Southeastern can suck my dick.”
When he takes me home, Tyler asks me to stop coming to practices. He says he wants to keep us completely separate from football. Us. The word sings through my brain.
I like to think that Tyler doesn’t want to talk about college because it means we’ll be separated. It is what I like to think, but I know that is not the real reason. Maybe, like me, he doesn’t even know the real reason.
Before he lets me out, I glance down at his crotch and get my answer: It was not the freestyle fighter in the movie. It was me.
I not only stop going to practices, but I make a point of never even asking about the games.
Simple. Like the quarry.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010
Near dawn, I sit up in bed, heart hammering like I’ve been reanimated, and grab for my phone praying that Aubrey has left a message. Nothing. The reanimation motif turns out to be apt, since, in the bathroom mirror, I behold the Bride of Frankenstein. My hair is frizzed into a corona arching above my head, and mascara remnants raccoon my eyes. I cup my hand under the running faucet, sluice water down my parched throat, then jump in the shower.
In the great room, Martin, covered by my afghan throw, pajama suit in a heap on the floor, is asleep on the couch. Everyone, even your own child, is a stranger when they sleep, strange in their quiet unguardedness. But Martin is more than that. For a second, I don’t recognize him at all, this young man who is no longer young. His hand drapes off the edge of the couch and rests on Pretzels’s head. He’s made a bed for her beside the couch. A blanket is carefully folded and arranged in the large doggie-bed basket she sleeps in, replacing the pillow that’s usually there. Martin noticed what I hadn’t: that the cushion I’ve been making my sweet girl sleep on has been smooshed flat, offering not the tiniest bit of fluffiness to cushion her old bones.
Noticing the soft bed he made for Pretzels derails me long enough for that stupid crack cocaine/rekindling effect to hijack me: I want to lie down next to Martin. Badly. I’m like a shipwreck victim who’s been lost at sea for days, weeks, years, and Martin looks like dry land.
Didn’t Dori tell me that an incredibly high n
umber of divorced couples sleep together after the breakup? How many? Eighty, maybe ninety percent? At that moment, watching Martin, his bottom lip still plump, there is kindling. Which is why I’m embarrassed when his eyes open and he sees me staring at him.
Groggy, not quite awake, he nods at the phone in my hand. “Any word?”
The instant he speaks, all kindling ceases. Plus, when he sits up and tucks the afghan under his armpits like a granny getting out of the shower, it is clear that he’s kind of let himself go. A bizarrely pro-prietorial tweak of annoyance stabs me, as if I’d lent someone my car and they returned it sixteen years later with the fender crumpled. He used to have some seriously admirable shoulders, broad and with a lovely upholstering of muscle. Now they are bonier and slump forward a little like an office worker’s. Someone who’s spent too much time in front of a computer.
“No word,” I answer, and an awkward silence falls. Minus the beer, I never would have let him in my house. The beer and the total fucking collapse of my life.
“Hope you don’t mind me crashing here. No car. Exhaustion.”
“No, actually you could prove useful.” Prove useful? I am trying a little too hard to sound unkindled and all business. “I need a male voice. Someone who can sound like a hard-ass. You can do that, right?”
“Does the pope shit in the woods?” Martin answers in his snappiest tone. It makes me remember how, once he was really awake in the morning, he was always at his peppiest. He adds, “Maggot!” and I almost smile.
There had been entire days back at Sycamore Heights when we hadn’t called each other anything but maggot.
I wave my hand in the direction of the condiment-print shirt. “Did anyone on the underground railroad happen to give you any clothes?”
“You don’t like the suit? I was trying to dress up.”
“That is dressed up? Dressed up is you in all those pictures with movie stars.”
“Yeah, that. Stylists. I haven’t actually dressed myself for years. Anyone who has achieved Public Face status has to pass inspection before they leave Hub HQ. They gave me the clothes. I put them on. Someone did my hair. All that shit.”
