The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  “Where did he come from?”

  Maybe the dogs hear the high pitch of anxiety that suddenly spikes into my voice, because they go crazy, barking and hurling themselves against the closed door.

  “I am not at liberty to discuss that. I’ve got to—”

  “Martin.” I try to prompt Martin to do something, but Hines is already wedging himself back into the crack he opens in the door.

  “No. Wait. You can’t go. You have to tell us. You have to—”

  But the dogs lunge frantically at the opening, insane with the desire to break free and crush my trachea in their massive jaws. Coach slips inside and slams the door shut.

  While he yells at the dogs on the other side—“Silencio, Big Shot! Baron! Where’s your manners!”—I start to punch the doorbell, but Martin touches my hand gently. “Don’t bother. We’ve gotten more than he wanted to give. He’s Walled In.” I wince at the Nextspeak, but can’t argue with his analysis.

  In the car, Martin reads through the thick pile of letters and packages while I try to find my way out of a neighborhood of cul-de-sacs where all the street names start with Park—Parkview, Park Terrace, Park Ridge, Park Drive.

  “ ‘Raising’?” I ask. “What does ‘raising’ mean?”

  Martin, absorbed in the letters, says, “I don’t know. What’s Tyler’s family like?”

  I don’t answer.

  He looks up from the stack of mail. “Cam? What’s this kid’s family like? You met his family, right?”

  “He transferred in from another district. Don’t look at me like that, Martin. You have absolutely no right to look at me like that.”

  “Cam, I am not looking at you like anything.”

  “You’re judging me. You’re wondering ‘How could she have let this happen?’ ”

  “No. I’m not.”

  “ ‘How could she not know anything about this person my daughter was spending all of her time with?’ As if they were both sitting on the porch swing courting or something and I just willfully chose not to know anything about him. Like I was in the house getting high or something. Do you realize what my life has been like since you left? How I have had to hustle every minute of every day just to keep us afloat?”

  “Cam, I honestly don’t doubt anything you’ve done.”

  “How exactly are you supposed to force your way into someone’s life? Like I said, I have nothing she wants anymore. Not even, or especially not, my love.”

  “She wants that, Cam. She’ll always want that.”

  “You don’t know. You don’t know a goddamn thing about her.”

  “I know she had a wonderful mother.”

  “Fuck you, Martin. Just fuck you. And fuck Park Pebbles Cove.” I circle the cul-de-sac I’ve accidentally turned into. “Where the hell are we?” I ask him automatically. Martin has a freakish sense of direction and was always able to answer that question no matter how lost I thought we were.

  “Take a right, then another right at Park Vista.”

  I follow his directions out of the neighborhood.

  “You think I should have been able to control her. That you could have. Don’t you?”

  “Cam, here’s what I think. I think that I have no right to think anything, and that I am lucky you have allowed me to be here at all, and that some of the answers to our questions might be in one of these letters.”

  He holds up the one he’s reading. “This guy was heavily recruited. So far, they’re all from college football coaches encouraging Tyler to”—he skims the letter in his hand—“ ‘seriously consider’ blah-blah and to ‘remember what we talked about.’ Wonder what these guys were ‘talking about’ that they don’t want to put in writing? I’m sure the NCAA would be interested too. Must be a hell of a player. I wonder why he didn’t answer any of them.”

  “Martin, you sound like Coach Tighty Whitie back there. I could care less why this bonehead jock football player gave up his chance to bang college cheerleaders. That is not my concern. Aubrey is my one and only concern.”

  “We don’t disagree.”

  “God, I hate that expression. ‘Don’t disagree.’ You agree, okay? Could you just say you agree?”

  “I agree.”

  I could use a little less agreeability at this moment. A screaming brawl would take my mind off the question it circles back to so many times that I can’t hold it in any longer, and I ask, “Do you think he’s dangerous?”

  “I think we need to find out. Oh, this is interesting.” He holds up a grease-smudged carbon of a form filled in by hand.

  “What is that?”

  “Looks like an invoice with a balance-due date of …” He studies the scrawls more closely. “Hmm, this is interesting. Today.”

  “Oh, spectacular. How much?”

  He puts on the glasses Next was supposed to keep him from needing and studies the faint bluish scrawls at the bottom of the form. “I can’t make it out. But whatever the actual sum is, it’s a five-figure number.”

  “Great, so that’s where our daughter’s college money went.”

  Our daughter. The words are out before I have time to edit them. I hope Martin won’t notice, but a minute turn of his head lets me know that he caught the unintended plural possessive.

  “We don’t know that. It’s just a bill.”

  “Does it say what for?”

  “The carbon is too faint to read—”

  “Who uses carbon copies anymore?”

  “—but the name of the business is Worthy Restorations. ‘Randy Worthy, Prop.’ Proprietor, I guess.”

  “Restorations? Is that little criminal using our daughter’s college money to buy Old Masters or something?”

  “Restorations? Okay, houses are restored, cars are restored, computer drives are restored.”

  “Oh, God. I saw this Nightline about this whole crime syndicate that bought used computers from Goodwill, then got these data-recovery people to mine credit card numbers and Social Security numbers off the hard drives, then sent them to the Soviet mafia.”

  Martin beams at me.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. You’re just such a good mother.”

  “I am?”

  “You are.”

  Martin delivers this bulletin with the explaining-gravity certainty that I learned to hate and distrust. Still, I want this one pronouncement to be true so badly that I have to clamp my jaws closed to keep from whimpering, “Really?” To keep myself from presenting all the evidence of my bad motherhood—the lax discipline, the breakfasts in the car, my complete and utter failure to also be a father—for him to rebut. Instead, I give a crisp nod toward the form and ask, “Is there a phone number?”

  The smile fades and Martin studies the carbon copy. “There’s no phone number, just an address on North Fifty-four out past Layton.”

  “We should talk to Randy Prop, don’t you think?”

  “Oh, we are most definitely going to talk to Randy, and sooner rather than later.” Martin glances at me the instant the words are out of his mouth and says, “Sorry, soon. Just soon. So, we should probably head for Layton.”

  I say, “We don’t disagree.” We laugh. Mostly at how ridiculous it is that we can still make each other laugh.

  I make a U-turn and head for North Fifty-four.

  DECEMBER 8, 2009

  We’ve been sitting in his truck a block down from my house for at least an hour, maybe more, since all the windows are frosted with our condensed breath, when Tyler tells me, “Get ready for it all to end.”

  I stop breathing, give him popped-open disaster eyes, and he adds quickly, “No, not that. Not us. State semifinals are next Friday.”

  “The last game of the season, right? Unless you win?” I squint as if I’m not exactly sure. I am; I’ve been checking the schedule.

  “Oh, it will be the last game. No question about that. Lincoln Consolidated?” He names the powerhouse team they are playing. “They will kick the snot out of us. After that, no more football.
No more Ty-Mo.”

  “You’re quitting football?”

  “Uh-uh. Not quitting. That job will be over.”

  I want to ask about college. Won’t he have to play in college? But I don’t want to speak the C-word. I want to sit in his truck and look out at a world that our breath together has made into a soft, gauzy place where the ugly crime lights now make everything shimmer with a golden radiance.

  Tyler murmurs into the top of my head, “You probably need to go in. Your mom’s gonna worry.”

  “Mmm.” I snuggle in tighter, thinking what a challenging but ultimately good idea it is that we are saving ourselves for marriage. He peels me off his body. “I should go in with you and meet her, your mom.”

  “No. Don’t. She hates meeting people. She has, like, this really bad social anxiety.”

  “She doesn’t sound like a social-anxiety person. I mean, isn’t she out there teaching classes on …” He circles his hands around his chest to indicate breast-feeding.

  “Oh, yeah, she’s fine out of the house. That’s not really a problem. But she hates—hates—having people come into her house. She feels all invaded and shit. It’s a phobia.”

  “What about Dori?”

  God, does he ever forget anything? “Dori’s the exception.”

  He helps me out of the truck. As he is getting back in, he pauses and says, “I think it’s time for us to talk. No, don’t look like that. It’s good. Well, not good, but … Just don’t look like that, OK? I’ll call as soon as the game is over. The second it all ends.”

  I watch until long after his taillights disappear before I go into the house. It is stiflingly hot.

  “Are you trying to get sick?” Mom asks the instant I am in the door.

  The shift from Tyler to her is so jarring that my brain actually hurts. She jerks the giant dogsled parka she bought me for the trip to Peninsula out of the hall closet. “Why don’t you wear your jacket?”

  “Uh, because it’s hideous?”

  “Well, it would have been nice of you to tell me that before I spent almost two hundred dollars on it.”

  “I didn’t ask you to.”

  “Right. I was supposed to just let you get soaked and frozen at Peninsula. Wear the damn jacket, Aubrey.”

  “I’m not going to wear that jacket. Ever.”

  She flaps her lips like a horse. A very annoyed horse.

  “Mom, I don’t really get that cold.”

  “Aubrey, your lips are blue as we speak. And now you’ll probably get bronchitis like you do every year. Then that will turn into a sinus infection. And I’ll have to miss work. And you’re resistant to everything now except those designer antibiotics that cost a fortune.”

  “Sorry to be such a bother.”

  That gets me Hurt Look Number 85, which is the one about how my father screwed her in the divorce and that’s why we have no money. Of course, that look is based on the reality that my being born is pretty much the whole cause of the divorce. The thing that drove her husband to what she has always told me is his psycho religion. Not that I’ve heard his side of that story.

  She yells at me that there are going to be some new rules around here from now on. The first one is that I have to come straight home after school every day or she will ground me.

  After she lists a bunch of other rules like calling and checking in, I say, “Sure. Not a problem,” and walk away. By the time I’ve closed my bedroom door I can’t recall any of the new rules because I’m concentrating so hard on figuring out exactly what Tyler meant, and to do that I have to remember every word he spoke.

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010

  I twine through the web of roads that have woven Parkhaven and all the once-separate little towns surrounding the city into a metropolis with the prefix Greater.

  Martin opens an envelope and pulls out a form. “Hey, his high school transcript.” He studies the computer printout. “Hmm. Looks like they mercy-graduated our young Mr. Moldenhauer.”

  “Perfect. He’s stupid. Stupid and a criminal. This just gets better and better. How long have you and Aubrey been in touch?”

  “About a year.”

  “Weren’t you worried about Next finding out?”

  “I used a fake name.”

  “She’s been communicating with you for a year and never said one word to me?”

  “I kept asking her to tell you.”

  “You ‘asked’ her to tell me.”

  “Cam, what was I supposed to do? I was in no position to make demands. All I wanted was to know her. Let her know me.”

  I weave through a clogged intersection, then say, “It’s like bigamy.”

  “Bigamy?”

  “This double life my own daughter kept from me, it’s like finding out your husband has another family. A whole other double life.”

  “Not that this is your favorite subject, but for the past sixteen years most of what I did every day was listen to the double, triple, quadruple lives that people, mostly famous people, live. People you would never expect.”

  “Movie stars? I would expect movie stars to have multiple lives. I mean, wasn’t that really your job? Keeping the less savory ones hidden from view?”

  “Not really. In my mind, not at all. But I’m not up to diving back into all that. Aubrey, all I care about now is Aubrey. All I ever should have cared about was Aubrey.”

  “So what did you two talk about?”

  “Her classes. Her crazy physics teacher.”

  “Psycho Saunders? She told you about Psycho Saunders?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What else?”

  “She wanted to know why I left.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Not enough. It was hard. How do you fit an answer you’ve been trying to figure out yourself for sixteen years into a chat bubble? Mostly I just wanted her to know that I was wrong. That I regretted leaving and that it wasn’t fair to her. Or to you.” He shakes his head. “God, I was an asshole.”

  “ ‘Was’?” I give him the barest peek at a smile.

  “Oh, no doubt, I am still an asshole. But at least now I’m an asshole who knows that he is.”

  I still can’t believe how completely the Next version of Martin has disappeared, and keep poking around to find out where the cracks in this facade are. “So what did make you give up all that delicious certainty?”

  He leans his head to one side and plucks at the sideburn there with his thumb and middle finger. “Like I said, disillusionments. They just kept mounting. It’s been coming on for years. Years while I told myself that the tenets were good and I just had to accept that flawed humans were carrying them out.”

  “Plus it was nice driving around in a Bentley, squiring movie stars to premieres, being the crown prince or heir apparent or whatever you were. Never having anyone tell you your shit stinks.”

  “You have no idea. When I first got involved, it was as if my whole life I’d been trying to sing with a choir I couldn’t get in tune with. I was always the one who was off-key, out of pitch. The one who was ruining the music. With Next it was utter harmony for the first time in my life.”

  “I thought we had some pretty goddamn harmonious moments.”

  “God. Yes. I met you, Cam, and life became livable. For years. And if it had just been you and me forever … Who knows? Maybe I could have limped through the entire rest of my life with you propping me up.”

  I have no recollection of me propping Martin up.

  “But with a child? That changed everything. I had to be worthy of being a father.”

  I turn my head away so that Martin, who is truly baring his soul, will not see me roll my eyes. It’s pointless to bring up the contradiction of how one becomes worthy of being a father by not being one. I just listen as he goes on about how seductive Next was at first. How they showered him with attention, treating his every utterance as either deeply profound or uproariously hilarious.

  “I think the Moonies call that ‘love bombing
.’ When they lure a new recruit in, then lavish him with attention and affection.”

  “Right. The Children of God had ‘Flirty Fishing’ to show God’s love and win converts. Nothing like plain old sex to put a man on the path to righteousness. Next called their version of all this The Bath. For some of us, being right is so much sexier than sex.”

  So there it was. What I’d always known—and Martin had always denied—had propelled him into Next. A part of me wants to gloat and crow and kick this man while he’s down for every second that my child did not have a father. But why? Because I’ve won an argument I had sixteen years ago? How could any of this have been a surprise when the first thing Martin did after we met was read me the story of a young man searching for enlightenment?

  Outside, the space between the businesses lining the road grows and goes from a scatter of strip malls to a fast-food joint here and there to isolated guys selling fruit and pottery out of the backs of their pickups.

  Even the pottery guys are gone and the country has opened up by the time Martin asks, “Isn’t that the lure of all religions? Don’t they all promise to give you the answers? Let you in on the big mystery?”

  “I guess,” I say. “That and control the pussy.”

  “Cam, Cam, Cam. You were always a good one for keeping it real. How could I not know that that is what I needed more than anything in my life?”

  The Bath. I see why Next calls it that, because a gush of warm delight floods through me at Martin’s admission. And I see why The Bath is dangerous: A person could drown in such a pool of approbation.

  I dry off and crisply demand, “So what was it? What made you give up this life of getting your ass smooched?”

  “One moment? You want one moment? There wasn’t one moment. There was an accumulation over years, then a tipping point. Aubrey mentioned that you showed her the …” He holds his hand out, palm up.

  “Yeah, I made an album so she’d know her father existed.”

  “All right. Well, the last time was with … The star doesn’t even matter. Two Oscars. Four marriages. Hair plugs like a trail on an old map. Was a great actor before he turned himself into a franchise. Anyway, it was the premiere of his latest action-hero blockbuster, Tsunami: Wave Bye-Bye, and he brought his youngest child with him, this beautiful little girl. Five at the time. As usual, the instant he appeared, the photographers were crawling all over him. I instinctively picked up his daughter. She buried her head in my shoulder. I put my hand out to shield her. Just like always. But this time I stopped and thought, ‘What the hell am I doing? I’m protecting this little girl?’ That was it. It was as clear as night and day. I could never again do for someone else’s child what I hadn’t done for my own.”