The Gap Year (25 page)

DECEMBER 8, 2009

W
e’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.”

This story is genetically engineered to melt my heart. Which it does. “Plus, you saw that Next was a load of horseshit and you were an idiot for ever falling for it.”

“You really need me to say it?”

“Only if it’s true.”

“Plus, I saw that Next was a load of horseshit and I was an idiot for ever falling for it.”

The barometric pressure in the car lightens and I am almost happy. Then I remember that he wasn’t there when Aubrey needed him to protect her the most—he wasn’t there last winter on Black Ice Night.

DECEMBER 11, 2009

T
hree days later, Friday, I wait for Tyler to finish the game and call me. I stand in the front hall, looking out the little barred window in the door. Mom has set the heat down so low that my breath freezes on the glass. Outside, light shimmers off the ice that has turned the street black and shiny.

I check my phone for about the hundredth time to make sure it is turned on and I haven’t missed his call. It is 9:43. Tyler needs to call. Soon. I have to sneak out before Mom gets home. She’s really been intense with all her new rules. Her evening classes end at nine, but usually she’ll stay and talk and, essentially, hold private consultations for anyone with a question. She actually really cares about her students and their babies. It is why she is such a guru or diva or something.

I strain to hear the sound of the garage door going up. If I zip out at the first clang, I can be out of the house before she comes in. I’ll have to wait outside in the freezing cold until Tyler comes, but if I don’t leave before she gets home, Mom will trap me. For the last few days, I’ve felt like she is getting ready to lose it.

I turn from the door and send Tyler a text telling him to hurry. Just as I hit “Send,” the front door flies open and there is my mom. “Aubrey, sweetheart, you’re home. Way to obey the new rules.” She unwraps the muffler wound around her neck. Her nose and cheeks are red from the cold.

“Why didn’t you come in through the garage?” I ask, panicking.

She holds up the opener. “Dead batteries. God, it’s freezing out there. The roads are really getting dangerous.” Her hair is up in a ponytail. My mom has this magical belief that putting your hair in a ponytail is the same as washing it.

One strap of her tote bag slips off her shoulder and all her stuff spills out onto the foyer. The rubber tit with blue veins and red milk ducts bounces away; clear nipple guards go sproinging all over; the boob apron, heavy as the one the dentist puts on for X-rays, lands with the nipples facing up.

I stoop down to help her gather the paraphernalia up. I stuff her dolls back in the bag. Those dolls with their heavy bottoms were so real, I craved them when I was little and it was a giant treat when she let me play with them.

“Did you bring my plants in like I asked you to?”

Before I can answer, she goes on, “And while you’re out there, can you turn the faucet in the backyard on so it’ll drip and not freeze? I’ll go get the one in front. No, never mind. That one never stops dripping.”

I am heading out the door with her when the phone in my bra vibrates. Tyler. I stop. “Uh, I’ll get the plants in when I get back. I’ve got to go”—I hold up my cell—“help Tyler with his college applications.” Anything to do with college grants instant immunity.

“Aubrey, you are not going out now. There’s black ice on the roads. It’s late. It’s too—”

“Mom, I have to. Deadlines for his top-three reach schools are, like, tomorrow.”

“Invite him in. You’ve been sneaking around seeing this boy for months—”

“Mom! We are not ‘sneaking around.’ We study together. Period. End of story. Since when do you have to investigate everyone I study with?”

“I’m not going to
investigate
him. And be honest, Aubrey. He’s a lot more than someone you study with.”

“That’s your opinion.”

“Aubrey, you’ve got on mascara. You flatironed your hair. Don’t try to tell me he is just some study buddy. You’re wearing …” She sniffs me. She is always sniffing me. It makes me paranoid that I stink. “Is that my Jo Malone?”

I move toward the door. “He’s waiting.”

She grabs my arm. Hard. “Look …”

It drives me crazy how she says “look” all the time, like she’s Barack Obama. Every grown-up I know who voted for him starts all their sentences with, “Look,” to clue you in that they are going to be calm and reasonable even though they think you are a raving loon.

But she quickly gives up on calm and reasonable and orders me, “OK, that’s it. That is it. You are not going anywhere. If I have to sit on you, you are not leaving this house. This is no longer up for discussion.” She blocks the door, crosses her arms.

The thought of not seeing Tyler makes me frantic. She has to be moved. She has to get out of my way. I shove her aside and rush out. The wind is so cold and strong that it punches me in the chest and knocks the breath out of me, like jumping into the quarry did. I run down the porch stairs.

To my amazement, she follows me. I am already at the edge of our yard when she grabs my hair and stops me dead. “What are you doing?!” I scream at her. “Let go of my hair!”

“This is over, Aubrey. This sneaking around. This disrespect. This lying to me. You are staying home tonight! End of story!”

“Is this the way your mother smothered you?”

“Don’t even try. You are so unsmothered it’s not funny.” She lets go of my hair.

“That’s because you’ve never
had
to smother me! I have never done one single thing to make you worry or doubt me! I still haven’t!”

I try to walk away, but she grabs my arm and yanks me toward her. “Get back in this house!”

I put my hands on her shoulders and physically halt her. “No!”

“Yes!” She clamps onto my wrists and starts dragging me back. “Get inside the house this instant!”

I refuse to be dragged. Light flashes from the window of the house across the street where the neighbor pulls back the blind to see what is going on.

I shove her away. A second later, she has her hands all over me, wrapping around me, pulling me down, drowning me. I wrench away, stand back, and raise my hand up above my head like the Statue of Liberty. I am going to hit her. We both know it. I stop only because, on the porch behind us, Pretzels barks a hideous, strangled bark.

Almost deaf, almost blind, she struggles to see into the darkness. She stands on the side of the porch, away from the stairs, barking, searching, ready to save us. Mom and I both realize that, no matter what, Pretzels is coming to rescue us.

“Pretzels, no!” Mom screams.

Using memory more than muscle, Pretz jumps off the porch. With only old bones to absorb the shock, she hits hard and crumples onto the ground, yelping piteously as she lands. My mom runs back, kneels beside Pretzels.

“Aubrey, come help! We’ve got to get her to the vet!”

Mom hoists her up around the middle. When I see Pretzels struggle to her feet and stand, I run from them.

I would have run even if she hadn’t gotten up.