The Gap Year (28 page)

DECEMBER 12, 2009

T
yler changes the radio station; when he hits twangy, old-time country music, he twists the dial hard to get away from it. I want to say something about what he’s told me, but I can’t think of a comment big enough or wise enough or humane enough. He stops on an oldies station and a band sings about
walking on sunshine
. It is one of the songs Mom and Dori danced to on Thanksgiving.

Tyler’s voice is almost normal when he says, “OK, enough of my sad shit.”

I turn the radio down before the singer can ask again,
And don’t it feel good
? And Tyler goes on.

“Sports were good. Sports saved me. They bused us to school from the home. Since I’d never been in a classroom before and was dumb as a stump—didn’t know my letters, numbers, colors, nothing—they just put me in kindergarten. I towered over the other kids. Towered. Which made me feel weird until sports came along a year or so later. And then I ruled. Whatever they had going—baseball, football, basketball—I owned it.

“From day one, I was bigger and faster than any other kid on the field. Being outside? Not having to do chores? Not getting your ass chewed or whaled on? Playing? Just playing? I’d never just played before in my life. And I was warm and clean and getting fed. I was waiting to wake up and find out it was a dream and I’d have to go split kindling or dig postholes.”

“So what happened?”

“I got too big. They had an age limit, so after a few years they kicked me out of the home, and the coach at my school, Coach Randall, took me in.”

“He adopted you?”

Tyler snorts a laugh. “Not hardly. He knew where I’d come from. No, state paid him. Foster-care deal.”

Tyler is silent as he remembers, then shakes his head at the memories. “Coach had three daughters. Youngest was getting ready to go off to college, so he says, ‘I always wanted me a boy.’ Just exactly like you’d say, ‘I always wanted me a cocker spaniel.’ No, actually, more like you’d say, ‘I always wanted me a hound to hunt.’ Because he didn’t want any old boy; he wanted a boy who could play football and he’d take all the credit.

“Coach spent a lot of time with me. Why not? I made him look like a genius. He said I was ‘coachable.’ Gave himself all the credit. Like he’d produced this great player. Bullshit. The day that asshole laid eyes on me I could have given him lessons in the one thing that football is all about: taking punishment.

“I won every game I ever played for him and I was happy doing it. Happy running the bleachers. Happy pushing a training sled back and forth across his backyard. Happy eating pancakes with him and his wife in the morning. Happy eating lasagna with them at night. The only thing he did that was really wrong was he started introducing me as his son. That was wrong. It made me believe that if I worked hard enough, if I won enough games for him …”

Tyler won’t say what he’d believed, but I know.

“That’s what an ignorant piece of white trash I was.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t. I was that way about my dad too. I thought that if I did everything right, he’d come back. I’d have a father. And I had a good life. I wasn’t surrounded by monsters like—”

“Aubrey, it’s fine. I’m not telling you any of this shit so you’ll hate the people I came up with. Or feel sorry for me. Or any of that. I’m only telling you so you’ll know. So one person on earth will really know who I am. Then you can decide if you even want to be that person.”

“I do. I already know I do.”

“You don’t, though. You don’t know. You can’t. See, that’s the thing; until that last game, no one could know. This is the first day of my life since I left that shack back there that I can let anyone know. So you don’t know. Like you don’t know what happened with Coach Randall.”

“What? What happened?”

“He took me back to the pound.”

“The coach?”

“Yeah. Cute puppy turned into a big, old smelly dog. Hey, here’s some shit women never have to deal with: what happens when a boy can look a man straight in the eye.”

“You mean …?”

“Yes, literally look him in the eye. It’s a caveman thing. No, even farther back than that. More like a wolf pack thing. Coach woke up one morning, I was looking him in the eye, and he could not deal.”

“Where was his wife this whole time?”

“Oh, Mrs. Coach? She was pretty much off scrapbooking every shit her daughters ever took. I remember this one time? They all went on a scrapbooking cruise. Yeah. What that all about? You’re, like, taking pictures of each other taking pictures so you can come home and put them in an album with a bunch of stickers and stamps around them and remember when you took the picture?

“No, even hiding everything I could about who I really was, I was way too much real life for Mrs. Coach. She had scrapbooking and I was her husband’s hobby. So when he came to me with a bunch of bullshit about his wife’s migraines and how her doctor ordered her to cut all the stress out of her life or she’d have a stroke, I knew exactly what was happening. I was out of there that night.”

“Is that when you came to Parkhaven?”

“Not hardly. Lots of stops before Parkhaven. They sent me to some old cow and her husband who was a long-distance trucker, so I never saw him. They kept kids for the money. Straight up. The more she took in and the less she spent on us, the more she got to keep for herself. She already had seven when I got there. Big woman. Really big. Took her half an hour to get her blubber up and off the broke-down couch she lived on. Like the queen in a hive of termites, she had all us drones bringing her food.”

“Ew.”

“It wasn’t that bad. She left me alone. They put me in this middle school with a fairly kick-ass football team. One practice and I owned the place. Seriously. Coach—Coach Whitaker this time—was wetting his pants, calling to make sure I had all my permission slips signed and a way to get to practice and the games. He ended up driving me himself. Buying me extra food so I’d ‘stay strong.’ ”

“How long were you there?”

“Few years.”

“Tyler, how old are you?”

“Honestly? I don’t know exactly.”

“Didn’t you need a birth certificate to start school?”

“See? I love the way you think. Way my grandparents tell it, my mom had me in a gas station. Dried me off with the hand dryer, then went out and got high. Not exactly a prime record-keeping situation.”

I think of how natural it was when Tyler called the kid who’d interviewed him “son.” Tyler seems older because he is older. And college? I also start to understand why he doesn’t want to talk about college. I think of him always saying, when we’re in a new restaurant like last night and the waitress hands him a menu, “I’ll have what she’s having.” I think about him never texting. About how when we do his homework together he always arranges it so that he never has to read. I know he can read, just probably not well enough for college.

“Have I completely freaked you out?”

“No, Tyler, I’m …” What? Every word I think of—honored? grateful? humbled?—they all sound like fake, college-application-essay words.

I am silent for too long and Tyler jumps in. “Don’t stress. That was weird. Too weird. Sorry. I shouldn’t have … Just shouldn’t have. Ridiculous, huh?” He pretends it is all a joke and says in this fake game-show-announcer voice, “A. J. Lightsey, come on down! You signed on for the golden-boy, football-hero boyfriend, and surprise! Guess what? You’ve won a redneck hick who doesn’t know who his father is and whose mom is either dead or a meth whore!”

“No, Tyler, that’s not it at all.…” I have too much to say to say anything.

Tyler apologizes again, and the silence stretches out until it is broken when I run over a few lane markers and some cans clatter around the bed of the truck.

“I should have cleaned those empties out.” The Tyler of just a few moments ago has disappeared. He sounds confident again, in command. The perfect boy to be a star quarterback. He sounds the way he did when we first met. The way he always does at school when he is hiding who he really is, and I know that this will be the way he will speak to me from now on. If he ever speaks to me again.

On the highway ahead, a giant red arrow above a sign that reads
SINGLES $19.95.
DOUBLES $21.95
, points to a few cabins tucked back into the woods. I turn off into the parking lot, pull up to the office, switch off the engine. Before I get out, I tell Tyler, “I never wanted a golden-boy, football-hero boyfriend. I wanted you. Just you.”

SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010

W
ho was that?” Martin asks the instant I hang up without having said a word.

“Tyler.” The one-sided conversation was over so fast, I’m not certain it really happened. “He was whispering. He told me not to worry and that he’s going to get Aubrey to call as soon as he can. Probably be a couple of hours at the earliest, though.”

Martin lifts his eyebrows, stands, asks, “Shaved ice or cupcake? We’ve obviously got time for dessert now.”

I put my order in for a cupcake, watch him lope away, and do not let myself remember other times at this park.

“Hey, Danielle!” A mother yelling to her friend as she enters the park catches my attention. She is carrying an infant hidden in a padded sling. A long-legged child of about four dressed in a
POTTY LIKE A ROCK STAR
T-shirt and tiny black skinny jeans is hiked up on her hip. Another mom and her daughter, also around four, wave to the newcomers from the swings.

The mother lugging two children lumbers toward her friend and I recall reading about how much advocates of attachment parenting hate strollers. The latest thinking in that group is that the good mother would not think of exiling her child to such a conveyance.

The women release the older children and they streak off to the swings while their moms settle in on a bench, talking like words are oxygen and they are drowning. The mother with the sling shifts the infant hidden within its padded folds, opens her blouse, and lets the baby nurse. This scene would be impossible to imagine in Parkhaven, where, if a mother
does
dare to breast-feed in public, there are dirty looks, followed by letters to the editor about public indecency, and then an effort to get a law passed to ban such “displays.”

“You really love it here, don’t you?” Martin places a sinful mound of a cupcake on the table in front of me. Dark chocolate. My favorite. He tips his head to the side to catch a sunset-colored drop melting off the side of his cone of shaved ice, asks, “Did you ever think of moving back?”

I study his face to see if he is being willfully obtuse. “Oh, no, never. It was so much more fun being a single mother in a place where that guaranteed social pariah–hood.”

“I knew that. Stupid question. Sorry.”

“And that helps me how, your apology?”

He stops slurping on the fluffed ice and stares at me, his lips tinted orange. “It doesn’t. I just wanted you to know that I am sorry.”

Then he goes directly back to slurping slurps of such blithe obliviousness that I demand, “What? You think you apologize and sixteen years disappear? Martin, you’re not some televangelist who blubbers on TV and tells everyone how sorry he is for sleeping with whores and Boy Scouts and Shetland ponies and all is forgiven.”

“I didn’t ever think I was. And I didn’t realize you knew about the ponies.”

Without a word, Martin hands me the shaved ice and I slide the cupcake toward him. We always did this, shared bites.
You get one, I’ll get the other, and we’ll split
.

He holds the cupcake up, asking if I want the rest. I shake my head, he finishes it, and says, “Move back to Sycamore Heights.”

“Right.” The shaved ice is cold and sweet.

“No, seriously.”

I gasp at the condescension of his ridiculous oversimplification; he is as bad as Dori.

“Why not? No doubt you’re underwater in Parkhaven. You either take some lowball offer on the house or just mail the keys back to the bank. Jingle mail. Happens all the time now. Then move. There’s enough from the car sale—”

“Car
theft
. Yeah, that’s a great idea. Next traces that money back to me—”

“Next will never come after you. Or me. Or Aubrey. I have guaranteed that.” He speaks with Next’s laser-lock intensity. “Nobody as high up as me has ever defected. I’ve counseled every major celebrity in their stable. They know that the papers and talk shows will be lining up to interview me if I ever go public. I could seriously mess with them and half a dozen of the biggest careers in Hollywood. They will never risk that. Never.”

“Okay, let’s just say that that’s true. I now have a college fund to replace in case you haven’t noticed.”

He leans forward, excited, hooked on his own idea. “Right, right, sure. But try this: You give the house back and, since the trust is now gone, you have nothing on the books and the financial aid rolls in. You rent in Sycamore Heights or buy the cheapest place you can get into.”

“It’s a teensy, tiny bit more complicated than that.”

“Cam, I know your thoughts on my work, but this is a big part of what I was doing for all those years. Helping people visualize what they want, and then actualizing that. I’ve strategized entire Oscar-winning careers.”

“ ‘Oscar-winning careers.’ ” I snort. “Yeah, that’s what I need help with.”

Martin ignores my sneering. “What you want is insanely easy. And, P.S., the housing bubble has burst, so we could not be having this discussion at a better time. Especially since you’re buying, not selling.

“Look.” He directs my attention to the For Sale sign in front of a house down the street. “They’ve still got the asbestos siding on it. You think those owners aren’t scared? Wouldn’t take a lowball offer? Seriously, Camille, if it would make you happy, you could have that house. Just go with me for a moment and visualize yourself back here. Beats worrying about a situation we can do absolutely nothing about at the moment, doesn’t it? I mean, all we can do now is wait for Aubrey to call.”

Though I intend to resist, a vision of me in the neighborhood I never should have left, where I should have raised Aubrey, where Martin and I were happy, fills my head. All these years, it was the dream I had left behind. The dream I hadn’t even really analyzed because it was so impossible. But now, sitting here with the hot cash in my shaved ice–chilled hands, I consider the idea. The “good school” concerns that had imprisoned me in Parkhaven are over. I could actually get many more clients in the city than in Parkhaven. And it’s not as if I’d have many emotional connections to uproot.

A realization hits me: I could do it. I could actually move.