The Gap Year (27 page)

SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010

W
e are out from beneath the shadows of the tall pines before Martin notices and pulls over.

“Cam, are you all right? Cam?”

“I’m fine. Let’s go. We’ve got to keep moving. Get to Sycamore Heights. Find out what the hell is—”

“Camille, you’re shaking.”

Camille
.

I was Camille on the train in Morocco and for the happy years when we lived in Sycamore Heights. During the colic siege, the Next siege, I cut my hair short so I wouldn’t have to deal with it, and somehow my name ended up getting snipped off as well. I guess that after Next neither one of us had the breath or tenderness for even one extra syllable.

“I’m fine. Let’s drive.”

He opens his arms. Am I supposed to tumble into them?

He undoes his seat belt, undoes mine. I stiffen as he pulls me into his arms like a firefighter dragging a person out of a car that is about to explode. “Camille.” He summons back the person who used to fit in his arms.

“That guy back there. He is my nightmare. He is the embodiment of all my worst nightmares of what Aubrey … Someone like that should never have touched her world. Should never have … never have …”

As I babble, he strokes my hair and murmurs, “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out. It’ll be fine.”

“No, fine is no longer a possibility. Fine would have been me putting my only child on a plane today and sending her off to college, where she and her roommate could have decided whether to stack the beds into bunks for more room or leave them separate. Fine would have been her calling me while she’s walking to her anthro class. Fine would have even been me and Pretzels, curled up on her bed with her baby pictures, me crying myself to sleep. This … this …” I wave my hand at all of it: the snake-bearded hillbilly, the stolen money, the lies. “This is most definitively not fine.”

I’m the one who sounds like a speed freak as I rant on. “His ‘people’? What did that mean, ‘his people’? Oh, God, why would Aubrey know someone like that?”

“Apparently he restored a trailer for them.”

“For him. Tyler Moldenhauer stole our daughter’s college money.”

“At least it’s not drugs or guns.”

“ ‘Bronk’? What kind of a name is ‘Bronk’?”

We both know that it is not the name of a kid heading to college or the name of the boyfriend of a girl who is. Martin’s breath warms the top of my head. It feels luxurious, like getting your hair washed at a salon. I want to close my eyes and lean back, but the words keep pouring out of me.

“I thought I could control her by taking the laptop away. No, no, wait, here’s how stupid I was. I thought I could control her with Christmas cookies. Here’s what an in-tune mother I was: I forced Aubrey to make and decorate cookies with me last Christmas.
Forced
. Five different kinds. As if I could lure her back into childhood with sweets. As if pressing hatching with a fork into peanut-butter cookies would transform her into the toddler I taught to name all the colors. Or that in the middle of sifting powdered sugar onto lemon bars the schoolgirl who sang Beatles songs with me would reappear.”

Martin rests his cheek on the top of my head.

“How did I not know that all those little girls Aubrey once was were already gone?” I straighten back up. “We should go.”

Martin starts the engine. “Sycamore Heights?”

“Unless you have a better idea. Dude.”

Martin snorts a thin laugh and pulls back onto the highway.

DECEMBER 12, 2009

A
t an all-night truck stop, I go into the bathroom with Tyler. The mirror is a greasy sheet of polished metal bolted to the wall. Tyler sits on the edge of the sink. I clean the cut on his lip, wash off the blood dried on his chin, his neck. He closes his eyes while I do this.

A waitress brings tall plastic menus and automatically pours coffee, since it is either late-late-night or early-early-morning breakfast time. Tyler lets me order for both of us. We eat big, fluffy omelets, split a stack of pancakes, and drink too much crummy coffee just because we like sitting across from each other so much. We dawdle so long that I think Tyler has abandoned whatever urgent mission we’d originally set out on until he says, “You ready?” as if I was the one who’d been stalling.

There are only a few semis on the main highway. After a while, we turn off onto a road that shoots through the few scattered small towns. For a while there are one or two lights on in the towns we speed through. Then all the lights and all the towns disappear and it is completely dark. I turn on the radio. I think it will be funny to listen to crazy preachers and talk-show hosts ranting about “the puppet king, Obama, whose soul is owned by the Chicago Zionist Jewish machine.”

Occasionally, I can catch glimpses of tall pine trees. Since neither of us has said anything for a long time, I ask, “Where will all these babies that the government is going to force us to abort come from after Obama makes us all gay marry?”

Tyler is concentrating so hard on the empty road ahead that a few seconds pass before he gives a weak, delayed-reaction chuckle, never taking his eyes from the hole cut out of the darkness by his headlights.

All that I can make out are dead weeds growing up through the cracks in the buckled asphalt, but Tyler sees something that makes him slow down and squint at the left side of the road. He switches off the radio, as if silence will help his vision.

At a spot that doesn’t seem any more overgrown with scrub brush and spindly trees than any other, he says, “This is it,” and turns off onto a road that isn’t even single-lane, and has ruts running down it like a riverbed. Branches swat at the windshield and shriek as they scrape both sides of the truck.

Tyler doesn’t seem to notice the scraping sound that gets louder and louder the farther in we go. The road goes uphill and the engine groans. Tyler puts the truck into four-wheel drive. We come to a sagging gate held shut with a piece of chain and a rusty padlock. The instant the headlights flicker across the gate, Tyler stomps on the gas and we rocket forward. Pebbles spit out from beneath the back tires. He rams the gate so hard that the lock pops off, flies up, and lands with a hard
thunk
on the front windshield. It startles me and I shriek like a little mouse.

By the time he stops and we get out, the sun is beginning to crack a few thin streaks of a dismal gray dawn into the new day. The ground is rocky and uneven; the air is so still and dry and cold that I can blow out a stream of frozen breath so far I lose sight of it in the dim light.

I shiver. Tyler takes off his brown corduroy jacket and puts it on over my hoodie. I protest, but he doesn’t seem to hear me.

We watch in silence as the slowly rising sun, like the lights coming up on the first act of a play, gradually reveals the wreckage of an old, low-lying farmhouse. When he finally speaks, Tyler’s voice is different. Twangier. More country. A little mean. “So, what do you think of the old family estate? Should I have Madison and Paige and the whole gang out?”

“Is this where you grew up?”

“This is where my mom dumped me.”

I take his hand. It is dead cold. “We don’t have to be here.”

“Oh, we have to be here.” His hand trembles. He yanks it back, jams it into the pocket of his jeans, nods to a smaller shack beside the bigger one. “That’s where they put the
mojados
. The wets.”

The building is a converted chicken coop. The gray boards are bowed and popping away from rusted nails. Beside it is the hulk of a windmill. The blades are crumpled and the head is hanging down like a daisy with a broken stem.

I take his arm. “Let’s get in the truck. Turn the heat on.”

Tyler doesn’t move. “The thing I remember most about her is her laugh. She had this smoker’s laugh. Shit rattling around in her lungs. Everywhere she went she had her smokes in one hand and a drink in the other. Know what she named me? Bronco. How sorry is that? Someone name a sweet, clean, newborn baby Bronco? Would you even name a dog Bronco? Ditched that sorry name soon as I could.”

He lets me lead him away like someone in shock leaving the scene of an accident. At the truck, he fumbles for the keys in his pocket, drops them on the rocky ground. I pick them up. “I’ll drive, OK?”

The branches scraping the sides of the truck seem even louder going out. It takes all my concentration and nerve to navigate the big truck over the ravines in the narrow road. Tyler doesn’t seem to notice or care that his truck is being destroyed.

Neither one of us speaks for a long time after we emerge and get back on a decent road. I don’t know what to say and finally ask, “So that wasn’t your mom’s place?”

“No. She lived in some piece-of-crap trailer one of her ‘boyfriends’ gave her. Mighta been my father. Who cares? That was my grandparents’ place.”

“Where’d your mom go?”

He shrugs. “My grandparents acted like she was dead. But who knows what that means, since my grandparents thought that anyone who wasn’t an android working machine was a waste of good oxygen. With them you were either working until you dropped or dead asleep just long enough so you could get back up and work until you dropped again. They had me bucking hay out the back of a flatbed truck by … Shit, I couldn’t have been more than five. My age. Another little detail nobody bothered to keep track of. I’m going to shift you out of four-wheel.”

He reaches down next to my feet, moves the shifter. The growl of the engine softens and the ride smooths out. I want to be back on a big highway with lots of traffic and lots of lights. I blow through a couple of small towns that are not much more than a few boarded-up shops with gas stations at either end.

A truck with wheels the size of satellite dishes zooms past us. Bumper stickers on the back proclaim
IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THANK A TEACHER. IF YOU CAN READ THIS IN ENGLISH, THANK A SOLDIER
and
MY OTHER RIDE IS YOUR MOM
.

I reach across the seat and take his hand. Even with the heater on full blast, his fingers are still icy.

“What happened to …?”

“My grandparents? Died, I guess. They weren’t never …” He drops my hand, splays his fingers in frustration, corrects himself: “They
were
never prosecuted.” The mean country twang fades more and more the farther we drive. “County just let them go back home and die.”

“What happened? After?”

“CPS put me in this group home. For the first time in my life I was getting fed regular, didn’t have to work like a slave. Had toilet paper, soap, sheets on the bed, screens on the windows. And you want to know the really messed-up part? I missed them. I missed those heartless, ignorant peckerwoods. Missed my skank of a mother. I’d hear someone with shit rattling around in their lungs when they laughed and my heart would hurt, I missed her so bad. I woulda gone right back to my grandparents if they’d let me. How fucked up is that?”

“It’s what you knew. They were all you ever knew.”

“Hey, even a dog learns to keep away from someone whups up on him.”

“They whipped you?”

“See? I love it that you even ask that question. Where I come from, you’d be a fool to ask that question.” He laughs; it’s almost a real laugh. “You’d get the shit kicked out of you for asking such a dumb-ass question.”

He looks out the window and speaks only to give me directions. We are back on the highway before I can take a full breath. Farther on, out of nowhere, Tyler asks, “What do you call that kind of ice cream with chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry all in one box?”

“Neopolitan?”

“Yeah, neopolitan. There was this little black kid in the home had a face like that. Regular chocolate skin, pink scar tissue, and white where the color was permanently gone. Sweet kid. Smart too. His mother threw a pan of boiling water in his face.”

“Jesus.”

“He was my buddy. Idolized me because I gave him my granola bar at breakfast and also knocked the shit out of anyone bothered him. I enjoyed doing both. That’s what kind of psycho thug I was. So here’s Neopolitan with his face half melted off, and you know who he cried for at night? His mother. He begged to go back to her. He loved her. He thought she loved him. For real. Neopolitan taught me the most important thing anyone ever taught me: A mother, father, that’s random. That doesn’t have to be who you are.”

SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010

I
stare out the window but am too distracted to notice the area we’re driving through until Martin says, “We’re almost there.” We wind through the familiar streets that lead into Sycamore Heights’ small commercial area.

The parking lot of the tiny grocery store where I’d once bought soy milk and rotisserie chickens is now occupied by a carnival midway assortment of food trailers. A festive street-fair vibe pervades, young and old strolling about eating food off sticks and out of cones.

Martin and I plow through the happy crowd. I run to the first trailer. It has a Dumpster-size pink cupcake perched on top, advertising its product. We cut to the front of the line and peer in. It is manned by a pair of cute hipster girls in black-and-white-striped tights, ruffled skirts, and Chuck Taylors. In the next, Kim Chi Wah Wah: Korean BBQ Tacos, an Asian man sears thin strips of meat while his wife takes orders at the window.

I race next door, where a middle-aged woman pours stripes of crayon colors onto a snowball of fluffy shaved ice. Across the street, we investigate Frankly Speaking: Purveyors of All Things Pork and find a frat-type guy selling hot dogs. Inside the KeBabulous! wagon a Middle Eastern couple skewers chunks of grilled beef and pepper.

I dodge mothers leading packs of children, bob and weave through coveys of tween girls giggling and trading bites, sprint past couples holding hands, studying menus posted on the sides of trailers. We gape into the windows of the final few trailers, breathe in the fragrance of sugar and vanilla that they exhale.

Aubrey is not inside any of them.

I stop in the middle of the closed street while what amounts to a block party eddies around me. A mother and her high school–age daughter, both of them whippet-thin, the kind that would share each other’s clothes, pass by, heading for the cupcake trailer.

“Snow Cap or Red Velvet?” the mother asks.

“You get one, I’ll get the other, and we’ll split,” her daughter answers.

I hate them both. Intensely.

Martin plows through the crowd, reaches me. “She’s not here.”

“Now what?”

Martin guides me away from the mob. “Cam, you haven’t eaten all day. I’ll grab some food and meet you at that park around the corner on our old street and we’ll reconfigure.”

Starved, out of ideas, and grateful to him for offering to brave the throng, I agree.

I could find my way to our old street a few blocks away with my eyes closed. The instant I turn onto it, the tumult falls away and I am back in my lost paradise. Our street, lined with tall sycamores so old their crowns have grown together to form a canopy that shades the road, gave the entire development its name. On either side of the road are one- and two-bedroom bungalows built after the war for the vets who came home but didn’t use the GI Bill to go to college. Instead, they worked in the ladder factory that used to be nearby or got jobs as plumbers, painters, electricians.

The street is spruced up far beyond what it was the last time I visited several years back. The faded gray asbestos shingles that had covered most of the houses when we lived here have been removed by the new hipster owners and the houses are painted bright, imaginative colors: Periwinkle with lime green and pimiento accents. Mustard with cobalt blue trim. Seeing all the rebellious colors makes my eyes ache. I can almost not look at the tiny duplex where Martin and I lived, where we drank wine at sunset in the backyard, and decorated joke Christmas trees with souvenirs of our happiness. The place where Aubrey was conceived. The new owners have converted it into a single house with one porch and painted it soft lavender with chocolate trim.

I sit in the little park at the end of the street and my heart constricts with a pang of melancholic longing as I imagine how I could have pushed Aubrey in her stroller to this park to meet the children of my friends for playdates. How they all would have grown up together and she’d have been part of a jolly swarm of girls eating cones of pink shaved ice together right now.

Martin arrives, deposits several bags on the table, and we dig in. “Oh, my God,” he says after his first bite of a taco piled with Korean barbecue, napa cabbage, cilantro, and tomato. He holds it out to me. “You have got to try this.”

The taco is a revelation. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to eat a taco without kimchi on it again.”

“Finish it,” Martin says. “I’m moving on to bachelorette number two.” He pulls out a crepe stuffed with a mixture of caramelized onions, goat cheese, roast chicken, and tarragon, splits it, and slides half over to me. It is heavenly.

I find it hard to hate a man who brings you exactly what you didn’t even know you craved. Food so good that it is impossible to worry while you eat it. Martin takes a bite of the crepe, puts it down, rolls his eyes back in his head, raises his fists up next to his ears, rotates them, and makes purring, lip-smacking mews of pleasure. The Happy Happy Yum Yum Dance. Aubrey would perform it while sitting in the blue space pod of a high chair if Martin or I spooned some especially tasty blob of mushed something into her mouth.

Exactly one other person on earth carries in his memory this image of Aubrey’s moments of immaculate delight.

My phone rings. I grab it and hear the last voice on Earth that I expected to hear.