by Sarah Bird
He acts like my jaw hands have forced all the air out of his puffer fish lungs. He blows bubbles into my face, then grimaces, squeezing his eyes together, challenging me to try to stay under longer than him. My lungs are on fire, but I mime a yawn, look at the watch I pretend I am wearing, tap my fingers on my chin like I’m bored. I am stretching out for a nap when he shakes his fist in my face, then blasts off toward the surface. I am a fraction of a second behind him.
With the first breath I suck in, I yell, “Loser!”
“I don’t think so!” Tyler inhales a lung-busting gulp of air. I do the same, then we plunge back down. Tyler flips backward in elegant circles, going farther and farther down. Then he stops, crosses his arms over his chest, and tilts his head up at me, cocky as a rapper in a battle who’s just spit out some deadly rhymes, challenging me to top him. I dive farther down, do some body popping and a goofy, jokey robot, then freeze with my arms crossed over my chest, throwing pretend gang signs with both hands. We go back down again and again, break-dancing and having rap battles and seeing who can stay under the longest.
I always win because I can hold my breath forever, since I know how to move on the outside and stay silent and still on the inside.
1:13 A.M. NOVEMBER 2, 2009
=Is it a happy or a sad thing to feel like you just had the best day you will ever have in your entire life?
=For me, Aubrey, reading this, it is a very happy thing.
=Does it matter if there will never be another one as good?
=There will be.
=How do you know?
=You will. More than you can count. It’s late. Why aren’t you asleep?
=Good question. G’night.
=Sweet dreams.
=Sweet dreams to you, Dad.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
I haven’t dabbled in drugs much since one unfortunate incident involving marijuana that should have been labeled “crack weed.” I suddenly have the same feeling that I had after smoking the crack weed: The world around me dissolves into wavy lines and recedes at a panic-inducing velocity. Though a roaring in my ears prevents me from hearing exactly what Brad is saying, I’m getting the picture and state it as clearly as I can: “Aubrey took the money? All the first-year money?”
Brad nods.
“That is not possible. The trust specifies that I, the guardian of record, have to be present. I was not present. My daughter doesn’t even have a copy of the trust agreement. You could not have given her the money. Or if you did, it was illegal and your bank is criminally liable.”
Brad is as calm as a yoga instructor as he murmurs, “Situations like these involving divorce and estrangement from the child are difficult, I know. It can be hard for everyone to get on the same page.”
Oh, shit. Brad is giving me Zen Banker.
“ ‘Page’! There is no ‘page’ to be on! I have the page! All the pages!” I hold the trust agreement up.
“Our records indicate …” Brad swivels away from me to study his monitor with the weary demeanor of a man who is tired of dealing with crazy, screaming bitches. Was Joyce a crazy, screaming bitch beneath her perfect highlights? Or did it make it easier for Brad to leave to pretend that she was? “… that we received a fully executed codicil to the original agreement that altered the terms of distribution with the principal trustee mandating that the beneficiary be given full and complete access to all funds designated in Section—”
“You gave the money to Aubrey? You didn’t send it to Peninsula State College?”
“That appears to be the case.”
“You just gave a child a year’s worth of college tuition?”
Brad scans the form on his computer. “Our records indicate that Aubrey’s birthday is today and she turned eighteen—”
“Oh, God! Her birthday. That’s what she was waiting for. Fucking ‘legal age.’ How much?”
Brad had taken his hand off the mouse at “fucking,” and I already feel him distancing himself. “I’m going to need to check on a few things before we—” He means he’s going to talk to lawyers.
“Something in the vicinity of thirty thousand dollars, I guess.” The way Brad’s eyes flicker back to the screen confirms how close I am. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fucking Tyler Modenhauer, he put her up to this!”
I am now screeching like a howler monkey, which causes Brad to go to his ultimate Zen Banker level and start scribbling down the phone numbers of “someone in corporate” who might be “better able to assist” me. Then he uses the word “defund” and I come close to losing it altogether until I remember that I’m in a bank and that Brad, no doubt, has a button under his desk he can push and I’ll be eating industrial carpet with a security guard’s knee on the back of my neck if I don’t calm down.
I stumble outside into the parking lot. It takes me a second to remember what my car looks like. Dori is waiting for me in it with all the windows rolled down, texting madly, when I collapse into the passenger seat.
“Cam, what? You do not look good.”
I stare at her.
“Say something. You’re white. Greenish white. You want to lie down in the backseat? Come on, put your head between your legs. God, you’re trembling.”
Dori forces my head down. As I lean over, hyperventilating car rug fibers, I see, under the seat, a yellow Peeps bunny looking back at me. I try to recall what Easter he dates from and calculate that he must be a minimum of ten years old. And still as fresh as the day I tucked him into a nest of shredded green cellophane grass in Aubrey’s basket.
I sit back up.
“You haven’t eaten anything all day. Have a bite of my wrap.”
I take the wrap and gnaw on rubbery tortilla and whatever vegan abomination she had them fill it with. My guess is nonegg tofu egg salad. Or tile grout.
“Is this,” I ask, holding up the wrap, “supposed to balance out smoking, drinking, drugs, and your powdered-sugar-doughnut binges?”
“Oh, good, you’re feeling well enough to bitch me out.” She snatches the wrap out of my hand. “Crisis over.” She eats and waits for the story.
I hold out for roughly thirty seconds. “She got it. They gave it to her.”
Dori’s mouth drops open and I am treated to the sight of half-mulched vegan egg salad. “The bank gave it to her? I thought you had to be present to sign off.”
“Martin, that psychotic, lying asshole, added a codicil to the trust so that Aubrey could get the money without me. Something that, apparently, is possible the second she turns eighteen. The entire first-year tuition is gone.”
Heat waves shimmer off the parking lot pavement, but I am chilled to my bones. “What the hell has my life been about for the past sixteen years? I exiled myself here so she could get a good education, go to college, and have a wonderful, fabulous, exciting, fulfilling life.”
“You don’t know that. Aubrey is a sensible girl. Beside, worse comes to worst, it’s just the first year.”
“You don’t understand. This whole codicil thing means that Martin must have had contact with her.”
“Yes. And?”
“And any contact nullifies the trust agreement. It gives Next the right to defund the entire trust.”
“ ‘Defund.’ Is that even a word?”
“Brad Chaffee used it. He and Joyce broke up.”
“No! Ken and Barbie split up? Is he gay? Please tell me that Brad Chaffee is gay.”
“It’s gone. It’s all gone. I cannotcannotcannot believe this.”
“Maybe Next won’t find out.”
I squint, which gives Dori time to remember that article I showed her about Next hacking into the IRS system.
“Hmm. Probably not. Cam. Cammy, no, don’t cry. Oh, shit, yeah, cry.”
“What do I do now? What can I do? Please, will someone please tell me what I am supposed to do right now? I have no idea on earth where my daughter is. I no longer know any of her friends. And even if I could track her down, then what do I do? Stand outside a locked
door and scream at her? Call the police to drag her home? At which point they ask how old she is and hang up when I say eighteen.”
“Preaching to the choir,” Dori agrees.
I’d been on the extension when, after Dori’s ex had told her that he didn’t know where Twyla was, Dori had called in a missing person report. The officer’s first question was, “How old is the missing person?” When Dori answered eighteen, the woman on the other end delivered a speech that she had obviously given a thousand times about “law enforcement guidelines” requiring that if the missing person is an adult there has to be “concrete, solid” evidence that he or she is in grave physical danger or will harm himself or others before a police report can be taken. The woman had ended the conversation with these words of wisdom: “Adults are free to roam about as they please.”
“So much for my delusion of easing her into college with dust ruffles and comforters. What kind of a fantasyland of denial was I living in? Even if I could get the money, I’d have had to drug her to get her on a plane for Peninsula.”
“That would have made for an interesting freshman orientation.”
“You know who has that money? Right now?”
Dori nods.
“That redneck, football-playing, swaggering, entitled …” As with Next, there are not words foul enough. “How could Martin have done it? How could he have let her have all that money? I can’t stand it that they’ve been conspiring behind my back. I wonder how long that’s been going on.”
“And, of course, there’s still the possibility that she’s—”
“Don’t. Don’t say the P-word. Please, not at this exact moment. I just cannot deal.”
“Not a problem. You know me. No deal is good deal.”
“So,” Dori asks, “cocktails?”
Apparently my shift as a mother is officially over and whatever higher purpose I might have deluded myself into believing my life in Parkhaven had no longer exists. At this point, a downward spiral into alcohol with maybe a little drug sidebar looks like my next logical move.
“Why not?”
I kick myself for not being more vigilant back when all this started. Shaniqua, the star of all Aubrey’s November lies. How could I have fallen for Shaniqua?
NOVEMBER 4, 2009
Tyler and I went to the quarry yesterday and again today.
I tell Mom that I have a new friend, Shaniqua, and I am going to her house every day after school. To work on a physics project. Study for a Spanish test. Swim in her pool. I tell her that Shaniqua’s father is an obstetrician and her mother is a lawyer. As expected, Mom is so thrilled that I have not only a friend, but an African American friend, that she doesn’t ask any questions. Like what Shaniqua’s last name or phone number is. Or where she lives. Or how, exactly, I met the Huxtables.
Here are the things Tyler and I do not talk about: College. Football. Our “plans for the future.” His dad. My dad. His mom. My mom. Why he lives with Coach Hines. How weird it is that he is hanging out with me.
Here are the things Tyler and I do talk about: Whether you can double-punch on old VW Beetles in Slug-a-Bug or just on convertibles. Whether Mister Rogers or Sesame Street was better. The best way to pull a Band-Aid off. Whopper or Big Mac? Worst sore throat you ever had. Worst sunburn. Best way to keep fireflies alive in a jar. Whether my feet with the creepy middle toe freakishly longer than the big toe are grosser than his feet with the disgusting permanently yellow big toenail.
Here are the things Tyler and I do at the quarry: play.
No one would believe that that is all we do. That Tyler Moldenhauer would take a girl, an ordinary girl no one remembers knowing, to the quarry and just play like a couple of kids. We jump off the cliff holding hands and hang in the air, suspended in sunlight. We dive under and float in the metallic water, suspended among the glittering bits that sparkle around us like we are swimming through the Milky Way.
Halloween was last Saturday. I try to remember how many years it was hot when I trick-or-treated and how many times I wore a parka over my costume. It seems about fifty-fifty that the weather will hold. I don’t want the warm weather to ever end. I want to stay suspended with Tyler forever.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
Since I don’t have the energy or money for anything other than the first convenience store we pass, we pick up a suitcase of Milwaukee’s Best, which meets my very exacting standards of being available, alcoholic, and cheap, and head to my house. I fill a cooler with ice, plant the beer in it, and Dori, Pretz, and I install ourselves on the front porch.
Something about the day’s combo platter of shocks has left me boneless. Semicoagulated in a rocking chair with my feet planted on either side of the cooler, by the time I’ve drained my first Beast in one long glug, I am wondering why I don’t do this more often. Just sit out on my own goddamn front porch and take the world in.
Next to the great room and the theoretically great schools, the porch—sweeping across the front of the house, raised up above the street by seven broad, concrete steps—was this house’s biggest selling point. As the Realtor showed Martin and me around, I imagined Aubrey and her little friends—sweet, pigtailed girls—coloring on the porch, cooled on a hot summer day by breezes rolling up the sloping yard, while I served lemonade to their mothers. I bought two rockers and a glider and figured I’d keep adding seating once our porch became the spot where everyone gathered on lazy evenings to share kindly gossip and watch the kids chase fireflies through the endless summer nights.
Who was I channeling? Aunt Bee?
We moved in and I found out that, although, yes, there were kids galore, none of them ever had a single unscheduled moment. On summer evenings and every other second they weren’t in school, they were getting tutored or coached or enriched. None of them walked or rode bikes the five blocks to the blue-ribbon elementary school. The only social interaction I enjoyed on my porch was catching glimpses of kids strapped into minivans while they waited for the garage door to go up before they disappeared inside. This was mostly because, though the appearance of a stranger made antennae bristle as if a red ant had wandered into our black ant colony, every parent in Parkhaven Country believed they were one unguarded moment away from seeing their offspring on the back of a milk carton.
I pass a beer to Dori and methodically start in on my second.
“On the bright side,” Dori says, “you can sell the house now.”
I give a little snort to indicate how impossible that is.
“No, seriously. What’s stopping you? You sell the McMansion, get some adorable, tiny little place. Maybe not actually in the city, but close to signs of intelligent life. Why not?”
For a lovely ten, maybe twenty seconds, selling the house seems like an actual possibility. All it takes, however, to remind me why that is impossible is to lift my butt cheeks off the rocker. Which I do when I reach for cerveza tres. Just this slight change in my viewing angle allows me to look up and down the street and see seven For Sale signs planted in seven yards. Three of them are being circled by the foreclosure vultures. Every time there’s another round of layoffs at the computer-chip factory or the price of gas goes up and those commutes into the city become more expensive, another sign appears.
Dori leans forward, follows my gaze, and sees what I see. “Oh, yeah. Forgot about that little detail.”
After a malt-enriched meditative moment, I muse, “I read this book about a British expedition in 1845 to explore the Northwest Passage. Or, actually, not a book so much as a book review. In any case, this expedition sailed into the Canadian Arctic looking for the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They couldn’t find it. But the captain was a stubborn, classic male-answer-syndrome guy who would never admit he was wrong, so he refused to let them turn back. Winter set in. By the time the captain admitted he might possibly have been the teensiest bit wrong, massive planks of ice had frozen their boat in place and escape was impossible. All the men died hideous deaths—starvation,
exposure, scurvy. They found corpses with black tongues, which showed that a lot of them had succumbed to lead poisoning. There were knife marks on some of the bones. Which meant cannibalism.”
“What’s the title? I need a fun summer beach read.”
“I’m like that expedition. I waited too long. I am frozen in place.”
Dori stands. “Well, much as I’d love to stick around and tenderize, then eat you, Gary’s waiting and I need to pick up a few things. If you know what I mean.”
She bumps her eyebrows up and down. I do not need the hubba-hubba signal to know that what she means is that she and her beau are going to stick a variety of preordained items into each other’s orifices. What she really means is that she is a wild, lascivious lady of untrammeled wants and desires who cannot be tamed into suburban beigeness. Since she’s mentioned it before, I know that one of the things she will be picking up is lactose-free whipping cream, because dairy does unmentionable things to Gary’s bowels. I would never tell Dori this, but no matter how many ball gags and gel-filled dildos might be involved, once your partner is apprising you of his or her digestive inconveniences, you’ve moved out of untrammeled territory.
“Are you going to be all right?” Dori asks, pulling the keys to her Toyota RAV4 parked in the driveway from her pocket.
“Is there an alternative?”
“I’ll stay if you want me to.”
“No, go. I’m just going to sit here, get drunk, and wait for the phone to ring.”
Dori leans down, gives me a hug, and, for a couple of seconds, I cling to her. She whispers in my ear, “You raised a great kid, Cam. She was great before this happened. She’ll be great when it’s all over. She is going to have a great life. A great big, wonderful, happy life.”