The Gap Year

by Sarah Bird

  “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.

  DECEMBER 12, 2009

  Tyler 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 dr
eam 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

  Who 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 hidde
n 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.”