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 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