it again. “You are hopeless. Okay, purge, spew, ralph up those regrets. Come on, get them out. You can’t control what you can’t name. What are the regrets du jour?”
“The Secret Garden,” I wail. “I always thought that Aubrey and I would read The Secret Garden together.” I see us as we should have been. Aubrey is eleven. Lanky. All long, skinny legs and bony arms. Just got braces. Her bangs hang over her eyes. We are each in our own cozy armchair, silently companionable in a sun-splashed room that faces onto an actual garden. I have set a tray of tea and cookies on the coffee table. Chamomile with lots of cream and sugar for Aubrey, Earl Grey for me. Lorna Doones for us both, just like the ones I’d eaten the first time I read The Secret Garden.
“I missed the window of opportunity. One day I was reading Amelia Bedelia out loud to her, and the next she was holed up in her room devouring gigantic, fat books about a girl in love with a vampire.”
“Oh, God. Twilight. Don’t get me started. What is the appeal of that crypto-Mormon sexual-repression shit? Such crap. What else?”
“A cabin in Maine?”
“Okay …” Dori is dubious.
“I always thought we’d rent a cabin in Maine for two weeks every summer so that Aubrey would have memories of picking blueberries, and sailing out to a secret island in the middle of an icy blue lake.”
“Somehow Aubrey never seemed like an icy-blue-lake kind of kid. God, remember our sad little single-mom campouts?”
“That last time?”
“When that family of jackwad hillbillies took the space next to us?”
“In a Winnebago!”
“Hauling a trailer of dirt bikes. Oh, that was fun. Listening to them revving up the bikes at six in the morning.”
“And they used the park’s barbecue grill as a stand for the television set they kept turned on all day so loud that Aubrey told us that she liked the ‘nay-choo’ back at our house better?” I see Aubrey, solemn, steadfast, as she makes her pronouncement about nature. Her sunburned nose is peeling; she wears a Pocahontas T-shirt.
“Stupid idea.” I dismiss the whole cabin-in-Maine fantasy. “My busiest season is summer.”
“Yeah, all those moms who were drunk-dialing on New Year’s Eve need to learn how to breast-feed.”
“And it’s not as if I’ve ever made enough for a cabin in Maine anyway.”
“So, no cabin in Maine. Boo-fucking-hoo. You get Aubrey to the bank tomorrow, even if you have to do it at gunpoint. Day after tomorrow, you shove her on a plane to Peninsula. Done and done.”
“God, I wish that my only begotten child was as clear on all of this as you are.” The five-o’clock masters swim class starts trickling in. “I gotta blast. Aubrey should be finished microwaving burritos for construction workers now. I’m going to call and tell her that tomorrow is nonnegotiable.”
“You go on. I need to drag my fat ass through a few more laps.”
I heave myself out of the pool and pad into the locker room. My wet footsteps dry on the hot cement a second after I leave them.
Heat. That was the whole problem. Aubrey was never really the same after she got heat exhaustion at band camp. I knew I should have insisted that she see a doctor.
AUGUST 12, 2009
Since school has not officially started yet, the assistant principal, Miss Chaney, who wears blazers and keeps a walkie-talkie clipped to the belt of her Dockers, takes me to the nurse’s office even though the nurse isn’t there, gives me a cup of lukewarm blue Gatorade, then leaves. I hear her talking to the campus cop about spotting potential signs of gang activity as she walks down the empty hall.
I sip the fake-sweat drink and wonder if it is possible that I hallucinated Tyler Moldenhauer cradling my head in his lap, since, although band completely exists for football, no football player has ever acknowledged the existence of any band geek. Him doing that, helping me, is like Brad Pitt stepping out of the movie Troy, walking into the audience, and giving some random girl a sip of wine from his golden goblet.
I finish the Gatorade and study a chart that shows the bones of the ear. Though I actually feel fine and figure I must have just passed out from sheer boredom, I sit in the nurse’s office and am deciding what my new look for senior year is going to be when Miss Chaney returns and asks, “You OK in here?”