leave you and how much I’ve thought about you over the years.
=OK. I’m gonna go feed Pretz now. Or something.
=Wait. Wait. You’re right. You deserve to know as much as I know. Where do I start? I was born scared. Maybe it’s that simple. Your grandparents didn’t do anything or not do anything to make me that way. I just was. I have always been scared.
=Like worried about everything all the time and can’t sleep, then worried about not sleeping?
=You too?
=Yeah. Thanks for the genes. Keep going.
=It was like walking through life on stilts. Everyone else had their feet planted safely on the ground and I was teetering around way up high, terrified, certain that I was going to come clattering down to earth at any second.
=And you’re going around thinking that that’s just the way it is.
=Oh, sweetheart, I hope that’s not how it is for you.
=A little. Not so much anymore. I’ve kind of figured out how to get my feet on the ground. Deal with the teeters or whatever. Keep going.
=When I was a kid, I believed that everyone around me was just a lot braver than I was. I didn’t know back then that no one else was up on stilts. I thought that my mother was screaming inside when she turned off my Archies cartoons and told me to go outside and play. I thought she was like me and could only breathe when she was watching TV and that she was training me to be tough too. So I went outside and watched and waited for the birds to mass on the clothesline and peck me to death or for zombies to rise from the flower beds.
=Or for home invaders to swarm in your bedroom window. Or for your mother to lose it and drive right off the flyover on the way to school.
=Yeah. Today they would have poured every pill in the medicine chest down me, but back then I got sent to the nice lady who asked me to draw pictures of a house, then tell her why I put my father and mother and little brother in one window and me off alone in a different window.
=I should have gone to that lady.
=Why, Aubrey?
=Also, “complicated.” GTG.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
Cam?” Martin asks again. “Are you going to tell me where Aubrey is?”
I guess Martin can read my tells as well as I can read his. The Cape Cod/badminton scenario was never going to work. “I was hoping you might know.”
“You really don’t know where she is?”
Martin’s alarm offends me. It pretends that this is the only, the first, the worst, of all the crises I’ve faced alone over the past sixteen years. Maybe it is the worst, but it is far from the first.
“You’re the one who funded her disappearance.”
“ ‘Disappearance’?” He actually has the audacity to jump from his seat, to spring into action as if this, this were the decisive moment. “I knew something was not right.” The glider jerks spastically behind him.
“ ‘Disappearance’ is too strong a word.”
“What’s going on? Why are you sitting there? What do we need to do?”
We. Two humans united to protect the one they created. For sixteen years I ached to be a plural.
“Is she not returning your calls either?” he asks.
I don’t answer. What right does he have to know one single thing about Aubrey and me?
He answers his own question. “Of course not. And the boyfriend? Tyler? He’s not answering either, I assume.”
Tyler? He knows about Tyler?
“And her friends? His friends?”
I stare at him with annoyance rapidly accelerating toward the homicidal.
“I’m sorry. That was stupid. I’m sure you’ve called them. And checked the food truck. It’s probably not even worth calling Peninsula to see if she’s registered.”
My temples throb from the hostile, bitter, sardonic responses I bite back. I am both furious that he has such an unearned connection with Aubrey, yet hanging on to the hope that he might be the connection to pull her back to me. So, for Aubrey, I summon Zen Mama and admit what I’ve known for a long time: “She doesn’t want to go to college.”
“She has to go to college.” He states it as an indisputable fact, just the way he had after we came home from looking at this house and I showed him the lousy test scores from Sycamore Heights Elementary. And the insane tuition rates at the private schools. Only then had he finally agreed that we should move because “our child