has to go to the best school.” These two moments are an equation that balances perfectly. In both halves, he is a father who loves his daughter more than anyone else on earth. Loves her more than me. More than himself. It is the intervening years that make no sense.
“We’ll locate her and I’ll talk to her.” He announces this with a finality that makes me want to weep.
“Oh, Martin, where have you been for the past sixteen years?”
“Going into the past sixteen years is not going to help Aubrey today. What do we do right now? At this moment in time?”
“God, still with the recycled Buddhism. Okay, Martin, you tell me what we do at this moment in time. Because at this moment in time, if she has one friend I could call and pump for information I don’t know who it is. At this moment in time, even if I could get Aubrey to actually take one of my calls, what do I say to her? At this moment in time, do I take something away from her? I haven’t had anything she wants since I took the laptop away. Do I threaten her? With what? Kicking her out of the house when she’s got a loser boyfriend who’s dying for her to move in with him?”
The glider wobbles as he sits back down. “What can I do? How do I help our daughter?”
“How about not abandon us when our daughter was two years old? How about be here when our daughter got septicemia and I had to drip melted Popsicles into her mouth for a week so she wouldn’t die of dehydration? How about be the person with a deep voice who would take the phone and tell our daughter that this discussion is over and to get her little butt home right now? How about be the person who drank beer instead of Diet Coke and didn’t worry about eating fries and hamburgers? Who didn’t resonate and twang to every tiny mood swing, whose periods weren’t synchronized with hers so you’re both PMSing at the exact same hysterical time? Huh, could you do that? Could you help our daughter that way?”
“Every feeling you have is legitimate and justified—”
“Like I need you to tell me that.”
“And we should spend a few months exploring every one of—”
“You should spend a few months staked out spread-eagled on a fire-ant hill with honey dripped on your balls.” Saying this cheers me up in a way that the six-pack-plus has not. It makes me giddy to blurt out whatever comes into my mind. It lightens me so much, in fact, that I celebrate by popping another top and tossing in, “You are such a colossal fraud.”
“You’re right. You are absolutely right.”
Again, for a second, I have a gender-change level of discombobulation at hearing Martin making such an un-Nextian admission. One of Next’s favorite indictments that Martin used to hurl at me was that my “downfall” was that I was “invested in being right.” I denied it and tried to expunge the very concepts of right and wrong from my thinking. But I seize upon it now like a vegetarian backsliding with a bucket of KFC.
“Oh, I know that I am right. I am right and you are wrong and everything wrong with our daughter is your fault.” Staking a position. Ascribing blame. Gluttony, lust, greed, this is all the most delicious sins rolled into one.
Martin nods in solemn agreement. “A lot of truth there. Possibly the whole truth. It was stupid of me not to question her more. But when she called that first time … Hearing her grown-up voice …” He shakes his head at the memory. “God, Cam, it was exactly like talking to you. Her voice. It’s your voice. It was powerful. Hearing the voice of someone you love so much after all those years. It was like …”
He stops, but I know exactly what that was like. I guess this is what would be called a Pyrrhic victory. At almost any time in the past sixteen years, hearing him admit how much the sound of my voice, even channeled through our daughter, still affected him would have felt like winning. Today, it’s close to irrelevant.
Pretzels whines, reminding me that her dinner is late. I start to get up, but my legs don’t want to cooperate. Martin is at my side, steadying me. “I don’t drink,” I say. “I haven’t become a sad alcoholic divorcée.”