The Gap Year Read online

  Certainly I should have ceased and desisted long before the start of her senior year last August. Exactly one year ago today, which was when everything started to spiral out of control. If only I had stopped my stupid teasing, she might have worn the damn hat and not gotten heat exhaustion and not dropped out of band. Certainly that goofy feathered hat would have immunized her against Tyler Moldenhauer’s attention. If only I hadn’t persisted in making those moronic jokes. But like a hummingbird returning to an empty feeder, I kept going back for one more drop of nectar, one more shared joke.

  The hat, though, that’s just a theory. I get frantic sometimes wishing I knew for certain. I think that if I had the whole story, I might be able to reverse the evil spell, cure her psychic flu, and send her off to college with a happy heart. Even if having all the details gave me no power at all, I would still give anything to know what really happened to my daughter on that day one year ago.

  AUGUST 12, 2009

  It’s the first day of my senior year. Well, unofficially, school isn’t really in session yet, but the whole band has to be here a week early for “camp.” The big marquee sign at the edge of the field where we march reads: AUGUST 12, 2009. 10:43 A.M. 92 DEGREES, WELCOME, BAND CAMP!!!! SCHOOL STARTS IN ONE WEEK!!! … WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19!!!! SEE YOU THEN! GO, PIRATES!!!!

  Rivers of sweat run down my back. It is way too hot for all those freaking exclamation points. And way, way too hot for Mr. Shupe, who is bellowing at me, “Clarinets, wake up!” I try to focus. “Lightsey, get your section under control! You’re a senior now! Start acting like one!”

  Once Shupe finishes bullying me and the section I lead, he moves on to torture the freshman trombone players. “T-bones! Did they teach you the definition of ‘line’ in middle school?” Their section looks like an amoeba wobbling all over the field. Mr. Shupe does not do wobbly. Mr. Shupe does crisp.

  Then he tells us what he tells us at the start of every school year about how we are “Shupe’s Troops” and the way they did things “in the Corps.”

  The Corps? Dude, you were in the Marine Corps band.

  This fake military stuff makes the band boys feel like they’re Green Berets. They are as delusional as Mom, who is always telling me that I am “marching, both literally and figuratively, to the beat of a different drummer” and that “being uncool at Parkhaven is the coolest thing imaginable.”

  Uh, right, Mom, hang on to that dream.

  Shupe yells at the percussion section, “Drum line! It’s called a line, not a squiggle! What did you all spend your summer doing? Smoking crack?”

  The freshman horn players laugh so hard they lose their embouchure. Wait until they’re seniors like us and have heard all of Shupe’s lines often enough to recite them along with him.

  I can almost remember when the first day of band was fun. When it was a thrill to be one of a hundred people all marching in perfect, straight lines. When I loved the neatness and crispness of it and felt like I belonged. Now, though, it is like that moment when you discover that you’re too old to ride the Teacups. That they’re not the tiniest bit scary or fun and that even riding them as a joke, goofing on the whole thing, isn’t fun anymore.

  My fingers drip sweat and slide around on the keys, which doesn’t really matter, because I’ve been faking it for the past hour anyway. My lips are barely touching the mouthpiece. The air is too hot to touch. Like I am really going to stick a piece of scorching metal in my mouth. I feel weirdly distant from everything. It is taking more and more energy just to ignore the monster headache squashing my head.

  “Lightsey!”

  Oops. At first, I think Shupe has noticed that I am fake-fingering and fake-playing, but it is worse than that.

  “Where’s your hat? Did you not read the three, count them, three e-mails I sent that specified that for today, and today only, everyone was required to wear their hats?”

  Maybe it’s the weird distant feeling, but I shout back, “Sir, yes, sir! I was unable to find said hat! Sir!”

  Anyone would have known that I was messing with him with that fake marine stuff. Not Shupe. He believes that this is how the entire world should talk to him—like respectful recruits.

  “You’re a senior, Lightsey! You have to set an example! It’s Semper Fi—”

  “Not Semper I!” I shout along with him.

  Yelling at Shupe is not worth the effort, because now not only is my head pounding insanely, but I don’t seem to have the energy to even sweat anymore. I am suddenly as dry as this dusty field I’ve been tramping back and forth on for the past three years. Then everything gets brighter and brighter. When it starts to seem like a flash has gone off in my face, I signal to Shupe that I am stepping out to get a drink of water.

  “Make it fast, Lightsey! You need to tune up your section!”

  The water station is on the side between our practice field and the football team’s. Since it is so hot, the football guys are practicing without pads, just the stretchy tees and shorts they wear under their uniforms, so they look like humans instead of the hulking video-game predators they resemble with their shoulder pads on.

  It feels like I’ve been walking forever, but the big red-and-yellow Igloo cooler of water doesn’t get any closer. Then everything turns bright. Really bright. The football players seem to be in a movie that has been overexposed. One player separates from the others and heads toward the water station. He looks like he is running in slow motion through a shimmery mirage. The number seven printed in black on his white jersey floats through space. His dark, shoulder-length hair rises and falls with each step. In the overexposed movie, he looks like an invading barbarian, some warrior from an ancient time.

  Then the movie gets even slower and everything begins to float—players, Igloo cooler, goalposts. All the sounds—the tweets from the drum major’s whistle, tuba blats, football coaches yelling—they fade farther and farther away. Then I am looking at a pure white sky. Then yummy cool darkness.

  “Drink this.”

  Water dribbles across my cheeks and into my hair. I open my eyes and am staring at a black number seven. With some effort, I part my lips. The water funnels into my mouth and I swallow. Big mistake. It comes right back up, along with the Diet Cherry 7UP and half a bagel with strawberry cream cheese I had this morning. The barfing brings me around and I notice that I have just puked all over Tyler Moldenhauer.

  Even though I’ve spent the past three years marching at every football game Parkhaven ever played in, I made it a point of honor to know as little as possible about the sport. But Tyler Moldenhauer is such a god at Parkhaven that he managed to penetrate even my footballophobic consciousness.

  “Sorry.”

  “Why? Did you puke on me on purpose? Keep sipping. You get overheated, you puke. Simple as that. I do it at the start of every season. Besides, I never saw anyone puke pink before. Is that a band thing or a girl thing?”

  I attempt a smile, but it comes out as rubbery as I feel.

  He looks up, searching for help. Someone to take me off his hands. “Your band director guy hasn’t even noticed yet. Is he blind or what?”

  “It’s hard to see much when you’ve got your head shoved that far up your butt.”

  He laughs and his abs bounce against my ear. When he yells at Shupe—“Uh, man down over here!”—I feel the rumble through my whole body.

  Shupe looks over at me, holds his hands up to the sky in irritation, yells, “O’Dell! Acevedo! Get Lightsey to the nurse’s office!”

  Tyler helps me up as the two girls run toward me. Everyone considers Wren and Amelia my best friends even though we’ve been drifting apart for a long time. When I am on my feet, he asks, “You OK?” Not wanting to release any more puke breath in his direction, I just nod.

  Wren and Amelia reach us. He lets me go, but keeps his arms out, ready to catch me. “You got her?”

  I say I’m fine and wave Wren and Amelia away. But when I take a step forward, my knees buckle like Bambi learning to wal
k. Tyler grabs me. “A little help here,” he orders the girls, setting me between them. They feel like tiny pipe-cleaner people compared to Tyler. Like they would crumple if I put any weight on them. My arms around their skinny shoulders, I limp off the field.

  The instant we are out of hearing range, Amelia loses it and squeals, “You had your head in Tyler Moldenhauer’s lap!”

  “OK,” Wren blurts out, “that means that Amelia and I are now, officially, the only girls at Parkhaven who have not had their heads in Tyler Moldenhauer’s lap. Or their faces, at any rate.”

  At that point, I am supposed to go, “Wren! You’re so bad!” and slap at her and get all giddy and hectic. But I can’t say anything. These two girls who I ate lunch with almost every day since freshman year, and sat with through endless band trips, and helped through endless crushes, seem like people I knew a long time ago. And never had that much in common with anyway except marching around in a really ridiculous hat.

  THURSDAY, AUGUST 12, 2010

  Since my otter happiness has drained away, I ditch the kickboard and flip over onto my back. The big cottonwood overhead makes a green lace against the blue sky. My arms windmill backward, grabbing for water handholds to propel me forward. I focus on lengthening the glide and finally fall into an easeful rhythm.

  The tweet of a lifeguard’s whistle ruffles the serenity and I recognize Madison Chaffee at the other end of the whistle. “No running!” Madison orders, and two little girls, formless as baguettes in their fluorescent bikinis, giggle and slow down to a tippy-toed canter. The taller of the two has flyaway blond hair shot through with red and gold like Aubrey’s. The smaller one, a sturdy coppery redhead just like Twyla was, yells out, “Sowwy!”

  Though the blonde looks like Aubrey at that age and the cute redhead reminds me of Twyla, Aubrey was the one who had the speech impediment; it took years of therapy before she could manage her Rs and Ws.

  Madison swings down off the stand. She is a streak of long tan legs, sunglasses, a glint of silver from the whistle around her neck. Madison Chaffee used to be part of a playgroup that her mother, Joyce, organized when Madison and Aubrey were in the same mothers’-morning-out preschool program. Joyce decided that we would all bring our kids to the pool on Sunday afternoons when time stretched into a Sahara without the oasis of even a tumbling class.

  All the moms traded off hanging out on a blanket in the shade of the cottonwood trees, a veritable grove that used to ring the pool, while one of us stayed in the water and played Marco Polo and tossed weighted rings for our polliwogs to retrieve. I quickly came to prefer Marco Polo over the other moms’ discussions of whether the Suzuki or Dalcroze method got better results with the three-year-old violinist. Mostly, though, they all just wanted to hang out with other moms who had quit their jobs and lived in a world where every social encounter their child ever had was arranged by an adult and involved getting in a car. They wanted what we all want: reassurance that they had made the right choices.

  I don’t know why Joyce stopped inviting Aubrey and me to the pool sessions. Maybe because I was still shell-shocked from the divorce. Maybe because my ex had left me for a cult whose theology could be summed up in its founder’s wisdom: “What is, is. What ain’t, ain’t.” With the unspoken coda “Now give me all your money.” Maybe because I regularly dropped the F-bomb and didn’t shave my legs. Luckily, though, Dori and Twyla appeared not too long after the expulsion to rescue me from total pariahhood.

  Another lifeguard, a boy I vaguely recognize from Aubrey’s senior class, also one of the popular kids, comes to relieve Madison. He stands at parade rest next to the guard tower, legs braced shoulder-width apart, hands folded, vigilantly watching the swimmers as Madison climbs down. Jayden? Brayden? Hayden? I imagine this boy as Aubrey’s sweetheart, both of them poring over college catalogs together, shopping for extra-long jersey sheets for their respective dorm rooms, debating whether to take biology first or second semester.

  As Madison stands beside the guard tower while the boy climbs up, the highlights of her résumé scroll through my mind: senior class treasurer; a math whiz; performed around the state with her select choir group; spent the first half of the summer in Nairobi on a church mission helping build a pump station; accepted at Duke.

  I replay Aubrey’s life. This time, I am a permanent part of Joyce Chaffee’s group of Moms Who Had a Clue. I shave my legs, watch my language, and stick a violin in Aubrey’s hands when she is three. Instead of spending every second with Tyler this summer microwaving breakfast burritos, she is in Africa pointing to something on a blueprint while Masai tribesmen, tall and lean as Giacometti sculptures, tilt in to catch every word spoken by their pale child savior. I hear Aubrey’s angelic voice echoing off cathedral walls.

  Yes. I decide that these adventures are worth putting up with the suburban moms.

  I make this decision as if it were an actual possibility. As if I were swimming through a wormhole, a rip in the space-time continuum, and would find Joyce and her crew nestled on blankets in the cottonwood grove, opening Tupperware containers of Goldfish and carrot sticks, figuring out which camps to sign up for. As if I could still join them. As if Aubrey would still be standing on the edge of the pool at this very moment, tummy round and plump, hair two squirts of pigtail above the goggles strap, hands tucked into her armpits, shivering a little, bouncing as she yells, “Mom. Mom! Watch me, Mom; I’m gonna dive! Mom, are you watching?!”

  A continuous loop plays in my head, focusing on me barely glancing up from my book—I had so little time to read back then—and yelling that I was watching. Dive already and give me two seconds of peace. I barely tore my eyes from the page—it was The Handmaid’s Tale! Who could resist?—as Aubrey steepled her arms above her ducked head, curved her fingers, bent over until she slowly toppled into the pool. A moment later, she burst to the surface. “Did you see me? Mommy, did you see me?” Hungrier for my approval than for oxygen.

  I’m certain I gave it. Probably with too much rote lavishness. Precisely the sort of knee-jerk self-esteem building that Recent Studies just revealed is the psychic equivalent of feeding your children lead-based paint chips. The overpraising and inevitable blue ribbons have left an entire generation undermotivated and overentitled. Except when they are driven, achievement-addicted anorexics.

  I am deciding that, henceforth, I will praise Aubrey only if she’s done something to really deserve it. That’s when I notice that the single cottonwood above the pool is the only tree left. The big grove was cut down years ago. Probably around the same time that Aubrey’s world stopped pivoting on my praise.

  I dive underwater and swim down into silence. The whistles tweeting, children yelling, the tinny music, aggravation from Mr. Banana Hammock, my worries about Aubrey and her college money, for one second they all stop. I dive deeper, so deep that slivers of pain crack into my ears. At the bottom of the pool a Sponge-Bob SquarePants bandage floats like a wisp of yellow seaweed and I wish I had bought the Little Mermaid Band-Aids that Aubrey begged me for, instead of always cheaping out and getting whatever was on sale.

  I pop to the surface, grab my kickboard, and churn through the water.

  At the turn, Dori falls in next to me. “You’re doing it again, aren’t you?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Don’t pretend. I recognize that expression. That’s your regret expression.” Dori breaks into her chanteuse mode and belts out, “ ‘Non, je ne regrette rien!’ ”

  “Look, I completely agree with you and Edith Piaf. And moi? My own life? I really have very few regrets. It’s this whole other life, Aubrey’s, that I was supposed to arrange that I wish I could have a second chance at.”

  Dori reaches over and slugs my biceps.

  “Ow!”

  “Sorry, I read where you can interrupt negative thought cycles with a sharp physical stimulus.”

  “Well, tell your buddies back at the lab that it works.” I rub my arm. Joyce Chaffee would never have given me a monkey bump.
At this very moment, we—Joyce and I and the other Moms Who Had a Clue—would be discussing what kind of under-bed storage containers to buy our daughters for their dorm rooms.

  Dori sees me doing 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?”