unconsummated love affair is an ominous sign. I’m not a fool. I know that there has been consummation. Far too much consummation. I knew that from the first night she failed to come home.
What I want to find are signs that all this consummation has been controlled. A nice, empty pill dispenser, a diaphragm would be great. What I really don’t want to find is a white plastic stick with a pink positive sign on it. Mostly I’m doing what I did when I sniffed at the new odors clinging to Aubrey: gathering evidence from an uncooperative witness.
Tiny bottles of hand sanitizer gleam at various spots around the room. What clothes remain in her closet all hang in the same direction. The shoes she’s left behind are boxed up in perfect rows on the shelf above her clothes. Peeking down at me from a shelf beside her bed are her My Little Ponies, with their squat bodies and pastel manes, that I recall her occasionally rearranging long after most girls her age had abandoned ponies and morphed from cuddly pre-teen puppies into aloof, disdainful adolescent cats whose fondest hope was that their parents would leave their credit cards in a neat pile before signing on for an extended tour aboard a nuclear submarine. Listening to the other moms moan about how their daughters had mutated overnight from sweet, submissive girls into snarly tramps who hated them and wanted to wear little junior-miss stripper outfits was part of the reason I thought I was a parenting genius.
Eventually, of course, the “whatevers” and eye rolling, gasping, and utter exasperation began. I thought I’d nipped the problem in the bud by telling her, “Look, let’s save us both a lot of time. Just end every statement you direct toward me with the words ‘you asshole,’ because that is exactly what you’re saying to me.”
I now look back on that time fondly because, although the “whatevs” did start, we were still connected. There would be entire weekends of truce when we would watch a complete season of Project Runway or shop for new tops for her together. Since Tyler Moldenhauer, however, Aubrey hasn’t been connected to anyone but him.
Resting on the pillow of her neatly made bed is BeeBee, Aubrey’s favorite Puffalump. BeeBee was once a Pretty Hair Purple. Pretty Hair Purple BeeBee is gray now, all the stuffing from her head has shifted into her lumpy legs, and her braids are dull, fuzzy ropes. BeeBee was a present from the last Christmas that Martin and Aubrey and I spent together sixteen years ago.
I put my nose to the bedraggled toy and a bit of wisdom I’d stumbled across in my Googling last night flits through my mind: “Your kid will always come back.” Yes, I know she’ll come back , I now want to tell that blithe poster, but will she ever come back as a newborn with breath that smells like caramel? A four-year-old who sits in my lap through whole movies so she can bury her face in my chest at the scary parts? A ten-year-old eager to explain to me in dazzling detail why Sailor Moon must search for the fabled Moon Princess? A two-year-old who tries to say “baby” and it comes out “BeeBee ”?
A couple of poster-size collages trace her romance with Tyler through homecoming, prom, winter formal, and formals that I never even learned the names of. In the next-to-last photo, they’re holding their maroon polyester graduation robes open to reveal that they’re wearing nothing except bathing suits underneath. The last photo was taken at a graduation party given by their friends. Well, his friends, really; I didn’t recognize any of the sports-capped chuckleheads or spaghetti-strapped hoochies holding up cups of beer caught in mid-slosh and grinning drunken grins at the camera. Tyler—wayward curls of dark hair flipping out beneath the weathered cap hugging his head, the torn-away sleeves of his snap-button Western shirt showing off arms still pumped up with football muscles—has Aubrey slung over his shoulder and is carrying her
What I want to find are signs that all this consummation has been controlled. A nice, empty pill dispenser, a diaphragm would be great. What I really don’t want to find is a white plastic stick with a pink positive sign on it. Mostly I’m doing what I did when I sniffed at the new odors clinging to Aubrey: gathering evidence from an uncooperative witness.
Tiny bottles of hand sanitizer gleam at various spots around the room. What clothes remain in her closet all hang in the same direction. The shoes she’s left behind are boxed up in perfect rows on the shelf above her clothes. Peeking down at me from a shelf beside her bed are her My Little Ponies, with their squat bodies and pastel manes, that I recall her occasionally rearranging long after most girls her age had abandoned ponies and morphed from cuddly pre-teen puppies into aloof, disdainful adolescent cats whose fondest hope was that their parents would leave their credit cards in a neat pile before signing on for an extended tour aboard a nuclear submarine. Listening to the other moms moan about how their daughters had mutated overnight from sweet, submissive girls into snarly tramps who hated them and wanted to wear little junior-miss stripper outfits was part of the reason I thought I was a parenting genius.
Eventually, of course, the “whatevers” and eye rolling, gasping, and utter exasperation began. I thought I’d nipped the problem in the bud by telling her, “Look, let’s save us both a lot of time. Just end every statement you direct toward me with the words ‘you asshole,’ because that is exactly what you’re saying to me.”
I now look back on that time fondly because, although the “whatevs” did start, we were still connected. There would be entire weekends of truce when we would watch a complete season of Project Runway or shop for new tops for her together. Since Tyler Moldenhauer, however, Aubrey hasn’t been connected to anyone but him.
Resting on the pillow of her neatly made bed is BeeBee, Aubrey’s favorite Puffalump. BeeBee was once a Pretty Hair Purple. Pretty Hair Purple BeeBee is gray now, all the stuffing from her head has shifted into her lumpy legs, and her braids are dull, fuzzy ropes. BeeBee was a present from the last Christmas that Martin and Aubrey and I spent together sixteen years ago.
I put my nose to the bedraggled toy and a bit of wisdom I’d stumbled across in my Googling last night flits through my mind: “Your kid will always come back.” Yes, I know she’ll come back , I now want to tell that blithe poster, but will she ever come back as a newborn with breath that smells like caramel? A four-year-old who sits in my lap through whole movies so she can bury her face in my chest at the scary parts? A ten-year-old eager to explain to me in dazzling detail why Sailor Moon must search for the fabled Moon Princess? A two-year-old who tries to say “baby” and it comes out “BeeBee ”?
A couple of poster-size collages trace her romance with Tyler through homecoming, prom, winter formal, and formals that I never even learned the names of. In the next-to-last photo, they’re holding their maroon polyester graduation robes open to reveal that they’re wearing nothing except bathing suits underneath. The last photo was taken at a graduation party given by their friends. Well, his friends, really; I didn’t recognize any of the sports-capped chuckleheads or spaghetti-strapped hoochies holding up cups of beer caught in mid-slosh and grinning drunken grins at the camera. Tyler—wayward curls of dark hair flipping out beneath the weathered cap hugging his head, the torn-away sleeves of his snap-button Western shirt showing off arms still pumped up with football muscles—has Aubrey slung over his shoulder and is carrying her
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