FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 2010
Thinking of how Martin and Aubrey have been plotting behind my back does me in. I dig out Aubrey’s pink boom box from elementary school, find her favorite CD—the sound track from Toy Story 2—select “When She Loved Me,” hit “play,” then “repeat.” I am gravid with grief and this song is the Pitocin I need to deliver. As Sarah McLachlan sings in her aching mezzosoprano, “When somebody loved me …” I bury my face in Aubrey’s pillow just the way I imagined I’d do after she’d left for college to build a bright future and I was missing her. Except that now she’s gone from my life and there is no college, no building of a bright future, to comfort me.
She is just gone and my “next” seems empty indeed.
The first time I heard “When She Loved Me,” Aubrey was sitting on my lap because movies on big screens scared and overwhelmed her. She tolerated the frantic action adventures of all the boy toys—Woody, Buzz Lightyear, Mr. Potato Head—but she came to life when Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl doll appeared on-screen. I felt her grow lighter on my lap as she strained toward the screen, drawn into the tale of how Jessie the doll had once been loved by a little girl, Emily. As the years passed, though, Emily grew up, dolls were replaced by nail polish, and Jessie, crumpled and lonely beneath Emily’s bed, was forgotten. I’d thought it was adorable when, after the movie, Aubrey had rushed from the car to her room, found BeeBee, whom she’d been neglecting, and spent the next hour brushing the Puffalump’s purple hair, fastening it with tiny plastic barrettes, talking to the doll the entire time.
I was so certain that I would remember every adorable thing that she’d said that day that I didn’t write it down. And now I can’t recall a single word.
When somebody loved me.
Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl’s song washes over me, the lyrics like a horoscope, a fortune cookie I opened years ago and should have paid more attention to. I agree wholeheartedly with Jessie as she sings about how everything was beautiful when Emily loved her and she had the power to dry her tears. When Jessie the doll sings that every hour she spent with Emily lives within her heart, but that now she is left alone, waiting for the day when Emily would say again that she would always love her, it is my song.
Feeling deeply, satisfyingly sorry for myself is a luxury that I’ve had no time to indulge for the past sixteen years. I am snuggling in to enjoy it when I suddenly switch from grieving about Aubrey abandoning me to remembering when my own mother had the power to dry my tears. When had I abandoned her? When she became ill? When I hit puberty? When my grandmother appeared with her more vibrant version of life? If my mother hadn’t died, would we both have ridden out adolescence until the day when I returned and said that I would always love her?
When Jessie sings about how she stayed the same, but Emily began to drift away, “she,” the one drifting away, becomes Martin. But I am still Jessie and everyone I have ever loved has drifted away and a cartoon movie about discarded toys has become the template of my entire life and I am just going to blubber about it for a while.
I gather Aubrey’s pillow—still smelling like her special “volumizing” conditioner—BeeBee, and Pretzels into my arms and hug them to me. As I am noticing that one part of my bouquet of loss needs a bath and a visit to the vet to get her teeth cleaned, thin shafts of reflected light stream in from the window and play across the wall.
I release pillow, pooch, and Puffalump, and peek outside to trace the source of this heavenly host–esque illumination just as an extraordinary and extraordinarily silent vehicle pulls up to the front curb. The car is silver, stately, and opulent. It looks as out of place on this street as a brontosaurus. Though I’ve never actually seen one, I identify this car immediately: a Bentley. I am equally certain that I know only one person on earth who might be driving such a vehicle: Martin.