SATURDAY, AUGUST 14, 2010
We are out from beneath the shadows of the tall pines before Martin notices and pulls over.
“Cam, are you all right? Cam?”
“I’m fine. Let’s go. We’ve got to keep moving. Get to Sycamore Heights. Find out what the hell is—”
“Camille, you’re shaking.”
Camille.
I was Camille on the train in Morocco and for the happy years when we lived in Sycamore Heights. During the colic siege, the Next siege, I cut my hair short so I wouldn’t have to deal with it, and somehow my name ended up getting snipped off as well. I guess that after Next neither one of us had the breath or tenderness for even one extra syllable.
“I’m fine. Let’s drive.”
He opens his arms. Am I supposed to tumble into them?
He undoes his seat belt, undoes mine. I stiffen as he pulls me into his arms like a firefighter dragging a person out of a car that is about to explode. “Camille.” He summons back the person who used to fit in his arms.
“That guy back there. He is my nightmare. He is the embodiment of all my worst nightmares of what Aubrey … Someone like that should never have touched her world. Should never have … never have …”
As I babble, he strokes my hair and murmurs, “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out. It’ll be fine.”
“No, fine is no longer a possibility. Fine would have been me putting my only child on a plane today and sending her off to college, where she and her roommate could have decided whether to stack the beds into bunks for more room or leave them separate. Fine would have been her calling me while she’s walking to her anthro class. Fine would have even been me and Pretzels, curled up on her bed with her baby pictures, me crying myself to sleep. This … this …” I wave my hand at all of it: the snake-bearded hillbilly, the stolen money, the lies. “This is most definitively not fine.”
I’m the one who sounds like a speed freak as I rant on. “His ‘people’? What did that mean, ‘his people’? Oh, God, why would Aubrey know someone like that?”
“Apparently he restored a trailer for them.”
“For him. Tyler Moldenhauer stole our daughter’s college money.”
“At least it’s not drugs or guns.”
“ ‘Bronk’? What kind of a name is ‘Bronk’?”
We both know that it is not the name of a kid heading to college or the name of the boyfriend of a girl who is. Martin’s breath warms the top of my head. It feels luxurious, like getting your hair washed at a salon. I want to close my eyes and lean back, but the words keep pouring out of me.
“I thought I could control her by taking the laptop away. No, no, wait, here’s how stupid I was. I thought I could control her with Christmas cookies. Here’s what an in-tune mother I was: I forced Aubrey to make and decorate cookies with me last Christmas. Forced. Five different kinds. As if I could lure her back into childhood with sweets. As if pressing hatching with a fork into peanut-butter cookies would transform her into the toddler I taught to name all the colors. Or that in the middle of sifting powdered sugar onto lemon bars the schoolgirl who sang Beatles songs with me would reappear.”
Martin rests his cheek on the top of my head.
“How did I not know that all those little girls Aubrey once was were already gone?” I straighten back up. “We should go.”
Martin starts the engine. “Sycamore Heights?”
“Unless you have a better idea. Dude.”
Martin snorts a thin laugh and pulls back onto the highway.