Chapter 23
— Chapter 23 —
I don’t want to go back to the house. Ever. But at least not right away. I drive to Deans Pond and walk down to the man-made beach where I built sand civilizations with Eddie Davis. The water is frozen over, opaque from getting warmed by the sun during the day and refreezing at night. A few feet from the edge, there’s a dark spot where someone threw a rock or sunk a foot while testing the strength of the ice.
As a kid, I spent every afternoon here, reading in my rowboat or lying belly down on the low branch of the really good tree, watching turtles and sunnies swimming in the shallows. I’d row out to the wild grape vines to eat mouthfuls of sour sun-warmed fruit, spitting the seeds into the water to see how long I could track them before they disappeared into the silt and algae. As long as I made it home shortly after dark, no one ever came looking for me. I guess I could have ventured further, but I never needed to. The pond seemed like an entire world, and I felt safe here.
From the beach, I can see the bare grape vines. It’s almost five o’clock and the sun is already low, turning the trees into silhouettes. The scuffed ice glows with the reflection of dusky sky. I stay until the light is gone. Until I’m shivering and my eardrums ache. When I drive home, I slow down by the spot where I used to keep my rowboat. Wild blackberries have taken over, and there’s a mess of leaf-bare canes blocking my view of the tree where I kept it chained. I can’t see my boat, but nothing I see tells me it couldn’t be there, which feels like a hope to hang on to.
At home, there’s a light on in the den, and the blue flicker of the television reflects in the window. When I get inside, Aubrey is lying on her belly on the floor, biology textbook and binder open in front of her. She’s wearing green pajama pants, eating popcorn from my mother’s yellow Pyrex mixing bowl. On TV, Anne of Green Gables, brimming with joy, tries on her puffed-sleeve dress for the very first time. Aubrey must have found the VHS copies. It was one of my favorites as a kid. I wanted to be an orphan so badly, but orphaned at twenty-nine does not hold the same breathless literary romanticism.
“Hey,” Aubrey says brightly when she sees me. She points to the television with her pencil. “I haven’t watched this before. It’s so good.” Without her makeup and fake piercings, she looks like the kind of squeaky-clean kid who would run for class president or volunteer to organize a bake sale. I wonder if that’s who she used to be.
If there were no danger to Aubrey being here, I’d be thrilled for all of this. I’d steal a handful of popcorn and curl up on the couch to watch her watching Anne, and when it was over, we could try to find the Avonlea videos. But I’m rattled and tired. I was hoping Aubrey had decided to go home tonight, because I can imagine the chain of events we are headed toward so clearly. There’s already a track of every horrible thing Steena will scream at me running through my head.
“Did you tell your mom I’m here?” I ask.
“No!”
“You can tell me if you did. I just…” I realize that I don’t need to know. It doesn’t make a difference if Steena had a heads up—she’s seen me now. I feel gross for throwing a loyalty test at Aubrey. She has no reason to be loyal to me, and I shouldn’t ask her to keep secrets from her mom. That’s what creepy relatives do.
“I don’t talk to my mother. Ever. About anything,” Aubrey says.
“I’m sorry. It doesn’t even matter. She saw me at Gristedes.”
Aubrey’s eyes get big. “What did she say?”
“She told me my hair looked like shit. Then she ran over my cereal.”
Aubrey lets out a nervous, sputtering laugh.
“Can she really think you’re at Kelly O’Leary’s every day?” I ask. It sounds more combative than I intend, but I don’t think you’re allowed to have your niece at your house if your sister hates your guts.
“My mom doesn’t care,” Aubrey says, more combative now too.
“She has to,” I say.
“She doesn’t care,” Aubrey says, eyes filling with tears.
“Can you at least tell her you’re at Shray’s house sometimes? So it’s not this many days with Kelly O’Leary? I’m sure she’s getting suspicious.” I wonder if Steena could have me arrested. I know if she can, she will.
Aubrey snorts. “My mom hates Shray. That would not be better.” She slams her textbook shut. “I don’t have to tell her anything, because I don’t talk to her, because she doesn’t care where the fuck I am. Because she hates me.”
My reflex is to tell her that Steena doesn’t hate her, but I know first-hand it’s not a given for a mother to love her child. “I’m sorry,” I say instead. “I want you here. I’m not saying you can’t hang out. Just put in some face time at home to keep her from looking into where you are.”
Aubrey throws her books into her backpack and slings it over her shoulder. “Whatever.” She storms into the kitchen, comes back, and shoves a grocery bag into my hands.
“Happy birthday anyway,” she says, hair swirling as she turns to leave.
“Aubrey! You don’t have to go right now .”
“Yeah, I do, apparently.”
“I don’t mean—”
She turns back. Eyes narrowed. Points at me. “You just care more about yourself. That’s what my mom always said. I didn’t think it was true. But I was a little kid when I knew you. What the fuck did I know?”
The ways she says it, I can tell that Steena said those exact words to her. You were just a little kid, Aubrey. What the fuck did you know?
“That’s not true!” I shout. “I’m worried she won’t let me see you! Again.”
“You’re like the opposite of brave.” Aubrey’s voice is sharp with disgust.
I brace for the sound of the door slamming as she leaves, but it doesn’t happen. Aubrey doesn’t like loud noises either. The quiet is almost worse.
In the grocery bag, there’s a plastic clamshell container. Six cupcakes. Pastel blue and yellow.
“Choo-choo-tree-ten-choo-tree,” Aubrey sang while I pushed her on a swing at Reis Park. She’d gotten pretty good at pumping her feet and didn’t need as many pushes as she used to. “Ten-choo-tree-choo-choo-tree!” She was four and finally had her T-H s down but still said tree just as often as three .
“Hey, silly goose! What are you singing?” I asked.
She kicked her feet against the dirt until she stopped swinging and twisted the chains together so she could look at me. “Our birthdays,” she said. “Silly goose.”
“I thought you were singing about a train.”
Aubrey laughed in the way that made her whole face scrunch up. She sang her song again. Louder and slower. “Two-two-threeeeee-ten-two-thhhhreeeee.”
“I get it now.”
“Hey, silly goose? Are we twins?” she asked.
I looked up at the sky until I could get my face back to straight. I always tried hard not to laugh at Aubrey’s questions, because I remembered the burning shame that crept up my neck when an adult laughed at me for asking something I had no way of understanding yet. “Why do you think we’re twins?” I asked.
“Because we both have two-three birthdays.” She sounded pretty certain of her reasoning. “And the same shirt.” As she pointed to her block-printed baby tee, she lost her balance, and the swing spun her around.
I reached out to steady her, but she was finding her own footing, so I stepped back.
“I did say we were twins when I gave you that shirt, didn’t I?”
Aubrey nodded gravely. She’d liked my shirt, so I bought another one at the hippie craft sale that always seemed to be happening somewhere on the SUNY Purchase campus. It was full-sized on her, too big even. The tulip print didn’t stretch out like it did on me, so the flowers looked like tiny rosebuds.
“I’m sorry, goose,” I said. “That was a figure of speech.”
Her eyes were big and sad.
I felt terrible for disappointing her. “Remember how we talked about what a figure of speech is?”
Aubrey nodded. “But we have the same birthday.”
“We have the same day of different months as our birthday,” I said. “And different years as our birth date . Real twins are the same age.”
“Can we be pretend twins?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have my birthday on your day too, and you have your birthday on my day too?”
“Of course,” I told her. “I’ll wear my twin shirt.”
“Me too,” she said.
Her four-year-old mind came up with an elaborate plan for cupcakes—that we’d each have our own, and we’d get the kind of candles that are numbers, and one of us could have a two on our cupcake and the other would get a three, and we’d blow them out at the same time.
“The real birthday person should get the three,” she said, making the serious, squinting face that meant she was scanning her mind for the right answer. “Because threes are blue, and blue is for birthdays.”
“What color is two?” I asked.
“Yellow!” She shook her head at me, like she thought it was silly that I didn’t know. The letters and numbers in my mind have never been consistently one color or another, but I worried if I told her how it was for me, she might doubt her own reality. She was always so sure the world existed for everyone else in all the dimensions she saw, and I never had the heart to tell her otherwise. I wonder if I should have warned Aubrey that other people’s minds aren’t as busy and burnished as hers, because believing other people thought like me, that they had the same intentions I do, caused me so much pain.
On Aubrey’s fifth birthday, when I brought her cupcakes, she shrieked and clapped her hands. “We’re twenty-three!”
“You’re five,” Steena said slowly, holding up her hand, fingers spread, as if Aubrey didn’t know how to count. “Your aunt is nineteen. No one is twenty-three.”
Aubrey rolled her eyes at Steena, which made Steena glare at me.
“It’s an inside joke,” I said.
“It’s weird,” Steena said. And the look she gave me could have had its own subtitles: You’re weird. You’re making my child weird. She’s going to end up like you.
“Aubrey thought we might be twins,” I explained, trying to bring Steena in on the joke, hoping she’d find it cute. “Because we both have birthdays with a twenty-three in the date.”
“How long are you staying?” Steena asked, sighing. “I didn’t buy enough salmon to have an extra person at dinner.” She said extra with the level of disgust someone else might reserve for a stranger covered in cow manure knocking on the door to demand a full serving of broiled salmon.
“I’m not staying for dinner.” I didn’t want to sit in Steena’s echoey dining room, trying to choke down half a piece of dry salmon while baby Austin screamed, Aubrey quietly mourned the way spinach made her mouth feel, Charlie tried to teach me about annuities, and Steena blamed me for upsetting the perfect dinner she had planned. But I felt the sting of her rejection anyway.
Our friendship had been precious to me, even though it was short-lived. By Aubrey’s second birthday, Steena had a group of friends she met at a Mommy and Me playgroup, and a few of her high school pals had gotten married and were having babies. She was no longer an isolated new mom who didn’t want the outside world to see her with greasy hair in postpartum sweatpants. She was back to queen-bee, cute-outfit Steena, and her appreciation for me had devolved to what was, at best, a simmering tolerance. It hurt all the more because of how much I’d loved that brief span of time when I was important to my sister.
As Aubrey grew out of the cherubic toddler stage, Steena was put off by her evolution into personhood. She was not inclined to show off a three-and-a-half-year-old who had proudly dressed herself in mismatched socks and inside-out overalls. And when Aubrey got hold of the kitchen scissors and cut her own hair, Steena stopped taking pictures of her for four months, claiming, “Well, I don’t want to remember her looking like that !”
At home, Aubrey was always uncomfortable. The kitchen light was too bright or the TV was too loud. She didn’t like the smell of the candle Steena had burning on the coffee table. She didn’t like Charlie kissing her cheek when he came home from work with a scratchy five-o’clock shadow. It never occurred to Steena or Charlie to ask Aubrey how she needed things to be or even what she liked.
I never minded if Aubrey wanted to wear her t-shirt inside out because the seams were being mean , or we had to leave a movie because the theatre smelled too popcorny , or that when I took her to the Bronx Zoo, she spent the whole time following pigeons. I understood how awful it was to be trapped in someone else’s preferences, and I didn’t want Aubrey to feel the way I always had. So it made sense that she was happy around me and crabby at home. But Steena saw it as some kind of slight, as if Aubrey were a mean girl trying to dethrone her, instead of a little kid with a lot of sensory issues.
Steena hadn’t planned anything for Aubrey’s fifth birthday. No cotton candy machine on the patio or petting zoo in the cul-de-sac like the year before. No preschool friends scheduled to descend on the house with a deluge of plastic presents, ready to decimate a three-tiered teacup cake.
“She doesn’t like parties anyway,” Steena said, when I’d asked what the plans were. This was true, but Aubrey’s feelings rarely tempered Steena’s efforts to prove to the world that she was a better host, a better mother, and an all-round more spectacular human being than the other women in town. Since Austin was born, it had become very clear that Steena would rather show off her perfect baby boy than the strange little girl who insisted on wearing Spider-Man galoshes, even with a dress, even on sunny days.
I did everything I could to keep Aubrey from feeling the impact of the way Steena treated her. I woke up early after late night shifts to take her to preschool when I could, because I knew it made her happy. I’d been an observer my whole life. Of my friends. Of my family. I never felt like I belonged to anyone. I didn’t feel like that with Aubrey, and I made sure she didn’t feel like that with me.
The cupcakes I brought over for her birthday were from Gristedes, not a gourmet caterer in Chappaqua. But I special-ordered them to make sure I could get the right colors. They were the kind with icing that’s gritty with sugar crystals and dyed too bright, and the cake part smelled strongly of imitation vanilla.
“These are my favorite!” Aubrey said, pointing at them with her pinky finger, eyes bright.
I stuck the number three candle into the icing of Aubrey’s blue cupcake and the two on my yellow one. When I lit them, she leaned in to whisper, so Steena couldn’t hear, “We’re twenty-three. For all the times, always.”
In the months between that October and February, I brought Aubrey cupcakes on the twenty-third. She would go get the two-three candles she’d secreted away in her nightstand drawer. We’d sing Happy Birthday to each other at the top of our lungs and light the candles and watch them melt a little more.
There were very few moments when Aubrey acted like a child. But when she blew out her candle and shouted all her silliest wishes, she looked like the little kid she was supposed to be, all her concerns falling away for a moment.
I wish I was an aardvark!
I wish I was the moon!
I wish we lived in a treehouse! On the moon! With an aardvark!
By March twenty-third, I wasn’t allowed to see her anymore.
This time, the twenty-third snuck up on me. My life has been about days of the week for so long that I don’t keep track of dates.
I’m fucking thirty now. Aubrey remembered and I forgot.
I pull my phone from my pocket but can’t bring myself to call her. If Aubrey wants to come back, I won’t have the heart to say no. But she needs to go home. I can’t have Steena or Charlie showing up to look for her.
I carry the cupcakes to the dining room table. In the bottom of the bag are candles in the shapes of a two and three. I light the three with the mini Bic Aubrey keeps by the back door and stick it in one of the blue-icing ones. It’s dark outside, so the windows are mirrors again and I can see myself and the cupcakes and the candle. I don’t know what to wish for. I never really did. I watch the reflection of the candle as the flame melts the cheap wax, the roof of the three starting to fold in. These candles are meant to go fast so you always have to buy new ones. The original two-three candles were tiny nubs by my birthday, but Aubrey insisted she still knew which was two and which was three and we had to use them again, “so the candles don’t feel bad.”
I would have taken her with me to Maine if I could’ve.
In the window, I look more like Step than I can stand. I look more like an adult than I feel I’ve earned. I have nothing to show for myself. I blow out the candle without wishing, pull it from the cupcake, and lick the icing off the wax.
Aubrey’s rat is scratching around in his cardboard castle. He’s eaten through one of the turrets.
“Hey, Lenny Juice,” I say, and he pokes his head out of a pile of shredded paper to look at me. “Want some?”
He climbs up the bars of his cage, chattering. I pinch a piece of squishy imitation-vanilla sponge from the side of my cupcake and hand it to him through the bars, feeling an instant wave of revulsion when his tiny fingernails graze my thumb. But then he looks at me while he’s holding that little clump of cake in his hands, murmuring and pleased as he chews. It feels like he’s thankful, and I’m moved by how human his mannerisms are. I change seats to sit closer and finish my cupcake, giving him a tiny piece every time I take a bite. I’m sure it’s not great to feed him sweets, but it can’t be the worst thing a rat has ever gotten into.
I sit with Lenny and polish off another cupcake and then another. It doesn’t take long for the sugar to give me jitters and call acid into my stomach. I feel the urge to eat more, as if the right food could make me feel less full, but almost everything that survived my shopping trip requires effort to prepare. I’m tired, so I just keep eating cupcakes.
I leave one yellow one for Aubrey in case she comes back tonight or shows up tomorrow, or before the cupcake turns into a brick. Then I’ll light the two candle for her and listen to all of her wishes.