Chapter Eleven Where Dreams Go to Die
Chapter Eleven
Where Dreams Go to Die
It’s the Smiths’ turn to drive the boys to hockey practice after school, so I’m at home in the kitchen when Amanda walks through the door. She pulls off her snowy boots, removes her coat, and drops her backpack on the floor.
“How was your day?” I ask from the table, where I’ve been sitting for the past hour, doing some research on my laptop.
“It sucked.” She goes straight upstairs to her bedroom. Her door slams, and my stomach squinches. I shut my laptop, get up, and follow her.
I knock lightly on her door. “Can I come in?”
“Okay.” Her voice is weepy. It reminds me of when she was three years old and accepted, stoically, that she couldn’t have ice cream before dinner.
When I walk in, I find her curled up in a fetal position on her bed, hugging her furry pink pillow.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Nothing.”
I gently close the door behind me and sit on the edge of her bed. “Did she call you again? Or do something else?”
Amanda doesn’t reply. She lies still, so I sit, patiently rubbing her back.
After a moment, she rolls to face me and speaks with outrage. “One of her friends posted a comment on my Instagram about the play.”
“The musical?” I think about the pictures Amanda had shared from rehearsals and opening night.
“She said I was desperate for attention. Then she took a screenshot of one of the pictures and photoshopped it with me . . .” Amanda stops talking and rolls away from me again. “I can’t tell you.”
I touch her shoulder and encourage her to face me again. “What did she do?”
Amanda finally rolls onto her back, sits up, and hugs her knees to her chest. Her eyes are puffy and red. “She made it look like I was . . . you know.”
“No, I don’t know. You have to tell me.”
“It’s that picture where I’m singing in the finale,” she explains, “and she changed the microphone . . . she put a guy’s . . .” She pauses. “She put a guy’s thing in front of my mouth. Then Marissa posted it too. All my friends saw it.”
It takes a few seconds for this to fully register in my brain as I stare at my daughter. When it hits me, my blood heats to a raging boil. “She did what?”
Amanda doesn’t bother to repeat the information because she knows it’s a rhetorical question, but she watches me with wide eyes when I rise to my feet.
“That’s it,” I say. “We’re filing a report. Do you have a copy of the picture? Is it still online?”
“I have screenshots.”
“Good. Grab your phone.” I wave at her to follow me. “We’re driving to the police station right now, and we’ll get a restraining order if we have to.”
“Mom . . .”
I stop and turn. “No. Listen. She can’t get away with this kind of thing. She needs to learn a lesson about consequences and know that you’re not going to take it. Get up. Let’s go.”
Amanda scrambles off her bed and follows me downstairs, where we pull on our coats and boots and march outside to the car.
It’s not until afterward, when we’re leaving the police station, that I think about calling Nate. I unlock the car door and get in, and that’s when Amanda mentions it.
“Are we going to tell Dad about this?”
“Of course,” I reply as I buckle my seat belt. “Do you want to call him right now? Or would you prefer that we tell him later, when he gets home?”
“You can tell him later,” she replies, tipping her head back on the headrest and closing her eyes. “I’m not up for explaining it again. It sucks, and it’s so embarrassing. I just want to go home and chill.”
I glance at her and worry that this experience is going to damage her self-confidence—the kind of energy that drove her to try out for the high school musical.
She was always fearless as a young child, adventurous and buoyant, but in this moment, I sense a gloom in her, a withdrawal I’ve never seen before, and I’m not sure how to handle it.
Should I give her space to recover? Or encourage her to talk more about it and call her father?
But if she called Nate right now, would he have time for her?
It’s past five o’clock, and Oblique has just opened its doors.
I press the ignition button and start the car, back out of our parking spot, and decide to leave it alone for now. Unfortunately, that decision amplifies my resentment.
As we cross town during rush hour, I wonder how Nate and I got here.
I remember a time, early in our marriage, when I’d never hesitate to call him for anything, even just to chat.
But as soon as he opened the restaurant, everything changed, and he started ignoring my calls.
Not always, but often enough that I noticed.
Or if he did pick up, he was distracted or even annoyed at me for interrupting him at work.
Eventually, I stopped calling, and over time, I learned how to deal with life’s many challenges, big and small, on my own.
But today, the situation feels monumental. I just took our daughter to the police station to file a report about a crime committed against her, and she and I are both shaken up.
Nate is her father. He should know about this.
And yet . . . not telling him feels strangely satisfying—because if he’s unaware of what’s going on, it shines a glaring spotlight on how negligent he’s become as a parent.
I almost feel like I’m rubbing it in his face, hoping that he’ll wake up and feel guilty.
It’s the ultimate act of passive aggression.
I pull to a halt at a stop sign, flick the blinker, look both ways, and steer onto our street. Amanda has been quiet the entire way home, scrolling mindlessly through her Instagram feed. I’ve been quiet too, reflecting, simmering with my bottled-up hostilities, which seem to have come to a head.
In that moment I decide that I shouldn’t let this fester. I’ve always prided myself on being a good communicator, so I resolve to call him as soon as we get home and tell him what happened today. I’ll give him a chance to rise to the occasion. For once.
He’d better pick up, or at least return my call. If he doesn’t . . .
I pull into our driveway and swear that if he fails this test, my resentments might explode in the deep, dark place where hopelessness lives—that old den inside me where I believe future happiness is beyond the realm of possibility.
I know that place. I lived there once, for a very long time.
It’s the place where dreams go to die.
It’s past midnight, and I’m waiting up for my husband. After Amanda and I arrived home, I called Nate, but unsurprisingly he didn’t answer. I left a voicemail and told him it was about Amanda, and it was important, but he never called back.
Maybe I should have reached out to Martina, the restaurant manager, but every time I speak with her, she shares colorful details about incidents in the kitchen—things Nate clearly hasn’t shared with me.
She then responds with sympathy, as if she understands how painful it must be to be so out of touch with my husband.
But I refuse to take her bait, even though I’m conscious of how much time they spend together.
I feel like she can smell weakness, so the last thing I want her to know is that Nate doesn’t return my calls.
When at last I hear his car in the driveway, I rise from the sofa to meet him at the door and will myself not to make this about me.
Yes, I’m annoyed as hell at him for not calling, but this is about Amanda and what she needs from us.
I’ll address the broader subject of our relationship after we get that out of the way.
“You’re still up,” he says with surprise as he walks in.
“Didn’t you get my voicemail?” I can’t help it that my tone is full of accusation.
He sets his backpack on the floor and kicks the snow off his boots. “I saw that you called, but I didn’t have a chance to listen to the message. It was a busy night.”
I turn away from him and go to the kitchen. “It’s always a busy night.”
He removes his coat and boots and follows me. We end up standing across from each other at opposite ends of the kitchen island.
“Isn’t that a good thing? That Oblique is busy again?”
I don’t want to get into how long it took to revive the business after the COVID-19 closures, so I say nothing, because I want him to recognize that I’m miffed.
When he finally lets out a weary sigh, as if I’m the quintessential ball and chain, I want to climb over the kitchen island and shake him until his teeth rattle.
He drags a stool out to sit down. “What’s wrong?”
I choose to remain standing. “You’d know what was going on if you’d listened to my message and called me back.”
“I told you we were busy,” he replies defensively. “You know I don’t have time to talk on the phone once guests start to arrive.”
I don’t want to get into the weeds about restaurant operations. We’ve had this conversation too many times, most notably on the day he missed my father’s funeral.
“Fine. You’re here now, so I’ll fill you in.” I pull out a stool from my end of the island and sit down. “I took Amanda to the police station this afternoon—”
“What? Why?” he asks, interrupting before I have a chance to finish.
“To file a report because she’s being bullied.”
Nate frowns. “At school?”
“No, it’s a girl from a different school, and it’s happening online. She’s posted some doctored images, but somehow she got ahold of Amanda’s phone number and called her and made threats.”
“What kind of threats? And why is she doing that?”
“She thinks Amanda’s going after a guy she likes,” I explain. “Amanda works with him at the pool on Saturdays. His name is Jeff.”
Nate slowly nods. “I see.” He sits quietly for a moment, taking it all in. “So is she actually going after this guy?” he asks with disbelief.
I scoff. “That’s not really the point, is it? Even if she was, this girl has no right to call her and make threats. Did you not hear the part about us going to the police station today?”
He holds up a hand. “Okay, yes. I’m sorry. I’m just caught off guard with all this. Let’s backtrack and start at the beginning.”