“You talk to them?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you tell them about me?”
“I do. I tell them all about you. How smart you are. How beautiful you are. How much I miss you.”
“Oh. Is it—is it hard? To see all the babies?”
Mom seemed to think a little. “It is hard,” she admitted. “I didn’t see much of the babies at first. At first, I was just helping out in littler ways, just a couple of hours a day, cleaning and cooking, doing the laundry. Then they asked me to drive some of the girls to their doctors’ appointments.”
“And you did?”
“After a few weeks I did, when it really looked like they needed me to. I got to talk to the girls then, you know, on the ride, and sometimes in the waiting rooms at the doctors’. So I talked to them back at the house, too. Then I started to come in for more hours, because suddenly there seemed to be so much to do. Some of the girls go out to get jobs, and we need people to watch the babies during the day.”
I felt a lump growing in my throat.
“I’ve got to get back to my party,” I said. “My friends are waiting for me. You know, for cake and ice cream.”
“And presents?” Mom asked. I could hear in her voice that she was smiling.
“Yeah, and presents,” I said. “I didn’t open yours yet.”
“Go get it,” she said. “I can listen to you open it and pretend I’m at your party.”
I carried the phone with me to the dining room, found the pink box, and brought it to the kitchen. I sat at the table to open it. It was two books, one with large pictures about life in the Middle Ages, and the other with stiff paper for you to cut out little people and buildings to set up a medieval town.
“You left all your history books here, sweetie,” she explained. “I thought you might like some new ones.”
“Thank you,” I said. I had almost forgotten about that me, the one who liked to learn things in history books. Mom hadn’t.
“Happy birthday. I love you, baby.”
“Bye, Mom,” I said. “Thanks for calling.”
I hung up before she could say anything else.
Bridget came running in from the dining room. “Ready, Aubrey? Come on!”
She pulled on my sleeve, and tugged me into the other room.
I forgot all the funny feelings I had on the phone with Mom when I saw the twelve glowing candles on the beautiful cake Gram had made me. It was a chocolate cake, but outside it had smooth pure-white icing with pink edges and lettering that said, Happy Birthday, Aubrey! Marcus and Bridget started to sing at the same time.
I was wrong. There were thirteen candles. One to grow on.
Dear Bridget and family,
Thank you so, so, so much for the bicycle. I love it. It was definitely my favorite present this year. I can’t wait until it is nice enough out for us to go riding together. I know that Gram knew you were getting it for me because her present was a helmet. She did a good job keeping it secret!
Thank you for being so, so nice to me.
Love,
Aubrey
I sat in the living room, surrounded by books for a language arts report on Robert Frost. I had a stack of them in my lap, and I was copying notes out of the top one.
“Hi,” Gram said as she came into the living room.
“Hi,” I said.
She found the remote control on the coffee table and shut the TV off.
“Aubrey, I want to talk to you.”
“Okay,” I said, not looking up from my homework.
“No, I need to know you’re really listening,” she said. She pulled the stack of books out of my lap and took the pencil from my hand, and put them on the table. Then she scooped up the poetry anthologies and biographies from the couch cushions, added them to the pile, and sat down.
I couldn’t tell how serious this conversation was going to be. I couldn’t even tell if she was happy or sad.
“I talked to your mother.”
“Oh.”
“We’ve actually been talking pretty regularly.”
“How often is that?”
“A few times a week.”
“Oh.” I felt like the two of them were being sneaky, with secrets.
“I think she is doing really well, Aubrey.”
“Oh yeah?”
Gram paused for a moment before continuing. “She wants you to come home.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say.
“And I think,” Gram continued, “if you wanted to, it would be okay.”
“Are you sending me back?”
“I said if you wanted to. You can stay here as long as you like, you know that. But I think this is what you’ve both been working toward, isn’t it? And if you are ready, and she is ready, then you can go if you like. I wouldn’t just send you off, either. I’d come down and stay with you for a while. And once the two of you were on your own, there would be a social worker to check in and make sure things were okay, too.”
Over months and months Gram had never let me decide anything. She made me move to Vermont. She made me get out of bed. She made me go to school. She tried to control when I got to see or talk to Mom. And now she was going to let me make this big decision?
“Well, what do you think?” I asked. Maybe she could make this one for me, too.
Gram thought for a few minutes. “I would miss you a lot, duckling. But, I think, you can look into your heart and figure out what you want.”
My heart was a confused place. All that night it jumped with excitement and intense happiness. I dreamed of Mom, and us together again. I dreamed it both when I was asleep and when I was lying awake. I missed her so much, and there she was, within reach.
The other half of my heart was heavy and dark. It made me think things I didn’t want to. It felt like being hungry, or scared, or lonely. I didn’t know why my heart would have those things inside it, too, when I should have been happy.
It is hard to hug a fish. But I tried. I carefully took Sammy’s bowl and sat on my bed, holding my arms around the glass. I think he was confused. He fluttered his fins quickly. Maybe my arms around him made it seem darker than he was used to.
“I’m sorry, Samkins,” I said. I thought about Sammy. “You’ve been with me a long time, haven’t you?”
How long did betta fish live?
Pet fish don’t always hang around very long. Sammy had been good to me, living through the whole summer and fall and winter. A fish could die any day. Sammy could die any day.
“Don’t leave me, Sammy,” I whispered.
But really, anybody could die any day, whether you were ready or not. It could be your pet fish or your sister or you. Nothing is the same forever. Maybe all the people on Earth are God’s little pet fish. God lives such a long time that people’s lives probably seem really short to him. He watches them swim around for a little while, and then they stop swimming.
“And then do we all go to swim together in the big sea in the sky, Sam?”
Did I need to hurry and get to Mom because you never know how much time there is? Or did it not matter, because we’ll all be together again, someday, anyway?
“Bridget?”
“Yeah?”
“I have to tell you something.”
Bridget stopped spinning her swing. She had been twisting the ropes for a big push off, but she untwisted them and the swing hung straight. “What?”
“My mom called. She didn’t talk to me, she told this to Gram to tell me. She wants me to come home.”
“Oh,” Bridget said in a very small voice. “You have to go, right?”
“No. Gram said I could choose.”
“But you want to go.”
“I don’t know.”
Bridget turned to look at me. “You don’t know if you want to be with your mom?”
“I mean, of course I do. I really, really do. All I’ve been wanting all year is for things to be right again.”
Bridget
looked hurt for a moment, then looked back down at her tennis shoe, whose tip she circled in the dirt.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I mean, I love being here with you, too.”
“Maybe your mom could come up here. You could both live with Gram.” Bridget sounded like her idea was the perfect solution.
“Gram says that she and Mom talked about it, and Mom doesn’t want to have to be taken care of by another adult. She wants to have her own life.” I had to think about how to explain it. “It might be like, if Mom came to live with Gram, she would never be making things better, but staying in the same place.”
“I don’t get it,” said Bridget.
“I don’t really get it, either.”
Bridget shrugged.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“I don’t want you to go away.”
“We can still be friends. I would come back to Gram’s, of course.”
“Not friends like now. Not like next-door, everyday kind of friends.”
“You have other friends.”
“Not the same.”
“Bridget, I’m sorry.” Bridget always tried so hard to listen, to understand. But now it seemed like she was thinking about what she wanted. “I might need to go home.”
She sat quietly, but only for another minute or so before she got up, slid off her swing, and said, “See you tomorrow.”
I sat on the swing in her yard, wishing that our conversation had gone differently. Maybe I shouldn’t have told her at all.
Dear Mama,
You think we are ready, but how do you know?
Bridget and I sat on the bus in silence on the way to school, and then through lunch with a rather confused Marcus trying to make conversation between us, and then again on the bus home. After I told Gram I was home and dropped off my backpack, I walked to Bridget’s and her mom let me in. I found Bridget in her room, furiously cutting cardboard cereal boxes into shapes and then gluing them together into structures.
“What are you making?”
“A town,” she answered.
“Can I help?”
Bridget looked at me with raised eyebrows, then shrugged. I got some scissors and found a whole box and just sat there with both in my hands, not sure what to make.
“I think I might stay here,” I announced. It was hard to say that out loud. It made it feel like the truth, like I had decided, even though I hadn’t, not yet.
To my surprise Bridget started to cry.
“It was what I said, wasn’t it?” she asked. “Now you’re not going to go be with your mom because of me. She’s going to be all alone and it’s my fault, because we had a fight.”
“What?” I asked.
“No, you have to go,” she said, crying harder.
“Why?”
“Because kids are supposed to be with their moms, if they can,” she sobbed. “I told my mom everything, and that’s what she told me, that you and your mom should be together if you can, so go!”
I had never seen Bridget look so upset—angry, and confused—and she was almost turning purple she was crying so hard.
I didn’t know what to do. She turned away from me, to the wall. When she didn’t turn back, I let myself out of her room, and left her house.
“Have a seat, Aubrey. How is everything?”
“Fine.” I slouched into the chair in Amy’s office.
“Just fine?”
“Just fine.”
“I hear you have a big decision to make.”
“So you talked to Gram?”
“She thought I should know.”
Amy let a pause hang in the conversation. I figured I was supposed to fill it.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said.
“Have you and your mother talked about it?”
“No.”
“It might help. That way you could both be clear about what you expect to happen.”
I shook my head. “I can’t talk to her.”
“Why not?”
“If I heard her voice, and she asked me, I would say yes right away. I wouldn’t think about it. I would just say yes.”
“So you can think of a reason not to say yes?”
“Yes—no—I mean, sorry. I got confused.”
Amy smiled. “That’s okay. It seems to me you are doing really well here. And if you wanted to stay here, because you feel safe at your grandmother’s, or because you are happy with your friends here, or because you like school, that would be a good choice. On the other hand, it would also be a good choice to live with your mother again, because I know it has been really hard for you to be apart. You don’t have to decide right away, and your decision doesn’t have to be permanent.”
I hadn’t thought of that. Something about that idea seemed funny, though.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to just sit here and not decide, because then I’ll think about it every day, whether I should just make a choice. And it would be so hard—to go there—and to find out—it was a mistake. I need to be sure.”
“So you have decided to make a decision. That’s good. That in itself is really positive.”
“I’m back where I started.”
“Of course you aren’t. You may be in one of many places, but none of them is where you started.”
When I didn’t take my turn to talk, Amy started talking again.
“Well, it seems we have come to a stopping point for today. My door is open to you, though, if you want to come back again. You have a lot to think about, and I’m here.”
“Thanks,” I mumbled. I held out my hand.
Amy shook it, and laughed. “How formal! Even if you decide to go, this isn’t goodbye. We’ll certainly talk again before you leave.”
I nodded. It felt weird to say bye, even if it was just for now, so I didn’t say anything. Only when I was out in the hall did I realize I hadn’t even thought about M&M’s once while I was in there.
“Where’s Bridget?” Marcus asked when he found me sitting alone at lunch.
“We’re … we’re not talking today.”
Marcus sat down across from me. “Again? You guys don’t not talk. You always talk.”
“I know,” I said. “But not today.”
Marcus shrugged. He started to eat his hamburger. I picked up my can of soda to take a sip, then put it down and started playing with the tab.
“I have to tell you something,” I said. “Um … my mom is doing okay… and she wants me to come home. I don’t know if I want to go yet, but I’m thinking about it.”
Marcus stopped chewing his hamburger. “Do you need an ice cream bar?” he asked. “I think I need an ice cream bar.” He reached into the pockets of his baggy corduroys and fished out some change. He sifted through it and then hopped up. He came back from the lunch line a few minutes later with two ice cream bars.
The ice cream bars sat on the table, getting melty, as he continued to eat his hamburger, and as I continued to pull at the tab instead of drinking my soda.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know how to tell you, because I knew it would make you upset, hearing about my mom when …”
“What?” Marcus asked. “I’m not upset about that.”
“What’s the matter, then?” I asked.
“It’s just that… I would miss you,” Marcus said. He looked at me while he said it, even though he never looks straight at people when he talks to them.
Even though I was surprised, I knew I meant it when I said, “I would miss you, too.”
The doorbell rang. I got off the couch to answer it.
It was Bridget. I didn’t remember her ever ringing the doorbell before.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hi.”
She held up a covered plate. She handed it to me, and I peeked under the foil.
“Cookies,” she said. “Chocolate chip. Mom and I just made them. I should have invited you to help … but… next time.”
“Next time,” I agreed. “Come i
n.”
She followed me to the couch. She took off her tennis shoes and sat down next to me with her feet under her. I peeled back the foil and took a cookie. It was still warm, and the chocolate was melty. It was baked just enough so that it was still really soft, just the way the best cookies are. Nothing had ever tasted better.
Bridget watched me eat for a minute.
“Aubrey?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re my best friend.”
“I know,” I said. “You’re mine, too.”
Bridget was quiet for another minute. “You don’t know yet, do you?”
I shook my head.
I set the plate on the coffee table and we sat, still and quiet, for a few minutes.
“Bridget?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I tell you something?”
“Yeah.”
“I really want to go home.”
Bridget waited, leaving her eyes on me.
“Sometimes I imagine going back to Virginia. I ride down on the train by myself.”
“Why the train?”
“Because that’s how I got here.”
“Would they really make you go by yourself?”
“No, Gram said she would come. But when I imagine it, I’m by myself. And when the train stops at the station, I get off, and I stand there. And I look down the platform one way. And then I look the other way. For my mom … And there is no one there.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Bridget said.
I looked down and spoke in a very small voice. “I know. Or, at least, I’m trying to tell myself that. But when I imagine it, that’s what I see.”
“Aubrey, it’s going to be okay. Everything is going to be okay.” Bridget moved closer to me on the couch. She wrapped her arms around me and hugged. She hugged me for a long time. After a while she got up. I stood up, too, while she put on her shoes, and we walked to the door.
“Don’t forget you’re my best friend,” she said.
“I won’t,” I promised. I held up my hand, offering her my flat palm. She pressed hers to it.
When we lowered our hands, she said, “Bye, Aubrey.”
“Goodbye.” After Bridget had walked off the porch without looking back, I shut the door.