Tonight the Streets Are Ours (14 page)

Arden rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “Sorry, Linds. I was reading something and I just … got really caught up in it.”

Lindsey swigged some water. Arden could tell from the sheen of sweat on Lindsey’s face that she had run all the way here, which made Arden’s sedate-walker cardiovascular system want to curl up into a ball and die.

“I was looking at some guy’s blog,” Arden explained, which felt like such an understatement of what Tonight the Streets Are Ours was, or what it meant to her—but she felt like she had to say
something
about it to Lindsey, because when things mattered, Lindsey needed to know.

“Some guy. Is he hot?” Lindsey asked.

“Please, Linds. I have no idea.” Which was not to say that Arden hadn’t tried to find out. She had searched for every relevant combination of words she could think of:
Peter and Bianca. Peter and Leo. Peter and art school. Peter and bookstore.
Whatever she tried, she didn’t have enough information to find photos. She suspected he was probably hot, though.

“Yeah, right,” Lindsey said. “‘No idea.’ You are such a stalker. This is going to be like Ellzey’s house all over again. What’s this guy’s last name?”

“I don’t know. His first name is Peter.”

“You’re going to be like, ‘Peter, I read your blog,’ and his mom is going to say, ‘Well, I’m
Mrs.
Peter.’”

They both cracked up. A few more parents moved away. “It’s a basketball game,” Lindsey said loudly. “It’s okay to get a little rowdy.”

“Wooo!” Arden shouted toward the court, to support Lindsey’s statement.

“Wooo!” Lindsey agreed. All the bleachers within a six-foot radius of them emptied.

Once the game had ended, Arden drove Roman and Lindsey home, despite Lindsey’s protestations that she could run home the way she came. “Please don’t,” Arden said. “Just the thought of it makes me want to take a nap.” In the car, Roman seemed subdued, even for a child whose basketball team had just been totally crushed for the hundredth time this season.

“You killed it out there, Huntley,” Lindsey told him. “You wiped the court with those guys. I bet they’re scared to come back next time.”

Roman had been in the game for all of six minutes, and Lindsey was a terrible liar, but it was possible that a child might believe her.

Roman didn’t seem to be paying attention to her, though. “I don’t know where Mom went,” he said.

“To New York, Roman,” Arden said. “You do know.”

He shook his too-big head. “I saw her in the stands, though. I saw her while I was playing. But she wasn’t there afterward. Why wouldn’t she come say hi? Because we lost?”

Arden and Lindsey exchanged a glance. “She wasn’t there,” Arden said. “I promise.” But there was a tightness in her chest. If her mother
had
been there, she would have noticed—right?

“Yes, she was,” Roman insisted. “She was sitting right under the exit sign.”

Then Arden realized what had happened. Roman hadn’t been wearing his glasses, so of course it made sense that he would have gotten confused, from a distance. “No, Roman,” she explained, and she felt so bad for him, her baby brother, who had so much learning to do about the world and all of its disappointment. “That wasn’t Mom. That was just me.”

Arden’s mother explains herself

It was funny that Roman thought their mother would come home for his basketball game, because the next day, she sort of did. Not in a literal, physical sense. But she sent a letter. It was addressed just to Arden, and her father hand-delivered it while she was sitting in her room doing homework on Monday after rehearsal.

“No,” Arden said when he handed it to her. “What is this? No.”

“Your mother asked me to make sure you got this.”

“And what, you just do everything she tells you now?”

“I think doing this particular thing makes sense,” Arden’s father said. “You won’t take her calls. You don’t respond to her e-mails. I think you should hear her out.”

“Do you know what she says in here?” Arden asked, weighing the unopened envelope.

“I have a pretty good idea.”

Arden gave an impatient snort. “I don’t have time for this. There’s a huge math test tomorrow that I’ve barely studied for, and I’m supposed to call Chris in twenty minutes, and Naomi is freaking out over some costuming thing, and I can’t rearrange my entire life just because Mom has written a letter.”

“Fine,” her dad said. “I don’t have time for this, either. It’s pro day for a lot of big college teams, and I need to keep track of it all.” He turned and left her room.

A minute too late, Arden said, “Oh, Dad, that’s not what I…” She sighed. She hadn’t wanted to fight with her father. But the person she wanted to fight with wasn’t there.

A
letter
. Could there be a more one-sided form of communication? A letter was saying,
I’m going to state my thoughts, and you can’t argue with them because I’m not even there to hear you. All you can do is listen to me.
A letter was not a conversation.

Arden threw it in the recycling bin. Then she fished it out and opened it. Her curiosity always got the best of her.

This is what her mother’s letter said:

Dear Arden,

I know you’re angry at me, and I don’t blame you. I’m certain what I’ve done has been traumatic for you, and it pains me to think about how you might be suffering, or what you might think of me now. But this was something I had to do. I’m hoping that enough time has passed since I left that you might be willing to consider what I have to say, to try to understand why I felt like I didn’t have any other options.

The first thing I need you to know is that I did not leave because of anything you or your brother did, or failed to do. I love you both with all my heart, and all my soul, and nothing that you
ever
do, or fail to do, could change that. Please understand that.

Things between your father and me have been difficult for a while, and in recent years, instead of improving, they’ve only gotten more challenging. As you’re well aware, your grandparents fought constantly when your dad was growing up, and it affected him in a lot of negative ways. So it was important to him that you and Roman not be exposed to the same sort of parental conflict that he was, and I agreed with that. But the truth is that just because two people aren’t yelling at each other doesn’t mean that they’re making each other happy.

To put it simply, your father and I have very different ideas of what it means to be a parent. And I reached a breaking point. I felt like I had done all the running of our household for seventeen years. I wasn’t getting the sort of support from your father that I needed. And I couldn’t take it anymore.

I felt like years of injustices and unequal distribution of responsibilities all caught up to me at the same time. It frustrated me to feel that your father prioritized his job over his home and, even when he was home, that he prioritized his fantasy sports over his real family in front of him. It’s never seemed fair to me, and lately it’s seemed less tolerable than ever.

It’s not something you and I have talked much about, but I think you know that before you were born, I was working on getting my master’s degree in social work. I had this idea that I could be a really great social worker. And maybe I couldn’t have, maybe that was all in my mind, but that’s what I imagined.

I was incredibly excited to have a baby. It was my dream come true. But I realized very quickly that I couldn’t be the sort of mother I wanted to be—the sort of mother I thought you deserved—and also be going to classes and studying and doing field work. It didn’t seem possible. Someone had to take care of you. And I didn’t want to get a babysitter for you, or send you to day care where a bunch of babies would all be vying for attention. I thought you should be raised by a parent. And your father was not interested in being that parent. So I set aside my master’s degree and figured I would come back to it once you were in school.

Once you were settled at school, we had Roman. And, again,
this was my dream come true
. The problem wasn’t that I got to be a mother again—that was a blessing. But your father didn’t agree that, since I had done all the work of raising you, this time around maybe it was his turn. He felt like he was the breadwinner of the family, and he was doing pretty well for himself at that point, and he loved his career. And my idea of going back to school was a pipe dream, which might never turn into anything profitable. He was going to stay at his job, and if I wanted to go back to school, he said, then Roman could go into day care.

But I’m sure you remember what a fussy baby your brother was. He needed his mother.
He needed me.
I wasn’t going to hand him over to some stranger who could never love him with the intensity that I did.

And your father said, basically, that was my choice. I could choose grad school or I could choose spending all my time with my children, and I chose my children, I chose that freely, and so what reason did I have to be unhappy?

Making that choice made me feel like I mattered—I
must
matter, if my family needed me so much. And then I kept making that choice every day, until eventually it became too late for me to unmake it.

I kept thinking I would someday go back and finish my degree. But there was always something else to do. There was always a basketball practice or a parent-teacher conference or an upcoming Spanish test. I loved being so involved in the lives of my family, but at the same time I felt like I’d lost sight of myself. I only knew who I was in relation to somebody else. For years I was somebody’s wife, somebody’s mother, somebody’s friend, somebody’s daughter. And for once, I wanted to be somebody for myself.

I didn’t know how to find that in Cumberland. I felt like as long as I was in that same house and that same situation, I would keep making those same choices. So, I left.

I don’t know if this is anything you’ll be able to sympathize with, or if it will give you any peace to know all of this. I’m telling you because I hope that it will help, and because I think you’re old enough to hear what’s going on.

Your father and I are trying to work things out. We’re talking about all of these issues, and I’m hopeful that we can come to some sort of understanding, some way forward, so I can come home again. The bottom line is that I love you totally and completely, and I always have, and I always will. I would be happy to discuss all of this further with you. Or just to hear how you’re doing. You can e-mail or call me at any time.

Love,

Mommy

Arden stared at the letter for a long time, the words blurring together until they became just meaningless shapes. Then she tore it up into as many tiny pieces as she could, and she threw every last one of them in the garbage.

Stalking people, take two

It wasn’t fair of Arden’s mother to blame her running away on Arden’s dad. It was ridiculous and self-centered. Okay, so he didn’t do the everyday parenting. He rarely took Roman to sports games, collected Arden from school, managed their schedules, oversaw their doctors’ appointments and haircuts, set up playdates, or noticed when they outgrew clothes or finished a carton of milk. Yes, their mother did all that boring, mundane stuff. Give her a standing ovation.

But that didn’t make their dad a bad parent. On the contrary, when there was a big thing in his kids’ lives, their dad was first in line to document it with photos and video, or to cheer them on, or to coach them in the necessary skills.

He was the one who taught them to ride their bikes, for example. He was the one who taught them how to catch and throw a ball—really poorly, in both Roman’s and Arden’s cases, but he did try. When they went to the beach, he helped them build elaborate sand castles, and when they decided to get a dog (RIP, Spot), he was the one who took them to the animal shelter so they could choose one. He had tried very hard to instill in them a love of pro football, his passion. While it never stuck, he was always delighted for his kids to sit on the couch to watch a game with him, and he would regularly e-mail them articles about the teams he followed, whether or not they’d expressed any interest in reading them.

When he taught Arden to drive last year, he left nothing to chance, telling her everything he knew about how to handle different road situations she might someday find herself in. Together they logged almost double the number of required practice driving hours, and when he took her to her driving test, she passed with flying colors. Even the officer administering the test commented that he’d rarely seen drivers her age who were so confident. Her dad took this as a personal compliment and printed out official-looking certificates on thick cardstock, one for Arden saying
WORLD’S BEST TEEN DRIVER
and one for himself saying
WORLD’S BEST DRIVING COACH
. They both still had them hanging over their respective desks. Once she had her license, he even helped her purchase the Heart of Gold, matching her dollar for dollar.

He was a good dad.

Thanks to the Heart of Gold, Arden spent every day last summer driving. She’d drive as far and as often as she could, usually with Lindsey in the passenger seat, since Lindsey was game to go anywhere at any time. Often they would drive forty-five minutes to a crumbling independent cinema called the Glockenspiel, which showed artsy films, some of which were in French or Italian with subtitles, or which were old and in black and white. It’s not like they were such huge cinephiles. It was simply that the Glockenspiel was far away, and seeing a movie there was
something to do
.

Plus, they were obsessed with the Glockenspiel’s manager.

Her name was Veronica and she had bleached blond hair with an inch of obvious brunette roots. She always wore chunky platform shoes and her arms were covered in tattoos, and she cursed up a storm when she introduced any film (“Truffaut was an effing genius and
Jules et Jim
is one of his shittiest films, and yet for some effed reason it’s the only one anyone effing talks about when they talk about Truffaut.”) She embodied the mandate, handed down by one of their English teachers, of knowing something about everything and everything about something.