The phone is hidden inside the spare tire in my trunk. At the car wash, I take everything out of the back so it can be vacuumed, grabbing the phone along with everything else. As the car goes through the wash, I turn on the phone. The new-message beep startles me. Both the sound and the phone are old-fashioned. It’s not even a smartphone, just a prepaid phone that is heavier than it looks.
I bought it at a discount store years ago. It took me a while to decide. Not on the phone itself—back then all the prepaids looked the same. It took me a while to decide to get one in the first place. A nice saleswoman came along and asked if she could help. She looked too old to know a lot about electronics, but it turned out she knew everything. And she was so patient, so kind, and I asked one question after another. The answers did not matter. I did not care about the technical details. I was trying to decide if I wanted a second phone, the disposable kind, and I think I ended up with one because at some point it would have been rude not to buy something. I had taken up too much of her time.
I have had this thing ever since. Annabelle is just the latest entry.
I have not thought about her since deciding she would not be the one. There has been no reason to think about Annabelle, not until she called. Or texted, I mean. It does not do any good to call a deaf man.
Hey stranger, let’s have a drink again soon. Oh, and it’s Annabelle â?º
I have no idea when she sent the message. It does not arrive on my phone until I turn it on, but she could have sent it a week ago. At least a week has passed since I checked it.
I consider answering the text, at least to say I was not ignoring her on purpose.
My car is still being washed, so I scroll backward on the phone. Before the text from Annabelle, there is the one text from Lindsay. The one I ignored. It is now fifteen months old.
Had a great time the other day, Tobias. See you soon!
Tobias. He was never supposed to have a personality of his own. And he wasn’t supposed to sleep with anyone.
Millicent and I came up with him together. It was on a rare cold night in Florida, where the temperatures dipped below forty degrees. Between hot cocoa and a pint of ice cream, Tobias was born.
“You can’t really change how you look,” she told me. “I mean, not without some kind of wig or paste-on beard.”
“I’m not wearing a wig.”
“So then you need something else.”
I was the one who suggested pretending I was deaf. Just a few days before, I had taught a teenage kid who was deaf and we used cell phones to communicate. It stuck with me, so I suggested it.
“Brilliant,” Millicent said. She kissed me just the way I like it.
Next, we discussed my name. It had to be memorable but not weird, traditional but not common. It came down to two: Tobias and Quentin. I wanted the latter because of the nickname. Quint was better than Toby.
We debated the pros and cons both names. Millicent even pulled up the origins of them.
“Tobias comes from the Hebrew name Tobiah,” she said, reading from the Internet. “Quentin comes from the Roman name Quintus.”
I shrugged. Neither origin meant anything to me.
Millicent continued. “Quentin is from the Roman word for ‘fifth.’ Tobias is a biblical name.”
“What did he do in the Bible?”
“Hang on.” Millicent clicked and scrolled and said, “He slayed a demon to save Sarah and then he married her.”
“I want to be Tobias,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Who doesn’t want to be the hero?”
That night, Tobias was born.
Not many people have met him—just a few bartenders and a few women. Not even Millicent has met him. Tobias is almost like my alter ego. He even has his own secrets.
I do not answer Annabelle’s text asking me out for a drink. I shut off the phone and put it back in my trunk.
Thirty-four
Christmas, six years ago. Rory was eight, Jenna was seven, and both had started asking why they had only one set of grandparents. I had never talked about my parents, never said anything about who they were or how they died. Their questions made me think about what I could say. What I should say.
One night, I went down to the kitchen, hoping that if I filled up my stomach it would make me sleepy enough to get past the insomnia. I ate leftover black bean casserole right out of the pan. Cold, but not half-bad. I was still eating when Millicent came into the kitchen. She grabbed a fork and sat down with me.
“What’s going on?” she said. Millicent took a big bite of the casserole and stared at me, waiting. I never got up in the middle of the night to eat. She knew that.
“The kids are asking about my parents.”
Millicent raised her eyebrows, said nothing.
“If I lie and tell them their grandparents were wonderful, they’ll hate me if they find out the truth, right?”
“Probably.”
“But they might hate me anyway.”
“For a while,” she said. “I think all kids go through a stage where everything will be our fault.”
“How long does it last?”
She shrugs. “Twenty years?”
“I hope things are pretty quiet during that time.”
I smiled. She smiled.
I could tell them my parents abused me. Mentally. Physically. Even sexually. I could say they beat me, tied me up, burned me with cigarette butts, and made me walk to school and back uphill both ways. They did not. I grew up in a nice home in a nice area, and no one touched me the wrong way. My parents were refined, polite people, who could recite manners in their sleep.
They were also horrible, cold people, who should not have become parents. They should have been smart enough to know a baby couldn’t fix anything.
The final straw came when I went overseas. When I told them I wanted to take a break from college and travel, they gave me some money. I bought an open-ended ticket and a large backpack, and drank a few dozen shots. Andy and two other friends decided to join me, so we made a haphazard plan and set a date. I did not tell them, or tell anyone, that I was afraid.
A few hours before the flight, I was still packing, still trying to decide which T-shirts to bring or if I needed a heavy jacket. Excited, yes. I was dying to get out of Hidden Oaks. Dying to get away from my childhood bedroom, where the walls were painted to look like I was in the sky, surrounded by stars. I was tired of dreaming about what else was out there, and wanted to see it for myself.
I also had no idea what would happen. I had already failed at tennis, then again at getting into a good college. Middle-of-the-road tennis player, middle-of-the-road grades. What would happen if I was middle-of-the-road while on the road? No idea. But it had to be better than feeling like I should never have been born.
I’d hoped I would never return and never see those sky-painted walls again.
My parents did not drive me to the airport. A cab picked me up, because I was too embarrassed to ask for a ride from my friends and their parents. It was a Wednesday morning, my flight was early, and dawn had just started to break. My mother with her coffee cup, my father already dressed—all of us stood in the foyer, on the shiny tile, surrounded by mirrors. The vase on the center table was filled with orange chrysanthemums. The rising sun hit the crystal chandelier above us, making a rainbow on the stairway.