Takeoffs and Landings (19 page)

“It's my turn for a question,” Mom said, still looking at Chuck. “What did you two talk about at the cemetery after your daddy's funeral?” She turned her gaze on Lori. “When no one but Chuck could convince you it was time to go home?”

Lori looked puzzled.

“I don't remember that,” she said. “I remember seeing the coffin, at the funeral home, and everybody saying Daddy was inside. I remember Gram feeding me cherry Life Savers during the service, so I'd be quiet. I haven't eaten them since. I don't remember the cemetery.”

Chuck looked down, studying the whorls in the table's wood. They circled back on themselves endlessly. He couldn't believe Lori had forgotten. Was she just being polite? Was she keeping secrets for him, the way she used to?

It didn't matter. Chuck had to confess.

“I told Lori—” He made himself say it. “I told her that Daddy wanted her to go home. That he was waiting for us there.”

Familiar guilt swept over him. He could remember exactly how he'd felt, standing beside Lori in the cemetery, a little boy sent to do what grown-ups couldn't accomplish. He could almost feel the thin cotton of his church pants blowing against his bony legs. He'd wanted to cry, like Lori was doing, but Pop had told him boys weren't allowed. Then Lori had looked at him with big, trusting eyes, and he'd said the first thing that popped into his mind.

“I lied,” he said now. “I knew it was a lie. But I wanted to believe it, too. I thought if I said that, maybe it would be true.”

Lori gasped.

“I remember now!” she said. “Then we went home, and Daddy wasn't there, and I was so mad at you. You kept saying, ‘Just wait. Just wait. He's coming.' And I kept waiting. I'd sit by the front window every day, watching for him. You promised me! I thought it was all your fault that he didn't come. And then I forgot I was even waiting for Daddy, but I was still mad at you.”

Chuck nodded, barely hearing her words, except for “mad at you.”

“Yes,” he whispered. “I—I don't blame you. You should have been mad at me.”

He looked up, and Mom was staring at them both, her face flooded with dismay.

“Oh, no,” she said. “I'm so sorry. I didn't know—Chuck, it wasn't your fault. It wasn't your fault, either, Lori. I just—someone gave me a book about how kids deal with grief, but I never had time to read it. If only . . .”

Chuck stared back blankly. Lori shrugged.

“What good would that have done?” she asked. “Neither of us told you what was wrong. We were just being stupid. We just didn't want to believe that Daddy was never coming back.” She looked across the table at Chuck. “I shouldn't have been mad at you,” she said. “I'm not mad at you anymore. It's over. It's all in the past.”

Saying that, Lori realized it was true. The place where all her fury lived was gone. The walls had broken down, and it had all washed away.

Chuck closed his eyes, waiting for some sense of relief. Lori forgave him. She wasn't mad anymore. Why didn't he feel good? He opened his eyes, still bothered, still worried. Still guilty.

Mom reached down and gathered up the travel brochures and guidebooks.

“Anybody in the mood for Disneyland now?” she asked. “We really ought to get out of the hotel room.”

Lori grimaced.

“I don't feel like Disneyland,” she said. “Or Hollywood. But does—does Los Angeles have an art museum?”

“I think so,” Mom said.

She and Lori both turned and looked at Chuck, questioningly. He kept staring down at the table, listening to an argument in his head.
Tell! No, no, I can't. But this might be your only chance.

He opened his mouth.

“I was drawing when they came in to tell me Daddy died,” he began slowly. “I wasn't supposed to be. I was supposed to be doing math. Mrs. Swain warned me, lots of times, that I'd get in trouble if I drew instead of paying attention. Then Daddy died. I thought—”

“You thought it was your fault?” Lori asked incredulously.

Chuck nodded slowly.

“I decided I'd never draw again,” he said. “And I didn't. Even when I wanted to. Even when I was flunking art.”

“You flunked art?” Lori asked in disbelief.

“And I didn't notice,” Mom muttered, almost as if she were talking to herself. “That was the one F I didn't think to worry about.”

Chuck didn't seem to hear his sister or his mother.

“Then on this trip, away from home . . . it seemed like maybe it'd be okay to draw again.” Chuck's words came so slowly, it was excruciating. “To go to art museums and all. Like I was free. For–forgiven. And then in Phoenix—what happened there—it started to seem wrong again. . . .”

Mom laid her hand on Chuck's arm.

“Oh, Chuck,” she murmured. “I—” She hesitated, as if searching for the most comforting words. Lori wasn't so cautious.

“You really thought Daddy died because you were drawing instead of doing math?” she asked. “And you quit drawing because of that? Are you crazy?”

“Lori!” Mom exclaimed.

But Chuck didn't scurry back into his usual shell. He looked up slowly.

“It is crazy, isn't it?” he asked.

“You were thinking like a seven-year-old,” Mom said. “That's all. And because nobody tried hard enough to find out what was wrong, you never escaped the guilt. Or the guilt about what you told Lori. It's my fault. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

Her voice was so full of pain that Lori and Chuck both reached for her at the same time.

“It's okay,” Lori said. “Really.”

“Yeah,” Chuck echoed. “It's okay. Now.”

Lori and Mom let Chuck have the window seat for the flight home.

“You like looking at things more than I do,” Lori said.

Chuck started to protest, then he realized she didn't mean it as an insult. It was a flat statement of fact. He did like looking at things more than Lori did. He slipped into the row of seats, put his backpack on the floor, buckled the seat belt.

The flight attendant down the aisle launched into the safety lecture, but Chuck didn't listen. He closed his eyes instead, visualizing his favorite pictures from the art museum the day before. If he remembered them well enough, he could look at them anytime he wanted for the rest of his life—sitting in algebra class, plowing a field, pressure-spraying the hog barn. He couldn't believe Lori had asked to go to the art museum.

She did that for you,
a little voice whispered in his head.

And she hadn't done it to mock him. She'd stood behind him, gazing at the paintings with him, as if she'd honestly wanted to understand.

This was going to take some getting used to, Lori being nice to him again.

“Ready to go home?” Mom asked beside him now.

“I guess,” Chuck said, his mind still back on Lori and the museum.

“You don't feel sick, do you?” Mom asked.

Chuck shook his head and held up his wrists to show his airsickness bracelets. They were taking off, and he hadn't even noticed. He wasn't scared at all now. What was the big deal? People flew all the time.

The plane's engine roared beneath his feet, sounding ever so slightly like a tractor engine. For the first time, Chuck felt a pang of homesickness. How could he be thinking of tractors longingly?

They left the city behind, far below, and flew out over mountains—mountains and desert, landscapes so foreign to Chuck that they seemed to belong to a different planet. There'd been mountain and desert paintings at the museum yesterday. Chuck closed his eyes again, but this time what he pictured against his eyelids was the pattern of sunlight on corn leaves, of soybean rows flowing toward the horizon, of wheat stalks bowing in the wind.

He hadn't seen any of those designs in any of the museums he'd visited. Someone needed to draw those or
paint those or sculpt those—or something.

No,
he thought.
I need to.

Without thinking, Chuck turned to his mother.

“Remember what you offered?” he asked. “Can I still—I mean, will you still pay for art lessons?”

Mom looked up. Smiled.

“Of course,” she said. “Absolutely.”

Chuck felt a shot of joy. For just a second, he felt the usual guilt:
Drawing is bad. Daddy died because I was drawing.
But then the guilt was gone. He could draw, and it was okay.

They were in clouds now, high above the earth. The pilot announced he was turning off the seat belts sign. Chuck stared out the window, losing himself in following the arcs of cloud against the wings of the plane. Such designs. He wanted to draw those, too. He didn't have another notebook yet, but maybe when he got home . . .

When he got home, there'd be chores. Two weeks' worth, if he knew Pop. And then Mike and Joey would probably make fun of him if he tried drawing anywhere around them. And at school, his drawing would just be something else for the other kids to laugh at. Or destroy.

“Ready to go home?” Mom had asked him. And he'd said he was. Why? He felt a weight settle on his shoulders. He felt like an escaped criminal who'd been caught, getting sent back to prison. He might as well be wearing handcuffs. What if the trip hadn't changed anything?

But it had.

Chuck remembered when one of their neighbors had died, trapped in a corn bin the year before. He'd gotten buried in corn and suffocated. Chuck could remember Pop describing the accident to Gram: “He just didn't have any room to breathe,” Pop had said, again and again, shaking his head. It was like Pop had to repeat the words to make himself understand.

And Chuck had lain awake nights picturing the man, kernels of corn packed against his eyes and ears and face and nose, with no room to breathe.
That's me,
Chuck had thought.
I'm suffocating, too.
He was surrounded by what Pop wanted and what the kids at school said about him and what the teachers said about him and what his own brothers and sisters thought about him. And what he thought about himself.

But now—Lori had given him some space, and Mom had given him some space, and the pictures he carried around in his head would give him some space, and art lessons would give him some space. And what space he didn't have, he'd make.

Nobody can suffocate me now,
Chuck thought, and it was a surprise. A happy one.

They were in the sky for the last time. The flight attendants had brought out a meal and cleared it away. Just about everyone else seemed to be sleeping now, heads bobbing uncomfortably on pillows no bigger than lunch bags.

Lori was too antsy for sleep. She flicked through her magazine—
Seventeen
, again—but it couldn't hold her interest. Down the row, Chuck was peering eagerly out the window, and Mom was scribbling notes to prepare for yet another speech. Mom caught Lori's eyes on her and made a face.

“If I do this now, I won't have to worry about it once we get home,” she said. “I'll have four whole days off before I leave for Kalamazoo.”

“Don't tell Gram,” Lori said. “She'll put you to work scrubbing windows and shelling peas.”

Mom laughed and went back to writing.

Lori regarded her mother through half-closed eyes.
Poor Mom,
she thought, surprising herself.
“Poor Mom”? “Poor Mom”? All those fancy hotels and expensive meals and applause every night, and I'm thinking, “Poor Mom”?
But fancy hotels were just empty rooms in strange cities, and the applause was just a bunch of strangers hitting their hands together.

Lori remembered how she'd thought of Mom as the Ancient Mariner, and it was true; Mom was just as trapped, her speeches were just as much an albatross around her neck. Mom kept saying the same thing over and over and over again, and she couldn't stop any more than the Ancient Mariner could.

“When you're on the twenty-ninth minute of your half-hour speech . . .” “When you're down to the last second in your time-bank account . . .” “When you're signing the last line on the contract of life . . .”