Takeoffs and Landings (2 page)

Lori couldn't imagine saying that to her own mother in a million years. The kind of mother she could say that to wouldn't be taking her to Chicago right now.

That would be fine with Lori. She hadn't asked for this trip.

And the longer she sat in this strange, impersonal airport, the less she wanted to go. She felt uglier by the minute. She squirmed in her seat, embarrassed beyond words to be wearing such a horrible, homemade, crumpled sundress. Her hair had gone limp now, too, and her zits were probably as bright as neon signs. If anyone like that fashion designer she'd imagined was strolling through the airport right now, he'd run from her in horror. Probably all the other passengers were staring at her when she wasn't looking and laughing at her from behind their
USA Today
s and their John Grishams.
Get a load of that girl over there. Ever seen such a hick?

Lori glanced around quickly, ready to glare at anyone hiding giggles. But the only person she caught looking in her direction was her brother Chuck.

Chuck was someone else Lori couldn't talk to. She'd practically forgotten he was there, practically forgotten he was going to be on this trip with her and Mom, too.

Chuck was easy to forget. He was big and fat and
dumb. And that was what people said about him when they were trying to be kind.

Chuck looked away as soon as Lori's eyes met his. Ordinarily, that would have been fine with Lori. But she was so miserable today that his glance away made her feel rejected. Even fat, gross, sweating—ugh—Chuck couldn't stand to look at her. Lori bit her lip, holding back tears. Aside from Mom, who didn't really count, Chuck was the only person she knew in this whole crowded, overly bright airport. Part of her wanted to cling to Chuck, the way she'd clung to him all those years ago at Daddy's funeral.

Part of her wanted to slide down a few seats, so nobody would think they were together.

Mom came back from the bank of phones at the other end of the waiting area.

“Well, that's confirmed,” she said. “One of the organizers will meet us at the airport, so we won't have to take the hotel shuttle.”

They'd been away from home for only two hours, and already Mom sounded different. Her voice was crisper, more businesslike. She didn't seem like the same person who'd been reading bedtime stories last night to Lori's little sister, Emma, in a lulling, singsongy tone.

No wonder Lori could never talk to Mom at home. Mom-at-home was just a fake, some role she played while she waited for her next flight out.

“Excited?” Mom said, sitting down beside Lori. “Just think—your first plane trip.”

Lori shrugged. If Mom couldn't see how far away Lori was from excitement, there was no way Lori could tell her.

Behind her, Chuck only grunted.

Good for Chuck,
Lori thought, as if they'd chosen sides and Chuck were on her team. She wished he were. She wished he were someone she could talk to, confide in. She wanted to ask him:
Why is Mom
really
taking us on this trip?
It made no sense. She wished Chuck could explain it to her. After years of traveling on business, why had Mom suddenly decided to take Lori and Chuck with her?

But Chuck wasn't the type of person who had any answers. And it had been years and years and years since they'd been Chuck-and-Lori, inseparable pals. “Joined at the hip,” Gram used to joke. Not anymore.

Around them, people were talking in little clusters. Two businessmen types were comparing golf scores. A family with a toddler laughed as the child careened from seat to seat: “Now, come back here and give Grandma a good-bye kiss,” the mother implored.

Lori felt like she and Chuck and Mom were an island of silence in the midst of all that chatter. She wished suddenly that the rest of her siblings had come, too—eight-year-old Emma, ten-year-old Joey, and eleven-year-old Mike. Joey would be rattling off a list of questions:
How fast can our airplane fly? What will the ground look like from up there? How high will we be? How many people will be on the airplane?
Mike would be pretending he knew all
the answers:
It's thousands of miles an hour, right, Mom? And we'll definitely be above the clouds. Definitely.
And Emma would have Mom's full attention, as usual:
Do you remember when you told me that the clouds look like cotton balls up there? In the Raggedy Ann books, the clouds are bouncy, and you can jump from cloud to cloud. Could someone really do that?

Most of the time, Lori's younger brothers and sister drove her crazy. But if they'd come, they'd hide the fact that Chuck and Lori and Mom had nothing to say to one another.

Only, Mom hadn't invited them.

Chuck was sweating. The backs of his legs stuck to the plastic airport chair.

I'm going to die. I'm going to die. I'm going to die.

Planes went up. Planes went down. Planes crashed. Happened all the time.

He closed his eyes and saw plane parts strewn across a mountainside. Bodies bobbing in the Atlantic Ocean. That one crash had had a lot of kids. A whole high school French club thought they were going to Paris.

Chuck made himself breathe slower.

Mom flies a lot. Hasn't killed her yet.

Yet. She'd never had Chuck along. Bad-luck Chuck.

Lori was staring at him. Why? Oh. He must have snorted. Kids at school always made fun of him for that.

Sorry, Princess Lori,
he thought.
Sorry I bothered you.

You'd think she'd be nicer to him. Seeing as how they were all going to die.

No, Lori would live. She has good luck.

The sun always shone on Lori. She walked on a path of light.

Chuck crawled in darkness, groping his way through the muck.

He saw a face in his mind. Girl from school, wide-spaced eyes, freckles across the nose. A new kid. She was asking somebody: “That's Lori Lawson's brother?”

The girl's eyes bulged, her jaw practically scraped the floor. Like he was Frankenstein and Lori was Miss America. Like Lori was Einstein and he was the idiot drooling in the back of the classroom. Like he was pond scum and she was the peak of evolution.

Well, all that was just about true.

The only thing Chuck had on Lori was being born first.

Far as he could tell, the extra year hadn't helped him any.

Mom was talking now. Chuck focused too late to catch any of her words, but she pointed; he understood. It was almost time to get on the plane.

Chuck's stomach lurched. He pictured his plate at breakfast: five of Gram's thick pancakes, stacked. And then—gone. The plate was empty when he put it on the counter.

Stupid. Shouldn't have eaten so much.

Or not. Why die on an empty stomach?

Did Daddy—?

Chuck didn't let himself think about that. He stared out across the waiting room chairs, all welded together in rows, like a grid. A pattern. People and luggage jammed in the seats and aisles, messing up the pattern. Random. Everyone about to fly. To die?

You wanted this,
Chuck accused himself.
You wanted it bad.

He could see himself, last spring, begging Pop. “Please. I'll do night work all by myself for a month. Just let me go with Mom. I'll pay attention to everything you say. I'll work hard.”

Pop chuckling, rubbing his bald head. A little grim. “You should be paying attention anyway. You should work hard all the time.”

Pop was right. Chuck was just thinking of the trip as a chance to avoid replanting beans, baling hay, feeding hogs, spreading manure.

No. He'd wanted the trip for more than that. He remembered what he'd thought:
In Chicago and Los Angeles and wherever else Mom wants to go, nobody will know I'm just fat, dumb Chuck Lawson. Maybe . . .

It wasn't worth hoping for.

He'd always be fat.

He'd always be dumb.

And if nobody else noticed, Lori would always be there, remembering.

Still . . .

All spring, he'd silently cheered Mom on as she
argued with Pop that, yes, Chuck could take two weeks off from farmwork without causing them to slide into bankruptcy once and for all. Even when he didn't like the way she argued.

“You've said yourself he's not that much help, anyway,” she'd said one night after Chuck was supposed to be upstairs in his room, doing his homework. “Didn't you say last year that he cost you hundreds of dollars, running over three rows of beans by mistake? I'll be saving you money, taking him away!”

Chuck was in the kitchen, eating peanut butter straight from the jar. Mom and Pop and Gram were in the front room, talking over the noise of the TV. Chuck flattened himself against the wall (as much as he could; he didn't have the kind of body that flattened). He couldn't quite hear Pop's answer, but Mom's reply came through loud and clear.

“Yes, of course I'm joking. I know you're not getting any younger, and you rely on the boys for help. But we're just talking about two weeks here. I'll pay for you to hire somebody to take Chuck's place. I just think it's time for Chuck and Lori both to see more of the world than Pickford County. And to see what I do.”

Pop's answer was a mumble again. It might even have been Gram who spoke.

“I'm not saying there's anything wrong with Pickford County,” Mom said.

Chuck reminded himself that Gram and Pop were
Mom's parents. They were mostly raising her kids for her. She couldn't afford to cross them.

Hopelessly, he slunk up the stairs, back to the homework he didn't understand.

But the next morning, before taking off on another trip, Mom told Chuck and Lori not to make any plans for the last two weeks of June.

“You're coming with me,” she'd said with a broad grin.

Chuck saw Gram nod silently behind her. Pop already had his back turned, as he pulled on his work boots to head out the door.

“I can't go,” Lori said. “Jackie Stires always has a pool party the last Saturday in June, and we need to do the Pickford High float for the Fourth of July parade, and then there's my 4-H projects—”

“You can miss a party for once in your life,” Gram said firmly. “The float'll be there when you get back.”

“And you never start your 4-H projects until July anyhow,” Mike chimed in, sneaking in under Gram's arm to snatch a biscuit from the plate she was carrying to the table.

“I do so!” Lori said. “And what about the 4-H pigs? I'm the only one who remembers to feed and water them—they'll never make weight if I'm not around. They might even die.”

“It'd be good for the younger kids to take on some responsibility,” Mom said calmly. “And Pop wouldn't let them die.”

“But why can't we go, too?” Mike complained. Pretty soon Joey and Emma were whining the same thing.

Chuck stopped paying attention.

I'm going away,
he whispered to himself.

The crackle of a loudspeaker brought him back to the present.

“We are now boarding rows twenty-two and higher,” a woman's voice announced.

Chuck's armpits were drenched now. His hair was plastered to his head with panicky sweat.

“Is that us?” he asked.

Mom nodded.

“No point in rushing to the gate,” she said. “We'll wait until the line's down a little.”

She sounded so sure of herself, one of the other passengers sat down.

Chuck gnawed his left thumbnail.

It was Gram's fault he was scared.

A few nights ago, when he'd come in late from replanting beans (he hadn't managed to avoid that chore entirely), she'd given him the supper she'd been keeping hot on the stove. Then she hovered over him.

“I never got used to Joanie flying all over the place,” she said. “Every time I heard about a plane crash . . . Well, you know. I read someplace that takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous part. That's when planes crash. So I always make sure I say a prayer anytime I know your mom's schedule, the first and the last five
minutes of every flight. But now with three of you all flying at once . . .”

She'd bit her lip.

Pop came up behind her and ruffled her hair, like she was just as young as Emma.

“Now, Ida, you know Joanie says those planes are always delayed. Probably sometimes when you're praying that she'll have a safe landing, she's just in the middle of taking off. Don't you worry about confusing God?”

“God doesn't get confused,” Gram said stiffly. “And you know you worry, too, Fred. You can't say you don't.”

“Aw.” Pop waved her concerns away. He sat down beside Chuck and began eating the beef stew Gram slid in front of him. “Haven't you seen those statistics about how flying's safer than driving? The way this kid gets to daydreaming, he's probably safer on an airplane than driving a tractor.”