The Art of Crash Landing (31 page)

He steps inside and turns off the porch light. As he's closing the door he looks at me and sighs. “That doesn't make me feel any better at all,” he says. And then he's gone.

I wait a few seconds, hoping he'll reappear, but the porch stays dark and there's no noise except the sound of the rain and
the gusting wind. The wood beneath my feet trembles with the thunder's roar. Standing here on Trip's porch, shivering in my wet clothes, I am as tired and discouraged as I can ever remember feeling. My muscles ache with exhaustion, my eyes burn with unshed tears.

I carefully tuck the photos back into the plastic bag, and then slide the bundle under his doormat. My uncle's doormat. That secret is his burden now. I don't want it. I've got enough of my own.

I
t wasn't as if I hadn't been preparing myself for my mother's death. She'd been sick for the better part of a year, and more often than not when her doctors talked about what time she had left, they described their goals in terms of
quality
, not
quantity
. But this was different, not the slow fade I'd been rehearsing, but a sudden darkness. One morning she was standing in front of me, the next she was gone. Her absence felt as sharp as her presence had been—the pain of a phantom limb.

Queeg and I were quiet on the way to the police station that Saturday morning. We were in and out of the property management building in fifteen minutes carrying my mother's purse. We were then directed to go around to the impound lot to see about the car. I didn't want to go; they could have the damn jeep for all I cared, but Queeg insisted. We needed to get the insurance paperwork, he said. I argued that we could do it another day, but he maintained that we had to do it that morning. At the time I was irritated at his refusal to understand how difficult this was for me. In hindsight I think I understand. He had respected my
preference not to view her body, but he needed to see something to convince himself that she was really gone.

There wasn't much blood immediately visible, just a broad smear on the cracked windshield and a darker spot on the black upholstery. And there were flies, fat, black flies swarming the seat and the carpet. The front of the car was crushed, the back a jumble of the Christmas gifts I'd bought and left there. The driver's-side door was mangled and hanging ajar, obviously having been pried open to get my mother's body out.

On the floor of the driver's side there was a crumpled receipt, yellow where the folds were above the floor, a deep reddish brown where it rested on the carpet. Next to it was a gray plastic film canister and a small white . . . something . . . a tiny shell, I thought. Or a rock, maybe. I leaned down, waving the flies away, and carefully lifted the receipt, the film canister, and the little rock from the sticky carpet. I remember that it seemed important that I understand the meaning of those objects that had been at my mother's feet, but I don't remember why. The receipt was from the bookstore:
The Caine Mutiny
, $17.95. The film canister felt empty, and I mindlessly tucked it in my pocket. Then I turned my attention to what was lying in my palm, the small white pebble that was not a pebble. And it was not a shell. It was a tooth.

I hadn't told Queeg what the police had told me, that my mother had been drinking. I'd hoped to spare him that. But the whole car smelled of blood and whiskey. When Queeg leaned down to look in the window and saw the two empty bottles on the floor of the passenger's side, he gave a quiet grunt, as if he'd just taken a punch to the belly. With some effort he opened the passenger-side door. Holding up one of the empties, he looked at me wordlessly, shaking his head.

I glanced at the label on the bottle—Maker's Mark—and then back down at my mother's tooth, at the tiny smear of blood it left
in the palm of my hand. I didn't speak and neither did Queeg. I'm pretty sure that he attributed the shock and dismay he saw on my face to the fact that my mother had been drinking, but he was wrong. I already knew that she'd fallen off the wagon. But I hadn't known until that very moment that I'd pushed her off.

Queeg pulled paperwork from the glove box and then opened the hatch, telling me to take whatever I wanted. I looked at the mess, the cigar box, the knit hat,
The Caine Mutiny
, the empty bag that had once held those damn bottles of Maker's Mark. In the middle of the disorganized pile was my mother's camera bag, with her camera, a lens, some film canisters spilling out of the top. I took a minute to tuck her gear back inside the bag, and then I lifted it into my arms.

“This is all,” I told him.

He nodded and frowned. It was only when he pointed at my hand that I realized that all this time I'd been packing things using one hand. The other was still clenched in a fist.

“What have you got there?” he asked.

With a shudder, I relaxed my hand, letting my mother's bloody tooth fall into the oyster-shell gravel between us. I kept my voice casual when I replied, “Nothing.”

Once we settled back in his car, Queeg cracked his window and lit a cigarette to steady his shaking hands. “She promised me,” he said. “She promised me no more gin.” He took a long drag and then switched his cigarette to his other hand so he could hold it near the window. “And what does she do? She goes out and buys bourbon.”

I should have explained. I should've told him that she hadn't gone out and bought anything. I'd bought them. I'd put those bottles in the jeep with my own two hands. I remember wondering, as I sat watching the smoke curl up and out his window, how my
mother had known the bottles were back there. Did she get curious and look to see what was in all the sacks? Could she have, like a little child, been hoping to find her own gift? Or maybe she'd braked suddenly and heard the bottles knocking against each other. She would have recognized the sound.

“So,” Queeg said, crushing out his cigarette in the already full ashtray. “I'm guessing that she got bad news at the doctor's yesterday.”

I glanced over at him, but he wasn't looking at me. He was staring at the jeep. “I talked to her early yesterday morning and she told me she'd moved her appointment to that afternoon,” he said. “She promised she'd call and let me know what the doctor told her, but she never called. And I didn't call her. I should have.”

Was it possible that she'd gone to the doctor's office alone? When I'd asked her at the funeral to move her appointment back to Monday, she hadn't actually agreed to do so.

Queeg wiped at his eyes and then started the car. “So, what did the doctor say?”

I stayed silent, staring out the window, while my stepfather completed a slow, overly complicated twenty-point turn. By the time we were facing the right direction, I'd made up my mind. My heart was broken, but I had a chance to save Queeg's.

“He told her that the chemo didn't work,” I said, and it could have been true. “She didn't have much time left, and it was going to be bad.” I took a shaky breath and continued. “In the end, maybe this was for the best.”

He glanced at me, nodded briefly, and then put the car in drive. I saw Queeg look at the jeep in the rearview mirror as we pulled away. I didn't look back.

The seat belt was pushing against the empty film canister in my pocket, so I took out the little plastic tube and opened my
mother's camera bag to toss it inside. But I heard something, a faint rattle from inside the canister. I pried off the lid and carefully poured the contents out into my hand.

Queeg pulled out of the impound lot and merged onto the street. Reaching over to pat me on the knee, he said, “Everything is going to be okay.”

He didn't seem to expect a reply from me; he just switched on the radio and turned his attention to negotiating the traffic. A Phil Collins song was playing, of that I'm sure, but I'm not certain which one. When I think back on it, my memory starts playing “Against All Odds,” but maybe that's because it's my favorite Phil Collins song, or maybe it's because the song is so fucking sad.

What I do remember, though, is how the rain started back up right then, the fat drops popping against the windshield, the old wipers squawking and smearing the rain rather than clearing it. And I remember the way Queeg hunched over the wheel, concentrating as he drove, and how the music filled the car, and how I twisted in my seat, angling myself away from Queeg so he couldn't see me cry. And so that he wouldn't notice the two tiny white birds resting on my palm.

A
nd so here I am, sitting on the floor in my mother's room, in her mother's house, mystery solved and nothing has changed. She's still dead. I'm still here.

Karleen's problems aren't my problems. It's time to dry off and go to bed. Tomorrow I can pay Trip, collect my car, and go back to Tallahassee, to Nick, to a clinic for an abortion. By next weekend I'll be at the bar, buying everybody a round of drinks, making this past week into a funny story. It'll be great. It's what I'm good at. It's what I do. It's what my mom would do.

I pull the camera bag into my lap, unzip the inside pocket and pull out the film canister. Again, I pop off the gray lid and dump the contents into my hand. The two delicate white pieces of plastic weigh nothing. When I close my eyes I can't even tell they're there.

Q
ueeg has always told me that the adage
Opportunity only knocks once
is bullshit. “It knocks all the time,” he likes to say. “All you have to do is listen for it and open the damn door.” What Queeg
didn't tell me was that sometimes you can't bring yourself to put your hand on the knob; you're too proud, or too angry. Or too ashamed. Instead you press your ear to the door and hold your breath, listening for the sound of it passing you by.
Next time,
you tell yourself,
next time I'll open it
. But even as you say it you know you're lying, that there's never going to be a next time.

Well, fuck that shit.

I stand, tugging at the knees of my wet jeans. Luke didn't need to tell me that it's too late to save my mother; I knew that the day I held her bloody tooth in my hand. And as far as it never being too late to save myself . . . well, the jury's still out on that one. But I do know one thing for sure: he was dead wrong when he told me the
only
person I could ever save was myself.

Because tonight, I have a chance to save somebody else.

I consider the tiny plastic birds in my hand, and then I tuck them deep into my pocket and run down the stairs. When I open the back door, a wet gust of wind hits me in the face.

Shit.

“This had better get me some good fucking karma,” I shout into the night sky. And then I jog out to the garage to get the bike.

I
t doesn't take me long to realize that this was a terrible idea. It's dark and slick and even with the streetlights, the potholes and gravel aren't visible, so I'm bouncing and sliding all over the place. If I pick up any speed at all, the rain in my eyes makes it nearly impossible to see. Once I get to the park, the trail is smooth, thank God, although the going is still tricky since the park trail isn't lit. Luckily, there's enough vague ambient light to make the black asphalt shine in the darkness. It's slow going, but I keep pedaling. I hope Karleen didn't check her watch after fifteen minutes and leave, because with all the time I wasted trying to get a ride it's already
been more than thirty, and I've probably got at least another ten minutes before I'll be there.

When I finally reach the playground at the far end of the park, I start putting on speed, take the right-hand path and pump the bike up to street level. I pop out on the sidewalk next to the street and turn left, angling across to the other side of the overpass, where Shandy and I had our conversation a few nights ago. Head down, I am pedaling hard to keep up my momentum for the next hill.

Perhaps it's because it's so much brighter up on the well-lit intersection than it had been in the park. Or maybe it's because there are still rumbles of thunder and flashes of lightning every few seconds. Or it's just because I'm tired—bone tired. There must be some reason it takes me so long to notice the oncoming truck.

When I do sense movement behind me, I glance back and see it approaching. The pickup has only one headlight, but because of the rain, the light reflects on the street making it look as if there are two lights, one on top of the other. Maybe this is what disorients me enough to make my feet slip on the pedals. Or it could be the sound that the truck is making as the driver tries to stop, the grinding of gears, the hiss of rubber sliding on a layer of oily water. But more likely than not, it's the driver's face, illuminated by the streetlight overhead. It's Trip, his eyes wide with fear, his mouth open in a shout, or a curse, as his truck slews toward me.

I almost make it to the far sidewalk before it happens. My front wheel is nearly to the curb when there's a lurch and a sharp pain in my right knee and then my hip. Suddenly I'm no longer on my bike, but I'm still moving. I pass over the curb and sidewalk and then, after a brief impact of my ankle against the metal railing, I'm off the edge of the roadway and plunging into the deep culvert below.

I am five years old again, and I am flying. No. I am falling. I'm too old to believe in magic, and no wings will save me.

Everything has gone silent, and time has slowed and slowed, and I am falling into shadows cast by the streetlights. I feel the rain wetting my face. Below me I see that what had been a shallow stream under the bridge is now a tide of rushing water. It looks deep and soft, and as my trajectory takes me past the water, I understand that I have once again missed the mark.

I think of Karleen sitting alone in a dark church, waiting for help that's not going to come, and I think of Luke, broken, yes, but still openhearted. In my mind's eye he's grinning at me, blushing pink.

And Queeg—I think of Queeg, and how often he showed his love for me, and how rarely I returned the favor.

I think of my mother.

A girl in a photograph, laughing, her eyes narrowed against the sun. Then with me at the beach, holding my small gritty hand in her own. In her Malibu, red hair whipping in the wind, as she turns her head and looks at me. She smiles.

And then she is seated at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette, drinking a mug of something I know isn't coffee, and in her outstretched hand are two tiny white birds. “One for you,” she says, “and one for me.”

And this time I reach out my hand to take one, but now we're at the beach, and I'm struggling in the water, my throat burning, my legs and arms heavy with exhaustion, and suddenly she is there beside me. She puts her arm around my waist and I grab for her, burying my hands deep in her hair. I hold tight to those thick, wet curls, just as I have held tight all these years to my thick, sticky guilt.

And just like that, I understand. She isn't dragging me under. She would never do that. I took on this burden. I'm the one who insists on trying to swim with pockets full of memories as heavy as stones. I'm the one who chose to relive my mother's life as an act
of penance. It's not her; it's never been her. I'm the one who can't let go.

And I understand that it makes no difference if her hair was wet or dry, because if she'd been able to save me, she would have. My mother loved me, and I loved her, and she loved her mother, who loved her in return, and in the end we all fucked everything up. And it wasn't because we're bad people. We did it because we're only people, and sometimes that's what people do.

And as the scrubby sloping ground grows closer, I think about Mr. Hambly holding out his trembling hand, palm up, open and ready, and I understand.

And I soften my clenched fist of a heart, and I open it wide. And I give forgiveness—of her and of myself—one last try.

And I let go.

I let
her
go.

I'm close enough to see the yellow of the dandelions peeking out from between the rocks, but I'm lighter now, and the air feels like water on my skin, and I am unafraid. In the rush of the stream below, I hear a voice that at first I think is my own.
Tuck and roll
, it says.

But it's not my voice.

Remember,
I hear her call out.
Tuck and roll,
she is shouting after me, as I'm being pushed through the door of the funeral home. And I'm annoyed, and I stop and set down the tripod, and this time I turn to look over my shoulder, and in the crowd I see her face one last time.

Tuck and roll
, she is saying, hoping that I will hear.

And I do hear.

And I listen.

And I believe.