The Art of Crash Landing (9 page)

I notice a “help wanted” sign, and so on a whim I lean past Luke to ask the teenager at the window for an application.

The girl hands it to Luke who passes it to me along with the enormous sack holding my sandwich. “I think I can find you a job you'd like better than this one.”

“Really?”

“Sure.” He doesn't look at me; he busies himself putting his Coke in the cup holder, pressing on the plastic lid to make sure it's snapped into place.

“Why would you do that for me?”

Still concentrating on his hands, he unwraps a straw and pops it through the lid. “It's not a problem.” I see his ears growing a little pink. “Really,” he adds, still not looking at me. “I like helping out.”

“It's your daily good turn. What a nice Boy Scout.” I reach over to ruffle his hair.

He ducks away from my hand, grinning, his face now such a remarkable shade of raspberry, that I can't help but laugh again.

“What's so funny?” he says.

“It's nothing. Just . . . thank you. Really.” I sit back in my seat and smile. God, there's nothing like embarrassing a ginger to improve my mood.

Luke pulls back onto the street, using the hand controls as effortlessly as I do the pedals of my car. I'm curious about how long he's been in a wheelchair and why, but I don't ask. A little teasing is one thing, but digging into someone's past is different. In my experience, the past is rarely as harmless, or as far away, as we'd like it to be.

L
ike most kids, I wanted a pet. At first this longing was vague, species-wise. Dogs, big ones at least, frightened me with their red toothy mouths and sharp eyes. Cats seemed calm enough, but I had a tendency to get itchy if I spent too long petting one. Fish . . . boring. Snakes . . . ick. But I knew that out there somewhere was the pet for me. It wasn't until my stint in Mrs. Baxter's fourth-grade class that my ambiguous pet-ownership urge found its focus—on a fat ginger and white guinea pig named Buttercup.

Buttercup had the dubious, possibly hazardous, honor of being Mrs. Baxter's classroom pet. Daily, she suffered pokes and prods by dozens of tiny fingers pushed between the metal bars of her cage. She made the best of the situation, nibbling on her pellets and greens, shuffling around in slow circles, and—most telling of her innate intelligence—spending much of her time watching us from the far corner of her cage, tucked inside the empty twenty-two-ounce can that had once held crushed tomatoes and now served as her refuge. Buttercup made lovely little chortles and
ooooweek
sounds throughout the day. The whole room smelled faintly of cedar shavings.

Buttercup was to Mrs. Baxter's class the proverbial carrot to a donkey. Unlike the girls in Mrs. Wilson's class, the girls in our class did not spend their time during math lessons writing notes and drawing pictures of Strawberry Shortcake on our notebooks. No, the girls in Mrs. Baxter's class worked every bit as hard in arithmetic as the boys, because whoever made the highest grade on the Friday math quiz got to feed Buttercup the following week.

When Christmas approached, Mrs. Baxter began discussing a class “Maptastic Geography Bee.” To make the contest even more exciting, the winner would be allowed to take Buttercup home to care for over the Christmas break.

Oh how I studied state capitals, rivers, mountains, estuaries. I was determined to win. I was certain that if my mother had the chance to get to know the sweet little guinea pig and see how responsible I could be, she would allow me to have a Buttercup of my very own.

The Bee was scheduled for Wednesday morning. That afternoon the winner would take home a permission slip outlining the responsibilities of caring for Buttercup, to be brought back to Mrs. Baxter on Thursday. On some level I must have known that, no matter how many geographic facts I managed to stuff into my frizzy-haired head, the real hurdle would be Wednesday night, not Wednesday morning. But I was nine years old and not yet ready to give up on miracles. If I won the Geography Bee my mother would have to let me bring Buttercup home.

Wednesday finally came, and just over an hour into the contest only two of us were still standing—me and Ronnie Richter. Ronny was smart and cocky, and he was also the tallest boy in class. Some of the girls thought Ronnie was cute, but one afternoon
during reading time, I noticed that he had visible earwax, so I was immune to his charms. Even then I had standards.

Anyway, thanks to a last-minute brushing up on my deserts, I knew, and Ronnie did not, that Death Valley was in California not Nevada. Everybody cheered my win, even the girls who I thought liked Ronnie, which made me wonder if they'd noticed his dirty ears, too. Mrs. Baxter gave me a hug, a one-hundred-piece puzzle of the United States, and the permission slip. On the way back to my seat I glanced at Buttercup. At that very moment she stepped out from inside her tomato can and looked straight into my eyes, letting out a little squeak. Even Buttercup was glad I'd won.

It wasn't until I was walking home from the bus stop that I started to consider the outcome of handing the permission slip to my mother. She knew about the Bee, of course, since I had to give her a reason for my sudden enthusiasm for schoolwork. But I hadn't mentioned the prize.

The next morning, eyes swollen from crying, I handed Mrs. Baxter the unsigned permission slip. After a quick squeeze of my shoulders and a whispered, “I'm sorry,” Mrs. Baxter sent Ronnie Richter to the office to call his mother and see if Buttercup could spend the holidays at their house. Naturally, his mother said yes.

As it turned out, it was a difficult holiday. The day before Christmas, my mother and I came home from the grocery store to a dark, cold apartment with a yellow eviction notice taped on the front door. We spent Christmas day and the day after shuttling our belongings from that apartment to another one across town. New school, new teacher, this one with no class pet. My mother was right after all; it would have been a mistake to trust us with the beloved guinea pig.

But when I think back on that autumn and Mrs. Baxter, the Geography Bee and that sweet, fat little guinea pig, what I
remember most clearly is the pained look on my mother's face when I gave her the permission slip. She'd glanced at it, and then handed the unsigned paper back to me, saying only, “We're not Buttercup people.”

W
aiting on my grandmother's porch is a surly mechanic, two squatty dogs, and a black plastic bag. JJ starts in with detailed dog-care instructions, and I try to pay attention, but all I can think about is how I wish my mother could see me now. If we weren't Buttercup people, I can promise you we would never be Winston people.

Finally JJ shuts up and hands me the leashes. I drag the trash bag, the dogs, and the sack of their food into the house. Looking in the trash bag, I'm pleased to see that it's one of the six that were stuffed in the backseat of my car. I guess I have to admit it was decent of JJ to bring me some clothes, but unfortunately it's the bag that was on top, in other words the last bag I packed, filled with things I almost didn't bother to bring—old or uncomfortable shoes, stuff that's too small, sweaters with snags.

I turn to the dogs, pat their wide little heads and unhook the leashes. It's time to make friends. I go into the kitchen, cut off a section of my sandwich and feed each grinning monster a piece. Once they happily wolf down their snack and then lick that part of the floor clean, they fix their beady brown eyes on mine and wag their stumpy tails in what I'm sure passes for charming when you're a freaky-looking dog. I eat the rest of the sandwich quickly, furtively, feeling their stare with every bite.

One is a little larger than the other, but overall the Winstons look alike—tan fur, short legs, stubby bodies, batlike ears. They snort and trot around like little pigs, and already there has been significant fartage. I'm hoping it's the sandwich and not the natural
state of affairs, although it would explain the bowls of potpourri everywhere. JJ informed me, when he dropped them off, that they are French bulldogs, which has led me to reassess my opinion of the French. They may know a lot about making wine and fries, but they don't know jacques-merde about making dogs.

N
ick the Impregnator calls twice, but I don't answer. I can't avoid him forever, but I can avoid him tonight. By nine o'clock, the dogs have gone in and out of their doggy door a couple times, and since the cable is still on, the dogs and I have passed the evening watching several hours of crappy television. The three of us are settled on the sofa, the dogs, one on each side of me, are snoring and twitching happily, but I'm feeling restless.

I wander upstairs to my mother's old room. On the wall next to the closet are the types of photos you'll see in any photographer's collection of favorite shots—flowers, landscapes, shadows cast by buildings. But I'm interested in the pictures thumbtacked over her bed. There are groups of smiling teenagers, and in a few of these I'm relieved to recognize my mother. There was a moment back at the bank, when Gordon Penny talked about my mother's blond hair, that I worried this would all turn into some Movie-of-the-Week drama about mistaken identity.

I pull one group-shot off the wall. The girls in the photo look happy—my mother looks happy—a sense of mischief, a lightness in her expression that I don't remember ever seeing. And her hair really was blond. Even from the earliest snapshots of her on this wall, her hair is a cap of blond curls rather than the red hair I remember so well.

She'd always been so proud of her hair, agonizing over the first few gray strands, yet refusing to cover them up with dye for fear it would change the color of the rest. And when she lost it all,
clump after clump in the shower and on her pillow, she mourned her hair harder, I swear, than she seemed to mourn the future she might not have.

There are pictures of other people, too, an elderly couple, standing in front of this house, or one that looks just like it. There's a square photo with the ripple-cut edges you find on pictures from the 1950s. It's faded, but it's easy to make out a young man, a teenager maybe, wearing a suit that looks a little too big. He's standing by a car with the oversize tailfins of that era, and he has one hand raised to shade his eyes. He's smiling, looking slightly away from the camera.

I take a step back and look again at the wall, at the photos of all these people, and I realize what's been bothering me. It's not what I see, but rather what I don't see.

I gather up the pictures of the young man by the car, my mom posing with her friends, the elderly couple, and carry them to the desk. Before setting them down, I run my hand over the dark wood. There is dust, but just the lightest coating. My grandmother Tilda cleaned in here, watered the plant hanging in the window, left her daughter's shoes sitting next to the bed. How must she have felt to be the caretaker of this room, its walls filled with photos of everyone, it seems, except her.

Relationships are complicated, none more than that of a mother and her daughter. I, of all people, know this to be true. But still, the absence of that photo weighs heavily on me.

I check the closet and the dresser—both completely full of clothes. There's a suitcase in the corner of the closet. I pull it out and unzip and inside there's another and then another—a whole set of nested suitcases. They look practically new. There's a small bookshelf with the usual paperbacks, but also a stack of what look like college textbooks—a history book, a psychology book, two on music theory. In the desk, some spirals filled with my mother's
handwriting. I skim through them but they're class notes, nothing personal. There's a notebook of sheet music paper, half of it filled in with penciled dots and scribbled annotations. In other drawers there are tons of photo negatives, some loose, some in manila envelopes. In the bottom drawer there is only a shoe box.

The rubber band securing the lid crumbles in my hand. I open the box, peer inside, and then let out the breath I hadn't noticed I was holding. It's just a conch shell. I set it on the bedside table and close the drawer. There are no answers in this room. Only questions.

Back downstairs, I lock doors, turn off lights. When I get to the living room, I pull out the piano bench and sit for a minute, looking out the window. A streetlight shines through the maple out front, casting a shadow shaped a little like an upturned fist. I shiver in the darkness even though the room is not cold. On the piano there's a collection of silver-framed photos, most of them black-and-whites of a boy and then that boy as a young man, the same guy, I think, who was posing by a car in that old photo upstairs. There are a handful of framed pictures of my mother as well. In one she's seated at this very piano.

I lift the piano fall and gently press a few keys. Then I take out my phone and call Queeg.

He answers on the third ring.

“I have a question,” I say.

I hear a shuffling sound and a cough, and I wonder if I have woken him up. “What?” he finally replies.

“This is going to sound strange but . . . did you know that Mom could play the piano?”

There's a pause before he answers. “Yes.”

“Why didn't I know?”

“I only found out by accident,” he says.

“Tell me.”

“We were shopping at an outlet mall. I was trying on trousers, and your mother was restless, bored. I told her to go on to another store and I'd catch up with her. She told me to wait there and she'd be right back.” He pauses and coughs again. “Sorry. Where was I?”

“She told you to wait . . .”

“Right, but I didn't wait. When I got finished, I went looking for her. A few doors down there was a music store and as I walked past it, I glanced in the window and there she was, playing a piano. She had her back to me but it was her. And she was terrific, Matt. I mean, she wasn't just fooling around. Everybody in that store had stopped what they were doing to listen. I'm not sure I'd have been more surprised to see her sprout wings and fly away.”

“So what happened?”

“I don't know if she felt the air move when I opened the door, or she just felt me looking at her, but as soon as she noticed me, she jumped up and came outside.”

“Didn't you ask—”

“Of course I did,” Queeg says. “I asked her why she'd never told me she could play like that. I wanted to go right back in there and buy her one of those keyboards for the house. But she wouldn't hear of it. The more I talked the angrier she got.”

“So . . .”

“So I dropped it.”

As I watch, the wind is moving through the maple, flexing the shadow fist.

“I don't know why I never told you about that,” he says.

“It's okay,” I tell him. “I'm sitting on a piano bench, in the house she grew up in.”

“That's good.”

“It's a nice house, Queeg. Really nice. In a nice neighborhood
with big trees and sidewalks. Mom went to college for a year. She had a music scholarship.”

“I never knew that,” he says.

“She was going to be somebody.”

“She was somebody, Matt.”

“Not what she could have been.”

“How can you know that?”

I stand and walk to the window. The temperature has fallen since the sun went down; the glass feels cool against my palm. “Because the people who lived here were Buttercup people.”