The Summer I Learned to Fly (10 page)

Maybe because it was too early to joke, or maybe because this girl was not Nick yet took over most of his tasks with ease, I hated her at first sight.

Her name was Veronica and she was reedy and tall, with a short dark bob, severe bangs, and a permanent whisper of a voice. I’d like to say that she was mean, or cold, or at the very least indifferent, because that would justify why I was so rude to her, but she was tremendously sweet. She also knew her food. The daughter of two chefs from New York City, she’d come to the Central Coast for its bounty. Mom had once told me that we grew about one-fifth of all the nation’s food, but I never quite believed that, because I was
too committed to the idea that nothing about where I lived mattered to the rest of the world.

Nick was still in the hospital, and would be there for weeks to work with a team of physical therapists. One afternoon I brought along a batch of egg linguini, the most basic fresh pasta, not because I thought he could eat it, but because I wanted him to check out my handiwork. To see what I’d been doing while he’d been gone. How I’d chosen to honor him.

Becca stood up as I came in. She motioned for me to sit in the chair by his bed, the one she rarely left empty, but I walked over to the window and sat on the sill.

“I’m going for a coffee,” she said. “Can I get you anything?”

I thought about asking for a latte, but I shook my head no.

“How ’bout you, baby?”

He smiled at her, a little sadly. “A right leg?”

She put her hand on his cheek. “With cream and sugar?” He closed his eyes against the kiss she placed on his forehead. He watched her leave the room.

Nick’s mother had offered to fly in from Argentina, but he said she didn’t need to, so she wasn’t coming. This made no sense to me. What kind of mother doesn’t come when her son loses his leg?

I handed him the egg linguini. He took a strand and gave it a tug. Held it up to the light. He took the tiniest bite, even though uncooked pasta tastes like clay.

“Come here.” He motioned me over from the window where I was keeping my distance. It had no view. I wished more than anything that he could see the ocean from his hospital bed. The waves he loved so.

He grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me closer. He gave me something in between a hug and a noogie. “Don’t get any better at this, kiddo, or I’ll be out of a job.”

He’d lost his leg, so somehow I expected that he’d look different, that he’d act different, but he was still every bit the Nick I knew.

“I’m really sorry.” I took a long swallow. “So, so sorry this had to happen to you.”

“This?” he asked, and he lifted up his pale blue hospital blankets, took a peek underneath. He sighed. “At least I’ve still got a good one.”

I don’t know why his resilience surprised me. He was unflappable Nick. Nothing rattled his world. Like that day of the health inspection, he always saw things for the way they could be fixed.

People talk about the reserves you never know you have until you call upon them. But I’d done a little poking around for mine. They weren’t hiding anyplace. I could never recover from an accident like Nick’s. Or from my husband’s death while I had a small child to raise.

I couldn’t even seem to put the disappearance of Emmett behind me. I told myself that it didn’t matter in a world where Nick was in the hospital and Mom was keeping a major secret from me, but the disappointment sat like a balloon filled with sand somewhere in my middle. I felt it whenever I took a deep breath.

So I avoided deep breathing. No dramatic sighs. No sitting down at the end of the day and putting my feet on the couch. At night I stayed up too late watching TV that didn’t interest me.

Right when I’d almost convinced myself that he didn’t matter, that the summer would end, my friends would return from England, I’d start eighth grade, Nick would come back and work the pasta machine from a wheelchair, business would pick up, Mom wouldn’t worry about work or lie about where she was going at night, he returned.

He didn’t leave a note in the alley.

Or show up at my house when he knew nobody else was at home.

This time, the bell jingled as he walked right through the front door into the Cheese Shop.

looking for somebody

Veronica greeted him with her whisper voice.

“May I help you?”

He didn’t see me sitting in the pasta corner. Veronica had ceded it to me and taken up work behind the cash register.

“Yeah, I’m just …” He turned and our eyes locked. “… looking for somebody.”

I went back to the mixing bowls. I’d lost track of the number of eggs I’d cracked, so I tried retracing my steps by counting the broken yolks.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.” I didn’t look up.
Six yolks. Seven
.

“Can you take a break?”

“No.”

“Just a minute?”

“I’m working.”

“I can wait.”

“I’m busy.”

“Robin.” I looked up. For some reason it was important that nobody hear him call me that. “I’m sorry.”

Just then Mom came out from her office in the back. She started walking toward us and I thought I could see in Emmett’s face, and in a slight jerk of his body, the desire to flee. But he stood there and he shook Mom’s hand.

“I’m Lizzie,” she said. “Drew’s mom.”

“I’m Emmett. Her friend.”

“Yes.” She studied his face. “Drew tells me you’re a big fan of our cheese.”

His cheeks flushed. I stepped into him, became him for an instant, and understood what it was that made him redden. He thought I’d told Mom that he took our cheese and day-old food from the alley. He thought I’d betrayed him.

I would never do that
. I caught his eye.
Never
, I tried telling him with my look.
I would never betray you
.

Mom put an arm around him, the way she did with me, with the few friends I’d brought home over the years. “Here,” she said. “Try something new. We just got this in this morning.”

She led him over to the case and selected a cheese, handing it to Veronica to slice. I was too far into making my pasta to walk away without ruining the entire batch. But I watched, and I saw the ease with which Emmett took the cheese from Mom and how he returned her smile, and I knew that whatever worry he might have had that I’d told his secrets was gone.

Anyway, it was Emmett who’d betrayed me. He’d disappeared when I needed a friend. Right then, whether he knew it or not, he was the only real friend I had.

And he’d left me.

Mom returned to her office and Emmett to my corner.

“Can you take a break?”

I turned on the pasta machine and dumped in my mixture.

“No.”

“I thought that’s what you’d say.”

He dug his hand into the pocket of his jeans with the holes in the knees. “I don’t blame you.”

He pulled out a wad of paper and then took it in his fingers and reshaped it, smoothed it out, and did a final few small folds before placing it on the counter next to me. Another crane.

“Goodbye.”

I didn’t look up or say a word; I just waited for the sound of the bell behind him.

Something told me I didn’t want to read his note at work, where Mom or Swoozie or Veronica might see me. So I waited. And I was right to wait, because when I got home that night, and went up to my room and closed my door and opened the crane and read his note, I started to cry.

what it said inside the paper crane

I want to be your friend, but I’m afraid I don’t know how
.

someone like me

I cried.

And cried.

I felt confused. Bewildered. Not just by his note and what it meant, but also by the hurricane of emotion it stirred in me. I cried for Nick and his paper-thin hospital blanket. I cried for the fifty-two pages that made up Dad’s Book of Lists, a life in a deck of cards, the weeks in a year. I cried for Mom and her calculator ribbon of worry. I cried for the silver car that drove her away from me.

I took Emmett’s note apart and put it back together again. Not just folding and refolding the paper, but folding and refolding his words, reshaping them, trying to understand them. Searching for his
intentionality
.

Was he afraid he didn’t know how to be my friend because I made that too hard on everyone? I looked at my list of friends. Stephania Allessio, Aaron Finklestein, Alison
Samuel. Georgia, Beatrice, and Janice. Any way you cut it, it was a pathetic list. Thirteen years. Six people.

Or maybe it was Emmett who had the hard time with friendship? But if it was, then how could I explain Jasper, Christian, Molly, and Deirdre? Or Finn? He had friends. Older friends. He had friends the way I had Nick and Swoozie.

I went into the bathroom and washed my face. I held a cold cloth to my eyes. I looked at my puffy reflection in the mirror.

I want to be your friend, but I’m afraid I don’t know how
.

I could have written that same note.

I’d met someone like me. After all this time. Someone just like me. And I’d let him walk away. Literally. Bell jingling behind him.

I went back to my room and looked at my clock. Eleven-thirty.

Even with a closet full of reflector vests, I knew enough not to leave home at that hour. And even if I could, even if I could will myself that sort of courage, I didn’t have the first idea of where to go looking for him at an hour like that.

So I went to sleep. And I dreamed of lists. Of all the things I’d say when I found him. All the ways I’d make him my first real friend.

so vital

I woke up early. Mom was still home. She sat at the breakfast table with her ledger, writing checks.

“Am I hallucinating?” she asked. “Is this really you? My daughter? Up before the lunch hour?”

She poured herself another cup of coffee.

“Morning,” I said.

“It is.”

I sat down and reached for her toast, and she swatted my hand away.

“I’m taking the day off,” I said.

“Really?” She took a sip, not looking up from her book. “Because I’m not sure this is such a great time. What with Nick gone and Veronica still learning the ropes, we need all the help we can get.”

I was torn. Mom was finally willing to admit she needed me, but she also assumed I had nothing better to do with my time.

“Sorry, Mom. I’ve got things I need to do today.”

She put down her pen and closed her book. She fixed me with her tired eyes.

“What could possibly be so
vital
?”

“Why does everything have to be vital? I just can’t come to work. I’ve got other stuff to do.”

“Like what?”

“Like stuff.”

“That’s not going to cut it, Drew. I need to know where you’re going.”

This was debris, left over from that horrible night of Nick’s accident. She was still mad at me for not being home and for not telling her where I was, and I knew she was mad only because she had to be mad at someone. Something. Because Nick’s Vespa had spun out and hit a tree, and you can’t get mad, or stay mad, at a tree.

“This is
my
business,” I said.

“No, Drew. You don’t have your own business. I need to know where you’re going.”

“You have
your
own business. And I don’t mean the Cheese Shop.”

“I know what you mean. And I don’t think I like your tone.”

I held my breath. I counted to five. It was the first time I made it all that way, so I counted to ten. I still didn’t know what to say.

The truth wasn’t an option because I didn’t know the truth. I didn’t know where I’d go looking for Emmett, but more than that, I didn’t know why he felt like the most important thing in the universe, why he felt so
vital
, and I didn’t
know why Mom was the last person I felt I could ask why that might be so.

We were building a wall between us, Mom and me.

“Listen, Birdie.” She reached for my hand. “Do you want to talk about the—”

“No,” I snapped. I didn’t want to hear about Mom’s life, about the silver car. I didn’t want to know anything. I just wanted her to leave me alone.

She put her hands up in mock defense.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do today. I just know I don’t want to be at the shop. I have a life. My own life that doesn’t involve selling cheese.”

“Wonderful.”

Mom so rarely turned on the sarcasm that it stung when she did.

“No, really, this is just terrific.” She stood up and took her dishes to the sink. “I guess it was inevitable that you start pulling this teenage crap on me.”

“Whatever, Mom. Go complain about me to your boyfriend.”

She stopped and spun around. She looked at me with the same sort of bewilderment I’d felt in my room the night before. Then she took in a deep breath through her nose, yoga style, and walked out of the kitchen and through the front door, slamming it behind her, without counting to five.

“Who do you think is going to wash these dishes?” I yelled after her. “Last time I checked we had no cleaning staff!”

have you seen me?

I started with the cove, even though the day was cloudy. I rode my bike as far as I could, and I left it leaning against a telephone pole as I jogged down the beach to the rocks and scrambled over them. Empty. I walked over to the surfboard table and ran my hands up and down it, sweeping the cigarette butts into the sand and then burying them.

I rode over to Capri Drive and the beginning of the trail to Garfield Park. The brush had been cleared a bit, and I wondered whether Mrs. Mutchnick had finally worn down the fire marshal. I’d planned on hiking up the hill but was suddenly worried about being on my own. Even ignoring the threat of fire, there were still snakes.

I decided to go ahead anyway, but after a few strides another idea struck. I turned around, climbed back on my bike, and pedaled as fast as I could in the opposite direction. I coasted down the hill, crossed Euclid Ave, rode by the library, the elementary school, the gas station. I rode by the
hospital and looked up in the vain hope of finding Nick’s room, waving to him, having him cheer me on, but I knew his window only looked onto another building. And maybe it was best, I thought, to have no view. Maybe it didn’t help to look outside and see people walking, or running, or pedaling furiously on their bikes.