The Summer I Learned to Fly (12 page)

I stopped. I didn’t turn around.

“Is that why you’re acting this way? Because I’ve dared to spend some of my free time with someone who isn’t you? Grow up, Drew.”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to do,” I shouted. “But you won’t let me.”

grounded

Here’s the note I found by the kitchen sink the next morning:

7:54 a.m
.

DREW Robin Solo—

Do not even think about leaving this house today. You are grounded. You may come to work if you wish, but if you choose not to, you may not leave this house. I will call you at 10:00. And I will continue to call you every hour on the hour all day long to confirm that you are home
.

Don’t argue. That’s the way it has to be. Mom

The space above where she’d written
Mom
glared at me, an angry, punishing white. No
love you madly
, not even its poor cousin, the simple, lonely
love
. I knew she meant business. I glanced at the clock: 9:39.

I had time for a shower. Showers always helped me think. I stood in them far longer than it took to get clean, staring at my feet until I turned pink. But when I stepped out of this shower, I had no idea how to go about my day, or my life.

The phone rang a minute later.

“I’m here.”

“Good.”

“Talk to you in an hour.” I hung up.

The phone rang again.

“Don’t hang up on me.”

“I thought we were through.”

“We were.”

“So?”

“It’s customary to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Mom.”

“Goodbye, Birdie.”

I let her hang up first this time. I got dressed even though I wasn’t going anyplace. How do you dress for a day of nothing? Of exile from the world for crimes you can’t even name?

I put on a tank top and a pair of Mom’s old yoga pants. I cleaned Hum’s cage and I cleaned my room. I took out Emmett’s notes, with their crane creases, and reread them, though I knew them by heart, before putting them back in my bedside drawer.

The phone rang again.

“An hour already?” I said.

“Time flies when you’re grounded.”

“And see? I’m still here.”

“Yes, you are. Good girl.”

“Don’t talk to me like a child.”

Mom sighed. “I know you’re growing up, Drew. But I want you to know that I’m not taking my eyes off you.”

“That sounds creepy.”

“I guess what I mean to say is, I’m not falling asleep on the job. I know I’ve been distracted. Running a business is all-consuming even in the best of times, and Lord knows these have not been the best of times. And yes, I’ve met someone. When it rains it pours, I suppose. I know I could have handled this better. I should have talked to you earlier, but I wanted to wait until I knew it was something worth telling you about. And now I’ve gone and messed this up. But we’ll figure it out. I promise. We’ll sit down and we’ll talk. I’m not forgetting you, Drew. You come first. Before anything else in my life. For better or worse.”

“Can I go now?”

“Yes, you can go now. Goodbye, love.”

“Goodbye, Mom.”

I continued my cleaning frenzy. At least, that was how I justified rifling through the piles of mess in Mom’s bedroom. Mountains of books abandoned in the middle; clean shirts pulled from the closet, then tossed to the floor; mugs of half-drunk coffee—an anthropologist dropped in the center of Mom’s bedroom would have no choice but to conclude that whatever creature inhabited this space suffered from some
sort of attention deficit disorder. But I knew that already. Mom had trouble finishing things. That wasn’t what I was looking to discover about her.

I wanted to know who drove that silver car.

I looked in her bedside drawer, trying not to think about how awful it was to do that. If Mom went looking through
my
bedside drawer, I’d never forgive her. I’d cease loving her madly. But I opened the drawer anyway, slowly, as if this somehow absolved me of my sin, and I found nothing. No folded and refolded notes. No book of lists including
Men I’m Currently Dating
.

The phone rang again.

“It’s only eleven-forty-two,” I said. “You’re early.”

“Robin?”

I pulled the phone away from my ear and stared at it. Then I held it up again.

“Hello … Hello …?” he was saying.

Have you seen me
?

He must have heard me breathing, because he began to talk. “Please,” he said. “Don’t hang up. Just listen to me. I want to come see you. Can I come see you? I’m only a few blocks away.”

I closed my eyes and traced a circle around my small house, and then I traced another, and another, radiating out, wider and wider, until I could picture a pay phone. Outside Patrick O’Malley’s. The bar nobody ever seemed to go into or out of, which was no more than five blocks away.

“I’m grounded,” I said.

“I’ll come to you.” He paused.
“If Lost, Please Return to Drew Solo: One Forty-Six Mount Pleasant Drive.”

All those circles, like rings on a tree stump revealing how long that tree has been alive, and I was the center. My little house. My little life.

“Okay.” I hung up without saying goodbye.

You are lost
. I stared at the phone tucked back into its cradle.

But I have seen you
.

this is not a dream

Mom’s twelve o’clock phone call and Emmett’s knock on the door arrived simultaneously.

I reached for the phone first. “Can’t talk now, on a cleaning jag.”

“Don’t forget the fridge,” she said.

“Goodbye.”

“Good—”

I hung up and then worried she’d call again with a lecture about how it isn’t customary to cut off somebody in the middle of a goodbye, but she didn’t. It was a work in progress, this business of learning how to say goodbye to each other.

I opened the door and stood facing him. I hadn’t decided if I was going to let him in or not.

“Robin,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I know you aren’t staying on a couch with your father and I know you aren’t looking for a bachelor pad and I know you ran away from home, wherever that is.”

He dug his hands into his pockets and sighed.

Something about the sadness on his cartoon face tipped my inner scales. I let him in. He followed me into the kitchen, where we both sat on stools at the counter.

“I’m not sure where to begin,” he said.

I thought of saying
How about at the beginning?
or
How about starting with the truth?
but both of those responses felt cliché to me even then, like something from one of the bad TV shows I liked to watch.

“Start with your name,” I said. “Your
real
name.”

“Michael Emmett Forsythe.”

“So where’d you get Crane from?”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a paper crane, put it on the counter between us, and shrugged.

“I see.”

A long silence followed.

“I’m sorry I lied to you,” he said. “You know … I can’t really come out and tell just anyone that I ran away from home. What if you called the police? What if you thought you were doing the right thing? You’re like that, Robin. You want to do the right thing.”

I thought about how I’d searched Mom’s bedside drawer. How I’d stolen Dad’s Book of Lists. How I sneaked Hum into all the places he wasn’t allowed. What could possibly have made Michael Emmett Forsythe see me as someone who wanted to do the right thing?

“I don’t even know what to call you,” I said.

“Call me Emmett. Please.”

“Okay.”

“People don’t run away for no reason, you know. I have my reasons.”

“I know. I’m sorry.”

I started rifling through the fridge. Mom wasn’t kidding. It needed a good clean. I took out bread and salami, turkey, lettuce, mustard, mayonnaise, a jar of gherkin pickles. I’d been raised to believe that something good to eat makes everything better.

I spread the goods out between us while he began to talk.

“Do you ever have dreams about when you were little? You know, like you’re in your room and the light is soft, and you’re sitting on the carpet and you’re playing with your favorite toy, and everything just feels perfect? Like you’re really happy?”

I nodded because I sort of knew what he meant, although in my dream, I’m sitting in the lap of a father I don’t really remember, leaning against his chest, listening to his heartbeat, while he rattles off a long list of all the things we’ll do together someday.

“Well, I can’t really tell anymore what’s a memory and what’s just a dream. I’d like to say that there was a time everything was good. That there was a time when I was happy. But I might have made all that up.” He took a slice of salami and popped it in his mouth. “I can tell you this, though. I used to have a real family. A mom and a dad and a little brother. And we used to live in a house where we grew cucumbers in the backyard. They had these little spikes on the outside, so they made for killer weapons if you happened to be into battling like Conan the Barbarian.” He smiled at me. “Don’t judge.”

This
, I thought,
is memory
.

This is not a dream
.

“And my brother, he’s younger than me. His name is David. He shared my room. We only had two, so there was really no choice, but I didn’t mind. I never liked sleeping alone. I used to tell him stories in his crib. After my parents shut out the lights. Usually about Conan the Barbarian.”

He’d started making a sandwich, but he stopped halfway through.

“Those were happy times. When I thought my stories were putting him to sleep. This was before we realized that he probably wasn’t able to understand what I was saying, or much of anything else.”

He looked from his half-built sandwich to me.

“I don’t mean to blame David. None of what happened is his fault. But when you’ve just got a small house you rent with a cucumber patch in the back and one parent who works fixing cars but doesn’t have health insurance and you discover that there’s something wrong with the three-year-old who hasn’t learned to talk, things can kind of go to crap.”

I remember what I used to tell myself when I was younger: all that business about how lucky I was to have only Mom and me. Magical thinking. Like building a moat around a dream castle.

But maybe I wasn’t too far off. Maybe magical thinking can come true.

“It’s hard, dealing with the sort of problems David has. As he got older, he seemed to get worse. Stories didn’t soothe him to sleep. Not much calmed him down. Not much, other than being with animals. So … we got him a pet rat.”

Immediately I pictured Hum. Upstairs. Sound asleep in his newly cleaned cage.

“And while rats may be one of earth’s most perfect creatures,” he said, “they can’t make miracles.”

He went quiet. I didn’t move, even though my feet had fallen asleep. Pins and needles. I felt them everywhere.

“So, Robin. That’s my story. The beginning of it, anyway. Have you ever noticed how most stories, at least the ones you learn when you’re a kid, start out sad but have happy endings? Well, mine starts out happy, and I’m just doing what I can to keep it from ending on the sad.”

I thought of my story. A redheaded father who’d grown a Fu Manchu, who wanted to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, who hated the Doors, who loved his wife and his little Birdie, and who, despite all these passions and desires and convictions, possessed a body that was all done living.

A sad story. But one that would wind up happy: with a girl, her mother, a rat, and some really excellent cheese.

“So what are you trying to do? Why are you running away?” I asked.

He considered me with his kind eyes, the same way he did that first night when I asked why he was in the alleyway. As if I’d asked the simplest question in the universe.

“I’m looking to make a miracle,” he said.

the onion fields

We all have our stories. The ones we’re told or read as children that never leave us. For me, that story is
Charlotte’s Web
, and it always struck me how Emmett mentioned it the very first night we met in the alley, as if he’d removed a big fat crayon from his pocket and drawn a line connecting us together.

Mom first read it to me when I was five, and I began to realize, as she doled out the chapters night after night, that Charlotte was going to die. It made no difference to me that she’d left behind her masterpiece, the sac of spider eggs that would survive her. What good was a world to Wilbur, or to the spiders those eggs would become, without a Charlotte in it?

For Emmett, that story, the one that would not leave him, was a legend.

It wasn’t Conan the Barbarian, though he loved that story too. The story Emmett carried with him came from a book of Native American legends his father would read to
him and his brother David before it became clear that David wasn’t listening, and before David’s problems grew too large for their family and the house with the cucumber patch, and before his father ran away, though his face would never appear on a milk carton.

Those were the times Emmett was happiest. When his father would squeeze himself into Emmett’s bed with the book of legends, and Emmett would look at their feet side by side and wonder how his would ever grow so big. The book had been his father’s when he was a boy, and his favorite legend became Emmett’s too. Emmett demanded it every night.

He told me all this as I rode on the handlebars of my bike while he pedaled it behind me. I’d seen other kids doing it, and while they looked like they were having fun—and even more than that, they looked part of a twosome, close enough to share one bike—I always thought it was crazy. Dangerous.

But we had only one hour for Emmett to show me where he’d been living and get me back home in time for Mom’s two p.m. call. And anyway, I had my helmet. I hated that I didn’t have one to offer him, but he said he was a good cyclist. He promised to deliver us there and home again safely.