The Summer I Learned to Fly (14 page)

“I want to go with you,” I said before I even knew what I was saying. That was the opposite of caution, wasn’t it? Following the impulse of your beating heart? “I want to go to those waters.”

the runaway type

We made plans for Emmett to come back the next day, in the afternoon. I wanted to go see Nick first. I needed to see him, and I was pretty sure Mom would give me a pass to leave the house in the morning. Sure, she was mad, but she’d have to see that there were more important things than being grounded.

“Okay,” she said. “But only to the hospital. Then straight home again. I’ll check on you at one o’clock.”

“Must you treat me like a common criminal?”

“I’m just treating you the way any sane mother would treat her daughter who’s beginning to try on her teenagerness. I’m showing you where the lines are. I’m reminding you what happens when you cross them.”

“Fine.”

“Back by one.”

“Aye-aye, Captain.”

So in the morning I hopped on my bike. It seemed so tame and boring riding alone on the banana seat.

On the way to the hospital I started to get cold feet. Who was I kidding? I wasn’t the runaway type. I’d gone to the Safeway without leaving a note, and look where that had gotten me. I wasn’t a risk taker. I wasn’t a believer in miracles.

But then I thought about lists. About how one day I’d make my own book. And I wanted to have things to put in it. Things to remember. Experiences. Times I didn’t take the safe route. Times I reached out and threw both arms around life.

There was so much to sort through. So many details to figure out. Emmett had done the research back in Los Angeles about how to find the hot spring in the woods. With the help of a kindly librarian who printed historical documents and maps from microfiche without charging him the five cents a page, he’d concluded that the legend had taken place near a town now known as Wilcox, in a county about two hours north of San Francisco. His librarian friend had found him a geological survey map of the area, on which there was a body of water surrounded by trees, but whether it was a hot spring or an ordinary pond he wouldn’t know until he reached it. While there were hot spring resorts in the general vicinity, this body of water near what is now Wilcox was nestled amid two thousand acres of privately owned property.

It seemed like an awful lot of work had gone into this research, way beyond anything I was capable of, but it came as no surprise to me that Emmett had found someone to help him. He knew how to find people who wanted to help him. That was his special power.

Emmett knew where he had to go, but he was still saving up the money it took to get there. He’d lost everything the day he was attacked, and he was slowly building up the fare
for a bus ticket to Wilcox—not an insignificant amount. He told me he’d been collecting recyclables and returning them for their deposits. He couldn’t sing like Finn, but he
could
mop floors and clean grills, which he said he sometimes did for Daisy at her diner after hours. He
could
clean cages at Pacific Pets and Pet Supply. There were child labor laws, as my mother had pointed out to me that Sunday at Bartholomew’s, and I guess Euclid Avenue was the kind of place where merchants took them seriously. But not so seriously that a smile and a plea from a boy with a cartoon face couldn’t make them bend the rules a little.

Emmett told me that he was lucky. That he liked it here. He was happy here. And the fact that it was taking him a long time to make back the money he’d lost turned out not to be such a terrible thing.

“And anyway,” he said to me, “
you
are here.”

I pulled up in front of the hospital and squeezed my bike into the rack. I took off my helmet and smoothed out my hair. I didn’t have my backpack with Hum inside. Poor Hum. He was grounded too. I’d left him behind on my last two adventures. The day before, I’d neglected to take him to the onion fields, because I didn’t see the wisdom in us both risking a ride on the handlebars. And I might not have respected the health codes of the Cheese Shop, but hospitals were an entirely different story.

Nick was propped up in bed with a pencil and a pad of paper. His face lit up when he saw me. He still had the power to make my heart skip a beat. Corny, I know. But that’s exactly what happened.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said.

“Hi, Nick.”

“Come on in a little closer,” he said. “Give a one-legged guy a hug.”

It felt good to hug him. To feel his hair on my cheek. “How’s it going?”

He shrugged. He looked down at his blue hospital blanket. “You know.”

“How’s Becca?”

His smile widened. “She’s just … awesome. She’s at work, but she’s coming by later with dinner.”

“I’m so glad.”

“So what’s up with you, Drew? What’s new in your world? How’s your pasta coming along?”

He patted a spot for me to sit at the edge of his bed. I sat down facing him and he put a hand on my shin.

“I don’t spend that much time at the shop anymore,” I said. “And anyway, I’m grounded.”

He nodded. “I think I spent my entire thirteenth year grounded.”

“It’s … I don’t know. It doesn’t make all that much sense. I’m kind of confused. About everything.”

“Well, again, you’ve just described my entire thirteenth year.”

I laughed.

“Nick?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know my mom’s boyfriend?”

Was that why I needed to see Nick? To press him for details about the man in the silver car?

He shook his head slowly. “C’mon, kiddo. Don’t do that to me. Don’t take advantage of me like that. You know I want to be your friend. You know I have a weak spot for you. But don’t put me between you and your mother.”

“You’re right,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Forgotten.”

I looked around his room. “So when are you going to get out of here?”

He sighed. “Soon, I hope. But I’ve got an infection they have to get under control first. And there’s still more physical therapy. And I have to find a place to live that’s wheelchair accessible. And there’s all kinds of arrangements that have to be made, and, you know, there are days I think maybe I’d like to just stay here forever.”

This was the first time Nick ever appeared to me as anything less than on top of the world, on top of a snow-covered mountain on a gloriously sunny day, and seeing this cloud pass over him as I sat on his hospital bed, I felt like weeping.

We were both quiet. I could hear carts being wheeled by in the hallway. Nurses chatting. I looked out his window at the building next door and swallowed away the urge to cry.

“Nick,” I said. “Do you believe in miracles?”

I could see that he was thinking about the question. He didn’t dismiss it as silly, or childish. He adjusted his pillows, propped himself up higher, and reached for the notepad he’d been writing on when I arrived.

“I want to show you something,” he said. He flipped the pages back a few and held the pad out to me. “Here.”

It was a sketch. Something long, wide in the middle,

narrow at the top and bottom. There were measurements and some sort of contraption in the center made from straps and bars.

It was a surfboard. A surfboard that could be ridden with only one leg.

I looked up and smiled at him.

“It’s a crazy idea, I know,” he said. “And that sketch is totally lame, but it’s the seed of something. It’s a beginning. I know I should be okay with a body board, with just lying down to surf, but I can’t let go of the dream that I’ll be able to stand up on a board again someday. It’s the best feeling I’ve ever known, surfing a perfect wave, and I just can’t believe that I won’t ever do it again. So yes. I guess I do believe in miracles, because I believe that someday I’ll stand on a surfboard and ride a perfect wave.”

Whatever I’d been doing to beat back the weeping urge stopped working. Tears streamed down my face. Nick reached over for a tissue and handed it to me.

“Don’t cry,” he said, and a sound escaped me, a mix of a sob and a laugh. I wasn’t sad, exactly. I was just flooded with all kinds of feeling.

I stood up to leave. I was running late. Mom’s call would be coming in twenty minutes.

I hugged him. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

I took in his smile. His sea-green eyes. His shaggy blond hair. The genuine look of concern for me.

“For being beautiful Nick.”

the silver car

No matter how fast I pedaled, I wasn’t going to make it home by one. I’d promised Mom that I wouldn’t stop anywhere between the hospital and the house, but I figured if I swung by the Cheese Shop to tell her I was running late she’d be okay with that. I didn’t think she’d consider it an infraction of her rules, though I couldn’t be sure. Mom was unpredictable as of late.

I rode past the gas station and the library, past the elementary school, but instead of turning left onto Euclid Avenue, I crossed the street and turned left into the alley, the one that would lead to the parking lot behind the shop, where I’d leave my bike leaning up against Mom’s car.

As soon as I pulled into the lot I saw her. I was about to call out her name when I realized she was in the middle of what looked to be a serious conversation, judging from how close she stood to the man with whom she was speaking. Then she leaned in closer and gave him a quick kiss before
he climbed into his silver car. He rolled down his window. She leaned in for another kiss and then she put her palm on the roof and gave it a slap before he put the car in reverse.

She walked toward the rear door of the shop and the car backed up closer to where I stood straddling my bike, my feet part of the pavement.

As the silver car executed a three-point turn, I was able to see the driver clearly, leaving no room for doubt about his identity.

With the car safely out of sight, I managed to step back onto the pedals of my bike and continue through the alley, back onto Euclid Avenue, and all the way home, where I arrived at twelve minutes past one.

The phone was ringing as I walked in the front door.

I let it ring a few more times before I reached for it.

“Where have you been?” She sounded angry.

“The Belcher?” I asked. “Seriously, Mom? You’re dating Retcher Belcher?”

A long silence followed.

“His name is Fletcher,” she said. Her voice had gone from angry to controlled. Measured. She was drawing another line that I’d already started to cross.

“Ugh. Mom. I think I’m going to be sick.”

“That’s enough, Drew.”

Another long silence.

“We’ll talk more about this tonight, when I come home.”

“Goodbye, Mother.”

“Goodbye.”

But we didn’t talk that night. Mom came home after I’d
already eaten a bowl of cereal for dinner, and I told her I wasn’t feeling well, and she pretended to believe me, and I went up to my room. It was a win-win situation. She didn’t have to tell me the tale of how the Belcher, that meddlesome health inspector, had won her heart. And I could go upstairs and continue to convince myself that somehow she’d betrayed me.

That’s how I chose to see her relationship with Fletcher Melcher, as a betrayal, because that made it easier to contemplate what I was about to do. If he was the villain out to get us all, then Mom had violated some essential trust, and if I were to go and do the same by running off with Emmett, then we’d be even. If not magical, this was certainly convenient thinking. I kept myself from reimagining Fletcher Melcher as someone who frequented our shop not because he wanted to put us out of business but because he was, understandably, so taken with my mother.

We didn’t talk that night. And we didn’t talk the next night because by then, I was already gone.

one last stop

Emmett and I planned to meet at the bus station. There was a bus departing for San Francisco at eleven-fifteen p.m. It would arrive at six-thirty in the morning, and we’d wait three hours for another bus, which would take us up to Wilcox. From our stop in Wilcox, according to the geological survey map Emmett would carry with him, we’d have to walk a few miles to the east to find the water in the woods.

Emmett wanted to meet me at my house. He didn’t think I should ride my bike alone so late at night. I reminded him I had a reflector vest and told him it was too risky for him to come around. Better to just meet up at the bus station. That way, I’d be able to make a stop en route. One I did not want him to accompany me on.

Mom was out that night. She didn’t tell me she had to work late. That ruse was over. Instead she said she was going to dinner and a movie, and that Swoozie would come over and hang out with me, which really meant
watch over
me,
and I felt bad because Swoozie hadn’t violated my trust but I was going to go ahead and violate hers.

She knitted. I flipped through pages of a book I wasn’t really reading. We sat by the fireplace that Mom and I never lit, with Mom’s Irish folk record on the stereo, and I waited for a time when I could reasonably excuse myself to go up to bed.

Finally, at nine-fifteen, I said goodnight.

“You feeling okay, Bird-girl?”

“Yeah, I’m just tired.”

“You sure that’s it?”

I hated to lie to Swoozie. She’d always been the one person I didn’t have to keep secrets from. She listened to me. She understood me.

“Yeah, that’s it. Just tired.”

“Okay then.” She reached for my hand and gave it a squeeze. “Sleep well.”

“Thanks for keeping me company,” I said.

“It’s an honor and a privilege.”

I went up to my room and began to pack. I couldn’t take much because I needed to take Hum. I couldn’t trust that when Mom realized I was gone she would remember to feed him. And anyway, what did I really need? What mattered to me other than Hum and Dad’s Book of Lists, both of which I put in my backpack along with one change of clothes.

I went into Mom’s room and reached under her bed. This was where she kept the foldable fire escape ladder. Though she didn’t always show it, Mom was cautious too. I’d inherited that trait from her.

It was still in its package. I brought the box into my room,
tore it open, and read the instructions less thoroughly than I’d have liked. My pulse was racing, and I had to get out quickly in case Swoozie decided to check on me.