Write Before Your Eyes (12 page)

“Gracie, what are you writing? And why are you crying?” Jen looked at Gracie, nearly rear-ending someone on the highway before she swerved around them.

“Nothing,” Gracie said. Her heart was racing out of control. She had a feeling that Dylan never wanted to see her again, and it made her feel dark and hopeless inside. She still had to write about Dad, but it seemed as though everything that had happened was coming down on her all at once now, and she started shaking. The cat, pressed against the car’s back window, gave an eerie growl. It looked as though he were putting one of his paws right through the window, as if the glass of the window had turned to Jell-O. Gracie’s hand was shaking and she could hardly write.

Could she stab him with her pen? Then she froze. It had suddenly occurred to her: She could simply write the Cheshire cat out of existence! Why didn’t she think of that before? She could write away her worst fear! Gritting her teeth, she scribbled, struggling to hold her hand still:

The Cheshire cat left Gracie alone and went back where he came from.

She looked back at him and suddenly, like a helium balloon, he whooshed from the window of the car high up into the air, shrank to the size of a star, and blinked out.

“Oh my gosh! I got rid of him! He’s gone!” She almost collapsed with relief onto the floor of the car.

“What in the hell is wrong with you?” Jen said.

“Nothing.” Gracie took a deep breath, closing her eyes. “Nothing,” she repeated. She looked at Jen, who rolled her eyes. She watched the dark trees loom beside the highway. The moon seemed to be following them, peeking through the trees. She waited until her heart slowed and the roaring in her head quieted. She clicked the pen again. What to write about Dad and Mom?

Dad and Mom made up

Now that the cat was gone, she had some time. Should she add that they didn’t get a divorce and they lived happily ever after?

“Jen,” she said, “do you think Mom and Dad love each other?”

“Course they do.”

“Then why do they fight so much? Like that huge fight today?”

“Gracie, everybody fights. Think how freaking boring life would be if we all sat around and agreed with each other all the time.”

“So you don’t think they’re going to get a divorce?”

Jen glanced at Gracie, and she slumped a little more in her seat. “I don’t know. But what could we do about it, even if they did?”

Gracie hesitated. Should she tell Jen? As mean as Jen was to Gracie sometimes, she wasn’t being mean now.

“Hey,” Jen was saying. “How did you know Mom and Dad had a fight, anyway? You weren’t even there. You were at Dylan’s.”

“Actually, I was there,” Gracie said. “I was invisible.”

“What?” Jen looked annoyed.

“Well, you probably aren’t going to believe this, and there’s no reason why you should, but if I wrote in this journal that Dad and Mom made up, it would come true. Whatever I write in this journal comes true.”

“Get out.” Jen howled with laughter. “Can you write me some bigger boobs?”

“I could. I mean it, Jen. I made Dylan and myself invisible by writing in this magic journal earlier today.”

Jen glared at her. “Gracie. Get a grip. You’ll be in
high school
next year. You’ve got to quit this fantasy crap. Take a reality check. I’m serious.”

“Never mind,” Gracie said. “Just never mind.” She put a period after
Mom and Dad made up,
and closed the journal. At that moment her purse rang.

She fumbled until she found the phone. “Hello?”

“Gracie?” It was Mom. “Where are you?”

“I’m with Jen. We’re on the highway. Where are you?”

“I’m on the way to the airport. I feel really bad about losing my temper. I’ve decided to go tell Dad good-bye.”

Gracie smiled and patted the journal. It was miraculous, the way it worked. “Okay. How about if we meet you there? We can all tell him good-bye.”

“Okay, I’m glad you guys want to come. Dad will be very pleased. And then, by the way, Jen is grounded until the next millennium.”

“No problem.” Gracie hung up.

“What’d she say?”

“Nothing, really. She’ll meet us at the airport. We can all say good-bye to Dad.”

CHAPTER
FIFTEEN

Jen pulled into a space right by the entrance, just like people did in movies, squealed to a stop, and she and Gracie raced into the airport terminal. It was a little after ten and most of the last flights would be leaving soon.

As she ran past the ticket desks for Delta, Northwest, and U.S. Airways, Jen dialed Dad’s number on the cell phone.

“Hello?” Gracie could hear Dad’s voice coming from Jen’s phone, sounding one-dimensional and faraway.

“Dad, it’s Jen. Are you at the airport?”

“Yeah, I’m on the last flight out to Atlanta. I’m waiting to go through security. It boards in about twenty minutes. Where are you, honey?”

Gracie grabbed the phone. “Dad, Jen and I are here, and Mom’s coming.”

“You all drove to the airport?”

“Yes.”

“You’re kidding!”

“Dad, do you have to take this job? Can’t you be a sports announcer here in Chesterville? Why do you have to go to Atlanta?”

“Gracie, I would love to be a sports announcer in Chesterville. But no one has offered me a job in Chesterville. I have to take this, honey. Our family needs the income and it’s a good opportunity. I’ll come home whenever I can. I’m hopeful that this won’t last for a long time. You’ll be at school, you’ll be busy with your after-school activities, you won’t even notice I’m gone.”

“Yes, I will, Dad.” Gracie knew her voice sounded very small, and she wanted to kick herself for acting like such a baby and trying to make Dad feel guilty.

“Gracie.” Dad’s voice sounded warm but very tired. “Everything is going to be okay.”

“Okay.”

“Gracie! Jen!” Gracie looked up. Running through the terminal at breakneck speed was Mom, her big red leather purse bouncing on her back, followed by Alex, his shirttails flapping behind him like the wings of a moth.

“Hey, Mom!” said Jen.

Mom’s eyes were wild. “I’ll deal with you later, Jen Rawley. Did Dad’s flight leave yet?”

“No, he’s waiting to go through security,” Gracie said. “So, you’re not mad at Dad anymore?”

“Mad?”
Mom said. “I was never
really
mad!”

All three kids looked at each other as if they’d been sent at warp 7 on the starship
Enterprise
to another galaxy.

“O-o-kay,” Alex said carefully.

“I admit it, I have a short fuse, I fly off the handle sometimes. People make mistakes. Come on,” Mom said, grasping Gracie’s hand. “Let’s see if we can catch Dad before he goes through.”

They went running toward security. Dad had just taken off his shoes to put them in a gray plastic bin. As they raced down the long concourse, he turned and saw them.

Gracie had always liked watching people say hello and good-bye to each other in airports. She loved seeing the way a person’s face changed when someone they loved walked off a plane. Sort of like, we were apart, and we did okay, but now we’re together again and we’re safe. Sometimes it made her feel so happy, tears welled in her eyes.

So when Dad saw them all running down the concourse, especially when he saw Mom, Gracie was watching his face and waiting for it to change that way, in that wonderful way. Dad hadn’t shaved and he looked rumpled, and he smelled like day-old fast food when he hugged them, still holding his shoes. But his face did change. It sort of crumpled, like he was going to cry for joy, and Gracie’s whole being relaxed and trusted that everything—at least for a while—was going to be okay.

CHAPTER
SIXTEEN

Dad’s flight was delayed by an hour, and since no one in the family could go through security with him, they all curled like worn-out puppies in a group of uncomfortable chairs by the airport entrance. Gracie sat beside Mom, and Mom massaged Gracie’s feet while Gracie scratched Alex’s head. Dad had an arm around Mom and Jen was curled next to him. They were all together in the airport lobby and it was the Rawley family against the world.

Dad was making his sports-announcer jokes like, “And now Jen Rawley, with the incredible poise of a major rising star, twirls her hair. The crowd goes wild. And Gracie Rawley has exactly what her name implies, grace, as she bites her nails. She’s a talent to watch. Meanwhile, Alex Rawley picks his nose. Let’s take another look in slo-mo.”

They were all rolling around, punchy and laughing, saying, “Cut it out, Dad.”

At one point Gracie went into the women’s room and tried to call Dylan, but it seemed that Dad’s old company had finally canceled the cell phones. She couldn’t imagine where Dylan had gone or what he must be thinking of her. She felt a horrible emptiness and her face went hot every time she thought about what she’d written about him in the journal. Standing in one of the bathroom stalls, Gracie opened the journal and read over the silly things she’d written. She’d never even done the research on global warming or world hunger. After Jen got attacked in the lunchroom, Gracie had forgotten to write about world peace. She’d only written silly, selfish things. Feeling guilty, she started to scribble,
And then there was world peace,
but then had a sudden fear if she wrote about world peace there’d somehow be a world war. She realized that writing about a huge thing like peace was scary and complicated. She still only felt safe writing about little things.

“Steven, remember that time you tried to go to Woodstock with your older brother when you were about thirteen?” Mom was saying to Dad when Gracie rejoined the family by the airport entrance. Mom moved closer to Dad and tried to lift the armrest between them. “Remember?”

“How could I forget?” Dad said, putting his arm around her. If they’d been at home the kids would have gone to another room and done something else, but here there was nowhere to go. Mom and Dad laced the fingers of their hands together.

And then Mom said, “Tell that story, I don’t think the kids have heard it.”

“Yes, we have,” Alex said, glancing at Jen as she looked ceilingward.

“But that’s okay, tell it again,” said Gracie.

And Dad started telling that story. They had all heard it about a thousand times. It was the story of how Dad had tagged along with his older brother when he tried to drive to Woodstock. The traffic came to a complete stop. His brother ran out of gas. And then it started raining. The two of them spent that landmark weekend soaked to the skin with a dead car on the side of the highway leading to Woodstock, which had been lined with cars in one of the biggest traffic jams in history. He never heard a single note of music. But he said he still had the weekend of his life because he’d been with his brother, whom he loved, and he’d met a whole bunch of amazing people.

For some reason that story comforted Gracie. Maybe it was because Dad had tried to do something, and what he tried hadn’t worked, but he’d made the best out of what did happen. Meanwhile the airport Muzak played “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” turning Bob Dylan’s driving sixties call to action into a sappy, aimless tune. Gracie thought of Dylan again, and she felt sad, as though she’d lost something very valuable.

Finally the announcer called Dad’s flight and the family said good-bye while he stood in line at security.

“See you next weekend,” Mom said, hugging Dad briskly.

“Blow them away, Dad,” said Alex, grabbing him around the waist.

“Shhh!” Mom said, squeezing Alex’s neck. “No explosion jokes, Alex!”

“Later, Dad,” said Jen.

“Bye, Dad, love you,” Gracie said, and she didn’t cry, and they all hugged him in a rush. He went through security and headed off to catch his flight.

When the rest of them got back to where Jen had parked the Mustang, it was gone.

“This is where you parked?” Mom slapped her forehead. “This is a no-parking zone. Jen! They probably towed the car. Oh, for crying out loud. I cannot believe it. Didn’t you read the sign?”

“Crap! Crap, crap, crap!” Jen gave the curb a series of swift kicks. “I didn’t think we would be gone so long, and then I forgot about it.”

“That towing fee comes out of your pocket, young lady.”

“All right! I get it!” Jen kicked the curb once more and threw her purse on the ground. Mom glared at her and Jen picked it up.

“Excuse me!” Mom waved down a stocky female security guard. “My daughter’s car has been towed.”

The guard, without expression, reached into her shirt pocket and withdrew a business card. “Call this number,” she said. “A map to the tow lot is on the back of the card. Vehicles towed after three p.m. Friday will not be released until after eight a.m. Monday.”

“No! That can’t be!” Jen said. Her face showed the sheer terror of being without a vehicle for an entire weekend.

“Towing fee is a hundred and fifty dollars, and impoundment fees of thirty-five dollars per day will accrue through Monday,” added the guard, pursing her lips, clearly disapproving of the entire Rawley family.

“You can’t be serious!” Mom said. “We’re talking nearly three hundred dollars to get that car back!”

“That is correct, ma’am.” The guard sauntered away.

They straggled through the lot now, and everyone suddenly felt exhausted, and then Mom couldn’t remember where she’d parked the van. She kept asking Alex if he remembered what level she had been on and he kept saying no, he hadn’t been paying attention, and they walked around and around through the sloping concrete tunnels, feeling more and more hopeless. Gracie wondered what in the world were they going to do without Dad. Dad would never lose their car.

She remembered the journal. She pulled it from her back pocket and scribbled:

The Rawley family found their van in the airport lot.

They walked around a corner and there it was. Mom whooped with relief and Jen and Alex muttered under their breath. Gracie ended up sitting in front with Mom, since Alex wanted to put the backseat down to go to sleep, and Jen wanted to stay as far from Mom as possible. Gracie felt kind of guilty about Jen getting towed. She’d been so excited about seeing Dad she hadn’t paid attention to the signs either, and now she opened the journal and ran her fingertips around the edges of the cover, again and again, trying to figure out how to fix this. She was handicapped by not knowing exactly where cars went when they were towed or what exactly happened to them while they were there.

As they pulled out of the lot, Gracie watched a plane climb, rising above them through the dark, glimmering fog of the clouds, and she wondered if it was Dad’s. The plane disappeared into the dense darkness of a night cloud, but Gracie could still see the faint blinking of a small green light. A thread of cold air blew in around the edges of the car window.

Gracie clicked her pen. She wrote:

The Rawleys got the Mustang back from the tow lot.

“Mom, why don’t we just drive to the tow lot right now? Maybe they’ll let us have the car. What have we got to lose?”

Mom glanced at signs and swerved to the right to follow an arrow at the last possible minute. “You’re right, Gracie; what have we got to lose?”

The tow lot loomed like a surreal cage for monsters, with rows of hulking shapes lurking in the darkness, surrounded by a twelve-foot-high metal fence topped with prickly-looking electric wires. Outside the lot was a small lighted kiosk. A dented sign on the locked lot gate proclaimed, in large red letters,
ROMANOWSKY TOWING
,
CASH ONLY
.

“Oh, no,” Mom groaned. “I have twelve dollars to my name.”

Gracie quickly scribbled in the journal:

…for free.

The attendant at the lot was an enormous man with a gold tooth and a black leather jacket. “Evenin’, folks,” he said. “What can I do you for?”

“Hey!” said Jen. “Romanowsky Towing. Are you related to Sean Romanowsky? The Fridge?”

“Sure am,” said the attendant. “My nephew. Great kid. Rushed for four hundred yards already this year.”

“He’s my boyfriend,” Jen said.

And so they got the Mustang back for free.

Fifteen minutes later they were headed back up I-77 toward home. Jen followed in the Mustang; Mom had informed her that she could drive home and then hand over the keys for a month. Alex slept in the backseat, with the seat laid all the way back.

“How lucky was that!” Mom exclaimed.

Gracie, though, was already thinking ahead to future problems. She was worried about how she was going to use the journal to get their whole family through the next week without Dad. She had opened the journal, and was tapping her pen on the edge of the cover. Another blinking green light climbed through the night sky from the airport behind them.

Mom put her hand on Gracie’s arm. “What are you working on, sweetie?”

“A paper for school.” Gracie angled the cover so Mom couldn’t see what she’d written.

“That’s an interesting notebook. It looks old. Where’d you get it?”

“From that yard sale in the neighborhood a few weeks ago.” Gracie couldn’t believe Mom was only now noticing it.

Mom squeezed her arm, then put her hand back on the wheel. “Things are going to be okay, Gracie. Dad’s new job is great. Maybe we’ll go spend a weekend in his apartment soon. It’ll be like being on vacation to go there. And it’s a good chance for him. We’ll get through this, sweetie. You don’t have to try and fix it.”

“Okay.” Gracie let Mom stroke her arm. She let what Mom said comfort her, and as she watched the green light that was the plane rise into the sky, she felt herself let go of something. A soft core of warmth expanded near the bottom of her heart.

She realized that she’d fixed the main thing that she’d needed to fix. Or maybe it had fixed itself. She couldn’t for a minute pretend that she could bring about world peace or prevent global warming. (Though, just like anyone else, she’d do her part.) She’d found power that she’d never known she had before she’d gotten the journal, and for that she was very grateful. She was no longer flying-under-the-radar Gracie. But it was time for her to let go of the journal. Like Merlin in Jane Yolen’s books, and Sparrowhawk in
The Wizard of Earthsea,
and Harry Potter, and all the others. Eventually you have to handle things on your own. She opened the journal. She wrote:

What Gracie wrote in the journal no longer came true.

She closed the journal. Something immediately felt different. When they got home, Gracie slid the journal under her pillow and fell into an exhausted sleep.

Dad’s first job was to announce an Emory University soccer game on Saturday. During the game, Mom wrote a proposal on her laptop at the kitchen table, and Jen, who was grounded, but said she’d rather have needles stuck in her eyes than listen to a soccer game, painted her toenails and watched reruns of
Real World
. Mom yelled at her to turn it down, and she did, but then Jen inched the volume back up again and Mom yelled again.

Gracie went in the computer room and found Dad’s station on the Internet, and she and Alex listened as Dad announced the game.

“And so far this season has been an uphill battle for the Eagles. Their goalie, a senior, was benched for cheating this semester and since that time team solidarity has just never come together,” Dad said. Gracie slid her eyes over to look at Alex when Dad said that about cheating, and he blinked but didn’t look at her and just kept tossing a Lord of the Rings action figure up in the air.

“The coach has pointed out that Lady Luck hasn’t been on their side, but that there has also been a dearth of team leadership,” Dad went on. “In an interview just last week, the coach was quoted as saying, ‘Someone has to step up and be the heart and soul of this team.’ We can only hope that is going to happen for them today.”

“Hey, Gracie,” Alex said while Dad was reading a commercial about speedy service at Tire Kingdom. “Is Dad going to live in Atlanta, like, permanently?”

“Course not. This is just temporary.”

Alex didn’t say anything else, but Gracie noticed bruise-like darkness shadowing the skin under his eyes.

“You know,” she added, “your friends are going to think it’s cool that Dad announces sports on the radio.”

“I guess,” Alex said.

That night, after everyone else went to bed, Gracie turned on her bedside lamp and reached for the journal. As she pulled it from beneath her pillow, and turned it this way and that, she decided to conduct a final test. She glanced at her bedroom window.

Mo jumped onto her bed with a friendly meow. Gracie opened the journal and scribbled:

Mo’s fur turned from black to white.

Mo, weaving his black tail through the air like a plume, sidled next to her legs under the quilt and preened his whiskers on the knuckles of Gracie’s hand. His fur remained black. Gracie listened to her heart beat for several long seconds, waiting. Mo grew bolder and bumped his nose into her knuckles again, entreating her to pet him. She ran her palm over his flat skull and scratched under his chin. He purred and preened. His fur gleamed bluish-black in the dim light.