The Chance You Won't Return Read online

  He tried to grab the book away from me, but I shielded it with my body. “No way!” I said, laughing. “You should’ve thought of this before we came down here.” In the album, someone had written the title CHRISTMAS PAGEANT FIRST GRADE and neatly arranged photographs of small children in dresses and ties, all looking a little dazed and uncertain. I recognized the setting — the Sherman Elementary School stage, with its faded blue curtain and a dark-haired music teacher in front, probably leading the kids in a rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” or “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.”

  “Okay, which one are you?” I asked.

  Jim shook his head. “You want to look at pictures, you have to guess.”

  I studied the photograph, trying to remember what Jim looked like in elementary school, back when boys were just kids we played soccer with. “This one?” I said, pointing to a little blond-haired boy in a green bow tie.

  “Nice try, but not me. That’s an awesome tie, though; thanks for thinking it’s my style.”

  This time I tried a boy with a reindeer sweater, whose hair was a little curlier than the first boy’s. “Him?”

  Jim scratched his scalp. “I thought it’d take you longer than that.”

  “Oh, make fun of the kid with the bow tie, but you had reindeer sweaters? Now you need to wear one to school on Monday.” I flipped the pages, seeing more pictures of Jim’s first-grade class onstage, then pictures from his third-grade birthday party, and of his youth soccer team. One photograph was of Jim in his soccer uniform with an old man and woman, each with an arm around Jim.

  “Those are my grandparents,” he told me, tapping a finger against the picture. I asked if they were the ones he’d stayed with last year and he nodded. I studied the picture. Jim didn’t resemble either of his grandparents, who were short and stocky and wore glasses with thick lenses. But in the picture Jim had a wide, gap-toothed smile, and he leaned his head against his grandfather’s torso. They all looked right together, like family.

  “They look nice,” I told Jim.

  “Yeah, they are,” he said. “My grandma won’t bullshit you at all — she tells it like it is, but doesn’t make you feel stupid about anything, which was kind of what I needed. Plus, she still smokes and drinks, and, of course, she’s healthier than people half her age. Doctors totally hate her. She’s hysterical.”

  He turned a page and found another picture of his grandparents, in the kitchen at Jim’s house. From the way everyone was dressed and the glasses of lemonade on the table, it looked like summer. “Granddad’s kind of a hard-ass — it’s where Mom gets it from — and when I first got there, I hated him because he’d make me get up at five and help him do chores or whatever. But then one day he had me repaint the bathroom and, of course, started giving pointers. I was like, ‘Granddad, I’m fine,’ but he kept telling me what to do, until I was like, ‘I know as much as you do about painting a room,’ and he said, ‘I went to art school — I know paint.’ That, like, blew my mind.”

  “That’s where you get it from,” I said. “I mean, I saw your painting. The one in the library. It was really good.”

  Jim shifted his feet. “Right, thanks. Yeah, I guess that’d be where I get it. Apparently Granddad was really talented and took art classes for a while but had to give it up when his dad got hurt and needed him to take over the farm. He had never talked about it before, but then I kept asking questions about it and he’d talk about light and technique the way he would normally talk about how the rain would affect crop drainage. Art got to be our thing.” He shrugged. “And it was nice to have something to do out there in the soybean fields.”

  “But you still do it here.”

  “Yeah. Actually, right here.” He nodded toward a door off the main room. “My mom only lets me paint in that part of the basement, so I don’t drip paint on anything.”

  I didn’t wait for Jim to invite me to see it; I walked into the other room, which was unfinished, with concrete floors and exposed walls. All around were canvases in various states of work. Like the one in the library, there were several of birds, working out different textures.

  “That was for a project,” he said. “For class. We had to study something up close — Mr. Hall’s into Georgia O’Keeffe — and I picked birds.”

  He must have gone through several paintings before settling on the one that hung in the library. Most of them looked like ordinary birds — pigeons, sparrows, crows — but there were a few exotic ones, like parrots and peacocks, in the mix. Like the one in the library, the texture was amazing. I reached out and touched one of the crow paintings, brushing my fingers along a feather and expecting it to feel like a real feather and not like dried paint.

  “You’re really good,” I said, a little jealous that I couldn’t do anything even close to this, but also proud of Jim, as if he was my actual boyfriend. “You could get into art school with that.”

  “I’m kind of thinking about that,” he admitted. “Art is, like, the one class that I don’t hate. Imagine getting to do that all day.”

  I nodded, although a small part of me felt worried — what if Jim went to school far away? — and then felt stupid for being worried. That was more than a year away, and I didn’t have any major claims to Jim. “That sounds great. Just, you know, in your application essay, don’t tell them you’re just in it for the girls.”

  He smiled. “Hey, it got your attention, right? Jim for the win.”

  “Oh, right —” I started to say, but then Jim stepped toward me and suddenly we were kissing. If he moves away to art school, I thought dimly, I’m going to miss him. I didn’t have a lot of time to dwell on that, though. We moved over to the couch and got absolutely no driver’s ed studying done.

  It rained through Thanksgiving and the following day. By Saturday, we were kind of experiencing cabin fever. I would have called Theresa or Josh or Maddie, but I wasn’t sure they were feeling especially affectionate toward me. Jim had gone to his aunt and uncle’s in Chesapeake and wouldn’t be back until Sunday night. And without a license, there wasn’t much of a way for me to get around without getting soaked and frozen, so I stayed home and was in charge while Dad was at work. He told me I was a big help that week, and he didn’t ask why I hadn’t gone out with friends at all.

  Even Mom seemed to feel it. Lately she’d been nervous, antsy, and kept pacing around the house, talking about the provisions she’d need and the problems she’d be bound to run into in the Pacific. Then she’d complain about being too old for this kind of thing. She wrote furious letters, tearing pages out of notebooks and searching the kitchen cupboards for envelopes. Aeronautical charts got tacked up on walls, and stray parts of old appliances appeared around the house. Once I caught her halfway out the front door, claiming she was late for a lecture. I told her it had been rescheduled and offered to go over the speech with her instead. When Dad was home, she’d pick fights with him about tours and his managerial experience and wouldn’t listen when he tried to explain that he wasn’t George Putman. In her bedroom, I could hear her pacing and saying people couldn’t expect so much of her, that she was only one woman.

  Katy was tearing through her homework. This year, she was getting better grades than ever. She’d always been a good student, but now her teachers were talking about magnet schools and college scholarships. She was putting together a diorama about natural selection when Mom came into our room.

  “Anybody seen my goggles?” she asked, touching her pockets as if she’d find them there.

  “How about you knock first?” Katy said.

  Mom frowned at her. “I need my goggles. How am I supposed to fly anywhere if I can’t even see properly? Do you want me to crash?”

  Katy looked like she was about to say yes, so I suggested Mom check Teddy’s room for the goggles. She went off without closing the door behind her.

  Katy got up and shut it loudly. “She won’t even leave us alone anymore.”

  “Better than her just leaving the house
on her own,” I said. “I’d rather her come in here without knocking than walk out the front door and wander off.”

  In the next room, Mom started yelling at Teddy for taking her goggles. “These aren’t toys. They’re serious instruments, and I don’t appreciate you stealing them from me. Who knows what could have happened?”

  I rushed over. Teddy was sitting on his bed and starting to cry. “I wanted —”

  “You have to think more.”

  “Amelia, how about you get those charts out for me?” I asked. Anything to distract her. “For altitude checks. I’ll handle things here.”

  She took a breath and looked at the goggles in her hand, still not quite satisfied. For a second, I thought she’d argue with me, but she walked out of the room without saying anything.

  Teddy wiped away tears with his sleeve. “I hate her. I didn’t steal her goggles. She left them out, and I was looking at them. I wasn’t going to take them forever.”

  I grabbed a few Kleenex and sat on the bed. He snuggled up to me. “I know. It sucks.”

  “It totally sucks!”

  Katy appeared at the door. “Sometimes when Alex and I are sick of Mom, we play a game.” We taught Teddy the It Could Be Worse game and played it for a while: Mom could have thought she was Genghis Khan and try to conquer our rooms. Mom could have had elephantiasis. Mom could have thought she was a shark. Mom could have thought she was Marie Antoinette and made us bring her cake.

  “Yeah,” I said, “but then when we got fed up, we’d get to chop her head off. Definitely not worse than Amelia Earhart.”

  “She could try to steal a plane,” Katy said. “That would definitely be worse.”

  That was true. I imagined Mom hitching a ride to Richmond or Dulles and walking onto the runway, pretending to inspect planes and getting attacked by airport security. At that point, I’d say let her suffer the consequences and get arrested. It’s not always a blast being Fake Amelia Earhart. But if she managed to get in a plane, who knows where she’d try to take it? Most likely she’d crash it, not having any flight experience, and there would be little pieces of Mom on the tarmac. But what if she could get away? Where would she even try to go? Guam? Europe?

  “Katy,” I said, “you know when Mom has the maps out? And she’s planning some flight?”

  “Yeah.” Katy looked a little annoyed that I’d stopped playing It Could Be Worse.

  “It’s not like she’s planning one trip.”

  Katy shrugged. “So what? Amelia Earhart went all over, didn’t she?”

  What had Mom talked about? She told me about being in Europe, touring around and giving talks. And now she was talking about the Pacific trip. I remembered all of this from the books I’d stolen.

  Mom was following Amelia’s timeline. Even in her delusions, events for Mom happened in chronological order as they had for Amelia Earhart. Maybe things happened faster for Mom than they had for Amelia — months didn’t go by between flights or lectures, as they would have in real life — but Mom didn’t pick out events randomly or mention anything out of order. It was like she felt she could only be Amelia Earhart if she mirrored her life exactly.

  Then it hit me: she had three flights left. One between Hawaii and California. One from Los Angeles to Mexico to Newark.

  I felt like I was going to fall off Teddy’s bed and grasped the comforter to steady myself. And then the big one, the flight around the world that everyone knew. The one Amelia never came back from.

  Mom was going to disappear. She’d have to, if she was going to keep following Amelia’s timeline. I didn’t know if that meant she’d stop being Amelia Earhart or if it was something worse. Something permanent. No one knew what happened to Amelia Earhart. What would Mom do with that?

  It was like we were all in a plane — once we were on board, we had to keep going. We couldn’t just step outside and end things partway through. We were thousands of feet above the ground, jostled by turbulence and headed for bad weather. Maybe we would make it safely to ground, but I worried that soon we’d all end up spiraling downward, weightless and vulnerable.

  Please know I am quite aware of the hazards of the trip. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others.

  — Amelia Earhart to George Putnam

  I didn’t tell Dad about the timeline. He hadn’t seemed that interested when I talked to him about Mom’s Amelia Earhart stash, so I could guess what his response would be to this idea: We’ll talk about it with Dr. McGlynn. I couldn’t see what good that would do. Mom wasn’t getting better — she was getting worse. When was the last time she’d been Mom and not Amelia Earhart? But maybe it was the reverse — instead of having Amelia Earhart as a little voice inside her head, maybe now Mom was the small part of her, inside, that we didn’t see. Maybe when she was silent, sitting on the couch and staring into the yard, she was thinking about her own life — Christmases in Florida, her wedding day, putting us on the school bus for the first time. Every so often I would ask her what she was thinking about, but she’d just shake her head and laugh a little, telling me about her father in Kansas or how lovely her sister Muriel’s wedding had been.

  I wanted her to be lying. I wanted her to be thinking about us.

  But that must have been part of the problem. Dr. McGlynn had said this was probably caused by extreme emotional distress, including the baby she lost. She wouldn’t want to think about Katy or Teddy or me. We were the babies who had lived, and for some reason, we weren’t enough for her.

  Sometimes I couldn’t think about her, either. Sometimes I would come in the house, taking over for Mrs. Ellis, and I couldn’t even look at Mom. If she were in the kitchen, I’d be in the living room, throwing out honorary membership certificates she’d made for herself or hiding her goggles — anything to mess with her. Or I’d be absently watching TV and not really caring if she walked out the front door. I would curl my knees to my chest and think, It’d be better for all of us if she just disappeared.

  But I didn’t want that, either. It was like being in kindergarten again, when I released my mom’s hand at the door and raced over to a bunch of kids making a block tower. When I looked up again and she was gone, my chest felt empty, as if the air had been sucked from the room, and I screamed for her to come back. Now that she was Amelia Earhart, at night I would sit with her and ask about the trips she’d taken. Sometimes I wouldn’t even talk at all — I’d just watch her write notes to herself in her marbled notebook. Even being around her as Amelia Earhart was better than her not being around at all, at least for the moment.

  I took Mr. Kane’s test on the last day of classes before winter break. He told me I could take it during the History of Music exam, with the dozen seniors from his class. We all sat in the music room, the walls filled with posters of Mozart and Louis Armstrong and giant treble clefs. A few seniors glanced at me when I slid into a desk in the back.

  “Are you in this class?” Tina, a girl with long brown hair, asked. “Alex, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, trying to keep my driver’s ed manual hidden. “I mean, yes, I’m Alex. No, I’m not in the class. Mr. Kane’s just letting me take a makeup test here. So he doesn’t have to hang around afterward.”

  I wished they’d leave it at that, but a guy in a turtleneck said, “You’re the one who drove on the football field, right?”

  Everyone was looking now. “I guess,” I said.

  “So what’s the exam?” he asked. “You have to take the permit test again?”

  I wanted to strangle him with his own turtleneck, but Mr. Kane came in with a stack of exams and everyone froze. Under his breath, he whistled a cheerful version of a funeral dirge. The class tittered with laughter. I felt my stomach drop into my small intestine as I tried to remember everything I’d ever learned about driving.

  Mr. Kane handed out the music exam to everyone else. “You’ve got three hours, although I don’t expec
t it’ll take you that long if you’ve studied. Turn it over when I say — now.” The room filled with sounds of papers shuffling and pens scratching.

  “Alex,” Mr. Kane whispered, crouching beside my desk. He had one more exam in his hand. I stared at it. “Are you ready?”

  Even though I was afraid all the facts about speed limits had flown out of my head, he sounded so enthusiastic that I nodded.

  “Great. Take as long as you need.”

  For a second, all I could do was blink at the exam. It was only a few pages long, mostly multiple-choice and a few short-answers, but the letters blurred into meaningless squiggles. I took one breath, then another, and told myself not to freak out, especially with Mr. Kane sitting at the front of the classroom. If I had another panic attack, he’d probably be really nice about it but secretly think I was just like my mother. Plus, staying up at night was starting to wear on me. My eyes always felt red and raw.

  One question at a time, I told myself.

  I imagined being in the backseat with Jim, reciting parking laws and identifying road signs. There, it was our own world and there was nothing to worry about. Soon I was circling answers I was sure were correct. Even though my test was shorter than the music exam, I went over it several times, checking my responses until I was the last person in the room.

  When I walked up to Mr. Kane, he smiled. “All done?”

  “I guess.” I almost didn’t want to hand the test over, just in case I’d misremembered everything, but made myself place it on his desk. “No use going over it anymore, at least.”

  “Right. You’ll just outthink yourself,” he said. As I turned to the door, he continued, “I can grade this now if you want.”

  I grimaced. “Do I really want you to?”

  He laughed, a deep tenor. “I don’t have to. I can call you over break to let you know how you did.”

  I imagined Mom answering the phone. “Now’s fine. Pull off the Band-Aid, right?”

  “Right. Otherwise you’ll be thinking about it the whole time.” He uncapped a red pen. I practically collapsed into a seat in the front row, studying the graffiti on the desk so I wouldn’t have to look at Mr. Kane making either check marks or Xs. LAURA + ROBBIE, it read, with a bunch of little hearts. THIS SUCKS. ’99 LADY MOUNTAINEERS ROCK! A few misshapen stars. I pulled a pen out of my bag and began to sketch a few of my own.