The Chance You Won't Return Read online

  Mom had noticed, too. She walked away from the table and stood at the window, arms crossed in front of her like she was cold. Her face was illuminated by the snow. “It’s beautiful,” she said, then looked at me and smiled. “Isn’t it?”

  I smiled back. “Want to go for a ride?”

  I knew it was stupid while I was doing it, but everything was so lovely outside that I didn’t care much. With the snow floating silently to the ground and the rest of the neighborhood dark, it didn’t feel real at all. It was more like a dream, and in a dream, why couldn’t Mom and I go for a drive through the snow?

  The keys were kept in a cupboard, behind the cereal bowls, in case Mom ever tried to drive on her own. Upstairs, Dad would be fast asleep. He’d never have to know.

  Mom and I put our coats on over our pajamas. When the first gush of cold air hit us, we shivered. She looked up at the sky, thick with gray clouds. “Are you sure this is good flying weather?”

  “Sure it is,” I said. “High air pressure.”

  Satisfied, she nodded and climbed into the passenger seat. It was the first time I’d been in a car without Jim or Mr. Kane or even Dad. Mom hadn’t taken me out for driving lessons before she went crazy because she claimed we’d end up fighting, which was probably true. There was a light dusting of snow on the windshield, so for a second, it was like being in a cave. I flipped the wipers to brush it away. Unlike getting caught in the rain with Jim, I wasn’t afraid. I knew where all the buttons and knobs were and how everything worked. And everything felt so dreamlike, it would have been stupid to be afraid. Of course I could drive. Of course my mother was Amelia Earhart. Of course we were going for a drive in the snow.

  “Where are we headed?” she asked, clicking her seat belt in place.

  We rolled down the driveway, and I took a left for no reason at all. “Newfoundland,” I said.

  Her face brightened. “Oh! That was our starting point for the Friendship flight. Have I told you about that one?”

  “Once or twice,” I said. “But why don’t you tell it anyway?”

  She did, from the beginning, about how Captain Hilton Railey called her, asking, Would you like to fly the Atlantic? How excited she’d been but how she calmly asked for details about the flight. How the project coordinators — George Putnam included — thought she had the right look for it. How Railey was the first person to call her Lady Lindy. How she hadn’t really piloted anything aboard the Friendship — she might as well have been a sack of potatoes — but it was about the opportunity. She’d become the first woman to cross the Atlantic, and look at all that happened as a consequence.

  I only heard about every other word. I knew the story already, and I had to focus on the road, which was slowly being obscured by a layer of snow. But more than that, I didn’t want to be distracted from the moment. We were the only ones awake, it seemed. Ours was the first car to drive through the snow. The snow falling looked like tiny, frozen stars. Maybe this was what flying looked like, I thought. All those stars, all that solitude.

  “It’s a lovely night,” Mom said suddenly.

  “Yeah,” I said, not turning my head to catch her expression. “We haven’t gotten much snow this year.”

  She pressed her palm to the window. “I never mind the cold. Usually on flights, I drink hot chocolate to keep warm and awake.” For a minute, she was quiet, and then she gave my shoulder a squeeze, saying, “You’re a solid pilot. You know that? Even in foul weather.”

  At first I thought it was a part of her delusion. I was just some other Ninety-Nine, the daring girl pilot of her mind who would win races and fly impossible distances. But then I glimpsed her out of the corner of my eye — she was looking at me so solidly, so tenderly, I wondered if she was thinking of me as something more. Maybe somewhere in her brain, she recognized me. Me, Alex Winchester, her daughter, who fought with her constantly and barely passed driver’s ed and was a general disappointment. Maybe she was actually talking to me, and this was the only way she knew how to say it.

  “Thanks,” I said, blinking at the windshield. “I’ve been practicing.”

  A gust of cold air filled the car. Mom was rolling down her window. I opened my mouth to ask what she was doing, but then I saw her stick her hand out the window, feeling the air rush against it. Instead of asking her what she was doing or complaining about the cold, I rolled down my window and stuck my hand out, too. It was the first time I’d allowed myself to take a hand off the wheel. For some reason, Mom and I both started giggling. Our laughter and the wind were the only sounds we heard. I reached out as far as I could, trying to catch snowflakes in my palm. It seemed like a better idea to go faster — more snow, more wind. My foot pressed against the gas pedal and soon we were soaring down the street. People in their houses were fast asleep while we were zipping through the snow, laughing all the way. It was our own secret.

  Until the car hit a patch of black ice.

  The world spun around us. I wanted to scream, but the sound died in my throat. I didn’t know what to do; I’d never learned how to handle ice; I wasn’t even supposed to be driving, really. So I did the only thing my body could do at the moment — slam my foot against the brake. It didn’t matter much. There was a sudden hit and pop, and the car stopped.

  For a minute, I didn’t move, in case I’d died and didn’t know it yet. Then I felt my entire body start to shake, and I knew I couldn’t be dead.

  “What . . . what happen — ?” I tried to say, but once I could form syllables, my throat swelled and I started to cry.

  Mom unbuckled herself and slid her arm around my shoulders. “It’s all right,” she said calmly. “Deep breaths. No one was injured, and that’s the most important thing, right?”

  I choked back a sob and nodded. Mom’s voice was so steady that for a moment, I believed she was going to handle this for me. She’d pull it together and help me deal with whoever owned the mailbox I’d just smashed. She’d act like my mom instead of a famous historical figure.

  “And it doesn’t seem like the vehicle took much damage, either. With a little maintenance, it’ll be up and flying again soon.”

  “Driving!” I looked at her like she’d betrayed me, so she backed off a little. “It’s a car, not a fucking plane.”

  “I was just trying —”

  “Well, don’t.” It didn’t feel dreamlike anymore. It was cold, and hot tears were blurring my vision, and the car was half on someone’s lawn. I didn’t recognize the house — a blue split-level. Wiping my face with the back of my hand, I stumbled out of the car to assess the damage. One tire completely blown out, a dented bumper, and someone’s totally demolished mailbox. (A mailbox in the shape of a cow. Perfect.)

  I kicked the deflated tire. Of course I didn’t remember how to change it. “Dammit.”

  Mom had gotten out of the car as well. “It’s not so bad,” she insisted.

  I didn’t answer her, just shook my head and sniffled. A few yards away, lights flicked on in the blue house.

  “I guess I’ll have to call Dad,” I said, even though I didn’t want to think about what would happen when I did. I’d have to explain why I was out with Mom in the middle of the night. Why I was driving without actually having a license. Why I was driving in the snow. Why I’d crashed. Why it had all seemed so nice until I lost control of the car. Hugging myself on some stranger’s front lawn, I wished I could be anywhere but there. I would rather have been miles under the Pacific Ocean, in the cockpit of a plane, never to be seen again.

  Not much more than a month ago I was on the other shore of the Pacific, looking westward. This evening, I looked eastward over the Pacific. In those fast-moving days which have intervened, the whole width of the world has passed behind us — except this broad ocean. I shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.

  — Amelia Earhart, several days before she left for Howland Island and disappeared

  I’d never seen Dad so upset. He couldn’t even talk — just kep
t shaking his head like he had to jostle the information around for a little while. He apologized to the owners of the mailbox, but with me, it was like he had to struggle to get any sound out. And it wasn’t only outside, with the smashed mailbox and banged-up car, either. For a few days after, it was like he tried not to look at me, his eyes glazing over whenever I was in the room. At first I would try to make insignificant conversation — “Weather’s better today ”; “We need more cereal”— but his responses were so brief that after a while I stopped.

  He did speak enough to mention that I was grounded for a couple of weeks, and, when I wasn’t at school, I had to call him every hour to let him know I wasn’t destroying the neighborhood. I also wasn’t allowed to see Jim outside of school, not even for driving lessons. Whenever I said I needed to practice, Dad said he’d take me out instead. But we never got near the car.

  Things were tense between Mom and Dad, too. They were arguing a lot more: Mom would blame Dad for not paying enough attention to her flight plans. “I can’t do it all myself,” she’d say, and shove charts at him. Usually Dad was calm as he explained that he wasn’t George Putnam and they weren’t planning anything, but now he’d snap a response, and soon they’d be yelling at each other behind their bedroom door.

  A little part of me thought that maybe it was a good thing — that Mom was working out whatever issues she had — but I didn’t get my hopes up. Once I warned her that if she tried to fly around the world, she wouldn’t make it home, but she waved me away, claiming I was unnecessarily nervous and that she was taking the proper precautions. I argued that it wasn’t about proper precautions, that it was going to happen, that it had already happened. She started muttering to herself about heading west instead of east, wondering if the weather patterns would be more favorable that way.

  No one else seemed worried about her disappearing. Dad looked distracted all the time, and not only because he was upset with me. I would have asked him, but no one was talking about anything. We were all standing still, waiting for things to get worse.

  In bed, I would listen for Mom downstairs. More specifically, for the sound of the door opening. For Mom trying to make her exit and vanish forever. Eventually I would fall asleep listening to the sound of maps crinkling and her footsteps on the kitchen floor.

  About a week after the accident, Theresa came up to me before homeroom. Since she’d accused me of ditching my friends for Jim, we hadn’t really spoken. Instead of switching off between lunch with them and lunch with Jim’s friends, now I sat with the seniors. So I was surprised when I heard her say, “I was at the dentist yesterday.”

  I took a random book from my locker. “Okay?”

  “Your mom works for Dr. Forrester, right?

  “Um, right.” I paged through the book, like I was trying to find something specific. “Not every day, though.”

  She leaned against someone’s locker. “Well, I asked if your mom was there, because I was your friend from school, and they said she’d taken some time off because she wasn’t feeling well.”

  I tried to focus on page 320 of my calc book. Even though I didn’t look up, I knew Theresa’s eyes were on me.

  “Alex,” she said, “what’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “Did you get this equation at all?”

  She took the book from me. “Alex, you’ve been acting really weird all semester, and if it’s because of something with your mom, you can tell me. I mean, if she’s really sick, that’s serious and you should talk about it.”

  It was the perfect intro. She sounded genuine, and maybe it would make her understand why I’d avoided her and everyone else for the last few months. I could have told her about how I wanted everyone — my friends, my family, Jim, his friends — in their own little bubbles, far apart so no one else could get hurt. We could have skipped homeroom and our first classes — English lit for her, calc for me — and gone to the bagel shop on Archer to talk about how messed up this year had been. She could have told me how much it sucked and how she knew somebody else whose mom was depressed or whose Dad had shot himself or whose sister had schizophrenia. I could have told her about the It Could Be Worse game. We could have laughed about something.

  But I couldn’t make the words form in my mouth. If I said it, it would be real. It would be out there, and maybe Theresa would ask questions about it that I didn’t want to answer. Maybe she’d bring it up at lunch with Josh and Maddie, and then they’d know. And maybe everyone would find out. And even if they kept it a secret, maybe Theresa, Josh, and Maddie would want to come over, saying it wasn’t such a big deal, and what if they did something to upset Mom? What if it sped up her final flight plans?

  “My mom, um, just gets these migraines,” I said. “Like, she stays in the dark and can’t have any noise. She’s trying different medications for it.”

  When I looked up, Theresa was staring at me. “Really?”

  I pulled my book out of her hands. “Really. I’ve had to take over some stuff at home. It’s not a huge thing.”

  The bell rang before she could reply, and we filed into homeroom. Behind us was Nick Gillan. “Hey, Winchester,” he said, snickering, “I heard you demolished a mailbox. You must be the dumbest fucking driver ever.”

  I cringed. We didn’t exactly live in a bustling metropolis, so if someone’s mailbox got plowed over in the middle of the night by a teenage girl and her mom, people knew about it.

  “Hey, Gillan,” Theresa said, not even turning around. “I hear you’re the dumbest fucking person in our school.”

  Our homeroom teacher, Mr. Pianci, looked up from his desk. “Language, people.”

  “At least I can drive,” Nick muttered as we took our seats.

  “Yeah,” Theresa said, “drunk.”

  “Whatever. I’m a better drunk driver than she is sober.”

  I kept my eyes on the blackboard, where Mr. Pianci had already written the date, with huge slashes in between the numbers.

  “And look,” Nick said. “She knows it. She’s got to let you fight back.”

  “Oh, it’s not that,” Theresa said. “I just love seeing your face scrunch up when I use words with more than two syllables.”

  “Settle down, people,” Mr. Pianci said, and started to read the announcements for the day — there was a girls’ basketball game that afternoon, students were reminded not to park in the faculty parking lot, the drama club’s performance of Oliver! still needed people to help build sets, and so on. I wanted to thank Theresa for sticking up for me, but when the bell rang, she popped up from her seat and left before I had the chance.

  That afternoon, Katy and I taught Teddy how to play BS (we refused to play any more Go Fish). He liked it once we convinced him that saying “BS” wasn’t swearing. Katy was thrashing both of us.

  “Can you, like, see my cards?” I asked, picking up the pile and adding it to my hand. “Because that’s cheating.”

  Katy smirked. “I know what you look like when you lie. Maybe you shouldn’t do it so often.”

  I grabbed a pillow from the couch and whacked her with it. Teddy tried to do the same, but Katy was too fast for him and snatched it away. They were struggling with the pillow when I heard Mom in the kitchen: “Hello? Is Fred there?”

  At first I thought Mom was off in her delusions, but after a short pause she said, “No, I need to talk to Fred. Noonan. It’s important.”

  I told Katy and Teddy to play the next hand without me and went to find Mom. Standing over the kitchen table with maps spread out in front of her, she was punching digits into the phone. Then she pressed it to her ear and said, “Fred? Fred, I have to talk to you. . . . You know what it’s about.”

  Fred Noonan was Amelia Earhart’s navigator for her final flight and disappeared with her. I grabbed the phone away from Mom.

  “Hello? Who is this?” a man was saying into the phone. I didn’t know who it was. “There’s no Fred here.” Instead of replying, I clicked off the phone. I hoped whoever tha
t was didn’t call back.

  Mom was beside me, hands on her hips and eyes narrowed. “What in the world did you do that for? I need to talk to Fred Noonan about our flight. It’s absolutely essential.”

  “That wasn’t Fred,” I told her. “That wasn’t anyone. You can’t call strangers and pretend they’re whoever you want them to be.”

  She grabbed a handful of papers and held them up for me. “How else is this going to get done? Look at how much work we have left!”

  “There’s no rush —”

  “Yes, there is!” she insisted, then slumped into one of the kitchen chairs, touching her fingertips to her forehead. “I can’t manage it alone. I need Fred on board for this one. We’ve already had a false start, and I can’t risk that again.”

  I sat down beside her. “When is it going to happen? When are you leaving?”

  She pawed through maps. “We have to finalize the route and supply lists, make sure the Electra is in shape, get the finances —”

  I took her hand in both of mine and stared into her eyes, hoping that a little part of Mom was listening. “Whenever it happens, you have to let me know. Before you leave. I don’t care if it’s in the middle of the night, but I need to know. I get that you want to keep it all secret, and I promise I won’t tell the reporters or whoever. I just want to make sure things are okay. You trust me, right?”

  For a moment, she didn’t react at all. Then, slowly, she nodded. “You’re an excellent pilot.”

  “And you’ll tell me before you go?”

  She paused again. “I’ll tell you.”