The Chance You Won't Return Read online

  “Good.” I stood. “Just try to handle things without Fred for now, all right?” I took the phone with me. Maybe if Fred Noonan wasn’t available, she’d stay with us a little longer.

  I was sitting down with Katy and Teddy again when the doorbell rang. “Got it!” I shouted, in case Mom thought it was Fred coming over to work on the Electra. Assuming it would be Mrs. Ellis, I swung open the door. It wasn’t.

  It was Jim.

  “Hey,” he said, smiling.

  I stepped onto the front steps and shut the door behind me. “What are you doing here?”

  He took a small step back. “Thought I’d stop by and see you.”

  “I’m grounded,” I said. “You know that.”

  “Yeah, that’s why I came over here instead of asking you to go somewhere.” He craned his neck to look behind me. “Is your Dad at home or something?”

  At the window, Katy and Teddy were spying from behind a curtain. I didn’t see Mom anywhere. Why wasn’t one of them watching her so she wouldn’t open the front door? “Yeah,” I said, “that’s it. Dad’s gonna be really pissed if he catches you here, so you should probably go.”

  Another backward step. “Okay, I’ll go. See you at school, I guess.”

  “See you.” Immediately I was mad at myself for being so short with him, but I also didn’t want to say anything else that might make him stick around. I turned to let myself back in the house, but the door was locked. “Dammit. Katy, open up!”

  I heard footsteps approach, then a voice: “Is Fred here?”

  “Katy!” I banged on the door. My sister opened it a second later, with Mom close behind.

  “Take forever, why don’t you?” I pushed past her.

  “Don’t you want to talk to him? I thought Jim was your boyfriend?” Katy asked, peering outside. Jim was standing at the end of the driveway, watching us. I tried to smile at him and waved, and he waved back without smiling.

  “Kind of,” I said, and shut the door.

  I texted Jim later to say I was sorry for brushing him off like that, but he didn’t respond. I started typing out a lie about my mom and I having been in a fight and that it was bad timing, but I erased it. It would be too complicated to start making stuff up about what was going on at home. Instead, I decided to just pretend like nothing happened. Jim hadn’t asked a lot of questions about my family before, so I didn’t think he would now.

  The next morning, I found him in one of the stairwells, sitting with a few of the seniors. They were all crowded around Will’s cell, watching a video. I walked up to them as they started laughing.

  “Oh, my God, his face.” Cameron giggled.

  “I’ve watched it like nine times this morning,” Will said. “I lose it every time.”

  Jim had been laughing, but when he looked up at me, his smile faded. “Hey,” he said.

  “Alex, you need to see this,” Jess said, and nudged Will. “Hit play again.”

  Even though the video was only about a minute long, I didn’t really pay attention and only laughed when everyone else did. I noticed that Jim didn’t laugh this time, either. We weren’t the kind of couple that clung to each other like barnacles, but when I moved next to him, he didn’t kiss me or try to hold my hand.

  Mr. Hunter entered the stairwell and frowned at us. “Fire hazard, people,” he said. “Move along. First bell is —” As if on cue, the bell rang, and Mr. Hunter smirked as he continued up the stairs.

  “Mr. Hunter has evil powers,” Cameron said as we all grabbed our bags. I followed Jim even though we didn’t have homeroom together.

  “Hey,” I said, “did you get my text?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, last night.”

  I dodged a group of freshmen trying to share homework. “Well, I’m really sorry about being so weird. My parents are just so mad at me right now.”

  Jim stopped at his locker and turned the knob back and forth. “Sure. Fine.”

  “So we’re okay?”

  He shifted through books but didn’t take anything. After a second, he turned to me; the lines in his face seemed sharper. “Actually, we’re not. At least you don’t seem to be that okay with me.”

  A couple of junior girls slowed as they walked by, so I kept my voice low. “What are you talking about?”

  “You’ve been to my house tons of times,” Jim said. “You’ve seen my art; you came to my family’s Christmas party; we always end up there. And for some reason, I haven’t been inside your house since that first time we went driving. So if you’re, like, embarrassed to bring me over, just say it. Is it that I’m repeating my junior year? Or the crashing-into-my-house thing?”

  I was so stunned, I could barely get my mouth to work. “That’s not it at all.”

  “Then what is it?” When I couldn’t answer, Jim slammed his locker shut and darted into homeroom.

  The hall was almost empty now. For a second, I couldn’t do anything but stare at the space Jim had just occupied, hating myself for not telling him what was going on and potentially ruining the one good thing I had going. But I still didn’t know how to explain everything.

  The second bell rang. I ran to homeroom, where Mr. Pianci snapped at me for being late and I had to take deep breaths so I wouldn’t cry in front of everyone.

  Even though I hadn’t sat up with Mom since the car accident, I wanted to tell her about Jim. She wouldn’t understand what had happened and would probably try to relate it to flying, but I had to talk to someone. With my friends mad at me and my still not being close to any of Jim’s friends, I went almost the entire school day without saying a word to anyone. All day I felt like I was underwater. I could practically feel the weight on my lungs.

  Things still felt off when I went downstairs that night to see Mom. I heard papers shuffling and her talking low. She was telling herself to be calm, that it would all be fine.

  “Hey,” I said, and she jumped a little.

  “I didn’t think anyone was up.” Behind her, the kitchen table was bare and there were no maps taped to the wall. She was wearing her battered leather jacket and best linen scarf. Goggles hung around her neck. A small canvas bag stuffed with papers sat on a nearby chair.

  I took a step toward her. “What are you doing?”

  She sighed. “We were trying to keep it secret.”

  My heart started beating faster. It was the same feeling I’d had all day, but worse — like the room was filling with water and I couldn’t breathe. “What secret?”

  “A flight around the world,” she said. When she tried to smile at me, her lips looked strained, as if they might crack. “It’s going to be most important thing I’ll ever do.”

  The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.

  — Amelia Earhart

  I barely heard Mom as she spoke. She and Fred were ready this time, she insisted, not like that first try in Hawaii. It was an entirely different route. They were going to see so much — Brazil, Ethiopia, India. This was going to take flying one step further for everyone. This was going to mean something.

  “You were just going to leave?” I managed to ask. “Like none of us mattered to you?”

  She stopped flipping through one of her notebooks. “I never said that.”

  “You promised you’d tell me before you left.”

  “I know.” She reached into her bag. “I wrote you a letter —”

  “That’s not the same thing,” I said. Now I was shaking. If I hadn’t come down to talk about Jim, I would have gotten up the next morning to find her gone. To maybe never see her again. I hated her and loved her so much in that moment; it felt like falling.

  The floor swayed underneath me. “I have to get Dad.”

  I was two steps out of the kitchen when Mom grabbed my arm. “No, you can’t. I’m leaving now.”

  I stopped.
It was a bad idea. But if I turned away now, maybe we would lose her forever. “Let me go with you. Either I go with you or I tell Dad.”

  “No.” Her voice shook. “We can’t take passengers.”

  We, I thought. “Fred. I know where Fred is.”

  For a second, neither of us breathed. Then Mom let me go, snatched her bag from the table, and headed toward the door. When I followed her, she didn’t object.

  Before we left, I snagged my coat from the closet. In the pocket was my cell phone, where I’d left it since I didn’t expect to hear from Jim that night. I tapped out a quick text to him: need help now please. I hoped he would get it, and I hoped when he did I would know how to explain everything.

  The car was already full of Mom’s things — the cobbled-together cockpit, cardboard boxes filled with maps, compasses and canteens, some extra clothes. She wasn’t planning on coming back.

  I automatically slid into the driver’s seat. Mom didn’t protest. She didn’t even look at me as we rolled quietly out of the driveway and down the street. I’d thought that whenever she’d try to leave us for Amelia’s final flight, she’d be calm and happy as she moved determinedly toward nothing. But whenever I snuck glances at her, her face looked strained and stretched, as if it hurt just to sit there.

  Amelia Earhart was tired, I thought. She wanted to be done after this big flight.

  When we pulled up to Jim’s house, I saw a light on in his room, but it quickly switched off. I tried to pretend that didn’t hurt. I was about to shift the car into drive when the Wileys’ front door opened and Jim stepped outside, peering at our car.

  I told Mom to wait a second and met Jim halfway up the front walk. I wished he’d hug me, but his hands were stuffed in the pockets of his hoodie. At least he didn’t look mad at me. “I need your help,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, voice a little scratchy. “I got your text. What is it?”

  I took a couple of breaths. Outside of home, I hadn’t said the actual words before. And they seemed so ridiculous in my head that I didn’t know how they would even make sense when I actually said them. “My mom thinks she’s Amelia Earhart.”

  Jim blinked. “She what?”

  If I didn’t say it now, I never would, so I kept going. “She had, like, a nervous breakdown and thinks she’s Amelia Earhart — you know, the woman pilot who went missing in the 1930s?” Before Jim could even ask any questions, I started telling him everything quickly and all out of order — how I had to find her on Halloween because she wasn’t supposed to go off alone; how she freaked when Mr. Kane called her by her real name; how I had a little sister that was born too early and died; how Mom and I went driving on that snowy night and broke a mailbox; how now she wanted to go on Amelia Earhart’s last flight and I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew I had to stay with her and I needed Jim to be our navigator.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” I said. “I just didn’t know what to do.”

  Jim didn’t say anything for a second, glancing between my mom waiting in the car and me. Then he nodded. “Let’s go.”

  We held hands as we rushed to the car. I got behind the wheel, and Jim took a spot in the backseat. Mom didn’t turn around to see Jim. “Do you have everything we need?” she asked coolly.

  “Um, yeah,” Jim said. “Right here.”

  “I hope you haven’t been drinking.”

  He glanced between Mom and me. I shrugged. “Not recently.”

  “Good. I expect you to control yourself during this trip. The world will be watching us.”

  I didn’t know where I was going when I started the car again, so I followed familiar paths from when Jim and I practiced driving, only now everything was dark and there was no one else on the street. Mom started pawing through her papers again. Every few minutes, she would pass one back to Jim to get his opinion on distances they’d have to travel and how much fuel they’d need. For the most part, Jim tried to agree with her, but nothing he said seemed to calm her. My hands stayed firm on the wheel without my even having to worry about it.

  “Are you sure it’s enough fuel?” she asked. “I don’t know if we’ll make it. But we can’t take on the extra weight for fuel. It’s a long trip. It’s such a long trip. I don’t know.”

  “Maybe you should wait,” I said. “You don’t have to leave now.”

  Mom extracted a notebook from her bag.

  “We can go back —”

  “No.” Mom’s voice was so sharp, I nearly hit the brakes in surprise. Amelia Earhart was never this upset. “No, we need to go. Now. I can’t —” She took a deep breath and didn’t exhale for a while.

  From the backseat, Jim reached out and rubbed my shoulder with his hand.

  We were outside of town now, winding our way through the countryside. Barely any streetlights lined the road. The dark and quiet pressed against the glass and metal of the car.

  “We’ll send the parachutes home once we get to New Guinea,” Mom said. “No use for them over the Pacific.”

  Jim and I glimpsed each other in the rearview mirror. “Why not?” I asked.

  “Even if you survive the crash, you’ve almost no hope for rescue,” she said. “No one would ever find you.”

  “They won’t ever find you,” I said without meaning to. I knew arguing would upset her even more, but the words pushed themselves out. “Don’t you get that? Amelia Earhart never finishes her big trip. She dies somewhere out in the ocean.”

  Mom tried to laugh, but it came out as a gasp. “What? I don’t —”

  “Amelia never came back.” I hit the brake. We stopped in the middle of the road, vast fields on either side. “That’s the great finish to the story. You have to know that. Why are you doing this?”

  For a second, she didn’t move. Every breath came faster until I thought she’d cry or scream. But then she threw the car door open and rushed into someone’s fields.

  Jim and I ran silently after her. She was faster than I’d thought she’d be. We were halfway into the field when she slowed to a walk and wrapped her arms around herself. Jim circled around to her right, in case she turned toward the road. I stayed a few steps behind her, ready to run after her again. It was dark enough that I could have lost her if she got too far ahead of me.

  Mom tilted her head toward the sky. “Clear tonight,” she said, sniffling. “It’ll be a good start. It will.”

  “Mom, please.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d called her that. Usually I avoided saying her name, or went with Amelia if I had to. I’d missed the sound of it and wanted to say it again. “Mom. Mom. Please.”

  She stopped suddenly, shaking her head and trying to shield her body from me. “I need to go,” she whispered. “There are so many plans.”

  “It’s not real,” I insisted, expecting her to run away again, but she stayed. “Amelia died. Years ago.”

  Mom turned to me, her eyes red but unblinking. “No one dies. No one.”

  There was a heartbeat, and then I saw everything before me, like clouds parting to reveal the earth below. “Amelia Earhart never dies,” I murmured. “She disappears. They never find her, so she never dies.” I thought of Mom curled up in bed after losing the baby; Mom in a hospital waiting room, waiting to see if she would die of cancer like her mother, always steeped in death. She must have wished she could float above it all, never letting death touch her again.

  “Mom,” I said, “we’re still here. Don’t disappear, please.”

  She inhaled, waited a second, then exhaled. Her face softened a little and she tilted her head to the sky. “Look at all those stars.”

  I took a step toward her, and she didn’t back away. When I reached for her hand, she curled her fingers around mine. We stood there for a moment, leaning against each other and looking at the stars, Jim watching from a few feet away.

  “That’s Vela,” Mom said, pointing to one part of the sky. “It means ‘sails,’ like on a ship.”

  I tried to find the cons
tellation she meant, but they all looked the same to me. I was about to ask her where it was exactly, but I saw someone walking toward us from the far end of the field. I turned to Jim, who had seen him as well. “We should go,” he said. Then we heard the wail of approaching sirens. Red and blue lights streaked across the fields. I gripped Mom’s hand in case she tried to run away.

  “It’s okay,” I said to Mom and Jim and myself, but I didn’t think it would be.

  We were caught trespassing. I tried to explain that we weren’t just kids messing around, but the man who owned the strawberry fields didn’t seem to buy it.

  “This is my livelihood,” he said. “I can’t have a bunch of people tramping through my strawberry fields at any time of the night.”

  “We weren’t tramping,” I said. “My mom just needed to get some air. She wasn’t feeling well.”

  Mom didn’t say anything to back me up, but at least she wasn’t introducing herself as Amelia Earhart. And the police officer wasn’t taking my word or Jim’s, especially after he found out that Jim also crashed into his home last year.

  “You’re all going to have to come with me,” the officer said tiredly.

  We trudged through the fields and climbed into the backseat of the police car. He didn’t use the sirens as we sped back into town, leaving Mom’s car behind us at the side of the road.

  I’d never been inside the police station before, but it was smaller than I’d expected and not very active at three in the morning. Instead of being shoved into a cell, we were directed to a wooden bench by the wall. Mom and Jim sat, but the police officer pulled me aside.

  “Is your mom all right?” he asked me.

  I stared at him for a second. He hadn’t been a jerk to us so far, and his eyes seemed genuine. “She’s been depressed,” I said. “She was feeling really bad tonight. Can I call my dad?”

  When Dad answered the phone, he was still half asleep and didn’t quite understand what had happened until he heard the words “police station.” He rushed through the station doors, what seemed like seconds later, in rumpled clothing, his hair a mess. He took a step toward me, but the police officer waved him over. For a moment, Dad stood apart with the officer, talking in low voices. Then the officer strolled over to us and nodded to the door.