The Chance You Won't Return Read online

  She walked slowly, like an old woman unsure if her bones would support her. As she climbed the stairs, she tugged at the linen scarf around her neck but didn’t take it off.

  I turned to my father. “She wasn’t driving.”

  He readjusted his ice pack, blinking at me. “What?”

  “She didn’t drive home,” I said. “She must have left her car at the office — or somewhere else.”

  “Maybe she didn’t drive because she wasn’t feeling great. She didn’t want to hurt anything,” Katy said.

  Dad groaned softly as he removed the bag of ice and set it on the table. Jackson had wandered into the kitchen and was leaning against Dad’s leg. Dad bent to pet him, not looking at Katy or me. When we lost Meagan Rose, Dad was efficient — he called relatives, bought groceries, got rid of baby clothes, but he didn’t talk much about what was happening. Whenever I asked him if Mom was all right, he would say, “Of course,” and end the discussion.

  “You know your mom,” he said. “She tries to do everything. She hasn’t been sleeping well. Once she gets a few good nights’ sleep, she’ll be fine.” He ambled toward the reclining chair.

  “But she was acting so weird,” I said. “And that new receptionist said she was at the doctor’s recently. Don’t you think — ?”

  “Alex.” His voice was sharper than I’d ever heard it. “I’ll take care of it.”

  I looked at Katy for support, but she refused to meet my eye and I felt like I was being melodramatic. And what did I expect him to do, anyway? If Dad had asked me what he could do about Mom, I wouldn’t have known what to say. But I was sure there was something he and Katy were refusing to see.

  “Fine,” I said, grabbing Jackson’s leash off the counter. As I was hooking it to his collar, I added, “Maybe we can call Aunt Pidge and ask her to talk to Mom.”

  Courage is the price that Life exacts for granting peace.

  — Amelia Earhart

  Mom never slept well. She would get up at two in the morning — a few hours before Dad had to be at the post office — and pad downstairs in her slippers to pay bills or fold laundry. Sometimes, if I couldn’t sleep, either, I’d find her sitting at the kitchen table with piles of clothes scattered around her, bathed in the glow of the single fluorescent light above the sink. I’d slump into a chair beside her. She’d ask if I wanted herbal tea or something to eat. (Her late-night snack was peanuts.) Then we’d talk. There was something about being awake when everyone else was asleep that made it okay to tell her about things. How did I do on that math test? How was the movie I saw with Maddie? Did I still talk to my friends from middle school? At any other time of day, I found these questions annoying, but sitting together at the kitchen table late at night made me feel like I could open up. Her hands moved efficiently as she folded towels, but she would look at me with a kind of softness. It was like we’d stepped into an alternate universe, where she didn’t nag me and I didn’t get so irritated by everything she said. When I started to yawn and said I was going to bed, Mom would say, “See you later,” and wave a little, as if I were traveling a distance farther than upstairs.

  The night before my parents’ meeting with Mr. Kane, I woke to the sound of her bare feet on the staircase. Earlier that evening, after Mom had had a nap, she was herself again and remembered the call from Mr. Kane. Of course an argument followed. Mom was furious that I’d been in an accident and didn’t tell them. “I had to find out from some teacher. What if it happened on the road somewhere? You could have been killed.” I argued that I wasn’t on the road somewhere, and even if I had been, I wouldn’t have told her anyway because she just freaked out about every little problem. We ended up yelling at each other so late that it kept Teddy awake. So hearing her in the middle of the night made me think it might be a good way to smooth things over.

  At first I thought she kept hitting the creaky boards as she moved downstairs, but then I realized she was saying something. I hoped she was humming to herself, but there was no tune or rhythm. Then she moved into the kitchen and I couldn’t hear anymore.

  Katy turned over in bed to face the door. I hoped she heard it, too. “Katy,” I whispered.

  “What?” Her voice wasn’t drowsy enough to make me think she’d been asleep.

  “Mom’s downstairs.”

  Katy shifted again, grasping her pillow. Most of the time I complained about having to share a room with my little sister, but now I was grateful to have her lying a few feet away.

  I threw back my blanket and was halfway to the door when Katy asked, “What are you doing?”

  “She was all weird earlier. She could burn the house down or something.”

  “It was just had a headache,” Katy said. “She was confused and then she was all right, so she’s probably making tea or whatever. Just go back to bed.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “Alex.” I heard her feet hit the floor. She stumbled after me, following close as we went downstairs.

  In the kitchen, the overhead light was on, not just the one above the sink. On the floor, Jackson licked at his paw. Papers covered the table and the counters. At first I thought, relieved, that she was paying bills, but the pages were too colorful. My eyes traveled over the blue and green, small lines stretched across. Maps, I realized, printed out from the Internet and taped together. Dozens of them.

  Where was she going?

  Mom was leaning over the table with a contemplative frown. “Hmm,” she said as she ticked off marks. “Too far for that.” When she noticed us in the doorway, she started folding up the pages. “Did I wake you? Sorry, I didn’t realize how much noise I was making.”

  I stepped closer, Katy trailing after me. Crinkled printouts of the United States, Europe, and the Pacific overlapped one another, so it looked like someone could go from Guam to Alaska to France in two easy jumps. Writing sprawled across nations, mostly numbers but a few notes, too — high altitude, mountain range, and stop for supplies, and English?

  Mom tried to cover up the maps with her hands. “These are nothing. You don’t have to worry about them.”

  “Are we going on vacation? Like to Florida again?” Katy’s voice was hopeful.

  Mom chuckled. “Why not farther than Florida? People can fly all over the world these days.”

  “Where are you going?” I demanded. “When?”

  She stiffened at the harshness in my voice. When she put her hand on my shoulder, her fingers were too rigid. I shook them off and she sighed. “Well, not now,” she said. “I’ve still got a lot of work to do, plans to make, people to contact.” Her voice dropped to a murmur. “Must ask Bernt Balchen — but that’s top secret; he’s a decoy. We haven’t even started fixing up the Lockheed.” She snatched a pen off the table and scribbled a few notes on the edge of a map.

  Katy bent down and swung Jackson into her arms. “The what?”

  “The engine’s completely shot.”

  “What engine? Do you mean the car?” I asked. What if she tried to fiddle with her car? I imagined a spark and an explosion. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with it.”

  Mom pressed a hand to her forehead. “Of course not the car. Who mentioned the car? Sometimes everything looks fine, but there could be a leak or a crack and then you’re fifteen thousand feet in the air and you’ll feel it.”

  “In the air? Like a plane?” Katy asked.

  “Obviously,” Mom snapped, then drew a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .” She gathered up a few more maps. “Yes, it’s like a plane.”

  Her expression softened so that for a second it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for her to say. But she had to be joking. I tried to imagine my mother in the cockpit of a giant plane, soaring briskly through the clouds. If I was worried about driving, imagine the problems that could happen in the air.

  “Are you going flying?” Katy nudged me.

  Mom laughed again. “I would hope so, yes.” She untucked the corner of one set of
maps. “It’s late. Why don’t you girls get to bed and I’ll show you the plans later?”

  Katy nodded. “Sounds great.”

  I wasn’t as enthusiastic. Even if Mom was learning how to fly, why hadn’t she just told us in the first place? She wasn’t a huge sharer, but usually she didn’t guard information like that. Not that I knew of, anyway. For all I knew, there could have been a dozen different plans and ideas spinning in her mind. I studied her face closely, as though her cheekbones and eyelids were hiding something.

  But nothing seemed different. And I didn’t know what else to do except steal her maps. “All right,” I said. “Show us tomorrow.”

  “You girls sleep well.” She turned back to her work, sighing thoughtfully to herself as she made another note above Scotland.

  Jackson still tight in her arms, Katy elbowed me out of the kitchen and upstairs. But when we passed the door to our parents’ room, I stopped. “I’m going to tell Dad,” I said.

  “He’s asleep,” Katy said. “He has to get up in a couple hours. He’ll be mad.”

  “No, he won’t. He’ll want to know Mom’s planning an around-the-world tour at two in the morning. That’s not super normal.”

  “She always wakes up and does stuff like that. It’s just, I don’t know, a fun idea or something. Come on, please, just tell Dad tomorrow.”

  I glanced at my parents’ door, imagining Dad snoring lightly, one foot peeking out from under the covers. I wanted to go in and tell him that Mom was planning to run away, fix the car engine, or steal a hot-air balloon, but all of that sounded ridiculous. She wasn’t slurring her words or talking about conspiracy theories or having seizures. She wasn’t stuck in bed. When I tried to put my anxieties into words, I couldn’t. And if I couldn’t even talk about how Mom’s expressions and gestures were suddenly different and why that seemed so wrong, what would I tell my father when I woke him a few hours before his route started?

  But I knew he’d was concerned, too. After he’d picked up Mom’s car from the dentist’s office, where she’d left it that afternoon, he was quieter, and he didn’t joke around during dinner or anything, even though he’d said he’d take care of everything. And he would. I didn’t need to wake him up right now for that to happen.

  “All right,” I grumbled, letting myself be led down the hall.

  “He’ll probably say it’s nothing. Stress or something,” Katy said. Jackson curled up on the floor between us.

  I couldn’t see her face in the dark. She wanted so badly for there to be nothing wrong. I wondered if she was thinking about Florida, of when our family had gone there for April vacation when Teddy was still a baby. Katy was probably hoping Mom’s imaginary trip would be something like that. Mom made sand castles with Teddy while Dad taught Katy and me how to bodysurf. We threw ourselves into waves, riding them until we scraped ourselves on the shore. At night I would lie in bed and still feel the rocking sensation of the ocean. That was before Mom lost the baby.

  But I didn’t want to remember that part. I feel asleep, making myself think about wave after wave after wave.

  I slept through my alarm the next morning, so by the time I got up, Dad had already left for work. I wouldn’t be able to talk to him until after school, and the meeting with Mr. Kane. That would be fine; Dad would talk to Mr. Kane and then he’d figure out what was wrong with Mom.

  For breakfast, Mom made a pile of toast slathered with butter and jam, not asking if that was what we wanted. Usually we made our own breakfasts. At least the maps were gone. For a moment, I hoped the previous twenty-four hours had been a fluke, just an off day for my mom. But when I reminded her about the meeting with Mr. Kane, she tilted her head at me. “Today?”

  “Yes.” Geez, how could she have forgotten? “You know, you don’t have to —”

  “No, no.” She seemed out of breath as she grabbed a notepad and pen. “These things are important. Here, I’ll write it down. What did you say? Kane?”

  I repeated the information to her twice to make sure she’d gotten it down. As much as I wished this meeting didn’t exist, it would be worse if Mom didn’t show up at all and had to reschedule. She promised she wouldn’t forget. “I’ve done so many of these things I can practically sleep through them.”

  “No, you haven’t. I haven’t failed a class before. I’m not a total idiot.” I wanted to believe this was the kind of exchange we had every day.

  She looked at me, bewildered. “I didn’t say that you were.”

  I picked up my backpack and slung it over my shoulder. “You know, you don’t have to see Mr. Kane today,” I said, hoping to make the meeting sound insignificant. “If you’re too tired or something.”

  Mom shook her head vehemently. “No, I’m fine. Don’t I look fine?” She reached for the notepad again and moved too quickly, knocking a glass of juice onto the floor. It shattered and juice pooled on the tiles. “Dammit,” Mom said. For a second, she looked as if she were going to cry.

  Mom pulled out the dustpan while I reached for larger shards of glass. From the living room, Katy shouted, “Alex, the bus!”

  “Go ahead,” Mom said. “I’ll be fine.”

  I frowned but there wasn’t enough time to argue. If Dad had talked to Mom earlier, he must have thought she was feeling all right; and as long as he would be there, too, the meeting couldn’t get too bad.

  Mom followed us to the door and waved as we ran across the yard. On the bus, I looked to our front door, hoping to catch a glimpse of her expression. But I was too far away, and all I could see was the vague outline of her face.

  During homeroom, Theresa complained about her parents’ recent announcement that they were going to spend Hanukkah at her uncle’s house in Colorado this year. Sitting in the back row, she ranted to me as she scratched stars into the cover of her French notebook.

  “It’s like, do we even know these people? They could be totally obnoxious. My mom barely talks to them, and anyway, it’s her brother, not mine. Why do I have to spend so much time with them? And my own parents, for God’s sake. Usually we only get together to light the damn candles.”

  At the front of the classroom, Mr. Pianci was reading the announcements — football game on Saturday, pep rally on Friday, lunch today was pizza. “Colorado’s supposed to be pretty,” I said.

  “Yeah, maybe I can make myself an igloo and hide out in it.”

  “Colorado’s a little south for that.”

  Theresa shivered. “It’s close enough. All of Hanukkah,” she said. “That is such a long time. Do you know how long Hanukkah is?”

  “Eight nights,” I said. “I live in the world.”

  Theresa half smiled, then rubbed her pen deeper into the cardboard so that a star filled with dark ink. “That’s practically all of winter break. It’s like a bad movie. They think we’re going to end up overcoming wacky obstacles and act like one of those families.”

  I didn’t know Theresa’s family very well. Whenever we went to her house, her parents were at work or a conference or a vineyard. At first I expected to see signs of a neglected child in her — confessions that she wished she saw more of her parents, acting out to get their attention — but she seemed fine with the setup.

  “So now I’m kind of trapped,” she said. “Can you just kidnap me or something?”

  She was joking, but I thought about Theresa coming over to my house now. How would I explain my mother poring over maps in the kitchen, planning a trip to nowhere? “Sure,” I said, trying to smile. “In fact, how about we just run away together?”

  Mr. Kane had agreed to meet with Mom and Dad during the third lunch period, when my parents could get away from work. While Theresa and everyone disappeared into the cafeteria, I waited at the front door for my parents’ cars to pull into the parking lot. Part of me hoped that Mr. Kane and my parents would come to the conclusion that I didn’t have to learn how to drive. Logically, I knew there was no reason to be afraid, that in such a small town it wasn’t likely I’d hit a lot o
f traffic, much less get into a major accident. But just the thought of sitting behind the wheel made me sick. I knew I couldn’t control something so big. I imagined the car veering off the road of its own accord; the air bag would detonate; the alarm would blare. The car would start to flip, and all I would see would be the ground, the sky, the ground, as the car turned over and over, until the windows cracked and the metal frame crumpled as easily as a tin can.

  I had to turn away from the parking lot.

  The halls were empty by the time Mom rushed in. She held the folded note from this morning as if she would have forgotten without the details in front of her. She wore a button-down shirt and a pair of baggy khaki pants held up by a leather belt. My mother was a tall woman, but the pants seemed odd somehow. After a second, I realized they were cut wrong — they were men’s trousers. The linen scarf from yesterday was tossed over her shoulder, and she readjusted it when she saw me.

  “All set?” she said cheerfully.

  I was glad the halls were empty. “What are you wearing?”

  She glanced down at her outfit. “What’s the matter with it?”

  “Those aren’t your pants,” I hissed, in case anyone was within earshot. “And where is Dad?”

  She held out a note for me. “Your father . . . David . . . called earlier. He can’t get out of work.”

  I took the piece of paper from her and saw her choppy handwriting, first the time and location of the meeting I’d dictated that morning, and then an addition below: David at work, not able to get away, talk to Alex later. I read the note three times before crumpling it in my palm. Mom watched me, smiling benignly. I wanted to shove her away. I couldn’t believe Dad. He had talked to me about driving, sounded sympathetic, been willing to work out a plan, and now he disappeared at the last minute. Was the town suddenly mad for stamps? Did a package need to be delivered immediately or someone wouldn’t get a heart transplant? How could he have left me like this? Looking at my mother in my father’s pants, I wanted to push her out the front door and lie to Mr. Kane about why neither of my parents was present.