The Chance You Won't Return Page 8

  It’s not her fault, I told myself. She died in an ocean somewhere. It’s not her fault that Mom’s going crazy.

  But after a while, I couldn’t stand her face anymore — the smug smile, the steady gaze into the distance, the hands shoved in the pockets of her bomber jacket. She looked so daring. It was like a challenge to anyone else, including my mom. Who asked Amelia to come into my life? She was dead. Couldn’t she stay that way?

  The librarian cart squeaked its way to the front desk. Quickly, I tore a page out — part of the photograph section. Then another page, text about her first flight. Then two more. Blood pulsed in my neck. I crumpled the pages in my hand. If I could have, I would have lit them on fire right there in the library.

  The first bell rang. I stuffed the pages into my pocket and replaced the books on the shelf, hoping that no one else would look at them until after I’d graduated. My heart was pounding, and not just because I had messed with school property. I felt the torn pages burn inside my pocket. Even though I’d just wanted to destroy them, I couldn’t let them go quite yet. Although Dad said he’d take care of things, I thought I should be prepared — just in case. When I went past the librarian’s desk, I was running.

  “Slow down!” the young librarian called after me. But I didn’t stop until I was out of the library and halfway down the hall.

  I didn’t realize it at the time, but the cooperation of one’s family and close friends is one of the greatest safety factors a fledgling flyer can have.

  — Amelia Earhart

  Mom didn’t come home the next day, or several days after. I kept making Teddy sandwiches and riding in the backseat during driver’s ed. At night, when Dad would get home, I’d ask how Mom was doing. At first he sounded hopeful, saying that the doctors were sure it wasn’t anything physical, like a brain tumor, so we should be grateful for that. But she was still calling herself Amelia Earhart. The hospital psychiatrist said it wasn’t schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder, which Dad thought was good news. Even so, the doctor said it might take some time to work out.

  When Dad told me, I asked, “What does ‘some time’ mean?” He just replied, “However long it takes.” After another day or so, he could barely look at me when I asked about Mom.

  Katy still didn’t talk to me much, as if it was my fault Mom was gone. She started going to bed early just so she wouldn’t have to see me across the room. Which was all right with me. If she didn’t want to talk about anything, even when I basically asked her if she wanted to know the truth, fine. And it gave me some time alone to look at the pages from the Amelia Earhart book.

  They were mostly about Amelia Earhart’s first experiences flying. (I’d have to go back to the library if I wanted to learn about her mysterious last flight.) The pages even mentioned technical details about flying in those early days, which made me think about driving and how difficult it was to deal with mechanical things. When she first started flying, Amelia, like most other beginner pilots, had had a hard time making her plane fly level. One kind of plane in particular, the Canuck, tended to nose down on a right turn. I wondered if Mom knew any of this mechanical stuff.

  It felt wrong, holding on to the torn pages like that. It was like an admission that I’d need to know about her, that Mom wasn’t going to get better. But I still couldn’t tear them up or throw them away. The stolen pages, which I could shove under my bed if Katy walked in, didn’t feel real yet. They weren’t a whole book. And even though I didn’t want to, I kept wondering about why Mom would want to be Amelia.

  Not that Amelia Earhart’s life wasn’t exciting. At first I thought it might just be that — Mom wanted something more thrilling. But there were lots of exciting, glamorous women: Sacagawea, Annie Oakley, Frida Kahlo, Susan B. Anthony, Sally Ride, Katharine Hepburn, Lady Gaga, any of them. Why Amelia? Did Mom want to fly? Travel? It wasn’t like she got out of Virginia very often, but she never talked about places she wanted to go. I felt like the pages I’d torn from the biographies might be a key. Like the answers were all there, between the lines — I just had to figure out the code.

  At school, I kept thinking about the books in the library. The torn pages I kept in my backpack already felt thin and tattered. Maybe if I just knew a little more, I could make sense of what was going on. Of course, I could have known a lot more all at once if I just checked out the books or went online, but I didn’t want the librarian asking me about Amelia Earhart like the books were for a school assignment. Individual pages were safer — just ripples of information at a time, not a whole wave. With enough of those glimpses, I thought I could get things back to the way they were.

  One night about a week after Mom left, I was in the basement getting laundry out of the dryer and Dad came looking for me. He said, “How about you come with me to the hospital on Friday?”

  I stopped looking for a striped sock’s twin. “Come with you?” I said. “Like what, to visit?” Please don’t mean “to visit,” I thought. I didn’t want to sit in some stiff metal chair, talking to Mom who didn’t know she was Mom and who would be in a hospital-issue bathrobe.

  Dad leaned against the washing machine, which was rumbling with another load of my clothes. “No, Mom’s coming home, actually. I thought —”

  “So she’s better?” I looked straight at him.

  “Well,” he said, “not exactly.”

  I chucked my pile of clothes in the laundry basket and got the ironing board out of the corner, jerking it open. Usually I didn’t care about ironing, but at the moment, I felt like potentially burning something. “‘Not exactly’ is like ‘almost,’ right? Like how when you have the flu and you’re in bed for a while and the next week you’re still dragging but not contagious so they send you to school anyway?”

  “She’s not contagious.” He chuckled. “They’ve figured out that much.”

  I attacked a shirt with the iron. “Oh, great. I was really worried about that. I mean, if there were two Amelia Earharts, we wouldn’t know what to do. There’d probably be a duel or something. An air duel. But, hey”— I threw the shirt back into the laundry basket — “at least then we’d get rid of one.” Anger smoldered in my lungs. I could practically taste it — like engine smoke.

  Dad had been trying to smile but stopped. “She still thinks she’s Amelia,” he said.

  “Isn’t that kind of a problem? Like sending somebody home with a broken arm? What did they even say? ‘Sorry, good luck with that’?”

  “They suggested therapy —”

  “Oh, therapy,” I said. I grabbed another shirt, one of Katy’s that had gotten mixed up in my laundry, and ironed it anyway. “Mental problems are always super easy to fix.”

  “Nobody said this was going to be a quick fix. It’d be great for your mom to stay in the hospital, get private treatment twenty-four hours a day, until she had all her issues sorted out, but that’s not really an option right now, Alex. We just don’t have the money for that, so she’s coming home.” The washing machine stopped rumbling, and we studied each other in silence for a second. Then Dad reached into the laundry basket and refolded the shirt I’d just ironed. “It’s tough and it sucks, but we’ve just got to deal with it, all right?”

  That was it, I thought — dealing with it. Whenever kids at school suffered personal tragedies — parents with cancer, car accidents, fires — people would say, “I don’t know how they can deal with that.” But there was no other option. People didn’t deal because they rose above; they dealt because there was nothing else they could do.

  Dad went on to say that he thought it would be better if there were two of us at the hospital — more people for her to recognize. (Or not recognize, I thought.) If she got familiar with us, maybe she would start to remember things.

  I wondered if we would have to go through the house and reintroduce everything to Mom — this is the couch, these are the stairs, this is Jackson, this is water, this is a window. Although, I guessed she would already recognize all of the inanimate ob
jects; Amelia Earhart would have had stairs. It was the rest of us that she wouldn’t know. Who would we have to be for her?

  “I’m not going to make you,” Dad said, “but if you want to come to the hospital, I’ll write you a note to get you out of school for the day.”

  “For the emotional strain,” I said.

  “Something like that.”

  I unplugged the iron. Who was going to notice wrinkles now, anyway? Amelia Earhart probably didn’t have time to iron. “Fine. Count me in. I’ll make sure to get the straitjacket washed before then.”

  Dad smiled and put his arm around my shoulders, planting a kiss on the top of my head. “I’ll iron it for you.”

  Friday was two days away. I kept thinking about what it would be like to have to go pick up Mom. After not having seen her for almost a week, it had all started to feel unreal, like I’d imagined the whole situation. But then I’d remember seeing her in the driver’s seat, unable to figure out how to get home.

  I went back to the library a couple of times a day. Just to look, I told myself. Maybe there would be some clue, some detail of Earhart’s life that would tell me why my mother had gone crazy. That would help me when I had to live with her again. One of the biographies was actually by Amelia Earhart, which I hadn’t noticed the first time around. I pulled it from the stacks and shifted it from hand to hand, as if I would catch whatever my mom had, just from being too close to the words.

  She speaks directly to other young women, the back cover read, urging them to test themselves, to go as far as they can — and beyond.

  What was “beyond”?

  I slid the book back onto the shelf and took out the other biography, the one I’d torn pages from. Flipping to the index, I hoped to find some term that would stand out. Friendship, flight across the Atlantic. Roosevelt, Eleanor. Putnam, George Palmer. At least George was Amelia’s husband. It would have been too confusing if Amelia had never married — Mom might not have gone anywhere with Dad if she thought he was a random guy.

  I turned to one of the pages about George. Amelia had written him a letter before they got married, saying she wasn’t exactly nuts about the idea, but she’d give it a try as long as he understood she couldn’t be tied down: On our life together I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any midaevil code of faithfulness to me nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. . . . I must exact a cruel promise and that is you will let me go in a year if we find no happiness together.

  Shit, I thought. Did they break up?

  What would Dad do if Mom tried to leave him, thinking she was Amelia Earhart leaving George Putnam? Did Mom even know about this letter? I flipped ahead, trying to find some hint of marital problems. No section on divorce in the index. Maybe it had worked out all right for George and Amelia. Until she went missing, that is.

  Even so, I didn’t want to leave the page with the letter behind. I could quote it, or something, and see Mom’s reaction. And then I thought I should take a few more pages, about George and Amelia’s relationship, just in case. I looked around — a group of kids was at the far table, sharing math homework. A few others were going over Spanish vocabulary in the corner. The librarians were at their desk. I waited until I heard the chanting of verbs — viajo, viajas, viaja — and tore.

  What the hell was my problem? I could just check it out, like a normal person. But having the entire book on me would have been like admitting that something was really wrong. Besides, in the grand scheme of things, I figured this wasn’t so bad. If Mom could become another person altogether — a famous historical figure, at that — then I could become a vandal of school property.

  I grabbed a random biography, just in case, and went to the librarians’ desk. The young librarian I’d seen before put down her coffee. “Checking out?” she said, taking the book. “Curie is fascinating.”

  “What?” I said, then glanced down. I’d picked up a copy of Marie Curie’s biography. “Oh, right. Yeah. She’s great.”

  She stamped the back of the book. “Due on the sixteenth of November. Interested in chemistry? Or just some fun reading?”

  I shoved the book into my bag, on top of the ripped pages from the Amelia Earhart book. “No,” I said. “Research.”

  At lunch on Thursday, Josh complained about the SAT prep class his parents had signed him up for. “Last night it was like, ‘Pass the chicken; here’s your prep book,’” he said, drowning his fries in ketchup. “It’s every Saturday morning. At eight. Who does that? They looked at me all happy, like I should throw myself on the floor and kiss their feet because now I’m going to get a perfect score.”

  Theresa was pulling apart her chicken enchilada. She wrinkled her nose. “Is that supposed to be guacamole?”

  “Thanks for all the sympathy,” Josh said.

  “It’s not like they signed you up for boot camp or one of the rehab clinics out in Montana. And if you get a good SAT score, you can get into college and out of here.”

  That was how Theresa saw a lot of our academic career at Oak Ridge — a means to an end. I hadn’t even picked up one of those prep books. Mom might have mentioned it over the summer, but she definitely wasn’t on my case now.

  “And you’ve already memorized the SAT vocab list,” Josh said.

  Theresa looked kind of smug but didn’t get a chance to answer, because Caroline Lavale appeared at our table. “Hey, y’all,” she said, smiling so it looked like her lips hurt. “How’s it going?”

  “Hey, Caroline,” Maddie said. “Do you need a place to sit?”

  Caroline shook her head and laughed. “No, I just wanted to tell you about the pep rally and game this weekend. We’re playing Franklin, and they’re, like, the team to beat, so we’re hoping to get a really good crowd.”

  “Sorry, we don’t exactly do football. Or anything involving physical exertion and the accompanying cheering,” Theresa said. She’d either forgotten that I’d been on the soccer team until recently or had chosen to ignore that fact. “Besides, why do you care what the football team does? They’re not exactly good.”

  “I do color guard,” Caroline said.

  Theresa looked at Josh. “Another thing your parents could have done to you.”

  I remembered how Nick and the other football players stopped me in the hallway and talked about my mom. “Um, hello, you were there,” I told Caroline. “I fucked up the football field. I’m the team’s worst enemy. Pretty sure no one wants me at the game.”

  “They fixed it fine,” Caroline said. “I’m sure if you apologized —”

  “Apologized?” My eyes hardened.

  “Anyway.” Caroline kept smiling but the sunshine drained from her eyes. “I really hope you all show up. It would mean a lot to the players and all of us in color guard and cheerleading.”

  “Yeah, well, they’d better hope I don’t do it again.” I didn’t really mean to snarl like that — usually Caroline was fine — but I couldn’t help it. At my side, Theresa grinned. “See you in driver’s ed,” I told Caroline as she rushed to the next table.

  After my last class, I shoved my way through the crowds to get to Jim’s locker. He was there already, sifting through notebooks, and didn’t notice me a few feet away. For a second, I wavered — what if Jim was okay with the occasional phys ed conversation but not with extended periods of time together? Then I remembered the Amelia Earhart quote, about going to the edge and beyond. I was barely anywhere, let alone beyond.

  “Hey, Jim,” I said. “Remember when you said we should drive again? Can we try that? You teaching me how to drive?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “Now?”

  “No, not now.” It would have to be soon, before I lost my nerve. “How about tonight? I can probably get my mom’s car again.” It wasn’t like she’d be using it anytime soon. Even when she came home tomorrow, Dad probably wouldn’t just let her drive off.

  “Works for me,” Jim said, closing his locker. “Are you still doing straight lines?”

&nb
sp; I hadn’t exactly practiced since that night in the parking lot. Whenever Dad wasn’t at work or at the hospital, he passed out in the chair at home. “How can I get out of straight lines if you haven’t taught me anything else?”

  He laughed. “Fair enough. I’ll come by your place. Around seven?”

  “Sounds great. See you tonight,” I said, walking away before I could talk myself out of it or say anything stupid. I wasn’t sure how it would feel to get behind the wheel of a car again. But even if I threw up or passed out or otherwise made myself look ridiculous in front of Jim Wiley, it was something I needed to do. And not so I could get my license or pass driver’s ed. Not even so I could stop being that dumb girl who couldn’t drive. I just didn’t need one more thing to be afraid of.

  Teddy was at a friend’s house and Katy had gymnastics that afternoon, so I holed up in our room with the freshly torn Amelia Earhart biography pages. For the last few days, I’d had to look at the pages in secret, hidden in another book or after Katy had gone to sleep. Now I had the chance to spread them out on my bed so I could see all of them at once. There were nine in all — two that were just photos, the rest all text. I felt like an archaeologist who had excavated bits of clay pots and pipes and was now trying to figure out how it all fit together within the context of my mother’s own history.

  One page was about Amelia’s first ride in an airplane — how she went up in a plane with Frank Hawks, and that was when she knew what she wanted to do with her life. She said, As soon as we left the ground, I knew I myself had to fly. Another was about a flight around the world, which didn’t work the first time she tried it. She and her navigator, Fred Noonan, couldn’t get off the ground in Hawaii. The next time she tried the around-the-world thing, she disappeared.

  There was one picture of her sitting in a cockpit, turning her head to look back. She wasn’t looking at the camera, just at something or someone beside it. All the dials and knobs made me queasy, especially after reading about how Amelia probably died during her flight around the world.