Takeoffs and Landings

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  “You’re coming with me,” she’d said with a broad grin.

  Chuck saw Gram nod silently behind her. Pop already had his back turned, as he pulled on his work boots to head out the door.

  “I can’t go,” Lori said. “Jackie Stires always has a pool party the last Saturday in June, and we need to do the Pickford High float for the Fourth of July parade, and then there’s my 4-H projects—”

  “You can miss a party for once in your life,” Gram said firmly. “The float’ll be there when you get back.”

  “And you never start your 4-H projects until July anyhow,” Mike chimed in, sneaking in under Gram’s arm to snatch a biscuit from the plate she was carrying to the table.

  “I do so!” Lori said. “And what about the 4-H pigs? I’m the only one who remembers to feed and water them—they’ll never make weight if I’m not around. They might even die.”

  “It’d be good for the younger kids to take on some responsibility,” Mom said calmly. “And Pop wouldn’t let them die.”

  “But why can’t we go, too?” Mike complained. Pretty soon Joey and Emma were whining the same thing.

  Chuck stopped paying attention.

  I’m going away, he whispered to himself.

  The crackle of a loudspeaker brought him back to the present.

  “We are now boarding rows twenty-two and higher,” a woman’s voice announced.

  Chuck’s armpits were drenched now. His hair was plastered to his head with panicky sweat.

  “Is that us?” he asked.

  Mom nodded.

  “No point in rushing to the gate,” she said. “We’ll wait until the line’s down a little.”

  She sounded so sure of herself, one of the other passengers sat down.

  Chuck gnawed his left thumbnail.

  It was Gram’s fault he was scared.

  A few nights ago, when he’d come in late from replanting beans (he hadn’t managed to avoid that chore entirely), she’d given him the supper she’d been keeping hot on the stove. Then she hovered over him.

  “I never got used to Joanie flying all over the place,” she said. “Every time I heard about a plane crash . . . Well, you know. I read someplace that takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous part. That’s when planes crash. So I always make sure I say a prayer anytime I know your mom’s schedule, the first and the last five minutes of every flight. But now with three of you all flying at once . . .”

  She’d bit her lip.

  Pop came up behind her and ruffled her hair, like she was just as young as Emma.

  “Now, Ida, you know Joanie says those planes are always delayed. Probably sometimes when you’re praying that she’ll have a safe landing, she’s just in the middle of taking off. Don’t you worry about confusing God?”

  “God doesn’t get confused,” Gram said stiffly. “And you know you worry, too, Fred. You can’t say you don’t.”

  “Aw.” Pop waved her concerns away. He sat down beside Chuck and began eating the beef stew Gram slid in front of him. “Haven’t you seen those statistics about how flying’s safer than driving? The way this kid gets to daydreaming, he’s probably safer on an airplane than driving a tractor.”

  He punched Chuck in the arm, to let him know he was just joking, but Chuck still wanted to protest: I didn’t make a single mistake planting this year. Can’t you ever forget anything? Next thing you know, you’ll be blaming me again for letting the cows out back when I was six.

  But Pop’s expression softened.

  “Won’t be the same baling next week without having to restack half your loads.”

  That was the closest Pop ever got to mushy and sentimental. Flying really must be dangerous.

  “Chuck? Chuck?” Mom was saying. “Let’s go.”

  Lori was already standing—and making a face that very clearly said, Come on, stupid. Chuck scrambled to his feet. Mom picked up the small bag she was going to carry on to the plane. Chuck wondered if he should offer to carry it for her—be manly and all that. But she looked so right with the strap slung over her shoulder, bag balanced against her hip. Someone could take a picture of her and frame it. They could title it WOMAN ON THE GO.

  Some magazine had done an article about Mom a year or so ago. There’d been lots of pictures with captions like that, making her sound like Superwoman. MOTHER OF FIVE FLIES HIGH IN “ACCIDENTAL” CAREER, was the headline.

  He could almost remember feeling proud, wanting to go around bragging, Hey, that’s my mom.

  But then some of the kids at school had seen the article.

  “Your mother’s a motivational speaker?” Cassandra Dennis had asked. “Why can’t she motivate you?”

  The whole English class had heard, and laughed.

  Now just thinking about that article made his face hot with shame.

  Lots of thoughts did that for him.

  He stumbled following Mom and Lori toward the lady taking tickets. Horrified at the thought of falling—he pictured a giant tree crashing in a forest, a beached whale flopping on the shore—he stomped squarely on Lori’s foot as he tried to regain his balance.

  Lori flashed him an outraged, pained look.

  “Watch it!” she hissed.

  She even had tears in her eyes. So one of Chuck’s last acts would be hurting his sister.

  Again.

  Chuck watched his feet, heading toward the plane. Toward his doom, probably. He had sympathy suddenly for the hogs that tried to run backward down the loading chute when they were being sent off to slaughter. Chuck hated sorting hogs, anyway—Pop always yelling at him, “Don’t let that one past you! He’s not ready for market!” and Joey and Mike tattling, “Chuck’s not helping!” It was a relief, at the end, when the hogs were all headed up the chute onto the truck. But some hog always balked. He’d turn the wrong way and try to run against the pack. The backward hog would squeal, and the others would squeal, and no matter how much Pop and Chuck and Joey and Mike pushed, the dang hog wouldn’t turn around.

  More than once, Chuck had seen Pop flip a 250-pound hog end over end, just to get him on the truck.

  If Chuck were a hog being sent to slaughter, he wouldn’t have the nerve to turn around. He wouldn’t have the nerve to squeal. He’d go quietly.

  Mom handed a packet to the airline attendant beside the door out to the plane.

  “There’s, um, three of us,” she said.

  “Family vacation, eh?” the woman said.

  “Sort of,” Mom said.

  The woman ripped out three tickets and handed the packet back to Mom.

  “Have fun!” she said cheerily.

  Mom led them through a door and down a hallway. Then they were in the plane, and Chuck had another attack of panic. Everything was too flimsy looking—he felt like he could reach over and crumple the tin of the door with his bare hands. He glanced to the left, and shouldn’t have, because that was the cockpit, all those important-looking dials and gauges. But they looked fake, like children’s toys. He didn’t know what he’d expected the inside of an airplane to look like, but it wasn’t this. This was supposed to fly?

  He looked at Mom, walking confidently down the aisle ahead of him. But that was a mistake, too, because she was tiny and fit easily between the rows of seats. She moved like she belonged on a plane—it wasn’t too hard to believe she could be lifted off the ground. Chuck felt like Godzilla trampling behind her. He knocked one man’s jacket to the floor and accidentally kicked another man’s luggage.

  “Excuse me. Sorry,” he muttered.

  “Who wants the window seat?” Mom asked when they reached their row.

  Silently, Chuck shook his head. What? And have to look out?

  “I don’t care,” Lori said, though she usually had an opinion about everything. “You can have it, Mom.”

  A woman behind them cleared her throat impatiently.

  “No, you take it, Lori,” Mom decreed. “So you can see out during takeoff and landing. Those are the best parts. Then you and C
huck can switch the next time, so he gets a turn.”

  Chuck had no intention of switching. He wondered if Gram and Pop were right—that being away from Pickford County so much had made Mom lose a lot of common sense. How could takeoffs and landings be the best parts, when those were the times you were most likely to die?

  Chuck eased into his seat. The side of his leg hung over onto Mom’s seat. She scooted a little closer to Lori. She was just making room for him, but Chuck felt a stab of self-pity. Here I am, about to die, and my own mother is trying to get away from me.

  Why should she be any different from anyone else?

  Lori decided she was going to read a magazine during both takeoff and landing. That would show Mom: the last thing Lori cared about right now was scenery out some tiny window. She just couldn’t face this trip. The world of Seventeen, where everyone had good tans and clear skin and perfect clothes, was her only escape.

  But somehow, when the engine began to rumble, and the pilot said in his clipped, official-sounding voice, “Cabin crew, prepare for takeoff,” she couldn’t help sneaking peeks out the window, just to see what was going on. The pilot revved the engine and then floored it, just like Dan Stephens drag racing on Cuthbert Road. Men—they were all the same, right?

  But there was something exhilarating about zooming along the runway, faster, faster, faster. . . . Lori felt herself straining forward, wanting to leave the ground behind. Maybe there was something wrong, and they’d never take off. The engine did sound terrible. But then there was a bump, and the concrete of the runway fell away. Lori heard the wheels of the plane being folded up into the plane’s belly, beneath them. It made Lori giddy to think of not needing wheels to move fast. Hey! Look at me! I’m flying!

  In seconds, they were higher than the roof of the airport. Trees, houses, highways—everything receded beneath them. Nothing looked the same from the air. Lori stared at a blue kidney bean-shaped spot on the ground until it was out of sight, and only then did she realize that it had been someone’s backyard swimming pool.

  “Great, huh?” Mom said beside her.

  Lori turned her gaze back to her magazine.

  “It’s okay.”

  Mom didn’t say anything else, and Lori let herself look out the window again after a few minutes. They were in the clouds now. Lori remembered the question that she’d imagined Emma asking: Do the clouds really look like cotton balls? And they did. It was amazing. The clouds looked just like the cotton batting that her great-grandmother rolled out for quilting.

  Lori wanted to tell someone about that idea, but if her choices were just Mom and Chuck, she’d take a pass. Mom would say something like, Didn’t I tell you you’d like this? That would ruin everything.

  Lori glanced quickly over at Chuck in his aisle seat. Maybe he’d tell Mom what she wanted to hear: how incredible this flight was, how wonderful she was to share it with them. But Chuck had his head back and his eyes shut. His face was pale, making the scattering of pimples stand out more than ever. Pathetic.

  Nothing new there.

  Lori groaned soundlessly. Two weeks of nobody but Mom and Chuck. How would she survive?

  Chuck was going to throw up.

  He kept his eyes closed—did he honestly believe that what he couldn’t see couldn’t hurt him? But not being able to see just let him focus more on his stomach. He felt like the five pancakes he’d eaten had expanded, grown arms and legs, declared war on one another. He felt a retch pushing its way up his throat, and he swallowed hard.

  Was this how he’d spend his last moments of life? It figured.

  They were taking off. He could tell, the way the plane lurched forward. Some force pushed him back against his seat, like on an amusement park ride. He fought back the urge to gag.

  Not being able to see was too horrible. He opened his eyes a crack and saw Mom staring at the seat ahead of her, Lori reading a magazine. Like she didn’t care. Gram always did say Lori had a cast-iron stomach and nerves of steel.

  Chuck had nerves as wobbly as cooked spaghetti. And a stomach as sensitive as—as—

  Jell-O, he thought. And then he began retching. As the plane leveled off, meaning maybe they weren’t going to die—not this time, anyway—the five pancakes in his stomach began a takeoff of their own.

  Lori couldn’t believe it. Right there, two seats away, Chuck was starting to puke. Lori didn’t know what to do. And instead of helping at all, Mom was just digging around in a pocket on the seat-back in front of her. No, wait—she was pulling out some bag.

  Did people throw up on planes so often that the airlines gave everyone bags, just in case?

  That made flying a lot less appealing, in Lori’s mind.

  Mom hadn’t been fast enough. Someone across the aisle had already thrust a bag at Chuck. But Chuck, being Chuck, didn’t see it or didn’t know what to do with it. Mom had to shake the bag open, put it right under his mouth, tell him it was there.

  Lori couldn’t watch, she was so grossed out. And embarrassed. And mad. Didn’t anyone but her remember? Back when Chuck was little, he got carsick all the time. What was Mom thinking, taking him on a plane? What was Chuck thinking, agreeing to go?

  Chuck, the eternal fountain of vomit, seemed to be done for now. Mom turned toward Lori.

  “Are you all right, Lori?” she asked. “You don’t feel queasy, do you?”

  “I’m fine,” Lori replied. She was trying so hard to keep the anger out of her voice that her words came out flat and dull, like she didn’t care about anything. She turned a page in her magazine, and the anger hit her again full force. Why didn’t Mom remember? Chuck had a delicate stomach; Lori never threw up. Don’t you know us at all? Lori wanted to scream at her mother. Instead, she found herself saying, “You should have known. Take Chuck up, of course he’s going to upchuck.”

  Lori wanted the words to come out like a joke, laughing everything off: Ha-ha. Isn’t it hilarious being around Mr. Gross? But the anger had snuck back into Lori’s voice. She sounded nasty, nasty, nasty. If Lori had said something like that at home, Gram would have told her off, sent her to her room, given her some extra chore—trimming an entire fencerow, weeding the whole garden.

  Mom just looked at Lori. But that look was worse than any punishment Gram ever doled out. That look could have sliced bone. It was like Mom had the same kind of X-ray vision as the superheroes on the TV shows Mike and Joey watched—like she’d seen clear to the ugly depths of Lori’s soul and pronounced, I don’t want you as my daughter.

  Chuck felt like he was four years old again, getting carsick just riding into town. The feel of Mom’s hand on his back was the same, the sound of her voice was the same: “It’s okay, Chuck. You’ll be fine.”

  Chuck could close his eyes and see the weeds by the side of the road back home: Queen Anne’s lace and milkweed, cornflowers and foxtail, dandelions and clover. And a little boy crouched down in those weeds, his mother bent over him, comforting him: “It’s okay, Chuck. You’ll be fine.”

  It sounded all backward, but those were some of his happiest memories from childhood, getting carsick. Not the sick part—that wasn’t any fun. But afterward, he and Mom would be there in the weeds, not moving, the sky bright blue overhead, the ground solid beneath their feet. And then they’d get back in the car, where Lori and baby Mike waited patiently in their car seats. Lori wasn’t even big enough to see over the front seat, where Chuck had to sit. But she’d call out to him in her little-girl voice, “Chuckie okay? Chuckie okay?” So worried. Neither one of them liked having to sit apart.

  That was when they were best friends. That was before.

  Did Lori remember at all?

  Mom still had her hand on Chuck’s back, but she was asking Lori, “Are you all right? You don’t feel queasy, do you?”

  Chuck’s ears were still ringing so badly, he couldn’t make out Lori’s answer, but he could hear the cruelty in her voice. The contempt. That brought him back.

  He wasn’t four years old anymor
e. He was fifteen. Carsick four-year-olds were still cute and lovable. Fifteen-year-olds who threw up on planes were disgusting. He deserved whatever Lori had said.

  Chuck shook Mom’s hand off his back.

  “I’ll go get cleaned up,” he mumbled.

  The man who met them at the airport was black.

  Somehow that made it worse, the way they were presenting themselves: Lori, all rumpled in her stupid homemade dress; Chuck, still reeking of vomit, even though he and Mom had all but hosed him off; and Mom—well, even Lori had to admit that Mom still looked pretty good. How could she have stayed clean, sitting right there beside Chuck while he was doing his impression of Linda Blair in The Exorcist, spewing every which way? It wasn’t fair.

  Not that Lori really wanted Mom covered in vomit.

  Did she?

  Lori couldn’t think straight after that look Mom had given her. She still felt as shaky and jolted and scramble-brained as she’d felt the time she’d touched an electric fence on a dare.

  And that was a shame, because she really wanted to think about what it meant that the man who met them at the airport was black.

  There weren’t any black people in Pickford County.

  Or African Americans—some of the more with-it teachers at Pickford High said you were supposed to call them African Americans now.

  From the moment the man had come over to greet them, Lori had wanted to assure him, I’m not prejudiced. Everybody says people in Pickford County are prejudiced, but I’m not. So don’t worry.

  Mom was talking to the man as if she hadn’t even noticed he was black.

  “Yes, I think we should get Chuck some Dramamine for the next flight. Or those pressure bracelets—I’ve heard those are very effective.”

  “Good idea!” the man exclaimed. “My wife and I went on a cruise last winter, and it seemed like everyone we met had those bracelets. Now, that’s a cure I wish I’d invested in ten years ago.”