Takeoffs and Landings

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  When he got home, there’d be chores. Two weeks’ worth, if he knew Pop. And then Mike and Joey would probably make fun of him if he tried drawing anywhere around them. And at school, his drawing would just be something else for the other kids to laugh at. Or destroy.

  “Ready to go home?” Mom had asked him. And he’d said he was. Why? He felt a weight settle on his shoulders. He felt like an escaped criminal who’d been caught, getting sent back to prison. He might as well be wearing handcuffs. What if the trip hadn’t changed anything?

  But it had.

  Chuck remembered when one of their neighbors had died, trapped in a corn bin the year before. He’d gotten buried in corn and suffocated. Chuck could remember Pop describing the accident to Gram: “He just didn’t have any room to breathe,” Pop had said, again and again, shaking his head. It was like Pop had to repeat the words to make himself understand.

  And Chuck had lain awake nights picturing the man, kernels of corn packed against his eyes and ears and face and nose, with no room to breathe. That’s me, Chuck had thought. I’m suffocating, too. He was surrounded by what Pop wanted and what the kids at school said about him and what the teachers said about him and what his own brothers and sisters thought about him. And what he thought about himself.

  But now—Lori had given him some space, and Mom had given him some space, and the pictures he carried around in his head would give him some space, and art lessons would give him some space. And what space he didn’t have, he’d make.

  Nobody can suffocate me now, Chuck thought, and it was a surprise. A happy one.

  They were in the sky for the last time. The flight attendants had brought out a meal and cleared it away. Just about everyone else seemed to be sleeping now, heads bobbing uncomfortably on pillows no bigger than lunch bags.

  Lori was too antsy for sleep. She flicked through her magazine—Seventeen, again—but it couldn’t hold her interest. Down the row, Chuck was peering eagerly out the window, and Mom was scribbling notes to prepare for yet another speech. Mom caught Lori’s eyes on her and made a face.

  “If I do this now, I won’t have to worry about it once we get home,” she said. “I’ll have four whole days off before I leave for Kalamazoo.”

  “Don’t tell Gram,” Lori said. “She’ll put you to work scrubbing windows and shelling peas.”

  Mom laughed and went back to writing.

  Lori regarded her mother through half-closed eyes. Poor Mom, she thought, surprising herself. “Poor Mom”? “Poor Mom”? All those fancy hotels and expensive meals and applause every night, and I’m thinking, “Poor Mom”? But fancy hotels were just empty rooms in strange cities, and the applause was just a bunch of strangers hitting their hands together.

  Lori remembered how she’d thought of Mom as the Ancient Mariner, and it was true; Mom was just as trapped, her speeches were just as much an albatross around her neck. Mom kept saying the same thing over and over and over again, and she couldn’t stop any more than the Ancient Mariner could.

  “When you’re on the twenty-ninth minute of your half-hour speech . . .” “When you’re down to the last second in your time-bank account . . .” “When you’re signing the last line on the contract of life . . .”

  Before she had time to change her mind, Lori leaned over and tapped her mother on the arm.

  “You and Daddy had a fight, didn’t you?” she asked. “The day he died.”

  Mom looked startled. She stared at Lori for a long time, and Lori felt like Mom was judging her, just as she had two weeks earlier, on the first flight. But this time Lori knew that Mom wasn’t going to push her away or shut her out. Lori didn’t have to worry about being found unworthy. Very slowly, Mom began to nod.

  “Yes,” she said, drawing the word out, like a whisper, an echo, a memory. “Oh, Lori, we were both so tired. And Mikey was getting into everything, and Joey was teething and crying all the time. . . . Those aren’t excuses, just . . . reasons. Tom didn’t take the time to kiss me good-bye when he walked out that door, and I yelled at him about it. And he yelled back. . . . It was just a stupid little spat. Nothing I would have remembered even a day later if—if only . . .”

  Mom didn’t have to finish the sentence.

  Lori felt like Mom had just handed her the last piece of a complicated puzzle. No, she corrected herself—probably not the last piece. But the last piece that Lori needed to see the picture clearly. To understand.

  “That’s why you keep telling me not to get married too young,” Lori said. “So I don’t have a stupid fight with my husband someday and have him die without either one of us apologizing.”

  Mom frowned at Lori doubtfully.

  “But what do I know, anyway?” she said. “People always have stupid fights.”

  Mom and I are really talking, Lori marveled. We can do that now. She and Mom probably had more stupid fights ahead, themselves. But Lori would never again feel like she’d felt in Chicago, when Mom was hiding everything and Lori was lashing out, desperate to learn anything. She’d never again feel like she’d felt the whole past year, when she couldn’t even look at Mom without wanting to scream.

  Lori glanced up, and the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign had blinked on again. The pilot came on the P.A. system to announce that they were about to land. Mom went back to her speech.

  So we can talk in midair, thirty thousand feet above the ground, Lori thought. Will we still be able to talk after we get home?

  Lori wanted to think so. But it was hard to think at all, with so much jumping around in her mind. She stared at the seat in front of her, but her eyes saw a potted tree in a fancy hotel, a street full of dark faces, her brother’s drawings. Over the hum of the plane’s engine, her ears still heard her mother’s voice on tape: “By the grace of God, we’ll get by.” How could Lori go home, knowing what she knew now? How could home still be home, if Lori was different?

  The plane angled downward. Lori welcomed the pressure in her ears. She thought about leaning over and telling Mom, You know, I really did think we were going to crash when we were landing in Los Angeles. Then she and Mom could laugh about that together.

  But they were already on the ground. The wheels hissed on wet pavement, seeming to say, Almost there, almost there. Almost home. This was the landing Lori had been longing for the entire trip. But it didn’t bring the relief she’d expected. It didn’t feel right.

  Lori gulped and picked up her backpack, still feeling jangly and strange. She held it on her knees, waiting.

  The plane pulled up to the gate and stopped. People stood up all around her, like puppets on invisible strings. Lori waited while business-people pulled rolling luggage down the aisle, while grandmothers tugged shopping bags behind them. When she couldn’t stand it any longer, Lori lunged out in front of a guy with a shaved head and a ring in his nose.

  What’s he doing in Ohio? Lori wondered. She imagined him wandering around Pickford County peering at everyone with the same bafflement Lori had had looking at people in L.A. She giggled, and the guy actually smiled at her, companionably, as if they had something in common.

  Maybe they did.

  In the ramp leading to the airport, Lori stopped and waited for Mom and Chuck, who hadn’t crowded in front of anyone. So the three of them stepped through the door together, and were practically knocked down by a human torpedo.

  “Mom! Lori! Chuck!” It was Emma, trying to wrap her arms around all three of them at once. Lori saw Gram and Mike and Joey waiting right behind her.

  “I missed you!” Emma shrieked.

  Gram had fixed Emma’s blond hair in a single ponytail, practically on the very top of her head. She looked like a Kewpie doll. Lori felt an unbelievable rush of love for Emma, who wasn’t even born when Daddy died, who didn’t remember a time when Mommy didn’t travel. Lori threw her arms around Emma and lifted her off the ground, spun her around.

  “Missed you, too,” she whispered.

  “What a nice surprise,” Mom was saying to Gram. “You d
idn’t have to—”

  Gram waved Mom’s concerns away.

  “Oh, I knew you had the car, and I know I should be home weeding the garden—wait till you see how much it’s grown—but we just couldn’t wait another hour. Could we, Emma?”

  Emma shook her head so hard, the end of her ponytail whipped from side to side. She slid her hand into Mom’s and said, “I had to tell you about my piano recital. I played ‘Frère Jacques’ without making a single mistake, and everyone clapped, and Pop said I was the best eight-year-old in the whole show—”

  “Dummy. You were the only eight-year-old in the whole show,” Mike jeered.

  “And all of the seven-year-olds were better than you,” Joey added.

  Lori regarded her younger brothers seriously.

  What if you knew what I knew? she wondered. What if Mom told you what happened when Daddy died? Would you feel like making fun of other people then? But they didn’t know what Lori knew, and Lori was glad. She wanted to protect them. And because she didn’t know what else to do, she got Joey in a headlock and rubbed his hair with her knuckles and said, “Good to see you’re as big a brat as ever.” Mike moved out of range before she could reach him, but he stuck his tongue out at her, and she stuck out hers right back.

  “So was ‘Frère Jacques’ the only song you played, or did you do that other one, too? What’s it called?” Mom was asking Emma.

  “‘Country Gardens,’ Mom,” Emma said, looking up trustingly.

  “She just did the one,” Gram interrupted. “They had twenty kids playing—one song per kid was plenty.”

  Out of habit, Lori started to glare at her mother, thinking, If you’d been there, you’d know. What kind of mother misses her own daughter’s piano recital? But as Mom turned to straighten the straps on Emma’s jumper, Lori caught sight of the glitter of pain in her mother’s eyes. She remembered what Mom had said, only the day before: “You all could be kids who got free lunches at school and bought all your clothes from yard sales; or I could go on the road, and you could have piano lessons and dance lessons and pay 4-H club dues and wear the same clothes as everyone else.” Did Mom think it was worth it? Did Lori?

  For once, Lori didn’t know. She was just glad she hadn’t had to make the decision Mom had faced.

  Everyone began walking toward the baggage claim area. Lori’s family was a rowdy group, with Joey and Mike playfully punching each other and Emma skipping on the colored squares of the floor. Gram pulled Lori and Chuck close and began quizzing them.

  “You just didn’t send enough postcards!” she scolded. “What was the weather like? What was your favorite city?”

  Lori and Chuck exchanged glances. It was like what they’d done as little kids, conferring without words: Do you suppose they know we pulled all the green apples off the tree? I won’t say anything if you don’t say anything. . . . Will they get madder that we left the gate open if we don’t tell them the pigs are out in the garden, eating all the peas? Lori had missed that camaraderie, that sense of conspiracy, more than she’d even realized. It was like having an arm or leg amputated, years before, and suddenly getting it back.

  She thought back to the Los Angeles art museum the day before. It’d been boring. That was what she wanted to think. But every now and then, standing with Chuck before some painting, she’d squinted hard and almost understood.

  He was going to be a great artist. She just knew it. And she was going to make sure everyone else knew it, too.

  But for now, she said only what Chuck’s eyes told her to say.

  “Everyplace was nice,” Lori said politely. “And the weather was great.”

  Lori liked Gram. There was a part of her that wanted to tell Gram at least some of what had really happened on the trip. But it was too hard.

  This is what it’s like to be Mom, Lori thought. To carry around secrets you can’t speak of.

  In Lori’s mind’s eye, she saw a ball of fire, a tractor burning, and Mom watching in horror, a stupid argument still echoing in her ears. It should be worse for Lori to have that image in her head, that secret in her care. But it wasn’t.

  She knew her mother now.

  Gram began chattering about the fair queen nominees being announced and the tomato bugs infesting the other end of the county. Lori glanced at the posters on the walls they were passing. She was surprised that they looked so familiar: A beautiful woman and a gorgeous man lay in sand under the words CLUB MED. Above them, a jet took off into an incredible sunrise. Suddenly Lori realized why she recognized them. She’d passed the same posters two weeks ago, on her way to Chicago. In fact, she and Mom and Chuck had sat in the waiting area right on the other side of the hall.

  Lori had a sudden, strange feeling that all she had to do was turn her head and she’d see a girl in a homemade sundress in the second seat from the right, squirming in embarrassment, waiting for her first plane trip. How long ago that seemed, when Lori actually thought that what she wore mattered most. Lori didn’t even know where the sundress was now—wadded up in the bottom of her suitcase, probably. Or left behind, forgotten, in some hotel room. You lost things, traveling.

  And found things.

  “. . . the new extension agent—Bud Pike, you know, that really nice guy?—he had a whole column in the paper yesterday on tips for getting rid of the tomato bugs. I sent the kids out, looking for them, but they couldn’t find a single one in our garden,” Gram was saying.

  Lori threw her arms around her grandmother and said, “I love you, Gram.”

  Gram gave her a startled look and straightened her dress.

  “Well, you, too, I’m sure,” she said, and went on talking about tomato bugs.

  They took the escalator down to the baggage claim, pulled their luggage off the conveyor belts.

  “Don’t you wish there was a bellhop or a taxi driver nearby?” Lori teased Chuck as he heaved yet another stuffed suitcase to the ground.

  He looked at her very seriously.

  “No,” he said. “That never once felt right, letting someone else carry my bags.” He peered off into the distance, past Lori. “You know, if I ever go anywhere again, I’m not going to let them.”

  “Oh,” Lori said. She watched him skillfully hoist the suitcases onto a cart. Had he gotten taller on this trip, or was he just standing up straight for once? She remembered how he hadn’t even bothered to open the peanut packs the flight attendants had given him on the plane, how he’d turned down the chance to eat the rest of Mom’s lunch. What had happened to the brother she’d left home with?

  She knew. She just didn’t fully understand.

  Luggage in tow, they all headed out to Mom’s car and Gram’s truck. Lori and Chuck went with Gram, and the other kids went with Mom.

  “Guess Mom’s had enough of us after two weeks,” Lori joked as they pulled out of the parking garage.

  “Don’t think so. It kills her leaving you. You know that, don’t you?” Gram said.

  Oh, yeah. That’s why she keeps leaving, Lori started to say, out of habit. Then the words registered for once.

  Gram has been telling me that for years, Lori realized with a shock. But I never heard her before.

  “Yeah,” Lori said quietly. “I know.”

  Gram stopped in the middle of fumbling in her purse for money to pay the parking attendant. She gave Lori a startled look.

  “Good,” she said softly.

  Soon they were out on the interstate, Gram muttering under her breath about the city traffic.

  “Now, why would anyone want to live in a place like this?” she asked.

  “The people here probably say the same thing about Pickford County,” Chuck said.

  Gram laughed.

  “Fair enough,” she said. “I’m just as glad all of them don’t want to live there.”

  Lori felt muddled. Chuck was different. She was different. Mom was different. How could everything else stay the same? Lori tried to ignore her growing sense of dread. She leaned forward in the seat
, as if that would get her home to Pickford County faster.

  After miles of stop-and-start traffic, they left the city and its gridlock behind. Out in the country, they zoomed past fields of corn and beans and golden winter wheat, ready for harvest.

  I haven’t seen a cornfield in two weeks, Lori realized with a jolt. She drank in the sight. In the two weeks she’d been away, the corn had grown from knee high to waist high. It was like coming back to find toddlers transformed into teenagers. I missed it all, Lori thought. But it was silly to feel sad about corn.

  Gram pulled off on the Pickford County exit, and soon they were traveling down achingly familiar roads. Lori stared joyously at sights she’d never thought about missing: the old corncrib rusting behind the Brownleys’ barn, the Riptons’ metal mailbox leaning toward the road, the tiger lilies growing wild in the ditch. She had missed them. Unbearably.

  Then they were turning into their own lane. Swaying above the porch, Gram’s hanging flower baskets were full of blooms now, instead of mere buds. The morning glories had climbed higher on the lamppost. One of the tabby kittens tumbled down the porch steps, and he was bigger than two weeks ago, almost full grown.

  Lori felt like she was seeing everything with two sets of eyes or thinking with two separate brains. Part of her was still the pretrip Lori, and part of her was—she didn’t know who she was now. It was like she didn’t recognize her own home anymore. Had the shutters always been such a bright shade of green? Had the weeping willow in the front yard always been such a huge tree? Everything looked different than she remembered. And, somehow, at the same time, everything was so familiar, she felt like she’d never left.

  That’s what Mom meant, Lori thought, when she said she would never leave Pickford County.

  Lori hadn’t left, either. She’d just carried Pickford County around with her, everywhere she went. She understood now how that worked. She could fly to the moon and not lose Pickford County. And not lose herself.

  It’s ground into our souls. Like dirt, Lori thought.

  That was such a silly thing to think that she laughed out loud.