“Why do you think you did anything?”
She stared down at the tissue. A large red dot was beginning to seep through the other side. “It’s gotta be something. There’s a reason he’s not calling.”
“When’s the last time you talked to him?”
“The day we left Florida,” she whispered.
I struggled not to let my mouth drop open. I hadn’t talked to Momma in four days and already it felt like a lifetime. I couldn’t imagine not talking to her for two whole months. I’d probably lose my mind. “Wow,” I whispered. “That is a long time.” A moment passed as I gathered my courage. “Why don’t you call him?”
“I did, once.” Silver’s face looked so sad that I almost reached out for her hand. “I just got his voice mail. I tried to leave a message …” She stopped, letting the thought drift off between us. “But after I said the word Dad, I didn’t know what else to say. So I hung up.”
“Maybe he didn’t get the message. You know, because it was so short. Maybe you hung up too quick.”
Silver gave me a look that said, Please stop saying dumb things just to make me feel better. My cheeks felt hot. It was a stupid thing to say. But I didn’t know what else to tell her.
“Aren’t adults the ones that are supposed to have everything together?” Silver shook her head. “I mean, they’ve had their whole lives to figure things out. It’s not fair that they still get to act like jerks sometimes. Especially when it comes to us.” Her face darkened. “The whole thing just sucks.”
Our situations weren’t the same, but for a moment, I thought I might understand what Silver meant. I knew what it was like to want a parent to be there. To really be there, instead of drifting in and out of the shadows the way Momma did all the time. Even before Grandpa William died, it was as if she was living half her life with us and the other half somewhere else. Maybe it felt that way for Silver, too. Most of her life was spent with Aunt Marianne. But there was another part of it—a big part—that wanted the other half there, too. The dad half. She deserved to have both, just as I did.
“Yeah,” I said softly. “I know.”
The shadows from Russell’s night-light flickered against the wall, and I could hear a rustling sound as the wind blew the leaves outside. Silver lifted the bloody tissue off her knee one last time, and peered at the raw, pink skin beneath. The bleeding had stopped. She tossed the tissue into the trash and then looked at me. “You know, Wren, if things ever get too hard with your mom being away right now …” She hesitated, and looked back down at her knee. “I mean, you can come hang out with me if you want. You know, in my room.”
“Thanks.”
“You’re welcome.” She stood up. Her eyes traveled over Russell’s small, lumpy shape, and her face softened. “You’re a really good sister.”
I blinked, feeling a little stunned. “Thanks,” I said again.
“Okay, well, good night.”
“Good night.”
I stared at the door for a long time after Silver left. Then I took my notebook back out from under the covers. But instead of finishing the letter to Momma, I held the notebook against my chest and lay back down again, staring up at the ceiling.
Dad had told me once that I should never judge a book by its cover, but I don’t think I really understood what he meant until just that moment. It was strange how people could turn out to be so much different from what you first thought of them. Stranger, too, how those differences could also be so much like yours.
My eyes grew heavy and then closed, and I fell asleep like that, still holding Momma’s letter against my heart.
Aunt Marianne, Silver, and Russell were already sitting around the kitchen table when I came down the next morning. “Hey there.” Silver put her glass of orange juice down and grinned. “Perfect timing. We were just about to start talking about what we wanted to do today.” She scooted over a little on the bench she was sitting on. “Here, have a seat.”
I sat down next to her, hoping I didn’t have morning breath. Aunt Marianne was preoccupied at the stove, stirring something in a frying pan. A pair of reading glasses were perched atop her head, and she was wearing an apron dotted with pink owls.
“Hey, Wren, it’s Windy Sunday!” Russell wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, and then rapped on the table to get Silver’s and Aunt Marianne’s attention. “What’s Windy Sunday again, you guys?”
“Windy Sunday means that one of us gets to pick whatever we want to do today,” Silver said, “no matter how crazy it seems. Sort of like letting the wind take us in whatever direction it wants to blow. Mom and I do it every week.” She looked over at Aunt Marianne. “Right, Mom?”
Aunt Marianne turned around from the stove, one hand on her hip. “Yes, that’s right,” she said. “Who would like to pick what we do today?”
Russell’s hand shot up. “Me!”
“Of course.” I sighed.
Russell scowled. “What’s wrong with me?”
Aunt Marianne laughed. “Nothing’s wrong with you, Russell. In fact, I was going to ask you if you would like to be the one to pick. Maybe Wren can do it next Sunday.”
Silver looked over at me and raised an eyebrow.
“Sure,” I said, although I couldn’t possibly imagine what I would pick.
“Okay, Russell,” Silver said. “It’s all you. What would you like to do today?”
“I want to go skydiving!” Russell shouted.
Aunt Marianne and Silver looked at each other.
“It has to be reasonable, Russell,” I said. “We don’t know how to skydive.”
“Silver said anything.” Russell glowered at me. “And that’s what I want to do.”
Aunt Marianne bit her lower lip. “Your sister’s right, sweetheart. It can be anything that we already know how to do.” Her eyes skittered around the top of the table, the way Momma’s sometimes did when she was thinking fast. “Last Sunday, for example, Silver wanted to eat breakfast in the tree outside. So we made really big egg-and-cheese biscuits and poured our orange juice into a thermos, and we climbed the tree outside and ate our meal up in the branches! Would you like to do something like that?”
“No,” Russell said. “That’s stupid.”
“Russell!” I yanked his pajama sleeve. “Mind your manners! No blankety-blanks.”
But Aunt Marianne and Silver just laughed. “That’s exactly it, Russell,” Silver said. “It can be stupid or dumb or silly, just like you said. The point is that you get to pick. And no matter what anyone else says or thinks, we all have to do it.” There was a pause. “Except for things that we don’t know how to do. Like skydiving.”
Russell made growling sounds for a few moments. He kicked the underside of the kitchen table and fiddled with his Captain Commando figurine. I could feel the back of my neck start to get hot as everyone waited.
“I want to go in a plane,” he said finally. “Just to sit.”
My heart fell as I began to anticipate the next scene Russell would throw. Sitting in a plane was just as impossible as skydiving. Sudbury didn’t even have an airport.
Aunt Marianne opened her mouth to say something and then shut it again. Without warning, her eyes lit up and she clapped her hands. “That’s a great idea, Russell!” she said. “And I know just the place we can go!”
“Where?” Silver asked.
Something was cutting off the air in the back of my throat. She wasn’t serious, was she?
“Come on!” Aunt Marianne stood up. “I’ll show you!”
Who knew Sudbury had an airport? It wasn’t a real airport, of course, or at least not like the ones I’d seen on TV, with the gigantic jet planes and endless runways. This airport was in the middle of a huge field. A slightly weedy runway cut down the middle of it, and off to one side, in a very small hangar, were four airplanes. Actually, even the word airplane was debatable, in my opinion. None of the pieces of junk inside looked like they could get to the end of the runway, let alone lift up into the sk
y.
“This is a glider airport,” Aunt Marianne explained as she parked Old Betsy. “It’s the only one in four counties. Before Grandma Ruthie and I moved to California, we used to come here all the time with Grandpa William. He was a glider pilot.”
She waved at someone as we got closer to the hangar. An older man dressed in a denim jumpsuit and a baseball cap ambled toward us, wiping his hands on an oil-stained rag. “I know that’s not little Marianne Woodbine,” he said. His voice was low and gravelly.
“Pete Moses!” Aunt Marianne beamed. “It’s me, all right! And look at you! Exactly the same, right down to your Red Sox cap!” Mr. Moses wrapped his arms around Aunt Marianne, laughing and smacking her hard on the back. I snuck a look over at Silver. She didn’t seem embarrassed at all. In fact, she was grinning.
“We’re here for the planes,” Russell demanded. “Where are they?”
“Just gliders here, little man,” Mr. Moses said, still holding Aunt Marianne around the waist. “No airplanes.”
Russell’s eyebrows narrowed. “But I said I wanted to go in a plane. Not a glider.”
“Oh, a glider is very much a plane, Russell,” Aunt Marianne said. “It just doesn’t have a motor.”
“How does it get up in the sky then?” Russell asked.
“A little plane has to pull it up into the sky with a big cable,” Aunt Marianne said. “And then once they’re both up high enough, and the wind is just right, it lets it go.”
“And then it just hangs there?” I looked at Aunt Marianne incredulously. “How can it do that? What if it falls?”
Aunt Marianne smiled and looked at Mr. Moses. “Gliders depend on two things,” he said, holding up his first and second fingers. “Its wings, which are shaped especially for flying, and the air.”
“So it has magic wings?” Russell’s eyes were huge.
“No, not quite magic,” Mr. Moses said. “I’ve got one over here that’s just about to go out. Come on and look.” The four of us traipsed inside the hangar after Mr. Moses. He had heavy work boots on that reminded me of Dad, and his eyebrows were thick and bristly.
Inside the building, an enormous glider was parked off to one side. With its long, narrow body, and sleek wingspan, it looked like a plane, except more modest. There was no row of windows, no fancy tail wings or lights. In fact, it was almost like someone had started to build a plane—and then stopped.
Mr. Moses pointed to the wings. “See how these babies are curved a little at the tip?” he asked. “That’s because gliders need to catch as much air as possible once they’re up there. The more air the glider catches, and the better the air itself is, the longer it can stay up. Completely on its own.”
“Wow,” Russell breathed. “Just like Captain Commando!”
“Can they sit inside, Pete?” Aunt Marianne clasped her hands together in front of her, almost as if she was about to beg. “Just for a little bit?”
“I’ll do you one better,” Mr. Moses said. “I’ve got a guy coming over in about ten minutes to take this one out. He can only fit one passenger in at a time, but I bet he’d be happy to take them up for a few practice runs.”
“Really?” Silver sounded awestruck and overjoyed at the same time.
“Yesssss!” Russell’s fist shot up into the air. “I’ve always wanted to go into a real plane!”
Somehow, I managed to retrieve my voice, which had plummeted down around my belly button. “Russell, no,” I said. “You should really just do something like that with Dad. And I don’t even know if he would …”
“Dad’s not here,” Russell interrupted. “And this guy said I could. And he’s in charge of the whole airport.”
“Russell.” I put both hands on his shoulders and leaned in close. He had to understand the seriousness of this. This wasn’t a game. It wasn’t even riding a horse. This was serious. Ten-thousand-feet-in-the-air serious. Momma had told me countless times how dangerous planes were. Especially after 9-11. It was why she never took them, why she’d spend three days traveling across the country in a train to get to Arizona. People died in planes every day. Every. Single. Day. It was just too risky. “Listen, you can’t, okay?” I said. “You just can’t. Not today.”
“You’re not the boss of me.” Russell looked over at Aunt Marianne. “Is she?”
Aunt Marianne cleared her throat. She looked over at Silver, as if hoping she might give her some advice, but Silver didn’t say a word. “Russell, honey. The plan was just to sit in the plane. Why don’t we keep it at that?”
“We got some passengers today?” a voice boomed out behind us.
We turned around and saw a man striding toward us holding a pilot’s cap. He was much younger than Mr. Moses and had a head of bright red hair.
“Me!” Russell hopped up and down as the man got closer. “I’m a passenger! I’m going with you!”
“Russell,” I tried again, pulling him to one side, and lowering my voice. “You cannot go up there by yourself. What if you get scared? What if you start to feel frustrated? You can’t kick anything in that plane like you do down here. If you get freaked out, there’s nowhere for you to go. Do you understand me?”
“But I won’t.” Russell was pleading with me now. “Come on, Wren. Stop being such a poop-head.”
“If you want to go with him, you can.” I looked over nervously, hoping the man was addressing someone else, but he was speaking directly to me. “The seat back there only holds one, but you’re about as wide as a beanpole. I bet we could fit both of you into it, and still have some room to spare.”
My heart missed a beat. The only thing scarier than the thought of Russell going up there alone was me going up there with him.
I wasn’t ready for that.
Not now, or ever.
“Go ahead, Wren.” Aunt Marianne was looking at me encouragingly. “You’ll love it. I flew in the glider a hundred times as a kid. It’ll be one of the best experiences of your life.”
“Try it, Wren!” Silver nodded her head behind her mother. “And then when they’re done, can I go?” she asked.
“Absolutely,” said the pilot.
And just like that, things started moving. I didn’t have time to protest, and even if I did, I doubt anyone would have heard me. Russell and I were helped into a space the size of a shoebox, directly behind the pilot’s chair. We sat side by side on the glider’s single passenger seat, which left about a quarter of an inch of room, and even less than that for my knees. Russell plastered himself against the tiny window, and began to smack it with his hands. “Yeehawwww!” he screamed. “I’m going flying! For real!”
I snatched at his hands, stricken. “Russell! Stop it! You’re going to break the window!” My voice was trembling. I was hot. Nauseated, too. What if—after the glider crashed, and Russell and I were killed—I threw up in front of everyone? What then?
Russell paused then and looked at me. “You’re sweating.” He pointed to my forehead, and then jabbed at my upper lip. “There, and there. You’re sweating. What’s wrong?”
Where could I start? I looked away, blinking back tears.
Russell put his arm around me as the plane began to pull our small aircraft out of the hangar. I craned my neck, trying to get a glimpse of the cord attached to the plane, but it was too far out front. Russell patted me lightly on the back, and kept patting me, over and over. Like a hundred times. “I’m right here, Wren,” he said. “It’s me. So don’t worry, okay? It’s just a little glider plane, Wren. That’s all it is. We’re going to be perfectly okay.”
I kept my eyes closed as our pilot began to talk. “We’ll be up in the air in about thirty seconds. Pete just needs to get the plane in front of us to pick up a little more speed.”
Beneath us, I could feel the single wheel beneath the belly of the glider moving faster. The sides of the glider began to tremble. “Russell,” I whispered.
“Move over more,” Russell ordered. “You’re stepping on my foot.”
I lifted
my foot without opening my eyes, and pushed my face into the soft leather seat.
“Okay!” the pilot said up front. “Here we go!”
Russell’s arm was still around me. I could feel his fingers squeeze my shoulder, his nails digging into my skin. I almost screamed as the glider tipped up, pushing Russell and me farther back into the seat.
“One thousand feet,” the pilot said into a small headset.
“One thousand’s nothing,” Russell muttered. “I want to go to a million feet. A zillion.”
“Russell, don’t talk.” I was holding my breath now, squeezing his other hand so tight that I was sure he was going to hit me at any second.
Instead, my brother said, “Why’re you squeezing your eyes, Wren? Don’t close your eyes! You’re missing all of it!”
I ignored him, aware only of the lightness in my head, the whooshing sound in my ears, and the odd, hollow sensation in my belly. My breathing began to come in short gasps, and the hair on my scalp prickled.
“Holy cow!” Russell sounded genuinely awestruck. “Holy Captain Commando!”
“Two thousand feet,” the pilot said. “Take a look, you two. It’s not every day you get to see the world from up here.”
Russell poked me right in the cheek. “You gotta look, Wren. You gotta look.”
Slowly, I peeled one eye open. Then the other. I forced an eyeball to the left, just barely peeking out of the window. My head turned a quarter of an inch. Then a half inch. I leaned forward just a little so that I could bring my eyes into focus.
It was hard to pinpoint exactly when my breathing started to slow, or when I stopped sweating. Actually, I might not have stopped sweating at all. But something did pause and then settle just the tiniest bit when I looked out at the view below, a patchwork of green-and-yellow fields punctuated every so often by a red or white silo. Blue swimming pools the size of dominoes gleamed up at us, and ribbons of highway, smooth as silk, meandered in and out of the lush countryside. It was so quiet up here. So quiet and beautiful.
The World From Up Here Page 11
