Flight (30 page)

The orphan one. Her mother, an older cow,

Died in the birth.

We were raising her on the bottle.

It isn’t hard.
”

Margaret glanced around the room. There was total silence, everyone listening, eager. Some people were smiling. She wondered if they were making fun of him.

“
Until then she didn’t move much.

But that day she got away,

And ran all the way through the field

And found that sweet spot

Where you’re safe from the wind

And the sun makes the grass warm.

I didn’t want to wake her.

I wanted to leave her there, happy.

But I had to. I had to catch her. That’s my job.

I keep cows.
”

He stopped. Margaret wondered if he was finished or if he had just run out of inspiration. He nodded, a short, stiff nod that
seemed to say he was done. The silence that followed was like the edge of a precipice. Margaret was beginning to feel sick, from anger or pity, when the applause began. The noise of it startled her. It seemed to startle Doug more. There were whoops and shouts and the stomping of feet.

They’re not making fun,
Margaret thought.
They really liked it.
She watched Mare clapping and thought of how she had admired Doug in his Pennzoil T-shirt.

“That was so great!” Mare cried as Doug waded toward them, grinning. “We had no idea you were so lyrical!” The others squawked their agreement, and Margaret stood back, watching Doug’s pleased discomfort as the little crowd enfolded him.

For the rest of the evening, Doug was the hero. One of Mare’s friends went to buy him a beer, and others grouped around him, talking and laughing.

“Was that a true story?” Margaret heard one of them ask.

Doug glanced at Margaret before answering. “Naaaaah,” came his slow reply.

Doug’s success emboldened a few more poets, and there were further entrants. All were well received, but no one generated as much enthusiasm as Doug. After each poem, Mare’s crowd assured him that his was better. Doug seemed baffled by the attention. His head turned toward Margaret regularly.

Finally, everyone who wanted to had spoken, and the judges retired to decide the winner. Margaret stood with the others, trying to look pleased. At one point she looked across the room to see David standing at the bar. He winked and raised his beer to her.

When the MC stepped up to announce the winner, Margaret was standing next to Doug. He was on his fourth beer and starting to seem a bit dazed. Mare, at his other side, put an arm around him and squeezed. “Good luck!” She beamed.

Doug looked at Margaret. She attempted an encouraging smile. He leaned toward her, as if to say something, but then hesitated, seemingly lost in consideration. He didn’t seem to hear the MC announcing that Leah had won.

“Yay, Leah!” Mare shouted. She glanced over at Doug, still clapping. “Yours was great, too,” she said apologetically.

“Oh well,” Doug said, tilting his head. “I could’ve used that hundred.”

Mare tried convincing them to come to an afterparty in her suite, but Margaret demurred. Doug stood quietly behind her as she lied and said his bus left too early. They made their way to the door in a crush of people, many of whom stopped to shake Doug’s hand. By the door, Margaret felt a hand squeeze her arm.

“Next week it’s improv lock-picking,” David’s voice murmured in her ear. “We’ll see who takes you home then.” He winked and turned around, rejoining a circle of people who looked like faculty.

Outside, it was colder than it had been since school began.

“Smells like snow,” Doug said as they walked toward her dorm. Margaret didn’t reply. They walked in silence the rest of the way back.

“Margaret,” Doug said when they reached the door. “Stop a minute. Are you mad at me?”

Margaret turned from the door, key in hand. “Why would I be mad?”

“I don’t know, but it feels like you are.” He had his hands in the pockets of his coat, a brown Carhartt jacket that ended at the waist. It made him look even bulkier than usual. Margaret had seen those coats a thousand times. They were sold at the hardware store in Ryville.

“I’m not mad,” she said, but as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. There was a glowing ember of anger inside her that refused to die.

He shoved his hands deeper into the pockets, gazing up at the sky. “The stars look different here,” he said. “I always wondered about that.” He breathed in, turning away from her, and Margaret could sense him struggling, longing to grasp at something. “There are so many things I …” He stopped, the incomplete sentence breathing between them like an invisible animal. Margaret could have helped him. She could sense him waiting for a hand, for the encouragement to find his own thoughts. She turned toward the door.

“Did you like my poem?” he asked. Margaret turned halfway back and leaned over to look down at her feet. Her clunky oxfords gleamed in the light from the dorm windows.
Say something,
she told herself.
Say anything.
She felt herself shaking her head, as if to deny that the question was answerable.

“It was fine,” she said at last. “It was … funny.”

“Funny?” Doug said. “It was funny?” His brow darkened, and abruptly, all Margaret wanted was for him to be gone, back in Michigan where he belonged.

“Not funny, exactly,” she said. “Amusing. It was amusing.”

“Amusing?” The darkness in his face turned to confusion. Margaret felt bad. She shouldn’t have said it. It wasn’t even true. But something wouldn’t let her retract it. She shuffled her feet.

“It seemed easy at first,” Doug said. “Until I got up there. I wasn’t sure I could do it. I wanted to, but I wasn’t sure I could.” His face was open; he was offering her something. “But then the words just sort of came. I wasn’t even sure I was done until I heard the clapping and cheering.”

“Yeah, well.” Margaret shrugged. “They shouldn’t have done that.”

“They shouldn’t have?” Emotion moved through Doug’s face. For a second he looked insulted, but then he saw Margaret’s meaning. He looked away from her, and the hurt in his face made Margaret hate herself. Why was she making him think they’d laughed at him? As far as she could tell, they hadn’t. But how would she know, really? They could have been laughing at her, too. Margaret, the country girl, out of her league. She looked at Doug in his bulky jacket and wished he had never come.

“Come on,” she said. “Let’s go inside. It’s cold out.”

They slept side by side, not touching. The next day Doug took the noon bus home. In silence they rode to the station, and when they got there, they found his gate without exchanging words. There they stopped, and it seemed as if they might not even say goodbye. Finally Doug spoke.

“I really liked the aquarium,” he said. “I liked the whole city.” He stopped, unsure whether to go on.

Margaret stepped in quickly. “Chicago’s great,” she said. “You’d like the Museum of Science and Industry, too. There’s a lot to see there. You should go sometime.” She said it with finality.

“Maybe I will,” Doug said, understanding. “Goodbye, Margaret.”

“Goodbye, Doug.” She looked at his elbow, a neutral place.

After a moment, Doug hitched his duffel bag onto his shoulder and turned toward the bus. Seeing the back of him, Margaret felt an urge to stop him, to grab his arm and at least hug him goodbye. In the second it took him to climb onto the bus, a wave of homesickness rushed over her. She longed to run and join him, to watch the city slide away and see flat, dull Michigan roll into view.

The bus engine turned over with an asthmatic cough. A woman ran past Margaret, and the driver opened the door. She was carrying a tennis racket. Margaret was reminded of her mother, who had always talked about the tennis club she belonged to in Chicago, before they moved to the farm. Every summer, she worked on the girls’ tennis strokes. They would throw balls up in the air and serve them against the barn, racing back and forth to hit them. They would keep going until the ball hit a clump of grass or a stone from the gravel drive and bounced crazily off.

“It’s a grass court,” their mother would say, her eyes squinted against the sun, determination edging her jaw. “Even Wimbledon has grass courts.”

Margaret swung an arm back now, as if holding a racket. Her tennis stroke was smooth and firm, perfectly respectable.
Not bad, Brain,
Alexis had said when they went to hit some balls once.
You could be a jock if you weren’t such a bookworm.

The feel of the stroke pulled Margaret backward. Following her arm’s momentum, she turned around. Behind her she heard the hissing of unclenched brakes, then a long, slow grinding of gears. The bus was backing out, but she didn’t stay to see it leave.

THE RUN-THROUGH IS AT TEN. ALL THE WAY TO THE
country club, Leanne is thinking the same thing.
There’s no way out. You have to go through with this now.
She sits with her mother in the backseat. Her cousin Eddie is meeting them there. Whatever she felt for Kit when she agreed to do this seems far off. He’s wearing an ugly short-sleeved plaid shirt that she’s never seen before, and his elbows are sharp and too pointed. He’s riding in the front seat with her father—Carol insisted—and when he turns to Will to make a comment, he has never looked more like a stranger.

She’s a stranger to him, too. She has become her former self: the quiet girl, the follower, the girl brooding in the backseat while her father drives and her sister does all the talking. Except it’s Carol next to her, breathing in quickly and slapping her own thigh lightly whenever Will goes too fast or slides through a stop sign without really stopping. It’s a relief when the sign for the country club appears around a curve.

“Here we are,” Will says. He roars across the parking lot and pulls the car into a spot near the clubhouse door.

“Did Margaret see you make that last turn?” Carol frets. Margaret insisted on taking her own car, because in the family car, she’d have had to hold Trevor on her lap instead of having him in the car seat. “It’s not even legal for him to be out of it,” she had declared.

“It’s just a few miles,” Will had said, and Leanne had sensed the hardening around the edges that meant her sister was gearing up to get her way. Will had shrugged but then driven fast, as if wanting to punish Margaret by losing her. But every time Carol twisted around to check, she made the little
humph
that meant the Rabbit was there.

“If she didn’t see me turn, she wasn’t paying attention,” Will mutters. But Leanne can see his face in the mirror, and his eyes are bright with amusement. Sure enough, the Rabbit appears and zooms toward them, cutting across the white parking-space lines.

“Well,” Kit says in a light tone, “let’s get this over with, shall we?”

“The list of things we need to do after this is on the fridge,” Carol says to Leanne as they walk toward the clubhouse. “You’ll be checking on Kit’s mother’s room when we get home, then Margaret’s going to do your nails. We have to make sure you only do light work if you help us set up, so you don’t wreck them.”

“There are worse things than getting married with your nails unpolished,” Leanne says, but Carol shoots her such a wounded look that she immediately regrets it. “Don’t worry,” she says, backtracking. “I’ll be fine.” Carol keeps on looking at her, as if assessing her mental condition, so Leanne looks up at the sky. It’s a classic Michigan sky, deep blue, dotted with a few drifting, fluffy clouds, throw pillows on a magnificent blue sofa. The sky in New York never quite looks like that—it’s flatter, without as much depth. She imagines Mexico City’s sky as an even darker blue, a wide azure bowl arching over the endless tangle of life below.

“Yoo-hoo! Bride and groom!” It’s the determined voice of events coordinator Lori. She’s standing on the lawn where the trellis has been set up. A few chairs have been put in place to mark off the wedding area. Standing with her is their cousin Eddie and another man Leanne doesn’t recognize.

“Eddie!” she says, genuinely happy to see him. He grins, still awkward at thirty-five, and gives her a clumsy, tentative hug.

“Hey there, slugger!” he says to Trevor as Margaret walks up. His awkward grin warms to a real smile. He and Margaret were always close; Leanne was the third wheel. They used to lock her out of rooms, pick on her until she ran away, angry. When they went somewhere fun, they would sneak out of the house so she couldn’t sulk until Carol made them take her along. Now Eddie always acts vaguely nervous around Leanne, as if she’s going to reprove him for all those years of teasing.

“Hey, Eddie,” Margaret says. In spite of Eddie’s warmth, she seems on edge, nervously twisting her hair with one hand and holding Trevor tightly with the other, ignoring his struggle to get free. She keeps glancing around as if expecting someone else to arrive.

“Don’t go over there,” she says when Trevor gets loose and makes for the lake. “You stay here, near us.”

“Bride and groom, this is Kevin, the justice of the peace,” Lori says. She must call everyone that to avoid having to learn their names. “He’ll lead you through the walk-through today.”

“Okay,” Kit says when Leanne doesn’t respond. Some part of her has decided never to answer to the generic “bride.”

“It’s a pretty simple ceremony we’re looking at, isn’t it?” Kevin says. He’s a tall, rangy man who looks too young for his job. There’s a gap between his two front teeth. “Leanne, is it? You have no wedding party, right? Will your father be walking you down the aisle?”

Leanne shifts her weight. “I guess, yeah.” She glances quickly at her father, then looks away. Everything seems too real, too intimate, somehow.

“Okay, then, uh …” Kevin glances at his piece of paper. “Kitto, is it? You’ll be up here with me, and your best man, too.” Kit and Eddie move easily to Kevin’s left side, both grinning like kids in on a stupid joke.