The Chance You Won't Return (10 page)

“Awesome serve!” someone from the fence yelled.

“All right, all right,” Mrs. Harriott said, “one more try.”

I managed to hit the ball this time, although it was into the net again, so Mrs. Harriott let me go to the end of the line, saying I’d get it next time. I barely heard her. I was still thinking of Amelia Earhart. My mom was becoming this person, and all I had of her were these little facts I’d learned in class. What was Mom thinking about in the hospital? Was she imagining herself as a young Amelia Earhart, playing tennis and pounding together a homemade roller coaster? Was she sitting in her hospital bed, thinking she was flying? Could she see the sky right now, bright blue and dotted with clouds? Did she see it the way she’d always seen it, or did she know what it felt like to fly through those clouds? And how could she? Was it just her imagination, or had she searched for the answers without any of us knowing what she was doing?

A hand waved in front of my face — Jim’s. “A little spaced-out?” he asked.

“Oh, no,” I said, sliding my fingers through one of the links in the fence. “Just one of those days, I guess.”

Now Maddie was serving. Her racket sent the ball flying with a twang into the next court. I lifted my face to the sun, closing my eyes and listening to the thunk of the ball bounce, and then another thwack of the racket.

Next to me, I heard Jim shift his feet. “So were your parents okay about the car?”

I wished the talk with my dad had been that simple. “Oh, totally. But my sister was worried that we’d destroyed the school gym or something.”

He laughed. “I wish. That could have gotten us out of class today.”

When I opened my eyes, Jim was glimpsing me from the side. God, he was cute. I couldn’t help smiling. “More time to practice driving.” I liked the thought of Jim and me practicing anything together, preferably just the two of us in very close proximity.

But the clear skies and another thwap of a tennis racket reminded me of Amelia again. I wondered if my mother was practicing being a famous missing pilot.

Instead of going to the cafeteria for lunch that afternoon, I slipped into the library. With institutional bookcases and hard-backed wooden chairs, it wasn’t exactly a place I usually hung out. Plus, the selection was pretty limited. (More money went to our football team, who apparently couldn’t win unless they had a perfectly manicured field.)

At one table, a group of kids was playing chess. Two librarians were sorting books at the front. A handful of kids were on the computers, checking Facebook or doing research for papers on
Lord of the Flies.
The rest of the library was deserted, thankfully. I strolled through the science section and past the history books before stopping in front of the biographies. I ran my finger over the spines — John Adams, Robert Browning, Winston Churchill. For a minute, I didn’t let my brain register what I was doing.

I just want to see if it’s here,
I thought.

I stopped at two slim volumes — basic biographies, like the ones I’d read for projects in middle school. The name stared back at me twice:
Amelia Earhart, Amelia Earhart.

She was on both covers. One was a full-length picture of her standing by a plane, wearing baggy pants and a scarf, the uniform Mom had recently adopted. Amelia’s face was a little tense, as though trying not to squint as she looked into the sun. The other photograph was closer up, of Amelia sitting in a plane, her hair covered by an aviator’s cap and goggles. Her features were surprisingly soft. I’d imagined someone harsher, who’d survived near-death experiences and didn’t have time for moisturizer. She looked so young. I wondered when it was taken. She was probably closer to my age than Mom’s.

The back covers talked about the mystery of her disappearance, how she broke down barriers for female aviators, and how she was beloved the world over. It was all information I could have gotten from Wikipedia, but I didn’t want to look up anything online in case someone saw me or saved the search history.

One of the librarians, the younger one, wheeled by with a cart. I clutched the books to my chest, feeling like I’d been caught with porn or
Mein Kampf.

“Need any help?” the librarian asked.

“No, thanks, I’m fine,” I said.

She smiled with her lips pressed together. “I’ll be in History if you need me.”

So will Mom,
I thought, and laughed. But when the librarian raised her eyebrows, I tried to turn it into a cough. “Right. Thanks so much.”

I waited until she wheeled over a few rows before looking at the biographies again. Thumbing through them, I caught sight of things Mom mentioned — a sister nicknamed Pidge, a husband named George (who was also her manager), and names of planes, like the Lockheed. How did she know? Had she learned about this kind of thing before, like when she was in high school, or did she pick up a book recently and everything snowballed from there? She could have been doing research for years without any of us noticing. It would have seemed so ordinary for her to pick up a biography.

In the middle of one book, there was a section of pictures — Amelia in a parade, Amelia standing beside dozens of different planes, Amelia with George Putnam, who was always in a suit. Turning the pages, my stomach twisted with anger.

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.

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 objects; 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?