The Chance You Won't Return (13 page)

I breathed in and out slowly, then rested my foot on the gas pedal. The car crept forward. Nothing exploded. My arms didn’t feel like they were full of water. Someone could have passed us on foot, but it was all right. I was doing it again — driving and not dying.

“Hey, that’s it,” Jim said. “But we’re still kind of in the breakdown lane.”

I didn’t dare take my eyes off the road. “And?”

“We sort of need to be over in the actual road.” I opened my mouth to argue, but he said, “There might be glass or something around here.” Dammit. “It’s really easy. All you have to do is turn the wheel to the left a little. Like barely at all. And keep your foot like it is.”

The words got all jumbled up in my mind. Foot — where? Left? I kept going straight.

“Anytime now,” Jim said. When I didn’t turn, he rested his left hand on top of my right, holding the steering wheel. The slight contact made me almost stop breathing, but in a good way. “Here we go,” he said, helping me move the wheel just a little. The car veered back into the road, and Jim brought our hands back to their original position.

“Easy, right?” he said.

Inside my chest, my heart thudded. I had to keep from laughing like an idiot. “Yeah,” I said. “Super easy.”

He took his hand away from mine. “And look, you’re on the actual road. This is way better than just some stupid parking lot. One lesson and already you’re so much better than half the kids in Mr. Kane’s class.”

I laughed. “Right.” I wished I could have glanced over at Jim, but I was afraid if I did, something would go wrong and we’d end up flipped upside down in a ditch. As it was, the driving wasn’t so bad. It was so quiet around us, and the glow from distant houses was soft. The sun was just disappearing behind the horizon, making the sky purple and pink and orange and deep blue. My hand felt warm from where Jim had rested his on it. I wished he would touch me again, even something as small as that. Suddenly driving didn’t feel like being trapped or compressed; instead, it was like the car had opened up and we were gliding above the ground without any aid at all.

“Check you out,” Jim said. “Fifteen miles an hour!”

I glanced down and saw that he was right. For a second, I thought about slamming my foot on the brake — I could kill something at that speed — but I didn’t want to look too scared again. But now I kept glancing down to make sure we didn’t go too fast.

After a while, Jim asked if I wanted to try reversing. I stopped the car. “Oh, excuse me,” I said. “I forgot I had eyes in the back of my head.”

“You don’t need superpowers,” he said. “It’s easy. We’re not going to try to parallel park or anything. Just a little backing up. Like five feet. Just to get an idea of it.” When I didn’t say anything, he started talking about the little
R,
which meant reverse. And how it was the same as going forward; I just had to glance in my mirror and out the back window instead.

I gave it a try. At first, I wouldn’t let my foot press the gas pedal. Then I hit it too hard and we jerked backward before I could slam down on the brake.

“That’s okay. And look, you’ve already gone backward. Now, try again, only a little slower.”

This time I applied pressure carefully. At first I wasn’t sure if we were actually moving, it was so slow, but then I saw the ground retreat from under us. In the rearview mirror, the road came to meet the car. I hit the brake again. “I went backward!” I said.

“You can go two directions now,” Jim said. “Crazy, huh? You can basically go anywhere you want. Canada or Mexico.”

“I’m totally going to drive backward all the way to Canada. As long as it’s at five miles an hour.”

We drove around for a little while longer, mostly going forward. Jim even convinced me to try turning onto another street. It took me about ten minutes to get the courage to veer right — I didn’t want to go careening into someone’s fields — but I did it. By the time Jim and I traded places again so he could drive us home, I could practically feel little sparks shoot out of my skin. When I was finally allowed to drive in class again, I wouldn’t suck so much — I hoped. (I didn’t want to think about what driving would be like without Jim’s calm encouragement.)

And even better, aside from the first anxiety attack, I hadn’t thought about Mom or Amelia Earhart.

The next morning, I heard Dad waking Teddy up for school. Katy and I were allowed to sleep in, because we weren’t going to the hospital until a little later in the day. Teddy whined that he was the only one up and that we should have to wake up, too. Dad offered toaster waffles to make up for it.

For a second, I thought about getting up, too, and following Teddy off to school. Let Katy and Dad deal with Mom on their own. But I stayed where I was. I’d already disappointed Dad by telling Katy everything, anyway. It was supposed to have been the two of us, Dad and me. I didn’t want to see his face fall again, now that he was the only parent around who actually knew who I was.

When I fell back to sleep, I dreamed about being on the ground, prop planes flying overhead. I waved at them and shouted for them to come pick me up, but they only circled a few times before disappearing into the clouds.

I’d been to the hospital a few times before — when I was eight and broke my arm falling off the monkey bars at school, when Katy was nine and got stung by a bunch of bees, when I rode in the ambulance with Mom, and when I saw the baby who was born too soon. This time, Dad parked in a short-term lot and guided us through a part of the hospital I’d never been to, the psychiatric ward.

Somewhere, there were girls going to visit their mothers in the cancer ward. For a second, I wished I could be doing that instead. Then I realized how messed up that was. Who wants their mom to have cancer? It’s not like Mom was going to die. Unless she really wanted to emulate Amelia Earhart.

I’d expected patients running around in straitjackets, reenacting scenes from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
But it looked like any other part of the hospital. The waiting area had uncomfortable chairs, bad paintings of the ocean or a garden, and a nurse typing behind an old computer. The walls were shades of gray and yellow — cloudy or sunny, I thought.

Katy and I sat on opposite couches while Dad talked to the nurse. It was the first cool day of fall, so he was carrying an extra jacket for Mom, for when we took her home. When he came back from the nurses’ station, he told us that he had to talk to the doctor for a minute, and then we could all see Mom. “Wait right here, okay?”

He disappeared around the corner. For a few minutes, Katy and I listened to the sound of the nurse’s fingernails clicking against the keyboard. People walked by in jeans and T-shirts. I wondered if they were visitors or patients.

I glanced at the clock. If it had been any other day, I would have been in calc class, probably trying to convince my teacher that I’d done the homework. It was hard to tell which would have been preferable — public humiliation or sitting here under a watercolor of a rowboat. “Aren’t you glad I got you out of school?” I asked Katy.

She was flipping through an old issue of
Good Housekeeping.
“Mom never lets us skip school.”

“Amelia might.”

Katy put down the magazine. “Stop talking about her like she’s someone else. She’s not — she’s Mom and she’s confused, but she’s still Mom.”

After looking at Amelia Earhart pictures the past few days, I kept seeing her face imprinted over Mom’s in my mind. “I know that,” I said. “I just think we should be prepared. Things are different.”

“Duh,” she said. “I’m not five.”

A large group walked by, so we shut up. One woman hung back and sat beside Katy, yammering into the cell phone tucked under her neck. “No, I told you we couldn’t,” she said as she dug through her purse. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and expertly lit one. “No, that’s just not going to happen. We can’t.”

Katy frowned. “You’re not supposed to smoke in here.”

The woman blew smoke in my sister’s direction. “My son tries to kill himself and you’re trying to tell me what the fuck to do?” She turned her body away and went back to her conversation.

Katy looked like she wanted to shrink back into the cushions; her face was getting red, and she tried to shield herself with the magazine. At the desk, the nurse didn’t seem to notice either my sister or the cigarette.

“Come on,” I said, getting up and grabbing Katy’s arm. She followed, magazine still in her hand.

Dad had gone down the hall. I pulled Katy along, glancing into rooms to see if he was in any of them. Once, I caught the eye of a patient — a woman with muscular arms and stringy hair — and rushed past as if I’d intruded. Down the hall, I heard two voices speaking low. As I got closer, I could distinguish one of them as Dad’s.

“. . . insurance will cover this?” he was saying.

“Dad,” I said. Katy followed me into the room, practically hiding behind me. The doctor, a tall man with a beard and a clipboard hugged to his chest, had his mouth open to reply to Dad’s question but closed it when he saw us. The room was like any other in the hospital — a couple of beds, flimsy blankets, venetian blinds, tiled floors. Everything smelled like stale popcorn and antibacterial hand cleaner. Mom was sitting on the bed closest to the door, smiling at us pleasantly. I stopped. All the air in my lungs seemed to vanish, so for a second, I thought I would cry, but I managed to take a breath instead. I wondered how she saw me — who was I? She was wearing her own clothes, at least — jeans and a sweater, and not some awful hospital gown. For a second, I hoped Mom would call me by name, even to say something disapproving, but her face remained unchanged.

“Can you girls wait in the hall?” Dad said. “We’re just finishing up.”

“Nonsense,” Mom said, gesturing for us to come in. “You keep shoving girls out of the room and they’ll never learn anything.”

There she went again, acting like the champion of women’s rights even though she didn’t know who we were. She patted the bed beside her. Katy and I glanced at Dad, who shrugged and waved us in, so we walked stiffly to the bed. I sat next to Mom, while my sister perched beside me on the edge of the bed. Mom grabbed our hands and shook them enthusiastically. “Hello. Amelia Earhart. So glad you could come today.”

“Yeah,” I said, “me too.” I leaned away from her.

The doctor studied Mom. “So,” he said, his voice light but curious, “who do we have with us this afternoon?”

“Ninety-Nine business,” she said, beaming at my sister and me. “Some of the best aviators working today. You should see them in the air — natural as you please.”

Even though it wasn’t real, for a second it was kind of nice to see Mom so enthusiastic about my nonexistent flying skills. If she couldn’t say the same about my driving abilities, at least this was something. I didn’t remove my hand from under hers; she gave it a squeeze.
It’s Mom’s hand,
I had to remind myself.

The doctor made a note on his clipboard. “That’s encouraging. She feels comfortable with you.”

“She should,” Katy said. “She’s only known us since we were born.”

Mom’s smile drooped a little. She looked across me, to Katy. “Well, at least it feels like that,” she said.

They called it a delusional disorder. I’d never heard that phrase before. The bearded doctor, Dr. Cowan, told Dad about it while Katy and I were supposed to be helping Mom gather her things. It wasn’t like schizophrenia, Dr. Cowan explained. Mom wasn’t hearing voices or experiencing hallucinations. She wasn’t outwardly bizarre or impaired by her beliefs; a stranger could look at her and think she was totally normal. Mom simply disregarded any logic that countered her idea that she was Amelia Earhart. Most likely it had been caused by a great deal of emotional stress — some kind of trauma. With time, Dr. Cowan told us, she could be treated with therapy and medication. When Dad asked how much time, Dr. Cowan mentioned how psychotherapy varied with patients, and it generally took a while to find the right balance of medications for a particular person’s unique chemical imbalances.

“Why Earhart?” I asked.

Dad and Dr. Cowan turned to me, as if they’d forgotten I was in the room. In the bathroom, packing up her toiletries, Mom was talking to Katy about how excited she was to have us on board with the Ninety-Nines.

“I imagine it’s because of the intrigue,” Dr. Cowan said. “Earhart was an important figure in female aviation. She traveled all over the world. And then there’s the matter of her disappearance. Even now, people are still fascinated by her story.”

“But Mom’s never talked about her before. She’s never even talked about traveling anywhere.”

Dr. Cowan coughed and said it was probably a combination of reasons for choosing Earhart. Then Dad asked him something about therapists, so I had to go back to putting Mom’s clothes in a duffel bag. But Dr. Cowan’s answer left me empty. Anybody could have been interested in Amelia Earhart with reasons like that. But what about Mom specifically? If I could have become anyone, it wouldn’t have been Amelia Earhart.