The Chance You Won't Return (33 page)

I barely heard Mom as she spoke. She and Fred were ready this time, she insisted, not like that first try in Hawaii. It was an entirely different route. They were going to see so much — Brazil, Ethiopia, India. This was going to take flying one step further for everyone. This was going to mean something.

“You were just going to leave?” I managed to ask. “Like none of us mattered to you?”

She stopped flipping through one of her notebooks. “I never said that.”

“You promised you’d tell me before you left.”

“I know.” She reached into her bag. “I wrote you a letter —”

“That’s not the same thing,” I said. Now I was shaking. If I hadn’t come down to talk about Jim, I would have gotten up the next morning to find her gone. To maybe never see her again. I hated her and loved her so much in that moment; it felt like falling.

The floor swayed underneath me. “I have to get Dad.”

I was two steps out of the kitchen when Mom grabbed my arm. “No, you can’t. I’m leaving now.”

I stopped. It was a bad idea. But if I turned away now, maybe we would lose her forever. “Let me go with you. Either I go with you or I tell Dad.”

“No.” Her voice shook. “We can’t take passengers.”

We,
I thought. “Fred. I know where Fred is.”

For a second, neither of us breathed. Then Mom let me go, snatched her bag from the table, and headed toward the door. When I followed her, she didn’t object.

Before we left, I snagged my coat from the closet. In the pocket was my cell phone, where I’d left it since I didn’t expect to hear from Jim that night. I tapped out a quick text to him:
need help now please.
I hoped he would get it, and I hoped when he did I would know how to explain everything.

The car was already full of Mom’s things — the cobbled-together cockpit, cardboard boxes filled with maps, compasses and canteens, some extra clothes. She wasn’t planning on coming back.

I automatically slid into the driver’s seat. Mom didn’t protest. She didn’t even look at me as we rolled quietly out of the driveway and down the street. I’d thought that whenever she’d try to leave us for Amelia’s final flight, she’d be calm and happy as she moved determinedly toward nothing. But whenever I snuck glances at her, her face looked strained and stretched, as if it hurt just to sit there.

Amelia Earhart was tired, I thought. She wanted to be done after this big flight.

When we pulled up to Jim’s house, I saw a light on in his room, but it quickly switched off. I tried to pretend that didn’t hurt. I was about to shift the car into drive when the Wileys’ front door opened and Jim stepped outside, peering at our car.

I told Mom to wait a second and met Jim halfway up the front walk. I wished he’d hug me, but his hands were stuffed in the pockets of his hoodie. At least he didn’t look mad at me. “I need your help,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, voice a little scratchy. “I got your text. What is it?”

I took a couple of breaths. Outside of home, I hadn’t said the actual words before. And they seemed so ridiculous in my head that I didn’t know how they would even make sense when I actually said them. “My mom thinks she’s Amelia Earhart.”

Jim blinked. “She what?”

If I didn’t say it now, I never would, so I kept going. “She had, like, a nervous breakdown and thinks she’s Amelia Earhart — you know, the woman pilot who went missing in the 1930s?” Before Jim could even ask any questions, I started telling him everything quickly and all out of order — how I had to find her on Halloween because she wasn’t supposed to go off alone; how she freaked when Mr. Kane called her by her real name; how I had a little sister that was born too early and died; how Mom and I went driving on that snowy night and broke a mailbox; how now she wanted to go on Amelia Earhart’s last flight and I didn’t know what that meant, but I knew I had to stay with her and I needed Jim to be our navigator.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before,” I said. “I just didn’t know what to do.”

Jim didn’t say anything for a second, glancing between my mom waiting in the car and me. Then he nodded. “Let’s go.”

We held hands as we rushed to the car. I got behind the wheel, and Jim took a spot in the backseat. Mom didn’t turn around to see Jim. “Do you have everything we need?” she asked coolly.

“Um, yeah,” Jim said. “Right here.”

“I hope you haven’t been drinking.”

He glanced between Mom and me. I shrugged. “Not recently.”

“Good. I expect you to control yourself during this trip. The world will be watching us.”

I didn’t know where I was going when I started the car again, so I followed familiar paths from when Jim and I practiced driving, only now everything was dark and there was no one else on the street. Mom started pawing through her papers again. Every few minutes, she would pass one back to Jim to get his opinion on distances they’d have to travel and how much fuel they’d need. For the most part, Jim tried to agree with her, but nothing he said seemed to calm her. My hands stayed firm on the wheel without my even having to worry about it.

“Are you sure it’s enough fuel?” she asked. “I don’t know if we’ll make it. But we can’t take on the extra weight for fuel. It’s a long trip. It’s such a long trip. I don’t know.”

“Maybe you should wait,” I said. “You don’t have to leave now.”

Mom extracted a notebook from her bag.

“We can go back —”

“No.” Mom’s voice was so sharp, I nearly hit the brakes in surprise. Amelia Earhart was never this upset. “No, we need to go. Now. I can’t —” She took a deep breath and didn’t exhale for a while.

From the backseat, Jim reached out and rubbed my shoulder with his hand.

We were outside of town now, winding our way through the countryside. Barely any streetlights lined the road. The dark and quiet pressed against the glass and metal of the car.

“We’ll send the parachutes home once we get to New Guinea,” Mom said. “No use for them over the Pacific.”

Jim and I glimpsed each other in the rearview mirror. “Why not?” I asked.

“Even if you survive the crash, you’ve almost no hope for rescue,” she said. “No one would ever find you.”

“They won’t ever find you,” I said without meaning to. I knew arguing would upset her even more, but the words pushed themselves out. “Don’t you get that? Amelia Earhart never finishes her big trip. She dies somewhere out in the ocean.”

Mom tried to laugh, but it came out as a gasp. “What? I don’t —”

“Amelia never came back.” I hit the brake. We stopped in the middle of the road, vast fields on either side. “That’s the great finish to the story. You have to know that. Why are you doing this?”

For a second, she didn’t move. Every breath came faster until I thought she’d cry or scream. But then she threw the car door open and rushed into someone’s fields.

Jim and I ran silently after her. She was faster than I’d thought she’d be. We were halfway into the field when she slowed to a walk and wrapped her arms around herself. Jim circled around to her right, in case she turned toward the road. I stayed a few steps behind her, ready to run after her again. It was dark enough that I could have lost her if she got too far ahead of me.

Mom tilted her head toward the sky. “Clear tonight,” she said, sniffling. “It’ll be a good start. It will.”

“Mom, please.” I couldn’t remember the last time I’d called her that. Usually I avoided saying her name, or went with Amelia if I had to. I’d missed the sound of it and wanted to say it again. “Mom. Mom. Please.”

She stopped suddenly, shaking her head and trying to shield her body from me. “I need to go,” she whispered. “There are so many plans.”

“It’s not real,” I insisted, expecting her to run away again, but she stayed. “Amelia died. Years ago.”

Mom turned to me, her eyes red but unblinking. “No one dies. No one.”

There was a heartbeat, and then I saw everything before me, like clouds parting to reveal the earth below. “Amelia Earhart never dies,” I murmured. “She disappears. They never find her, so she never dies.” I thought of Mom curled up in bed after losing the baby; Mom in a hospital waiting room, waiting to see if she would die of cancer like her mother, always steeped in death. She must have wished she could float above it all, never letting death touch her again.

“Mom,” I said, “we’re still here. Don’t disappear, please.”

She inhaled, waited a second, then exhaled. Her face softened a little and she tilted her head to the sky. “Look at all those stars.”

I took a step toward her, and she didn’t back away. When I reached for her hand, she curled her fingers around mine. We stood there for a moment, leaning against each other and looking at the stars, Jim watching from a few feet away.

“That’s Vela,” Mom said, pointing to one part of the sky. “It means ‘sails,’ like on a ship.”

I tried to find the constellation she meant, but they all looked the same to me. I was about to ask her where it was exactly, but I saw someone walking toward us from the far end of the field. I turned to Jim, who had seen him as well. “We should go,” he said. Then we heard the wail of approaching sirens. Red and blue lights streaked across the fields. I gripped Mom’s hand in case she tried to run away.

“It’s okay,” I said to Mom and Jim and myself, but I didn’t think it would be.

We were caught trespassing. I tried to explain that we weren’t just kids messing around, but the man who owned the strawberry fields didn’t seem to buy it.

“This is my livelihood,” he said. “I can’t have a bunch of people tramping through my strawberry fields at any time of the night.”

“We weren’t tramping,” I said. “My mom just needed to get some air. She wasn’t feeling well.”

Mom didn’t say anything to back me up, but at least she wasn’t introducing herself as Amelia Earhart. And the police officer wasn’t taking my word or Jim’s, especially after he found out that Jim also crashed into his home last year.

“You’re all going to have to come with me,” the officer said tiredly.

We trudged through the fields and climbed into the backseat of the police car. He didn’t use the sirens as we sped back into town, leaving Mom’s car behind us at the side of the road.

I’d never been inside the police station before, but it was smaller than I’d expected and not very active at three in the morning. Instead of being shoved into a cell, we were directed to a wooden bench by the wall. Mom and Jim sat, but the police officer pulled me aside.

“Is your mom all right?” he asked me.

I stared at him for a second. He hadn’t been a jerk to us so far, and his eyes seemed genuine. “She’s been depressed,” I said. “She was feeling really bad tonight. Can I call my dad?”

When Dad answered the phone, he was still half asleep and didn’t quite understand what had happened until he heard the words “police station.” He rushed through the station doors, what seemed like seconds later, in rumpled clothing, his hair a mess. He took a step toward me, but the police officer waved him over. For a moment, Dad stood apart with the officer, talking in low voices. Then the officer strolled over to us and nodded to the door.

“Sounds like this was just a case of wrong place, wrong time,” he said. “You weren’t causing any real mischief, so we’re gonna let you go with a warning. Just make sure it doesn’t happen again.” He looked at me. “Take care, now.”

Dad guided us out to the parking lot. I didn’t even know how to begin to explain what happened, so I stayed quiet. Dad didn’t ask questions, either.

When we dropped Jim off, the windows in his house were still dark. “See you later,” he said to me, and I nodded. I watched him run up the front walk and disappear inside the house.

In the backseat, Mom stared at the houses flashing by, all dark. She hadn’t said anything since we were alone in the field. I wanted to tell her that I was glad she hadn’t disappeared, that things might still suck but they would be okay eventually, that we weren’t going to leave her, either. But instead I just said, “Mom,” and it came out as a sob.

She turned. Her eyes were still red, but she looked at me, waiting for me to speak.

“That was Jim,” I said, wiping away tears with the cuff of my shirt. “He’s my boyfriend.”

The edges of Mom’s lips curved up. “He seems like a nice young man.”

Dad glanced between us as he eased the car back into our driveway. But after he turned off the engine, he didn’t move. I braced myself for a lecture about how dangerous it was to drive into the middle of nowhere with Mom, or how lucky we were that the police officer was so understanding, but it didn’t come. His face was wilted, not angry. At first I thought he might be tired or disappointed, but there was something softer behind his eyes. He brushed his face with the palm of his hand.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “I —”

“Alex, you can’t keep doing stuff like this,” he said. “First it’s the mailbox, and then you’re nearly arrested. You could get everyone seriously hurt.”

“She was leaving.” My voice was small and calm. “I couldn’t let her go alone.”

He caught Mom’s eye in the rearview mirror. After a moment, he sighed. “It’s okay. I’m just glad you’re safe. Come on, let’s get a few hours’ sleep.”

Outside the car, Dad took a step toward the house and stopped. Suddenly he turned back on his heel and pulled me into a fierce hug. “I’m sorry,” he said, and pressed a kiss on the top of my head. “I’m so sorry.” I held tight back, as if we’d both fly apart otherwise. When I pulled away, I saw I’d left tearstains on his shirt, but Dad didn’t seem to notice or care.

We trudged back into the house, walking so close together that our shoulders touched.