The Chance You Won't Return (8 page)

At the end of the parking lot, I pressed the brake and put the car into park. I wasn’t ready for turning yet. Even so, I thought that if Jim hadn’t been there, I would have danced like an idiot. “Oh, my God!” I said. “I didn’t hit anything!”

He laughed. “Yeah. Mr. Kane can sleep easy now.”

I wondered if I could repeat this experience in class. It would be more difficult with Mr. Kane and his clipboard, classmates in the backseat, and orange cones all lined up. Maybe this was a fluke.

Jim must have seen my face fall, because he said, “We could try this again sometime. I promise I won’t teach you how to demolish your house.”

Let’s do this again sometime
— it was something I’d have expected to hear on a date, even though I knew driving around the parking lot with Jim Wiley didn’t exactly qualify. Still, it was something. And maybe eventually I would be able to guide the car out of the parking lot, away from the high school, across town and onto the highway.

“A little demolition would be all right,” I said.

Since my driving skills were still limited to a straight line, Jim drove me home. After he’d crashed into his house, his license had been suspended for six months. He told me he missed being behind the wheel and didn’t mind chauffeuring. All my mom’s radio stations were set to light rock, so I had to fiddle around with the dial, trying to find something that didn’t suck too much. We drove by the houses I passed every day, windows glowing warmly.

“So what’s the driving fear about?” Jim asked. “Were you in a bad crash or something when you were a kid?”

I tapped a finger against my seat belt. I hadn’t talked about this with anyone else — not Theresa, not Mr. Kane, not even my parents. But Jim had helped me actually drive, so I thought he might understand. “Sort of,” I said. “I mean, nothing happened. I was like four and ran after a ball into the street — you know, like kids do — and this car stopped just in time.”

It was one of my earliest memories. Katy was a baby, and Mom was doing tummy time with her in the yard. I threw my ball into the air and caught it over and over; then I missed and raced after it, even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to. I didn’t want it to roll down the street and away forever. I don’t remember the car approaching, but I remember the screech of the brakes and my mom screaming, “Alex, no!” Then she was screaming at the driver, who got out of the car in a panic. He tried to apologize, but Mom kept shouting, “You could have killed her!” She held me so fiercely, I thought she was yelling at me, too, which made me start crying.

“I was okay and everything,” I told Jim. “But I keep thinking I could do that to someone. I didn’t even know I’d be like this until driver’s ed. I mean, I’m fine if I’m a passenger. Right now I don’t care if you go a hundred miles an hour.” Then I remembered this was the guy who broke part of his house. “Not that I want you to.”

Jim laughed; it was a good laugh, a throaty tenor. “All right, no drag racing until your third time out.”

“Thanks so much. But, yeah, I don’t know what the deal is. Driving’s not something I’ve ever really looked forward to, like everyone else. I used to think I’d like it once I started, but I never thought I’d get so freaked out by it.”

“And that’s where the football field comes in.” He grinned. “You should’ve kept going, right from one end zone to the other.”

“Maybe next time,” I said. “If Mr. Kane lets me drive again.” That reminded me of the disastrous meeting between Mom and Mr. Kane. Between the successful drive across the school parking lot and actually being in a car with Jim Wiley, I’d kind of forgotten. Now my stomach clenched as I realized we were getting closer to home. I didn’t know what I’d find there. Given the choice, I would rather have been back in driver’s ed, with Mr. Kane and the Volvo.

“He will,” Jim said. “Mr. Kane loves the underdog. He didn’t look at me like I was a crack addict when I came back this year.”

I was surprised Jim brought it up. We didn’t exactly hang out a lot, but I never heard him brag about driving into his house. “So where were you, anyway?” I said, tugging at a stray thread on my shirt.

“Well, with the crashing into the house thing, my parents got the idea I was not really doing anything with my life — and I guess that was true — so they sent me to stay with my grandparents in Indiana, way out in the boonies. Like even more than here.”

“Fun.”

He shrugged. “When I was a kid, I liked going to see them a lot. They have this soybean farm, so there was a lot of space to run around. I was kind of into it.” I imagined Jim in a pair of overalls and a trucker hat, and I tried not to laugh. “And my grandparents are okay, so I went.” He turned down my street. “It was kind of good to get away for a while.”

Maybe Mom needed to get away for a little while, too. Except instead of going somewhere, she’d decided to be Amelia Earhart.

“It’s the yellow one on the right,” I told Jim as we approached my house. “You can just pull right in the driveway.” Inside, several lights were on — more than just Katy’s and my room and Teddy’s room. Dad and Mom must have gotten home already.

Jim turned off the engine and the headlights. “How are you going to get home?” I asked. I hadn’t thought that far in advance. If he wanted a ride, my dad would have to give it to him. And I wasn’t sure I wanted Jim coming inside the house yet, depending on what we’d find.

“I’ll walk,” he said. “I don’t live too far.” I wanted to say that I knew, that I had seen his house before, and I had even seen when the front corner had been smashed off, when he drove his parents’ car straight into their bedroom — their closet, actually. I was walking Jackson early one Sunday morning when I saw the cluster of police officers, firefighters, Wileys, and a few neighbors with coats over their pajamas. Steering Jackson in that direction, I could see the hole at the front left corner of the Wiley house. Mrs. Wiley’s quilted slippers and winter boots poked out, and a couple of her long skirts fluttered in the breeze. Mrs. Wiley herself stood on the lawn in a nightgown and a George Mason University sweatshirt, talking to an officer. She explained, “We felt it before we knew what it was.” Mr. Wiley kept touching the broken edges of brick and plaster, as though he could understand what had happened if only he could gather the pieces together. From what I could see, Jim wasn’t there. Maybe they’d already taken him to the police station or the hospital. I didn’t tell anyone about seeing the accident — not my friends, not the girls on the soccer team, no one. It was all anyone was talking about, but for some reason it felt like my own secret. And even after the driving lesson with Jim, it felt like too much to admit.

Dad’s silhouette passed in front of the living room, then retreated again. I didn’t see Mom with him. Maybe she was better, like Dad had promised, but if she wasn’t, I didn’t want to go inside and find out. I didn’t even unbuckle my seat belt.

“Your parents are going to be okay with me driving?” Jim asked. “Sometimes people get protective about their cars.”

“Insurance and everything,” I said.

“Right.”

I shook my head. “No, it’s fine.” I wanted to stay there and talk about anything, even car insurance, but my father passed by the window again and I could tell he was waiting for me. “Thanks. For driving and helping me drive and everything.”

“No problem,” Jim said. “You’re really not that bad.”

We swung out of the car, Jim tossing me the keys as he rounded the trunk. “See you tomorrow,” he said, and I waved good-bye. He shoved his hands into his pockets and strode down the driveway and across the street, moving through the cold glow of the streetlights. I watched him until he cut through a neighbor’s yard and disappeared.

Inside, someone had left the TV on. Usually I would have shouted hello, but now I just stood in the kitchen, listening for footsteps elsewhere in the house. But my father must have heard the door close, because he walked in from the living room.

Before he could say anything, I told him, “I brought the car back. We had to leave it at school today.”

“Yeah,” he said. His face was drawn, and he absently rubbed the shoulder he’d pulled the day before. “I saw.”

On the table was a stack of mail. I began sifting through it, trying to find something with my name, but everything was addressed to my parents:
Mr. and Mrs. Winchester; David Winchester; Mrs. Janet Winchester.
I turned over the envelopes so I wouldn’t have to see the names.

“I didn’t drive,” I said. “It was a friend.”

“Yeah, I saw that, too.” He glanced toward the door as if to find Jim standing there. “That wasn’t Josh, was it?”

“No, it was Jim. Jim Wiley. It was the only way to get home. And he drove carefully. I don’t know how you guys are about that, other people driving your cars.” I wanted him to yell at me. At least it would have been a conversation about something else. Not the conversation I knew was coming.

“Alex, that’s fine,” he said. “I don’t care about the car. Let’s sit down, all right?” He guided me into the living room, where the news was still on. A tornado had ripped through a small town in Oklahoma; they were interviewing people in front of shredded homes and piles of wreckage.

“Good thing we don’t live out there, right?” I said, sitting on the couch, next to Jackson. I scratched around his ears, so he put his head on my lap. “They say the sky goes green before it happens.”

Dad switched off the TV. “So I took your mom to the hospital.”

“I know,” I said. “It’s Lyme disease, right? That’s what you said it would be.” Lyme disease was better than a brain tumor. Mom had gotten a tick bite and didn’t notice. She’d end up on antibiotics. Everything would be fine in a week.

Dad leaned forward in his chair, forearms resting on his knees. “They did some tests, and that’s probably not the case.”

“Well,” I said, “what is it?”

“They’re not really sure right now.”

“What do you mean, ‘they’re not sure’?” I could hear my voice getting louder. “They’re doctors. It’s their job to know these things. They didn’t just let her leave like that, did they?”

Dad shook his head. “She’s still at the hospital and now she refuses to respond to any name except Amelia Earhart. They — they’re not sure if it’s medical. They recommended a psychiatrist —”

“So they can’t do anything for her?” I wanted the doctors to provide a simple explanation and give Mom a week’s worth of medication, erasing anything unhinged in her brain. Otherwise, she would go on thinking that she was Amelia Earhart. What were we supposed to do with her like that? She wouldn’t even know who we were.

“Hey, calm down.” Dad glanced briefly over his shoulder. “I haven’t told your brother or sister yet.”

“They don’t know Mom’s nuts?”

“She’s not nuts, Alex. And I don’t think they have to know until it’s absolutely necessary.”

I thought of Teddy and Katy upstairs, maybe worried that Mom had Lyme disease or pneumonia or malaria or whatever. Maybe they were even thinking about when she wouldn’t get out of bed for a week. But they didn’t know that Mom wasn’t Mom anymore, that she was Amelia Earhart. That maybe she would drive off a cliff in the car, thinking she was flying a plane. I wished I could have been upstairs, too, unaware of all the cracks in Mom’s mental state.

“So where is she? In the psych ward?” I didn’t like the thought of my mom around people who heard voices and tried to claw out their own eyeballs.

“It’s not like an asylum,” Dad said. “They’re just keeping an eye on her.”

I pulled Jackson onto my lap. He licked my neck. “When is she coming back?”

Dad sighed and scratched his beard. “Once they have an idea about what’s going on, I guess. Probably in a few days. Honestly, Alex, we can’t really afford to keep her in there forever.”

But what if she wasn’t better? How were we supposed to talk to her at breakfast? Somebody would have to take care of her. What if people found out? They’d have to, eventually, if she were just around, calling herself a famous pilot. That’s who I’d be at school — not even the girl who was death on wheels, but the girl with the crazy mom. We couldn’t let her come home until she was better again. They had to make her better again.

Before I could tell Dad any of this, he said, “And please don’t mention anything to your brother or sister, all right?”

“Then why are you telling me?”

Dad leaned forward, hands clasped together. “I’m going to need your help, Alex. We’re not in a great situation, and I’ll need you to do things around here and help with your mom when she comes back.”

I looked away, my throat tightening.

“And besides,” Dad said, taking my hand, “you were right there today. Wouldn’t you be upset if I’d lied to you instead?”

No,
I thought. I wanted him to lie. To tell me Mom had the bubonic plague or leprosy or whatever. I would have believed him. But I still would have been wondering. “Fine,” I said. “I’ve got homework to do, so . . .”

“All right.” Jackson jumped down from my lap and went to sit by Dad’s feet. Dad didn’t seem to notice.