Takeoffs and Landings

  Someone knocked on the door.

  “Lori?” Mom called softly.

  Even though the door was locked, Lori scrunched back against the tub.

  “What?” she said.

  “If it bothers you so much, I’ll stop telling any stories about you,” Mom said. “I’ll cut you out of all of my speeches.”

  Lori wondered why she didn’t feel the least bit triumphant. She felt almost rejected instead. Didn’t Mom want to talk about Lori?

  Lori reminded herself Mom was giving in; Lori had won. She stood up and opened the door a crack.

  “Promise?” she asked.

  Mom nodded. “I—I remember being fourteen,” Mom said. “I remember how things can seem . . . out of proportion.”

  Oh, so Lori was wrong to be upset? So Lori was just silly and sensitive? The anger flared again.

  “What about the other kids? Chuck and Mike and Joey and Emma?” Lori asked. “Will you stop talking about them, too?”

  Mom winced. Lori could tell Mom hadn’t thought of that.

  “They haven’t asked me to,” Mom said stiffly.

  “Mike and Joey and Emma haven’t exactly had a chance, have they?” Lori asked. “They don’t even know you’re talking about them.”

  “They’re young enough that I can still judge for them,” Mom said.

  Lori didn’t know what made her push the issue. If Mom had only said, I know how you feel. I got mad when Pop spread stories about me, too. Let me tell you about some cartwheels. . . . But Mom would never tell Lori the cartwheel story because it involved Daddy, and Mom didn’t talk about Daddy.

  “Chuck’s here,” Lori said. “He heard your speech. Hey, Chuck. What do you think?”

  Chuck was sitting on the far bed now, watching TV. He pulled his attention away from a soap commercial.

  “Huh?” he said.

  “Isn’t it unfair how Mom’s been telling stories about us in all her speeches, and she’s been doing it for years, and we didn’t even know?” Lori fought to control her voice, but it was useless. She was crying again.

  “Well, that was certainly an unbiased account of the situation,” Mom said dryly. “Lori has asked me not to mention her in my speeches again, and we were wondering if you felt the same way.”

  Lori glared at Mom. How could she stay so calm? She sounded as formal as the queen of England, ordering tea.

  She really must not care, Lori thought.

  Chuck looked from Mom to Lori and back again. He squinted, looking as confused as if they’d both been speaking foreign languages. Lori had seen hogs make up their minds faster than Chuck did.

  Finally he shrugged.

  “I don’t care,” he said. “I, um, thought your speech was real good.”

  Then he looked back at the TV, as though it were dangerous to look at Mom or Lori for very long.

  “Well,” Mom said. “That’s settled.”

  There was nothing left for Lori to do except stomp back into the bathroom and do her best to slam the door.

  The televised images danced in front of Chuck’s eyes, but he wasn’t seeing them.

  Lori asked me for something, he thought again and again. Lori hasn’t asked me for anything in eight years.

  If only he were smarter, he could understand what was going on. Mom and Lori were mad at each other. He knew that. Lori didn’t want Mom talking about her. He knew that, too, but didn’t understand. Lori wanted Chuck to tell Mom not to talk about him, either.

  Why? Why did Lori care?

  What Chuck saw now, instead of the TV, was huge tangles. The whole conversation he’d just had was like Pop’s piles of old baling twine, knotted and snarled and impossible to sort out. He could picture very clearly the twisted loops of twine lying on the barn floor.

  He’d just stepped in one of those loops, and gotten caught.

  Now Lori will never forgive me, he thought.

  Lori couldn’t believe that, after everything that had happened the night before, Mom still wanted to get up and take them sight-seeing the next morning.

  “Come on, sleepyheads,” she urged when the alarm went off at seven. “You don’t want to miss anything, do you? We have to be back at the airport by three this afternoon—this may be your last chance to see Chicago for the rest of your life.”

  Lori wanted to say, So what? but she just groaned and rolled over.

  When she did get up, she had that unsteady, fragile feeling she always had the morning after she’d cried herself to sleep. She didn’t have to look in the mirror to know that her eyes were swollen and ugly, her entire face puffy from all those tears. Neither Mom nor Chuck seemed to notice. While Mom was in the shower, Lori got the ice bucket and sneaked down the hall to fill it. Then, back in the room, she wrapped several cubes in a washcloth and pressed it on her eyelids. That was the only method she’d ever found that worked.

  Lori couldn’t remember when she’d started crying herself to sleep back home. It wasn’t really that often—maybe once every couple of months. Sometimes it was because of something specific that happened—John McArthur totally ignored her at a Junior Leadership meeting, or she got a B– on her English essay, or Courtney Snyder told Mickey James that Brandi Wyland had said that Lori was the biggest flirt in the freshman class and that everyone hated her for it. Sometimes there wasn’t any reason at all—Lori just felt like crying. And so she did, sobbing silently in her bed for hours, until her eyes ached, and her head ached, and she miserably fell asleep. She wondered if other girls did this. Maybe it was connected to puberty. Lori had been the last one of her friends to get her period; maybe they had all been crying themselves to sleep once a month for years and they’d just never told her.

  Lori didn’t want to ask.

  Regardless, she’d gotten very good at treating and camouflaging swollen eyelids. Ten minutes of the ice treatment, a little extra mascara—even if she didn’t feel normal, she looked okay.

  Half an hour later, the huge mirror in the elevator assured her that she’d erased all signs of crying; the long brass panel at the checkout desk reflected back a face devoid of emotion.

  That was just the look Lori wanted.

  “Yes, yes, we’ll be back for our luggage this afternoon,” Mom was assuring a man in an official-looking suit. She turned back to Lori and Chuck. “Let’s have breakfast here at the hotel, all right?”

  She led them through a maze of halls. Lori was sure they’d walked an entire city block before they even got to the door of the restaurant.

  How could anyone keep a place like this straight in her head? Lori felt a pang of homesickness for small buildings, square street grids, restaurants surrounded by only parking lots.

  Mom seemed entirely at home.

  “We can go out to the science museum when it opens at nine thirty, and then come back downtown for lunch. If there’s time, we can shop a little at Water Tower Place—it’s this huge, ritzy mall with all these incredibly expensive stores. I can’t promise that we could afford anything, but it’s kind of fun to look,” Mom said while they waited to be seated.

  Lori wasn’t interested in science, and Chuck had practically flunked general biology last year. Lori looked around the hotel restaurant, wondering whether she should tell Mom that. She knew Chuck wouldn’t speak up. Surely he was as intimidated by all the shiny brass and fancy chandeliers as Lori was.

  “Table for three?” asked the waiter or host or whatever he was called. He had an accent that made the words sound foreign, even though they weren’t.

  “Yes, please,” Mom said crisply. She was used to talking to people like that, and Lori didn’t even know what they were called.

  The waiter guy pulled out Lori’s chair for her and placed her napkin on her lap. Lori tried not to giggle. Then he handed her a menu. The cheapest breakfast, cold cereal, was $6.95.

  “We could have gone to McDonald’s,” Lori said.

  “I know,” Mom said. “But I wanted to treat you. You can go to McDonald’s anytime you want at hom
e.”

  “Not really,” Lori said. “Gram and Pop always say it costs too much.”

  Mom didn’t say anything.

  “Anyhow, it’s not like Pickford County only has a McDonald’s,” Lori continued. “We have a Burger King there now, too. And a Bob Evans.”

  “I know,” Mom said. “I live there, too, remember?”

  “Oh, sorry,” Lori said. “It’s easy to forget when you’re never around.”

  Lori couldn’t believe she’d actually said that. Maybe she hadn’t—maybe the words were just throbbing in her head so strongly that she only thought she’d spoken them out loud. For a second, no one reacted, and she silently hoped, I didn’t say it. I didn’t say it. Nobody heard. But then Chuck’s eyes bugged out, and two spots of angry color appeared on Mom’s cheeks.

  “We’ll pretend,” Mom said quietly, “that you didn’t say that. That we haven’t had this conversation. We don’t need a repeat of last night.”

  That made everything worse. You couldn’t have your house burn down and blithely say, We’ll pretend that never happened. You couldn’t murder someone and say, Let’s pretend you’re still alive. You couldn’t be furious enough to scream and cry and rage for hours and still smile sweetly and say, Aren’t we such a nice, happy family?

  But hadn’t Lori been doing that for years?

  She looked up and saw that the waiter guy was still there. He was focusing intently on pouring water for all of them, as if that required every ounce of his concentration. He’d heard everything. Lori felt her face go red; she’d thought she’d cried herself out the night before, but a fresh supply of tears threatened under her eyelids as she watched the guy walk away. He probably couldn’t wait to tell the other servers, You won’t believe the horrible family I’ve got over there. Lori had broken one of Gram and Pop’s biggest rules: “Don’t air your dirty laundry in public.” It was closely related to the main question they asked anytime one of the kids even threatened to do anything wrong: “What will people think?”

  Mom and Chuck were studying their menus now with every bit as much concentration as the waiter had used on the water.

  “Are you feeling brave today, Chuck?” Mom asked with what had to be fake heartiness. “Want to try the salsa omelette?”

  Chuck looked as startled as a bull hit with an electric prod.

  “I—I thought I’d just have bacon and eggs,” he said.

  “Fine,” Mom said. “Lori?”

  “Cereal,” Lori said.

  “Are you sure?” Mom said. “We’re going to be doing a lot of walking this morning. I don’t want you getting too hungry—”

  “Pop says a fool and his money are soon parted,” Lori said self-righteously. She didn’t know what had gotten into her; she hadn’t meant to say that. She’d seen a movie once where a man was incapable of lying, and it got him into lots of trouble. She’d thought the movie was totally idiotic. But he’d been under a curse or something. What was Lori’s excuse?

  “Pop isn’t—” Mom stopped. “Okay. Get whatever you want.” Now her face was redder than Lori’s. At least the waiter guy wasn’t lingering over them anymore, listening intently while he pretended not to.

  Another man came and took their orders. Mom asked for cereal, too. Lori wondered what that meant. She felt guilty and didn’t know why.

  Then the waiter went away, and the three of them were left alone with nothing to say. All of them kept taking sips of their water.

  “Do you think the science museum is a good idea?” Mom finally asked. “I’ve been there a couple times, and it’s really cool, but if there’s something else you’d like better—I have the guidebook. . . .”

  She was fumbling with her purse.

  “Why don’t we skip the museum and just go shopping?” Lori said.

  “All right,” Mom said evenly. “Is that okay with you, Chuck?”

  Chuck nodded like one of those toy dogs with a spring for a neck.

  “Fine,” Mom said grimly. “I’m sure we’ll have fun.”

  At least Mom can still lie, Lori thought.

  Chuck didn’t get Lori.

  Back home, she was Ms. Everything: honor roll student, high scorer on the freshman girls’ basketball team, secretary of the church youth group, president of their 4-H club, even though that title usually went to a junior or senior. And most of all, she always seemed to know the right thing to say. Or, at least, the most popular thing to say.

  Chuck knew how she and her friends talked, when it was just them and they didn’t think anyone else was listening: “Did you see Suzanne’s hair? I think she stuck her finger in an electric socket!” “Doesn’t Brad Knisley stink?” “Can you believe it? They changed the seating assignments in algebra, and I’m stuck with dogbreath right behind me!”

  But even then, Lori was usually the one saying, “Stop! That’s really nasty!” And in public—well, she might as well have a halo. Chuck remembered one time at school when he’d seen a girl crying at the back of the auditorium during an all-school assembly. He’d just stood there, wondering what to do. Did she need help? Or did she just want to be left alone? Chuck had decided to pretend not to see her, mainly because he didn’t know what else to do. But five minutes later, he’d looked back, and there was Lori with her arm around the girl’s shoulder, talking to her. The girl was nodding and even smiling a little through her tears.

  Later, walking down the lane from where the school bus dropped them off, Chuck had gotten up the nerve to ask what the girl had been crying about. Lori had just given him a look.

  “Chuck, that was Janice Seaver,” Lori said.

  The name didn’t mean anything to Chuck.

  “You know,” Lori said impatiently. “It was her brother who was killed in that crash yesterday. The one we were having the assembly for.”

  “Oh,” Chuck said, feeling dumb as dirt. “I didn’t know.”

  And then Lori had run on ahead, because she had a lot of homework, and Chuck didn’t have a chance to ask any of the other questions he wondered about: What did you say to her? How did you know she wanted you to talk to her? And most of all, Would you cry if I was the dead one?

  Back home, the worst thing Lori ever did was ignore Chuck. And nobody noticed that—or maybe nobody expected teenaged brothers and sisters to get along, anyway.

  So everyone in Pickford County thought Lori was the greatest. The old ladies at church always nodded approvingly while they watched Lori scrub down tables at the annual ice-cream social. “What a good kid,” they murmured. “What a hard worker.”

  And the parents who dropped her off from babysitting always came in and told Gram and Pop, “She is such a nice girl.”

  So why was she being so mean to Mom?

  It had started last night, after Mom’s speech. Or during it. It was really rude of Lori to get up and leave right in the middle.

  Then she and Mom had that fight afterward. . . .

  Chuck didn’t want to think about his part in it.

  Breakfast was hard, because there was still that strange tension in the air. Lori would say something, or Mom would say something, and they’d just smirk at each other.

  It was like watching a war.

  Chuck watched the chandeliers instead. The millions of tiny prisms were so graceful, dangling from the lights like glass waterfalls. He wondered about the people who got to make things like that—surely there were people involved? Surely something that beautiful wasn’t stamped out by some assembly-line machine, the same way as tractor parts or silo frames?

  A crazy idea sprouted in Chuck’s head, but he stomped it down, squashed it dead. He was fat, stupid Chuck Lawson. People like him weren’t entitled to dreams.

  Now they were at Water Tower Place, Chuck trailing along behind Mom and Lori as they moved from store to store. Chuck studied the pattern in the tiles on the floor, paying only enough attention to Mom and Lori to make sure he didn’t lose them.

  They were still fighting.

  “Well, why d
o you have to talk like that during your speeches?” Lori said on the threshold of Marshall Field’s. “‘Now, listen up, all you honey chiles, and ah’m a’gonna tell you a ni-ice story,’” she mocked in a southern accent as thick as oil.

  “I don’t talk like that,” Mom snapped.

  “Maybe not quite that bad,” Lori conceded. “But you get this accent when you’re making speeches, like you’re some hick from the sticks. It sounds bad.”

  Mom didn’t answer. They walked into the juniors’ department.

  “What do you think of that dress?” Mom said. “If you found something you really liked, we could get your prom dress for next year.”

  “Mom, sophomores don’t go to the prom,” Lori said. She looked at Chuck, like she expected him to back her up.

  Chuck probably wouldn’t ever go to prom.

  “I know,” Mom said, fingering another dress. “I just thought, if an older boy asked you . . .”

  “You trying to marry me off young or something?” Lori asked. “Get rid of me?”

  Her tone was joking, but the edge was still there. Her voice made Chuck think of sheep being sheared: a sharp razor hidden in soft wool.

  “No, I don’t want you to marry young,” Mom said steadily. “I don’t think marrying young is a good idea at all.” She wasn’t looking at dresses anymore but straight at Lori, with a very serious expression on her face.

  “You were only eighteen when you and Dad got married,” Lori said, sneering. “So you regret marrying him?”

  Chuck froze, and even Lori had the grace to look ashamed. Her look of scorn slid into one of uncertainty, like she hadn’t known what she was going to say and was stunned herself that she’d said it.

  Chuck sneaked a look at Mom, and her expression was frozen, too. It was like the pictures in Chuck’s world history book of the people caught by the lava, centuries ago. Stuck for all time.

  Then, “No, of course I don’t regret marrying your father,” Mom said in a careful tone. “But sometimes I wish . . .” Her voice trailed off. She was staring past the mannequins. Then she looked back at Lori. “Well, you can always wish lots of things, can’t you? It’s like Pop says, ‘If wishes were horses, then beggars could ride.’”