Flying

by Megan Hart

  He did. “Sorry. Got caught up with stuff. I can’t make it this weekend. It’s my turn to have the girls.”

  “Ah.”

  “I should’ve told you sooner,” Matthew said.

  Stella frowned. “That would’ve been nice. Do you not want to come visit me? Is that it? Are you worried about meeting Tristan? Because we could arrange it for when he’s with his dad.”

  “Of course I want to visit you. Don’t say that. You’re overreacting. What can I do? It’s my turn to have the girls.”

  Oh, how she hated being told she was overreacting. “Didn’t you know that when I asked you? You could’ve told me then.”

  “I thought I could rearrange.”

  This rang so false she had to take a moment before she could reply. “Matthew, I’d rather you be honest with me than ever try to save my feelings with a lie. Okay?”

  “I’m not lying about anything.” He sounded mad, and she didn’t really care. She was mad too.

  “I’d rather have a no than a maybe that you already know is a no. For anything.”

  Matthew sighed. “It wasn’t a no when I said I would check. Okay?”

  “Okay.” This had the feeling of becoming a second non-argument, so Stella changed the subject toward something lighter.

  After a bit more awkwardness, the tension eased. They joked. They laughed. They shared stories about their days—Stella had some funny things to share about her job and the sorts of crazy photos she’d been asked to retouch. Matthew spoke with fondness of some of his students in the adult education class.

  “We’re doing poetry,” he said. “Limericks. Hey, it’s an art form, really.”

  “What’s your favorite? The only one I know is about Nantucket.”

  “All the good ones are about Nantucket,” Matthew said.

  He talked more about the class, how his students had gone from barely being able to put together coherent sentences to publishing pieces in a chapbook. The obvious pride in his voice moved her.

  “You’ve made a difference in their lives,” she told him. “That must feel so amazing.”

  Matthew was quiet for a few seconds. “I don’t think of it that way. I’m just trying to show them there’s more than one way to look at the world.”

  “That’s a beautiful and important thing to do for anyone, Matthew.”

  “It’s not... Thank you. I guess I never thought of it as being beautiful. Or important.”

  “Well,” Stella said, “it is.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Stella’s heart jumped at the familiar boop-boop tone of an incoming Kik. Up to her elbows in dishsoap suds, she needed a minute or so to dry her hands and fish her phone from her pocket, then to open the app, but when she did, she burst into low laughter. Matthew had sent her a picture of his dinner—macaroni and cheese. With ketchup. A hot dog, sans bun, peeked at her from the corner of the shot.

  Father of the year, she typed and watched the tiny D turn to an R.

  Matthew is typing, the app said at the top of the screen. What? It’s delicious. And has all the food groups.

  Stella, in reply, took a picture of the inside of her oven, the chicken and potatoes baking inside. Also her table’s two settings. The bowl of salad and basket of rolls. She sent them all, one, two, three, without commentary.

  Nice, Matthew said. Next time you come to Chicago, will you make me chicken?

  If you’re good. How are the girls?

  Louisa has a cold. Beatrice is having a fight with her best friend. God help me when they get to be teenagers.

  Stella laughed, but ruefully. Tristan had come home from school an hour or so ago and pounded right up the stairs to disappear into his room without little more than a word for her. He’d been up there ever since, not a peep, which she had to admit was better than the bass-beat thump of his music being played too loud or the steady back-and-forth thud of the weights or treadmill.

  What’s on the agenda for tonight? she typed.

  The D became an R, but Matthew didn’t type. Stella watched the screen for a minute longer than necessary, then put the phone back in her pocket so she could finish scrubbing the rice cooker and Crock-Pot crocks—the ones she’d asked Tristan to take care of last night. He’d been out with Mandy when she got home, so she couldn’t yell at him about forgetting, or deliberately refusing to do it. And she’d been too tired to do it herself until now, which was why now it was like completing an archaeological dig.

  “Tristan!” she called as she rinsed the final bits of crusty rice and soggy carrots into the drain strainer so she could empty it into the trash. “Dinner in half an hour! Gather up your laundry and bring it down!”

  No reply seemed to be the theme of the night. Frowning, Stella went to the bottom of the stairs to shout again. This time, the muffled shout from her son’s room seemed to be an answer of some sort, and, too weary to make herself climb the stairs, she went back to the kitchen.

  Boop-boop.

  Movies and popcorn at home. Early morning tomorrow. Museum for a birthday party, then bowling party in the afternoon.

  Busy girls, Stella typed. Have fun.

  She paused, then added, Call me later, when they’re in bed?

  D.

  R.

  No answer.

  Stella waited.

  Matthew is typing...

  He typed for a long time, with no message coming through. Until at last: I’ll try.

  She knew better than to let it sting her, but it still did. Stella put her phone away, vowing not even to look at it again even if it did boop-boop at her. She poured herself a glass of wine, then busied herself sorting the piles of mail and cleaning up the disaster of her kitchen, until the timer on the oven went off, signaling that the chicken was done. She shouted for Tristan, then again when he didn’t answer or come down. A third time, her voice cracking, blood pressure rising, and finally he thumped down the stairs with a tread like an elephant and flung himself into his chair with a sigh so heavy it was as if she were asking him to stab himself in the eyes with the fork.

  Boop-boop.

  Stella ignored it, but another ping a moment later made it impossible for her to pretend she hadn’t heard it. Tristan scowled as she set the chicken and potatoes on the table, then pulled out her phone. He didn’t say anything, though.

  Louisa forgot her inhaler. And I think she might have a fever.

  Do you have a thermometer?

  Yeah.

  Take her temp, Stella said. Then you’ll know.

  “Tristan,” she said aloud. “Get the iced tea. C’mon, I shouldn’t even have to ask you.”

  “I don’t even want to eat this,” he muttered.

  Stella looked up from her phone, where Matthew had not yet replied. “Excuse me?”

  “I told you, I’m going out with Mandy tonight. Remember? I have to leave in, like, ten minutes.”

  She had forgotten, but shouldn’t have been surprised. Friday night, no reason for him to hang around at home with his mother. Still... “Where are you going? You don’t even want to eat dinner first?”

  “We’re going to see a movie. We’ll get some pizza or something after.”

  “And after that?” Stella asked slowly, looking at the meal she’d prepared. Admittedly, it was no gourmet fare. It hadn’t taken hours or anything, but if she’d known he wasn’t going to be home she’d have made herself a sandwich and been done with it.

  “Probably hang out somewhere.”

  She pursed her mouth at this. Her phone booped, but she ignored it to focus on her son. “Where?”

  Tristan shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  “Well, you need to know, Tristan. I don’t want you just wandering the streets looking for a place to go.” She paused. “Why not co
me here?”

  He gave her a shifty glance. “But you’ll be here.”

  “Um, yeah,” she said tightly, trying not to be offended and failing for the second time in less than half an hour. “That’s kind of the point. But you call me and tell me where you’re going after the movie. I mean it. And wherever it is, I’ll need to know there’s going to be an adult.”

  “Fine!”

  He was gone, out the front door, slamming it behind him before she had time to say another word. Not that she had any to say, Stella thought with a sigh. She looked around the kitchen. She drank the rest of her wine. Friday night, alone at home.

  Hooray.

  Her phone booped again. She’d forgotten about Matthew’s message. Pulling her phone out again, Stella swiped the screen to pull up the app.

  Fever. What do I do for that?

  The next message had come only a minute or so after, according to the time stamp. Caroline’s bringing her inhaler and some children’s Tylenol.

  Caroline.

  Stella’s lip curled. She looked at her phone for a long, long minute before she thought of how to respond.

  Louisa will be fine. She has a cold, right? Kids get colds, Matthew. How high is her fever?

  The D became an R, but Matthew didn’t answer.

  Stella poured herself another glass of wine. She cleared off all her counters and scrubbed out her sink. She turned her music up loud, dancing alone in her kitchen, though she wasn’t actually in the mood for dancing. She set her phone on the counter, but it stayed frustratingly silent.

  The wine had made her the tiniest bit hazy. Her need for a cigarette suddenly became a gnawing ache.

  How’s Louisa? she messaged Matthew and watched the D stay solid for a few minutes while she sat and drank her wine and did nothing else. At last, the D became an R. He’d read the message. He saw her talking to him; he saw her concern for the daughter she hadn’t yet been allowed to know.

  But he didn’t answer her.

  “Fucker.” The wine spoke for her. The rational part of her mind told her to chill out. That he was with a sick kid, probably worried. Maybe she’d thrown up or something, and he was dealing with that. But it was bullshit, and Stella knew it. She could make excuses for him all night, but the simple fact was, Matthew was deliberately not replying to her, and not for the first time, and yes, oh, yes, it fucking pissed her off.

  Not for the first time, she thought how much easier flying was than this...this supposed relationship with Matthew. No phone number exchanges, no repeat visits, no expectations.

  No disappointments.

  The third glass of wine didn’t seem like a luxury, but a necessity at that point. And finally, so did the cigarettes she pulled from way back in her dresser, inside the vintage tin where she’d kept her “emergency” pack for years before quitting. Somehow even after she’d long given them up, knowing that pack was in there was like a lifeline. Except when she pulled out the tin and opened it, all she could do was stare at the crumpled and clearly empty pack of cigarettes she most definitely had not smoked.

  Stella let herself sink onto the bed, empty pack in one hand, wineglass in the other. There was no sipping or savoring now. She gulped the wine and put the empty glass on the nightstand that had once been Jeff’s. A little too close to the edge, but she caught the glass as it fell, spattering her white bedspread with dots of purpley crimson.

  “Shit,” Stella muttered, but had nobody to blame but herself. She sat there for a few minutes, staring at the empty pack. It was possible Jeff had, at some point, taken the cigarettes, though he’d never smoked and wouldn’t have snuck them anyway, if he had. Which meant her son had been sneaking around in her drawers and stealing. And smoking. Dammit.

  Standing in front of Tristan’s door, Stella took a few deep breaths. Stella’s mother had thought nothing of coming into her room, snooping around in Stella’s private things. Reading love notes, journals, school papers, whatever. Stella had vowed she would never do that to her kids, that she would treat her children with respect for their privacy.

  But what if it wasn’t just cigarettes, but something worse? She’d smoked a few joints in her teen and college years. Experimenting with pot and booze was a part of growing up. She knew that. And she had no reason to believe that Tristan might be into anything more hard-core than that, other than his recent surliness, which she’d chalked up to teenage angst and the strain of his parents’ less-than-amicable divorce. Privacy was important, respect was important, but she had a duty as his mother to make sure he wasn’t in trouble.

  Still, she hesitated. She could go into Tristan’s room and riffle around, but if she found something she was going to have to confront him on it, and then he’d know she snooped. She’d have to call Jeff too. Deal with shit from him, even if she’d prefer to deal with it on her own. If she found nothing, she’d know she snooped for no reason, and that would be bad too.

  The wine was making this decision less of a no-brainer than it normally would’ve been. Here she stood in front of the closed door, wondering if the missing cigarettes—which could’ve been snuck years ago, for all she knew, when Tristan was a rebellious middle schooler trying to look cool to his friends—were worth fucking with the already fragile relationship she had with her son.

  She pulled her phone from her pocket, thumbed the screen to bring up the app. No reply from Matthew. She tried again.

  How’s the kiddo? I’m standing here in front of Tristan’s door, trying to figure out if I should snoop around in his room. I think he stole some cigs from my drawer from ages ago. She added the emoticons for an embarrassed face, then a frowning one with a tear. Having a teen IS hard.

  D became R, but he didn’t answer.

  She imagined his phone boop-booping, Matthew pulling it from his pocket, seeing her message and putting it back in his pocket. She closed her eyes at that vision, and leaned against the wall with a heavy sigh and hanging head.

  “Matthew,” she said aloud. “You know I hate it when you ignore me.”

  Stella squared her shoulders, took a deep breath and opened Tristan’s door. The stink wrinkled her nose. Sneakers, stale laundry, the pungent and unmistakable odor of teenage boy. She had to shove the door open against the pile of laundry she couldn’t tell was dirty or clean, and remembered that she’d asked him to bring it down to the laundry room before dinner. Obviously, just like with last night’s dishes, he’d forgotten or ignored her. Stella kicked aside four damp towels and stood in the center of his room, then turned in a slow circle.

  Standing in the middle of what looked like an explosion of dirty clothes, books, papers, video game and DVD cases, a myriad of broken bits of wood and tools... What the hell had he been doing in here? Building an arc? With a snort of disgust, she toed up the edge of a body pillow on the floor and found a tangle of socks and underwear beneath.

  Where are you? she texted quickly. I told you to call me when the movie was over.

  On top of his dresser, Tristan had lined up a diorama in a shoe box, circa the fifth grade. Inside, a clay horse she remembered him crafting at the kitchen table. Seashells from their last vacation to the shore. He’d done a report on the wild ponies of Chincoteague. Got an A, she saw from the score sheet still stapled to the back. Next to the diorama were several small trophies from when Tristan had played baseball. Cheap plastic things, one of them broken. Littered over the dresser top were nubs of crayons, pencils without erasers, pens with the ends chewed and split. Garbage, all of it, and she was tempted to sweep it all into the overflowing trashcan next to his desk.

  She held herself back. First of all, none of this was what she’d come in here to look for, and second, if anyone was going to clean up this junkyard, it would be Tristan. The kid who was steadfastly not replying to her texts.

  She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for, other than
proof he was actively smoking. Or doing drugs. Or oh, God, shooting heroine into his eyeballs or something like that.... It was the wine talking again, but suddenly she was yanking open his dresser drawers to search through the mess of unfolded clothes to find...something. Anything to help her understand where her sweet boy had gone.

  She found it.

  Tucked into an empty shoe box beneath a pile of video game magazines, Tristan had left a couple of empty lighters and a half-empty pack of Marlboro Reds. It wasn’t pot or drugs, but it didn’t make her feel much better to think of him as one of those boys who hung around the outside of the mall, shoulders hunched against the wind, smoking. And it was enough to keep her looking through the rest of his stuff. In the bottom drawer of his nightstand, the quickest glimpse of bare flesh and blond hair on a glossy magazine had her closing it right away.

  But, bolstered by her discovery and probably that third glass of wine, she kept looking until she found other things. Things that weren’t worse but that made her stomach churn uncontrollably.

  First, a handful of photographs collected in a battered manila envelope. She shook them into her palm and gasped at the sight of two small boys, arms around each other. Identical striped shirts. Identical gap-toothed grins. Tristan’s teeth had straightened after years of orthodontia, but Gage’s never would.

  Gage would never wear braces.

  Gage would never grow out of that shirt.

  Gage would never steal her cigarettes from her dresser.

  Gage would never do anything. Ever. With trembling fingers, Stella pushed the photos back into the envelope and replaced it. The room spun a little, her head woozy.

  She almost didn’t open another drawer, but when she did she found a layer of smoothly folded sweatpants and T-shirts, so incongruous with the rest of his room that she knew there had to be something beneath them. Lifting them, she found another layer of clothes. These much smaller. Folded just as neatly. She picked up one shirt and held it to her. Gage’s. Beside it, his favorite sweatshirt, the one with Cookie Monster on it. And next to that, the soft, folded square of pale blue waffled fabric edged with satin.