“Don’t worry about it,” you said, words thick with morphine. And you thought you meant it, that you didn’t care about his absences or opinions anymore—not with Phoebe down the hall.
But hidden away somewhere, all of that must have still mattered, because first semester of your engineering Ph.D. program you found yourself drawn to aeronautics research with a strange mix of guilt and excitement, like it was something taboo.
It must have still mattered, because three years after your appendectomy you heard about a little girl, Jessica Dubroff, who wanted to be the youngest person to fly across the United States. You were on the leather sofa in your father’s house trying to file your taxes while your half sister, Natasha, napped in her playpen and your stepmother folded laundry on the floor, her thin shoulder brushing against your calf in a way that made you uncomfortable, even though nothing sexual had happened yet. Maura had the news on, but you weren’t listening until you heard the phrase “child pilot.”
“Would you look at that,” Maura said to the TV. “She can’t be more than eight.”
Mid-calculation, you turned stony, eyes locked on the screen. The solar-powered calculator dimmed, but you didn’t notice; you needed to see what a child pilot was supposed to look like.
There she was, a golden-haired girl in her Lilliputian bomber jacket and the baseball cap with WOMEN FLY printed across the top.
One of the reporters asked her if she was scared of crashing.
“Nothing is going to happen,” Jessica said, smiling into the camera. “It’s simply an airplane.”
And you hated her in a way you hadn’t hated anyone since you tried to drown Braden Washington in the community pool when you were a junior in high school.
“No, no,” you said, forgetting about Maura, who looked up at you, head bent in confusion.
For the next two days, you devoured every media snippet about Jessica and her impending flight—you got on the Web and did a search for newspapers in her hometown and were glued to CNN, even though they played the same clip over and over. When twenty-four hours into her flight Jessica’s plane crashed into a driveway near Cheyenne, Wyoming—killing all three people on board—you were inappropriately giddy. You felt you’d gained a greater understanding of the world, as if her crash confirmed a hypothesis you’d developed a long time ago. By then you were an honor roll student at Northwestern, but the plane crash was one of the few times you ever felt truly smart. It was the first time in years you wanted to talk to your father. To call him in whatever corner of the world he was temporarily located and say “I told you.”
* * *
Your mother:
You never doubted that your mother loved you and did her best and all of those basic things, but it likely says a lot about your relationship that your clearest memory of her is the day she found the Neiman Marcus catalogs under your bed when you were thirteen. It was two years before she surrendered to cancer but months after the diagnosis, when she was already lying around waiting to die.
“Ollie,” she called to you from the beige couches in the living room, when you got home from school. “Do you need new clothes?”
You were in a hurry. The Washingtons were taking you and Braden to see The Princess Bride, and you wanted to change, dump your books, and go back to Braden’s house, where his mother, Alicia, smelled like heaven—garlic and lilacs—as she prepared dinner.
“New clothes?” you asked, walking through the hallway to the living room, the Days of Our Lives theme weeping in the background. “No, I don’t think—”
And you stopped talking, stopped breathing, because on the couch your mother—not really fat but bunchy in the hips and thighs—was reading Redbook and wearing your old Eons & Empires hat with the E&E crest. She must have noticed the horror on your face.
“Is it okay that I’m wearing this?” She touched the brim.
“Sure,” you said. But it wasn’t really okay; you were pretty sure the hat had been under your bed along with the Neiman Marcus catalogs, where Alicia Washington modeled fur and sportswear. On nights when you couldn’t sleep, you’d jerk off to the pictures of Braden’s mom. “It looks good.”
“Thank you.” Your mother sat up a little. “I found these catalogs under your bed, and I was wondering if you needed school clothes.”
There they were on the oak coffee table atop the pile of women’s magazines and self-help books that your sister kept bringing her.
Staring at the department store’s skinny regal font, you felt your face turn as red as your hair, and a bomb detonated in your lungs.
“Is everything all right?” she asked.
You didn’t say anything because you didn’t have the kind of relationship with your mother where you discussed things like that … ever.
It’s not that you didn’t love her, you just don’t think about her on those Hallmark-card moments like Christmas and graduation—the times when your sister gets flubbery, holds your arm, whispers she wishes Mom were still around.
Instead, your mother’s image came to you when you were eighteen and driving from Chicago to Southern California to help Phoebe Fisher move into a studio apartment in a not-so-great neighborhood south of Wilshire Boulevard. In one of those glorious Western states that’s simply a colored box on the map, you stopped at a Cracker Barrel knockoff. Sliding into an orange vinyl booth (on the same side as Phoebe, because you were that kind of couple), you examined the gravy-stained menu. “Food like Mom used to make,” it read.
Your mother’s memory washed over you then—the smell of Chinese takeout and frozen pizza burning in the oven, scents that filled your house growing up.
“I’m thinking tuna melt,” Phoebe said, her thigh—bare in short shorts—pressed against yours. “You?”
All at once you missed your mom so much your eyes blurred and you had to take off your glasses, rub the bridge of your nose.
“You okay?” Phoebe twisted her fingers together and pressed them to her chest.
And you were suddenly devastated that your mother never met Phoebe Fisher, wished you could have corked Phoebe in a bottle, hopped back in time, and shown her off—This is my girl, Mom, isn’t she great?
* * *
Your older sister:
Your sister largely avoided you for the first thirteen years of your life, but when your mother got sick, Karen, three years older, became a great revisionist of history, framing the two of you as grand old chums. This meant doing things like taking you gym shoe shopping at Old Orchard Mall.
Over greasy waffle fries in the food court, she said you could tell her “anything.” In a bed at Northwestern Memorial Hospital down the road, your mother was reading magazines and waiting to die, and your father was somewhere over Asia.
“And I do mean anything.” Karen patted your hand across the table. She looked a little like your mother, only she was pretty, but that might have been nothing more than a combination of youth and aerobics classes. “Sex, drugs, whatever. I want you to know, I’m here for you, Ollie.”
“Sure,” you said, running a fry through a puddle of cheese sauce and ketchup. Never in a thousand years did you contemplate telling her about Alicia Washington and the catalogs you’d put back under your bed and still used some nights. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
Karen looked at you, amber eyes so wide and earnest, you felt guilty. It was clear that she was genuinely trying to help.
“I’ve been wondering about birth control,” you finally said, even though you hadn’t been. Braden had found his father’s Trojans in the bathroom, and the two of you had examined them thoroughly, despite the fact that you hadn’t even kissed a girl and wouldn’t meet Phoebe Fisher for another four years. “What do you use?”
Lips curling into a knowing smile, Karen leaned even closer, the ends of her long red hair brushing your paper plate, said she’d wondered all about those things when she was your age.
“Mark and I waited to make love until I was sixteen, but I was really nervous about
how the condom was to going to work,” Karen began … and continued with stories about other boyfriends and blowjobs and a pregnancy scare.
It was way more information than you’d ever wanted, and was slightly creepy, but it was also the first real conversation you’d ever had with her, and it led to many more. When Karen left for college in Arizona eighteen months later, you were surprised by how much you missed her.
On Sunday nights she’d call and tell you about each new Mark or Ron or Bob and finally Gary, whom she married her junior year. You never told her about Braden trying to kiss you or Phoebe blowing raspberries on your stomach, certainly not about your stepmother, but it was still nice to have someone to talk to.
The day before your father and Maura’s wedding, you picked Karen up at O’Hare. She’d left her baby girl with her husband in Salt Lake City, and when she hugged you, you felt the swell of baby number two.
“So this is nuts, right?” Karen began. “This woman is, like, young enough to be our sister.”
You agreed, even though Maura was only ten years your father’s junior. At forty she was twice your age at the time.
“Don’t you think she’s uncannily pale?” Karen asked. “It’s like she’s an albino or something.”
Maura always seemed perfectly pleasant, but that obviously wasn’t the response Karen was seeking. “She might be a vampire,” you offered.
“I know, right?”
The luggage carousel jerked to life, and Karen asked about school. “I can’t believe you didn’t want to get out of Evanston; you couldn’t have paid me to go to Northwestern.”
Karen hadn’t actually gotten into NU, but you didn’t mention that, just explained again that they had a strong engineering program.
“And that girl never returned your calls?” Karen asked of Phoebe.
You shook your head. “How are Gary and Maxi?” you asked, bending over the rotating belt to pick up Karen’s blue roller suitcase.
“You’d know if you ever came out to visit,” she said.
* * *
Your best friend:
Braden Washington had been your best friend since Mrs. Stewart’s kindergarten class, but by sophomore year of high school, the muscles in his chest and arms had swollen, and you occasionally hated the defined V of his torso, the girls who asked you if he liked them, and the Big Ten and Big East recruiters who had already contacted him about college football.
“Do I look any different?” he asked as the two of you stood in line for the high dive at the community pool. It was the summer before junior year (after your mother had finished her dying and your sister had started college in Arizona). Braden looked the same as always, almost goofily handsome, with his mother’s perfect cocoa skin and mahogany hair.
“Why would you look different?” Even before the words were out of your mouth, you knew what he was going to say, and your lower body seemed to liquefy. Fifty yards away, Braden’s girlfriend tanned with her friends. In a bikini of little more than strings and triangles, Josie was the quintessence of high school—blond with green eyes, a member of student council and the dance team. “You guys did it, didn’t you?”
Braden flashed his aw-shucks grin, and a white-hot poker stabbed you between the eyes. It would be a year before you met Phoebe Fisher and got beyond first base.
Still, you must have said something a normal person who didn’t abhor his best friend would have said, because the conversation continued. But all you could think about were the Neiman Marcus catalogs you still had under your bed.
Behind you, a pack of skinny, wet middle-school kids screamed that the two of you were holding up the line, so Braden started up the ladder.
“What should I do?” he asked.
You told him to do a back flip because you could do it better, and you needed to be superior at something.
Fisting your hands so tight your knuckles turned to white knobs, you held your breath and hoped Braden wouldn’t be able to complete the dive. Still, you were utterly amazed when he twisted awkwardly around and crashed, almost completely prone, into the water. You were even more surprised when he didn’t come up.
The lifeguard—a senior at your high school who constantly bragged about bedding the girl guards—stared on from his chair in disbelief, paralyzed by what to do in the face of an actual emergency. So you were the one who dove in. As you reached out for him, Braden’s head bobbed up and broke the surface of the water. Gasping and thrashing, he looked at you and went under again. You grabbed his shoulders, broader and more filled out than yours.
Instead of pulling him up, you held him under. In your hands, his body jerked, and you felt a rush of excitement that you were really doing it. Chemically treated water filled your nose, your mouth, your ears.
One, maybe two seconds.
The pool was on an approach pattern to O’Hare, and a plane flew overhead—a stiff white bird in the blue, blue sky.
Just like that, and it was over. Once again you were Oliver Ryan, the boy the Washingtons referred to as their “other son.” Yanking Braden up, you swam with his body to the side while he sputtered and choked. With help from the gathered crowd, you pulled him out of the water. His arm slung over your back, you took him to the locker room, where he sank into one of the toilet stalls and threw up pool water and snack-bar nachos. “Brade?” you asked, kneeling next to him.
He nodded. “Thanks, Ollie, I owe you.”
“Any time,” you said, feeling sick from the smell of chlorine and vomit and thoughts of what you’d been doing. If there was a hell, you were pretty sure you were going there—and it was probably that moment right before takeoff, when the plane picks up speed.
Braden looked at you for a long time. And then you felt his mouth on your own, lips soft and warmer than you would have expected.
Shoving him away, you asked why, even though it wasn’t really all that earth-shattering. And then you didn’t hate him at all but felt inconsolably sorry for him.
“I’m not—” you started.
But he shook his head. “Don’t say it, please.”
And both of you sat there, hands between your knees, until the locker room door swung open and three boys—towels flung over their shoulders like capes—clomped in complaining about adult swim.
The two of you never talked about it again, which made you feel even sorrier for him and the girls he dated. But senior year, when Phoebe Fisher transferred to ETHS, all of those things didn’t seem to matter much anymore.
Braden played QB at the University of Colorado for a few losing seasons but injured his shoulder junior year in a skiing accident. As soon as Alicia Washington called you from the hospital, you flew out from Chicago, even though you had finals the next week.
“All these girls and his teammates, they all wanted to come, but you were the only one he wanted.” Alicia hugged you in the waiting area while surgeons tried to put Braden back together again. Even though she hadn’t been in catalogs for quite some time and her hair was probably only mahogany from dye, she still smelled so good. “He’s so lucky to have you, Oliver.”
Remembering the slick feel of Braden’s hair when you tried to drown him, you looked away.
That whole first week you stayed at his off-campus apartment. You went to his classes, took notes for him when he couldn’t go, lugged his backpack for him when he could. A part of you thought he would shatter, break down completely, but the closest he ever came was six days after surgery when the two of you were carrying groceries home.
Most of the bags were in your hands, but Braden insisted on taking a few. “I’ve got a gimpy arm; I’m not an invalid.”
At his front door, Braden tried to balance the bags on his bad arm while searching for his keys. The thin plastic straps slipped from his grasp, and a jar of Prego tumbled out, cracking on the chipped tile. Marinara sauce oozed out, and you felt it, all of it—your obsession with Alicia, the jealousy in high school, the undiscussed kiss—in the expanding red puddle on the floor.
“This isn’t right,” you said, bending down to clean up the mess. “You … this shouldn’t…”
“Don’t worry about it; it’s spaghetti sauce.” Braden adjusted his elbow in the sling.
Shaking your head, you said that wasn’t what you meant. Braden blinked and nodded.
“It’s cool, I wasn’t gonna go pro anyway.” He shook his head. “Now it can be the thing I blame everything else on. I can blame my whole life on a wrong turn down the bunny hill.”
That wasn’t what you had meant either, but you thought about the plane with your father when you were seven, wondered if everyone had some origin story they used to justify and rationalize and validate.
Two days later you went back to school, took your makeup exams, and did fine without the hours of studying you normally would have put in. Braden, likewise, went on being Braden, even though he had six pins and limited mobility in his right shoulder.
* * *
Your stepmother:
You suspected it was going to happen with your stepmother years before it actually did. A senior at Northwestern, you were home for Christmas playing Mr. Potato Head with your two-year-old half sister, who kept chewing on the assortment of noses.
Behind the two of you, Maura collected crumpled red and gold foil paper from the living room carpet and menacingly shoved it into a drawstring garbage bag.
“Maura?” you asked, and she looked away.
“It’s not even noon yet.” Though not the albino your sister claimed, Maura did look as if she were painted in watercolor. Everything about her was nearly translucent, from her flaxen hair to her blue eyes, so light they almost appeared to have no color at all. “And Christmas Day, Christmas Day. I can’t believe he had to leave.”
No one in the world understood that better than you.
Setting aside the plastic potato Natasha had put you in charge of decorating, you touched Maura’s slender shoulder and offered a sympathetic half smile.
In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel Page 8