The Art of Crash Landing

by Melissa DeCarlo

  The Bee was scheduled for Wednesday morning. That afternoon the winner would take home a permission slip outlining the responsibilities of caring for Buttercup, to be brought back to Mrs. Baxter on Thursday. On some level I must have known that, no matter how many geographic facts I managed to stuff into my frizzy-haired head, the real hurdle would be Wednesday night, not Wednesday morning. But I was nine years old and not yet ready to give up on miracles. If I won the Geography Bee my mother would have to let me bring Buttercup home.

  Wednesday finally came, and just over an hour into the contest only two of us were still standing—me and Ronnie Richter. Ronny was smart and cocky, and he was also the tallest boy in class. Some of the girls thought Ronnie was cute, but one afternoon during reading time, I noticed that he had visible earwax, so I was immune to his charms. Even then I had standards.

  Anyway, thanks to a last-minute brushing up on my deserts, I knew, and Ronnie did not, that Death Valley was in California not Nevada. Everybody cheered my win, even the girls who I thought liked Ronnie, which made me wonder if they’d noticed his dirty ears, too. Mrs. Baxter gave me a hug, a one-hundred-piece puzzle of the United States, and the permission slip. On the way back to my seat I glanced at Buttercup. At that very moment she stepped out from inside her tomato can and looked straight into my eyes, letting out a little squeak. Even Buttercup was glad I’d won.

  It wasn’t until I was walking home from the bus stop that I started to consider the outcome of handing the permission slip to my mother. She knew about the Bee, of course, since I had to give her a reason for my sudden enthusiasm for schoolwork. But I hadn’t mentioned the prize.

  The next morning, eyes swollen from crying, I handed Mrs. Baxter the unsigned permission slip. After a quick squeeze of my shoulders and a whispered, “I’m sorry,” Mrs. Baxter sent Ronnie Richter to the office to call his mother and see if Buttercup could spend the holidays at their house. Naturally, his mother said yes.

  As it turned out, it was a difficult holiday. The day before Christmas, my mother and I came home from the grocery store to a dark, cold apartment with a yellow eviction notice taped on the front door. We spent Christmas day and the day after shuttling our belongings from that apartment to another one across town. New school, new teacher, this one with no class pet. My mother was right after all; it would have been a mistake to trust us with the beloved guinea pig.

  But when I think back on that autumn and Mrs. Baxter, the Geography Bee and that sweet, fat little guinea pig, what I remember most clearly is the pained look on my mother’s face when I gave her the permission slip. She’d glanced at it, and then handed the unsigned paper back to me, saying only, “We’re not Buttercup people.”

  Waiting on my grandmother’s porch is a surly mechanic, two squatty dogs, and a black plastic bag. JJ starts in with detailed dog-care instructions, and I try to pay attention, but all I can think about is how I wish my mother could see me now. If we weren’t Buttercup people, I can promise you we would never be Winston people.

  Finally JJ shuts up and hands me the leashes. I drag the trash bag, the dogs, and the sack of their food into the house. Looking in the trash bag, I’m pleased to see that it’s one of the six that were stuffed in the backseat of my car. I guess I have to admit it was decent of JJ to bring me some clothes, but unfortunately it’s the bag that was on top, in other words the last bag I packed, filled with things I almost didn’t bother to bring—old or uncomfortable shoes, stuff that’s too small, sweaters with snags.

  I turn to the dogs, pat their wide little heads and unhook the leashes. It’s time to make friends. I go into the kitchen, cut off a section of my sandwich and feed each grinning monster a piece. Once they happily wolf down their snack and then lick that part of the floor clean, they fix their beady brown eyes on mine and wag their stumpy tails in what I’m sure passes for charming when you’re a freaky-looking dog. I eat the rest of the sandwich quickly, furtively, feeling their stare with every bite.

  One is a little larger than the other, but overall the Winstons look alike—tan fur, short legs, stubby bodies, batlike ears. They snort and trot around like little pigs, and already there has been significant fartage. I’m hoping it’s the sandwich and not the natural state of affairs, although it would explain the bowls of potpourri everywhere. JJ informed me, when he dropped them off, that they are French bulldogs, which has led me to reassess my opinion of the French. They may know a lot about making wine and fries, but they don’t know jacques-merde about making dogs.

  Nick the Impregnator calls twice, but I don’t answer. I can’t avoid him forever, but I can avoid him tonight. By nine o’clock, the dogs have gone in and out of their doggy door a couple times, and since the cable is still on, the dogs and I have passed the evening watching several hours of crappy television. The three of us are settled on the sofa, the dogs, one on each side of me, are snoring and twitching happily, but I’m feeling restless.

  I wander upstairs to my mother’s old room. On the wall next to the closet are the types of photos you’ll see in any photographer’s collection of favorite shots—flowers, landscapes, shadows cast by buildings. But I’m interested in the pictures thumbtacked over her bed. There are groups of smiling teenagers, and in a few of these I’m relieved to recognize my mother. There was a moment back at the bank, when Gordon Penny talked about my mother’s blond hair, that I worried this would all turn into some Movie-of-the-Week drama about mistaken identity.

  I pull one group-shot off the wall. The girls in the photo look happy—my mother looks happy—a sense of mischief, a lightness in her expression that I don’t remember ever seeing. And her hair really was blond. Even from the earliest snapshots of her on this wall, her hair is a cap of blond curls rather than the red hair I remember so well.

  She’d always been so proud of her hair, agonizing over the first few gray strands, yet refusing to cover them up with dye for fear it would change the color of the rest. And when she lost it all, clump after clump in the shower and on her pillow, she mourned her hair harder, I swear, than she seemed to mourn the future she might not have.

  There are pictures of other people, too, an elderly couple, standing in front of this house, or one that looks just like it. There’s a square photo with the ripple-cut edges you find on pictures from the 1950s. It’s faded, but it’s easy to make out a young man, a teenager maybe, wearing a suit that looks a little too big. He’s standing by a car with the oversize tailfins of that era, and he has one hand raised to shade his eyes. He’s smiling, looking slightly away from the camera.

  I take a step back and look again at the wall, at the photos of all these people, and I realize what’s been bothering me. It’s not what I see, but rather what I don’t see.

  I gather up the pictures of the young man by the car, my mom posing with her friends, the elderly couple, and carry them to the desk. Before setting them down, I run my hand over the dark wood. There is dust, but just the lightest coating. My grandmother Tilda cleaned in here, watered the plant hanging in the window, left her daughter’s shoes sitting next to the bed. How must she have felt to be the caretaker of this room, its walls filled with photos of everyone, it seems, except her.

  Relationships are complicated, none more than that of a mother and her daughter. I, of all people, know this to be true. But still, the absence of that photo weighs heavily on me.

  I check the closet and the dresser—both completely full of clothes. There’s a suitcase in the corner of the closet. I pull it out and unzip and inside there’s another and then another—a whole set of nested suitcases. They look practically new. There’s a small bookshelf with the usual paperbacks, but also a stack of what look like college textbooks—a history book, a psychology book, two on music theory. In the desk, some spirals filled with my mother’s handwriting. I skim through them but they’re class notes, nothing personal. There’s a notebook of sheet music paper, half of it filled in with penciled dots and scribbled annotations. In other drawers there are tons of phot
o negatives, some loose, some in manila envelopes. In the bottom drawer there is only a shoe box.

  The rubber band securing the lid crumbles in my hand. I open the box, peer inside, and then let out the breath I hadn’t noticed I was holding. It’s just a conch shell. I set it on the bedside table and close the drawer. There are no answers in this room. Only questions.

  Back downstairs, I lock doors, turn off lights. When I get to the living room, I pull out the piano bench and sit for a minute, looking out the window. A streetlight shines through the maple out front, casting a shadow shaped a little like an upturned fist. I shiver in the darkness even though the room is not cold. On the piano there’s a collection of silver-framed photos, most of them black-and-whites of a boy and then that boy as a young man, the same guy, I think, who was posing by a car in that old photo upstairs. There are a handful of framed pictures of my mother as well. In one she’s seated at this very piano.

  I lift the piano fall and gently press a few keys. Then I take out my phone and call Queeg.

  He answers on the third ring.

  “I have a question,” I say.

  I hear a shuffling sound and a cough, and I wonder if I have woken him up. “What?” he finally replies.

  “This is going to sound strange but . . . did you know that Mom could play the piano?”

  There’s a pause before he answers. “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t I know?”

  “I only found out by accident,” he says.

  “Tell me.”

  “We were shopping at an outlet mall. I was trying on trousers, and your mother was restless, bored. I told her to go on to another store and I’d catch up with her. She told me to wait there and she’d be right back.” He pauses and coughs again. “Sorry. Where was I?”

  “She told you to wait . . .”

  “Right, but I didn’t wait. When I got finished, I went looking for her. A few doors down there was a music store and as I walked past it, I glanced in the window and there she was, playing a piano. She had her back to me but it was her. And she was terrific, Matt. I mean, she wasn’t just fooling around. Everybody in that store had stopped what they were doing to listen. I’m not sure I’d have been more surprised to see her sprout wings and fly away.”

  “So what happened?”

  “I don’t know if she felt the air move when I opened the door, or she just felt me looking at her, but as soon as she noticed me, she jumped up and came outside.”

  “Didn’t you ask—”

  “Of course I did,” Queeg says. “I asked her why she’d never told me she could play like that. I wanted to go right back in there and buy her one of those keyboards for the house. But she wouldn’t hear of it. The more I talked the angrier she got.”

  “So . . .”

  “So I dropped it.”

  As I watch, the wind is moving through the maple, flexing the shadow fist.

  “I don’t know why I never told you about that,” he says.

  “It’s okay,” I tell him. “I’m sitting on a piano bench, in the house she grew up in.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It’s a nice house, Queeg. Really nice. In a nice neighborhood with big trees and sidewalks. Mom went to college for a year. She had a music scholarship.”

  “I never knew that,” he says.

  “She was going to be somebody.”

  “She was somebody, Matt.”

  “Not what she could have been.”

  “How can you know that?”

  I stand and walk to the window. The temperature has fallen since the sun went down; the glass feels cool against my palm. “Because the people who lived here were Buttercup people.”

  Queeg is quiet, and then I hear a rumbling sound and I know he’s holding the phone against his chest while he coughs. When he speaks again he’s a little out of breath.

  “I don’t know what that means, Matt, but I do know that your mother did her best.”

  I consider that for a few seconds. “No. She left her best here,” I say. “We just got what was left.”

  He sighs, and then he says, “It was enough.”

  “No it wasn’t.”

  There’s another painful silence, and I picture him sitting on the edge of his bed, trying to think of something to say that will make me feel better. Or make him feel better.

  “Queeg?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “I’m gonna let you down. You know that, don’t you? Just like she did.”

  “I haven’t given up on you yet, kiddo.”

  There’s such tenderness in his voice that I can’t bring myself to say what needs to be said: that he’s making a mistake; that he should have given up on me a long time ago. I did.

  The silence sits there between us for too long. Finally he says, “I don’t know what’s going on with you, sweetheart, but it scares me.”

  It scares me, too, but that’s not what he needs to hear. So I tell him not to worry, that I’m just tired. When we say our good-byes, he tells me that everything is going to be all right. He’s wrong, but I don’t argue.

  I walk through the dark, quiet house, looking for the dogs. I find them asleep on the floor in my grandmother’s room. On the dresser there’s a ratty gray quilt that looks like something that’s been used by dogs, so I fold it into a rectangle and lay it on the floor near where they’re resting. Immediately they stand and move to the blanket, circle a few times, then snuggle together on the quilt. The dogs have the right idea. I look at my grandmother’s bed, but it looks uninviting, hastily made up; besides, I’m too spooked by the idea that she might have died in it to sleep here. I consider the couch downstairs, but then remind myself that I’m a grown woman and I’m being ridiculous. There’s another perfectly good bed in this house.

  It’s a clear night, and there’s plenty of moonlight so I leave the lights off while I exchange my clothes for an old tank top. I reach to pull the thin curtain closed. I pause. There was something, for just a second in the darkness outside. I see it again: a flash of red and then it’s gone. I stand motionless, my heart speeding up, and watch the same spot. There, again, a brief red glow. Someone is outside smoking a cigarette. JJ, it has to be, standing in his yard, smoking, facing this house. Somehow I know he’s looking up at this window, and I can’t help but wonder if he knows that I’m looking down at him.

  The sheets on my mother’s bed smell stale, but I’m too tired to look for a fresh set. Instead, I lie on top of the bedding and wrap the comforter around me, the back of my head resting on my dead mother’s pillow. This is hard. Nights are always hard, but tonight is harder than most. There’s not enough light for me to see the details of the photos tacked to the wall above my head, but I can feel them there, the pictures of my mother. In them she’s laughing, happy. Whole.

  I take that girl in the pictures, the same one Gordon Penny at the bank knew, and hold her up against the brittle, damaged woman I remember, and my heart breaks. Because something happened to change that girl into the woman she became. And the terrible truth is that the one thing I know happened to her was me—her unplanned-for, unwanted, child. For five long years I’ve struggled to stay afloat under the weight of my mother’s death, and now I wonder if the blame for her unhappy life rests with me as well. It’s possible. It’s unbearable.

  And yet . . .

  Mr. Penny’s account of how abruptly and completely my mother severed all ties to her past gives me hope. If she really abandoned her life in this town five years before my birth, maybe I didn’t start my mother’s downward spiral. Maybe I was just along for the ride.

  Queeg has warned me more than once, that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and here I am lying in my mother’s bed, my head resting on her pillow. I am pregnant with an unwanted child just as she once was with me. Like her, I am bitter, lonely, broke. Broken? Perhaps.

  I reach over to the nightstand and lift the conch shell, holding it to my ear, knowing as I do that my mother once cupped it just s
o. After all, she’s the one who taught me to listen for the ocean’s secrets. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I want to. I want to hear my mother’s voice whispering to me, telling me what happened to her and why and when. I want to know. I think I need to know.

  Either the shell is warming or my skin is cooling, because I can no longer feel its chill on my cheek. I’m still listening but the shell holds no comfort for me. There are no answers here, only echoes of my own childhood—the sigh of the surf, the wind stirring the sea grass on the dunes, and the gulls. They’re always there, of course.

  TUESDAY

  A half-truth is a whole lie.

  CHAPTER 15

  A thin curtain over an east-facing window pretty well guarantees some early-to-rise crap happening. I’m awake at six thirty, by seven I’ve fed the dogs their kibble, scrounged in the pantry, and am sitting at the table feeling sad and lonely. Sad, because dry, stale Cheerios and a glass of tap water are a decidedly noncheery breakfast. Stupid Cheerios. Stupid water. Lonely because my usual breakfast companions, coffee and cigarettes, are no longer my friends. I thought about trying some coffee this morning—there’s a coffeemaker and some Folgers—but just smelling the can almost made me puke. Stupid coffee. Stupid pregnancy.

  I hear excited yaps from the backyard and look out the window to see Tweedle Dumb and Tweedle Dumber race across the yard. JJ is squatting on his side of the fence, one hand reaching fingers through the chain links to pet the dogs, the other holding a fucking cup of coffee and a cigarette. Stupid dogs. Stupid JJ.

  I open the door and step outside. “Good morning,” I call out to him. “Can I ask you a question?”

  He stands and takes a sip out of his mug, watching as I approach the fence. This time I carefully avoid the viney weeds.

  “There are some plants inside the house.”

  “That’s not a question,” he replies.

  I ignore him and continue. “The soil is a little damp.”

  “Okay.”