The Art of Crash Landing

by Melissa DeCarlo

  Luke nods, but there’s something in his silence that tells me he’s not finished.

  “What was the second thing Charlie told you?” I ask.

  “That I’d overstepped my authority when I gave you access to Ms. Thayer’s house and the belongings therein.”

  I’m not sure what to say to that. “Oh” is all I come up with.

  “I’m afraid I’ll need that key back.”

  “But all my stuff is still there—”

  “Patty will help you pack.”

  “You mean monitor me to make sure I don’t steal anything.”

  Luke glances up at me but only for a second. “Honestly, I have no idea why Charlie is doing this.”

  Considering the timing, I’d be willing to bet that Fritter had something to do with it, but I could be wrong. Maybe, unlike Luke, Charlie Franklin does do criminal background checks.

  “So is this all happening right now?” I ask. “Tonight?”

  Luke gives me a small smile. “Well, it was supposed to, and as far as Charlie is ever going to know it did happen tonight. But I talked to Patty and she agreed with me; you can stay until tomorrow morning. We trust you.”

  “Well, thank you for that.”

  He shrugs off my thanks. “The paperwork is on the coffee table.”

  I turn on a lamp and then read and sign the agreement, which says I will use their firm to sell the property, and I must vacate the premises immediately. Lying next to the document is an envelope with a stack of hundred-dollar bills.

  “It’s five thousand,” Luke tells me.

  I start to reach for it, but he stops me, saying, “Patty will bring it when she comes tomorrow morning.”

  “What time?”

  “Nine o’clock.”

  I nod. This is what you came for, I tell myself, but it doesn’t feel that way to me now. Instead of feeling relief that I can finally leave, a weight settles on my chest. It’s a familiar weight, the kind that comes with an opportunity missed, a last chance blown.

  “I thought I’d have more time,” I say.

  “We could make it nine thirty—”

  “No, I mean, I was so close.”

  He wheels his chair over to the couch, joining me in the lamp’s pool of light. “Close to what?”

  I shrug. “It’s pretty clear that for my mother there was a before and an after, and in between something happened to her. I really wanted to know what that was.”

  “It’s too late to make things better for your mother, Mattie.”

  “I know.” I almost add, but it’s not too late for me. But then I look again at the money sitting on the table and realize that now it probably is.

  “You’ll still be in town until your car is fixed, right?” he asks.

  “The car is ready. All I have to do is pay.”

  “I see,” he says, nodding. “Well, you still wouldn’t have to leave right away if you didn’t want to.”

  “What reason do I have to hang around?”

  This would be the perfect time for him to tell me he wants me to stay.

  He doesn’t.

  In the car, I turn on the radio to take the edge off an awkward silence that feels darker than the usual postcoital loss for words. The DJ of the classic rock channel we’re listening to must be a mind reader, because he’s got some Beatles-music-for-suicidal-types marathon going on. We go from “Yesterday” to “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” right into “Eleanor Rigby.” The rain further deepens the mood. Luke’s wipers thump steadily, always close but never quite on the beat.

  He breaks the silence. “So, about the dogs . . .”

  I have a flash of dismay, remembering that they’re gone and then worrying that he knows I’ve lost them, before I realize that he must be asking if I’m going to take them with me when I leave.

  “My neighbor wants them,” I say.

  “Really?”

  “Oh yeah. He’s a dog person.” Who knows? It could be true.

  The silence swells again to fill the space, and I’m relieved when we finally pull into my grandmother’s driveway. He idles the car up as close as he can get it to the house, then pulls a neatly collapsed umbrella from behind his seat and offers it to me.

  I shake my head. “I won’t melt,” I tell him. “I’m not made of sugar.”

  He smiles. “You could have fooled me.”

  His cheesy remark just lies there, wedged between us while we both try to figure out how to end this evening. It feels as if there’s something unsaid with us in the car, taking up all the air. My grandmother’s house is dark, but JJ’s porch lights are on, their yellow glow on my bare legs almost makes it look like I have a September tan. On the radio “Eleanor Rigby” fades into the bouncing guitar of “Blackbird.” I can’t stop myself from hoping Luke is trying to think of a way to ask me to stay in town for a while.

  “I love this song,” he says. His face is mostly in shadow, but I can tell he’s not smiling anymore.

  “Me too,” I reply and it’s true. Of course we love it. My mother loved it, too. It’s the theme song of broken things.

  He looks down at his steering wheel and sighs. “The night of my accident . . . I was the one driving the car. It was my fault.”

  He pauses, but I stay quiet and let him talk. We’re in familiar territory now; guilt is an old friend of mine.

  “I got probation. I guess they figured being in a chair for the rest of my life was punishment enough.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  He looks over at me with a tight smile. “I’m fine. I mean, I’m working at being fine. I’ve talked to a therapist, to Wayne’s parents. I lost my best friend, but they lost a son. They say they forgive me, if you can believe it. It’s been ten years.” He shrugs, adding, “Things are as settled as something like that can ever be. Someone is dead, and it’s my fault. I just have to live with that. There’s nothing I can do to change the past.”

  He sighs and takes my hand in his. I look away, my heart pounding in my chest. When he sees me blinking back tears, he gives my hand a squeeze. He thinks the tears are for him.

  “What I’m trying to say is . . . no matter what happened to your mom, it’s too late to go back and make it right. You can’t save her, you can’t save Father Barnes, or me, or anybody else. The only person you can ever save is yourself, and it’s never too late for that.”

  He’s waiting for me to tell him that I understand, but all I can manage is a nod. I do understand. I just don’t believe it.

  I open the car door and turn back, opening my mouth to say Good night, Howdy, but then I think of that puppet propped up, his useless legs dangling off Cowboy Bob’s lap, and I wonder if that’s what Luke pictured every time I called him Howdy. I hope not.

  “Good night, Luke Lambert.”

  “Good-bye, Mattie Wallace,” he replies.

  I lean over and give him a peck on the cheek and a little smile. And then I reach up and ruffle his hair one last time.

  I hurry through the rain to the garage to retrieve the camera bag and strap from their hiding place in the washer, and my finally dry laundry from the dryer. The gate still stands open, the backyard still empty. The bowl of dog food on the front porch also looks undisturbed, and inside the house is even quieter than it was this morning, the air more stale, the stairs steeper.

  Up in my mother’s room I leave the lights off while I change out of my grandmother’s tweed and into my clean jeans and a T-shirt. I walk to the window and look outside. In JJ’s house I can see a blue flicker through his blinds that tell me his television is on, but the other houses that I can see are dark. The streetlights look like starbursts through the watery blur. While I stand there, the rain picks up, the wind pushing the drops against the glass until it almost sounds like hail. The fresh smell of the storm seeps in through the cracks in the casement.

  A miss is as good as a mile, Queeg likes to say, and he’s right. Almost changing my life feels exactly like not changing it at all.

  I pu
ll out my phone.

  Nick answers on the first ring. It’s noisy again on his end, and I remember that it’s Friday and he’s almost certainly at a gig. He shouts “hang on,” so I do. A few seconds later the noise stops abruptly.

  “I’m in the alley,” he says.

  I smile. Nick and I met in an alley behind a bar.

  “Remember the night we first met?” I say. “We shared a cigarette, and we swapped stories about our shitty parents. You told me about your dad and how he never came to hear you play. And I told you my story about the time I almost drowned while my mom was busy flirting with her boyfriend. Remember?”

  It was cold that night in the alley and I wasn’t wearing a coat because I didn’t want to cover up my new dress. My friends had stayed inside the bar, but when the band took a break I’d followed the handsome guitar player, Nick, out into the alley. My teeth chattered the whole time I talked about trying to swim to the second sandbar and how I could remember everything except for how I got from the water back to the beach. While I told the story, Nick carefully lifted the cigarette from my shaking fingers and put it to his lips, squinting at me through the smoke. He wasn’t shivering. He was wearing a jacket.

  “Yeah,” Nick replies. “You had on that short red dress.”

  “Do you remember what you said when I finished my story?” I pause to give him a chance to answer. When he doesn’t, I continue. “You said it could have been my mom. That maybe I couldn’t see her on the beach because she was already in the water, swimming out to save me.”

  The phone is quiet. I can’t even hear him breathing.

  “Nick?”

  “I’m here.”

  “And then you asked me, ‘Was her hair wet?’ You meant after, when it was all over. You said that if my mom’s hair was wet, then I would know she’d been in the water.”

  “Mattie . . .” His voice is quiet. “What the hell is going on with you?”

  “Rico didn’t take your guitar strap,” I say.

  He doesn’t respond.

  “I’ll bring it back. I’m coming home tomorrow.”

  More silence.

  “I shouldn’t have taken it. I’m sorry.”

  I hear him sigh. He’s eight hundred miles away, but I don’t have to be able to see him to know that he just tilted his head to the left and shrugged his shoulders the way he always does when he acknowledges an apology without really accepting it.

  “I’ve got to go,” he tells me.

  “Wait,” I say. “What would you say if I told you I wanted to have a baby?”

  He doesn’t reply, but from his end I hear a faint voice and a muffled response from Nick. I wonder who’s with him in the alley. I wonder if it’s a woman. Maybe they’re sharing a cigarette.

  “Nick?”

  “Listen, Mattie, I need to get back inside.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “You want me to answer your question? Okay. I’d say you’re fucking crazy, that’s what I’d say.” He’s angry now. I can picture him, his face flushed, his lips pressed together. “I gotta go. We have another set.”

  “Wait, one more thing.”

  “What?” He’s practically shouting.

  “That first night . . . what did I say when you asked me about her hair?”

  “Whose hair? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “My mother’s.” My throat is pinched; I’m struggling to get the words out. “Did I say her hair was wet, or dry? I can’t remember what I told you.”

  “Jesus Christ, Mattie, what is wrong with you?”

  I consider his question. He hangs up long before I come up with the answer.

  I read an article once about our instinct for survival, about how even a person determined to kill himself is often betrayed by his body in the end. Feet struggle to find the knocked-over chair, a gag reflex fights the swallowed pills, exhausted arms pull to one side, turning the disconsolate swimmer back, and back again, toward shore.

  Giving up is easier for the mind than the body.

  Maybe that explains why I open my purse and take out the negatives.

  I know it’s over. There’s not a doubt in my mind. It’s been over from the moment I told Nick I was coming home. No, from the moment I saw the envelope full of cash on Luke’s coffee table. Or maybe from the moment I got into my car and pointed it west. No. Earlier still. It was over the night my mother died.

  For five years I’ve been fighting the tide, barely keeping my head above water, memories of the past always there, grabbing at my ankles, trying to pull me under. Surely it’s time to just accept the fact that sinking is not only inevitable but a welcome relief.

  And yet . . .

  Here I am, standing once more in the darkroom’s amber glow.

  CHAPTER 48

  I don’t have enough paper to print all the negatives, so I print contact sheets to see what I have. Once they’re dry, I lay them flat and study the tiny black-and-white images, all the while certain that this is a giant waste of time. I should be packing. I should be sleeping. I should be doing anything other than inhaling nauseating chemical fumes.

  There are only a few of my mother since she was usually taking the pictures. But there are several of Trip, a few shots of a lake, some squirrels. Obviously most of the pictures were taken on one of their clandestine camping trips, although part of one roll must have been used before or after, because there’s also a good shot of a woman smiling above what looks to be a birthday cake. I decide to just print five, so I go through the sheets and mark the ones I want to enlarge.

  Doing this goes more quickly than showing Tawny how to do it. One by one the images appear in the developer: first the woman leaning down over a birthday cake, her smiling face uplit. Then there are three of my mother, and one of Trip—this one a portrait, head and chest. I stack them in the wash tray and carry them to the sink to rinse. In the bright lights of the bathroom, I swish them around looking at one then the other.

  The woman sitting at the table with the birthday cake can only be Tilda, my mother’s mother. I recognize the setting as the kitchen in this house. She looks to be in her late thirties, I’m guessing eight or nine years older than I am now. She’s wearing a floral apron that reminds me of something from a Father Knows Best episode, and her short curly hair frames her face as she leans down over the cake. The tickle of recognition I felt earlier changes to a flush of understanding now that I’m looking at the full-size picture in the light. I might resemble my mother around the edges, but I look a lot like this woman, similar enough that someone taking a quick glance at this photo could mistake it for a picture of me with short hair. Comprehension washes over me so suddenly that it’s almost a physical response.

  Fritter’s brother, Jonah, thought he was apologizing to Tilda.

  The photo of Trip is a nice one, enough of a close-up that I can see what a handsome boy he was. His expression is serious, his wet hair pushed back from his face. There is beaded water on his neck and chest.

  The three pictures of my mother were all taken on a camping trip, I think. I imagine it went like this: my mother taking photos of the woods and of Trip, and then him picking up the camera and taking a few shots of her. My mother is laughing in the first picture, her wild hair blowing around her shoulders. In the second she’s mugging for the camera, eyes crossed, tongue out. In the third photo she’s not smiling, but instead looking straight at the camera, her brows knitted slightly as if she’d just asked a question. Bra straps or straps from a light-colored swimsuit cross her bare shoulders and her hair is wet and slicked back from her face. More than in the first two, in this photo I can see the woman this girl will become—sad, a little tired, looking for answers. Even the hair is more familiar in this shot, darkened by the water and pulled back rather than loose.

  When they’re rinsed I carry them to the darkroom and hang them on the wire: Tilda on one end, Trip on the other and the three faces of Genie in between. Standing there, looking at face aft
er face, I realize I’m holding my breath. I step closer and look at the picture of Trip: square chin, long, straight nose, wide mouth with a full lower lip—check. I step closer and then farther away, studying the whole group of damp prints.

  Holy shit.

  And here it is—mystery solved. I can imagine my mother at nineteen years old, a little bit pregnant, just like me, and standing right where I am now. She’s looking at prints of these same photos drying on this same sagging wire, and knowing then what I think I know now.

  It’s late, way too late to call anyone unless it’s with news of death or injury, but I hurry to the bedroom to get my phone anyway. I have to float this theory past somebody. I can’t call Queeg this late, can I? Not Nick. Luke? Maybe . . .

  When I pick up my phone, I see I have a missed call that came in just a few minutes ago from a local number. I try to call Luke, but it goes straight to voice mail, and I remember him switching his phone off earlier; he must not have turned it back on.

  Crap.

  I hesitate, looking at the display of that missed call. It’s crazy late to return a call from a number I don’t recognize, but I’m just too curious not to check it out.

  The phone rings twice and then a woman answers. “St. Benedict Episcopal Church.”

  The voice is muffled, but familiar. “Karleen?”

  “Yes. May I help you?”

  “It’s Mattie.”

  “Hi,” she says, sounding surprised. “What’s up?”

  “You just called me,” I reply.

  “Oh. That’s right.”

  “Why are you at the church at one thirty in the morning?”

  “Because I thought Father Barnes might have your number in his Rolodex.”

  Her answer brings me up short. “Rolodex?”

  “One of those round things with cards in it—”

  “I know what a Rolodex is, Karleen. I also know what a Brontosaurus is, but they’re extinct, too.”

  “Apatosaurus.”

  “What?” She’s making no sense, and her voice sounds funny, her consonants blurry. “Karleen, are you drunk?”