Just Fly Away

by Andrew McCarthy

  “Thanks for telling everyone,” I said to Arianna. I could barely squeeze my foot under the table without banging something.

  “I didn’t tell everyone.” She shrugged. “Just some people. And it’s not like no one would have known. I mean, look at you.”

  At that moment my crutches slipped from the side of the table where I’d leaned them and crashed to the floor. Everyone nearby looked over at the commotion.

  “They wouldn’t have to know I jumped off the roof,” I hissed at Arianna.

  “Whatever.”

  As if that was an explanation.

  “You are way too impulsive, Willows.” Arianna always called me by my last name; why, I have no idea. I think she saw somebody talk that way in a movie or somewhere. “You gotta learn to relax.” She was shaking her head at me, also, not demonstrating a lot of sympathy. If I’d had any thoughts of sharing my real, serious news with Arianna, they evaporated right then. The rest of the day was no better. More snide remarks and stupid stares from people.

  That night Arianna texted.

  Hope you’re not trying to fly again

  What was wrong with her? I didn’t even answer.

  The next morning in front of my locker she came up to me. “What’s with ghosting me?”

  “I didn’t ghost you. I just didn’t answer your stupid text.”

  “It wasn’t stupid, and I’m not the one who jumped off the roof.”

  I just closed my locker and hobbled to class. Clearly, whatever flair I had with people was out of sync. The next few days were no better. I started to feel like a freak, and began to give everyone a wide berth. School usually never troubled me too much, but now it was starting to stress me out. I really began to dislike going to my classes.

  I also started to fall behind on these interviews I was supposed to be doing for the yearbook. A while ago I had this crazy idea to speak with various people about things that they were not very good at. For example, if someone was a great basketball player, I talked with them about what sport they were the worst at. Or if someone was very outspoken, like the president of the debating club, I asked them what they felt shy about. The yearbook advisor, Mr. Burke, thought this was actually a pretty great idea, so it became my job to interview people—twenty-four of them was the number he decided. Then they would put my interview answers on the yearbook page next to the one with those lame Senior Superlative winners—although, I suppose if you were named one, like “most likely to earn a million dollars the fastest,” you wouldn’t think it was so stupid. Anyway, I had to find about four people a week if I was going to have all twenty-four in time for the printing, but now I started to get behind.

  The first day I didn’t have my crutches, we took a field trip into New York to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to look at the impressionist paintings. We’d been studying that period in art history and we were supposed to find a painting we liked and sketch it.

  Arianna was in my art history class, but she was getting her braces off and not at school that day. I actually didn’t care all that much that she wasn’t there. Frankly, I couldn’t really deal with her recent attitude—I couldn’t deal with anyone’s attitude.

  I ended up sitting next to Maxine Wagner on the bus. I had sort of known her for years, but had never really spoken to her much or hung out with her before. She rode horses all the time and had no interest in anyone—which at this moment was fine by me.

  But by the time we reached the highway, she still hadn’t spoken a word, so just to be polite I said, “How are the horses treating you?”

  “I quit,” she said.

  “Really?”

  “Yup.”

  “Wow. Didn’t you ride all the time?”

  “Six days a week.”

  “What happened?”

  She shrugged. “I grew up.”

  Of all the answers she could have given, I actually thought this was one of the best.

  I nodded.

  She nodded back. Then she broke into the biggest, warmest smile I think I have ever seen. Who knew she was capable of such a nice smile?

  We had a pleasant chat about the joys of getting out of school and going into the city, but mostly we were both content to just hang out. I spent a good deal of the time gazing out the window. There’s something really peaceful about seeing things zip past, knowing you don’t have to deal with them—just look at them and then they’re gone.

  Then we disappeared into the Lincoln Tunnel. I know a lot of people dislike going into a tunnel; they find it claustrophobic or some such. But I really enjoy it. I can’t help but feel that when we come out the other side, things will be different.

  There was a lot of traffic in the city, like there always is, but we eventually made it through the park. At the museum, we went through security like we were getting on a plane to nowhere, then we were herded directly up the stairs and off to the left to the appointed galleries. I am not an artist. I thought since the paintings were impressionist instead of realistic they would be easier to sketch—I was wrong. I tried to do the big painting of water lilies by Monet. My sketch was a mess. It looked like a bad necklace with large teardrops hanging off it.

  I didn’t expect it to be any good since I’m generally so bad at artistic stuff, but I was surprised how embarrassed by it I was.

  “Yours is the only one worse than mine,” someone said over my shoulder.

  It was Maxine. She was smiling her big open smile again. Then she held up her sketch, which was of that famous Starry Night painting by Van Gogh. Hers was terrible also.

  After a less boring than I would have thought lecture on the “radical reactionism” of the impressionists, we had a half hour to look at whatever else we wanted at the museum. Maxine and I went to the Egyptian section, not because I had any real interest in it, but because it was the only place I knew. When I was little, my family used to go to the museum occasionally and I remember I got freaked out by the mummies. This time they just seemed really sad. Those poor people didn’t have any place to eternally rest. When I die, I do not want my coffin sitting in some museum, not that any museum would want my coffin. I would like to be under a tree on a hillside, or better yet, cremated and scattered somewhere that holds deep meaning for me. I haven’t found a place like that yet, but when I do, that’s where I will want to be scattered. At sunset.

  For some reason I noticed this mummy tucked over in the corner, behind glass. It was really small; it must have been a young person—perhaps an eight-year-old boy.

  “What are you staring at?” Maxine asked.

  “Nothing.” Were thoughts of this Thomas kid now going to pop up everywhere I went? That was all I needed.

  The truth is that most of the mummies were fairly small. They must have been pretty short in ancient Egypt. I should have been born then—I would have been average height. Of course, I probably would have been some slave who had to carry water through the desert under the blistering sun to the other slaves who were building pyramids or the Sphinx or some such ancient ruin.

  But on the off chance that I was actually royalty, my exalted status might have come in handy. Back then life was cheap, and if you were a nobleman you could get away with killing just about anyone you wanted to kill. And there were one or two people right about now that I wouldn’t have minded seeing dead.

  5

  “Your mother and I thought it would be a good idea to talk about this a little more.”

  It was two weeks since the Thomas bomb had been dropped, and the day after my parents had gone out for a big dinner to celebrate their wedding anniversary—which I suppose qualifies as a fine example of irony.

  If you had come over to our house during that two-week stretch, you wouldn’t have noticed anything different from the way things had always been. My dad went off to work selling houses, my mom continued doing her layouts part-time for the magazine and chauffeuring Julie around to the various singing and dancing classes that consumed her life. Dinner was on the table each night
. Everything looked the same, yet nothing was.

  I had been trying to keep my head down and basically just avoid everyone, but then my father gathered us all in the living room. I couldn’t remember the last time I had actually sat in that room. Everyone always passed through it on the way from the stairs to the kitchen. My dad was on the big couch next to my mother, a cup of tea in his hand. Julie and I were in the two overstuffed chairs across from them. The sun streamed in through the window over my dad’s shoulder, and dust motes floated in the shaft of light. I kept my eyes on them throughout most of the talk.

  “The first thing I want to say is that I love you two very, very much,” my dad said. “And I love your mother very much.”

  My mom reached over and took his hand.

  If this was the way this talk was going to go, then I was gonna puke.

  “When you kids were much younger, your mother and I went to a party at a friend’s home.”

  So this was it. He was going to tell us all the dirty details. I wondered which friends had the party. I didn’t ask.

  Apparently my father met a woman at said party and shortly thereafter they had a onetime fling. That was the word he used, fling. Seriously?

  It was just the one time—or so he insisted.

  He was leaning forward, his elbows resting on his knees, the mug of tea clutched in both hands. “I didn’t know there was going to be a child until months later, when I saw the woman at the train station and she was very pregnant.”

  “When’s his birthday?” I asked. I didn’t even know I was going to ask that. I had never wondered before.

  “It’s in September,” my father said. “September 24.”

  “And what’s his name?”

  “His name is Thomas,” he said calmly.

  “Yeah, I know that. What’s his last name?”

  My parents looked at each other for a second.

  “Eaves,” my father said. “His name is Thomas Eaves.”

  The talk went on from there. At one point I looked over at my sister. I knew she was sitting beside me, but somehow I couldn’t feel her there so I had to look over and make sure. She seemed very small, buried deep in the cushions of the puffy chair. She’s very fair skinned, but she seemed even paler than normal. She was staring at something above my father’s head. I had no idea what. A little later I thought I could just barely hear her humming “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning,” or another one of those super old show tunes she’s been singing forever. She didn’t say a word the entire time.

  The talk was meant to clear the air, but frankly, it was too much information and not a lot of answering the important questions, like how the hell could he do that to my mom, especially when she was at home dealing with the kids and keeping his house running? Why didn’t she just take her hand out of his and punch him in the face?

  I remembered once seeing a TV show about a Hollywood couple who had newborn twins. The guy had been caught cheating, and this was their first public appearance to say how their love and family was so important, and they were putting the incident behind them.

  “With a new child everyone is so overtired,” the starlet wife was saying, but she didn’t look overtired. She looked like a movie star with perfect hair. She was sitting on the couch next to her movie star husband, just like my mom was now sitting next to my father. She went on to say that between their stellar film careers and now parenting, they just hadn’t had any time for each other or for romance and that it happens more often than you’d think. It didn’t mean they didn’t love each other. “And from now on,” she said, “we’re going to have a date night every week just to keep things percolating.” Then she turned her glimmering teeth on her A-list husband and he smiled back devilishly.

  “It’s just something that can happen in a long relationship,” the wife concluded as the husband nodded his head.

  I suppose it makes sense, but it also sounded like a bunch of excuses to me. He looked like a smug jerk, and she seemed like a total wimp.

  I realized I wasn’t even listening to my father anymore, and at some point I had shifted my focus from the floating dust to the oversized palm tree mug he was holding in his hand.

  When I was little, about seven or eight—the same age as that kid who lives across town—my dad used to take me to this pottery place not far from his office. It was our place, the thing that just we did together. You could make your own cups and bowls and various other things, or you could pick from the stuff that had been premade. Neither my dad nor I was very good at throwing pottery, but we both loved painting it.

  “What are you going to do today, Dad?” I’d always ask as we walked through the glass front door.

  “I think maybe today it’s gonna be a mug,” my dad said that particular morning he decided to paint the palm tree. He had a sly grin on his face, I remember.

  We set about filling our trays with the colors we’d need. The trays held eight colors each, but that day he only squeezed out four. Usually we chatted away while we painted, and sometimes we even changed our minds about what we were painting halfway through, but that day my dad was quiet. He was really concentrating. He knew just what he wanted to do.

  “Whoa! Awesome, Dad,” I said when he finally let me see it. Even before it was fired it looked pretty great. “I want to go to that beach.”

  “Me, too,” he said with a big sigh.

  It took about a week after we painted the stuff for it to go through the kiln and be ready for us to pick up. As much as we loved the painting part, what I think we both liked best, but also couldn’t stand, was the anticipation of the final product.

  My dad actually got pulled over once for going through a red light just trying to get there faster. He didn’t get a ticket because he had sold the policeman his house two years earlier and the cop remembered him.

  “Good thing he likes his house,” I said after the officer let us go. I have to admit that my dad is very good at his job.

  “Sure is.” My dad laughed. The truth is that the stuff we made at that shop was usually a little disappointing. Nothing ever turned out as good as I thought it was going to—except for that palm tree mug. It’s not that the palm tree or the ocean was so perfect; it’s just that you sort of felt like you were at the beach when you looked at it—which doesn’t make much sense, but is really the best way I can describe it. It just exceeded all expectations, even my mom’s.

  “Look at that!” she said when she saw it. “Did you really do that, sweetheart?”

  “Shocking, isn’t it?” my dad said.

  My mom laughed. “It is.”

  She usually tried to make a show of being impressed by my stuff, even when it wasn’t all that stellar, but this one thing of my dad’s caught her genuinely off guard. It was spectacular.

  And he gave it to me. Naturally, being the bighearted person that I am, I gave him carte blanche to use it whenever he wanted. Now that I thought about it, he probably made it right around the time of the incident with the woman from the party. Disgusting. It was pretty insensitive of him to be drinking from that particular mug at that exact moment in the living room.

  My mother didn’t really say two words during the talk, and nothing my father said was of much interest to me. Eventually the big meeting just fizzled out.

  After that, whenever I was in a room with my dad, I left as soon as I could. At first I tried to do it so he didn’t notice that it was because of him.

  “I’ve got a lot of homework,” became my standard thing to say so I could leave right after dinner. Or I’d say, “Oh, I gotta find my phone,” if he came into the kitchen while I was having something to drink. Not very original lines, but I didn’t care.

  After a little while, I stopped trying and simply walked out whenever he walked in. The sight of my dad had started to make my stomach sick.

  One afternoon he caught me off guard when he came back between house showings. I hadn’t expected him until dinner. I was at the kitchen table reading the newspaper. Though I
generally have no interest in reading the paper, for some reason I take great pleasure in spreading it out on the kitchen table and perusing it when no one else is around.

  When I started to gather it up, he stopped me.

  “Lucy.” He said my name with great seriousness. He was getting set to have a little heart-to-heart. You certainly had to admire his perseverance, if nothing else. He gazed down at his shoes and then looked up at me. His already big blue eyes got even bigger, and bluer, if such a thing was possible. In the past I would have said that my dad had very sincere eyes, but of course I couldn’t say that anymore.

  “We’re going to have to talk again sooner or later,” he said.

  “We’re not not talking. I’ve just got a term paper due.” I left the room.

  I didn’t have any interest in anything he had to say on the subject, or any subject for that matter, even though I did actually have a lot of questions. Questions that didn’t get addressed during the big talk.

  Did this Thomas person have a father who was his everyday father, like a stepfather? Would it even really be a stepfather since my dad and this woman were never married or a couple? Was she married now? Was she pretty? And what was her name? Where exactly did they live? Did the woman really want no involvement between my dad and their child, as he had said? Would she change her mind? And what about his involvement with her? Was it really just that one time? Did he still like her, did he love her, or think about her? How often did he run into her at the supermarket? Was my dad ever going to go and live with them? There seemed a lot of loose strings to this situation, and it wasn’t likely that I was going to get any answers, especially since I wasn’t talking to the main person who would have been able to tell me everything.

  And I certainly wasn’t going to ask my mother. Frankly, I couldn’t really deal with her either. How could she have stayed with him after what he did to her? We should have moved out when it happened, and then we’d be all set up in our new life by this point. We might not have our family, but I’d at least still have some respect for her.