Just Fly Away

by Andrew McCarthy

  “Where are you going?” Maxine said. She jumped up and chased after me.

  I didn’t say anything as I shadowed the boy. It was pretty crowded, but it was fairly easy to keep up with him. It was odd that an eight-year-old was alone in the mall, but you could tell by the way he walked that he knew where he was going. He glided up the escalator. We followed.

  “What are we doing?” Maxine asked.

  I didn’t answer, not only because I didn’t know what to say, but because I couldn’t really talk. There was a large lump in my throat. When the boy got off the escalator, he swung back and went into a day spa called Dashing Diva. He went to a woman who was getting her nails done and showed her the mitt. She could have been his mother; she was about the right age. She was pretty; she had long, straw-colored hair. She didn’t seem to be wearing any makeup, so it seemed kind of odd that she was getting her nails done. I just stood looking at them through the glass. Maxine was beside me. She wasn’t talking anymore. All of a sudden a guy joined them; maybe he was the husband. He arrived as if he’d been running to catch up. He tousled the boy’s hair. The boy didn’t seem to notice; he just continued to show the woman the glove. When they looked out toward the front of the shop, I bolted.

  Then, a few weeks later, I thought I saw Thomas again. Same feeling up my spine, same lump in my throat, only this time it was a different kid. He was kind of chubby, but with blond hair—he even had glasses. I was walking down Elm Street with my mother, on our way back from picking up flowers for some charity event thing she was cohosting. The boy was going the other way, right past us, beside an older boy. It had never occurred to me that Thomas could have brothers or sisters. I stopped in my tracks.

  “Come on, sweetheart,” my mother said. “We’re late, we’ve got to get home.”

  I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t just start going up to random kids and asking them who their dad was.

  And that was another thing: I didn’t know if this Thomas person knew that my dad was his dad. It was one more of the many things my parents forgot to talk about when they sat us down to tell us everything. What the hell did the kid know, or think? A lot of people were affected by this onetime fling.

  When we got back to the house, I told my mom I was going over to Maxine’s.

  “How come she never comes over here?” I had been wondering when she would finally ask this.

  “She will. Can I go?”

  My mom was already deep into her flower arrangements for the charity event that night. I think she was glad to see me leave.

  Part of the pleasure of going to Maxine’s house was the walk over. Since it was away from town and on a side street, traffic was much lighter, and I never passed anyone I knew on the way. I was anyone I wanted to be.

  One block had a bunch of old trees that formed a canopy over the road, and as I came out of the tunnel of leaves, the sun was shining. I slowed way down and moved as little as I could without actually stopping. I was watching my shadow hardly move. It was a childish game, but it was also quite peaceful. When I sped up again, it was disappointing in a way, and at the same time, I felt really powerful. If there had been any ants crawling across the sidewalk, I might have held my shoe over them for an instant before I let them live. I am not an ant crusher.

  I cut across Maxine’s front yard and went up the two steps of her stoop. Simon answered the door. He was wearing a black T-shirt that said The Ramones on the front. It was too small for him. His long arms stuck out like beanpoles. I looked down and his feet were bare. He had exceedingly, elegantly long and tapering toes. Wow.

  “Maxine’s not here,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Where’d she go?”

  “She’s at the store with my mother.”

  I kind of stood there on the stoop for a minute. I wasn’t sure what to do. I mean, I had come over to see Maxine, right? I had always come to see Maxine. That I ended up kissing Simon for a little while most times was purely a bonus.

  “You can come in if you want,” Simon said.

  I shrugged. “All right.”

  He turned and walked away, leaving me there. I watched him walk up the stairs as I closed the door. He moved like his joints were connected by rubber bands, everything all loose and swinging. It was a cool walk. Very Simon.

  I didn’t know exactly what to do, so I followed him. By the time I got upstairs, he was sitting in his usual position on the futon. He was picking his nails the way he sometimes did. The window was open a few inches. There was a nice breeze coming in. I’d never noticed before that his room had always felt kind of stuffy, but not on this day. I sat down next to him in my normal spot. Then Simon smiled at me—which felt very nice. Whereas Maxine had a big open smile, Simon had the sweetest, goofiest grin. There were two fine faces for smiling in that family, that’s for sure.

  “You know, your sister didn’t tell me about you,” I said.

  “Didn’t tell you what about me?”

  “That you existed. I didn’t know she had a brother until you walked into the kitchen that day.”

  “And you’re telling me this now because . . . ?”

  “Um, I don’t know. Maybe ’cause we’re alone.”

  “Well, it’s not surprising she didn’t tell you. She doesn’t really notice anyone but herself.”

  “That’s not very nice. She likes you.”

  “I like her too,” he said. “She’s my sister. I love her. I wasn’t being mean—it’s just true. She’s kind of wrapped up in her own thing.”

  “Well.” I shrugged. “Isn’t everybody?”

  Simon gave me one of his soulful gazes. “True that,” he said. Then he leaned in to kiss me.

  I guess he could tell I had other things on my mind, because he stopped after a bit.

  “You okay?” He leaned back in order to have a good Simon look at me.

  “I have a brother, too,” I said.

  “Oh, yeah?” Simon looked at me. “Older or younger?”

  “He’s eight.”

  Simon nodded.

  “I also have a sister who’s thirteen,” I said.

  It was no big deal to him. Why should it be? Lots of people have sisters and brothers.

  I got up and went to the window. It could have used some curtains. Poor guy—how did he sleep in the morning with no blinds or shade? There were tons of fingerprints on the glass.

  “Your window’s open,” I said.

  “Yeah, it’s a nice day.”

  He came over and stood next to me to look out. He pressed his fingers up against the glass and leaned his nose close to it, as if he was looking through a store window at Christmastime.

  Now I knew how all the fingerprints had gotten there. We were both looking out, up into the blue sky. There were very few clouds on the horizon.

  “Ever wish you could just fly away?” I asked him.

  “All the time,” Simon said.

  8

  It occurred to me that perhaps I was losing my mind. I couldn’t go around thinking every eight-year-old I saw was Thomas. It had to stop. I definitely did not want to be going crazy. That’s all I needed, on top of everything else. But what could I do about it?

  I walked into my sister’s room. She was listening to her old musicals, per usual. Some twangy woman was singing

  Anything you can do,

  I can do better.

  I can do anything

  Better than you.

  The one thing that gets Julie truly excited is the musicals that she acts in at camp during the summer. One was about to start up soon. She likes the school plays, too, but those aren’t musicals; they’re just regular talking plays. You have to be in high school to be in the school musicals. So she has to wait.

  Personally I’m just not into getting up in front of people and dancing around and pretending to be a poor orphan with fake smudges on my cheeks or an old lady with a bad wig and a cane. But my sister loves it.

  I hadn’t seen much of Julie lately. It sounds stupid to s
ay since we ate breakfast and dinner together pretty much every day, but it was like she had just sort of become invisible around the house, even when she was in the same room.

  “What are you doing?” I asked her as I walked in.

  “Listening to music,” she said.

  She could have at least turned it down when I started talking.

  Suddenly some guy started singing too, going back and forth with the woman; they were arguing about who was better at everything.

  “It’s creepy about this Thomas kid, isn’t it?” I said to Julie when the song was just about done.

  “Who?”

  I thought she was joking. “Uh . . . Dad’s other kid, Thomas.”

  “Oh.” She nodded. Her hair fell in front of her face. “Yeah.” It was as if I had reminded her of an old pair of skinny jeans she used to wear, or some other ancient memory that didn’t matter all that much.

  “I love this song!” Julie said as the next tune fired up. The singer was going on about how folks were dumb where she came from, but that didn’t matter; they got by just “doing what comes naturally.” What was the matter with everyone? Was I really the only person even slightly bothered by this Thomas catastrophe?

  I left Julie and her singing farmers and walked down into the kitchen. I was standing at the sink, filling a glass, when my dad came through the back door.

  “Ah, shoot. I meant to pick up some bottled water,” he said. “You know, we used to drink from the tap all the time. When I was your age, if you told me that one day people would pay a good amount of money just to have water in a bottle, I would have said you were nuts.”

  “Times change.” I shrugged.

  My dad turned on the stove under the teakettle, and then opened the cabinet and grabbed the palm tree mug and tossed a teabag in it. How many times in my life had I seen him do this exact same thing? He shook his head. “I sound like my father,” he said. “Sorry.”

  I could tell my dad was making an effort to reach out to me, especially since he was talking about his father. He didn’t mention him that often. They never got along.

  “My father never really liked me very much,” I once heard my dad say. It seemed a very weird thing to think—how could a father not like his kid? Apparently, his father also had a particularly bad temper.

  The one and only time that I had met my grandfather, he had seemed quite nice, and not angry at all. He only had teeth in the left side of his mouth, but that didn’t stop him from having a huge appetite, even though he was skinny. He loved to eat. And he especially loved ice cream—how bad could he be?

  He lived up in Maine. We finally visited him a couple of summers ago, after my sister and I saw a picture of him and badgered my father about how come we’d never met him.

  My mother jumped all over that. I heard her talk to my dad about it several more times when they thought no one was around. My dad always answered her with things like, “Yeah, we’ll go up sometime,” but you could tell he didn’t mean it. But she wouldn’t let it go. Finally, we piled into the car.

  My dad said he would only stay at my grandfather’s house for one night, so we stopped at an inn in New Hampshire on the way. After two days at this inn, kayaking and goofing around, we headed to Maine. It was a lot nicer than my dad had led us to believe. His father had moved to this small town by the ocean a long, long time ago, when he and his wife got divorced. My grandmother died a few years after that—I never met her. My grandfather married a woman from Germany, and they lived in a big house on a hill a few blocks away from a small harbor. Supposedly a sea captain had lived in it back in Ye Olde Days.

  They were waiting for us in the driveway when we arrived. My grandfather was kind of nervous, you could tell. But his wife, Angela, brought us all into the kitchen to make fruit smoothies together and everyone settled down.

  Meanwhile, out in the living room, my dad was staring at something. “I haven’t seen this table in twenty years,” he said. Then he said the same thing about a bookcase and a picture on the wall. He walked around the house just shaking his head.

  After dinner my grandfather pushed his chair back from the table and folded his hands over his stomach.

  “I know a place that has the best ice cream in the world. Who’s in?”

  “Me,” my sister shrieked. She had never really been that into ice cream as far as I knew, but she sure was on this night. It had started raining really hard and my dad said he’d drive, but my grandfather wanted us to drive his car, so my dad got behind the wheel. Only one headlight worked and it was really difficult to see since there were no streetlights and it was pouring.

  After a while my grandfather said, “You must have passed it.”

  My dad sighed and started to make a U-turn when my sister saw a big ice cream cone sign down the road. It wasn’t lit up or anything, so how she saw it in the rain and dark I will never know.

  The place had a tall, pointy roof like a Swiss chalet. There was nowhere to go and eat inside, and the parking lot was empty. You ordered through one window and picked up from another. The roof ended right above where you stood to order, and there were no gutters, so water was cascading down. We huddled close to the building but started to get soaked anyway, so we all raced back to the car—except for my dad, who stood getting drenched as he ordered for everyone.

  Once we all had our ice cream, we started back. My grandfather was sitting up front next to my father. He was very quiet at this point, eating his ice cream, which, I have to say, was very good. It was soft serve. It was maybe not the best in the world, but still very good. I had a vanilla cone with chocolate sprinkles, my sister had a vanilla-chocolate combo with rainbow sprinkles, and my grandfather was eating a large hot-fudge sundae. I had certainly never seen such an old person eat a hot-fudge sundae before, especially one that big. I don’t think my dad had, either, because he kept looking over at his father, watching him eat.

  “What is it, Dad?” I asked him when he wouldn’t stop looking over at his father.

  My dad just shook his head—he was doing a lot of shaking his head on this trip. “I had no idea you liked ice cream,” he said to his father.

  “More than anything in the world,” my grandfather said. Chocolate sauce was dripping down his chin and he swallowed the giant final gulp of his hot-fudge sundae. My dad handed him a napkin. My grandfather wiped his chin, but he must have missed a spot because my dad handed him another.

  “Your chin,” he said.

  “A two-napkin sundae—must have been a good one,” my grandfather said.

  That was two summers ago. My dad never talked about going up to Maine again, except whenever Julie or I would ask if we could go, and he would mumble something like, “Oh, we will. Don’t worry,” which was obviously his code for “We’re never going back there again.”

  The idea that he had only taken us up to meet my grandfather once now seemed totally insane to me—really selfish. Because of some stupid feud, or whatever it was, I had been deprived of my grandfather.

  The kettle on the stove started to shriek but before my father could reach for it to make his tea, my arm swept out and in one lightning-fast move I knocked that palm tree mug off the counter and onto the ground, where it shattered into a million pieces.

  “Lucy!” my father yelled.

  I froze where I was.

  My father didn’t say anything else. He just slowly turned to the counter to get some paper towels. He crouched down and started picking up the pieces.

  “Move your foot please, Lucy,” he said.

  That snapped me out of my trance. I bolted up to my room. My father didn’t call after me. He should have. He should have done something.

  The door slammed behind me and I grabbed for my phone. Simon had given me his number after one of our make-out sessions and we had texted a few times, but this was our first call.

  He had told me that he wasn’t that into talking on the phone, and right from the start it was pretty easy to see why. He wasn’t very go
od at it. He just kind of mumbled answers to my questions and didn’t ask me much of anything. Until I told him about what had just happened in the kitchen and the whole history of the mug.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “I don’t know. I just got mad at him for some reason.”

  I left out the mysterious little brother part of the story.

  He was silent for a long moment. “Well,” he said eventually, “now he can’t use it anymore.” It was a fairly obvious thing to say.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Then he stated another maybe less obvious fact: “And now you don’t have it either.” It wasn’t so much what he said, but the way his voice seemed to contain all the sadness I felt that made me glad I had called.

  I started to cry a bit but was careful not to sniffle or anything, and we didn’t speak for a while.

  “Are you picking your nails?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  I knew he was lying.

  “Yes,” he said.

  Then it was quiet again. I didn’t mind not talking so much now. The silence between us went up into outer space, riding on those electromagnetic waves to the satellites in their geosynchronous orbits thousands of miles above our lonely planet, then banged around the heavens for a few milliseconds before being projected back down to Earth and into our ears a few blocks from each other. I pressed the phone closer.

  9

  Finding Thomas’s address was fairly simple. It took about five minutes on the computer to figure out that there were only three people with the last name of Eaves living in our town. What was weird was that it had taken me so long to think to do it. I have no excuse that it was only now coming into my head.

  I rode my bike to the first house on the list, which was near Tamaques Park, where we skate sometimes in the winter if it’s cold enough and the ice gets thick enough so you won’t crash through and drown or die of hypothermia or various other tragic consequences of unvarnished nature.

  I waited for nearly two hours outside a small, gray, one-story house that needed a new paint job. About ten minutes before I was going to have to leave to get home for dinner, a blue car with a big dent on the right passenger side rolled down the street and turned into the driveway. An old guy with glasses and a cane emerged from the car and shuffled toward the door.