Flight Season

by Marie Marquardt

  I think about anything, anything at all but the thing that my body so desperately wants. I know she said yes, and—in that moment—I am sure some part of her meant it. But this is too important to screw up. She’s too important. And God, she’s a mess. She’s hurting so much. I want for her to be better.

  She needs to be better, or at least getting better. It needs to be right.

  After she’s fallen asleep, I pull away from her as gently as I can. I cover her with the fancy blanket that’s draped over the edge of the bed. I fold the blanket carefully over her so that the row of gold tassels won’t brush against her face or her bare shoulders. I grab a pillow and head downstairs.

  I stretch out on that big leather couch in the media room and try to stop my mind from racing.

  I really hope I didn’t mess this up.

  * * *

  Gray morning light comes through the blinds. I long ago realized that sleep was not going to happen for me. If I can’t sleep, I might as well make myself useful. So I get up and head to the kitchen.

  I don’t know how old this house is, since the outside has that nondescript big-nice-house look. I think maybe it’s stucco, vaguely Spanish Colonial. It’s nothing like the old Colonial buildings in St. Augustine, though, with their squeaky doors, sloping wood floors, and windows swollen shut with humidity.

  Vivi’s house is a lot like her mother. When I saw this house from the outside, I thought I knew what to expect—one of those generically beautiful homes, the kind people call “stately.” I expected fancy furniture and heavy drapes, lots of mirrors with those ornate gold frames. But once I followed Vivi through the front door, I knew I had thought wrong. It’s nothing like I expected.

  First of all, the house is wide open. It has virtually no interior walls, at least not on the main floor. And it barely has any color, either. Most of the walls are white, and the furniture is all natural colors, like the kinds of colors you find at the beach. There’s tons of wood everywhere, but it’s bleached natural too.

  It’s not boring, though. Vivi’s house is anything but boring. Because everywhere I looked there were these perfectly placed objects, evidence of her family’s insane travels—carved wooden masks, strange teak chairs with leg rests that swing out from the bottom, bright woven cloths draped across white walls. Most of them are gone now. Vivi and I spent hours wrapping them in paper and packing them into boxes.

  So, yeah, this strange house is a lot like Vivi’s mom. She looks like she’s just gonna be your typical rich suburban mom, with her highlighted hair and manicured nails, but then she surprises you by making a couple dozen origami birds to hang from the ceiling of a hospital room.

  This summer I’ve learned enough about Vivi and her mom to know that I’ll never have any idea what to expect from either one of them.

  A heat pulses through me, because I’m letting myself remember the amazing, beautiful, unexpected Vivi who I walked away from last night.

  I am in need of some serious distraction.

  I go into the pantry and flip the light switch. They have a second freezer in here, which is overflowing with food. I found it last night, after I decided to make dinner, and I almost had to laugh, thinking about Vivi at Costco, and about how she’s subsisting on ramen, beans, and rice in St. Augustine, when there are forty-dollar porterhouse steaks getting freezer burn in the back of this thing.

  I dig out a steak and put it in the microwave to thaw. I find an unopened box of Bisquick in the pantry and mix up some biscuit dough, reading the instructions on the back. I figure it can’t be too hard to make biscuits from a mix. We don’t have any milk, but Vivi did bring half-and-half for her precious coffee, so I use that instead.

  I set the oven to preheat. While it’s heating, I clean up some of the garbage left over from last night’s packing, and take the bags outside to the garbage.

  There’s a door from the kitchen into the garage. I open it to find a huge white Cadillac that looks like it’s probably forty years old. I put down the stack of boxes and walk over to inspect it. It’s a convertible Eldorado, with a creamy white leather interior. The leather is in pristine condition. It’s trimmed in red piping, and the entire dashboard is red too. I’m not, like, a huge car person, but I know enough to know that this thing is a work of art.

  I mean, a red dashboard?

  I let myself slide in behind the steering wheel, which is enormous. It’s three times the size of a normal steering wheel, and it’s also red. The car is like a freaking valentine. I feel like it should have heart cutouts along the windshield.

  Of course, the key is in the ignition. I can’t resist turning it. The engine starts right up, with no hesitation. The radio even comes on. It’s set to a jazz station.

  I cut the engine, close my eyes, and lean back in the seat.

  After a few minutes I hear the garage door open behind me. I turn to see Vivi, standing in the doorway. Her face is flushed and her hair’s sort of messy.

  Seeing her fills me up—I can’t even begin to make sense of the way I feel.

  “Hey, Viv,” I say, hoping she can’t recognize all of these unexpected emotions creeping into my voice. I’m not ready to try explaining them. “Did I wake you?”

  She shakes her head but doesn’t say anything. She also doesn’t look at me. I think she’s having a hard time looking at me.

  “This car is amazing,” I say, hoping to change the subject. “Whose is it?”

  “It was my grandmother’s,” she says. “I think, technically, it’s mine now.”

  “She must have been one awesome lady to drive this thing around town.”

  “I was named after her.”

  “Her name was Vivian?”

  “No, Viola.”

  “Viola Flannigan,” I tell her. “That’s quite a name.”

  Jesus. I barely know this girl. Until now, I didn’t even know her real name. And still I feel more connected to her than I knew was possible. It’s like I’m feeling the future before it arrives.

  “She was quite a woman,” Vivi says. “My grandfather gave her this car for her sixtieth birthday. I’ll never forget coming out of their house and seeing it with a huge red bow on top.”

  “Good present.” I climb out of the car and head toward her.

  “He adored her.” Vivi shrugs. “God, they were so embarrassing, kissing all the time in front of us, but it was nice to know that—”

  Before I even know what I’m doing, I’m taking her hand and pulling her into me, wrapping my arms around her waist. I lean back against the car, pulling her with me. I kiss her forehead and then her lips. But her body feels wrong—it’s not careening toward me like it did last night. It’s not still and calm, like it was after—when she fell asleep. She seems stiff, awkward, unsure of where she should be in space.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she says. “I’m really hungry, actually.”

  She steps back and puts her hand on the doorknob.

  “I’m making steak biscuits,” I tell her. “Give me, like, ten minutes.”

  That produces a smile. “Of course you are,” she says, shaking her head.

  I follow her in through the door.

  “I’m gonna get cleaned up,” she says, gesturing up the stairs, where her room is. I saw it yesterday. I guess maybe I shouldn’t have gone in there, but I couldn’t pass it without looking in. It has light blue walls and a white bedspread. I think the most prominent feature is the enormous desk, stacked with schoolbooks and jars of still-sharp pencils.

  “Be right back,” she says.

  I season the steak with oil and a little garlic salt and pepper. While the biscuits are baking, I grill the steak. They have one of those gas grills on their cooktop. It’s far from the best way to make a porterhouse steak, but there’s no use wasting this expensive cut of meat. I have a feeling this is the last time they’ll be here. I slice the steak thin and put it between the warm biscuits. I wrap each one individually in parchment paper and foil and
put them in the oven to stay warm.

  Vivi doesn’t come downstairs for a long time. When she finally does, she’s wearing a green sundress I’ve never seen, and her hair is damp against her bare shoulders. She’s not even to the bottom of the stairway when she blurts out, “Do you know what a short sale is?”

  “A what?”

  “A short sale.”

  I nod. “Yeah, why?”

  “The Realtor already sold our house,” she says. “Mom just showed me the contract.” She’s shaking her head slowly.

  “Oh Jesus, Viv,” I say. Because I have no idea what to say. I know that Vivi thought selling this house would pay for another semester of college. I also know that a short sale means not a penny goes to the seller. It all goes straight to the bank. Vivi’s parents were carrying some serious debt if they had to do a short sale.

  “I know he had a second mortgage to pay for all of the alternative treatments, but—”

  She lets out a long breath and sits on the bottom stair. I walk over and sit down beside her.

  “You’ll figure something out,” I say. I’m desperate to help her come up with a solution, but I’ve got nothing. How does a person find $61,000? She told me that’s how much she needs—for only one year of college. People buy houses with that kind of money—yachts, fancy cars. That’s a shit-ton of money for one year of school.

  Wait. Fancy cars.

  “Hey, Viv,” I say. “You could sell the car—the Cadillac.”

  “What? No. I can’t do that.”

  “Do you own the Tesla—I mean, outright?”

  “I think so,” she tells me. “I know we don’t have car payments on it.”

  “So sell it and drive the Caddy. It seems like it runs fine.”

  She squints a little, like she’s thinking about the possibilities.

  “It’s so strange,” she says. “I’ve spent the entire summer being mad—mad at my mom for not telling me how bad things were, mad at my dad for dying and leaving behind such a mess, mad at the world for not giving me what I needed.”

  I can’t come up with anything to say.

  “I’m not mad anymore.” She’s looking down at her hands, folded neatly in her lap. “I’m just so sad because I see it now; I get why all this happened. He was afraid to die. He couldn’t face it—he pretended none of it was happening. He bought me a car; he went off and did all of those stupid meaningless treatments. He sunk us into the ground, trying to avoid the thought of it.”

  “Everyone’s afraid to die,” I tell her.

  “Ángel’s not afraid.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I ask, probably too loud. “He’s scared out of his freakin’ mind. He’s totally terrified.”

  “He doesn’t act like it.” She stands up, her back turned away from me, and heads into the kitchen.

  “It’s you,” I tell her. “He’s different when you’re around—more calm or something.” She turns to study my face. “You two are, like, I don’t know. You have this strange effect on each other.”

  She nods. “Yeah,” she says. “I think maybe you’re right.”

  I look at her, so beautiful and so vulnerable, so incredibly alive and so deeply sad. And I know I can’t give her what she needs. I can’t even begin to know what she needs. I thought I was some kind of goddamned hero last night because I didn’t let myself take anything from her. I thought I gave her something. I thought maybe it would help. But she’s not feeling any better this morning than she was yesterday. And her situation? It keeps on getting worse.

  I take a biscuit from the oven and toss it to her.

  “Let’s get this shit done,” I say, looking at the living room, which is filled with boxes. “I’ll follow you and your mom back to St. Augustine in the Cadillac—my buddy Travis can check it out, see what kind of shape it’s in.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  VIVI

  BIRD JOURNAL

  July 29, 9:48 P.M.

  Still no bird sightings. Perhaps the offshore hurricane disrupted the birds’ flight patterns? This is the only plausible explanation I can come up with.

  DRIVING BACK TO ST. AUGUSTINE, I can’t stop thinking about a confused cardinal I watched one spring morning in the quad outside of my dorm at Yale. I was supposed to be on my way to chemistry, but I couldn’t bring myself to go into that lecture hall. It had been weeks since I had completed a problem set, and I was incredibly lost. Every time I went to class, it was like one of those recurring nightmares, when you wake up and realize you have to take an exam for a class you never went to.

  Most days, I was managing to get to class, but—still—I had no idea what was going on in there. By the time I stopped to watch the cardinal, I should have been paying close attention to Professor Lorenzo talking about reactive intermediates and the octet rule (another quiz I barely passed).

  Instead, when I heard the thud, I stopped to investigate, and then I ended up sitting on a stone bench, watching a cardinal throw himself against a window for at least half an hour.

  Birds sometimes behave this way in the spring, when they are busy coupling, establishing their territory, preparing to protect their young. They see their own reflection in the glass and think they’re seeing a competitor, another bird who is out to steal their mate or damage one of their eggs or maybe just invade their territory. So those birds—usually males, but not always—start attacking their own reflection in the window.

  Again and again, this bright red cardinal hurled himself from the tree where, apparently, he was building a nest, and threw his body against the glass. His partner, a dull brown thing with the tiniest bit of orange on her crown, perched on a nearby branch and watched the idiotic behavior unfold. Finally (and quite legitimately) she got exasperated and flew away.

  When the battered cardinal realized his mate was gone, he flew to the top of a nearby tree and started calling out for her like crazy. She didn’t respond.

  I guess that cardinal throwing himself against a window is a good reminder to me: even the smartest animals can be stone-cold stupid sometimes.

  * * *

  “TJ was very kind to help us with all those boxes,” Mom says from the passenger seat.

  “Mmhmm,” I mumble.

  TJ is driving in front of me in the Eldorado. He has the top down, and his shaggy dark hair is whipping around in the wind.

  I’m feeling incredibly confused about what happened last night. I’ve fooled around plenty of times. I’ve even had a couple of real boyfriends, nothing all that serious, but still. I can honestly say that my body has never reacted that way to any person’s touch—not even my own. The whole thing was so overwhelming, especially the way TJ stopped so suddenly. And then this afternoon, when we were taping up the last of the boxes, I made the mistake of picking up his phone when it rang. I only meant to hand it to him. I held the phone for no more than five seconds—long enough to see a photo of a stunningly beautiful girl in a gold sequined bikini. He took one look at the phone and then walked outside to answer. Neither one of us said another word about it, but I couldn’t help wondering if she was one of the girls on whom he’d honed his incredible skills. Clearly, last night was not his first time doing that.

  I’m sure that, for TJ, last night was a pity hookup—without going through with the actual hookup. So now I have to figure out a way to let him know that it’s okay—I don’t need anyone’s pity.

  So, if Mom wants to sit in the passenger seat and talk about TJ, instead of addressing one of the many important issues we’re facing—including but not limited to our overdue power bill, the fact that she has nowhere to live, and my looming Yale tuition—she’s going to get no response from me.

  Mom and I are beyond broke. Our only remaining possessions are packed into an eight-by-seven storage container, and they consist of such useful objects as Balinese shadow puppets and Norwegian drinking vessels.

  I am entirely over her pretending that none of this is happening. I refuse to let her use TJ as a distraction. And me? I�
��m going to have to find a way to stop being distracted by him too. I need to pull myself together. I need to focus.

  I was going to be a homing pigeon this summer! I was going to come home, do a kick-ass job at my internship, and return to Yale, victorious, glowing recommendations in hand, ready to jump on the premed track. What happened to that plan?

  What is happening to me?

  We pull off the interstate and head into the Old City. Mom agreed to help her friend Wendy hang a new show, so I drop her at Wendy’s gallery, on San Marco. Then I follow TJ down US 1. TJ eases the Eldorado into an old gas station, with a shop around the back. It looks to be abandoned. He steps out of the Eldorado and I roll down the window.

  “Is anyone here?” I ask.

  “Not yet,” he says. “Travis is on his way.”

  I park beside the Eldorado and get out. We sit beside each other on the hood of my grandmother’s car and I look up at the sky.

  No birds. Not a single bird since we left for Orlando. Where have all the birds gone?

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  He turns to look at me. His eyes searching my face. “What are you sorry for, Viv?” he asks carefully.

  Hearing him call me Viv punches a little hole in my heart.

  “I shouldn’t have—”

  “Attacked me?” He smiles a broad, heartbreakingly beautiful smile, and his eyes sparkle with light. “I didn’t mind.”

  “It was a mistake.” I bite down hard on my lip, and that taste of metal fills my mouth.

  “What’s this about?” he asks. “Are you embarrassed? You shouldn’t be embarrassed. It was—”

  “Grief,” I say. “I think it must have been my grief or something. I mean, it was so intense and I’ve never had…”

  “Had what?”

  “You know. That reaction.”

  He turns his head and looks right at me. I can feel my cheeks turning bright red. “Never?”