Mayday

by Karen Harrington

  Yeah, like setting off explosives inside his house. Genius!

  She sat down next to me and touched my hair the way moms do.

  “Sometimes people aren’t who you think they are at first. That’s how it was for me and your dad. I had to speak up for myself. And for you. But he’s maturing, I think.”

  You wouldn’t think he was mature if you knew about that day he came over and hit me and Grandpa chased him off.

  “Just be careful about expecting too much from him, okay?”

  I turned my head away.

  “The best thing he ever did was to give me you,” she said. “What I’m trying to say is that even a flower can grow in the desert. You know, something beautiful can come from something… dry.”

  Dry?

  “You know what I mean. Something good from an unexpected source.”

  I sort of understood what she meant about my dad. Even if she was comparing me to a flower and the Flee to an uninhabitable climate.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  No. I stared hard at the carpet on my floor.

  Then she saw what I was looking at. The flag display case.

  “Is that what I think it is?” she asked, her voice full of surprise. Hello, elephant in my room.

  I’ve been looking for the flag.

  She put her hands to her mouth. She was trying to hide her face. The sad face. We stared at the empty case.

  Weeks ago, I’d told Denny that I was certain the flag would be found by the time the investigators announced the initial findings and cause of our crash. Why had I been so certain?

  Why?

  The report was due out on Monday.

  DATA

  NTSB initial report on Flight 56 released two months following the crash:

  32 people died, including passengers and flight crew.

  Severe winds were a factor in the crash.

  During an earlier scheduled inspection, it was noted that there were fatigue cracks along the seam of the aircraft.

  The cracks had not been repaired.

  The fatigue cracks, coupled with wind shear, ripped open the hole in the plane.

  Therefore, a human error, or failure to adequately maintain the aircraft, was listed as the primary cause.

  CHAPTER 21

  I expected weather to be the primary culprit of the crash. The storm. The winds. All of it pushing down our plane.

  It was not. It was only listed as a factor.

  So now I considered fatigue cracks. Tired spaces in the plane.

  And it blew out and gave up during a freak December thunderstorm over East Texas.

  It was a week after I’d first met Tim LeMoot. He and Mom were sitting at our kitchen table, drinking iced tea and checking movie times. I showed Mom the NTSB report I’d found on the Internet.

  “It’s difficult to accept.”

  Yeah.

  “Do you feel better now that you know the facts?”

  Sucks.

  “I have to agree with you.”

  No amount of money will put the plane back together.

  And Tim LeMoot chimed in. “Not that plane, Wayne. But others. Aircraft are designed by humans, and humans make errors. Sometimes you must hold people accountable.”

  Right.

  “Hey, I have to go shoot a new commercial later. Want to go with us?” Tim LeMoot asked. It turned out that Tim LeMoot, in real life, was a nice guy who actually asked people what they wanted to do. And because I wasn’t used to that, I shrugged and left them. They were happy. I could only pretend to be happy for so long.

  I wasn’t. I was too distracted. The NTSB report made everything about the crash final. Would that mean no more searches through East Texas? No more newscasts about the tragedy? I guessed the answer was no. There was already a sinking cruise ship off the coast of Italy eating up all the tragic news time, anyway.

  Liz Delaney was probably researching that story right now.

  Liz Delaney had not answered my third e-mail request. Denny had even left a message on her voice mail: “Hello, Ms. Delaney, I hope it’s not rainy. Respond to your e-mail from Mr. Kovok so he won’t go into shock.”

  Liz Delaney probably thought she was being pranked. Denny used his whisper-voice, which could sometimes sound a little murdery over the phone.

  Reporters were not responding to my e-mails.

  And Sandy Showalter? I expected a report on the demise of our sort-of-boyfriend/girlfriend status any day now.

  The primary cause of this relationship ending was a lack of interest.

  But, the day before, Sandy Showalter had allowed me to walk all around the mall with her. And I mean from the Pizza Kitchen to Sears. End to end. The only thing we had in common was that we both avoided eye contact and sipped on drinks I bought when we passed the food court. Her mother had run off someplace in the mall to buy plates that were on sale.

  I knew it was all pretend. As long as I was mute, I was her sort-of boyfriend. As soon as Dr. P pronounced me healed, Sandy’s mother would allow her to bolt.

  So I’d gathered up a bunch of facts and wrote a note to Sandy. I tried to be like old Wayne, giver of facts. Facts doing the talking so that I wouldn’t sound stupid.

  Want to know what it said?

  Did you know that the word “muffin” is believed to come from the French term “moufflet,” which means “soft bread”? And also, the corn muffin is the official state muffin of Massachusetts, and the apple muffin is the state muffin of New York?

  “Ohhhhh,” she said as she handed the note right back to me. The way she said it and carried out the word oh with three syllables had a lot in common with the way Anibal Gomez had given me the dog-dump glare and said Duuuuude.

  Her look gently approximated the dog-dump glare.

  My recitation of facts backfired.

  Even for Wayne Kovok, it was a new low. It wasn’t the ground floor of dorkery. No, there was a level beneath that. I’d ridden the elevator all the way to the basement of awkwardness.

  I bet Sandy wrote a novel-length text to her friend Wendy about what a muffin-researching moron I was.

  Now I sat on my bed thinking about the previous day. And I got so sick of myself. So sick of thinking and wondering. I went back to the kitchen table, where Tim LeMoot and Mom were still drinking iced tea.

  I’ll go to your commercial shoot.

  “That’s great,” Tim LeMoot said.

  We spent the rest of the afternoon watching Tim LeMoot stand in front of a green screen inside a studio. He’d shout his phone number into the camera, practically begging accident victims to call him. His production team superimposed fake explosions, shattered glass, a bald eagle, and a giant black boot in the background.

  Then they brought out actors to stand in front of the screen and shout about their fake injuries and how much money Tim LeMoot had kicked into their pockets.

  Then they put Tim LeMoot up high on a ladder.

  “This is the part where the team will superimpose the giant eighteen-wheeler,” Mom whispered to me.

  The last scene. Tim LeMoot stood in front of the green screen, and then they superimposed a giant field of grass behind him. I didn’t get it at first. Why a field?

  Tim LeMoot looked directly into the camera and said, “WHY WERE YOU IN AN ACCIDENT? WELL, ACCIDENTS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE. GOOD PEOPLE NEED SOMEONE LOOKING OUT FOR THEM! YOU NEED A LAWYER WHO’S OUTSTANDING IN HIS FIELD. SO CALL ME, TIM LEMOOT, THE TEXAS BOOT. I’M OUT STANDING IN MY FIELD! WHY SHOULD YOU GO THROUGH HARD TIMES ALONE? WHY?”

  At the end of that session, the entire crew clapped. The Boot took a bow. The field disappeared from the screen.

  Do you know what I was thinking? That Tim LeMoot seemed to understand the plaguing question.

  Why should any of us go through anything all alone?

  It all made sense now. The real reason Grandpa had come to live with us. The real reason he was still here.

  Why should anyone go through hard times—or an illness—alo
ne?

  CHAPTER 22

  So I was going to talk to Grandpa as soon as the sun rose in the morning. I hoped he would point to the elephant in the room and say, Yep, there he is and his name is Dave. And me and my elephant are here because we didn’t want to be alone while I have stomach problems that may or may not be cancer.

  But I didn’t get the chance, because Grandpa answered the phone, took a message, folded it into a paper airplane, and aimed it at my head, and then I had to go eat with the Flee.

  Epic fail.

  Epic.

  Epic.

  Epic.

  Grandpa said, “It might be a good idea. Considering.”

  Considering what?

  Some unspoken message passed between him and Mom that I couldn’t decipher. I suspected it had something to do with all the elephants living in our house.

  Because if Grandpa thought it was a good idea to go out with the Flee, the world had gone crooked.

  “I’ll go with you, Wayne,” Mom said.

  “Jennifer, let the boy handle it on his own,” Grandpa said.

  “I’m going with him,” Mom said with a determination I hadn’t heard in her voice since, well, since we lived in BEFORE.

  I got inside Mom’s car, not knowing what to expect and not really caring. Sandy had told me that the most epic poet of all time, old Bill Shakespeare, had once written that “expectation is the root of all heartache.”

  So I prepared to have zero expectations.

  Like Mom told me.

  Zero expectations = zero heartache.

  Do you know where the Flee wanted us to meet him?

  At a very international restaurant. The International House of Pancakes. Did you know that IHOP recently opened its first restaurant in the Middle East? It’s true. They opened one in Dubai. Maybe a lot of the world’s problems could be solved over pancakes and boysenberry syrup, which is my favorite. Boysenberry syrup is a cross between four different kinds of berries (European raspberry, blackberry, American dewberry, and loganberry). Do not ask me why I know so much about this syrup. I just do.

  “Something wrong with you?” the Flee asked.

  No.

  “Still can’t talk yet, huh?” the Flee said, his mouth full of pancakes.

  “His therapy is going great,” Mom told him.

  I knew he enjoyed how I couldn’t talk. He probably liked me better this way.

  I ordered a shake, and a sandwich I couldn’t eat, but what the heck. He owed me at least a sandwich. While he stuffed pancakes into his mouth, the Flee managed to spit out a few words.

  “Sorry about the other night,” he said.

  I studied the back of the ketchup bottle. One tablespoon has twenty calories.

  “Sorry, Jennifer,” the Flee said. “It’s just your dad.”

  “You might want to stop talking now,” she told him.

  “Hey, here’s something I thought Wayne might be interested in,” he said, passing me a brochure. It was yellow, and on the front it read, JOIN THE AQUADUCKS THIS SUMMER.

  “I thought, you know, you might want to check out the swim team at the rec center. If you aren’t going to run track and field, maybe this is the sport for you. What do you think? I’ll take you.”

  No.

  “Well, why not? Don’t you want to join something this summer? Meet some new people?”

  I shrugged.

  “Think about it. It might be fun.”

  Sure.

  I knew I wouldn’t spend a minute thinking about his stupid idea.

  “Want to go shopping for your birthday next?”

  I nodded.

  “Great, I’m headed to the men’s and we’ll be on the way. Anything you want!”

  “You don’t have to go,” Mom said when he left.

  She didn’t have to say that. I wasn’t going to go anywhere with him. I had a gut feeling the Flee was going to ditch me.

  When he left the table, I noticed a lot of happy families were eating at IHOP. When you want something in your own life, it looks like everybody at every table in a restaurant has it. I’m not just talking about eyebrows. All over IHOP, people were having a great time. So why couldn’t we?

  When the Flee came back, his ear was to his phone. Across the table, half of my DNA stuffed pancake into his mouth as he talked.

  “Yeah, yeah, calm down. I’m having lunch with my number one son.” He winked at me. “Fine, fine. Okay. Don’t have a cow.”

  Yep, I’d seen it coming.

  From what I gathered, Stephanie was having some kind of emergency that required his immediate attention. He paid with a coupon, made a big production out of telling the waitress it was my birthday and “customers eat free on their birthday,” and then I wrote a note to the waitress asking for a to-go box for my uneaten sandwich. He threw a twenty-dollar bill at me and told me he’d call me later and we’d do that shopping trip.

  Loserberry.

  Mom and I drove home in silence. I went inside the house and put my sandwich away. I rearranged Mom’s blue glass birds into a circle, like she liked them. Why couldn’t people leave things the way other people liked them?

  Next to the sink, there was an amber pill bottle. One I hadn’t seen before. It was a prescription made out to Truman Dalton.

  Right then I knew I’d chicken out on asking Grandpa anything. I didn’t know if I really wanted the answer.

  I pushed the AquaDucks brochure in front of Mom’s face.

  “Well, I get it,” she said. “He’s trying to encourage you to do something.”

  Remember the last time he encouraged me to do a sport? We all remember how great that was.

  “It’s true that your father didn’t handle that well,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I think he’s right to want you to try new things.”

  It all made me think of that time the Flee did what he did. So I stopped thinking.

  Grandpa walked in. His timing was perfect.

  “What the heck is an AquaDuck?” he asked.

  Going out!

  “Mashed potatoes for dinner!” Mom said, and I headed for the door.

  I wandered down Cedar Drive by myself and into the smooth streets of the Estates, kicking the same acorn for two blocks. The sky changed into a mix-up of oranges and purples, and the clouds looked like controlled explosions.

  Maybe I did know something about poetry after all.

  Or maybe the sky was distracting me. It worked. It made me think about a new topic. Something I’d just read that I couldn’t wait to share with Denny Rosenblatt.

  The Irish crown jewels have been missing since 1907. The jewels had been transferred to a safe in 1903. The new safe was to be placed in a newly built vault, but the safe didn’t fit through the doorway to the vault. So the safe was then stored in a heavily locked office. Four years later, the jewels were stolen from that office.

  Office versus Vault. Talk about heartache.

  Among my many questions that start with the plaguing word is this: Why didn’t builders measure the new safe before building the doorway to the new vault?

  DATA

  Returned e-mails from Liz Delaney: zero

  Questions I still have for Liz Delaney: one million

  Internet hours spent reading her articles and online biography: four

  Data collected: Liz Delaney’s great-aunt perished more than sixty years ago in a plane crash just outside Marshall, Texas. The flight left Dallas and was bound for Shreveport, Louisiana. According to reports, on May 17, 1953, the airliner flew through a thunderstorm and plunged to the ground thirteen miles east of Marshall. There were twenty souls aboard the aircraft. There was only one survivor. Since then Liz Delaney has had a special interest in aircraft disasters.

  CHAPTER 23

  My head was dizzy and excited about finding the Liz Delaney information. It felt like a weird connection. We were both interested in doomed flights over East Texas. If she only knew our story, she could help! I was sure of it. So I fi
red off another e-mail to her and hoped for the best.

  Next, I received a text from Dennis Alan Rosenblatt, a.k.a. Denny, who made tragic use of acronyms. And it completely took my mind off air disasters.

  Do not 4get. My BM is at 10:30 on Sat.

  Do you know why that is so hilarious? So hilarious that I fell off my bed laughing and Grandpa Grouch shouted through my closed door, “Keep it down in there, soldier!”

  My new and improved post-crash laugh still sounded like a sick donkey.

  Anyway, here is a truth: People will make fun of you if you use acronyms incorrectly. It has happened to me with disastrous consequences. Never text anyone you are having a BM, okay?

  BM = bowel movement.

  So I wrote back to Denny:

  Wow, you know the exact time of your BM??? How long have you been timing them?

  I hadn’t found anything that funny since one of the special gymnasts at the West Academy wore her shirt backward and didn’t even know it. But aside from that, it was Denny’s bar mitzvah, and I was excited to go.

  Me: I’m going?

  Denny: Of course, Wayne on a plane. Don’t you want to hear me stutter through my Torah portion?

  Me: You’ll be okay.

  Denny: I may have an actual BM. Very nervous! But there will be girls from my synagogue and they love the dance portion, so there’s that. Wear a tie.

  I wore a tie.

  Now, I want you to picture me with all my many flaws, scars, a poorly tied tie (I wasn’t about to invite Grandpa into my room, so I Googled how to do it), and a superthin left eyebrow as I entered Temple Emanu-El the morning Dennis Rosenblatt was to become a bona fide man.

  You won’t believe it, but I didn’t look too bad. When you are in a room where every man is wearing a suit and the same type of hat, you fit in.

  Mom had dropped me off at the synagogue. I went in and they fitted me with the yarmulke and handed me a program.

  I expected the synagogue to look serious, and it did. It was all warm orangey colors, especially the oak pews, and the lights were low, so it made you know something important was about to take place. Mrs. Rosenblatt waved me up and sat me right next to Denny’s grandmother.