Mayday

by Karen Harrington

  “Your scar looks better. You learned a lot from Denny.”

  “I guess.”

  “I missed hearing your voice.”

  My new voice still surprised me. Mom never said if it surprised her, too.

  “Now, Wayne, listen. I have to tell you something. About your grandfather,” she said. She couldn’t get the sentences out. She stuttered like Denny. I’d never seen her that rattled in my life, and that includes the month before we fled from the Flee.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” I said. Now that Mom was going to come out and tell me, I didn’t want to hear it. Because of what a jerk I was. I didn’t think about how it was hurting her feelings, too.

  “No, I need to. I need to tell you, but I don’t know how to give you more bad news.”

  “What she’s trying to say is that I’m dying. Ta-da!” There was Grandpa, standing in the doorway.

  “Dad! I was trying to say it gently.”

  “You were saying it too slow,” Grandpa said. “The truth doesn’t take a lot of words. Sorry you had to find out this way, kid. You probably want to go eat a muffin now.” He was smiling, teasing me. But it didn’t feel right.

  I waited to feel something. Something like relief. I waited for the mighty elephant to walk out of the room. But here’s what they don’t tell you about that phrase. When you do point to the elephant in the room and it finally disappears, it leaves a mighty space behind. A space so big that there’s nothing else. My throat closed up. My heart sank.

  Stupid elephant.

  Because to tell you the truth, I’d imagined this day already. I’d say something to Grandpa like I’ve known for a long time, and then he’d say, You’re not as stupid as you look, Kovok, and Mom would say, Cut it out, you two.

  But none of what I’d imagined happened.

  I didn’t say anything. No one said anything.

  Not a word. It was one of those long, stupid, agonizing, awkward silences that I hated with the intensity of a hot, red August sunburn.

  Hate. Hate. Hate.

  “Don’t you have any questions?” Grandpa finally asked. He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “I even made a list of answers. I wanted to be prepared for your torrent of questions.”

  “Answers? Answers to what?”

  “Well, for example, question one might be”—Grandpa began reading from his paper—“How bad is it? Can’t you have surgery? and the answer to that is no, the cancer has spread to the liver.”

  I guess my throat told my feet to just run. Because that was what I did. I grabbed the piece of paper from his hand as I darted past him.

  And I took off and was glad I’d been wearing my Adidas. I didn’t take my phone, house keys, or anything. I went outside and jogged down Cedar, zigging and zagging all through the tree-named streets in the dark. It was a beautiful March night. Cool and moonlit.

  I could tell it was the Car pulling up behind me. Just the sound of it purred like no other car on the road. But I kept running.

  “How long are you going to jog?” Grandpa shouted. He’d put the soft top down on the convertible.

  “Until I get tired,” I said.

  “I’m tired just watching you.”

  “Then go home!”

  “Your mother is worried.”

  Tell me something I don’t know.

  “Hey, nice night to go to a drive-in for a shake. I’m buying!”

  I stopped and looked at him. He idled the car. “Getting a shake doesn’t solve everything,” I said.

  “We can talk about this, you know, Wayne. I know it’s hard on you now that you just found out, but—”

  “I’ve known for a while.”

  Grandpa smiled and turned his head at me. “Well, you’re not as stupid as I thought, Kovok.”

  I got inside the Car.

  New topic.

  We went to Sonic and ordered thick, creamy milk shakes. Then we drove all over town with the radio turned up and the top down and looked at the constellations and the full moon.

  “I taught Reed to drive in this car, you know.”

  Nope, didn’t know that.

  “I love how this car growls,” I said.

  “Son, Japanese muscle cars growl. American muscle cars rumble.”

  “Okay, I like how it rumbles!”

  I don’t know how long we drove, but it was long enough to finish our shakes and drive back to Sonic and get fries.

  There wasn’t a better distraction in the world.

  True story.

  CHAPTER 28

  Good distractions, like driving classic cars in the moonlight, can’t last forever.

  It had been two long weeks since Grandpa and Mom told me the bad news. I’d tried hard to not think about him being sick. I stayed in my room and read. I watched every action movie I could find. I did all I could to not have to think about real life.

  But real life creeps back in.

  It creeps in right on a Friday night when you notice a forgotten piece of paper there on your desk, written in your grandpa’s handwriting, with a list of answers, all bullet-pointed, neat, and full of data about terminal, untreatable pancreatic cancer. Data that told me he had been diagnosed months before Uncle Reed deployed (he didn’t tell him), and how he kept eating cheeseburgers (when his doctor told him not to), and that his prognosis was three to six months (the average life expectancy after diagnosis with metastatic disease is just three to six months), but that the doctor said every patient’s cancer is different, some live longer than others (and I expect to, so don’t worry, I’m not dying tomorrow).

  It was all right there. All the questions he knew I’d have. Because he knew me. He knew how my brain worked. It wanted the facts.

  Stupid cancer.

  Stupid.

  Stupid.

  Stupid.

  I punched my wall. I punched it again. And again. Then I looked out my stupid window.

  Did you know that it takes four hundred and fifty years for your average plastic water bottle to fully degrade? Plastic bags take ten to twenty years to degrade if exposed to air and sun, but five hundred or more years if they’re dumped in a landfill. The reason is that microorganisms are put in landfills to eat the trash like food. No microorganism we now have recognizes polyethylene as food, and that’s the main ingredient in a lot of plastics.

  If my stupid neighbors thought that awful, old, flattened plastic Christmas snowman was just going to automatically biodegrade and they wouldn’t have to put it away, they were ignorant of the facts. Couldn’t they see the lump-of-white-plastic ghost of Christmas past? Couldn’t they see the obvious right in front of them?

  Right in front of them!

  So I did what I had to do. And I’m not sorry. No, I’m not sorry for what I did to that irritating hunk of nonbiodegradable stupid snowman that everyone up and down Cedar Drive still had to look at every stupid day. I mean, if he was still going to be there, either put it out of its misery or put it back to its original state.

  Make it useful.

  I crept over to my neighbors’ yard and did a snatch-and-grab. I got the old snowman into my garage and inspected him. The tiny generator was still attached. My neighbors had just left the thing unplugged all this time. The snowman was chewed in a couple of places, probably by feral squirrels. There were a few surface tears in the plastic, but otherwise, he was still in one piece. I put duct tape over the tears so that he wouldn’t leak. I got an extension cord, plugged him in, and waited for inflation. He popped like a giant kernel of popcorn. And there he was, staring at me with his Christmas grin, all happy and festive and thinking everything was still merry. Man, that made me mad. So I punched the snowman in the face. But that didn’t do it. He still looked happy.

  I reasoned that when I returned it, my neighbors would look like lazy spring morons with an outdated lawn ornament waving at the street. But as I stared at the dirty, chewed-up snowman, it occurred to me that he needed something extra to get the message across.

 
Using dark black markers, I made the snowman’s eyes twice as big and connected his eyebrows. With a red marker, I drew a blood line down his mouth, and Snow Zombie was born!

  I unplugged the extension cord, grabbed rolls of duct tape, and headed out of the garage. The zombie snowman rode on my skateboard down the back alley. The snowman lost a little air, but not too much. By the time I got to my neighbors’ front lawn, I spotted the car. I didn’t recognize him until it was too late.

  Tim LeMoot, the Texas Boot. Tim LeMoot slowed down his car, looked me right in the eyes, and kept driving.

  I quickly rigged Snow Zombie right up to the front door of my neighbors’ house. I found the electrical outlet by the door, plugged him in, and waited for him to inflate face-first into their doorway, so that the first thing they’d see the next morning was a zombie snowman. Take that, neighbors.

  Then I hotfooted it out of there. Lightweight. Like at least one thing was right in the world. One stupid snowman wasn’t lying flattened but instead was doing what he was meant to do. Being who he was meant to be. For about two minutes, I felt useful. For about two minutes, I forgot about the list of answers.

  Two minutes.

  Then, out of nowhere, Mrs. Rosenblatt’s van rolled up to the curb. And out popped Denny. And he walked up my walk, holding a pie with at least five inches of white meringue, and I was thinking I must have been having a weird dream. Because why would Denny show up on a Friday night with a pie?

  The snowman. Denny. It was all just a dream.

  Bam! Do you want to know what a pie to the face feels like? Because I can now tell you. I’m not just a crash survivor. I’m a pie-in-the-face recipient, too. A pie in the face will snap you into reality pretty quickly.

  “You said you were my friend,” he sang in a high-pitched song. And I felt sorry for him because I know he wanted to sound mad, not like he was serenading a lady.

  “Wait. What?” I wasn’t dreaming.

  Denny backed away from the scene of the crime, past the bald patch bushes of heartbreak, and made his way down the front walk. I ran after him and caught him by the arm.

  “Wait.”

  “It’s been two weeks. No calls. Nothing.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ve been busy.”

  His words came out like an angry song. “You’ve never asked about my other friends. Not once. You never said, Denny, why do you always invite Wayne on a plane to the mall? Where are your friends from your own school? Where are your friends from your synagogue? You never asked me that!”

  “Why would I?”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “I don’t have other real friends, Wayne. I go to school just to get through it. News flash. I don’t talk at school.”

  Man, the hurt in his eyes knocked me back. I wished he’d punched me. It would have hurt less.

  “Because I don’t have any. Not like you, Wayne. So now that you got your voice back, you ditch me? I mean, you were my friend. My friend friend. My parents were starting to think I was normal. Normal-ish.”

  I’d tried so hard to block out any thoughts that I’d even blocked out a good friend. Which, I realized, was a stupid move.

  “Did you know that Wayne Kovok is an idiot?”

  That made him smile. “So what’s going on?”

  “Sandy dumped me. My grandpa is sick—like, disease sick. And my mom’s depressed.”

  “Is that all?”

  “Try to contain your jealousy about my life.”

  “It’ll be hard, but I’ll try.”

  “Who made this pie?” I asked, detecting a strong banana-cream flavor.

  “My mom.”

  “It tastes good. What I had of it, at least.” I thought of her ambitious sandwiches and how now I might be able to eat one of them.

  We stood there, not saying anything. No, there wasn’t anything else to say. It would be all about action now. “Can you skateboard, Denny?”

  “Like a boss!”

  “Ask your mom if you can stay.”

  In two minutes, we were back on track, like nothing had gone wrong. The tightness in my chest eased a little.

  I ran inside, raced into the garage, and grabbed my old, old skateboard.

  I crashed into Grandpa as he was coming into the living room.

  “Are you rabid, boy?” he said.

  “Pie attack, sir.” I turned to Denny, who was now standing right behind me, grinning. “Friendly fire.”

  “Pie, you say? Any left?”

  “Negative.”

  “Okay then, carry on.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Spring was coming fast and green and I was actually looking forward to spring break. It was the next week.

  The Flee sent me a text: I’ll try and get by to see you. We’ll go to a concert or something.

  I didn’t bother replying.

  I hadn’t seen him since my awful birthday. And do you know what? I didn’t care. I wasn’t about to be a chump. Because do you know how many concerts I’ve almost attended? Too many to count. It’s depressing.

  Besides, Denny and I had plans to go to the movies and hang out all spring break. Lately, we’d go sit in the kiosk of Elegant Engravings after school and help Mrs. Rosenblatt with orders or play Minecraft. The mall wasn’t a bad place to be, really. There were distractions every ten minutes. Families shopping together. Couples holding hands. Miserable girls trailing behind their fathers into the shoe store. Even more miserable boys following their mothers into the candle store. I even spotted the trio of gymnasts from West Academy. They walked past me, each with her hair pulled up in a ponytail. Each with a different-colored ribbon. Red. White. And blue.

  “Hey, Wayne,” they said as they breezed past the kiosk.

  “Hey,” I replied.

  And Denny sprang into action with song. “Wayne, are you going to introduce me?”

  I punched him in the shoulder. “Those gymnasts are out of your league.”

  “Gymnasts?” He said that with a big smile on his face.

  “Boys, why don’t you walk around,” Mrs. Rosenblatt suggested. “Go get a soda or something.” She shoved some cash into Denny’s palm and we left.

  When we got back, we decided to play Minecraft again. Before I launched the game, I discovered a new alert in my e-mail: New Flight 56 debris found in East Texas.

  “Denny, get over here.”

  It was a video news report. Liz Delaney standing by the side of some road. We watched the report seventeen times.

  True story.

  “This is Liz Delaney, reporting live for KTSB-Three News. We’re here on Highway Forty-Three in Karnack, Texas, just on the outskirts of Caddo Lake State Park, and if I can just get our cameraman to pan upward into this thicket of cypress trees. There, do you see that flapping up there in the trees? You can really see how the color red stands out, and that’s what got the attention of local residents. We weren’t sure what this item was until late yesterday.

  “Sources tell us this is a piece of debris from the crash of Flight Fifty-Six late last year. A family member called our station, alerting us to the fact that this quilt belonged to Nelda White, resident of Shreveport. Ms. White, who perished in the crash, was on her way to see relatives. Ms. White’s relatives recognized this as a Christmas tree skirt she had made for her family.

  “Local officials will later bring a fire truck and cherry picker to access and then return the item to Ms. White’s relatives. A poetic reunion. Back to you, Jeb.”

  A tree skirt flapping from the top of a tree? Something caught in the tops of tree branches a few miles from the existing debris field. My theory was correct! The tree skirt. The flag. They both had kite-like qualities and had sailed closer to Caddo Lake State Park. I knew it. I knew it! It was still out there, waiting to be found and precisely folded and placed into the empty display case. Returned to my grandfather and mother from a grateful nation.

  So I could shout now. I could talk. I could even make a
phone call to Liz Delaney of KTSB-3 News with my new, older-sounding voice and let her know that more debris was ready to be found.

  I looked at Denny, and it was as if he’d read my mind. “Call her!” he shouted.

  I found her number and called.

  Know what the recording said?

  This voice-mail box is full. Please try again later.

  True story.

  I couldn’t wait to get home and put a pin on my debris-collection map. Denny and I watched the video again. We had to wait for Mrs. Rosenblatt to close up her shop.

  “Come home and have dinner with us, Wayne,” she said.

  It was tough to pass up a delicious meal from Mrs. Rosenblatt.

  “I’ve got to get home,” I told her.

  And when I did get home and go into my room to check my data, I found Grandpa standing there in front of my closet door, rubbing his chin, about to pronounce me a darn Kovok.

  CHAPTER 30

  He stared at my closet door of research.

  All the little bullet points of facts and data. Missing things and found things and miracles and randomness.

  My maps of East Texas.

  The dots I’d placed at the NTSB search areas. The debris fields. The definitions of wind speed. Pictures of American burial flags and photos of our downed plane. My dry-erase board with my still-unsolved science project hypothesis. All my notes in a neat pile on my desk. I tried to look at the door the way a stranger might look at it.

  Viewed from that perspective, it only looked like a mess of papers and tape.

  So any words to describe my project had to be carefully selected.

  “Hi, Grandpa” was my carefully selected response. Not the best selection of words, mind you, but the only ones I could get out.

  “Wayne.”

  A long, awkward silence. The kind I wanted to fill with a fact or even a statement about the weather.

  “So, what are you doing in here?”

  “Well, I found this on the computer printer and thought I’d bring it to you,” Grandpa said.

  He handed me a single sheet of paper. It was a list of medical miracles.