by Susan Perabo
“Mom—” I tried to take a deep breath, but my lungs were tight, so suddenly tight that I thought: I can never, ever smoke another cigarette again. “I won’t stop,” I said. “Are you listening to me? I want you to hear this. Are you listening? It was you.”
That is what I always planned to say, what I should have said, what I would have said, if the phone call that day, that suffocating July day, the day I stood in my kitchen and watched my glistening son wrap my sparkling daughter in the badminton net, had been from my mother. But it was instead from my father, his voice calm, gentle, because I was his baby girl, and it was his job to tell me this terrible thing. Your mom collapsed, he told me. In the morning. In the kitchen. Pouring herself a cup of coffee. They’d rushed her to the hospital, but there was nothing anyone could do. She had a tumor in her brain—who knew how long it had been there? Six, eight months?—and she died in the ER.
“Did she say anything?” I asked him.
“Sweetheart,” he said. “There was no time.”
This was unacceptable. So I tell myself the story. I make time. I rewrite it in my head as summer turns to fall, rewrite as I drive the children to school, as I sit at my desk at work, as I lie awake in bed long after Kevin has fallen asleep. The story’s not perfect by any means. In every version, my mother gets her cigarettes back, but I alter the order of things, meddle with the point of view, change the setting. It is, and always will be, a work in progress. I indulge myself in my revisions. Sometimes my father has a larger role; other times my brothers arrive with their own bags of conflict; other times my children show up and, being children, save us all from our sadness. And sometimes my mother is angrier, and sometimes she is sicker, and sometimes she is more heroic. In one version, she and I take a train across Canada. We sit in the smoking car. We play cards on the table between our seats. We steady our trembling coffees. We nap, using our sweaters as pillows. We wake and marvel at the snow, and learn our lessons this way.
TREASURE
The truth is, I never saw the plane.
It was just after nine in the morning and we were in the S formation across the middle of the football field when, on the first note of “Seventy-six Trombones,” the unmistakable squack exploded from my clarinet. Split reed. Nothing to do but make the long walk back to the field house and get a new one from my case. I swore, broke ranks, trudged toward the squat building that sat fifty yards behind the end zone. I was sweaty and thirsty by the time I reached it—it was September, still summer, really—and I gathered my hair in one hand and bent down for a quick slurp from the drinking fountain. It was one of those awful fountains, the kind where the water trickles feebly from the hole, and I had to touch my lips to the spout to get a half-decent mouthful.
I heard it then, heard it while thinking about all the lips and tongues that had touched this fountain before mine. I heard the roar and turned my head without lifting my mouth from the cool metal. I did not see the plane. I saw, instead, the thirty-two-minus-one members of the Somerville Senior High marching band lift their eyes to the sky, gaze together as with one astonished face at something I could not see, would never see (though I would say I had, and not even the people who marched beside me would remember otherwise), the friends of my youth in the shape of an S, some with instruments still at their mouths, frozen in what would surely be the most historically significant moment of their lives, they all a part now of the unfolding future, linked forever with those on the plane simply by being the last to see them—or perhaps even be seen by them, a giant S with one slice missing?—as they fell.
We spent three hours in lockdown, the entire student body, nearly three hundred teenagers bolted inside our redbrick and mortar, dropped only these pathetic morsels of information from the loudspeakers: there had been a plane crash; no one from the school was hurt; we would be notified with further information as it became available. But there was more, much more, that the loudspeakers were not letting on. There had to be, because why would a plane crash force the school into lockdown? And what further information could possibly become available? By midmorning rumors were swirling; the general consensus was that the plane had been carrying lethal chemicals and that the town had been poisoned, that our families were dying in their homes and cars and offices and it was only a matter of time before the toxic gasses slithered into our classrooms. By noon half the kids in school were in tears—some blubbered openly, but most cried only the misting, bewildered tears that crept back even as we blinked them away. There has been a plane crash. No one from the school is hurt. You will be notified with further information as it becomes available. Later we learned that some boys tried to escape out a basement window, that a distraught girl had kicked out the glass door of the principal’s office, that one teacher pushed another. The complex system of high school social hierarchy collapsed into a chaotic heap of cliques and types; we were at once unified in panic but each isolated in our own unique dread. No one knew how to behave. We got lost in hallways we’d traveled for four years, forgot our locker combinations, looked searchingly into the faces of unfamiliar friends.
And then, just as it seemed we were about to lose our grip, forever, on the world we knew, our parents arrived. In truth they had been arriving all morning, but they were not allowed onto the school grounds until now, and so as we looked out the windows it seemed as if they arrived en masse, a sea of quivering lips and frantic eyes rushing up the grassy slope to the school. Moments later the front doors burst outward and two hundred and eighty children, momentarily unashamed, collapsed into the arms of mothers and fathers. It was only then we learned what had really happened. For some time we stood in dumbfounded groups around the parking lot. We stood listening to car radios with family and friends until our parents, perhaps only now truly realizing the frailty of the tether that kept us all anchored to earth, took us home.
“Was it on fire?” Toby Hartsock asked me.
I pulled my eyes off Dean—he was mowing the lawn—and turned from the window. “Huh?”
“The plane. Did you see flames and stuff?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing like that.”
I turned back to watch Dean complete his final circuit, the rows in his wake as impeccable as lap lanes in a pool. I was supposed to be watching Toby, babysitting while the Hartsocks and my parents went for their weekly dinner at Ponderosa, but of late it was the elder son who held the majority of my attention. Dean liked to mow the lawn in only his swimming trunks. He didn’t even wear shoes. Living on the edge, he’d said when I asked him if he wasn’t worried about losing a toe. And he’d winked. He winked all the time now, conspiratorially, at everyone. My mother said he was turning into quite a charmer, and it was clear from her tone that she didn’t mean this as a compliment.
“I’d ’a kicked sombody’s ass up there,” Toby said. “I never would’a let ’em crash it.”
“Toby . . .” I said. But then I didn’t know where to go with it. He was ten years old. What could you say? “Don’t you have homework to do?”
“Did my mom leave dinner?”
“We’re getting a pizza.”
“Is Dean eating with us?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not babysitting Dean. Go do your homework and we’ll order the pizza when you’re done.”
“You’re very inflexible today,” he said, on his way up the stairs. A moment later I heard Dean come into the kitchen and open the refrigerator. He was singing a song to himself. I stepped into the doorway in time to watch a bead of sweat swim down his freckled back to the waistband of his trunks. He was drinking a glass of juice and, with his free hand, picking splinters of grass from his dark brown hair. After a minute he turned.
“S’up, Kit-Kat? You sittin’?”
“Yep.” I blinked. When I needed to, I could blink this Dean away and see the Dean from before, the one who once rubbed his ear wax on my paper cut to seal it.
“Cool,” he said. “You guys getting pizza or what?”
“Y
eah, I guess. You want some?”
“Yeah”—(and here a stumble in my heart)—“but I can’t. Going out.” He looked at the clock over the stove. “Shit, I’m late already. I gotta grab a shower.”
And then he was gone. I rinsed out his juice glass and put it in the dishwasher, then took it out again, washed it carefully by hand, and returned it to the cupboard. I heard the thrum of water hitting the tub upstairs. He was up there, I thought, not ten feet above my head, eyes closed, humming a tune, naked in a hot rain.
The Hartsocks had moved in next door to us when Dean and I were in the second grade. Our houses sat at the end of a dead-end street, and since we were in the same grade and walked to school together, since we each liked knock-knock jokes and KFC, since we both loved to sit in trees or under porches and pretend (sometimes for entire afternoons) to be people other than Deano and Kit-Kat, we became fast friends and remained so until middle school.
If life really can be compared to a hand of cards, I’m fairly certain that those cards remain facedown until sixth or seventh grade and only then do you get to turn them over and see who you actually are. Problem is you’ve already spent several years guessing what those cards are going to be, betting on your gut instincts, so when you flip the cards and discover that you don’t have the hand you imagined—or that you and the person you thought you had everything in common with have very, very different cards—you have little recourse.
So it was with Dean and me. We never planned on not being friends, never intended to go in different directions, never even realized we were going in different directions until we’d already gone, but by the time we were thirteen we ran in different circles and had little to say to each other. We were still friendly—we often walked home from school together, and spoke superficially of teachers and kids in our grade—but instead of having after-school snacks at each other’s houses in front of the TV, we amicably parted ways at the foot of his lawn.
By high school we were firmly entrenched in our separate worlds: I was band; Dean was basketball. I was newspaper; Dean was yearbook. I ran with a crowd of bright kids who made up for their anxiety by being clever, by mocking everyone who was more popular and ignoring everyone who was less popular. Dean ran with the prettier people, not the idiot jocks but the all-around guys, the ones most likely to succeed at something, certainly, because it seemed there was little they could not do. They could shoot baskets and maintain a B+ average. They could take pictures for the yearbook and get trashed on the weekends. They could be pals with the girl next door and date the most popular girl. Or girls. Lots of them: Rachel Cook, Celie Jenkins, Diana Wollkind, Abby Reed. I could list them chronologically, alphabetically, by height, weight, depth, IQ. I could easily list them in order of who deserved him least.
It had come as a shock to me, the sweaty palms, the thick tongue, the jelly knees. It washed over me during April of junior year, a gradual but steady wave of longing that, on the day I finally acknowledged it, named it for what it was, seized possession of me with a grip so ferocious I lost five pounds in one week and twice swooned to the floor of my front hall after brief exchanges with him in the yard. I was casually dating someone else, a boy from band, but after two weeks of loving Dean I had to break up with my trombonist. I needed to be free to pine without guilt, and once free I pined unabashedly from my bedroom window, from bio class, from the strappy lounge chair on our back deck. I pined in the shower, at my locker, over dinner, through assemblies. I gaped at couples kissing on TV, read sex articles in magazines I’d once sneered at, imagined his hands (hands I’d known when they were hairless, hands I’d reached for climbing trees) sliding up the back of my shirt.
“Pepperoni and onion!” Toby called from the top of the stairs.
I dialed the pizza place. It would be an hour, the guy said, before our pizza was delivered. Everything in town was crowded now. Whoever thought, in Somerville, you’d have to wait in line just to pump your gas?
Psychologists roamed the halls of the high school throughout the day. Walking counselors, they were called, the idea being that if you were uncomfortable sharing your night terrors in private you might be willing to stand in a crowded hallway and, over the din of slamming lockers, shout to a complete stranger that you couldn’t get the smell of dead people out of your nose.
Special sessions were set up for “high risk groups.” I was in the We Saw The Plane group with the rest of the marching band and a freshman gym class that had been playing hockey in the west parking lot.
“It sounded like somebody screaming.”
“It sounded like a train.”
“It sounded like a tornado.”
“You ever heard a tornado?”
“No. But I know how one sounds.”
“It sounded like a fucking plane crashing, you guys.”
“It was trailing fire.”
“Smoke.”
“Sparks. Like fireworks.”
“The tail fell off.”
(Sometimes, though I knew this was impossible, I convinced myself that I had seen the reflection of the plane in the instruments, that the bells of the tubas had flashed to me, in an instant, the extraordinary sight.)
“The wing was hanging off.”
“It had already split in two.”
“It was upside down.”
“Okay,” the group leader said. He was no one we knew. He was a specialist, they said, when they introduced him. He specialized in things like this. What other thing was like this? I wondered. “That’s what you saw and heard,” he said. “Now tell me what you feel about it.”
Silence. Not even a rustle, for probably a full minute. Finally somebody sneezed.
The thing was, really, the thing no one would dare say, is that we were secretly thrilled that something had happened in our sleepy lives, that whatever residual terror seized us in our most vulnerable moments was outweighed by the pride and excitement of seeing four hundred news vans lining the eight dilapidated blocks that was downtown Somerville. It was not that we were happy it had happened; we were simply happy that, if it had to happen somewhere, it had happened here.
“Caroline Gable found half a shoe in their backyard yesterday,” my mother said over dinner. “They’re almost two miles from where it went down.”
“Christ,” my father said, setting down his fork. “Not at the table. Let there be one place—”
“We should look on the roof,” my mother said. “We should make sure there’s nothing there.”
“I’ll climb up tomorrow,” my father said. He looked at me wearily.
“How ya doin’?”
“I’m all right,” I said.
“Sure?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’m busy. We’re doing a special issue of the paper.”
“When I was a senior in high school,” he said, “we did a special issue of the paper when our quiz bowl team won at state.” He traced the lip of his water glass with his index finger. “I can’t even—” He stopped. Even what? he must have been thinking. He did not know. All he knew was that tomorrow he had to climb onto the roof of his home to look for pieces of shoes.
“It’s okay, Dad,” I said. “We’re all okay.”
“Listen to her,” my mother said. “Everyone’s okay.”
My father put his head in his hands. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “Those people.”
“Tell him again, Katie,” my mother said.
That was September, of course. By mid-October all the roofs in Somerville had been checked. The news vans had migrated north to the turnpike and then scattered in the numerous directions of new threats. Only a few strangers remained in Somerville—counselors, investigators, coroners—and they, too, were beginning to pack away their bags of tricks. You could look around town and see that it was the same as it had been in August, the same barbershop and diner, the same cracked sidewalks and battered stop signs. It could seem like a dream. And like a dream, it slowly sank from view. Like a dream, it descended from the sky and took root
under our feet until instead of it being something we had to squint to see it became the very ground we walked on.
“You know there’s treasure in the woods,” Toby Hartsock told me one Sunday evening as I prepared to shut off the light in his bedroom.
I paused at the switch. “What are you talking about?”
“Gold,” he said. “And diamonds. Rings and watches and stuff that fell out of the plane. It’s spread all over the woods.”
“Toby,” I said. “That’s crazy.”
He scrambled out of bed. “Check this out.” He opened the top drawer of his dresser and took out a tube sock that was spooled into a ball, unwound it and reached in, then removed his hand. He unfolded his small fist in front of me; inside was a tiny gold stud. “I found it in the woods behind the Burger King. That’s less than a mile from where it went down. It could be worth like a hundred bucks or something.”
“Toby, some girl probably lost that. It’s probably from Walmart.”
He scowled. “Nuh-uh. Why would a girl be in the woods behind the Burger King?”
Well, what could I say? In another few years he’d know why a girl would be in the woods behind the Burger King. He’d know about the places high school kids went—not me, not my crowd, but lots of others, including Dean, I was sure—to drink beer, to pass a joint around a sloppy campfire, to hook up under cover of the thick, towering trees.
“What were you doing back there anyway?” I asked him.
He sat down cross-legged on his bed. “Adam Lefton and me were at Burger King. He started telling me about all this stuff you could find in the woods and so we went looking. I found this in like a half hour.” He closed his fist around the stud. “It’s not just us. Lots of kids are doing it.”
“But Toby,” I said, “right after, the FBI and all those guys, they combed the woods. If anything was left—”
“They didn’t look everywhere,” he said. He got under the covers, the stud still in his grasp. “I’ll bet ya they didn’t get down in the brush. Or those skanky ponds. Plus they were just looking for evidence. We’re looking for treasure.”