The Secrets of Flight

by Maggie Leffler

  “Volunteering?” Holden repeated.

  I don’t know why I picked that verb except that I was thinking of how Mrs. Browning was having her surgery next week—Gene Rosskemp had emailed to tell me after Mom made me skip writer’s group the night before—and how Mom had said that if I wasn’t doing a fall sport, I should at least become a hospital volunteer, to beef up my college applications and ultimately get into medical school someday.

  “Well, if it’s voluntary, can’t you volunteer another night?” Holden asked.

  “Yeah, sure. I just have to see if I can get out of it.” I kissed his earlobe. “I’ll let you know by tomorrow.” I would ask my dad first; that was the answer.

  We went back to kissing again, and after a while, he reached up under my shirt and started squeezing my breasts like he was trying to milk them, which reminded me of Gene Rosskemp and Jean Fester comparing me to a cow. I sort of stiffened because 1) I was afraid his mom would get home and walk in on us; 2) I hate my breasts because they sort of jut out like two cones; and 3) I didn’t want to be thinking about senior citizens. Except that every time he would ask me if I was okay, I would tell him that I was definitely okay. Because this was Holden Saunders! Kissing me! Nuzzling me! Giving me mono! He unzipped his jeans then, so his penis stuck out of the hole in his boxers, the one Huggie always calls “my penis hole” instead of “my fly,” and when I touched it, I was amazed that a penis could be that big, compared to my little brothers’. One time in Key West four years ago, I saw a penis hat in the window of a shop on Duval Street, and I thought, What’s that supposed to represent? because I’d never seen anything so big and long and erect, but apparently the hat was supposed to represent Holden Saunders’s dick. “Want to suck on it? That way we don’t have to worry about one of those,” he added, jerking his head toward Henry, on the dresser, whose smiley face was looking sort of dopey and clueless.

  “I’d prefer not to,” I said. When Holden blinked, I wondered if he’d ever had a girl say no to him before. “I’d prefer not to,” I repeated.

  Suddenly, he cracked up. “Who are you, Bartleby the Scrivener?” he asked. Pretty soon we were both laughing, until we heard the alarm beep from the front door, and we jumped up from the bed. Holden zipped up his jeans and I was tucking in my shirt when his mother yelled, “Holden?” from downstairs. We both went out to the carpeted landing, which has a railing that overlooks the downstairs marble foyer.

  “What are these shoes doing here?” she asked, standing there with groceries even though it hadn’t looked like their fridge could hold a single thing more. “I could’ve tripped and killed myself!” Holden’s mom had brown hair with perfect curls at the end, and her eyebrows were thin and arched, like she might’ve been surprised instead of angry. “Who’s your friend?” she added. Holden introduced me and said that we were partners for the toothpick bridge in physics. When she asked how it was coming, he shrugged and said, “Slowly.”

  “Would you like to stay for dinner, Elyse?” his mom asked.

  I did want to stay for dinner, because a girlfriend would stay for dinner, but Holden’s hands were in his pockets and his eyes weren’t meeting mine, and I got the feeling that maybe he thought his parents might be embarrassing or maybe he didn’t want me to hear him getting in trouble for the missing beer bottles, or for not newspapering the desk in his room before we started using glue, so I told her I had to get home. She seemed surprised to hear that I lived next door and could walk myself home, and confused when I came downstairs lugging a sack of flour, even after I reminded her that it was our psych baby. I realized then that all those times Holden wrote in the babysitting log that he’d left Henry with his mother, probably the only thing watching the baby was the little gold man on top of his MVP lacrosse trophy.

  As I walked the acre across Holden’s yard into my own, it was windy, and leaves were blowing down all around me and sticking to my feet. I hunched my shoulders and zipped up my jacket and held Henry tight against my chest, wishing he were something real and warm to protect.

  THE NEXT DAY, BEFORE I GOT THE CHANCE TO RUN INTO HOLDEN to tell him I could go—figuring I’d worry about Mom’s reaction later—Thea walked up to my locker and asked if I’d heard that he was going to Homecoming with Karina Spencer. It was the first time I’d heard her voice in two weeks.

  “No, he’s not. He’s going with me,” I said, realizing all at once that my arms felt uncharacteristically lighter since I’d accidentally left Henry on my desk during geometry—two periods ago. “He asked me yesterday.”

  “Well, she asked him this morning. And he said yes.”

  I shut my locker and said that couldn’t be true, but that I had to go—I had to get back to math and on to English before the bell rang.

  “Finished your bridge yet?” Thea asked, as I backed away from her into the sea of students, and I shook my head. “But it’s due tomorrow!”

  Rounding the corner past the gym, I bumped into Holden and he stumbled backward, laughing with surprise. “Whoa, easy,” he said, chuckling and steadying me. He looked so kissable in his jeans and sweatshirt, and I was thrilled that his hands were touching my shoulders, and so for a second, I started beaming, too.

  “Have you seen this?” Holden added, still laughing, as he handed me a sheet of creased notebook paper. At the top of the page someone had drawn a picture of a cube labeled “All Purpose” with an X through it and at the bottom the words, Pay or The Torso dies. It took me a second to realize that what I was reading was a ransom note, for Henry. “Rob Parker found our flour when he showed up for Calculus,” Holden explained. I sort of panicked then and said if something happened to Henry, we’ll fail the project.

  “Stop calling him ‘Henry,’” Holden said, glancing around, like he didn’t want anyone to find out that we’d actually named it. “Listen, about Homecoming—”

  “I can go,” I blurted.

  “Karina Spencer asked me this morning, and I said okay. Since you weren’t sure.”

  “But I am sure!” My heart was pounding, and my face felt hot. All around us kids were rushing to beat the bell, except for at the end of the hall, where a couple of guys were hooting and laughing. Holden turned and grinned, which is when I realized that these were his lacrosse buddies, and what they were laughing about was Henry, whom they were volleying back and forth between them like they were running a football drill. They neared us, trailing flour.

  “Listen, Elyse, you’re really cool, but—”

  “Aw, look!” one of them interrupted, noticing me.

  “‘I’d prefer not to,’” Rob Parker quipped, and they broke up, laughing.

  Holden winced, as I stared at him, tears gathering somewhere in my throat.

  “No, I’d prefer not to,” his blond buddy replied, tossing Henry higher. “What about you, Saunders? What do you prefer? Fellatio? Or do you prefer not to?”

  “Okay, you guys. Shut up,” Holden said, but he was smiling when he said it.

  “Watch it!” Rob Parker said, lunging for the flour. I watched as the lacrosse player tipped the bag before it hit the floor in an explosion of flour. “Fumble!” the blond guy yelled, and even Holden was laughing. When I turned and ran, he didn’t even call after me.

  AFTER SCHOOL, I WAS JUST GETTING BACK FROM THE BUS STOP when a horn honked from a BMW turning around in our driveway. It was Dr. Khaira, leaving, and I waved back, wondering if he’d been looking for my dad, wondering if Mom considered him part of “the community” or if he was allowed to know the truth about the divorce.

  “Hey, buddy,” he said, after rolling down his window.

  “Hey,” I said, hiking the strap of my backpack up on my shoulder. And then, because he looked so very sorry, I asked, “Is everything okay?”

  He shook his head. “I think you better go inside.”

  I DUMPED MY BOOKS AND SHOES IN THE MUDROOM AND WALKED into the kitchen, which was empty except for the same breakfast dishes crusting in the sink from this morning. In the family
room, Toby and Huggie were watching SpongeBob SquarePants, and Huggie was already in his Batman pajamas, even though it was only four o’clock.

  “Where’s Mom?” I asked.

  “Upstairs talking on the phone. Grandma died,” Toby added, glancing away from the TV.

  “No, she didn’t,” I snapped.

  “Ray called. He said she was ‘septic.’ That’s like an infection in your blood that kills you. Ask Mom,” Toby said, since I was just standing there, slack-jawed, while SpongeBob danced around celebrating dental hygiene.

  “But I just saw Grandma. I saw her four days ago. She was fine.”

  “Ask Mom,” Toby said again, before turning back to the TV.

  Upstairs, Mom was in her bedroom, so deep in conversation with Rabbi Horowitz that she didn’t notice me until I stood next to her, flapping my arms. “Five minutes,” she mouthed, covering up the mouthpiece. I listened for a second but as soon as I heard her talking about “flying Margot’s body back to Pittsburgh,” my heart switched from beating to vibrating, and it was suddenly hard to take a deep breath.

  “I know, I know—shocking,” she said. “We didn’t even know she was sick.”

  No, you didn’t know, I thought. Maybe if you’d listened, she’d still be alive. “Clueless,” I hissed, my voice trembling with sudden rage and something else—panic, maybe. Panic that Grandma could be gone just like that, as if her life meant nothing at all. But Mom just furrowed her eyebrows at me and shooed me from the room.

  Across the hall, my dolls and stuffed animals and pink rug looked like relics from another era of me. I wanted to call Thea and tell her the impossible news that Grandma was dead but I couldn’t call Thea, because Thea wasn’t speaking to me. I wanted to tell Daddy, but I couldn’t tell Daddy when he wasn’t even living here anymore. I even wanted to call Grandma and tell her, but then I remembered and started to cry. Had I actually sat here last night, drawing a new mouth on a sack of flour—which only made its smile more misshapen and slightly evil—imagining myself as Holden’s girlfriend, when a deadly infection was multiplying in Grandma’s blood? I was the clueless one.

  Ten minutes later, Mom was still on the phone when I walked past her room again, my eyes raw and my head still swimmy with tears. “Devastated,” I heard her say, which made me want to hurl a toothpick bridge at the wall just to watch it shatter, until I remembered I hadn’t even built one. My limbs were still twitchy with dread, as if they were conducting electricity. Thumping back down the steps, I accidentally knocked over Huggie’s Lego tower in the process, which wasn’t the shatter I was going for, thanks to the carpet on the landing. Gently, I scooted the remains out of the way with my foot and then kept going to the mudroom, where I emptied everything from my backpack except for the toothpicks and slipped my arms through both shoulder straps.

  In the garage, I untangled my bike from the rack and considered my helmet for half a second before snapping the chinstrap in place with a sigh of self-loathing. What the hell was wrong with me that I couldn’t even run away without taking basic safety precautions? Charles Darwin applauds you, Grandma said in my mind, which made my throat tighten when I thought of how, from now on, Grandma’s voice was just a construction of my imagination.

  In the windows facing the driveway, I could see Huggie leaning his head on Toby’s arm, as they shared a bowl of microwave popcorn in the blue glow of the TV. For a second, it was hard to pedal away, especially when I realized it was thirty-two degrees, and all I had on was a sweatshirt. But eventually Mom would be looking for me, and scaring her to death, even briefly, was a satisfying thought. Besides, there was only one person I could think of who would know how to build a bridge out of toothpicks. Unfortunately, I kind of wanted to kill him, too.

  DADDY ANSWERED THE DOOR AT HIS NEW APARTMENT LOOKING bedraggled in a T-shirt and jeans. His mouth gaped for a second but he immediately pulled me into a hug and asked, “Elyse, are you all right?” He must’ve seen that my nose was red, my eyes were puffy, and that my teeth were chattering after riding five miles to his place. My helmet was still dangling from my fingers, and I resisted the urge to slug him with it. “I’m sorry about Grandma,” Daddy said, his chin in my hair. “I loved Margot, too. The whole thing is kind of a shock. I’m so sorry she’s gone.”

  “I’m so sorry you left,” I snapped, startling myself, which made him step back, as if struck by a power line. “I mean, I get that Mom’s annoying. But what about me? What about Toby and Huggie? You didn’t even say good-bye!”

  “I’m sorry,” Daddy said, sounding more bewildered then apologetic.

  “How could you just leave?”

  “It’s kind of hard to explain. Even to myself.” He sighed. “Does your mother know you’re here?”

  I nodded, even though I hadn’t even received so much as a frantic text yet. “I need help with my physics project,” I added, almost belligerently.

  “Sure, sure. Let me just straighten up a few things.” He turned and walked into the bedroom, while I set my helmet down on one of the chairs and glanced around. He had a nice view of the Allegheny River, where the red and gold trees were reflecting across the water in the setting sun. The place was compact. The kitchen island was a quarter of the size of the one we have at home, but instead of the clutter of school papers and mail there was only a single pen, decorated with the letters of a drug company. I picked it up and studied the letters for a moment in my palm: Pfizer, they spelled. I thought of Natalia, the Viagra rep “who was almost my mother.”

  "Elyse?” Dad called from his bedroom. “Have you eaten?”

  “No,” I said, following the sound of his voice down the hall. He was just finishing making the bed, and the room was mostly neat except on the floor was an open duffel bag.

  “Are you hungry?” he asked, tossing the last pillow by the headboard, and I shrugged, too afraid that if I mentioned the women’s silk pajamas hanging out of the bag, I might start screaming. “Well, I am,” he said. “Let’s get a pizza.”

  I waited until we were back in the kitchen and Daddy had hung up the phone with the restaurant to ask, “What’s the deal with Natalia? Is she your girlfriend now?” It was scary: my voice sounded almost like Mom’s.

  “I—it’s complicated.” He faltered. “I’m not moving to California. And she lost her first husband to pancreatic cancer. She thinks she’d be stupid to date a guy with the same thing.”

  I felt my eyes get big. “Wait—the cancer’s back?”

  “No, no, no. You just . . . never know in life.”

  There was something so depressing about the way he said it, like he’d fully resigned himself to the eventuality of death and the notion of never seeing me again. I didn’t mean to start crying again, but I couldn’t help it. When Daddy wrapped his arms around me, I let him, thinking that one day even this moment would be a memory, which made my face feel like a sponge, wringing water all over his T-shirt. I wished I could go back in time to when my parents laughed at each other’s jokes, and Daddy could swing Huggie onto his shoulders and still have a hand for each of us, or back to last weekend when Grandma and I were cracking up outside the hospital, or even back to yesterday when I stood on the edge of the lawn in the wind and watched the leaves floating down all around me and knew that Holden wanted me, too.

  “Remember Noah?” I suddenly said, wiping my snotty face with my hand, and Daddy’s pupils kind of dilated. “My twin who died?”

  “I—don’t remember telling you his name.”

  “Well, you did.” My voice was wobbling again. “Sometimes I wish he’d lived, so if anyone treated me like shit, Noah could kick his ass.” I didn’t mean to swear in front of Daddy; it came out before I even realized I’d said it.

  “Elyse,” Daddy finally said, his voice cautious and grave, “whose ass do I have to kick?”

  “Nobody.” I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “I just want things to be different.”

  “Me, too.” His shoulders sagged. “I’m sorry I left without saying go
odbye.”

  LATER, WE WERE SITTING AT THE BAR IN THE KITCHEN EATING pizza when he asked me about the physics project.

  “I have to build a bridge. Out of toothpicks. Here’s what I have so far,” I said, reaching into my backpack to pull out ten boxes of toothpicks, which I carefully stacked on the table in a neat little tower, next to my water glass. “It’s due tomorrow,” I added, blotting my pizza with a paper towel.

  Daddy looked at the boxes of toothpicks and looked at me. Then he started to laugh, and laugh, until his eyes were tearing. His giddy disbelief made me smile, even though I hadn’t planned on smiling at him ever again. Since he was handling the news pretty well, I figured I might as well take out the drawing of the bridge that I’d been imagining all along, the one that couldn’t possibly be constructed. “Here’s what I had wanted to build,” I said, handing him the picture, complete with five arches and crisscrossing cables and a separate, parallel foot path. “But I think we’re going to have to come up with something a lot easier.”

  Daddy sobered up, as he inspected my drawing. “It’s beautiful,” he said, and when he looked up at me, there was excitement in his eyes that I hadn’t seen in a long time. “This is the one we should make.”

  “But it has to hold thirty pounds.”

  “This is the one we should make,” he said again, tapping the picture, and I gave him a watery smile, imagining myself walking into Physics the way that Grandma had walked into the interventional radiology room to meet the cold steel table—chin up, back straight—and with my bridge, soaring.

  CHAPTER 21

  Beacon Street

  1945

  In the beginning, he sent updates every few weeks—student housing was depressing, the subway system confusing, his coursework daunting, and he missed me, missed me, missed me—but either Sol’s overwhelming schedule or my complete silence have made his letters fewer and farther between. I focus on flight instead and the growing anticipation of where my orders might send me after October’s graduation. There are one hundred and twenty possible air bases I might be stationed at—one hundred and twenty places to forget Solomon Rubinowicz.