by Amy Giles
“Hadley.” She calls out because she can’t keep up with me.
I stop and turn around.
“Let’s go inside for a bit and warm up,” she says. I eye the midday sun. Guess it’s not too early for her to start drinking.
As if she reads my mind, she adds, “For hot cocoa and lunch.”
“Fine.”
We’re seated by the oversize river-rock fireplace; the fire pops and crackles behind me, warm and earthy. We sip our hot cocoa first, then look at the menu. Dad’s not here, so I steal a roll from the basket. Mom glances over the menu at the basket, at me, then takes a roll. She smiles at me conspiratorially; it just fans the fire in my belly. An illicit buttered roll is not enough to erase the years of damage she’s ignored. It’s like putting sunscreen on after the melanoma has spread to your brain.
She studies her menu. “What are you thinking of getting?”
“Pasta,” I say, refusing to look at her.
She shrugs. “Get whatever you want. I’m going to get the burger.”
I roll my eyes. Oh, big deal, Dad’s not here so Mom’s pigging out.
The waiter comes, and we place our order. Mom chews my ear off about the PTA. While she talks, I stare past her out the window at the white rivers of snow snaking down the mountain. I try to picture which trail Lila is navigating now, or imagine how she’s managing with Dad. When our meals arrive, I plow through my own mountain of pasta.
Mom takes big bites of her burger. “Oh, this is so good,” she moans, closing her eyes in rapture. It’s going to be hard to go back to steamed vegetables when we get home.
She looks at my plate. “How’s your lunch?” She takes a sip of water.
“Amazing.” I shovel another huge forkful in my mouth.
“I can’t eat pasta,” she says. “I mean, I can, it just brings back bad memories.”
I look up from my plate and frown. “How does pasta bring back bad memories?”
She takes another sip of her water and then lifts her burger carefully so it doesn’t spit out all of the condiments from the sides.
“When Grandpa went through that bad time with his business, we ate a lot of pasta.” She takes an enormous bite of her burger, then carefully pushes the lettuce hanging off her lips into her mouth.
I wipe the excess sauce off my mouth with a napkin. “I don’t know this story. What are you talking about?”
I knew Grandpa was an electrician, and I knew times were tough. But according to Grandma, they were happy.
She swallows. “I never told you? Oh . . . well, one of the houses Grandpa worked on caught on fire. You know how people talk. They all thought it had to be because he had done something wrong, even after they investigated it and found it was a curling iron left on in a bedroom. But when you have your own business, you’re only as good as your reputation. People stopped hiring him.”
She picks up a fry and nibbles on it thoughtfully. “Money was tight. I’d lie in bed and listen to my parents talking in the kitchen. Grandma was afraid they would lose the house. She took up sewing for a dry cleaner. It was a lot of work for very little money, but that’s all she knew how to do. She even made me clothes out of leftover upholstery fabric.” She wrinkles her nose in distaste. “The house felt dark during those days. I started getting nervous stomachaches all the time, like I worried with them, even though I was just a child.”
“How old were you?”
“Seven, eight.” She gazes off into space. “Things got better, but we never had anything extra.” She scrunches up her nose. “Pasta was the cheapest thing we could eat to fill our stomachs. And now, whenever I see pasta, it makes my stomach knot.”
Stuffed, I push my plate away and finish my water.
“There are worse things,” I say, and she looks up over her burger at me. Her eyes harden. If she thought she was going to butter me up like a dinner roll, she was wrong.
“You know what your problem is? You’re spoiled,” she shoots back at me. She picks up her water glass, and I can tell by the look of disgust on her face she wishes it had some kind of alcohol in it instead.
“Spoiled? Where’d you get that from?” I snap.
She lowers her glass. “You’ve never wanted for anything. You don’t know what it’s like to be hungry, or to want things.”
I stare back at her, my mouth hanging open in outrage. I’ve never wanted for anything? How about wanting a father who didn’t scare the shit out of me?
“Your father is a good provider.” She nods like that’s the end of that conversation and takes another bite, but not with the same rapturous appetite as a minute ago.
I look out the window again and shake my head. “You keep telling yourself that.”
She’s signing the check when I hear the announcement.
“Courtney McCauley, please go to the medical clinic.”
“Mom.” I stand up abruptly. “Come on!” I take the lead, rushing out of the restaurant.
“Where’s the medical clinic?” I ask the first red jacket ski patrol I can find.
“It’s the big yellow building at the base, by the access road underpass,” he says.
Please be Dad. Please don’t be Lila, I pray as we make our way past the hordes of skiers coming off the mountain for a break in the day or just heading to the slopes. When we find the yellow building, we run through the doors.
“We just heard an announcement for Courtney McCauley,” I tell a ski patrol who’s just leaving the building.
He holds his hands up in the air to manage my visible terror. “She’s okay.”
“She?” I cry. “It’s Lila?”
He nods and looks at my mother. “She broke her arm, but she’s fine.”
“Where is she?” Mom demands, putting on her holier-than-thou voice. He points to a room behind him. Through the glass pane, I see a doctor talking to my father while Lila lies on a medical cot.
“Lila!” I shove through the door ahead of my mother.
Explosive wailing erupts as soon as we walk in. I know that cry; she was holding it inside for my father and now it bursts out of her in a rush.
“What happened?” my mother asks. The doctor looks up at my mother with a bored expression. He sees this all the time, he thinks. But he doesn’t. He has no idea.
Lila’s flushed face convulses; she’s too worked up to get a word out. Moaning and crying, she reaches her good hand out to me.
Dad laughs. “This is nuts. She was rock solid until you walked in.” He points to me but says it to the doctor, who shares a laugh with him.
“Why don’t you go wait outside,” Dad says to me. “I think you’re making it worse,” he adds. Lila’s moan turns frantic.
“Noooo! Had-ley,” she cries in between hiccups.
“Do what your father says,” Mom says, pushing me gently, which just makes Lila’s moans turn into wails then screams.
The doctor has to know these aren’t normal cries. He has to know there’s more to it.
“Tell the doctor how you broke your arm, Lila!” I yell over my shoulder as Mom’s hand on my lower back changes from gently escorting to a not-so-gentle shove.
Dad turns to the doctor. “Can you give her something for the pain? Something to quiet her?” Mom shuts the door in my face.
Outside again, I listen as Lila’s cries warble down to a low moan.
Our plane ride home that afternoon is quiet. Lila’s still doped up on something, so she’s sleeping, her broken arm cradled against her chest in a cast and sling. Mom stares out the window. Dad bristles with anger.
It was his decision to abort the rest of our vacation.
“What’s the point?” he said, packing up the rental car. “You all haven’t stopped bitching since we got here.”
Lila rested on the couch while we packed up around her, her eyes fluttering open and closed. Every time he looked at her, he couldn’t hide his resentment. But even he knew better than to blame her. So he lumped all of us together.
I’m jus
t glad we’re leaving. The worst already happened: Lila got hurt, because of him. Her arm again. It’s a repeat of the morning he dislocated her shoulder three years ago.
The late afternoon sun shimmers on the plane’s wings; the blue Long Island Sound is to our left as we fly east across the island. Dad’s anger has been vibrating off him in waves all day, increasing as we inch closer to home.
He turns sideways, so I see his profile glaring at Lila sleeping in her seat. His lips tug down in disgust as dark thoughts rush through his head. I know. I’ve been on the receiving end of that look too many times.
With an annoyed exhale through his nostrils, he reaches over and jerks the throttle back to idle. The plane drops, nosing down toward the Long Island Sound. Dad’s no longer trying to get us home safely and quickly. He’s trying to scare the shit out of us as payback.
“Dad!” I shout. Lila’s eyes flutter open. She looks at me, struggling to focus, to push through her groggy fog. Then she looks out the window, at the pitch of the plane, and screams.
Dad turns and looks at Lila and smiles! To him, the screams of terror coming from Mom and Lila as we nosedive is worth putting all our lives in danger.
Until the engine gurgles and sputters. And then there’s nothing but terrifying silence.
“Shit!” Dad shouts.
Outside the cockpit window, the propeller twirls like a pinwheel, no longer guided by horsepower but by the air rushing through the blades as we fall. Without the roar of the engine, Mom and Lila’s shrieks pierce holes in the dense silence. Mom clutches her harness as the nose of the plane dips, rushing us to our watery grave. Dad reaches over and restarts the engine.
The reassuring rumble of the engine roaring back to life floods the cockpit. Dad levels the plane and continues on his way as if nothing happened. But as the only two people here who have actually flown a plane, we both know how close he came to getting us killed.
“There’s an old saying, Hadley,” Phil told me early on in my lessons, walking me around the plane and pointing out the important parts. “‘The propeller is a big fan made to keep the pilot cool. If it stops, the first thing you’ll see is the pilot break out into a sweat.’” Hands on hips, he laughed. When I didn’t get it, he explained. “It’s a joke, see, ’cause if that thing goes, it’s all over.” He pointed to the propeller. “You can kiss your ass good-bye!”
Now that Dad has regained control of the plane, Mom turns to him, her face white, her lips firm. “Quit it, Miles. I mean it.”
“Ooh.” He laughs. “You mean it. That’s funny.”
Lila jostled her broken arm in her panic. Her shrieks of fear have turned into whimpers of pain as Dad prepares for landing.
Trees and homes blur by our window as the plane lowers. I focus on the horizon as he levels the plane with the runway. After two decades of flying, he knows all the tricks, even how to make the landing as bumpy as possible on purpose. Lila cries out with each skip and bounce of the tires along the tarmac.
Once we come to a full stop, Mom and I guide Lila out of the plane to make sure she doesn’t fall. Dad disembarks with a lazy, satisfied grin on his face. He found a way to get back at us for ruining his vacation. And now, finally, he’s happy.
While Lila cries and Mom digs in her purse for the painkillers the resort medic gave us, Phil races out of the terminal to meet us, trying, but not succeeding, to mask the alarm on his face.
“That was quite a landing. Everything okay, Miles?” he asks, walking the rest of the way. He glances at me, at Mom’s white face, at Lila crying.
Dad pumps Phil’s hand in a hearty handshake. “Everything’s fine, Phil.”
Phil takes his aviators off, looking to me for the truth, I guess. “For a second, I thought you guys might be in trouble up there.”
Before I can say anything, Dad cuts me off. “I was practicing stalls with Hadley.” Then he thumbs over at Lila and Mom. “They don’t have a stomach for flying.”
I don’t think Phil’s buying Dad’s bullshit. But Dad pays for my flying lessons, so Phil nods gamely.
Phil turns to me with a grin and grabs my shoulders, rattling me so my teeth clatter together. “Hadley, when are you coming back? We’re so close to getting you your license!”
The smell of jet fuel and fumes and Phil shaking me adds to my already churning stomach. I’m afraid I might throw up right here in front of everyone. Pasta was a mistake after all. I swallow, forcing my lunch back down. Dad steps forward, the ambassador to all things Hadley.
“Oh, she’ll be back. Next week. Let me know what days you’re free.”
Dad then wraps an arm around Mom’s shoulder. “Bring the car around. I’ll start unloading.” He slips the car keys in her palm then leans forward and kisses her on the lips. A flash of his tongue darts in her mouth before I walk over to a nearby trash can and throw up.
then
Back in my room, I unpack my clothes, sorting out the dirty laundry. My father walks by and stands in the doorway. He reaches in his back pocket for something, then throws it on my bed.
My iPhone sinks into the lofty depths of my frilly white duvet. “I’ll need my laptop to do that English paper,” I remind him casually.
“It’s on my dresser. Get it yourself,” he says, walking away. I wait until I hear him clomp down every step before I rush to my phone.
The battery is dead, which hopefully means he left it here while we were away. Grabbing my charger from my desk, I plug it in. While I wait for it to chirp back to life, the garage door rumbles open. I watch out my window as Dad’s car pulls out of the driveway and down the road. Mom walks by my bedroom door heading to her room with a pained look on her face that’s become all too familiar. She shuts her door quietly behind her. I suspect I won’t be seeing either of them for the rest of the night.
When my phone has enough juice to turn back on, I read through my texts, almost all of them from Charlie. Thankfully, he doesn’t say anything about CPS. The first one is just “Call me.” His messages from there on are panicked where are yous, one after the other. They come first every few minutes, then hourly, then daily. These past few days must have been horrible for him. I stop reading and call him back.
“Hadley!” He picks up on the first ring and says my name like I’m a hostage just released from her captives, which I kind of am. Just hearing his voice makes me fall apart crying.
“Where are you? I’ll come get you.”
I sniff. “I’m okay. I’m home.”
He sighs in relief.
“Come over, if you can. If you can’t . . . find a way.”
I nod, and I gulp. “I’m on my way.”
I stop by Lila’s bedroom. She’s passed out on her bed, doped up on pain meds, feet flopping apart at the heel into a ballet first position. The broken arm rests on her tummy, her other arm holds it protectively. Her rosebud lips are parted, breathing softly.
His deconstruction of her has begun. I can see it in the way she sleeps: vertically, instead of horizontally across her bed. The way her arms clutch inward instead of wide open, embracing and challenging the world all at once. Once she didn’t have a care in the world. That’s lost now.
Long Island caught some of the storm too. The sidewalks outside of shops are shoveled clean, piled into dingy mountains off to the sides, but there’s the occasional no-man’s-land that is a sheet of ice, flattened to a fine sheen by the steps of hundreds of shoppers. I skid across one in my hurry to get to Charlie’s apartment, nearly landing on my butt.
He answers the door seconds after I ring the bell. Before I have time to absorb how much I missed his face, I throw myself in his arms. We trip upstairs, groping and kissing. He frees a hand to open the door. I pull him roughly inside the apartment with me, slipping out of my jacket and letting it fall to the floor. Next I tug at his shirt.
“Hadley, wait.”
He kicks his apartment door shut then leans over to lock it. The air is cold between us, even in those few seconds. I reel him back
by his shirt, then lift it by the hem, trying to undress him. His hands are on mine, stopping me. I throw my arms around his neck to hold him still; he’s squirming away like a puppy I’m hugging too tightly. As he unknots my arms from behind his neck, it reminds me of how he did the same thing to Claudia that night at the party where he kissed me. Rejection burns inside of me, but it just makes me more determined.
“Wait,” he whispers against my lips.
“No,” I growl, tearing at my clothes instead. My hands are shimmying the bottom of my sweater up when he grabs them again. Then he wraps his arms around me in a hug that’s as romantic as a straitjacket.
“Hadley, slow down.”
“Why?” My cheeks flame, angry and hurt.
His answer is a kiss to my forehead, like he’s checking for a fever. He leads me to the couch and sits down, his arms still around me.
“Talk to me.” He takes my hands. “What happened?”
I shake my head and pull my hands away from him to cover my face. “She broke her arm.”
“Who? Lila?” He peels my hands off my face, and I nod.
The tears pour out of me as I tell him what I know.
“Did you find out anything from CPS while I was away?”
He shakes his head, his lips a grim line. “They wouldn’t tell me anything.”
I laugh bitterly. No one needs to tell me the result of that investigation. Lila and I are still here. The evidence speaks for itself. I always knew this was the probable outcome. We don’t fit the profile of an abused family. The worst-case scenario happened: we poked the bear and now we’re stuck with him.
I know why CPS couldn’t dig anything up. I covered my tracks so well, it’s like they never even existed.
“I don’t know what else to do,” I admit. All my life, I’ve studied hard and done well. I played hard on the field, and I’ve won. I thought I did it because my father made me. Turns out, defeat is not my thing. I don’t like losing. Not when the stakes are this high.
We pick up pizza from Sal’s and watch TV. Charlie flips through the channels and comes across Cosmos. Neil deGrasse Tyson stands on a cosmic calendar, unfolding the course of the universe’s 13.8 billion years in one human year. Each month equals 1.14 billion years, each day equals 40 million years, each hour equals 1.3 million years. The American Revolution, World War II, the Apollo moon landing, all happened in the last second of December 31st.