Flying in Place

by Susan Palwick

“I got sleepy, all right? I’m awake now.”

  “Are you sick?” She felt my forehead and frowned. “You don’t have a fever. How can you be so tired at seven at night?”

  Because I was flying around the ceiling with the ghost of your beloved dead daughter, “I don’t know, Mom. Maybe it’s because I have my period.”

  She wrapped a tendril of reddish-gold hair around one finger. Her hands were shaking. “You’re not taking drugs, are you?”

  “What?” I sat up; my body felt more real again, but so did the pain, and my voice was still weaker than it should have been. “No, I’m not taking drugs. Not unless you count the Tylenol Mrs. Halloran gave me. Look, Mom, I’m really okay. I’m sorry I upset you.”

  “Will you be all right to go to school tomorrow?”

  “Of course.”

  “You still sound exhausted. Maybe you should stay home tomorrow and reschedule the test. I’ll arrange it with Mr. Miller—”

  “It’s okay, Mom. I’d rather get it over with.”

  She tugged at her hair again. “Are you sure you aren’t sick?”

  “No, I’m not sick!” If I were sick the famous doctor would have to examine me, not that he wouldn’t do it anyway. But I had to get her off the topic of my health before she took him up on his previous offer. “I guess I’m a little hungry. Maybe I should have dinner after all.”

  Mom’s face relaxed, and she let go of the strand of hair. “I’ll bring up a tray. The pot roast and potatoes, and string beans, and some milk. And ice cream for dessert? Does that sound good?”

  “That’s great, Mom.”

  She gave me another of those strange shy smiles from the morning. “Maybe you’d better take an iron pill, too.”

  “Sure, Mom.”

  She nodded and bustled out of the room, and bustled back a few minutes later carrying a tray loaded with enough food to feed three of the Halloran children. She sat next to my bed and watched me eat it, and when I’d finished she said, “Do you want to go back to sleep now?”

  “Yes.” I really wanted to fly, but I couldn’t tell her that.

  Another shy smile. “I’ll read you Peter Pan, if you want me to.”

  Peter Pan, If she only knew. “It’s okay, Mom. You don’t have to. I think I’ll be able to fall asleep on my own.”

  “All right,” she said, and got up and kissed me on the forehead and left the room. It was deep blue dusk outside, the loveliest time of evening, and I felt much better for having eaten. I got up and changed into light summer pajamas suitable for flying, and then I got back into bed and went to find Ginny.

  Over the next two weeks, we learned that there was no way for us to reach the lake in a straight line, because we didn’t know the same way to get there. New houses had been built on our block since Ginny died, and Tom Halloran’s highway now cut through one corner of town, carrying trucks and buses and vacationers headed for larger lakes to the north, I kept striking off in what I thought was the right direction, only to discover that Ginny was no longer next to me because I’d put myself somewhere she’d never seen and therefore couldn’t remember. The first time it happened—as I hovered over the Woolworth’s in town—I thought she’d abandoned me, but when I went back home I found her curled with her arms around her knees in one corner of my bedroom ceiling.

  “I figured you’d have to come back here,” she said. “I was right over Palmer Street and then you weren’t there anymore—”

  “I was over Palmer Street! Over the Woolworth’s!”

  “There’s a Woolworth’s there now?” she asked, and then I realized what had happened. She looked at me and said sadly, “That’s how it works, Emma. We can only go to places I already know.”

  “Can’t teach a dead dog new tricks,” I said, and regretted it the moment I’d spoken, but to my surprise Ginny answered with her sweet, infectious giggle. Mom had told me Ginny was kind to everyone, polite to everyone, honest, brave, moral, and coordinated, but she’d never described Ginny’s laugh. It reminded me of the triumphant chortles of the little birds who hunted for food at the edge of the water, and I wondered if Ginny had learned to imitate them from spending so much time at the lake. Did I laugh like that, too?

  I’d stopped worrying about whether she was really real or not. Whatever she was, she was vibrant and interesting, and I wasn’t about to throw away any distractions. The bleeding had stopped, but the bruises continued, and the breathing had begun to follow me farther out of my body. I joined Ginny now at any time of day, whenever I could, but our dawn expeditions had a special urgency, because at dawn the breathing tracked us like a bloodhound. One morning I saw Ginny looking over her shoulder, frowning, as the noise whistled behind us, the moaning wind before a storm.

  “You hear it too, don’t you?” I said, and she shivered.

  “Come on,” she said, flying faster. “We have to find the lake.”

  We gradually mapped out a route that led through backyards and bits of forest still untouched by the highway, past the elementary school we’d both attended, and along stretches of nearly forgotten back roads, rarely travelled except by children and animals, where the scenery changed only with the seasons. The backyards of the established families in town stayed fairly constant, and the ugly brick school would outlast my grandchildren, if I ever had any, but there were few other human landmarks I could share with Ginny. She had lived in a gentler, slower town than I did, a town untroubled by highways. I wondered if she’d recognize the lake when we finally found it, or if we would forever be unable to reach our destination because owls and foxes no longer glided through the twilight.

  But at last we got there. Surrounded by trees, the lake we shared glimmered in an eerie silence, undisturbed by radios or powerboats. Nothing marred the water; there were no inner tubes or water-skiers or bobbing bits of trash. This was the lake of autumn sunsets when the chill kept everyone else away, the lake of summer dawns, the impossible lake of dreams. The first time we reached it, we spent what felt like hours flying loop-de-loops above the water, whirling in dizzying circles and alighting in the tops of trees to rest. When we swooped near the surface, thousands of minnows scattered at the shadows we made on the bottom, and the woods rang with birdsong, I’d never been so happy.

  “This is great,” I called to Ginny. “This is so great. Is heaven always this much fun?”

  “This isn’t heaven,” she told me, and flew off to sit on a tree branch. I followed her.

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned it’s heaven. I’d sign on for this right now.”

  “Not if it was all you could do,” she told me.

  “Well, it’s not hell, is it? Where are we, then?”

  “No place. Limbo.”

  “Nuts,” I said, and pushed off the branch to do some more aerial cartwheels. But Ginny didn’t join me, and when I flew back to the branch she looked thinner somehow, hollower, with deeper shadows under her eyes. For a moment I almost fancied I could see through her.

  “Ginny? What—”

  It must just have been a cloud over the sun, because in a moment she was solid again. “Show me how to do a triple somersault,” I said.

  In real time, back in the world, reality went rapidly from bad to worse. I was always tired from lack of sleep, always sore from the breathing. School faded into a monotone blur, alleviated only by flashes of terror whenever I encountered one of the Halloran children, and my grades plunged disastrously. My teachers questioned me, yelled at me, asked me if I were ill. My mother simply blamed Jane.

  “Of course you can’t concentrate,” Mom told me after I’d nearly failed a vocabulary quiz. I’d expected her to scream at me; her sympathy hurt more than her anger would have, because it meant she’d stopped expecting anything from me. “You’ve just learned that someone you care about can’t be trusted to act the way she should. Something like that happened to me once, too…it nearly broke my heart.”

  She trailed off, biting her lip. “When?” I said, my hurt replaced by fascinati
on. “Who?” Ginny had always acted perfectly. Did that mean there was another tragedy in my mother’s past? Some man she’d loved before she met my father, maybe?

  She shook herself out of her reverie as briskly as she’d shaken out the clean sheets that morning. “It was a very long time ago, Emma, and it doesn’t matter now. I only mentioned it because I wanted you to know that I understand how upset you are. It’s a terrible shock, but it’s also taught you how carefully you have to choose your friends. You’ll be all right. I’m just glad this has made you stop spending time with her.”

  Whatever else the fiasco had done, it provided controversy in a town far too hungry for gossip. As my father had predicted, the scene on the Hallorans’ front porch soon mutated into a dozen different versions. In some retellings, Jane lured Tad out in the rowboat and tried to seduce him. In others, he tackled her in the woods, dragged her bound and gagged into the boat, a la Perils of Pauline, and raped her. Sometimes he and Billy—present in only some of these tales—both raped her.

  New rumors sprang up overnight, like mushrooms. There were dark hints of beer and pot; there were versions in which Jane tried to drown Tad, ones in which Tad tried to drown Jane, and still others in which Jane and Tad struggled in the water, trying to drown each other, while Billy, stoned and drunk, sat in the boat and watched. The town buzzed with dire whispers of pre-teen sex rings, speculations that Jane was pregnant, reports that Tad had been caught masturbating on the beach, and mutterings that of course Jane was loose, since her mother not only approved of sex education but had helped develop the curriculum. Myrna’s offer to hold self-defense classes for all the girls in school—and any of their mothers who cared to attend—did little to quiet the gossips.

  “That woman’s got too many boys,” a matronly shopkeeper told one of the town mailmen while I was buying a candy bar. “By the time she had a girl, she forgot what they’re for. Teaching them to fight! She wants one of them Olympic boxers, not a daughter.”

  “Maybe she wants a mud wrestler,” the mailman said, handing her a stack of letters and magazines.

  “She’s already got a mud wrestler,” the shopkeeper said darkly, and I put down the Milky Way bar I’d wanted. I wasn’t going to give this woman any money. Oblivious to my boycott, she went on, “What else do you think Janie was doing, down by the lake with those boys? Not ballroom dancing, that’s for sure!”

  In the middle of all this, Jane and Billy steadfastly stuck to their account of what had happened, and the saner adults believed them. The Ewmets sent Tad to stay with his grandparents in California until the ruckus died down, but Mr. Ewmet, finding himself and his family under attack, couldn’t remain entirely silent. In his capacity as deacon, he delivered a sermon on the evils of licentious youth. One of the saner adults who’d been there said dryly, “Jane may not have been wearing much in the boat, but that sermon was more thinly veiled than she was.”

  In response, the road repair crew that had been scheduled to fix a large pothole in front of the church never showed up, and Tom Halloran made no effort to disguise the reason. “There are plenty of other potholes in this town that need fixing,” he told a local reporter, who dutifully reprinted the statement in the weekly paper. “If Ewmet repairs the hole in his head, maybe I’ll get around to fixing the hole in the road. As it is, I think that pothole’s an outward and visible sign of inner unbelievable idiocy, don’t you?”

  The reporter kept his opinions to himself, but a number of other people who should have stayed out of the fray took sides. My mother, predictably, was one of them. She replaced her usual unit on Huck Finn with one on The Scarlet Letter, taught largely from filmstrips that watered the text down for seventh graders. After the first few days, none of us bothered trying to read the book.

  At the end of the unit we had to give oral reports. My mother gave us the list of topics she’d prepared the last time she taught the book, four years earlier. I picked the safely dull subject of the role of religion in Puritan life. Jane, never one to back away from a fight, chose to talk about “Hester Prynne’s Relationship to her Community.”

  “Hester Prynne must have been mad because the people where she lived didn’t have any guts,” Jane told us, standing at the front of the class to deliver her report. She’d embroidered a scarlet A+ on her baseball cap; everyone but my mother had laughed when she put it on. It was already a safe bet that she wouldn’t be getting an A+ on this report. “Her friends wouldn’t talk to her anymore. They were prudes and cowards.” She glared at me the whole time she was talking.

  “Guts!” my mother said at dinner that night, as I sat drowning in shame. “That Halloran girl used the word ‘guts’ in a report about Nathaniel Hawthorne. Can you imagine?”

  “Guts is a perfectly fine word,” my father said mildly. He was home for dinner after performing a particularly grueling colectomy; he’d walked into the house whistling and hadn’t taken his eyes off me all evening. “It’s Anglo-Saxon, love, that’s all. Like shit and fuck.”

  “Stewart!”

  My father laughed. “Now, Pam, those are eminently expressive words. The only thing wrong with them is that they’re not Latinate. Tennyson had guts as surely as you or I do. Coleridge may not have produced much shit, since opiate addiction causes notorious constipation, but all those fellows fucked whenever they could get it—”

  “Stewart! Watch your language in front of your daughter!”

  “Oh, my dear, I’m sure she’s heard worse from her darling little compatriots. And why should I watch my language, when you do it so vigilantly for me?”

  My mother spooned more peas and carrots onto my plate, even though I hadn’t touched what was already there. “You’re starting to sound like Tom Halloran.”

  “Yes, he’s certainly a vigilante, although he probably couldn’t pronounce it.” My father whistled a fragment from the William Tell Overture and said, “So tell us, Emma, how is your friend coping with her newfound fame?”

  “She’s not my friend anymore,” I said, my arms aching with bruises under my long-sleeved shirt, and shovelled peas and carrots into my mouth so he wouldn’t ask me any more questions. I knew Jane thought I sided with my parents, but I couldn’t apologize, because to tell her why I’d acted like such a prude I’d have to tell her about the breathing.

  “You’re growing up, Emma,” my mother said approvingly. “You’ve finally realized that she’s not good enough for you. You’ll be much happier in school when you make nicer friends.”

  I swallowed the peas and carrots, which tasted like gravel. Nicer friends? Like who? Fine, Mom. I’ll spend all my free time with Ginny. That should make you happy.

  The phone rang, and my father grimaced. “That had better not be the hospital. I can’t digest pork in an ICU. Pamela, love—”

  She’d already gone into the kitchen to get it. “Hello? Yes, of course this is Pamela.” Her voice was suddenly cold and scornful, the way it had been when she was talking about Jane’s report.

  My father raised an eyebrow. “Pam?”

  “It’s for me,” Mom said tightly, and carried the phone into the pantry at the far end of the kitchen. “No,” I heard her say, vehemently, and then she closed the pantry door.

  My father shrugged at me. “There goes your mother, shutting herself up with the canned corn again. Is math going any better, Emma?”

  “No,” I said, straining to hear what Mom was saying through the closed door,

  “What are you working on?”

  There was a hiss from the pantry, something that sounded like, “Myrna, you’re not to call here.” My father frowned.

  “Mixed variables,” I said.

  “What?” He looked at me blankly and then said, “Oh, well, those aren’t too hard.”

  Sure they aren’t, for a famous doctor. “Absolutely not,” my mother said. Her voice faded for a few seconds before rising sharply. “I don’t want you in this house, do you understand that?”

  “Maybe you should go upstairs and m
ix up some variables,” my father said, still frowning. He’d started tapping on the tabletop with his fingers, a nervous, drumming tattoo.

  “I told you,” said my mother, “you’re not welcome here! Don’t call again!”

  I wanted to cry, and even my father scowled. “Dad, why does she have to talk to Myrna that way? It’s rude, isn’t it? Mom’s the one who’s so big on manners.”

  “What?” He looked at me blankly again, and then his features softened into something like relief. “Well, Emma, your mother has to act as she thinks best. Don’t worry about it. They’re both adults, and it’s not your responsibility. You should be worrying about your grades instead. Do you want me to help you with the math?”

  I shook my head and got up to go to my room. On my way up the stairs I heard my mother say, “This is intolerable. Intolerable! Stewart, can’t we get an unlisted number?”

  He laughed: a short, sharp sound devoid of humor, “I don’t think that will do much good, Pam. You seem to keep forgetting that she knows where we live.”

  “Did you have to solve equations with mixed variables?” I asked Ginny that evening, as we did slow circles above the lake.

  She grimaced. “We’d just gotten to that in math, and then I had to go into the hospital, so I never learned. I always thought they sounded like mixed vegetables. Peas and carrots. I hated peas and carrots.”

  “We had peas and carrots tonight.”

  “Ugh. Have you ever been to Disneyland?”

  “What?” Her logic frequently mystified me. “Of course not. I’ve never been anywhere except Aunt Diane’s house in Ohio.”

  Ginny did a graceful loop-de-loop, mirrored by her reflection on the water, and said wistfully, “Dad was going to take us to Disneyland when I got out of the hospital. He’d promised. I’d always wanted to go.”

  “He doesn’t make promises like that to me,” I said. Why did she always have to make me jealous? “But he loved you, so I guess that’s the difference.”