The Summer I Learned to Fly

by Dana Reinhardt

  “I don’t even know what to call you,” I said.

  “Call me Emmett. Please.”

  “Okay.”

  “People don’t run away for no reason, you know. I have my reasons.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  I started rifling through the fridge. Mom wasn’t kidding. It needed a good clean. I took out bread and salami, turkey, lettuce, mustard, mayonnaise, a jar of gherkin pickles. I’d been raised to believe that something good to eat makes everything better.

  I spread the goods out between us while he began to talk.

  “Do you ever have dreams about when you were little? You know, like you’re in your room and the light is soft, and you’re sitting on the carpet and you’re playing with your favorite toy, and everything just feels perfect? Like you’re really happy?”

  I nodded because I sort of knew what he meant, although in my dream, I’m sitting in the lap of a father I don’t really remember, leaning against his chest, listening to his heartbeat, while he rattles off a long list of all the things we’ll do together someday.

  “Well, I can’t really tell anymore what’s a memory and what’s just a dream. I’d like to say that there was a time everything was good. That there was a time when I was happy. But I might have made all that up.” He took a slice of salami and popped it in his mouth. “I can tell you this, though. I used to have a real family. A mom and a dad and a little brother. And we used to live in a house where we grew cucumbers in the backyard. They had these little spikes on the outside, so they made for killer weapons if you happened to be into battling like Conan the Barbarian.” He smiled at me. “Don’t judge.”

  This, I thought, is memory.

  This is not a dream.

  “And my brother, he’s younger than me. His name is David. He shared my room. We only had two, so there was really no choice, but I didn’t mind. I never liked sleeping alone. I used to tell him stories in his crib. After my parents shut out the lights. Usually about Conan the Barbarian.”

  He’d started making a sandwich, but he stopped halfway through.

  “Those were happy times. When I thought my stories were putting him to sleep. This was before we realized that he probably wasn’t able to understand what I was saying, or much of anything else.”

  He looked from his half-built sandwich to me.

  “I don’t mean to blame David. None of what happened is his fault. But when you’ve just got a small house you rent with a cucumber patch in the back and one parent who works fixing cars but doesn’t have health insurance and you discover that there’s something wrong with the three-year-old who hasn’t learned to talk, things can kind of go to crap.”

  I remember what I used to tell myself when I was younger: all that business about how lucky I was to have only Mom and me. Magical thinking. Like building a moat around a dream castle.

  But maybe I wasn’t too far off. Maybe magical thinking can come true.

  “It’s hard, dealing with the sort of problems David has. As he got older, he seemed to get worse. Stories didn’t soothe him to sleep. Not much calmed him down. Not much, other than being with animals. So … we got him a pet rat.”

  Immediately I pictured Hum. Upstairs. Sound asleep in his newly cleaned cage.

  “And while rats may be one of earth’s most perfect creatures,” he said, “they can’t make miracles.”

  He went quiet. I didn’t move, even though my feet had fallen asleep. Pins and needles. I felt them everywhere.

  “So, Robin. That’s my story. The beginning of it, anyway. Have you ever noticed how most stories, at least the ones you learn when you’re a kid, start out sad but have happy endings? Well, mine starts out happy, and I’m just doing what I can to keep it from ending on the sad.”

  I thought of my story. A redheaded father who’d grown a Fu Manchu, who wanted to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, who hated the Doors, who loved his wife and his little Birdie, and who, despite all these passions and desires and convictions, possessed a body that was all done living.

  A sad story. But one that would wind up happy: with a girl, her mother, a rat, and some really excellent cheese.

  “So what are you trying to do? Why are you running away?” I asked.

  He considered me with his kind eyes, the same way he did that first night when I asked why he was in the alleyway. As if I’d asked the simplest question in the universe.

  “I’m looking to make a miracle,” he said.

  the onion fields

  We all have our stories. The ones we’re told or read as children that never leave us. For me, that story is Charlotte’s Web, and it always struck me how Emmett mentioned it the very first night we met in the alley, as if he’d removed a big fat crayon from his pocket and drawn a line connecting us together.

  Mom first read it to me when I was five, and I began to realize, as she doled out the chapters night after night, that Charlotte was going to die. It made no difference to me that she’d left behind her masterpiece, the sac of spider eggs that would survive her. What good was a world to Wilbur, or to the spiders those eggs would become, without a Charlotte in it?

  For Emmett, that story, the one that would not leave him, was a legend.

  It wasn’t Conan the Barbarian, though he loved that story too. The story Emmett carried with him came from a book of Native American legends his father would read to him and his brother David before it became clear that David wasn’t listening, and before David’s problems grew too large for their family and the house with the cucumber patch, and before his father ran away, though his face would never appear on a milk carton.

  Those were the times Emmett was happiest. When his father would squeeze himself into Emmett’s bed with the book of legends, and Emmett would look at their feet side by side and wonder how his would ever grow so big. The book had been his father’s when he was a boy, and his favorite legend became Emmett’s too. Emmett demanded it every night.

  He told me all this as I rode on the handlebars of my bike while he pedaled it behind me. I’d seen other kids doing it, and while they looked like they were having fun—and even more than that, they looked part of a twosome, close enough to share one bike—I always thought it was crazy. Dangerous.

  But we had only one hour for Emmett to show me where he’d been living and get me back home in time for Mom’s two p.m. call. And anyway, I had my helmet. I hated that I didn’t have one to offer him, but he said he was a good cyclist. He promised to deliver us there and home again safely.

  He didn’t hesitate when I’d asked. He said, Yes. Of course. There are no more secrets. I’ll show you where I’ve been living.

  At first I thought maybe it was the cove. But I started to realize he was just skirting town, taking the long route, playing it safe so we wouldn’t be seen by Mom or Swoozie or Mrs. Mutchnick or Mr. Flatbush from Fireside Liquor, or any of the other merchants on Euclid Avenue who probably knew by now that I’d been grounded.

  We headed inland again, north of downtown, up a rural road through vast farmland that gave this part of the state its reputation. Green onions grew along this road (though you’d find soybeans on the next farm road over, and citrus on the road south of town), and you could smell them from your car with the windows rolled up, which probably had something to do with why Mom and I didn’t come out this way very often.

  Emmett stood up to pedal and he leaned in closer to me.

  “Hold on tight.” He took a hard left off the road and through a break in the wire fencing, right into the onion fields, where the rows were planted so neatly and precisely that we continued on, bumping down a path dividing the crops without crushing a single one of the long, green, pungent onion stems that fluttered in the wind of our wheels.

  I felt the way I had that afternoon when I’d reached Garfield Park after the hot and brush-choked climb: like I was seeing my world, the world I thought I knew every corner of, from a new perch.

  “And the legend?” I called to him. “What is the legend?” I
had to shout because I wasn’t going to turn my head around. I believed looking forward kept me safe.

  “Let’s wait for that,” he said. “Almost here.”

  We rode up to a barn surrounded by fields of green, and far enough away from the farmhouse that it was little more than a speck in the distance.

  I looked at my watch.

  1:19.

  Emmett walked up to the large wooden door and gave three quick knocks followed by two shorter ones.

  “Nobody’s here,” he said, and he swung the latch and pulled the barn door open. He gestured for me to follow him.

  Inside the airy building were makeshift rooms divided by big sheets of brightly colored fabric hanging from the rafters.

  “Jasper.” He pointed to one. “Deirdre.” He pointed to another. “Christian and Molly.” A third. “Finn,” he said as we peeked into the last. “And I’m up here.” He began to climb a ladder and I followed him up to a loft where he slept with a bright orange life vest for a pillow on a bed made of straw stuffed into more of the fabric, which I recognized now. It came from the big bolts in Mrs. Mutchnick’s shop. The fabric that was crowding out the summer light, that she said she had more of than she knew what to do with. She must have put it out back behind her store.

  The barn wall at the head of Emmett’s bed was covered in stickers. There wasn’t enough room to stand, so I crawled over to take a closer look and saw that they were labels from the cheeses I’d left out. Cotswold from an English company called Royal Cheese and Dairy, port wine cheddar from Bracken Farms, a Camembert with a picture of the French flag—they were all here.

  “Wow,” I said, because this wall of stickers, this loft not unlike where Charlotte had gone to make her masterpiece, this barn with its fabric walls in the middle of the field of waving onion stems, it was all so unexpected. “Who owns this place?”

  Emmett shrugged. “Some farmers, I guess. But they don’t use the barn.”

  “And they don’t mind that you do?”

  He reached over and flattened a cheese label that was starting to peel off at its corner. “I don’t really know. But they’ve never come in here and told us to get lost, so I’m guessing it’s okay by them. Sometimes that’s the greatest kindness, the sort where you give something without showing up to get a thank-you in return.” He smiled at me. “Like leaving food in a back alley.”

  “How’d you even find your way out here?”

  “I stopped to listen to Finn play. It was a low point for me. I’d saved up all this money, I was on my way north, I was only here to change buses. But then I was attacked. Robbed of every penny. Cut with a razor blade.” He put his hand to his cheek. “I thought it was over for me. That I’d have to turn back. But Finn told me not to give up, and he brought me here, and I met the others, and then, Robin, I met you.”

  I wanted more than anything right then to reach out and touch the spot where I’d first noticed his cut, which had now become a pale thread running the length of his left cheek. But I didn’t. I was brave enough to ride on my handlebars, but not brave enough yet to throw that particular sort of caution to the wind.

  He was looking at me, and I wondered whether he could feel how much I wanted to touch him.

  “Better head out if we want to get back in time for your mom’s phone call,” he said. “And anyway, I have to tell you my favorite legend.”

  the legend

  There was a small tribe living happily in a remote village in what is now northern California. They had everything they could hope for—bountiful food, good health, and the guidance of a benevolent Great Spirit. The chief of this tribe had two sons, whom he loved beyond measure, and the eldest of his sons was set to marry. As the tribe began to prepare for the days of celebration leading up to the wedding of the man who would one day be their chief—in times that should have been so full of happiness and glory—a terrible darkness fell upon the village. Illness struck young and old without warning. The inhabitants of this once-blessed village began to grow sick and die. The many medicines they’d relied upon in their prosperous past proved useless. The chief was at a loss for what to do, so he called upon the tribal elders.

  At this meeting it was decided that there was nothing left to do but succumb to the will of the Great Spirit. If it was the Great Spirit’s will that they all die, then it must be for some purpose. They would meet this fate in the brave manner for which their tribe was known.

  The eldest of the elders, a wise medicine man upon whom the chief most often relied in difficult situations, stood and leaned upon his stick.

  He spoke quietly and gravely. “I am an old man,” he said. “And I will now tell you what my grandfather told my father when he was an old man, and what my father told me when he too was an old man. I have no son. You are all my sons. So here is what you must know. I was told that one day the Great Spirit would send a sickness to fall upon our people, and all, in turn, will die. Unless,” he said, leaning more heavily on the stick, which was now shaking beneath his weight, “unless a sacrifice is made to appease the Great Spirit.”

  Here he averted his eyes from the chief and the chief’s eldest son, their future leader, who was attending his first council of the tribal elders. “This illness will take us all, unless the firstborn son of our tribe’s chief willingly gives his life for his people.”

  A silence fell over the group. Nothing could be heard but the crackling of the fire around which they had gathered.

  The chief did not speak up in defense of his son’s life. He did not need to. The rest of the assembly quickly agreed that nobody would sacrifice his life for the village. They would abide by the decision they had reached before the old medicine man had spoken, that if it was the Great Spirit’s will that they all die, then they would meet their fate with bravery.

  The chief’s eldest son walked away from the meeting with a heavy heart. He had voted with the group, but he wasn’t sure he had acted with bravery. He spoke to himself as he wandered through the woods, and he pondered both fates as he walked back into the village, where he laid eyes upon a sight that would provide a crystal-clear answer.

  The face of his soon-to-be bride.

  His beloved.

  The face he loved more than he had words to describe was showing the first signs of the terrible illness.

  That night he sat by her bedside. He held her hand. He administered the medicines that had proved useless and he mopped her brow with a cold cloth. He sat with her all the next morning and into the late afternoon, and he whispered to her that he loved her. Could she hear him? He loved her. He would always love her.

  Shortly before sunset, he kissed her between her deep-set eyes. She was still alive, but he was not sure how much longer she could hold on.

  He went and he found his younger brother, who, with terror in his voice, confessed that he feared he too was feeling the signs of the terrible illness.

  “All will be well,” the older brother said. “Be brave, and be a great leader.”

  The second half of this command puzzled the younger brother, but he didn’t think much of it as he watched his older brother wander off into the woods. He was too consumed with worry.

  The elder brother collected the largest rocks he could find and he stuffed them all into a leather sack. He dragged this sack to the edge of the boulder from which, as a boy, he loved to jump into the natural hot spring that lay hidden in the wood. This spring was believed to be a place of healing. It was where the tribe members would go to soak in the warm waters and seek cures for minor ailments—though not all believed it made any difference.

  But as a boy, the eldest son had loved simply to swim there, and he had loved to dive from the boulder, and on this evening, just as the sun was setting, he took the leather bag filled with stones and he tied it to his ankle with a rope, and he held it in his arms, and he closed his eyes, and he leapt.

  The next morning, the village awoke triumphant. The terrible illness was gone. Those on death’s door arose from bed
renewed, as if from a good night’s sleep. A celebration erupted in the village, and it wasn’t until all had gathered that the absence of the chief’s eldest son was noticed.

  The cries of the chief, and of his youngest son, and of the young woman who was no longer about to become a bride, rose up and wove together into a sound more terrible than the howling of demons.

  And several days later, in a traditional ceremony, the eldest son’s life was mourned and celebrated at the edge of the spring in the wood, and from that day forward nobody doubted the special healing powers of the water.

  The water healed a village.

  taking a leap

  Back at the kitchen counter, after I’d answered Mom’s two o’clock call (Yes, I’m still here; yes, I’ve cleaned out the fridge; no, I’m not watching too much TV), Emmett told me, “I’m going to find that water.”

  “So … you’re going to kill yourself? ’Cause that seems like a stupid idea.”

  “No, no, no. I’m not going to kill myself. God. You’re so literal.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Those waters have healing powers. Serious healing powers. They’re not like all the other hot springs, those fancy resorts where people go to, like, cure their eczema or whatever. These waters can heal other people. They answer prayers. That’s the special thing about this spring—the water heals others. It’s not just about the person who goes there. This water healed a village. It brought a whole tribe back from the brink of death.”

  I’d heard of the hot springs up north. Sometimes we’d get tourists in the shop, Germans and Brits mostly, who were making their way down the coast after a stay at one of those resorts.

  And yes, maybe I was too literal, but what I understood of this legend was that the older brother had to die to save the people he loved.

  “Emmett,” I said, and I stopped because I could see how important this was to him. So important that he’d suffered a razor-blade cut to the cheek, so important that he’d been living in a field of onions. I didn’t want to be the sort of friend who dashes dreams. Friends, I was pretty sure, lift their friends up; they don’t weigh them down like a sack full of stones.