In Some Other World, Maybe: A Novel (10 page)

“Are you excited?” your father asked, strapping you into the copilot seat.

You’d flown with your mother and sister to visit various relatives, and you hadn’t liked it, but you knew the answer to your father’s question was an enthusiastic “yes.” Your mother hadn’t been diagnosed with cancer at that point, but your father had given up on her and your older sister years before because they didn’t love the sky the way he did. So you smiled against the whirling of the engine as the plane began its furious race on the runway, but at your sides, where your father couldn’t see, you dug fingernails into the flesh of your palms, leaving half-moon indentations in your lifelines.

“This is it,” your father said with finality as the plane broke through low clouds of thinly stretched cotton. “It’s like birth, like being born.”

Trying to hide your fear, you nodded. If he was Batman, maybe you could be his Robin.

“Come on, champ.” Your father offered the controls, as if bestowing a great gift. “Give it a go.”

Tentatively, you took the yoke, a strange W-shaped interface that felt far too cheap and plastic to have any real impact on your defiance of gravity. A bright kid, you suspected your father probably wasn’t giving you a grave responsibility (seven-year-olds, you knew, were rarely placed in positions of grave responsibility). You figured it must have been like the old-fashioned cars you’d ridden in with Braden and his family the summer before at Great America, where there had been a steering wheel but the cars were on a track, their course determined without your actions. Still, you thought the plane began to plummet. Screaming, you threw your hands into the air like a girl, like your sister.

Your father easily took back the controls.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said, but after that he looked at you differently. You were not Robin to his Batman.

He wouldn’t call you “champ” again for eleven years—not until your appendix ruptured and Phoebe Fisher and
her
father took you to Northwestern Memorial Hospital because your mother was dead, your sister was married in Utah, and your father was flying to Sydney and hadn’t thought to leave any contact numbers. Phoebe called the airline to track him down, and when he finally got back to Evanston, he hovered over your hospital bed, guilt wrinkling his forehead.

“Don’t worry about it,” you said, words thick with morphine. And you thought you meant it, that you didn’t care about his absences or opinions anymore—not with Phoebe down the hall.

But hidden away somewhere, all of that must have still mattered, because first semester of your engineering Ph.D. program you found yourself drawn to aeronautics research with a strange mix of guilt and excitement, like it was something taboo.

It must have still mattered, because three years after your appendectomy you heard about a little girl, Jessica Dubroff, who wanted to be the youngest person to fly across the United States. You were on the leather sofa in your father’s house trying to file your taxes while your half sister, Natasha, napped in her playpen and your stepmother folded laundry on the floor, her thin shoulder brushing against your calf in a way that made you uncomfortable, even though nothing sexual had happened yet. Maura had the news on, but you weren’t listening until you heard the phrase “child pilot.”

“Would you look at that,” Maura said to the TV. “She can’t be more than eight.”

Mid-calculation, you turned stony, eyes locked on the screen. The solar-powered calculator dimmed, but you didn’t notice; you needed to see what a child pilot was
supposed
to look like.

There she was, a golden-haired girl in her Lilliputian bomber jacket and the baseball cap with
WOMEN FLY
printed across the top.

One of the reporters asked her if she was scared of crashing.

“Nothing is going to happen,” Jessica said, smiling into the camera. “It’s simply an airplane.”

And you hated her in a way you hadn’t hated anyone since you tried to drown Braden Washington in the community pool when you were a junior in high school.

“No, no,” you said, forgetting about Maura, who looked up at you, head bent in confusion.

For the next two days, you devoured every media snippet about Jessica and her impending flight—you got on the Web and did a search for newspapers in her hometown and were glued to CNN, even though they played the same clip over and over. When twenty-four hours into her flight Jessica’s plane crashed into a driveway near Cheyenne, Wyoming—killing all three people on board—you were inappropriately giddy. You felt you’d gained a greater understanding of the world, as if her crash confirmed a hypothesis you’d developed a long time ago. By then you were an honor roll student at Northwestern, but the plane crash was one of the few times you ever felt truly smart. It was the first time in years you wanted to talk to your father. To call him in whatever corner of the world he was temporarily located and say “I told you.”

*   *   *

Your mother:

You never doubted that your mother loved you and did her best and all of those basic things, but it likely says a lot about your relationship that your clearest memory of her is the day she found the Neiman Marcus catalogs under your bed when you were thirteen. It was two years before she surrendered to cancer but months after the diagnosis, when she was already lying around waiting to die.

“Ollie,” she called to you from the beige couches in the living room, when you got home from school. “Do you need new clothes?”

You were in a hurry. The Washingtons were taking you and Braden to see
The Princess Bride,
and you wanted to change, dump your books, and go back to Braden’s house, where his mother, Alicia, smelled like heaven—garlic and lilacs—as she prepared dinner.

“New clothes?” you asked, walking through the hallway to the living room, the
Days of Our Lives
theme weeping in the background. “No, I don’t think—”

And you stopped talking, stopped breathing, because on the couch your mother—not really fat but bunchy in the hips and thighs—was reading
Redbook
and wearing your old
Eons & Empires
hat with the
E&E
crest. She must have noticed the horror on your face.

“Is it okay that I’m wearing this?” She touched the brim.

“Sure,” you said. But it wasn’t really okay; you were pretty sure the hat had been under your bed along with the Neiman Marcus catalogs, where Alicia Washington modeled fur and sportswear. On nights when you couldn’t sleep, you’d jerk off to the pictures of Braden’s mom. “It looks good.”

“Thank you.” Your mother sat up a little. “I found these catalogs under your bed, and I was wondering if you needed school clothes.”

There they were on the oak coffee table atop the pile of women’s magazines and self-help books that your sister kept bringing her.

Staring at the department store’s skinny regal font, you felt your face turn as red as your hair, and a bomb detonated in your lungs.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

You didn’t say anything because you didn’t have the kind of relationship with your mother where you discussed things like that … ever.

It’s not that you didn’t love her, you just don’t think about her on those Hallmark-card moments like Christmas and graduation—the times when your sister gets flubbery, holds your arm, whispers she wishes Mom were still around.

Instead, your mother’s image came to you when you were eighteen and driving from Chicago to Southern California to help Phoebe Fisher move into a studio apartment in a not-so-great neighborhood south of Wilshire Boulevard. In one of those glorious Western states that’s simply a colored box on the map, you stopped at a Cracker Barrel knockoff. Sliding into an orange vinyl booth (on the same side as Phoebe, because you were
that
kind of couple), you examined the gravy-stained menu. “Food like Mom used to make,” it read.

Your mother’s memory washed over you then—the smell of Chinese takeout and frozen pizza burning in the oven, scents that filled your house growing up.

“I’m thinking tuna melt,” Phoebe said, her thigh—bare in short shorts—pressed against yours. “You?”

All at once you missed your mom so much your eyes blurred and you had to take off your glasses, rub the bridge of your nose.

“You okay?” Phoebe twisted her fingers together and pressed them to her chest.

And you were suddenly devastated that your mother never met Phoebe Fisher, wished you could have corked Phoebe in a bottle, hopped back in time, and shown her off—
This is my girl, Mom, isn’t she great?

*   *   *

Your older sister:

Your sister largely avoided you for the first thirteen years of your life, but when your mother got sick, Karen, three years older, became a great revisionist of history, framing the two of you as grand old chums. This meant doing things like taking you gym shoe shopping at Old Orchard Mall.

Over greasy waffle fries in the food court, she said you could tell her “anything.” In a bed at Northwestern Memorial Hospital down the road, your mother was reading magazines and waiting to die, and your father was somewhere over Asia.

“And I do mean
anything
.” Karen patted your hand across the table. She looked a little like your mother, only she was pretty, but that might have been nothing more than a combination of youth and aerobics classes. “Sex, drugs, whatever. I want you to know, I’m here for you, Ollie.”

“Sure,” you said, running a fry through a puddle of cheese sauce and ketchup. Never in a thousand years did you contemplate telling her about Alicia Washington and the catalogs you’d put back under your bed and still used some nights. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Karen looked at you, amber eyes so wide and earnest, you felt guilty. It was clear that she was genuinely trying to help.

“I’ve been wondering about birth control,” you finally said, even though you hadn’t been. Braden had found his father’s Trojans in the bathroom, and the two of you had examined them thoroughly, despite the fact that you hadn’t even kissed a girl and wouldn’t meet Phoebe Fisher for another four years. “What do you use?”

Lips curling into a knowing smile, Karen leaned even closer, the ends of her long red hair brushing your paper plate, said she’d wondered all about those things when she was your age.

“Mark and I waited to make love until I was sixteen, but I was really nervous about how the condom was to going to work,” Karen began … and continued with stories about other boyfriends and blowjobs and a pregnancy scare.

It was way more information than you’d ever wanted, and was slightly creepy, but it was also the first real conversation you’d ever had with her, and it led to many more. When Karen left for college in Arizona eighteen months later, you were surprised by how much you missed her.

On Sunday nights she’d call and tell you about each new Mark or Ron or Bob and finally Gary, whom she married her junior year. You never told her about Braden trying to kiss you or Phoebe blowing raspberries on your stomach, certainly not about your stepmother, but it was still nice to have someone to talk to.

The day before your father and Maura’s wedding, you picked Karen up at O’Hare. She’d left her baby girl with her husband in Salt Lake City, and when she hugged you, you felt the swell of baby number two.

“So this is nuts, right?” Karen began. “This woman is, like, young enough to be our sister.”

You agreed, even though Maura was only ten years your father’s junior. At forty she was twice your age at the time.

“Don’t you think she’s uncannily pale?” Karen asked. “It’s like she’s an albino or something.”

Maura always seemed perfectly pleasant, but that obviously wasn’t the response Karen was seeking. “She might be a vampire,” you offered.

“I know, right?”

The luggage carousel jerked to life, and Karen asked about school. “I can’t believe you didn’t want to get out of Evanston; you couldn’t have paid me to go to Northwestern.”

Karen hadn’t actually gotten into NU, but you didn’t mention that, just explained again that they had a strong engineering program.

“And that girl never returned your calls?” Karen asked of Phoebe.

You shook your head. “How are Gary and Maxi?” you asked, bending over the rotating belt to pick up Karen’s blue roller suitcase.

“You’d know if you ever came out to visit,” she said.

*   *   *

Your best friend:

Braden Washington had been your best friend since Mrs. Stewart’s kindergarten class, but by sophomore year of high school, the muscles in his chest and arms had swollen, and you occasionally hated the defined V of his torso, the girls who asked you if he liked them, and the Big Ten and Big East recruiters who had already contacted him about college football.

“Do I look any different?” he asked as the two of you stood in line for the high dive at the community pool. It was the summer before junior year (after your mother had finished her dying and your sister had started college in Arizona). Braden looked the same as always, almost goofily handsome, with his mother’s perfect cocoa skin and mahogany hair.

“Why would you look different?” Even before the words were out of your mouth, you knew what he was going to say, and your lower body seemed to liquefy. Fifty yards away, Braden’s girlfriend tanned with her friends. In a bikini of little more than strings and triangles, Josie was the quintessence of high school—blond with green eyes, a member of student council and the dance team. “You guys did it, didn’t you?”

Braden flashed his aw-shucks grin, and a white-hot poker stabbed you between the eyes. It would be a year before you met Phoebe Fisher and got beyond first base.

Still, you must have said something a normal person who didn’t abhor his best friend would have said, because the conversation continued. But all you could think about were the Neiman Marcus catalogs you still had under your bed.

Behind you, a pack of skinny, wet middle-school kids screamed that the two of you were holding up the line, so Braden started up the ladder.

“What should I do?” he asked.