Takeoffs and Landings(21)

Lori figured she was responsible for any headache Mom had. And probably the bad dreams, too.

You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Lori thought to herself, but it was Gram’s voice she heard in her head: I didn’t raise you to be rude. If it really had been Gram talking, she would have thrown in a Bible verse, too—about disobedient children getting what they deserve.

I wasn’t disobedient, Lori thought. I was just . . . curious. I was just asking questions.

But she knew how she’d sounded, all day long. Even Chuck had been giving her strange looks. Lori went to school with some kids who believed in demon possession—really believed in it, brought it up every time there was any in-class discussion—and Lori briefly wondered if she could blame that. She thought about touching Mom on the arm and apologizing: I don’t know why I was such a brat today. I’m sorry. Maybe I was possessed by demons.

Maybe she would have apologized—not with the excuse, just flat out—if Mom had really answered any of her questions. But she hadn’t. She’d changed the subject, she’d evaded, she’d given those one-sentence half replies: “No, I don’t want you to marry young.” “No, I don’t regret marrying your dad.” “Your father liked the name Lori.” They were answers that pushed Lori away. They built walls, not windows.

They made Lori angrier than ever.

The plane was taking off now. Mom opened her eyes and leaned away from Lori, pointing out sights on the ground to Chuck. Their heads totally blocked the view for Lori, but she didn’t care. She hated Chicago. She’d been terrible there. Her face burned just thinking about it.

She thought about what her friends would ask her when she got home: Was the shopping great? Were the guys cute? Did you have fun? And she’d give the same kind of nonanswers Mom had given her.

Suddenly Lori wished fervently that she was back home with her friends, right now. She could be on the phone gossiping about Jackie Stires’s pool party, figuring out whose parents could drive them to the movies on Saturday night. Everything at home seemed so simple suddenly. There were rules there. You cleaned up after yourself. You didn’t flirt with other girls’ boyfriends. You ignored Mike and Joey’s roughhousing unless it looked like they were going to break something. You kept your eyes on your own paper when you were taking tests at school. You said, “Please” and “Thank you,” and you didn’t tell anyone what you were really thinking.

Why had Lori suddenly felt there were no rules in Chicago?

She winced as the plane turned sharply, knocking her against the arm of her seat. Then the plane leveled off, following a straight path.

They were on their way to Atlanta now. Maybe Atlanta would be better.





Mom had gotten Chuck those airsickness bracelets, and he had them on, but it didn’t matter: there was no way he could be sick now. He wasn’t even scared, and here he was, staring straight down at the ground, thousands of feet below him.

If I die now, I wouldn’t care. I would die happy, he thought. But he would care. There was a whole world he’d discovered today, and he intended to see more of it.

Come on, plane, don’t go down, he thought, as if he could help the pilots. But the plane was in no danger of going down. It climbed up and up and up, until all he could see was clouds.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Mom said beside him.

Chuck nodded. Suddenly he wanted to tell Mom where he’d gone today. But he couldn’t. When she’d asked, when they met back at the water fountain in the mall, he’d just said, “Oh, I just wandered around. Saw the city.” And then Lori had said something nasty, and Mom got distracted, so he didn’t say anything else. Which was fine. He didn’t want anyone ruining the day for him. He could just hear Lori: You went to the art museum? Why?

Never in a million years could he have explained to Lori what it had been like to stand in front of those paintings and feel what the artist had been trying to show him. He’d seen paintings before, of course—copies of them, anyway. One of the kids in their 4-H club had that lady with the strange smile—Mona something . . . Mona Lisa?—hanging up in their bathroom. In their bathroom! But that whole family was kind of weird. The dad was a professor at some college an hour away. Everybody knew professors and people who commuted that far weren’t normal.

What Chuck had seen in the art museum was different from looking at some lady’s picture hanging over a toilet. At the art museum, the paintings were treated reverently—framed just so, hung just so, lighted just so. And people practically tiptoed around.

At first, Chuck had been afraid that someone would tell him he didn’t belong, maybe even kick him out. He’d practically trembled when he paid his money at the front desk. He waited for the thin, dry-looking man to push his sweaty twenty-dollar bill back and sniff, No hicks allowed. But the man only made change and handed him a brochure, and Chuck was free to look at whatever he wanted.