“Did you?” Chuck asked.
Mom shook her head silently, tears collecting in her eyes.
“I heard Mike behind me, screaming, ‘Mommy, look! Mommy, look!’ And when I turned around, Joey had climbed up on top of the high chair and was standing on the tray. He was about to fall. I grabbed him as quick as I could. It didn’t even take a minute. But when I looked back out the window—”
Mom stopped. Silence pooled around the three of them, like something they could drown in.
“Dad’s tractor was on fire,” Lori finally said, because nobody else would.
Mom nodded.
“I saw it explode,” she said. “I didn’t hear it, but I saw it—isn’t that weird? I saw the flames, all over. It didn’t seem real. Or I couldn’t make myself understand what I was seeing. I threw Joey down in the playpen, and I went running out the door. All the way there, I kept praying, ‘Oh, please, let Tom be alive. Please, God. Please.’” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And then at a certain point, you realize what you’re praying for isn’t possible anymore.”
Chuck was seeing his father inside a fireball. Orange and red were such awful colors together. Had Daddy known what was happening? Did he know he was going to die?
“Pop was the one who called 911,” Lori said accusingly.
“It didn’t even occur to me,” Mom said. It sounded like she was apologizing. “I was in shock. I went back inside, and Mike and Joey were both crying because I’d left them. I pulled them both onto my lap, and I hugged them, and I said, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay,’ over and over again.”
“But it wasn’t,” Lori said. “You were lying.”
Mom gave her a long look.
“They were not-quite-two and three. What was I supposed to say?”
Chuck was working everything out in his head.
“You wouldn’t have had time to warn Dad,” he said. “Even if it hadn’t been for Joey on the high chair.”
Mom looked at him gratefully. But, “Wouldn’t I?” she asked. “I don’t know. I’ve replayed it in my mind a million times, and I can see Tom jumping down, flattening himself against the ground when the fire came. Like in a war movie. Then getting up safe. Unharmed.”
“Why didn’t Pop know?” Lori asked. “That you saw everything, I mean.”
“Because when he came inside to call 911, I was sitting on the couch reading Good Night, Moon to Joey and Mike. The tractor was still burning, but I didn’t care about that. Everything that mattered was already gone.”
“Pop thinks tractors matter a lot, too,” Chuck said. He didn’t mean it to be funny, but it was.
Nobody laughed.
“I couldn’t have explained,” Mom said. “And then, everyone kept treating me like I was made of glass. They tiptoed around me and whispered and whisked you kids away from me every chance they got. And all I wanted to do was grab ahold of all of you, and never let go.”
She reached for Lori, and this time Lori didn’t protest being pulled into a hug. But after just a second, she shrugged Mom’s arm off her shoulder and leaned away.
“You act like telling us all this is some big gift,” Lori complained. She’d been expecting something like a fairy godmother’s special blessing. No—a mother’s blessing. That should be even better. Lori had wanted some secret that would protect her forever. What she’d gotten was just more to mix her up. “I don’t know what to do with what you’ve told us.”
“Neither do I,” Mom said.
All three of them stared at the same patch of carpet, swirls upon swirls upon swirls. It was like a maze. Lori tried to follow the pattern with her eyes, but she kept getting lost and having to start over.
That’s this whole trip, Lori thought. We fly all over the country, but just about every conversation we have leads back to the farm, eight years ago, and Daddy dying. And Mommy leaving us, too.
“Are you going to tell Joey and Mike?” Chuck asked. “About Joey almost falling off the high chair, and Mike yelling, right when you were going to warn Dad?”
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “Should I? What do you think?”
It made Chuck feel good, the way Mom said that. She wasn’t asking, “What do you think?” like teachers did, when they knew the right answer and were just waiting for you to say something wrong. This was more like she didn’t have an answer, and she thought maybe Lori and Chuck did.
“You don’t want them to feel guilty,” Lori said. “Because it wasn’t their fault.”