Takeoffs and Landings(45)

“I was drawing when they came in to tell me Daddy died,” he began slowly. “I wasn’t supposed to be. I was supposed to be doing math. Mrs. Swain warned me, lots of times, that I’d get in trouble if I drew instead of paying attention. Then Daddy died. I thought—”

“You thought it was your fault?” Lori asked incredulously.

Chuck nodded slowly.

“I decided I’d never draw again,” he said. “And I didn’t. Even when I wanted to. Even when I was flunking art.”

“You flunked art?” Lori asked in disbelief.

“And I didn’t notice,” Mom muttered, almost as if she were talking to herself. “That was the one F I didn’t think to worry about.”

Chuck didn’t seem to hear his sister or his mother.

“Then on this trip, away from home . . . it seemed like maybe it’d be okay to draw again.” Chuck’s words came so slowly, it was excruciating. “To go to art museums and all. Like I was free. For–forgiven. And then in Phoenix—what happened there—it started to seem wrong again. . . .”

Mom laid her hand on Chuck’s arm.

“Oh, Chuck,” she murmured. “I—” She hesitated, as if searching for the most comforting words. Lori wasn’t so cautious.

“You really thought Daddy died because you were drawing instead of doing math?” she asked. “And you quit drawing because of that? Are you crazy?”

“Lori!” Mom exclaimed.

But Chuck didn’t scurry back into his usual shell. He looked up slowly.

“It is crazy, isn’t it?” he asked.

“You were thinking like a seven-year-old,” Mom said. “That’s all. And because nobody tried hard enough to find out what was wrong, you never escaped the guilt. Or the guilt about what you told Lori. It’s my fault. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

Her voice was so full of pain that Lori and Chuck both reached for her at the same time.

“It’s okay,” Lori said. “Really.”

“Yeah,” Chuck echoed. “It’s okay. Now.”





Lori and Mom let Chuck have the window seat for the flight home.

“You like looking at things more than I do,” Lori said.

Chuck started to protest, then he realized she didn’t mean it as an insult. It was a flat statement of fact. He did like looking at things more than Lori did. He slipped into the row of seats, put his backpack on the floor, buckled the seat belt.

The flight attendant down the aisle launched into the safety lecture, but Chuck didn’t listen. He closed his eyes instead, visualizing his favorite pictures from the art museum the day before. If he remembered them well enough, he could look at them anytime he wanted for the rest of his life—sitting in algebra class, plowing a field, pressure-spraying the hog barn. He couldn’t believe Lori had asked to go to the art museum.

She did that for you, a little voice whispered in his head.

And she hadn’t done it to mock him. She’d stood behind him, gazing at the paintings with him, as if she’d honestly wanted to understand.

This was going to take some getting used to, Lori being nice to him again.

“Ready to go home?” Mom asked beside him now.

“I guess,” Chuck said, his mind still back on Lori and the museum.

“You don’t feel sick, do you?” Mom asked.

Chuck shook his head and held up his wrists to show his airsickness bracelets. They were taking off, and he hadn’t even noticed. He wasn’t scared at all now. What was the big deal? People flew all the time.

The plane’s engine roared beneath his feet, sounding ever so slightly like a tractor engine. For the first time, Chuck felt a pang of homesickness. How could he be thinking of tractors longingly?

They left the city behind, far below, and flew out over mountains—mountains and desert, landscapes so foreign to Chuck that they seemed to belong to a different planet. There’d been mountain and desert paintings at the museum yesterday. Chuck closed his eyes again, but this time what he pictured against his eyelids was the pattern of sunlight on corn leaves, of soybean rows flowing toward the horizon, of wheat stalks bowing in the wind.

He hadn’t seen any of those designs in any of the museums he’d visited. Someone needed to draw those or paint those or sculpt those—or something.

No, he thought. I need to.

Without thinking, Chuck turned to his mother.

“Remember what you offered?” he asked. “Can I still—I mean, will you still pay for art lessons?”

Mom looked up. Smiled.

“Of course,” she said. “Absolutely.”

Chuck felt a shot of joy. For just a second, he felt the usual guilt: Drawing is bad. Daddy died because I was drawing. But then the guilt was gone. He could draw, and it was okay.