Never Coming Back(30)

Helpless.

That was how it felt to me. I was a passenger on an airplane made of aluminum and rubber and steel, and the only thing that nonpilot I could do was sit with my seat belt on and look out the window. Everything was out of my hands and nothing, nothing in that world was under my control and because of that, everything felt sacred.

The plastic soda cup, the square of paper napkin that the flight attendant handed me, the barf bag that I saved to bring back to Tamar because it would make her laugh, the button that, when pressed, reclined the seat I sat in, the SkyMall catalog that I read cover to cover as if it were a magazine, every page filled with things I had never known I wanted or needed, things that existed in this world but had been unknown to me until just now: all of it, full of wonder.

I took my eyes away from the window, on that first flight, and searched for someone. Anyone. But they were reading their newspapers, or listening to their headphones, or their heads were tilted back in sleep and snores. The flight attendant was busy at the front of the cabin, her back to me. I turned my head halfway and met a middle-aged man’s eyes. He was two rows behind, sitting on the aisle. I wanted to tell him—what? Something. Something that meant something. Something about this flight, the fact that we were two human beings breathing and thinking and living at this very moment, so high in the sky. I looked at him helplessly.

“It’s a miracle, isn’t it?” he said to me.

Those were his exact words. You might think, he was two rows behind her and across the aisle, the plane’s engines were no doubt roaring, what makes her think he was talking to her, there is no way she could have heard what he was saying. You would be wrong. We were kindred spirits, that man in his business suit and me in my jeans, filled with a helpless wonder.

Sometimes still, when I drove the curves and hills and hollows of the land where I grew up, or when my fingers remembered the hours of music they had brought forth from that winged instrument in the basement practice room, back when I was just learning to play the piano, or when I sat in my chair on the porch and the fireflies, those miraculous creatures thought by some to live on air—air—were floating about me, I thought of that man in that suit on that plane. I saw his eyes, those eyes that had met mine, and I heard his words again.

Did he ever think of me? The girl I used to be, turning around in her seat looking for someone, anyone, who wasn’t asleep, someone who knew how she felt.





* * *





There are people in this world who instinctively know how you feel. Even if they don’t know you, they sense what is happening inside you. The man on the plane was like that, and so was Asa, Asa who came back to me still, unbidden.

Something about Blue Mountain’s eyes when he looked down at me, lying on the floor of the arts center waiting for my heart to calm down, reminded me of Asa. I didn’t know Asa when he was little, but maybe he was like that, skinless, growing up in that house of chronic tension. Martha Chamberlain with the suspicious eyes and the ready anger, Eli with the smile that came to his face every time he looked at his son.

Or when he looked at me. Eli was not stingy with love.

Asa grew up allowing others in, especially kids. I pictured him the way he used to be at Camp. Camp wasn’t a summer camp the way they were now, with classrooms and learning goals and measurable outcomes, and it must have had a different name, an actual name, but all the kids called it Camp, and we did too. Asa and a few others ran it themselves at the elementary school, under the semi-supervision of a fifth grade teacher who needed extra money. Someone was in charge of snacks and Band-Aids, someone else was in charge of story time, and Asa cheered the kids on at the playground. That was it. That was Camp.

But by the end of each week, under Asa’s watchful eye, the kid who was scared of the monkey bars could swing from one to the other like an actual monkey, the kid whose foot couldn’t connect with the kickball was walloping them out to left field, and the kid who was scared of going down the slide was going down the slide. Maybe he was sliding down on Asa’s lap, but he was going down the slide, right? Which counted with Asa.

Everything counted, with Asa. He collected things from the woods: a fallen pinecone, a small piece of quartzite, a double acorn, and they became the awards he handed out at the end of the week. A pinecone for Monkey Bars. A double acorn for Slide. Quartzite for Kindness. The kids loved those prizes. I watched one Friday as he leaned out the playground pirate ship window and made a small speech about the winner of each prize and then led the applause. Every kid got a prize and everyone cheered. Everything with Asa was simple like that. The kids loved him for it. So did I.





* * *





“Are there things that you two don’t talk about?”

That was my question to Sunshine and Brown. I had cooked us dinner in the fire pit at the far edge of the cabin clearing. Carrots chopped by Brown, onions chopped by Sunshine, who was one of those people immune to their crying power, potatoes and sausage diced by me, then drizzled with olive oil and sealed into foil packets and put into the coals. Now we were sitting outside the ring of rocks, on the benches I had made out of old boards nailed onto stumps, drinking the wine they had brought, and waiting for the packets to cook. It was early evening in early October, the falling sun filtering through the white pines that ringed the cabin. Just over one year since I had moved back. One year of keeping the enormous secret I had promised my mother I would keep, the secret that was too hard to keep. But a promise I had made, and keep it I would.