The Art of Crash Landing Read Online Free PDF Page B

away, I crawl along Interstate 10, mile after mile, just me and my piece of shit Malibu with the vinyl trim peeling in so many places that it looks like fur, rust on two fenders, backseat stuffed full of all my worldly possessions. Cars slow as they drive past, the driver and passengers ogling my little redneck melodrama. I give them each the finger—a little cherry to sit atop my white-trash sundae.
    I stop a few times for soft drinks, gum, a bathroom. It’s an interesting population at small town all-night convenience stores. Lots of tattoos and unwashed hair. Nobody in these sad places gives my car a second glance. These are my people, my mother’s people. Not a single one of them looks interested in making lemonade.
    As the night grinds on, I come to understand that twenty hours alone in a car gives a person a lot of time to think. I turn the radio off when the static starts and back on when I see a town coming up. I sing along when I know the song, I hum when I don’t, and I sigh when every once in a while a song finds a crack and wriggles inside, causing memories to shift and slide. In a rare moment of clarity I see this loss of my high gear for what it is: a pretty damn good metaphor for my life.
    When we are young we are limitless. I remember leaning into the wind and feeling as if I could run until the sand turned to water, swim past the horizon, and fly until the blue sky around me filled with stars. There was a time when I believed my whole life stretched before me, rich with promise.
    Now?
    Not so much.

CHAPTER 6
    T he summer I turned five years old, my mother and I moved into an apartment complex with few children, and I was lonely. Things weren’t all that great for my mother either; they’d cut her hours at the Photo Gem and she’d had to take a second job at Woolworth’s. During the summer, while she was at work, Mom left me with our downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Klapper. The old woman was nice enough, but deaf as a post and addicted to game shows, so all day long her television played at ear-splitting levels. Mercifully, she took a long nap after lunch, which gave me a chance to watch a few cartoons with the volume down.
    Mrs. Klapper had a key to our apartment in case she needed something from up there for me, and I think I wasn’t supposed to know that she kept it in a little silver bowl on the mantel. But, like most five-year-olds, I knew a lot of things I wasn’t supposed to know.
    That summer Peter Pan , the Disney version, was rereleased in theaters. We didn’t have a lot of extra money, but my mother must have understood how long the days were for me, because theweekend it opened she called in sick and took me to the Saturday matinee.
    I’m not sure if that was the first movie I saw on the big screen, but it’s the first one I remember. The sticky floor, the salty popcorn, having to sit on my knees to see over the head in front of me—I remember it all. But mostly I remember wanting to fly.
    It felt so obvious to me. With enough fairy dust and lovely thoughts anyone could fly. Lovely thoughts aren’t hard to come by when you’re five, and in our apartment dust wasn’t in short supply. Unfortunately, even after several weeks of lovely thoughts and trying everything from flour to the dust from the windowsill, my feet had never lifted from the olive green carpet.
    I started kindergarten that fall and underwent the usual strain of adjusting to school and trying to make friends, but I never gave up on my dream of flying. It wasn’t long before Halloween appeared on the horizon, and I had an epiphany. I wasn’t Wendy; I was Tinker Bell. What I needed were wings.
    Convincing my mother that last year’s costume, black leotard and tail with cat ears on a headband, would not work again this year, took all the whining I could muster, which, in all honesty, was a fair amount. I wasn’t an easy child. But when you’re five and you