It was New Year’s Eve, and I decided the day had to be good.
Good-bye, year that tried to kill me!
That’s what I could write on a card. No poetry. All truth.
Wasn’t New Year’s the time to move forward? Make goals?
Right after lunch, do you know what hit me out of the blue? No, not an idea. A notebook.
A coffee-scented notebook.
“Don’t leave your stuff lying around, Wayne,” Grandpa said.
Man, the trouble with not being able to talk is that you can’t shoot off a remark to the person throwing things at you. You have to hurry up and write it down, and by then the person has turned his back to you so that he can get more coffee. Not that I would have said or written anything.
I picked up the notebook.
And I guess I stared at the wall thinking about my weird life for longer than a person should stare at a wall. Because Uncle Reed’s official army photo was on the Wall of Honor now. I couldn’t help but stare at it. The colors in it were so new and bright compared to the other photos.
“Why are you looking at that wall for so long?” Grandpa asked.
Because that’s what voiceless people in the country of AFTER do now. They stare at things.
“If you wait any longer, you’ll turn thirteen right here in this hallway.”
I shrugged. Citizens of this new land also shrug. A lot.
“If this wall could talk, huh?” he said. “What stories these photos, these men would tell.”
If this wall could talk? Really? He was more interested in learning the language of a wall than understanding me and the reason I had notebooks all over the house?
I waited him out. Maybe he would tell a patriotic story or order me to go and do a chore. It could have gone either way.
Grandpa took a long sip from his coffee mug. “If you’ve got time to stare at a wall, you’ve got time to unload the dryer and fold the clothes.”
Do you know what? It went the way I predicted it would.
I did that chore, and then he ordered me to do a new one.
“What you need for your recovery is to stay busy,” he said. “That will make you stronger.”
I looked at the clock. I was counting the hours until Grandpa left for some appointment. He was going to see a doctor because his back hurt. My back hurt, too.
Hellooooo, I fell out of the sky!
“Son, are you listening?” he asked. “Hank Williams needs to eat at noon.”
I wrote: I know!
“When are you expected back at school?”
Christmas break!!!
“Oh, going soft, are you?”
Grrrr.
My New Year’s attitude was sinking. I was still in my PJs. Maybe I would just go back to bed. Read. Hide.
I wrote on my notepad: Not soft, G.
“Who is this G?” Grandpa asked.
You! Grandpa = G.
“Oh, okay, W,” Grandpa said.
School. I wasn’t going to go back. Not like this. Not with my zippered-up face. Not without a voice full of facts to shield me from awkward situations.
So Grandpa finally left for his appointment and then Mom rang her little bell, and all my hopes for New Year’s Eve being good evaporated. I pinned my hopes on the new year itself. What choice did I have?
“Would you bring me an ice pack, honey?” she asked.
I brought her an ice pack. We sat in her room watching the news. Before the crash, I never watched the news. Didn’t care at all. But now I got up every day thinking, This is the day. This is the day the news will say something about the flag.
A woman named Liz Delaney reported every other day. She’d give an update on passengers newly released from the hospital. Some new fact. Some new piece of debris retrieved. Some amazing story about witnesses in town watching the plane as it came down. An aviation expert giving his opinion on the cause of the crash. All the reports were pretty interesting.
What if today was the day?
It wasn’t.
Liz Delaney reported that two suitcases had been miraculously found on a roadside with hardly any scratches. She thought it was so miraculous that there was a pristine wrapped Christmas present the size of a cereal box on the roof of a barn. Not a single singe or tear in the paper. The curly red bow still intact.
Liz Delaney concluded her report with, “In addition to finding a seat belt in Fred Haney’s goat pen, we’ve also discovered a copy of the Bible. What do you think of that, Mr. Haney?”
“Well, I always suspected my goats were God-loving mammals.”
“It’s not confirmed, but this might be further debris from the airline tragedy that occurred two weeks ago. This is Liz Delaney reporting from Marshall, Texas, for KTSB-Three News.”
“I guess they have a lot of ground to cover,” Mom said. I had the feeling she got up every day expecting to hear news about Uncle Reed’s flag. Just like me.
I guess.
“I mean, they have to find it. How hard can it be?”
Pretty hard.
Mom didn’t know it, but a couple of days ago, I’d looked up Liz Delaney’s e-mail and shot her a message.
Dear Ms. Delaney,
I am a survivor of Flight 56 that crashed near Marshall, Texas. I’m following your newscasts about found objects. I’m searching for my uncle’s American flag. Our family received this at his funeral. It’s very important to us. I hope you will help. Please write back.
Wayne H. Kovok
Sending the message made me feel like I was doing something. It was a major new step in the right direction. Putting things right on the Wall of Honor.
“You’re probably so bored, Wayne, and can’t wait to go back to school, huh?” Mom twisted her hair.
Skip school next semester?
“What? I don’t know, Wayne.”
So I wrote to Mom that I didn’t feel like going back to Beatty Middle School. Look at my eyebrow-challenged, stitched-up face if you have questions.
I underlined eyebrow three times.
And she reached out to touch my face the way moms can’t help doing ever, and I flinched because it hurt. Even my pillow hurt my face.
“It’s not that bad,” she said.
Yes. It. IS. My face is epically unbalanced. Eyebrows are important!
She eased off the bed with her one good arm and went into her bathroom for a few minutes. She returned to her bed and smiled at me. She’d shaved off her perfectly good left eyebrow! Shaved it clean off for no good reason. I raised my right eyebrow.
Wait, what? Why did you do that?
“See, it doesn’t look as strange as you think it does.”
But it did. It did look strange. God gave us two eyebrows for a reason. Balance. Symmetry. Expression.
Why?
“It’s solidarity. We will heal and grow eyebrows together,” she said. “Now, eventually you have to go to school just like I have to go back to work. I’m not saying it’ll be easy, but we have to move forward.”
I nodded.
“You’ve given me an idea,” she said, typing fast on her laptop. She could type pretty fast for someone with a big brace down one arm.
“There. I have a friend whose daughter goes to this school.” She pointed to her computer screen. The West Academy. A school for star athletes, actors, or special students who went to school for half the day and trained, acted, or were otherwise special for the other half.
“What do you think? I bet we could get you in there. Half days, too. New friends.”
Can we afford it?
“Leave that up to me,” she said. “The airline is going to settle with the passengers, so I think we’d be covered.” We’d gone months without a new dishwasher. And I wanted to replace my lost laptop. A private school seemed like a stretch.
I couldn’t stop staring at the space on her face that had once had a perfect eyebrow. The skin was really white where her eyebrow had been. Who messed up their face on purpose? I forced myself to stop staring. I looked at the school where I could be considered special for no good reason.
It made sense to be in a place where no one knew me. Keep my head down. No expectations. No history. No friends. The idea had promise.
Mom cried.
Okay. Okay. I’ll go to school.
“It’s not that.”
Your eyebrow?
“No. Never mind. I’m fine. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Quickly, I wrote her a note.
Did you know that there’s a guy in Australia who collected his own belly button lint for more than twenty years? He had three jars of it.
It wasn’t exactly a dazzling fact.
“You definitely need to go back to school.”
You need a new eyebrow!
“It’s temporary.”
Why were you crying?
“I don’t know. I get sad in waves. I guess a wave hit me.”
Sorry.
A few hours later, I was invited to a party. Okay, I was invited to a party by my dad, who rarely invited me to anything. Mom said I should go, listen to music, try to have fun. It’s hard to argue the definition of fun with a sad, one-browed parent. So I agreed to go.
He said he’d be here at nine.
I stood at the kitchen window, waiting for his car to roll up. Five minutes after nine.
It was ten minutes after nine and still nothing. But so what. What’s ten minutes?
Grandpa hovered behind me. Waiting for my dad to be late. I knew it. He didn’t like my dad. I once overheard him saying my dad had the backbone of an éclair. I’m pretty sure he was the one who’d started calling him the Flee.
“You want a ride over there?” Grandpa asked.
Nope.
I couldn’t look at him. I was afraid my face would show my thoughts. Grandpa didn’t think my dad was going to show up anytime soon. I was starting to doubt it, too.
Please, be on time! Be on time! Don’t make me look stupid!
“Being on time is a virtue,” Grandpa said.
My nerves rattled me and I started to sweat. Like it was my fault Dad was late. I wished Grandpa knew that I was allergic to being tardy. My teachers always said so.
Dad showed up ten minutes later. Only twenty minutes late. I grabbed my jacket and hustled toward the front door, smiling. Smiling with so much relief that it pulled at my stitches and made my face feel tight.
“He’s bringing you home, right?” Grandpa asked. I nodded yes, still smiling. “Well, call if anything changes. If you need help.”
I wasn’t going to need help. My dad had said he’d be there and he was. I raced down the front walk, excited about the party, the new year. Everything.