“But you’ve never prayed,” she tells me over another yawn. Through the rearview mirror, my father squints his eyes at me, and my mother begins biting her nails but doesn’t look back.
“Yes?—?yes, I pray.” Maybe it’s Gran’s dementia. She has to be wrong. There’ve been prayers. I’ve drowned in prayers. Though I can’t conjure a specific memory of doing it alone or with them. Only an inner knowing that my knees have been worn red from praying, praying so hard for something that my soul ached with the void of not getting it. “I’ve been angry at God.”
This time my mom does whip her head sideways, and she pierces me with a black look. Unease creeps through me. I’ve said something wrong. Still, I can’t help but stubbornly think that maybe if I pray for Gran, she’ll feel the brightness of heaven on her skin. Gran pats my hand like she knows I’m thinking blue thoughts. She probably does. I’m sweating anger and emanating bitterness from my fight with Avery.
“Avery accused me of faking everything,” I whisper to Gran. “For attention.”
“Psht. Don’t think on her and her sour words. Treat the bad ones like the vinegar they rolled in and the sweet ones like they were dipped in honey.”
Once home, everyone works together to get Gran into the house and to her room. She seems more disoriented than usual and keeps asking me to sing for her again. My mom and I share confused looks as we help Gran into nightclothes and get her into bed.
“She doesn’t want dinner.” My mom sighs as she shuts Gran’s bedroom door. “That’s not a good sign.”
Her attention is soon diverted to my dad, who rummages loudly in the kitchen, pulling a snack from the fridge. His car keys jangle in his pocket. My mother insisted on driving us home from the drop zone. Her eyes narrow as he walks toward the door.
“You don’t really need to go back, do you?” she asks. “Dom said he’ll keep an eye on things.”
He glances my way.
She grabs his hand. “Please, no more to drink tonight, Nolan.”
He sucks the inside of his cheek with a defiant look and says, “I’ll see you later.” And he’s gone.
Later, as soon as I’m sure my mom is asleep, I pull the jump helmet from the bag and sit on my desk with two rolls of decorative duct tape. Dom’s origami tiger stares at me from the black surface of the desk. What is the tiger’s message? I’ve been thinking about it and have an idea. The conversation with my father in the B-17 sparked it. Jumping is the thing that makes me feel truly alive. My father and I are alike. It’s true for him. Once upon a time, it was true for me.
When I wake in the predawn, I smile at the helmet, a darn good representation of a tiger head if I do say so myself. I worked on it nearly all night. It’s not inconspicuous, but it’s not the recognizable Red Baron, either. I stuff it in my bag and jog down to catch my dad, hoping he hasn’t already left. A dented pillow and tousled blanket lie on the couch.
I find him leaning on his forearms at the new kitchen table, wooden this time. When he looks up at me, I see the dark circles that rim his eyes, and his hair looks darker because it’s greasy. He’s wearing the same clothes from yesterday.
“You okay?”
One huge swig of coffee later, he nods. “Affirmative. What’re you doing up so early?”
Forcing my feet not to shuffle, I say, “I enjoyed being at the DZ yesterday.”
“So you were surprised?”
“You have no idea. I was wondering if I can go again today? Just to hang around, maybe help if I can?”
There’s an awkward beat of silence before he shrugs and answers. “You take your meds?”
I nod.
“Sure.”
On the way there, my dad turns his head away from me when he yawns. He needn’t try to hide it. I’m yawning too. The car drifts over the center line of the highway. He casually corrects course, then ducks his head to look up through the windshield. Bulbous gray clouds obscure the sky, making it look as if we’re trapped underneath the tops of jellyfish in a vast ocean. Scattered raindrops patter on the windshield.
No one else has arrived yet. The hangar looks cold and shuttered. Because of the chill of the morning, we enter through a side door and leave the main doors closed. It takes my eyes a moment to register that some of the lumps on the packing pads are actually people curled up in sleeping bags. The place is an after-party disaster. Red plastic cups and wrinkled balloons litter the countertops. Someone’s bra is strewn over a picture of the Golden Knights, the Army skydiving team. The place smells like old nacho cheese and dirty feet.