Lone Stars

by Justin Deabler

  Philip watched him and nodded.

  “And just so you know,” Julian continued. “I’m wearing two corsets. I’m actually four hundred pounds, and there’s no unwrapping this big delicious package tonight.”

  * * *

  Philip knew Julian meant it when they got to his door and, resisting the lure of Philip’s new Napster trove, he chose to wait in the hall. Philip grabbed blankets. They climbed three flights to a disarmed fire door and onto the roof, a glowing stage of reflective paint bouncing moonlight everywhere. The river curled below. Above it sat the beetle dome at MIT, with a hint of the Boston skyline twinkling in the background. Philip fired up the joint. He really wasn’t a regular drug user, nothing hard, but weed for anxiety—his mom?—it went with the territory. He passed it to Julian, reclining beside him, who took a monster hit and started coughing.

  “You ever smoke before?” Philip asked. Julian shook his head in terror. “Breathe,” Philip murmured. “It’s OK. I’m here; the stars are here.” Julian rose and wandered to the edge of the roof, taking in the views, his face like an awestruck newborn’s. Philip struggled to his knees. “Not to beat a dead horse,” he said, “but I meant no disrespect when I approached you at the meeting. I like hearing your plans. I think you’re amazing. And cute.” Julian stared off into the night like he hadn’t heard. “Why’d you come back with me?” Philip asked. “Here.”

  “You gotta let it all hang out sometimes.” Julian turned to Philip and smiled. “Or else you’ll go crazy in the head.” He strolled back to the blanket and flopped down. “I’m stoned,” he announced. “Why’d you intern for your dad last summer, if you didn’t want to?”

  “We’ll need a double session for that. God, the other guys there? Money and fucking, all they talk about. Who made it, who made more, what did he buy? No readers. I asked one intern the last great book he read. He said, ‘The Art of the Deal. Donald Trump. The man’s a genius.’ I was like, that douchebag? And he says, ‘To be that big a douche and still make shit tons of money? Genius.’”

  “Is it sexist,” Julian pondered, “to use ‘douchebag’ pejoratively?”

  “I think you’d like my mom.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Philip said.

  They lay beside each other and watched the stars. Philip could feel Julian’s heat where their arms touched. He could’ve made a move but he didn’t, because in the clarity of his high Philip knew he desired something more than sex—for the night never to end, and then another night, to be close to Julian always and maybe let the whole world see.

  “What’s your greatest fear?” Philip asked. “If we’re being honest.”

  “Huh?”

  “I told you mine at the restaurant last night.”

  “Oh yeah. I guess … I have this anger inside me that I think could save the world, or some part of it. Or it could burn me up first. I don’t know.”

  “He who wills something great is in my eyes a great man.” Philip’s words floated up and away. “Not he who achieves it. For in achievement luck plays a great part.”

  “What is that?” Julian asked.

  “Herzl. Jewish flotsam, from back in the day. We’re human. We fall on our faces. I’ll fail. You’ll fail.” He nudged Julian’s shoulder. “The point is the fight, right? To die trying.”

  Julian lay very still. “Do you think anyone will—could ever love us as much as…”

  “As much as what?”

  Julian sat up. “I have to go.” He was on his feet, zipping his backpack.

  “Oh.” Philip tore himself from the life he thought they’d been having on the blanket island and hustled behind Julian to the door. Julian took the steps double time, until Philip called out, “Hey, Jay? This is my floor.”

  Julian stopped and checked his watch. “Twelve thirty. Wow. Thanks for the coffee and cannabis, the highs and lows of Cambridge, the—”

  “Do we have to sum it up?” Philip asked. And he could blame it on the weed, or blue balls, or the feeling of something precious slipping away, but he leaned in and went for the kiss.

  Julian put his hand to Philip’s cheek before their faces met, and held him there. They stared into each other’s eyes. Julian gave him a cautious peck on the lips, slow and curious, and continued down the stairs.

  “Are you going to get home OK?” Philip asked, leaning over the railing.

  “Call me tomorrow to make sure I’m alive.”

  “You want to do something?”

  “Yeah. I need to see what you look like in daylight.” At the bottom of the stairs, Julian paused and looked up. “Really. Thank you for finding me.” He disappeared out the door.

  Philip gripped the banister with both hands. He heard his mom’s voice in his head. The voice he spent his whole life trying to shake, but in the wee hours of this particular night, on the stairs of his dorm, he invited in. “Yeah, maybe,” he answered her. “Maybe this is the one.”

  9

  Around the World in Eighty Minutes

  Lacy had been driving in circles for almost an hour, on a very short fuse. She knew every drab detail of Intercontinental by her eighth lap around the terminal. Painted fields of long-term parking, the disc-topped spaceship Marriott where once upon a time Julian had his debate club awards dinner, then back to baggage claim with the wreaths on the sliding glass doors, where she craned her neck for a view until police toting semiautomatics shooed her off. The security was overkill. Irrational, like so much of the response to these terrorists. How was she supposed to pick them up if she couldn’t idle for a minute and look for them? Do it like the old Westerns, where the cowboy dives into the speeding stagecoach? You used to go inside, Lacy thought as she circled. You used to be able to stay with your loved ones all the way to the gate. She was at the gate a few summers ago, waving goodbye as Julian boarded a plane for Boston by himself.

  But the world changed. And this year when her son came home for Christmas, he didn’t return alone. Men were flying planes into buildings, America was suddenly at war, and Julian was bringing his brand-new fiancé home. “We get in on the twenty-third,” he said on a rushed call. “Great news, right? Philip can’t wait to meet you. Now, what’s your doctor saying?” The longer she drove around, the more she went over the things Julian had on his plate right then: graduating early because of loans, the LSAT, law school apps. She listed his burdens and knew this wasn’t the time. Not the time to tell him the chemo wasn’t working, or that the doctor had shrugged and given her the sad death smile. What it was time for was one more Christmas, and to get a good look at the man who wanted to marry the love of her life.

  On her tenth lap, while waiting at a stoplight, Lacy saw Julian from afar. She glanced at her skeletal face in the rearview mirror, remembering all the years she cursed herself for not being thinner. She fluffed the wispy remnants of her gray hair and inched the car forward. Her heart fluttered at the sight of her baby, still boyish at twenty-one. His hair was shorter but the same pretty chestnut. Julian ducked down to get something from his bag, and that was when Lacy saw him—the New York Jewish boyfriend. But Philip was no Jeff Goldblum. No glasses, not the nerdy lab-coat type. He was handsome, as tall as her son but the shape of a man, his clothes perfect like he stepped out of a J.Crew catalog and not off a plane. Julian stood back up and saw Lacy, she could tell by his eyes. His face, usually so determined, was shaded with something else. A shyness or fear. He grabbed Philip’s hand. The other he raised timidly to her, fingers extended, in a gesture that said hello or to stay where she was.

  * * *

  Lacy couldn’t remember when the pain started. It was in her lower back on the right side. For a while she thought she slept on it funny, so she started taking Advil with her morning Metamucil and went to work. It was a busy new school year. And she’d had plenty of pains after fifty. Her knees, ankles, hips. She was fat, and she was used to how people stared when she walked slowly or stopped to rest at Walgreens—like she deserved every pain she felt. But o
ne day the pain got so bad that Lacy couldn’t hoist herself up into the minivan, so she called in sick, and over lunch her best friend Bonnie took her to her PCP. He massaged where the pain was, the first time a man had touched her like that in years. He frowned. The rest was a blur.

  First she went local to Royalwood Hospital, then to MD Anderson, where they found the cancer wrapped around her kidneys and other places, and then every Friday it was chemo downtown. Bonnie took half days off and drove her there. They were both in need that fall and had to rely on each other. Right after school started, Bonnie’s husband told her he’d been having an affair with a colleague at Shell and left her alone in a big house with the ghost of her family. During the chemo visits, Bonnie would crack her nicotine gum and read People, gabbing about the latest celebrity breakups while Lacy lay back in the chair. She rubbed Lacy’s arm when she turned the page. On most Fridays they stopped at the Rothko Chapel before the Medical Center. It was Bonnie’s idea. She knew that Lacy was an atheist, and that her own God had done her wrong. Yet when they entered the muted brick octagon and arranged their cushions on the benches, there was no difference. They could gaze at the black canvases around them until the colors came. They could shut their eyes and drink in silence. It was their church beyond words or stories, injustice or revenge. Outside the world rocked with violence. Inside they sat together. Breathed. And survived.

  Julian knew little of this, though he and Lacy were in regular touch. He called home twice a week. But they usually talked about him. The authors he was reading, his classes, how pretty snow was. He talked about the Rosenblums. Philip’s powerful dad, their country house, the mom with the PhD—who’d have ten PhDs if she got one every time Julian mentioned it. She never criticized her boy at Harvard. On the rare occasion when he asked how she was, Lacy had about a two-minute window to say something interesting before he began to give her advice. She could hear it in his voice then. Not disdain, but his sense of the smallness of her life—her conflicts at the high school, worrying how to pay for the new roof—that warranted a kind of distant pity.

  So after years of playing second fiddle to Julian’s Proust and Marx and Jane Jacobs, when Lacy slipped in a comment about her diagnosis on the phone one night, she wasn’t sure how to talk to him about it. It was a few nights before the terror attacks. Julian started calling her every day after she told him, pelting her with questions, but Lacy felt out of practice in the spotlight and paralyzed by the darkness of the world. And often so tired she wanted to cry. She decided the easiest thing was to tell Julian the dry bits the doctor told her: the plans for chemo, scans, more chemo. For months, with no added emotion, Lacy shared everything the doctor said and prescribed. Until last week, when she got the news she got. And now it wasn’t just her son she had to talk to face-to-face this Christmas. It was a curly-haired stranger too, smiling and waving vigorously as she pulled the minivan up to baggage claim.

  “Hi, Mom,” Julian said, opening the shotgun door.

  “Hop in, guys,” she called. “This policeman’s about to run me out of town.”

  “Mrs. Warner!” Philip said, buckling up behind them. “I’ve heard so much about you. Great to meet you! From the back seat.”

  “You too. Call me Lacy.” She pulled into the exit lane, stealing glances at Philip in the rearview mirror. Dark curls, the jawline, milky skin. He had movie-star looks. The exotic blue-eyed guy who leads Israel to freedom in the old movies. “How was y’alls flight?” she asked.

  “Crazy.” Julian turned off the heat. “You heard about the shoe bomber?”

  “The what?”

  “Yesterday. A guy put explosives in his shoes and tried to light them on a plane.”

  “And now?” Philip said, appearing between the front seats like a Muppet. A push-up kind of guy, Lacy thought, unsure how she felt about that. “Everyone has to take off their shoes and walk through security in socks. We gave ourselves three hours to get from Cambridge to Logan and barely made our flight.”

  “A bomb in his shoes,” Lacy murmured. She drove, and stayed in her lane, but the world went dark again. She could feel her eyes watering.

  “Mom?” Julian looked at her for the first time since he got in. “You OK?”

  “Will wonders never cease?” She brushed her eyes on the sleeve of her Santa cardigan. It had taken her two hours, but that morning she’d showered and put on makeup and dressed for the boys. And after all her fashion efforts, she was still swimming in clothes that used to fit. “Let’s talk about y’all’s visit!” she said. “Philip, we’re having spaghetti tonight like we always do, and tomorrow my friend Bonnie’s coming over. She says she has a surprise for us. On Christmas Eve we each open one present before bed. And on Christmas I thought we’d go see Lord of the Rings.” Lacy squeezed the steering wheel in fierce anticipation. “I was waiting for Jules to come home to see it.”

  “Oh.” Philip turned to Julian. “I didn’t know you liked those.”

  “Tolkien?” she blurted. “Of course, we both do. Every Christmas Day we go to the movies. We saw Evita, and Chocolat; last year it was Miss Congeniality.” She shook her head sarcastically at Philip. “What a bomb that one was, right, Jules?”

  Julian’s face went blank. He would not receive the memories. “We can go to the movies if you want,” he said. “Are you feeling up to it?”

  “Sure,” Lacy said. “Only if you boys want to. No biggie.”

  She didn’t hear much of the conversation after that. Philip asked questions about her and Houston and Royalwood, and Lacy answered them, unable to tell if he was being polite or didn’t know a thing about her. But her mind mostly shut down after Julian disclaimed their movie tradition. Get home, she repeated as she drove, she had to get them home and then she could put on another sweater and rest for a bit.

  “How pretty,” Philip said when they pulled up to Lacy’s house, where the holiday lights and window candles were on a timer and clicked to life at dusk. “The decorations.”

  “Come on in,” she said, opening the door as they dragged their bags from the car.

  “Oh, wow.” Philip’s eyes went right to the tree, and the stockings hanging on the brick fireplace, and the tiny crèche on the entryway shelf. “It’s beautiful here.”

  “Mom’s a Christmas nut,” Julian said. “How many trees do you have?”

  “Four,” she replied gamely. “This is my Angel tree. There’s a Santa tree, a Snowman tree, a Homemade tree. But a lot of the angels and Santas and snowmen are homemade too.”

  “Did you make this?” Philip asked. With his fingertips he lifted a cross-stitched angel from a branch and squinted. “‘Julian, ’89’?”

  “I’ve been making one for him every year since he was born. Badly, at first, but I got better. I made this for you, Philip.” She took one of the stockings off its hanger and handed it to him. The back was mint green satin with a needlework front. Some of her best and fastest work, oddly, on the days the chemo knocked her flat in her recliner. There was a scene running up the stocking of Santa and his reindeer flying over the New York skyline. “I figured,” she said, “since you’re from there.”

  “Wow.” He held the stocking in his palms like a sacrament. “That is so sweet of you.”

  “Did you design the pattern?” Julian asked. “You did, didn’t you?”

  Lacy beamed. It was everything she hoped for, the moment she craved but never came, when everyone saw you and your work, and it was right. Then she noticed something in Julian’s face, an expression too upbeat and false. He was standing far from Philip and her, in the dining area, blocking the spot on the linoleum discolored by water damage. A patch she meant to fix—the whole floor she wanted to replace with nice ceramic—but hadn’t gotten around to. And she sensed it. Julian was seeing her home, his own, through Philip’s eyes. Focusing him on the decorations like paint on an old whore.

  “I can’t believe you designed this.” Philip grinned and without warning reached over and hugged Lacy. “How long did i
t take?”

  Lacy shrugged. “Just a hobby. Do you have any hobbies, Philip?”

  “Dance,” Julian fired off.

  “Yes,” Philip said. “I like dance and theater. My parents took me to Shakespeare in the Park every year when I was a kid.”

  “I love the theater,” Lacy said. “Great theater here, downtown at TUTS? I saw Phantom three times and Les Mis twice, but right now my favorite is Into the Woods. Did you see it?”

  “No.” Philip smiled.

  “It’ll blow your mind. It mixes fairy tales like ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Rapunzel’ and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’ but it shows the dark side underneath the—”

  “I’m really tired,” Julian interrupted. “Philip, are you—I think we need to lie down before dinner. And probably shower too. What time did you want to eat?”

  “Whenever,” Lacy said, turning away and heading to the kitchen. “No rush.”

  “Give me a hug,” Julian said, grabbing her arm as she passed by. “We didn’t hug.” Gently he folded his arms around her. He held her there, running his hands over her ribs and spine. His eyes were red when he pulled back. “You lost weight,” he said. “It’s this way, Phil.” He picked up their bags and led Philip to his old bedroom.

  Lacy tried to rest too, bundling up in a blanket on the recliner. It was where she spent many nights, once the chemo wrecked her sleep. Every morning around two a.m. a possum came scratching along the same branch outside the windows, eyes reflecting the porch light. He was ugly, like a thing from her sci-fi novels. She named him Lancelot. And while Julian dreamed big ideas, and Bonnie lay alone in a king-size bed, Lacy had a standing date with her night creature. She talked to him, in her mind, about things. The feeling of her life slipping away. Leaving for college and saying goodbye to her mother, who reminded Lacy to condition her hair. The years of city life with Aaron—the fun, going out to Ninfa’s with such a handsome husband, and the doubts, marrying someone better-looking, the babies they lost and the sadness, mixed up in one sweet-and-sour time. She talked about Julian’s birth and the early days of inconsolable crying, which she took so personally. She tried to talk about death but didn’t know how, or how she didn’t feel at peace. She pondered some nights if it was because she didn’t go to church. Had she crossed an angry God, by not passing on a faith to Julian? Then she scoffed and readjusted on the La-Z-Boy. But putting God aside, she asked Lancelot a few times, did people of faith—in something, anything—feel peace at this moment? More than she did with her vivid, bittersweet reflections?