Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  “No.”

  Paul got to his feet. The back corner of their house was crushed, sheared away as if by a giant claw, and debris dotted the grass around it like bones. Beams jutted, broken off and bent. A crater the size of a car yawned ten feet beyond the house, and past it a wide, rough track of torn-up earth led across the yard, through the wasted scraps of their toolshed to the edge of the woods. There, between two trees, sat the object, crumpled and smoking like a cigar stub, its butt end blackened. An engine, an airplane engine. The light grew dim as smoke filled the sky.

  He helped her up, noting with alarm the red marks his fingers had left on her arm. Her mouth hung open. “Oh, my God, Paul.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Wait,” she said. She stuck her arms out at her sides, the fingers splayed. Her eyes squeezed shut. She inhaled deeply, held it for a moment, then let it out. “Okay. Go call nine-one-one.”

  “Right.”

  Paul ran into the kitchen and picked up the phone. He dialed. The living room was weirdly illuminated by natural light; its corner was gone. A photo that had been hanging there was gone. Their records had fallen from the shelf and lay now on the floor, fanned like a deck of cards. The window had shattered, and pieces of it were sprayed across the couch and floor. Through the empty window frame he could see Anita stepping into her underwear and pulling on her sneakers.

  “Emergency,” said the phone.

  “A plane just crashed,” he said.

  “You say a plane crashed?” It was a woman’s voice. She pronounced each syllable separately, like a schoolteacher.

  “In the woods near our house. Part of it hit our house.” Outside, Anita knelt on the ground, tying her shoes. “It was a passenger plane, I think.”

  “We haven’t heard anything on this yet.”

  “It just happened. I mean, a couple seconds ago.”

  He heard the click of a pen. “Okay. Where are you?”

  “Way out on Valley Road. Two-one-five-four-oh Valley Road. On the left, right before the Salmon Wilderness.” Anita stood up and ran toward the woods. “Oh, geez.”

  “Sir?”

  “Get police and ambulance and fire. Fire, definitely. The woods’ll burn for sure.”

  “You say it’s a big plane?”

  “Yeah, pretty big, I think.”

  “Can you—”

  “Yeah, hey, I gotta go.” Anita plunged into the trees, her sneakers flashing white in the shadows.

  “Sir, I need your name.”

  “Paul Beveridge. B-E-V-E-R-I-D-G-E. I really have to go. I’m sorry. Please send them out here.”

  The briefest of pauses. “Okay.”

  * * *

  He ran into the woods. At the edge of the clearing stood a few aspens, still a vibrant green and white despite the drought. Beyond them the conifers thickened around him like a soft, damp cloth. The smoke, acrid and coarse, had already drifted this far, and he lifted his T-shirt to his lips as a filter. Ahead he saw only haze and more trees. He called out to Anita, but his words got lost in the pine needles and murky air. Somewhere ahead there was a stream; it ran down the valley and into the river. He slowed to get his bearings and saw the stream up ahead, glistening weakly. By the time he reached it, he could see what must be the wreckage in the distance—there was an eerie glow, fire, and the shifting trunks of trees allowed him a glimpse of gray and white and the gentle, unmistakable curve of metal. The stream was low from lack of rain, and he hopped over it easily.

  “Anita!” No answer.

  But not far ahead, he saw her: the slim expanse of her back, motionless beneath the green silk, and the pink bottoms of her shoes. She was kneeling at the foot of a tree.

  “Anita!”

  She turned to him, and her face, framed by spruce trunks in the middle distance, appeared like a ghost’s in the haze. Then she turned back.

  He ran toward her, and came suddenly to a small clearing, where sunlight drew his attention to something in the grass: a woman’s purse. It sat there, open, as if someone had simply set it down for a moment, its shoulder strap trailing along the ground like a garden snake. He stopped and peered inside: the usual jumble of stuff. He crouched over it, reached in and pulled out a checkbook.

  The forest was perfectly quiet, and he felt watched. He stood up with the checkbook. Looked around. Nothing, no people, only Anita, still hunched under the tree.

  The checkbook cover was black plastic and had a cartoon of Bugs Bunny embossed on it. Bugs wore a tux and munched a carrot. Inside, the checks had been printed with scenes from famous Looney Tunes: Sylvester chasing Tweety, Fudd chasing Bugs, Daffy whipping his head back and forth like a dog. The owner’s name was Pamela Kinyon. She lived on Southwest Weir. Paul recognized the address, an apartment complex somewhere near Bi-Lo, where he sometimes went to buy beer. He flipped through the carbons, noting where the woman had been and what she had bought: $5.00 at Starbucks, $27.50 at Elliott Bay Book Company, $19.00 at an Italian restaurant, Santori’s. A trip to Seattle. Earlier checks were made out to her landlord, to AirAmerica. He looked up again, through the woods, at the wreckage. The smoke was thicker now, the plane harder to make out, the glow of fire eerier, like the light from a jack-o’-lantern. He turned back to the checkbook and a drop of liquid fell there: sweat. It was getting hotter.

  Replacing the checkbook, his hand brushed something that felt familiar, and he pulled it out. It was a film canister, and he shook it. A roll of film clattered inside.

  “Oh! Paul!”

  He went to her, shoving the film into his back pocket as he ran. His eyes had begun to sting. When he came up behind her, he noticed the heart-shaped sweat stain blossoming on her back and the defeated, rounded set of her shoulders, and so didn’t see the boy until he had almost arrived. It stopped him short, six feet behind her.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  The boy lay on his back at the base of a blue spruce, his left side burnt black, his hand, his foot, his face. Paul stepped closer, knelt, and rested his hand on Anita’s shoulder. Her skin leaped beneath his touch. The boy’s right leg was cut deeply just below the hip, and the ground around it had blackened with blood. His right hand gripped a branch, and he wore a white T-shirt, much of which was burned to his body. It read, in black letters partially obscured by burns, “Skate or die.” His right eye was open and blank. He couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve years old.

  “Are you all right?” Paul asked her.

  “No.”

  “There was nothing you could have done.”

  “I guess,” she whispered. There was a terrible smell, the turpentine stink of burning sap, and urine and the greasy stench of meat. Paul couldn’t look up now, couldn’t look at the crash, afraid that the woods would open up before him like a picture puzzle and reveal a grisly tableau of human debris where before there’d been nothing but trees. He closed his eyes and reached for his wife. His hands found her arms and he pulled her up. She leaned against him, her hands hanging motionless at her sides, and when she found her footing and pulled away, they turned together in the heat and started back.

  At the creek, they stopped and let the water soak into their shoes and socks, and splashed it up against their legs. Anita’s knees and ankles were black with blood, and as she washed she uncovered a two-inch gash across one knee. Her own blood flowed bright red from it. Blood had dried on the nightdress. She rinsed it and squeezed it out again and again.

  In the distance, sirens.

  * * *

  In the night, after the reporters and police, Anita lay in bed, her eyes open, while Paul sat at the kitchen table, looking through the living room, through the hole in their house to the trees. Lights flashed, voices crackled through radios and walkie-talkies, ambulances hunkered in the dark like icebergs, their doors opening and shutting. On the table in front of Paul stood the film canister, unopened, and Anita’s briefcase, which he had rescued from the yard. He reached out and pulled the briefcase to him, took out Anita’s T-shirt and
socks and shorts. Under them he found his last birthday present. He quietly unwrapped it.

  It was a cardigan sweater. He set the wrapping aside, pushed back his chair and stood up. He pulled the sweater on over his T-shirt, and fastened each button, careful to align them all properly, to smooth out the wrinkles and adjust his arms in the sleeves. The air had grown cold, and the sweater felt good.

  2

  Lars felt sorry for unhappy people. At the moment, Toth was one of them. Toth had been dumped. They were driving to the airport to pick up Megan, Lars’s girlfriend, who had spent the summer living in Seattle with her brother and working for his landscaping business. The car they drove, a red Chevette, was hers, and its farthest reaches were cluttered with her things: cassette tapes, blankets, clothes, a filthy stuffed animal that had served as an emergency rag once when they needed to check the oil on a trip. Lars himself was happy. He anticipated a nice dinner with Megan and Toth, and then afterward some time alone with Megan.

  Toth had fully reclined the passenger seat, and his voice came to Lars from the back, where his head now was. “I’m trying to figure out when it started. I’ve got it narrowed down to two possibilities.”

  “You mean the coffee shop.”

  “Yeah, that’s one,” Toth said. Toth had spent about a week theorizing, Kennedy-assassination-like, on the particulars of Julie’s affair. One theory was that she first encountered her lover at Banana Karenina, a University-area coffee shop and deli, where she worked long hours. “The other is the movie incident.”

  “Sorry?”

  Toth reached for the seat adjustment and ratcheted up until he was even with Lars. “Okay, we go to the movies about a month ago, and right in the middle of the movie she suddenly gets up and goes out to the lobby to get a snack. Just gets up, right in the middle!”

  “Hungry?”

  He frowned. “Who gets hungry in the middle of a movie?”

  “Lots of people. Me.”

  Toth shook his head. “So she’s out there, like, forever. And when she comes back, no snack! So I say to her, What took you so long? And she says, Line. So then I ask her why she didn’t get anything and she says they were out of Raisinets and that was what she wanted. Then later, after the movie, we pass by the counter.” He nudged Lars. “So, what?”

  “What what?”

  “Whaddya think is out there?”

  “Raisinets?”

  He slapped the dashboard. “Raisinets. Like, a hundred big yellow boxes of ’em.”

  “Maybe they’d just restocked for the next show.”

  “I thought so at the time.” His voice took on a hoary, incriminating rasp. “But now I’m not so sure.”

  Toth was chronically unlucky in love. This owed, Lars believed, not to any lack of appeal—girls seemed to love his wan, Buddy Holly-ish looks and his nervous manner—but to the fact that Toth didn’t really seem to like any of them, including Julie. Julie was pretty but didn’t have much to say. Toth, on the other hand, spent much of his time talking. Why this breakup upset him so much was not clear. Lars wondered if all those conspiracy theorists actually gave a hoot about Kennedy himself. Probably not.

  Lars didn’t much like anyone either until he met Megan. The women he’d met in college hadn’t seemed serious enough for him, and even if they had, he wasn’t very good at making friends. With Megan, though, it was easy. They met in a huge lecture class. He remembered exactly what he was thinking when she sat down next to him: that it would be great if the professor, a diminutive man shouting from a stage, wore a throat mike, which would transmit via a wireless control box to tiny speakers fitted into the arms of each chair in the hall. He remembered this because of what Megan had asked him when she sat down. “What are you thinking?” she said.

  “What?”

  “You were gaping into space.”

  “Uh…it’s kind of complicated.”

  “Tell me after class,” she said, turning back to the stage, where the professor was writing something illegibly on a blackboard. “I don’t want to miss Shorty’s talk.”

  He thought she was cute. She had small features spaced in an Old Masters kind of way. Her hair was black and rolled into a little ball on the back of her head.

  Over lunch he told her what he’d been thinking. He told her a lot of other things he’d thought about too, and to his surprise she not only understood them, but seemed genuinely interested in the entire act of thinking. She shared some of her own ideas. Tax breaks for people who grew their own food, book-buying subsidies for the poor, electric cars you could charge by hooking them up to an exercise bike. “I’ve changed majors about fifty times,” she told him. “Right now I’m a business major, but it’s getting old. All those people talk about is numbers.” She leaned forward. “I wanna talk about stuff.” Lars was smitten. He couldn’t stop looking at her tiny ears. He wanted to cover them with his hands.

  “Can I touch your ears?” he said.

  “Go for it.” They went out again that night, and again the next. That was almost a year ago.

  * * *

  Marshall International Airport had recently been remodeled to look like a giant hangar. A bank of revolving and automatic doors were set beneath a series of tall, thin windows, all under an enormous arc that stretched to the ground on either side. The airport expressed a certain World War II-ishness Lars found charming, and as it had been built outside the city limits on a bare expanse of prairie, it had an aura of top secrecy, like a military enclave or missile base. It was an exciting place to meet somebody.

  They parked and walked to the entrance. Toth lunged into the revolving-door compartment with Lars, and tiptoed behind him as they looped the loop. In the lobby stood an eight-foot stuffed grizzly bear encased in glass and flanked by two vending machines offering cigarettes and snacks. They walked up a flight of stairs to the gates, all four of which were down the same stretch of hallway, and found the AirAmerica desk. People milled restlessly around it. A digital clock read 5:40.

  “I don’t see any plane out there,” Toth said.

  Lars leaned over the desk and said to the attendant, “Is flight one fourteen late?”

  She looked up, flustered. Her lips were chapped and the lower one bled from a crack in the skin, which she licked, wincing. “Should be in shortly. Are you here to pick someone up?” The name tag over her breast said “Jeanne.”

  “Yes.”

  She bit the lip now, nodding. “We’ll be…” she said, then stopped. She cocked her head like a bird. For a moment, Lars thought she was listening for something in the distance; then he noticed the headset she was wearing, earphones and a tiny microphone that curled across her cheek to her mouth. Hi-tech, Lars thought, cool. “All right,” she said into the mike. Her forehead creased. “Yes. Yes…No, I know. Thank you.” She looked down at her desk a moment, then turned back to Lars. “We’ll have everything worked out shortly,” she said, grinning. The cut in her lip bled freely now, and she wiped at it with a finger. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

  “Sure.” He watched as the attendant curled the fingers of her left hand into her palm. Then she spread them out flat and stared at them as if they were the strangest things in the world.

  * * *

  They went downstairs to the bar and drank glasses of beer. The decor was something Lars had seen before, a style he and Megan liked to call Nouveau West. Cheap chairs with chrome frames and gray upholstered cushions were pushed under varnished knotty pine tables; mounted elk heads and fake Indian art hung on carpeted walls. Lars liked Nouveau West. It was tacky and ill-conceived, perfect for a bar. As if to complement it, a dour cowboy sat drunk at a corner table behind a small cluster of empty beer bottles. His eyes were red, and they focused on a shot glass, which he turned in his hand like a specimen jar.

  Toth was talking about Julie again. “You didn’t seem too keen on her when you actually had her,” Lars told him.

  “Yeah, well…” Toth swirled the beer in his glass. “It got better.” He put the
glass down and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His head hung.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Toth had lately been prone to these sudden clam-ups. Lars didn’t dare ask much about them: more than once, when he had, Toth had suddenly found an excuse to get up and leave.

  In the corner, the cowboy tipped back his head and poured in the drink. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He blinked, held the glass one inch over the table, then dropped it. At the sound, the bartender looked up from behind a cash register. The cowboy picked up the glass and spun it like a top, and it careened into the empty bottles. One fell over.

  “Check this out,” Lars whispered. Toth turned.

  The bartender walked to the table and said something quietly to the cowboy. The cowboy didn’t look. The bartender took a dishcloth from his back pocket and pulled it taut between his hands. Lars heard the words “problem” and “somewhere else.” The cowboy nodded. His arm slid from his lap, and it swung free a moment at his side before he noticed and reeled it in. The bartender watched, then returned to the bar.

  “Think he’s taking off or picking up?” Toth said.

  “Passing out.”

  Toth snorted. “Falling down.” They laughed, then sat in silence for a moment, staring at their glasses.

  “I don’t mean to bug you,” Lars said, and Toth straightened himself in his chair. “You just switch off like that lately. I mean, I have to ask.”

  “Yeah, it’s okay.”

  “I’ll lay off. Just, you know, if you want to talk about it…”

  “Sure.” He drained his glass. “It’s nothing. Weltschmerz. Angst. You know.”

  “You can talk to Megan about it too.”

  He raised his eyebrows. Lars was aware it had come out wrong, as if he had meant Toth could borrow Megan from him.

  But Toth let it go. “Yeah, sure.”

  A squeal of feedback sounded over the PA system. A few people in the bar looked up, surprised. “Those waiting for AirAmerica flight one fourteen, please report to gate two,” came a woman’s voice. Then she said it again.