Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  But then some movement, to the right this time, near the patch of moss. She walked toward it, wiping the moisture from her face; the heat was so bad here that her arms were already crusted with salt from her sweat. She pulled the silk from her skin and riffled it, letting the air in.

  What had looked like a patch of fungus against the tree trunk fell to the ground, and she saw then that it was a human arm, and the moss a body, lying on its back.

  She ran, gulping in the bad air, and fell coughing to her knees where he lay: a boy. At first she thought he was lying half in shadow and looked up to see what dark object hung above them, but there was nothing, and when she turned back to him she saw that it was not shadow, but burn. His arm and leg, his hair, the side of his face—it was all blistered and black, and stank. His left eye was gone, evaporated or burnt over. But the right was open. It blinked.

  “Hello?” he said.

  Anita stood up and ran ten steps before she retched, and when she was through her stomach clenched and unclenched like a beating heart and her pulse rang in her head. She breathed as deeply as she dared, then went back to the boy’s side. It was even worse than she’d noticed: his right leg was gouged as if by a butcher’s knife, the cut clean. Blood ran from the wound and covered the ground. She knelt.

  “What happened?” he said. His voice was folded strangely over itself, as if an old man were speaking his words with him. “I can’t move.”

  “Just relax,” she said. She had begun crying briskly, without ceremony. The boy didn’t seem to notice. His eye spun untethered in its socket.

  “We were almost there,” he said.

  “You’re here now.”

  “I am?” He tried to lift his right arm, the good one, but it only flopped over lifelessly in the humus. “I can’t move,” he said.

  “Don’t. Don’t try.”

  “Are you okay?” he asked her. His eye seemed to have settled, though it wobbled now when she looked at it. He blinked.

  “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

  His head moved just slightly, a twitch. “My uncle.”

  “What’s that?” She leaned closer to his face.

  “My uncle…I’m supposed to stay with him. He’ll worry.”

  Anita said nothing. The boy squinted. He drew in breath and let it out. “Oh…”he said.

  “My name’s Anita.”

  “What?”

  She moved her lips to his ear. “Anita. I’m Anita.”

  “I’m so tired.”

  “Do you want me to do anything?”

  She heard her name being called then and turned. It was Paul, at the top of the rise, waving to her. He had his shirt bunched up over his mouth and his belly was thin and white.

  “Ma’am?” the boy said.

  She turned back. “I’m here. I’m here.” Somehow, his hand had found a twig and held on to it. She stared at this delicate hand and tried not to look at his other side.

  “Tell my uncle I’m here.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Uncle Larry.”

  “Sure, of course I will.” She wrapped her own hand around his fist. If he noticed he didn’t show it.

  “Will somebody bring me to his house?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They’ll bring you wherever you want.”

  “Fishing,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He was quiet a long time, and the eye went halfway shut. His hand was cold. She thought he was dead, and then he said, “I’m beat.”

  “I understand,” she said. She thought she must be empty of tears now, but there they were, still going. The boy said something she didn’t catch, and she leaned closer. His smell rose up to meet her, the chemical tang of blood and metal.

  “What’s that?”

  “You have a nice accent,” he said.

  “Thank you.” And after that, he said nothing else.

  She didn’t know how long she had been there when Paul came for her. “Anita,” he said. “Jesus Christ.” She felt his hand on her shoulder, and then at her elbows, lifting her to her feet. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go, now.”

  He turned her around and took her arm, then led her back through the trees. They walked together in short, slow steps. She felt like she was in a dream or on the moon, unable to gather momentum, unconnected to the earth. She tried to turn, but he held her fast.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  “No.” She watched her legs move, each knee crusted with pine needles and blood.

  “There was nothing you could have done.”

  “I guess.”

  She didn’t want him here now, touching her, and shook his hand off her arm. But somehow he interpreted this as need and slipped his arm around her shoulders. She had no energy to speak. The arm stayed.

  They came to the creek and wordlessly stepped in together. Her shoes soaked through instantly, and the coolness of the water seemed to her a great and generous gift. Paul knelt in the current and began to splash water onto her knees. She let herself feel gratitude for this, even pleasure.

  “Better?”

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “I didn’t see anyone else. I didn’t want to look.” He stopped splashing her and scooped up water into his hands, then rubbed it into his face.

  She could still see blood on her ankles and the sight of it filled her with revulsion. She reached down and finished washing it off, and when the blood was gone she kept rubbing her legs until the feeling came back to them. There was a raw, jagged wound on her knee, deep but barely bleeding. She felt no pain from it. The silk nightdress was covered with blood. She tried to rinse it, but it wouldn’t come clean.

  “I can’t believe this,” Paul said. “Did you see the plane?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t see anybody at all. Maybe there weren’t many people on it.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I just can’t believe this.”

  She looked at him crouching there, shaking his head. She took a step back.

  “You don’t have to be so excited about it,” she said.

  He stopped and looked blankly at her.

  “They’re all dead,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She stared down at the water, at the mud and moss Paul had upset flowing over and around her shoes. “That boy was alive when I found him.”

  “What?”

  “I talked to him.”

  “What did he say?” He stood up.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I just talked to him. He was alive. He didn’t know what happened, and I didn’t tell him.” Paul only watched her, his face slack and wary. The default face for Paul, the reason he didn’t know anybody. Her feet had grown cold, and now were beginning to go numb; the air had thickened. She felt urgent, pulled with increasing strength in two directions, neither any good.

  From ahead came a flurry of snapping twigs and footsteps. She looked up, startled. A black man with a thin beard, dressed in white, appeared on the rise. He was carrying an orange plastic box with a cross on it.

  “Hey! Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” Paul said.

  He ran down the incline and stopped at the edge of the creek, his breathing heavy. A surgical mask dangled at his neck. “Were you all in the crash?” he said, his eyes frantic. He looked from Anita to Paul and settled finally on Anita.

  “No,” she said, pointing. “We live in the house.”

  “Did you see…” the man began, then looked past them, to where the woods burned. “Sweet Jesus,” he said.

  Then, from over the rise came the others: people in white, masks strapped to their faces, carrying stretchers and bags and boxes. They splashed past Anita and Paul, their faces grave, their eyes locked on the scene ahead. The black man fumbled with his mask and ran, disappearing into the mass of them as thoroughly as a drop of water into the creek. When they passed, Anita turned and watched them go, sunlight flashing on their uniforms, swift and quiet into
the smoke, like angels.

  * * *

  Light poured through the hole in the house. Anita and Paul sat on the sofa. A record, apparently knocked free of its jacket, lay on the floor at their feet, and Anita pressed her toe to it. A wet print appeared on the vinyl, flecked with dirt. There had already been newspaper people, and now they milled in the yard. She dreaded the rest of them, who were sure to come.

  “I’m sorry,” Paul said.

  “About?” Though it could have been anything now, as far as she was concerned, any one of his inadequate reactions to trying circumstances. But I must give him a chance to redeem himself, she thought. I always do.

  “Outside, before. In the yard. This,” he said, pointing to the green nightdress, now beyond repair. For the first time she felt naked, and smoothed the fabric over her thighs.

  “Oh.”

  “I was a jerk. It all seems so stupid now. I’m sorry, I really am.”

  “Please stop that.”

  “What?”

  “Apologizing.” She leaned back and closed her eyes. From outside came the sounds of car doors opening and closing, of men calling things out to one another, of people asking questions and other people answering. It had already begun when they stumbled out of the woods together: ambulances and police, firemen in a red car with a flashing light. She stood up and looked out the hole. A ripped-up track led in a gentle curve to the trees, where the fallen object, clearly a jet engine, sat half-blackened in the shade. Two policemen had come and wrapped the trees around it with yellow police-line tape, and they stood just inside the tape, talking, cups of convenience store coffee in their hands. As she watched, another police car pulled up and parked halfway into their garden. Two more officers got out, a man and a woman, and marched to the police line, but when they got there, they only stood, joining in the conversation. The scene had a peculiar, festive air to it.

  “We’ll have to fix this,” she said. “Or at least put some plastic over it.”

  “As soon as these people leave, I guess.” Paul said.

  Two more people approached the cops now, men wearing jeans and identical green golf shirts. The taller one held a clipboard. They ducked under the tape, said a few words to the police, then walked around the engine a couple times. The short one pulled out a tape measure and held lengths of it up to the engine, and the tall one scribbled on the clipboard. Soon the tall one moved away from the engine and walked along the trail of ruined earth, while his partner stayed behind and talked to the police. He used his own tape measure to record the length of each mark on the ground, and its distance from the next. In a couple of minutes he had reached the hole in the house and examined its edges.

  “May I?” he said to Anita, holding out the tape measure. He wore a neat red beard and reminded her of a cigarette ad, though he wasn’t smoking. An insignia on the breast of his shirt read “MASA: Excellence In Flight.”

  “Sure,” she said. He nodded and extended the tape measure, positioning it various ways and writing down the results. When he was through he stepped back and surveyed the debris, tapping the tape measure on the clipboard in a complicated rhythm, but he seemed to come to a decision about it and wrote nothing down.

  “You live here, I take it.”

  “My husband and I, yes.” She looked back at the couch. Paul had left.

  “They told me you saw the wreckage.”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked back over his shoulder and narrowed his eyes, as if this could let him see through the trees. “Well,” he said. He shoved the clipboard under his arm and stuck out his hand, up and into the hole. “I’m Chase. Montana Aviation Safety Authority. My partner and I are the crash investigators. For the state, I mean. The fed guys are always late.”

  “Anita Beveridge,” she said, shaking the hand, then realized what she was wearing and backed up a step. If Chase noticed or cared, he didn’t let on.

  “No kidding? I Need a Beverage. I knew a guy named James Brown.”

  “I see.”

  “Yeah, well.” He turned again to face the trees, and spoke to her over his shoulder. “They won’t let us back there yet. Fire. Slurry bombers are coming in to drop retardant. That should about do it.” He kicked a piece of splintered wood and it helicoptered over the grass. “Anybody out there? Any survivors?”

  “No, nobody.”

  “Mmm,” Chase said. He took the clipboard from under his arm and tapped on it with the tape measure. “They go down in trees, things get pretty ugly, that’s for sure.”

  * * *

  She went into the bedroom to lie down. She had the scattered feeling she always got when events conspired to mess things up, and nothing exhausted and frustrated her more than a mess she was incapable of fixing.

  This was something she couldn’t make Paul understand. To her, chaos was self-perpetuating, both in the real world and in her head; her life, for better or worse, was her struggle to defeat it. And usually she relished the task. Nothing thrilled her like a desk covered with paper clips and staples and little pieces of paper with things scribbled on them, or a long list of onerous tasks laid out in order of importance. These things were an invitation to battle, and she always won.

  But today she felt like the underlying structure of her life had crumbled and was, even to her, beyond repair. She had decided that morning to give in to Paul for now—she was young, after all, and didn’t strictly need a baby yet—but her short-term solution had failed. The second he opened the box, she knew it. It was as if she had cleared the clutter from her desk to find that the desk itself had vanished under its weight. And now, despite her best efforts, the desire was back on her.

  It was that boy. He was the victim of circumstances that should never have been, and when she saw him and realized how far gone he was, she tasted for the first time the sheer folly of hope. Her moment alone with him was a series of first-priority demands that would, and did, pass into eternity unsatisfied. Of course his uncle would never pick him up, of course they would never go fishing—and that these plans were left hanging had thrown off the balance of the world forever.

  She wanted babies, and she wanted to give them whatever they wanted. That was the bottom line. But Paul was still her best hope, and Paul wasn’t budging, with his deep obstinance disguised as wishy-washiness and his cringing fear masquerading as sensitivity. She thought they were lucky to have fallen in love, that they should be kneeling on the ground thanking God that there was love enough for both of them, most of the time. But sweet Paul, who had lacked it all his life, thought that love was always there, around them like a pervading gas, and could be snatched out of the air and made to work. Love was radio waves to him.

  But he was wrong. Love was finite. Love had its limits, and theirs was close.

  * * *

  She woke to voices in the kitchen. The bedside clock said 7:41 p.m., still early. She got up, unsticking her knee from the sheets, and dressed: T-shirt, shorts pulled on gently, over the wound. She balled the ruined nightdress and tossed it onto the floor, then limped out.

  Chase and his partner sat at their kitchen table, asking Paul questions, and Paul answered animatedly, his hands describing shapes in the air. A group of men leaned against the counter, each with a glass of water. All heads turned when she walked in.

  “Are you the wife?” one of the men said.

  “I’m Anita Beveridge.”

  Another took a notepad from the pocket of his jeans. “Can I ask you some questions?”

  More reporters. “You already talked to Paul?”

  The reporters looked at one another. “Uh.” said the man with the notebook.

  “I don’t want to talk,” she said.

  “Anita,” said Chase’s partner. “We need to know a few things.”

  “I don’t think we’ve met.” At the counter, conversation sputtered and restored. She sat down on the remaining chair.

  “Anita,” Chase said, “this is Alan. Alan, Anita.”

  Alan wore a beard too, b
ut his was bushy and black. His hand was sweating when she took it. “Now,” he said, “please describe the crash, the way you saw it.”

  “Hasn’t Paul done this?”

  “Now, Mr. Beveridge tells us he saw a bright flash before the plane changed direction and began to fall. Did you see the flash?”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  He turned to Paul. “She didn’t see a flash, Paul.”

  “I wasn’t looking,” Anita said.

  “I just want to get these stories straight, Anita.”

  She stood up. “What difference does it make, really? Nobody’s going to be any less dead.” She pushed her chair in. “Everyone,” she said. “All of you.” The reporters fell silent. “Please get out of my house. All of you, please. Goodbye.”

  The reporters exchanged glances, then put their glasses on the counter and filed out, trying to look as if they wanted to. When they were gone, she turned back to Alan. “You too, please. Go, go.”

  “Mrs. Beveridge,” he said with put-on patience, “This is a matter of—”

  “Please. Go now.”

  “Come on,” Chase said to him, touching his arm.

  For a moment, nobody moved. Then Alan got up, and Chase after him. “I think we have enough,” Chase said. “Thank you both.”

  “Sure,” Paul said.

  “The fed folks will be coming from Seattle tonight,” Chase said, his eyes on Anita. “They’re going to ask you a lot of the same questions.”

  “I don’t doubt it.”

  She followed them onto the porch and watched as they climbed into a green truck. They sat in the cab for a moment, talking. Several times Alan looked up and scowled in her direction. Finally they started the truck and drove away.

  Paul came out behind her and touched her shoulder, then they stood there and watched: the smoke, billowing out of the forest, firefighters running in and out, planes swooping overhead and disappearing behind the treeline, then rising up out of the fire like embers. As they watched, a dump truck appeared, rumbling up their drive, with a giant white dumpster on its bed. It squeezed between two police cars near the edge of the trees, and stopped. Two men got out and stood behind it, guiding the driver, and it lowered the dumpster onto the ground on long steel arms. Then the men detached it and signaled to the driver. It was the cleanest dumpster Anita had ever seen.