Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  “I’m really sorry.” He thought for a second of telling him about having seen the plane go down. But what was the point?

  “Yeah, well. What’s your name again?”

  “Paul. Paul Beveridge.”

  “I don’t mean to tell you all this. It’s just…” And he trailed off into silence.

  “Why are you working today? Why not take the day off?”

  “And do what? Sit at home? That’s the last thing I want. Though it’s not like the job is particularly distracting.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Well,” Lars said. He thumped the table with his hands. “I should go. Good luck with your surveillance.”

  “Oh, thanks. Sorry to have to spy on you.”

  “It’s no problem.”

  “I hope things improve for you.”

  He shrugged. “They can’t get any worse, I guess.”

  “I guess.”

  Lars stood up and left. While he waited to cross the street, a car pulled into the lot, and he jogged to the shop soon enough to hold the door open for his customer, a middle-aged lady wearing a sundress and hat. Inside, she gathered an armload of party toys and dumped them on the counter.

  Later, when he left, Lars waved to Paul. Paul waved back, then watched Lars strap on a bicycle helmet, walk to the back of the store, and pedal away on a mountain bike. Lars wobbled off into the distance, and Paul wondered where he lived, and what he would do when he got there, if he had friends he could call.

  Paul knew he could get up and leave now, but he didn’t. The thought of home only worried him. Despite the night before, he felt no more able to reach Anita; whatever lay between them seemed no less tangled and impassable than before. This was the week that was to set things right, he remembered, the week that was going to put him on the right track: the one to responsibility and reconciliation. And he was trying, wasn’t he? He was supposed to be feeling things falling into place, right?

  A few more minutes in the Kwik Stop: nothing. Finally he paid for his last cup of coffee and headed for the car.

  7

  Lars’s first thought when he got back to his place was that there was no food in it, and that he hadn’t eaten for nearly twenty-four hours. He left the apartment again with relief, and with the ample justification of a necessary errand, one that any civilized person had to make. Groceries. This made great sense.

  On the way to Safeway, he pedaled past a fraternity house. The brothers were standing around outside, stiff and bulky in their matching T-shirts, barbecuing steaks. For a moment he forgot his distaste for fraternities and their calculated squalor and found himself salivating uncontrollably. He thought this a good sign; it was the first time he’d felt any urgency since Friday. A car honked behind him, and he realized he was standing in the middle of the road. He moved aside and received the middle finger from the driver, a teenager with a tiny mustache.

  He pedaled to the supermarket, feeling the hunger drifting like a virus through his blood, settling in his bones. He locked his bike to a pole and beelined for the electronic sliding doors. Then he noticed a banner, out of the corner of his eye:

  ADT Bake Sale

  to Benefit Christine Stull

  It was set up at the near end of the parking lot, next to what seemed to be a trailer house. Beneath it stretched a long buffet table where a lot of blond-haired girls were sitting. The table was covered with neat piles of baked things: brownies stacked into pyramids, blueberry muffins wrapped in cellophane, glass jars stuffed with cookies. He recognized ADT as a campus sorority, perhaps one of the very ones he and Megan had taken such joy in mocking. These girls evoked in him a jumble of conflicting impulses—to approach, to run, to retreat into Safeway, to cry—and he realized he no longer knew what to say to girls or how to act around them. Panic slithered on the ground near his feet and began to climb up his legs by the hairs.

  Someone at the table—the girl behind the cookies—motioned to him: Come on over here. He did.

  “Saw you looking,” the girl said. “How about a cookie? Good cause.” The girl wore big sunglasses and—oddly, for the heat—a long-sleeved T-shirt. Her hair was held back with a giant yellow clip.

  “Uh,” Lars said. The cookies were huge. “Okay,” he said, “okay.” He fished a dollar out of his wallet.

  She handed him a cookie wrapped in a small sheet of waxed paper. He closed his eyes and bit into it, and the chocolate dissolved on his tongue like a drug. He only looked again when he lost his balance and stumbled, and he found the girl leaning forward, offering him another cookie.

  “You look like you need another.”

  “Oh,” he said, patting his pockets. “No, I’m cash-poor.”

  “On me.”

  Lars took the cookie. “You sure? What about…” He looked up at the banner. “Christine Stull?”

  “No problem. She doesn’t mind.”

  The girl was grinning. “You?” he said.

  She extended her hand, and Lars had to switch the cookie to his other hand to shake it. “Me,” she said. “I baked these. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anybody eat a cookie like that. You can have as many as you want.”

  He felt himself redden. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, no! I’m flattered.”

  He took a bite of the new cookie. “So, how are you…benefiting?”

  “Kidney transplant.”

  “Oh.”

  “Insurance’ll only cover so much. The sisters here are helping out. They’ve been real pals.”

  “You’re in the sorority too?”

  “Yup.”

  “You’re lucky to have such good friends.”

  She shrugged. “I suppose so.”

  “Well,” he said. The second cookie was already gone. He crumpled the waxed paper and shoved it into his pocket. “I hope you’re feeling…you know, better.”

  “You need another one?”

  “Oh, no,” he said. “Thanks. I’m going to go get groceries.”

  “Don’t let me stop you.”

  Lars smiled at her. “Nice meeting you. Good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  But however the cookies outside had improved his mood, he realized how hopeless the larger fight was, once he’d set foot in the store. First, it was the red and blue plastic hand baskets with their twin metal handles: he would always hold one handle, Megan the other. And the bread display, which stood just inside the door, to the right of the bakery; they’d always get the sourdough loaf and smother it with butter and garlic and cheese at home, sometimes making an entire meal out of garlic bread. The shelf upon shelf of brightly colored boxes: food packaged to attract children or processed into unappetizing shapes. They laughed over these, and the kind of people who bought them. They had been smug in love. His throat burned and he steadied himself against the rows of grocery carts, the metal supercooled in the air conditioning and electric on his hot skin.

  * * *

  Her brother Frank had called him Sunday with directions to their parents’ house in Seattle, where he said they should meet to go to the funeral. “I’m sorry I won’t have much time,” he said, “but I want to see you.”

  “I want to bring a friend,” Lars said.

  “Of course, sure.”

  “Listen,” Lars said. “I have her car.”

  “She had a car?”

  “A small one. I guess we’ll drive it out there.”

  “All right.” He sounded distracted, unwilling to think about these things, but Lars had wanted them settled and out of the way.

  “Do you want me to bring her stuff?”

  “No, no. We’ll worry about that later. Just…just bring the keys to her apartment. Do you have those?”

  “I have a set.”

  “Okay then.”

  He and Toth would have to leave around four in the morning to make it; Seattle was eight or nine hours, barring any problems with the car. He called Toth that night to tell him to get some sleep. Toth was in the tub with the portable phone,
crying. Lars could hear his voice echoing off the tiles and water.

  “I’ve been in here all day, man,” he said. “I’m completely fucking wrinkled.” He sniffed deeply.

  “Don’t drop the phone,” Lars said. He gave Toth the details. “Bring a few bucks for gas.”

  “How are you doing, man?”

  Lars had not been doing well. “Didn’t sleep much. Megan’s dad said ‘Fuck you’ to me on the phone.”

  “I’m doing terrible,” Toth said.

  “At least you’re clean.” And miraculously, they both laughed.

  That night long shadows from the neighbors’ trees crept across his sheets. He ate half a bowl of cereal in bed, and massaged his mind to sleep by tracing the road to Seattle, every landmark and stretch of highway he could remember. He woke to his alarm at three-fifteen and found he had kicked his half-filled cereal bowl over in the night, and Hodge sat placidly on the floor beside it, licking the puddle. Lars got up and tossed a towel onto it. He dressed—khaki pants, white shirt, blue blazer was the best he could do—and stuffed what clothing of hers he could find into a plastic bag.

  He got some cash at the drive-up bank and went to her apartment. She had lived in a tiny carpeted studio downtown and owned nearly nothing. He let himself in with his key. The place was a mild but particular mess; there were no books or papers on the floor but both were stacked precariously on her desk, and though all her clothes were in the closet, they were stuffed there haphazardly. He tossed the plastic bag onto her futon, which was spread sheetless on the floor. He went to the bathroom and pissed, then rubbed his hands under the tap. In the medicine cabinet he found a tube of toothpaste and a barrette. He put the barrette in his pocket. As he did all this, the dull pain in his throat was constant and debilitating; it felt like someone had lodged a gigantic rubber ball there, around which he could breathe only the barest essentials of air. When he left the apartment he did so forever.

  Toth was waiting on the porch when he pulled up. To Lars’s surprise, he was wearing a black funeral suit, and under the streetlight, his hair tied into a tasteful ponytail, he looked nerdily elegant. Lars commented on the suit when Toth got in. Toth didn’t look up. He seemed paler than usual and his eyes were red. “Yeah,” he said. “I got it at the Goodwill. This is the first time I’ve worn it.” He pushed his fingers up under his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Lars pulled into the street.

  “It’s funny,” Toth said, finally looking at him, “I feel like we’re going fishing or something. I mean, it feels like some kind of fun trip thing. Getting up early and all that. Except I feel like jumping in the river.”

  “It just feels lousy to me,” Lars said.

  They drove in silence for an hour and a half, into Idaho and across the panhandle. Occasionally Lars heard Toth crying but didn’t say anything. What could he say? When they crossed over into Washington he suggested some music.

  Toth nodded and opened the glove compartment. He pushed the tapes around for a minute, then shoved one into the cassette deck. It warbled out of the speakers, a song Megan had liked. Toth left it for a minute, then said “Fuck” very quietly and popped it back out. He tossed it into the back of the car, where it clattered against the rear window. From then on they listened to AM radio, farm reports and news, and the sun came up behind them.

  They stopped in Spokane for coffee and a box of Fig Newtons, which they ate sporadically on the road. At one point Lars said, “A bag of these costs three twenty-nine.”

  “So?”

  “These boxes are half the size, and they only cost one twenty-nine.”

  “Doesn’t make sense,” Toth said.

  “People are dumb.”

  It was the only thing they said all the way across Washington. Toth slept for the rest of the trip, and Lars stared out at the bleak hilliness of the state, wishing it would never end, would just go on and on being empty and boring. He wouldn’t have minded if he had to drive this road forever, listening to the news. Not at all. When they came close to the city, Lars took the folded envelope with the directions on it from his pants pocket. He exited the highway and tooled through town, stymied briefly by a series of one-way streets, and ended up in a shady neighborhood, where giant stone houses loomed behind cast-iron fences and rows of shrubbery. The house that matched the address on his envelope seemed to have nothing to do with Megan at all. It was huge, like the others; its fence was the tallest in the neighborhood, and the front walkway led through a ten-foot wrought-iron arch over which ivy grew. The house spoke, Lars thought, of concealment, of embarrassment, and seeing it reminded him just how little he knew about Megan’s family. She had rarely mentioned them. It was a bright day without direct sun; the light was diffused through a layer of gray cloud. Lars found the driveway and pulled in, and the change of speed seemed to jar Toth awake.

  “We’re here, buddy,” Lars said. He parked behind a blue Datsun station wagon and a green BMW.

  “What?”

  “We’re here.”

  Toth sat up straight, blinking. He had a red seat-belt mark across his face, and as he took in the yard his eyes clouded over. “Oh,” he said quietly. “I fell asleep and forgot everything.”

  “Sorry.”

  They stepped out and stretched, then walked to the door. It was giant and wooden with a huge iron knocker that Lars was certain never got used. He rang the bell.

  When the door opened, and he saw Megan’s brother for the first time, something heavy and cold came unbalanced inside him, and he had to steady himself against the doorframe. His face was hers, round and open, several years older. His hair stuck up on his head and he stood at about six feet.

  “Are you Lars?” he asked them.

  “I am,” Lars said.

  He offered his hand to shake, and Lars took it. “I’m Frank.”

  “This is Toth. He was a good friend.”

  “I’m glad you could make it,” Frank told Toth, and Toth nodded wearily.

  Frank looked tired—his limbs hung off his body like broken tree branches after a storm—and Lars could hear voices behind him, in the house, a man grumbling and a woman yelling at him. Nobody said anything for a few moments, and the yelling continued. Frank slumped, holding himself up with the doorknob. “Maybe we ought to sit out here,” he said. “Just for a little while.”

  The only thing Lars could remember Megan saying about Frank was that he spent a lot of time in the sandbox in the Hellenbecks’ backyard when he was a kid. He would build things—houses and their yards—and decorate them with bits of styrofoam cups and rocks and sticks. Now he walked between Lars and Toth, shutting the big door behind him, and sat down on the porch step. He was wearing black pants and a white shirt. Lars and Toth sat down on either side.

  Frank pulled a single cigarette from his pocket and lit it with a yellow lighter. He turned to Lars and said, “She loved you, you know.”

  “I loved her too,” he said. He had a picture in his head of Megan, sweating in her shorts and T-shirt and cap in the summer sun, laying sod next to Frank, telling him that she loved her boyfriend back in Montana. Did Frank even work outdoors? Or did he just go around assigning grunt work from his office? It didn’t matter. Lars rubbed his eyes.

  “She told me about you, too,” Frank told Toth. “She loved you guys. I’m glad you could come out here. It was kind of short notice.” He was silent for a second, then turned bright red, embarrassed at saying something so stupid.

  “Was it a good summer?” Lars said.

  “It was a great summer.”

  Behind them the door swung open and smacked against the wall. Lars felt the house tremble. Somebody stormed past them, off to the right, and he looked up to see a thick-bodied man in gray slacks stomping through a bed of flowers. He heard the jingling of keys. Frank stood up. “Dad!” he called out. He stood, tossing his unfinished cigarette onto the walk. “Dad!”

  “Shit,” Toth whispered. He wiped the sleeve of his jacket across his face.

  Frank caught
up to Mr. Hellenbeck in the driveway. Lars couldn’t make out the words, but Frank’s voice was edged with exasperation, as if this was the sort of thing that happened frequently. His father twirled the keys on his finger but didn’t speak. Lars had never seen a man who looked so physically dense. He could easily have been made of lead, his features painted on. After a minute, Frank’s hands fell to his sides, and the two men stood unmoving for some time. Then Mr. Hellenbeck turned and disappeared behind the corner of the house. Frank stayed put. Lars heard a garage door rolling up creakily, then a car engine and the squeal of tires. Another BMW, this one red, shot into view, careening down the driveway. It angled into the road, leaving deep gouges in the grass, and fishtailed loudly in the street.

  Frank came back to the porch. “Sorry,” he said.

  Lars and Toth said nothing.

  “He’ll be at the funeral,” Frank said. He leaned forward and picked his cigarette off the sidewalk. “I don’t think he’d go off and miss that.” He took a long drag and stubbed the cigarette out, then swiveled his head, looking for a trash can. When he found none he wiped off the ashes and stuck the butt in his pocket. Then he got up. “I should see if Mom’s all right. Why don’t you come in for now?”

  * * *

  Lars and Toth sat opposite each other in powder-blue wing-back armchairs. The room they sat in was spacious and lavishly—perhaps professionally—decorated; long opaque drapes hung over long windows and the floor was covered with Oriental rugs. Frank had gone down the hall.

  “Come on, Ma,” they heard him say. “You have to get yourself together.”

  “That man!” she cried, her voice dissolving in tears.

  “You have to get dressed, Ma.”

  Toth leaned forward. “This is weird,” he whispered. “Where are all the relatives?”

  “I don’t know.” Lars was looking at a portrait above the fireplace of a man with white hair, wearing an ascot. Something in the forehead reminded him of Megan, though that could have been his imagination. He could not picture her even standing in this house, let alone growing up in it.