Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  “Is this the dress you’re going to wear?” he heard Frank say.

  “I can’t do it!”

  “C’mon, Ma. This is for Megan.”

  “Don’t you say that to me! Don’t you say that to me!”

  Somewhere, a door opened and shut. Footsteps, some fussing in what sounded like a kitchen. Then the footsteps again.

  “Take these, Ma.”

  “Get those things away from me.”

  “You have to face these people, Ma, okay? Just this afternoon, and then it’ll be over and nobody’ll bother you anymore.”

  A long pause, then: “Give them to me.”

  “Okay,” Frank said. “That’s good. Now get yourself dressed, all right?”

  “Get away from me.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I’m going.”

  Frank walked wearily into the room, his hands in his pockets. “Maybe we ought to go back outside,” he said.

  * * *

  The blue wagon turned out to be Frank’s. He helped his mother into the passenger seat. She was puffy and rumpled in a black dress, like a poisonous mushroom. Her pupils were very, very small. Lars and Toth took Megan’s car, and Lars’s heart sank as he slid back into the seat. He hadn’t wanted to drive it ever again.

  Frank’s car led them to a small Presbyterian church a few miles away. They followed Frank and Mrs. Hellenbeck up a narrow sidewalk that had some odd glittery substance embedded in it. Lars found this curiously inappropriate and felt himself actually getting angry about it, hoping a priest or somebody would walk by so that he could complain. Ahead, Frank held the door open for Mrs. Hellenbeck, who staggered through it as if pulled in by ropes.

  There were only thirty or so people in the church, though a hundred and fifty could easily have fit. Lars scanned the crowd anxiously, seeing if there was anyone he knew. Every face was empty and unfamiliar. Then he looked toward the altar and saw the casket. What was in it? How had they found her? His first impulse, sudden and palpable as a knife at the throat, was to turn and run, and this is what he did, pushing Toth out of the way and plunging back into the gray light, back into the awful, flower-sweet air that surrounded the church like a fog. He dodged a middle-aged couple on the sidewalk and sat down hard in the grass, his palms against his forehead.

  “Lars.” It was Toth, standing in his light, reaching out to touch him. “Lars?” Were they kidding about all this, the casket, the flowers? Surely they had to be kidding.

  “I can’t go in there,” he said. “Are you insane?”

  “Come on, man, you have to.”

  “Who are those people? I don’t know any of those people.”

  “Don’t worry about them.” Toth knelt before him. Lars let him pull his hands away from his face. “It’s just you and me and Megan, man. This last time, all right?”

  No, he thought, this isn’t the last time. The last time was at the airport, dropping her off for her trip to Seattle. His last kiss had been on her neck, just under her left ear, her hair smelling of shampoo and her T-shirt of detergent. As she walked away he saw that the back of the shirt was half-tucked into her shorts, like she’d pulled the shorts on in a hurry, not noticing how they looked. And the last time he’d heard her? On the telephone, I’ll see you Friday, she’d said, and he said, Okay. What else had they talked about? Had they joked about a summer without sex, without conversation that didn’t entail a ring of sticky sweat around the ear? Had they given their I-love-yous? He would have thought this would all come back to him unadulterated by the flaws of memory, but it didn’t. He barely recalled a thing. He lay back in the grass. It had been cut, and the scent of chlorophyll was sharp in his nostrils, and the dirt musty and fertilized beneath it.

  “Come on, buddy,” Toth was saying.

  Forget it, he thought, forget it.

  “Come on. If you don’t want to do it for her, man, do it for me.”

  So he did. He got to his knees, wiped the grass off his pants. He stood up and went in.

  * * *

  He paid little attention during the funeral. At the ends of the pews were stacked thick stapled booklets full of hymns, and he flipped through one of these, hoping nobody would begin singing. Nobody did. There were some prayers, and a few people spoke. At one point he looked up and saw Mr. Hellenbeck standing in the doorway, panting, his face shiny with perspiration. He had come late and was staring at Lars. Lars stared back. It was Hellenbeck who turned away first, then sat down alone in front, his wide gray coat heaving as he breathed.

  What if? Lars thought.

  What if he had driven to Seattle to pick her up, as they both wanted but couldn’t fit into their schedules?

  What if he’d asked her to marry him?

  They walked to the cemetery for the graveside service, mercifully un-eventful and brief. They lowered the box. When it was over, he and Toth stood in the grass outside the church. Nobody approached them. It then occurred to Lars for the first time that they couldn’t drive back if they were planning to leave Megan’s car in Seattle. They had made no other plans. He told Toth this.

  “Oh, Jesus.”

  Lars pulled out his wallet. He had four dollars. And something else, hard and sharp, in his pocket. He curled his hand around it: the barrette he’d taken back in Marshall. “How much have you got?”

  Toth emptied his pockets. “Seven and change. I got plastic, though.” Twenty feet beyond him, in the church parking lot, an old woman was talking to Mr. Hellenbeck. He was looking over her shoulder, at the cemetery.

  “Where’s Frank?”

  Frank was in the parking lot with his mother, walking her in small, crooked circles. She seemed to want to leave, and for whatever reason, Frank kept pulling her away from their car. Finally she seemed to give in, and he led her over to a small group of middle-aged women, who surrounded her, touching her on the shoulders and back. Lars’s hand was sweating around the barrette, and he took it out of his pocket. Without looking at it, he dropped it into a nearby bush. It was a relief to be free of it. He waited until Frank was looking their way, and raised his hand to him.

  Frank came over. “That wasn’t so bad,” he said, his face indicating exactly the opposite. “Are you guys okay?”

  “We’re not sure how to get back,” Lars said. “We came here in her car.”

  “I’m thinking bus,” Toth said.

  Frank nodded with a stricken, sugary gaze. “Right.”

  “Can we walk there?” Lars said.

  “No.” He squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. “No. Look, why not just take the car to the station? You can leave the keys under the mat.” He gave them directions. “If you get lost you can ask.”

  “I really appreciate it.”

  He shrugged. “Yeah, well. I’d ask you to stay, but there isn’t going to be much in the way of a wake. A lot of drinking and moaning.” Something seemed to come to him then and he snapped his head up. “I’m glad we met,” he said. “Both of you guys.” They shook hands. “I’ll probably never see you again.”

  “I guess not,” Lars said.

  “We would have, maybe. Maybe on holidays.”

  Lars winced, and he watched tears appear in Frank’s eyes. Then they were gone, wiped away with a pass of his hand. “You’re a good kid, Lars,” he said. “So was she. She was a really good kid.”

  “Yeah.” He wanted to look into the bush—could he still see the barrette? could he pick it up again?—but he held himself back.

  “I gotta think about that more, when I get time.”

  “So,” Lars said. “I’ll be seeing you.”

  He looked hard at Lars, then at Toth. “Okay, then,” he said, and walked away.

  * * *

  On the bus, Lars could feel the pain pulling away from him, as if it were a series of small, hot beads on a long string, and one end of the string was attached to Megan’s car back at the bus station, and the rest coiled inside him. With every mile, more of the pain unspooled and stung as it left him, and then was go
ne. He slept for most of the trip, an entire night’s worth in an afternoon and evening, and they pulled into the Marshall station in the middle of the night. He understood that the worst was not over, but the keenest part was. What remained would be duller and blunter, and he would have to stuff the burned-out hollows that sharp pain left with something new and different, something that didn’t quite fit. When they stepped off the bus and into the cool night air, Toth said, “We’ll have to walk.”

  “I know.”

  “How are you doing?” he said.

  “Better, some.”

  Toth stared out over the trees and houses to the North Side Bridge rising bright in the distance. “Me too,” he said. “Still bad, though.” He turned back to Lars. “Can we talk about her sometimes? Would that be too weird for you?”

  Lars shook his head. “No, I figure we’ll have to do that.”

  “It’s good we were together for it.”

  “I guess so.”

  And then they hugged clumsily and went off in opposite directions toward home, afraid to say anything more and suffer from scrutiny in one an other’s light. Lars kept his head up as he walked, so that he could catch the moment when the streetlights started winking out.

  * * *

  He gathered his groceries in a sort of fog, breaking the rules he and Megan had always so carefully followed together: never shop hungry, never shop without a list. Anything that looked good, he put into his cart. The shopping was dull, each item offering a modest lump of heartbreak as he remembered eating it with her. His hunger, held at bay by the two cookies, was dull. Everything with Megan, on the other hand, had crackled, her energy so great that it buzzed like a force field around her; the best of times had been like touching a nine-volt battery to the tongue: a little uncomfortable, very exciting. But all Lars wanted now was this: the comfort of predictable hurt, eating and sleeping and breathing. Time passed, and when he got to the cashier he had four sacks’ worth of groceries, far more than he could carry. He paid, then loaded two onto his bike, leaving the others behind with the cashier for the second trip. But when he returned from home the cashier was gone, his groceries with her.

  “Excuse me,” Lars asked the new cashier from behind the plastic bag rack. A considerable line had formed.

  “What,” the cashier said. He was a corpulent man with tinted glasses. He didn’t turn his head, but continued to swipe items over the UPC reader.

  “I left my groceries here? With the lady who was here before you?”

  The man stopped and spun on him. “What?”

  “Two sacks of groceries. I left them right here.” He pointed at the bagging area, now cluttered with a lot of health food—vegetables, vitamins. He felt himself sweating from the bike rides.

  The man scowled behind his glasses and grabbed a nearby PA phone. His voice boomed throughout the store. “Assistance at seven. Assistance at seven.”

  Lars noticed that the girl whose groceries were being rung was staring at him. She had a funny quality about the eyes, kind of tired and sick.

  “Two-cookie guy,” she said.

  It was the sorority sister from the bake sale. “Hey.”

  “What was your name again?”

  “Lars Cowgill.” Somebody was trying to get past him in the exit aisle, an old woman, and she sighed loudly several times. Lars pressed himself up against the bag rack.

  “Koggle?”

  “Cow gill.” He spelled it.

  “Right. Christine Stull, remember?”

  “Some trouble?” a man said behind him. Lars turned and met a plastic nameplate: Frank Banner, Floor Manager. The accompanying face towered above Lars by eighteen inches at least, and sat on a neck as thick as a pile of sandbags.

  “Uh…I…

  “Two sacks of groceries? Got ‘em in back.”

  “Oh. Good. I mean, thanks.”

  “Step aside there, son,” Banner said. “Make way for Claude. He doesn’t wanna be cramped.”

  The checker’s lips thinned. “Ten forty,” he said to Christine.

  Banner brought the bags, and as Lars stood outside, fastening them to his basket with a pair of bungee cords, Christine came through the sliding doors and set her sack at his feet.

  “You got out of there in a hurry,” she said.

  “Oh! Sorry.”

  “Oh, hey, I just gave you a couple of free cookies. No reason to chat.”

  “One free cookie,” he reminded her.

  “Okay, geez.” She smiled. “You look like you haven’t eaten in a week.”

  He looked down at his bicycle, teetering under the weight of the sacks. “This is only half of it.”

  “Well,” she said.

  “Well.”

  “Nice meeting you, Lars.”

  “Good luck with the, you know. The kidneys.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Yup.”

  * * *

  That night he was sautéing vegetables when the phone rang. He carried his wooden spoon with him into the living room and picked it up.

  “Lars Cowgill,” said a female voice. “Here you are, right in the phone book.” In the background, he could hear a low mechanical whooshing.

  “Hello?”

  “It’s Christine.”

  “Oh, hi.”

  “Don’t sound too excited.”

  “Sorry,” he said. He picked up the phone and brought it into the kitchen, and the trailing cord reminded him of his call from the airline days before. He took a deep breath. “I just wasn’t expecting anybody to call tonight.”

  “Ah.”

  “So what’s up?”

  “Dialysis,” she said. “I have to do this every couple of days. They hook me up to this machine and all my blood goes through it.”

  He reached over the burners and turned the heat down. “Does that hurt?”

  “I get tired. The day after, I’m okay, but then I start feeling shitty again fast.”

  “Where are you?” he said. “The hospital?”

  “That’s why our trailer’s at Safeway. It’s near the hospital. Gotta be close by if they find a kidney and all.”

  “You’re living there?”

  “Yeah. They let me call people while this thing’s going. It gets boring.”

  There was a long silence, during which he moved his vegetables around in the butter and oil.

  “So what’s up with you?” she said.

  “Cooking dinner.”

  “I mean in general. What’s your story?” He heard her shifting, and she grunted and let out a long breath. “You sound like a sad fella.”

  “Not generally,” he said.

  “But specifically…”

  He slid the pan off the burner and scraped the vegetables onto a plate, then rummaged in a drawer for a fork.

  “Okay, don’t answer.”

  “Specifically, my girlfriend’s dead.” How many times would he have to tell people? He decided that was it, that nobody else should know.

  Another pause. “Oh…”

  “So I’m sad.” It didn’t feel so bad to say this. It almost felt good. “I’m sad,” he said again.

  “Maybe I’m not the person to be talking to.”

  “I don’t mind.” When she didn’t say anything, he said, “Do you mind?”

  “No.”

  “I’m going to eat while we’re talking.” He crunched into a piece of broccoli. It tasted great. “Oh, God,” he said.

  “What?”

  “This broccoli. It’s really good.”

  “Ugh. Don’t talk to me about food. I feel like blowing hash.”

  “Sorry.”

  They talked until he was finished eating, and when he hung up, Lars felt like he had never slept before, like an infinite chorus of rock bands had been keeping him awake since the dawn of time. Still, he didn’t sleep for a long time. “Just you and me,” he said to the cat when he walked by. “Goodnight, darling,” he said to the blocks of street light that arced across the ceiling. “Goodnight.”

&nb
sp; 8

  Sunday morning, the phone rang. When she dragged herself from bed to answer, Trixie saw that it was nearly ten-thirty and was stunned to find herself still aching and lethargic, things she usually shook off by nine. She picked it up and leaned heavily against the counter. “Hello?”

  “Mother, it’s Katerina.”

  The words were so foreign that it took her a moment to understand they were being addressed to her.

  “Mother?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “How are you, Mother?”

  Trixie cleared her throat. That voice, still sharp as a spanking—she hadn’t spoken to her daughter since Kat’s son was born, seven years before.

  “I’m feeling just fine. Older, still getting around.”

  A low tone escaped Kat, as if this was more than she had wanted to hear. She said, “I’m calling with bad news, Mother.”

  “I think I know it already.”

  “Father?”

  “His plane.”

  There was a long silence, after which Kat said, “You know he’s dead?” Her voice was incredulous and, Trixie thought, slightly disappointed, as if she had been looking forward to delivering the news.

  “I know.”

  “Mother,” she said, “what was he doing flying to Marshall? We didn’t know anything about it.”

  “He was coming to see me.”

  “To see you.”

  “Yes.”

  After a long silence Trixie said, “Does Edward know yet?”

  “He couldn’t be reached.”

  “Oh. And Rachel and David—are they taking it badly?”

  “They’re children,” Kat said. “They don’t understand.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “Mother, why was he going to see you?”

  “I can’t say I know. He just wrote me a letter saying he was coming, and I wrote back telling him he should go ahead, if he wanted.” She felt so tired, so helpless: this was not, she had imagined all these years, the way it would be at the end, nothing resolved, no impulses satisfied. She wasn’t sure what the proper reaction was, not just for appearances’ sake but for herself: how to mourn the man who left her when she was young? The man who was on his way to see her old self?