Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  She went to the open door, but he was gone now, lost in the glare of the sunset. A car window gleamed at a bend in the road. She stepped back inside, shut the door behind her and closed the cupboard. She left his empty plate on the table. Her hands shook, but she turned on the gas under her dinner and watched the blue flame until the soup was hot enough to eat.

  * * *

  “He came tonight,” she told Diane on the telephone. “Hamish did.” It was dark outside now, and she sat on her chair, watching the back of the door.

  Diane took her time saying anything. “What do you mean by that, exactly?”

  “I was making dinner, and he came into the house, and took a dish from the cupboard, and sat at the table and ate off it.”

  She heard something being set down on the other end—a drink, a book? “Are you all right? Do you need to go to the doctor’s?”

  “I’m fine. A little afraid.”

  “You saw Hamish.”

  “He didn’t really eat. He just pantomimed eating.”

  “Forgive me, dear, but that sounds a bit funny.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t you think maybe you’re seeing things?”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I feel fine. I’m not light-headed or confused, nothing’s numb…It was strange, Diane—he could hear me saying things to him, but he didn’t know what, or that it was me. It was like he was only half here.”

  Trixie heard her grunt. She was getting out of bed. “I’m coming over,” she said.

  “Oh no! You don’t have to do that!” But suddenly she wanted Diane there; she wanted the house full of people.

  “I’d feel better. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

  “Yes, fine.”

  “Hmm. I’m on my way.”

  “It’s no rush.”

  “Well, it’s not like I’m waking anyone up.”

  When they hung up, Trixie could sense, almost supernaturally, the emptiness of the house, just how much of the air lay fallow in the corners and around the ceiling, and she felt lonely there for the first time in years. It reminded her of her days alone in the old house, with Hamish at work and the children at school, and how quickly solitude turned to misery after he left them and Kat had moved out.

  She could remember feeling this way once the year before Hamish left for good. It was a Saturday, the day after a night he had walked out drunk and not yet returned. She was sitting in the quiet of the living room, trying to ease herself down from panic, when she realized she hadn’t heard the children for hours. She strained to hear them, but there was nothing. The silence began to grow ominous, and she went up to check on them. She found Kat’s door wide open, her curtains drawn, and there in the darkness she and her brother knelt before her bed, their hands clasped before them in what struck Trixie as a grim parody of prayer.

  “What are you doing?” she whispered.

  Kat was sixteen then, and her face had begun to take on the firm lines of an adult’s. When she looked up, it was filled with calm and righteous anger. Edward’s face, still a boy’s, was terrified beside her.

  “We’re praying to God,” Kat said.

  Trixie’s first impulse was to march into the room and pry their hands apart. Instead, she stared at them, waiting for them to crack and run to her for comfort. But nothing happened. Edward buried his face in the blankets. Kat was glowing. Finally Trixie dragged herself away, and wept wearily when she heard Kat’s door slam shut behind her. Now she wondered how she had let that happen, why the loss of Kat’s trust only paralyzed her and stripped her of resolve. Her imagination had long provided a better end to that scene: she walks into the room, throws open the curtains, and confronts Kat. It isn’t me, she explains, I’m not the one driving him away. You can trust me still. You can both trust me. And the three of them sit, cross-legged on the floor, and talk about what they’ll do when Hamish gets home, when their problems have been solved and the family is back together again.

  * * *

  When Diane came, Trixie put on a pot of coffee and they sat together in the living room. Trixie recounted what had happened, and Diane nodded, her face resolvedly neutral. She glanced around the house as Trixie talked. When the coffee finished brewing, Trixie went to the cabinet for cups and saucers. They clinked together as she pulled them out, and when she set them on the counter she could see her own face reflected ash-white in a saucer’s well. She trembled as she poured.

  “Well,” Diane was saying, “you look all right, anyway.”

  Trixie set her cup on the ottoman and handed Diane hers. “I told you.”

  “Yes.” Diane pushed each shoe off with the opposite foot, then propped both feet up on the coffee table. She cracked her toes.

  “You don’t believe me,” Trixie said.

  “No, I do.” She was staring off at the door, licking her lips.

  “What, then?”

  She turned to Trixie, as if just now noticing she was there. “I’ve never told anyone this,” she said.

  “What?”

  “My miscarriage.”

  Trixie sipped the coffee. It was too hot, but her body came to life at the flavor. “When did you have it?”

  “Before the kids were born.”

  “I think you may have told me about it, actually.”

  “No,” Diane said, “not the circumstances. We were living on the second floor of an old woman’s house—come to think of it, she was probably about the age I am now, but she acted old. She was awful, yelling up at us every time we walked across the floor or left a dish dirty for more than a few minutes, that sort of thing.”

  She smiled at this and drank from her coffee cup, then set it aside. “I was pregnant, about five months. One day I was sitting in this old rocking chair we had in our bedroom, trying to learn to knit, which was something I thought I was supposed to do. I was starting to feel like a fool, though. I couldn’t do it. I don’t have a logical mind, and all that counting…Anyway, I kept at it, making a mess of the yarn, and I started to feel sick. Finally I put the knitting down, but I kept feeling more and more nauseated, until it actually hurt—and I looked down and saw blood, a lot of it, and I knew the baby was lost.”

  “My God,” Trixie said. Her own mother had miscarried the year after Schatze died. She remembered hiding under the bed in fear as her father rushed her to the hospital, and choking on the dust under there.

  “I remember screaming, and the landlady coming up to yell at me. But when she saw me she ran to the doctor. She didn’t have a phone, you see. I was terrified—I wasn’t yet twenty and I thought I was going to die. I didn’t, though.

  “But the strange thing happened a few weeks later, when I was recovering. It was in the middle of the night, and I had had this dream—I can’t remember it, but it was a nice one, the kind you’re sorry to wake up from—but when I woke up, I was pregnant again. I mean, very pregnant, as much as I had been before.”

  “I don’t understand,” Trixie said.

  “I mean I was pregnant.” She shrugged. “My belly was big, and there was a baby in it, and it wanted to come out. It kicked. And years later, when I felt Eleanor kicking, I knew the kicking that night had been real, or had felt real. And there was this terrific, awful pressure. So I pushed.”

  “You pushed.”

  She nodded. “I just sort of knew what to do. Frank was asleep next to me and I prayed he wouldn’t wake up. And after that, it was suddenly easy, not at all like Eleanor and Fred, it was easy and there was no pain. He just came out, like pulling a scarf out of a bottle. Zip! he was out.”

  “He?” Trixie said.

  “This white baby. He just floated up out of the sheets. He was smiling in such an adult way…I’ll tell you.” She took her feet off the table and sat up straight. “He was like those medieval paintings of Christ, where He’s a baby, but He’s got those adult eyes, and hands and feet. You know the ones?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like that. This white baby just kind of hovered the
re, and as I watched he covered up his mouth with his hand, like this”—she flattened her fingers together over her face—“and I was suddenly exhausted. It was like he had cast a spell. I felt like I had gone days without sleep. And as I was sinking, the baby just kind of…drifted away.”

  She stopped talking and sat back. Trixie was stunned. “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. When I woke up I was fine. No blood, no nothing. We ate breakfast and Frank went to work.”

  “Don’t you think you were dreaming?”

  “No, it didn’t feel that way.” She touched her chin. “It’s hard to explain. If it was a dream, it was a strange kind I haven’t had since, where everything is very real. Oh, Trixie, it was so real. I thought I was going crazy. But after that, I could bear the loss. I was still sad, but I didn’t want to kill myself. It was bearable. I felt like…I felt like he was safe, somehow.”

  “So you think…”

  “It was a ghost? I don’t know. The jury’s still out on that one. My point is, it doesn’t matter.” She noticed her coffee with a start, as if she had forgotten, and took a sip.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it helped me to get over what had happened. I’m saying maybe there’s a parallel here. I’m also saying I believe you.”

  But the rest of that night, Monday, Tuesday, he didn’t come again, and Trixie was left to consider what the encounter meant, left alone in a strangely empty house with her memories. For the first time she envied those who had God to turn to: these people knew what was to come if they had lived virtuous lives, had a collection of rules to turn to when things made no sense. She wondered if seeing Hamish meant that she was close to death herself; if, in fact, there was an afterlife and he was a messenger from it. A few weeks earlier, she had felt that her life, if not exactly what she’d expected, was at least settled. Now she didn’t even have that.

  9

  She’d kept the list of names from Monday’s paper and stuck the article in her bottom left desk drawer. It felt like a betrayal. Neither had said so, but when she and Paul made love that day it had seemed a partial reconciliation, and if she was serious about it, she would do her best to forget about the boy. If he had triggered some need in her that Paul was unprepared to fulfill, then so be it; her marriage ought to come first.

  This is what Anita told herself all afternoon Wednesday, when the teller lines were overflowing and customers with all kinds of problems were spilling into her office, demanding she solve them. This was not like Tuscaloosa, where people were polite in banks. Now, a tiny, furious woman stared at her with tired eyes behind large square eyeglasses.

  “It says right here, five point five percent. You told me it’d go up that much every day.”

  “You must have misunderstood,” Anita told her. “You see, this is an annual rate. It’s compounded daily. That means it goes up gradually, see, not all at once at the end of the year.” She pointed to the print on the woman’s CD that explained this.

  The woman stared at the paper for a moment, her mouth hanging open. Anita had seen this look before; it meant the customer was deciding not to believe what she’d just heard. She jabbed her finger at the print, looked up, and said, “My husband and me figured it. You owe us seven thousand, three hundred and ten dollars. That’s what you told me.”

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, Mrs. Leary. Do you know who you talked to when you came in to open your CD?”

  “It was you!”

  “It probably wasn’t. I do loans, not CDs.”

  She looked down at the paper and back up again. “My husband just bought a brand-new car!”

  “I understand your problem, but—”

  She snatched the paper from the desk and stood up. “I’m sick of you people trying to rip us off! You’re going to be hearing from Ted!”

  “Please, Mrs. Leary.”

  But she was already gone, stomping across the marble floor, her handbag swinging around her like a wind-whipped flag. People turned. She slammed through the door and out into the glare of the parking lot.

  It was ten after four by the clock on her desk, twenty minutes until the lobby closed. The clock had been a gift from the electronics company that had installed their phone system; nobody else had wanted it. It was a five-inch Lucite cube, with the clock embedded in the middle. The cube was perfectly clear, and whenever Anita looked at it she thought of the Kreskin’s Krystal she’d had as a kid—you’d swing a pendulum over the Krystal and it would tell your future. But all this clock told was the time. The clock itself was just a little plastic digital thing that she was sure would give out someday, but she was glad to have it there, blinking away, heavy and bright. There were tiny shafts that ran through the bottom of the cube to the clock, and it had come with a little metal spike you could stick in them to change the time.

  When she looked up, she was surprised to find no one in the chair facing her. Except for the line to the tellers, and a young couple sitting in New Accounts, nobody was waiting. She organized her desktop, straightening the out box, brushing the dust off her desk calendar, setting the stapler and tape dispenser next to each other at an empty corner. She rearranged her dried flowers. Then finally, desperately, she opened her drawer and pulled out the newspaper article.

  The paper had printed the ages of all the crash victims who had been identified, and the towns where they lived. She had recognized a lot of names, probably from the bank, and wondered if she’d notice, somewhere down the line, the absence of familiar faces. Three names were circled—all the boys between eight and thirteen who were from out of town. She copied the names onto her desk calendar, looked at the newspaper one last time, crumpled it up and threw it away.

  She took out the phone book and looked up the boys’ last names, then wrote down the numbers corresponding to those names in the phone book: three Huttons, five Butzes, four Rileys. Seven of these were men whose first name was definitely not Larry. There were two L’s and three women.

  Of course, it was very possible that the boy’s last name wasn’t the same as his uncle’s. At least fifty percent. And there was a chance that even if it was, the uncle didn’t have a listed number. She underlined L Riley, L Hutton, and the three women. Then, before she could change her mind, she dialed the first number. It rang four times, five, then an answering machine picked up. “You’ve reached Diane and Lloyd Riley,” came a woman’s voice. “Or rather, you haven’t.”

  She hung up. It was four-thirty—most people were still at work. She crossed out L Riley and dialed L Hutton. It rang seven times. She was about to hang up when a man answered. “Hello?” He was soft-spoken, tired-sounding. He said it again: “Hello?”

  She put on her business voice. “May I speak to Larry?”

  “This is,” he said.

  “Larry Connell?”

  “Oh,” he said. “No, this is Larry Hutton.”

  “Hutton…” she said, feigning confusion. He sounded young.

  “You must have the wrong number.” And he hung up.

  She set down the phone and leaned back in her chair. What were the chances that it wasn’t him? It could always be another Larry entirely, somebody with a different last name, but she doubted it. It felt right.

  She opened the phone book again and copied his address out of it: 2153 Keneally Drive. She knew where that was—down by the health food store, west of the Strip. There was a little neighborhood there that a lot of people didn’t know about. She and Paul had found it driving around. Small houses with clean yards, and beyond it Laidlaw Creek, which ran down to the river from the southern foothills; the crummier end of the neighborhood was separated from the mall parking lot by a thin, trash-strewn line of trees. She could call him anytime now; she could get in the car and drive to his house if she wanted. It wouldn’t take much to fulfill somebody’s dying wish. Tell him I’m here. Not much at all.

  * * *

  That night she got a ride home and ate alone on the couch, a plate balanced on her leg. Behind
her rattled the plastic garbage bags Paul had used to patch the hole, the clear plastic over the window. She watched the telephone, wondering if she should pick it up. The boy’s name, according to the paper, was Sasha. She reimagined finding him, speaking his name. Sasha, she says, it’ll be all right. You know my name, he says. And Anita touches his face, the side that still looks like a boy’s face, and says, Shhhh.

  It was just after eight when she heard the doorknob turn. She considered getting up to greet him. It was her duty, wasn’t it, to get up and do that? But she didn’t. She couldn’t shake the irrational feeling that everything that had happened was somehow Paul’s fault—the crash, Sasha’s death, the chaos of the aftermath. She set her empty dish aside, crossed her arms, and waited, watching the kitchen through the doorway.

  She heard footsteps, and Paul passed the doorway. He looked like he was carrying something bulky, like groceries, in his arms, and she was about to call out and thank him for shopping—immediately she felt like a heel for being angry at him—when it occurred to her that the man who’d come in was not Paul at all. He was too short and his hair was curly and darker than Paul’s. And he was fat. That was a belly he was carrying. She surprised herself with how angry this made her. They were being robbed. Then she heard the refrigerator door suck open and the bottles rattle on the door.

  He’s eating? she thought. He broke in for something to eat? She heard the man grunt, and items move around on the shelves; then the door shut and she heard a plate being set on the table. There was a distinct crinkle of plastic wrap. She was wondering whether to announce herself or not—what if he had a gun?—when he stepped into the living room, a cold chicken drumstick in each hand and his lips slick with grease. He was around sixty and wore a pair of khaki pants and a white shirt, both filthy. He sucked in breath and Anita let out a yelp, and in the silence that followed, the man’s eyes bulged and he dropped the chicken.