Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  “I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

  “Oh, well…”

  “No, please, it must have been awful. I…I can’t thank you enough. For staying with him through it. Most people would have run.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well,” he said, “it was a good thing, what you did.” He wiped his face with a napkin. “It was the best you could do. I hope you understand that.”

  She nodded. Relief was spreading inside her. Of course! I did my best! This wasn’t something Paul ever had bothered to tell her, had even bothered, she guessed, to notice. She’d done all she could.

  When they parted it was as if they were old friends. Who hugged whom was unclear—she thought it was Larry who first leaned toward her, but something in her stance could have been asking him to. His body was slender, like Paul’s, but there was substance to it, something surprising and alive when she pressed herself to it.

  “We should get together again,” he said.

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll call you at the bank.”

  Sure, sure, she was thinking, why not? Of course he must have seen her wedding ring, of course he wasn’t getting any ideas. This is what she told herself on the way back to the office, when on the bridge the breeze from the canyon threatened to lift her into the air and set her adrift in the river: of course everything will be fine now, everything will be fine.

  10

  Every day that he woke on the rock outcropping, Bernardo sat bolt upright, terrified, unsure of what happened to him or where he was. It was as if this place was a nightmare he kept dropping into from the sleep of his real life, though what that real life consisted of, or where it had gone, was a mystery to him.

  He had spent afternoons in the sun, looking down on the plane and the house and the tireless search-and-rescue operations, slowly working the soreness out of his body. For a couple of days he hadn’t eaten anything but foraged sour berries, so crowded was the yard, so awful the pain in his muscles. But once the people began to clear away, he was able to sneak into the house and take what he wanted. It was easy. They never locked the door, and the refrigerator and cabinets were always full of things to eat. He brought them up here, to his hideout, and tried to find a pattern in the mess he’d made of things, a signpost that would tell him what to do next.

  If the American movies he’d seen were any indication, it would be unwise to make himself known. He had lost his passport, and for all he knew, they still shot each other for no particular reason in the West. Surely the airline presumed him dead, and if he appeared, announcing he’d been in the crash, they’d probably interrogate him about what happened and then throw him in jail for a lunatic. He’d be found out, deported.

  The obvious solution was to find Antonio. It wouldn’t be hard. He had lost the phone number, but there was the town, off in the distance; all he had to do was go down to the road and walk along it, then look for his son in a telephone book. And though this increasingly seemed like a bad idea, though he recalled with greater and greater intensity that it wasn’t coincidence that drove his son away from him, certainly that is what he had to do, sooner or later.

  But right now he was a dead man, and this vantage point much like his imagined heaven: high, clear, uncomplicated. The problem was that he didn’t belong here: he belonged down there, with the real dead, carried in pieces to a waiting ambulance. Until he was caught by the people in the house, he’d had plenty of time to consider this, to wonder what it meant. Now he could only do what he’d dismissed as foolishness years ago: pray.

  * * *

  Maria hadn’t liked Bernardo’s mother; for that matter, neither had he. She was an irreligious woman who wielded religion only when it was morally convenient. She had a deep klaxon of a voice, which she employed in issuing endless commands, and Maria steadfastly refused to help Bernardo obey them. Mona was the last thing he attended to before he left for the market, and the first when he returned. And now that he had a son, Bernardo found himself stopping home several times a day on errands for Maria: lotions and groceries and unfathomable baby things. Generally on these errands he would come in reeking of meat and sweat to find his frosty wife pacing in the kitchen, and the shrill cries of his mother echoing in the back of the house: Bernardo, potete venire qui?—sarcastic and loud.

  Mona’s room was hung with acres of home-woven lace curtains, pillowcases, linens and tapestries, all white. She lay in bed in the middle of it, skinny and pale, her sewing laid out around her like surgical instruments. The room was immaculate but had the dusty, sour smell of sedentary skin and hair and bone. “Bernardo,” she would say to him, “that woman is trying to take over my house.”

  “She lives here, Mama. We need the room for the baby.”

  “It’s my house! I should kick you out on the street!”

  “Mama—”

  “Get her out! Get her out!”

  His mother wasn’t even old—younger than Bernardo was now—but she had taken on, unaccountably, the obstinacy of the ancient and infirm. He could feel his bones go to rubber at the sound of her screams, and Maria had little sympathy for him and his inability to stand up to her. Looking back, he felt like he had spent every waking moment smoothing out the battles between the two women, and fallen to sleep every night exhausted, Maria’s back to him across an expanse of empty sheet.

  He had married too quickly, that was for sure, and he and Maria were proving incompatible. Talking to her, trying to get at the source of her dissatisfaction, he learned that she saw marriage as an escape from her own crowded family home and its dreary obligations. She thought that being married would make her free, like it did in the movies, but living in Mona’s house she felt less free than she ever had.

  “Let’s live in an apartment,” she said one night. “Just you and me and the baby.” They were cleaning up the market after closing, Antonio asleep in the back room. This was when she could still enjoy helping him with the business, before she had come to realize their entire life might be played out here, in the service of strangers. “We need some time alone, Bernardo. Even when we’re in bed, I can feel her there, listening.”

  “She needs me,” he told her. Outside, the voices of young men echoed in the street, and a girl’s voice answered from somewhere, distant and sweet. “I can’t just leave.”

  “Go see her for an hour or two a day.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Hire a nurse! Do something!” She had been wiping the counter, calling across the room to him where he swept, and now she put the rag down and came to him. “Bernardo. Who’s more important to you, me or her?”

  “It isn’t like that. It’s not a matter of more or less important.”

  “Sure it is.” She grabbed the broom from him. “I married you,” she said. “Not her.”

  “You are, then. It’s just that she’s my mother.”

  Her eyes grew fiery, but then, suddenly, she gave up. She deflated like an old tire, hung her head, handed back the broom.

  “I’ll talk to her,” he said as she walked back to the counter. “I’ll tell her we want to move.”

  “She’ll only get angry.”

  “Maybe not.”

  The next day he pulled a chair to the foot of his mother’s bed, and asked her to let them move out. Mona had a stony, angular face, but before all the words had left his mouth her face went slack and soft as a rotting pumpkin and tears began to well in her eyes. “Okay,” she said, groping for a handkerchief. “Fine, you go.”

  “Mama…”

  “No, abandon your mother, I don’t care. I can be alone. I’ve been alone before. Not while your father was alive, of course—your father would never have abandoned me, but you, you’re something different entirely.”

  So they stayed. Bernardo would later see this as the moment when they gave up on their ambitions of independence and ease, when the old lady finally beat them. But now he only scrambled for an angle, a way to make this latest disappointment into a trifle.r />
  He went to the kitchen, where Maria was waiting, and understood there was no reassurance, no platitude that could pacify her. Her face was a dull cipher, a grim mirror of his sleeping son’s. Of course she had heard everything. And then, strangely enough, he saw only evidence of Maria in Antonio; his tiny fists seemed loaded with her defiance, his face weighted down with her defeat. Bernardo’s own features were nowhere to be found.

  * * *

  He dozed on a rock for a while, and dreamed the plane had landed safely in the forest. It tumbled violently in the air, just like it had during the crash, but the passengers were perfectly calm. When they touched down, gently as a fallen leaf, the door opened into the trees, and outside stood crowds of happy people, greeting their loved ones, shaking hands and hugging and kissing. As the plane emptied, people walked off in different directions, disappearing into the woods. Soon they were all gone, and Bernardo found himself alone with the plane, a charred hulk already overgrown with weeds and grass.

  He woke to the sound of his name, among markedly different shadows. It was afternoon. He sat up and looked around, but saw no one. Then he heard his name again, from far away. Below him, in the yard of the house, stood the blond-haired man. He was peering into the woods. He brought his hands to his mouth and put them down again, and a second later Bernardo heard his name a third time.

  “Hello!” he called out from the rock. Paul leaned farther toward the trees, facing the wrong direction.

  “Come out!” he called.

  Bernardo considered a moment, then began to make his way down the hill. Dirt and stones got into his shoes, and he stopped several times to empty them. Once or twice he heard Paul call to him again, and when he got out of the woods Paul was still standing where he had been, in the middle of the yard, looking up at the hills.

  “Hello!” Bernardo said.

  “Hi.” Paul walked across the yard to meet him. He seemed uncomfortable with the sunlight and walked shading his eyes. When they met he stuck out his hand.

  “I didn’t really get to talk to you,” he said. “It’s Paul, remember?”

  “Ah. Well. Happy to meet you.”

  Paul nodded, and pointed over at the hole in the house. “Anita said you could fix that?”

  “Oh, yes. The other, too.” He gestured toward the shed.

  He nodded again. “Well, you know, I’ve gotta talk her into it…”

  “Yes?”

  “I think you ought to do it. I mean, you need the work, right? And we’re pretty busy. So…”

  “I work slow. But a good job. In Italy, I fix my market.”

  “Oh!” Paul said. “So that was what you did. You had a market.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Is that what you came here to do?”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “But it didn’t work out.”

  “No.”

  Paul shook his head. “Yeah, I hear you.”

  He looked over Bernardo’s shoulder into the trees and seemed to get lost there for a moment. Bernardo wondered what, if anything, to say now. He didn’t imagine this would go over at all well with the wife.

  “Well,” he said. “We go look? At the house? Probably you need wood…”

  “Oh, yeah. Sure.”

  They walked toward the house, skirting what looked like the remains of a large vegetable garden. A strip of gouged earth led to the airplane engine lying just beyond the treeline. Paul shook his head when he saw Bernardo looking at it. “You’d think they’d come and take that away,’’ he said.

  Bernardo had been thinking nothing of the sort. In Italy, the engine would probably stay there forever, disintegrating. When they reached the house, he could see that the damage wasn’t as bad as it might have been; the window had shattered, but the frame wasn’t crushed. The engine had sheared the corner off more cleanly than he would have thought possible. He shuddered to think of how fast it must have fallen to do this, how fast the plane too must have fallen. And the trough it made in the yard was deep enough to bury a body in. His stomach began to seize up. That he had survived seemed beyond comprehension.

  “What do you think?” Paul asked.

  “Well. You need new roof. Also the wall?”

  “Hmm.”

  “And the window.”

  Paul frowned. He looked defeated. “Sounds expensive.”

  “Not so bad.”

  “No?”

  “Well,” Bernardo said. He looked around at the trees. “I do not know the cost of wood. But…”

  “Maybe we can go to the lumberyard later and get the stuff we need.”

  “But your wife…”

  He shrugged. “I gotta pick her up at work pretty soon. Depending on what kind of day she’s having, maybe I can talk her into it. You never know.”

  “Work.”

  “Works at a bank.” He grinned. “And I just started a new job myself. Private eye. Well, assistant to one.”

  “Like in the movies.”

  “Sort of,” Paul said. “Not so exciting, I guess.”

  “So today you do this?”

  Paul frowned. “Not exactly. Well, sort of, I guess.”

  For awhile, they talked about detective movies. The Big Sleep, Chinatown. Paul mentioned Double Indemnity. “Ah!” Bernardo told him. “This is my favorite.”

  Soon they sat at the kitchen table, making a list of what they’d need on a paper napkin. Bernardo found himself slightly put off by Paul’s enthusiasm. There was something blind and unseemly about it, as if the enthusiasm wasn’t for the thing at all but the fact that they had it to do. Did he think his wife would change her mind about letting this stranger into her life? Bernardo was certain she wouldn’t, especially now that Paul had simply gone against her wishes and asked him to stay anyway. He could smell a bad marriage from a mile away.

  Paul picked up his keys. “I’ll get us a few things,” he said, walking toward the door. “Why don’t you go check out the shed? See what we can salvage.”

  “You have…tools?”

  “Uh, yeah. They were in the shed.”

  “Ah.”

  When Paul had gone (leaving him in the house, to his surprise), Bernardo rummaged in the refrigerator and found some cheese, which he ate. He walked around the house, snooping. Their bedroom, for all its rustic simplicity, was strangely antiseptic, the walls devoid of photos or art, the bed covered by a plain gray quilted bedspread.

  The bed. He sat down on the edge, testing, then lay back. It felt like months, though he’d been in his own bed in Italy only a week ago. This mattress was the way he liked them, just a bit resistant, as if to remind you of your own body. It was like Paula’s—the sort of bed you wanted to be in with a lover, when awareness of the body was the point, and rest secondary.

  For years he’d never visited that bed at night. He and Paula took their lunches at her apartment in the afternoons—a cup of coffee and a snack, and often love, when they wanted. There was no pressure; for both of them, obligations were elsewhere—for him, with his wife and mother and son; for her, with her art. It was only tenderness they relied on each other for, and in that each found the other generous and dependable.

  Maria’s illness had brought them together. By this time Bernardo had come to hate his wife in a familiar way. She complained she was like a slave to his business; he thought her expectations of him were too high, that she only felt she needed things because she hadn’t accomplished anything herself. Divorce was out of the question. They still ate dinner at the same table, with Antonio, by now a brooding ten-year-old; they still slept in the same bed.

  Then she began to grow thin. At first it stirred in him a new desire; it reminded him of the way she looked when they courted—slender and dark, with dim circles under her eyes. For some months they even made love again and spoke to each other when they didn’t need to, for pleasure. And then one day she fainted in the market from pain and was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer—something they both secretly expected. She went to bed and grew worse. In her pain
she needed more from him, and the competition between her and Mona intensified; each bossed the boy around and criticized Bernardo for his attention to the other. And their pain, he knew, was great, and this knowledge racked him with guilt when he thought about hating them, which was often. He hired someone new at the market to take Maria’s place. This was Paula.

  They fell into their romance easily. She was a painter, a realist, not at all bad, though she had the frumpy clothes and dull features of a housekeeper instead of the artist’s Bohemian affect. Her body was round and farmy, and its solidness held a particular appeal for Bernardo, whose home was haunted by near-ghosts. He fed her, and she taught him how to draw and paint.

  But later, after Mona and Maria had died and Antonio had left for America, things changed between them. Without any obstacles to something deeper, they began to drift together more often and under new circumstances, spending nights in each other’s beds, dining out. Somehow, though, it felt forced. Much of the time they both wanted to be alone, and neither of them welcomed the change of pace that extra contact brought. Before long they had returned to their old habits, and that didn’t feel right either; what was once necessity now seemed selfish. It took some time for them to adjust to this new revelation: that they were two adults who preferred distance.

  And then, just recently, things changed again: Paula began to want more. Bernardo was wary. Her desire was to him a kind of flattery, and his immediate impulse was to give in to it. But something held him back: a strange portent of catastrophe, as if to give himself to her in any deeper way might mean the end of them both.