Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  He followed them to a suburban house in the South Hills, presumably the boy’s parents’, and watched them go inside. They were in there for a long time—Paul had no watch on, but it seemed like an hour and a half—before Alyssa came out alone, hitching her knapsack up on her shoulder. She walked around the truck and started off down the street, walking with a swagger that, in its blithe confidence and pleasure, Paul found heartbreaking.

  When she was out of earshot, he got out of the car. He pushed the door nearly closed as quietly as he could, then leaned heavily against it until it latched; he began to follow her on foot, through the undulating grid of streets that had been carved into the side of the foothill. She walked ten, eleven, twelve blocks, turning frequently and cutting through the corners of yards, following no apparent set route, making it difficult for Paul to keep her in sight. Finally, when they had reached a slightly older, more run-down neighborhood (for this part of town, anyway, with its succession of in-ground pools and chattering sprinklers) than the one they’d left, Alyssa ran up the walk of a small ranch-style with yellow wood siding and walked in the door.

  Paul stood on the corner of the previous block, blinking. There was a familiar-looking car in the driveway, an old Jeep Cherokee with a dent in the passenger door. He remembered suddenly where he’d seen it: the parking lot of the strip mall where Ponty’s office was. He’d followed her to his boss’s house.

  * * *

  This went on for a while. He followed Alyssa to coffee shops and the movies; he sat behind her in the drive-up line at Burger King. Sometimes she was with her boyfriend and sometimes she wasn’t; occasionally she hung out with a towheaded girl with impossibly white skin, and they leaned together, giggling.

  He wasn’t sure how to treat this new behavior of his. He thought about her constantly, terrified whenever he was at home or doing real work that she was in some kind of trouble, had gotten herself into a situation that she would need to be rescued from. He began to have fantasies about just that: she and her friend, or boyfriend, get their hands on some beer (something, to his surprise, they didn’t ever seem to do), they drive around and crash, and he resuscitates her on the hot pavement while lights flash around them. The boyfriend gets rough with her, she protests, Paul steps in. She finds herself in a tough part of town, and is threatened by thugs for her money; Paul shows up and chases them away. The fantasies always ended in a kind of haze, just at the height of Paul’s heroism. Whatever happened next was always unclear. Did he drive her home, comfort her with fatherly pats on the back, bring her to Ponty (“I happened to be driving by,” he says to his employer. “Lucky thing”)? Or did it go in another direction—a kind embrace, the purple hair beneath his hands, his fingers on the smooth skin of her neck…? It was this ending that made Paul nervous, and he always prevented himself from fully imagining it, the way he would occasionally entertain the horror, in his most miserable moments, of some kind of awful self-mutilation, then pull back the reins on his imagination before something disgusting actually happened in it.

  On one hand, the idea of romance with a teenager was highly unattractive to him. Pimples, gum, the characteristic combination of boldness and squeamishness. But the idea of romance with Alyssa was a different thing. He only watched her, he never talked to her, and at such distance he admired her for her independence and lack of gloominess. He was well aware of the difference between the Alyssa he daydreamed about and the one who probably existed, for real, in the halls of the high school. This knowledge did not, however, curb the frequency or intensity of his obsessions.

  Meanwhile, he worked on the house with Bernardo. The old man knew his stuff, this was for sure, and Paul could see that he took great pleasure in it. He had been a big man when they met him, but since then he had lost weight and grown a black and gray beard that made him look ten years younger. They said little to each other that didn’t have to do with the repairs. Bernardo talked about filling in the divots the plane engine had left and covering them with new sod; he gave Paul advice on bringing the garden back to life in the spring: planting it elsewhere in the yard, staggering the various vegetables in a different way, keeping bugs out at the times of day when they were most likely to appear.

  It was the middle of September. Paul was on his way back from the lumberyard with siding and plywood when it began to rain. The drops were gigantic and left splashes the size of half dollars on the windshield, and before he had gone a quarter mile up Valley Road his visibility had fallen almost to zero. He found the side of the road and stopped there, letting warm air from the car heater widen the clear circles on the inside of the window. By now—after six—Anita was in the living room, relaxing after her day of work. Paul stared out into the rain and pictured her there, on the couch, dozing and waiting for him to come home.

  He realized this was wishful thinking. She hadn’t been herself these past few weeks. Or, rather, she had been herself—nervous to finish tasks begun, eager for whatever she was doing to end. But usually she felt that way only when she was tied up in something she didn’t like. Now, evidence of that mood was cropping up all the time. She rushed through her dinners, went to bed soon after. She got up a little later than usual, forgoing her leisurely cup of coffee, and left for work early. She lingered only in the bathroom. Her baths could last for well over an hour, and sometimes Paul heard the faucet over the sink running for fifteen or twenty minutes at a time. He’d been thinking it was Bernardo who bothered her, but lately Bernardo seemed to have sensed her mood too, and backed off as much as he could, only coming into the house to make them dinner, or to take something from the refrigerator for breakfast.

  The rain slowed down. Paul pulled back into traffic, the lumber clunking in the back of the car, and drove slowly. The defogger was losing to the outside air, and he reached forward to wipe off the window: it was cool. Autumn, finally, was here.

  He pulled up to the house and ran inside. The lights were off, the air still dry and flat from the morning’s heat. Nobody was there. He looked at his watch: six-forty-five. He went back out to start unloading the car, slipped on the porch steps, and landed in the mud, banging his elbow on a rock.

  It barely hurt, but he lay there, feeling it, trying to follow the last fluttering scrap of pain as it floated away from him. When it had all receded, he found his chest suddenly heaving and tears gathering hotly behind his eyes.

  This took him by surprise, and it wasn’t until his vision blurred and he felt the itch of humiliation in his face that he realized just how frustrated he had been lately—how much of the past few weeks had been spent deflecting Anita’s brazen dismissiveness, how little affection she had offered him, how little he had risked offering her. In the mud, he felt doomed. He let himself sink farther, his head cradled by the accommodating muck, and breathed, his eyes closed, until it seemed that tears wouldn’t come after all.

  He stood up, and the frustration began to drain out of his body, and loneliness percolate up into it. This loneliness was great and hollow as an empty gymnasium, and he gulped air trying to fill it. He hadn’t felt like this since his deathbed vigil, years before, with his mother, who rejected his every attempt at conversation as if they were offers to get up and play tennis. “Remember the time…” he might ask her, or, “Tell me about when Dad…” And she would slowly turn her head, her dry lips parting like the seal on an old jar whose forgotten contents had long since putrefied, and tell him with great effort to shut up. And he did, with relief, because he didn’t want to know what might come out of her if she really started talking. She hated him, and he hated her, and he carried on his charade of compassion and gratitude until she was dead.

  He wondered if he had ever loved Anita—if he had ever loved anything—with the unmitigated passion he hated his mother with during those weeks.

  He rubbed the water off his face with a clean part of his hand, and found himself peering off into the forest, toward the wreckage. The rain had slowed, and the droplets shone in newly revealed sunlight over
the trees. Nothing was visible from here, but the dark green was so strong, the new coolness of the air such a shock and invigoration, that he felt himself invited into it. He walked to the edge of the clearing, gave the sodden and rotting garden a wide berth, and stepped over the deep ruts the emergency vehicles had left.

  Under the canopy of trees, the rain seemed to have stopped entirely, and the turpentine smell of pine needles was enough to make his eyes water. He hadn’t come back here since the crash. The rescuers and investigators, now long finished, had left a clear path through the humus where they had carried their stretchers and clipboards, and he followed it to the creek, which from the rain had regained some life. He stepped in and over, and was shocked by the cold of the water. It rushed against his legs and lapped up to his thighs. When he stepped out he squinted into the distance and thought he could see a flash of metallic light. Then it was gone. He bent over and rubbed his legs, now nearly numb with cold, and began to jog along the new path slowly, looking at the ground around him for evidence of the crash.

  Ahead now, the plane’s pale outline was easy to see; it looked like a whale that had been beached here, the tail a great fin sticking out of its side, the torn fuselage its gaping mouth. Its flesh gleamed in the light, which had come almost to dominate the sky, shoving aside the storm like dust before a broom. Paul wondered briefly how they would get the thing out—surely it was too heavy to be lifted by helicopters.

  The fuselage was surrounded by a strip of yellow police-line tape. He arrived at it panting—it was the farthest he’d run, perhaps, since he was a child—and was immediately surprised by the plane’s size. It was not big. For a moment he thought he must have missed something. Such a flimsy thing—its metal skin bare inches away from the skin of its passengers—could never carry human cargo anywhere; it could only be knocked out of the air. And here, of course, it had been. He looked up and saw where the tops of trees had been shaved off as it fell; several trees had fallen completely, and leaned crazily against each other around the irregular clearing the crash had created.

  He stepped over the police tape and stood before the wide maw of the fuselage. The backs of four seats sat before him, and the rows continued beyond them into the wet half-dark of the plane. A hole had been blown in the side, over where a wing, now doubled over and crushed beneath the wreck, had been. There was an accordion bend just beyond this, where the fuselage bunched up on one side and tore open on the other, and this bend allowed him only the slightest glimpse of the cockpit, with its glistening dials and switches. There was no rain at all now, and slivers of sun sliced through the trees to the ground; there was no sound save for the rushing of the creek in the distance behind him and the steady drip of water everywhere. The forest smell couldn’t mask the sharp scent of metallic decay. The entire scene reminded him of a half-eaten meal, carnal and ruined.

  He climbed into the hole and stood on the carpet between the rows of seats. It had not been cleaned up—there was still blood here. It stained the seats and carpet and ceiling, and the rain had brought it back to life, so that it drooled down the walls and windows as if the plane itself were bleeding. Muddy footprints tracked through the blood, where investigators had certainly been, where paramedics removed belted-in bodies. He walked forward suppressing nausea, around the strange and frightening bend, into the cockpit.

  The control panel had been smashed and was brown with blood; the steering column had been snapped off and lay in a corner like a pair of antlers. A few shards of windshield remained. The entire thing was canted at an angle of about thirty degrees, so Paul had to grip the doorframe to keep from falling over.

  Outside, chewing on a nut and staring at him through the windshield, was a brown squirrel. It was balanced on an upthrust fold of metal on the pushed-in nose cone and seemed undisturbed by his presence.

  He thought, I will never fly again. How could anyone think it would work? Then he thought that there would be nowhere for him to fly, anyway.

  * * *

  He came out into the yard, which now, illuminated by full sun, sparkled like broken glass. He squished through the mud to the porch, took off his shoes and socks, and went inside.

  Anita was at the table, sipping from a mug of something. She looked up at him and her face darkened. She managed a weak smile.

  “When did you get home?” he said.

  “Just now.”

  “I didn’t hear a car.”

  She put the mug down and folded her hands. “Kathy dropped me off at the end of the drive. Her car can’t handle the dirt road.” Kathy was her coworker, who’d been giving her rides since Paul had started working. She’d never had problems with the dirt road before, though. Both of them knew this, and after a moment under his scrutiny, Anita hung her head. This gesture had the effect of sucking every last bit of energy from his body, and with great effort he removed his muddy shirt and tossed it onto the porch.

  “What happened to your shirt?” she asked, trying to sound cheerful and failing.

  “I fell in the mud.”

  She nodded, not bothering to ask where he’d been since she got home. She stared into her mug. Paul walked past her. “I’m going to take a bath,” he said. “Just so you know where I’ll be. In case there’s anything you want to tell me.”

  He showered briefly, to get the mud out of his hair. It fell to the floor of the tub in thick dark chunks and dissolved in the water. Afterward he stepped out and drew a bath, then sat in it, and finally lay down, his nose and mouth just above the surface and the rest of his head underwater. He could not get warm.

  He heard her come in. She said something he didn’t catch, and then repeated it, a little louder. He cut her off. “Are you sleeping with somebody?” he said.

  She said something else now. “What?” he said. “I can’t hear you.” Then he felt her hand in his hair, pulling him up. She brought her face down to his.

  “Yes!” she said. “I am!”

  “Thank you,” he said, and sat up.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Ah! Sorry. Good!”

  “Paul—”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said. The feeling of exhaustion would not go away. He started to sink again but left his ears above water this time.

  “I’ve been unhappy,” she was saying. She sat on the toilet, her knees pressed together. Her voice bounced around the room, off the walls, off the surface of the water, which seemed to modulate it a half-tone too high. Or perhaps that was just the way she said it. “You promised me a family and it didn’t come. And then, all this.” Her arm swung out, toward the woods. “Everything just went to pieces, Paul.”

  “Not me!” he said. “I didn’t go to pieces.”

  “We can’t all be as steady as you, Paul.”

  “Oh, that’s true. I suppose you’ll tell your lover that. ‘Paul was a rock through all this, poor brave guy.’”

  “Paul—”

  “So is it serious?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “So it just might be a casual thing, then? Just a little snack? Well that’s certainly a relief.”

  She sat there for a moment, silent, and he closed his eyes and tried to will the heat of the water to penetrate him. He reached out with his foot and let the hot water tap run for a few seconds. When he shut it off he heard her moving, the sound of her clothes being taken off.

  “Ah,” he said. “The reconciliation.”

  She stepped into the tub at the spigot end and crouched there. He heard her splashing herself. “Jesus,” she said. “This is hot.” She tried to sit but his legs were in the way. “Move,” she said.

  “Fuck you!”

  “Come on.”

  He moved, bringing his knees up to his chin and holding them there with his arms, trying with all his might not to touch her. When he opened his eyes, finally, she was staring at him, her eyes red, her hair sticking to her forehead with sweat. “Do you still want me?” she said.

  He slammed his fists into the water. It spla
shed over the edge and spattered on the floor, and he felt his knuckles smash into the enamel, felt the skin on them break. “Of course I do! Of fucking course I do!” he screamed at her, and the sound against the tiles was incredibly loud, louder than he had ever heard himself or thought he could get. She flinched, and began, silently, to cry.

  He felt his bowels loosen with the force of his anger and clenched himself inside, clenched every muscle in his body against it, to keep from screaming again. His hands were palms down in the water, curled like an ape’s, and blood had begun to strip away from the knuckles in slow, widening strands, four to a hand. The blood dissolved like contrails, and he brought his hands to his face. Little flaps of skin pulled back and jumped with each heartbeat. His elbow throbbed.

  “Oh Jesus, Paul,” Anita said, and stepped dripping from the tub. He heard her rummage in the cabinet under the sink. Then she climbed back into the water, her breasts long and slender from the pull of gravity as she stood above him, her hands spilling with bandages and tape.

  He understood that this was what he was in danger of losing—the privilege of seeing her body at its most raw and practical. The muscles in her thighs went taut as she sat, her shoulders bowed; this was unsexual and beautiful to him, and the loss was a great, awful vacuum in his chest, pulling at anything he seemed to have left inside him. “Keep still,” she said. She patted his knuckles with tissues and swabbed iodine onto the wounds; she snipped up a gauze pad with a pair of cuticle scissors and taped the pieces to his fingers. The flat, medicinal odor of the gauze floated up to him. He closed his eyes.