Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  13

  Hamish kept coming. It wasn’t every night, but by now it was familiar enough to her that she could keep her heart from racing as he walked around the house. Usually he sat down to dinner, whether she was eating or not; sometimes he only paced from window to window. He always pushed the curtains aside with the same deliberate movement, the back of his hand sweeping them slowly up. He would stare out for long minutes, perfectly still, and then the curtains would sift through his fingers like a wooden fence swallowed by blown sand. And when they were closed he withdrew, apparently disappointed, and walked off, only to vanish again at the road.

  One night, while he stood sadly at the window, Trixie got up and went outside. She watched him from the yard. He was faintly luminous, a paper lantern lit by a candle. After a few minutes, during which he didn’t seem to see her, his eyes suddenly widened in surprise and he leaned forward, frowning. He pulled away and headed for the door; she saw him flash by in the kitchen window. But he never came out. When she went back inside, he was gone.

  Saturday morning she woke up just before dawn from a strange and unsettling dream, her body trembling and damp from what she recognized, after a moment’s thought, as sexual warmth. This was the dream: she was treading water in a huge lake, the shores of which were too far away to see. She didn’t feel like she was in immediate danger of sinking, though it was obvious that sooner or later she would have to. She had the same seventy-three-year-old body in the dream, with its same erosion and marks of age, but it kept her afloat without strain.

  Beneath her something huge and muscular was swimming, a creature she sensed was deadly and capable of bringing her under. The water’s surface swelled around her with the creature’s slow undulations. She woke up when its skin—not scaly or slimy, but smooth, warm, like a Thanksgiving turkey—slid across the pads of her feet. The contact sent waves of hot itch up her legs, and the feeling persisted once she was awake. When she reached down to rub her feet, she was surprised and frustrated to find that her stiff and sore old limbs had been restored to her. She lay down again and noticed the slick warmth between her legs; she touched herself there, pressing as she sometimes had, but the desire leached out of her and she fell back to sleep, her fingers drying on the air.

  The dream left her with a drifting sense of urgency that followed her all morning. After coffee and toast she decided to go to the University Library, where she could bury herself in other things. Going out to the car, she noticed that the air, which had been nosebleed-dry for the better part of a month, had gone clammy. The temperature had dropped fifteen degrees overnight. The change heralded the approach of uneasy breathing—the cold alone would be tough on her lungs, as it was every year, plus there was the industrial sludge and woodstove smoke the valley trapped in autumn and winter. She’d have to stay inside more, soon, a fact that filled her with unusually deep dread. For now, though, the air was damp and clear as a glass of water.

  She wondered how Edward was doing in Glacier Park, where by now it was certainly much colder. They might already have snow. She remembered how much he hated fall when he was a teenager; he trudged off to school as if to prison. The year before Kat left, he was thirteen and at his most brittle and fearful. Meanwhile his sister had gotten more brutal. She dragged him about the house by the arm, telling him where to sit, what to do. She listened dutifully when Trixie scolded, but her eyes were full of disdain, and Trixie sensed that she was only paying attention to get a better sense of her enemy’s flaws. When Trixie brought home their meager groceries, Kat sneered at them, as if Trixie held exclusive blame for the family’s poverty. She endured Trixie’s reprimands with unsettling patience before stealing away to her room. She studied the Bible passionately, masochistically, sometimes staying awake all night, and always returned from school over an hour late.

  Edward, on the other hand, frequently didn’t go to school, and the school secretary’s tone of righteous disdain on the phone became all too familiar to her. On a September morning much like this one, she went to look for Edward down along the river, where she’d occasionally found him before. She looked in all his usual spots—crouched at the base of a bridge abutment; cracking rocks together in the tall grass—but he didn’t turn up. She had decided to climb the bank to look for him in the street, when she heard a sound trickling from a corrugated drainage pipe. She came closer and recognized the sound as Edward’s voice. He was talking, it sounded like to himself.

  “Edward?”

  She scrambled over the rocks at the water’s edge and listened. “Edward!”

  There was a thud in the pipe that cast a metallic echo onto the riverbank.

  “Sweetheart, is that you?”

  To look inside, she had to take a step into the shallow edge of a cataract. The water was cold, and her feet, protected only by tennis shoes, quickly went numb. It was dark in the pipe, and smelled gritty and flat with the collective runoff of the town’s busiest streets. Above them, on the bridge, cars rumbled past.

  “Edward, are you in there?” Now her eyes had gotten adjusted to the darkness, and she could see him, pressed into the pipe’s curve with his arms wrapped around his knees. His toes poked into a muddy puddle. It occurred to her then that Edward was almost fourteen—fourteen!—no age to be crouched here by the river, mumbling. He was sitting just beyond arm’s length.

  “Please come out,” she said. Her voice bounced off past him, and it took a few seconds for the echo to stop.

  “No.”

  “It’s dangerous in there. There might be rats.”

  He turned his face toward the darkness, then buried it in his knees.

  “Please talk to me,” she said. “I’m your mother.”

  “Why should I?”

  “Because I care about you, Edward.” She began to slip from the rock she was standing on, and moved to better footing. “I love you. I’m worried about you.”

  He sighed heavily and deeply, and for that moment he didn’t sound like he was fourteen. He sounded like he was forty. “Kat says you lie.”

  She held the edges of the pipe tightly. “Edward, it’s me. I don’t know what Kat has been telling you, but I…we should talk about it.” He said nothing. “What does she say I lie about? What?”

  “Everything.”

  “Everything.” She curled her toes in the shoes. It was hard to feel them. “Look, Edward, come out. I’ll buy you something to eat. We can have lunch downtown. We can talk.”

  He looked up, his face filthy. “I won’t have to go back to school?”

  “Of course not. Not if you don’t want.”

  He gave this a moment’s thought, then began to crawl out. She offered him her hand. “I can do it,” he said.

  She moved away from the opening and stood shivering on the dry rocks. He came out a second later, gangly, glum, hugging himself against the cold.

  “Come on,” she said, taking his arm. “Where do you want to go?”

  He shrugged. “Corner Deli?”

  “Okay,” she said, thinking about what she could not spend money on to make up for the extravagance of a restaurant. Powdered milk? Coffee. This week, no coffee. “Corner Deli it is.”

  In the restaurant, they sat at a small table near the window. She took her shoes off and rubbed her bare feet until the feeling came back to them. Edward was astonished that she would do this, and finally he slipped off his own shoes. They ordered hamburgers. Trixie hadn’t had a hamburger in months. When the food came, a great pit seemed to open up inside her, and she are with ravenous energy, nearly forgetting about Edward. She looked up and noticed that he was doing the same thing. They said nothing to one another until the hamburgers were gone. And then Edward, without prompting, said to her, “Kat goes to this religious place after school.” He swirled a couple of french fries around in a puddle of ketchup.

  “Religious place?”

  “Some kind of church, except people live there. She gets all these prayer books and pamphlets and things. Sometimes she makes
me read them, or she makes me listen to her read out of them.” His voice was very small, and Trixie noticed that his hand, gripping the french fry, was shaking.

  “I don’t understand. A church where people live?”

  He hung his head and she thought for a moment she had blown it. But then he said, “It’s this house she goes to. These religious people live there. They call it a church but it isn’t, really. I went there a couple of times.”

  “You did?”

  “Yeah.”

  Her hands twitched and found each other. She moved them under the table. “So what did you think?”

  He shrugged, his head still low. “I dunno. It was okay. They’re into peace and love and all that, you know, God. But they’re weird.”

  “Weird.”

  “They think the world’s going to end. Also they’re like…it’s like they think everybody else is wrong. Like, the people who don’t do their thing are all going to die when the world ends, but they’re all going to live somehow. Marshall’s supposed to be some sort of high ground, because of the mountains. Except most of the country’s going to get flooded and everybody’s going to get killed.” He risked a glance to see how she was reacting. She must have looked okay, because he kept his head up. When he looked down at his hand he seemed surprised to find a french fry there. He ate it.

  “So what do you think?”

  “I believe in God, I guess.” He sighed. “But not the other stuff. I think if there’s a God He probably likes everybody.” Now he braved a direct look at Trixie, and it froze her to her seat: he hadn’t met her gaze for a long, long, time. The Edward she thought she knew was gone. “Kat does, though. She tells me you’re going to die. Like she’s trying to scare me.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t scare me. I mean, I’m not a little kid.”

  “Well, okay,” she said.

  “I think Kat’s kind of crazy.”

  “Crazy?”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I mean, she hates everybody. I think she’s going to run away.” As he said this a cloud seemed to lift from his face. His eyes gleamed. “She really scares me sometimes.”

  “I’m sorry,” Trixie said. “If your father and I caused any…”

  He shook his head. He didn’t want, or need, to hear. “Is he coming back, or what?”

  This startled her. Of course she had no hope of Hamish returning. She had assumed the children felt the same. “I don’t think so.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “It’s better this way.” He seemed to doubt this a little.

  “It’s not now,” she said. “But we can make it better.”

  “Kat thinks he’s coming back. Or she says so. I think she’s going to go look for him if he doesn’t.”

  “I have no idea where he is,” Trixie admitted.

  “Seattle. Or someplace near there.”

  “What!”

  “Kat found out.” He didn’t offer any explanation and, for the time being, Trixie didn’t ask for it. Seattle. She wondered what Hamish, who’d been so choked here in a small town, would do in a city.

  “I wish I was older,” Edward said after a while. “I wish I was in college.”

  “That’s why you ought to be in school,” she couldn’t help saying.

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  * * *

  She drove slowly down her road, dodging potholes, then accelerated to the speed limit when she got to the new section of pavement. The windshield was fogging up on the inside and the heat was not yet hot. She tugged the sleeve of her coat over her hand to wipe away the condensation, revealing the hillsides on the way into town, dotted with new developments ugly in their uniformity. When she got to Cedar she turned right and headed east, toward the University. She had just passed the bowling alley and was looking south, to where the sun sparkled on the river, when she noticed a hand resting on the dash to her right. It moved back and forth, tracing a rectangular swath in the dust. Her heart lurched and she took her foot off the gas. The car rolled to a stop on the shoulder, and soon the only sounds were the noises of Cedar Avenue seeping through the closed windows and the shallow rhythm of her own breathing.

  And then, the most gentle of brushings: that hand on the dash, moving again through the dust. Its edges were eerily, impossibly clear, the hairs upon it false, uniform; its skin was dark and unblemished, as if airbrushed there in heaven by a ceaseless and benevolent sun.

  A scent in the car, like the sea: salt, a hint of fish. Rich decay that reminded her of swooping gulls.

  Before she could gather herself, could consider the consequences, she turned, and there he was, dressed crisply in a light denim shirt, jeans, boots. As he moved, his clothes did not rustle against themselves; his chest neither rose nor fell. He turned to her. No hat, his face mature but youthful still, his hair combed neatly back across his head, exposing his wide forehead. It was and was not Hamish’s face, precise in the shape of its features yet curiously emotionless. He seemed an apparition by committee, an average of her memories of him. He was fifty, thirty. He looked at her and did not look at her.

  “Hamish?” Her voice sounded steadier and stronger than it felt, yet there was something curiously flat about it, as if this ghost absorbed all sound around it. Her skin felt dry.

  His eyes narrowed and he looked blankly at her. He blinked.

  “Hamish.”

  And now, instead of answering, he looked out the front window, frowning, and then craned his neck to see out the back, toward where the hills rose from the valley floor. She could see the outline of the passenger headrest dimly through his neck. After a moment he turned back to her, expressionless, and turned again to look out the back, like a dog who wanted out, but with military dignity.

  She turned the car around and went back the way she had come, taking the first turn south, toward the foothills. In the minutes it took to get there, she stole glances at him, sure he would vanish if she didn’t. They drove past condominiums so new the windows still bore their labels, and ranches, raced a freight train running along the road until the tracks gave way to a stream that thinned as they climbed. Hamish stared straight ahead, and finally leaned forward, taking in the mountains in the distance. He faintly flickered.

  Soon the road yielded to dirt, and she turned around in a private drive that ran up over a ridge, out of sight. The car idled, and she sat there, looking over Marshall. Hamish looked too, until finally he turned to her, his eyes empty. He looked out again.

  “I don’t understand,” she said.

  He closed his eyes and lifted his hand to his face. He rubbed it there slowly, and took it away. Then he opened his eyes again and, smiling now, turned back to her.

  She looked out at the town—so built up now, almost a city—to try to find what he had seen, and when she looked back he was gone.

  * * *

  She sat in the car on the hill, unmoving, for a few minutes. The sun had come out, and she rolled down the window to let in some fresh air. It was cold and clean, and swept away the ocean smell that Hamish had brought. When her head had cleared and she could think, she put the car in gear and started the trip back to town.

  In the distance, to the west, smoke pushed from the twin stacks of the pulp mill and swept off toward the airport, curving hazily across the sky. The sight made her feel purged somehow, and the confusion of burdens she had been bearing lifted; for a moment her destination was unimportant. She felt like a little girl again—still thrilled and gratified by the ineffable rewards of experience. She remembered the smokestack that once stood over Great Falls, and how, before she was told it was an eyesore, she fantasized climbing it and looking out over the city for a view untainted by what she knew about the people in it, the way a new arrival might see it. The memory was strangely clear, the way images from books could imprint themselves perfectly onto the imagination. She was kneeling on a bench, leaning against the wooden slats of its back. It was late summer, and she was worried that her new stockings would tear on a splinter from the wood. The smokestack pour
ed smoke. And Schatze, her sister—she was there too, next to her on the bench. Schatze wore a new hat, with wildflowers tucked under the band.

  Then it all came back to her—it was the train station. They were there with their parents to meet Gran, Trixie’s mother’s mother, who lived in New York City and was coming to visit them. It was Schatze’s voice that pulled her from the stack. “The train is here!” she shouted, and indeed when Trixie turned, there it was, its own smokestack visible above the trees just beyond the bend. They waited as close to the tracks as they were allowed.

  Gran was the skinniest woman Trixie had ever seen. Her face was pale with makeup and shaded by a black hat, and her shoes were perfect, black and gleaming like little pieces of night sky. They looked like they would fall apart the second they hit the ground. But when she stepped onto the platform bricks, she and the shoes were steady as stones. Trixie’s mother called to her—“Mama!”—and her voice was filled with hope and anxiety, feelings her mother rarely betrayed. Trixie was flooded with a sudden sense of her grandmother’s power. When she hugged the girls it was perfunctory but fierce. Trixie thought it was like hugging a length of baling wire.

  That night, Schatze, always the boldest, pestered her with questions, which Gran deflected as if they were flies. She only stopped asking when Gran lifted her up by the armpits and moved her across the room. “You may ask your questions from there,” Gran said, but Schatze had been scorned. She retreated to the sofa, where she and Trixie played checkers and eavesdropped.

  Gran carried an air of constant disappointment. She pursed her lips at everything. When Trixie’s mother put dinner on the table, Gran smiled and nodded her thanks, but closed her eyes while she ate, as if great concentration was necessary to endure the meal. She entered the guest bedroom with a resigned sigh. Trixie’s father did his best with Gran, cracking silly jokes, asking deferential questions about life in New York. She answered these with something approaching animation, and for days her stories entertained them when nothing else did. But she refused to engage her daughter or her family in any other way—she played no games with Trixie and Schatze, and detested the musical that was showing at the Grand Opera.