Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  He had eaten the Snack-’Ems down to the crumbs and hadn’t offered Toth any. “Sorry,” he said.

  “You needed them.”

  He thought again of the amazement and terror of watching those clouds passing above him, and he wondered what the crash had been like for Paul and his wife, if they had actually seen it go down, or if they only heard and felt it. Did it take a few stunned seconds to understand what was happening, what had happened?

  “What?” Toth said.

  “What what?” Lars’s jaws were tight, and he brought his hand to his cheek.

  “You sighed.”

  He looked at his friend, who was still waiting for some explanation. “It’s been on my mind awhile, I suppose.”

  “What?”

  “The wreckage. I mean, it’s right there, isn’t it.”

  “Of the plane?” Toth rumpled his face as if from a bad smell.

  “I got this idea I should go look at it. I decided not to, but now I don’t know.” His heart was racing, and in spite of himself he looked at his wrist. His watch wasn’t there. He could see it lying next to the dish rack by the kitchen sink, the last place he’d taken it off.

  “I do,” Toth said. “Forget it.”

  Lars’s hands were tingling, and he shook them to dispel the needles. “I think I have to go. There isn’t much time.”

  “You don’t have to do anything.”

  “I do.” His hands were shaking on their own now. He felt like someone who is compelled to take five, six, seven showers each day, someone who has to fill in all the e’s and o’s in the newspaper. Suddenly the six hours that Christine would be in surgery seemed like a strange and urgent window of opportunity for him: it was as if doing this awful thing, which had for so long eluded his capability, would put something of Megan to rest. Lars was aware that this was not rational—even now, in the wake of the crash, he still found himself occasionally gripped by the impulse to call his father on the phone, something he had never done in his life—but he had finally lost much of his fear. The hospital breathed out its stale air behind him. This is where it would have ended up anyway, right? With one of them dying and the other doomed to watch it happen? Lars had never thought that Megan would want to marry him, and for this failure he got to live through her death early. Proposing might have kept her in Marshall for the summer; almost anything could have, and this was the fact that he had been avoiding, along with the fact of the wreckage, still out there, quietly rusting. He pictured a dripping glade, the scraps of plane scattered around it like the remains of a chicken. Not a battlefield, a cemetery. He turned to Toth.

  “So are you coming or not?”

  Toth squinted, as if against bright sunlight, though there was none. “I don’t think so, Lars.”

  “Then I’ll see you around, I guess.”

  He spun and headed for the Safeway, where they had locked their bikes. It was a sudden, impulsive exit, and blood pounded in his head from the sheer impoliteness of it. It occurred to him on the way that he didn’t strictly know where the crash was, and he hoped he could make it that far and back before they closed Christine’s body, the new and foreign kidney pulsing inside her.

  He passed the bike rack and walked into the Safeway lobby, where the pay phones were. He looked up Paul in the book: 21540 Valley Road.

  For a moment his conviction waned, and he slumped against the booth, feeling tired. He watched people walk in and out of Safeway, half-hoping somebody he knew would show up and he could bail out. There was a checkout clerk he often encountered, coming in for his shift, and a chubby man, burdened with bags, leaving with his red-haired teenage daughter, who Lars thought he knew. Then he remembered: Montana Gag. She and her boyfriend used to come in, looking for Greg. Briefly, Lars suffered under the weight of a despairing wish to be her: to buy groceries with her father, to eat dinner in front of the TV, to dip carelessly into the stash of weed stuffed into a hole in her box spring and drink in the smoke from her bed, the open window admitting cool night. He watched the girl and her father get into a car and drive away. And then, there in the lobby with him, was Toth.

  “Okay, I’m in,” he said. A bicycle helmet dangled from one hand.

  Lars pulled himself from the phone booth and looked his friend in the eye. “Good,” he said.

  * * *

  The ride up the valley was long and windy, and darkened by the threat of rain. Cedar Avenue widened and followed the tracks, where freight cars clanked into each other like thunderheads, and cars and trucks raced past them, freed from the speed limits of town. Lars was exhausted before they even reached the exit to Valley Road, but seeing the green and white sign gave him new energy, and he rounded the corner at a smooth coast, a breeze at his back. It had taken them only half an hour so far. Once onto Valley, he and Toth were able to talk, as trees broke the wind and the traffic was light. But they didn’t. Their mission retained some kind of sacredness, despite the bikes.

  Soon, as the road evened out into a gradual climb, Lars was able to set his breath and motion into a smooth rhythm, and he let the scenery distract him. It had been a long time since he’d come up here; he and Megan went cross-country skiing one weekend in the woods. They passed the last convenience store and gas station, rode through wide meadows on which planned communities had been built along perfect curving paved streets. They came upon small ranches with sport utility vehicles in the driveways, and these petered out, leaving only trees and large log houses, set far back on the edges of hills. Soon there were posted signs—“SALMON NATIONAL WILDERNESS: NO HUNTING, BY ORDER OF MONTANA FISH & GAME”—and he heard Toth’s voice, small behind him: “You think we’re about there?”

  Lars coasted to a stop, and listened as Toth did the same. Silence fell around them. “I suppose.”

  “They can’t live in the wilderness, right?”

  “I don’t know.” He scanned the horizon, then saw, up ahead, a gray metal mailbox, its flag hanging loose at its side. Across the two-lane from it was a dirt road, brown tracks fountaining out to the left and right.

  “There?”

  “Maybe.” He straightened on the bike and started pedaling again, his muscles popping in protest.

  The mailbox had the street number scrawled on it in black magic marker. There was no name. They crossed the road and stashed their bikes in the trees, out of sight from passing cars. The dirt road was heavily rutted and just wide enough for two cars to pass with great care. Water pooled in the tire tracks. They walked in silence, listening to the distant sounds of machinery.

  “What is that?” Toth was asking.

  “I don’t know.”

  They rounded a corner and found themselves in a wide arc of churned-up grass, half-buried in drying mud. Off to the right, a piece of yellow plastic tape was tied to a tree and flapped in the breeze; nearby there was a dirt road, wider than the one they’d just been walking on, cut far back into the forest. It looked crudely new. From over a rise at the end of the road came a white pickup, driving slowly, and as it neared them Lars could see its tires bouncing over chunks of debris that lay in its way. Two men sat in it, both wearing caps. Lars was sure the men would stop and ask them to leave, but the driver simply raised two fingers in solemn greeting and nodded hello. Something rattled in the bed, beneath a large blue tarp.

  Lars gazed out over the truck’s path. “Down there,” he said to nobody.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  He turned and looked at his friend, possibly for the first time since they left the hospital. Toth’s eyes were weary and rimed with dried sweat, and his glasses sat far down on his nose, like a crotchety librarian’s. Seeing Toth, his chest rising and falling, his lips slightly parted to let the air in, Lars had the distinct sensation of falling from a great height, and closed his eyes against hitting the ground. He felt dizzy, filled with the overabundance of life around him: the trees, the dirt, this panting, sweating Toth. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  They walked, side by side,
down the road. Most of it was littered with pine needles and small rocks, and occasionally they passed a deep divot, where a tree must certainly have been. Here, the soil was exposed to the air and was darker than the ground that surrounded it; they avoided stepping into it, as if it were cursed. Another truck came over a rise and they moved out of its way.

  And then they were standing at the bottom of the rise. Beyond it they could see the upper halves of trees, swaying gently. From behind them, there was sun. Toth went up it first, and stood at the top, perfectly still. Then he turned his head back to Lars, and in his face the wreck was reflected, as if in a shallow pool of water. A gulf opened up between them, Toth’s expression, his thin body, unfamiliar to Lars now that he had seen. Toth extended his hand.

  “Come on.”

  “All right,” Lars said, and he climbed to the top of the rise.

  The wreck was distant, but clear; gleaming metal attended to by yellow machines. People wearing blue baseball caps bent, examined things, wrote on papers flapping from clipboards. Things were lifted into pickups; a wheel loader scraped at the ground around a large piece of half-embedded airplane. Lars and Toth walked toward it slowly, letting the details accumulate gradually the closer they came. The entire scene was less like a wreck than an archaeological dig, every item from the teetering tail section to the sheared wing to the massive bent fuselage exhumed and examined with care, even reverence. There was something like elation in the air, the collective sense of chaos being brought back into line, and Lars felt himself moved by it, by the workers’ absorption in the task. And Megan, he was surprised to notice, was nowhere to be found. He stopped walking.

  “Lars?”

  “No closer than this,” he said. Because his sense—that this place was far from death, was more like a spot where Megan had waited for him, then given up, finally, and left—this sense, certainly, encompassed loneliness and loss, but not despair. Any closer and he might be set back again, sure to grieve without relief. But this sadness had some consolation to it, like reaching out and taking an offered prize. He did this, took what was offered and held it.

  They stood a minute more, then turned back.

  * * *

  Though they had not been gone six hours—the sun was bright and high as they returned, and shadows still short on the ground—they returned to the hospital waiting room to find Amanda Stull pacing by the swinging doors to the operating rooms. Nearby an orderly sat behind a desk, watching over her. And in the chairs and couches arranged along the walls, big-haired girls in anxious poses. Sorority sisters.

  “Mrs. Stull?”

  She whirled upon Lars as if to grab him by the shirtfront, but when she recognized him she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, gathering restraint. Lars felt himself flinch. “I’m sorry.”

  “I thought you might be the doctor.”

  “Any word?” Around them, the sorority sisters watched, their eyes wide.

  “Somebody came out. It went okay. Or it’s going. They’re…closing.” It seemed a great effort for her to say the word. “It’s in there, anyway.”

  “Good.” And for the moment, that was all that mattered: that a bad thing had been removed and a better thing put in its place.

  Amanda Stull turned and peered through the door’s porthole, and when Lars moved away he found that the girls had stood up behind him, six, seven of them, and were watching him and Toth, waiting for them to speak, to explain themselves in light of Christine’s dramatic and anomalous life. Lars didn’t have any explanation. He smiled, and nervously, a few of them did too. Then he held out his hands to them, and they took hold.

  18

  The man who answered the phone at Glacier Park Market was kind to her, but he failed to put her on hold, and she could hear him ringing up customers while she waited for Edward. “Going to have a few hot dogs tonight?” he asked someone. “No, ma’am, we’re all out of those....I’d just try singing....No, ma’am, if you don’t bother ‘em, they won’t bother you.”

  When Edward came to the phone, he sounded tired. “Hey, Mom.”

  “Did I wake you?” Trixie said.

  “No.”

  “You sound tired.”

  He sighed. “I was in the back, trying to finagle some more bear whistles. Everybody’s all riled up around here over the bear thing.”

  “Bear thing?”

  “These people got mauled. They were sneaking up on some grizzlies in the backcountry, trying to take pictures. Now everybody’s bought out the whistles.” He sighed again. “It sounds like a Fourth of July parade out there.”

  “Well,” she said. No use putting it off. “I have a little something to ask you.”

  This was a difficult thing for her to do. On his twenty-first birthday, just after he’d gotten his first job in the park, Edward had declared himself a family neutral zone. He would talk to or see anyone in the family (at that point Trixie, Kat, and her husband), and wouldn’t talk about them to anyone else in the family. This included Hamish if he ever turned up. Edward moved into the mountains and was only accessible by telephone or long drive, and she noticed a subtle shift in his personality: he acquired a polite reserve, his letters became shorter and chattier. Trixie thought also that he might be homosexual, which, if so, he had never been candid about and probably never would be. Knowing his sister, this was the best tack if he wanted to remain on good terms with everyone.

  In the end, the new Edward was a genius of restraint, a package that embodied all the quietness and delicacy of his childhood self and simultaneously jettisoned his fear. Trixie had tried to express her pride in him, in his self-control and even temper, but he resisted talking about it.

  Still, she had a feeling he preferred her to his sister. Kat was likely to be suspicious of Edward, as he didn’t share her faith, and the few times he mentioned her—which came very, very rarely—he seemed weary of bearing her scrutiny. So between mother and son there had evolved an unspoken trust, which is what made this phone call so difficult—she was going to ask him to lie to Kat.

  “What is it?” he said, suddenly concerned. It was his misapprehension that she was frail, and he would soon need to move to Marshall to care for her. Though she supposed it was possible.

  “I’m having a little get-together I want you to come to.”

  A pause. “Really?”

  “A little thing. Just you, and…”

  “Who?”

  “My grandchildren,” she said. “I’d like you to bring them along.”

  He snorted, a sudden and, she thought, contemptuous gesture entirely unlike him, and afterward fell into a silence broken only by the continuing sound of the cash register ringing, and the genial patter of the checker.

  “Come on, Mom,” he said finally. “I can’t do that.”

  “Now don’t say that so quickly,” she said, and she could feel the opportunity vanishing, like so much precious water into the floor of a vast and lonely desert. “I’m getting old, and there are things I want known. You don’t know about my parents, do you?”

  “Grandma and Grandpa?”

  “And my sister. Did you know I had a sister? Your sister was named after her. I’ll bet those kids don’t even know who their own mother was named after.”

  “I think I remember something about this, Mom, but really. I can’t bring them to you. That’s ridiculous.” His voice had that sharp, particularly male, edge of finality she had grown to resent. Hearing it disappointed her.

  “Do you intend to have a family, Edward? You’re forty years old. Will you have children?”

  Another silence, and this time the ambient sounds seemed to move away. When he spoke it was quiet and close, a deep and confidential voice. “No.”

  “I didn’t think so. None of this will be passed on, Edward. I know this isn’t so important to you—there is a lot you’d rather forget—but it is my life we are talking about. And my parents’, and their parents’. It’s our family, Edward.” She paused, decided to play the only card she had.
“And I’m getting to be so old, you know, I could forget it all. I want to pass it on before that happens.”

  “Is this about Dad?” he asked her. His voice took on that patronizing quality it had when he called after the funeral, as if she were the child now.

  She sighed. “It is and it isn’t.”

  “I can’t violate Kat’s trust,” he said.

  “Kat doesn’t have to know.”

  “Oh, sure,” he said. “I’ll just whisk them away and have them back before she notices.”

  “You take them on a trip to the park. Just don’t tell her about me.”

  “Think about this, Mom. They’re kids. Do you think they’re not going to tell their mother what they did on the trip? Do you think if I tell them it’s a secret, they’ll listen to me?” He chuckled, a low and sad laugh that made her heart ache. “You don’t know these kids. They’re tough customers. They don’t trust anybody except their parents and God.”

  She hadn’t known how well he knew them. Did he visit often? she wanted to know, but didn’t ask. “I see,” she said.

  “You’re asking me to undo Kat’s hard work.” He paused a moment. “You know, Mom, she’s told them that you’re dead.”

  “What!”

  “That’s why she didn’t want you at the funeral.”

  “They think I’m dead?”

  “They think you’re dead. You’ve been dead since before they were born. That’s the party line.”

  Trixie sat down now, on a kitchen chair, to catch herself from a sudden swoon: she felt for a moment that it was true, that she really was dead and had never existed in the first place. The ends of her fingers went cold and numb, and she loosened her hold on the receiver until the blood flowed back into them. How could Kat tell such a lie? Maybe part of her actually believed it. She could see how it might happen: the hatred beginning in isolation, a nacreous bead that floated, hard and inert, inside her; then something happening—their move to Marshall maybe, or Hamish leaving—to dislodge it and let it float free, and gather smaller hatreds like oil congealing on water. And soon it would be big enough to kill Trixie in her mind. To her daughter, she thought, it was better that she was dead. Trixie felt like she was groping at the last threads of her life, her past, things she wanted with a desperation she feared she did not have the strength to maintain.