Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  She slept lightly, and in the morning emptied her shoebox of Hamish’s things onto the bed. She sifted through them, holding each item for a moment in the hope that it would surrender something of the past. The box itself gave off a rich, musty odor that she recognized as an element of the old kitchen; this reminded her of the grave silence of family dinners in Hamish’s presence, during his days of construction work, and how after his absence he was never mentioned, not once, by any of them during dinner.

  Her memories of Schatze yielded a sense of their bedroom back in Great Falls, the yellow window shades with their dark stripes, and the single bowed floorboard at the foot of the closet that made a bench for Schatze’s dolls. She remembered her parents’ discussions, which she listened to from the top of the stairs when she couldn’t sleep. They argued affectionately about how they thought the world was put together, sometimes for hours, and though Trixie didn’t understand what they meant, she always was confident that the world was put together well, hearing it from their lips.

  These three days of recollection were a kind of bliss for Trixie. She understood, writing, that it was a rare concentration, one she was not likely to see again. She had, for the first time in many years, a real sense of herself and what came before her. It was like talking to the dead, asking them those things she had always wanted to know. For the moment she let herself forget about what she would tell the children. Such was her state that she assumed she would come up with the perfect thing when the time came.

  But then it did, and she had nothing. She was in the bathroom, trying to cover up the marks on her face, when Edward’s knock came at the door. He came in before she had a chance to answer it. “Mrs. Kurtz!” he said, to her puzzlement: she had completely forgotten about the assumed name. She hadn’t seen her son in a year. He had a thick beard now, the same color his father’s hair had been before he left—dark, dark brown, with strands of gray bright throughout, like moonlight. She went to him and hugged him.

  “Hello, Edward,” she said, and she marveled again at how much he felt like Hamish, and how his smell, that smoky, cherry brandy smell, was so familiar to her, his childhood smell intensified with age.

  And then she saw them over his shoulder, standing in the doorway, backlit and shadowed by the light outside, and remembered her role. “Mark,” she said. “Does Mark look well?” Could Edward hear the apprehension in her voice? Could the children?

  “He’s excellent, Mrs. Kurtz.”

  “Oh, good.” She had prepared nothing, in her worry over what to say. Did she have tea or coffee? Cookies for the children? “This must be your nephew and niece.”

  “Mrs. Kurtz,” he said, “this is Rachel, and this is David.”

  The children stepped into the house and Rachel, like an adult, closed the door behind her. “Hi,” David was saying, his eyes straying around the house.

  “It’s nice to meet you.” There was nothing of her in David’s face. But then, in response, he hung his head just slightly, his neck vanishing into his shoulders, and she recognized in the gesture her farher, that strange manifestation of his politeness. She thought of the stack of yellow pages in her pocket, that this was something she would add to it.

  “I’m Rachel,” Rachel said, and Trixie was astonished—the little girl might have passed for Schatze. She stood perfectly still, wearing a simple dress and sneakers. How Trixie wanted to tell Edward! But she couldn’t, not right now.

  “It’s nice to meet you, dear,” she said, trembling.

  “Mrs. Kurtz.” It was Edward, at her side now, touching her shoulder. “Did you hurt yourself? Your face.”

  “I had a spill out on the path.”

  “You have a path?” David said. “We saw a mountain goat and elks.”

  “You did!”

  He nodded. “And this huge bird.”

  “A raven,” Edward said.

  “Except real big, like this.” And he held his arms out.

  And then Rachel suddenly said, “How do you know Uncle Edward?” It was not quite an accusation, but Trixie feared, for a moment, that they had been found out.

  “His friend Mark is my son,” she said, quietly.

  “Did we meet Mark?” Rachel asked Edward.

  “No.”

  They were all quiet, and then Rachel, satisfied, went to the cupboard and peered through the glass doors.

  Trixie broke the silence. “Well,” she said. “Let me see what I have to eat.” She went to the cabinets over the sink and found some ginger snaps and chocolate syrup. She got the milk from the refrigerator and mixed it up for the children, who had found their way, along with Edward, to the table. The three sat there silently as Trixie set out the cookies and milk. David thanked her and drank his milk immediately; Rachel smiled and took a single sip before pushing it subtly away. She was a serious girl, nothing at all like Schatze in manner. “David,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Say your prayers.”

  Trixie and Edward exchanged looks as the children bent over the table, their hands folded before them as if they concealed some found treasure. The girl’s voice had real authority. When they had finished, David set upon the cookies but Rachel did not.

  “Edward tells me you live in Butte,” Trixie said to them. “Do you like it there?”

  “Yes, very much,” Rachel said. David nodded.

  “Do you get to go camping much?”

  “Mommy doesn’t like it,” David said.

  “Because she’s so busy,” his sister added, with a note of warning in her voice. Her eyes turned to Trixie and lingered there, sizing something up. Trixie turned away.

  In the silence that followed, Edward talked about the trip: they had gone into the backcountry, where they slept two nights in a rustic cabin, cooked over a fire, and took long hikes. David interrupted several times to add his observations, but Rachel only sat and listened.

  “It was real cold,” David said. “I wore gloves to bed.”

  “Shoes too,” Edward said.

  “Rachel,” Trixie said now, “how did you like the park?”

  “It was glorious,” she said soberly. “I’d like to go again.”

  “I’m sure you’ll get the chance,” Edward told her.

  They went outside to take a walk. David ran back to the edge of the woods and Rachel walked quickly after him, leaving Trixie alone with Edward. She turned to him, keeping her distance in case the children were watching, and said, “Thank you.”

  “I wish we could be out in the open.” He looked about to cry.

  She nodded. “They remind me of you and Kat.”

  “Maybe,” he said, smiling. “David’s a little more thick-skinned than I was. And Rachel’s cleverer than her mother.”

  “She is clever.”

  “Yes.”

  They grinned at each other. “You go alone with them,” he said. “I’ll stay back.”

  “All right. I love you, Edward. I feel like I haven’t been mother enough.”

  “I haven’t been son enough either, I guess, out in the woods.” He sighed. “I’ll come for Thanksgiving, if you’ll be here.”

  “I will,” she said, and took his hands.

  Out back, David was calling to Rachel as he ran about: “Look at this! Look at this!” Rachel followed him at a distance, like a worried parent, and made no response.

  On the path, David ran ahead, calling back to them about the things he saw. “Don’t go too far!” Trixie yelled to him, and to Rachel she said, “This is where I fell the other day. I don’t want him hurting himself.”

  “He gets excited,” Rachel said, and then, without the slightest change in tone: “I know who you are.”

  Trixie did not stop walking. Rachel was a stride behind her, her light steps making almost no sound on the trail. If not for her words, it would have been easy to think she wasn’t there at all.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mom has pictures of you and her and Uncle Edward.” She paused, waiting perha
ps for a reaction. Trixie didn’t give it to her. “She keeps them hidden, but I found them.”

  Ahead, David left the path and ran into the trees, toward the ruin of an old stone springhouse. The spring, Trixie knew, was dry. She stopped and turned on her granddaughter.

  “You mustn’t tell your mother. She doesn’t want me to see you.”

  “She says you died.”

  “I know that.”

  “She says you drove Grandpa to drink.”

  Trixie knelt in the dirt. In the pocket of her jeans, the papers crackled. “Don’t tell her. She would be very angry at your uncle.”

  Rachel seemed to consider this. She took a handful of her dress and bunched it in her fist. When she let go, the creases remained. “I won’t tell,” she said.

  “All right,” Trixie said. “I trust you.”

  Later she would wonder what sent her hand to her pocket for the sheaf of papers. By the time they were out, she had reconsidered, but there they were between her fingers, like an ill-spoken confession that couldn’t be taken back.

  “What’s that?” Rachel set her hand on the papers but didn’t take them.

  “It’s about our family.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “It’s for me?”

  Trixie pushed the papers toward her. “Yes.”

  Rachel took them, unfolded them, looked for a moment at the writing. “Okay,” she said, and refolded them and slipped them into the pocket of her dress.

  Trixie took her arm and held her fast. “You mustn’t tell.”

  “I said,” she said. “I thought you trusted me.” Her eyes, gray and brave, her grandfather’s eyes, met Trixie’s and held them there. “You do, don’t you?”

  Trixie tightened her grip. “I do,” she said, and let go.

  19

  Kathy wasn’t home when she called, so Anita left a message that she was coming and called Larry. He was subdued in the truck, but apparently only with great effort; he tried to start several conversations that she didn’t want to have.

  She hadn’t wanted to see him at all, not yet, not until she had her own place, which she had taken a week off to look for. Her bag was stuffed with essentials—clothes she needed for work, for putting together an apartment. There were some books, some things she had grabbed in a moment of bitterness: a few pairs of men’s boxers she bought for herself that Paul had appropriated, stolen from his bureau along with a roll of film he must have dropped there by mistake. She’d savored the prospect of denying him the pictures, which probably were of her and Paul in happier times, but now she only felt mildly guilty about it, as if for a nasty prank pulled years ago on someone nobody liked.

  Anita had never seen Kathy’s building before, but it was more or less what she’d expected of Kathy: a big concrete block covered with gray wooden siding and surrounded by well-pruned shrubbery set in beds of white gravel. There were six apartments, each with a little balcony. Most of the balconies were jammed with recreational equipment—kayaks, waders, rafts, inner tubes—but one, on the second floor, overflowed with flowering plants and weathered-looking redwood porch furniture. Kathy’s. The building filled Anita with despair. She knew that the sill of Kathy’s single tiny window would be caked with a mixture of dust and kitchen grease, and that the carpet would smell like a new car.

  “If you have any trouble,” Larry said. He had turned off the car. She would have been more comfortable if he’d left it running. “You know. You can come stay with me.”

  “Okay,” she said, suddenly weary. She rested her head on his shoulder. Not the sort of gesture she’d pictured herself indulging in on this trip, but now it made her feel a little better.

  “Doesn’t look like your kind of place.”

  “It isn’t. She says she got it because of the balcony.”

  “I like the balcony, though. At least there isn’t a dead elk hanging from it.”

  It made her laugh, and for a moment she felt relaxed and wondered why she was bothering to stay with Kathy at all when she had Larry’s house, with its yard and creek. And then she remembered the awful fantasy she’d conjured for herself: never finding a place, and simply staying there indefinitely, neither of them mentioning it. And then, without an adequate space between one man and another, not having the time to figure out who she wanted to become, and gradually accepting her identity as a subset of his. And finally, an image: years from now, a lonely moment at the house, Larry away with friends fishing, and she tries to comfort herself with food and spills it onto the floor, and she’s kneeling there cleaning it, and the grit on the floor is rubbing itself into her knees, and she just gives up. She lies down there and does absolutely nothing until he returns.

  Forget that. A week with Kathy, tops, and then a decent studio apartment. Near downtown.

  She untangled herself from his arms. “Well,” she said, meaning everything she’d been thinking.

  “Can I call you here?”

  “Larry…”

  “No, okay, I’m sorry.”

  “I’ll call you, I promise.”

  “Anita.” He was looking at her intently, as if she were a tricky mechanical problem.

  “Yes?”

  “I love you.”

  She stiffened. How could he? She watched his face fall as she said nothing, and he began immediately to apologize.

  “No, wait,” she said, but they both knew there was no way she could make him happy at this moment. She took his disappointed face in her hands and pulled him to her and kissed him, deeply but, she hoped, without the desperation she felt. She held him, and whispered, “Soon,” and then she got out of the car.

  * * *

  She stood before the door, listening to a strange sound: a sort of dim, scraping thud accompanied by a high, dull metallic clinking. A pause, and then the sound again. Anita knocked, hitching her bag up on her shoulder.

  “Be right there!” came Kathy’s voice, and a flurry of clinking with her footsteps. Then the door swung open. “Hey! You made it!”

  “Hi there.”

  “This is it,” Kathy said. She took Anita’s bag and ushered her into the apartment. “In, in, in.”

  Against the far wall stood a gigantic wooden object strung with wires. It looked like a complicated musical instrument, and was about ten feet long and half as high. It dominated the room. As Kathy walked off with the bag, her footsteps made the wires vibrate and clink against each other. Anita was stunned. She thought, Every step? Every step you take in this apartment makes that sound?

  “I see you’ve noticed the loom,” Kathy said from the hallway.

  “Loom?”

  “I made all these,” she said, gesturing around the room, and now Anita noticed, for the first time, the walls: they were covered, every inch, with intricate tapestries, each in jagged patterns of subtly shifting colors. They looked a little like Navaho blankets, but with a disturbing touch of madness. She had to admit, she liked them.

  “They’re terrific.”

  “Thanks.” Kathy was wearing a baggy wool swearer and stirrup pants. Anita thought they made her look chubbier than she already was, but she also looked comfortable, and this was her own house after all.

  Kathy led her to the extra room, where she’d be sleeping. The loom tittered as they walked, and Anita tried to tread lightly to keep the noise down. Kathy didn’t seem to notice. The extra room turned out to be a sewing room. A sewing machine sat on a drafting table, and swatches of fabric lay in little piles on the floor and spilled off shelves. There was a large wooden rack covered with spools of thread, and a pincushion in the shape of a frog, its face full of dismay.

  “I did the frog,” Kathy said.

  “It’s something else.”

  There was a certain cluttered charm to the apartment Anita hadn’t expected. It had all the distasteful elements she’d imagined, but they didn’t add up to anything; Kathy had transcended her environment. It put Anita on the defensive. Not since junior high, when she attended various powwows in her friends’ bedrooms
, had she seen a place so obviously designed for one person’s comfort—the couch was draped precisely with an old blanket, its tassels frayed at the ends, the walls covered with framed magazine covers from the twenties and antique-shop oil paintings of Victorian-era scenes.

  Anita set down her bag. “You can sleep on the couch,” Kathy told her. “It’s comfy. There’s a towel for you on the chair, and some bath stuff. I’ve got tea on. Get yourself situated and come on out.” She disappeared. Sure enough, there was an upholstered chair with a folded white towel on it, and on the towel was a bar of soap wrapped in paper, some bath beads, a little bottle of shampoo.

  She sat on the couch. It gave beneath her with a whoosh, and lowered her slowly into a deep, soft pocket of cushion. She felt held. She reached for the chair and pulled the towel out from under the other toiletries. It was thick and fuzzy, with flowering vines embroidered into the hem; she noticed now a washcloth and hair towel (she hadn’t seen one of those since junior high, either) of the same design. She laughed, and thought she heard Kathy stop puttering for a moment. To fill the silence, she called out, “Everything’s so nice!”

  “Well, good,” Kathy called back.

  She unpacked her things, trying to form neat piles on the floor around the couch. She folded up her bag and stowed it under the sewing machine. Then she went out to the kitchen and sat down across the table from Kathy. The table was covered, at an angle, by a lace tablecloth, and a blue porcelain teapot steamed in the center, next to a small lamp. Anita’s cup was full, and a tiny pitcher of cream and a bowl of sugar cubes sat next to it.

  “This is some place,” she said.

  Kathy sipped her tea. “You sure you don’t think it’s funny?”

  “Funny?” But she felt herself reddening. “Oh—no, I was just…It’s just a surprise. How nice it is.”

  Kathy nodded slowly. She seemed unsatisfied with this answer, and stuck her spoon into her tea for no obvious practical reason. She stirred it.