Meteors in August

by Melanie Rae Thon

  “What did happen after you left here?” Mom said.

  Nina hummed a snatch of song. “I think it’s cooler tonight,” she said. “Smells like rain.” She twirled on her toes. “Wouldn’t that be something? Rain. Now, that would be a miracle.”

  “Please,” Mom said, “tell me.”

  Nina leaned against the stove, sighing like a girl who’d been dancing all night. “Don’t make me think of all that now.”

  “But you’ll leave—”

  “Yes, in the morning.”

  “—and I won’t know anything about you. You’ve been wandering around in my head for five years, Nina, like some dead girl who can’t rest.”

  Nina fell into her chair. “I’m not dead, Mama, but sometimes I’m afraid to lie down. I can’t sleep in a bed without it getting narrow in my dreams, without a lid slamming shut on me. I can’t hear a sound—my ears are full of water. I see Jesse. Remember how white he was? Like he didn’t have any blood.” She held out her hands, exposing the underside of her forearms. “Look at me,” she said. “Look how pale I am.” And it was true. That skin was as white as the underside of a fish.

  The girl in the airplane pressed her face up to the glass, stunned and silent, awed by her own death. Even Myron Evans who chose his time must have been startled when it finally happened. He didn’t know death would be a hard slap, a boot in the back, knocking him off the chair—no, he was hoping death had arms to hold him, fingers to smooth his hair, lips to kiss his eyes closed, good-night for the last time.

  Nina put her head down on the table. “No,” Mom said, shaking her, “you can’t sleep now. You have to tell me.”

  “Tell you what?” She sounded groggy already. She was afraid of her dreams, and still she longed for them.

  “What happened to Billy? What happened to the baby?”

  “Oh that, that was so long ago.” She looked around the room as if she expected someone to walk in the door and tell the story for her. “Lizzie,” she said, “could you make your old sister some tea?” I nodded and she smiled at me as if I’d just done her a great kindness. Her gratitude mocked me. All these days I’d been wishing she would go away and leave me with my visions of my sister, and the only thing she wanted from me was a cup of tea.

  “Why did you go with that boy?”

  “He touched me right.”

  “That’s no reason.”

  “It was to me. The boys before Billy made me feel like a heap of damp ground. They couldn’t wait to get their hands under my clothes, but I could have been anybody in the dark—I could have been a pig tied down tight for all they cared. Not Billy. He had a way with his hands. Once a wild canary landed in his palm, and his fingers closed around her so slow that she was stunned and didn’t try to fly away. He called me his yellow bird. He said my heart whispered to his hand. He said if I left with him, he’d fill my house with birds—owls to coo us to sleep, peacocks to parade in the yard, a rooster to wake us at dawn. But I woke one day and realized a house of birds has walls of feathers that fly away the first time the wind blows. I woke up on the reservation and saw my house just as it was: a plywood shack with a roof of corrugated tin where the birds never landed, where the sound of rain on metal could make you go mad. Nobody sang to me, but my whole body was awake with sound, and the sound was my baby’s cry. I heard it so deep I thought my bones were sobbing.

  “Billy rubbed my breast with his callused fingers, telling me, ‘Amos is awake,’ as if I didn’t know. He poked at me, using a touch he’d learned somewhere else with a woman who liked it hard and fast, good-night. Those fingers had forgotten how to tempt birds. That palm could have rested flat on my chest without feeling the beat of my heart. He was bored with me. He’d already found some dark-skinned lady who made him laugh and didn’t expect too much. This was February, the first year. I already saw myself leaving.”

  The teapot whistled and I leaped out of my chair. Nina snorted. “Everybody has to answer to something,” she said. I put the pot and the cups on the table, and Nina kept talking. “I told Billy I couldn’t stand that filthy crook in the road they called a town, that rathole he called a house. I wanted curtains to hang in my windows instead of sheets. I wanted a car that ran instead of a rusty pickup with no tires, sunk in the mud of our yard. I wanted to live where people painted their houses white and yellow and gray instead of turquoise and flaming pink. I never wanted to see another trailer turned into a house again. I said we were moving to Missoula to live like decent people. ‘Like white people,’ he said, ‘isn’t that what you mean?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, what’s wrong with that?’ And he said, ‘You’ll see.’

  “So we did move, stayed almost a year, but Billy couldn’t keep a job. He said folks didn’t trust Indians; I said he made his own misery expecting people to treat him wrong.

  “One night I was doing the dishes. Billy patted me on the butt and said, ‘I’m goin’ out for cigarettes—you need anything?’ ‘Milk,’ I said, ‘for Amos.’ He was gone an hour and I started to wonder. Sometimes the neighborhood kids waited in the alley and ran at him with sticks.

  “There was only one other explanation. I’ll tell you the truth: I wanted to believe he’d been beaten more than I wanted to believe he’d left me that way, with a pat and a lie. Things weren’t too bad by then. He’d had the same job for two months. We’d saved nearly fifty dollars. He didn’t like heaving garbage, but nobody gave him a bad time. ‘All garbage men look dirty,’ he said, ‘so they don’t notice me. And there’s nothing to steal.’

  “By midnight, I knew Billy was on his way back to the reservation. I planned to go after him in the morning, drag him home by his hair if I had to, but a storm whipped through the night and the snow piled up all the next day. Frozen waves blew across the road. The wind found every crack in the apartment. I thought I’d just lie down and let the bed fill up with snow. Amos and I crawled under the blankets, made a tent for ourselves and waited. I needed the damn milk. All I had was a cup of powder; it wouldn’t last long, and Amos didn’t like it. At least Billy could have brought the milk before he split.”

  Nina looked at the screen door; a cool breeze filled the room. “There it is,” she said, “the rain.” It took me longer to hear it. At first it was no louder than leaves rubbing together in the dark, as hard to hear as your own heart. But in a flash the sky heaved and broke and poured out all the rain held back through the long hot days of August. Rain pummeled the side of the house with a thousand furious fists, and Nina said, “At last.”

  “So you didn’t go after him,” Mom said.

  “As soon as the blizzard died down, Billy’s boss was looking for him. We didn’t have a phone, so he called Mrs. Clate, the landlady. That fat bitch came banging. She said, ‘I know your husband’s gone—if he is your husband—and I say good riddance, but don’t get the idea I’m running some kind of charity home here. You pay the rent like everybody else or you’re out on your ass. I rented to you against my better judgment, but don’t think there aren’t limits to my kindness.’ Amos sat in the middle of the floor. He was barely a year old, but he burst into a full-bellied scream just like he understood every word, just like he saw the two of us on our butts in the snow. Mrs. Clate poked her head inside and said, ‘I’m sick of his squallin’. You keep him quiet or you’re out whether you have the rent or not.’ I slammed the door so fast I almost caught her nose. ‘Against her better judgment.’

  “We stashed our money in a tin under the tea bags. I’d been afraid to look. Now I prayed he hadn’t left me dry. We paid Mrs. Clate by the week: on Monday, I’d need twenty dollars. I bolted the door and walked to the cupboard, picking Amos up on the way and bouncing him on my hip. I was in no hurry. The money was there or it wasn’t. Running and digging weren’t going to change anything. I dumped the tin on the table. Billy had left me nine tea bags and forty-seven dollars. ‘Look, Amos,’ I said, waving a five-dollar bill in front of his nose, ‘we’ve got two weeks, as long as we don’t eat much.’ Something about t
hat struck me funny and I started giggling. I got cackling and rocking so hard I couldn’t stop. Then all of a sudden I was crying and Amos was crying too and we sat there for a long time, rocking ourselves and wailing at the ceiling.

  “I thought, I don’t know how to do a damn thing. Best job I could get would be slapping mayonnaise on buns in a burger joint. By the time I paid somebody to watch Amos, I might as well stay home. So I paid the rent early and told Mrs. Clate I’d be back in a couple of days. She took my money, but she didn’t believe me.

  “I strapped Amos to my chest under my coat and hitched down to the reservation. Billy wasn’t hard to find. I knew he’d be with a woman. I asked around. When I knocked on his door, he acted like he’d been expecting me. He told me the woman’s name was Rowena and she was his cousin, and I said, ‘Yeah, I know,’ like I believed him. She was twice my size and didn’t try to hide it. She wore a down vest over a flannel shirt. The woman looked old enough to be Billy’s mama. I figured that’s what he saw in her, some kind of mama love I couldn’t touch. I knew there was no sense in begging. How could I compete with a six-foot-tall Indian with a punched-in nose and a barrel chest? I was a wild canary and she was a buffalo. A man has to choose. I told him, ‘You wanna live down here, fine with me, but you’re gonna have to take Amos because there’s no way I can make it on my own with some kid hanging on my rear end.’ Amos was already on the floor, playing with Rowena’s boys. She had three of her own plus one that belonged to her fifteen-year-old daughter. Billy looked from me to Rowena and back again, thinking I’d put a wire cage over his head. But Rowena set us all free. She laid her hand on my shoulder. Her touch surprised me—something flowed through that hand, some kind of healing in the heat of her blood, and I knew why Billy loved her. She said, ‘He can stay.’ With three words, a woman I didn’t know gave my life back to me.”

  “You left him?” Mother said. The rain streamed down the windowpanes in thick rivulets. “You left your baby?”

  “Maybe it would have been different if I’d found Billy right away. The snow blinded me. But when the wind died down, I saw what I had to do. We never did get around to getting married, so all I had to do was shake hands and leave.”

  “But Amos—you can’t shake hands over a child’s life.”

  “Oh I’ve heard all this,” Nina snapped. “I’m some kind of unnatural mother, some kind of monster who’s deformed on the inside. Listen, I was nineteen years old; I had twenty-seven dollars and no job. I tell you, women with warm houses and cupboards full of soup and beans, women with husbands who come home at the end of every week with a paycheck, women like that, like you, Mama, have the luxury of loving their children in a natural way. Women like me aren’t so lucky. Love to us is leftover scraps, bits of rags, other people’s garbage. How much love do you think a woman has when there’s no money and no food, when the baby’s howling his head off and the landlady is banging a broom on her floor so hard your ceiling rattles?”

  “We would have taken him—our own grandchild.”

  Nina pounded her fists on the table. “No, Mama. Can’t you see? Look in the mirror some night and see how tired my life has made you already. If I’d brought Amos here, I would have had to stay too. What kind of life would that be for any of us?”

  “What kind of life do you have now?” My mother’s voice was cool and hard as a polished stone.

  “My own life,” Nina said. “My own life.” And her voice turned to water, fast and clear, rolling over every rock in her way. “I don’t mean to offend you by talking this way, Mama, but I can’t live my life the way you lived yours—doing things for Daddy, doing things for us, never taking one sweet breath that was just for you. When I hear about women who run away and leave their families, I’m not surprised. You know what surprises me? It surprises me when any woman stays. I look at you, Mama, and I wonder why you don’t hate us all. What did any of us do for you that was half what you did for us?”

  The rain beat out a steady answer: nothing.

  Mother cradled her head in her hands. “I have hated you,” she said, “all of you. But it goes away if you can just wait.” Her voice was so low I had to look at her to be sure her lips moved.

  “How many years?” Nina said. “How many years do you have to wait, Mama?”

  I closed my eyes. Nina threw a merciless light on us. I couldn’t bear to see our faces in that glare. I thought of the reservation and the dark highway, a dead dog in the ditch. I saw my mother pressed up against the sweaty body of a stranger, the trucker who listened, and I knew how badly she wanted to keep driving north.

  The sky tore above us. A rip of thunder exploded in the distance. Already it seemed the rain had fallen forever, that the words in this room had made it unstoppable.

  My mother spoke from the hollow box of her years. “Tell me about this life you call your own, Nina.”

  “I live in a basement, two rooms, fifteen a week. I don’t mind the dark. I tend bar down the street. It’s better than waitressing. I did that for a while. When you’re behind the bar, some guy can grab your hand but he can’t grab your ass. It’s just temporary, fast money till I find something better. Rowena said the problem with me is that I can’t imagine my life. She says I only saw three choices in this town: get married quick, sling slop out at the truck stop, or sell lipstick at the five-and-dime. Rowena thought up her whole life and then made it happen. She left the oldest girl with her mama and went to college. Now she’s back on the reservation teaching school. She says she got tired of white women full of their own good deeds coming to the reservation and running away after the first hard winter, after the first drunken suitor banged on her door. She said those kids needed someone to admire, someone who looked like them, someone they’d see around town. She says she always dreamed of knowing things worth telling other people and now she does. I never dreamed anything like that for myself. I let my life fall on me. Everything I’ve ever done was an accident. Did you imagine your life, Mama?”

  “No.”

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “My mother got sick and my father was long gone. I had to take a job. Like you say, a girl in this town doesn’t have a lot of options. So I filed papers at the mill. I met your father. He was the only man in town willing to take me and Mother both, so I figured I could learn to love him. Your grandmother did love him. She begged me to marry him. She wanted to know somebody was going to be there to look after me when she was gone. ‘Put your old mother’s mind at ease,’ she said. I married him because a dying woman wanted it. She forgave his transgressions easier than I did. If he came home stumbling, my door was locked, but hers was always open. Lots of mornings I’d find him asleep in a chair in her room. She told me, ‘Drinking’s no crime as long as a man comes home at the end of the night. Your own daddy didn’t touch a drop, that holy man. Just look what he did for us, Evelyn.’”

  “Did you learn to love him, Mama?”

  “Well enough, I suppose.” My mother’s hands lay on the table, pale and limp, the knuckles already beginning to knot with arthritis, like her own mother’s hands. I wondered how long it would be before I sat beside her in Grandmother’s room, how long before the bad dreams came and I had to pull the covers from her gnarled claws.

  I thought she’d tell Nina how she wanted to go to Canada with that truck driver. I saw them crossing the border, humming along with Patsy Cline. But she spared my sister that knowledge. What difference did it make? Nina was already gone by then. She wasn’t the one our mother wanted to leave. She wasn’t the one who would have sat by the window day after day, afraid to move, afraid to breathe. She wasn’t the one who would have had to watch our father drink himself blind. No, Nina would not have heard the windowpane shatter, would not have picked the slivers of glass from his bloody fist or bandaged his hand while he wept.

  Somehow day had come without its ever getting light. The rain had spent itself and given way to a gray drizzle. It rolled off the roof with the weary sound of a child who has c
ried herself to sleep and still sobs in her dreams.

  Nina said, “I’ll just pack my bag and wait for Daddy to wake up so I can say good-bye.”

  I couldn’t stay in the kitchen alone with my mother, hearing things about her life I never wanted to know, hearing there were times she hated us, knowing we deserved nothing better for the way we’d stolen her life away from her before she had the chance to dream it. I stood, and Mother said, “Turn out the light before you go.”

  Leaves hung heavy with rain and tree trunks stood slick and black against the sky. The rain had come too late to save the yellow grass. Nina rustled upstairs, running water in the bathroom, whispering to Daddy. And all I could think, after my years of longing, was how glad I would be to see her go: glad to have her makeup off the bathroom counter, glad not to hear her words to my mother, those words that Nina would leave behind and I would live with. And I would be glad when she could not keep secrets with my father. He would get better or worse, but he would have to depend on us again either way.

  I went back to the kitchen, where Mother still sat at the kitchen table, staring at her own hands. “Shall I make coffee?” I said. She was deaf to my question. I made it anyway and put some in front of her, but she never drank it.

  Nina clamored down the stairs, her startling heavy steps smacking the wood. In the hallway she made a phone call, her voice hushed and sweet, a demand and a plea. “Thanks, baby,” I heard her say. “I knew I could count on you.”

  She stood in the kitchen doorway wearing her denim skirt and denim jacket, leaning against the frame, Nina, a glimmer of her old self, always leaning up against something, the porch railing, a window, and the boys watching, always, their bodies saying, Lean against me. But she was not that girl. She had her bag in one hand and a cigarette in the other. I remembered the silky curtain of her golden hair falling across one eye; now it sprang from her head, curly and wild, that weird unbelievable blond.