Light of Falling Stars Read online

  The Light of Falling Stars

  J. Robert Lennon

  Contents

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  Part Two

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  Part Three

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  for Rhian

  The volcano trembled in another ether,

  As the body trembles at the end of life.

  WALLACE STEVENS,

  “ESTHÉTIQUE DU MAL”

  part one

  1

  A plane crashed. It was August, a hot, dry day. An hour before it happened, Paul was sitting on a metal folding chair at the edge of his shriveled garden, thinking about the end of his mother’s life.

  It was the garden that reminded him. The last three months, she hadn’t moved from her bed, and except to tend to her, Paul hadn’t left her side. Her demands came in a hoarse monotone that sounded like the cracking of a distant whip. There was little light in the bedroom, owing to her sudden distaste for the outdoors, and Paul could only see outside through the crack of window left exposed beneath the blind. The crack revealed, in the yard below, the back of a cushioned wrought-iron bench and the desiccated corpse of the flower garden that his mother had not had energy or concern to water since she took ill.

  This was back in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where Paul grew up. The Beveridge house stood in the Caplewood section of town, a towering plantation-style without a plantation; their money was inherited from Paul’s father’s grandfather, a speculator in the American frontier. Paul’s mother gardened, threw parties, and drank. Paul’s father gambled and drank. Paul went to college in town, feigned poverty, grew his hair long, and graduated in seven years. Then his father died of pancreatic cancer, which he had apparently concealed with superhuman stoicism for a year, until he passed out and fell down the curving stairs of their home, breaking his neck in the process. He lived two days, blanked out on painkillers in the hospital. Paul found this out nearly a week later, having been unreachable because he hadn’t paid his phone bill. The black woman his mother employed to clean the house showed up at his door. “Your daddy’s dead,” she said, never taking her hand from the doorknob. “And your mama’s in bed. She says she won’t ever get out. She says to go tend to her.”

  “What?” Paul said, barely awake.

  “When you get there you can tell her I quit.”

  This was the beginning of the end of Paul’s life in Alabama.

  As she died, his mother demanded strange things, then scoffed when he brought them. Three yards of white cotton, scissors and thread. Buttered grits. Clothespins. She ate almost nothing; he fed her until she told him to stop (“Get away from me, you shit,” she frequently said when sated), then he would eat the rest. They didn’t talk. For some reason Paul didn’t actually believe she would die of whatever it was she had. He fully expected things to return to normal once his father’s ghost had fled the premises, and for his mother to return to the garden with her kerchief and trowel and hip flask. The possibility of her death did not occur to him.

  It came in late August. He went to the kitchen to make her a bowl of oatmeal, then returned to the bedroom and set it on the bedside table. She ignored it. He picked up a magazine and began to read. After a while he put the magazine down, scooped up a spoonful of food, and brought it to her lips. She didn’t take it. Her mouth was slightly open, so he moved the spoon between her lips and dumped the oatmeal. She didn’t chew it. He ate some of the oatmeal himself. Then he shook her and found her body cool and unresponsive, and found himself alone in the room, alone in the house, in the world. An orphan. The phone had been shut off long before, so he walked to the hospital and asked what he should do.

  Later, the doctor who pronounced her dead would glare at him with untethered hatred. Her body had been riddled with deep, caustic bedsores. Hadn’t he noticed? the doctor wanted to know. Did he not have an ounce of compassion? At this Paul cried, not for his parents’ pain or loss, which wouldn’t move him for some months, but out of fear for what he didn’t know: the things he’d missed, the things yet to come.

  * * *

  Now he lived with his wife, Anita, in Marshall, Montana, at the edge of the Salmon National Wilderness Area, in a renovated fishing cabin once owned—and never used—by his father. The garden had been Anita’s idea. She thought it would be good for him, therapeutic. Paul had agreed. He liked the idea of growing their own food. It made him feel like he was pulling his weight. They had dug it together, a long plot thirty by twenty feet, its rows separated by sunken walkways, and planted according to Paul’s research: what went next to what and how far apart, which week to plant, how deep to bury the seeds and how many to drop in the hole. After that, it was Paul’s responsibility.

  It worked for a short time. They ate fresh salads every night, and Paul diligently pulled weeds and inspected for bugs. Then the weather turned. For the previous three years they’d lived here, summer had been wet and gloomy, the sun a pale disk of little consequence. Yet by the first of this August, there had been a full week of arid, scorching air that supported none but a few pathetic shreds of cloud. The garden sprang to life in the sun, then began to wilt. Paul watered, but the earth made short work of it, the water hissing away into the dirt like drops on a hot pan. He forgot to water one day, and once the following week; and today, at the end of August, he realized that he had lost it. The leaves were bored through and sucked dry, the tomatoes slack and rotten and drooling dark fluid. The greens were gnawed to stumps by rabbits or shriveled flat, and even the potatoes were coming up wrinkled and soft.

  He’d come out here intending to give it one more shot, but it was no use. Anita would be disappointed. She’d been giving him significant looks for weeks and commenting with forced nonchalance about the heat. Now he shifted his body, and the parts of the chair that had been exposed to the sun burned his arms and legs. He picked up the bottle of beer he’d pressed into the dirt and drank from it. It was warm.

  Anita had been able to take root here in a way that he hadn’t. She had a job, taking loan applications at First Marshall downtown, and she’d had her way with the cabin, sanding and polishing and painting so that it finally gave up on its dank dilapidation and relaxed into a ramshackle coziness that made Paul feel, if not at home, at least welcome. It wasn’t that he couldn’t get jobs. He’d had plenty over the past three years, odd ones mostly. He worked at a tree service for a while, pruning, and had copyedited contracts for a real estate developer; he was a lifeguard one summer and a housepainter the next. But he was aware of an aura of impermanence that surrounded him, and he felt powerless to hang on to anything. His jobs evaporated, his employers told him they had nothing left for him to do. The people he had worked with seemed to know this about him and kept their distance.

  It was only Anita who stuck with him, and only she he felt he could hang on to. They had been married four years now, and when he thought fondly of anything in his past, it was Anita: the things they’d done together years before; their holidays and weekends; their shared possessions, the artifacts of their life as a couple. They had met in Tuscaloosa, shortly after Paul’s mother died. He bought a suit to wear to the funeral, and the day after to the bank, where he intended to settle his parents’ estate. The woman who helped him was barely out of college. She wore a blue blazer and a crisp white blouse, and her desk was in perfect order. This w
as Anita. She had the cleanest forehead Paul had ever seen, a smooth, white, near-impossible expanse of clear skin. When she looked over his parents’ papers, her sweet smell drifted across the desk and fell around him like confetti.

  “The house is ours,” she said. “After we take what they owe us, you’ll get about ten thousand dollars.”

  Paul leaned over the desk, into the clean cloud. “I don’t get it. From the house?”

  “No, from everything,” she said. She had light brown hair, pulled back from her face.

  “That’s not right. They’re rich.”

  “Not anymore, I’m afraid.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  She sighed, then reached across the desk and touched the back of his hand with her fingers. “I’m sorry, Mr. Beveridge,” she said. “They ran out of money. There isn’t much left, only the ten thousand. And a few hundred more.” She showed him the figure on a piece of paper. “You see?”

  “Sure.” He scanned the rest of the paper. The ten thousand was the highest number on it. He began to calculate how much time this would give him. A year?

  But there was a safety deposit box too, and this was where Paul found the deed to the land in Marshall, a place he’d never been to or heard about, and a photograph of the cabin, and a key. The deed had been signed by Paul’s grandfather and father. Not long after their wedding, when Paul could barely stand Tuscaloosa anymore, it was Anita who suggested they move there.

  * * *

  His beer was gone when she came home, her car trailing dust. It was a Subaru, a four-wheel-drive wagon. When they’d first moved here, it was what people told them to buy, and they did. He saw her head bobbing behind the windshield and willed her to wave. She did, and he waved back. She stopped the car in the wide patch of dirt they parked in, and got out, briefcase in hand.

  “Hey!” he called out.

  “What are you doing out there?”

  “Gardening.”

  She shaded her eyes with her hand. “I don’t see any garden.”

  Paul shrugged. “C’mere.”

  “Wait a second,” she said. “I’ll be right out.” She jumped onto the porch and went inside. A few minutes later she came out wearing cutoffs and a T-shirt and carrying her briefcase. She came to him across the clearing and sat cross-legged on the ground near the empty bottle. Her foot snaked out and kicked it over.

  “Drinky-poo?”

  “Just the one.”

  She unlatched the briefcase, turned it on her lap to face him, and opened it. “Happy birthday!” she said. There were three small presents there, wrapped in shiny silver paper, and a white envelope.

  “You remembered.”

  “Duh. Open the card.”

  On the front of the card was a watercolor of a bouquet. A florid script read “To My Love on His Birthday.” Inside, Anita had crossed out the poem printed there with a red marker, and had replaced it with the words:

  YOU LOVE ME, I LOVE YOU

  HAPPY FUCKING THIRTY-TWO

  “How sweet,” he said.

  “I know.” She smiled at him and slapped his calf. “Open ‘em left to right.”

  He lifted out the first package, a flat, oblong box about five by eight inches, and shook it. Something thunked against the sides.

  “Come on.”

  He tore off the paper and handed it to Anita, who folded it neatly while she watched him. In the box, he found a note. “Good luck on your NEW JOB,” it said. Underneath it was a magnifying glass.

  “Cool,” he said.

  “You can look for clues.”

  “I don’t think it’s that sort of thing,” he said. Tomorrow he would start working for a private investigator. He didn’t want to let on, but he dreaded it. What if he made a mistake? He held the magnifying glass out at arm’s length and concentrated the rays on a dead plant. “I can roast bugs, though.”

  “Open the next one.” She handed it to him.

  This box was larger, but lighter. He unwrapped it and found a gently folded square of green silk. He raised his eyebrows at her and she smiled. When he lifted it out, it unfolded into a thin nightdress. He held the dress up by its straps and a breeze filled it for a moment, bringing it to life. It seemed to have no weight.

  “It’ll never fit me,” he said.

  “Here.” She reached out. “Want to see me in it?” She stood up and pushed off her sneakers.

  “Anita,” he said. “Come on. We’re outside.”

  “Oh, Paul. Who’s going to see?” She grabbed the nightdress from his hand and walked around behind him. He heard her zipper, the jingle of a belt. “Don’t look.”

  But Paul was looking away, at a spot over the trees, where a plane, still just a dot, was flying low. He could hear its drone from here. He had the fleeting urge to be on it.

  “I’m almost ready,” she said.

  “Okay.”

  “Close your eyes.”

  He heard her feet in the grass, and then her voice. “Open ‘em,” she said.

  He did. She stood before him, posing, one hand behind her head, one on her hip: a joke pose, but she was still beautiful. The wind moved the nightdress, and he could see that she wore nothing underneath.

  “It’s very nice,” he said.

  “That’s it?” She sat on his lap. “Nice?”

  He felt the words coming, assembling in his guts and floating up to his lips like a gas. He thought, I am such an asshole. “I thought we’d…”

  “What?” she said, and they looked into each other’s eyes. She stood up. “What?”

  “No, nothing.”

  They were frozen for a moment, their eyes on one another, the hot air and light and the noise of the oncoming plane fixing them more soundly in place with each passing second. Finally she said, “All right then,” and bent over to pick up her clothes.

  “No, don’t,” he said.

  “I’ll take it back. I’ll get a refund and you can have the money, how about that?”

  “I’m sorry. That was stupid. I knew you didn’t mean—”

  “No, no, I know what you thought I meant.” She tossed the clothes into the briefcase and shut it as far as it would go. The corner of a sock hung out the side. “For once I wasn’t thinking about having a baby, just so you know. That was part of the gift, giving that to you. No, whatever you were thinking, I deserved it. It’s my fault.”

  “Please, Anita. I’m just in a rotten…Please keep it. Don’t take it back. I like it.”

  “Forget it. Every time you see me in it, you’ll think about how manipulative I am. Forget it.”

  But she didn’t move. She stared at the trees behind him, her shoulders rising and falling with her breath. “I was dumb to think you would ever change. I was dumb to think I could love you enough.”

  “Hey.”

  “That’s what I learned today, Paul. It only goes so far.”

  “What?”

  “Love,” she said. “It’ll only take you so far, and then you’re stuck there.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. “I’m starting this job tomorrow. That’s a change, right?” He struggled for words. “It’s my birthday.”

  “You’ve started jobs before.” Her eyes found him, and her expression was so pitying, so hopeless, that he wanted to run for the woods. Over her head, the airplane had grown, and its wings flashed in the light like broken glass. “It’s not you, it’s me. I overestimated you,” she said. She slipped her thumb under a shoulder strap and rubbed it. “I’ll take this back. I’m sorry I bought it.” She turned to the house.

  “I didn’t mean to…”

  “I know,” she said over her shoulder, the plane’s rumble nearly drowning her out. “That’s part of the problem. You just said it without thinking.”

  He watched her as she walked away, and could think now about nothing else: the shape of her body beneath the silk and how her skin would warm it, how sweet it would be to slide the straps over her shoulders and let it fall in a green puddle at her feet.
He missed it deeply, this gift she’d given him and now taken away, and there was nobody to blame but himself.

  “Paul.” She’d stopped just short of the porch and was pointing at the sky.

  He looked. The plane was nearly above them now, a passenger plane. They flew over all the time. “What?”

  Then a popping sound, and the plane changed direction.

  Paul laughed, a defensive gesture, the same thing he did once when he’d been slapped by a woman in a bar. What other reaction could there be? He could no more undo the slap than he could reach into the air and set the plane on its proper course. Something small and dark dropped from the plane, trailing smoke. The plane screamed. He watched the dark object fall for a moment and noticed, with the easy, opportunistic logic of a dream, that it was coming toward them. Then he remembered his wife.

  “Anita!”

  She turned to him, astonished.

  “Get behind the car!” he shouted. The words vanished in the noise. He pointed—“The car!”—and ran for it, then angled for her instead. “Down! Down!” And at the edge of his vision, the thing falling toward them. He reached her, grabbed her arm, pulled her to the car and pushed her down.

  The ground shook, flinging him onto her. He heard, or maybe only felt, her grunt as the air came out of her, and off at the edge of the woods, motion, something fast and black, rumbling away like a great and awful beast. The air stank flatly. The sound of the plane receded. He rolled off her and crouched on his knees in the dirt. “Anita!”

  She rolled onto her back, coughing, the nightdress covered with dust and bunched around her stomach.

  Then, from the distance, an uneven rattle like an old machine gun’s, and a terrible wrenching groan, and a double-bass thud like two punches to the stomach. He toppled again, and a sharp rock found his spine and gouged him there. His back arched automatically and he swept the rock out from under him. Above the trees, a cloud of smoke rose, sudden and black.

  “Anita?”

  “Oh my God,” she said.

  “Did you see? Did you see that thing?”