Meteorites

by Julie Paul

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  The search continues into March and April, a daily ritual for Catherine despite the warming temperatures and the abundance of so many other lovely birds. She needs that waxwing, its crest an elegant variation to so many round, predictable heads, because sighting it would mean that her brother is fine. That’s what she’s told herself every year: the waxwing is a soldier, back from war, and John is lost in action, in another kind of war altogether.

  Oh, the hero’s welcome she’ll give him, the celebrity he’ll become!

  Once a week, as she has for all these years, Catherine walks past the bus station to check for John. She saw him there once, before he disappeared, on a day when he hadn’t known she was following him, and she’d watched as he did his thing. His thing was a secret, she knew that much, and she was no snitch! Still, when he looked up from talking to a blonde woman in ripped pants, after giving her a small packet and taking rolled-up cash, his face had turned red beneath a blank and empty stare when he caught her watching.

  As usual, he’s never at the station.

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  In October, Catherine begins a new kind of search. She’s been dreaming of black things, gigantic crows and umbrellas and bruises. She has not seen a waxwing all year.

  Catatonic. Catastrophic. Cataclysmic.

  She begins an exhaustive search, obituaries from when he first disappeared, or as far as Google will take her. John Bryan, she types. Dead. Death of John Bryan, suddenly. And Young man dies tragically. She reads of young men dying tragically all over the place, even one with the same name as her John, who met his end by driving off the ferry dock. But the photos are not of her brother. The details are all wrong. The drugs are new ones—some hidden in other drugs, so that you don’t even know you’re taking them until it’s all over, just like that! They say it’s a peaceful way to go, but that’s no consolation.

  She turns to searching for his description next, in case he isn’t dead, only at large. In case he might be wanted by someone else. She enters: Small-eared man. Afraid of rats. Double-crowned. Voice sweet, like cinnamon. Nothing comes up.

  Then, after dinner, there’s a face at the patio door. A fluffy orange cat wants in, and after Catherine opens the door, he lets her pick him up. She can feel him purring. He’s got a name tag, unlike the dog she rescued, and while she calls the phone number on the tag, Dexter, the cat, gets a can of tuna.

  The woman on the other end of the line is ecstatic. Her baby has been missing for twenty-four hours. When she arrives a few minutes later, she lifts Dexter from Catherine’s arms, and it feels like he doesn’t want to leave her. Catherine begins to cry. The woman throws twenty bucks on the coffee table for her effort and makes a quick exit.

  Caterwauling. Catapult. Catalyst.

  After they leave, Catherine makes a sign on poster board to fit into the front window. Welcome Home, John! it says in bubbly letters, coloured like the rainbow. She stands on the lawn to admire it, to make sure it can be read from the sidewalk, and then she strings up white Christmas lights around the window frame, just to give it more punch.

  A few days pass, and the sign begins to buckle; a few more, and the letters fade. Neighbours start to look away when she meets them on the sidewalk, once they’ve asked about the homecoming. Still the sign remains in the window. Still the lights shine, attracting moths and dust.

  Catherine begins to leave open cans of tuna on the porch, and Junior Mints, and bowls of bright red berries she gathers from the park on her walks home, just in case. She sits on the front steps at dusk and sings songs about coming home and a hymn she’s heard at the church around the corner about putting your burden down. Come to me, it says. All who are weary.

  John was tired all the time before he disappeared. She knew that could mean low iron, but didn’t that apply mostly to women? It could have been her; she remembers her mother saying that she was exhausting, on more than one occasion. But that was back when she ran the circuit, making a race track of the path from living room to hallway to kitchen to dining room, round and round. That was back when she had to sit on her hands to keep from picking at the wallpaper or the label on the HP sauce or whatever scab was ready.

  She’s tired now too—tired of waiting, and the waiting makes her tired.

  At work one afternoon, Catherine crawls into one of the beds she’s just made. She takes off her uniform and slides between the cool sheets and frees her long hair from its plastic clip. She turns to the window and sees her brother’s face in the clouds above the park. She closes her eyes.

  When she opens her eyes a while later—did she fall asleep?—there’s a man, right in front of her, in a uniform.

  “Catherine,” he says. “Are you okay?”

  “John!” she cries and leaps out of bed to embrace him. “You’re really here!”

  The man looks toward the door. “Better come,” he calls, and her co-worker Shirley bustles in.

  “Ryan from engineering’s going to get you home, Cat,” Shirley says. “He’ll take care of you.”

  Catherine is still hugging him, unable to let him go. “I am home,” she says. “In my brother’s arms. Shirley, this is John.”

  Then she is in his arms, fully, because he’s picked her up like a bride; they move from the hotel room down the hall, into the elevator, and out through the staff doors to a blue Jeep, where she’s set gently down in the back seat.

  “No air bags in the front?” she asks. “That’s why I’m back here?”

  “Sure,” Ryan says. “Safe and sound.”

  They drive the short way to her apartment—without her even needing to give directions. Of course, he knows where she lives!

  “Where have you been?” Catherine asks, calmly. She doesn’t want to upset him or scare him away.

  He’s pulling up outside of her home. “Let’s get you inside,” he says. “Then we can talk.”

  He wants to tell her! And look, he’s smiling at the sign in her window, even though it’s barely legible anymore, giving her a thumbs up.

  When they’re inside, she gives him another hug. “I can’t believe you’re here!” She holds him at arms’ length. “Promise me you’ll stay?”

  “I’m here,” he says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  //// In the Next Breath

  Barbara and Jack sat at the kitchen table, scrolling and eating loud cereal, a level of comfort between them that made it acceptable to belch, softly, without fear of judgement, as long as an excuse me followed. Both of them weary from end-of-semester stress and studying, they still had the energy to scan the news headlines on their phones, to take turns reading out bits of tragedy or outrage.

  The biggest story trending that December morning was the anniversary of the École Polytechnique shooting in Montreal, when fourteen women died at the hands of a lunatic.

  “Horrific,” Barbara said, and rubbed her face, as if to wake herself from a bad dream. “You never know, do you, when a madman might strike.” Then, in the next breath, she said, “I’d like to feed the birds again.”

  It was dizzying, this feat, the leap from despair to hope, something Jack had a hard time navigating. Had she forgotten that she was leaving him in a matter of days for sunny California and wouldn’t see the birds finish the seeds they put out? And what about the shootings since Montreal?

  “Sure,” Jack said. “I miss the little guys.”

  Barbara had moved in with him about nine months ago, over spring reading break, and the seeds had moved in too, but he’d had to shut the operation down after a squirrel came into the apartment through the balcony door and lived with them for three days until, finally, it went into the live trap he’d bought.

  Today she wore her bunny blouse: it was off-white, semi-sheer, like the shed skin of a corn snake, and on it, stamped like leaf prints on a sidew
alk, were rabbits. Jack knew she knew that he loved it, and she wore it more often than she used to. He wondered if he should wear T-shirts imprinted with leave and berries, cotyledons and lichen. He was an animal man, and she a plant woman, in simple terms, but he was wearing a T-shirt that featured Pluto, the planet demoted and then partially redeemed. And he wore it not for her but for underdogs everywhere, a gesture of solidarity. It also glowed in the dark, which made both of them giggle more than it should when they lay in the drafty bedroom, making love with half their clothing still on. They did not get out enough.

  Jack wanted to leave the cereal and phones and thoughts of madmen on the table and go back to bed, where he would slither in next to her and resume their body press, their retreat, and attempt to stop time from advancing. But there were scarves to be wrapped around necks, coats and gloves to don; there were groups of smart and good people waiting for them to help them study for their exams; there were exams, and then, much later, there were those very same necks to unwrap before falling against each other in the closest pub, where, despite it being exactly what Jack wanted to prevent, they would toast to another day having passed.

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  After breakfast, they headed for campus, but not before they passed Russell, the man who slept beneath their window, two floors down on the street. He was still asleep, in blankets Jack recognized. He’d tried to help Russell with quilts, pillows, food, music, attention, and these things had worked to placate him, temporarily. Some days he was lucid, and he and Barbara could talk to him, just like they talked to one another. But recently, when the weather turned from bad to worse, things had started to change. Russell was getting as bitter as the wind.

  He didn’t seem to recognize them anymore, and in the early morning hours for the past few weeks, they’d been awakened by his screams. Thankfully now, he didn’t stir.

  A block from school, a young guy who Jack called “the poet” joined them; he wasn’t a student, but he liked to hang around academics, a natty notebook in whatever pocket was handy.

  He’d eavesdropped on them at the laundromat a few months ago, when Barbara had been deeply in love with a particular type of begonia, growing “like static flames” on their balcony. The poet had liked that phrase, and said so, which prompted her to pull out her phone like a proud grandma and brag with photos. Since that day, the poet, named Joshua—an infantile name for a poet—had hung out with them.

  “Because of your focus,” he’d said, when they’d asked him why. “And your lack of shame about being slightly freaky, in a good way. Plus, you’re able to have normal conversations,” he continued. “You just choose otherwise when possible.”

  Neither Jack nor Barbara could argue with that, so he’d stuck around ever since.

  The three of them parted ways at the university; Barbara to her people, Jack to his, Joshua to wherever he went, with plans to meet for lunch at the cafeteria.

  Barbara and Jack were not a fancy couple, nor one that made plans together beyond lunch or passing their exams, but he loved her with a certainty that caught in his voice like a swallowed bone. After exams, she was planning to put herself on a plane and head south, to where the land bloomed anew in January. Succulents, ice plants especially, were her passion, and in Hamilton, Ontario, they only bloomed in the floral sections of the grocery stores.

  And this was right, this was appropriate. She studied plants with more attention and reverence than any nun ever read the Bible—sometimes Jack could feel her eyes on his head, trying to classify the lank curls that grew there.

  At semester’s end, it was anyone’s guess as to her heart’s next move, but at least for a semester or two, she would be gone. Jack’s heart was crumbling, disintegrating deep inside; and although he was an animal man, well-schooled in cardiac anatomy, if he jumped up and down, he swore he could hear the bits and pieces making music, something slowcore, mournful, and spare.

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  That night, after a lot of studying and a little tired loving, they woke to screaming, a panic flooding their systems like twenty shots of espresso.

  “It’s okay,” Jack said to Barbara. “I’ll deal with it.”

  It was the last thing he wanted to deal with. He wanted to ignore the suffering just beyond the window and turn toward her delicious warmth and go back to sleep.

  “Thank you,” Barbara mumbled, before sliding into what he imagined were dreams made of satin and spider webs, gauze and coloured shadows.

  It was okay to turn to each other instead of to the pain beyond the window, Jack reasoned, because they had tried before to help, and nothing had come of it.

  Russell, most likely, was not being attacked by a pit bull, not a victim of a hit a run. His leg was not broken, his fingers still hung from his hands. Visibly you could not spot one thing wrong, unless you looked into his eyes.

  Then you would feel it, the helplessness: his, the world’s, in the face of a brain gone sideways.

  Jack lay in bed with Barbara against him, breathing softly once more, a moth drawn to his heat and light. Russell had quieted down.

  Jack’s father had been a drunk, a chain-smoker, and a gambler, and he’d been front and centre for it—a car ride with a drunk dad behind the wheel was the perfect gamble, after all. “Let’s see if we can make it home both alive and without a cop noticing” was the game of choice. Sometimes Jack thought the smoke that filled the car was what saved him, despite the fact that it had given him asthma. That smoke was cellular, like endoplasm, holding the family together, at least until his father finally ran off for good.

  His family seemed unbelievable to Barbara, if she got him talking.

  “How you survived it is a miracle,” she said.

  But Jack knew there were worse situations; he’d had food and shelter, after all, and although he hadn’t needed to scramble into ditches for beer bottles, he’d done it anyway, on the long walk home from school, for candy money. That his father had forbade his mother from getting her driver’s license, or that he’d disappear for days at a time with the one car, leaving them stuck on bikes or their own two feet—Good enough for Jesus, his father used to say if they complained—these were the things Barbara got upset over.

  The truth was, those spells when his father was gone were the best times: nights of uninterrupted sleep, mornings of peace and quiet. He hadn’t felt like he was living a cliché, a parody of the alcoholic’s family life, not until she pointed it out. It was their normal, and both he and his brother knew other kids with way shittier lives than them.

  Their man on the street was like a New Yorker cartoon on irony, haunting Jack’s sleep more effectively than his father or memories of childhood. But he didn’t need to revisit all that stuff, did he? Did the animals in his care rehash every moment they’d felt stress? He was one of the ethical ones, not those madmen spraying soap in the eyes of rabbits to see if it hurt them. The payoff, if he used animals, had to be worth the price, over all else. If he could find a cure for MS by manipulating the myelin sheath of a mouse, was that not worth the process? He was getting closer every day.

  Jack credited his father, in fact, for making him the person he was today. Not because he’d taken his example and done the opposite, although that was exactly what he’d done. Not because of genetics, either—nowhere in the family tree was a branch sturdy enough to hold him and his future Nobel Prize. No, it was all because of the night his father had shoved him into a hole in the frozen lake.

  He’d been depressed, obviously. It was as clear as anything now. But kids weren’t allowed to be depressed back then, not unless something really big and really awful had happened. Plus no one in his family would even consider seeing a “headshrinker,” so even if they’d recognized it, his therapy would have been the advice to suck it up and get his shit together.

  Jack could remember only vague bits of the year that
preceded the big event; one year of high school over, he’d been fine, managing, the quiet nerdy kid in Grade 10 who kept to himself because it was easier that way. He’d carried a couple of friends over from elementary school, and they ate together, rode the bus together, and gamed together when he was able to use his brother’s laptop, which wasn’t often. Then his brother just up and dropped out of Grade 12, right before Thanksgiving, and took off with a guy heading to Mexico, to surf the winter out. Jack felt stranded; he was stranded. He started spending all his time in his room, in a kind of stupor.

  “You stoned?” his father asked him. “High on some weird shit?”

  Jack just stared into nothing. He felt like he was inside a television. Everything seemed to be outside of himself, beyond the glass, people trying to reach in and touch him.

  After a couple of months of this, and a couple of beatings, after missing weeks of school, his father and some buddies took steps to fix the problem. Under the light of a clouded-over moon, they nabbed Jack from his stinking bedroom cocoon and carried him to someone’s pickup truck; then after a short drive, they carried him from the truck and onto the frozen lake, littered with ice-fishing huts. Jack was too out of it to even protest. They stood him upright, unwrapped the blanket that swaddled him, and then they dropped him through an enlarged ice-fishing hole, directly into the frozen lake.

  All Jack remembered was that it felt like a blister popping, that kind of painful relief. The opposite of a fairy-tale kiss to wake him up, it worked the same magic, that frigid water. He emerged, aware and alert, angry and ready to get back to it. He had no explanation to give his father, nor did he thank him. But he’d finally done something right as a parent. After the guys helped to warm Jack up, his father handed him a flask of rye. The sweet burn of it in his throat, the clarity it brought, made it all too clear he could drink like his father—and that he might be better off avoiding the stuff. But he was fully, completely awake.