Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  “I’m sorry,” he said after a while. “I should have known better.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked him through her hands. His voice had that quality of disappointment her mother had expressed when Anita announced her decision to start a career in banking.

  “This is it for us,” he said, so resigned, so quickly. She began to panic.

  “Wait.” She sat up, holding out her hands for balance. “Please just wait.” When she opened her eyes she found he hadn’t budged. He sat sourly before her like a monk, his legs crossed and his hands on his knees. “I don’t not want you. I’m just worried about my husband, okay? It’s not like him to—”

  “Okay,” he said, impatient.

  “Do you understand? I don’t—”

  “All right.” He uncurled himself and went to his dresser. He opened drawers, taking things out, keeping his back to her.

  She got up and put on her jeans and jacket. When she reached into her pocket for her car keys she remembered she hadn’t driven. She stood a minute by the bedroom door while Larry fussed at the dresser. Then she said, “I need a ride home.’’

  “I know.”

  “Larry…”

  “You don’t have to say anything else.” He turned to her, eyes wet, and she started at the sight of him, rigid with dejection. “I get it.”

  “I don’t know if you do. I just need—”

  “Please,” he said. “I know.”

  The cat looked up sleepily when they came out, and fled when Larry opened the car door. He was a careful driver. He steered with unwavering control, his fingers wrapped tightly around the wheel. He drove the speed limit. When they turned onto Valley Road, Anita began to feel heavy, and by the time they reached the drive she could hardly muster the energy to step out of the truck. He didn’t make the left turn onto their road, only signaled right and pulled to the shoulder to drop her off. He had done this before: he didn’t want to see their house.

  The truck came to a stop. He pulled himself toward the wheel until his forehead touched it, and he extended his fingers. The joints made gentle cracks, like ice cubes dropped into water.

  “Tell me, please,” he said, “that this isn’t doomed.”

  “It’s not.”

  “I’m very serious about you,” he said quietly.

  “Oh.”

  “No, no, don’t say anything. Jesus Christ.”

  She reached across the cab to touch him but stopped short. He was right. She would have said something, anything, because it was called for, not because she wanted to. Being in love, she’d long believed, was a condition of being able to say it. Now she feared the opposite was true—that the word, spoken, could shake loose the emotion. She didn’t dare speak.

  “Okay, go,” he said finally.

  “I’ll call.” But she sat there, moving her fingers in a small circle on the seat.

  His hand came down on hers and stilled it. “Go,” he said. She went. She looked back only once from their drive, when she heard his tires crunching the gravel. He was leaning over the wheel, his dark face long and miserable and determinedly fixed on the road.

  * * *

  She heard a chain saw before she had walked half the way to the house, and she fantasized briefly that Paul had come back, charged with anger, to chop it into a thousand pieces. But the closer she came, the clearer the sound was: not just one chain saw, but a chorus of them. Up around the bend, the house came into view, intact, and beyond it she was stunned to find a swath shaved into the forest, already a hundred yards deep. There were gigantic trucks equipped with winches, some kind of crane, a flatbed with tall supports on the sides, onto which denuded trees were already being loaded. Men worked: half a dozen in the woods, cutting down trees, others gathering armloads of branches and feeding them into a buzzing chipper, which greedily consumed them and spit them out as kindling. Somehow the entire operation had materialized since this morning.

  One man, wearing a white hard hat, surveyed the scene, his jaw frantically working a mouthful of chew. Anita walked up to him. “Excuse me.”

  He whirled. “Yeah!”

  “What’s going on here?”

  “Building a road,” he said. His face was plump and red as a football, and his eyes bugged out slightly, lending him an oddly theatrical expression of surprise. He frowned. “You shouldn’t be here, lady.”

  “I live here.” She pointed to the house.

  He turned his head to take in the house, and stared blankly at it, seeming not to understand the connection. “Uh-huh.”

  “What road?” she said.

  “Gotta get that plane out of there.” He tilted his head toward her. “You see the crash?”

  “I was here when it happened, yes.”

  “Uh-huh.” It wasn’t clear what he made of this admission. After a moment, he seemed to become uncomfortable with her presence and walked off toward the chipper.

  Walking to the house, she noticed her car wasn’t in the yard. Inside, she found that Paul had come and gone. There were dirty dishes in the sink, two of them, and a wet towel bunched on the bathroom floor. The door had been left unlocked. She walked outside again, to the shed, and tried the door. To her surprise, it was locked; she didn’t even know there was a lock on it—sure enough, a shiny circle of brass with a keyhole in the center. The sight of it filled her with rage, and she pulled harder, kicked the door. It gave a little. She pulled again, and the handle came free in her hand. She held the handle tightly, crushing it in her fingers, and finally hurled it, with a scream, at the treeline.

  All evening, she sat and waited. When it grew dark, she got up from the couch and searched the house for a note he might have left. There was none.

  She lay awake in bed that night, wondering if Larry was doing the same. Probably not. It seemed that he could sleep through anything, eat through anything, regardless of the grumblings of his heart. He never failed at the logistics of living: his truck would never be broken down for more than a couple of days; his clothes never appeared on a bed or chair on the way to their hangers in the closet. He made schedules.

  He was, in short, what she aspired to, but all too infrequently achieved. This was her greatest fear about him: that if she gave herself to him, he might make her into that perfect version of herself. And then what?

  It was obvious why she had fallen in love with Paul. She saw in him a blank slate that she could quickly fill with the details of her choosing; she could teach him to be more like her. Now this seemed like the most infantile kind of folly, and cruel to boot. Paul was not a blank slate. He was Paul and always had been.

  And the baby she had so wished for, the baby for which her marriage was falling apart? Another mirror.

  When she was a girl, she often fantasized that she’d been adopted, or that her parents had taken her from a household of refinement and order. For the better part of her eighth year, she was convinced of it. She secretly dug through her mother’s papers looking for her birth certificate, and when she didn’t find it, held up its apparent absence as proof of her rightful lineage. Once, agitated by some childish disappointment she could no longer recall, she baldly accused her mother of stealing her and demanded she be returned to her real parents, her real house. Her mother seemed mildly alarmed by all this, but made no response. The next day, she brought Anita to the bank, opened the safety deposit box, and showed her the birth certificate—Anita Jane Sloboda, seven pounds, nine ounces. Her footprint was on it, a smudged blob of black ink next to the state seal of Alabama.

  She wouldn’t speak to her mother for a week, thinking herself a victim of the worst sort of betrayal. But part of her knew that she could only blame herself for it. It was this part she most hated, the same part that had reawoken now.

  * * *

  In the morning, she woke to cold, and the already certain knowledge that he hadn’t come back yet. She pulled the sheet tight over her body. There wasn’t a blanket, and she had to pee, but the discomforts focused her and she reached deep
into the muck of her heart to see if she could find out what she wanted, right now.

  Not Paul. The thought of him here beside her—his warmth less comforting than unsettling, like the warmth of a bus station bench once a stranger has left it—made her legs ache with apprehension. She rubbed them. Were he here, he might have done it himself, his palms sweaty with self-loathing and guilt. The ache remained.

  And not Larry, whose love, if that’s what it was, seemed treacherous: there was a hardness to him that didn’t want to forgive her for not being at her best at all times. More disturbing was that he thought he already knew what her best was. Even more disturbing was the possibility he was right.

  And ultimately, she didn’t want to be alone here either, which unfortunately for the time being was her only option. It was as if the walls were polished steel—everything in the house reflected back to her those qualities that had engineered her failures. What she wanted was really two things: to be elsewhere, and to be somebody else. Or at least a version of herself that had made better decisions, that had thought more clearly. She got out of bed shivering, put on the heat, and made her way to the bathroom in the half-dark.

  After her shower, she stood in the kitchen in her sweater and jeans, waiting for inspiration to strike. None came. She noticed that the bulk of the cold was coming from the living room, where the wall was, at this point, nothing more than a piece of plywood nailed onto two-by-fours. Balled-up scraps of insulation were piled on the floor by the sofa. But, of course, it didn’t matter. The house already felt like it wasn’t hers. She remembered her last few weeks in Tuscaloosa, how much she hated those things she had long loved—the constant humidity, like the friendly embrace of a large, affectionate, slow child; history’s weight over everything; the calm self-knowledge of people whose ancestors had been conquered on their own soil. She had longed for the mountains and towering, oblivious detachment of Montana. Now she missed the South, hated this house, and longed for nothing that she could actually have. It was time to jettison desire and begin treading the more familiar road of obligation. She opened the phone book and looked up Emil Ponty.

  “Hello?” A young girl answered. A lover? A daughter.

  “Is Mr. Ponty there?”

  “He’s in bed.”

  “This is Anita Beveridge. My husband works for your dad.”

  “Oh, yeah,” the girl said, as if she knew Paul. “Sure.”

  “I’m wondering if he’s…” But why explain it to the girl? She felt her voice going businesslike, the loan officer demanding a delinquent payment. “It’s important I speak to your father.”

  She saw through it. “Right.” And the clatter of a dropped phone.

  Outside, a movement caught her eye. The trucks had arrived to cut down more trees. On a Sunday, even. She heard a chain saw start up, and a man walked into her view in the distance, holding the saw before him like a weapon. He laid it into a tree and the blade sunk in as if it were butter.

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Ponty? This is Anita Beveridge. I hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Just reading the funnies.” His voice was nimble and slightly high-pitched, a gruff child’s.

  “I’m calling about Paul. Have you seen him?”

  “Nope. Not since last week, anyway. When’d you lose him?”

  “He called from somewhere Friday night, and he’s been gone since.”

  “Ever do this before?”

  “Oh, no. He’s a homebody.” She pressed the receiver closer to her ear, remembering Friday night, the bathwater she sat in pink with his blood. She thought that their separation would be something more than a sorting out of emotional goods. They were made of the same stuff. She wore molecules that used to be his. It would be like pouring the gin and the tonic back into their respective bottles.

  “Mrs. Beveridge? Are you there?”

  “Sorry.”

  “Have you checked the places he goes to? Bars, maybe? Friends in town?”

  “He doesn’t have any friends.”

  Ponty paused before saying, “Did you have some sort of disagreement?” And he added, “Maybe?,” as if the question was somehow out of line.

  “Um…yes, actually.” As she watched, a tree fell in the forest. At the edge of their yard, a backhoe was unearthing stumps. One came up with great resistance, clods of dirt falling from the broken-off root ends.

  “I have some experience with this, Mrs. Beveridge,” Ponty was telling her. “Could be he’s laying low.”

  “Experience. You mean your wife left you?”

  “Uh. I meant in my work. My detective work.” He waited a beat, during which she grew hot with embarrassment. “But as a matter of fact, yes.”

  “So she came back,” Anita said, relieved.

  He cleared his throat. “Oh. Actually, no.”

  “I see.”

  “If I see him…” he said finally. He sounded tired.

  “Sure. Thanks. I’m sorry to get you out of bed.”

  “No problem. Hey—”

  “Yes?”

  “Tell him to call me when you find him? I have some work I need done.”

  * * *

  When they hung up, she put on a pot of boiling water and sat down at the kitchen table. She stayed there most of the day, doing crossword puzzles and flipping blankly through catalogs. In the evening, she called Kathy, the head teller, and asked her for a ride to work.

  “You two need another car,” Kathy said.

  That night she didn’t sleep, only lay in the middle of the bed, alternately tugged by the wish that he would come home and they could get it over with, and a wrenching dread of the same thing. She fantasized a plan of action: herself, her car, her things, and a cashier’s check for her life savings, all on their way to someplace better and new, maybe somewhere in the Southwest like Tucson or Albuquerque. She could already taste the dust, sharp as glass on her tongue, and feel the hot dry air plucking at her skin.

  In the morning, Kathy came for her and they drove to work. Anita tried to act cheerful. But when a car approached close behind them with its lights on, she saw herself reflected in the windshield, her eyes sunken and wary like a rabid animal's. She hadn’t eaten breakfast. Larry would have been disappointed and even slightly disgusted by that.

  “Okay,” Kathy said suddenly. “What is it?”

  They were at the end of Valley Road now, on their way toward town. “Nothing.”

  “When was the last time you spilled your guts to somebody, Anita?”

  The question took her by surprise. “Uh…not lately.”

  “So.”

  She shifted around in her seat and felt a draft on her thigh. My God, she thought, I forgot my underwear. But she felt around and found it was only a hole in her stockings. “I don’t know what to say,” she said. “I think Paul and I are breaking up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kathy said. She meant it. The unexpected sincerity choked Anita up, and she had to pause a second to keep from crying. Kathy was wearing a frilly blouse and a black skirt. She had big hair. Anita had never really trusted her, always thought she was a bit ungenuine, a little tasteless. “How long have you been together?”

  “Four years.”

  She nodded like a doctor gathering information for her diagnosis. “What happened?”

  “We want different things,” she said. “It was my mistake.” After a moment she added “I thought I could make him want what I did.”

  “You were young.”

  They were pulling into the bank parking lot. “I guess I was. Am.”

  All that morning, she pushed things distractedly around her desk. She approved several car loans automatically, with only vague attention to the credit reports. She passed her desk clock from hand to hand like a hot biscuit, as if doing so would jar the numbers loose and speed the time. At lunch, she passed up the leftovers in the doughnut box and walked across the street to the used-book store, where she thought she might be able to distract herself.

  It was mostly
a kitsch store. They carried a lot of Western Americana, gag books ancient how-tos on the art of the love letter or postwar diner party etiquette whose only value now was their age. It was uncomfortably warm, and she immediately began to perspire. At the back of the store she spied a wooden stool. She went to it and lowered herself onto it.

  It was a very short stool. To sit comfortably she had to cross her legs in an awkward way, so that she took on a near-Indian-style stance. Her calves brushed the carpet. It reminded her of a visit she took to a first-grade classroom. The class was learning about money, and the teacher, whose home equity loan Anita had handled, had asked her to come in and explain how a bank worked. While Anita talked to the kids, she sat in one of their tiny chairs. At the time, the visit struck her as a preview of a world she would soon be a part of—a world of exuberance tempered by order, of regular schedules and parent-teacher conferences. This stool only made her feel like an oaf in a country of pixies.

  There was a row of old books at eye level, which she wearily scanned. They were children’s treasuries of fiction and poetry, all of them oversized and crusty with dried binding glue. She opened one called Great Moral Tales, and found a story about a sick boy who gives his toys away to poor kids. In one scene, he tries to demonstrate a bicycle to a little girl, but he is too weak to stand and topples like a rusted fence. Anita read it through to the bitter end: the boy’s tragic death, surrounded by his admiring little friends.

  In spite of herself, Anita began to cry. She slapped the book shut and shoved it back onto the shelf, and as she pulled her hand away a splinter found the webbing between her thumb and forefinger and drove in deep. She grabbed the hand with her other and squeezed her eyes shut. Now the sobs came up and out of her in great and ragged waves. God, she was sick of crying, of having to cry. She leaned heavily against the books.