Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  Out of a job.

  When he got home, he padded around the apartment in his stocking feet, trying to decide if he should empty his savings, buy a car, and drive back to Wisconsin. It was probably a bad idea, though that had not always been an effective deterrent for him. Already he could see the confusion of emotions on his mother’s face: joy at seeing him, coupled with the horror of realizing he would not be leaving. When he picked up the phone, he wasn’t sure who he would call. It turned out to be Toth.

  He answered, still asleep, on the first ring.

  “Huh?”

  “Toth, it’s Lars.” When he heard nothing from the other end, he added, “I’m sorry to wake you up.”

  “‘Sokay.”

  In truth, this was something he needed to do, but had been putting off. Over the weekend he’d bumped into Toth and his roommate, Tim, at the Safeway. They were buying provisions for a camping trip that Lars had not been invited on. This simultaneously insulted him and filled him with pity; Toth didn’t really like Tim, who was a hippie music teacher at the alternative elementary school and was always listening to tapes of himself playing guitar. At the store, a plastic bulk bag of peanuts dangling from his fist, Toth told Lars that he would have invited him “if I didn’t think you’d be hanging around with your girlfriend all weekend.” At this Tim snorted, and the expression of triumphant scorn on Toth’s face faded away.

  “What are you doing today?” Lars asked him now.

  “Jesus,” he said. “It still feels like yesterday.”

  “Maybe you ought to come over.”

  Toth paused, still breathing with the slowed rhythm of sleep. “Why’s that?”

  “To talk.” And when he didn’t answer; “I’ll make you breakfast.”

  “French toast,” Toth said.

  “Okay, French toast.”

  “Okay. I’m on my way.”

  He arrived in half an hour, just as Lars was finishing the food, got plates and forks out for them and set them on the table.

  “Thanks.”

  “No problem.”

  They ate, made small talk. Lars told him about the police cars and his feint to the Chinese place. Toth talked about his terrible weekend with Tim. “Man, the guy eats,” he said. “He ate peanuts and crackers all fucking night. I didn’t sleep.”

  Afterward, they went outside to walk off the food, and ended up on a path down by the river, mostly obscured from view by trees and shrubs.

  “I didn’t know this trail was here,” Toth told him.

  “Not a lot of people know. Homeless guys.” He broke off a branch that was sticking into the path. “I used to come down here with Megan sometimes.” He didn’t want to walk ahead, where there was a small curved bank of flat rocks around which the roots of cottonwood trees grew. The roots described the edges of an open circle of water, where eddies carved a deep pool. He and Megan had tried to make love there, but found nowhere dry to lie down, and the rocks hurt them. They had finally given up. Lars remembered that Megan had lost a ring along here somewhere, and he automatically scanned the weeds for the glint of metal. But there was nothing.

  “Here,” he said, and pointed to a little clearing where a low, forgotten bench rotted at the water’s edge. Once Toth had collected enough round stones to toss into the river, they sat there.

  “I’m really sorry,” Lars said.

  Toth tossed the first rock, and the water shuddered beneath it. Then he shrugged it off.

  Lars said, “I miss you, and I’m really sorry.”

  “So what’s up with this Christine?” This very simple, nothing betrayed in the tone.

  “She’s a friend.”

  “Okay…”

  “It’s nothing romantic,” Lars said. “She’s too sick for that. And I’m not ready. You have to know that.” He looked up at Toth, who was still staring at the spot where the rock fell. Suddenly he pushed the others off his lap, and they knocked against each other on the ground.

  “I guess.”

  “I know it seems like a big deal to you.” He touched Toth’s shoulder, then withdrew. “It is, kind of. She needed…we both needed somebody who’s not so much better off.”

  “I’m not good enough for that?”

  “You remind me of her.”

  Toth turned to him. “You remind me of her too.”

  For a few minutes they watched the water pass. In midstream, just downstream from a boulder that jutted from the water like an iceberg, a fish jumped. As if it were a signal to him, Toth said, “There’s something you don’t know, man.”

  “I don’t know?”

  “I don’t think you know.” He looked Lars in the eye. “No, you don’t.”

  He felt a chill. “What.”

  Toth frowned suddenly, a reflex to precede tears, but the tears didn’t come. “I was in love with her. With Megan.” He kicked the pile of rocks and they scattered. “Nothing ever happened or anything, I just loved her. Like, romantically.”

  Lars said, “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “I don’t know how it…yeah, I do. She treated me so nice. That’s stupid. I mean, nobody bothered to get to know me like that. I could say whatever to her, and she’d know what I meant. That kind of thing.” He shoved his thumb and forefinger up under his glasses and pressed them to the inside corners of his eyes. “And then, I pretty much knew you weren’t going to break up, I mean, she wanted to marry you…”

  “She did?” Another spike through his throat. He swallowed around it.

  “Well, yeah.” Toth looked at him strangely, apparently astonished that he hadn’t known.

  “Did she know?” Lars managed. “About you.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since about eight months ago. We, the three of us, went to the Kwik Stop for beer, and I was in the front seat and she was in the back, and you ran in alone, and I just told her. I talked the whole time you were in there, and I just told her everything, how I felt and all, and I never looked back to see her reaction and she didn’t say anything, and then you came out and we drove off. And you didn’t notice a thing, I guess.”

  “I don’t remember this at all.”

  “You wouldn’t.”

  Toth took his glasses off, folded them up and dropped them into his pocket. It was an old man’s gesture, and it made Lars deeply sad.

  “I couldn’t help it,” Toth said. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize.”

  After that there was nothing more to say. They both seemed to realize this at once, and in time stood. On the way back to Lars’s apartment, they talked about seeing a movie—a matinee somewhere.

  But when they walked in, Lars’s message machine was blinking. It was Christine’s mother. They had found a kidney for her.

  * * *

  This is what had happened:

  A group of teenagers, two boys and two girls, had spent the night camping illegally on a remote stretch of eastern Washington river. They got drunk, and were still drunk when they woke the next morning, when they drove their Ford Bronco into the water. One of the girls in the front seat hadn’t been wearing a seat belt and cracked her head on the windshield. She stayed conscious and climbed out, but her friends, ironically, all wearing seat belts, drowned. The survivor stumbled back along the dirt road they had taken the night before, until she encountered a group of picnickers, who drove her to the nearest town. As the picnickers’ car pulled into the hospital parking lot, she suddenly screamed, “Oh my God!” and keeled over dead of a brain hemorrhage.

  Of the three people within helicopter distance ahead of Christine in priority, none shared the dead girl’s blood type. Christine did. The kidney was being removed from the girl’s body when Christine’s doctor called. She had been eating lunch, and when she hung up the phone she went to the bathroom, threw up half her sandwich, brushed her teeth and walked across the parking lot with her mother to the hospital.

  Lars and Toth got all this information from Amanda S
tull, who was sitting on a wheelchair that had been left in the hall outside Christine’s hospital room. Christine was inside, undergoing rests in preparation for surgery; Amanda Stull was frantic. “I called all of Christine’s brothers,” she said. “Dennis and Leslie are coming, and Samuel…“And she switched off, as if the thought of these children, scattered as they were across America, almost out of reach, was too much for her to take.

  She looked older here than she had in the trailer, where Lars had met her; her hair was an icy steel gray that seemed perfectly in place in the hospital, and it added to the already strong impression that she was emphatically and inconsolably nervous. Her eyes shone from the stone of her head like two glinting coins; her cheeks sagged under the weight of incipient jowls. Her hands were wrapped around the chair’s push rims as if she might, at any moment, need to go careening down the hall in search of help.

  Lars and Toth moved quietly away from her and waited near the elevators. “How long do you think it’s going to be?” Toth asked him. They had been here twenty minutes, hoping to see her before surgery.

  “Can’t be much longer. How much can they do to her?”

  Down the hall, there was a noise: Christine’s door had opened and her mother was launching herself from the wheelchair. As they watched, she disappeared inside.

  Lars tried to recall when he had last been in a hospital. The memory that returned most easily to him was of his father’s illness, though there had been other visits since then. He remembered his grandfather’s bypass surgery, which had been a failure; the operating doctor came out of surgery and told them that his arteries had been like wet paper towels. In high school, his soccer coach had broken his ankle when, running along the sideline after a play, he stepped in the water bucket and fell. And Megan’s strep throat, which Student Health had refused to treat because of a filing error regarding her tuition bill. He brought her to the emergency room here, where they sat for two hours before anyone would see them. She lay across two waiting room seats, her head in his lap. Her forehead burned, and it radiated the scorched scent of a baked potato, and he brushed hairs from her face and read aloud to her from a copy of Highlights for Children, which neither of them had seen for years.

  He wondered how these doctors and nurses, how anyone on the staff of the hospital, could stand to work in a place where everyone is angry or miserable, watching the lives of their loved ones drain away.

  He thought: I took such good care of her. And in the end for nothing.

  After a few minutes, a nurse came out to find them. She led them back to Christine’s room and through the door, where her mother sat opposite them, mashing her daughter’s hand in her own. Everything in the room was beige. Behind Amanda Stull hung a beige curtain. Lars could see the wheels and frame of another bed underneath it, and the feet of a man and woman, presumably doctors or nurses. Christine’s head poked out from under her sheets, looking slightly waxen in the fluorescent light, but all in all she looked healthy and alert, more so anyway than she often was out of the hospital. Lars told her so.

  “Well Jesus, it’s pretty damned exciting, don’t you think?” she said, her voice quieter, less sure than usual.

  “I guess so.”

  She pointed at Toth, smiling. “Who’s the kook?”

  “I’m Toth,” he said. “Lars’s friend.” He stuck out his hand and she took it.

  “Christine. Lars told me about you.” She looked down at herself, and gestured to her body underneath the white sheets. “Sorry I can’t get up and show you around.”

  Toth looked flustered. “Oh, that’s…I mean—”

  “We came as soon as we could,” Lars said. “They had us waiting outside…”

  “They were sticking things in me.” She made a dismissive wave with her free hand. “Business as usual. Did Mom tell you about the kids who drove their truck into the river?”

  “Yeah.”

  She shook her head. “This kidney was cleaning out some kid’s blood a few hours ago.”

  “Jesus,” Toth whispered.

  “Yeah,” she said, and to Lars’s utter astonishment, she began to cry. Her mother reached out, and with great and trembling gentleness ran her fingers over Christine’s forehead. She whispered, “It’s okay, baby,” and Christine nodded.

  “Christine,” Lars said. “Do you want—”

  “No, no, stay.” She wiped her face with her free hand. “It’s just, that poor girl had to watch them go down. I’m going to think about her every time I pee.”

  “Are you afraid?” Lars asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a perfect match, baby,” her mother told her. “They said so. It couldn’t be better.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  The curtain behind Christine’s mother parted, and two nurses, a man and a woman, stepped out. “Excuse us,” the man said. Lars caught a glimpse, as the curtain fell closed, of a still figure under sheets. No sounds came from the other bed, only the low hum of some machinery—a monitor perhaps. They were all silent for a moment, suddenly aware of this presence they had forgotten, until Christine spoke again.

  “You know,” she said, “I’ve been totally confident about this transplant ever since all this started. Why shouldn’t I be, right?” She swallowed hard, looked at her mother and back to Lars. “But now…they’re gonna cut part of me out and put something else in? How can that work?” Her face tightened. “How can that be anything but the most ridiculous bullshit?”

  * * *

  Before they left Christine asked him to make a couple of calls. “The Alpha chicks,” she said. “Just call up the house, okay? It’s in the phone book.”

  “Okay.”

  “I know you probably think they’re stupid, but they’re good to me.”

  “I don’t think anybody’s stupid.”

  “It’s in the yellow pages. ADT, under ‘Fraternities and Sororities.’” She paused. “As if sororities don’t deserve their own listing.”

  “Got it.”

  “Come here,” she said. Lars wasn’t sure what she meant. He raised his eyebrows, questioning. “Here,” she said, and waved him close.

  When he leaned over, she touched the back of his neck and kissed him once, on the lips. He let it happen. Her lips, her fingers, were a little cold. It felt good.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  “Good luck.”

  “Don’t tell me. Tell the surgeon.”

  He smiled at Amanda Stull, who managed a thin smile in return, and looked once more at Christine before he took hold of Toth’s shoulder and walked with him out into the hall.

  * * *

  Lars called the sorority from the lobby. “I’m Lars Cowgill,” he told the girl who answered. “Christine Stull’s friend.”

  “Really?” she said. He heard her whispering something to someone else.

  “She wanted me to call you. She got a kidney. They’re putting it in now.”

  There was a pause. “Oh my God!” the girl said. Lars told them how long it would take—six hours—and about the accident that brought her the kidney.

  “So do we come down there? Will they let us see her afterward?”

  “I don’t know,” Lars said, and he wondered when he would next see her. Possibly never. Don’t think that.

  There was no use staying at the hospital. Lars looked at his watch: twelve-fifteen. It would be evening when she came out. Would she wake up before the day’s end? He felt his blood scraping along the inside of his veins. It was as if he’d been poisoned.

  In the lobby, they passed by a vending machine full of starchy junk food: pretzels, snack mix, potato chips. Lars was drawn to it. Just the thing to soak up the toxins. He pulled a dollar out of his wallet and fed it into the machine. The machine spit it out, over and over again. He felt something electric and uncontrollable creeping into his limbs, and he stepped back, panting. The machine ejected his wrinkled dollar onto the floor.

  “I have one,” Toth said. He unfolded a crisp bill fro
m his pocket and stepped toward the machine. “What do you want?”

  His mouth was dry and sour. “Snack-’Ems.”

  “You got it.” Toth fed his dollar in without incident and punched the appropriate buttons. A package cascaded down into the tray, and Toth pulled it out. He handed it to Lars, along with the crumpled bill.

  “Thanks.”

  On the sidewalk, Lars ripped the bag open and ate. His body sucked the salt out of the food, and he shuddered as it coursed through him. They had biked here when they heard the message, and now they were faced with either returning home, where Lars emphatically did not want to be, or spending the afternoon hanging around downtown, sitting in cafés, waiting to come back to the hospital.

  To the south, beyond the river, green clouds churned over the foothills. Somewhere within driving distance it would rain. It was the kind of sky that, in Wisconsin, would make people start thinking tornado. Lars remembered once, as a child, watching tornado clouds just before they gave birth to a funnel: he was in the parking lot of a shopping center in Madison with his mother when the sirens started (and before that, he now remembered, when he was even younger, he had thought those sirens were the tornadoes themselves, pulsing in the air like giant revving engines). He and his mother were standing, loaded down with bags, on opposite sides of the car. They looked up and saw, seemingly close enough to touch, two clouds passing one another at the same elevation. They clung briefly, the strands of each trailing off in the opposite direction as they parted. It was not something that was supposed to happen; Lars knew this without understanding why. It filled him with excitement and fear. And when he looked at his mother—he would not be afraid, he decided, if she wasn’t—he saw her head tipped back and her mouth open, laughing, and she said, “Lars, if only your father could see.”

  Every kind of weather, for Lars, evoked a complicated layer cake of emotions, based on everything he’d felt on similar days. Sunny, dry, and cold meant the embarrassed anticipation of opening presents at his fifth birthday party, the one his parents had thrown for him at the skating rink; it meant the impending sense of both defeat and relief in the last seconds of the final soccer game of his freshman season in high school; it meant the crystal diode radio he had made in sixth grade with Matt Acheson, and the wire-hanger antenna they had strung in a tree in his backyard. And this weather, today’s weather, meant that afternoon with his mother, when they had gone Christmas shopping early, because it would be the first Christmas without Dad. And now the mingled pain of both loss and worry, each for a different woman, one who was gone from the world and the other struggling to stay in it.