Light of Falling Stars

by J. Robert Lennon

  “I am not dead,” she said.

  “No.”

  “Then you wouldn’t need to tell them who I really was. I could just be an old lady you knew.”

  He let out a weary breath. “They would tell Kat, Mom.”

  “It would be the last thing on their minds. They’re going to see mountains and bears and canyons, and that will be what they tell their mother.” He said nothing. “When have I ever asked you for a favor, Edward?”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said finally.

  “Well, all right,” she said, and hoped the excitement was not so obvious in her voice.

  “I have to go.”

  “I love you, Edward.”

  “You too, Mom,” he said, and hung up.

  She pushed herself out of her chair and her muscles resisted, as if they might snap. She straightened slowly and hung the phone on the cradle. It had felt, as they talked, like Edward was here in the room with her, like one of the many talks they’d had in his sister’s absence the last few years he lived at home; now she noticed that it had become dark outside, and the darkness in the corners of the house challenged the kitchen’s single lamp, stranding her in an island of dull yellow light.

  The effect depressed her immensely. In the half-dark, the room’s objects sat with an indifferent, immutable confidence, the way other people’s possessions looked in their houses to a visitor waking in the night. Her hands trembled, not from nerves, she imagined, but to shake off the skin and muscle and blood, easier then to settle in their grave. She felt like her body was launching its first offensive against her mind, which it had decided had run its due course.

  Her thoughts startled her: so macabre! She remembered Hamish’s strangely smooth hands, the patterns they traced in the dust of her dashboard.

  She walked around the house to get her blood flowing, and turned on every lamp. It helped, a little. In the light her things looked less threatening. Still, they distinguished themselves mostly by the shadows they harbored—a smear of dark behind a chair, the black patch behind a photograph.

  She took her jacket—a red windbreaker, worn at the cuffs—and slipped it on. It felt a little big on her, the way Schatze’s clothes had felt when they were girls together, the way Hamish’s had when they were married. Outside, the air had taken on a rough texture, like burlap. She inhaled it and the burn in her lungs felt like an infusion of new life. The moon was bright and nearly full, and she could just make out the worn paths into the woods behind the house. She had walked them enough to know them in the dark, especially with the moon bright and the lights of the house still blazing.

  She wondered what it would be like to meet them. How much of herself would she see in them? The genetic line between herself and Kat, always clear in her imagination, was in fact broken by a husband she had never seen (or had, barely, in a photo Edward had shown her: he stood with Kat, at a great distance, beneath a blossoming magnolia, a thick man with a round face and the sun’s glare in his glasses). She imagined the children fidgeting, their restraint learned, not innate, and polite. His hair cut short, hers long, with a bow slightly ratty from travel. They would be wearing blue jeans bought especially for this trip, the only ones they had ever owned. They would have white sneakers on their feet and would refuse offered food.

  She hadn’t really walked this path during the summer, and it had grown halfway over. She didn’t recall its having grown so quickly in previous years. Perhaps the plants had saved up their growth during the drought, and exploded after the rain. Several times she thought she might have lost her way, but the path reappeared before her in the moonlight. She came to a rise, which she scaled with some difficulty, and looked down at her house from between the trees. The lights cast squarish beams into the weeds in the yard and the split-rail fence that ran around it. From here, it all looked small and inert, pulsing out light that nobody would see or care about. How many people passed it on the road as they returned home in the evening, without noticing it? Her neighbors used to stop by to see her, but the ones who did so had moved, and those who replaced them never came.

  It wasn’t the company she missed, but the acknowledgment that she was there, living.

  Hers, she thought now, was a life without consequence. It would vanish when spent, the way the house would one day be claimed by lupines and knapweed. She’d always had faith in the forces that combated entropy, but now it seemed like her life, everyone’s lives, were only wounds in the fabric of the universe that would heal up in time, despite everyone’s best efforts at preservation. The evidence was everywhere—the path, growing over faster than she could clear it; the stems of plants around her that would, if clipped, heal and grow double; the rain washing ruts from the mud and making new ones where it wished them to go.

  And her family, eroded beyond recognition, leaving and marrying and dying as if they’d sprung fully grown from the dirt, without the intervention of her flesh.

  She was cold, and the back of her hand stung and itched. She brought it to her lips and tasted blood; she must have been scratched parting the underbrush. It was time to go back inside. For a second, looking around her, she saw no path at all, and couldn’t remember how she had gotten to this place. She took a step in a direction that felt right, but there was a bramble there that tugged the laces of her sneaker loose; in another direction was a fallen tree, rotted through and overgrown with moss. And then she remembered: she’d stepped over a thick root. The moon had grown dim behind a cloud, so she felt for it with her feet. There was nothing at first, and then it materialized beneath her. In the face of a rising and inexplicable panic, she leaped it, crashed through the groping branches of a thick bush, came down with her foot sideways on a rock and fell.

  She landed on the path, the air knocked out of her. The impact was more a shock than a pain, her bones recoiling at the sudden pressure; she felt pine needles dig into her stockings and prick at her knees, and something hard drove itself into her chin. She rolled over instinctively, her hands finding her face in the dark, and she coughed until her breath returned to her, ragged and desperate. She tried moving her jaw: no problem. But her hands came away sticky. She found the wound with her finger, and it stung her terribly.

  She got to her feet slowly, fearing a sprain or worse in her ankle, but it had held up. The hurt parts of her throbbed dimly, like electric coils, just beneath the surface of her skin. She felt dizzy and panicked, as if the woods themselves, or something in them, had done this to her; she stood perfectly still, taking deep, cool breaths, trying to calm her thudding heart. When she thought she had the strength, she hurried back down the path, taking it as slowly as her panic would let her, her hand clamped over her chin, stanching the blood. She burst out finally, letting go of a cry that seemed to come from somewhere else, so horribly and perilously weak was it, and she ran into the house, slamming the door behind her.

  Inside, she rushed to the bathroom. Her cheeks were scratched, and blood welled thickly in the gash on her chin. Spots of it darkened on her jacket. She opened the medicine cabinet, her hands shaking, and fumbled with a tin of gauze and bandages. It clattered into the sink. She picked it up, set it on the toilet, and went to work cleaning her wounds, washing them with soap and water and swabbing them with iodine. Then she bandaged the cuts, and watched in the mirror as the gauze on her chin sprouted a red blotch that grew and then stopped. Now, finally, she calmed. She cleaned the blood off the sink and floor and went to her room.

  In bed, the sensation of falling returned to her, and the room spun. She reached out and gripped a bar on the headboard for support. She wondered what Hamish saw when the plane went down, if he ever saw the ground he would die on or heard the other passengers. Or if it seemed he was alone, everything else just a blur around him, as he hurried to meet the forest floor.

  * * *

  The telephone woke her. She wondered who would call so early until she saw her bedside clock: noon. She hadn’t slept this late in years. When she tried to lift her hea
d, the pillow stuck to her face, and came away streaked with the dark brown of dried blood. Her face felt bloated and sore.

  “Hello?” The room was still hazy, the light in the windows a bright affliction, as if the sun had risen in the yard.

  “Mom.”

  “Edward!”

  “You sound funny. Are you okay?” His voice was distant and tinny; a bad connection.

  “I’m fine. I had a fall, and I’m sore.”

  “A fall! Is anything broken? Do you need—”

  “Everything’s fine. Just a few scratches.”

  “Okay,” he said doubtfully. “I wanted to tell you that I called Kat. She liked the idea, believe it or not. Not the part about you, I mean, the trip. I’m taking them for the weekend, and I can put them up in one of the chalets, and then we can hike on some—”

  “Wait a minute, you mean you’re coming?” she said, her sluggish blood starting to flow.

  “Well, maybe. I’m picking them up Friday morning.” His voice was buoyant with excitement.

  “So you’re coming?”

  “Well, I think.”

  “This is okay with Kat? She’s letting you take them.”

  “They have some church thing this weekend,” he said. “There was some kind of shake-up or something, a priest getting drunk, I don’t know. It’s like a retreat. They were going to leave the kids with some neighbors, but they don’t really like the neighbors…”

  “You’ll bring them.”

  He sighed. “I will try to bring them, Mom. It’s a little out of the way. I have to think of some reason to get them there.”

  “You’ll bring them, please, Edward,” she said. Her wounds stopped their dull throbbing and began to sting like fresh cuts. She touched her face. It had the mealy tautness of a tomato. “Tell me you will.”

  “I can’t guarantee—”

  “Edward!”

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay, I’ll bring them. But I don’t know the details. We’ll have to make up something about who you are, I don’t know. There’s still time to think about it.”

  “I have to get ready,” she said. “What can I do for them? We can go walking, and—”

  “Look, don’t make any big plans, okay? It’s supposed to be no big deal, just some old lady.”

  “Right,” she said, though she was loath to hear it.

  “I’ll get back to you on this. Let me think about my schedule here and I’ll try to whip something up. Brainstorm, Mom, okay?”

  “All right.”

  “I’m gonna go,” he said. “I love you, Mom.”

  She had heard of her granddaughter’s birth from Edward. Rachel, he told her, her name’s Rachel. Trixie hadn’t even known Kat was pregnant. Edward got hold of a picture of the baby and made her a photocopy of it. Even grainy and cracked from folding, Rachel’s face bore the shadows of Hamish, and a little of Schatze. Somewhere she still had this photo, though she hadn’t looked at it for years.

  But after that, Edward sent no pictures. Maybe he had been optimistic that Rachel’s birth would smooth out the rift in the family. If anything, it widened. Kat called only once, and that call had only been a curt declaration of her intentions, an almost defiant (and at that point entirely unnecessary) gesture. “Our spiritual adviser suggested I call,” her daughter told her, and little else. And when David was born, nothing.

  In the bathroom, Trixie was stunned at her reflection: last night’s scratches had swollen like streambeds in a flood, and the wound on her chin reopened, turning the gauze and even the tape that held it a gruesome brown-pink. Gingerly, she tore off the bandage and replaced it with another, and the stain quickly stopped its spread.

  That afternoon she ate lunch with Diane, at the same place she had eaten with Edward years before. It had a different name now, and the pressed-tin ceiling was gone. Now the water pipes and air shafts were left exposed high above them. Long cords hung from the rafters and ended in lamps that dangled directly over each table. It had been many years since the place changed hands, but this decor still seemed like an affront, a surface change that marked a larger movement in Marshall away from its humble beginnings. It reminded her that she wouldn’t die in the place she had come to so full of hope for a new life, but in the urban landscape that had been built around it, which she would never fully know.

  Even so, Marshall was more familiar to her than her own son was. Marshall had built itself out in the open: retail warehouses grew out of prairies, housing developments crept across fields like renegade weeds. But Edward grew up in private, like a greenhouse plant. He read books and listened to the radio, and if she had a tangible effect on him, it was only the fretful leniency that allowed him space to change in. And Kat, finally, seemed less her child than a piece of her broken off and lost, a piece she had lived so long without that it had stopped being hers.

  When Diane arrived she gasped and touched Trixie’s face. “I know,” Trixie said. She explained the scratches and told Diane about the welling of panic that had sent her sprawling, the fear that something would find her in the dark.

  “Well,” Diane said, “you aren’t getting any younger, now are you?” She raised her eyebrows. “Did your ghost come back?”

  She was tempted to confess the episode in the car, but something in Diane’s tone prevented it—an amused restraint, colored with the hope that the answer would be no, that the delusion, if that’s what it was, had stopped. Instead, she told about her grandchildren, that they might be brought to her soon.

  “You’re kidding!”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “So what will you say?” Diane said, happy to get off the subject she had brought up. Trixie shrugged.

  “I don’t know. You’re the one who has a way with words. You tell me.”

  Diane shook her head. “Not a chance.”

  “I don’t even know how to start thinking about it. I’m at quite a loss.”

  A waitress came and they ordered lunch. “You know,” Diane said, “it might help you to write down your thoughts. Script it. When Frank and I were divorcing, I always took notes before we met. I kept them on note cards in my pocket. Never had to pull them out, but it helped knowing they were there.”

  “That’s a thought.”

  “I say, give ‘em something to think about someday. Make it a visit they’ll remember.”

  “But won’t tell anyone about,” Trixie said, and thought for the first time of the risk that Edward was taking to try this. A cloud of doubt and guilt drifted through her and she took a deep breath.

  They ate, talking about other, easier things, and paid their bill. As they parted, affection swelled in Trixie, the kind you get when leaving on a trip of indefinite duration, when you tell somebody you’ll see them again someday. “You’ve been such a friend,” she said, and almost wept at the sound of the words, thin and empty out on the sidewalk, against the noise of traffic. Diane took her hand. “Well, I’ll keep on being one,” she said, but Trixie could see she was afraid to be moved, as if she saw, in her friend’s confusion, her own future, and wanted desperately to believe it wouldn’t be so bad.

  Driving home, she noticed the handprints were still visible on her dashboard, not yet covered by new dust. She reached out during a red light and fitted her own, smaller hand into the wide fingers of his. The surface was cold, and the cold seeped into her, stiffening the fingers. She worked them, wiping the dust off onto her palm, and now there was another cleared space within the first in the spidery shape of her hand.

  * * *

  Edward called that night; the trip was set, and he would bring the children to her house on Sunday, sometime in the afternoon, as he drove them home. “Your name is Mrs. Kurtz.”

  “Kurtz?”

  “You’re the mother of a friend of mine, okay?”

  “What’s the friend’s name?”

  A pause. “Oh, Jesus…uh, Mark.”

  “Mark Kurtz,” she repeated, trying to fix the name. Her son.

  She had thr
ee days to prepare whatever she was going to say. When she’d hung up, she looked through her kitchen drawers for a package of note cards she thought she had. She didn’t find them. Eventually she uncovered a yellow legal pad, its pages dusty and brittle with age, and pulled it out from under a pile of pot holders and dishrags. She threw it onto her table, where it shone dully under the kitchen lamp, and turned back to the drawers for something suitable to write with. A pencil. It was unsharpened, clean and yellow and untouched by anyone but her. With a kitchen knife, she shaved it to a point, then she sat down at the table, the legal pad before her, and set the pencil to it.

  It was harder to start than she’d imagined: the memories that had surfaced were less parts of a narrative than evocative and fleeting images, and she could no more commit them to paper than she could justly describe a painting or symphony. There were no words at her disposal other than the words she recalled people saying. When she started, finally, it was at the beginning of her family history as she knew it: My parents, she wrote, came to Great Falls from the state of New York.

  She was up late that night, setting her story in motion. She found that her efforts to describe one incident stirred up memories of others, until, by the time she usually went to sleep, her head was so spinning with stories that she could barely write them down fast enough. Her handwriting became nearly unintelligible, and she whittled her pencil into a little pile of graphite dust and wood shavings that steadily grew beside the paper.