The Night of the Comet

by George Bishop

  The Night of the Comet is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2013 by George Bishop, Jr.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Music Publishing Co., Inc., for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Woodstock,” words and music by Joni Mitchell, copyright © 1969 (renewed) by Crazy Crow Music. All rights administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing, 8 Music Square West, Nashville, TN 37203. All rights reserved. Used by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bishop, George.

  The night of the comet: a novel / George Bishop.

  pages cm

  eISBN: 978-0-345-53879-6

  1. Adolescence—Fiction. 2. Dysfunctional families—Fiction. 3. Comets—Fiction. 4. Louisiana—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. I. Title.

  PS3602.I7565N54 2013

  813′.6—dc23 2013004334

  Jacket illustration: Ben Perini

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  v3.1_r1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Baton Rouge, 2000

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Epilogue

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  We are stardust, we are golden,

  We are billion-year-old carbon,

  And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.

  —Joni Mitchell, “Woodstock”

  “Hey, look! It’s right out there. I tell you, it’s one of the most beautiful creations I’ve ever seen. It’s so graceful.”

  “It’s yellow and orange, just like a flame.”

  —astronauts Edward Gibson and Gerald Carr, on spotting Comet Kohoutek from Skylab, December 1973

  BATON ROUGE, 2000

  HERE in Baton Rouge you can still see the stars at night.

  Our backyard abuts the last patch of pastureland in the neighborhood, a piece of the old Pike-Burden farm still hanging on at the edge of the city. On a clear night like tonight, when my wife and boy are busy inside, I like to leave my desk for a few minutes and walk down to the rear of our yard, down to where my quarter acre ends at a low ditch and a barb-wire fence, and take in the night air. Beyond the fence the land stretches out flat as calm water. Stands of pine and oak ring the field. Off in the far corner a cow pond gleams in the moonlight. From the east comes the swish of cars passing on Perkins Road; from the north, the distant rumble of trucks on I-10.

  But a person can’t stand for long on a night like this without looking up. Call it the lure of the ineffable: your eyes are drawn skyward, and there they are. The stars. The night is filled with them. They cluster, they scatter, they shine, they go on forever. They’re beautiful, aren’t they? I’m no expert; I can name only the brightest ones, pick out the most obvious constellations: there’s Polaris and Vega; Ursa Minor, Aries, and Capricorn … But no matter how little I know them, I still love the stars. How could anyone not? Wherever you go, you know they’ll always be there, shining. All you have to do is turn your eyes up.

  Also up there, I know, somewhere behind the stars, is the comet. You don’t hear much about Kohoutek these days—“C/1973 E1” as it’s known by its modern designation. You can’t see it now; not even the most powerful of telescopes can see it. It’s billions of miles away, far beyond the edge of the solar system, a small lump of ice and rock spinning out into the black vacuum of space. In the planetary scale of things, Kohoutek barely registers as a speck of dust; really, it’s nothing anyone needs to be afraid of anymore. And yet, lately, when the sky is clear and the neighborhood is quiet, I find myself thinking about it. In fact, more and more, I find I can hardly stop thinking about it.

  I suppose it’s because I’m turning forty soon, the same age my father was when the comet came crashing through our lives, and I worry that heredity might catch up with me at last—that a genetically preprogrammed crisis is due for a generational reoccurrence right about now and I won’t be able to dodge it.

  Or perhaps it’s because in not so many years my own son will be the age I was then, and I worry for him, worry that he’ll finally have to step up to the world, the real world of hope and love and loss, and I don’t want him to have to go through all that like I did. I believe if I could, I’d put a blindfold on Ben and pick him up and run with him through all the burning years of his adolescence and not set him down again until he’s safe on the other side, when he’s thirty or so and I know he’ll be all right.

  Because it’s not true what they say, that you get over it—that with time, whatever happens to you, good or bad, drifts away into the harmless river of the past. You never get over it, not really. The past never leaves you. You carry it around with you for as long as you live, like a pale, stubborn worm lodged there in your gut, keeping you up at night.

  My son’s in the house behind me now, helping his mother clean up after dinner. The kitchen window’s open. I can hear the soft rattle of dishes as they load the washer, their voices as they talk about beautifully inconsequential things. (“If you use too much soap, then what happens?” “I don’t know. Maybe the dishwasher will explode.” “No, it won’t!”)

  The comet, I know, is long gone, not to return for millions of years. In another sense, though, it never left. It’s still there; it’ll always be there, hanging like a black star above my head wherever I turn. And on an evening like this, all it takes is the sound of my boy’s voice, and the bright stars above, and the cool air wafting around me, to stir the worm of memory. Then the past comes flooding back
, and whether I want to go there or not, I’m instantly transported again to that night.

  “Dad? Dad, is that you?”

  I sat up in bed to listen. The night was quiet; the Moon shone in at my window. I wasn’t altogether sure if I was still dreaming or not. I heard a rattling noise outside at the garage shed, and I got up and went to the top of the stairs.

  “Dad?”

  But his bedroom door was ajar and the house was empty, as I knew it would be. There was the tilting Christmas tree in the corner, the TV set, the couch, the rug, the chairs, all looking abandoned. The broken telescope, what was left of it, sat in pieces on the floor near the back door. I paused just long enough to pick up the phone in the living room and dial a number.

  “Something’s wrong. Something terrible is happening.… Hurry,” I said before replacing the receiver.

  Outside was cold; I hadn’t stopped to put a coat on over my pajamas, and I could see my breath rising in front of my face. A breeze stirred the trees. Up above, stars and a bright slice of moon. A dog began barking from a nearby backyard as I jogged out of our driveway and down the street. Here and there a neighbor’s house was still blacked out, with the curtains drawn and the lights off. Some had sheets of newspaper taped up behind their windows, giving them a ruined, desolate air. The streetlights, though, those were back on, and as I ran below them I passed from light to dark and light to dark again. I came out of the neighborhood at the end of the block and turned right toward the square. There were no cars at this hour on Franklin Street; there was no sign of life anywhere, as if the whole town had packed up and fled in the middle of the night.

  Up ahead, set back from the road, stood the town water tower—an ugly industrial thing, a hundred feet tall, four spindly legs supporting a round tank that glowed a pale blue-green in the moonlight. I was still some distance from it, half a football field away, when I spotted the wooden ladder from our garage toppled on the ground below it. That was when I looked up and saw my father climbing one of the support legs of the tower.

  Yes, my father. I immediately knew it was him. He was wearing his black Sears McGregor over his blue-striped pajamas. His elbows jutted out, his head was twisted to one side, and his glasses hung on the tip of his nose. As he scrambled up the leg of the tower, his shoes clicking on the metal rungs, his coattails flapping below him, he looked almost comical, like a giant, jittery black bug.

  I halted in the road to watch, hugging myself as I stepped back and forth from one foot to the other, still not quite believing what I was seeing, although at the same time I knew exactly what was happening.

  When my father reached the top of the tower leg, he disappeared under the belly of the tank and then reappeared seconds later standing on the catwalk. He steadied himself with a hand on the railing and began walking carefully to the left. At the hip of the tank, he stopped, turned back, and seemed to look directly at me.

  “Hey!” I shouted, and jerked a hand up to signal to him.

  But he quickly began moving again, looking back over his shoulder as he circled around to the dark side of the tower.

  I stepped to the left, tracking his orbit from the street. When I caught sight of him again he was no longer standing on the catwalk but was hanging on the outside of it. This was so strange and unexpected that I only slowly understood it: my father had somehow crawled under or over the railing, so that now he was balanced with his toes on the edge of the catwalk, gripping the handrail and leaning in awkwardly toward the water tank.

  He shifted oddly at the rail, sliding one shoe out and then back along the edge of the catwalk, as though he was feeling for something with his toe. He groped with one hand behind him at the empty air. He paused; he seemed to be thinking about something. Then all at once he threw out his right arm and leg, flipped around, and gripped the rail behind his back so that he was facing the air with his heels hooked on the edge of the catwalk. I gasped; at the same time, my father made a small exclamation, as if he was pleased and a little surprised at having been able to execute this tricky maneuver: “Ha!”

  But the abrupt motion had jarred his glasses from his nose. My father and I both watched them dropping through the air. “Oh—” he said. As his glasses fell and turned, I thought of gravity, and of Galileo and the Tower of Pisa, and I knew my father must’ve been thinking the same thing. There was a faint cracking sound as they landed on the sidewalk below the tower.

  When I looked back up, he was gazing out at the night sky. Head tilted back, mouth ajar, he might’ve been standing at the rail of our back porch instead of dangling from the edge of a water tower a hundred feet up in the air. For a moment we were both perfectly still, my father watching the sky, me watching him.

  Following his gaze, I turned my eyes to the stars. The Moon was a waxing gibbous, the left side dark, but the right side so bright that I could see the mountains and craters shadowing its silvery landscape. Off to the east of the Moon I made out Leo. And was that Hydra creeping up over the top of the water tower? My father would’ve known all the others; he could point out even the near-invisible constellations, the ones with the names that made his students laugh out loud when he said them: Cassiopeia, Camelopardalis, Sextans.…

  He moved at the rail, drawing my attention back down. As I watched from the street, an unnatural charge filled the air, an electric premonition that raised the hairs on my arms and told me something terrible was about to happen. It was happening right now. The red light atop the tower blinked on and off. I wanted to cry out a warning, I wanted to do something, but I couldn’t move or speak, struck dumb by the awful realization of what I was seeing.

  My father leaned out from the railing and lifted his head, like he was trying to touch his face to the sky. He stretched his arms behind him and opened his mouth wide. Then he squatted, preparing to launch himself into space, and as I looked on in horror his black raincoat unfurled behind him so that for one heart-stopping second he appeared not to fall but to fly, up, up from the tower and into the air, where, flashing like a beacon in the sky above him, ever so faint but visible at last, was his beloved comet, its tail pointed away from the Moon as it hurled back along its orbit to its home in the stars.…

  God help me, I may never forget it. Twenty-six years later, and I still see it all as clearly as if it had happened just yesterday.

  CHAPTER ONE

  SUMMER 1973

  TERREBONNE, LOUISIANA

  “WELL?” my mother asked, reaching in to straighten one of the candles.

  My father touched her arm. “Shh. Don’t rush him. He’s thinking.”

  The blue and yellow flames danced in the draft of the air conditioner. Crêpe paper streamers dangled from the overhead lamp, and colored balloons decorated the corners of the doorways. We leaned in around the table, all of us wearing cardboard hats, as blithe and unsuspecting as partygoers on the Titanic.

  In my usual chair on the left sat my father, Alan Broussard. His arms were crossed on the table, his hair slicked over to one side, his black-rimmed glasses slipping, always slipping, down the slope of his large nose. My mother, Lydia, sat next to him, dressed up for the occasion in a pink pantsuit with a white belt, her red hair styled in a low bouffant with a curl flattened against either cheek. On my right was sister Megan, an angry seventeen-year-old with an embroidered blouse, contact lenses, and a weight problem: a wannabe hippie trapped in the most unhip household in the world.

  And I—I sat in my father’s chair, the seat of honor for the evening. Alan Broussard, Jr.: “Junior” to family and friends, a slight boy in a striped polyester shirt, tight blue jeans, and a cardboard Burger King crown.

  What did I wish for, staring into the blaze of candles on my cake that summer of my fourteenth birthday? I wished for so many things that it would’ve been impossible to name just one; I was a swirling fog of dreams and dissatisfactions. I wished that I was somewhere else. I wished I had a different name, a different family. I wished that something, anything, would happen to change the unpr
omising course of my life.

  I had no obvious talents, no great looks, no exceptional humor or intellect or passions. I couldn’t sing, I couldn’t dance, I couldn’t play an instrument or throw a ball or ride a horse. Except for that odd suffix on my signature, the loopy “Jr.” that linked me to my father and gave me my nickname, I was as close as anybody could get to indistinguishable.

  The only thing I had any affinity for—and I hardly considered this a talent—was reading. I was a reader, a bookworm. My tastes weren’t sophisticated; just give me a ripping good yarn (a phrase I’d gotten from a book: “a ripping good yarn”) and I could stay up half the night with it. Best, of course, if the story had a swarm of deadly army ants, or a jet plane crashing in a desert, or submarines, or jungles, or a raft lost at sea. But really, I would read almost anything I could lay my hands on. Slumped in my bed or a corner of the couch with a good book, I’d look up and feel nothing but disappointment at my own world, so dull and colorless in comparison. If I could have, I would’ve gladly spent the rest of my life in books. Stories were my escape, my refuge, my consolation, my love—

  My sister razzed a noisemaker at my cheek. “Jesus, hurry up.”

  “Stop it!” I hissed, and knocked her hand away.

  I narrowed my eyes on the candles until my family receded into a blurry background. An image rose up at the front of my mind, like a genie conjured by the flames: a tanned girl in pink standing on a lawn. That was all. It was only a glimpse, barely a notion. I hadn’t expected to see her here tonight; this girl in pink was so far outside the realm of possibility that she might have been a fiction herself, an imaginary character from one of my books. But here she was at my birthday, signaling to me through the fog of my desires, and I instantly felt, rather than understood, that she represented everything I could ever wish for. I puckered my lips and blew: Gabriella.

  My family cheered, and my mother plucked the candles from the cake and began passing pieces around.

  “Are you excited about starting high school?” she asked.