Star Time (9 page)

"It's only for a little while," she said with her tone of finality that Greg recognized.

He had sworn to
Meggy
that they would always be together, that he would always take care of her, but they were being separated now and he could do nothing about it. The decision had already been made for him. He ran from the room before his mother could see he was crying.

When she left a few days later, Greg and
Meggy
had to be torn apart, sobbing. Matt said good-bye to his daughter at the door. He would not look at his wife or drive her to the bus station.

Sensing emptiness in the house, loneliness swiftly rushed in to appropriate the space Essie and
Meggy
no longer occupied, rebuffing all attempts at eviction; the other occupants were never rid of loneliness after that. Nor was Matt ever rid
of anger at his wife's departure nor
of his weighty sadness at his powerlessness to hold her.
Taciturn before, he spoke even more rarely afterward.
He allowed both his and Greg's lives to be ruled solely by the clock: time to wake, to eat, to work, to eat, to sleep, to wake again. He knew there were things he should do to comfort his son, but did not know what they were and would be incapable of doing them if he did. They stopped eating in the dining room
—
it was too painful; loneliness appropriated
all the
empty, precious chairs and grabbed gluttonously at food for which they had no appetite.

Losing the two people who had always brought him happiness devastated Greg. Their departure gouged huge ruts along his heart, leaving a large tract of inner landscape scarred and barren. Wherever he went, their absence awaited him.

Greg's solace was the world that welcomed him from the television screen. Its population was the most dependable friends; they did not desert him. Its families were happy and their problems minor and always soluble. Its dining rooms were filled with carefree children and wise parents who never left. He believed it to be the real world, everyone else's world; his own existence was a terrible, nightmarish mistake. He longed for a family like Ozzie and Harriet's, and imagined their children were he and
Meggy
, not David and Ricky. He longed simultaneously for something even more inconceivable: for his mother to be there watching TV beside him as before, telling him they would have that car
some day
.

His father sometimes watched with Greg, accepting whatever programs his son chose. They never watched Essie’s favorites.
Occasionally they told each other how funny something was, but mostly they just sat together watching in the dark. Having his father there was better somehow, as if sharing their separate loneliness lessened it.

Greg scrutinized his mother's letters for word that he would soon be allowed to join her, refusing to let
himself
recognize that his father would then be left alone. He missed
Meggy
desperately and wrote to her with stories and drawings and with jokes he had heard on television. Writing was a difficult chore for his father, but each weekend he would set himself to the labor of writing a note to his daughter and
ask
Greg to include it with his.

As the second summer approached, his mother wrote that she and
Meggy
would be returning for a visit. Greg was sure she was coming for him. He began to make private choices: He would take his tennis racket, to be sure, and his baseball mitt, but not the bat, which was too heavy.

Only a few weeks before the scheduled arrival, very late at night, the phone rang. His father was holding it to his ear, listening, when Greg reached the living room.

"They're sure?" his father finally asked in a tone of utter desolation. And then he added, "I'll tell him myself."

His father slowly lowered the receiver. When he turned at last to Greg, his face was ashen.

"
Meggy
is very sick. She has a very bad disease: leukemia. The doctors don't know if she'll live."

Greg prayed fervently that night and every night afterward for his sister's recovery. He told God how much he loved her and missed her and how good she was. God would not let someone so young and wonderful die, he was sure.

Meggy
died less than three weeks later. She was buried in California. Matt sent some money to help pay for the funeral, but none was left to travel there for it.

Greg was inconsolable. A silent father wrapped in his own grief was little comfort. Greg had trusted God, as he had been taught to do. Either God was a nonexistent hoax or a brutal monster to be despised. Greg was determined never again to place futile hopes in God.
Or his mother.
She had taught him that family was indispensable to her and must be to him. And then she had betrayed him.

The day after receiving the phone message, Greg and Chris drove out of the city to the cemetery. Greg had asked his grandmother, now a widow living in Florida, to find out its name and address. She and his mother had reconciled after Greg's grandfather died. The two women obviously hoped that the phone call would reconcile Greg with his mother, too.

To Greg's surprise the cemetery was Jewish.
Having rejected God after
Meggy's
death, he had ceased to relate religion to his life and considered himself, if anything, Protestant because his father was.
He parked the car, top up, on a knoll overlooking the meadow planted with rows of headstones where
Meggy
was buried. A small red Ford was parked on the road meandering among them. A straight-backed woman in a blue dress stood before one of the gravestones. Her hair was short and dark.

"That's her, isn't it?" Chris asked quietly.

"Yes," he replied.

He had not seen her since the bleak December after
Meggy
died, when she had appeared without warning in the living room, but he had no doubt the woman was she.

Greg's anger was too quick for her. He ran off, stopping only long enough at the kitchen door to yell back, "You took
Meggy
away and killed her before I could get there. You knew I would try to save her if I came."

Next day, when he returned late from school after stopping to play basketball in the schoolyard, his mother was waiting on the porch steps for him. Head down, black hair cascading over the shoulders of a heavy black coat, white breath floating upward, she looked like a volcano in the dimming light. Beside her was a gift-wrapped box.

Hearing the front gate open and close, she looked up.

"
Meggy
would have died regardless," she said before he could run away again.

He did not want to believe that. "I would have kept her safe. I always protected her."

"I tried to, too," his mother said sadly. She then spoke so carefully he knew she had planned the words while waiting for him. "I truly had hoped that by now you and I and
Meggy
would have been together. Being separated was only to be for a little while."

He could perceive in her voice a plea for forgiveness for leaving him and taking
Meggy
, that she would take him with her now if he gave her half a chance
—
she had come back for that, he realized. But he would never forgive her. If you truly love your child, you do not leave him, no matter what. She had made her choice. Now he would make his.

Through the glass window in the storm door, he could see his father sitting on the sofa in the lighted living room, watching them. Greg marched up the porch steps past her and into the house to take the seat beside him. For the first time he could remember, his father placed his hand on Greg's shoulder.

A few minutes later, his mother stood up and walked down the short path to the sidewalk and then, turning onto it through the gate, headed
back to the bus station. Greg saw her for one final moment through the living-room window. Her head pivoted, and he realized that she could see him in the lighted room, so he looked away.

Someday he, too, would leave, he decided. Someday he would set out on his quest for the success that would keep him safe. But the choice of where and when would be his. Relying for happiness on someone he loved could bring him grief, he had learned. To become important, to become a person who mattered in the world and of whom others had to take notice, a person who was rich and invulnerable and admired, that must be his goal.

Next morning the gift-wrapped box was gone from the porch. He assumed his father had disposed of it.

Every Christmas after that, until he went off to college, his mother sent Greg a card with a little note on it. He would read it and then make a point of not saving it or the envelope that bore her address. He never answered her, and she never returned.

After a long while, Chris spoke again. "Isn't it time you forgave her?"

"Some things can never be forgiven," Greg quietly replied.

Chris wished she could understand what he was feeling behind the impassive expression. It never changed and his eyes never wavered all the time the woman stood at the grave until she finally drove away. Only then did Greg start up the car and drive down to it.

He left the car and, picking his way the few feet up the narrow path and then across two other graves, finally stood before the granite marker that read: "Margaret H.
Lyall
." The
H
was for Henrietta, their father's mother's name.
Meggy
had always hated it and made him swear he would never tell a soul what it was. It made no difference now, but he was sorry that his mother had placed the initial on the only permanent reminder that
Meggy
had ever lived, of who she was. Perhaps she had had it placed there as small solace to his father if he should ever make the trip. Greg’s gaze dropped to the rectangle of myrtle at his feet. Somewhere beneath it
Meggy
lay, awaiting his good-bye all these long years. That thought broke the dam of tears behind his eyes, and he sobbed for all the years stolen from her and for how much during all those years he had missed her.

Much later, he noticed an old rabbi trudging along the sidewalk at the edge of cemetery section. Greg asked him to recite the Hebrew prayer for the dead for his sister, who had always believed in God. He wondered to himself if
Meggy
suspected at the end that God had forsaken her. He also paid the old man to say prayers for Grandfather
Kaplowitz
and for his father, even though his father had been a Presbyterian. The only reason he could give was that he did not wish to slight him in this episode of remembrance.

Chris drove back; Greg was too aggrieved. He seemed to have collapsed into himself. They had planned to stop for dinner at a picturesque inn tucked along a byway of the route, but Greg said he'd rather not, and they continued on into Los Angeles.

He fell asleep that night hugging Chris. All night, in his sleep, he pulled her more tightly to him each time she shifted even a few inches farther away.

The
incident breached the fortress Greg had erected around his feelings and allowed Chris, as no one else had been allowed since his childhood, to enter inside him. He no longer felt the need to present a perfect and impregnable facade to her. He could talk about his feelings and more significantly, about his fears. She lightened his heart.

Once he confided, "I'm so consumed by what I want to achieve and to have, so driven, that sometimes I get afraid there's nothing else."

"There's love," she assured him.
"And much more.
I know."

Changing viewing habits is a long process. As time slipped by and KFBS news's rise was halted for a while or measurable only in tiny fractions of a point, the urgency intensified for a quicker improvement in the ratings. Stew grew more quick-tempered and capricious and put greater pressure on Greg. The ratings were still creeping up, but at an agonizingly sluggish pace as competing news programs struggled just as hard to fine-tune their broadcasts to attract viewers.

The previous executive producer had once been heard to remark, "If I didn't put it on the air, it never happened." But the job invoked neither cynicism nor self-importance in Greg. Rather, what exhilarated him was commanding the people and resources to transform his notions into pictures and words, to tame chaos like an unruly beast and make it dance to his vision in all those little boxes. He loved being in the pilot's seat at the heart of the dogfight as events darted furiously about him and decisions had to be made quickly, flawlessly. He loved the action almost as much as the responsibility. His skill could enhance the broadcast, the station, and his career. An error could blow away all three. His desperation as a child to control a threatening universe had become an adult's desire for the power to make his wishes do his bidding.

Nevertheless, his frustrations and dissatisfactions were beginning to outweigh his rewards. He was irked that Stew's concern with the ratings dominated the man's
judgement
and narrowed it to shortsighted solutions.