The Night of the Comet (17 page)

She was at home now, I sensed. Any minute she would come to her French doors and open the curtains, and I waited expectantly at the edge of the bayou, hoping for one last wave and hello before the end of the day.

The quiet was broken by a shout behind me. I heard my sister stomping through our house, yelling “Ruined it!” and “How could you?” Our mother told Megan not to raise her voice at her, but Megan shouted her down, ending with a furious “No! No no no no!” before storming out the back door and slamming the screen shut. She marched down the steps and across the yard while inside our mother trailed off into an ineffectual protest about ingratitude and respect.

“Oh. Hey. You,” she said, pulling up short at the water.

“Nice to see you, too, sis.”

Megan dug into the pocket of her jean jacket for her cigarettes. She’d only recently taken up smoking and came down to the water sometimes to sneak a cigarette when our parents were away. At the moment, though, she didn’t seem to care whether our mother saw her or not. She fished a cigarette from her pack of Kools, lit it, shook the match and tossed it aside, performing the whole routine with the drama of someone intent on demonstrating her anger. She took abrupt, impatient drags, and soon she was coughing and rubbing at her contact lenses.

“What was that about?” I asked.

“God, she makes me mad. Look at that. Look!”

She turned sideways so I could see the back of her jacket. Drawn in colored ink on the denim was an oriental landscape of hills, rocks, bamboo, a river, and a tiny temple on the side of a mountain. Hovering above the scene, seated in clouds, were images of the Buddha and a
couple of exotic Hindu gods waving their arms. She’d been working on it, I knew, since the beginning of the school year.

“What happened?”

“She put it in the wash. She said it was unintentional. She said she found it with my other clothes.… Bullshit. She did it on purpose, I know she did. She ruined it.”

I didn’t see how her drawing was ruined, exactly. I thought it actually looked better with the lines and colors a little faded, but I kept that to myself. I kept to myself, too, the thought that our mother might very well have thrown the jacket into the wash by mistake; she’d never been exactly scrupulous about the laundry.

“Mom obviously hates her life and so she takes it out on me.”

“You can always redo that, can’t you?”

“Not the point, bro. Not the point,” Megan said, and took several more puffs of her Kool to calm herself.

I caught sight of someone moving past a downstairs window in the Martellos’ house just then and snapped my head around to check. My sister eyed my book on the picnic table, the house across the water.

“Any sign of her?”

“Who?”

She nodded at their house. “You know who. Your little friend over there. The one you’re always out here mooning over. You should try not to be so obvious. You might creep her out. She might think you’re a pervert, spying on her like this.”

“I’m not—”

“Relax. I’m kidding.” She blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth and watched their house with me. “I like Gabriella. She seems very mature for her age. Very levelheaded. Cute, too. It must be hard being so pretty, though, don’t you think? No one would take you seriously.”

I had thought exactly the same thing about her. “I know, that’s just it. You wouldn’t expect it, but she is, she’s very smart, very mature. She doesn’t giggle all the time like the other girls. She sits at the front of the class taking notes. And she asks good questions, too, but then everyone laughs like she’s trying to make a joke, but she isn’t.”

I’d said too much. Megan looked at my wryly. “Uh oh. Someone sounds like he’s smitten.”

I shrugged. “I just think it’s interesting, that’s all.”

She snorted a laugh. She happened to have her cigarette in her mouth, though, and she swallowed a gulp of smoke, causing her to erupt in another fit of coughing. She coughed so much, hacking and bending over her knees, that I became worried for her.

“Are you all right?”

“Ouch. Damn.”

“Those’ll kill you, you know.”

“Thank you, Doctor. I’ll be sure to remember that.” She straightened up and rubbed her eyes, recovering. “God, I’m so bored right now, I don’t think I’d mind.”

The air shifted and we could hear the marching band practicing on the football field at school. The sound drifted up the bayou and then fell back, drifted up and fell back, like waves at a beach. In front of us, the ground sloped down to a low muddy bank studded with cypress knees. The afternoon light flashed on the bayou. Water bugs skimmed and darted across the surface, tracing tiny golden wakes that glittered for a second in the spotty light and then vanished.

I wanted to go on talking about Gabriella, but Megan was staring at the water, her mind someplace else.

“If you could be anywhere in the world, where would you be?” she asked me. “Right now.”

“I don’t know. Texas?”

“Texas? My god, why would you want to go there?”

“It’s just the first thing I thought of. Where would you go?”

“New York, for starters.”

“Why New York?”

“Bob Dylan lives there.” She brushed aside her hair with the fingers of her hand that held the cigarette; her nails were bitten and ravaged-looking. “I could. I’ve thought about it. I could pack my bags and leave tonight. Easiest thing in the world.”

“Are you serious? How would you get there?”

“Hitchhike. Or take a bus. I figured it all out: New Orleans to Atlanta, Atlanta to Charlotte, Charlotte to Washington … I could be there in four days.”

Driving into New Orleans we sometimes saw these kids, teenagers
not much older than my sister, standing on the highway in ragged clothes and holding up cardboard signs scrawled with the names of improbable-sounding destinations:
CANADA. CALIFORNIA. MEXICO
. I pictured my sister as one of them, marching along the edge of Highway 1 outside of Terrebonne, a canvas bag on her back, a bandanna tied around her hair, angrily smoking her cigarette as she held out her thumb for a ride.

“And then what? Where would you stay? How would you live?”

“I’ll find some room. I’ll get a job in a restaurant or a drugstore. People do it all the time.”

“Wouldn’t you miss it here?” I asked—but I knew her answer before I’d even finished the question.

My sister looked around, taking in the dark bayou, our muddy yard, our little house, our small world. If she hadn’t said it, the arch of her eyebrow would’ve been enough. She sighed a stream of cigarette smoke.

“God. Sometimes I hate this town. Hate it with all my heart. A great big world is happening out there right now and we’re missing it. All of it. In Paris, right now, people are sitting down at cafés and drinking coffee and eating croissants and opening their morning newspapers. In China they’re riding bicycles and rickshaws to work. In India they’re waking up and making fires in their stoves and going to temples to pray.…”

She waved her cigarette at the water like a wand, and I could see the world she described floating there in front of us: Chinese men in coolie hats guiding water buffalo through rice paddies; an Indian boy in a turban bowing and praying to a blue-painted statue. Megan went on, gesturing more violently with her cigarette. She could really talk when she got herself worked up.

“And here—what do we do? We go to school, come home, go to school, come home. You get to do this every day until you’re old enough to find a job and get married, and then you go to work, come home, go to work, come home. And then your little kids go to school, come home … It’s like you’re digging a hole deeper and deeper into the ground, and pretty soon you’re miles below the surface of the Earth and you forget that there’s even a world outside anymore. Paris might as
well never exist. India, China—forget it. Your entire world is your hole. And people
like
this, apparently. They
love
it. They can’t
wait
to dig. They’re digging for all they’re worth. They’re digging like madmen, tossing out shovelfuls of dirt, digging their own graves as fast as they can.… My god!”

She broke off her rant, took another pull on her cigarette, and huffed twin streams of smoke from her nose like a dragon. Her eyes were red, her hair wild. There was no arguing with Megan when she got this way, so I didn’t try.

Behind us, we heard our mother get into the car and back out of the driveway, off to do the grocery shopping. Megan looked over her shoulder to watch her go and then turned forward again.

“Not me. No thanks. I’m crawling out of this pit as soon as I can,” she said, and flicked her cigarette away. It arched over the muddy bank, tumbling end over end through the air. The red tip flared up briefly before it landed with a
pfft!
in the water.

“Say hello to Gabby for me if you see her.”

She turned, crossed the yard, and let the screen door fall closed behind her as she went back inside the house—to start packing her bags, for all I knew.

SHE
was a tough one, my sister. In one way, I admired her. She was smart; she wasn’t going to take any crap from anyone. No one could tell her what to do.

In another way, though, she alarmed me. She didn’t look like a happy person, and I was afraid the same thing might happen to me soon. When I turned fifteen or sixteen, an irreversible change would take place in my personality and I would become like her—skeptical, mistrusting, holding a permanent grudge against a world that was wrong in ways too many and too obvious to even name.
This is what it means to grow up
, she seemed to say.
You stop believing whatever people tell you. You see things as they really are
.

I scraped up a handful of pebbles and began tossing them into the water one at a time, lifting my eyes now and then to check on Gabriella’s house. The pebbles plopped into the water, sending concentric silver rings rippling across the surface.

For years, it seemed, our mother had tried to shape Megan into a
polite, well-bred southern girl, and for years my sister had gone along with her, trying to live up to our mother’s expectations. She dressed up Megan in ribbons and lace, with bows on her dresses, bows on her shoes, bows in her hair. She taught her how to curtsey and—god knows why—serve tea. She bought her an elaborate Junior Miss Makeup Kit, with an instruction booklet on “How to Be Attractive,” and a fancy lacquer brush and comb set, and a jewelry box that played “Für Elise” when you opened the lid. She wanted, she said, to give Megan all the pretty things she’d never had as a girl—although whether or not Megan wanted those things herself was open to question.

Once—I remembered this particular incident well, even though I must’ve been very young at the time—our mother arranged to rent a pony for her birthday. In keeping with the cowboy-cowgirl theme of the party, Megan was costumed in a frilly yellow dress with boots and a straw hat. The pony, a snappish thing, was led around the front yard and up and down the street by an unfriendly woman in blue jeans and boots who kept warning us, “Don’t tease her!” My sister was terrified of the animal and refused to go near it. Our mother, though, insisted: Megan looked so cute in her cowgirl dress, and all of her friends were here, and everyone was waiting. Our father, under orders from our mother, lifted Megan up, sat her on the pony, and held her in place, pleading, “Do this for your mother, Meg. Just this once”—words that would become a familiar refrain for her. How many times did my sister hear that growing up? A thousand? Ten thousand times? “Do this for your mother, Meg.” And so she did, she clung to the pony as our mother told her to “smile, Megan, smile!” for the photograph, and tears burst from her eyes as my poor sister wailed in fear and misery.

The one thing that my sister loved unreservedly, on her own, without any prodding from our mother, was singing. That she should have this talent was somewhat surprising since no one else in our family had any musical ability. But she joined every choir and Christmas pageant she could find, and when she stood on the stage in the gym or in front of the altar of the church and opened up her mouth, her voice was like a butterfly, fluttering prettily up to the ceiling.

For her fourteenth birthday she begged our parents for a guitar. They
bought her a Harmony Classic from Sears—a cheap thing, light as balsa wood, a starter guitar they called it, but Megan was thrilled to have it. She began taking lessons with a boy from school, Greg Barnett, a senior who played in bands. She practiced constantly, after school, in the evenings, even in the mornings if she had a few minutes between breakfast and the bus, picking out scales and chords in her bedroom.

Within a couple of weeks she was playing songs, mostly folk songs and songs about love: “Barbara Allen,” “Scarborough Fair,” “Blowin’ in the Wind.” After she had learned a new one, she would bring her guitar to my room. I’d sit on my bed, and she’d sit on my chair, her legs crossed, her left shoulder slumped low so she could see the frets.

“I’m still working on this one,” she’d say. “I’m not sure about this part.”

“That’s a good one,” I’d say. “I like that.”

When she had three or four songs down, she gave a concert for our family. Our father moved the TV out of the way and set up a chair for her in front of the window curtains. We sat on the sofa to watch. “Wow, honey, that’s wonderful,” our mother said when she’d finished, and our father agreed: “You’ve got a real nice voice.” She repeated the whole set, we liked it so much. “You should go on TV,” I told her. “You could win a prize.”

Her voice had a high, pure tone with a tentativeness to it that made it that much more lovely. At night when she stayed up late practicing I would hear her voice through the wall, and it was like having angels sing me to sleep.

That fall, the same year she got her guitar, she was invited to the high school homecoming dance. A boy she liked, a junior named Todd Picou, had asked her. The dance was open—you didn’t need a date to attend—and so an invitation like this seemed especially significant. While Megan giggled and spoke on the phone to her friends in a corner of the living room, our mother paced the house trying to hide her own joy and anxiety.