The Night of the Comet (2 page)

“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.

“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 unpromising 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.

“A little, I guess.”

“Why would he be excited?” Megan asked.

“Oh, I’d be excited. New classes, new teachers. Meeting new friends. Dances, dating, all that.”

“Your first kiss. That’s something to look forward to,” said my father. “Maybe Meg can give you some pointers. Huh, Meg? What about that? Huh?” He laughed, an abrupt snorting sound.

Megan frowned. “Dad, you’re being gross.”

“Yes, Alan, that is a little gross,” my mother said.

“Anyhoo. I know I’m excited,” he said, settling back and digging into his cake. Though it was summer, he wore his teaching outfit: black shoes, dark pants, white short-sleeved shirt, and a narrow tie. He’d just returned from a science-teaching seminar in Baton Rouge that day, where, he told us, he’d picked up some nifty ideas for his class this year—group projects, cross-curricular study activities, interactive demonstrations.

“That’s how you make a lesson more fun,” he said, gesturing with his fork. “You get the students up and moving around. Science
is
interesting. It’s just the teachers that are boring. Of course, it would help if we had a decent lab. We can hardly do anything with that junk we’ve got now.”

He launched into his usual complaint about the lack of support for the sciences in the Louisiana public schools. No respect, he said, none at all. Football and baseball, that was all anyone cared about. While Principal Lee showered money on Coach DuPleiss, his labs meantime were falling to pieces.…

Megan rolled her eyes, and my mother gave a little sigh as she began
picking at a ridge of frosting with her fork. We had no interest in what my father had to say, but we were his family, after all, the kindest audience he had, and so we ate our cake and let him talk.

Other people—tellers at the bank, cashiers at the IGA—all had a way of grinning when my father began to speak, as if they couldn’t take him quite seriously. And certainly, he was peculiar. A tall, angular man, he was always blinking and peering around, like he’d just stumbled into a room and wasn’t sure where he was. He rode a rattling Raleigh three-speed bicycle to school, instead of driving a car like any normal person would do, and he carried a brown briefcase that he swung stiffly at his right side with a ridiculous air of importance. More than once I had seen students, high schoolers, even third graders, following my father down the hallway and imitating his jerky walk, swinging invisible briefcases, twitching and snorting and then falling all over themselves with laughter.

That year I would be entering his freshman Earth and Space Science class, and the thought of being his student, sitting in his classroom, filled me with dread.

“God help you. Although not even God can help you there,” my sister had warned me. “I have yet to recover.”

He pushed back from the table. “I picked up something else in Baton Rouge.” He winked. “Special order. Be right back,” he said, and disappeared into the bedroom.

“He’s really excited. He could hardly wait to give it to you,” my mother whispered as she bent in to take my plate. “At least try to pretend you like it, okay? It means a lot to him.”

My father reappeared carrying a bulky gift-wrapped box. “Here we are.” He rested it carefully on the coffee table and called us into the front room. “Go ahead, open it. It’s yours.”

My heart sank. I knew what it was. He’d been hinting at it all summer. I sat on the couch and cradled the gift in my lap. Megan settled heavily on the armrest. “What is it?” she asked. My father stood at the edge of the rug, bracing his hands on his hips and twitching all over, like he was holding himself back from diving in and ripping off the paper himself. “You’ll see. You’ll see.”

“It’s a telescope,” I said when I got the wrapping off. “Wow. Gosh. Look at that.” I turned the box around and looked it up and down, trying to show some enthusiasm.

“Huh? Yeah? Huh?” he said.

“Look up. Smile!” my mother called, and took a Polaroid.

My father already had his own telescope, of course, but his was old and not very powerful. What a person really needed, he’d been saying—if you really wanted to get good resolution—was a Celestron C8. It was the Mercedes-Benz of telescopes, the latest thing, made in California. A high-quality telescope like that wasn’t cheap, but a good one would last a lifetime. An investment, he called it. Wouldn’t I like something like that? We’d be able to track the comet with it, catch it before anyone else saw it, follow it all the way to the Sun and back.

“That’s not a toy, you know,” he said as I lifted it out of the box. “It’s a serious piece of scientific equipment. But I figured that you were old enough now.…”

Megan asked practical questions about the telescope: How far could you see with it? How did it work? And why was it so short and stumpy-looking? I knew all the answers; my father had already schooled me on the C8. It was a compound refractor-reflector, which was why it was so short. The light came in at the open end, bounced off a big mirror at the back, bounced off another mirror at the front, and then was focused down to the viewing lens, here—

My father interrupted my explanation. “With the forty millimeter Plössl eyepiece, you’ll get a magnification of about fifty power. Although theoretically, with the C8 you could get a maximum magnification of four hundred and eighty power. Cool, huh?”

“Far out,” said Megan. Her interest spent, her family obligations fulfilled, she headed upstairs to listen to records. “Happy birthday,” she called and closed the door to her bedroom.

My father couldn’t hold back any longer. He scooted in and squatted next to me. Soon he had the telescope in his own hands, running his fingers excitedly over the tube, his eyes bright behind his glasses. “How about that? You like it? Huh? You like it?”

While he checked all the parts, my mother, to make the occasion
more festive, put a Pete Fountain record on the hi-fi and made drinks, a Coke for me, a rum and Coke for her and my father—“For fun,” as she liked to say. If our family had anything like a cheerleader, she was it. She was the one who staged all our birthdays, planned our holidays, arranged the group photos, and signed our names to Christmas cards when she mailed them out. That we had any sense at all of “the Broussards” as a family unit was mostly due to her—although, to be sure, she rarely got credit for this. If anything, my sister and I wondered why our mother bothered to make such a fuss over such a lost cause.

She was just returning with the drinks when my father stood up.

“Let’s bring it outside,” he said, and, carrying the scope in his arms, he headed for the door.

The air was swampy and warm. To either side were more homes like ours, small boxy hutches with clapboard siding, screened-in porches, and muddy yards. A broken line of bald cypresses and tupelos marked the edge of Bayou Black, a low, sluggish creek that passed behind the neighborhood. When a north breeze blew, as it did tonight, you could smell the Gulf. Bullfrogs and crickets kept up their noisy racket, lending a feeling of wildness to our damp little backyard, and a reminder that we barely had a foothold here—that given half a chance, the water and swamp would rush back in and reclaim the land from under us.
“Terra non firma,”
my father liked to call it, stamping his foot on the ground as though to demonstrate its unsoundness.