Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (6 page)

“She’s not here,” says Thomas.

Lisa Mitchell’s voice comes questioning from the depths of the house: “What’s keeping you?”

Thomas clears his throat. He raises his hand from the lock plate, and his breath comes huffing through his nostrils like a plug of steam. “You can go now,” he says, tightening his lips. “I don’t expect to see you here again.” Then, sliding back into the house, he shuts the door. The bolt engages with a heavy thunk.

Lewis does not know where to go or what to do. He feels like a man who, dashing into the post office to mail a letter, discovers his face on a wanted flier. He stands staring at the doorbell—its orange glow like an ember in a settling fire—until he realizes that he is probably being watched. Glancing at the peephole, he feels the keen electric charge of a hidden gaze. Then he walks across the frost-silvered lawn to his car, his staggered footprints a dark rift in the grass. Lewis drives to the end of the block and parks. He looks into the crux of his steering wheel, his hands tented over his temples, and wonders whether Caroline has been told that he won’t be returning.

On the sidewalk, he passes a paperboy who is tossing his folded white missiles from a bicycle; they sail in neat arcs through the air, striking porches and driveways with a leathery slap. He walks around the house to the window of Caroline’s bedroom, his heart librating in his chest like a seesaw. The sun will soon rise from behind the curved belly of the fields. The frost will dissipate in the slow heat of morning, and his footprints will dwindle into the green of the lawn.

Caroline is awake in her bed, a sharp light streaming across her face from the open bedroom door. Her pacifier falls from her mouth as she yawns. She wiggles in a pair of fuzzy blue pajamas. Lewis presses himself to the brick of the house and watches her for a few moments. Her body casts a wide shadow over her rumpled yellow bedspread, and it looks as if there is an additional head—his—on the pillow next to hers. He touches his fingers to the window. When he curves and sways them, they look like the spindled legs of an insect. He wants to rap against the glass, to pry it from its frame, to reach across Caroline’s blankets and pull her into his arms, but he doesn’t.

Instead, he lowers his hand to his side, where it hangs like a plummet on a string, and as a hazy form moves into the glare of the doorway, he turns and retreats to his car. Driving away, he spots a filament of dawn sunlight in the basin of the side-view mirror. He will realize as he slows into his driveway that he has just performed one of the most truly contemptible acts of his life. If he were a good man, he would have found a way, no matter the resistance, to tell her good-bye; to hand her like an offering some statement of his love; to leave her with at least this much. He could certainly have tried.

He did not, though. He simply left.

Memories and dreams are the two most potent methods by which the mind investigates itself. Both of them are held by what is not now happening in the world, both of them alert to their own internal motion. I have begun to imagine that they are the same transaction tilted along two separate paths—one into prior possibility, the other into projected. In one of my earliest memories, I am walking through a wooded park with a teacher and my classmates. I carry in my hands a swollen rubber balloon, cherry red and inflated with helium. I don’t know where it was purchased, whether it was mine or how long I’d held it, but it was almost as large as the trunk of my body—I remember that. Something jostles me, or my arm grows tired, and I lose my grip. I do not think to reach for the balloon until it has risen into the trees. It floats through a network of leaf-green branches and shrinks in the light of the midday sun. Soon it is only a grain of distant red, and then it vanishes altogether, leaving the blue sky blue and undisturbed.

Remembering this moment, I often dream of Caroline. I dream her resting in my lap and dream her swaying on the swing set. I dream that she is beside me, or I dream that she is approaching. One day, perhaps, we will flee together in my car. We will pass from this town into the rest of our lives, driving through the focus of the narrow black road. On bird-loud summer mornings, as a warm breeze rolls through our windows, we’ll watch yellow-green grasshoppers pinging along the verge of the highway. In autumn, the leaves will fall red from the trees as our windshield blades fan away pepperings of rain. The heat will billow from our dashboard vents in winter, and the houses will chimney into the low gray sky. And on the easy, tonic nights of spring, we’ll pull to the side of a quiet street and spread ourselves across our ticking hood: we’ll watch the far white stars and the soaring red airplanes, ask
Which is the more beautiful? Which is the more
true?
and in finding our answers, we will find what we believe in.

Things That Fall from the Sky

It is easier to believe that Yankee professors would lie than that stones
would fall from heaven.
—Thomas Jefferson, 1803.

Katherine is opening a new book, gluing a lending slip to its blank front page, when she hears the noise again, a clap of sound like the report of a hammer, then another softer clap. This is the third such noise she has heard in ten minutes, and she wonders if she should investigate. “What do you think that noise is?” she asks the other Katherine—Katherine A, people call her. Katherine herself is Katherine B, and there is another Katherine, in Genealogy, who is Katherine C.

“Don’t ask me,” Katherine A says, staring into the display of her computer monitor. She floats a playing card from one stack to another. “Can’t you see that I’m helping a customer?”

This is a game the Katherines play: whoever can tell the most open lie, can hatch the story least in keeping with the truth, gets to idle at the desk while the other sets to work. Katherine A, Katherine concedes, has won the first match.

It is two in the afternoon, a Tuesday, and the library is all but empty. It is quiet and peaceful, and Katherine walks between the rows of books listening to the hum of the air conditioner. Everything drifts around her with a slow, heavy current, and the bookshelves seem to waver and buckle in the silence. She imagines that the light outside the windows is sunlight shifting through water and that she is at the bottom of a deep swimming pool.

At the Z end of Bound Periodicals, she finds a man standing at a wooden table, his arms held straight in front of him and a book in either hand. He closes an eye and joggles the books up and down for a moment. Something in his bearing suggests to Katherine a measuring scale—two brass pans hanging from a balance.

She clears her throat. “Excuse me,” she says. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

“Oh, hello.” The man smiles and meets her eye. “It’s a test.”

“A test?” says Katherine.

“Yes,” he says. “A test.” He shows her the books. “Gravity’s losing.”

“I see,” says Katherine. Her tone, she hopes, will suggest to him that she doesn’t see at all. “Still, if I could ask you to—”

“You’ve heard that all objects fall at a constant speed. Drop a bowling ball and a marble from the top of a building and they’ll hit ground at the same time: that’s a law, right? But it’s not true,” he says. “Watch.” And before she can intercept him, he has squared the books in the air and released them.

The larger book, a hardback, lands on the table with a flat bang, the smaller book an instant later.

Katherine winces. “May I ask you not to do that? There are people trying to read here.”

The man looks around at the empty study carrels, at the tables reflecting puddles of light, at the autumn-colored rows of books, and then he laughs, a loud gleeful bark. “What’s your name?” he says.

“Katherine B,” Katherine answers. Then she feels a prickle of color spreading into her face, something that hasn’t happened to her in many years. She corrects herself: “Just Katherine.”

“I’m Woodrow,” he says. “Just Woodrow. You should read this.” He picks up the larger of the two books, the one that landed first, and cocks the spine to display the title:
Things That Fall from the Sky.
“The world is a strange place, Katherine. Did you know that until the nineteenth century, scientists believed that meteorites were just peasant superstition?”

“No, I didn’t,” she says.

“It’s true. I’ll have to copy some of this for you.” He riffles through the pages of the book.

“Yes, well—” It occurs to Katherine that the man might be out of his mind. Meteorites? Gravity? He is seventy-five or eighty years old, and like her mother he may be showing the first confusions of age. His hair is a pale straw yellow, and the sleeves of his jacket are a cuff or two too long. The skin on his forehead seems to filter into a large central dimple. “If you could just be a little bit quieter,” she whispers.

He shrugs his shoulders. “You’re the boss,” he says. Before she leaves, though, he asks her a question: “Will you be my mother?” he says.

At the desk, Katherine A is still playing solitaire on the computer. She bends closer to the monitor, her face taking on a pallid green glow. Katherine sits heavily beside her and makes a
hmph
ing noise to catch her attention. “I just met a crazy man,” she says.

Katherine A looks at her and gives a needle-thin sigh. “This is a
library,
” she says. “There’s nothing
but
crazy men. What do you want, a cookie?”

That evening, Katherine finds a message from her son Peter on the answering machine. Peter is the younger of her two boys—a happy, noisy, eager-hearted child who somehow became, when she wasn’t looking, a lonely, sullen man. He manages a drugstore now in London, and though he calls once a month, she suspects that he no longer loves her. After he moved, she discovered a half-written letter in his bedroom, addressed to his older brother, that pierced her heart like a baited trap. “You’re lucky to be living your life,” it read. “I want no more of this place—no family, no home, no quiet little town. It’s only holding me back. Sometimes I think that even an ocean won’t be far enough.”

She gazes at the blinking red message light and listens to his voice on the answering machine; it speaks quickly lest she should arrive home unexpectedly. “Hey, Mom, this is Peter, just calling to touch base. It’s eight o’clock here, and you’re probably still at work. Everything’s fine, it’s raining outside, things are busy at the store. You know how it is. Give me a call sometime.”

Katherine lets his phone ring eleven times before she hangs up.

Later that night, after she has eaten dinner, she calls her other son, Tanner, who lives across town with his wife and daughter. Tanner is on the creative development team for a national breakfast food manufacturer and is trying to find a name for a new product. “It’s a tropical fruit–flavored cereal,” he tells her. “Little pineapples and bananas and coconuts. What do you think of ‘Fruit Island Cereal’?”

“That sounds familiar,” she says. “Wasn’t there a Fruit Island something a few years ago?”

“Familiar is good. People will think it’s an old favorite.”

“Still,” she hesitates. “How about ‘Tropical-Ohs’?”

“Mom.” Tanner squeezes the word from his mouth like an egg. “I don’t try to explain the Dewey Decimal System to
you,
do I? Besides, they’re fruit-shaped, not O-shaped.”

Katherine changes the subject. “Have you talked to Peter lately? He phoned today and sounded depressed on the machine.” She thinks of her son and a sadness moves through her. “Oh, Tanner, does he let anyone know him at all? Is it just me? I feel like I haven’t heard his voice in years.”