Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (9 page)

Her mother’s mouth gives a sudden tic at the corner, and her eyes grow misty with tears. Katherine can see the realization washing through her: he has left her behind and she is all alone in the world.

Katherine leans over her mother’s bed to embrace her, resting her arms against the stiff white sheets. “Oh, Mom,” she says. And then, against her cheek, she feels a sudden hard slap.

She draws back, startled.

Her mother’s hand is raised, her face braided with anger. “Don’t you
ever
talk about your father that way!” she says.

The next day, at the library, Katherine finds herself hoping that Woodrow will reappear. She listens for the rasp of his old man’s voice, the fall of his shoes in the aisle, the clapping of books against a wooden table. She volunteers to shelve the titles in the returns cart, taking frequent walks around the library. When he doesn’t appear, she feels curiously disappointed.

“Have you ever heard of strange objects falling from the sky?” she asks Katherine A.

“What, like meteors?”

“Meteors,” says Katherine, “or fish, or frogs, or blood.”

Katherine A considers for a moment. “I was struck on the head once by a nut,” she says. “I was standing under a chestnut tree.”

“No,” says Katherine. “You know what I mean.”

“I heard this rumble while I was in bed last night. When I looked outside,
water
was falling from the sky.” Katherine A is clearly enjoying herself. “Nails and shingles fall from construction sites. Birds fall when they’re shot by bullets. The devil is supposed to be a fallen angel. Oh, and then there’s the Fall of Man—”

“Never mind,” says Katherine.

That afternoon, shortly before she is scheduled to go home, she receives a letter from the director of Library Services:
It has come to my
attention that you have been engaging in lewd discussions with minors visiting our
facility. Contact my office ASAP so that we may discuss this matter further.
It’s signed:
Most sincerely, Dick Ridling, Director of Library Services.

“Did you know about this?” she asks Katherine A.

“Let me see.” She reads the letter and hands it back, giving a little puff of indifference. “News to me,” she says. “But I can’t say I’m bowled over by it.”

“Great,” Katherine sighs. “Perfect.” She slips the letter into her purse, then stands and pulls her jacket from the back of her chair. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she says.

“Tomorrow,” says Katherine A.

Though a mass of gray clouds is rolling in from the west, little bubbles of sunlight are still glinting from the hoods of the cars in the parking lot. Katherine is parked beneath a thick black walnut tree. When she steps around its buttress of roots, she finds another slip of paper on her windshield.
Woodrow,
she thinks, and she fills first with a sense of relief, then with a sense of surprise at her relief. She opens the flier and reads:

Annual Red Cross Blood Drive
October 2–8
At the Fletcher County Hospital

Beneath this is an illustration of a smiling red blood drop holding a yardstick, followed by the line:

Every Drop Counts!

When she looks around, she sees these squares of paper beneath the blades of every car in the parking lot, like rows of white headstones in a cemetery. Katherine has never been comfortable with needles; in fact, they terrify her. She folds the leaflet in half, tosses it toward the open lid of a trash basket, and watches as it goes maple-leafing to the ground.

At home, there is another message from her son waiting for her on the answering machine: “Hey, Mom. Peter again. You’re probably working, so we’ll talk some other time. I’ll be busy for a few days, so don’t bother to call. Bye.” She erases the message as she slips from her shoes, then drops wearily onto the bed and closes her eyes. She listens to the arms of the ceiling fan splitting the air—
whup, whup, whup.
After a few minutes she rises and walks to the window. The weather has broken and it is showering outside, fine particles of rain that she can only detect because of a slight tapping motion in the leaves. The relaxation in the air and the slow darkening of the room calls up a spell of old recollections. She remembers, all at once, many things, and these things seem both free-floating and particular, clear and disconnected, as if the strings between them have come unfastened. She remembers biting the inside of her cheek when she was a little girl: she was stepping onto a school bus, and the thin taste of blood in her mouth was buttery and familiar. She remembers counting to seven and jumping from a staircase, the tingle in her feet when she hit the floor. She remembers her grandmother calling her “my little drop of sunlight.” She remembers kissing her college boyfriend on a spring day, squeezing his knee by the fountain in back of the student union. She remembers the black chocolate cake she made for her mother’s sixtieth birthday, Tanner and Peter chasing each other with plastic swords, the chop of water against a boat pier. She remembers yellow leaves falling in an autumn wind. She remembers her house on Christmas morning. She remembers her husband boxing his books away and her children leaving for college and her dad in white sheets in a hospital bed. She remembers these things as if no one memory is connected to any other—as if each makes known a different place and life, a thousand different places and a thousand different lives. She presses her forehead to the glass and looks outside, wondering how all these many places came to be this one room and this one window, how all these many people came to be just her, her alone, the woman who wouldn’t give her blood away.

And so, on Tuesday, though Katherine is sitting before a mahogany desk in the office of Mr. Ridling, and though he is dressing her down for her lack of good judgment, she does not hesitate to leave when the moment arrives.

“So what do you propose we do about this?” Mr. Ridling is saying. “I know that from your perspective it might seem somewhat
unorthodox
to suggest such a thing—that we should reserve certain materials for our patrons who are, shall we say,
of age
—but then again, we can’t have our librarians just blithely violating the basic rules of polite society, now can we?”

That’s when Katherine hears the sound: the double
bang
of falling books. She stands to leave.

“Where do you think you’re going?” says Mr. Ridling.

She hesitates in the doorway, her hand on the brushed metal knob. Mr. Ridling is tapping at his desk. “I’ll be right back,” Katherine says.

The library is quiet and still, and the sunlight shimmers through the high windows. As she walks from room to room, Katherine can hear her footsteps echoing softly against the walls of shelving. She listens to herself tapping along. Woodrow is not in Fiction, where she expected him to be, and he is not in Bound Periodicals. He is not in the Music Lab or the Map Room, the Reference Stacks or the Children’s Collection. He is not in Genealogy.

She finds him instead at a table in the rear corner of New Acquisitions, weighing a book in either hand.

“Hello,” she says.

“Oh, hi,” he answers. He is wearing the same oversized jacket as before, his hair the same straw yellow, his eyes the same pale blue. He shows her the books. “One more test. Just to make sure.”

Katherine reaches for the books. “Allow me?” she asks.

Woodrow seems surprised. His eyebrows arch, which makes the dimple in the center of his forehead wink shut like an eye. “Of course,” he says.

She takes the books from his hands, weighs them for a second in her own, and then drops them squarely onto the wooden table, where they land in sequence, one following the other,
bang bang.
“Now,” she says. She brushes her hands together. “How would you like to go to lunch? We’ll just walk outside—that’s what we’ll do—and I’ll take you to lunch.”

His face registers genuine pleasure. “I’d like that, Katherine.”

“Good,” she says. She takes him by the arm and leads him down the aisle.

Apples

The fall of my thirteenth year was a time when all the important events in my life seemed to cluster together like bees. On the same sun-bright afternoon that I won the school spelling bee, my parents sat across from me in the living room and told me that they no longer loved each other, and a great gray ocean of wishlessness filled our house. Days like this would surface around me every few weeks: I was chased to my front door by a stray dog on the same day that I had my braces removed. I answered the phone to an obscene caller on the same night that my mom went to live with a stranger. And on the same November day that I received my first kiss from Allison Downey, I watched my Bible teacher, Coach Schramm, get killed by a bucket. This took place at the Heritage Christian Academy, a private junior high school run by the Church of Christ. We assembled there each morning in the chapel for a prayer, rode our buses home each afternoon across the river, and gathered in between to study grammar and human fitness, biology and the King James Scriptures.

On the morning of his last autumn storm, Coach Schramm walked between the chalkboard and his desk, tapping at his leg with an index rod as he told us about the Creation. I remember that I was tracing a line of graffiti in my desktop, a pair of capital U’s channeled with the scorings of many pencils and pens. Thunder was grumbling from a fish-white sky, and there was a bias and stress to the air that made the sounds of the classroom seem bold and sudden, like voices speaking out of a long silence. A wristwatch beeped the hour. Lead ticked from a mechanical pencil. After two weeks of nothing, I could feel my life assembling inside itself a certain urgency.

Coach Schramm stood for a moment at the chalkboard, tall and ropy in his shirt and tie. His sleeves were gathered at the elbows, and the lanyard of a whistle dangled from his breast pocket. “And on the sixth day, God created—what?” he asked.

Nobody answered. Jeff Cypert dropped his notebook. Max Krain gave an emphatic sniffle.

“The beasts of the earth and man in his image,” he said, and then he repeated himself, stressing the cardinal words: the
beasts
of the
earth
and
man
in his
image.
“Come on, folks,” he continued. “Eyes on the ball.”

We had begun the year with Lamentations and Ezekiel, but were returning to Genesis as a preface to Daniel. “A warm-up,” Coach Schramm had announced, twirling his whistle around his finger. He taught volleyball, the Old Testament, and track and field, and he had introduced himself in August as our Bible Coach. When we lingered over a test or pop quiz, he would clap his hands and tell us to hustle.

Coach Schramm opened his Bible, leafing past the maps and the foreword, and I watched, as I always did, each thin translucent page catch the air and hover for a moment before it fell. He read, “And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.” This had been our memory verse earlier in the semester, and hearing it again after so many weeks was peculiar, like discovering that a twist of metal you’d been carrying in your pocket was part of some intricate machine.

Coach Schramm spread the Bible open on his desk and placed a stick of chalk in the valley. “So that’s the sixth day. Who can remind us what happened on the third? Mister Bozeman?”

Walter Bozeman turned from the window, where a pitch pine was slanting back and forth in the wind. He blinked at his notebook paper and his voice gave a little skip. “The moon and the stars?” he said.

“That’s day four, Walt. Who can take the ball on this one? Mister Cave?”

“Trees and dry land, Coach.”

“Good.” Coach Schramm cupped one hand around the other and cracked his knuckles. Outside, it began to rain. “And the fifth day?”

Dewey Nichols, who sat beside me, tilted forward in his desk.

“Yes, Mister Nichols?”

Dewey cleared his throat. “The birds and the fish. But I have a question: the pattern seems to be that God creates something, then sees that it’s good. But on the second day, when he splits the world in two, it doesn’t happen that way. He divides the heavens from the seas, and then that’s it. He just moves on. Why?”

Coach Schramm was pacing the room. “I don’t know,” he said, “what do you think, Dewey?” and Dewey gave his familiar reply: “I don’t know, either, but I think it bears looking into.”