White Oleander - Janet Fitch [38]
I thought I saw a streak of light. I wasn’t sure if I even saw it. I gazed upward, trying not to blink, waited.
“There!” Davey pointed.
In a different quadrant of the sky, another star broke loose. It was eerie, the one thing you didn’t plan on, stellar movement. I tried to keep my eyes open without blinking. When you blinked, you missed them. I held them open for the light to develop on them like a photograph.
The little boys shivered despite the jackets over their pajamas and muddy boots, chattering and giggling in the cold and the excitement of being up so late as they gazed at the stars that started pinging like pinballs, mouths opened in case one should fall in. It was completely dark except for the line of Christmas lights that twinkled along the edge of the trailer porch.
The screen door opened and slammed. I didn’t have to look to know it was him. The flare of a match, the warm stinky pot smell. “Ought to take down those Christmas lights,” he said. He came out on the yard where we were, the ember glow, and then the sharpness of his body, the smell of new wood.
“It’s the Quadrantid shower,” Davey said. “We’ll be getting forty an hour pretty soon. It’s the shortest-lived meteorite display, but the densest except for the Perseids.”
I could hear the mud sucking at his boots as he shifted his weight. I was glad it was dark, that he couldn’t see the flush of pleasure on my face as he drew closer, looking up at the sky, as if he cared about the Quadrantids, as if that’s why he’d come out.
“There!” Owen said. “Did you see it, Uncle Ray? Did you?”
“Yeah, I saw it buddy. I saw it.”
He was standing right next to me. If I shifted just an inch to my left, I could brush him with my sleeve. I felt the radiant heat of him across the narrow gap between us in the darkness. We had never stood so close.
“You and Starr having a beef?” he asked me softly.
I exhaled vapor, imagined I was smoking, like Dietrich in The Blue Angel. “What did she say?”
“Nothing. She’s just been acting funny lately.”
Shooting stars hurled themselves into the empty places, burned up. Just for the pleasure of it. Just like this. I could have swallowed the night whole.
Ray toked too hard, coughed, spat. “Must be hard on her, getting older, pretty girls coming up in the same house.”
I gazed up as if I hadn’t heard, but what I was thinking was, tell me more about the pretty girls. I was embarrassed for wanting it, it was base, what did pretty matter? I had thought that so many times with my mother. A person didn’t need to be beautiful, they just needed to be loved. But I couldn’t help wanting it. If that was the way I could be loved, to be beautiful, I’d take it.
“She still looks good,” I said, thinking that it wouldn’t be so hard on her if he didn’t follow me out into the star-filled night, if he didn’t watch me the way he did, touching his mouth with his fingertips.
But I didn’t want him to stop. I was sorry for Starr, but not enough. I had the sin virus. I was the center of my own universe, it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around me, and I liked the way he looked at me. Who had ever looked at me, who had ever noticed me? If this was evil, let God change my mind.
Dear Astrid,
Do not tell me how much you admire this man, how he cares for you! I don’t know which is worse, your Jesus phase or the advent of a middle-aged suitor. You must find a boy your own age, someone mild and beautiful to be your lover. Someone who will tremble for your touch, offer you a marguerite by its long stem with his eyes lowered, someone whose fingers are a poem. Never lie down for the father. I forbid it, do you understand?
Mother.
You couldn’t stop it, Mother. I didn’t have to listen to you anymore.
IT WAS SPRING, painting the hillsides with orange drifts of California poppies, dotting the cracks in gas stations and parking lots with poppies and blue lupine and Indian paintbrush. Even in the burn zones, the passes were matted with yellow mustard as we jounced along in