Something Calming, Something Necessary

Tapping rattled my bedroom window, where the wind dragged bare oak limbs across the panes, and from the safety of my sheets I thought of all the unknowns out in the sky, something dark and shifting, a slow procession overhead that might forever change me like it had so many others in our town. The tapping came again, a sound more like the pelting of hail though the sky was clear.

When I looked, Jane was standing beneath the branches and the moon like a stone overhead, bright and mournful in the blackened sky, a pebble in her hand held high to throw again in my direction.

“Hey,” she said softly, when I unlatched the window. “It’s supposed to get colder this week. We should go tonight.”

Though we’d talked about this only once, it still felt impossible, as impossible as the headline news now in our town, that she stood in my yard. I grabbed my jeans and hoodie and a flashlight I still kept under my bed, from the days I’d stayed up reading when I was supposed to be in bed. I held my breath, listening for the sound of my mother like I knew Tim had before sneaking out, so many times with his friends, back when his room was full of soccer jerseys instead of garment bags to preserve what remained of him, back when I pretended to sleep.

In the car Jane hummed along to the stereo while I stared straight ahead, the music filling the space between us like a storm cloud, pushing out everything else, even the sound of my own breath.

“Do you know anyone who’s seen them?” she asked, breaking the silence between us.

“My neighbor, Mr. Larsen. And some guy at my mom’s work.”

“Same here. Some lady my dad works with over at Boeing.” She glanced at me. “If I saw some kind of spaceship, I wouldn’t tell anyone. I mean, why bother with the news.”

I stared out the windshield, at the mailboxes whirring past us on both sides of the car until Jane slowed to turn into Creve Coeur Park, the only woods our suburb really offered for miles around. The entrance had been partially barricaded, since the park closed at dusk, but Jane maneuvered the Celica around the half-closed gateway, dimming the headlights as we drove up the hill into the park.

“This is where my neighbor saw it last week.”

“I know.” Jane turned down the volume on the stereo to listen for other cars or cops on duty. “That’s why I picked it.”

It occurred to me then that she’d been reading the papers as much as I had, that she’d been watching the news. Once we’d snaked through the curving paths, and Jane saw no cops hiding out with their engines cut, she parked the car near one of the bluffs overlooking the lake, a bluff covered in trees, one we’d have to hike through to see anything at all.

She pulled the keys from the ignition and looked at me. “Ready?”

I pulled my hoodie over my hair and grabbed my flashlight from the car floor.

We walked out into the woods, on a faint path carved out by the footfalls of others, maybe teenagers looking for a place to be alone, maybe hikers seeking one of the few natural spots in a county full of strip malls. I flipped the switch on the flashlight to find the bulb had burned out, hidden under my bed for how many years, I wasn’t even sure. My eyes adjusted to the darkness anyway, and Jane began to look more like a ghost walking before me instead of a black mass emitting only sound, the sound of crunching leaves and cracking branches.

Near the edge of the bluff, discernable only by the moonlight pooling out before us across an open stretch of white lake burning below, Jane found a flat, smooth boulder the size of a couch. I sat down next to her, and we waited there in the dark, for what, I didn’t know. I looked straight up through the dark web of the trees and let my head fall back a way it rarely did, to watch everything directly above me, all of the time.

I wondered then what Mr. Larsen saw here, beyond what he’d reported, whether slow airship or true UFO what he’d really seen, what he felt.

Jane pulled a pack of cigarettes from one pocket, a lighter from the other. “You want one?”

She handed me a cigarette then lit her own, holding the smoke behind her teeth as she inhaled, a cloud I imagined sleeping there in her mouth, tucked away beneath the blanket of her tongue. The lake wavered in the distance, ripples that caught the moonlight. I’d never seen the park at night, at least not past sunset, and there was something harshly beautiful in it, something so raw and burning that it almost felt strange how peaceful it was, no cars and no lights, but only the two of us on a rock, our breath misting the late October air.

“I went sailing out there once,” Jane said, the smoke of her cigarette coiling up toward the trees. “This guy from my neighborhood, he belongs to some sailing club and took me out last year. He couldn’t have been more of an asshole, but the sailing itself, it was nice.”

“I’ve never been sailing.” I blew smoke away from her, out toward the bluff’s edge. “But we did go out there in a rowboat once, back in junior high. My brother wanted to fish. We didn’t catch anything, but we did find a turtle. Tim named it Anderson, and we kept it on the boat all afternoon.”

It was a memory I’d nearly forgotten about, and one that had never been at the forefront anyway, certainly not anything I’d have called a memorable afternoon. But thinking of it now almost made my eyes well, and I looked away again, blinked it back so I wouldn’t embarrass myself and Jane wouldn’t have to ask.

“Your brother, Maribel,” she said anyway. And then she stopped, like she didn’t know what else to say. She looked out beyond the bluffs, staring so hard it looked like her eyes were watering. “He was a really nice guy, is all I meant to say. I know I didn’t know you then, but I’m really sorry about what happened.”

Of course she knew about Tim. Everyone in the entire school did. But I never knew what people meant when they said they were sorry, if they were sorry that my brother was gone, or if they were sorry I’d been there to watch him go, immobile, allowing him to fall through the ice to a world entirely away from my own.

“So that’s why you wanted to hang out.” I turned away from her, crushed my cigarette beneath my heel. “I don’t want any charity, any fucking pity.”

Jane squinted across the lake, her breath held. “I just thought I should say so,” she finally said. “But it’s not why I’m here.”

Something heavy encased my heart then, something like shame, the kind I’d remember not only the next morning, but for a stretch of days from here.

“Sorry.”

“It must be hard,” was all she said back. We sat there like that, not speaking, and beneath my hands the rock was cold and worn smooth like a windowpane against my palm, something calming, something necessary.

“It’s harder than I could have imagined.”

It was something I’d learned not to talk about, something closed off and kept tight, a box lodged in my heart. But the box had creaked open, less like a chest and more like a flood, something viscous, its edges unclear in the space between us there in the woods. I looked over at Jane, someone I barely knew, and maybe that alone made it easier, some unnamed confessional without consequence. But with her hand near mine there on the rock, I knew that wasn’t it, I’d have been happier if her skin was actually brushing against mine and more, something as familiar as a hug, someone I wanted to know so much better than I did.

“Holy shit,” Jane breathed just then, sitting forward on the rock, her hand pointing up past the trees. I followed her fingers up into the branches, and saw just past the limbs a flare shooting across the sky, a flash like streaked paint across a darkened canvas. A faint arc blazed, so far away it burned for only a second, and then it was gone, leaving only its trail, like the marks of the lightning bugs we’d crushed across the pavement as kids, to see the light they left behind.

I’d looked for meteors and comets before, and I thought I’d see one the night Tim died, when my mother and I sat all night on the back porch, when I expected some small show of the heavens reasserting themselves, telling me they still existed. But there was nothing there either, not even the flash of planes that night, no meteors or even the faintest of shooting stars, stretched like banners across the winter sky. There was only the black, a sky darker than any I’d ever seen, and my mother sitting quietly on the porch beside me, no words or sounds to break what had already been shattered.

I looked down at the dried leaves and pine needles, and wondered how it was that we were even here. Jane and I sat there, watching the sky without speaking, not sure what we’d even seen, until the air turned colder and the wind picked up and clouds began to stretch like fingers in from the west, and that’s when I knew it was time to go.

When we finally pulled back up to my house, well after 2 a.m. by the dim red of the dashboard inside Jane’s car, I pushed open the car door and stepped outside.

“Thanks for taking me.” I leaned on the passenger side window.

“Anytime.”

I closed the door behind me, so she could go, so I could get some small amount of sleep before school, before my mother woke up and knew I’d been gone. As I walked across the grass, the dew seeping through the canvas of my shoes and touching my toes beneath, I knew I wouldn’t sleep, and that the flash of Jane’s headlights across my back as she pulled away would keep me up long after the car was gone, after the sky faded to morning half-light with no trace of star or ship, and after the pine sap on my jeans was only half-scrubbed away, the resin too thick to remove.