What Burns Away (7 page)

Without a word, Mom leaned over the table. Sweeping her arm across the surface, she collected the cards, her colored sea glass, and all the dollar bills on the kitchen table into a paper bag holding the week's produce. She looked at my father as she did it. Even in her fury, my mother was beautiful, her Irish skin rouged, her pursed lips seeming the caricature of a kiss.

“Guess that's fold,” Rex announced, leaning back in his chair.

Uncle G ran the back of his hand across his forehead. His palms were dirty with the work he'd been doing on our water heater in exchange for a place to crash while he was in between girlfriends. “Kat, you need a drink,” he told my mother.

In one pull, Mom guzzled the beer that was sitting in front of my father. “I'm taking a walk. Don't wait on me.”

Next to me on the living room couch, Kara colored while I watched my parents. I thought about the note my mother had left for my father that morning, the one I had read after snatching it off Dad's dresser. It remained wadded up in the pocket of my parka, and because I'd taken it, my father spent much of his morning walking the picket line with Rex, oblivious to Mom's impending split.

“You're dismissed,” Dad shouted at my mother and pointed to the door. “Take your walk. Weather might cool you off.”

I was anticipating my own dismissal after homework was done so I could meet Dean at the creek. While my uncle helped himself to another beer, I opened the
World
Book
Encyclopedia
to the letter
C
. Under a photograph of an old cave wall with a comet sketched across it, I read the Mongolian legend that dubbed comets “the daughters of the devil, warning of destruction, fire, storm, and frost whenever they approached the Earth.”

When I looked up from the book in my lap, my mother was pulling on her green winter boots and tying her scarf. Then she slammed the door behind her.

I wondered if perhaps Christa McAuliffe had suffered from Halley's arrival as the legend predicted. And as my mother disappeared, my panic rose. I feared she too might be placed in some unknown jeopardy out there in the cold with the falling dark, so I grabbed my coat and hat and followed behind her.

“Dad—” I called.

“Just go,” he yelled back.

• • •

For a year, my mother had been walking to Sea Glass Beach alone when she was angry or quiet or sad. But I could remember a time when she'd walk off with my father, hand in hand. And just a year prior, on the Fourth of July, the four of us had walked beyond the creek and over the seawall together. Everyone was disappointed because thunderstorms rained out the fireworks, but to assuage our disappointment, Dad brought two kites on the trip to surprise us. One was a dragon with a long yellow tail, and the other was a neon butterfly.

Kara and I had moseyed down the beach, but Dad ran with a kite in one hand, gripping my mom's palm in the other. They raced like kids down the sand, as Dad's dragon and Mom's butterfly took flight.

Dad hollered to Kara and me to catch up. “Girls, come on! Let's get them higher!”

Kara had an orange Popsicle stain around her mouth and bent over breathless, her hands on her knees, when we finally reached my father.

Mom held both kites while Dad pulled additional spools of twine from his shorts' pocket. My mother smiled at me, the wind whipping her long, dark hair in her eyes, as the mansions beyond the seawall hovered like disapproving chaperones.

Dad added to the lines and showed us how to let the twine out slowly. “Give barely an inch at a time, or you'll crash and burn.”

“You're a damn fool,” Mom told my father as he added a third spool. She shook her head, but she laughed loud.

When the thunder cracked, Mom looked at my father, then at us. “Maybe that's enough.”

“We're grounded,” Dad said. He kicked up a shoe. “Rubber-soled sneakers.”

My mother was barefoot.

Lightning struck and the sky darkened to almost purple.

Mom turned toward home, her kite trailing behind her, and hollered into the wind, “Peter? Girls? You coming?”

Kara did cartwheels on the wet sand. Pink shoelaces hung from her ponytails. Her scatter of freckles, the beauty of her high cheekbones, and the heart shape of her face made her my mother's twin.

“Kat, you're no fun anymore,” my father shouted back. “You used to be fearless.”

Mom stood still a moment. She examined my father. There was a pause. A change washed over her face. Then she let go of her twine completely and we all watched her kite nosedive into the ocean.

• • •

But as I tailed my mother after she took down Dad's poker game, she was anything but still. Her anger fueled her speed, and she kept a good forty paces beyond me, shrinking toward the horizon. With her ponytail wagging behind her, she could easily be mistaken for a girl my age.

At the creek, our first marker, I wondered if my mother would run and leap the width of the water. Unsure of the tides and fearing that she might find herself immersed, her down coat billowing as it filled with a current that could easily take her under, I ran to catch up.

But the tide was dead low and my mother marched right across the creek, soaking her green boots. On the sand she broke into a run that lasted until she reached the breakwater, and then she scaled the five-foot rise of the rock wall and dropped over the side.

She was out of my sight for several minutes, the jetty separating us from each other. When I finally crested the climb, I stood atop the granite ledge a moment, wanting my mother to look back, to call my name and wait for me to join her. But she kept jogging ahead, her tied hair swinging behind her like a pendulum.

Beyond the wall, I dropped onto the beach, my momentum growing sluggish against the wind as I chased after her in my heavy moon boots.

Across the creek was a world so different from the one we lived in. There homes were the size of city blocks, and fancy inns rose above manicured walkways to claim ownership of the frost-covered sand. Passing the mansions, I could no longer concentrate on my stride, and I slowed, peering into their lit windows and thinking about how my father admired those kinds of master homes, always claiming that with a little more money our lives would be all ease.

To my shock, there at Quayside, my mother veered off the strand and down a pebbled path, while I made ground on her. Close enough to track her course, I followed her up to a paved drive, to the walkway of a house whose colossal door she opened and entered as casually as if it were her own.

I stopped in my tracks, taking in the house my mother had entered. It was grand and white, erected in the time of whalers, when women walked its watch in petticoats and squinted out over the ocean for a glimpse of familiar ships coming home. As I stood shivering in the dark, a room on the second floor of the three-story house brightened. From my vantage point, I saw a leather sofa next to a large desk covered in papers. Next to the desk was a huge telescope, even more remarkable than the one in Mr. Barnet's science lab, and it pointed out toward the blue. I had trouble believing that my mother could know someone there, yet there was a throb in my belly all the same.

Mom came into view, and I shook my head in disbelief as she shed her white ski parka and hung it on the telescope, as if it were a coat hook. I thought of Christa McAuliffe, her smiling face in the autographed picture, and how my mother had cried and cried when she drove us home from school only hours ago.

In the illuminated window, a slim man with silver hair approached my mother. His robe was the same stark white as her parka, white like the telescope and the clapboards of the house, white like the drifts of snow that collected along the breakwater.

He put his arms around her.

I held my breath.

What I wanted then, what I prayed for, was that my mother would turn toward the window, somehow seeing me there in the impending dark, and that my presence would stop her from doing what would happen next. But in the orange light of the room, she unfastened the man's robe and slipped it from his shoulders. He stood before her naked, something I forever wish I had not seen. Then, she pushed him onto the desk and climbed on top of him with her green boots and jeans still on, while pulling her turtleneck over her head.

“Mom, no!” I shouted.

Gulls shrieked back from breakwater, and anger percolated from where my worry and sadness had been.

Part of me wanted to run inside, to catch her red-handed and say simply, “Come home.” And another part of me, the biggest part, wished I had never crossed the breaker to discover her.

Full of adrenaline, I raced home, slipping as I ascended the cold rock jetty, and charged toward the creek. Rushing through the rising tides of the stream, I was soaked waist high. Undone by what I had witnessed, I wished those waters could quell the fire in my heart, but it bloomed into an inferno no ocean would ever halt.

Back in the empty living room of our tiny ranch on Willard Street, I peeled off my wet Levis and wriggled into a dry pair from a laundry basket left on the couch. From the television blaring into the empty room, President Reagan assured a grieving nation that the Teacher in Space Project would persist.

“We'll continue our quest in space,” he said. “There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers and women in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue.”

On the deck off the back of our house, out beyond the chatter of the media's questions to a deflated-looking President Reagan, I could see the silhouettes of Rex, Uncle G, and my father, who held Kara's hand. The men passed a joint between them, and when I opened the door, I was surprised to find that the discussion was not about my mother's departure, but NASA's inability to determine the cause of the explosion.

My father spoke in a grave tone. “By now, there's not a prayer that anyone on that crew survived. My platoon leader once told us that the brain could only last four minutes without air before the functions broke down. By six minutes it's game over. They're gone.”

Rex shook his head, his arms folded across his chest. Despite the chill he wore no coat. “We won't hear anything until the Coast Guard finds the debris.”

From where they stood, I could hear foghorns in the distance.

Uncle G dropped the butt on the deck and snuffed it out with the toe of his boot. “NASA's going to keep this bullshit ‘no comment' policy when it comes to the astronauts. They might know the whole story now, all those radios and devices on that rocket, but they aren't gonna tell the public shit until they're good and ready. And I promise you this: none of it will be their fault.”

“Dad,” I interrupted, “I'm going to work on my comet project with my lab partners. Can I be back by ten?” I wanted to ask him about my mother, if he knew when she would return, but I couldn't find the words.

“Great,” Dad mumbled, staring as far off as the Milky Way. He pulled the winter cap Mom had knit him for Christmas over his ears. “Walk your sister to the skate pond when you go and I'll pick her up when she's ready.”

Kara and I kicked a stone between us as we walked through the neighborhood. Tasseled with blue and pink pompoms, her skates were slung over her shoulder. “I thought your project was done,” she said. “Didn't you bring it to school already?”

We both watched our feet.

“This is a different thing,” I lied. “Group work. Individual projects were handed in.”

Kara stopped dead in her tracks and set her skates on the ground. Her face was the carbon copy of our mother's. Even her expression, the way she pressed her lips together, was the same. “The astronauts, do you think they felt it?” she said.

Ahead of us, the street lamps wore halos.

“Felt what?” I said.

Kara shouted to hear herself from under a pair of fuzzy earmuffs. “The fire. All of us watching them burn to death?” Her voice echoed off the indistinguishable houses lining our street.

“No,” I lied again. “I think it happened before they felt a thing.” But in my mind I imagined air masks falling from overhead compartments, sirens, the shudder of the cabin, heat from the flames, followed by the resonating clap of the fatal belly flop the capsule made off the coast of Florida. I pictured each of the crew members' faces watching the others from behind their masks as their oxygen winked out, while at home a thankful Barbara Morgan, the runner-up for the mission, ate Doritos and drank Cherry Coke with her kids, watching the whole thing from her couch, grateful to God that it wasn't her, after all, who got to be the Teacher in Space.

I took Kara's mittened hand in mine, and as we turned into the warming hut at Marsh Cove Park, I lied to her one last time to protect her from the sadness in her eyes. “They never even had a second to think about anything other than how happy they were to be chasing Halley's comet across the sky.”

“Good,” Kara said. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other and waved to her friends.

“Call Daddy to come get you when you're done,” I told her and handed her a shiny dime.

Then, as I had done only hours before while tracking my mother, I rounded the bend, where, at the creek's dead-end, I saw the billowing exhaust of Dean's truck. I hadn't expected him to be there before me.

He sat alone in the dark, leaning against the bed of his pickup, the tailgate open, blowing cigarette rings at the night. He was handsome like Simon Le Bon, the lead singer of Duran Duran, my favorite band in those days, but in a tougher, less British way. In his jeans and camouflaged hunting jacket, with his cigarettes and coffee, Dean already seemed somewhat old. I guessed that having four sisters and no dad at home weighed him down with a cargo of responsibility. At seventeen years old, he had a steadier job than my dad, and working hard to make money for his family seemed to be the thing he honored most.