The Night of the Comet (3 page)

I stood by while he set up the telescope. My mother stood back by the porch, arms crossed lightly over her chest with her drink in one hand, smiling at her two boys.

“Check the ground surface first to make sure it’s level, no rocks or holes,” my father said as he bobbed around the tripod. He still had on his party hat, a red cone with white polka dots, like what a clown would wear. “Be sure the legs are locked. You don’t want it tipping over. Now, the first thing we do is polar align it.”

I looked over the top of his hat, across the black water to our new neighbors’ house on the opposite bank of the bayou. Spotlights shone
on the walls and up into the fronds of tall, freshly planted palm trees on the back patio. Upstairs and down, lights glowed goldenly behind the windows, suggesting a rich, vibrant interior life. Their house stood out like a jewel in the darkness.

“Man-oh-man. Look at that. Sharp.”

My father stepped back and called me over. I bent to the eyepiece, curious in spite of myself. A bright blob wavered into view.

“What is it?”

“It’s the Moon, silly. Don’t you recognize the Moon?”

“Oh, right.”

“You have to hold still. Breathe easy. I trained it on the Sea of Tranquility. They were right there, Mr. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, walking around. Pretty amazing, isn’t it?”

I blinked and breathed. The image steadied itself in the glass, revealing a silvery, desolate landscape. My father squatted at my side, pointing out some of the more prominent lunar features while reciting their names at my ear:
The Sea of Serenity, the Sea of Fecundity, the rays of Tycho, the rays of Copernicus
. I peered closer, hoping I might see something interesting, an American flag, maybe, or leftover pieces of a landing module, but all I could make out were dusty hills and shadows. I wondered why anyone would ever want to go there, it looked so cold and lonely.

“Come see,” he called to my mother.

She tottered down the yard in her high-heeled sandals and, holding her drink aside in one hand, bent to the telescope.

“Careful you don’t spill on it,” he said.

“I won’t!”

She had a slim figure, narrow shoulders, and a straight back. Even though she was my mother, I could see it was true what people said about her, that she was a pretty woman. Even in a cardboard party hat, Lydia Simoneaux Broussard managed to look pretty. It was only lately that I had begun to notice what an unlikely couple my parents made: she petite and stylish and full of spunk, he gawky and birdlike and dull as a stick. I sometimes wondered what they were even doing together in the first place. Did they love each other? What did love even look
like between two adults like them? And who in the world were these two strange creatures, Alan and Lydia, who called themselves my parents, anyway?

“Is this the comet?” my mother asked, blinking into the eyepiece.

“No, it’s not the comet. It’s the Moon! My god, doesn’t anyone recognize the Moon when they see it?”

“Wowser. Gosh. Look at that. It looks really close,” she said, and then pulled away and headed inside, as little interested in the Celestron as Megan, apparently.

“Let’s see what else this baby can do,” my father said.

He fiddled some more with the knobs, talking about declination and right ascension and azimuth. After some time studying the Moon, he went for Venus, and then Mercury. Then he began scanning the spaces between stars, “just to see what’s out there.”

“You’d be surprised,” he said. There’d been some remarkable discoveries made by amateurs doing just what we were. A Japanese man, a factory worker, had discovered half a dozen comets on his own using an ordinary old Seiko Polarex. Another man, a British pastor, found a new comet while looking out his living room window one night with a pair of binoculars. All it took was time. Time and perseverance. Tradition held that the comet was named after its discoverer.

“What if we found one, huh? Wouldn’t that be neat? Comet Broussard. How about that? Comet Junior.”

But I’d soon had enough of the telescope, too. I didn’t want to leave all at once, for fear of disappointing my father, so at first I stood a little distance apart on the lawn, and then sat on the back porch steps, and then stood near the door, before finally saying I had to use the bathroom and ducking inside. My father didn’t seem to notice. He was gone, lost in his love for worlds millions of miles from our own.

I retreated upstairs to my room. There was my bed, my desk, my bookcase full of books. My junior high school twenty-five-pound junior barbell set rested against one wall, gathering dust. Next door, my sister played “Killing Me Softly with His Song” over and over on her stereo. From the window I could see my father down in the backyard working the telescope beneath the big, deep sky.

I had just turned fourteen and nothing had changed. I could wish all I wanted, but I was still the same lonely, frustrated boy I was when I was thirteen. My parents, too, were the same, my sister the same. My room, our house, our small dull town, the night sky, everything exactly the same. Birthdays, I was beginning to suspect, were a kind of dirty trick, a way to get you all excited about nothing.

I
moved closer to my dormer window. The window was up, the air outside tepid and still. By leaning to the right, I could see between the trees and across the bayou to her house. Its lights fell on the black water, creating a shimmering, inverted double of itself, like a castle floating upside down in a dream. I wondered what she was doing there tonight, at home in her dream castle. Only a twenty-foot-wide canal separated us, but it might as well have been an ocean, and she was on the other side of it, as remote and inaccessible to me as a Roman princess.

Over the past year and a half, my mother and I had watched as the new house went up on the other side of the water: first the sprawling foundation, then the ground floor, then the second floor. A walled-in patio with a pool and a cabana were added, then a fanciful gazebo in the side yard, and then a boardwalk leading down to a boat dock on the water. The house was so marvelous, so grand that it looked almost absurdly out of place there at the edge of our muddy bayou. “Good lord, it’s huge,” my mother said.

All the neighbors on our side of the canal were curious. People knew that Frank Martello was an oil man from Shreveport—he’d been coming here for years on business and he kept a condo in Thibodaux. But what about the rest of the family? We sometimes caught glimpses of a lady, sometimes two, stepping out of a white Cadillac at the front of the building site. “Wowser,” my mother said, straining to make out their clothes and features from our back porch. “Look at them. Like movie stars at a premiere.”

When the family finally moved in two weeks ago, I biked across the Franklin Street bridge and watched from the end of the block as freight trucks from New Orleans department stores came and went and men in uniforms unloaded furniture all day. That’s when I first spotted her, standing beside the fountain in their yard of newly plugged grass. She was wearing pink shorts and a pink top that showed off her bare arms and legs. Her skin was tanned a golden brown—although it wasn’t a tan, exactly, but a hue. Her color came from inside her, as if she held the heat and glow of the Sun inside her. Her hair was thick and black, pulled up in back. Standing in the yard perched on one leg, the other craned up with her foot resting on her inner thigh, she looked like some exotic tropical bird who’d flown off course and landed by mistake in our town. Even then, even in that first view from a block away, I knew she was special. The movers, every one of them, stopped to talk to her—grown men sweating and grunting under heavy pieces of furniture, lingering in the yard just for a chance to speak to her, to admire her lithe teenage body. My mother soon managed to learn their names: Frank’s wife was Barbara, and their daughter was Gabriella.

Gabriella
: even her name was beautiful, angelic, impossible.

Down in the backyard, I saw my father fold up the telescope and carry it inside. In a minute he appeared at my bedroom door with it, talking excitedly about what an amazing instrument it was and how good it’d be for viewing the comet.

“We ought to take it out of the town some night soon. Get away from the lights and find some elevation. Wouldn’t that be fun?” Save my money, he said, and I could buy a more powerful eyepiece. A good
twenty-five millimeter wouldn’t be that expensive. He could help me out if I wanted.

He carefully stood the telescope in the corner and stepped back, hands on his hips, admiring it, this fine, expensive instrument, the Mercedes-Benz of telescopes. His present, I understood, was meant to be a bond between us, the thing that would hold us together even as my adolescence tried to pry us apart. In his eyes, nothing could have been better than this: a father, a son, their telescope.

“Well. Happy birthday, son.”

“Night, Dad.”

My father looked at me as if he meant to say something more. He still wore his clown hat—he’d forgotten he had it on, apparently. He blinked and nodded, shoved his glasses up on his nose. Then he inexplicably laughed—one short, goofy snort—turned, and left.

I looked at the Celestron standing in the corner of my room. What kind of a gift was that? What kind of a father was this? I didn’t want a telescope for a birthday present. Who would? No doubt he meant well, but my father moved in a universe of his own—“His head in the stars,” as my mother put it. I wondered if he could even see me at all, blinking behind the thick lenses of his glasses. As a parent, he was practically useless. Like the telescope—good for nothing. I felt like kicking the damn thing.

But then, staring at his ridiculous present, an idea occurred to me. Yes, of course.

I pushed my desk chair out of the way, pulled the telescope over to the window, and adjusted the legs. The angle was a little awkward, owing to the narrowness of my dormer window, and the brick wall around their patio blocked most of my view of the downstairs. But by panning along the wall, I found the set of tall iron gates giving access to their patio. I adjusted the focus until I could see across the patio to the back of their house, where a room with large windows and a sliding glass door faced the pool.

Inside I found Mr. Martello sitting in a leather recliner, drinking from a bottle of beer, his image jittering in the lens of the scope. I panned a fraction of a degree to the right and discovered the corner of a
TV cabinet, and then a painting of a horse and hound, and a wooden floor lamp, and the edge of a couch. And there, hanging out over the corner of the couch, was a bare, tanned knee. My breath caught in my throat. It was her. It had to be her. I could hardly believe my luck.

She was sitting with her legs crossed Indian style, watching TV with her father while reading a magazine she held in her lap. She turned a page of the magazine, and then she tilted her head into view and lifted her hand to her hair. She twirled her fingers in her hair, curling and uncurling strands of it around her index finger. Her fingernails, I could see, were painted a bright, playful, achingly suggestive pink.

The telescope, with its magical arrangement of lenses and mirrors, had carried me across space and set me down in the room right beside her. I was so close I felt I could reach out and touch her. I could almost hear her breathing; I could read her thoughts in the small changes flickering across her face, the way she pursed her lips and then widened her eyes when she found something she liked in her magazine. I could practically see her whole life story in the dainty way she stroked the corner of the paper with the tip of her middle finger to turn the page.… My father was right, the Celestron was an amazing instrument.

My mother laughed. “Clever!”

I spun around. “What?”

“Enjoying your new telescope?”

I sidled away from it. “It’s okay.”

“You know,” she said, stepping into my room, “with the Plössl whatever-whatever eyepiece, I bet you could see into the next neighborhood. You could probably see right inside someone’s house.”

“Huh? What?”

“What what what?” she mocked. “Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. It’ll be our little secret. You’ve got good taste. She’s a cutie.”

She asked if I wanted to come downstairs to watch an old movie on TV with her,
Lost Horizon
. Ronald Colman’s plane crashes in Shangri-La, where he meets Jane Wyatt, an orphan girl brought up by a Tibetan wise man.

“No, thanks.”

“You’re sure? It’s supposed to be good.”

“That’s okay.”

“Well. Goodnight, then.” She kissed me on the side of the head, her breath sweet with rum and Coke. “Let me know if there’s anything else you want for your birthday.” She paused, frowning thoughtfully at the Celestron.

“He does love you. You know that, don’t you? He just has a funny way of showing it sometimes,” she said. We both stared at the scope, nodding in agreement, and for an instant I had the feeling she might’ve been speaking for herself as much as for me.

As soon as she’d left, I grabbed the telescope and aimed it again at the Martello house. There was the television, the lamp, Mr. Martello’s chair … but the couch was empty. Gabriella had disappeared.

I found a light shining in an upstairs room with two balconies that overlooked the patio. Was it her room? Yellow curtains were closed across the French doors behind the balconies, so I couldn’t be sure. I toyed with the telescope some more, adjusting and readjusting the focus, trying different windows and different angles, but an hour later, I still hadn’t found Gabriella again.

I had, however, become more adept with the instrument, and before I went to bed, out of a drowsy sense of curiosity, I aimed the Celestron skyward.

From my dormer window I could only see a wedge of the sky, but even in that small view there was an astounding array of astronomical bodies. I saw what I knew to be stars, and what could’ve been the planet Venus. I saw the incandescent smudge of the Milky Way and a moving speck of light that must’ve been a satellite.

And somewhere up there, high above it all, was the comet, fiery and silent, hurtling toward us.