The Night of the Comet (37 page)

I circled the square on the outside walkway, looking for her face among the crowds of people. I passed a hippy couple, an older boy wearing a floppy hat and a long purple coat with his arm around a girl in a psychedelic miniskirt and purple stockings. I must’ve been staring, because the girl puckered her lips and blew me a kiss, making her boyfriend laugh. I kept walking, past a black family gathered around a park bench.

“You’re not going to say hello?”

It was Christine; I hadn’t seen her. I stopped and she introduced me to her family—her sister, her aunt, her mother and father, a few kids. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” she said. “I said we’ve got to go see that comet. I told them how your daddy showed it to me on the telescope.”

A little boy standing at my knees waved a cardboard tube. “I got a telescope.”

“That’s my littlest one, Jeremy,” said Christine. The boy put the
tube against his eye and looked up with it. “What do you see? You see anything?” she asked him.

“The Moon,” the boy said, and everyone laughed. The boy looked around worriedly, not sure why this was funny, and hid his face against Christine’s legs.

She opened a picnic basket beside her on the bench and invited me to stay and eat with them. They had chicken, biscuits, everything. “Peppers? You like peppers? That’s from my garden last summer.” I begged off, saying that I had to meet someone.

“You’re in a hurry, that’s okay.” Christine returned the jar of peppers to the basket. “Tell your daddy I said hello. Tell him we were here.”

I thanked her and said goodbye. The little kid waved his cardboard tube in the air at me as I moved on.

I’d lost sight of Mark and his red Camaro; I didn’t see any sign of Gabriella yet, either. But cutting through the middle of the square, I heard music and turned around to see my sister. She was sitting cross-legged on a tie-dyed sheet on the ground in a corner of the square, playing guitar with Greg. She wore a tiara of yellow and white plastic flowers. Greg slouched beside her in a winter coat. The other members of the band lounged back smoking cigarettes and listening, glassy-eyed. I stepped across the grass to them.

“What’re you doing here?”

Strumming her guitar, Megan looked up. “Same as you. Came to see the comet.”

“Alan Junior,” said Greg, and reached up for a soul shake. The drummer took a suck of gas from a helium balloon and said in a high, funny voice, “What’s up, dude?”

I asked my sister if she’d seen Gabriella. She hadn’t. “The Comet Queen,” Greg said. “I remember her.”

“You think we’ll see it?” the drummer asked, squinting up at me from the ground.

“My dad says so.”

He nodded. “That’d be cool.”

Greg began strumming his guitar along with Megan. They got up a
tune, and my sister took the high part, her voice sounding light and pretty. I looked over their heads to the end of the square. Night was falling fast; the streetlights had come on and the store signs were all lit now. On the corner, people were going in and out of the Rexall—

A ridiculous hope, I knew, but it was worth a try.

“Rock on,” the drummer said as I rushed off.

The kid with the gas was still filling balloons at the front of the store, tying them off and attaching strings with a bored expertise. I held the door open for a woman coming out, and as I waited for her to pass I saw one of my dad’s fliers taped up inside the window. Across the top of the flier was a poorly reproduced black-and-white photograph of a comet; around the edges were hand-drawn stars and planets:

Inside, then, and up and down the aisles. The lights were white, the air medicinal. The store couldn’t have changed much since my parents met here almost twenty years ago: same magazine racks, same shelves of stomach medicine. Coming around to the front of the store, I half expected to find, through some magical repetition of time and events, Gabriella waiting for me behind the counter. Instead, there was a thin black girl wearing the shop’s pink smock, her hair combed out into a large, well-shaped Afro. She leaned across the counter flirting with a black fellow about her age, one foot extended behind her rocking from side to side on its toe.

“I’m not going to give you a discount. Why should I give you a discount?” she said.

“Because I’m your friend,” the guy teased. “I’m your special friend.”

She laughed. “Shoot. You think you’re my special friend.”

No Gabriella, though. I went back outside. A damp, cutting breeze blew along the sidewalk as the last traces of daylight bled from the sky. I stuffed my hands in my coat pockets and was about to cross the road for another pass through the square when I noticed the front fender of a blue car peeking out from the alleyway beside the drugstore.

I stepped closer. It was our Rambler. My mother sat behind the steering wheel, her eyes on the square. I knocked on the passenger-side window and she jerked back, startled. Then she leaned over and unlocked the door to let me in.

“IT’S
cold out, isn’t it?”

She still wore the navy-blue jacket and skirt I’d seen her in earlier at the Martellos’ house. Her pearls were gone, though, and her eyes were red and puffy. The motor was running and the heater on. I didn’t want to embarrass her by asking what she was doing here, and she didn’t seem inclined to offer any explanation, so instead we both pretended that it was perfectly normal that I should find her hiding in our car in the alleyway.

I warmed my hands in the heat from the vents and watched the square with her. Policemen had begun blocking off the road around the square with sawhorses. Red brake lights winked on and off; above, soft blue comas haloed the streetlamps.

My mother sniffed and wiped her nose with a tissue. “I’m surprised to see so many people.”

“Me, too.”

She peered up thoughtfully at the sky through the windshield. “Can it do that? Just appear all the sudden?”

“I guess so. It’s supposed to be a good night for it.”

“But it’s cloudy.”

“I know.”

“Where’s your telescope?”

“With Dad.” I told her how I’d come with Peter, and how we’d been helping the Cub Scouts set up chairs. “I saw Megan.”

“Was she with Greg?”

“With him and his friends, yeah. Over there playing guitars.”

“I like Greg. He seems like a nice boy. He probably smokes pot, but at least he’s polite.”

My mother and I hadn’t spoken to each other since her phone calls to me the week before, when I’d hung up on her. Having witnessed her horrible humiliation at the Martellos’ that afternoon, though, I was finding it hard to stay very angry at her for abandoning us. Still, I wasn’t ready to just forgive and forget everything yet.

Three of Gabriella’s girlfriends from school passed directly in front of us on the sidewalk. They were followed by some older boys who teased them as they walked. The girls jutted their chins and pretended to ignore the boys, which only provoked them more. The girls turned sharply to cross the street, and the boys chased after them.

My mother smiled. “Look at them go.… Reminds me of when I was a teenager. We used to come here all the time. It was just like this. Families and kids, people out walking. Boys circling in their cars, chasing after the girls. You hardly ever see this anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know. People like to stay inside and watch TV, I guess. Or maybe they’re afraid to go out at night now.”

I fooled with the heater vents as she went on, her voice taking on a wistful, sentimental tone.

“Do you remember when we used to take you and Megan to see drive-in movies? At that place out on Highway One? You got so scared the first time, I don’t know why.”

I had a vague memory of huddling in blankets in the front seat between my parents as brightly colored giants went crashing and leaping across the night sky in front of our car.

“It was something like
Mary Poppins
. You were so afraid!” She laughed.

“I didn’t know it was just a movie,” I explained.

“Probably not. You had nightmares for weeks after that. Because of
Mary Poppins
.” She laughed again, and I chuckled with her. She sniffed and wiped her nose, and then asked, “How’s your father?”

“He’s all right, I guess.”

“Did you two have dinner tonight? What’d you eat?”

“Leftover chicken.”

“He cooked it?”

“No. God, no. Are you kidding?”

We sat there a minute, looking out the windshield. I got the feeling we were both working up the courage to start in on what we really needed to talk about, which was the whole complicated issue of where we stood now as mother and son, and what would become of the Broussard family.

Off to the right, I saw the guy who’d been flirting with the counter girl come out of the drugstore. He bought a balloon and ducked back inside.

“It’s your famous drugstore,” I said.

She looked across me out the window. “My famous drugstore.”

“The one where it all began.”

“Ha.”

“It was on a night like this. You were working all alone,” I prompted. She didn’t say anything. “He was a new teacher, fresh from LSU.…” Still nothing. It suddenly felt important to hear the story again, as a reminder, for both of us, of how love was supposed to work.

“Tell it,” I urged her.

“No, not now.”

“Why not?”

“It’s too sad.”

“How’s it sad?”

“It just is.”

“You should come home.”

She looked at me and sighed. “Oh, honey.”

“Why don’t you?”

“There’s so many problems now.”

“No there aren’t.” I poked at the heater vent. “He misses you.”

She bit her lip and turned forward. In the dim light of the alley her face was gray and shadowed. She was looking through the windshield, but she wasn’t seeing the scene outside anymore; she was seeing something else entirely, perhaps peering down into her own heart.

“I think I might’ve made a terrible mistake,” she said softly.

“What?”

“It’s like I wasn’t thinking right. I believed something was true that wasn’t true, and then I … and then I …” She shook her head, as though to shake away the thought. “God, I’m such an idiot. I’m so stupid. I’m so stupid. What did I do? Look at the mess I made.”

“Maybe you can still fix it.”

“I don’t know, it might be too late for that.” She looked at me. “Am I a terrible mother? Do you hate me?”

Her eyes were damp, her brow wrinkled and pleading. An honest answer might’ve been,
Yes, sometimes you are a terrible mother, and yes, sometimes I hate you for that
. But now, I sensed, was not the time for honest answers.

“No. No, of course not,” I said.

Across the square, someone was checking the microphone on the podium.
“Test. Testing one, two.”

She wiped her nose. “He’s a stubborn man, isn’t he? Your father. He never gives up. He just keeps on going. I don’t know how he does it. He stands by his beliefs, no matter … no matter what other people think. You have to admire him for that, I guess. Even if sometimes he does seem a little … a little, I don’t know what. Cuckoo.”

At the courthouse, the mayor had begun speaking at the microphone.

“It’s starting,” my mother said. “You should go watch. He’d want you to be there.”

I hesitated before leaving her. We hadn’t really resolved anything, but the mayor was introducing my father now, and Gabriella was somewhere out there, maybe watching and waiting for me.

I turned once more to my mother. It could’ve been the way the light in the alley fell on her face, but she looked suddenly older. She might’ve
aged twenty years since that afternoon. I thought of her as that teenage girl staring dreamily out the window of the drugstore, and then the nervous young newlywed boarding the train for her honeymoon, and now the sad, mistaken lover dropping to her hands and knees on the sidewalk in front of our neighbors’ house—

She leaned abruptly across the seat, grabbed me by the shoulders, and gave me a strong kiss on the cheek. Then she pushed me toward the door.

“Go. Go watch it, sweetie,” she said. “Once in a lifetime chance and everything. You wouldn’t want to miss it.”

THERE
was a smattering of applause in the square as my father came forward and laid his notes on the lectern. The wind riffled the pages. He adjusted his broken glasses and thanked the mayor, thanked everyone for coming out this evening. Then he stood up straighter, cleared his throat, and began his speech.

“Tonight, we are gathered here to witness a truly remarkable event, one whose importance will be recorded not only in the history of science, but also in the broader history of civilization. As inhabitants of the planet, we are fortunate indeed …”

The sound system was weak, and from where I stood at the edge of the square it was difficult to hear what he was saying. But the audience was attentive. People shushed one another. A woman beside me stopped her child from running and held him at her legs in front of her and told him to be quiet, the scientist was talking now. I moved to a spot nearer the chairs where I might hear him better.