The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel (33 page)

A few more of her on the boat, and some of her walking away. Then a new setting: Lydia in the sun-spotted jungle, standing in a tin pail with soap all over her naked body. A fat man (presumably her father) leaned out of the edge, but Lydia was focused directly on the camera. She had a vine of orchids in her hand, dry and brownish near the bottom; it seemed she had just grabbed them from the bush. A bee seemed to be exiting one of the flowers (or it could have been a drop of water, or an error in the old film), but the girl didn’t notice. She was smiling. It was a smile of astonishment, something like the previous frown: I don’t know why I’m here, but I’ll be fine. A few more of these pictures, with middle-aged Swift moving in and out of the frame. Eli wondered why Kathy had taken these, and when? Had he been sleeping in their hut? Had she crept away from her husband’s bed? And then, below, a darker set of photos entirely.

That night, the meteor hunt. Lydia, her hair in pigtails, wrapped in a shawl and looking at a local woman who had a rhesus monkey on a leash. Kathy had caught the monkey with its mouth wide open as if it were singing. Everything was washed with cold light, people looked shocked, and the sky seemed utterly dark. Then one of Lydia smiling, with the wall and a red-haired boy in the background. Then Lydia asleep on her father’s lap, with the professor, as he held a piece of chocolate in his fingers like a pawn, looking enraged at the camera’s forbidden flash.

And then Lydia screaming. A crowd behind her, turned all directions, slacks and sarongs and high-heeled shoes, with a few faces looking straight at the camera. Chairs were overturned, coffee mugs spilled, and Lydia’s face was ugly and red and mangled with fright. And then Lydia in Kathy’s arms. Eli looked carefully at this one— Kathy as a young woman, with shining black hair and a skinny face and arms. He had never realized there was something so stylish about her, and not just the sixties-ness of the moment, but the layers and patterns of her clothes that now looked effortlessly beautiful. Had he ever thought of her that way? She held Lydia gently to her and, with the little girl still screaming fitfully at the camera, reaching one paw toward the photographer, Kathy’s lips were pressed against her cheek.

“Who took these?” he asked.

“I…” she began. “I can’t tell for sure.”

“Why would someone take these? With the boy dead?”

But Lydia just crossed her arms and shook her head.

He didn’t care. He was glad to have these pictures. Here was another one, closer now: Kathy’s eyes closed under her glasses, her neck stretched to reach the girl, and Eli could almost hear Lydia’s terrible cry, feel that struggling body through more than two decades of time. His wife, at twenty-four, kissing a child. Yes—it made no sense, after everything—but he felt the itch of love. He lifted the photograph to reveal the next.

These were out of order; daylight filled this scene. He felt the muscles of his back tighten, the tug of a bellpull. It was Denise.

He thought of the call. It came in the afternoon. It was a beautiful December day in 1988, and Eli had already moved to his new Hollywood apartment, sitting on the couch with Penny watching a baseball game on tape. She was a fan, and the incongruity of this fragile and pretty woman shouting at the screen comforted him, let him think there were more mysteries to her than he suspected, ones worth pursuing. Penny sighed in disappointment at the screen, and then the phone rang. Eli paused the tape on an image of some fans in the stadium, standing and yelling, and he picked up the phone. It was Adam. A low voice of endless words. Eli sat there and listened to the details. It was a long call, and all the while Eli just kept staring at the screen, at that blurry, frozen image of two women in the stands waving their banners: a tall blonde, overweight, delighted by something that had just happened, and a woman beside her, a redhead, flag held sideways, seemingly unsure of how to feel. Eyes turned down, a look of doubt, an image he would never forget. “Thank you for telling me,” he said at last, hung up the phone and stared at the frozen women while Penny asked him, over and over, what had happened. In a minute, the tape automatically unpaused and the raucous game began again; the woman landed on the ground, clapping, and the camera switched to focus on the sweating pitcher. Tied, bottom of the ninth, two bases loaded. They watched until their team lost, an outcome they had already known, and then Eli turned and said at last that his best friend was dead.

And here she was. In his hand, in a photo from the past, one he’d taken of her, in fact. He remembered it. On the boat over to the island in 1965, a few sips from her flask of bourbon with the guards looking on, the shadows from the gulls passing over the canopy, over her face shining with sweat. Very young, both of them. Talking about Carlos, Kathy, his worries back then that seemed so innocent now— whether his wife was happy, or would have children with him. As if Denise had ever really cared. She was so focused on the stars, on her fame that wouldn’t ever come. She had taken off her hat and let her hair fall in sticky waves. He hadn’t loved her then—it was hard to look back and imagine himself so hollowed and yet happy—but Denise stared at him in that moment on the boat, fanning herself with the hat, and he’d tried not to smile at her harmless crush.

“I’ve had too much to drink!” she had said, holding that long look.

He remembered leaning against the railing, amused at this rich girl. He had asked, “You think it’s a good idea to be drunk so early?”

“Yes. I do.”

“Good,” he had told her. “So do I.” And, with her yelling in protestation, he had taken the picture. This one in his hand. He remembered it perfectly.

And yet, the actual image did not quite fit. Denise was young here, of course, but much younger than he’d made her in his mind’s eye, with such unlined skin and a long face, a clumsy expression before she learned how to control these things, the surprised face of a girl. But he was shocked to see it. She looked so plain. Eyebrows plucked severely, gray eyes slightly bulging in her profile, especially in this joyful shout, a flat forehead and a stiff hairdo crushed by her hat and loosening messily in the heat and sea air—the kind of girl you see and hope the best for, but don’t love. Why had he remembered her as something else, someone so carefree and beautiful? Gold swirls of hair and jewel eyes and a sharp, clever face gleaming under the powder? The dark and muddy print put her out of context, made her seem like a young woman dressed up for the prom—the prim blouse and skirt, the hat—when back then all this had seemed so natural. But he couldn’t blame it on the print. It was simpler than that. She was not pretty.

He did not want there to be pictures of such things. They ruined the past, flattened it in all dimensions. Why couldn’t he have kept her beautiful? Because it wasn’t true. The picture showed it. And the sense that she’d been funny and mysterious and brilliant as all hell couldn’t be felt on that glossy square—now she was no one even to look at twice. Would there be photographs of them together in the hut as well? Of the perfect body he remembered, wet and stuck with sand? And of the night of the comet hunt when she touched his shoulder? And even of Denise at nearly fifty, staring out to sea with her hat in her hand, her explosion of hair?
You were wrong,
the pictures would admonish,
there was nothing there to love.

He began to hate the dead a little, too. A young, plain girl from San Francisco shouting on a boat. An older woman on a hilltop, letting her dyed-blond hair fly out in a nebula. Unfinished, unsaid. He was to blame, of course, but she was also. She had grown beautiful without him. She had been happy with her son. She had sat in a car, wordless, and not fought for them. And of course now, being dead, she had the last word, and it was nothing.

“That was Dr. Lanham, right?” Lydia asked.

“Yes.”

She laughed. “It’s hard to think of her so young.”

“You know, actually, it’s hard to think of her so old.”

Lydia paused. “That’s interesting,” she said.

“Well.”

“And that was you,” she said, showing him the next one, and it was.

But different. Different from the last one. Yes, Eli gaunt and cleanshaven, with a crew cut, his eyes warped by thick glasses as he wrote with his red pen in a little book. A novel of some kind. He noticed a painful-looking pimple on the corner of his mouth—he’d forgotten that, but the sensation returned to him—and the absurdity of his clothes: woolen pants, a button-up shirt (sweated through) and a tie (folded in his pocket). Those old glasses, that shy grin. But what made him gasp here, even more than at the old photo of Denise, was not just the sense of himself—of all of them, his wife, these scientists here—so very young, so ignorant of what would come, but simply the way the photo had been taken. A shot of a young Jewish man caught in a private act: writing in a book. A quiet photo, composed in a way that made him seem much handsomer and smarter than he’d really been, a generous photo; and at the bottom edge, to the left, he could see the wind-lifted edge of a skirt. Her skirt— Denise’s—as she took the picture. Because for Eli it was really a picture of her, more so than the last one—of the skirt and angle and the light that implied her, and her busy mind, and how she looked upon this young man with a schoolgirl’s crush.

He took it all back, his petty rant against the dead. He saw himself through Denise’s eyes and it was happening again—the moments when he couldn’t grasp it, how things had gone, when his mind suffered some eclipse of the spirit—he had to leave. Eli dropped the photos in Lydia’s hand and walked away. The other scientists were approaching, muttering and laughing, and he went in the other direction, to the edge of the wall. Always here, to the edge of this wall.

“Are you okay, Dr. Spivak?” the young woman was asking. He said nothing. She would understand, when she was older, how you cannot look directly at the sun.

I should have come here,
he thought. An island thirteen days in the past, a place to tear the seams out of time and sew it back correctly.
I
should have come here that day.
The day of her death. Rather than sit with Penny in the TV-flickering room, letting it all fall wordlessly into the past, he should have rushed out of the house, driven to the airport in a frenzy, flown across the Pacific to arrive here the next day, to step onto the hot sand of a place where she was not yet dead. Thirteen days until she died, thirteen days to prepare himself. To sip cocktails and think of her calling to her son or arguing with Adam or reading a book, ordinary and still alive. Days would pass. To swim and nap and have her still alive. And then the day would have come at last: Eli, standing in the shallow ocean water off the spit, staring east to where the future would arrive, when Denise would be torn from his life again. A few moments of still ocean. A gull crossing the sky. Then it would have come, in waves like light, to cover him.

The line of ants was here before him, yards and yards of braid upon the wall. Eli put his finger down and let them crawl over it— an odd feeling, a trickle, like drops of blood. He thought of the photograph again, the ruffled edge of skirt. Of Adam’s mournful voice over the phone, giving a crazed and terrible description of her body on the hill: her pale neck blooming with a purple bruise, the stale blood, the wreath of broken glass. There it was, the awful image, the drop of poison convulsing in his throat. He leaned against the wall, covering his wet eyes with his thick fingers, and let his mind heave.

Out there, past all the asteroids and planets, halfway to the nearest star, to a point in space where the sun was dimmed to just a subtle fleck of light, another mass of ice and rock was moving. Moments before, it had been still. The light from everywhere was equal, cold, and all around were gathered icebergs of similar giant size; there were more of these objects in this part of space than there were stars in the Milky Way. From their great frozen distance, they circled the sun in a halo; this was the Oort Cloud, that auditorium of ice, that house of comets. A star passed close by, disturbing them. Then another; and then a final star that tipped one comet off the shelf, sending it slowly toward the sun. It fell, turning slothfully through the darkness, growing ever warmer so that eventually, in a million years or so, the ices would begin to sublime from its surface, causing the wisps of a tail; and in a few million more, that tail would paint a broad white stripe across the earth’s sky. This has been happening for longer than we can imagine.

Our comet lay once more in the open sky, blazing, a dozen or so astronomical units away from the sun, which it had once again looped during this apparition. The bright sun blocked it from view on the island, and tonight the rising full moon would outshine it as well, drawing all attention like a celebrity arriving at a party; but still the comet wobbled on its dust-strewn ellipse as if all the world were watching it. It was dark, most of its ices gone into space long ago; it was one of the darkest objects in the universe. Occasionally, gases jetted from its interior, but they did not change its orbit; that had already been done, years before, by Jupiter’s great presence. Warped and altered, unpredictable yet again, heading toward the outer solar system; a swarm of dust falling through cold space.

And thousands of miles away, on an even more eccentric orbit, a similar object was approaching on its own loop, a comet whose last apparition was in 1974, discovered by two astronomers on a mountaintop in California. Two comets with hyphenated names, two cousins floating through the ether. And not even the scientists below, at countless observatories across Australia and America and the world, pouring numbers into their equations like grains into sand-clocks, not even they could tell you where those objects were headed, where they would be in a year, or when the time might come, a lonely hour, when they’d be lost to greater gravities than ours.

Kathy felt two shadows on her. They came from some men who stood outside the window; shadows, even in the gray light of the muddled evening, falling across her table like a scolding. She was wishing these two would pass; wishing the sun would come out full again, although the fog had clearly settled in for good; wishing the woman beside her, reading now, were someone she could trust enough to tell the truth to. But was there anyone for that, really? Anyone who could even audition for the role?