Afterlight

When the telephone rang later than usual, Nora thought it would be her son, Charley. He’d forgotten to take home the extra pizza when he left earlier. Maybe he’d want to come by for it after he finished jogging.

Nora’s husband, Paul, listened to the caller with a blank expression, then let the receiver slide through his fingers and drop to the base with a clack. “I have to go to the police station. Someone was found—a jogger—on the road near Charley’s cottage. Of course, it’s not Charley.” He reached for his corduroy jacket. He slid his arm into one sleeve, but the other arm got caught up and hung halfway. Nora pulled it the rest of the way for him. Paul patted his pocket where the phone was, but he did not call Charley.

“I’m going with you,” Nora said. She got her coat. Paul waited while she buttoned it.

The sheriff had been waiting and asked them to go downstairs to make an identification.

“Downstairs?” Nora asked.

“You stay here. I won’t be long.” Paul cleared his throat, the way he does when thinking things over. But she saw the fear in his eyes, the centers dark like exoplanets.

 When Paul came back, he shook his head. “It’s him. It was Charley.” He stared at the tile beneath them as if looking into a bottomless pit. “Let’s go home. Someone will call tomorrow to make arrangements.”

But when they arrived home, everything in the house seemed off-kilter—the floor slanted, the walls leaned in. Nora listened for the jiggle of bottles when Charley opened the refrigerator for water, for the thump of his car hitting a bump while pulling out of the driveway. These sounds seemed more possible than the reality that Charley was dead.

She heard Paul brushing his teeth. The bureau drawer squeaked as he opened it for his pajamas. Paul was preparing to go to bed, like any other night.

 Weren’t they going to talk about this? Didn’t his nose feel smacked into—like bumping up against a wall—as he faced the reality head-on? What did he imagine she would do with her grief? Didn’t his heart seize up? What would she do with her grief?

Nora didn’t understand. Paul was processing this occurrence as calmly as if he were viewing one of the faraway galaxies on his telescope. Why didn’t he tell her how he felt, deep and close, like when stepping into one of Charley’s bear hugs?

 If Paul wasn’t going to talk about it, then she wouldn’t either. Nora found herself thinking that, in fact, maybe the accident had not really happened at all. She put the leftover pizza, still on the counter, into the refrigerator.

On the third day, the sheriff’s office called to say that they were ready to release Charley’s personal effects. Nora went to pick them up. She could not wait until Paul returned from work to bring them home.

She received a plastic bag filled with Charley’s billfold and his clothes, no flashlight. His tennis shoes stacked on top. Nora saw dark streaks in the terry cloth fabric at the bridge of one shoe. She touched one of the blood spots through the plastic.

She took the shoes into the laundry room, poured out measurements of soap and bleach and softener, numbly taking each from their places on the shelf. When she submerged the shoes, the dried blood unraveled tiny red ribbons in the water.

 Paul stopped reading his journal and came in to find her loading the wet shoes into the dryer. “Why are you doing this?”

“I have to.”

“Impact with that much force will break the belt,” Paul said. “You’d better turn it off.”

“I want to wait until they are dry.”

“He’s not going to wear them again. You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course, I know that. What a heartless thing to say.”

They were silent, standing face-to-face, locked in a motionless dance to the beat of the rubber soles hitting the drum. They were alone with each other, and each one alone.

Paul turned away. “You should come to bed,” he said, his voice trailing off as he went toward the stairs.

Nora sat down on the floor, let the banging continue on and on into the night. She listened to the sound of the rubber tennis shoes hitting the metal wall of the dryer. Bouncing in a closed place. The repetition lulled her, a clanging thud with every turn, two thuds, actually, because each shoe banged separately from the other. The repetitive bumping of the shoes was in fact soothing, the one predictable thing left.

When she finally did turn off the dryer, the silence in the house made her throat close against her need to scream. She looked out the back window, the yard dark now, and thought of Paul and Charley three days ago, near dusk, cutting the last of the wood from the fallen branches. Charley had come inside to eat pizza with them. He was excited, talking about his plans to return—again this summer—to the Pine Ridge Reservation. He asked if he could bring a stray cat he’d been feeding over to stay while he was gone. Had she hesitated too much in answering yes? Nora wanted to go back to that dusk, the cutting of the wood, the pizza, Paul walking out to the car with Charley. She wanted to start everything over.

Nora had trouble falling asleep when she went to bed. When at last she did doze off, she dreamed the same dream as the previous two nights. It was Charley—she was with him at the base of Brass Town Bald. He came toward her on the stone bed of the access road, a crunching sound. Against the night, the angles of the piled gravel looked like shards of broken tombstones. Charley bid her to follow, but before she could move, she woke.

She sat up, swung her legs around, and planted her feet on the floor beside the bed.

Her movement roused Paul. The bed creaked as he turned. “Can’t sleep?” he asked. “Again?”

“I’d like to go back into my dream,” she said.

“You never can go back into a dream, Nora.” Paul reached out to touch her shoulder, but she pulled away. “You know that, don’t you?”

Nora rose and went into the guest room, opened the window to look out at the stars, but the sky was overcast. Nora listened for the raspy rhythm of a blade sawing wood, for the thunk of a sectioned trunk hitting the ground. She wished she could still smell sawdust in the air.

Nora turned on the light and opened the closet door, pulled out boxes that contained Charley’s possessions she had kept even after he’d moved away. She took out a beaded medallion from camp, a pine box car he and Paul made, a baseball glove from grade school. The inside of the glove felt snug and soft when she put it on her hand and held it out as though ready to catch something. 

~

Nora went looking for the stray cat by Charley’s cottage but never found it. She stopped trying once the “for sale” sign was removed. She could not bear to see someone else living there. Nora gave up her volunteer work at the hospital. She stayed home, cooking more food than they would ever eat and cleaning the house more than was necessary. One day looked very much like the next.

Near the end of the summer, Paul told Nora he was planning a trip to Brass Town Bald to set up his telescope. “It’s the best month to see the third closest spiral galaxy. Remember—we went with Charley last year.”

Nora said she would go with him even though the place he proposed was so far away that they would not return until after midnight. She did not tell him that each night, she went to sleep with the hope that Charley would appear in her dreams. She felt uneasy about being away from home in case Charley came looking for her. 

~

Nora helped carry the heavy tripod to the set-up spot in the deserted parking lot of Brass Town Bald.

Then she held down the styrofoam packing, which screeched as Paul lifted the telescope out. He seated it onto the tripod.

Last year, Charley had tried to persuade Paul to drive up the service road to set up on the observation platform on top of the mountain. But Paul preferred the convenience of unloading in the parking lot.

“The view would be worth the extra trouble. You can see four states,” Charley argued.

“Not at night you can’t.” Paul always found a reason to be right.

Paul angled the scope to the eastern sky. Tonight—like last year—Paul would look in the Triangular Galaxy. “Why did you want to come tonight—on this night in particular?” Nora asked. It had been a year ago, minus one day, that they had come here with Charley.

“The alignment. With a binary star, the orbit has to be just right to see two instead of one.” Paul’s field was stellar astronomy, and Nora knew he’d been observing this specific star for many years.

Paul put his hands on his hips, frowning at the clouds passing in the sky. “Last year was better,” he said.

Of course it was better. Last year we were here with Charley, Nora wanted to say. But Paul would not talk about that. He never would talk about Charley.

Paul looked into the finder trying to bring the galaxy into range. “My star’s there somewhere.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ll find it.”

“You devote a lot of time to finding something that may not even be there,” Nora said.

“We can still learn. Everything we learn about the universe we are learning about ourselves.”

“You sound like you’re lecturing one of your classes,” Nora said.

“You shouldn’t have come if you didn’t want to,” said Paul.

“No, I think it’s good if we do things like this together. We must try harder to do that,” Nora said. She knelt beside the light of the Coleman lantern to untangle the drawstring of the homemade felt bag that held the eyepiece.

Nora heard the whine of the motorized apparatus that synchronized the movement of the scope with the earth’s rotation. Years ago, he’d needed her to help. Now he used a computer program to get a fix on the star.

Paul attached the eyepiece, leaned close to turn the focus knob and sharpen the resolution. He would be completely absorbed in his efforts now, the same as he had been last year. That’s what had given Nora and Charley the chance to climb to the observation deck of the mountain.

 Now Nora regretted that she had decided to come back to this place with Paul. She shivered in the night air. She told Paul she was going to the car to get her jacket. But she walked past the car and went beyond where it was parked. She did not know where she was headed in this world thrown off its axis.

 From the wooded area, Nora heard the call of a night bird. This call—a rapidly repeated single note broken by the entreaty “come-with-meeeeeeee”—was the same as she and Charley heard last year. Nora stopped and looked back. Paul was a street block away. She saw his shape, dark against the sky now that he had extinguished the lantern light. He sat on a small, fold-up stool, leaning into the eyepiece.

Nora heard a twig snap. She heard Charley before she saw him.

“Ah, here you are,” he’d say. A shadow. He was standing in it.

She held her breath. Was this the part of the dream where he would disappear? She reached out to touch his arm. But he had already turned to start the trail.

“Remember the shortcut?” Charley’s raven-black hair was longer now than in the beginning of the summer. He always let it grow to his shoulders when he taught at the reservation.

“It’s only a half mile. But straight up,” he reminded her, ducking under the first branch.

The path was steep. Nora felt like her thighs were gripped in a vise. Was she more out of shape now having given up going to Tai Chi? Nora heard her own labored breathing. The night bird had stopped singing. There was no chirp of crickets, no rustle of a creature deep in the woods.

But soon she heard Charley whistling. He had learned to do that from Paul, through his teeth not his lips. Nora thought of Paul, alone, looking at his faraway galaxy. Did he realize yet that she was gone?

Nora’s feet were heavy and the toe of one shoe scraped the ground. She looked ahead.

Charley carried a flashlight that lit the trail. She followed the beam as it burrowed into the darkness.

Nora wiped the prickly sweat on her forehead with the tip of a paisley bandana she took from around her neck. Bushes at the side seemed dense and flowed like thick velvet curtains across a stage. “I think I see flowers,” Nora said, making out cream-colored appliqués sewn into the night tapestry.

The flowers were Silberlich, “silverlight.” She knew the species. The blossoms—cup-shaped with stiff, waxy petals—would bloom for a long time. Nora ran her finger over an unopened bud, expecting to feel tiny ridges like on the sugar stars with which she decorated birthday cakes. But, instead, what she touched felt like air.

“There it is,” Charley said, aiming the light beam on the bare plateau ahead. “The ‘bald’—did I ever tell you the story?” They stepped from the dirt trail up onto the rock.

“There were so many stories,” Nora said. “Tell me again.”

“I heard this from a Cherokee guy I met, the summer I rewalked the Trail of Tears.”

Nora felt a breeze—more detectable now without the buffer of trees around them. She wished she had brought her jacket from the car.

“Folklore has it that heinous winged beasts—with pointy scales and sharp-toothed mouths—swooped down from the treetops here and gobbled up all the small children.”

Nora felt fearful to be so out in the open. “That’s a terrible story,” she said. “The stories I made up for you as a child had happier endings.”

“So does this. Medicine men summoned good spirits to kill the beasts with fiery thunderbolts. The tribes were so grateful,” Charley continued, “that they vowed to keep this land clear of trees forever.”

“But how could the Cherokee keep that promise? Weren’t they rounded up and forced West?”

“Well, look around.” Charley swept his arm across the bare terrain. “Do you see? One single tree?”

“You got me there,” Nora answered with a ripple of laughter.

When they reached the other side of the plateau, Charley leaped from the rock and helped ease her down. “We’ve arrived.” He crossed the paved path that led to the stone stairway up to the first level of the observatory.

Charley did not hesitate. He climbed straightaway to the first level of a darkened visitor center with fixtures for bolting down telescopes. It was hard for Nora to keep up. Tall and lean like Paul’s side of the family, her long-legged son took one step for each two of hers, even up the dark and narrow steps to the second level—the observation platform and the fire tower.

Nora felt her pulse throb against her fingertips as she made fists, bent forward to gather strength for the final mount. Charley hurried so much that Nora felt alarmed. To her, he seemed reckless—hurrying ahead in this desolate place without worrying if a plank were loose or considering that a fugitive might be hiding out around the corner at the top. Although she felt it was dangerous, she followed him. She would follow as long as she could.

Charley stood at the second landing waiting for her with his arms folded behind him, expectant as though ready to watch her open a present.

Taking a final step onto the deck, she felt she was floating on a wave of starlight, winking overhead, and stretching to the four horizons. And below, throughout the rise and fall of mountain ranges, were more tiny patches of light. Signs of life glowed in white wisps like the Queen Anne’s Lace that grew wild in fields near Charley’s cottage.

“I feel like I am so high up that I’m part of your dad’s sky. I wish he had come.”

“Me too. Let’s see if we can find him. He may be closer than you think.” Charley walked the circular deck until they could see the parking lot—the size of a game board, a bare recessed swath cut into the forest.

“I’m going to signal Dad. Maybe he’ll see us.” He leaned over the rail and shined the light down so it flashed on the tops of trees.

 “The beam won’t carry that far,” Nora said. She knew there was no line of sight to where they stood.

“You never know what’s going to reach someone.” Charley jiggled the light. “Like the shy students I helped at the reservation with remedial math.”

Yes, he was going to tell her another story.

“At first I got no response—the kids are so afraid that they might give the wrong answer. But I noticed that some students had one hand on their desk. So I asked what’s 2 plus 3. ‘That’s right,’ I told them. ‘Five fingers. Five.’ Next thing I knew, students with both hands up pulled one hand off. They wanted to have the right answer too.”

Charley grinned at her triumphantly, shined the light back to glow on his face. “And greatest of all—one kid unclamped the hands folded in his lap and put one hand out on the desk—he wanted to show me the right answer too.”

He then turned the flashlight around so that it splashed on the foliage below like paint poured from a tilted can.

“No, your father won’t see that,” Nora said. “The only thing visible from down there is the top of the tower,” she added, pointing up.

Charley redirected the flashlight so that the beam scampered across the planks and up the clapboard sides of the firetower. The tall windows reflected the light in beacon-like streams.              “Maybe he’ll see this,” Charley said. “I want him to know I’m thinking about him. If he misses it, you tell him. You tell him for me.”

“Is that the reason you’ve come? For your father?” Nora asked.

Charley tilted his head to a lopsided angle and smiled broadly as he walked closer to her. She smelled the familiar acetic scent of his warm body, the same as when he was a boy. Overheated from playing in the summer sun, he would run to her for relief. She wanted to lift a loose strand of hair out of his eye, tuck it behind his outward-slanting ear.

Nora looked down at her fingers, curving as though sand was slipping through them. “Don’t leave.” Nora wasn’t sure if she said it out loud or only in her mind. “Stay longer. You could wait. We could make a deal for you to stay—it could be our very own agreement, between you and me.”

“But we can’t leave out Dad,” Charley said. He paused, maybe to give her time to take in what he had said. “And you know I have to go.”

Charley backed away slowly, looking up at the sky with resignation. His broad shoulders, long legs, lean-forward stance—they all wavered in the light and shadows. He turned. The sole of one shoe creaked and became fainter with each step as he faded into the night’s veil. The beam of his flashlight went black.

Sooner than she wanted, Charley was gone. Gone again. Could she have stopped him? No, she realized that she could not, despite her longing. She might as well have believed the truth of the stories she had told him as a child—how the moon would come and sit in his palm with a warm glow or that one of Paul’s galaxies would sail by and sprinkle a million stars in their hair.

A cold draft blew so hard that Nora had trouble standing. The blustery wind brought her a brutal declaration—no deal. It was the universe taunting her. You are foolish to think you could make a deal. She knew she would not see Charley again.

Clouds covered the moon, and the night became so dark that Nora could hardly see where she was going, could barely see one step in front of the other. She held tightly to the railing and carefully walked down the two flights of stairs to the paved passage below the observatory.

She crossed the blacktop to the mountain’s “bald” plateau. Something seemed to swoop down on her. But no, it was simply the cloud sweeping by and out of the way so that it no longer blocked the moon.

Nora shifted all her weight to her back foot and lifted the other to heft herself up onto the bald. Her grounded foot faltered, and she could not raise it as high. As it landed on a lower stone, the branch of a sapling pine caught the cuff of her pants. She heard the cotton rip as she pulled it loose.

After struggling to get to the top, she sat down on the hard, cold boulder. The moonlight shined down on the smooth surface, giving it the luminosity of an ice-covered pond. But darkness completely bordered the other side. Nora couldn’t imagine how she would find the trail through the woods and get back to the parking lot without a flashlight.

And then Nora saw a faint dot in the blackness. Its sound grew clearer—a sharp hiss, gas seeping from the Coleman lantern. Paul was coming for her. The bright bead burned an arc into the space around it—a pendulum swinging in rhythm to his body.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” she heard him ask as he crossed the bald.

“Why do you have the lantern so bright?” Nora asked. It gave off such a searing light that she could hardly see him walking beside it.

He set the lamp down and, with his left hand, turned the valve wheel to lower the light. His tone was reproachful. “Didn’t you consider that I would worry?” A fretfulness was in his voice. “You go off by yourself.” He stepped closer, trying to see her better.

“And so do you,” Nora said. “The countless hours you spend studying galaxies eons away, your towers of books and your endless calculations.”

Paul didn’t deny it. Silent he reached down to help her up. Nora realized he was using his left hand. “Why?”

“The edge of my finger got pinched. That’s all,” Paul explained. “The tripod collapsed unexpectedly.”

Nora felt a pang of guilt that she had not been there to help him. The steel legs were too heavy for him to hold in place by himself when folding up the tripod.

“I left so I could come up here with Charley,” Nora explained. She looked back at the observation center, at the fire tower, above them now like a diver about to make a plunge. “Did you see the light signal he made to you from up there?”

“He?” Paul paused and turned his face toward her. “You believe that you saw Charley tonight?” Instead of confronting her, Paul took a deep breath and turned away.

Nora reached out and pulled on the yoke of his jacket. “Did you hear what I said?”

He stopped and shifted his shoulder to pull the cloth loose as he looked back out of the corner of his eye.

“Charley was here tonight,” Nora said. She saw him blinking slowly with forced patience. “How could I have gone through the woods in darkness? Charley had the flashlight,” she said to convince him.

“Oh Nora,” he said. He looked up at the tower; he did not say if he had seen the light that Charley had flashed.

“Do you believe me?” Nora asked.

Paul tilted his head to look even higher, turned his attention to the stars overhead. Nora wondered if he was comparing this naked-eye view with the one through his telescope earlier. He said, “The light of stars in deep space glows for millions of lightyears across the universe, even after the star is gone.” He looked back at Nora. “I know you see things that you have to believe.”

“But this wasn’t my imagination. I saw Charley—and he was as real as you are now.” Nora put her hand on his sleeve. “I saw him tonight.”

“No, Nora. I am the last person who saw Charley alive. It was me who saw him last that night.” Paul brought his head and shoulders forward and down, drawing himself close to her. “The last moments. In the yard when he was leaving. After he’d come to help me split wood, after the pizza.”

“I was there too,” Nora said.

 “No, you were in the kitchen later.” Paul pushed his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose. “I went out to the car with him. I knew he’d still go jogging and I thought he should wear something more reflective—something lighter to show up in the dark.”

“He always wore that gray college shirt, even the mascot was faded,” Nora said.

“Charley brushed me off and I was peeved that he wouldn’t borrow my jacket. This one.” Paul raised his arm. The beige color swept the night air like a light-colored flag. Paul groaned. “I should have insisted.”

“But what happened wasn’t your fault, Paul.” The gas light was faint, and Nora could not see his face well, but she knew what he was feeling. Sensing the heaviness of his presence beside her, she was no longer misled by the mask of restraint he forced himself to wear. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened, Paul.”

Standing on the bald next to Paul, Nora realized that life’s horrors are more cruel than the fanged creatures that swoop over a plateau to devour children, as in Charley’s fable. And they are more devious than a commonplace thing, the ringing of the telephone later than expected on a Tuesday night.

No, the real horror is what happens next—really monstrous things happen—or that don’t happen—between a mother and father of a child who has died.

Nora picked up the lantern. She suspected that the pinch on Paul’s finger was deeper than he was letting on. They walked across the bald and saw the gap in the foliage at the same time. As they stepped down onto the dirt trail, clusters of trees met from each side, forming a loosely-crocheted canopy against the sky. The stars came in and out of view.

“Those snatches of light—they remind me of watching Charley’s home run ball glide above the treetops,” Nora said.

“It was the best hit of his life,” said Paul.

“It soared so high, sailed so long that we couldn’t imagine where it would land,” Nora said.

“Until we heard the glass break in the window of the house near the field,” said Paul.

“Yea, no wonder! He really did wallop it.” They stopped walking now, in the darkness, with the stars elusive behind the branches. “We wouldn’t have changed a thing. It was a great night for Charley.”

“It was also a great night for the glass repair man. I had to pay him double to fix it,” Paul said.

They laughed, the sound echoing back from the soft cover of foliage.

“I kept the ball even after Charley scoffed at me for being too sentimental,” Paul said, “I have it still. In the garage.”

“After all this time?” Nora asked.

“Every now and then, I wipe off the dust,” said Paul.

“You’ll have to show me,” said Nora.

They walked on as the trail tapered in. The span between their hands—like what was once the infinitesimal distance between them—narrowed as the pathway closed in. Nora felt Paul’s hand touch hers. Their fingers interlaced with one another and held tight the rest of the way down the mountain.