Melanie Thon - Meteors in August

Nina turned and hugged me quick, so I didn’t have time to hug her back or pull away. “How’d my baby get so tall?” she said, then climbed in the bug and rolled down the window. “Take care of them for me, Lizzie.”

I have been, I thought, all this time — for you, because of you. I stood and watched the Volkswagen buzz down Main. The fine rain fell through the open roof of the Last Chance Bar, fell on the steps of the Lutheran church and on the street in between, that street like a river, carrying my sister away again.

I thought, At the end of the day the rain will still be falling. My father will stand alone at his bedroom window. My mother will sit at the kitchen table. All the lights will be off when dusk comes, and dark. And the doors will be open, and the wind will blow through our house.

The little yellow car disappeared. I wondered how far Rafe Carson would drive her. I wondered if he would be able to leave her at that dingy bus station in Rovato Falls, or if somewhere along the way he’d say, “I might as well drive you to Missoula; I’m not doing anything else today.” And I wondered if he’d stay the night or the week, a year or half a life. How strange that she’d chosen him, a boy she’d taunted back in the days when she was a beautiful girl. But they’d grown alike somehow, both of them living on the borderline, trying not to step across. They might hold on to each other for a while and be safe; maybe the best kind of man for Nina was one who couldn’t afford to judge her.

I thought she was brave in a way, taking all the credit and all the blame for her own life. I didn’t know whom to admire — Nina who cut herself free or my mother who took her life just as it was. I only knew that I wanted my own life someday. I wasn’t going to wait on the road for some trucker to take me north. I wasn’t going to settle for some redheaded boy whose misery and humiliation matched mine. Someday I was going to leave this town. But when I did, I was leaving by myself, and I was going to decide where I was headed before I got there. Standing on Main Street in the rain, my own life was the only thing that seemed worth having.

YOU COULD play the days of August forward or back and it made no difference: in the beginning Nina was gone and in the end too.

Father did return to work, just as he’d promised her. He didn’t talk much about Nina. You could see he held her clutched inside him, in a place no one else could touch. The snake that had curled in his chest for so many years finally disappeared, leaving only its own skin behind. Nina’s forgiveness freed him.

Seeing my father step so close to death had made me fear him less. When he yelled at me for skipping school or threatened to slap me for talking fresh, I wasn’t afraid. I was too big to paddle, too fast to catch. This knowledge disappointed me in a way, and I felt strangely alone. Neither he nor God watched over my life. Neither could punish or protect me.

So my father and I accepted each other in our silent, uneasy way. He never looked at me as he had looked at Nina or Miriam Deets, eyes opened wide, hands trembling. I was just as glad. I didn’t think I could bear to have him need that much from me.

I can’t say Mother was happier, but I believe she was less sad. She started painting on her eyebrows again, and the high, thin arches made her look more like her old self: bemused and wise. Sometimes I caught her at the window, staring at nothing in particular. I turned quickly, careful not to startle her, wanting to allow her this small illusion of privacy. I stopped being afraid of her wish to leave us. She had had her chance and she’d stayed. In my selfish heart, I was grateful.

Mother no longer wondered if she could have changed Nina’s life with some magic words. Nina had chosen her own life, just as she said. For all of us, it was better to imagine her pulling drafts in a noisy bar, to see her sleeping in a dank basement room, than it was to envision her lost in the desert, blinded by wind-blown sand, or to see her face wavering behind glass at the bottom of a lake.

People asked what else could go wrong in Willis. It’s not that so much happens in a small town. Very little happens really. It’s just that everything touches someone you know. The quiet fall settled into a still, long winter and the days of August became a legend, a myth about the devil visiting our town, hiding smoldering coals in dirty rags and setting fire to Main Street, sucking a plane down in Moon Lake, tying a knotted shirt around a man’s neck and kicking the chair out from under him. In death, Myron Evans was finally accepted. I suspect he would have laughed to hear folks speak of his small kindnesses, and that laugh would have been bitter and full of blame.

Elliot Foot was never accused of arson. He and Joanna returned to the Lutheran church, to bland sermons and calming prayers. Elliot talked about building a cafe where the Last Chance Bar had been. I don’t know if Joanna let him stuff his shoes under her bed or not. I don’t know if he cared.

Lyla Leona got back to business. When her neighbors reported that Bo Effinger was her best customer, I was sorry for both of them. I’d expected their promises to be more permanent. I no longer admired Lyla’s independence. She relied on men after all. She was a wife three times a night. She had to smile when her head was splitting and remember not to talk too much about herself.

Minnie Hathaway fell off the wagon fast and hard. Most days she was drunk by noon and the oaths spewed from her lips with new force; all those months of holding back gave her renewed energy. Children teased her on the street, just as I had when I was young. Once I saw a pack of them prancing in a circle around her. She spun so fast, looking from one to another, that she fell to her knees. The hooligans scattered and I ran to help her; she cursed me as I lifted her to her feet. Her whiskey breath hit my face, and she called me a string of names, mistaking me for one of the cruel children. Her crippled fingers pinched my arms, and I saw her white gloves were soiled from her fall. I offered to walk her home, but she only snarled. I was relieved, to tell the truth; I could endure her rebukes but not the sight of those dirty gloves.

Lanfear and Miriam Deets left town after Myron hanged himself. I was glad to see them go, though I knew Miriam had no hold on my father now. Still, I didn’t wish to pass her on the street and see her look at my mother with pity. She knew nothing of our lives, not really, but Daddy’s gifts had entitled her to indulge in this false intimacy, this superior sense of mercy.

Caleb Wolfe left too; every morning when he woke, he saw Myron Evans in his jail. The dead man accused him for falling asleep, or so Caleb Wolfe believed, and I thought how strange it was that the only person who had shown Myron kindness in the last hours of his life should be the one to bear the guilt.

In late November the Rovato Daily News reported a story about a blind woman preacher in Idaho who had led her followers to a secluded valley, a valley of darkness, to wait for the second coming of Christ, which, according to her, was due any day. She had seen the signs: fire and drought, men and animals going mad. They built shacks and stashed a store of rifles for the great battles that would come in the final days. They claimed to grow their own food and hunt, but farmers in the area reported stolen chickens and sheep, missing bushels of potatoes, and too many footprints in the yard. Arlen, of course, knew someone who knew someone else who had a daughter who joined the group and later escaped. The preacher woman she described — six feet tall and bony as a starved mule — could not have been anyone but Freda Graves. She was still wearing mirrored sunglasses and telling the story of how the wickedness she’d seen made her put out her own eyes; that is how deeply she grieved for those she knew had fallen away. I knew now she had not blinded herself. I knew there was no daughter, no misshapen grandchild.