Perseids

by Alyssa Beatty

My brother Peter and I lie in the back of the station wagon, cocooned by our blankets and pillows, suitcases, boxes of kitchenware and books. The backseats were laid flat so our legs could stretch out. Low voices murmured from the radio up front where Mom and Cliff, our stepdad, were silhouettes against the red glow of the dashboard lights. The highway was a hum under our wheels, and in between trees flashing by we could see the sky, filled with falling stars. Too many to wish on, and not enough.

Usually, on these trips, Mom would sit in the backseat with me, while Peter took the front with Cliff. She would let me put my head in her lap, stroke my hair and sing to me in her thin, reedy soprano: songs about missing home, to show me she understood. I cried every time we moved; it made me feel hollow, like I was leaving some important part of myself behind. But tonight, we’d gotten a late start, setting off after sunset, and Mom said me and Peter should stay in the back together so we could sleep.

I tracked another streak of light across the sky. Cliff said they weren’t stars, really. They were meteors falling to earth. The Perseids. I rolled the word around in my mind, tasting it. It sounded magical; maybe they had enough magic to change things. I closed my eyes and wished. But when I opened them, we were still in the car, still speeding away from our little house.

We’d only lived there for a year. And it wasn’t ours; we rented it from a mean-tempered old couple who had a weird obsession with security, although Cliff always said what they expected anyone to want to steal here at the ass end of nowhere was a mystery. The property was never dark; high powered lights glared over every inch. They shone into the living room all night, where I slept on the couch with my head under the pillows. I always had dark circles under my eyes; Mom said they meant I wasn’t getting proper sleep. I thought maybe that’s why we were moving this time. Or maybe it was the wasps who’d built a nest over our front door. Peter said they were psychos: they waited until the door closed, then dive bombed us when they knew we had something solid between us and safety. Cliff tried to knock the nest down and got stung fourteen times. His face swelled up like an orange.

“This will be great,” Mom had said when we were packing up the car earlier. “A fresh start. Maybe the new place will even have a bedroom for you.”

She’d smiled at me, and I smiled back. But I must not have done it right, because she got that pinched look that meant she was worried. She got that look a lot.

I saw another shooting star and wished again. I closed my eyes and pictured the house as hard as I could: the sagging back porch that looked out over a hill snarled with blackberry bushes. The little shed, half caved in on one side, where I went to have tea parties with my stuffed animals. The metal gate at the top of the dirt path that led into the woods, crowded with morning glories and honeysuckle that had grown so big and wild we couldn’t open the gate anymore and always just climbed over it. The rungs would get hot under the sun, little waves of heat rising up. Mom called them the sun’s fingers. Even the psycho wasps, waiting in their nest to attack. All the small things I tried to make mine, make home, hoping this would be the place we would stay.

I guess I spent too long with my eyes closed, because when I opened them again it was late in the morning and there were no more stars and no more wishes.

Dust swirled up from the packed dirt parking lot next to a long low building stretched out along the highway. A sign creaked in the wind, so faded its letters spelled out nothing.

“Is this our new place?” I asked.

“No, idiot. It’s a motel,” Peter said. He reached out and pinched the soft skin on the underside of my arm, where it would hurt the most. I bit my lip to keep from crying. I was almost eleven, and it felt like that was an age when it was too old to cry about things like a little pinch.

“Kids, stop. Please,” Mom said. She opened the back of the station wagon and pulled out my blanket and pillow. “This is just a place to stay, for a bit, until we figure out our next move.”

“It’ll be great,” Cliff said. “Look, they have a pool.”

He nodded towards a rusted chain link fence enclosing some cracked concrete with a few stray beach chairs. Peter ran over to look through the fence. One summer we’d lived in an apartment complex, with a big fancy house next to it with a pool in the backyard. Peter and I had spent a lot of time sitting on the metal fire escape listening to kids splashing and laughing, and talked about how someday we’d have a pool too, and not invite any of the snobby neighbor kids over to play in it.

  Peter kicked the fence, making it rattle in a noisy wave all down its length. He stalked back to the car and grabbed his own blanket and his backpack.

“Are we going to check in to this shithole, or what?” he said.

“Peter! Language!” Cliff barked.

Mom shook her head at him and put a hand on Peter’s shoulder.

“It’s just for a few days.”

“Whatever.” Peter pulled his Walkman out of his backpack and slipped the headphones over his ears.

I walked over to the fence and looked through. The pool was nearly empty, just a low layer of water filmed with green slime at the bottom.

“It’s not good weather for swimming, anyway,” Mom said. It was cloudy, but still muggy, the air thick and sticky. I would have loved to dive into a nice cold swimming pool. “Come on, Theresa. Let’s get you kids set up in your room.”

The room Peter and I shared had two single beds, each with a thin scratchy bedspread and one flat pillow. Mom came in and stripped both of our beds and made them up with our own sheets and pillows.

“There. Just like home.”

Peter rolled his eyes at her and flopped on top of his old Star Wars comforter, thumbing the volume up on his Walkman until the whine of electric guitars and thump of drums screeched out of them.

“It’s great,” I said, because Mom was getting that pinched look again.

She leaned over and kissed the top of my head. “You’re my best girl,” she said. “Are you kids going to be okay by yourselves for a bit? Cliff and I need to get some sleep.”

I nodded and sat down on the bed. It was too soft, and even through my blanket it felt damp. “Is it ok if we watch TV?”

“Anything you want, sweetie. Just lock the door behind me.”

I followed her to the door, but I held it open a crack to watch her walk to her and Cliff’s room. He was waiting for her, leaning against the door. When she reached him, she leaned her head on his chest. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight. They stood that way for a few minutes, not saying anything. I closed the door and turned the lock on the knob.

There wasn’t much on TV in the middle of the day on a Tuesday. One channel just had reruns of Happy Days. I liked it, liked to see their house, with all those pictures of the family on the walls. I liked to imagine living there, growing up in one place, with marks on the doorway tracking how tall I was at every age. After the fifth episode, Peter threw the remote at the wall.

“I’m going out to the pool.”

“It’s empty.”

“I know that, moron. But it’s better than sitting here watching crap TV with you.”

He slammed the door on the way out. It made a sad hollow sound. I got up to lock it after him. But sitting in the room by myself felt weird. I should have liked being alone. Peter and I usually shared a room, or I slept on the couch if there wasn’t room for two beds. I could do whatever I wanted, now: sing or dance or tell myself stories, all the things that annoyed Peter and made him tell me to shut up. I slipped my shoes on and followed him out to the pool.

Peter sprawled on one of the beach chairs, his arm flung over his eyes. I dragged another chair over the concrete, so it was closer to him. When I sat on it the wide plastic strips that made up the seat stuck to the backs of my legs. A rotting green smell wafted up from the pool.

“Do you think we’ll be able to see the Perseids again tonight?” I asked. I repeated it to myself, silently: Perseids. The word made me think of magic horses galloping across the sky, trailing fire.

Peter moved his arm and squinted up at the low heavy clouds, tinged a strange mustardy yellow. “Probably not. Too cloudy.”

“I wished on them last night.”

“That’s dumb. What’d you wish for?”

“That we didn’t have to leave home again.”

“You should have wished for Dad to die.”

“Why? I like Cliff. He’s nice.” Cliff and Mom had been married for two years now. It was hard, at first, to get used to having another person in the family. But he was nice to Mom. I didn’t really know what her laugh sounded like until she met him when she was working at a gas station, four moves ago.

“Not Cliff, dumbass. Dad. Our real Dad. Remember him?”

I nodded, although I didn’t really. There were images out of reach, like photos so faded by the sun they were just colors, wavy and smudged: dark hair and a beard, a loud voice. Rough hands. I remembered, or thought I remembered, a bit of the night we left. I must have been five or six. I remember Mom putting suitcases in the back of the car. Her fingers on my lips, whispering “Quiet like a mouse, ok?” Peter holding my hand, so tight it hurt, and crying in little gulps. Mom looking back at us in the rearview mirror, a deep line between her eyes, then looking past us to the road behind.

“Why would I want him to die?”

“Because he’s the reason we never stay anywhere. You know that, right?”

I shook my head. Usually, I pretended to know what Peter was talking about, so that he’d like me more and wouldn’t put on his headphones and leave me alone. But I couldn’t make the connection between those blurry images and the way we moved around so much. The house with the sagging porch, the blackberry bushes and angry wasps, and the metal gate that got hot in the sun, was the place we’d stayed the longest. Thinking of it made me miss it, a huge empty ache in my chest.

“He didn’t want us to leave, Mom says. He’s always trying to find us and get us back. So, we have to keep moving, so he can’t.” Peter frowned at the green sludge of the pool. “I think if he finds us, he’ll kill us.”

I gulped. “Why?”

Peter shrugged. “I don’t know. But I heard her and Cliff talking once, and that’s what she said.”

“But she’s married to Cliff now. We’re not his family anymore.”

Peter laughed. “They’re not really married, Theresa. Mom can’t, unless Dad says she can. They have to get divorced first.”

“But they had a wedding. We were there.”

It wasn’t like the weddings on TV. Mom didn’t wear a big poofy white dress and a tiara with a veil. And it wasn’t in a church. But it had been nice, just the four of us on the beach, with some man with a long white beard telling Mom and Cliff they were now each other’s shelter in the storm.

“That wasn’t a real wedding. We’ve never been to a real one. That was just, I don’t know. Some ceremony where Cliff agreed to be stuck with us for a while. He can leave whenever he wants. There’s nothing stopping him.”

I remembered the way Cliff held Mom outside the door to their room. The way his hands clutched at the fabric of her dress so hard his knuckles went white. Peter was almost fourteen, and he knew a lot more about things than I did. But I thought, maybe this time, he was wrong.

“What will make him stop? Dad, I mean?”

Peter shrugged again and pulled out his Walkman. “Maybe if you wish hard enough, T. Maybe then.”

He slipped the headphones over his ears and closed his eyes.

I sat by the pool, listening to the music leaking out of Peter’s headphones, until Mom came to get us for dinner.

We ate in a diner a few miles down the road from the motel. I thought it was the most glamorous place I’d ever seen. It looked just like something from Happy Days, with shiny red booths and little jukeboxes on every table.

Mom let me and Peter get burgers and fries and milkshakes. Normally we had to eat healthy food, broccoli and whole wheat bread. But whenever we moved, we got to eat whatever we wanted.

It got dark outside while we ate. I leaned my head against the window to see if I could see any Perseids, but Peter was right: it was too cloudy.

“Why does Dad want to kill us?” I didn’t know I was going to ask that until I did. It just came out while I was thinking about the shooting stars and wishing to be home.

Mom dropped her fork on her plate. “Why on Earth would you say that, Theresa?”

Cliff put his fork down, very carefully, and covered Mom’s hand with his. Peter kicked me under the table, so I knew I shouldn’t snitch on him and say he told me.

“I heard you say it once.” Lying was as bad as snitching. But it wouldn’t get me kicked again.

Mom sighed and rubbed her eyes. They looked red, and tired, like when she worked overnight shifts at the gas station.

“I’m sorry you heard that, sweetie. It’s…well, it’s a bigger conversation than I wanted to have, until you were older.”

“Is that why we have to move so much? Because he’s going to kill us?” My voice got thin and wavery like when I’m about to cry, and I bit my lip again.

“No one is going to hurt you, or your mom,” Cliff said. “Ever. Not while I’m around. Okay?”

Mom squeezed his hand. He let hers go and wrapped his arm around her shoulder and pulled her close, like he did when she was cold.

“Your dad is an angry person. Some people are just like that. They get angry and then they do things they don’t mean to. And some people like that don’t like it when they think something that belongs to them has been taken away. So, they get angrier and angrier, and sometimes do very bad things. Does that make sense?”

It didn’t make any sense at all to me. But Mom had that look, like when she was teaching me math, where I could tell she wanted me to understand so much that I would be nothing but a disappointment if I didn’t. So, I nodded.

“But you don’t have to worry. Either of you,” Cliff said. “We’re going to find a place soon where we can stay for a long time. Put down some roots. Right, Lena?”

Mom nodded. But it felt a lot like when I did it, just to stop a conversation I didn’t want to have.

“Can we get ice cream?” Peter asked.

“Sure, honey. Whatever you want,” Mom said. She rubbed her eyes again, and Cliff raised his hand for the waitress to come over.

On the drive back to the motel, I kept my head pressed to the back window. The clouds were so heavy it felt like they might just come crashing down on my head and crush me. I closed my eyes and imagined them up there, the Perseids, wild horses made of light, galloping through the sky. I wished on them, all of them at once, and hoped it would count even if I couldn’t see them.