Radiant Drift
Thirteen knocks on the front door, and you’re fifteen again. Twelve. Eight. Seventeen and scared to leave the cedars. Nine and peeling wallpaper in the office downstairs. Thirteen, and you’ve just come up with a secret pattern between you and your neighbour to know when it should be you to answer the door.
Who is it, your dad calls down, and once again you’re twenty-six and no longer live here.
I’ll be back in a bit, you say, somewhat over your shoulder. You know the acoustics of the landing, still, how quiet your voice carries.
The porch lights shine on her dark hair. She is the same. Wire-rimmed glasses, curly bangs, thin wrist poised mid-rap on the brown frame of your dad’s front door.
There’s the meteor shower, she says, and you close the door behind you, the snick of the lock a soft laugh.
—
That last summer before leaving. Seventeen and chafing. Clothes and kettles thrown into suitcases, rocky beaches visited with pre-nostalgia, online course registration for classes with fanciful names like Zombies, Ghouls, and Ghosts: Horror Film Analysis and Introduction to French Grammar.
You slept in a lofted pink princess bed with your name spelled out on the headboard. Medieval windows made up the ladder footholds, pink and turquoise castle towers surrounded the twin mattress. You’d left sock marks on the ceiling when you’d first moved in, with the flats of your feet propped against the popcorn texture.
Lena texted that afternoon, a link to a news story about the meteor shower, blue graphs of dark sky probability for North Vancouver.
Maybe, you’d responded and gone back to packing, where you and another friend sat on your floor. Your dad came in then. He leaned against the princess bed and the wood groaned.
I may have plans tonight, you said, not saying. The stars were a foolish thing.
What time?
Late.
Your father considered. His elbow pulled loose the lime green corner of the bottom sheet.
It’s with Lena, you said, because you were a foolish thing. His chin raised to look out the window, past your chunks of crystals on the sill, across the cul-de-sac to the squat grey house at the end of the road, enshrouded in yellowing hydrangeas.
He was so tall, then. Your friend scurried out with a muttered something about the bathroom, her sock feet slipping on the bamboo floors when she stood up. Your father let her pass and tapped an absent-minded fist on a rosy parapet. The backs of his hands were lashed with scars from construction work, thumb hammered flat and purple.
I haven’t said goodbye to her and I have to, you said.
A sigh.
He never looked at you, just at the mess of things you were leaving behind, then at the yellow flowers across the street. Then he left, too, his footfalls heavy.
Girl, your friend said, re-entering, your dad has a spooky vibe these days. Are you going to be a crop top person in Montreal, do you think?
Thirteen knocks later that evening and Lena was there. She’d run over from the house with the hydrangeas that glowed ghostly in the streetlight. You each carried a blanket with you on the walk to the park. She handed you a thermos. Hot chocolate, the magenta Hello Kitty brand packets melted into 2% milk. The first sip burned your tongue.
Dude, I literally just made it, she said. Wait a second or something.
Her voice was deeper than you expected, distorted by time, different from kids yells across backyards. You wondered if the years had passed the same on her side of the cul-de-sac. Quietly. Doggedly. Tracking guilt on the carpets.
The path through the park was brick, quiet underfoot. You didn’t lie down on the grass there, though. It was boggy near the back and it would soak through your t-shirts and the trees were too close.
Past the playground you’d been too old to climb on when your family moved in, past the tennis courts where your parents all used to play doubles.
Yo, how was your mom’s game last week? Lena said.
I haven’t talked to her yet. I’m going over there Friday and staying to do the last of the packing before Monday.
That soon?
I know.
There’s a circle around the moon, Lena said. A sundog—moondog. Whatchamacallit.
You stood shoulder to shoulder facing the moon. A ring of light pressed the moon into the sky like a button. Lena skipped ahead to the edge of the soccer field, dark curls tossing themselves into the shadows over her shoulders.
—
Now twenty-six, she drives her mom’s old PT Cruiser. There are no hot chocolates, but a Hello Kitty sunshield has to get wrestled out of the way so you can fold yourself into the passenger seat.
The park? you ask.
The mountain has more sky, she says. I want to get pictures.
The small world of the backyard, the street, the park, it has expanded since you were last here. She plays music you don’t know on the drive up Cypress Mountain. It’s loud but played quiet. Scratching punk sounds, quick words over yowling guitars. You lean your head against the window and try to see the streets you grew up on through the dim distance.
A text from your dad buzzes against your thigh: ETA?
I still have my key, you respond. Stargazing would be the least of your late-night crimes since moving away.
How’s school, you say.
It’s. Well, it’s fine. I’m doing the paperwork to fasttrack my PhD so that sucks right now. But you! How’s the big world beyond? Lena guides the car to the base of the mountain.
PhD. That’s incredible, you say. I’m still figuring things out. I tried to meal prep Kraft dinner and it kind of sucks reheated.
You go quiet. It’s not the big life you painted before you left. If you were the one behind the wheel of your own car, saving rent by living at home, you would’ve laughed at yourself. But Lena’s always been kinder than you. She is getting her PhD. She has a rice cooker. She still has friends from high school to go on weekend trips with. She isn’t the caricature you picture—of a schmuck who never left home—to make yourself feel better, prying five-day-old noodles from congealed cheese.
The car putters onwards and you feel younger every minute. Purple streetlights blink through the windshield and douse your arms in bursts of violet.
—
Back then, the earth of the soccer field was cool on your shoulders, even through the fleece blanket. Lena had a paper star chart out and was trying to read it in the light of the moondog.
Cygnus, she waved a hand at the entire sky. Like Barbie Swan Lake.
Where?
Her arm stuck upward, unbodied, wheeling against the stars. Her movement reverberated in the ground under you. A part of this place.
Should we be worried about bears? you said. Will they get us in the middle of the field?
You pushed your eyes as wide as they could go. Woodsy murmurs encroached. It didn’t feel like the park at the end of the road, it felt bigger now than it ever had.
A star shot across the bottom left corner of your vision. It disappeared quick, a thin trail of white.
There, Lena’s loud voice ricocheted off the tree trunks. She’d hopped up onto her knees, closer to the sky.
Shh, shh, you say, but you were laughing. I saw it.
You wanted more.
—
Your family moved here when you were eight years old. You went to the Christian academy at the bottom of the ravine; Lena went to the public school and took the bus like a grown-up. She knocked on the big brown door of your house and asked your mom if you could play. It felt so formal, that first time. Every day after school, Lena at the door on a bike, with a bubble wand, with a box of chalk and plans for the world’s longest hopscotch. You’d traced each other onto the cul-de-sac in pink and yellow, like those outlines in the detective shows your dad watched. It didn’t feel dire, though, the smell of asphalt in your hair, the intimacy of holding still while each finger was inlaid onto the street. It felt like an invitation to stay.
—
Halfway up Cypress, there are two sets of stars: the hot white glitter of the constellations overhead, and the blinking cityscape below.
Have you seen anything like it? Lena says.
They have stars in Montreal.
Here, take this. Lena shoves a tripod at you from the trunk. The metal legs poke between your fingers like a paralyzed spider. She marches off towards the view, onto what looks like a cliff.
You cradle the tripod and follow. It’s not a drop-off, but a steep ditch with a temporary fence in its hollow.
I want to go past that, Lena says.
Maybe it’s closed just for the season? you say. Not safety?
There is a moment where neither of you remembers how to climb a fence. Then you heave yourself upwards. The wire digs into the base of your thumb. Jumping down, you almost think you’re going to land on the city and crush it, but wet grass licks your bare ankles; you are still on the mountain.
That one summer I was friends with the exchange students, you say. That’s the last fence I climbed.
Lena frowns through the fence at you. All you can see of her face in the dark is a pale forehead spliced by a worry line, the shadow of eyes, a downturn of a mouth. Chain-link cuts her into pieces. A breeze sways the treetops behind her head, like fingers traced against the sky. Nothing is the same.
Pass me the telescope and anything else, I’ll talk you through the climb, you say.
—
Your parents became fast friends, as you do when you have kids the same age. Borrowed gardening supplies turned into coffee visits, into weekly potlucks. You and Lena spent weekends in each other’s basements, cramming as many crafts and movies as you could into long sleepovers. You’d take turns sleeping on the short couch in her rec room so you only had to be uncomfortable a night at a time. The couches were green with flowers, the corners scratched to hell from two tabby cats. It’s been almost thirteen years since you were down there, or Lena inside the shrine of your dad’s home. The wedding photos still hung in the staircase, the piano sat warped out of tune, everyone else long gone.
—
The stars, the stars. Streaked silver, bulleted from treetops, criss-crossed over the moon’s faded halo. Lying on the soccer field, you cheered each one. You pointed and laughed and delighted until you remembered you were leaving. You sat up and grabbed the hot chocolate thermos.
The hot chocolate sluiced a heat path all the way from your gums to your belly. You hadn’t realized how cold you were. It grained on your teeth in a sticky sweetness. You licked it off and stared with your new night vision into the bushes surrounding the pitch.
It is bear season, you said.
You’ll do well as a city girl, Lena said. Are you done?
You let your body crash beside Lena and the hot chocolate swooshed in your stomach.
I hope I will. I want it all to be different.
You watched a shooting star arc over her face in profile. It landed in her eye.
All of it? she said.
—
The end started when you were camping on Lena’s back deck. You’d hauled cushions next to the hot tub and turned the kind of giddy that settled into your throat as a high laugh triggered by every word past midnight. Lena kept egging you on, until you thought you’d die from trying to keep silent.
I’m worried about your parents hearing and being mad, you’d wheezed out between bouts of giggles.
They’re fine, Lena said. They love that you’re here. Don’t worry about them.
She adjusted the pillow that lay under both your shoulders.
I think I need to worry about my dad, though, Lena said.
Your dad? He’s so…, you grasped for the word, goofy, though.
It’s probably nothing.
Worried how?
My mom thinks he’s having an affair—
That’s—
Which is bonkers because he loves her too much, she said in a rush.
A star passed overhead with a long bright tail. Lena snuggled closer to you. The cushions were a lumpy mess, but you were twelve and unbreakable.
He didn’t come to dinner at yours last week or the week before, Lena said. She thinks he’s seeing someone while we’re at your place.
Another star crossed, this one slow and thin.
Maybe my parents made him mad? you said.
I don’t think so.
I’m sorry, you say. Look, a satellite.
Where?
Blinking red, by Orion.
That’s the Big Dipper, she said.
And it was. The satellite cleaved it in two.
—
A bear never came to chase you off the soccer field.
You lay side by side, talking to the stars and hoping the other would hear. You mapped plane tickets and syllabi onto the stars.
It’s called the radiant, Lena said. The point where the meteor originates. The radiant drift is how far it goes.
Maybe Lena just saw stars, you didn’t think to ask at the time. All you could do was try to think of ways to explain the drift that didn’t sound like an apology—or blame. Your mom had told you that familiar didn’t always mean love. Even if you couldn’t forgive her for that, you were finally trying to understand.
You opened your mouth and felt it fill with stars, but before you could say any of this to Lena, the field sprinklers cut on. Wet and loud, a guttural roar like thirty bears charging the field, then rhythmic cha-cha-cha-chas.
You both ran all the way home, squealing and sodden like kids on a summer afternoon.
—
The high-tech setup is a telescope and a tripod holding Lena’s phone, which has a fancy app that takes long exposure photos accounting for the rotation of the Earth. She forbids you from looking at your phone, saying it’ll take twenty minutes to reset your night vision. Your phone buzzes, but you hold down the power button in your pocket.
You must have been immune to the smell of cedars when you lived here. The smell floods you now. Inescapable and fresh. You breathe deeply and look at the stars. Above the indigo-hued tint of the sky off the city, the deep end of the dark starts right overhead. Everything crystallizes. You can feel your feet on the mountain. They are sturdy and sure.
Do you see how many satellites are out there, now? you say to the constellations. I feel like it was always a big accomplishment to find even one.
You feel your words pass through the moon before landing back between you.
I wish it were still like that.
The camera clicks its fake shutter, and a picture of the city with stars cartwheeling overtop of it illuminates on the screen. The blur makes it all look the same, the sky a mirrored reflection spun too fast.
This is what you regret: the first time you crouched behind pink curtains and pretended you weren’t home, all the years after cloaked in your father’s shame. Leaving before you understood the explosive beauty of a West Coast spring. That trees grow only skyward and you’ve never been brave. That you were never the one to knock first. That, still, you can never love something until you leave it.
Me too, Lena says, and only the stars listen.
