The Difference Between Planes
and Satellites

The quiet of the apartment was as hard as the red wood walls. Janelle had gone, the sound of her car reversing out of the driveway subsided. The smell of her leather jacket and perfume still hung in the kitchen. She'd left all the lights on, and I went from switch to switch turning them off. The bright rooms made the undraped windows black mirrors. Even though there was a row of trees between our house and the nearest neighbor, and the apartment was on the second floor, I still felt like a fish in a bowl when it was dark outside and light inside.

I lay on my stomach, elbows sunk into the thick carpet, with one eye on Night Court and the other on my Carlos Castenada book. I couldn't concentrate on either, and soon I got up. I sat on the edge of the couch, straightened magazines and envelopes into piles and tapped their edges straight. Then I rearranged the clutter of scented candles in painted miniature flowerpots on the coffee table, which was one wide oak board, gnarled and shiny with shellac.

When Dad and Janelle are home I can't get alone enough. I shut myself into my walk-in closet, disproportionately big in my tiny room. I like the feel of a second closed door between me and their paper reading and TV watching. I turn my tinny tape deck up loud--Hendrix or Pearl Jam--prop my feet up against the wall and draw. I have a shoebox under a pile of crumpled flannels and dirty jeans, and in it I keep the bottle of cinnamon schnapps I pilfered from the dusty depths of a forgotten kitchen cabinet; an almost empty Zippo lighter etched with an eagle; and a tiny set of India inks, stolen from the "flammable" cabinet in the art room at school. I'm not used to space, and I don't know what to do with myself in it. I want to spread my paints out on the table and make a mess; I want to play every CD in the house at once; I want to lie down on the living room floor and melt into it.

It was too late to go visit Meme in her apartment downstairs. If she wasn't in bed yet, she'd be asleep in front of the TV in her Hawaiian print nightgown. It was too early for me to go to bed. There was nothing on TV, and I couldn't make the words in my book form sentences, the sentences form paragraphs, the pages turn.

The cordless phone stood silent like a statue on the kitchen counter. I half hoped that it would ring again, that it would be Dad calling back from Canada to tell Janelle one last thing, something funny that happened at the workshop. And then I could say, "You just missed her, sorry Dad!" And he'd say, his voice sandy and small, "What do you mean missed her? Where did she go?" And I'd say "Oh, you know, out. Probably to Lucky's, I guess." And he'd say, "Lucky's? She didn't say anything about going out to Lucky's!" And I'd say, "Oh, didn't she? Well, I guess she just figured maybe you figured . . . " And he'd say, "Figured I figured? Since when does she go to Lucky's on weeknights?" And I would laugh, "Oh, Dad, it's no big deal! Only when you're gone. . . ."

I was still mourning Karen's sudden absence from our apartment, which seemed darker and dustier than ever, the day Janelle had turned up at the breakfast table. She was wearing oversized red plastic framed glasses, like Sally Jessy, and looked sheepish and shy when Dad introduced us. My cereal was getting soggy and warm, and I was stirring it into a ferocious whirlpool with my spoon, wishing I could dive straight into the milky vortex and never come out. The silence was uncomfortable. Dad cleared his throat.

"Janelle went to Charlotte Hill, too," he said. Bringing up my hated high school was surely a last resort. The awkward catch in his voice made me want to get right back in bed and bury my head under a pillow.

"Oh?"

"Yup!" she said too brightly. "Class of eighty-seven. Is Mr. Katz still there torturing the freshmen?"

Of course he was. He was immortal and sour with a face like a vulture. He'd even taught Dad in the seventies. Dad had probably told her I hated him so that she'd have something to say.

"Yeah, he's there all right," I said as I brought my bowl to the sink and poured out the sad remains of my cereal. A thin stripe of dusty yellow sun streamed through the window.

"I hope you're not going to leave that mess in the drain, Charlyn," Dad said, his hand under the table, cupping Janelle's stonewashed knee.

I thought if I ignored her she would go away, but she was like a persistent puppy, appearing bedheaded in the bitter mornings, trying to make small talk. Finally, Dad told me to snap out of it and said I'd better get used to having her around. He said Janelle was going to be in our lives from now on.

"But, Dad, Karen was so fun and cool! Why can't we just have Karen in our lives?" Karen, with her long, feathered blond hair and her red Camaro, who took me to see Blondie for my thirteenth birthday. I had thought Dad would marry her.

"Janelle is cool," he countered. "Just get to know her, and I think you'll like her."

I couldn't quite like her, but with her fluff of moussed hair, her sad, blunt-penciled eyes, her pear shape, and tapered jeans I couldn't hate her either. My friends thought she was cool because she would take us to the mall or to the movies whenever we wanted, and she listened to KISS 95.5 instead of the country station like the rest of the parents. It was far preferable to be seen at the mall with a twenty-five year old, even an unhip one, than anyone resembling a legitimate parent. Dad was happy because when he got home from work the house wasn't a huge mess and there was somebody to throw his pizza in the oven for him. Before, he'd never let me watch R-rated movies, but Janelle had told him to loosen up.

"Come on, Tom, really, she's almost fifteen! It's not like she doesn't know about this stuff." He'd groan and act like he was letting me ride a motorcycle without a helmet down a steep ravine. "Come on, Tom," she'd say, dopey eyed, with a flirty smile, and they'd start giggling and swatting each other with throw pillows while the movie came on and I turned up the volume.

Then they got married, and I had to be in the stupid wedding and wear a stupid iridescent violet dress with inflatable shoulders and shoes dyed in the bathtub. Four pairs of satiny pumps floating belly up like dead fish in radioactive water. I had to walk down the aisle arm in arm with Janelle's brother Gus, who had a goatee and an earring. On the hot asphalt outside the church, on a hazy summer day with no breeze, he pinned a scratchy spray of baby's breath to my dress with one sweaty hand on my boob.

I had to get out of the house. I grabbed my denim jacket from the bedpost, opened each drawer of the dresser in the hall looking for cigarettes, found none. Outside, I stood for a minute on the landing at the top of the steps, feeling the breath of the black night, heavy with frogs and crickets, humid but not so warm. Through the trees I could see the bright lights of a construction site on the highway, and I could hear the distant chirp of a dump truck in reverse. The air was thick with fresh tar; I could feel it in my throat.

There weren't even any remains of cigarettes in the tuna can that was perched on the railing. I cursed quietly, and a thin breeze came across the yard from the pines and lifted the hair from my shoulders. I went down the steps on the soft toes of my running shoes. Just above the first floor window, I crouched and leveled my eye with it, inch by inch. I resisted the urge to tap at Meme's canary, Sunkist, in his cage probing under his wing with his beak. The kitchen was dark except for the little orange light above the stove, illuminating a clutter of spices and the porcelain gnome couple. Silver light came unsteadily from beneath the bedroom door. I descended the last steps.

I wasn't sure where to go. It had seemed like such a task just to get downstairs and past Meme's window that I'd forgotten their only purpose was to lead me somewhere else. For a moment, I stood on the walk between the cold stone walls that my grandfather, who had died before I was born, had built to contain the garden. There were daisies reaching precariously high, almost to my shoulders, dipping their heads under their own weight. It seemed so strange to see flowers at night, especially such hot, bright, middle-of-the-day flowers. I figured by now they'd be curled up into themselves to sleep or receded into the shadow of the house; but there they were, stretching expectantly out over the walk as if the moonlight would feed them.

I picked a few, close to the heads, tucked their short necks into my back pocket, and went down the walk to the street. The house next door had a floodlight on over the garage, washing the empty driveway in light; moths batted into it and each other stupidly. Its windows were dark and quiet. There were two houses close set across the street--one was pitch dark, and the purple light of a TV flickered in the bay window of the other. If I focused, I could hear the individual cars rushing and the tractor trailers downshifting on Route Six; but the noise, knit tight with the night, was just a whisper.

Our driveway looked like a mouth with its teeth knocked out. It was small so we had to pack the cars in tight and strategic: Dad's Explorer, the broken pickup that he always said he would get running one of these days, Janelle's Sable, and Meme's little Chevette. Now half empty, it looked spacious and sad. The ceramic shards of a broken flowerpot spread out, upside down, from a heap of black dirt. I almost cleaned it up, but fuck it, I thought, let Janelle. She probably knocked it over anyway in her rush to get out of the house as soon as Dad was off the phone--like her friends and the bar wouldn't make it through the next revolution around the sun.

It was a Tuesday, late in August, and school would start soon. I wished somebody were around to hang out, but it was late already, and none of my friends except Jon could drive, and he wasn't the kind of friend I could just call to hang out. I felt antsy, even considered for a second going back up to actually call Jon, maybe doing something different for once: going out and driving around and smoking and coming back and telling Janelle to fuck off, that if she was going to go out then so was I, and she wasn't the only one with a life to live. Or I could call Ben and walk over to his house on Elizabeth Street and sit next to him on his little sister's swing set, kicking at the dark dirt.

Then again, I could scuff around by myself as always and do nothing in the wide gravelly space where the street ends in front of our house. It was not a cul-de-sac like in the new development on Davis Road, measured in a neat circle and manicured in asphalt. There hadn't been a new house built on Carefree Lane since before I was born, and the road hadn't been paved for as long as I can remember. Years ago, the town crew came and oiled it, laying down a thick frosting of black tar and a truckload of coarse gravel that kicked up from under car tires for a week. The road was now balding and rutted, the ancient asphalt showing through where the same tires have worn the gravel into sand, collecting in the gutters. The end of the road wasn't calculated or engineered; somebody just gave up, turned the backhoes around, and left it like a half-finished sentence, punctuated by a heavy bulk of pines and a crumbling stone wall.

The thick woods that began there stretched back to the river and then on indefinitely. Somewhere it became a state forest, somewhere else, I supposed, it ended in another town. I crossed the street, and a motion detector light winked on from the garage across the street. I ducked out of its rays and into the shadow of the woods. There was a worn path between one end of the stone wall and the chain link fence, and I followed it a short distance. Prickers grabbed at my jeans and the night bugs droned.

I'm comfortable in the dark; I wear it like a disguise. It gives me the advantage of invisibility. I know that any enemy I'd face in the woods wouldn't be a monster with night vision but, most likely, a man, and in the dark he couldn't see me. My neck pricked up a little anyway, and my chest felt full of crickets, but I didn't hurry. Soon, I got to the sandpit and then, with the dark wide and airy all around and above me, I felt fine.

The sand was cool and a little damp, but I lay back anyway, hands knit under my head. Despite the sticky air, the sky was perfectly clear. The trees around the clearing framed a chunk of sky. In a wide field, the vast sky was overwhelming. How could it be that big, the stars that small and so many? In the sandpit, I could focus on a little swath of the atmosphere, a glimpse of the universe, and, over the hours, the scene would change, like one of those hand-cranked toy TVs that played a song while a happy picture went by on a slow reel.

There were almost as many planes in the sky as stars, trekking slowly in a caravan across a black desert. The stars were still in their multitudes; the planes pulsed, a dozen at a time, like a man-made galaxy. My dad said he could tell how the world had changed by how many planes were in the sky at night. He said when he was a kid, in the same house, on the first floor in an apartment almost as tiny and filled with sisters, in the night yard the sky would be almost still and silent. It was now a living thing, breathing and changing, inhabited by thousands of people, sleeping, reading, eating pretzels.

When he was young, Dad had a game of lying in the yard at night and counting the flickering planes that passed. When I was a kid, and it was just the two of us, he would take me out to watch the sky and learn the constellations. There were so many planes that it wasn't much of a game to count them; instead, we counted satellites.

I wondered what the sky was like in Canada. In general, I supposed Canada was flat and dark and empty and cold; but I think I remembered Dad telling me that planes usually flew over the North Pole because it was more direct to Europe, so I wondered if perhaps the sky there was just as busy. I thought maybe I'd ask when he called the next night. We rarely had much to talk about anyway; neither of us liked being on the phone that much.

The difference between a plane and a star is clear. Planes flash and move; stars don't. Planes whine softly; stars are silent. Planes are practically within arm's reach compared to stars, so far away that they might be burnt out and we don't even know it. The satellite game is more challenging because the difference between planes and satellites is sketchy at best.

Dad said that the tiny pinpricks that moved in a slow path, soundless and steady, were satellites. Anything that blinked or made noise or was bigger than a pencil point was a plane. An undeniable satellite was a rare occurrence.

A satellite is a lonely thing, an empty thing, quietly going about its robotic business, conducting science or transmitting information or spying on the Russians. It is one big mechanical eye in a solitary orbit around the blue and green and populated planet, glowing golden in the big black void of space. A plane, on the other hand, is like a party in the sky, all excitement and awkwardness and uncomfortable crowd. I'd never actually been on a plane, but I knew there was food and movies and pretty women and tons of people, couples fighting and babies crying and old men drooling in their sleep.

Everything in the night was whispering: the traffic on the highway, the jet engines in the sky, the wind through the trees, the bugs and frogs in the woods. Only a dog barked loudly, somewhere, because he could. Thinking about the sky and space made me feel cold and small, so I watched for meteors and concentrated on Ben. I thought if I focused hard enough, the energy of my thoughts might crawl through the woods and up Elizabeth Street and into his house. He'd be playing the guitar or watching Comedy Central, and, when my thought got there, he'd feel like going out wandering in the night all of a sudden and would put his guitar down and his boots on. And I'd lay here like a snake, waiting until he came into view, and then I'd sit up and act surprised and say, "Hey!" and he would really be surprised. He'd jump and say, "Jesus! Charlyn? Is that you? What the hell are you doing out here?"

"Watching for meteors. What are you doing?"

"Nothing, just going for a walk." And he'd sit down next to me, look up, and fold his arms around his knees. "Seen any?"

"Nah, just a lot of planes and satellites." Then I'd tell him my theory on the difference between the two.

"Do you come out here a lot?" he'd ask, reaching in his pocket for his Camel Lights. And I'd say, "Yeah, I guess, when I'm bored or when I need to get out of the house." And he'd light his cigarette, cupping a match with his hand, his face glowing orange under the hood of his sweatshirt like he was telling a ghost story, and he'd offer me one and hold the flame up to my chin, but it would keep going out, so he'd have to try again and again.

I thought about Ben in the student parking lot, long legs pushing the ground away from his skateboard, like a cartoon character running in exaggerated slow motion. Then, rolling fast against the curb, both feet on the board, eyes tucked under a hood or a knit hat, weighting himself even, crouching low to the ground, knees bent, and somehow lifting his body and the board together into an arc in the air, the result far more graceful than any of the elements. Most often, he'd land the trick, deep kneed, and roll off like nothing, rounding the lot and coming back again. But once in a while, he'd stumble on the landing, catching himself in a low run or a gangly somersault, the board catapulting wayward into the chain link fence.

The hoots of the other boys echoed off the stucco walls of the gym. They skated like their bodies craved it. They'd open the trunk of a car and have their backpacks in and their boards out and their feet on the boards before the wheels ever touched the ground. I liked the sound of their momentum building on the sidewalk: clack . . . clack . . . clack . . . clack . . . clack . . . clack clack.

The sky was round like a record, with a sharp orange light shining through the hole in its center. At first the light seemed to be glowing, like a rock burning in the heat of the atmosphere. It didn't flit and fade quickly like a meteor, but grew bigger and brighter. Then it started to look like a silver object reflecting light from some external source, like it was so high it was catching the sun's light from the other side of the earth. It fell toward me for what seemed like a very long time, then broke apart into a spray of sparks, a rain of fiery spider legs. The sound of an explosion came delayed to my ears; then whole planes were crashing all around me and billows of smoke touched my skin like light fingers.

I woke up to the sound of distant sirens. My neck was stiff and I was freezing cold. I thought for a moment I was looking down into a deep well, infinitely black and hazy. As I looked closer, I could see dim silver prickers in the water, and the well reversed itself into the sky above the sandpit. I got to my feet, brushing sand off my jeans and out of my hair. The sky was cast oddly orange, and the air really was full of smoke. It came, although strong and tangible, as if from a great distance, in gusts with the wind.

I had no idea what time it was or how long I'd been asleep. If Janelle was home, I'd be screwed. She could have called Dad and told him I'd run away or something, or woken up Meme and freaked her out. She'd make it sound like she innocently woke up in the middle of the night and found me missing. And it was not like I could say, "But, Dad, she went out. She goes out all the time when you're gone!" I was trying to make them trust me, convince them that I was old enough to stay by myself when they went fishing for the weekend, that having Meme downstairs was supervision enough. My hands started sweating, and the air in my chest felt carbonated.

I ran with my arms out, pushing back branches, down the path toward home. A root or a rock tripped me up, and I put my hands down to catch myself. I felt gravel in the heel of my palm. Something swiped and stung my face. Then the woods expelled me hard into the street, and when I paused in the shadow to catch my breath, the stupid motion detector light sprang on again. Janelle's car wasn't in the driveway. The house wasn't on fire. The sirens were faraway and didn't seem to be coming closer. I wiped my face with my sleeve and started across the lawn and up the stairs with my heart pounding from my toes right up to the top of my head.

It was after two in the morning; the bars were closing, and Janelle would be home any minute. Even the air in the house smelled of smoke. My heart wouldn't stop racing, and a pit had settled in my stomach. There were scrapes on my right palm and indentations where small rocks had stuck into my skin. I went into the bathroom to clean it up, still wearing my jacket and shoes. In the mirror I saw the cut on my face, a scratch really, long and deliberate. It traced my cheekbone almost exactly, a light line of blood on a welt like a fat finger. I cleaned my hand and my cheek with Bactine, kicked my sneakers off, and went into my dark room, leaving the kitchen light on.

The quiet was unbearable. Even the frogs and crickets had ceased. All I could hear were the sirens outside, and inside, the refrigerator motor, such a lonely, middle-of-the-night sound.

Where was Janelle? What if she had drunk too much at Lucky's and had driven into a tree? She'd be slumped over sideways in the driver's seat, the headlights of the car, misangled, shining through fluttering moth wings and into the deep of the woods. Or maybe she had decided to leave--maybe she got sick of Dad and his being thirty-five and sick of me, and she ran off with a normal guy to have a normal life. And Dad would come home and be heartbroken and start drinking again and sit sunk in his chair every night and not move his eyes from the TV. Or maybe she just went home with some random guy from the bar, and she'll stumble in tomorrow looking haggard and guilty, and I'll have to keep the secret or blackmail her or watch Dad being sadly oblivious.

I weighed each of these possibilities, as well as others even more outlandish, trying to decide which would be the best-case scenario. The clock flipped red number after red number. I picked at my cuticles and breathed the smoke. For some reason, I thought of the time Janelle and I had driven up to Maine together for vacation, when Dad couldn't get out of work and had to miss the first few days. It had poured rain the whole way--the sky was a big gray mass, and the windshield wipers thumped triple time. We'd had one of those deep conversations, one of those heart-to-heart moments when your chest feels wide and free and you want to say everything you think of and tell all your secrets. I don't have those moments that often, and I knew I couldn't tell Janelle all my secrets. She was intelligence for the other side, after all. But we talked about all kinds of things: about boys and Ben; the car accident she'd had in high school; and what we thought happened after we died, whether we were reincarnated or just ceased to exist. Neither of us believed in heaven.

Maybe the bar was on fire, and Janelle was dead or being treated for smoke inhalation. I thought suddenly of a nursery rhyme: Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home. Your house is on fire and your children all gone.

I couldn't remember the rest. It made me want to cry. What would life be like without Janelle? It would be just Dad and I again, going down to Meme's for dinner on Sundays and eating microwave meals the rest of the nights. I couldn't really imagine it. I'd prefer Janelle's goofy laugh and bad hair to another chasm in the house like when Mom had left. It wouldn't just be the two of us again like it had been before Janelle; it would be Dad and I and a big empty space.

I supposed there was a reason satellites were unmanned. It was probably preferable to be among the screaming toddlers and the paranoid and purple-haired old ladies and the false friendly service staff on the airplane than up on the fringe of space all alone, looking at a heaving planet across a dark distance.

After a very long hour, the purr of a car engine came from the street. I got up and looked out the window and could see headlights on the dewy lawn, the grass sparkling. The motor was cut, and I crossed the room and shut my door. The daisies, now drooping, fell to the floor from my jeans pocket as I undressed. I picked them up and stuck them in the glass on the windowsill, half full of old water, punctuated with soft bubbles. Once I heard the key in the door, I got into bed.

The water was running in the bathroom. I debated going out and talking to Janelle, but my eyes were already closing of their own accord. A late night breeze brought fresh air through my opened window, and it felt like medicine. My scratchy afghan was wide and heavy and warm. My whole body felt fine, like when I've been violently sick and sure I would die, but then I feel better like I've never felt, so whole and good.

The door to Dad and Janelle's room shut with a hollow click. In that place just before sleep, I thought of wide-eyed cartoon baby bugs in furious flight, the burning house receding as they left the atmosphere and fell into lonely orbits--All except one, and that's little Ann, for she crept under the frying pan.