After The Comets
By Jennifer Ann Janisch

My father always loved the stars. Whenever there was a meteor shower or an eclipse, he would wake me up and I'd grab my teddy bear and follow him out onto the deck, trying not to trip over my pajama feet as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes.

"Any minute now," he'd say, as he rubbed his calloused knuckles and stared upward.

I'd twirl with my teddy bear and listen to the crickets, then I'd hop across the splintery boards of the deck, trying not to step on the gaps. He'd call me away from my distractions to point out the more recognizable parts of constellations, like the Big Dipper in Ursa Major. And he'd tell me stories about spaceships he had seen, about time lapses he couldn't account for, and about aliens that had come into his bedroom when he was a child, and how, when he had pulled the covers over his head, they leaned in to touch him, and how he floated then when they touched him.

I'd listen to his stories and would wait with him, jumping every time he thought he saw something in the sky. My mother and my brother, Jonathan, were scared of these stories. But I wasn't scared of anything back then. It was me, therefore, who spent those nights outside on the deck with my father. And it was me whom he first woke after he heard that a bunch of astronomy enthusiasts had set up telescopes on the top of Bear Mountain for Haley's Comet. "It only comes around once every seventy-five years," he said, as he steered our family van up the mountain. Jonathan and I sat with our teddy bears in the backseat. My father looked at us through the rearview and added, "You'll both be in your eighties the next time this comet comes around."

My mother, brother, and I, bundled in our coats, followed my father to the clearing where a row of viewers were leaning into the telescopes, their arms held behind their backs so as not to disrupt the positioning. The astronomers stood beside the viewers, uneasily watching them, their hands occasionally jutting out in gestures of caution.

Noticing that I was too short for the telescope, I begged my father to pick me up so that I could see. And after an astronomer hesitatingly nodded in compliance, my father lifted me to his chest. I squinted into the lens, and when I didn't see the massive ball of fire that I had expected, I grabbed the telescope and aimlessly swung it around, asking, "Where is it?" Everyone gasped. "I can't see it," I said.

 ***

I was lying in the middle of the Palisades Parkway and all I could see was the stars. Focusing on the night sky, I tried to find the constellations that my father had once taught me but the stars were blurry, blending together like television static. I became dizzy and turned away. Gravel and glass on the road sparkled in the headlight beams. Like stars, I thought. Shadows disrupted the light, muted voices. I tried to lift my head to see but my chin fell limp against my collarbone. Then I saw the metal rod and the large, triangular shard of glass that were sticking out of my upper arm like javelins, wedged in my flesh.

I rolled my head back and felt myself floating. Shock, the doctor later told me, was why I then began nonsensically mumbling about Hale-Bopp—the comet that my father saw without me when I was a teenager too busy with music and drugs. And shock, presumably, was why I lay sprawled beside the crushed and smoking car, unable to move. My boyfriend and I had been living out of that car, driving all over New York in search of his money, stopping only to steal food or to steal cigarettes or to steal gas. I had given up everything for him.

"I smell gasoline," he shouted. I heard my boyfriend's voice but couldn't see him. It was too dark. Lights flickered across the metal and the glass in my arm. I watched the sky, waiting for something to happen, and wondered where my father was—likely sitting in his recliner downstairs, watching old episodes of Star Trek or The Outer Limits, maybe smoking the pipe he sometimes lit when everyone else had gone to sleep. I remembered the smell of his tobacco, the sweet and smoky cherry scent. And I remembered the book, Communion, which used to lay on the rickety end table beside my father's recliner. The image on the cover—a grey alien with big, black eyes, slanted like a cat's—had always scared my brother. But I wasn't scared back then.

I didn't know if I smelled the gasoline. My breathing was too forced, too quick. My eyes darted between my arm and the sky. I yelled for someone to pull me away from the car. I heard voices. I heard crickets. I felt the road scrape my back as I was dragged across the parkway.

 ***

My brother sat on the living room floor, holding my teddy bear. My mother was beside me on the couch, holding gauze and tweezers and wet washcloths. My father had been crying, and his eyes seemed softer then. He swept back his dark brown hair with his forearm, as his calloused hands were coated in my blood from pushing glass out of my body. The hospital had done little more than yank the metal rod and the windshield fragment from my arm before discharging me. My boyfriend's fault, perhaps. He had given the hospital fake names, believing that there might be warrants out for our arrest. "All the stealing," he had said.

My father kneaded the dirt and shards from my wounds. I winced. "You should've gotten stitches," he said. My mother passed him the antiseptic. "How could they send you away like that? Glass in your eyes, in your back, in your arm." My boyfriend, in the corner, was quiet.

 ***

The wounds leaked a pinkish ooze for months thereafter, soaking through every bandage no matter how many layers of gauze I had wrapped it with. The entirety of my upper arm as well as my pinkie and ring finger went permanently numb. And there was a swollenness to my arm, too, that never went away—a sort of gross, bloated disfigurement that stretched the scars across my bicep.

As I didn't have health insurance, no formal diagnosis was made. So, I learned to live with it. And it wasn't bad, really, so long as no one touched it. Touch set off pain. That was the only time I'd feel anything in that arm.

A friend had once, unaware of my injury, squeezed my arm in a friendly gesture. I felt a massive ball of fire—as I had once imagined Haley's Comet—exploding in my arm. Instantly, I saw flashing pinpoints of light. Then everything went black. Later, I joked, telling my friend that were she ever to consider me an enemy, she'd know how to take me down. But secretly, I hated having that weakness.

I learned to protect my limb from possible blows, guarding it when hugged or when walking through crowds. I wore shirts with long sleeves to hide the disfigurement. I gave up on summer—beach outings, hikes—anytime and anywhere my arm would be exposed. And I hid my pain when someone I didn't know touched me, not wanting to explain the car accident or the disturbed boyfriend, and not wanting to think about my father on the deck that night, surrounded by stars, crying.

 ***

My boyfriend had lied about the money. And he lied about the test results when he told me that we were indeed dying. We spent months in that car thereafter, chasing money that didn't exist, money that was supposed to allow for some living before we died. I didn't even know his real name until the day my father kicked him out of the house.

I don't talk about that time. Like my arm, I hide the ugliness.

 ***

The deck had rotted away in the years I was gone. When I returned home, my father and I found a new spot on the front steps, the concrete warming beneath us as we sat. He leaned over to put his arm around me and I flinched. Seeing this, he asked, "Still?" I nodded.

We sat in silence, smoking cigarettes, our breaths long and loud. I could hear the crickets.

"You were probably too young to remember that night on Bear Mountain," he said.

"I remember," I said, quietly.

"When you moved that telescope, man, was that guy pissed. We only stuck around a few minutes after that."

I wanted to tell him I was sorry. I wanted to tell him that I knew how much that must've meant to him, seeing Haley's Comet. He never got to see it. I was sorry. I wanted to say that I was sorry. But I didn't. And I don't know why.

"Eh," he said, as if he understood. "It was cold out anyway."

We smoked and watched the sky. He talked about his summers away from The Bronx, in the country, where his grandparents owned ten acres of land. "I saw some strange things in those skies," he said. "A quasar, once, I think." He pointed to constellations, asking if I remembered them. And he mentioned the book that scared my brother, and I laughed, as I was not scared back then, not when I was a kid. Absentmindedly, he put his arm around my shoulder, but I didn't wince, I didn't cringe. I just watched the stars.

Jennifer Ann Janisch is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at George Mason University. She is the Editor-in-Chief of The George Mason Review and the Nonfiction Reader for So To Speak. Other work is forthcoming in Fringe Magazine.

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