Silence and a view: Jase, typically, had decided he wanted both.
Diane and Jason had been born minutes apart but were obviously fraternal rather than identical siblings; no one but their mother called them twins. Jason used to say they were the product of "dipolar sperm penetrating oppositely charged eggs." Diane, whose IQ was nearly as impressive as Jason's but who kept her vocabulary on a shorter leash, compared them to "different prisoners who escaped from the same cell."
I was in awe of them both.
Jason, at thirteen, was not only scary-smart but physically fit—not especially muscular but vigorous and often successful at track and field. He was nearly six feet tall even then, skinny, his gawky face redeemed by a lopsided and genuine smile. His hair, in those days, was blond and wiry.
Diane was five inches shorter, plump only by comparison with her brother, and darker skinned. Her complexion was clear except for the freckles that ringed her eyes and gave her a hooded look: My raccoon mask, she used to say. What I liked most about Diane—and I had reached an age when these details had taken on a poorly understood but undeniable significance—was her smile. She smiled rarely but spectacularly. She was convinced her teeth were too prominent (she was wrong), and she had picked up the habit of covering her mouth when she laughed. I liked to make her laugh, but it was her smile I secretly craved.
Last week Jason's father had given him a pair of expensive astronomical binoculars. He had been fidgeting with them all evening, taking sightings on the framed travel poster over the TV, pretending to spy on Cancun from the suburbs of Washington, until at last he stood up and said, "We ought to go look at the sky."
"No," Diane said promptly. "It's cold out there."
"But clear. It's the first clear night this week. And it's only chilly."
"There was ice on the lawn this morning."
"Frost," he countered.
"It's after midnight."
"It's Friday night."
"We're not supposed to leave the basement."
"We're not supposed to disturb the party. Nobody said anything about going outside. Nobody will see us, if you're afraid of getting caught."
"I'm not afraid of getting caught."
"So what are you afraid of?"
"Listening to you babble while my feet freeze."
Jason turned to me. "How about you, Tyler? Want to see some sky?"
The twins often asked me to referee their arguments, much to my discomfort. It was a no-win proposition. If I sided with Jason I might alienate Diane; but if I sided too often with Diane it would look… well, obvious. I said, "I don't know, Jase, it is pretty chilly outside…"
It was Diane who let me off the hook. She put a hand on my shoulder and said, "Never mind. I suppose a little fresh air is better than listening to him complain."
So we grabbed our jackets from the basement hallway and left by the back door.
The Big House wasn't as grandiose as our nickname for it implied, but it was larger than the average home in this middling-high-income neighborhood and it sat on a bigger parcel of land. A great rolling expanse of manicured lawn gave way, behind it, to an uncultivated stand of pines bordering a mildly polluted creek. Jason chose a spot for stargazing halfway between the house and the woods.
The month of October had been pleasant until yesterday, when a cold front had broken the back of Indian summer. Diane made a show of hugging her ribs and shivering, but that was only to chastise Jason. The night air was merely cool, not unpleasant. The sky was crystalline and the grass was reasonably dry, though there might be frost again by morning. No moon and not a trace of cloud. The Big House was lit up like a Mississippi steamboat and cast its fierce yellow glare across the lawn, but we knew from experience that on nights like this, if you stood in the shadow of a tree, you'd disappear as absolutely as if you had fallen into a black hole.
Jason lay on his back and aimed his binoculars at the starry sky.
I sat cross-legged next to Diane and watched as she took from her jacket pocket a cigarette, probably stolen from her mother. (Carol Lawton, a cardiologist and nominal ex-smoker, kept packs of cigarettes secreted in her dresser, her desk, a kitchen drawer. My mother had told me this.) She put it to her lips and lit it with a translucent red lighter—the flame was momentarily the brightest thing around—and exhaled a plume of smoke that swirled briskly into the darkness.
She caught me watching her. "You want a drag?"
"He's twelve years old," Jason said. "He has enough problems. He doesn't need lung cancer."
"Sure," I said. It was a point of honor now.
Diane, amused, passed me the cigarette. I inhaled tentatively and managed not to choke.
She took it back. "Don't get carried away."
"Tyler," Jason said, "do you know anything about the stars?"
I gulped a lungful of cold, clean air. "Of course I do."
"I don't mean what you learn from reading those paperbacks. Can you name any stars?"
I was blushing, but I hoped it was dark enough that he couldn't see. "Arcturus," I said. "Alpha Centauri. Sirius. Polaris…"
"And which one," Jason asked, "is the Klingon homeworld?"
"Don't be mean," Diane said.
Both the twins were precociously intelligent. I was no dummy, but they were out of my league, and we all understood that. They attended a school for exceptional children; I rode the bus to public school. It was one of the several obvious distinctions between us. They lived in the Big House, I lived with my mother in the bungalow at the east end of the property; their parents pursued careers, my mother cleaned house for them. Somehow we managed to acknowledge these differences without making a big deal of it.
"Okay," Jason said, "can you point at Polaris?"
Polaris, the North Star. I had been reading about slavery and the civil war. There had been a fugitive slave song:
When the sun comes back and the first quail calls,
Follow the Drinking Gourd.
The old man is waiting to carry you to freedom
When you follow the Drinking Gourd.
"When the sun comes back" meant after the winter solstice. Quail winter in the south. The gourd was the Big Dipper, wide end of the bowl pointed at Polaris, due north, the direction of freedom: I found the Dipper and waved my hand hopefully in that direction.
"See?" Diane said to Jason, as if I had proved a point in some argument they hadn't bothered to share with me.
"Not bad," Jason allowed. "You know what a comet is?"
"Yes."
"Want to see one?"
I nodded and stretched out next to him, still tasting and regretting the acrid tang of Diane's cigarette. Jason showed me how to brace my elbows on the ground, then let me hold the binoculars to my eyes and adjust the focus until the stars became blurred ovals and then pinpricks, many more than I could see with the naked eye. I panned around until I found, or guessed I had found, the spot to which Jason had directed me: a tiny node of phosphorescence against the merciless black sky.
"A comet—" Jason began.
"I know. A comet is a sort of dusty snowball falling toward the sun."
"You could say that." He was scornful. "Do you know where comets come from, Tyler? They come from the outer solar system—from a kind of icy halo around the sun that reaches from the orbit of Pluto halfway to the nearest star. Out where it's colder than you can possibly imagine."
I nodded, a little uncomfortably. I had read enough science fiction to grasp the sheer, unspeakable largeness of the night sky. It was something I sometimes liked to think about, though it could be—at the wrong time of night, when the house was quiet—a little intimidating.