At the funeral, the priest called it an act of God. My brother, the paleontologist, called it a scientific statistic. I called it nothing, quietly playing the role of the caretaking niece and cousin. The only question I answered concerned pumpernickel versus sourdough when we ran out of bread at the reception.
My cousin Theodore was struck through the head and killed by a 1.73 pound, three-inch diameter meteorite on the first day of autumn in 1998, while he was scrubbing a casserole dish at the kitchen sink.
At the reception following his son’s funeral, my uncle couldn’t stop laughing (or something like laughing), swirling his gin in a gold-rimmed glass that he’d dug out of the basement amid the spare china for these unexpected guests, a glass he hadn’t used since his last drink thirteen years prior. No one knew for sure if it was laughter, or if he was clearing his throat, or wheezing, or what. He just stood there at the kitchen counter beside the liquor, saying nothing, churning gently from his big, sweating belly, like a washer that has been overfilled.
A black plastic bag was taped over the window above the sink, and it ballooned rhythmically in the breeze. The window pane had shattered when the rock had sliced through the roof and the attic floor and Teddy’s head, and the casserole dish had thrust out from Teddy’s slippery hands through the window.
Everything else in the house – the skateboard and sneakers beside the front door, the half-eaten packs of gum on the kitchen counter – remained untouched despite the crowd of unusual guests now crowding Teddy’s ordinarily calm home.
By the time I’d returned from the bakery with an armload of sourdough sandwich rolls and cigarettes for my Aunt Genie, all of Uncle Ben’s associates at the firm had excused themselves from the party.
A small old man in a lavender suit jacket complimented my dress as we passed each other through the door. I’d worn it, I remembered then, to Teddy’s confirmation.
My brother Phil set Teddy’s CDs to play on random – Blind Melon, Radiohead, REM. Half a dozen of Teddy’s friends got high in their cars and drank the free booze in the backyard, pointing again and again at the clean, black-rimmed hole that seemed to smoke still, naked and raw in the shingles of the roof.
The small old man with a handlebar moustache and wearing a lavender suit jacket introduced himself as Theodore’s grandfather’s cousin, twice removed. He told Aunt Genie that if she needed anything at all, he lived on Main Street by the Krauser’s. There were so many other semi-strangers that offered her the same useless courtesy.
Aunt Genie squirted herself half a glass of wine from the box and smiled at the man and thanked him coolly, her teeth round and white and comforting. She raised her eyebrows at me, pressed her fingers into the bridge of her nose as she passed her husband at the sink, and went into the yard to kick the kids out.
I watched her speak to them in the back yard; put her hands on their shoulders. A tall kid wearing a Led Zeppelin t-shirt tried to hug her, and she patted him gingerly on his back and led him toward the gate. She seemed so calm that whole day, her voice unwavering and deep, as though reporting a very unfortunate newscast to an audience of apathetic millions.
The kids went to their cars and swerved down the road to continue their tribute to Teddy, or whatever else they had planned to do that Wednesday afternoon.
Then it was only the family, the cousins from Delaware eating salami sandwiches and pickles and any of three varieties of lasagna, macaroni and potato and fruit salads, potato chips (stale, now), deviled eggs, cookies and mini-donuts.
In the morning, there would be bagels and lox, and more sourdough rolls for lunch, and the next day they would eat the leftover lasagna for dinner, and on like that until they had to go to the store to buy something new, something normal, something that Teddy might not have liked.
I had worried that Aunt Genie might not eat. But she did, everyone did. Even Uncle Ben ate the plate of meatballs I brought him. They ate what they ate, and it was enough.
I pulled saran wrap over the extra food as the sun set in the yard, and I cleaned out the fridge to make room for the salads. I replaced the last of Teddy’s Gatorade with a box of white zinfandel.
Uncle Ben’s laughter or rumble or whatever it was had lulled, and he went to bed after the last of his cousins and my brother Phil left the party. Now it was just me and Aunt Genie at the kitchen table, a bowl of fresh grapes, and two sweating glasses of white zinfandel.
“We had a deal,” she said. “Teddy and I.”
A headache nagged at the back of my head.
“The deal was: he was washes the casserole dish,” she said, “and I don’t tell Dad about the weed I found in his pants when I was doing laundry. When I found it, I thought it was kind of funny, I guess. It really wasn’t that much herb. So I brought it up to him and he was eating the last of my tuna casserole, cold, out of the dish. He was stunned.”
“So, you know, I said ‘this is so not cool.’ And I said that he could do what he wanted as long as he could hide it better than that. Now isn’t that a cool thing for a mother to say? The last thing I said to him was ‘if this is the last I see of it, your father doesn’t have to know. Wash the dish and we’re even.’ Isn’t that a silly thing to be the last thing to say to your son? Isn’t this all just.”
She twisted a grape from the bunch and warmed it in her palm. “So silly.” This was a new kind of calm in her voice, a complicated kind of calm.
She said, smiling with her big round teeth, “So I went back down in the basement, folded the rest of the clothes, and I thought about what a good job I’d done, and I was so proud of myself for the first time in a long time, for doing everything right and having a son that was doing the dishes and a family that made sense.”
She put the warmed grape in her mouth. “Maybe it’s all hindsight,” she added.
“Even once the,” she stopped, exhaled quick like a laugh, “once the thing came through the goddamned ceiling, and I heard the window break, I felt like everything made sense. It came through just to my left, you know. About three feet to my left. A meteor landed on my basement floor, just to my left, while I was folding Teddy’s shorts.”
I noted redundantly that it all was unbelievable, though by now I felt so immersed in Teddy’s unusual accident, it was such a part of me that it seemed as reasonable as a car crash and I was there playing the dutiful lawyer, the police officer, the victim and the car.
“When I went to look at it, it was shimmering in this hole in the basement floor. Shimmering like that rock you get in gift shops, the fool’s gold stuff, only not as brilliant, do you know? I looked at it for so long before I went upstairs. I wanted to show Teddy and I called for him. I thought he could make something out of it, or use it somehow. Part of me thought ‘Show and Tell.’ What is he, eight? I actually thought that. How silly.”
She seemed tired, then, finally. She rested her chin in her palm. “I guess this happens all the time. One of Teddy’s friends was telling me. These things hit the ground all over the world. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that I had to protect him from this. This doesn’t make any sense.”
I waited and watched as the sweat on her glass spiraled out, making larger rings on the table.
“But the rock in the basement. I didn’t even question it. I just looked at it there, in the light that was coming in through the basement window, and I thought, wow. Look at the universe, and how random and beautiful. And now I think about Teddy and how little sense today makes. But still I think of that rock in the ground and I remember it being so dazzling. Am I horrible? Would you tell me if it was just horrible of me to think that?”
I told her that no, she wasn’t horrible. And I asked her before she went to sleep what kind of bagel could I get for her in the morning, any kind of bagel at all.
Katie Reilly is a writer and a Hudson County resident. Comments on this story can be sent to: current@hudsonreporter.com.