Free The Path of Minor Planets: A Novel by Andrew Sean Greer

leaving her alone with her sullen sister and a dark barn full of attics, coops, sharp mysteries. March—they were there too early; it threw her off. But she didn’t question it. Perhaps some wonderful thing had happened to her here when she was young, so young she had forgotten it—a gold earring found in the dry straw, or a nest of chicks—something lost and invisible that drew her here without the
ohs
and sighs and feigned boredom.
    This month was the aphelion of Comet Swift—its point farthest from Earth. Her father had told her this the week before, in explanation of their early trip, pulling a pink piece of construction paper from her art table and drawing ellipses across it in dark ink, lovingly sketching the comet with its old-man’s beard. He talked about the attraction of Jupiter, the Oort Cloud, the effect of the solar wind. Spirals and lines covered the pink paper. He made sure Lydia understood the science of it, and she nodded as if she did, and then Swift folded the paper, squatted down beside her and asked the strangest thing: “Do you remember the boy who fell?”
    Lydia did not know what to say. It was a terrible crime to say you didn’t know something in her family, in that house crowded with books and maps. Could you say you didn’t remember? “Sort of,” she said carefully.
    “At Bukit? At the perihelion?”
    It was another word she knew she was supposed to understand, so she didn’t hesitate to smile and nod. So he smiled, too, relieved, and began to talk with her about it. He gave her the details that she’d lost in the confusion of youth—the rusted telescope, the broken wall, the baseball moving against the sky—but instead of bringing back her own memories in a rush, she regarded this as another of her father’s amazing stories, from a long time ago. And though he put Lydia in the story, placed her on a mat in the middle of the overlook, playing with a monkey, she believed this was, again, his old device. She was always in his stories. Lydia knew she wasn’t there that night—how could she have been? Nothing so terrible could happen except in the distant past of fathers. No one died these days.
    Swift did not always know the right thing to say; he told her things adults should never share with children. He talked about the crazy, wailing women on the island and the money he’d had to give to the sultan. He talked about his own doubts, about how he felt, for a long time, as if it were his fault—he had moved the telescope out of the way, just at the wrong moment, pulled the boy’s only support from underneath him. He no longer believed this, he told her, smiling through his beard. He’d meant to save the boy; that was all that mattered. He had tried. Lydia sat very still on her bed, afraid that if she moved, she might crack the mood and lose this odd confessional, lose the intensity of her father’s memory. So often he ignored his younger daughter, caught up in his stars, and here he was squatting before her, talking as if he was sharing a secret with her. She loved him desperately.
    He told her the story, he said, getting up at last, because people might talk about it at the party. He wanted to make sure she knew. Lydia nodded, acting as if it were nothing, but the image remained in her mind long after he left the room:
A boy fell from a cliff, through palm trees, onto a darkened beach.
    What she considered now, however, was not the boy at all; it was the people who might mention him. The scientists. Lydia didn’t like them; they were too strange, too unlike her or any of her friends’ parents. They talked about the oddest things, and their fascination with Lydia was beginning to seem suspicious to her, because they didn’t seem to recognize who she was. She felt this meant they didn’t recognize her star appeal, the beautiful and lazy way she reached for a pear (something Kim had taught her), the sexual batting of her eyelids and (of course) the clear brilliance of her mind.