9:02 pm

I am throwing a funeral for a constellation and if no one comes I will feel like such an idiot. And not just because I went to Heinen’s and bought a whole sheet cake that can probably feed, like, thirty people. It says, We’ll miss you, Betelgeuse! which I had to spell, and repeat, and repeat again, at least six times to the poor lady doing the icing. Sure, it’s a weird name, but it’s also been all over the paper so you’d think people would have some kind of familiarity with it. No, not just because of the cake, but also because my mother thought it was “weird and a bit grim” that a twenty-four-year-old girl (“woman,” she insists) would throw a funeral for a constellation when she hadn’t even known I was into constellations. Which I’m not, not really. I am just into this one constellation and I spend so much time around death that I feel compelled to do something for the star.

Okay, it hasn’t been all over the paper. It was in the paper one time, and it’s been online a little bit, and I’ve gotten in deep. This star, Betelgeuse, is one of the top ten brightest in our entire galaxy, and I don’t know how, but some astronomers figured that tonight might be the night he finally explodes and releases all of the heavy matter that’s been building up in his core to the rest of the universe. One person’s meteor shower is another constellation’s funeral, I guess. And there are so few constellations whose seemingly arbitrary arrangements actually mean something, or look like something, to the rest of us. Orion is one of them. You can see the elongated diamond of stars from a tennis court at camp in Chardon, Ohio, or the porch of a house in Maine, or even from your bedroom window while everyone else in your house is sleeping. It’s Betelgeuse at the top, Rigel at the bottom, and the three stars of his belt like a slice of American cheese on a sandwich.

If I gave Betelgeuse his three inches in The Chagrin Valley Sun, where I work, it would be: Betelgeuse is survived by younger sibling Rigel. He was known for his bright personality and strong fashion sense (friends fondly remember his iconic belt). 

I printed up party invitations last week at work even though you’re not really supposed to use that printer for “personal matters” which a sign above the printer reminds me every time I go to use it for, yes, personal matters. Who actually owns a printer? The invitations say: “Bid Farewell to Betelgeuse!” with the picture of a star, like an anthropomorphized star that’s waving at you and smiling, beaming really. Underneath: 

The meteor shower of the century is taking place this Thursday evening, so head to the roof around 9:45 for light refreshments ahead of what’s sure to be a stellar spectacle. As this is likely to be Betelgeuse’s final show, let’s give him a standing ovation!

Not like I own our roof, but since I’m owning the set-up of a party, or funeral party, I get to give directions.

There are like fifteen units in my building, so I slipped one under each door, and posted one in the laundry room for safety. Now I’m staring at this cake, which covers the entire surface of my tiny kitchen counter, and wondering when is too early to go upstairs and start setting up. 

The invitation isn’t my best work, but originally I was going to pass around a pre-written obituary for Betelgeuse until Annie suggested an invitation would be more festive. Annie does layout at The Sun, and I edit obituaries (“Maybe you could ask them if you could try a wedding announcement or two?” –My Mother). I also do the blotter. I did try to pitch Betelgeuse’s obituary to my boss, Frank. I thought it was a chance to really show my stuff. And Annie said she would give it a prime spot if Frank said yes (I’m not sure if she actually had the power to decide that, but I also don’t question Annie because she’s very confident and makes really good decisions with her life and I do feel like this is front-page news). Of course, he nixed it, and told Annie to put the high school football team’s two-win streak front and center. 

“Maybe the next one,” Frank said, “if it doesn’t conflict with the big game.”

“I’ll let the galaxy know,” I replied as he walked back to his desk.

I can’t stare at this cake anymore. I hook the bag of party supplies over my elbow, balance the cake on my forearm, and head to the roof.

9:15 pm

How’s the party? Annie texts, Annie who would definitely be here if she wasn’t out of town for her cousin’s wedding, who would’ve poured me a glass of wine thirty minutes ago and told me to, “take about sixty chill pills,” and who really understands that this is a party but also a funeral, and who was probably right, that passing out an obituary was not as welcoming as passing out invitations. Annie, who I met on my first day at work a year ago, who grabbed my shoulders and said, “Thank god, someone else who knows how to use computers.”

Hasn’t quite started yet, I say, because I don’t want to lie to her completely. But I got a cake!

Can’t wait to hear all about it! Maybe the Hot Dog will let you do a follow-up.

It’s kind of unfortunate that Frank’s head is just shaped like a hot dog, it’s kind of tall and narrow and he has the coloring, as my mother would say, of a Lunchables hot dog, and so between his head shape and his name, how can we call him anything else?

I look up to Annie, even if I don’t mean to, because it’s the only thing that makes me feel like myself. Because when I moved back home, temporarily, after fourteen months in New York, I was back in my childhood bedroom, and Doug’s room next door had become an extension of the attic, piled high with boxes and suitcases and a dining table’s-worth of bridge chairs leaning against the wall where his desk used to be and even though it had been five years, I had spent so little time in that house without him before fleeing to college that when I lay in bed on that first night back, I felt like I’d been packed away with his sweaters in a vacuum-sealed bag, the air sucked out of me until I was skin and veins and hollow bones. 

I send Annie a photo of the street, where I can see people all lined up with their lawn chairs and blankets. My street is going to be an absolute zoo, that’s what my mom said when she was explaining why she couldn’t come to my funeral. My party. It’s true—the neighborhood association or whoever only just planted trees along the sidewalk earlier this year, so there’s very little to obstruct a view of the sky from the street. Orion sits right above the FedEx at the end of the block, and at four stories, my building is really the tallest structure around here. Everyone is expecting that they’ll get a perfect, IMAX-like view of the meteor shower. The town even agreed to turn all the streetlamps off starting at 9:30 PM since the “show” is supposed to start around 9:53 (the precision surrounding this otherwise unknowable event is just wild). People are already antsy, yelling up at neighbors watching from the second floor of the restaurant to “turn off their damn lights” and I’m just sitting there gazing at all of these tiny little picnic set-ups along the street and wondering who will show up to my party. 

Here’s what I have: chips and salsa, that stupid huge birthday cake, and a suite of serving supplies, like plates and napkins, that I got from Party City for a kid’s space-themed birthday. They say, You’re Stellar! on them and they have this dopey little dog dressed as an astronaut waving at you while you eat off his face. Weird. They make me think of Doug, again, who begged my parents for a dog and even made a whole presentation where I had to pretend to be a puppy so he could prove what a great caretaker he was. I barked a little and he pretended to pick up my poop and my parents were still like, “No thanks, but cute.” 

I’ve dragged a few folding chairs up from the basement because Steve, the superintendent, said, “Sure, you’re welcome to ‘em if you can drag ‘em up and if they don’t have mouse shit all over.” I didn’t look too closely. I also brought up my laundry basket and piled it high with blankets. 

I make a plate of chips and salsa for myself and sit on one of the maybe-shat-upon lawn chairs and watch the sky, and take out my phone to start jotting some thoughts down in my Notes app, on the off chance that Frank does let me cover this tomorrow for the paper, thinking about what my angle would be since it’s not going to come out for at least a day. I think maybe it would be cool to talk about Rigel, to talk about what it’s like to be the knee, the number two, the support for the constellation and to have to literally step up (get a leg up, ha ha) and take over as the brightest spot on the Orion constellation. Frank will hate it.

We’ll probably end up just picking it up from “the wire” which is how The Sun does everything these days—we either pick it up from the wire or we syndicate it from The Plain Dealer and pretty much all we do that’s original is local ads, obituaries, and the police blotter. I mean, when Rhonda turned one hundred and finally retired from her hostess job at The Bistro, sure, they did a nice feature on her then, and when the high school soccer team went all the way to state championships, of course they got a full three columns in the sports section— but on a regular basis, we’re just not doing a lot of original stuff. I say I edit the obituaries, but that basically just involves spell-checking whatever someone sends to us or writing them from scratch based on this form you can fill out online. It is wildly depressing, actually, that the most-visited page on our website is the Obituary Form, but it’s also nice, like we can help outsource this thing that has to get done and no one really wants to do it. After Doug died, my aunt was literally sitting in the living room trying to count how many cousins there were on her two hands and I was like, “Why are we including the cousins?” and no one had a good answer, it was just that they wanted to fill lots of space. It’s hard with kids, I guess. Grandparents have generations that survive them and kids who die end up amputating the family tree. 

So I help people not think about that, they just fill out some fields online and give us their loved one’s name and any other names or nicknames and I put it all together in, what I hope, is a nice, simple, but meaningful tribute that helps bring the family a tiny bit of closure, an item checked off a to-do list. You don’t realize how many people are dying until you edit the obituary section, and I feel like the most powerful person in town, kind of, because I have this running tally of who is alive and who is not. I hold all their three-inch legacies in my head. I like the obituary section much more than the police blotter—the dead and the dumb, my dad said once, and my mom cried—where I churn out Noise Complaints and Concerned Citizens and Criminal Mischief and the occasional Man Thought His Mother Was Dead and Called the Police But She Was Only Vacuuming and Didn’t Hear Her Phone. I would do Motor Vehicle Accidents too, but I think Annie told Frank about Doug’s car and the tree, because now, Frank just quietly takes those complaints and writes them himself. And I don’t know how closely people read the blotter, but if they did, they might be able to tell those are never written in my voice.

9:35 pm

I need a sweatshirt. It’s colder than I expected, and even though my blankets are all up here I want to leave them in case neighbors do end up coming. I mean there are still like ten minutes before the lights go out and then another twenty before the shower starts, so there’s time. Maybe people went to late dinners.

My phone rings while I’m darting through the stairwell.

“Hi, mom,” I can hear Jeopardy in the background. They record it every night and watch it after dinner.

“Hi sweetheart. I wanted to hear how your party is going.”

I take a minute, “Oh it’s going to be fun, I think! I’m actually not up there—but you know, the whole thing doesn’t start ‘til almost ten so I’ll set up soon.” 

“Oh good. They showed your street on the news, you know. People were already getting spots as early as six! It was like the Fourth of July parade.”

“Well, I guess it’s kind of like a parade. Like a sky parade.”

“You have such a way with words—David! She called the meteor shower a sky parade, isn’t that clever?—your dad thinks that’s really clever.” If I had to guess, my dad was in the bathroom taking a post-dinner shit and my mom was fishing for compliments to throw my way. She could have just told me it was clever herself. She thinks things have more weight when they come from both of them.

They became more of a team after Doug, trying to fill up the space he left behind, trying to be my parents and my siblings all in one. My first year in New York, my only year in New York, my parents came to visit and my mom was insistent that we find a speakeasy, that we spend the night drinking and taking advantage of the city. We found, instead, a dark bar on the Lower East Side that had small, wobbly black tables and a waitress who was entirely uninterested in the distinct circles of grief these three Midwestern people were operating within, and so when my mom asked her for “three, ah, tequila shots, I suppose!” she didn’t think, “Maybe this family is quite transparently trying to imagine what this girl’s dead older brother would have done on his first visit to the city, so maybe I’ll just bring them glasses of the house white wine instead.” She just brought us the tequila in finger-smudged glasses, and we all sucked on the limes till our teeth rubbed against the rinds. 

For some reason, talking to my mom now reminds me of that moment. I run my tongue over the front of my teeth to see if they taste like citrus. And now she’s going on about what they had for dinner—salmon, green beans—and asking if I’ll stop by this week at all to say hello. “Probably next Thursday,” I say, the day is random, my tongue picks Thursday while my brain races to catch up. At my apartment door, I put the key in the lock as quietly as possible so she won’t hear the click and ask questions about where I’m going or coming from. 

“Thursday! We were thinking maybe, Wednesday. For… his birthday is Wednesday.”

He would’ve been twenty-seven, but really, he’ll be twenty-four forever. I turned twenty-four six months ago, and it’s given me an itch ever since—I’ve worn the age like a shrunken sweater, pulling at the fabric, willing it to fit.

“Right, Wednesday,” I say. “We’ll order Italian.” I can hear her turn on the sink. She is probably washing dishes ahead of putting them in the dishwasher. Scrubbing them clean with soap and everything, because she needs to stay busy when she talks about Doug. 

“Alright then, we’ll see you Wednesday! That will be nice. And enjoy the meteor shower, sweetheart, and hope you have a fun party.”

“Sure, I’ll see you Wednesday.” I hang up, not bothering to correct her that it’s a funeral, because I think that’s something only I understand.

I dart into my apartment and pull my sweatshirt off of the couch, where it’s flung like a decorative throw. I grab a half-empty bottle of tequila from the top of the fridge, because now I think it’s the only way to erase the ghostly taste of citrus.

I’m grateful that for this funeral, at least, people will gather on the roof, that I can leave my shoes in disarray by the door and the trash can that’s about three-quarters full and the bathroom mirror that needs a once-over with Windex. I don’t even own Windex, because the house reeked of it for the seven days we sat shiva, my mom wiping down the glass coffee table, the counters, the windows, every thirty minutes until our eyes burned. 

9:45 pm

I’ve been standing in the hallway listening for signs of life for more than five minutes. I look at my phone and it’s almost time, so I’m bounding back up the stairs, taking two at a time, remembering the first meteor shower I watched by myself, in fourth grade, from the guest bathroom because it had a skylight. I watched these stars crisscross the square pane, and I cried because it felt like I was watching one hundred tiny funerals with no time to say anything or ask them if they were scared.

And I think about Doug, who found me sitting on the black and white tiled floor, wiping my nose with the belt from a bathrobe, and told me to stop being such a “stupid weenie, they’re just stars,” and I thought but they’re not, they’re little magical lights and we get so sad when bugs die—why shouldn’t we be sad about stars? Because we did, we mourned every spider when we were little. 

The roof is still empty. There’s a bird on the rim of the chips bowl that I run at, waving my arms around like a crazy person. I take the binoculars I left on one of the lawn chairs and scan the street, trying to see if I can discern any of my neighbors down there, traitors, but it’s too dark without the street lamps. I’ve never seen it this dark, without the lights on the sidewalk or the glows of television screens from unshaded windows. I spend a minute just staring at the sky, widening my eyes as far as they’ll go until it feels like I’ve stretched my lids so far that my eyeballs might come loose from their sockets and roll off the ledge and land on the cement sidewalk with a gooey splash. But they don’t roll out. They adjust.

Across the street is a building of similar height to mine, it houses the Coffee and Creations bakery on the ground floor, that smells like blueberry muffins even if they aren’t baking them, and leases to small offices above. The office windows are dark, my new night vision takes in their liquid black, but the rooftop is crowded.

“Fuck that building.” I turn around and there’s Steve, and I’m not going to cry because that would be weird, but I am so happy to see him that I give him this loud laugh and very weird thumbs up. 

“The chairs are great!” I’m now apparently a person who shouts, with glee, about abandoned chairs. 

Steve came lol! I text Annie.

You know what they say: One person is a funeral, two is a party, she responds immediately, because like I said, she gets it.

Behind him, the door opens to an older woman and, I assume, her grandson, maybe he’s five or maybe he’s twelve—I honestly have no idea how old kids are just by looking. I am trying really hard to keep my face neutral because if I smile too widely or wave too hard, I will scare these people away. And then I think, these are my neighbors! I’m a neighbor, I’m a tenant, I’m a little weird and a little morbid, and I’m a reporter (eventually), and all of these things actually feel kind of nice and a little uncomfortable, like a headband stretched too tight so it pulses at your temples but also keeps your hair out of your eyes. 

“When’s this thing supposed to start again?” Steve asks me, or the world, I can’t really tell and I start to say “soon” but the little kid runs up and says (yells) “CAN I HAVE SOME CAKE” like an absolute nutcase and his grandmother or something says, “Please! Andrew, can you have some cake please.” 

I have no need for pleases and thank yous, so I say: “Absolutely, and the first piece is the most special because you can pick wherever you want on the cake. Even the middle.” That was a rule in our house. I always went for the upper right corner, because corners have an incredible frosting-to-cake ratio but Doug always went right for the middle, forcing my dad to bring out two knives and sort of wiggle out the shape from the center, and he’d shimmy his shoulders while removing the slice in this exaggerated way to make all of us laugh. To my surprise, this kid gets it (usually people don’t get it) and he points right to the center, too, where the ‘B’ is, and I am absolutely thrilled. I grab the plastic knives and a fork and perform a very bad hack job for this weird kid, weird like me, and serve the nearly-destroyed hunk of cake to him on an astronaut dog plate with a smile, and Steve starts laughing. 

The older woman stretches her hand towards me, “Laura Blake, 3F, thank you for putting this whole thing together!”

“Oh, thanks! I mean, it’s no problem. Thank you for coming! I’m Nora.”

“Nora and Laura rhyme,” Andrew chimes in.

“And this is Andrew, who you’ve met,” Laura laughs, handing him a napkin.

“Well, thank you for being here—have a drink!” I gesture to my very pathetic bar set up, a bottle of red wine and the half-drunk bottle of tequila. Steve, the greatest guy, pours himself a healthy glug of tequila, and when Laura and I shrug and laugh, he pours us the same. He raises his cup with a, “To Beetle—goose? Beetie… whatever that star is!” The plastic cups sound soft as they meet against one another, and our faces betray everything our throats are going through as we swallow.

“So, you actually think this star is going to explode?” Steve asks, and the little kid looks up and Laura looks at him and I think—oh, shit, no one told this kid what it’s all about. But then I realize he doesn’t look scared, he looks absolutely elated because, of course, the words explode and crash and destroy are exciting when you’re little and all you’ve seen is Lego towers fall or toy cars race into walls. Messes are fun and exciting because you never have to clean them up.

The real mess is down below, where people are counting down at random intervals, yelling to each other, lighting sparklers as though this were the Fourth of July. Our roof is quiet. Andrew is making a frosting mustache for the astronaut dog and I think, I should’ve had music, or I should’ve written down a speech, and I forgot about my Notes for tomorrow and I’m worried I’ve already forgotten everything, that Betelgeuse will end up just being beloved, dearly departed, treasured, missed, fondly remembered as. 

“Exploding star!” Andrew yells, thrusting his icing-coated fork into the air. “Die, star, die!”

My face feels numb, maybe it’s the tequila, or maybe it’s the death, or maybe it’s just that I feel like I’m doing this whole thing wrong. I should be running around, too, or I should be with Annie, or my parents, or down on the street in a clean lawn chair. I’ve been calling this a funeral the whole time, maybe because I want a do-over. Cake is much better than the stale bagels and lukewarm lox, dampening paper plates that ended up overflowing in our kitchen garbage can. And New York was supposed to be an escape from all that, at least with better bagels, yet it was just fourteen months of first dates in loud bars: Do you have any siblings? It got old, and I came home, and drowned myself in the news of this meteor shower.

But there must be people who love Betelgeuse for real, who have been studying the stars and skies all their lives, who will miss this constellation, who will look up at the sky every evening and feel pressure behind their eyes and a sourness in their stomach, because even if you were to know ahead of time about every bad thing that happened, everything you would lose, it would still hurt, I think, when you looked at the emptiness. And it’s not Andrew’s fault, but my molars are grinding together and my jaw is sore, and the street gets a little darker, and Steve sinks into one of the chairs, rocking back and watching the sky. Why can’t everyone on the street shut the hell up for one second and that building across the street is still really pissing me off because they just yelled “Cheers!” and I think about how I might be in New York if the car hadn’t hit the tree, if Doug hadn’t checked his phone and the deer hadn’t leapt onto the road, all of that might have meant he was here on Earth and I would be in New York, not even able to see the stars, not even aware that stars, like people, could die. I might have been able to say, easily, “Yeah, one brother, he’s back home in Ohio.”

All of the adrenaline that has been building inside me all day, stacking blankets and balancing the cake on the passenger’s seat and talking about salmon and now seeing these dark figures settle in for a light show—I want the people across the street to notice me, to notice the other people around and the bigness of the world. 

I grab a piece of cake, from a corner, and I mush it and it becomes soft but firm in my hands, slightly sticky with icing but molded like a snowball and I wind up my arm just like Doug taught me when I was seven years old and trying to play catch with him, begging him to play—and you can’t play catch with one person, there has to be someone else there to catch it, and here I am, winding back and I throw the cake as hard as I possibly can, aiming right for the group and watching it as it hit right below (“Dammit,” under my breath) but it catches a few people’s eye and I see them looking but then then I hear a scream from the street, a little voice screaming, “I saw one! I saw one!” 

The kid wants to know if he can throw cake too but Laura whispers, “Absolutely not,” and drags their two chairs to the other side of the roof, out of the orbit of the crazy funeral host. My hand is full of icing and I grab a napkin and rub it off on the stupid astro-dog’s face and sit on the lawn chair and pray I’m not sitting on mouse shit and I crane my neck and wonder if it will break.