The Stars We Share

by Rafe Posey

She looks up and smiles. “Good morning, Alec.”

  “Good morning,” he replies. His hands drift behind him and out of sight, but he forces himself to let them hang at his sides. Perhaps if he can pretend well enough that he is not ashamed of them, it will become true.

  She stands. “Would you like some coffee?”

  Alec lets himself wallow in the idea. When was the last time he had good coffee? Algeria? And whatever it is that she has brewed, it does not have that watery character that he had seen on bases and in cafés during the war.

  “Please, yes,” he says. He takes the chair across from her place, makes himself meet her eyes. “It smells marvelous.”

  At the sink she runs the water until it’s hot, fills a mug, and lets it warm for a moment as if she too finds the cottage a bit too cold. Alec’s chest flutters. He is having his morning coffee with June, an idea that only a few weeks ago seemed like a distant and improbable future. The idea echoes: I am having coffee with June. I am here, with June. June is here.

  When she sets the mug in front of him, he presses his left palm to it, letting the heat push into the sore spots in his bones. His right hand he settles in his lap, out of sight. Trying to be less self-conscious is a process, it seems, though he feels as if his inconsistency will only make things worse. The coffee is not the oil-black concoction he remembers from Algeria, but it’s unlike anything he’s had in ages, the aroma so dense he can almost touch it. He lifts the mug and sips carefully.

  God, he thinks, hoping June won’t see the emotions welling up. “This . . . I haven’t had anything like this in years, June. I would have thought with rationing . . .”

  “I know,” she says. “I’m lucky to have the good stuff. It was a gift from Floss Corbett.”

  Alec looks away, trying not to let his reflexive irritation about Corbett color how the coffee feels. How that next sip tastes. He makes himself smile. “Lucky, that.”

  “If you’d like cream or sugar . . .” She gestures at the two small jars in the center of the table.

  He hasn’t seen proper cream in years, and his mouth waters. How is it that such luxuries are just there, right before him? He’s always taken his coffee black, but turning down real sugar and rich cream now feels tantamount to turning down a meal. After years of Klim and worse, such a notion is nearly beyond his ken.

  “Might be nice, a spot of cream,” June says quietly. “Sometimes you just want that bit of extra.”

  Alec settles his mug in front of him and reaches for the cream with the rough pincer of his left hand, then goes back for the sugar.

  When he’s finished, the coffee is nearly dun, and he’s almost embarrassed. When he sips it, it’s too milky, and too sweet, but the wash of it into his throat and his belly is incredible. Yet that beautiful rich coffee is all but lost in it. It never crossed his mind that something as simple as a coffee on a cold morning could be so confounding.

  He looks up sheepishly. “I’ve made it too sweet.”

  “Think of it as a treat, then,” she says. “There’s more in the pot if you’d like a fresh cup. You can have it however you like.”

  “Second chances,” he says before he considers his words.

  “Indeed,” June says, regarding him warmly. “I wondered if you might like to take a walk with me.” She looks down into her nearly empty mug. “I know you saw a bit of Fenbourne yesterday, but . . .” Her brow knits. “I thought it might anchor you, a bit? The familiar?”

  The image of the shattered vicarage surfaces. He takes a long swallow of coffee to buy himself a moment before he has to answer. His stomach tightens. “Perhaps?”

  She nods. “All right. It might be good for you.” She shrugs, her smile quivering just a bit. “And I would like it very much myself.”

  When she stands, lifting her mug for one last sip before she takes it to the sink, the ring on her left hand flashes in the morning light, and Alec’s heart speeds up accordingly. In the bustle of the day before he hadn’t noticed the ring, but now it seems part of the larger domestic tableau they’re inhabiting. He wants to take it as a sign.

  “June?”

  She turns back to him, a look on her face he doesn’t know how to interpret. Wary, perhaps? His chest hurts, thinking this is how he has made her feel.

  “You’re right.” He rubs his hands together, trying to center himself and corral everything he’s feeling. “That does sound like a good idea. Let’s.”

  “Grand. Thank you.” Her eyes shine. “I was going to make myself a bit of toast and some eggs—would you like some?”

  He is always hungry, even when his stomach hurts. And his stomach almost always hurts. Too, it’s hard to navigate the new landscape of being in this cottage with her and trying to figure out what they are now. Who he is now. He blinks, tries to stop himself from overthinking all of this.

  “Thank you,” he says. His stomach growls, although he can’t tell whether it’s with hunger or nerves. “I would love some.”

  * * *

  • • •

  When they head out, the sun is as high over the hedgerows as it’s likely to get. Alec had forgotten how short the days were here in January. But God, the air feels good. It’s too cold, sinking into his lungs like a stone, but the relief of another day away from the tired, metallic air of his cabin on the troopship is immeasurable. When he falls into step with June, she smiles; she seems as relieved as he is that this works. He feels like he should be talking, but what can he say? He’s surprised when she loops around the long way, instead of following the sluice road straight into Fenbourne. At least they’re together, doing something that feels relatively normal, as if she understands that he is going to need some time to get his feet back under him again. The clarity of the air is such a gift, but after a certain point, when the chill has gone bone-deep, the bitter wet of the Fens and the terrible searing cold of the German camps are not so different. He jams his hands deeper into his pockets, but the cold is inescapable.

  In the village, it seems as though all roads lead to the vicarage. Alec stares up at the emptiness, trying to take in the enormity of the destruction. They stand together for a moment. He has an ocean of things he wants to say to her, but with the ruins looming over him it’s so hard to begin. Finally he says, “You must miss them awfully.”

  “I do,” June says. She slips her hand around his elbow.

  He holds perfectly still, his heart banging away at the feeling of her touch. His mind races, trying to find the right thing to say. “It won’t always be quite this raw.”

  June gazes at him, and he stares back, captivated by the impossible color of her eyes, the dark wing of brow on fair skin, although she is perhaps not as fair as she once was. But time has passed for them both, and God knows he doesn’t look the same anymore, either.

  “Thank you,” she says at last. “That helps more than you know.”

  They resume their walk. As they pass the solicitor’s office, June reminds him that eventually he’ll have to stop in and handle the various legal issues of probate and inheritance, and he’s grateful when she doesn’t suggest he do it now. Instead she leads him through the lanes, and gradually he finds himself not as disoriented and lost. For the most part, the village seems much the same. He’s been away for what feels like half his life, but perhaps Fenbourne is the kind of place where time runs more slowly, and things change much less.

  When they reach the bridge over the River Lark, June stops, her arm tightening on his.

  “Oh,” he says, his chest full of feeling again. “Oh, June.”

  “I thought you might want to see it,” she says, her voice low but strained, as if she’s trying to make it sound light. “One of the best parts of Fenbourne, as far as I’m concerned.”

  How to tell her how often he thought of this bridge, and those stars, while he was in the camps? How much time he used up in meticulous reveries of
drifting on the river with the girl he loved more than anything? He pulls her closer, feeling her hand against his ribs through his coat and layers. Can she feel his heart, how it beats for her?

  When they reach the cottage, Alec stops in the lane outside the stone wall and faces June. “Thank you.”

  She blinks. “For what, Alec?”

  He gestures at the landscape, the cottage, everything. “For making it so I didn’t have to do this alone. And for bearing with me.”

  She looks up at him with a crooked, sad smile. “I know things are . . . confusing, but I want to help you.”

  “June . . .” He pauses. “I missed you terribly. All the years I was flying, I just wanted to see you again. And in the camps . . . Thinking of you was how I bore the worst of it.”

  Her eyes well up with tears, and she steps closer. “Oh, Alec . . . You sweet boy. I am just so very glad you’re home. That we’re home.”

  Alec nods wordlessly. The tide of his anxiety has not turned, but: Home, he thinks. Perhaps there is hope after all.

  * * *

  • • •

  That night when he goes upstairs, the clock still too early despite the low black quilt of night overhead, he tries to sound less abrupt when he says good night. Every time he thinks he might be able to take another step closer, presume upon her for the things they used to share, he remembers his hands. Tonight she stood when he did, and before he came upstairs she stepped closer, paused, and hugged him. He had frozen, a dreadful moment of panic, and then somehow he had managed to put his arms around her, and they had stood like that for a second or two before he felt so confused and awkward that he’d stepped away. And he’d wanted to kick himself, but there was too much he didn’t know—where to put his hands when the hug ended, for one thing, and what to do with the dizzying blur of her hair against his face, when to let go or not. The uncertainty derails him—he knows she still loves him, or at least that she still feels some kind of connection to him. But how could he touch her with hands like this? Would she even want him to? Surely she can’t want them on her. So, another night alone, but this one less of a disaster than the last. She had said home, earlier; they share that want. Then he will keep working to make it so.

  * * *

  • • •

  June continues her work with Melody Keswick and the displaced persons, telling Alec while they eat or sit before the fire in the evening about the day’s meetings or the news that trickles into Fenbourne about the rest of the world. With each day that passes, Alec feels more at home in the cottage and in Fenbourne. When he walks through the village by himself, he tries not to avoid people, tries to focus on the moments of beauty that call at him, whether a hare watching him from the side of the road or a sow thistle prickling against his palm. He wishes it were easier to shove his hands into gloves, so that he could stop relying on pockets for both warmth and disguise. And each night he tries to push himself to act on his feelings, and each night he fails. The gap between what he wants and what he can do feels wholly insurmountable, even while he can sense June’s growing uncertainty. The hugs become a bit less awkward, but there is always that moment when his hands fall to her waist like they did so long ago and he panics. He always pulls away, feeling the pang of knowing that before, he would have left his hands in place and pulled her close to kiss her. And now he looks down into her face and wonders if that is what she wants, and how he is meant to know. It used to be that kissing her was one of the best things he knew, and now it is just another way he can’t remember how to be.

  While June comes and goes, Alec struggles to reorient himself. He shuffles through newspapers and magazines, coming to terms with the new state of the world, teaching himself how to turn the pages again. He practices pages with Smasher’s Bible too, scrawling out verses he recognizes on a sheet of rough paper with a stub of pencil. His efforts to write have been disastrous so far, but he keeps at it. And for now June has offered to help him with letters to the families of the friends he lost, as well as requests for information he will send to the RAF in the hopes of finding out what happened to Sanjay and the others.

  Every time he walks through Fenbourne he pauses at the office of his solicitor, Mr. Swift, then goes on. It seems too final, somehow, no matter how clearly Alec understands the task will need to be done. It seems easier to spend his time instead looking through the pages of adverts and seeing if anyone is hiring for whatever it is he can do. Although that is a question itself, isn’t it? There are days when the queries for men who can lift or write or operate a machine overwhelm him, and those days he is most likely to strike out as far as he can into the fens until he is alone with the sky and his hands don’t matter as much.

  With the RAF he had had a future, not to mention a plan for himself, and for June. Money is not the main concern—he has his parents’ estate and the small sum that had come to him at Constance’s death, but he has always thought of those as something to set aside for the future. In the present he needs to work, to be productive. Despite his ruined hands, there must be something, mustn’t there? A way to find his way back to the sense of purpose he’d had as a pilot?

  Midway through the first week, Mrs. Hubbox comes, along with a boy called George, who appears to belong to her despite his East End accent. It’s hard to think of the housekeeper as Mrs. Hubbox, when he knew her for so long as Mary, the Attwells’ maid. How has she become this middle-aged woman with a cheerful Cockney son? Later, June tells him that George had been one of their evacuees, and that Mrs. Hubbox had claimed him after his mother’s death in a Whitechapel bombing. He tucks away that information, trying to rid himself of the sense that Fenbourne has become a bewildering orphanage.

  * * *

  • • •

  A few days later, June returns from one of her meetings with a basket. Alec stands to greet her, distracted by the basket but also by the excited glow in June’s face. The basket shifts in his arms as she hands it to him, and a low whimper escapes it. He sits and opens the lid, and a small brown puppy pops up, all eyes and ears and tail.

  “June?” He glances at her, but most of his attention is held by the puppy. He lays a palm across the top of her head, and her tail flutters. When he lifts her out of the basket, she wiggles against him, licking at his face and fingers.

  “I thought you might enjoy the company,” June says quietly, her eyes still gleaming. “You know Melody’s retrievers, yes? One got loose, and apparently there was a tryst with a spaniel from one of those farms on the Ely road.”

  “I see,” Alec says, but he’s only half listening. The puppy is soft and so warm, her belly against his forearm like a compress. He looks up at June. “She’s lovely.”

  June beams at him. “At any rate, she needed a home.”

  The puppy nips at his fingers, and Alec cradles her against his chest. For a moment he can almost believe his hands are fine. Here is something he can hold without wishing for his hands to be as they once were. He sets the puppy on the floor, and she winds herself around his legs, tail wagging ecstatically before she sets to chewing at his bootlaces. “She’s a beauty. And look at those paws!”

  “Yes,” June says, stepping closer and eyeing the puppy. “I expect she’ll be a good-sized dog, Alec.”

  “I imagine so,” he says. He reaches out with his left hand and brushes it across the back of June’s hand, his stomach knotting when he doesn’t know what to do next. The puppy barks, and Alec stands. When he goes to the door, the puppy follows, and he grins at her.

  “There’s a bit of rope in the kitchen, if that would be useful,” June says.

  “I’ll get her a proper lead tomorrow,” Alec says. He bends and strokes the puppy’s back. “Come on, little girl.” The puppy barks again, and he scoops her up and carries her outside.

  It’s a clear night, early enough that the moon is just rising off to the east. Alec makes sure the gate is closed and sets the puppy careful
ly down on the tired, frost-gray grass. She looks at him, barks again, and sets off to explore, looping back to him every few minutes. Alec watches her, hardly aware of the cold, his heart beating so hard for June and this little tobacco-colored animal that he can hardly stand it.

  Overhead, the stars pepper the sky, and when he looks up to find his bearings the way he always has, his breath catches. For the first time in years, he remembers his mother telling him how to follow the stars from Ursa Major to the North Star at the tip of the smaller bear’s tail. He looks back toward the house, where June is leaning in the open doorway, watching him. He smiles.

  The puppy completes another loop, pouncing at Alec’s feet and grabbing his laces again. He crouches to fuss her ears, then glances back up into the night. How many times had he sat in the velvet dark with his mother and listened to her tell him stories about the stars? All those swans and dragons, princesses lost and found. The star bears shimmer overhead, the most constant thing he has ever known, the stories and the stars his guide and solace.

  “Ursa,” he says. He looks back at June. “What would you think if I called her Ursa?”

  June’s face lights up, and she glances at the sky. She smiles at him. “Ursa is perfect.”

  1946, Fenbourne

  A Sunday in early February, and the six bells of St. Anne’s peal into low-slung clouds. June sits at the kitchen table, coffee at her elbow, working the crossword in the Sunday Times. It still feels like a bit of a luxury to have it fresh on Sunday mornings, rather than waiting for a bundle of them to arrive by ship at Anderson. But today’s puzzle is less of a solace than it usually is—the weather has muffled the world, and so she is too aware of the church bells. The changes ringing out over the fens from St. Anne’s belfry had always meant home, and the complicated course of a plain bob minor had been one of the first codes she’d ever understood. They have sounded the same her whole life—from the bawling tenor of Great Tom to the clear treble silvering out over the fens from Little John. The apostle bell, her father had called that.