The Stars We Share

by Rafe Posey

  All instinct, her lips move to his ear. His hands rise, then fall back to his lap. June pulls away, just a bit, and he lifts his head. She’s moving so slowly, afraid that if she goes too fast Alec will bolt. And then she’s kissing him, one hand on his forearm and the other draped light against the faintly stubbled line of his jaw. He makes a sound, almost a moan.

  June’s heart is too fast, too loud. She’s half-afraid of the thunder of it, but the only thing that drowns it out is kissing Alec. When his left hand comes up against her waist, trembling just below her ribs, she almost forgets to breathe. Slowly, she unbuttons her blouse, takes Alec’s hand as carefully as she can, and presses it softly to her breast. He makes that sound again, his palm gentle against her. She fumbles with the buttons of Alec’s shirt, and the plaid fabric pools away from her fingers. When she dips her face to the hollow of his clavicle, his other hand settles itself at the small of her back, pressing her closer.

  June looks into Alec’s eyes, coffee-dark and as urgent now as the throb of her pulse. She can feel him quickening against her, and for a moment she thinks recklessly of slipping her fingers below the waist of his trousers, of giving in right there on the sofa. She smiles and leans closer, and Alec’s twisted fingers trace across her skin, then pause. “Upstairs,” he says hoarsely. He gestures at the windows. June nods. Anywhere, she thinks. Anywhere.

  * * *

  • • •

  After, they lie together in Alec’s bed. She feels as if a curtain has been pulled and the sun let in, even while she’s not sure what’s next or how to proceed. But perhaps for the moment the larger picture doesn’t matter. Perhaps she can leave it to one side, for a bit. So much of Alec’s return has been so difficult, and right now she just wants to bask in what’s happened.

  Alec breathes slowly against her collarbone. His fingers have found a place at her hipbone that seems to fit them just so, and June wants to bask in that, too. When his breathing evens out, she kisses the top of his head and lies as quietly as she can, making a map of him in her mind.

  * * *

  • • •

  The end of February is snowy and frigid, and more often than not Alec and Ursa return from their treks wet and rimed with half-frozen mud. June is always chilly, and having Alec to curl up against in the night is a boon. When they sit together by the fire in the evenings, tangled together while they read or listen to the wireless, she keeps a hand on him, or leans shoulder to shoulder with him. June knows she is the ballast that keeps him steady. In many ways the new routine is the same as the old, but June loves the ways in which it is different—the feeling of being part of something, of belonging with Alec again. Of being together. She continues her work with Melody, and Alec spends most of his time with Ursa or poring through newspapers, looking for a job and sometimes trying to find the men he’d flown with.

  But even with many of the same trappings, their life in the cottage is not the same as it was. The constancy of touch, of curling together in the night . . . Alec had warned her early on that he would be a bad bedmate, that the dark places he occupies in the night might cost her sleep. And it is true that there are nights when his dreams echo out of him like the spray of lake from a collapsing dam and he wakes wordlessly, sweating and reeking of fear. June tries to be his ballast then, too.

  March brings more snow and a leaden cold that settles across the Fenlands. Most mornings Alec is downstairs first, letting Ursa out into the brisk air. Sometimes, though, June’s sleep ends even earlier than Alec’s, and on those mornings June finds the tracks of rabbits and shrews outside the kitchen door. It will be spring in a few weeks, and beneath the snow there are early shoots waiting to flourish.

  But with the longer days come more of Alec’s bad memories. An early primrose on the lip of a ditch can be fine one day during an afternoon walk, and anathema the next. It’s impossible to know where the strains will come. He has begun to fret out loud about whether he will ever find work, and if not, how he will be able to support her when they marry, and his tension adds a new stress to their relationship. June worries over it—surely there are innumerable things he can do, even if they are not the things he would have done before. And surely he will not let his pride get in the way of this partnership they both want so much. Especially when the stress he feels over living together before they’re married only adds to his other anxieties.

  In April, Roger comes to visit, and June keeps him back to catch up while Alec is out with Ursa. She and Roger had corresponded the year before, while June had been occupied with trying to find Alec; Roger had made his own efforts through the echelons of the British Army. With Alec finally home, Roger had put in for leave, but in the postwar chaos it had taken this long for him to be approved and shipped back. It’s the first time Roger has seen his nephew in three years, since they’d both been in Algeria, and June, unsure what Alec had told him about his hands or anything else, had braced herself for the shock she was worried Roger would feel.

  But it had been better than she’d expected. Roger had seen worse and wasn’t afraid to say so. And when June had had a chance to talk to him alone, she had told him of Alec’s fears. All those dashed hopes, roosting like vultures. Roger had sat up with Alec late into the night, the two men talking quietly. The next morning, Alec had seemed lighter, somehow. More determined and less troubled, as if he had found a way through the maze of his efforts.

  * * *

  • • •

  A few weeks later Alec bursts out of the house and into the garden, calling June’s name. A startled skylark flits away, its song interrupted, and June straightens up from the vegetable plot, which she’s been clearing of the debris of a sudden spring squall. For a moment she thinks he’s hurt, and she starts toward him.

  “Look,” he crows, brandishing a letter as he crosses the garden. As he approaches she can see that his eyes are bright with tears. “It’s Sanjay! He made it!”

  June regards both Alec and the letter with pleasure. Of all the men to find . . . They had been more than just pilots together; Alec and Sanjay had been friends.

  “Another chap got my address to him,” Alec says, his voice breaking. “He’s in Scotland.”

  June steps closer, more relieved than she can say. “He’s well, I hope?”

  “Very much so,” he says, his eyes racing over the letter again. “He always said he’d head to Edinburgh after the war . . . I believe there was a woman there his family wanted him to marry. In any event, he’s working for a shipbuilding company . . .” He glances back at June. Something is ticking behind his eyes while he thinks it through, and June goes still, waiting. He looks so alive, and she doesn’t want to startle it out of him.

  “He wants to know if I’d like him to put in a word with the foreman,” Alec says at last. “And I think we ought to talk about that, June.”

  She blinks. “About moving to Edinburgh?” She tilts her head. “He’s quite sure you could find work?”

  Alec nods. “Place called Livingstone and Gray. Apparently they’ve brought on rather a lot of former airmen and whatnot . . . Sanjay says they want men who know their way around a plane, or a ship . . .” He regards her quietly for a moment and puts his arms around her. She leans gratefully into his embrace, loving the feel of him, the warm clean scent of his skin.

  “Shall we marry, June? Start over together, somewhere new? If Sanjay can get me a line on something . . . I’ll never find anything here, but perhaps in Scotland it would be different.”

  She hugs him closer. Perhaps somewhere else there will be fewer ghosts, and she and Alec can strive to become something new, not a different iteration of what they were before. “Yes,” she says. “Let’s.”

  Fieldfares whistle in the hedgerow, and the scent of mud and water rises fecund from the ground. If they go, she will miss the Fenlands, but in a village where the church bells ring out all they have lost, everything is full of echoing reminders. Ve
ry well, she thinks, the maps already coming together in her head in a hopeful shimmer. Onward.

  BOOK FOUR

  1948, Edinburgh

  The house on Shakespeare Close is frenzied with tulips, rocketing out of the soil at Alec every time he comes up the front walk. The riot of late-spring color, all those reds and yellows, and the way the stones of the oldest lanes hold together in the Old Town and the castle remind him of Srinagar, a bit. Morningside, in particular, feels sometimes more like a small town than part of a bustling city, and he likes it that way. Edinburgh Castle and Arthur’s Seat loom in the northeast, but he and June are largely free of the flurry of activity that the city proper carries through summer.

  On a day like this, the May sun streams through the tulips and lights up in filigree the veiny leaves of the pear tree craning upward where the front garden meets the street. The whole of early evening is a balmy weight on the back of Alec’s neck, and Edinburgh seems like the best idea anyone has ever had. He pauses to dig for his latchkey on the front stoop of the old villa, its yellowing Georgian bricks reassuringly solid and dappled with the crisp shadow of the rhododendron.

  This part always takes a moment—despite the work he’s done on his hands over the last two years and all the improvement that has come with that work, there are still these pauses like the skipping of a note in a song. Fetching out his keys bedevils Alec endlessly, though he’s experimented with a variety of systems: larger key fobs that are easier to grasp, a strap built into his attaché case to make the keys quicker to find, a loop from his belt into his pocket . . . but nothing has ever quite solved it. Per ardua ad astra, he thinks. Through adversity to the stars. The RAF’s motto, and now his own. He grips the key at last and smiles. The struggles have been worth it. The struggles have brought him to Edinburgh, to a job he likes with Sanjay at Livingstone & Gray in Leith, to a new closeness with June. To this lovely old house on the oversize lot, his and June’s, bought by the pair of them with their combined inheritances and the proceeds from selling Constance’s cottage. A long series of confusing days and weeks, getting them out of Fenbourne, but look where they had ended up. It’s the perfect place for starting over, or for a young married couple looking to start a family. Ad astra indeed.

  Inside, Ursa greets him with a quivering tail and the mincing smile she sometimes wears when she has spent her day on the sofa, where she knows very well she is not meant to be. Alec lays his hands against the sides of her jaws and shakes her head gently; the waft of her tail increases. She follows him to the kitchen, where June has left him a note: She is at the university, working on her research into algebraic varieties, and will be back before supper. Alec smiles; he has always known how brilliant June is, but watching her bask in the work, the way she looks when she talks about zeta functions and a thousand other things he doesn’t understand, gets into his chest and lights him up with pride. He taps his fingers on the note, then heads upstairs to change into something better suited for a ramble up to Blackford Pond. Ursa follows him.

  The sun won’t be down for hours yet, and the angle of the light through the bedroom window, broken into piecework by the thick leaves of the magnolia outside, catches at the pale scars on his thighs. He hardly remembers how they got there—which disaster marked him. His hands, his legs, a knotty tangle at the base of his spine, some of the hearing in his left ear. The trains on which he had been shifted across the Continent had sometimes come under fire. British, American, Russian . . . perhaps the Germans themselves, if they had known what manner of train it was.

  When he’s dressed, he lets Ursa lead him back down the stairs, where she goes straight to the front door and sits, her eyes fixed on her collar and lead.

  “Silly baby,” Alec says. Ursa’s tail speeds up, but her gaze doesn’t falter. He slips the collar over her head, running his thumb up the smooth slope of her forehead, and clips the lead on. He checks his trouser pocket for the house key, and then they’re off.

  Ursa stops to smell the rhododendrons, sniffing for mice or moles, then moves on, uttering a low, excited whine to lead him down the walk to the gate. Rachel Murray, a young mother who lives round the way, is out on a walk as well, with her son, Ian, in his pushchair.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Oswin,” says Rachel. She smiles at Ursa.

  “Afternoon,” Alec says. “Fine day, isn’t it?”

  “’Tis” Rachel says. “Everything all bright and growing.”

  Ian, not quite two, wriggles, reaching for Ursa. She sits, quivering, and stares at him.

  Alec says, “Ursa, would you like to say hello to Ian?”

  Ursa takes a step closer, sits again, and delicately raises her right front paw so Ian can reach it. He grabs her paw and squeezes ecstatically. “Doggie.”

  “She likes you very much,” Alec says to the baby. He’s glad, watching Ursa lick Ian’s fingers, that Rachel is not the kind of mother easily overwhelmed by a fear of dogs or their theoretical germs.

  “She’s nae the only one,” Rachel says.

  Alec nods. The bond between the two has been clear since the first time Ursa and Ian saw each other, not long after the Murrays moved in last summer. It can be difficult, sometimes, to navigate the confusion of watching Ursa with a small child—sometimes it’s hard to push away the fact that he had hoped for a baby of his own by now. June has her reasons, certainly, and they make sense—she is in the midst of her program at school, her focus almost entirely on the intricate dance of equations that make up her particular cosmos, and dealing as well with the stressors of being one of very few women in the university’s graduate courses.

  And of course there are his hands. They do well enough now for the quotidian details of maintaining a house and garden, and at the shipyards he has adapted tasks as much as he can. But being a father . . . That strikes him as a wholly separate list of challenges. Could he even hold a baby with these rough, knobby hands? Surely he will find his way through it, when the time comes.

  After a few more pleasantries, Alec and Ursa continue down the Close to Mortonhall Road. He weaves Ursa’s lead from hand to hand, practicing his grip as the doctor has instructed him. June had set herself to finding him help almost from the very first moment of their life in Edinburgh, and Captain Carnaby at the Royal Infirmary, for all his unorthodox ideas, has in fact helped him considerably. Alec had been afraid that Carnaby would fixate on his mental state or soothe him with snake oil, but he has turned out to be a sensible chap. It’s no small credit to him that Alec’s left hand has grown stronger and more functional, or that the right has regained a small measure of its old mobility and grip. The exercises Carnaby demands are grueling, but even on his worst days, Alec must agree that June’s searching has paid a considerable dividend.

  Ursa pauses to nose around the head of the path to the Jordan Burn. Most seasons, it’s hardly a trickle even before it vanishes under the willows beyond Glenisla Gardens, but the sound of it is always a delight. Part of what drew them to this part of Edinburgh, already desirable with its detached houses and the proximity to the King’s Buildings at the university, was the greenery.

  He tugs the lead gently, impatient to get to the pond and the trails that curl away from it. “Come along, Ursa.”

  * * *

  • • •

  There are swans at the pond, a cob and pen drifting with a clutch of cygnets trailing after them. Ursa eyes them, and Alec taps her softly on the forehead with his knuckle. She looks up at him, tongue lolling free, then back at the swans. He knows she won’t chase them; an encounter with a farm goose before they left Fenbourne has left her permanently wary of large birds.

  Watching the swans sets currents moving in his chest, reminders that although he is happier in Edinburgh with June than he’s been perhaps ever, there are still those gaps. Perhaps it’s the cygnets, the family the swans have made. Too, there is an energy in June that he doesn’t understand. He’s seen her sit as still as the i
ce that rimed the fens sometimes in the dark of winter when she’s working her equations or solving a puzzle, and he’s admired the grand long stride she has when they go for their walks. But this new hum feels like both at once, and he doesn’t know how to name it or what it means. Sometimes he finds her looking out the window at something too abstract to see, rather as if there is something hailing her, a clarion call that only she can hear. He feels in his bones that June’s longing for something more is not less than it was when they were children. In those moments, he can almost see a shadow surrounding her, the pent-up vibrations of a girl who has not yet found what she’s looking for.

  And that shadow worries him—it makes him wonder about her work, about the delays, no matter how reasonable, in growing their family. Love is meant to be all eggs in one basket, isn’t it? He knows he wants her forever, and she wants him, too. He believes this despite the lingering guilt, the idea that he has somehow trapped her, despite the ways the war changed them both. That feeling he had the first time he met her, of being with someone who could see who he really was, or was meant to be, has left him feeling as if his life is both more real and more perilous. He has so much more to lose now.

  * * *

  • • •

  An hour or so later finds him back at home, a set of schematics spread out across the dining table before him. It’s a new tugboat, which he hopes to sell to one of his connections at the port in Aberdeen. He’s eyed the bones of it in its berth at Livingstone & Gray, and now, studying the clear blue and black lines before him, he can see how it will look. All those years running his eyes over horses, cars, planes . . . Selling ships was not what he had ever expected to do, but he loves the deep joy that comes from being able to imagine the sweep of the hull, or the exact circumference of a smokestack, and find confirmation when he looks at the plans. One day he hopes to be part of the design team in their crowded, fuggy offices overlooking the mad glory of the yard, and if that dream is to come true, he must teach his hands to draw again. He lays a sheet of onionskin paper over the blueprint, licks the tip of the pencil clenched in his left hand, and begins to trace the tugboat’s lines.