The Stars Are Fire

by Anita Shreve

  —

  The sleek Packard pulls to the curb, and Grace gets in.

  “What happened?” John Lighthart asks as he turns toward her, one arm resting on the steering wheel. He is in his white coat, and she notices a tiny bloodstain on his sleeve.

  “I need to hire a nurse to take care of Gene, and I can’t go back to the agency. I was hoping you knew of someone.”

  “Days? Full-time?”

  “Live-in.”

  “Well, I’m glad,” he says. “Now you’re being sensible.”

  “No, I’m not,” she says, looking directly into his eyes. She trusts him. “I’m leaving Gene.”

  “Does he know?” the doctor asks.

  “No.” She pauses. “Will you help me?”

  “You know I will,” he says, adjusting his position. “But are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “No, but I have to try.”

  “You’re taking the children?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  He gazes down the street, thinking. “There was a young woman who came to us looking for work. I couldn’t hire her, though I wanted to. I know she’s done live-in care before.”

  Grace notes the kindness mixed with strength in his eyes, in his mouth. She has only minutes left until the children wake, if they haven’t already.

  “I’ll call her when I get back,” the doctor says.

  “I need her tomorrow morning.”

  John raises an eyebrow. “That’s awfully soon.”

  “I have to leave before I lose my courage.”

  “It’s live-in, room and board and so forth?”

  “And eighty dollars a week,” Grace adds.

  “That’s high,” the doctor says.

  “It’s for supplies and groceries, too. I’m also hiring a housekeeper.”

  “Well, it’s not an offer she’s likely to refuse. Her name is Sarah Brody.”

  “Please tell her to come to the kitchen door at seven o’clock in the morning.”

  He studies her face. He touches her hand. “When you worked at the clinic, for a while there, I conveniently forgot that you were married. I thought of you as single.”

  “At times, so did I.”

  “Just remember how strong you are,” he says.

  —

  After Grace has put the children to bed, she walks into the room that used to be her mother’s. The books and the licorice drops are still there. Maybe Sarah will go exploring and find the drops and eat them.

  “Mother, I’m about to do a terrible thing,” Grace says, again addressing her absent parent.

  —

  Grace has two letters to write.

  Dear Gene,

  This is to tell you that I’ve gone on a long trip with the children, and I’m not sure when I’ll be back. By now you have met Sarah, and I trust you’ll mend more quickly in her care. She’s extremely capable and well recommended. I have also hired a housekeeper named Peggy.

  If you think about the last several days, I’m certain you will agree that there’s been an unhealthy atmosphere between us and that it was beginning to affect the children. I will bring them back to you soon for a visit, and I will never deny your right to see them if it can be managed.

  I’ve arranged for Sarah’s and Peggy’s salaries and the bills to be paid by my bank, so you needn’t worry about anything.

  I think that if the fire hadn’t happened, we’d have continued as the little family that we were. In time, I believe, we would have come to care about each other in a way that was companionable. But the fire did happen, and that changed everything.

  I hope you’ll be happier and that your injuries will heal.

  Grace.

  Dear Mother,

  By the time you get this, I’ll be on a journey with the children. I could call this a little vacation, but I won’t. Truth is, I’m leaving Gene and taking the children with me. He’s become intolerable, frightening all of us. I have reason to believe that we all might be in danger. I know you’ll think this melodramatic on my part, but you’ll just have to trust me. I’ve hired an experienced live-in nurse to take care of him. I’m hopeful that without me in the house, and the poisonous relationship that has developed between us, he’ll make more progress and be happier. I’ve hired a housekeeper, too.

  As soon as I’ve reached a destination—I don’t know exactly where I’m going right now—I’ll call or write you with a phone number and an address so that we can be in touch. I can never thank you enough for taking such good care of the children while I was trying to find my way. And for taking such good care of me, I might add.

  Don’t worry about me, Mother. I’ve discovered, ever since the fire, or maybe more recently, that I have inner resources I can count on.

  The check is for you to make a down payment on a house. I can pay for all of it. In my next letter, I’ll explain everything.

  With all my love,

  Grace

  —

  It takes her three tries to get the letter into the envelope.

  —

  Grace lies on the nursery cot. In the morning, she’ll change all the linen. She’s already rid Merle’s room of her personal items and photographs.

  Ought she drive south to try to find Aidan? If she didn’t have children, she would. She would hunt him down and surprise him and hope that he reciprocated her feelings. A soloist performing with an orchestra, however, might take her weeks to find. And when she did, she and the children would be a burden no matter how fond he was of them. But the urge to drive south is a powerful one.

  To drive west is shortly to encounter John Lighthart at the clinic. She would like to work and keep his friendship. But she can’t work and care for her children at the same time, and she doesn’t want to relinquish Claire and Tom to a nanny. She herself must raise them and keep them safe. Of less importance, but still critical, is the fact that the clinic isn’t far enough away from Merle’s house that word of Grace’s whereabouts might not somehow get back to Gene. Might Grace be arrested for kidnapping? It seems absurd to her, but she believes Gene capable of anything.

  To drive east is to drive into the ocean.

  She will have to leave with no destination then. She won’t focus on a place to settle, but rather on the mechanics of freeing herself.

  —

  Sarah arrives at seven in the morning in her uniform. The woman has dark blond hair, blue eyes, and an air of confidence. Grace has made a large breakfast for her and the children. When the kids aren’t listening, she asks Sarah to give Gene the envelope with Grace’s letter inside sometime after lunch. Grace tells Claire that they are all going on a little vacation, and that Sarah, a nurse, will take good care of Daddy. Claire warms to the idea of a vacation and asks, “Will there be new toys?”

  “Yes,” says Grace.

  —

  While her children chat with Sarah in the kitchen, Grace moves to the library and stares at the paneled walnut door. In this room, she and Aidan once made love. She has never adjusted to the fact that it has become her husband’s room, its resonance no longer that of passion, but rather that of sadness and emotional turmoil. Reaching for the brass doorknob, she hesitates before turning it. Only her fingertips touch the metal. Inside, Gene is lying painless and asleep, or he is waiting for his own day to begin. Does he feel remorse of any kind? Grace thought, in a moment of empathy and generosity, that she would go into his room, sit in a chair, and try to talk to him about the terror he was creating in the night for the children. She wasn’t going to mention herself, because that was the point, wasn’t it? To punish her, to have power over her.

  She removes her fingers from the knob in case she inadvertently turns it.

  As if by mere touch she had instructed the door to swing open, Gene stands at the threshold, startling Grace so much that she grabs on to the back of a chair. His jaw is set, he has on clean navy silk pajamas, and he’s wearing his eye patch. “Where are you going?” he asks.

  Grace shake
s her head, stunned by her terrible luck.

  “You were about to come into my room, weren’t you?”

  She puts a hand to her chest and remembers that she has on a good dress. Not a special one, but a good one. She has fake pearls at her ears.

  She’s struck dumb.

  “You’re going somewhere?” An entirely different question from his first one.

  Her vision narrows to a black dot, but then returns.

  “What’s going on?” he asks, beginning to suspect something.

  “I was coming to wake you,” she says, her voice thin. “There’s someone I want you to meet. Wait here.”

  Fighting for air, she enters the kitchen, where Sarah is sitting with the children. “Sarah, I’d like to speak with you for a moment. Claire, you stay here and watch your brother. You’re a big girl now.”

  When Sarah stands, Grace notes that her back is straight and her legs are strong. The nurse looks like a woman who, while polite, can handle a challenge. There’s no time to explain anything further to her, just a moment for an introduction that has only a small chance of being successful.

  “Gene, I’d like you to meet Sarah Brody. She’s an extremely qualified nurse and is going to help with your care. Sarah, this is my husband, Gene.”

  There’s a long moment of silence. Sarah smiles. Gene cocks his head, considering.

  Does Gene understand? Does he know that he’s about to exchange one life for another, and that the other is potentially a better one?

  His scrutiny of Sarah continues. Then he looks at Grace as if he knew her plans. Before he can say another word, however, Sarah moves in front of Grace, and with a deft turning motion of her hands, she coaxes Gene back into his room.

  Sarah is more welcome than a vase of flowers. Than a wife.

  —

  Grace lifts Tom and tells Claire to come with her. Collecting one of the suitcases, she hustles her children down the driveway and along the block to the Ford. “Wait here, don’t move,” she says to Claire.

  Grace, crouching, runs and limps as best she can to the top of the drive and collects the second suitcase.

  With legs shaking and stomach hollow, Grace drives slowly along the coast road as if tempting the hand of God to hook on to the car and haul it back to Merle Holland’s house. She remembers the old baby carriage lost in the fire, the one with the navy enameled chassis and the white leather trim, and for a moment she pictures pushing Claire and Tom out of town with steely determination. When she comes to a stop sign, she rolls down her window, sticks out her arm, and bends it at the elbow. She’s headed north.

  Epilogue

  1950

  Grace

  “What are you doing on the ground?” Rosie asks.

  “I’m trying to take a picture of the stars.” Grace peers through the lens of the camera Rosie and Tim gave her for Christmas. “They’re so clear tonight.”

  Rosie lays a towel on the seat of a teak deck chair and sits.

  “I can see them with my eyes, but not at all with the lens,” Grace adds.

  “The camera isn’t perfect.”

  “It is perfect. You’ve seen the photographs of the kids.”

  “I have,” says Rosie, “but aren’t the stars awfully far away?”

  “I don’t get it. The camera is a lens. My eye is a lens. The sun is the same distance from each, and I can take a picture of the sun. Well, sort of. The stars are the same distance from each, but I can’t find a single twinkling dot in the camera.”

  “Not enough light,” Rosie says, putting a cigarette to her lips. “Now get up. You’ll catch your death.”

  Grace props her body on her arm and then stands. “My mother used to say that when I was a kid.”

  Rosie lays another towel on another deck chair meant for Grace.

  “Thanks,” Grace says, fitting the camera back into its case. “Have you seen how curious Claire is about this? Yesterday, I let her hold the camera and look through the lens and push the shutter. I can’t wait to get the roll of film developed so that she can see her pictures. I’m excited about the idea of teaching her the rudiments of photography.”

  “Don’t leave the camera lying around Ian. First thing he’d do is take it apart.”

  “And then he’d put it back together again. He’s going to be an engineer one day.”

  “They’re both asleep?”

  “Yes, yours?” Grace asks.

  “I left the whole bedtime thing to Tim,” Rosie says and laughs. “It’ll be good for him. He hasn’t done it in ages. And if I have to read The Poky Little Puppy one more time, I’ll scream.”

  —

  When Grace arrived in Tim and Rosie’s driveway in Nova Scotia during the summer of 1948, she bent her head to the steering wheel while Rosie and Tim, stunned and elated by her presence, took Tom and Claire out of the Ford. Grace had driven straight through, and she was more exhausted than she’d ever been. She hadn’t dared to stop for fear that she’d lose her nerve.

  She was malnourished and dehydrated, and for two weeks she lay in a guest room bed, sickened by remorse and guilt and also a kind of moral anxiety. One day, after much careful attention from Rosie, Tim and she appeared at Grace’s bedroom door. Tim sat in a chair and called a halt to the remorse. He told Grace she had a new life before her as well as happy children. Then Rosie took Grace outside, where they sat together on the rocks by the sea and talked. In that hour, Grace could feel her body repairing itself. Rosie swore it was the sea air that cleared her head.

  —

  Grace’s first act of independence was to design a house for herself and the children. It was constructed on the land beside Tim and Rosie’s. Grace’s is a simple cape with three bedrooms upstairs, painted white and unadorned: white trim, no shutters. Inside, she has a washing machine, a dryer, a bathtub, a shower, and a record player, luxuries she decided she couldn’t live without. Both Grace’s and Rosie’s houses lie on land owned by Rosie’s mother.

  Grace’s mother visits twice annually, Christmas and summer. Because the journey, by train and bus, takes three days, Marjorie makes a vacation out of it, staying overnight in hotels that appeal to her. Now there’s a plan in motion to launch a ferry from Bar Harbor to Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, which will cut the time in half.

  The deck chairs are perched on an invisible dividing line between Grace’s house and Rosie’s so that they can hear the children. The first warm evening of the season envelops them after a winter Grace can describe only as gray. She thinks Gray ought to be a season of its own—running from early January to late April. “Happy Gray,” she could write to someone on a note card.

  “Iced teas,” Tim calls from the porch.

  “That was fast,” says Rosie when Tim reaches them.

  “I just tell them to jump in bed.”

  “And they do that for you?”

  Tim smiles. “I confess I took advantage of the novelty of the situation. I skipped the bath and told them a short story. Then I lifted them high in the air and plopped them into their beds.”

  “That wasn’t the deal!” Rosie cries. “Now I’ll have to bathe them in the morning. They were filthy.”

  “Nothing that’ll kill them. Anyway, I came out here because I have an idea for you.”

  Grace raises her glass. “First iced tea of the season,” she says to both.

  “Drink it slowly,” warns Tim. “It’s really a watered-down Dark and Stormy.”

  “What’s the occasion?” Rosie asks, sniffing her drink.

  “I was thinking that you need a break.”

  “A break?” Rosie asks as if she doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

  “A break, a trip. You and Grace could go to Halifax for the weekend.”

  “Both of us?” asks Grace. “Who would watch the kids?”

  “We’ll let the mothers fight over them.”

  Rosie takes a long sip. “I have to say…I could really use a break. It’s been a hell of a long winter. How about you, Grace?”
<
br />   Rosie and Tim go to Halifax once a year, but Grace hasn’t been yet. Apart from her semiannual journeys to Gene’s house, she hasn’t been much farther than the next town over, where a market and shops line a small main street.

  Halifax. A city. Just her and Rosie.

  “Yes,” she says.

  —

  The first trip Grace made to Gene’s house with the children, this time stopping to eat and sleep, she couldn’t catch any air as she mounted the steps to the front door: She dreaded what she might find behind it. Sarah, the nurse, who was no longer wearing a white uniform, ushered Grace and the children into a room that smelled floral despite the absence of flowers. Gene was sitting upright in a chair and had been fitted with a glass eye. The skin on the left side of his face no longer looked raw, but instead scarred, which was somehow better. He wore a cap and had cut his hair short so that his head no longer looked as lopsided as it had. The most astonishing change, however, was the moment he bent forward in the chair and stood. In a freshly ironed shirt and pressed trousers, he held Tom’s hand and walked with him and Claire into the kitchen, where Grace guessed a snack awaited.

  “He’s improved so much!” Grace couldn’t help blurting out.

  “He works hard at it,” the nurse replied.

  “Does he?”

  Grace suspected it was all Sarah’s doing. “How are your funds?” she asked. “Do you need anything?”

  The nurse blushed. “We don’t need anything. Gene has his inheritance now.”

  We.

  Inheritance.

  Grace didn’t betray the fact that she hadn’t known about an inheritance. She thought, as she observed Sarah, that possibly she and Gene had fallen into a mutually satisfying relationship: Gene had a “wife”; Sarah’s financial future was set. Or was Grace selling the nurse short, and she truly loved the man? A man who had not spoken to Grace when she entered, or even acknowledged her existence.

  Grace understood then that she was dead to Gene, and a great weight was lifted from her.

  —

  Grace is content. Sometimes happy. Rarely troubled or anxious except when the children are sick. She knows the money from Merle’s jewelry will run out in time, but she hopes that she can get Claire into school in the fall, thus allowing Grace to look for a job to supplement that income. She’ll still have Tom during the school hours, though it’s possible she could find a babysitter to allow her to work for some of them. At first she thought she might try to be a receptionist at a doctor’s office, but after Christmas and the camera, she began to dream of becoming a photographer for the local newspaper. She’s noticed that they often use stock photos, some of them years old, when they print their stories. She doesn’t know what such a job would pay, but she doesn’t need much. Food and clothing, a babysitter, gas for the car, heating and electricity, and, of course, film for the camera. Both the house and the car are paid for. Even if she could earn thirty dollars a week, she might be able to make it. For some assignments, she could take the children with her.