The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  “I have to ask this,” Jake said. “But do you have anything financial to gain by having Elle live a few more months? Like a prenup that said you don’t inherit anything unless you’ve been married X amount of time?”

  “Jesus Christ, no. You’re seriously suggesting I’m doing this for the money?”

  “No, but someone could raise the issue if you had something to gain.”

  “We didn’t have a prenup.”

  “Works for me. Get me her will—so I have a copy. Next, did you discuss an advanced directive when she made her will?” He turned the page on his legal pad.

  “I went with her. To make a will in my name, too, but I don’t remember talking about an advanced directive.” I searched my memory. “Come to think of it, the hospital called me away for an emergency. I went back to the attorney’s office the following day.”

  “Talk to the attorney you used. Find out if he discussed it with her. Before we get into your relationship with Elle, what were her personal beliefs? She believed in God. What was her opinion on abortion?”

  “We are not doing this again.” I glowered at Jake.

  He shook his head, and we sat in silence for a few minutes, the clock ticking on the wall. “I won’t set you up again that way, which doesn’t mean I don’t want to explore using Pro-Life support, but I won’t blindside you, even if I think we could accomplish something incredibly important.”

  “You’re an asshole, you know that,” I said.

  “I’m your attorney, and you have to listen to me about this. We have to convince the judge about the kinds of decisions Elle would make on her own behalf. Her core beliefs are relevant. How she would feel about her unborn child is relevant. So how she felt about babies before they are born is important.”

  I stood and wandered over to the window. The fog had grown so dense I could barely see the opposite side of the street. My view of the future and perhaps my ability to tell whom I could trust were also clouded. All I knew was that I needed his help. I didn’t know how to find another lawyer who would have a chance of winning the case.

  “How did she feel about abortion?” he asked.

  I told Jake a half-truth. “She wasn’t in favor of abortion.”

  “Do you have anything in writing?”

  “In writing? Why would she have anything in writing about abortion?”

  He exhaled loudly. “She could belong to a group through her church.”

  “No. She wasn’t involved with any of that.”

  “Did she contribute to any Pro-Life organizations?”

  “No.”

  “Was she involved with any charities?”

  “Breast cancer, it killed her mother. And we sponsor four children in Guatemala through Save the Children.” Every time we lost another baby, we sponsored another child.

  “All right. But we need something that shows she was Pro-Life, that she believed life started at conception, that this baby would have already been real to her. Maybe during her college days she took an ethics class, and the papers are stowed away somewhere.”

  “As an undergraduate, she majored in physics and astronomy. Her doctoral thesis was on magnetohydrodynamic waves.”

  “What?”

  “Something to do with plasma physics—neutron stars—I think.”

  Jake shook his head. “She must have taken liberal arts classes when she was an undergrad at Bowdoin. It’s a liberal arts college.”

  “I don’t know. We weren’t exactly talking back then.”

  He scratched his chin. “That’s right, the two of you split up freshman year. How could I forget the way you moped around afterward listening to that U2 song? What was it? ‘I’m Losing You’?”

  “It’s called ‘The Sweetest Thing,’ ” I said. But like the lyrics, I was losing her. Only this time it was so much worse.

  “That’s right. Listen,” he said. “I need you to go through her things—if she still has her college papers. Anything she wrote down, anything that indicates she would put the baby first.”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw Elle sitting on the dock by the tidal river that flowed by our property, her feet dangling in the water, her diary in her hands. I saw her curled up by the window seat on winter nights, glancing up at the falling snow then writing in her journal. I remembered Elle just a few nights ago, cross-legged, writing tomes under the lamplight by the French doors to the widow’s walk.

  “What?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t know.” I rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands, wondering what she’d written in those journals for all those years. She once told me she started journaling when I was a foreign exchange student in high school. Letters. She began journals by writing letters to me, letters she never mailed. She said she still wrote “Dear Matt” instead of “Dear Diary.” But she never showed me any of these diaries, nor any of the entries. And a little intimidated, I never snuck a look. One time I asked what she was scribbling about and all she said was, “Some people meditate. This is how I work through my day. It’s like talking to my best friend. And you’re my best friend, but think of it this way, I spare you my whiny side.”

  Maybe I hadn’t wanted to know if she was whining about me. God, I missed her. I would have given anything to hear her, even to hear her bitch or tell me I was full of shit.

  “You all right?” Jake asked, bringing me back to the present.

  I glanced up at him. “Sure. I’ll see what I can dig up, but I don’t know if I’ll find anything that will help. Listen, the truth is, politically, Elle was Pro-Choice.”

  Jake let his head flop backward and covered his eyes. “No. I don’t want to hear that.”

  “I said politically. She didn’t want to force her beliefs down anyone else’s throat. She didn’t want to hear about dead babies in Dumpsters or young women bleeding to death by someone with dirty hands and a coat hanger. But Elle would never have aborted—no matter what it cost her.” I didn’t want to confess to Jake, but if it came out during the proceedings—and it could because my mother knew—I didn’t want Jake blindsided. “When Elle was fifteen, and I was seventeen, I got her pregnant.”

  Jake’s eyebrows flew up, and he leaned forward. “What happened to the baby?”

  I drew in a deep breath and told Jake about the daughter Elle and I lost a long time ago.

  11

  Twenty Years Before Elle’s Accident

  In late May of 1988, I returned home after spending my junior year of high school as a foreign exchange student in Wales. I thought I’d grown up over there, as if getting laid for the first time transformed a boy into a man. Later I would realize losing my virginity could not conjure an adult spirit. I was the same bubblegum-snapping, seventeen-year-old kid who had left ten months earlier, the youngest of four boys, filled with bravado. I told myself I could finally stand up and be counted as a man instead of the family’s pipsqueak.

  Home hadn’t changed much, a bit perhaps. My brother Mike had gotten his own place, and Mom had redecorated his room with this god-awful floral wallpaper, but otherwise not one fork or dinner plate had shifted location in the cupboard.

  Next door, however, Alice McClure, my mother’s best friend, was dying, and she was relying heavily on Elle for all sorts of things, from watching her little, seven-year-old brother to keeping track of how much beer Hank was consuming.

  Before I’d left for Wales, Elle had always followed me around like an annoying puppy with those big moss-green eyes of hers. I would have been at the top of my class if Elle hadn’t skipped two grades and landed in mine. She was one of those child prodigies, and I was merely brilliant. She was competition, and I tolerated her. The girl next door. A neighbor. A friend of forced proximity.

  Yet strangely, I’d missed her more than anyone else while I was gone, especially after her once-a-day letters stopped coming without explanation. Within hours of my return, I sought her out. Not because I recognized the truth: I loved her more deeply than I would ever love anyone else. I didn’t yet. I hadn
’t emerged from my childish narcissism.

  No, I banged on her back door because she hadn’t appeared at the airport along with the rest of the family. I gave her a second chance to welcome me home and invited her to the party a school buddy was throwing in my honor.

  Elle didn’t conform to the mold well enough to fit with the in-crowd. Even so, she came reluctantly because I asked. While I was grabbing a beer, high-fiving the hordes who’d come to celebrate my return, I realized Elle was gone.

  Her father’s parting dispatch was that I should look after her. Shit, I thought. I found her twenty minutes later out on the lawn staring up at the night sky. Of course she’d be stargazing with or without her telescope. I should have known to look there first.

  “It’s too crowded for me,” she said.

  I dropped down beside her and lay back with my arm tucked behind my head. “Where’s Orion?”

  She chuckled. “You can’t see Orion in a summer sky.” Without hesitation, she pointed. “There’s Vega, Altair, and Deneb, the summer triangle, each one the brightest in its constellation.”

  I glanced over at her. She was holding back. She probably knew an encyclopedia of information, complete with the solar mass and luminosity of each star.

  “I’ve seen a couple of shooting stars, too,” she said.

  “What did you wish for?”

  She grimaced and shook her head. “It would take a miracle to get what I want.”

  “Which is?”

  “Never mind. You can’t tell someone your wish or it won’t come true.” Her voice snagged like a fishing line on a lily pad, and she couldn’t yank it in. She sat up and turned away. Her voice broke again. “I’m heading home.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder and tugged her back to me. Her face was warm and wet, and I wondered how I’d missed that she must have been crying.

  “What is it?”

  She said nothing but clung to me. It had to be about her mother.

  “They can cure breast cancer, right?” I asked.

  “If they catch it in time, sure,” she said.

  “They did, right?”

  “It’s in her bones.”

  And suddenly the Barbie-doll blond wig that covered her mother’s head concealed something other than vanity. In a letter Mom wrote back in January, she told me about Alice’s cancer. There would be chemotherapy and radiation, Mom said, but I hadn’t grasped the full implication. Alice might die. Alice. God. “That’s bad? If it’s in her bones?” I asked.

  “Terrible. Don’t tell anyone, okay?” Elle was trembling. “She’s trying to be brave.”

  And so was Elle. Intrepid. Even as a teenager.

  I kissed her forehead, a caring gesture, nothing more. “Let’s see if we can see another shooting star,” I said.

  We eased down on our backs to the grass, side by side. I took her hand while I scrutinized the sky, searching for some way to make her feel better. Some way to make me feel better. I had nada. The night was supposed to go differently—be fun. Me. My friends. A party.

  Elle and I were close enough to one of the citronella torches that, after adjusting to the darkness, I could make out her face, and I found myself staring at her. Her braces were off her teeth, and she’d grown beautiful in my absence.

  Once in a while a kid or two came out on the lawn and wandered around. None of them said a thing to us. We said nothing to them. Or to each other. After a bit, Elle’s breathing grew soft. In the distance, the heavy bass of a Billy Idol song boomed out from the house. We were detached from the sound, and the activity slipped farther away until I was dreaming. Something. Like all dreams, it melted.

  When I awoke, my face was millimeters from Elle’s. I pushed the dial to look at my watch. It was a little past ten-thirty. “Wake up,” I whispered.

  Instead of rearing, her breathing deepened. I let my lips brush hers as much out of curiosity as out of lust. That’s when her eyes fluttered open. With our lips touching so gently, I wondered if I was the same guy I’d been in Wales, the one who thought of sex as a target.

  God, Elle’s lips were soft. At any moment I expected her to burst into juvenile laughter the way her little brother did when she tickled him right before we left her house earlier that night. She was a kid, too, but she didn’t laugh.

  And for the first time she didn’t look like a kid. I ran my fingers along her cheek, wondering why I’d never even considered kissing her before.

  Her breathing quickened as her lips held on mine, the pressure increasing hesitantly. I tried to slip my tongue into her mouth, but I guess the dare was too much. She shifted away from me and brought the pads of her fingertips to her mouth, and then, with her eyes locked on mine, she reached out and touched my lips as if she were bringing the kiss back to me.

  I didn’t have any idea what I should do next. I wanted her, but this was Elle.

  She stood, looking equally uncertain of herself. “It must be late. I’d better go home.”

  I rose and tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear, intending to kiss her again, seriously this time, but she backed away.

  “Elle.” What was I supposed to say? That I didn’t want her to leave? She had to. She was past curfew. “I’ll walk you home.”

  We didn’t talk about the kiss. We didn’t talk at all for a few minutes.

  The trees, tall oaks, maples, and pines, blocked the night sky from view as we strolled down the street. I tripped in a pothole, and feeling like a klutz, I tried to laugh it off. “I should have brought a flashlight.” My arm brushed against hers, half intentionally, half because I couldn’t see. I wanted to take her hand, but she’d broken away from my kiss, and the possibility of changing a relationship so rooted in established roles seemed as dangerous as anything I’d ever dared to do.

  After another block, she halted.

  I turned to her, needing to touch her again.

  “Matt?” Her voice whispered through the inky air. “Does that count as a kiss?”

  “What? That? Well, um, I guess. What do you mean?”

  “I’ve never kissed anyone before. Does that count as a kiss? Did you mean to kiss me?”

  “Yeah. Not at first, but yeah. I wanted to kiss you. Is that weird?”

  Elle slipped her hand in mine. “No, it was nice.”

  “What about a second kiss?” I inched closer, leaning over her.

  A car pulled out of a driveway, and like guilty schemers, we released each other’s hand and strolled awkwardly the last two blocks home.

  The TV lit the living room of her house with a blue hue. “It’s after eleven,” I said. “You’re late. I’ll come in with you and explain.”

  She opened the front door. Her father was conked out on the sofa.

  “No need. I guess he fell asleep,” Elle whispered. “Night, Matt.”

  I pecked her mouth and tried to tug her back onto the porch for more, but she pulled away again. “I can’t. Good night,” she said. The door slowly closed in my face.

  Through the window, I could see Elle rounding up beer bottles from the coffee table in front of her father, flipping on the kitchen light, and disappearing into the back of the house.

  In Wales, I’d had sex with a girl I didn’t care about—much. I could have—but she was more interested in conquest than even I was. This newborn fascination I had with Elle couldn’t be like that. We had to care about each other or it would be disastrous. Even at seventeen, I knew that much. But here’s the thing: I did care. That’s what made it scary. I already loved her—even if I didn’t love her like that. For days, I tried to convince myself it was a stupid crush.

  Besides, Elle was just a kid. Then I’d rationalize she would be fifteen in twelve more days, then eleven. Then it didn’t matter much; Elle’s mother ended up in the hospital with a blood infection, and her grandfather dropped dead from a stroke. If that weren’t enough, I was hit by a car.

  Actually, Hank ran me down, not on purpose, but he did. He’d been drinking, and I was out jogging afte
r dark. A downpour started, and somehow Hank hit me and broke my leg, my left tibia. He drove off, unaware. My folks figured it out the next day. His car had pulled into the driveway minutes after it happened, and then Dad found fabric from my running shorts embedded in Hank’s bumper.

  For Mom and Dad, my injuries presented a moral dilemma. Hank needed to stop drinking before he killed someone, especially since that someone could be me. Dad thought a drunk-driving, hit-and-run arrest might make Hank wake up to the reality he’d become an alcoholic. Mom worried about how sick Alice was and what would happen to Elle and Christopher if Hank went to prison. One dying mother, one jailbird father would likely land Elle and Chris in foster care. There were zip relatives—only my parents—and technically they weren’t related.

  My parents opted to handle the situation themselves. They confronted Hank, and utterly remorseful and relieved my broken leg would heal, he went to his first AA meeting, offered to pay my college tuition, and stayed sober—briefly.

  With the adults preoccupied, Elle and I stole plenty of opportunities to make out when no one was looking. No one was ever looking. No one even noticed we were smitten with each other. Why would they? Everyone assumed we had the same old relationship.

  Whether love at first sight is a myth or a legitimate phenomenon, I can’t say, but falling in love with Elle was as unexpected. I wish I could say it was a pure, chaste kind of love, and that I would have waited forever to make love to her. But I was seventeen. I’d already felt the curve and grind of a girl’s pelvis beneath my own. I knew Elle was too young. I did. But I couldn’t explain the hunger I had for her. And only in retrospect did I realize how big a mistake I was making by pushing her into sleeping with me.

  I was working the graveyard shift at L.L.Bean’s mail order, sleeping away the mornings, stealing the afternoons with Elle when she didn’t have to watch Christopher, and trying to put my hands places she continued to resist.