The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  When Hank was around, it was pretty obvious he was drinking again. His speech tumbled, and he tripped over things that weren’t there. I tried to ask Elle about it, but she only shrugged.

  One evening I heard my parents arguing. “Talk to him!” my mother yelled.

  “I have.” Dad dropped into his armchair. “I’ve dragged him to AA meetings, even threatened him with calling the police about what he did to Matt. If Hank is determined to drink himself to death, how the hell do you think I can stop him?”

  Mom hissed and stormed out of our house and into the McClures’.

  A few minutes later Elle knocked on our door.

  “Matt,” Dad yelled. “Ellie’s here. Why don’t the two of you take off for a while, go see a movie. Go ahead, take the car.” He picked up the keys, clenched them in his hand, then added, “Behave yourself.”

  We left, taking our freedom and clinging to each other. Elle and I hadn’t stopped having sex. It seemed more imperative now, like instead of being about wanting to touch her, making love was the reassurance and steadiness that we would survive together. I needed her. And when we were together, she showed me that she needed me, too.

  That Christmas was a pathetic sham of a holiday. My mother had to work, and my father, brothers, and I all planned to descend on Aunt Beth’s for Christmas dinner. Mike and I went next door to invite the McClures to come with us.

  Elle ushered us through the kitchen door and gestured we should sit at the table, offering us hot chocolate and Danish.

  “Not sure there’s time for that, Elle,” Mike said. “Just came by to see if you guys want to come with us.”

  “We can’t. There’s no nurse today. I have to take care of my mom,” she said.

  Her father was in the living room, drooling into the sofa’s cushion. Even on Christmas Day. Damn him.

  Elle gave me a hug, and as she stepped back, the hair covering her cheek slipped aside, revealing a deep purple bruise.

  Mike stood at the door. “We have to get going, Matt.”

  “What happened here?” I lifted Elle’s hair to get a better look.

  “Nothing.” She replaced her hair to cover her cheek, patting it down.

  “Something happened,” I said.

  She swallowed and whispered, “Daddy took us to Midnight Mass. He was—drunk.”

  “Wait, you got in the car with him when he was drinking?” My eyes darted to the driveway, expecting to see a smashed-up car.

  Elle tugged on my sleeve. “I know, but I didn’t realize how much he’d had. He made a scene at church, and the deacon asked us to leave. Anyway, Daddy took a swing at the guy but cuffed me by mistake. He didn’t mean—”

  I flew into the living room, ready to haul Hank off the couch, and I don’t know. I wasn’t thinking about what I was going to do.

  Mike grabbed my arm. “Whoa!”

  Dad walked in and noticed the ruckus. “What’s going on here?”

  “Hank hit Elle,” I yelled as I tried to shake Mike loose.

  “It was an accident. He didn’t mean to,” Elle said.

  “Mike, take Matt to the car. Let me handle this,” Dad said.

  My brother practically carried me out to the car. I was no longer a little brother, but Mike was the biggest and strongest of the bunch of us. He slammed me against the outside door. “Cool down. Let Dad handle this.”

  When Dad finally came out of the house, he said Hank was still bombed out of his mind, too drunk to talk.

  “He’s driving drunk, Dad. Elle was in the car with him. He hit her.”

  “I’ll handle this, Matt. You got that? I’ll handle this,” he said, his voice firm.

  Four hours later, as soon we arrived back home from Aunt Beth’s, I charged toward the McClure house.

  “Go home, Matt,” Dad said. “I’ll talk to him—if he’s even awake.”

  But I shook loose from my father and yanked open the McClures’ back door.

  Hank was in the kitchen, cradling his head in his hands.

  I dropped into the chair opposite him and pointed my finger in his face. “If you ever hurt Elle again, I will tell the police what you did to me. You’re a lousy drunk and a worse father. Don’t you dare touch her!”

  Hank looked up, utterly blank. “What?”

  Elle rubbed my arm. “It’s all right,” she said to me. “It was an accident. He doesn’t even remember.”

  “Remember what?” Hank slurred.

  “You had too much to drink, Daddy. And you, um, you kind of punched me. You weren’t trying to hit me, you just banged into me.”

  “You have to get it together, Hank, or Linney and I will have to notify the authorities,” Dad said as he leaned on the table, getting into Hank’s face. “You’re going to lose your kids as well as your wife.”

  Elle burst out into tears and darted upstairs with me not far behind her. My father followed.

  “You can’t do it, Dennis,” she screamed at my father. “It’s not Daddy’s fault. He’s upset about my mom. He’s not himself.” Her voice became so small, like a little girl’s. “I need him.”

  Dad shoved me aside and tilted her chin up so he could see the bruise. “I know you do, but this can’t go on. Someone is going to get seriously hurt.” My father took Elle in his arms, then suddenly pulled away, looking down at her belly. His eyes shot to me. “No.”

  Squeezing his eyes shut, he shook his head. “No,” he repeated. “I don’t want to know this. Not today.”

  13

  Nineteen Years Before the Accident

  Elle didn’t go back for the spring semester at Bowdoin. She told everyone else she couldn’t leave her mother. She told me it was because the baby would come before the end of the term. The end of spring. The end of everything.

  Panic was rising in my seventeen-year-old psyche, and I needed to talk it over with my father. Based on his reaction to Elle’s belly, he knew. Based on how he’d avoided me afterward, he hated me. I knew I’d disappointed him. And I wasn’t sure which was worse.

  Before Elle’s pregnancy, I planned on an Ivy League education. The truth was that even going to college meant I’d accomplished something huge. Although my father had been accepted at Dartmouth, he didn’t attend. My oldest brother was born six months after my folks graduated from high school, and all three of my brothers had taken the trade school route. Keith was a contractor, Doug a plumber, and Mike a mechanic. All fine paths in life. Just not what I wanted. I wanted to prove I could do more.

  Instead, I proved I was stupid enough to get a girl pregnant.

  Holding on to a box of Cheerios, I dropped into the kitchen chair.

  “It snowed last night,” my father said in a monotone voice. It was the first time Dad had acknowledged me in days. Weeks. He picked up a spoonful of oatmeal.

  He didn’t need to tell me to go outside and take care of the driveway. That was understood. Three years before he’d had a heart attack while shoveling. I stood and walked over to the mudroom and shrugged into my jacket.

  “Things are bad next door.” He sighed after stating the obvious. There was no need for me to respond. “Your mother figures we’re going to end up as Elle and Christopher’s guardians—if Hank doesn’t stop drinking,” he said. “But your mother doesn’t realize Elle is pregnant, yet.”

  I wondered if the knot in my gut felt anything like the lump of a baby growing in Elle’s belly. I could feel my father’s eyes burning into my back. I turned around, defiant if I needed to be.

  He looked sad, not angry. “It’s going to complicate things. I can’t imagine that Alice will last much longer.” Dad exhaled. “What are you planning to do about the baby?”

  I stammered, unable to find words.

  He stood and put his hand on my shoulder. “I’d be a hypocrite if I condemned you, but Elle is so young. You’re both so young.” Was he giving me absolution? I didn’t know, but his gesture gave me comfort.

  “She wants to put the baby up for adoption,” I said.

&
nbsp; A pensive expression fell across Dad’s face. “When’s it due?”

  “Late April.”

  He walked over to the sink and softly said, “Giving a child up is harder than it sounds. We thought about it, with your oldest brother, but as soon as your mother felt him move—”

  “Elle doesn’t want anyone to find out yet. Hank’s going to flip out, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah. I don’t know. Probably.”

  “Elle wants to wait to tell him until after Alice—you know …” Dies. “One crisis at a time.”

  “Jesus. Okay.” He stared through the kitchen curtains at the McClure house. “I can’t believe she’s still alive. The doctors didn’t think she’d make it until Christmas. And we’re halfway through January.”

  A couple of days later, Elle took my hand and laid it on her abdomen. “Do you feel that? It’s the baby. I’ve been feeling it for about a week, but I’m sure now.”

  I couldn’t feel anything. I was about to patronize her with a “Yeah, that’s cool,” but then I felt a little flutter through her skin. “Shit,” I said. “No way.”

  She smiled as if she were utterly content.

  “Wow. You’re not making it do that?”

  “No. She’s doing it all by herself. It’s so weird to think there’s a new person inside me.”

  “She?”

  Elle shrugged. “Don’t worry. I know we can’t keep her—or him. But, Matt, I love this baby. I dream about holding her and smelling that sweet baby smell.”

  The smell that popped into my head was the diaper pail at my brother’s house, that sickening, sour, rotten smell. My heart pounded in my chest because I knew Elle would never give up this baby just like my mother hadn’t put my oldest brother, Doug, up for adoption. In a year, Elle and I would be trudging along with a kid and no future. A sour smell was all I could imagine.

  “You know what I mean about that baby smell, right?” Elle asked.

  I wanted to smile at her, but I couldn’t. “I guess.”

  “Never mind. It’s just that babies smell like life, and my house smells like death.”

  At school, an old girlfriend, Donna, started flirting with me again. I don’t know why she thought I was fair game, but every time I went to my locker, she was right there, flipping her hair, touching my hand. “The Winter Dance is this Friday. I’ll let you take me if you ask nicely.”

  “I’m still going out with Elle,” I said, but it occurred to me that it sounded as if I meant that to be temporary, like tomorrow I might not still be going out with her. I wouldn’t dump Elle while she was pregnant, and I didn’t plan to dump her afterward. Yet there was a sense of relief that if the baby were adopted, staying with Elle would be my choice again. I loved her, but I was scared shitless.

  Donna snickered. “She’s getting fat. I saw her up at L.L.Bean’s the other day. You can do better than her. Take me to the dance, please?”

  “I’m with Elle.” I walked off, wondering how neither my mother nor Hank noticed that Elle was not getting fat.

  Like always, I stopped after school at the McClures’ before dropping my books at home. The nightmare continued smack in the middle of the McClure living room, which I renamed the dying room in my head. Once I even slipped and said it aloud, but I managed to cover with “dining room.”

  Alice was moaning in those low rumbles that punctuated every moment at 43 Chamberlain Street. The nurse was turning Alice so she didn’t get bedsores. “Hi, Matt.”

  “Where’s Elle?”

  “Upstairs. She’s not feeling well. I convinced her to take a nap.”

  “Oh.” I wondered if it was the pregnancy bothering her and started up the steps. “I’ll just check on her.”

  “Can I say something?”

  I turned around to look at the portly woman.

  “Hank is out and Christopher’s still at school, otherwise I wouldn’t bring this up, but it’s getting pretty obvious.”

  My heart raced. “What?”

  Her eyes narrowed like I was an idiot for trying to cover it up. “I heard her talking to her mother.”

  How could Elle talk to Alice? “What do you mean?”

  “I take breaks, and Elle always sits with Alice when I go outside for a smoke, but sometimes I hear her talking to her mother. Listen, Elle’s very scared. She looks like she’s handling everything okay, but she isn’t. She’s just a kid.”

  “What did she say to Alice?”

  “She promised to name the baby after her mother,” she said.

  I could hear my father saying my mother couldn’t give up my brother once she felt him move. Elle had picked out a name. Jesus.

  “It’s hard to be fifteen and pregnant,” the nurse said. “Even harder to watch your mother die, not to mention the bender her father is on. I know you’re just a kid, too, but stick with her through this or she won’t make it.”

  I didn’t know what I’d done that would make this nurse think I would ever abandon Elle. I grunted something and continued up the steps. We were both scared. True. I’d been accepted at all the colleges I’d applied to. I still wanted Columbia, but given the circumstances, I’d be lucky to commute to the University of Southern Maine—or even to a good trade school. I was feeling resentful. Guilty and resentful. Maybe the nurse saw that.

  I cracked opened Elle’s bedroom door. She stirred at the sound of the creak, and then settled down into the pillows again. Her shirt rose up a bit, revealing her pregnant abdomen. That my mother hadn’t noticed was absurd. Hank had an excuse. In the past few months, he hadn’t been sober.

  Suddenly Elle drew her legs up as if she were in pain, rising with it. “Oh God.” Her eyes flew open.

  I sat beside her. “What is it, Peep? Are you sick?”

  “Matt? Oh.” She grimaced. “Cramps.”

  “It’s not the baby?”

  She cradled her belly. “Of course not. I’m not due for months.”

  I accepted her explanation. “Do you need to go to the doctor?”

  “I don’t think so. Matt, the nurse knows about the baby. She asked me point-blank.”

  “I know. We have to tell your father before he finds out.”

  “Not yet.” Her chin dropped low.

  I couldn’t tell if she was afraid or ashamed, and I didn’t want to ask. I searched the room for something else to talk about. These days we discussed only two things, her mother and the baby. It was becoming such a hellhole. “There’s the dance Friday night. Want to go?”

  She lit up. “Really?”

  “Yeah. It’d be fun, right? Hang out. We’ve never done that together, gone to a school thing.”

  She raised an eyebrow and pointed to her belly. “What about?”

  “Who cares? Everyone will know pretty soon. We may as well hold our heads up.” I rested my hand on her belly. “How’s the little kiddo anyway?”

  “Quiet,” she said.

  For two months I’d watched her mother writhe. I’d learned the body language of pain, the tensing and the wash of it as it pounded into a person.

  Elle’s belly went rock hard, and she gasped.

  “What the hell is that?” But I knew the answer to the question. My mother had talked about how a woman’s belly could get as hard as granite during a contraction. “Are you in labor?”

  “No,” she said. “It’s too ear—” She grabbed my arm.

  “I’m taking you to the hospital. Wait right here.”

  “Maybe to the clinic.”

  “The hospital.” I bolted down the stairs and stopped in the living room. The nurse glanced up at me. “Something’s wrong with Elle. I’ll be right back.”

  The nurse headed up the steps two at a time.

  My mother’s car was in the driveway. I scurried over the fence, the snowbank piled on top of it, and blasted into the kitchen. Mom was peeling carrots, humming some stupid Supremes song, “Stop … before you break my heart.”

  “I need to borrow the car.” I grabbed her keys from the rack and turne
d for the door.

  Mom swung around. “Have a horse of your own, and then you can borrow another’s. I have to go to the—”

  “It’s an emergency. Elle. She’s sick. I have to take her to the hospital.”

  Mom grabbed her purse from the kitchen table. “What’s wrong with her? Where is she?”

  I needed a lie. This wasn’t something to spit out like gum. “Food poisoning. I don’t know for sure. Let me have the car, Mom.”

  “I’ll drive if Elle’s sick.”

  I didn’t know what to do, but before I could think of a response, we were pushing through the McClures’ front door. Alice was so still I wondered if she’d finally had the grace to die. Mom paused for a moment to check Alice as I barreled up the steps to Elle’s room, which was empty. I stepped back into the hall. Mom was three-quarters of the way upstairs.

  The nurse was coming out of the bathroom. “She needs to go to the hospital. I think she’s in preterm labor.”

  “Who’s in labor?” Mom asked.

  I swallowed. “Elle. She’s pregnant.”

  Shock registered on my mother’s face, but she didn’t pause or hesitate. She yanked open the bathroom door and found Elle lying doubled over on the floor.

  “How far along are you?” Mom squatted beside Elle.

  “I’m supposed to go to the clinic tomorrow for my five-month checkup. It’s just cramps.”

  Mom set her hand on Elle’s belly to assess the contractions, and within two minutes we were on the road to the hospital. My mother put aside her surprise, disappointment, and anger to contend with the pragmatic concerns. “I have to get ahold of your father, Elle. Do you know where he is?”

  “Please don’t tell him.” Elle shook her head. She sounded so much like a little girl for a moment that I recognized something so frank and apparent, but totally elusive to my usual perspective. She was a child. And so was I.

  “We have to reach your father to consent for treatment.” My mother had taken on a role I rarely saw. As a labor and delivery nurse, she’d told stories of seeing a zillion women give birth, but somehow I hadn’t considered her in this context, taking over, not as my mother, but as something else.