The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  “But I’m pregnant. Doesn’t that mean I can—at the clinic—they let me—agh.” Elle’s face knotted in pain again.

  “Where is your father?”

  Through gritted teeth, Elle said, “I don’t know—somewhere getting drunk.”

  That seemed a little optimistic on Elle’s part. “Getting drunk” suggested Hank had been sober at some point during the previous day. Or week. Or month.

  When we arrived at the hospital, my mother grabbed a wheelchair and pushed Elle directly upstairs to a labor room. Three nurses who worked with Mom appeared somewhat baffled.

  One cracked, “So are you rounding up girls off the street now, Linney?”

  “This is my son, Matt. And this is his girlfriend, Elle McClure. She’s pregnant, in her nineteenth or twentieth week, and she’s having contractions. What OB is on call?”

  “Blythe Clarke’s covering. All the regular OBs are at some conference.”

  “Thank God. Call her. Elle, change into this.” Mom handed Elle a gown and ushered me out into the hall.

  Mom’s expression hardened. She whispered, “Why didn’t you tell me? I taught you about birth control. And if you didn’t listen about that, then she still could have had an abortion. Jesus, she’s fifteen. Your whole life just went down the tubes, Matt.”

  I figured this wasn’t the time to tell her I did my very best to ignore her when she gave that particular lecture, or that I’d used birth control—just not properly. Nor was it the time to tell her that Elle had dismissed an abortion outright. As angry as my mother was at me, I was angrier at myself, and at that moment I didn’t give a shit if my mother never forgave me. I was sorry I’d hurt her, probably embarrassed her in front of her coworkers, but I only cared that Elle was okay. “Is she going to be all right?”

  In a frustrated gesture, Mom threw her hands into the air then returned to the room. I followed.

  The nurse was strapping two belts around Elle’s belly. “I’ve got to find the baby’s heartbeat.” The nurse had a disklike device, and she was tracing it around Elle’s belly button up, then belly button down. Side to side. Its speaker made a gooey, swishing sound. The nurse, who wore an uneasy expression, looked up at my mother.

  “Any bleeding?” Mom asked, taking over the search, continuing to move the probe as it made its scratchy white noise.

  “No, just cramps.” Elle drew a breath. “Like now.”

  “That’s a contraction, sweetheart,” Mom said.

  “But it’s too soon,” Elle said.

  Her reaction flabbergasted me. I didn’t understand how she could still be in denial. Because Mom talked about her work, I knew under certain circumstances they could stop premature labor, but not always. Sometimes babies came so early they spent months and months in the NICU.

  Mom continued her search for a heartbeat. Elle and I had heard its pitter-patter plenty of times at the clinic. Right now there was no such sound.

  Mom swallowed. “The doctor at the clinic, where is he finding the heartbeat?”

  Elle pointed to a spot on her belly.

  “Is the baby moving?” the nurse asked.

  “No, not since yesterday,” Elle said.

  Mom’s jaw tightened and she turned to the other nurse. “Go get a portable ultrasound.”

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, but I was thinking, What else could go wrong?

  “Sometimes it’s just hard to find a heartbeat,” Mom said.

  “Is that why the baby’s so quiet?” The pitch of Elle’s voice rose. She had figured out, as I had, what was happening. Not only was she in labor; something was wrong with the baby. I circled the bed to get to a place where neither hospital machines nor people would come between us. She buried her face in my chest, and I buried mine in her hair.

  The nurse rolled an ultrasound machine to Elle’s bedside. And in walked Dr. Clarke, pink ribbon in her hair like she was trying to signal she was a girl. Although her hair wasn’t as white in those days, she still looked ancient to me. “So what do we have here? Hi, I’m Dr. Clarke. Have you been getting prenatal care, sweetie?”

  “At the clinic in Brunswick,” Elle said.

  Blythe shot questions. Elle and I filled in the details again. Prenatal vitamins, check. Blood tests, check. Everything fine, check. Nineteen weeks.

  “Okay, let’s have a look.” She rolled the ultrasound transducer over Elle’s belly. A circular image appeared.

  “That’s your baby’s head.” The doctor’s eyes darted back and forth from the screen to Elle’s face.

  “This is the chest.” She swallowed.

  My mother squeezed her eyes shut.

  Dr. Clarke drew a deep breath. “How long since you felt movement?”

  “Last night at bedtime.”

  Dr. Clarke put one hand on Elle’s and pointed with her other. “This is your baby’s heart, and I’m so sorry, but it isn’t beating.”

  Elle scrutinized the screen. “But … but … it has to be beating. Are you saying—oh no, please. Oh God, please.” The monitor graph showed a rising wave. Still, she squeaked, “You mean she’s dead?”

  “I’m afraid so,” Dr. Clarke said softly.

  So many emotions surged through me simultaneously, sadness, concern, anger, disappointment, and to my shame—relief. I felt relieved, and I was horrified that I felt that way. I took Elle’s hand, and she batted me away. My mother tried. Elle reacted the same way.

  “That’s a pretty hard contraction. I’m going to check your cervix,” Dr. Clarke said.

  The nurse passed the doctor a pack of sterile gloves and offered her slimy goop.

  “Out of here, Matt,” Mom said, pushing me toward the door.

  “Linney, can you stay with me?” Elle whimpered, and again, her voice sounded so young.

  “Okay, honey,” Mom said.

  “What about me?”

  “Wait outside for a few minutes.” Mom shooed me.

  Elle opened her mouth to speak and closed it again.

  And so I was dismissed, useless, guilty, and sad. Elle didn’t want me there. She wanted my mother, any mother, because Elle was a child. And I wanted my mother, too, but all I could think was how much Mom hated me now and how badly I’d hurt Elle. I stood at the door, eavesdropping.

  “She’s fully dilated. Elle, with your next contraction, I want you to push,” Dr. Clarke said.

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s get an IV into her. Have the lab come up and draw her blood, and get ahold of the clinic to have them forward any medical records.”

  What seemed like forever passed, but it was probably only a half hour. Mom came into the corridor, touched my sleeve, and led me down the hall. I stared at her, unable to muster the questions. Is Elle all right? What happened?

  My mother avoided my gaze until we reached the window at the very end.

  “Mom?”

  “Physically, Elle will be all right.”

  “What about the baby?”

  “It was a girl. I want you to go in there with Elle, and although this is going to be very difficult, it is important that you hold the baby. If you don’t, you’ll always wonder.”

  My legs felt rubbery. I thought she was punishing me, making me look at my mistake. Then she embraced me. “I love you, Matt. Go inside, talk to Elle. I’m going to call home first. Your father should be home by now. Does he know?”

  I nodded, thinking that he would probably catch hell from my mother for not telling her.

  Mom exhaled. “Once I speak to your father. I’ll join you while you hold your daughter.”

  My daughter?

  Elle was sitting in the bed, pale and drawn. The nurse was injecting something in the IV bag. Elle didn’t look up; she just stared at her lap.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “Do you think we should give her a name? I didn’t let myself pick one … well, I did. But she was going to belong to someone else. I was going to call her Allie, for my mom—but that doesn’t seem right now. Do you think we should give
her a name?”

  I was taken aback, but I said, “Yeah.” It was then that I saw the baby, tucked in the blankets on Elle’s lap. The baby was so small, maybe eight inches long. I gulped.

  “What names do you like?” Elle asked.

  It seemed like the most absurd question. Like it mattered. We would never call her to come to the supper table or sing “Happy Birthday” to her. “I don’t know.”

  “It should be special because it’s the only thing we will ever give her.”

  That’s when the reality of what was happening hit me. This was a baby—who might have grown up into a person. I choked up. “Okay, a name.”

  Elle reached out and put one hand on my shoulder.

  “Whatever you want,” I managed to say.

  “Celina. It’s a beautiful name, right? It means goddess of the moon, and—”

  “That’s fine.” I cut Elle off because I knew I couldn’t handle whatever sentimental thing she was about to say. Like every time we looked at the moon, we would think of Celina. I already knew I would.

  “I think she would have been pretty. And smart, of course,” Elle said.

  “Brilliant like you.” I drew nearer to see.

  “Do you want to hold her?”

  I nodded, but I didn’t really.

  Elle put the blankets in my hands, and I couldn’t feel the weight of a baby. It was as if she wasn’t there at all.

  “I’m sorry, Matt.” Elle rubbed her eyes.

  “Why?”

  “It must be my fault. Dying is all around me. In my house. In my body. Everywhere. I’m so sorry.”

  I sat on the bed beside Elle and kissed her hair. “No, Peep. This isn’t—your fault.” It felt like it was mine. I’d believed Elle would never give the baby up. And I’d resented that, but seeing Celina, I knew I wouldn’t have been able to surrender her either.

  Mom tapped on the door, slipped inside, and sat on a chair in the corner. Her eyes were red. “When you’re ready, they’ll take her. They need to move you to a regular room soon.”

  “Take her? What are they going to do with her?” Elle took Celina from me and pulled the baby close.

  “Some decide to have a funeral. Most just let the hospital dispose of a fetus this early.” Mom meant they’d throw her away.

  “No. A funeral,” I said.

  “Dispose? God,” Elle said. “But a funeral? I can’t tell my dad about her. Not the way things are at my house. What are we going to do, Linney?” She started crying in earnest sobs.

  For a few minutes, in the resonating silence that filled the room, I held Elle while she held Celina.

  Finally Mom spoke. “I would like to disagree with you about not telling Hank, but right now maybe you’re right, Elle. I’ll see what I can do with the hospital. I’ll try to get them to direct the hospital bill to our house instead of yours. And the alternative to having a funeral would be to have her cremated. Dad and I can pay the expenses. Then you can do what you want with her ashes. They would give you an urn, but you could keep her ashes or bury them, spread them on the water, whatever you decide.”

  “Cremation?” They were going to burn her. I felt like I was going to puke. “No way.”

  Elle wiped her face. “It’s okay, Matt.” Elle’s tears started pouring down her face again. She smeared them away with one hand as she held the baby to her heart with the other. “You know that song, ‘Woodstock.’ It says ‘We are stardust.’ And we are. We come from stardust. Everything on earth is just ashes.” Her voice broke.

  A nurse entered the room. “We need to move you, Elle. Are you ready, honey?”

  “I’ll miss you.” Elle kissed Celina’s tiny little head and passed the baby back to me.

  They were going to burn her, no matter what euphemism Elle slapped on it. Feeling light-headed, I whispered to Celina, “I’m sorry.”

  Mom took the baby from my hands and blinked away her own tears. “Come here, little angel. I wish I could have known you.”

  Every year since, I’ve tried to watch the Perseids. It seems so long ago now that Elle and I first stayed up to watch them at Elle’s grandfather’s house, our house now. We conceived Celina not long after that first night together. In the years between, I have driven for hours to find a road open and dark enough, then climbed up on the car’s roof to watch the light show. Believing somehow Celina would know I was thinking of her. Other years, with no alternative, I’d watched from a New York City rooftop and only pretended I could see the fine streaks of fire.

  Celina, our little spark of stardust.

  14

  After Elle’s Accident

  Day 4

  “So you lost Celina.” Jake shook his head. “Was it Elle’s autoimmune disease?”

  “Probably.” I pulled a textbook from my office bookshelf that contained a chapter on antiphospholipid syndrome and set it on the desk in front of him. “Some light reading, if you’re so inclined.” I opened a file cabinet and pulled out a folder filled with journal articles on APS in pregnancy and dumped that in front of Jake as well. “Or you could rely on what Clint told you about APS when you interviewed him.”

  “There’s a lot here. You do your homework,” Jake said, flipping through the pages.

  “It’s not a neurosurgical problem. Before Elle’s diagnosis, it was just a footnote in my medical education. But for the past four years, it’s had my life by the balls.”

  “Anything else you think I should know about it?”

  “It didn’t kill the last baby.”

  “What did?”

  “We were at home. Elle’s water broke. Everything went wrong. And it went wrong very fast. I called for an ambulance, but—” My voice cracked. I started pacing again. “We didn’t get to the hospital in time. Not in time for the baby.”

  Jake and I spent an exhaustive hour, discussing what happened and about why I was so reluctant to try to have a child afterward.

  I gave him our life stories, even though he knew most of mine. I told him Elle’s, the part separate from me, the part when we weren’t together. The part that included NASA and Adam, although I don’t think I mentioned Adam by name, only that she had lived with him.

  Finally, at seven o’clock, Jake and I parted company.

  15

  Day 4

  I walked into our empty kitchen and flipped on the light. Elle’s running shoes were under a pulled-out kitchen chair, and the Boston fern over the sink drooped from lack of water. I half expected our yellow Lab, Hubble, to come bounding up to me, but my brother Mike had picked him up days ago.

  The stillness.

  Elle was in every room, the colors she picked for the walls, the books stacked on the shelves, the photographs of us, photographs with our friends, and the ones from her NASA days. She wasn’t exactly messy, but no one would ever accuse her of being a neatnik. Objects landed where they landed. “Gravity,” she’d say. “I’ll get to it later.” But she didn’t always get around to the smaller details in life.

  I used to find bills tucked away in odd places. “You’re like an absentminded professor,” I said once.

  “I know where everything is. Everything. Granted, Martha Stewart would cringe at my lack of external organization.” Elle tapped her temple. “But up here, I have a very detailed algorithm.”

  “Sure you do,” I said, and then I took over paying our bills.

  Entering our bedroom, I hoped to drown in the scent she left on the sheets, but she’d stripped the bedding the morning of the accident and left the quilt haphazardly folded on the bench at the foot of the bed.

  I went into the bathroom for a set of sheets. A bag from CVS sat on the counter. It held baby aspirin and a pack of pictures from our trip to Prince Edward Island the month before. Most of the photos were of me. She loved to shoot with a long lens, catching me unaware. She said that’s when you could find a person’s spirit, their truth.

  That was Elle, full of mysticisms and superstitions and contradictions. I loved that about her. The
world might see her as a driven scientist. She was, I suppose. How many people earn their PhD before they turn twenty-two? But my brilliant wife still feared black cats crossing her path. She wished on stars—even though she could mathematically calculate the trajectory of a satellite’s orbital decay and explain the chemistry and physics behind fission. And she never let an empty rocking chair move back and forth—something about it inviting a child’s death. The hollow of it. We lost our babies anyway. All before they were born.

  Why did I believe it could be different this time? That this baby would live—that Elle could be kept alive long enough to nourish it? Because this time had to be different. Because I had to give her the child she wanted. Because I could still see her holding Celina and weeping. Because part of me still carried that first baby, all of our babies, too. Because.

  The baby inside Elle was only shadow on the ultrasound. A glimmer. And yet I had to make that baby real.

  Dylan was a real baby; he was four pounds, ten ounces. At the hospital, they weighed his body and gave us his vital statistics as if vital statistics made him alive. The numbers were supposed to be something to hold on to, something concrete to grieve. I held my son in my arms. I tried to breathe life back into him. And I failed.

  Maybe that was what I was trying to do now—breathe life into this baby—breathe life back into some part of Elle. I did not believe a baby would bring her back, but having one was her dream. I needed to keep her hopes and dreams alive.

  I shuffled through the pictures and found one of her smiling. Her broad smile. Her smile gone forever. “What do you want me to do, Peep?”

  A few days ago she said trying to have a baby was worth the risk.

  Was it worth making her stay on life support? Would she think so, or was I clinging onto a delusion?

  I slipped a picture of Elle walking along the red sand beach into my breast pocket, and put the remainder back in the bag, and stopped cold. There was a pregnancy test under the bathroom sink. I pulled open the door and reached for it. Not there. I rifled around. Not there. Did she take the test? Did she know? Or did she simply throw it away so we wouldn’t fight over it anymore?