The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  She didn’t know. She couldn’t have known. She wouldn’t have gone up on that ladder if she knew.

  The farmhouse bedroom was small and plain, painted in a cool gray. “Gray is restful,” she’d said. It was just big enough for a full-size bed, ridiculously short for my height, but it meant Elle and I were always touching at night, which proved to have benefits.

  I couldn’t sleep there without her now or ever again. I picked up the quilt and a pillow, intending to take them downstairs to the couch in the living room, but instead, when I reached the attic door, I stood frozen, lost in the vastness of what had occurred in the past few days.

  I dragged myself upstairs. Only five nights ago, I’d come home late after doing an emergency surgery on what should have been my day off. Elle was waiting in the attic, sitting cross-legged beneath a floor lamp reading her mother’s old diaries and writing in her own.

  Elle should still be here, hiding the letters under the trapdoor in the attic, where she kept them tucked away from the world. What were the odds that she wrote something about believing life started at conception in one of those diaries? Slim, but it didn’t matter; I couldn’t bear to look right now. This was where I last saw her, where I last held her, yet it was the first place we made love. And the last place.

  But she wasn’t here. And the house was silent in the way that reverberates the pulse in a man’s ears.

  I lit the floor lamp and stepped through the doors to the widow’s walk, an apt name, for I had become a widower in all but fact. While waiting for a meteorite to pass, I spread out the quilt then sat down to look up at the night sky. The peak of the Perseids had come and gone, but Earth was still passing through the region of space. What would I wish for? To go back in time. I’d tell her not to climb up on that ladder. I’d wish for the baby to survive against the damning odds. Or I could die in my sleep so I could join Elle in nothingness. The vacuum nearly swallowed me.

  I curled on my side and cried. I cried harder than I ever had.

  When I awoke, the morning’s first light tinted the sky. I was achy from the hard roof, from the catharsis, and from a clearer vision of what the future held.

  16

  Day 5

  I should have expected to see Elle’s writing on the steamed-up bathroom mirror. It said, THE SWEETEST THING! Almost every day Elle left a couple of words scrawled on the glass, and the next time I showered a phrase would reveal itself. Sometimes it was something from a poem. She liked Dickinson, Thomas, and Rossetti. Some days she simply wrote, “Go save a life” or “I love you.”

  And I’d smile then wipe down the mirror before I shaved. Today I toweled off and leaned against the wall and waited for the steam to dry. I watched Elle’s love note disappear.

  I turned the shower back on and let steam fill the bathroom again, but her message did not rematerialize. Instead it condensed and rained down in heavy droplets. I wondered why she wrote those three words. Was it the title to a U2 song I used to play over and over? The chances were it was just Elle’s way of saying she loved me. She did. And it was the sweetest thing.

  The smell of coffee and my mother’s corn bread wafted upward—along with the sound of water running and dishes clinking. Immediately I knew Mom had let herself in. I stomped down the steps, prepared to throw her out. I would have, but her eyes were sad and hollowed. If we hadn’t been on opposite sides of the court dispute, we might have grieved together. She might have shared with me how she found the strength to survive my father’s death.

  But now I sensed another loss, my mother’s. Before this, before Elle’s accident, Mom and I were close, for the most part. But in the courtroom, Mom had one thing right: Elle was even closer, closer than a daughter-in-law. Sometimes, she was closer than a son.

  Mom turned away from me when I entered the kitchen. “Mike still has Hubble. I made you breakfast and—”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “I made a leg of lamb last night and packed you up a couple of sandwiches. Don’t worry, I removed most of the fat, but you need to eat, and you love lamb.” She wiped down the counter with a sponge.

  “I can take care of myself,” I repeated.

  She was acting as if I were still dependent upon her for food, for housekeeping, for her moral compass, and she kept rambling on as if she were giving a teenager a list to follow while she was at work. “We should be pulling together right now,” she said.

  “I can’t do that when you’re trying to kill my wife.”

  Mom gasped and stepped backward. “You cannot be serious! I love Elle.”

  “Get out,” I said. For a second I wanted to bodily remove her, drag her outside. For a second I forgot she was my mother. Pull together? She was tearing us apart. Elle and I married each other. What is the wedding rhetoric? What God has joined together, let no man put asunder. Sure. Try to tell that to my mother. “Get out,” I said again.

  Mom pretended not to hear me. Instead, she dried her hands on a dish towel, then not so furtively dabbed at her eyes. She poured two cups of coffee and set them on the table. “For ten minutes, just sit down. Eat something. I’m not ready to bury you, too. Come on, corn bread’s your favorite.”

  “But you’re ready to bury Elle? Jesus.” I glared at her for a moment, not willing to let it go, trying to punish her. She held out a plate.

  Hell. I didn’t want to take the time to make breakfast or stop at a fast-food place, so I grabbed it and sat down at the table.

  “We’re not enemies, just adversaries,” she said.

  I didn’t speak to her as I wolfed down her food and gulped her coffee.

  “The reporters kept calling,” she said as she slid a piece of paper across the table. “I have a new phone number; it’s unlisted.”

  I glanced at the blinking answering machine on the counter.

  “You might want to do the same.” She stared into her coffee. It was rare for her to avoid eye contact.

  I stood and listened to the first part of two dozen messages, deleting them as soon as the callers identified themselves. “Why can’t they leave me alone to deal with this?”

  “Because they feel like they own some little part of her. When she went up into space, she captured the imagination of people who wanted to believe in heroes. Because people don’t want to be kept alive against their wills.”

  I shot my mother a dirty look.

  “Being a vegetable scares people, honey. I’m sorry, but given what you do for a living, you know that.”

  “A vegetative state is not the same thing as being a goddamned vegetable, and you should know that. She’s brain-injured. Badly, but she’s a human being, not a vegetable.” I held out my hand. She took it, and I shook her loose. “I want my house keys.”

  “Matthew, I’m sorry.” My mother rubbed her forehead. “I thought by now you’d see more clearly. I’m going to have to hire an attorney. I can see that after Friday. We’re on opposite sides, but please understand.”

  “Understand what? Goddamn it, what? That you can’t even consider that I’m right?”

  “She was terrified by how Alice died.”

  “This isn’t the same. Alice was in constant pain. Elle isn’t. Elle is pregnant. Alice wasn’t. And even if Elle were in pain, she would have sacrificed herself for the baby.”

  “But how do you know she’s not in pain? When Alice was sick, the doctors insisted that since she was in a coma, she wasn’t in pain. And you and I both know that just wasn’t true. How do you know that, on some level, Elle isn’t experiencing pain? She can’t tell you. What if her head hurts at some excruciating level? On some primal level. What if she’s trapped in that pain?”

  A lump formed in my throat, and I barely was able to spit out the words. “I’ve studied her EEG. There’s virtually no brain activity, Mom. Artifact.” How I hated that word, artifact. The electrical artifact was all that was left of Elle’s essence. “She’s not there anymore.”

  My mother shuddered, then held still, probably abs
orbing the vacuum of Elle’s absence. Mom slowly walked to the door and removed my house key from her purse, which was hanging on the knob. “You are blind about what you’re doing to Elle. And to yourself.” She set the key on the counter. “And it is terrifying me.”

  17

  Day 6

  People try hard not to stare at the victims of tragedy, but they do. They stare at broken arms and wonder how it happened. They stare at missing legs. They stared at me as I stood in the cafeteria line. But I needed caffeine almost as much as I needed air.

  My cell phone rang. After the brief pleasantries, Jake went straight to the point. Had I searched our papers? Where was Elle’s will?

  Preoccupied by Mom’s appearance and exhausted, I hadn’t looked for anything the only night I’d gone home.

  “It’s been two days since we talked,” Jake said. “We need to prepare for the hearing.”

  At noon, I left Hank with Elle again, and I went to the bank. In the safe-deposit box, I found our wills, birth certificates, deeds, Social Security cards, nothing but meaningless crap. Nothing was secure, our lives, least of all.

  The truth was I never wanted to make a will. Elle pushed the idea at me like an unwelcome banner: we are both going to die someday. I’d seen death in all its ugly shapes and forms, and I understood the inevitability of it. But planning for it took courage, and I’d never been brave.

  She was. Imagine climbing into the Space Shuttle just a little more than a year after the Columbia disaster. She was terrified. Happy, but terrified. And she did it.

  Afterward, she told me that while they were strapping her in on Atlantis, she thought she was cursed, and she hoped everyone else aboard wouldn’t die with her. “It was stupid,” she said. “Don’t laugh, but not one woman in my mom’s line survived past the age of forty, not in six generations.”

  I knew this, had been to the family cemetery with her to see the headstones, but I teased her. “What? Some old witch cursed all the females in your family?”

  “You’re laughing.”

  Laughter was a defense mechanism. I watched her mother die. I knew Elle’s grandfather, and saw the scars he carried away from the accident that killed his wife.

  Elle was very pregnant with Dylan when we had that conversation. She took my hand in hers so I could feel him kick. “I’m not going to die young. We’re going to watch him grow up, but on Atlantis I was terrified. I thought I might somehow be dooming my crewmates to death along with me.”

  I kissed her mouth, and then I kissed her belly. “We’re going to be a family. We will live a long, happy life together.”

  “If I were destined to die young, it would have been on that space walk, right? Let’s make the will, if only to ward off the evil spirits,” she said.

  So as an act of solidarity, I went to a lawyer and made a will to match hers—to appease her superstition—to make her sleep easier at night. We lost Dylan anyway. I lost Elle. The only thing I had left—the only part of Elle I had left—was the baby inside her.

  I went home again and searched our home office, papers, checking account statements, bills, and medical records. Inside them, there was nothing that would support our contention. I couldn’t find her undergraduate papers or textbooks; maybe she had them in her office at Bowdoin.

  A late-afternoon thunderstorm rumbled off in the distance, and moments later the wind howled up the river to our house. I headed upstairs to check the windows and to look for Elle’s journals. Then something crashed in the attic, and I hurried up the steps into the ripe oven heat. The French doors to the widow’s walk, whipping back and forth in the torrents of wind, had knocked over the floor lamp. I closed the doors and bolted them, then bent down to lift the lamp, its bulb shattered from the crash. Perfect. Just perfect. I brushed away the fine glass and pulled up the trapdoor. Elle kept her diaries and her mother’s inside a hollowed-out compartment in the attic floor. One of many secret compartments in the old house—a reminder of a bootlegging great-grandfather.

  Alice’s diaries weren’t relevant. I only needed Elle’s. There were hundreds, maybe a thousand letters, far more than I’d realized. I wondered where to start, if she’d ordered them chronologically or if she’d simply shoved them away. At some point she started writing in composition books, and there were maybe seventy of those. Jesus, what if she wrote about Adam and the life she shared with him, their sex lives.

  I’d had other relationships, been fascinated by other women during the years Elle and I spent apart, but I didn’t want to know about her. With him.

  I pushed aside the thought and reminded myself that I needed to look for one thing: evidence that she recanted her advanced directive. Deep down, I knew it was unlikely she would ever have done any such thing. Elle hated, hated, hated how her mother died.

  I scooped up the bound satchels and marbled comp books and dropped them on the attic floor because my cell phone was buzzing in my pocket. I yanked it out expecting it to be the hospital. It wasn’t. It was just Melanie again. “Hi, Mel,” I said.

  “Why don’t you come over for dinner. We’re cooking on the grill. Just corn on the cob and burgers. It’ll be good for you to be out in the fresh air for a while.”

  “Ah, yeah, thanks for the invitation, but I have to find some papers for my attorney tonight. Some other time.”

  After hanging up, I looked at the size of the pile. I’d be there all night. Or longer, probably much longer. First, I needed more coffee and assurance Elle was still stable, so I called the hospital. The nurses said her status was unchanged, and then Hank came to the phone, confirming the same. He agreed to spend the night.

  I skipped most of Elle’s early entries and focused instead on the ones since our marriage. It was a little strange reading Dear Matt. It was stranger that at times she seemed to truly be addressing me. Most were loving. A few were not; one she’d written about a time I’d forgotten to call her when I was stuck at the hospital, another after I’d stood her up because I had gotten bogged down with paperwork at the office. Other entries were sentimental drivel. And I savored them, forgetting I had a purpose, a passage to find, something about a living will.

  Around midnight I brought the letters down to the living room, and sometime after that I fell asleep, dreaming of Elle in my arms and her voice reading her letters aloud.

  October 2, 2004

  Dear Matt,

  In the morning, you and I will stand in front of our friends and our families and promise ourselves to each other. I’m supposed to be nervous. I’m supposed to be worried whether I’m doing the right thing. Instead, I am at such peace.

  That we decided to sleep separately tonight is the most absurd choice I’ve ever made. Here is a truth, one thing the Catholic Church got right: Matrimony is one sacrament the priest does not give. He presides over it, but the sacrament itself is given to the man by the woman, and to the woman by the man. I marry you. You marry me. It is for that reason alone I wanted to marry inside the Church, why I made a big deal about it when ordinarily we don’t attend Mass. I believe this marriage is between us more surely than I believe in anything else.

  I’ve loved you my entire life. Never ever doubt that. Even when I couldn’t see clearly, I loved you. I felt you in my soul. So this wedding in the morning is simply a seal on what I’ve always believed was my destiny. Our destiny. I love you, Matthew. And I will for as long as I live. For longer.

  Love,

  Peep

  18

  Nineteen Years Before the Accident

  I decided I wanted to become a doctor when I witnessed my first medical miracle. I was seven. My family was picnicking at Sebago Lake, and my then ten-year-old brother, Mike, jumped off a rope swing into the water. He didn’t come up for air. Dad dove in and fished him out, limp and blue. My mother resuscitated him with mouth-to-mouth, compressions, the whole CPR bit. Two days later, sporting a black eye and ten stitches, he came home from the hospital.

  Not all endings are happy ones, but I didn’t unders
tand that for ten more years. Alice was dying. Everything went wrong during those last weeks. First Elle lost the baby, and then the hospice nurses called Child and Family Services.

  Looking back, it’s hard to believe they hadn’t reported what was going on in the McClure house sooner. They may have rationalized that my folks were over there all the time or that Christopher and Elle weren’t being physically abused. But Hank had started to disappear for days at a time.

  The hospice agency reported the neglect a few weeks later, citing that on the date Elle lost the baby, Christopher came home from school and no one was there to take care of him. They didn’t say where or why Elle was absent, only that she was. Yes, the nurse was caring for his dying mother, but she was not responsible for the eight-year-old boy. Hank never came home or called that night. The nurse reported that more often than not he appeared to be inebriated.

  During the time between the miscarriage and the report to Child and Family Services, my parents also argued about calling in the authorities.

  “Before Matt and Elle took leave of their senses,” Mom said, “we could have taken the kids in with us, but we can’t have Matt and Elle living under the same roof. We’d never be able to keep them apart.”

  “We can’t keep them apart when the McClures live across the driveway either,” Dad said. “What’s the difference?”

  Did I mention the radiator grille in my bedroom allowed me to hear every kitchen-held conversation? Their words flew at me like a swarm of hornets.

  I still went over to Elle’s house every day after school. Her lissome form returned in just a couple of weeks. I craved her, but she didn’t want me. She said she was scared of getting pregnant again. We had messed up once. She wouldn’t use the pill because she was afraid of getting breast cancer like her mother. The physical and emotional intimacy we’d shared evaporated as she grew increasingly distracted by her mother’s condition.