The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  I miss my dad and my brother. I miss snow and autumn. I miss kayaking on Casco Bay. I miss my life.

  And I don’t want to grow old and reflect that I could have had children, but my career mattered more. I’m going to walk in space. Nothing will top that.

  Except holding a baby in my arms.

  I thought someday I would get married. Someday I would have a household full of children.

  It won’t happen with Adam. This is not working. I have never seen him standing beside me forever.

  God help me, I saw you, Matt. I saw an altar and a white dress. I know our chance fell apart a million years ago. But somehow—

  Matt, you’re marrying someone else. Someone else will stand beside you in a church—and in life. Carol. Oh God. I want to be happy for you, but I feel like I’m slipping into my grave.

  What am I supposed to do with these feelings? I’m afraid I made the decision a long time ago. I don’t have any right to still love you. But I do.

  32

  After Elle’s Accident

  Day 11

  After testifying the day before, Adam had the balls to lumber back into Elle’s hospital room. He glared in my direction without actually meeting my gaze.

  Confounded, I stood. “What are you doing here?”

  He acted as if he hadn’t heard my question and bent down to kiss Elle’s cheek. “Hey, babe.”

  “Adam, get out.”

  “Have a little respect. I recognize that isn’t something you were ever good at, respecting my relationship with her, but perhaps you could take a walk for an hour or two and let me say good-bye.”

  “She said good-bye to you five years ago. As for respect, respect that Elle and I are husband and wife. And as for asking me to leave, are you out of your fucking mind?”

  He straightened up, his full height reaching for the ceiling, a smirk crossing his face. “What? You don’t trust me?”

  “No. I don’t. What the hell are you even doing in Maine? Her condition has nothing to do with you. She dumped you a long time ago.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Weren’t you listening in court? I have her medical power of attorney.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. My mother stepping in, I sort of understand. She’s wrong, but she’s family. You? You haven’t even seen Elle in years. What’s this about? Control? Power? Riding her fame so you look like a big man? Height aside, you’re such a fucking little Napoleon, needing to run everything.”

  “You were always an arrogant asshole, Beaulieu. I explained this all in court. We were together a long time, and I owe her this much. She was important to me.” As he swallowed, the gulp could have been heard in China. “I loved her. I never quite understood what went wrong between us, but I suspected it was your influence.”

  “You’re still in love with her. Jesus,” I said, turning toward the window for a moment.

  “I’m not—in love with her. Anymore. But … yes … I still care,” he said, his voice petering out. “We were together a long time.”

  “You’ve been apart a long time, too.”

  “That’s pretty damned ironic, coming from you. You were pathetic, all those years, sitting around, waiting for her, calling her, interjecting yourself into my relationship with Elle.”

  “We never talked about you. We were friends, long before you ever met her,” I said.

  “You were still in love with her.”

  I conceded the point with a nod. “So why are you here? You didn’t continue on as friends. That crap on the stand about—”

  “It wasn’t crap. We talked, maybe not often, but we did. I didn’t want to know she was pregnant. Once she had a child, it would be over for her.” He shook his head, looked back at her, and muttered, “I didn’t think it would be over like this.”

  And with that, I saw Elle again, not with the eyes that had begun to adjust, but the way I saw her that first time in the ER, that drop-me-to-my-knees way, the world-coming-to-an-end way. I zoned out. To see Elle. My Elle. Lying there. So motionless and so distant.

  He was still talking, recapping, excusing his intrusion. “So I didn’t call her back after she said she was pregnant last winter. But caring about her, that wasn’t crap.” And as if he’d concluded, he whisked out of the room.

  For some bizarre reason I felt compelled to follow him. Maybe I’d missed something. Maybe he’d announced the next bomb he intended to drop. I didn’t know what besides a long-forgotten advanced health directive he might produce, but uncharacteristically, he had surrendered.

  He took the back stairwell, the one that emptied out by the emergency room entrance, the one with the helipad, the large expanse of asphalt between the behemoth of the hospital and the parking deck. The rain was pelting down and neither of us was wearing a coat. In less than the fifteen seconds it took to dash across the lot, I was drenched. He was drenched. Only as he pounded on the elevator button in the parking deck did he see me. “What? I’m leaving. What more do you want?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  He exhaled, his shoulders sagging. “I know you don’t. But you ought to. You need to understand so you can stop this travesty.” He swiped the rainwater off of his face. “Let’s get out of here.”

  It wasn’t like this was the first time I ever sat across a table from Adam. Over the years I’d had the displeasure, but there we were again, this time soaked through to the skin, sitting in vinyl booths, hunched over laminated menus in a local Italian dive where overcooked spaghetti and olive oil ruled.

  “Not exactly vegan fare,” he said.

  “Get a salad. We’re not here for the cuisine. Talk,” I said.

  He closed the menu and looked at his watch. “Okay. I have an hour before I have to leave for the airport, but don’t think I’m giving up. I’m going back to Houston so I can find the lawyer Elle used to write that advanced directive, and I’ll be back with the original copy before court reconvenes in ten days.”

  A chill ran through my bones, and not because I was soaking wet sitting underneath an air-conditioning vent.

  He rattled off the story of how he’d met her, how young she was, how he even felt a little jealous of “the princess,” because he’d worked two jobs, and at twenty-nine he was just still working on his PhD.

  “Look, I worked my way through school, too,” I said. “How you met her has nothing to do with what’s happening now. Or more to the point, it has nothing to do with what she would want.”

  “Patience,” he said, rolling his eyes. “My point is everyone misjudged her. Even I did at first. The only reason I ever talked to her at all was because we both wanted to work for NASA. So whenever we ended up in the same place, I made polite conversation. But before long it became apparent she wasn’t such the little spoiled prodigy after all. Every weekend she was driving all the way to Maine and back—so she could see her little brother.”

  “Yeah, well, Alice made her promise to take care of him,” I said, using the paper napkin to blot a rivulet of water running from my wet hair down my forehead.

  Adam laced his hands behind his head and leaned back. “And I suppose you don’t see anything wrong in that? A teenage girl, a genius with huge promise, and she had to clean up her family’s dysfunctional mess. You were probably like everyone else.”

  “No. I told Elle to go to MIT,” I said. I argued that my parents would watch out for Christopher if Hank didn’t stay sober. And he did stop drinking for good not long afterward. I even told her I would go to Boston University instead of Columbia so we could be nearby. But no, Elle had to be responsible. “I wasn’t like everyone else,” I told Adam.

  “I tried to help her,” he said. “It didn’t take long for her to get to me. She was mesmerizing—brilliant. Really brilliant. But she was so naive and inexplicably ignorant of academic politics. She needed to be more aggressive with her research, and she was too soft, too distracted by her family—even driving up on a weekday once in a while so she could attend Christopher’s school events.”

>   “Elle’s family is important to her,” I said. “She couldn’t walk away from someone she loved, any more than she would have turned off her life support under these circumstances.”

  “See, that’s the point, Beaulieu. You’re forcing her into something equally inequitable. This time you’re asking her to accept torture to take care of some amorphous blob that isn’t even a baby yet.”

  “No.”

  “Listen to me first. For once, just listen to someone else’s point of view. I anchored her, helped her stand up for herself, to put her academic dreams first. I’m the one who convinced her to push for NASA even though it was so far away from her needy family. I made sure nothing and no one got in her way. She had the talent. She had the desire. But she had to prioritize.”

  “You aggrandize your role.”

  “Not really.” He laughed once, a dry, humorless laugh. “I helped her clear the static so she could get what she wanted. Space. Stars. Hubble. I loved her, and NASA was what she dreamed about. You were a distraction. Her family was a distraction. Sometimes even I was a distraction. And as much as she resisted me sometimes, she wanted my help.”

  The waitress came to the table, set sweating water glasses down in front of us, and took our orders.

  I shifted on the vinyl booth seat, squeaking in my wet trousers. I wanted to get this discussion over with; I wanted to get back to my wife. “Elle was never as weak-minded as you describe her. She knew exactly what she wanted. Always did. Yeah, she was well rounded, possessed compassion, and she loved her family. Hank and Alice made sure that, even though Elle was a genius, she had a normal childhood, played sports, and did chores. That wasn’t a distraction. That’s what makes someone human, being part of something bigger.”

  “Making her responsible for everyone else’s lives made her a doormat.”

  “Tell that to the crew of Atlantis. Tell that to Jabert. That she should have left him to die. She’s heroic.”

  Adam raked his hair and leaned forward. “Are you incapable of understanding what I’m saying? Elle deserves to have someone put her first. For once, think about it. Stand up for her. She left NASA for you. For once, do the right thing. For her.”

  I slammed my hand down on the table between us. “She wanted to leave NASA. You keep saying that I don’t understand. The fact is you don’t,” I said. “You evidently have very little respect for Elle’s independence. She didn’t need to be led. I couldn’t have led her anywhere. We were going in the same direction. We wanted the same things. Elle wanted children, maybe more than I did. Elle wasn’t an egocentric megalomaniac. Did she make sacrifices? Yeah. And that was her choice.”

  His face filled with so much contempt he looked like he might spit. “Keep telling yourself that. She wanted more. I took care of her. I’m here to take care of her now. Believe me, I don’t want to be in the middle of this. If you were even a halfway decent man, you’d let her die with dignity. Damn you for letting her die slowly.” Adam stood up and marched out the door.

  Keisha unfolded the jigsaw-patterned quilt in Caribbean blues, yellows, and pinks and tucked it in around Elle. “She always said this one made her feel happy. I was planning to make her a quilt this year for Christmas.” The furrow between her brows deepened. “She won’t be here, will she?”

  A couple of responses popped into my head. Certainly I hoped Elle would still be carrying the baby at Christmas—and for a while afterward—but even if Keisha completed a new quilt, it wouldn’t matter. Elle would never know about the love and painstaking hours put into stitching one of Keisha’s masterpieces. Elle wouldn’t even know if she was warm or cold. I hugged Keisha, this woman whose support had seen Elle through the loss of our son, whose own struggles Elle had supported in kind. “We’ll have to see what happens,” I said.

  Keisha made a pitiful attempt to smile and eased back into the chair next to Elle’s bed.

  We made small talk for a few minutes before I began to vent about Adam, his visit, the rain, and his tirade at the restaurant. “I hate that son of a bitch,” I said. “Did she ever tell you about him?”

  Keisha blinked a few times before she spoke. “I knew she’d lived with someone, but I didn’t remember his name. What is it you really want to ask me?”

  Is he right? Was I placing an inhuman burden on Elle by asking her to try to hold on for months? But instead of saying that, I shrugged.

  Keisha put her hand on mine in a consoling gesture. “Here’s what I recall she said about him. He reminded her of you. Don’t look so horrified, Matthew. She said he possessed some of the same qualities. He was smart enough to keep her on her toes, and they were friends first. But he wasn’t you. And although the relationship was serious, it didn’t have the substance to last. But that’s not what you want to know either, is it? You want me to tell you that you are right and that he is wrong.”

  I lowered my gaze. “After talking to him, listening to him, I don’t know anymore.”

  “Well, I do. I’m biased. I want the baby to live, but that is not enough for me to recuse myself,” she said. “You see, I have a theory. Do you want the long version or the short one?”

  “The middle-of-the-road one,” I said. Keisha was a storyteller by nature, and sometimes she went off on dissertation-length tangents. Elle said it was a hazard of academia. Faculty had a captive audience in the classroom, so sometimes that led to the delusion that every story professors told kept their students rapt.

  Keisha shifted in her seat, and I could see her composing her explanation. “Did you know Elle had a sixteen-year-old girl in her senior honors class last fall?”

  I nodded. “Julie something. Elle said she was gifted.”

  “She’s a little mousy but obviously she has a fine mind. She came into Elle’s office while the two of us were chatting one day, and after some discussion and some rambling about an incomprehensible mathematical formula, Julie excused herself. Elle sat back in her chair and told me how in between worlds she felt at that age. Like Julie, she had the intellect to outwit most of her peers, sometimes her professors, but she never felt like an equal to the other students, not in high school, not in college, not even in graduate school. Particularly not with Adam. At least not for a long, long time.”

  I leaned forward. “She had a hard time fitting in when she was a kid,” I said, “but …”

  “Exactly—but—she started to grow up. She went to Princeton. She met a much older guy. And she liked him because was older, and he didn’t seem to mind that she was a little naive about some things. He mentored her. She let him have the upper hand.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Because she outgrew him. She matured and she became a confident woman who knew what she wanted and knew how to fight and achieve her goals. She is …” Keisha swallowed hard. “She was a whole person. All of those things I talk about in women’s studies courses … Elle was the perfect example.”

  “Okay,” I said. “But how—”

  “How does that make you right and Adam wrong?”

  I nodded.

  “He continued to discount her opinions. She’d had enough. But she told me once that even when you were children, you respected her. I saw that. You didn’t always agree on everything, but you always listened. Do you believe she would want to save the baby?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And that’s how I know you’re making the right decision. For you, it is a matter of respect. Besides, I knew her, too. And she would never surrender—even like this.”

  33

  Day 12

  “The Mass has ended. Go in peace,” Father Meehan said.

  “Thanks be to God,” we responded like a pack of brainwashed peasants.

  Rote memory is a wondrous thing. I could make it through an entire Mass and not have to think once. I could recite prayers from my childhood. I could zone out during the homily and the Liturgy of the Eucharist, standing and kneeling in a tidal rhythm.

  God. If it took God, I’d bow
to God.

  But afterward I felt depleted, and I sat there wondering if the good priest who was at the front of the church shaking the hands of the devoted noted that I’d fulfilled my part of the bargain—at least for this Sunday.

  I stood, dusted myself off as if I’d grown roots into the hard oak pew, and then headed up to the altar to light a candle. I should do that. Twelve days. It had only taken me twelve days to become a hypocrite. I was looking for the taper to light the flame when I realized that, not only were all the candles ablaze, they were electric. What a sham. Should I flick off one and then relight it? It was stupid anyway.

  “I can’t even get altar servers these days,” Father Meehan said, walking up the central aisle. “Good to see you here.” Then he began snuffing out the real candles, the ones illuminating the altar. “How is Elle today?”

  “The same.” I pointed at the collection of prelit candles. “What am I supposed to do with this?”

  “It’s kind of like a gas fireplace, don’t you think?”

  “Or an electric one. It gives the illusion. It’s all smoke and mirrors, isn’t it?” Did I say that last part aloud? Shit. I’m tired. I’d spent most of the night replaying Adam’s argument.

  “You realize you don’t need to light a candle to pray. It’s simply symbolic,” Father Meehan said.

  “Right,” I said.

  “As for the smoke and mirrors, it’s called faith.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m trying.”

  He took the wine and chalice back into the back room. “Come along.”

  I followed. Can you say “sheep”? The analogy was befitting. Sheep. Shepherd.

  “I can run all the clichés past you,” he said, as if he could read minds in this house of magic. “Ask God for help, and He’ll answer you. I can tell you that faith is a gift. I can direct you to certain passages in the Bible. Instead I’m just going to tell you to try to open your mind. Have a conversation with Him. Or try to.”