Under a Dark Sky

by Lori Rader-Day

  “Share it,” Paris moaned. “Dev, do something.”

  “If this misunderstanding occurs often,” I continued to Warren, “perhaps the language you use to talk about the arrangements isn’t clear.”

  “The contract is clear,” he said. All business, indeed. “Do you make it a habit to sign documents you don’t read in full?”

  “She didn’t make the arrangements,” Dev said, kindly.

  “Did you make your own?” the director said, giving him the full weight of his attention now. “You also seem to have misunderstood.”

  “We have six people coming,” Dev said. “I thought—”

  “Six? Six?” For a moment my mind couldn’t move past the concept. I could feel my mouth opening and closing. “Six?” I had meant to spend the week alone, not in a frat house. Not in a barracks, for God’s sake.

  “Our good friends from school, Malloy, Sam, and Martha,” Paris said. “Malloy’s girlfriend. And us. Six. Which is why we wanted the whole house.”

  “You wanted three bedrooms,” Hoyt said, sliding behind the desk. He pulled out a clipboard and flicked through a couple of pages. “I can check your request in the system, but save me the time. Three bedrooms?” Dev nodded. Hoyt put down the clipboard. “Three bedrooms were available, and I’m sure someone would have told you the suite was unavailable.”

  “Oh,” Dev said. “I didn’t—I didn’t realize that’s what that meant. I guess I thought the suite was another building.” Paris sucked at her teeth.

  “But surely my husband would have asked for the whole house,” I said. I didn’t get to use that phrase—my husband—much anymore, and it felt like a soft blanket around my shoulders. I had always liked saying it. All the Army wives used it, every time, because you never knew when your last chance would come. Plus, my husband outranked a lot of theirs. “My husband would have asked for the whole house,” I said. “It was our—”

  It would have been a romantic getaway, a tenth wedding anniversary. Dev, reading my mind, blushed and looked down at the sandals he’d put on for the walk over from the house.

  “Well, he didn’t pay for the entire property,” the director said. “You have the suite at the back of the house. A bit secluded from the rest of the living quarters, with its own bathroom and entrance.”

  “But shared kitchen and living room?” I said.

  He didn’t want to admit it but nodded. “It’s communal living,” he said, brightening his voice into brochure copy, into a halfhearted sales pitch. “We’re a family-friendly place. We get a lot of grandparents with the whole brood, vacationing families. Intimate—” He cleared his throat. “More private retreats are probably best suited for the hotels in town. Only a few miles away.”

  I glanced at the other two. They probably didn’t mind communal living. That’s what they’d come for. And they probably wouldn’t let a little communal living ruin any private moments they had planned, either.

  Why had Bix chosen this place? In the last few months of his life, he had picked up a small interest in the night sky, flipping through a magazine or two, but with no patience, as usual, for reading. Out on the town, he might complain about the orange glow of light pollution. His interest in a wide sky coincided with a few other changes, including a few that I had welcomed. He’d been in the process of chilling out, and if a little astronomy was all it took, so be it. Among the many knotty mysteries of paperwork he’d left behind, this reservation hadn’t been the toughest to solve. The dates were just ahead of our tenth wedding anniversary, and he’d put away a little stash of cash, too. The money had come in handy while I’d figured out widowhood and how to take control of our finances. I had considered letting the reservation pass by, of course. I had been letting a lot of things pass by. But by the time the dates rolled around, I was ready for the change in scenery, for the chance to get out of that house. For the chance to get out of the rut I had created for myself.

  This was too much, however. Six people.

  I looked around. Everyone was looking at me, impatient. Maybe I had let the silence go on too long. “I’ll be on my way. Home,” I said. “Not to some backwater Motel 8, thanks. I can be back in Chicago before it gets—if I leave right now, I can get back tonight. I’ll need a receipt for my refund.”

  Paris’s chin rose triumphantly. Dev looked relieved. But Erica Ruth and her boss grimaced in exactly the same way. I had a feeling this conversation took place more than once in a while. “We have a no-refund policy,” Erica Ruth said.

  “Also in the contract,” Hoyt said. “The one your husband didn’t read.”

  I was angry and, worse than that, I was going to have to spend at least one night here on principle alone, refund be damned, and worse even than that, I was scared. I hadn’t known if I could go through with any of this on my own, and now I would have to find out what I was made of in front of an audience.

  “He might have read the contract,” I said, forcing my voice through the smallest window possible, the fit so narrow that it creaked. “He might have understood it completely, but he’s dead now, so I can’t ask him.”

  Faces around the room fell. If misery was good for anything, it was for reminding other people that their problems were petty and ridiculous. It was good for getting people to shut up.

  “I’m so sorry,” Warren Hoyt said, and he might have even meant it.

  “But not sorry enough to help me,” I said, and pushed past Paris for the door.

  Chapter Two

  I stomped past the park’s green Jeep, kicking as much gravel as I could displace as I crossed the lot back toward the guest house. Bix had done this to me. He had somehow managed to trick me into this predicament and also into being mad at him again, all from the grave. Duped me into being mad at him for something other than dying. Duped me into feeling something other than fear and betrayal.

  The thing was, I was afraid of the dark.

  I hadn’t always been this way. I used to be a grown-up. Or, I thought I was. It’s hard to remember. In the time since Bix had died, I had lost track of the woman I might have once been. She seemed like a person I’d met or read about, instead of some earlier incarnation of myself. She might have been an adult, or she might have been someone who tagged along after her husband from state to state, from one desolate life milestone to another. I’d been too busy to piece her back together. Too busy mourning, I guess, and not just the man but the life I thought I’d been living.

  I was shaking from the interaction in the office, from having brought up Bix in broad daylight. I hardly talked about him anymore.

  I had, at first. I talked about him all the time. I used up all the sympathy of friends, of family, of my entire world, talking about him. No one I knew had lost everything. They ran out of glib cheerfulness, and then the check-in visits stopped, the calls. The invitations. Talking about Bix drained people dry. I had to believe it was more than boredom. Maybe they didn’t want to admit that this thing that had happened to me—this annihilation—was possible. Maybe they didn’t want to admit it could happen to them.

  Bix’s mother was the only person who never tired of me. We sat around cups of tea getting cold and took turns saying his name. Between the two of us, we forgave him almost everything.

  At the funeral, some of his buddies had wanted to tell stories, funny ones, stories that would have lifted everyone’s mood. But I hadn’t wanted my mood lifted, not then. I had just learned a great deal about Bix that I hadn’t known. And by the end of the day, I would feel even less like having a laugh.

  So for a long time, when it happened by accident that a smile might find itself on my lips, I let it fall away. No. I wrenched it off before anyone could see it. I was a widow. Widows weren’t allowed to smile.

  Eventually, though, I got tired of my own grief, or of the person I was when I was mired in it. I got impatient with myself, with the role. With the story of Bix’s death, with the people I had to meet and talk with, the papers I had to read and sign, read and initial
here, here, and here, with all the things he’d left behind for me to sort through, discover.

  By six or seven months, I had started to see an opening. I wanted to talk about something else. I didn’t want to stay in it the way I was, trying to spite the guy who hadn’t even survived to see how angry I was at him. I wanted to forgive him, really forgive him, and so I began to try. At some cost, because other people couldn’t. That, apparently, was why some people had stayed away in the first place.

  I wanted to laugh. I had once liked to laugh, or I wouldn’t have been with Bix. And now, nine months later, I wanted—something. A way back. A way forward.

  I was stuck. So I didn’t talk about him much anymore, a relief to the few who were willing to be around me. And I tried not to think about him as much, either.

  Except—at home, in the night, no matter what I allowed myself to think about or talk about, every light source in our house glared out into the dark. It was the only way I could face the long hours of the night alone. The lights were keeping more than the dark at bay.

  Now, in this far-north refuge, the sky was still bright and would be for hours. But when the sun fell, these woods would close in around the guest house without the benefit of artificial light. Here in this dark sky park, one of only a handful in the world, all efforts had been made to keep lights minimal and those that were necessary turned toward the earth to avoid light pollution. All this so that we mere humans of the twenty-first century could gaze upon the pristine night sky as our ancestors had done.

  The ultimate prank.

  Bix had booked this getaway without knowing, of course, what it would mean to send me into the dark. He would have been with me, watching for the stars to sprinkle the black sky to the horizon, for shooting stars to dart over our heads. The visible Milky Way. When I’d discovered the reservation paperwork, I’d pictured the two of us sitting at the edge of the lake, our fingers entwined in the dark. Imagined days spent taking photographs of the ripples in the water, of leaves waving in the trees. A few nights in a strange bed to invigorate the marriage, who knows?

  The trip had seemed like Bix’s apology to me, a promise he was making to himself and, without my knowing, to me. It had all seemed terribly romantic.

  And it might have been, if he had lived. If he had lived and I hadn’t developed a real fear of the dark. And if six total strangers wouldn’t be ruining my chance of breaking through that fear with their presence. With their rowdy, happy lives.

  I was almost upon the guest house before I realized there were more people moving into it. Two more cars had pulled up behind what I assumed was Dev and Paris’s fancy Jaguar. All the vehicles had Midwestern plates—Ohio, and now Michigan and Indiana—and empty racks on top from which all manner of athletic gear had already been dislodged. Two bright yellow kayaks leaned up against the picnic table to the side of the house, warming in the sun. I reached for my camera.

  Maybe they’d be out all day on the lake. Maybe it would be fine.

  Through the viewfinder, I framed the shot, the kayaks like giant pieces of fruit resting against the rim of a bowl. But I didn’t take the photo. Instead, I lowered the camera and tucked it back into the bag.

  Six people. Six boisterous athletic types in their sexual primes, at the beginnings of their lives and relationships, before anything had to be faced or managed or gotten through. I couldn’t imagine spending another minute among them. Not for money. Not even on principle. So what if they were on the lake all day? It wasn’t the daytime I was worried about.

  My phone rang in my pocket. I hadn’t had more than two bars of service since Grand Rapids. I pulled the phone out, peered at the service. Spotty. The real estate agent, again.

  I braced myself. “Hello?”

  “Eden, hell-oh. Where’ve you been?”

  “On the road, Griffin, what’s up?”

  “Just checking in to see if all that driving has given you any clarity about what you want to do here,” he said breezily. “I know the plan—Tuesday—but just in case epiphanies came to you.”

  Griffin had a way of talking that made me think less of myself for listening to him, but he had a good track record of sales and a sense of style that I lacked. He had a sense of ambition that I was missing, too. The reception was bad. His voice seemed to be coming from inside a barrel, and the words cut out.

  “No rays of light or thunderbolts,” I said, examining a bruise on my forearm. I didn’t remember hitting my arm on anything. Was I a danger to myself, as my sister had suggested? “Is there some urgency?”

  “Well, I took a look around the house again—” He cut out.

  “And?”

  “—to get my hands on the place—just move some teeny tiny things—”

  “You’re breaking up terribly. What are you moving?”

  Nothing.

  “Griffin? You’re not coming through well.”

  “The sofas. All of them,” he said. “They’re out of here. You say the word.”

  “And this is going to help sell it?”

  “I’ll bring in a few—just—it up a bit—”

  “I’m not following you,” I said. I’d tried my phone at the front of the park on arrival. No bars. Texts were coming through. I could see I’d missed one from my sister, but I didn’t want to answer that right now. She would have too many questions for a text conversation, and the phone option was clearly not working well. “I can’t really tell what you’re wanting to do to the place. But what if I decide to stay? Remember the part where we are just thinking things through? Until Tuesday?”

  “We could—” He cut out again.

  “Griffin, can you please just leave the teeny tiny things where they are for now? Can you hear me? Just until Tuesday, OK?” I looked at the phone to see if we had disconnected. “Hello?”

  “A love seat—set off the—”

  “Tuesday, OK?” I said. “I’ll talk to you then.” I hung up the phone. He would probably use the bad connection to justify doing precisely what he wanted. The phone buzzed in my hand. A text from Griffin: Just one love seat? A shame that texts were getting through at all, really.

  I put the phone away.

  My suitcase sat somewhere inside. The car with Indiana plates had blocked mine in. Home was at least five hours away. And, even there, at home, teeny tiny things were already changing.

  I was suddenly magnificently tired. I put the heels of my hands to my eyes and pressed, letting time march toward sundown and darkness and my own reliable terror. If I could just relax for a minute. If I could just get some sleep. I had not gotten enough sleep since—

  And then the woman from the funeral appeared whole cloth in my mind. Navy dress, crumpled tissues in her hand, hair a bit mussed, slept in. The dress was too tight, stretching over her hips. That’s what I had to fall back on, the memory of that ill-fitting dress, after she said who she was. You think you’re the only one who lost someone—

  “I’m sure it’s not all that bad,” a man’s voice said. “Not the end of the world, at least.”

  I dropped my hands, not sure how long I’d been standing there. He was coming around the end of the house and past the kayaks toward me. Presumably he was one of the four additional expected guests and likely the same age as the pair I’d already met, but he seemed somehow older. He had startling good looks, the kind that hardly ever occurred in normal life—chiseled jaw; straight, bright teeth; and chestnut hair that had grown a little long, curling around his ears. He moved like someone comfortable in the world and, even though he wore far more clothes at this introduction than Dev had at his, I found myself imagining the skin underneath. I was staring. I pulled my arms around myself and looked toward the woods. A cloud passed over the sun overhead, its shadow dragging over us.

  I shivered. “It might be.”

  “It might be,” the man agreed, cheerful. He passed me and reached inside the open window of the car with Indiana license plates, the one keeping my car from leaving. He brought out a thick metal wat
chband and strapped it around his tanned wrist. The watch was a statement piece, the kind of thing that came with a yacht, maybe, not a kayak. Not a beat-up Volkswagen. He pushed the watch up his arm, shook it down to his wrist, then pushed it back up again. “It might be the end of the world,” he said. “But it’s probably not. Almost nothing is.”

  Something about him reminded me of Bix, though they looked nothing at all alike. There was no sense in it, really, but I felt a shift in this man’s favor for the similarity, whatever it was. “Did you lose the love of your life?” I said.

  The guy stopped and considered the question. “Well, strange you should ask,” he said, letting that sentiment drift between us without anchor. “To be honest, I just found her.”

  For a moment I thought he was flirting.

  It wasn’t out of the question. A few guys had tried since Bix’s death. I was young for a widow, for one thing, not yet thirty-five, and Bix’s benefits, insurance policies, and stashed cash had left me set up for a life of leisure that attracted a certain kind of attention. I had bumped up against single men—and married men who tried anyway, for sport—in all of the photography courses I’d taken. Lighting 101, portraiture, still life and tabletop photography. I’d had to skip darkroom techniques, obviously. In each of the classes, there were always men readily at hand who treated the course like a singles’ mixer, who thought I looked pretty good or at least pretty available. I could recognize the attempts, but didn’t allow them. I’d had to stop the classes, anyway. They were a waste of money at this point, given I couldn’t seem to take a single frame since Bix had died.

  I didn’t want men around me, anyway. Those swimming trunks on the newel post of the stairs inside had been doubly startling because they were so—male. I hadn’t kept any male company, hadn’t wanted any male attention. Yet, I wasn’t immune to a good smile.

  Here was a good smile. I caught my distended reflection in the windshield of the nearest car and ran my fingers through my messy hair, windblown from the drive and maybe a little more carefree than I actually was. I’d had no chance to admire a reflection in a long time but now I did. There she is. How odd that that woman was still there.