Follow the Stars Home

by Luanne Rice

  Alan’s house was a Victorian. White clapboards, gray trim, three steps leading up to a wide porch. Gingerbread, dovecote, a grape arbor. But the place was in disrepair. Paint peeling, one shutter on a side window missing, the weather vane cockeyed. The grass needed cutting, and the day-sailor on its rusty trailer had not seen saltwater in a long time. She remembered long sails with her husband and brother-in-law.

  Their relationship had been smooth back then. She had sensed that Alan wanted the best for her and Tim. He would invite them sailing, and they would invite him to dinner. Everyone was on his, and her, best behavior. Those sailing days were bright and sparkling, the three of them on Alan’s small sloop. He’d be at the tiller, Tim stretched out with a cap over his eyes, Dianne manning the jib as they sailed the Sound.

  One brilliant sunny day, the waves splashing over the rail, Dianne had felt incredible joy. They were sailing to windward, Tim trawling for bluefish off the stern, Dianne crouched in the bow. She had turned, mouth open in sheer delight, to say something about the sun or the wind or the three of them being together, and she caught Alan looking at her. His eyes were narrowed, the expression full of regret and longing. In that one glance she knew that his mood had to do with what had once briefly been between them, and for that instant she felt it too. She turned quickly away.

  Dianne and Alan kept things polite and superficial. They were each other’s in-laws. She would make fish stew every Friday night, and Alan would come over for dinner between office hours and hospital rounds. He would ask her opinion on what color carpeting he should get for his office. Tim would grin, holding Dianne’s hand, glad to include Alan in their happy family life. But the pretense between Dianne and Alan collapsed the day Tim took to the sea for good.

  Crossing the unkempt lawn, she spied something in the grass: an old birdhouse. Dianne had made it for Alan many years earlier, before she had had Julia. As a promise to Alan’s future kids, that she would build them the greatest playhouse in Hawthorne, Dianne had made him the birdhouse. She remembered Tim holding the ladder while Alan climbed up to hang the house in the tall maple. Now it had fallen down. Propping it against the stone foundation, Dianne walked up the front steps.

  Dianne rang the doorbell again and again, but no one came to the door.

  “Hello,” she called. “Hello!”

  It felt strange to be standing there. She remembered the night she and Tim had come to tell Alan their amazing news: that she was three months pregnant. She had stood in the foyer with Tim’s arms around her as Tim invited Alan to touch her belly. She had felt embarrassed for Alan; she could see the discomfort when he met her eyes, but he’d done what Tim asked to please his brother. His touch had been sure and steady. Closing her eyes, Dianne felt Alan connecting with the baby inside her, and she’d shivered.

  “Alan,” she called now. “Are you home?”

  She tried the doorknob. It turned. Creaking open, the heavy door led into a small entry hall and living room. The decor could be considered minimal: one mahogany table, one rolltop desk with chair, and one bleached-cotton covered love seat. His decorating skills hadn’t improved.

  “Alan!” Dianne called. She gave a whistle.

  The walls were lined with shelves overflowing with books: Dickens, Shakespeare, Norman MacLean, Yeats, William Carlos Williams, Hemingway, Freud, Dos Passos, Trevanian, Robert B. Parker, Ken Follett, Linnaeus, Jung, Lewis Thomas, Louis Agassiz, Audubon, Darwin, Winnicott, and many more. Tim had never been able to sit still long enough to read books like those.

  Turning away, she noticed an upper shelf full of framed photos.

  Alan was very tall, so the pictures would be at his eye level. Dianne, standing on tiptoe, could barely see. A portrait of his parents-he looked just like his father, tall and lean. A silver-framed photo of Dorothea, his grandmother. A picture of three young boys in baseball uniforms. The same three boys on a sailboat, at the beach, holding surf-casting rods. Alan, Tim, and their big brother, Neil.

  “Tim,” she said, almost shocked by the sight of him.

  Dianne and Tim’s wedding picture. She took it down, her hand shaking. People often talked to her about “letting go.” Of the past, anger, her ex-husband. Eleven years had passed. So why was Dianne filled with rage at the sight of him?

  They had loved each other once; she could see it in the way her body leaned toward him, the way he couldn’t take his eyes off her. His touch made her melt, his voice had made her want to promise him the stars. His shoulders looked ready to burst out of his tuxedo. His tie was crooked. Dianne had tried to make it her life’s mission to give Tim the happiness he’d lost when Neil died.

  Remembering how hard she had tried, Dianne dug her nails into her palms. Eleven years hadn’t diluted her feelings. He hadn’t just left her; he had left their daughter.

  She remembered one night, several months into the pregnancy, lying on the deck of his lobster boat. The starry sky curved overhead, and Dianne had whispered: “We can name the baby Cornelia if she’s a girl, Neil if he’s a boy. Either way, we’ll call our baby Neil.”

  Tim had kissed her; he had seemed overjoyed. They had been relatively young, just twenty-seven years old. Her doctor had suggested the prenatal testing, not because of her age but because he’d found high levels of protein in her blood. He had ordered amniocentesis.

  Two words: genetic abnormalities. Dianne remembered the shiver down her neck, the way her insides had turned to ice. Hugging herself, praying for time to go back and for the results to be a mistake, she had cried for days. How could such a thing happen? She and Tim were healthy. They loved each other, they were good people, they worked hard. Their baby was a girl, and it was abnormal.

  Was it her diet? The fact they lived too close to a power plant? Had Dianne drunk too much wine before she’d known she was pregnant? Had Tim smoked too much pot down on the docks? Was it air pollution? Something in the water? Were there chemicals in the milk they drank? The meat they ate? Was she using the wrong detergent, shampoo, skin lotion, fabric softener? Did she lack folic acid? Had she neglected to eat the proper green, leafy vegetables?

  Dianne had sat in a rocking chair in her workshop, going back and forth on the creaky floor, for days. She hadn’t washed her hair, eaten a meal, spoken to her mother. Tim would go out lobstering, come back, go out, come back. She had wanted him to hold her, tell her everything would be all right, but that wasn’t happening. So she had held herself.

  Inside her, the baby was still. Maybe it’s dead, she had thought. She’d been in love with the little child, called it Neil, but now she’d begun thinking of it as It. As in “It’s not moving.” “It’s genetically abnormal.” “It’s sick.”

  “We can’t have it,” Tim had said one night. Keeping his distance, he spoke from across the room. “No one would think we’re wrong.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “An abortion,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said, feeling nauseated.

  He came close. His face wet with tears, he pressed his lips against her neck. “When we said we’d have the amnio,” he said, “we knew we might have to face this. That’s the reason for the test-to give us a chance to decide. We have to decide, Dianne.”

  “I’m glad you’re saying ‘we,’” Dianne whispered. She had been feeling so alone. Tim had been fishing all this time, not wanting to talk to her about their baby and the nightmare they found themselves in. She understood-sickness drove him crazy. He was so afraid, but she wanted them to go through it together.

  “We can call the doctor,” he said. “Schedule the abortion. We can get started on a new pregnancy right away….”

  “I’ll think about it,” Dianne had said.

  And she did think about it. She rocked herself through the days, trying to imagine how relieved she would feel when this problem was lifted. She would go to the hospital, the doctor would give her a sedative, and the baby would be gone. It was a sick baby anyway. It would have horrible problems. It might be ret
arded; other children would make fun of it.

  Remembering those days in the rocking chair, Dianne reached up to take Julia’s picture down from Alan’s shelf. There she was, six months old. It was her official baby picture, a little late because she had spent so much of her early life having surgery. She was wrapped in a pink blanket, her tiny face peeking out. Dianne had been holding her. Alan had taken the picture.

  Dianne stared at her daughter’s face. It was so pretty and fine. Looking at those blue eyes, one would never guess at the mess inside her body, under the pink blanket. Julia’s tiny pink tongue glistened. Dianne felt the same surge of love every time.

  “Julia,” she said as if her daughter were right there. “Oh, Julia.”

  Dianne thought back to those days in the rocking chair. She didn’t hate herself for considering the options; most of the time, she didn’t hate Tim. For her, the decision to have Julia had been gradual. Rocking slowly, she had felt the baby move. A slight shift, her bones clinking against Dianne’s rib cage. The baby had tiptoed up her spine. Dianne had felt her heart flutter.

  Alan stopped by. He walked into the room, stood in the doorway. Dianne hadn’t told anyone the test results, not even her mother. Tim’s reticence on physical matters was renowned; Dianne would never have expected him to confide in his brother. Especially not his brother.

  “Tim told me,” Alan had said.

  Dianne was shocked. Hugging herself, she knew that nothing either of the McIntosh brothers could say would make her change her mind. She was rocking her baby, just the two of them, and everything would be fine.

  “He showed me the test results.”

  “They don’t matter,” Dianne said.

  “I’m supposed to talk to you,” Alan said. “Talk some sense into you. I guess he thinks because I’m a doctor—”

  “Doctors and lobstermen,” Dianne countered. “You’re both very practical.”

  “He’s scared,” Alan said. “He’s seen some very bad suffering. He knows what can happen between parents when they have a sick child.”

  Dianne lowered her head. She was scared too. Her eyes welled up and tears spilled down her cheeks. She had known about Tim’s parents fighting, his mother’s drinking, their turning against each other, and she had smelled beer on Tim’s breath ever since getting the test results.

  “Don’t,” she said, “say anything against my baby. Don’t tell me not to—”

  “I won’t,” Alan said.

  “Don’t tell me not to have her.”

  “No,” Alan said. Walking across the room, he knelt beside Dianne. Taking her hand, he waited for her to look up. Tears were running down her face, and she felt too tired to wipe them.

  “I’ll take care of her,” he said. “I’ll be her doctor.”

  His words hung in the air. She saw the circles under his eyes, imagined he had lost some sleep coming to this decision.

  “You will?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Tim show you the piece of paper?” she asked then, grabbing his hand tighter. “Could you understand the results? Will it be very bad?”

  “I don’t know,” Alan said.

  “Will she be in pain?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  Dianne wept, feeling Alan’s arms around her shoulders. She had already made up her mind: She was having this baby no matter what, but the questions were still hard. The child’s problems could be great or small, but she was going to be born, and Dianne was going to be her mother.

  “I want Tim to love her,” Dianne had said. “I want him with us. Tell him he has to accept this.”

  “Don’t ask me that,” Alan said. “He’s my brother, and I can’t tell him what to do. Okay?”

  Tim was gone before the next full moon. So much for loving each other through the worst. Dianne wept for weeks, remembering the broken promise.

  Alan had kept his though. He had been there from the beginning. Tim had walked out on his family, saddling them on Alan, a doctor and an uncle, but not a father. A fine man who made Dianne crazy because he was Tim’s brother. Dianne took down the picture of the three young McIntosh brothers fishing. They had been inseparable. When Neil had died, so had parts of the other two. The parts that knew how to love, Dianne thought now.

  She had no business being at Alan’s house. Deciding to leave the soup on his kitchen counter, she walked around the corner into the sunroom. And there he was, sacked out on a sofa.

  “Alan,” Dianne said, not wanting to scare him.

  Well, her mother had been right. He really was sick. Anyone could see it by the way he lay on his back, fast asleep, breathing through his open mouth, one arm flung over his eyes, the other flopping down to the floor. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and his beard was dark. With his glasses off and a five o’clock shadow, he looked almost like a different man. A little dangerous, too mysterious to be Alan.

  He wore khakis and a T-shirt. Dianne stared at his bare arms. They were strong and lean, the forearms covered with hair. Those were real muscles, and his patients’ mothers would never guess they were there. His stomach was flat and lean.

  Feeling weird, Dianne just stood and stared. Her insides flipped, and she felt she was doing something forbidden. He really did look awfully cute lying there. His tousled hair, the way his mouth looked, those arms: She was used to thinking of Tim as the McIntosh with muscles. The plaid blanket had slipped, and Dianne reached down to pull it a little higher.

  She walked out. But on her way down the front steps she stopped. Her heart was pounding. She told herself it was the bizarre intrusion of standing beside a person while he unknowingly slept, and maybe it was. The birdhouse was leaning right where she’d left it. Picking it up, she put it in the back of her truck.

  And then she drove home.

  Alan woke up to the smell of chicken soup. His head was thick and stuffy, and his mind swirled with a thousand dreams.

  He was in Italy or Greece, somewhere hilly and green with shimmering light silhouetting everything from dark cypresses to goddesses. Water flowed, and Alan lay helpless on a blanket of moss. The goddess stood over him. She had small hands and clear eyes and messy, straw-colored hair. Wanting to reach for her, he was paralyzed by love. The goddess was Dianne. She had come back to him after all this time.

  When he woke up, he went to the kitchen for a glass of water. On the butcher-block island he saw an unfamiliar paper bag. It smelled like his dream. Starving, he pulled out the container. The soup was still hot, and there was a hunk of fresh bread included as well.

  Sitting at the island, he ate the soup straight from the jar. Had Dianne actually been here? Dazed from his cold, he couldn’t figure anything out. What would she be doing, delivering chicken soup to him? She wasn’t the chicken-soup-making type. And usually she didn’t want anything to do with Alan that didn’t involve Julia.

  Chicken soup seemed more like Rachel, other people he could think of. He had a few regular mothers who knitted him sweaters, baked him cakes, dropped off casseroles. His friend Malachy Condon called them the SMB—Single Mom Brigade. They were nice women, grateful for the way he took care of their kids. They were kind and generous, and their gifts usually came thoughtfully packaged in wicker baskets strewn with fresh flowers, pinecones, seashells, and chocolates. Heartfelt notes always accompanied the offerings.

  The soup had come in a paper bag: decidedly original. He rifled through, looking for clues. No note, no flowers. No sign it was from Rachel or anyone else.

  Alan knew he was willfully stupid about the gifts. Some of the women who gave them were divorced, a couple were widowed. He knew how hard it could be, raising kids alone. These were conscientious people: They read all the good-parent literature, and they tried hard. Being alone hurt. Always being the parent to answer the nighttime crying, to soothe the sore throat, to hold the bowl that caught the throw-up. The single pediatrician could start to look pretty good. So they’d knit him a sweater, bake him a pie.

  Alan w
ould ask some of them out. They had good times. The women were nice, fun, smart, pretty. Alan would always wish he felt more than he did. Marriage and a family sounded so fine. He had started to wonder what he was missing in himself: Why couldn’t he love these women who seemed so ready to love him?

  One answer came to mind: They weren’t Dianne.

  When Alan made house calls to Gull Point, Dianne would answer the door looking like the wrath of God. Her face would show however she felt, and at those times it generally wasn’t good. Wild hair, madwoman eyes, clothes stained with Julia’s spit and urine, bearing almost no resemblance to the girl he’d taken to the Rosecroft Inn. She’d talk to Alan but all the while be staring at Julia. No dislike, no affection for him at all. At those times Alan was incidental. He wasn’t her brother-in-law nor a man she’d once dated-someone who had once been a friend, a guy she’d grown to resent-he was just the person she had called to stop her daughter’s suffering.

  She had mentioned time. She had wanted to know that they-she, her mother, and Julia-would have time together. He glanced at the calendar hanging by the phone, sent to everyone in Hawthorne by the Layton Pharmacy. It showed the lighthouse where he’d gone with Rachel, where he’d caught his cold. There was the exact spot where they had-Alan looked for the word: coupled. It couldn’t be called making love. He ripped the picture off and threw it in the trash.

  Then he stared at the days. All those white squares stretching through June, July, August, September, October, November, December. Seven pages, seven months. Alan’s head was thick and heavy, and his eyesight blurred. He didn’t think Julia was going to live more than seven months, seven calendar pages.

  On the other hand, Julia had confounded him again and again. He hadn’t expected her to survive her first birthday. He would never have believed she would see her fifth. Children with such severe health problems rarely lived long, so every year was a gift. But this year Julia had decided to grow.