Follow the Stars Home

by Luanne Rice

  “Maaa,” Julia said.

  “So much. You’ve always loved it so much, ever since you were born.”

  Julia moved, wringing her hands in Dianne’s embrace.

  “You’re a summer baby,” Dianne said. “You love this season so much, don’t you, Julia? This warm, wonderful time …”

  Across the marsh Dianne could see their house. The weathered shingles looked silver in the light, the shutters as blue as the sea. Lucinda’s garden blazed with color. Gold-green marsh reeds swayed in the breeze, and the flag waved. Her studio looked tiny, almost like one of her playhouses. The driveway was empty, but Dianne wondered whether Alan would be passing by later to check on Amy and Julia. She thought of how they had hugged the last time he was over, and she held Julia tighter.

  “Helloooo!” Amy called, waving from the top of the dune.

  “Hear that?” Dianne asked. “That’s your friend Amy calling you.”

  “Gaaa,” Julia said.

  “Hi,” Dianne called back. “Julia says hi.”

  Julia was weightless and free. Amy and Lucinda stood on the sand hill. Their faces were shadowed, but Dianne believed they were smiling. This day was blessed. The kingfisher perched on an old piling, watching them pass. The sun was hot, the breeze fresh. It was summer, and the girls were together.

  Nine hundred miles north-northeast, Malachy Condon sat on his old red tugboat, listening to dolphins sing love songs to each other. He had the headphones on. Last night he had anchored off Big Tancook Island, dangling the hydrophone over the side. Dolphins had streaked by, trailing green fire. Their language was complex and mysterious, irresistible as poetry to an Irishman like Malachy.

  Now he was back at his dock in Lunenburg, translating last night’s recordings. He was seventy-two years old, white-haired and sturdy. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, his love for the sea dated back to childhood. His father had caught salmon in purse nets, and one summer he and his sisters had made holes to let the salmon out. An idealist from the start, his love of nature knew no bounds. Like right now: He’d listen to dolphins crooning over James Galway’s flute playing or Pavarotti’s singing anytime.

  Out the wheelhouse window, the harbor was still as dark green glass. The bright red and blue buildings were as simple as children’s building blocks. White gulls circled overhead. A fishing boat left the dock, and Malachy sighed. Beautiful music in his ears, the drama of a northern harbor to watch, what more could he want?

  The question was a bitter one, and he bit down on his pipe. Malachy missed his wife. Brigid had died five years before. They had had a grand life together-in Ireland, in the States, and on many oceans around the world. An Aran Island girl, Brigid had encouraged him to study the sea. She had cleaned houses and taken in wash to put him through school. There weren’t many students at the Kerry Oceanographic College with young wives chapping their hands and toughening their knees so that they might study eel-grass and shark livers.

  “My day will come,” she’d say with her low voice lilting and heather-green eyes twinkling. “You’ll be hard at work studyin’ your fish, and I’ll be a lady of leisure. Me and the babies will stay home all day playing patty-cake.”

  “That’s a promise,” Malachy had said. “I’ll support you and eleven babies until you’re so happy, you can’t take it anymore.”

  “Can a person ever be so happy?” she had asked him, laying her red head against his chest. “So happy she can’t take it anymore?”

  “Maybe after eleven babies,” he had joked. “She’d be so happy, she’d be beggin’ her husband to leave her alone.”

  “Oh, Mal,” she had laughed.

  But there weren’t eleven babies. There was only one. Malachy and Brigid had had a son. They had named him Gabriel, because he was their archangel. Brigid never had another child, but Malachy was glad. Gabriel was enough. He was their full moon, their rising sun. Small, funny, with his mother’s curly red hair, he had been a poet.

  No, he hadn’t been published. But he would have been, Malachy knew. The boy had a gift. His language came straight from his forebears: Yeats, Synge, and Joyce. At fourteen he had the soul of a wise man. His words had the rhythm of songs, and when he wrote about moonlight shining on the bay, you could see the ripples. When he wrote about loving a girl, something he had not yet experienced, his poem had the power to pierce your heart and leave it bleeding.

  Gabriel’s agility and brilliance had its epicenter in his heart. The happiest baby ever born, he grabbed the life given him with passion and fervor. Everyone knew he was great. His teachers, friends, neighbors. His poems won contests. His English teachers were nurturing him, telling the Condons their son would be famous someday. Malachy didn’t care about fame. If only he could hear his son’s words for the rest of his life, that would be enough for him.

  But Gabriel had been killed. He was only fourteen, killed in a car accident on Route 132 in Hyannis, just before the Airport Rotary. The shock had nearly destroyed his parents. If not for their faith …

  Brigid had gone to mass at St. Francis Xavier Church every morning, kneeling a few pews back from Rose Kennedy. Sometimes their eyes would meet, the older woman well understanding Brigid’s dark sorrow.

  Malachy had buried himself in the lab. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution was used to night owls, but even so, Malachy’s office lights burned later than anyone’s. Dolphins became his passion. He would listen to them talk for hours. He had far-fetched theories that no one wanted to hear about-that dolphins were romantic, had elaborate rituals of courtship, that their voice tones changed when they were in love.

  Hunched over, his earphones on, Malachy was lost in grief. All he could do was listen. How could a human being interpret dolphins’ love songs without allowing the music to touch him? He nearly lost his grant that year. Unable to hear the love songs, he had been incapable of writing papers about them. Research without a theory didn’t get funded.

  Malachy’s young assistant helped him out. Months after Gabriel’s death, Alan McIntosh handed him a tape.

  “It’s from the Caribbean,” he said. “Dolphins recorded in the Anegada Passage.”

  “More gibberish,” Malachy said.

  “Not the way I hear it,” Alan said. “Not the way you taught me to listen. It sounds like poetry to me. We’re reading Yeats in school, and it sounds like that.”

  “Yeats,” Malachy said. Gabriel had been his Yeats. Gabriel had written words to break the heart and waken the soul. What did an American science student like Alan McIntosh know about Yeats?

  Malachy hated the sight of him for months: a young man who went to school every day, who was alive, the things Gabriel was not. On the other hand, Alan had lost a brother. It was tragic and lousy, and it destroyed his parents. So, wanting to oblige, Malachy slipped on the earphones, trying to listen for Yeats in the dolphins’ language. Instead, he heard Gabriel.

  Alan gave Malachy that gift. Mentioning Yeats, he’d handed Malachy the key to Gabriel. And Malachy heard his son still. The dolphin songs were like Gabriel’s poetry: beautiful, ethereal, too sweet for this world. After all this time, Malachy had met very few people who could hear it, truly get the magic. Most folks heard clicks, trills, crooning, keening. Only the emotionally intense, the spiritually advanced, the madly in love, the truly insane, the terminally foolish, the grief-stricken, the guilty, the enlightened, the people with souls of poets and hearts of children, could hear the dolphins sing their songs of love.

  Alan McIntosh was one such man. His brother Tim was not.

  The McIntosh boys: the only sons Malachy Condon had left. They weren’t his flesh and blood, but did that matter? Malachy had adopted them in his heart, as they had adopted him. Malachy believed that people didn’t choose one another. They were given to each other by God, companions for the journey. The McIntosh boys had entered Malachy’s life for a good reason, whether he could always see it or not.

  “Call your old man,” he said out loud with his pipe in his mouth. />
  He was alone on his tugboat. The dolphins talked his ear off, not a human voice among them, unless he counted the spirit of Gabriel. Malachy believed that voices carried, that even though Tim and Alan were nowhere in sight, they could hear him calling all this distance away.

  “Call me,” he said again. “You know you want to, by God. What the hell’re you waiting for? You think this life goes on forever?”

  Alan had telephoned last month. He was due again, and so was Tim. The brothers had unfinished business with each other, deep trouble, and they couldn’t rightly get on with their separate lives till they fought it through. Malachy had words of wisdom they both needed to hear.

  He had an unusual variety of second sight-common in the Irish but rare in men. He pictured Dianne, her stunning beauty quiet and natural, like Brigid’s had been; he could see the girl, Julia, gnarled as a tree root, soaking in her mother’s light and love. Malachy could have picked up the phone, contacted the boys, but it wouldn’t be the same. Fathers liked to be called. Good men knew to call their elders. Malachy had faith, so he listened to the dolphins with one hand ready to pick up the telephone and take Tim’s call. It was time.

  “Who are you taking?” Amy asked.

  “Taking where?” Lucinda asked.

  “To the library dance.”

  “Oh,” Lucinda said, smiling. They were sitting on the porch, having a cup of tea. Dianne had taken Julia to Alan’s for her checkup.

  “Considering you’re the-what do they call it?”

  “Guest of honor,” Lucinda said as humbly as she could.

  “Well, considering you’re the guest of honor, you should be able to take anyone you want.”

  “Like you?” Lucinda asked.

  Amy’s mouth dropped open. She had been baldly hinting for days, but now that she was caught in the act, she acted shocked. “Me? Not me. I didn’t mean that—”

  “How’s your reading coming?” Lucinda asked.

  “Well, I’m almost done with the book Dianne gave me. Anne of Green Gables.”

  “She gave you that two months ago! A smart girl like you, I’d have expected you to have read five or six more books by now.”

  “I just love it so much,” Amy said, beaming. “Anne’s all right. Going around that island looking for kindred spirits … she cracks me up! Do you like it, Lucinda? Don’t you think it’s a good book?”

  “A very good book,” Lucinda said dryly. “A three-months’-worth book.” She knew she was being conned. Anne of Green Gables was her favorite book and she was certain Amy knew it. Like Anne, Lucinda had been orphaned as a child. She had lived in a Providence orphanage for three years, then been adopted by angry people. Although she had called them her parents, she had lived with a secret hole in her heart, the place where her real parents dwelled. She had wished she’d been sent to a kind home like Anne’s.

  “Is there a real Prince Edward Island?” Amy asked.

  “Yes,” Lucinda said. “It’s one of Canada’s Maritime Provinces.”

  “Have you ever gone there?”

  “No,” Lucinda said, sipping her tea. “Emmett always said he’d take me, but he died before we could get there.”

  “Was Emmett your kindred spirit?” Amy asked, gazing over the edge of her teacup.

  “Oh, yes,” Lucinda said. “He was.”

  “My father was my mother’s kindred spirit,” Amy said. “They were best friends, not just another married couple.”

  Lucinda smiled. The child had wisdom beyond her years. “That’s how it’s supposed to be,” she said. “But sometimes isn’t.”

  “Their song was ‘You’ve Got a Friend,’” Amy said. “By James Taylor. They promised they’d always be there for each other. My father’s name was Russell and my mother’s was Theresa, and there’s a tree downtown near the library that has their initials, R and T, in a big heart. He carved it.”

  “Good thing the librarian didn’t catch him,” Lucinda said.

  “You’d have liked him,” Amy said. “He was a good man. Dianne said so.”

  “Well, he has at least two fine things going for him: Dianne saying so and you for a daughter.”

  “Were Dianne and Tim kindred spirits?” Amy asked.

  “Well …” Lucinda began.

  “Wild for each other, madly in love?”

  “Yes, they were very much in love,” Lucinda said. “But I wouldn’t say they were kindred spirits. There’s a big difference. ‘In love’ has to grow an awful lot to approach the realm of kindred spirits. Things help it along-hard times, joy, sickness, humor, money worries, having children. All the events of everyday life. But when one person decides he can’t stick around, that’s the end of that.”

  “I hope,” Amy said very quietly, “that I wouldn’t be the type to leave.”

  “I have a feeling you’re not,” Lucinda said.

  “They think I’m bad,” Amy said, bowing her head.

  “Who thinks that?”

  “The State of Connecticut,” Amy whispered, tears running off her nose. “They think I’m violent because I knocked Amber down.”

  “That means you made one mistake,” Lucinda said. “It doesn’t mean you’re a violent person.”

  “They say I learned it from Buddy. That when a kid learns that stuff in her own home, she can turn bad.”

  “She might learn it,” Lucinda said evenly, recalling her adoptive father’s brute face and scalding tongue, the crack of his belt, the hours spent locked in her room. “But she doesn’t have to incorporate it into her life.”

  “She doesn’t?” Amy asked, looking up.

  “No. In fact, I’d say it was her duty-to herself, to her parents, and to God-to rise above it.”

  “Huh,” Amy said, drying her eyes.

  “You make your own life,” Lucinda said. “Your actions are your own responsibility. Blaming others is always an excuse. You’re a good girl, Amy.”

  “Thank you,” Amy said.

  “You’ve brought a lot of joy to Dianne and Julia.”

  “I wish Tim hadn’t left them.”

  “So do I.”

  “You don’t leave your kindred spirit,” Amy said.

  “No, you don’t,” Lucinda agreed.

  Dianne stood beside Julia while Alan did the EKG. He squirted white conductor gel on her skin, attached the suction cups. Her rib cage was malformed, her chest sunken. The lines of her bathing suit straps showed, a slight tan on her neck and arms. Her shoulder bore a fading decal of a tiny rose.

  “Her tattoo,” Dianne said, noting his gaze.

  “Amy?” he asked.

  Dianne nodded. “Yes. We went to Layton’s, and Amy decided she and Julia should have tattoos for the summer. See?” She pointed at Julia’s left foot.

  Alan smiled. Just above Julia’s ankle bone was a blue and orange butterfly. Clasped around it was an ankle bracelet, colored beads strung together in flowerlike clusters.

  “That’s pretty, Julia,” Alan said. “My niece is the coolest girl on the beach.”

  “Alan,” Dianne said, her voice shaking in spite of herself. “Could you please do the test?”

  Alan nodded. He flipped on the machine. The engine hummed, and the printout began almost instantly. The machine turned out a long white tape, similar to a grocery store receipt, covered with black markings. He saw Dianne trying to read it, her head tilted to the side.

  “Just relax,” he said.

  She let out a long exhalation.

  “Sorry,” he said. He was as nervous as she was. His palms were sweating as he handled the long paper. As he scanned the graph, he looked for changes. Julia’s previous EKGs were in her file, but he was familiar enough to compare without looking. She had a murmur, an unidentified click.

  “What does it say?” Dianne asked.

  “Hang on,” he said.

  Julia lay on the table, staring up at the adults. She wrung her hands. Hand wringing was a common behavior of girls with Rett syndrome-the disease was genetic, affect
ing almost only female babies-but when Alan saw Julia twisting her hands, he felt helpless, as if she were expressing despair.

  “Can you tell anything?” Dianne asked as Alan turned off the machine.

  Alan lowered his glasses, peered over the rims at the minute markings. He scrolled through the long paper. He knew it was low and base to be excited by her closeness at this particular moment. Here they were, examining Julia’s EKG, and he was drinking in the smell of Dianne’s hair and skin.

  “If you don’t say something,” she said, “I’m going to scream like a crane. I can’t even help it. The scream’s coming, it’s in my throat right now—”

  “I can’t see any significant change,” he said, feeling her lean against his side. He tapped the paper, and she looked closer. “This area here might be something, but I’m not sure. I’ll fax it up to Providence, let Barbara Holmes take a look at it.”

  “Something like what?” Dianne asked, now holding Julia’s hand. She hadn’t moved away from Alan’s side though. She was sandwiched between him and the child, touching them both.

  “An irregularity,” Alan said. “A very slight change in the pattern.”

  “You just said there’s no significant change,” she said.

  “That’s what ‘very slight’ means,” he said. She was wearing a sleeveless white and yellow checked blouse. Her bare arm was tan and lightly freckled. It felt warm against Alan’s arm, through the thin fabric of his blue oxford shirt. He wanted to bend over and kiss her naked shoulder, but she moved away so fast, suddenly his whole left side felt cold.

  “I’m not a doctor,” she said dangerously, leaning over Julia as she started to remove the suction cups from her skin.

  “I know,” he said.

  “I don’t like it when you patronize me,” she said, her voice trembling. “I know the difference between ‘significant’ and ‘very slight.’ But you’re faxing the results to Dr. Holmes, and you wouldn’t do that if it was normal.”

  Alan watched her gently wipe the sticky gel from Julia’s skin. She used baby wipes from her own bag, dabbing carefully, not wanting to hurt Julia or leave any residue behind. She soaked a wad of cotton balls in warm water, sponged off the remaining lotion. By-passing the stiff brown paper towels, she dried Julia’s chest with gauze squares. Her shoulders were tight.