Waiting for a Star to Fall

by Kerry Clare

  Brooke said, “I really do.” They’d been through this before, but her mother never listened.

  Her mother said, “I think it’s for the best anyway.”

  “What?”

  “That you got out of there when you did. Before it all fell apart. Imagine being there now, all those repercussions. He never did anything like that to you, right?”

  “Mom, he never did anything like that to anybody.”

  “Because I wondered, I don’t know. If that was the piece of the story we were missing.”

  “It’s not a puzzle, Mom. It is what it is.”

  “It’s just hard to understand,” she said. “And you’re not yourself—I can see that. I’m not stupid, Brooke.”

  Brooke said, “I’m just tired. We were up late, Lauren and me. Had some wine.” She would give her mother this one morsel, because she knew she would savor it. Her mom would weave a cozy story out of it and imagine that here was the beginning of everything being okay.

  Sure enough. “Lauren,” said her mom. “So you’re getting along, you two? Because I was worried about that too. I just don’t know.”

  “You worry about everything.”

  “It’s in my job description,” said her mom. Right up there with making soup. “I’m glad you’ve got someone, though, to have fun with. You’ve got to have a social life.”

  “Oh, I do,” said Brooke. “No, we’re getting along great. She’s…she’s really great.”

  “Oh, great,” her mother said. Too many greats. They were trying. Brooke’s mom said, “You know Tina Skipton’s selling her house, right? They’re moving out west, or at least they’re hoping to. And Heather Wilmington listed it. Derek’s sister. She’s married to Evelyne’s friend’s nephew.” Lanark was a very small town. “Anyway, she’s furious—Heather. She did an interview in the paper, and she said it’s a political vendetta. She’s a huge advertiser, with the real estate listings. I guess they had to print it. You think it’s true, though? That they’re out to get him?”

  “Politics is nasty,” Brooke told her. Derek would never admit it himself, or partake in the nastiness directly, but he was not above having other people do the dirty work for him. “It’s a reality.”

  “Sounds like she’s starting a campaign to support him, or a barbeque. I don’t know.”

  “A barbeque for what?”

  “You should read the article.” She tilted her head toward the recycling box in the hallway where the Weekly Adviser had been flung atop a pyramid of meticulously rinsed jars and pop cans. Brooke’s dad had a Diet Coke habit. “I don’t know, he’s her brother. If Nicole were in trouble, you would organize a barbeque.”

  “Nicole’s a vegetarian.”

  “She wouldn’t have to eat.” What Brooke didn’t say was that Nicole would never get in trouble. She was principal and proprietress of Little Feet Montessori School in a small town forty minutes west down the highway. She’d moved away, but she hadn’t gone far, and she’d made a life that everybody understood and recognized, married to a guy adored by the whole family.

  “Or a car wash.” Her mom was kidding now. She was from the city, and moved to Lanark with her husband years ago, before Nicole and Brooke were born, and she had never stopped finding Lanark’s small-town sensibility ridiculous. She only read the Weekly Adviser so she could make fun of it, reporting back on which of Brooke’s felonious elementary school classmates had been written up in the court docket. “He’s got the support, though. They wrote an editorial. This town loves him and he’s worked hard to earn that currency. They’re not about to give up just like that, no matter what happened ten years ago.”

  “Nothing happened.”

  “That’s what I heard him say, before he ran away, all the way down those flights of stairs.”

  “It was not a good performance.”

  Brooke’s mother said, “No.” She said, “So we’re on his side, our family? As official representatives of you?”

  “There’s no proof,” said Brooke. “Just one woman’s word.”

  “There’s two,” said my mother. “And I think it’s interesting, the way a woman’s word counts for nothing.” She sounded disappointed. Maybe “interesting” wasn’t the word for it.

  “But it’s not ‘nothing,’ ” said Brooke, trying to explain. “It can’t just be either/or—there is something in the middle. And they’re being used, those women. No one cares about them, and they’re going to be eviscerated, and now Derek’s life is wrecked, like he’s just some other guy. And it’s personal for me. I know him. We were—we are—friends.”

  “How’s he doing?” asked her mom.

  Brooke picked up her sandwich again and ate what was left of it. Finally, she said, “I haven’t really talked to him. A few texts. I think he’s coming up for the weekend.”

  “And you’re going to see him then?”

  “I don’t know.” Her mother liked to push her into corners and watch her squirm. Aside from making soup and reading the Weekly Adviser, this study was her favorite pursuit.

  * * *

  —

  That night Brooke was scheduled to babysit Olivia Tavares again, picking her up from her after-school program at 5:30, the sun already low on the horizon—the days were getting shorter. She was carrying Olivia’s backpack because it was “too heavy,” apparently, even though it was empty. Kids were funny, a distraction. They didn’t care about politics, either, and while Brooke used to think that anyone who didn’t care about politics was irresponsible at best, short on brain cells at worst, it turned out that these days they were her favorite people.

  Walking home, Olivia didn’t ominously ask Brooke how she was doing, or even how her day had gone, no small talk, chattering instead about the plastic charm necklaces that were all the rage these days, all the charms she longed for and hoped that her mother was going to buy her. Brooke didn’t need to say a single word—it was almost like she wasn’t there.

  But when they got back to Olivia’s house, unlocking the door with Marianna’s spare key, boots in the vestibule, coats on the hooks, Brooke felt a visceral reaction to the living room. Because here was the scene of the crime, almost, three days that felt like a lifetime ago. She’d been sitting on the couch when her phone started going off, and she couldn’t sit in that spot again because it was still too overwhelming. For the time being, she avoided the living room altogether.

  She heated up leftover pasta for Olivia’s dinner and then helped her with her math homework. She tidied the kitchen when everything was finished, while Olivia was having her allotted screen time before bed. Loading the dishwasher and wiping the counter, Brooke felt like she lived her whole life lately haunting other people’s houses. She imagined what it would feel like if this life were hers, though, a life like Marianna’s, working two jobs to support her daughter on her own. Olivia’s dad had never been in the picture, taking off long ago when her mom was still pregnant.

  “It’s a funny thing,” Marianna had once told Brooke. “If Olivia hadn’t happened, I’m sure I wouldn’t even remember him. He was barely a blip.”

  It would be exhausting, Brooke knew. She’d had the whole day to herself before coming over to babysit, and still she was tired once she’d put Olivia to bed. She came downstairs, to the living room, and collapsed on the easy chair—not on the couch. Her sister had texted and asked Brooke to call her, so she did, and they talked about their mother, about the anxiety Brooke had detected at her surface at lunch that afternoon, and they both, as they always did, considered the depths that lay beneath. Their mother’s anxiety was how she showed her love, but this could also be a burden.

  “Have you talked to him?” asked Nicole. She had also watched the clip from the morning show, Derek in a sweater, back to his old self. Or at least, that had been the intention.

  And Brooke had to confess that no, she hadn’t talked to him. S
he’d never been able to lie to Nicole, who would always see through her. The morning after she’d woken up beside Derek Murdoch for the very first time, Brooke had called her sister without even thinking about it, because there was no one she trusted better in the world.

  And what Nicole had said was, “I don’t know about this.” Her voice tentative, but she was willing to be persuaded otherwise, to give Brooke and Derek the benefit of the doubt. But her first instinct was that this was going to end badly. “Of course, I trust your judgment,” she’d told Brooke, “but it’s the other guy I’m worried about.” It was nothing about Derek personally, she insisted. Just that a person with so much on his plate could not give Brooke all that she deserved.

  “But all I want is him,” said Brooke.

  “Okay,” said Nicole, “but don’t forget that you also deserve everything.” Her own husband, Sean, was the nicest guy in the world. And yet—the one thing Brooke could not admit to her sister—Sean was also ordinary, and so was their life together, and Brooke wanted something different than all that for herself.

  “Just don’t get in over your head,” Nicole had warned that first day, but it was too late for that, and all this time later, she was generous enough not to say “I told you so.”

  Editorial: Lanark Weekly Adviser (from Thursday’s paper)

  “DEREK MURDOCH: HE’S OUR MAN”

  …AND WITH THIS LATEST SCANDAL, some are wondering if his luck has run out. Is the Golden Age of Derek Murdoch finally over?

  Not yet. A look back at the progress and improvement Murdoch has delivered to Lanark over the past decade provides an unprecedented example of the kind of good a politician can do. Many lives in our community were made better, and to say that some were even saved is no overstatement. Murdoch has earned the right to have us stand by him during times of trial as we’ve supported him when it was so much to our advantage.

  “We told you so,” his detractors are telling us now, but imagine if we’d listened to them all along? How much poorer would this community be for such a failure of vision? So let’s not fail ourselves, or Derek himself. He’s been there for Lanark, and we resolve to return the favor when he needs it most.

  Friday

  Back before her life fell apart, Brooke used to have a digital calendar, the kind that divides every day into each quarter of an hour, and all of it was accounted for. She was a career girl, and she had meetings, and galas, and appointments, and field trips. She coordinated forums and panels and fact-gathering missions, and in those rare moments when she wasn’t working, she scheduled appointments with herself to go to the gym. When making plans with friends, she could only book weeks in advance, but she wasn’t even unusual in this respect. It was simply the pace of life in the city, and time was at a premium. A day was like a puzzle, the hours were its pieces, and at the end of every day she’d fall into bed exhausted, and she wasn’t even among the busiest people she knew.

  But everything was different now. She had all the days in the world, but none of the pieces, so the hours stretched long, and she felt very small inside them. Her mother had been urging her to keep busy, take classes, volunteer at the homeless shelter, and get back to being the daughter she recognized, but Brooke kept resisting. Partly because, yes, she probably was depressed—her mother wasn’t wrong about that, but there was more to the story. Despite her mother’s urging, Brooke didn’t want to take her mind off things. There were certain things it was vital her mind be on, because she was still sorting it all out for herself, trying to make sense of what happened. And she supposed that all this sorting was the only way she knew to hold on to what she had lost. Beginning to move on with a new chapter of her life would be to acknowledge the rest of it was over, and she wasn’t ready yet.

  And so she did nothing, waking up to another morning in this apartment that wasn’t hers, and she wondered what she was really waiting for. Checking her phone, she found an answer delivered in the form of a text from Derek. Hey, you haven’t heard from anybody, have you? I’ll be back tonight. We need to connect. A message that clarified nothing, because Brooke had no idea what he was talking about, not exactly. Was there even a door between them to open anymore? But she couldn’t just ask him, because she didn’t want him to think she was pushing too hard, which had been the problem between them even before everything else had gone so wrong. Instead, she had to continue to be cool. Yes, and. Engaging with Derek had always been more than a bit like high-school improv.

  BEFORE

  He’d been straightforward from the start, making sure that she knew what she was getting into with their arrangement. Brooke was aware that Derek wouldn’t be able to give her many of the ordinary things that women expected from their partners—time, devotion, attention. Everything between them would be different, because of who he was and what he did, the relationship made even trickier because of her age, her job. “You know they look for any excuse for an attack,” Derek reminded her as he explained why they would have to keep things under the radar, which sounded more reasonable to Brooke than it might have to most women, because politics was her business too.

  And because keeping their relationship out of the public eye was hardly a sacrifice. It would be easier, really, to step away from the spotlight, all the scrutiny. Or at least this was how it had seemed at the start. Brooke knew where they stood, and she didn’t need everyone else to know it too, didn’t need to contend with the rumors and the whispers. Insinuations that this was part of a pattern, the same old thing—Derek with another girl, the latest office romance. They wouldn’t understand, and nothing Brooke or Derek could say would convince people who were determined not to take their relationship seriously. Determined to believe this was just another fling. But Derek had promised it wasn’t, and Brooke had known him for years by now. She would have been able to tell the difference. What they had was altogether new, and this was special, but also personal, and nobody’s business but their own.

  Brooke had enough trouble dealing with her friends anyway, who only claimed they were looking out for her best interests, but it didn’t always seem like it. “Do you really want to go through life as someone’s secret girlfriend?” asked Carly. She wasn’t Derek’s biggest fan, and the disconnect was mutual. She had worked for Derek during Brooke’s second summer, which was how she and Brooke had met, but she only stayed for one season and ended up joining a nonprofit. Politics had left Carly disillusioned.

  Brooke’s housemates were more accepting than Carly, but then their house only had the one bathroom, so if she spent night after night at Derek’s place, nobody minded, as long as she paid her share of the rent on time.

  So she was alone in this, because even Derek brushed away her concerns about their relationship as things progressed, once it all started to seem more complicated than it had been solely in principle. She had been trying to articulate her feelings and anxieties and make him understand how it was that she was feeling, perilously suspended, but he didn’t want to get into it. He would tell her to stop overthinking everything. She was making it all too hard.

  “You can answer this one question,” he demanded of her. “Is it working? And I’m not talking about next week, or six months from now. I mean this moment.” At that moment they were drinking wine at the end of a long day at a healthcare conference in Boston, a view from the room overlooking the harbor, room service just delivered, so of course it was working. These rare and extraordinary occasions when they got out of town were the closest they ever came to functioning like a normal couple, even if it was awkward because she had to book her own travel and wait for Derek to reimburse her from his personal account, because she obviously couldn’t afford it, and none of the people in the office were supposed to know that he was paying because that wasn’t appropriate, but it was still more appropriate than word getting out that Derek Murdoch was taking his girlfriend traveling on the taxpayer’s dime.

  She had to concede. They’d been at
the conference for fourteen hours straight, an exciting and exhausting day, and they would have the rest of the evening to themselves for once. Yes, at that moment it was working absolutely.

  Derek said, “This is the one thing I don’t even want to analyze. It will wreck the magic of it all. I don’t know why it works, but it does, and can’t we enjoy that?”

  He’d called it magic. But. “I just want to make sure that all this is going somewhere,” she said. She didn’t only mean whatever was blossoming between them as a couple, the progression of their relationship; she was talking about her life in general. She had finished school and all the other people her age around her were beginning to launch into the stratosphere of adulthood, and there were moments she wondered if she was missing out, tagging along on someone else’s business trips. Coattails. Derek had already had years to get where he was going, and what if she was mistaking his momentum for her own? What if one day she woke up and realized that she’d only been standing still?

  But Derek would just start kissing her neck, saying “Let’s be here now” the way he always did. Just like he did a few weeks later when she was lying in his bed in the city and it was six o’clock in the morning. He’d been out jogging already, was about to get into the shower, and was urging her to take her time, to watch TV. The night table on what she thought of as “her side” was bare. Once she’d dared to leave a tube of hand cream in the drawer, but the next time she’d come over it wasn’t there anymore. She never mentioned it again, a failed experiment.

  It was a bit early in the day for such an intense discussion regarding the state of their union, but the subject had come up because he’d already told her twice that morning not to hurry. He seemed anxious about this, as though she might expect that the two of them would head in to the office together, conspicuously a couple.

  She told him, “Relax. I know my place.”