The Promise of Stardust (42 page)

For a beat, I didn't know what to say. She'd left him? They'd split up. After we almost—What did she say? Betrayal was a terrible way to end a relationship. “What happened?”

“I let Adam off the hook. Evidently, I have commitment issues. He thinks I should see a shrink, and I think he deserves someone who will love him for who he is. Long story short: I moved out.”

I raked my hair. “Elle—”

“Don't even go there, Matthew. You had nothing to do with it. Period.”

How the hell did she know what I was about to ask? “Are you sure?”

She exhaled, and when she finally spoke, her voice was so soft, almost consoling. “I already knew it wasn't working between Adam and me. I had a hard time letting go. Then you and I kissed. Gramps's farmhouse, you and me, sweet memories from long, long time ago. And if we hadn't kissed, I still would have left him—eventually.” She tried to laugh, but sounded anything but jovial. “Anyway, I'm certain it's not your fault.”

I glanced up at the sound of Carol's key in the door. “Fault? That sounds as if you think leaving him is a mistake.”

“No,” Elle said. “It was time.”

The loft door swung open, and Carol called to me before she saw me with the telephone at my ear.

“Carol's home?” Elle asked.

“Just came in.”

Carol smiled at me and slipped her arms around my waist. God, she smelled good. And I never felt as awkward in my life. She mouthed, “Who are you talking to?”

“Elle,” I answered.

“What?” Elle asked.

“Oh, let me talk to her.” Carol took the phone out of my hand. “Hi, Elle. It's Carol.” She paused. “Listen, I was wondering if you could do me a little favor.” Pause. “No, I have a ten-year-old patient who wants to be an astronaut. The kid has spent most of her life in and out of hospitals. Is there any way I could get you to send an autographed copy of something NASA?” Pause. “That would be so great. Her name is Camilla Rodriguez.” Carol spelled the name, said good-bye, and handed the receiver back to me.

The air in the room was as sparse as water in the desert. “Hi,” I said.

“Hey, I have to go. I'll send that picture of the crew along.”

“Peep—”

“We do it all the time. It's part of the PR end of NASA. How are you doing? The wedding plans?”

“I, uh, Carol's handling that mostly.”

Silence. “I want you to be happy,” Elle said.

“Are you okay?”

“Sure, but I have to hang up. I'm not ready to sound brave right now.”

“Wait. What do you mean, brave?”

For a beat she didn't say anything. “I have a lot going on here. A new apartment with no curtains, not that it matters. I'm not home much. It's just life feels a little bare. As full as it is with the mission, it feels a little empty. And …” Elle's voice broke. “I suppose being emotional is normal in the wake of relinquishing someone you love. Talk to you soon.”

   42   

As I said good-bye to Father Meehan, I'd actually asked the priest to pray for the baby. How was that? Progress? Or was I slipping into deeper desperation? If there are no atheists in foxholes, there are none in critical care hospital rooms either. The funny thing was I'd never thought of myself as an atheist. I was a lapsed Catholic, perhaps, with a little agnosticism thrown in for good measure. I was a man of science and a man of little faith, a man who loved his wife and behaved within the confines of whatever was and whatever would be.

“Of course, Matt,” Father Meehan answered. “I'm praying for both Elle and the baby already. I'm praying for you, too.”

I shook his hand and walked off. I'd parked on a side street, knowing it would be easier to make an escape quickly after Mass. Freeport used to be the quintessential New England town, lined with Victorians and farmhouses, until the upscale outlets arrived on the heels of the town's only real business, L.L.Bean. Now it had become a small town with every shopping opportunity known to mankind. Three blocks off the main street, I slipped into my car and drove toward my house four miles away, where rural America still teetered along in its time-forgot-us way.

I didn't bother to park in the barn. I wouldn't be staying long enough. I just needed a little fresh air, a little time, as Father Meehan said, to listen, to converse with God. Strangely, God seemed to be the strong silent type, and He didn't say a hell of a lot. Well, maybe He didn't say a
heaven
of a lot.

I snickered at my own dark humor.

His silence might be an answer of sorts, although not quite what I was looking for.

Celina's garden was thick with dead stalks of black-eyed Susans and every other living thing. Dead things, and dead seemed appropriate in my grief.

I would have to dig up the urns. I would have to—bury them with Elle. She asked me that five years before, and we'd never discussed it since, but I knew. I knew Elle hadn't changed her mind about that either.

I hadn't gone to the farm to prepare myself to bury her, but I needed to. Her kidney function was marginal, and the pregnancy would put a strain on them. The odds were bad. For a few minutes I sat on the grass and stared at the garden. Not here. Elle needed to be in the small family cemetery next to her mother under the trees in the pine forest she loved so much, and the babies would have to be with her.

“I need to be morbid for a minute,” she'd said that day on the beach. She was preparing herself for space back then—a kind of heaven in her eyes.

We never talked about where she wanted to rest for eternity, only that Celina should be with her. And that meant Dylan, too.

I headed across the field and up through the woods. Ten minutes later I came to the family cemetery on the ridge. Mostly because of a rainy summer, I hadn't been up there all year. It was unkempt, straggly, and a little lonely. Alice was buried over there in the corner. Elle's grandmother had died in a car accident when Alice was still a child, and Elle's grandfather died the summer Elle and I fell in love. The rest of the stones bore names that were only names to me. But even as a little girl, Elle had all of their names memorized.

I could still see her kneeling in the cemetery, pushing the white-blond hair out of her eyes as she prepared to do the rubbing of her grandmother's gravestone. Elle at nine, the intellectually precocious tomboy. “It's so tragic,” she'd said. “All my grandma left behind was an epitaph. My mom doesn't remember her at all. A few words on a headstone isn't much.”

It was an odd thing for a kid to say, odder perhaps that I recalled it, but her words stuck with me. Elle was intriguing, not that I would have admitted it back then. She was a girl, after all, the kid next door, a convenient playmate in a crunch. But she was a girl, and I hadn't yet stopped hating girls, at least publicly.

Without a word, she crossed the patchy lawn, skirting the graves, as if afraid that stepping on a plot of dirt would rile a ghost. Then she traced the words written in stone of ancestor after ancestor. “All the ladies in my mom's family died before they turned forty. Look. This one's the oldest.”

A few years later, Elle's own mother, shy of her fortieth birthday, died of cancer.

And now Elle. I had lost Elle.

In the morning stillness, I stood in the same bitter place, a family graveyard with nothing but lichen-covered stones marking the dead, marking the lost lives of the women who all died too young.

I was no longer a boy fascinated by the towheaded, little-girl-child Elle. I was her husband, and as incomprehensible as it was, I would have to bury her alongside her mother and grandmothers. Yes, all the women in her family died young. But I was determined an epitaph would not be the only legacy Elle left behind.

There wasn't much sunshine beneath the trees, but enough that a few shade-loving plants could grow. Bleeding hearts bloomed in the springtime, and hostas in late summer. There should be a garden for Elle; she loved flowers. Over by the back near the fence, the sun peeked through. Even if I had to take down a couple of trees to bring in enough light, I could do that.

“Please, God,” I said. “When it happens, take care of her.” I lumbered over the ground thick with the blanket of pine needles, my legs feeling heavier with the reality of grief, and I lay down on the dank ground where she would rest and let my tears flow like rain. There was no comfort in the promise of heaven or God's grace, at least not yet. Maybe not ever.

“What do you want from me? You want me to thank you for this? You want me to come closer to faith by stripping me of the only person who I ever believed in?”

My faith was in her, in the love we shared, that it was as durable as the light coming from a distant star, crossing space, enduring through the void expanses of time.

Time we lost.

“Time you stole,” I yelled.

I was angry at God—if He existed. And for the first time, maybe in my entire life, I was pretty certain He did. I had the entire mumble jumble circling in my head. God's plans. Trust in Him. Miracles happen. Lazarus. God so loved the world. Resurrection. Christ.

But I needed her. And the baby needed me.

“Please, God,” I whispered. “Please.”

   43   

Clint Everest shifted in the witness stand. “The mother's blood clots and causes circulation to the placenta to stop, and the baby dies. During pregnancy, that's the basic pathology, the very basic pathology, of how APS causes miscarriages.”