The Promise of Stardust (21 page)

People try hard not to stare at the victims of tragedy, but they do. They stare at broken arms and wonder how it happened. They stare at missing legs. They stared at me as I stood in the cafeteria line. But I needed caffeine almost as much as I needed air.

My cell phone rang. After the brief pleasantries, Jake went straight to the point. Had I searched our papers? Where was Elle's will?

Preoccupied by Mom's appearance and exhausted, I hadn't looked for anything the only night I'd gone home.

“It's been two days since we talked,” Jake said. “We need to prepare for the hearing.”

At noon, I left Hank with Elle again, and I went to the bank. In the safe-deposit box, I found our wills, birth certificates, deeds, Social Security cards, nothing but meaningless crap. Nothing was secure, our lives, least of all.

The truth was I never wanted to make a will. Elle pushed the idea at me like an unwelcome banner: we are both going to die someday. I'd seen death in all its ugly shapes and forms, and I understood the inevitability of it. But planning for it took courage, and I'd never been brave.

She was. Imagine climbing into the Space Shuttle just a little more than a year after the
Columbia
disaster. She was terrified. Happy, but terrified. And she did it.

Afterward, she told me that while they were strapping her in on
Atlantis
, she thought she was cursed, and she hoped everyone else aboard wouldn't die with her. “It was stupid,” she said. “Don't laugh, but not one woman in my mom's line survived past the age of forty, not in six generations.”

I knew this, had been to the family cemetery with her to see the headstones, but I teased her. “What? Some old witch cursed all the females in your family?”

“You're laughing.”

Laughter was a defense mechanism. I watched her mother die. I knew Elle's grandfather, and saw the scars he carried away from the accident that killed his wife.

Elle was very pregnant with Dylan when we had that conversation. She took my hand in hers so I could feel him kick. “I'm not going to die young. We're going to watch him grow up, but on
Atlantis
I was terrified. I thought I might somehow be dooming my crewmates to death along with me.”

I kissed her mouth, and then I kissed her belly. “We're going to be a family. We will live a long, happy life together.”

“If I were destined to die young, it would have been on that space walk, right? Let's make the will, if only to ward off the evil spirits,” she said.

So as an act of solidarity, I went to a lawyer and made a will to match hers—to appease her superstition—to make her sleep easier at night. We lost Dylan anyway. I lost Elle. The only thing I had left—the only part of
Elle
I had left—was the baby inside her.

I went home again and searched our home office, papers, checking account statements, bills, and medical records. Inside them, there was nothing that would support our contention. I couldn't find her undergraduate papers or textbooks; maybe she had them in her office at Bowdoin.

A late-afternoon thunderstorm rumbled off in the distance, and moments later the wind howled up the river to our house. I headed upstairs to check the windows and to look for Elle's journals. Then something crashed in the attic, and I hurried up the steps into the ripe oven heat. The French doors to the widow's walk, whipping back and forth in the torrents of wind, had knocked over the floor lamp. I closed the doors and bolted them, then bent down to lift the lamp, its bulb shattered from the crash. Perfect. Just perfect. I brushed away the fine glass and pulled up the trapdoor. Elle kept her diaries and her mother's inside a hollowed-out compartment in the attic floor. One of many secret compartments in the old house—a reminder of a bootlegging great-grandfather.

Alice's diaries weren't relevant. I only needed Elle's. There were hundreds, maybe a thousand letters, far more than I'd realized. I wondered where to start, if she'd ordered them chronologically or if she'd simply shoved them away. At some point she started writing in composition books, and there were maybe seventy of those. Jesus, what if she wrote about Adam and the life she shared with him, their sex lives.

I'd had other relationships, been fascinated by other women during the years Elle and I spent apart, but I didn't want to know about her. With him.

I pushed aside the thought and reminded myself that I needed to look for one thing: evidence that she recanted her advanced directive. Deep down, I knew it was unlikely she would ever have done any such thing. Elle hated, hated, hated how her mother died.

I scooped up the bound satchels and marbled comp books and dropped them on the attic floor because my cell phone was buzzing in my pocket. I yanked it out expecting it to be the hospital. It wasn't. It was just Melanie again. “Hi, Mel,” I said.

“Why don't you come over for dinner. We're cooking on the grill. Just corn on the cob and burgers. It'll be good for you to be out in the fresh air for a while.”

“Ah, yeah, thanks for the invitation, but I have to find some papers for my attorney tonight. Some other time.”

After hanging up, I looked at the size of the pile. I'd be there all night. Or longer, probably much longer. First, I needed more coffee and assurance Elle was still stable, so I called the hospital. The nurses said her status was unchanged, and then Hank came to the phone, confirming the same. He agreed to spend the night.

I skipped most of Elle's early entries and focused instead on the ones since our marriage. It was a little strange reading
Dear Matt
. It was stranger that at times she seemed to truly be addressing me. Most were loving. A few were not; one she'd written about a time I'd forgotten to call her when I was stuck at the hospital, another after I'd stood her up because I had gotten bogged down with paperwork at the office. Other entries were sentimental drivel. And I savored them, forgetting I had a purpose, a passage to find, something about a living will.

Around midnight I brought the letters down to the living room, and sometime after that I fell asleep, dreaming of Elle in my arms and her voice reading her letters aloud.

October 2, 2004

Dear Matt
,

In the morning, you and I will stand in front of our friends and our families and promise ourselves to each other. I'm supposed to be nervous. I'm supposed to be worried whether I'm doing the right thing. Instead, I am at such peace
.

That we decided to sleep separately tonight is the most absurd choice I've ever made. Here is a truth, one thing the Catholic Church got right: Matrimony is one sacrament the priest does not give. He presides over it, but the sacrament itself is given to the man by the woman, and to the woman by the man. I marry you. You marry me. It is for that reason alone I wanted to marry inside the Church, why I made a big deal about it when ordinarily we don't attend Mass. I believe this marriage is between us more surely than I believe in anything else
.

I've loved you my entire life. Never ever doubt that. Even when I couldn't see clearly, I loved you. I felt you in my soul. So this wedding in the morning is simply a seal on what I've always believed was my destiny. Our destiny. I love you, Matthew. And I will for as long as I live. For longer
.

Love,
Peep

   18   

I decided I wanted to become a doctor when I witnessed my first medical miracle. I was seven. My family was picnicking at Sebago Lake, and my then ten-year-old brother, Mike, jumped off a rope swing into the water. He didn't come up for air. Dad dove in and fished him out, limp and blue. My mother resuscitated him with mouth-to-mouth, compressions, the whole CPR bit. Two days later, sporting a black eye and ten stitches, he came home from the hospital.

Not all endings are happy ones, but I didn't understand that for ten more years. Alice was dying. Everything went wrong during those last weeks. First Elle lost the baby, and then the hospice nurses called Child and Family Services.

Looking back, it's hard to believe they hadn't reported what was going on in the McClure house sooner. They may have rationalized that my folks were over there all the time or that Christopher and Elle weren't being physically abused. But Hank had started to disappear for days at a time.

The hospice agency reported the neglect a few weeks later, citing that on the date Elle lost the baby, Christopher came home from school and no one was there to take care of him. They didn't say where or why Elle was absent, only that she was. Yes, the nurse was caring for his dying mother, but she was not responsible for the eight-year-old boy. Hank never came home or called that night. The nurse reported that more often than not he appeared to be inebriated.

During the time between the miscarriage and the report to Child and Family Services, my parents also argued about calling in the authorities.

“Before Matt and Elle took leave of their senses,” Mom said, “we could have taken the kids in with us, but we can't have Matt and Elle living under the same roof. We'd never be able to keep them apart.”

“We can't keep them apart when the McClures live across the driveway either,” Dad said. “What's the difference?”

Did I mention the radiator grille in my bedroom allowed me to hear every kitchen-held conversation? Their words flew at me like a swarm of hornets.

I still went over to Elle's house every day after school. Her lissome form returned in just a couple of weeks. I craved her, but she didn't want me. She said she was scared of getting pregnant again. We had messed up once. She wouldn't use the pill because she was afraid of getting breast cancer like her mother. The physical and emotional intimacy we'd shared evaporated as she grew increasingly distracted by her mother's condition.

“Let her go, Daddy,” Elle begged over and over. “Just stop her feedings. If Mommy didn't have that tube jammed down her nose, she would—she would be at peace. Look at her! Please! She's in pain. Can't they at least give her more medicine?”

Elle pleaded with the nurses. She pleaded with Hank. But even when Hank was there, he was so bombed he didn't see what the rest of us saw. I guess that was the point.

Once, when the nurse went outside for a smoke, Elle tried to jimmy open the locked medication box. The nurse came back inside and all but threatened to call the police. Maybe that's when they decided the family was in real trouble.

“What were you planning to do?” I screamed as Elle stormed off.

“Just give my mom enough to stop her pain. This is horrible. It's as wrong as torturing someone. Why won't he let her go? Why won't the doctors make this stop? My dad can drink himself into oblivion, but he's letting my mom suffer.”

“What do you want them to do? Help her die? A mercy killing?”

Elle rounded on me in the driveway. “Do you really think that would be wrong? If that were me,
I'd
want to die.”

I didn't know her when she was like this; her eyes were darting around like she was trapped in a room on fire.

“I have to study for my calculus midterm,” I said, charging off, not wanting to be a participant in what might follow.

Another week passed. Hank disappeared for three days.

That's when it happened.