The Promise of Stardust (24 page)

Jake picked up his fountain pen and shook it at me. “Wait. I might have met him once. Princeton. You dragged me along to a party there. Elle was with a tall guy. Was that him?”

“Probably. He's basketball-player tall.” I told Jake about the duration of Elle's relationship with Adam, that eventually, like most couples, they unraveled. Later Elle told me she had never quite gotten over me, and that's why she could never commit to him.

“My associate is researching him. Will she find anything to discredit him?”

“Besides being a controlling prick? Probably not.”

“What's his proof?” Jake asked.

“I have no idea. He talked to Hank, not to me. But he wouldn't tell Hank anything either. Like I said, Adam's controlling. That's how he likes to play his hand. He waves a big red flag and hides his knife.”

   22   

Elle and I didn't stay together the way we should have. Our relationship fell apart. We—fell apart. And mostly it was my fault. That autumn I left for Columbia University, while Elle remained home. Officially, after the social workers got involved, Hank stopped drinking, but he was still going on benders sporadically, and she believed Chris was too young to fend for himself. So instead of attending her dream school, she commuted to Bowdoin College, not a place without merit, but it wasn't MIT.

Six weeks into my freshman year, I blew it by getting so mind-fucking drunk at a frat-party hazing that I slept with a sorority girl in the same condition, and when I went home for Thanksgiving, I confessed. Brokenhearted, Elle refused to acknowledge my presence. She wouldn't answer my calls, my letters, or my pleas at her threshold for five long years.

Two years after our split she went her own way—off to her doctoral studies at Princeton, where Adam Cunningham pounced on her as fast as a hawk on an unprotected nest of baby mice. At least, that was my impression. Not so much by what Elle told me—she told me nothing—but in how I interpreted the secondhand facts Mom spread my way. Elle met Adam as soon as she arrived in Princeton, and after that, he was always around, hovering. Elle claimed they were only friends the first couple of years. Yes, he made overtures, but she was only eighteen years old. He was twenty-nine.

   23   

I never understood why Elle stayed with Adam for eight years, but ten months before her Space Shuttle mission, they finally broke off their relationship. That should have been the end of his influence in her life, yet as I worried about the start of the hearing, I also worried about what Adam might pull and about his so-called proof.

I was at the nurses' station, shrugging into my suit jacket and talking to Clint about Elle's blood thinners, when I noticed Adam in Elle's hospital room, standing with his back to me. His hands were characteristically laced behind his head.

What next? Would hospital security let the press in to take pictures of Elle lying there, her head shaven, unable to swallow her own spit?

I charged into her room with ten days' worth of grief and anger, loaded and ready to aim. He was a target. I'd wanted to belt him for years.

I grabbed his arm and spun him around.

After his startled look disappeared, a contemptuous expression replaced it. “Elle didn't want to die this way,” he said. “Why are you doing this to her?”

“What the hell are you doing here? Security is only supposed to let in the family.”

“I said I was family. I used to be her family.” His gaze left me and found her, a shadow of her former brilliant self.

I shuddered in the cold reality. “No. You were never her family.”

“I was. Maybe not technically, but Texas recognizes common-law marriage.”

“Oh, for Christ's sake,” I said.

“I know ‘common law' is an old-fashioned term,” he said, his voice measured with his slow West Virginian accent. “But Elle and I were together for a long time, twice as long as the two of you have been married. And my point is, I know what she would want under these unfortunate circumstances.”

Fear and anger, two intricately interwoven emotions, propelled me toward him. I had never been a violent guy, but I was willing to make an exception, and it didn't matter that he was a head taller. “Get out,” I said, issuing my last warning.

His eyes narrowed as he looked down on me; a glint of a smug smile flashed and disappeared. “When Elle was with me, she gave me her medical power of attorney.”

Although the blow was not physical, it punched me just the same.

“I wouldn't step into the middle of this,” he said, “if you'd let her die in peace. But you won't. And from what I've read in the paper, you didn't even know about that old advanced directive your mother produced. So actually, this is my responsibility. I talked to your mother's lawyer, and he's filing something or other so the judge will order the hospital to discontinue Elle's life support.”

The floor seemed to shimmy from side to side. I grabbed the bed rail.

“Listen,
Matt
.” He pronounced my name with true disdain. “From what your mother's lawyer tells me, the advanced directive I gave him should end any speculation about what Elle wanted done on her behalf.”

“You never knew what Elle wanted. Besides, a lot can happen in five years.”

Or in ten days. Or in the instant her head hit that rock.

“I knew,” Adam said. “And I took care of her when no one else did. She trusted me, but she never trusted you. Apparently, with good reason. I'm not disputing she married you. As insipid as it is that she left NASA and ended her brilliant career to go home and marry the boy next door, she did it. But she didn't want
this
.
This
terrified her. The idea of
this
woke her up at night. Crying about her mother, powerless in a coma. Christopher said it still nagged on her. When Elle signed the advanced directive, well, she made her own choice, and evidently, she didn't trust you to make the decisions for her. Being married to her doesn't give you the right to do anything you damn please. This is abuse, and I will end it. I have her medical power of attorney, and by this afternoon these machines will be off.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek.

Almost of its own volition, my hand shot from my side. I wanted to slam him against the wall, but in a last-second act of self-control I held up my palm instead. “Let me see the document.”

“Your mother's attorney has it.”

The only thing that pounded harder than my heart was my desire to pulverize Adam. Maybe it was the glint in his eyes, his calculated self-satisfaction that stopped me, the idea that if I lost control, he might somehow win by maintaining his. I said, “I'm calling security, and you will leave here. Now.”

“No need.” He held up his hand and strutted away.

I tore my cell phone out of my trousers pocket and dialed Jake. It rang until the voice mail picked up. I waited for the beep. “Jake, we've got trouble. Call me.”

For a futile five minutes we played a game of cell-phone tag. Finally we connected. “Don't worry about the common-law issue. The problem is this new advanced directive. We'll be in court in less than an hour for our regular hearing date. Rather than wasting time holding your hand, let me figure out what I can do to head this off.”

   24   

On our way to the courthouse, reporters trailed Jake and me as if we were the Pied Piper: our music, the inside story they coveted. They barked questions, and we answered them with deliberate silence—until one stopped in front of me, brandishing a microphone.