The Movement of Stars (22 page)

She aimed a sweet smile at the elders upon the altar at the front of the room and sat down again. Her hand crawled over to Hannah’s and grasped it. In spite of her gratitude for the show of support, Hannah pulled away. She did not want to be comforted or consoled; she wanted to escape. Her muscles braced to rise; her knees and ankles thrummed with desire for flight.

But she stayed in place. A series of images like a deck of playing cards fanned out in her imagination. She saw herself as a child, stealing away with a book while her schoolmates played their games, laughing at jokes she did not understand. Pounding up the stairs to the garret, away from company, from lectures, from anything that would require the mincing dance of chitchat. Fleeing the shearing festival, and then the engagement dinner, rather than revealing her feelings to Edward and Mary. Running from Isaac Martin, again and again.

All around her, the hiss and rustle of silk and wool, the smell of lemon oil and sawdust. Hannah basked in the deep familiar for seconds that ticked by like hours, like years, a lifetime of at-homeness. Then she rose to her feet.

A new silence layered itself upon the old as the staccato tickles of motion in the cavernous room ceased. No one coughed, or yawned, or scratched. They turned in unison to watch Hannah as she spoke, as if she herself were a celestial object streaming across the night sky.

“I have something to say,” Hannah said. She focused on Dr. Hall’s knees, which were at her eye level where he sat upon the altar. His cane lay horizontally on the floor at his feet. A beam of morning sunlight nearly bisected it, but the angle was off. An X, then, instead of a cross.

“I have always been guided toward Truth by indisputable fact,” she said. The room was so still the drone of flies sounded like train engines. “I am an expert observer. I do not say this to be boastful. I speak only what is known to me. My eyes are trained to see objects in a dark sky that would be invisible to most people in this room.”

An orchard of pale faces tilted toward her, waiting.
“I have spent most of my life pursuing that Knowledge that would lead to a great contribution from our small community. Some discovery that would illuminate a dark corner of the Heavens. And all that time I have sat here, in this seat, and believed that the Light that guided others was also guiding me. It is only now, today, that I understand I have been mistaken.”
A collective hiss as the assembly inhaled in unison like a reef swaying under a wave.
“I believed that turning inward was the path to right behavior. I believed that the ‘world’s people’ would distract and distance me from the Light within.”
Hannah directed her gaze at Ann Folger.
“And yet, it is only through my association with such a person that I have been able to unbind myself from this stricture.”
The squeal of wood upon wood as Dr. Hall rose to his feet. The cane slid out of the perpendicular when he kicked it with his toe. Now it was lit in the parallel, glowing like Pharaoh’s enchanted staff.
Hannah looked up.
“We thank thee, Friends, for these words. Enough has now been shared on the topic of the world’s people, and our association with them,” he said.
Ann Folger rose again.
“She is making an acknowledgment, brother. We must hear it.”
“I am doing no such thing,” Hannah stated. Her voice reverberated in the air overhead. “I have nothing to acknowledge but the pursuit of Truth as my own conscience guides me.”
“Does thee contend that such an association falls within the acceptable bounds of Discipline?”
It was Phoebe Fuller who spoke, from her place beside Dr. Hall. She spoke from her seat, her powerful voice ringing out, silencing the frantic buzz that had broken out among the congregation.
Hannah felt frozen in place, a field mouse under the eye of a hawk.
“I do not,” she said.
“Then is it thy position that Discipline is dispensable? Or have thy observations revealed a spiritual path that thee cares to share in the event that we should all follow in thy footsteps?”
Hannah shook her head, all language having run out of her like milk from a cracked bucket.
“I don’t believe that she—” Dr. Hall said, but Phoebe silenced him with one hand raised.
“Let Hannah Price speak for herself,” she said.
Hannah swallowed.
You are only saying what you have been taught.
“It is my position that the determination of truth from deceit does not rely on one’s island of origin, nor upon one’s occupation, nor upon the hue of one’s skin. It is my position that the world’s people pose no greater or lesser harm than any individual within our own esteemed ranks.” Dr. Hall sank into his seat as if being pulled down by an anchor. Ann Folger stared, slack- jawed.
“It is my position that determining the state of one’s spiritual health is best left to each individual. I do not believe that this Meeting nor any other association of persons possesses the ability or the right to make such an assessment.”
Once she had said the words, Hannah felt dizzy with understanding that they were truer than any she had uttered in the past months. Possibly years.
She bowed her head beneath the weight of it, the gravity of what she’d done bearing down on her. But as she turned and walked up the center aisle of the Meeting House for the last time, the heaviness lifted, and as she got closer to the door, relief flooded her body, lightening her bones, bearing her the final few yards until she was outside, in the daylight, invisible.

hen the double doors closed behind her, Hannah hesitated. She blinked in the brightness of day, then turned away from Town and began to walk west. Air and sky, dirt and leaves, these were what she needed. Things devoid of malice. Without realizing it, she chose the path she’d taken with Isaac the day of the storm. It was the first time in months she’d walked without toting a bag filled with instruments and books and maps.
My armor,
she thought. Stripped of it, her body felt buoyant.

Poofs of dry dust shot out from beneath her boots with each step, dispersing and settling again upon the surface. Her footsteps would disappear with a gust of wind, all evidence of her passage erased as sure as the wake of a whaleship would disappear before its mate could scramble up the rigging. Evidence so easily dispersed seemed a perfect metaphor for the day; everything she thought she knew about herself and her neighbors had proven to be upside down. True was false; friends were foes. Sincerity, hypocrisy, humility, vanity—she doubted she could even tell one from the other anymore.

She turned onto the sandy track leading out to the beach. As she emerged onto the dune, expecting nothing but the twinkle of the waves below and a stretch of fine empty sand ahead, she stopped short. A lone figure sat upon the bluff, his back to her, leaning upon his elbows in a familiar posture.

Hannah took a step back, ready to flee by force of habit. But no— there would be no more of that. What she’d put in motion could not be recalled. As she stood, feeling frozen in place, she realized that she’d chosen this spot, among all the others on the Island, in hopes that she would find Isaac here. He was the person she wanted to see; she had nothing to gain by leaving. If anything, she owed him an apology. He’d called her attention to Truth, and she’d refused to see it.
You are only saying what you have been taught.

She forced her feet forward. They felt like they were boiling in her high boots. As she drew near, he turned his head and smiled. He didn’t seem angry. Hannah unclenched her fists, which she’d shoved into her pockets, and dropped down beside him as if she’d done so every day of her life.

“I am surprise to see you here,” he said. “Are you not meeting this day?”
She shook her head. And then everything before her blurred as tears sprang to her eyes, spilling hot and shocking upon her cheeks and dripping onto her dress.
“What is happening?” Isaac asked, his voice gentle but fringed with worry.
“I’m sorry,” Hannah said. But a big heaving sob ripped through her. She bowed her head.
Isaac did not ask again, but he leaned toward her and drew her in. She let the ballast of his body support her as she wept, his solidity a small miracle amid the ruin. She cried for the loss of Meeting, for disappointment at how her individual neighbors, all people of conscience and faith, had hardened over the years into a unit so rigid it could not bend. Or would not.
She cried for the loss of her brother, and for the pain she’d caused Mary. She cried for Isaac, who had suffered because she had allowed herself to get too close to him. And she cried for the Island, the place she loved more than any other, her home that no longer felt like home. Yet she knew no other.
Finally, spent and aching, Hannah raised her head. Isaac looked down at her, his concern mixed with affection and confusion. As always, a hint of amusement. His own complicated face. How she adored looking at it.
A bright bit of color waving in the slight breeze caught her eye, and she looked to the east. A quilted bedroll was laid out upon the sawgrass. Isaac’s satchel lay beside it, his familiar green jumper peeking out from the top.
Puzzled, she turned to him.
“It was raining last night,” he said. “Everything is drying now.”
Hannah shook her head a little.
“Have you not been sleeping in the Atheneum, then?”
He shook his head.
“Not since our last meeting.”
Hannah pressed her lips together, but before she could answer, he squeezed her shoulder as if to show her that he wasn’t angry.
“I decide to sleep here, under the stars. But don’t worry: I replace the key in the box that very night.”
Hannah bit her lip. She’d checked her letterbox ten times in the last week, but the key had not reappeared. Her father’s words, months ago in front of the Atheneum in the dead of night, returned as if he were whispering in her ear:
What does thee know of this person?
She swept her mind for signs of doubt, and found none. And though she didn’t mean to consult her feelings, they made themselves known, like the insistent hymn of a pious neighbor. Isaac cared for her; he would not lie to her.
As if in answer, he sat up a little and released her, wrapping both his arms around his knees and looking out over the surf below. A half mile away, a couple was wading in the water. The woman held her skirts in one arm and the man’s elbow with the other. Hannah sighed and dried her cheeks with her sleeve. She didn’t want to think about the key now, or about what would happen when she went home that day, or woke up the next.
Isaac tilted his head in her direction, his eyes gentle.
“Do you wish to say what happened?”
“I’m adrift.” She didn’t want to be vague, but if she told him what had transpired, she knew he’d feel responsible. “Do you remember when you told me that I was only saying what I had been taught?”
He nodded, his eyes questioning.
“Well, it’s become clear that what I have been taught, and what I believe, have diverged. And what I thought would happen when Edward returned— I was wrong about that, too. I’m—” Hannah struggled to keep from crying again. “I feel as if I’ve been cut in two. Have you ever felt anything like that?”
It was hard to imagine that he had. Isaac seemed as even-keeled as a canoe cleaving through still water. She envied his composure, which came not from a rigid code of Discipline, as hers had, but from something else.
He gazed out at the water again.
“I’m sorry to hear about your brother. The feeling you describe— this makes me think of my own brother.”
“Is he on a whaleship?”
“He is dead.”
“I’m so sorry. I didn’t know.”
“It was a long time ago,” he said, glancing at her as if to comfort her. Her distress must have read on her face. “An accident. In the water.”
“What happened?”
“We were in the boat, my father, grandfather, Paulo, and myself. He was like a fish. Nine years of age. He slip into the water and my grandfather did not see. He was rowing. The oar, it hit him.”
Hannah imagined the crack of the blow, cries of the men from the water, rowing fiercely toward shore, his brother’s limp body a delicate arc over his father’s outstretched arms. The sound of his mother’s wail rising, his grandfather’s silence afterward. Edward at that age had been all arms and throat, mischievous and gentle and clumsy and coarse all at once.
“You must miss him terribly,” she whispered.
A smile flickered like a candle across his face. He stretched his legs out in front of him and leaned back on his elbows in the sand.
“I remember him laughing. The time to cry is past. We are passing through this pain: we cry for him, pray for him, remember him. We tell our stories. Now I am only happy to think of him.”
Hannah thought of the silence around her own mother’s death, the smothering of any outward expressions of grief. “I wish we were able to speak of such things. When I lost my mother, I was so young, and when I got older we never spoke of her.”
Isaac looked horrified.
“If you do not speak of it, where does it go?”
“Where does what go?”
“The suffering.”
Hannah paused, then reached for his hand and curled his fingers into a fist before lifting it to her heart, holding it there, covered with her own.
“It stays,” she said. Bowing her head, she allowed her lips to rest on the small stretch of his hand that was exposed, the soft underbelly of his palm. They sat this way for some minutes, no sound but the breakers whispering against the sand.
“I must tell you something,” Isaac said, not looking at her. Hannah felt like lobsters were pinching her gut. She raised her chin and released his hand.
“The
Pearl
is ready to sail. I have word from Mr. Leary last night.”
“When do you go?” Hannah asked.
“The day after tomorrow.”
She inhaled. Heat and salt. Only a tiny hint of Isaac, as if he’d become the place. Sand and sky and skin comingled. There was no imagining her Island without him now. If she could even call it hers.
Hannah dug both her palms into the sand, burying them to the wrists.
“So there is time for one final lesson,” she said.
He smiled.
“If you are willing.”
“Come tonight,” she said, rising as if she’d gotten marching orders.
“To the Atheneum?”
“No. Come to my home.”
“Is it wise?”
“It’s what I want.” She paused, wondering how much to say. Their relationship was no longer about the lessons, or his advancement. When she was near him, Hannah felt both exhilarated and free at the same time, the way she felt when she was observing. The idea of parting from him was excruciating.
Hannah hovered above Isaac for a moment, shielding him from the sun. Backlit, she imagined herself silhouetted by light, her features blurred, indistinct. The sensation of his embrace returned to her, warming her body like sunlight. Her hand came to rest upon the tight curls that covered his skull, light as a dragonfly. They were soft, moss-like. She’d expected them to be more resilient, like springs.
“I’ll see you then,” she whispered, and turned toward home, to face whatever awaited her there.