The Promise of Stardust (20 page)

Why did I believe it could be different this time? That this baby would live—that Elle could be kept alive long enough to nourish it? Because this time had to be different. Because I had to give her the child she wanted. Because I could still see her holding Celina and weeping. Because part of me still carried that first baby, all of our babies, too. Because.

The baby inside Elle was only shadow on the ultrasound. A glimmer. And yet I had to make that baby real.

Dylan was a real baby; he was four pounds, ten ounces. At the hospital, they weighed his body and gave us his vital statistics as if
vital
statistics made him alive. The numbers were supposed to be something to hold on to, something concrete to grieve. I held my son in my arms. I tried to breathe life back into him. And I failed.

Maybe that was what I was trying to do now—breathe life into this baby—breathe life back into some part of Elle. I did not believe a baby would bring her back, but having one was her dream. I needed to keep her hopes and dreams alive.

I shuffled through the pictures and found one of her smiling. Her broad smile. Her smile gone forever. “What do you want me to do, Peep?”

A few days ago she said trying to have a baby was worth the risk.

Was it worth making her stay on life support? Would she think so, or was I clinging onto a delusion?

I slipped a picture of Elle walking along the red sand beach into my breast pocket, and put the remainder back in the bag, and stopped cold. There was a pregnancy test under the bathroom sink. I pulled open the door and reached for it. Not there. I rifled around. Not there. Did she take the test? Did she know? Or did she simply throw it away so we wouldn't fight over it anymore?

She didn't know. She couldn't have known. She wouldn't have gone up on that ladder if she knew.

The farmhouse bedroom was small and plain, painted in a cool gray. “Gray is restful,” she'd said. It was just big enough for a full-size bed, ridiculously short for my height, but it meant Elle and I were always touching at night, which proved to have benefits.

I couldn't sleep there without her now or ever again. I picked up the quilt and a pillow, intending to take them downstairs to the couch in the living room, but instead, when I reached the attic door, I stood frozen, lost in the vastness of what had occurred in the past few days.

I dragged myself upstairs. Only five nights ago, I'd come home late after doing an emergency surgery on what should have been my day off. Elle was waiting in the attic, sitting cross-legged beneath a floor lamp reading her mother's old diaries and writing in her own.

Elle should still be here, hiding the letters under the trapdoor in the attic, where she kept them tucked away from the world. What were the odds that she wrote something about believing life started at conception in one of those diaries? Slim, but it didn't matter; I couldn't bear to look right now. This was where I last saw her, where I last held her, yet it was the first place we made love. And the last place.

But she wasn't here. And the house was silent in the way that reverberates the pulse in a man's ears.

I lit the floor lamp and stepped through the doors to the widow's walk, an apt name, for I had become a widower in all but fact. While waiting for a meteorite to pass, I spread out the quilt then sat down to look up at the night sky. The peak of the Perseids had come and gone, but Earth was still passing through the region of space. What would I wish for? To go back in time. I'd tell her not to climb up on that ladder. I'd wish for the baby to survive against the damning odds. Or I could die in my sleep so I could join Elle in nothingness. The vacuum nearly swallowed me.

I curled on my side and cried. I cried harder than I ever had.

When I awoke, the morning's first light tinted the sky. I was achy from the hard roof, from the catharsis, and from a clearer vision of what the future held.

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I should have expected to see Elle's writing on the steamed-up bathroom mirror. It said,
THE SWEETEST THING
! Almost every day Elle left a couple of words scrawled on the glass, and the next time I showered a phrase would reveal itself. Sometimes it was something from a poem. She liked Dickinson, Thomas, and Rossetti. Some days she simply wrote, “Go save a life” or “I love you.”

And I'd smile then wipe down the mirror before I shaved. Today I toweled off and leaned against the wall and waited for the steam to dry. I watched Elle's love note disappear.

I turned the shower back on and let steam fill the bathroom again, but her message did not rematerialize. Instead it condensed and rained down in heavy droplets. I wondered why she wrote those three words. Was it the title to a U2 song I used to play over and over? The chances were it was just Elle's way of saying she loved me. She did. And it was the sweetest thing.

The smell of coffee and my mother's corn bread wafted upward—along with the sound of water running and dishes clinking. Immediately I knew Mom had let herself in. I stomped down the steps, prepared to throw her out. I would have, but her eyes were sad and hollowed. If we hadn't been on opposite sides of the court dispute, we might have grieved together. She might have shared with me how she found the strength to survive my father's death.

But now I sensed another loss, my mother's. Before this, before Elle's accident, Mom and I were close, for the most part. But in the courtroom, Mom had one thing right: Elle was even closer, closer than a daughter-in-law. Sometimes, she was closer than a son.

Mom turned away from me when I entered the kitchen. “Mike still has Hubble. I made you breakfast and—”

“I can take care of myself.”

“I made a leg of lamb last night and packed you up a couple of sandwiches. Don't worry, I removed most of the fat, but you need to eat, and you love lamb.” She wiped down the counter with a sponge.

“I can take care of myself,” I repeated.

She was acting as if I were still dependent upon her for food, for housekeeping, for her moral compass, and she kept rambling on as if she were giving a teenager a list to follow while she was at work. “We should be pulling together right now,” she said.

“I can't do that when you're trying to kill my wife.”

Mom gasped and stepped backward. “You cannot be serious! I love Elle.”

“Get out,” I said. For a second I wanted to bodily remove her, drag her outside. For a second I forgot she was my mother. Pull together? She was tearing us apart. Elle and I married each other. What is the wedding rhetoric?
What God has joined together, let no man put asunder
. Sure. Try to tell that to my mother. “Get out,” I said again.

Mom pretended not to hear me. Instead, she dried her hands on a dish towel, then not so furtively dabbed at her eyes. She poured two cups of coffee and set them on the table. “For ten minutes, just sit down. Eat something. I'm not ready to bury you, too. Come on, corn bread's your favorite.”

“But you're ready to bury Elle? Jesus.” I glared at her for a moment, not willing to let it go, trying to punish her. She held out a plate.

Hell. I didn't want to take the time to make breakfast or stop at a fast-food place, so I grabbed it and sat down at the table.

“We're not enemies, just adversaries,” she said.

I didn't speak to her as I wolfed down her food and gulped her coffee.

“The reporters kept calling,” she said as she slid a piece of paper across the table. “I have a new phone number; it's unlisted.”

I glanced at the blinking answering machine on the counter.

“You might want to do the same.” She stared into her coffee. It was rare for her to avoid eye contact.

I stood and listened to the first part of two dozen messages, deleting them as soon as the callers identified themselves. “Why can't they leave me alone to deal with this?”

“Because they feel like they own some little part of her. When she went up into space, she captured the imagination of people who wanted to believe in heroes. Because people don't want to be kept alive against their wills.”

I shot my mother a dirty look.

“Being a vegetable scares people, honey. I'm sorry, but given what you do for a living, you know that.”

“A vegetative state is not the same thing as being a goddamned vegetable, and
you
should know that. She's brain-injured. Badly, but she's a human being, not a vegetable.” I held out my hand. She took it, and I shook her loose. “I want my house keys.”

“Matthew, I'm sorry.” My mother rubbed her forehead. “I thought by now you'd see more clearly. I'm going to have to hire an attorney. I can see that after Friday. We're on opposite sides, but please understand.”

“Understand what? Goddamn it, what? That you can't even consider that I'm right?”

“She was terrified by how Alice died.”

“This isn't the same. Alice was in constant pain. Elle isn't. Elle is pregnant. Alice wasn't. And even if Elle were in pain, she would have sacrificed herself for the baby.”

“But how do you know she's not in pain? When Alice was sick, the doctors insisted that since she was in a coma, she wasn't in pain. And you and I both know that just wasn't true. How do you know that, on some level, Elle isn't experiencing pain? She can't tell you. What if her head hurts at some excruciating level? On some primal level. What if she's trapped in that pain?”

A lump formed in my throat, and I barely was able to spit out the words. “I've studied her EEG. There's virtually no brain activity, Mom. Artifact.” How I hated that word,
artifact
. The electrical artifact was all that was left of Elle's essence. “She's not there anymore.”

My mother shuddered, then held still, probably absorbing the vacuum of Elle's absence. Mom slowly walked to the door and removed my house key from her purse, which was hanging on the knob. “You are blind about what you're doing to Elle. And to yourself.” She set the key on the counter. “And it is terrifying me.”

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