The Promise of Stardust (40 page)

I shrugged as if it didn't matter while I calculated the odds that I could find Elle if I drove the three hours up to the national park. The last time I was up there, cell-phone coverage was virtually nonexistent, so I concluded it unlikely.

“She's homesick,” Mom said. “She's planning to move back here in the next few years.”

“Really?” Elle hadn't told me that, although I suspected a move home was more about how Mom interpreted Elle's words. Mom probably said, “Don't you want to move home, Elle?” To which Elle probably replied, “Of course I do.”

We all wanted things we couldn't have.

“Unfortunately,” Mom said, “Adam loves NASA.”

Right. Adam. Pain in the ass as usual. “If I could talk Carol into moving to Maine, I would.”

Mom seemed to roll her words around on her tongue for a moment before she actually spoke. “It'd be nice to have you two close enough for Sunday dinners.” Carol and my mother in the same town, sharing recipes. Now there was an image.

A change of topic was in order. “Do you want to know something funny? There's this guy, Phil Grey. He's finishing his neurosurgery fellowship this month. He's from Brooklyn. You know, he has the swagger, the New Yorker attitude. Yankee fan.” I shook my head, that I, an avid Sox fan, would befriend a Yankee fan. “Brilliant doctor, though, fantastic surgeon.”

“You've mentioned him.”

“He heard me talking about Maine and how much I love it, so he and his wife decided to come up here on vacation last year. Three hours in, they decided this was where they should settle. A neurosurgical group offered him a position—Welsh and Sanders. Phil's moving to Maine, and I'm spending the rest of my life in the Big Apple. Ironic, huh?”

“So he's the one taking over for Sanders?”

“No. I think he's replacing Welsh. Welsh is retiring. Sanders is only fiftyish; I talked to him before I began my neurosurgical residency.”

“Yeah, but Sanders has cancer. It's bad. I heard through the grapevine his prognosis is grim. Your friend may need another partner if Welsh wants to retire, too. You should make nice with Phil. Maybe the two of you could start your own practice.”

I scratched my head. It was a shame about Sanders. He'd let me follow him around for a couple of days when I was still in med school. Nice guy.

I indulged myself in a brief fantasy where I convinced Carol to live in Portland, but it was indeed a fantasy. There was no way. She'd already bought a beautiful apartment on the Upper East Side. Hell, she had a preschool picked out for our future kids.

The farmhouse, an unpolished and aging Victorian with peeling clapboard, reflected the morning sun, and the unyielding steadiness of the place comforted me. The garden appeared recently tended. Whenever Elle came home, she took care of it as her first order of business. If she didn't make it up from Texas, it sometimes filled with crabgrass and dandelions. Mom weeded here and there. Sometimes I even spent an hour or two yanking up roots. But it was Elle's place, Celina's place.

Most of the plants were perennials. This time home, Elle must have spent hours augmenting them with annuals. New Guinea impatiens in hot pink and petunias in white tumbled over the edges. The garden looked like a fat wad of cotton candy.

A creaking door opened across the field. “May I help you?” Elle called, sounding tentative.

I spun toward her and waved, the pinwheel in my hand catching the summer breeze.

Wrapped in a long moss-green cardigan that matched the color of her eyes, Elle paused for a moment. Then the surprise in her voice rose over the anxiety I'd heard moments before. “Matt? Matt, what are you doing here?” Elle crossed the field, her step springing into a gallop, until we were hugging, not as lovers but as the friends we had become over time.

“Mom said you'd gone to Bar Harbor,” I said.

“I was planning to, but I, well, please don't tell her, I exaggerated how soon I was driving there. I wanted to spend last night, watching the stars—alone.”

Elle's cheeks and nose wore a barely sunburned glow. She shaded her eyes from the sun, which had broken through the trees to hit her face. “I didn't know you were coming home.”

“I wasn't. But I had this urge to see the ocean. Carol suggested Long Island. I wanted Maine.”

“Is she here?” Elle's gaze shot up to the driveway and my car. “I'd love to meet her.”

“She's on call this weekend. I have to go back tomorrow.”

“Oh, too bad.” She tugged on my sleeve. “Come up to the house. I'll make you a cup of coffee.”

I only held Celina for a few minutes, yet I'd carried her with me every day since. Pausing, I scanned for the rock-circled patch of moss and pushed the pinwheel into Celina's marker. Elle watched with silent intensity. I shrugged, and neither of us said more about my gift.

I'd never quite gotten over what Elle said about naming Celina, that her name would be the only thing we would ever give her. The day we buried her I felt compelled to leave some kind of token and the only thing I had in my pocket was a package of Bazooka bubble gum. I slipped it underneath the urn. Stupid, I know, juvenile even. I was a kid. Both Elle and I were. But ever since, I left a trinket here, a marble there, a wind chime, a ribbon, something. Almost fifteen years had passed and the only real thing we ever gave her was the name and even that was only etched in our memories.

Elle didn't say a word but scooted down and blew the wind toy, making the wheel spin around, then she placed her palm down on the pocket of moss for a moment.

“The garden looks
very
pink,” I said, mustering a grin.

She cocked her head to the side. “Something wrong with a pink garden?”

“Suppose not.”

Elle shook her head. “You won't believe this. Christopher and his girlfriend came out here. He thought he was doing me a favor, dug up everything except the lilac bush and moved the garden over by the house. He said it would make the lawn easier to mow. I had to replant everything.”

“Shit. Did he find her urn?” I asked.

“No. The moss was undisturbed. Thank God. It would be too difficult to explain after all this time.”

In the bright sunshine, I could read her body language. Neither embarrassment nor shame had kept her from telling her family. She still felt like it was her fault Celina died, and I wanted to tell her again that she shouldn't blame herself. I didn't. “Did you ever tell Adam about Celina?”

“No. He wouldn't understand. She didn't belong to him.” Elle lowered her eyes. “But enough of that. Tell me your plans for today.”

After a beat to regroup, we went inside. Not much had changed inside the kitchen. It still had one of those rounded-off Frigidaires from the fifties, as indestructible as the generation who made them.

“You look great,” I said.

She tousled her hair and pulled it away from her face. “If I knew I was going to see anyone, I'd have tried to make myself a bit more presentable.”

“You look great,” I repeated.

She leaned against the old sideboard, appraising me. “You, too.” Elle darted over to the blinking answering machine, picked up the receiver, and listened to the message.

“Something wrong?” I asked.

“I keep missing Adam. We haven't talked for a couple of days.”

“I talked to him Thursday night.”

“You did?

“I was calling to talk to you.”

“Did he sound okay?”

“A little distracted, but that's nothing new. He didn't even say you were in Maine. What's up?”

She shrugged. “The opportunity to take a few days off came up suddenly. I left him a note saying I was going home because it was now or never before the mission chance. Anyway, I think he might be angry, but it's hard to tell. Lately, he's been so tied up with the safety issues on the orbiter that we barely see each other. We live together, but we only bump into each other at night.”

That could have a couple of different meanings. As much as it bothered me to think of her with him, they did live together. Still, I didn't say anything. I considered her my best friend. I often told her things I didn't tell Carol, like how I had doubts about my neurosurgery residency, how I often wished I'd stuck with general surgery, how much I missed home. But our love relationships were forbidden topics.

We took the coffee out to the gazebo and sat on the wicker rockers, looking down at the high-tidal river. We talked about her father, her brother, about New York and Houston. We laughed the way we used to, and I felt more comfortable with her than I had with anyone in a long time. There was never pretense, only acceptance.

“You're no longer the child prodigy. Now you're just a smart-ass,” I said, grinning at her. “Are you feeling any trepidation over turning thirty next month?”

She chuckled. “No, just the opposite. I finally feel—normal—like I fit in.”

My stomach growled loud enough for Elle to hear.

“Hungry?” she asked.

“Lunchtime.”

We piled into my car, initially heading somewhere for lobster rolls. When I cranked the engine, it squealed.

“You need to tighten your belts,” she said.

I glanced at my waistband.

“Under the hood. The car hood,” she said. “How could you grow up with Mike and never learn the most basic things about engines?”

She was right to some degree. My brother loved cars as much as I avoided them. “I hung out with you,” I said as we pulled onto the road.

“Oh no, you can't get away with that. I watched Mike every time he was fixing something. I know basic auto mechanics.”

“You know quantum mechanics.”

“They're not quite the same thing.” She grinned.

“Yes, Einstein, I know.” I was trying to draw attention away from the fact that the only thing I could do with a car was pump gas into its tank. “I fix brains.”

“Yeah, yeah. Big brain surgeon. It helps to know how to fix a flat. I paid attention, and it's pretty useful now. When part of the Space Shuttle breaks loose, you sort of have to know what to do. Damned heat tiles.”

“You knew some of the
Columbia
astronauts, didn't you?”

“Yeah.” She stared out the passenger-side window.

“Are they training you how to fix the tiles if they come loose again?”

She turned away from the window to look at me. “They train us for every
contingency
. I think it's their favorite word. Don't worry. You're like an old woman sometimes. At least, if you die on a mission, you die fast.”

“That's comforting.” I refused to conceal my sarcasm.

“Listen, today I don't want to worry about what is going to happen up there. For the next ten months I can do that. Every day. How to do this maneuver, how to do that one.”

“You never told me how the Vomit Comet ride went,” I said, trying to break the tension.

She chuckled. “You'd lose your cookies.”

“And you think this, why?”

“Remember the roller coaster at Funtown? You were greener than the Hulk when we got off.”

“No.” I denied it to salve my macho ego.

“Yes. Like a lizard.”

“No.” I denied it to save face.

“Like a lawn on the PGA tour.”

“No.” I denied it because she was on a roll.

“Want to go to Funtown right now, get on a coaster, and redeem yourself?”

No, but we did. We took Route 1 to Saco. Funtown was like a microversion of Great Adventure, but it had a roller coaster, an old wooden one for the purist.

Forty minutes and the cost of admission later, Elle was rubbing her hands together like the villain in a silent movie. “Choose wisely, my victim. It may be your last ride.”

I pointed to Excalibur, the wooden roller coaster. I needed to, in Elle's words, redeem myself.

Elle practically danced backward, luring me onward with her finger coiled and her smile nearly as big as the dip in the rail. The
clickety-clack
of the cars going over the tracks could unnerve Rambo, but when we reached the line, she said, “You don't have to prove anything to me.”

“Methinks thou art trying to get thyself off the hook by making it sound like this young page wants to chickenshit out.”

“Ha!” She crossed her arms.

“It's all right,” I said, rubbing her neck. “If you want to surrender and admit that roller coasters don't scare me, I won't make you go on,” I said, hoisting up my bravado in the hope she'd leave my ego intact.

“Yeah, yeah. That will be the day.”

After ten minutes in line we climbed into the first car on the tram. I started to sweat, not because I was nervous, but because I felt strangely cold, as if my body was having a paradoxical reaction to the blazing sun.