The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  Elle had been her grandfather’s favorite, and he left his house to her for when she grew up. It remained vacant and available for our meetings. We took advantage. With all the awkward fumbling complicated by the cast on my leg, we rolled around on the sofa, and once I got her into a bedroom and half undressed before she said no. Our parents showed no indication of knowing or outward concern. Hank was still going to AA meetings. Alice, although still hospitalized, had improved, and my folks were busy watching Christopher and working their own jobs.

  In mid-August, Elle paid close attention to the weather forecast because the Perseid meteor showers were coming, and a cloudless sky was crucial to see shooting stars. Up on her grandfather’s widow’s walk, she lugged out the telescope. The hospital had released Alice the day before, and the families were having a quiet afternoon picnic down by the riverfront. Alice, Hank, and my folks gathered down below in the gazebo, and Christopher was running around with his hyperactive arms flailing away. One place Elle and I were always safe from Christopher was up on the widow’s walk because the kid might run around flapping his wings, but he would never fly. He was terrified of heights. Her grandfather’s house sat on over a hundred acres of land that rose up over the Harraseeket River. Most of it was forested except for the lawn that sloped down to the riverbank. The farmhouse, as we called it, was really an octagonal Victorian, a onetime fad of architecture. It had a wraparound porch and a widow’s walk where Elle loved to watch the nighttime sky.

  “You don’t need the telescope to see shooting stars,” I said, rubbing my shin. With my cast finally off, I felt compelled to scratch at even the slightest itch.

  “Shush, don’t tell my parents that I don’t need Gramps’s telescope. They’ll make me stay home and watch from the backyard.”

  “They can’t hear us up here.” I pulled Elle back into the attic, where I could kiss her. I pinned her against the wall, slid my hand up under her shirt, and snapped open her bra.

  “Matt, no; don’t.”

  I ignored her, kissing her neck, her ears, anywhere which had previously elicited a reaction.

  “My parents. They might come looking for us.”

  I slipped my hand onto her breast.

  “Matt, tomorrow night. Not now.”

  “Tomorrow?” I stood erect. Well, my posture was not my only anatomically erect feature.

  She trembled a little then met my eyes with her own less-than-certain-looking ones. “If you can get protection—I’m staying here tomorrow night for the Perseids. Alone. Can you, you know, sneak down here? You’re off, right?”

  For a moment my breath left me. “Seriously?”

  She nodded. “I want to—sleep with you.”

  “God, I love you, Peep.”

  “Me, too,” she said. “We just have to be careful.”

  And we were. But as it turned out, not nearly careful enough.

  12

  Twenty Years Before Elle’s Accident

  In September of ’88, I started my senior year of high school, but Elle had zoomed past me. Bowdoin College had allowed her to audit classes the previous semester since Freeport High School no longer knew what to do with her, and she impressed the hell out of the college. The dean of admissions looked at her age, grades, and perfect SAT scores, and the school admitted her for the fall semester. Since she was too young to drive, I volunteered to pick her up in the afternoons, but it was another excuse to be alone and to sneak more time down at her grandfather’s house.

  As the weather grew colder, so did Alice’s prognosis. Fully aware of the inevitable outcome, Alice decided to stop cancer treatment against the wishes of her husband.

  Elle’s tears didn’t surprise me. She wanted more time with her mother, and she cut classes, stayed up half the night studying, and generally neglected herself to get it. Even so, we found time to be together. Rather than distance developing, we found something else—intimacy, I suppose. I swore I could feel her pain, and I wanted to carry it for her. We were children, but we were a family, the two of us, and I could only foresee one future: we would get married—someday.

  On a mid-November afternoon, at her grandfather’s house, we started a fire in the woodstove and cuddled up on the sofa. Elle wasn’t feeling well. Everyone had noticed that much. Mom kept saying, “The girl’s run-down, trying to do all the housework for Alice and carrying a full load at college. Why doesn’t Hank hire a housekeeper? He can afford it.”

  I stroked Elle’s hair. She bolted upright and ran into the bathroom. Through the oak-paneled door, the sound of retching followed. An irrational idea hit me. Although I knew cancer wasn’t contagious, the tendency did run through families. But then, feeling like a dolt, I realized it was the chemo that made a person puke, not the cancer itself. “Peep?”

  “Go away.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “No!”

  “Elle, you’re sick. Do you need to go to the doctor?”

  The door creaked open, and pale as the ceiling, she crept back to the sofa and plopped her face in her hands.

  “What is it?” I rubbed her back.

  Her eyes widened to the size of saucers. “I didn’t pay attention at first.” Her chin quivered. “But I think I’m pregnant.”

  Elle didn’t want me to go in while the doctor examined her. So there I sat, conspicuously killing time in Planned Parenthood’s outer office, reading material on STDs. I didn’t have one of those. I used a condom every time I had sex. Every single time. I switched to literature on contraceptives. On condoms. On how to use them properly. I knew how. I went through boxes of them. The stupid thing was, I never read the directions. I learned like every other guy—by word of mouth. You waited until you got hard and rolled it on. When you were done, you threw it away and made sure your parents didn’t find the wrappers. Except these directions had a tidbit about making sure you were still hard when you pulled out.

  With the girl in Wales, I couldn’t get out fast enough. With Elle, I liked to stay inside her. And once, the condom came half off when I pulled out. It didn’t completely, so I thought we were safe. Christ.

  The door to the inner office opened and a woman in a lab coat beckoned me inside.

  Elle sat in one of those creepy hospital gowns on a table with stirrups. At least she didn’t have her feet in them. Her head hung low, and she didn’t meet my gaze.

  “Do you want to tell Matt, or do you want me to?” the doctor asked.

  Elle bit her lip and stared at her hands, which she had knitted together so tightly they were turning white.

  “She’s about ten weeks pregnant,” the doctor said. “You have options. You’ll have to decide quickly if you want to terminate. We have about a two-week window. You can keep the baby. Or you can consider placing it for adoption. I urge you to talk to your parents.”

  Elle stood and grabbed the back of her gown. “No. My mom and dad cannot know about this. Not now. Not ever.” She ran into the bathroom and slammed the door.

  For a moment I just stared and then I felt the doctor’s eyes on me. “Her mother is very sick,” I said as a way of explanation. Then it hit me just how dire the situation was.

  “I want you to talk with one of our counselors.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  After the doctor exited, Elle emerged, wearing her clothes and a panicked expression on her face. She dropped her shoes onto the floor and jammed her feet into them. “Let’s go.”

  “The doctor wants us to talk to—”

  “I can’t. Not now. I have to think. Please, Matt. Take me home.”

  I didn’t take her home. Once we climbed into the car, I had another idea, and I turned onto the interstate. Internally muttering self-recriminations, I drove. In silence. I’d promised to take care of her, to be safe when we had sex, and I’d been so frigging arrogant, so certain I knew exactly what I was doing. And she had trusted me.

  An hour later, I pulled off an exit near a beach town. The overcast day had that raw, November feeling. It was
gray and the leaves were gone. We parked next to a boarded-up beach motel and started down the sand. The wind blew off the Atlantic, chilling, not quite freezing. I took her hand in mine as we walked the wide beach. “We can do anything you want to do,” I said.

  “I don’t want to be pregnant. Do I look pregnant?”

  I shook my head. But her breasts were bigger, and her belly had a fullness that hadn’t been there before. I’d chalked it up to maturity, to growing curves. “You want to have an abortion?”

  She turned toward me. “How could I do that? My mom’s dying. I keep begging God to save her, and you want me to turn around and kill a baby?”

  “No, Peep. I didn’t say that.” I didn’t know what I thought. Or what I said. Or what I wanted. I wanted her not to be pregnant. “My parents’ll help us. Right after they kill me, that is.”

  “I’m fifteen. I can’t have a baby. I have to take care of Christopher. I promised my mom.” Elle started to cry, not in little whimpers but in consuming sobs. I took her in my arms, and we sat on the cold sand, huddled together.

  Our dreams were disappearing, medical school for me, MIT and NASA for her. And then, there was the more immediate. Alice would have to know. And my parents; I’d be disappointing them in incalculable ways. Hank would wish he’d killed me instead of just breaking my leg when he ran into me. It was a bigger mess than I could believe. However, part of me, a minuscule part of me, was in awe that we had made a baby. One I didn’t want, but we had made a baby.

  “How long do you think I can hide it?” she asked.

  “You can’t hide being pregnant. It’s going to get pretty obvious.”

  Elle tugged at the front of her bulky sweater, the style of the time. “Eventually. But if I can hide it for a while, if my mom doesn’t have to know—I mean—I don’t want her to die, but they said two or three months—and if I can hide it for that long, she wouldn’t have to worry about me, too. How could I do this to her now?” Elle started crying again, this time with her hands cradling her lower belly.

  I nodded. “What then?”

  “I’m not ready. I want one someday—but not now. I want to go to MIT. I want to—” She started shaking like she was freezing cold, like she was terrified. “What if we put it up for adoption?”

  “Give it up? No. I don’t know.” I stood and reached out my hand to her. We walked to the end of the beach, where the river cut through the sand on its way to the ocean. “What if we get married?”

  She clapped her hand over her mouth.

  I should have gone down on one knee. I knew you were supposed to do that when you asked a girl to marry you. So I did, feeling stupid on top of feeling guilty. “This is forever, right? So let’s get married.”

  She knelt beside me and buried her face in my chest. She held on for minutes, and I started thinking how crazy this was. How she and I would be getting married and playing house.

  “I love you,” she whispered. “You know I love you, right?”

  I nodded.

  “But, Matt, how could we get married? We’re not old enough. I’m not old enough. I’m not ready to get married—or to have a baby. Part of me wants to. I want all those things, just not yet. Not now.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

  “Do you really want to get married and have a baby now?” Elle asked.

  We broke apart just enough to look into each other’s eyes. I shook my head.

  “Me either. What are we going to do?” she whispered.

  A red ambulance strobe lit our street. Elle opened the car door before I came to stop. “What are you doing?” I yelled, slamming on the brakes.

  She jumped out and ran full sprint toward her house, and I followed after her.

  The ambulance crew was strapping Alice, pale, pasty, and wigless, onto a gurney while my parents looked on.

  “Mommy? What happened?” Elle grabbed Alice’s hand. The ambulance crew hoisted the stretcher into the back of the truck. Elle tried to climb in, but my mother took Elle’s shoulder and pulled her off to the side. The word seizure filtered through the darkness. Elle tore away and up into the back of the ambulance. She kissed her mother’s forehead. “Mommy, I love you.”

  “We need to take your mother to the hospital. You have to get out of the ambulance now,” the rescue-squad driver told her.

  “Come down, Elle,” Hank said. He was carrying Christopher, and he turned and walked away, as if Elle should obey him, as if she didn’t need her father every bit as much as Christopher did.

  Sniffling, Elle climbed down and into my arms. “This can’t be happening. Not all at once.”

  I held her close and whispered, “It will be all right. It will be. I love you, and I swear, I’ll take care of you.” Without thinking, we kissed, and when we pulled apart, I caught my mother’s surprised gaze.

  My father stood on the porch, studying me. “Where the hell have you been? You and Elle should have been home hours ago. We were worried.”

  I shook my head. “We went for a walk. What happened?”

  Elle shimmied away from me and dashed across the yard, following Hank and Christopher with Mom in pursuit.

  Dad’s eyes traced Elle’s path. “Alice had a convulsion on the kitchen floor. What’s going on with you and Elle?”

  “I love her.”

  “Love her? Since when?”

  I shrugged. “This summer.”

  He drew a deep breath. “Son, she’s too young for you. She’s fourteen.”

  “No, she turned fifteen in July. And you don’t understand, Dad. I really, really love her.”

  Something about the way my father’s eyes focused made me realize that I revealed more than I intended to. Dad rubbed his balding forehead. “Matt, don’t even think about it. She’s too young. You’re too young. Don’t. I mean it, don’t.”

  I glared, but in a couple of months, it would become obvious his warning came too late. Every dream either of us had ever held was coming to an end.

  The next day I dragged Elle back to Planned Parenthood, where, after an agonizing session with a social worker, we obtained the name of an adoption agency and a clinic for Elle’s prenatal care. We had a plan, but life didn’t get easier.

  After Alice’s seizure, the hospital released her on anticonvulsants and a new regimen of pain medications. Elle and I weren’t the only ones with a secret. In silence, Alice had been suffering an escalating level of pain.

  As if she’d waited for the family to have one last holiday together, Alice didn’t wake up the morning after Thanksgiving. No one could rouse her. Again, an ambulance arrived, but this time Elle seemed resigned. She was the one holding her brother as he clung to her neck. Hank paced back and forth, listing all Alice’s medications to the rescue-squad EMTs.

  I tried to take Christopher from Elle, but he wouldn’t let go. I kept thinking she shouldn’t be lugging around her eighty-pound brother when she was three months pregnant. I finally got her to sit on the steps with him on her lap.

  “There, Christopher. It’s okay. She’s sleeping. The hospital will wake her up,” she said.

  “But I want Mommy.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you. Come on, I’ll make us breakfast,” she said, leading him inside.

  Over the Thanksgiving weekend, Hank begged the oncologist to restart Alice’s chemo, but they wouldn’t. Instead, he told Hank that Alice could stay in the hospital to die, or Hank could take her home for hospice care.

  Thus, the McClure house became Agony Central.

  Alice had fallen into what the doctors described as a “light coma,” but that’s not what it seemed like. She lay on a rented hospital bed in the middle of the living room writhing most of the time. Because she wasn’t sufficiently conscious to eat or drink, they kept her alive by jamming a feeding tube up one nostril and pumping formula into her stomach. And worse, because she was unable to use a toilet, the stench of urine and feces took residence in the house.

  Anytime the hospic
e nurse wasn’t actively trying to take care of Alice’s physical needs, turning her, changing her, filling a bag that poured into her feeding tube, she tried to fill the gaps of silence, chatting endlessly. Monotonously.

  I sat in the corner on an overstuffed chair, pretending I wasn’t there, my nose in a book, my ears covered by Walkman headphones, the music sometimes off and sometimes on. I tried to blend into the wallpaper. There, but not there.

  In contrast, the nurse, a woman with round cheeks and a rounder backside, tried to blend into the family, doing her best to mother the kids. “When are you going to put up the Christmas tree?”

  Elle glanced up from whatever book she was reading to Alice. “What?”

  “Does your mother like Christmas, Elle?”

  Elle pressed her lips together, seemingly wholly lost for words.

  “Maybe she’d like a tree. What do you want for Christmas, anyway? Girls your age usually want clothes,” the nurse said.

  “I guess,” Elle said, rising. “Do you really think we should decorate?”

  “You should do everything; bake cookies, mull cider, everything you would ordinarily do.”

  Elle looked across the living room at her little brother, who sat building a fort with LEGOs. “Hey, Christopher, do you want to help me make cookies? I’ll let you lick the spoon.”

  “Yeah! Yay!” He ran into the kitchen.

  Alice moaned, as she did so often, and the nurse stood.

  “Can’t you give her more pain medicine?” Elle asked.

  The nurse glanced at her watch. “Not for another hour.”

  “This isn’t fair,” Elle said.

  “Suffering is never fair. Not for your mother. Not for the sick and not for kids like you.”

  During the afternoons I tried to do my homework at the McClures’ so Elle wouldn’t be alone, but we talked less and less. We had no privacy, and talking about the school holiday parties, about who was dating whom, or about the basketball team’s last game didn’t penetrate Elle’s veneer. Most of the time it was like she didn’t hear me.