The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  “Let her go, Daddy,” Elle begged over and over. “Just stop her feedings. If Mommy didn’t have that tube jammed down her nose, she would—she would be at peace. Look at her! Please! She’s in pain. Can’t they at least give her more medicine?”

  Elle pleaded with the nurses. She pleaded with Hank. But even when Hank was there, he was so bombed he didn’t see what the rest of us saw. I guess that was the point.

  Once, when the nurse went outside for a smoke, Elle tried to jimmy open the locked medication box. The nurse came back inside and all but threatened to call the police. Maybe that’s when they decided the family was in real trouble.

  “What were you planning to do?” I screamed as Elle stormed off.

  “Just give my mom enough to stop her pain. This is horrible. It’s as wrong as torturing someone. Why won’t he let her go? Why won’t the doctors make this stop? My dad can drink himself into oblivion, but he’s letting my mom suffer.”

  “What do you want them to do? Help her die? A mercy killing?”

  Elle rounded on me in the driveway. “Do you really think that would be wrong? If that were me, I’d want to die.”

  I didn’t know her when she was like this; her eyes were darting around like she was trapped in a room on fire.

  “I have to study for my calculus midterm,” I said, charging off, not wanting to be a participant in what might follow.

  Another week passed. Hank disappeared for three days.

  That’s when it happened.

  Elle didn’t even tell me he was gone. We had all but stopped talking. I found out when I came home from school. The note Mom left on the table said:

  We found Hank. Dad’s taking him to a place to dry out. The hospice nurse called Child Services. I’m going to Portland to see if I can keep Elle and Christopher out of foster care.

  I leaped over the fence between our two driveways to the McClures’.

  The nurse opened the door. “I had no choice. I’m legally bound to report neglect and abuse. Your family has been trying to keep the kids safe, but this is a mess.”

  Behind the nurse, I could see that Alice lingered, more skeletal than ever, and she sounded like she was struggling to breathe.

  “I didn’t tell CPS about Elle getting pregnant,” the nurse said. “And if your parents can get custody of Elle and Christopher, I will tell the social workers it’s for the best. Your parents obviously love the kids. But, Matt, you and Elle can’t mess around. If something happened again, if anyone found out, the kids would both end up in foster care for sure.”

  “It’s all right. Elle won’t let me near her anymore,” I said.

  Take one formerly pregnant underage girlfriend and one horny high school senior, and Elle and I arrived at an impasse. My father threatened to pull my college savings. My mother threatened castration. Elle cowered away every time I tried to touch her. And Alice festered. Day in and day out, Alice did not die. She would never die.

  Mom came home with Christopher and Elle around ten that night. Elle’s face was red and her eyes were puffy. Christopher’s face was filthy with snot.

  Mom kept shaking her head no. Dad beckoned to me to follow as he carried Christopher upstairs to my room. After dropping Chris on the top bunk, Dad said, “He’s scared. I want you to stay here with him.”

  I followed my father out into the hall. “Let me talk to Elle first.”

  Dad put his hand on my chest and pushed me back. “You need to get to bed. You’ve got school in the morning. Your mother is going to take Elle home. The nurse is over there, and the social worker said as long as that was the case, it was okay to leave Elle home.”

  I didn’t have school in the morning. It was a Friday night, but as I opened my mouth to argue, Christopher started bawling. “It’s too high. I want Elle.”

  “Go. Stay with him,” Dad said. “Let your mother handle Elle.”

  I sagged and joined Christopher. “It’s okay, kiddo. I’m here.”

  “I want Elle.”

  “Me, too.” I pulled off my shirt and dove under the flannel sheets of the bottom bunk.

  “It’s too high up here,” Chris said. “Can I sleep with you?”

  The only McClure I wanted to sleep with was Elle. “No. There’s a rail. You won’t fall out.”

  “Please, can’t I sleep with you?”

  “The bed’s too small,” I said. Hell, it was too small for me without him hogging the covers.

  “Elle would let me,” he said.

  Shit. Elle could probably hear him whining all the way down in the kitchen, too. So to shut Chris up, I said, “Fine.”

  His legs swung over, and he stepped on my arm. After a few minutes of shifting around, he settled next to the wall. I stared out the window at the McClure house until Mom walked Elle over. I expected Mom to be right back, but I didn’t see her come home.

  In the morning, Mom was cooking corn bread and bacon. I plopped down at the table. “Christopher snores.”

  Mom set a cup of coffee in front of me. A little baffled, I sniffed it. She’d never given me coffee before, although I’d drunk a cup here and there. “Is this mine?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Mom? Are you okay?”

  She looked at me, seeming to see me for the first time. “Why are you drinking coffee?” she asked. And then, before I could answer, “You’d better hurry; you’ll be late for school.”

  “It’s Saturday.”

  There was a tap on the door and the nurse entered. “I’m sorry to bother you, but—” She cleared her throat. “Alice McClure died about an hour ago. Elle is inconsolable.”

  Even after the months of praying for her mother’s peace, Elle wasn’t prepared for the impact.

  We never are.

  19

  A Year Before Elle’s Accident

  Elle and I were in bed together, discussing the differences between the sexes. After the usual and obvious anatomical comments, the ones lovers share, conversation turned to the psychosocial, the spiritual, the cliché. I said men were more aggressive and women more nurturing.

  Elle said, “Women are stronger, more certain of themselves.”

  I flexed a muscle. “How do you figure that one?”

  “No, no, men have all the testosterone to grow the bulging muscles—hmm, nice, by the way—and assert themselves, but men are an insecure bunch. I mean you, and I don’t mean you personally, but you in the plural sense, need to control everything you don’t understand. Men don’t get women, so they subjugate them. Your gender won’t even read books or watch films with female protagonists; it’s intimidating, and if men feel inadequate about something, they hide it.”

  “Huh?”

  “If you—and again I mean the plural you”—she wagged her eyebrows and touched me suggestively—“couldn’t get it up—which doesn’t seem to be a problem—but if a man had that issue, would he tell his buddies at the gym? I think not. No, he’d lay on the machismo even thicker, brag about all his conquests, and manage to convey he was a lothario instead.”

  “I’m being maligned.”

  She rolled her eyes. “No. You don’t have an issue in that department. Obviously. Let me make the counterexample, a case closer to home. If a woman couldn’t carry a baby to term, something which makes me feel like I’m as big of a failure as a woman as impotence would a man, what would she do? What did I do? I found another woman who has been through a similar thing, and we obsess about it together. Men can’t do that. They aren’t certain enough of themselves.”

  “Or, as I said, women are nurturers. You nurture each other. Same thing. We agree on everything. Did you ever notice that?”

  She hit me over the head with a pillow.

  The other woman Elle had found was Keisha Sudani. That was one of the few things the two of them had in common: their mutual inability to give birth. Keisha couldn’t conceive, and Elle couldn’t carry a baby to term. Yes, they were both associate professors at Bowdoin, but Elle taught physics and astronomy. Keis
ha taught women’s studies. Elle spent every minute she could outdoors, running, swimming, kneading the earth in her garden. The only way Keisha would put her hands in the dirt would be if someone told her it would help her conceive. She’d tried everything from IVF, herbs, and acupuncture to tribal remedies in the South Pacific. She had one of those undiagnosable fertility issues. Everything was perfect—except Keisha and her husband were lonely for a child—the same way Elle and I were.

  20

  After Elle’s Accident

  Day 7

  Having spent the last few months in New Zealand, Keisha came straight from the airport to the hospital, and her midnight-dark eyes filled with tears as she touched Elle’s shaven head. She murmured in her soft accent, “Girlfriend, girlfriend, look what they did to you.” Then, meeting my gaze, she said, “How’s the baby, Matthew? And how are you?”

  “I’m holding on. Everything’s all right with the …” I almost said pregnancy, but stammered, “baby.” That’s how I was still thinking about it, the pregnancy. Elle was pregnant.

  “Tell me what you need, and I’ll do it,” Keisha said.

  “Can you testify that Elle would want the baby to live?”

  “No, she wouldn’t want it.” Keisha swallowed. “She would insist upon it. I don’t understand how your mother could even consider stopping Elle’s life support, not when there’s a baby growing in her belly.”

  My mind flashed to Elle taking my hand and putting it on her belly to feel Celina kick—to feel Dylan kick. I connected to the child inside her through her actions. Elle would never do that with this baby. And it occurred to me, I might never feel attached to this child without Elle. It occurred to me, I would have to raise it alone. It occurred to me, I hadn’t even thought that far ahead.

  “Matthew, are you all right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Thank you. And, uh, could you go through her office at Bowdoin? Pack it up? If you find anything that would even hint at what she’d want done in this situation …”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open.” She turned back toward Elle. “This breaks my heart.” She leaned over to kiss Elle’s forehead. “I love you, my sweet friend.”

  I had two allies: Hank and Keisha. But the foes numbered higher. Christopher and his wife, Arianne, a sheepish little blond woman, came in to see Elle, stayed four or five minutes, and stormed out. All three of my brothers, one at a time, or occasionally with collective strength, paraded in to remind me about Alice McClure festering in her living/dying room for months. Doug moved to Vermont right out of high school, and since he was the oldest, and I the youngest, we had never been close. He put his arm around my shoulder. “Matty, it’s over. Let her go. You don’t have perspective.”

  “It’s not over,” I said. “Not while Elle’s pregnant.”

  Or Keith, who tried another approach: Mom and the guilt I should feel about defying her. Defying? As if I were an errant teenager instead of a grown man. And Mike—he turned into a water bucket every time he entered Elle’s room, blubbering about how she shouldn’t be lying in that bed. I told him not to come anymore. If anyone should be crying, it was me. But I couldn’t cry. I needed to act certain.

  Mike still came, and I was grateful he did. He was the only one who would come and talk about something else even though he disagreed about keeping Elle on life support. We were still family.

  In between the visits, all I wanted to do was sit in the corner of Elle’s hospital room and hear her voice in the shelter of her diaries. Instead, people came in waves, my family, Elle’s, doctors—the ones I’d chosen and the ones who were to testify for my mother.

  And the priest, Father Meehan, wearing black trousers and the collared black shirt, stood in the doorway in silence. Was I supposed to confess that he was the last person I thought to call? I didn’t believe Elle’s soul needed saving or that some incantation would make a difference to the Almighty God, the Father, Son, or Holy Ghost. I felt like a hypocrite, using Father Meehan so that I could go into court and swear on a Bible that Elle was in God’s grace and that keeping her on life support was an expression of her First Amendment rights to practice her religion. Yet I held out my hand to the priest and lied or told the truth. Who knows? In my eyes, she was a good woman, and it never occurred to me that when she died she would go anywhere but heaven. I didn’t mention I was uncertain if such a place existed.

  He blessed her with oil, uttered his prayers, and gave her Extreme Unction. He turned to leave, and I don’t know what came over me, but I dropped into the chair and began to sob.

  His brow furrowed, and he pulled up a chair next to mine. He said nothing for a few minutes while I cried with my face buried in my hands. Finally I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “I remember your wedding,” he said. “I don’t marry too many astronauts. Neither of you have attended Mass much since. She came once in a while this spring.”

  I pulled a hospital-issued box of tissue from the nightstand and honked my nose. “After Dylan died.”

  He nodded and paused before he spoke. “Is that why you lost your faith, Matt?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I never had it.”

  Father Meehan shook his head, maybe in anger, maybe out of pity. “I spoke with your lawyer,” he said. “He wants me to say Elle and you were practicing Catholics, and I suppose that’s why I’m here. For show.”

  I swallowed. “In part. But Elle would want to give the baby a chance. She’d want prayers.”

  He seemed to measure my words. “What about you? Do you want to give the baby a chance?”

  “Of course. We wanted kids.” I hesitated. “If I sound ambivalent, try to understand that my wife is—gone—lost, and I’m so—broken, and so tired. But we wanted children. We always wanted children.”

  He nodded. “See, this is what I’m thinking. I understand that you’re concerned about whether or not the baby will be born. And without that”—he shrugged—“you think nothing matters, but you’ve fallen away from the Church, Matt.”

  “Don’t hold my lack of religious fervor against the baby,” I said. “And Elle might not have been a churchgoer, but she believed in God. Maybe this would be easier if I did.”

  “I know she believed. She didn’t attend Mass often, but she came in to talk more than once about the pregnancies she lost. She believed life began at conception. When I tell the court that, it won’t be a lie. I’ll testify—for her—for the baby. But I’d like to ask something of you.”

  “Anything.” I was willing to make a deal with the devil or with his nemesis. It didn’t matter which.

  “When the baby is born, I want you to come back to the Church. Come even if you don’t believe at first. Go through the motions with an open heart. Have the baby baptized. Make it a commitment to raise the baby with faith. You see, I want you to give the baby a chance, too.”

  All in all, it was a small concession. Who knew that the bargaining phase of my grief would be so concrete? “Church. I can do that.”

  Father Meehan held up his hand and made the sign of the cross. “This Sunday would be a good start.”

  21

  Day 8

  Change of shift is not a peaceful hour. The nurses forget to keep their voices down when they greet one another—as if it were just another day at the office. There’s the occasional bitching about the work anticipated for the day ahead, and then the march through begins.

  The night-shift nurse led the day-shift nurse to Elle’s bedside, where one reported to the other while inspecting IV bags, double-checking settings and tubings and monitor waves.

  I scraped my stiff body out of the recliner and headed into the on-call room. There were benefits to being on staff, including a hot shower and shave without leaving the building.

  When I returned, my mother was sitting in my chair with elbows on her knees, her head cradled in her hands. My eyes darted to the ventilator, to Elle’s monitor—the same settings, a regular sinus rhythm. I drew air and stood silent, waiting for Mom
to look up.

  But she didn’t. And I realized after a minute that this was how my mother had always cried, in silence, her shoulders heaving almost imperceptibly.

  “You okay?” I asked despite my deep anger, resentment, and outrage. The list could have gone on.

  She startled, hastily wiping her eyes, then nodded. She was wearing her scrubs covered by a lab coat, her hair pulled up in a soft bun. “I hate this.” She gestured toward Elle. “It shouldn’t be like this. Elle. Elle.” She repeated the name like a chant.

  Part of me wanted to oust Mom from the premises. But another part of me wanted to hug her and release the grief and horror welled up behind the levee of my reserve. “No,” I said. “It shouldn’t be like this. But it is. Because there’s still a life at stake.”

  “That’s not what I meant … I want to roll time back a month. I want her to be all right again.”

  “Finally. Something we agree on.” I felt my resolve slipping. “You’re working today?”

  She nodded. “Trying to, but … well …”

  “Don’t even try to tell me they sent you over here to check the fetal heartbeat.”

  Mom regarded me. “I was at work,” she said. “My patient read my name tag and asked me if I was related to the astronaut. When I said yes, she told me to get out—said that I was some kind of baby killer. Me? I’ve had crazy patients over the years. One sixteen-year-old didn’t like it much when I told her to push, and she grabbed me by the throat so hard she left fingerprints, but no one has ever accused me of anything so heinous as being a baby killer.”

  “So why are you here? You want me to tell you you’re a saint? I’m not about to offer you my support. You’re wrong about Elle.”

  Mom wasn’t looking at me. She was stroking Elle’s forearm. “I’m not wrong. She didn’t want to die this way.” She bent down and kissed Elle’s forehead. “I didn’t do anything when Alice was dying. I didn’t stand up to Hank. I didn’t push the oncologists. I didn’t go over anyone’s head from the hospice agency. I held my tongue like a good little subservient nurse. Back when nurses were silent. Back when we didn’t assert ourselves. Back before we had a voice in the health care team. I grew up old school, as the young ones say these days. And I have regretted my silence, my passivity, ever since. I let my best friend down. I let her suffer.” Mom continued to rub Elle’s arm. “I won’t do that to Elle. I’m standing up for her and for what is right. And I’m sorry that means I’m standing against you.” Mom was trembling as she whisked past me. “I love you, Matt. Don’t forget that. But I love Elle, too.”