The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  Hank was usually meticulous and fresh-pressed from the dry cleaner, but he came in looking like he’d slept in his clothes. I sniffed in his direction. He smelled like Old Spice, not like beer or any other form of alcohol. He shook his head. “I didn’t have anything to drink.”

  “Okay,” I said, barely masking my doubt.

  “I didn’t. I look like this because I just got off a plane. I went down to Houston last night.”

  “Why?”

  “Adam.” Hank sneered. I knew he never liked Adam, and I think it was because Adam was more than ten years older than Elle, and she was only twenty when she started living with him.

  To be honest, I never liked Adam either. For eight long years he had the woman I wanted: Elle. “You went to see Adam?”

  “He called me. And, Matt, he said he has proof Elle wouldn’t want to stay on life support. He’s coming here tomorrow to testify.”

  My neck muscles locked up as if someone had just slapped a neck brace on me. “Testify? What kind of goddamned proof?”

  “He didn’t say. Or he wouldn’t say. That’s why I flew down there. To try to get him to tell me what he had. He’s been leaving messages on my machine since the accident. Finally he says, ‘If you don’t get that asshole’—meaning you; sorry, Matt—‘to turn off Elle’s life support, I will.’ So I flew down to Houston, but all he said was he has proof.”

  It didn’t make sense that Adam would interject himself after all this time. “Bastard,” I said. “Forget him. If he had something substantial, he’d have said what it was.”

  Maybe Elle was right. Like other members of my gender, when cornered, I resorted to plastering on the face of courage.

  I left Hank with Elle and went to meet Jake at my office, barely noticing the four-block walk. My receptionist had shown him in before I arrived and he was talking on the BlackBerry. I dropped down into the chair opposite his.

  “Matt just walked in, Yvette. Yeah, yeah, I’ll tell him. Love you,” Jake said, hanging up. “Yvette said to give you a hug. You don’t mind if I just tell you instead, right?”

  “A hug?” Maybe she wasn’t as cold as I’d always thought. “Words will do just fine,” I said.

  “Any problems getting out of the hospital?” he asked, referring to the press.

  “The rain seems to have scared them off. Or they’re losing interest. Hopefully the latter.”

  “I doubt it,” he said, opening his briefcase.

  “Keisha is going through Elle’s things at Bowdoin.”

  “Gotta say, I like Professor Sudani. I like her a lot. Talked to her for a couple of hours. A feminist Pro-Lifer,” Jake said. “I can work with that.”

  I handed over Elle’s will and said the attorney we used had not prepared an advanced directive for Elle. Then I mentioned she’d kept a diary, partially loose letters, partially in composition books.

  “And?” Jake leaned back in his seat.

  “Nothing that says what she’d want to do under the circumstances. At least not yet.”

  He asked how long she had kept a journal, and when I told him, he said he would have his associates read through them.

  “No,” I said immediately. “They’re private. Anyway, there’s something else. Her old … Adam Cunningham—the guy Elle lived with for a while—he’s making noise about having some sort of proof that she wouldn’t want to live on life support.”

  Jake tapped his knuckles against his chin. “Your mother retained an attorney, and this Adam Cunningham was on his witness list. Tell me what you know about him. Had he and Elle kept in touch?”

  “Maybe a Christmas card, but nothing more. In terms of his credentials, he got his PhD from Princeton, and he works for NASA as an aerospace engineer. Last I knew, he worked on safety issues like heat tiles on the Space Shuttle.”

  Jake picked up his fountain pen and shook it at me. “Wait. I might have met him once. Princeton. You dragged me along to a party there. Elle was with a tall guy. Was that him?”

  “Probably. He’s basketball-player tall.” I told Jake about the duration of Elle’s relationship with Adam, that eventually, like most couples, they unraveled. Later Elle told me she had never quite gotten over me, and that’s why she could never commit to him.

  “My associate is researching him. Will she find anything to discredit him?”

  “Besides being a controlling prick? Probably not.”

  “What’s his proof?” Jake asked.

  “I have no idea. He talked to Hank, not to me. But he wouldn’t tell Hank anything either. Like I said, Adam’s controlling. That’s how he likes to play his hand. He waves a big red flag and hides his knife.”

  22

  Nineteen Years Before Elle’s Accident

  Elle and I didn’t stay together the way we should have. Our relationship fell apart. We—fell apart. And mostly it was my fault. That autumn I left for Columbia University, while Elle remained home. Officially, after the social workers got involved, Hank stopped drinking, but he was still going on benders sporadically, and she believed Chris was too young to fend for himself. So instead of attending her dream school, she commuted to Bowdoin College, not a place without merit, but it wasn’t MIT.

  Six weeks into my freshman year, I blew it by getting so mind-fucking drunk at a frat-party hazing that I slept with a sorority girl in the same condition, and when I went home for Thanksgiving, I confessed. Brokenhearted, Elle refused to acknowledge my presence. She wouldn’t answer my calls, my letters, or my pleas at her threshold for five long years.

  Two years after our split she went her own way—off to her doctoral studies at Princeton, where Adam Cunningham pounced on her as fast as a hawk on an unprotected nest of baby mice. At least, that was my impression. Not so much by what Elle told me—she told me nothing—but in how I interpreted the secondhand facts Mom spread my way. Elle met Adam as soon as she arrived in Princeton, and after that, he was always around, hovering. Elle claimed they were only friends the first couple of years. Yes, he made overtures, but she was only eighteen years old. He was twenty-nine.

  23

  After Elle’s Accident

  Day 10

  I never understood why Elle stayed with Adam for eight years, but ten months before her Space Shuttle mission, they finally broke off their relationship. That should have been the end of his influence in her life, yet as I worried about the start of the hearing, I also worried about what Adam might pull and about his so-called proof.

  I was at the nurses’ station, shrugging into my suit jacket and talking to Clint about Elle’s blood thinners, when I noticed Adam in Elle’s hospital room, standing with his back to me. His hands were characteristically laced behind his head.

  What next? Would hospital security let the press in to take pictures of Elle lying there, her head shaven, unable to swallow her own spit?

  I charged into her room with ten days’ worth of grief and anger, loaded and ready to aim. He was a target. I’d wanted to belt him for years.

  I grabbed his arm and spun him around.

  After his startled look disappeared, a contemptuous expression replaced it. “Elle didn’t want to die this way,” he said. “Why are you doing this to her?”

  “What the hell are you doing here? Security is only supposed to let in the family.”

  “I said I was family. I used to be her family.” His gaze left me and found her, a shadow of her former brilliant self.

  I shuddered in the cold reality. “No. You were never her family.”

  “I was. Maybe not technically, but Texas recognizes common-law marriage.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said.

  “I know ‘common law’ is an old-fashioned term,” he said, his voice measured with his slow West Virginian accent. “But Elle and I were together for a long time, twice as long as the two of you have been married. And my point is, I know what she would want under these unfortunate circumstances.”

  Fear and anger, two intricately interwoven emotions, propell
ed me toward him. I had never been a violent guy, but I was willing to make an exception, and it didn’t matter that he was a head taller. “Get out,” I said, issuing my last warning.

  His eyes narrowed as he looked down on me; a glint of a smug smile flashed and disappeared. “When Elle was with me, she gave me her medical power of attorney.”

  Although the blow was not physical, it punched me just the same.

  “I wouldn’t step into the middle of this,” he said, “if you’d let her die in peace. But you won’t. And from what I’ve read in the paper, you didn’t even know about that old advanced directive your mother produced. So actually, this is my responsibility. I talked to your mother’s lawyer, and he’s filing something or other so the judge will order the hospital to discontinue Elle’s life support.”

  The floor seemed to shimmy from side to side. I grabbed the bed rail.

  “Listen, Matt.” He pronounced my name with true disdain. “From what your mother’s lawyer tells me, the advanced directive I gave him should end any speculation about what Elle wanted done on her behalf.”

  “You never knew what Elle wanted. Besides, a lot can happen in five years.”

  Or in ten days. Or in the instant her head hit that rock.

  “I knew,” Adam said. “And I took care of her when no one else did. She trusted me, but she never trusted you. Apparently, with good reason. I’m not disputing she married you. As insipid as it is that she left NASA and ended her brilliant career to go home and marry the boy next door, she did it. But she didn’t want this. This terrified her. The idea of this woke her up at night. Crying about her mother, powerless in a coma. Christopher said it still nagged on her. When Elle signed the advanced directive, well, she made her own choice, and evidently, she didn’t trust you to make the decisions for her. Being married to her doesn’t give you the right to do anything you damn please. This is abuse, and I will end it. I have her medical power of attorney, and by this afternoon these machines will be off.” He leaned over and kissed her cheek.

  Almost of its own volition, my hand shot from my side. I wanted to slam him against the wall, but in a last-second act of self-control I held up my palm instead. “Let me see the document.”

  “Your mother’s attorney has it.”

  The only thing that pounded harder than my heart was my desire to pulverize Adam. Maybe it was the glint in his eyes, his calculated self-satisfaction that stopped me, the idea that if I lost control, he might somehow win by maintaining his. I said, “I’m calling security, and you will leave here. Now.”

  “No need.” He held up his hand and strutted away.

  I tore my cell phone out of my trousers pocket and dialed Jake. It rang until the voice mail picked up. I waited for the beep. “Jake, we’ve got trouble. Call me.”

  For a futile five minutes we played a game of cell-phone tag. Finally we connected. “Don’t worry about the common-law issue. The problem is this new advanced directive. We’ll be in court in less than an hour for our regular hearing date. Rather than wasting time holding your hand, let me figure out what I can do to head this off.”

  24

  Day 10

  On our way to the courthouse, reporters trailed Jake and me as if we were the Pied Piper: our music, the inside story they coveted. They barked questions, and we answered them with deliberate silence—until one stopped in front of me, brandishing a microphone.

  The clichéd blue-eyed blond reporter with glaringly white teeth and a simulated smile to go with it refused to move. “How’s Elle? Is there any improvement? Has she spoken?”

  Clearly, the reporter, an anchor at a local affiliate, what was her name, Paige Cartwright, didn’t understand the meaning of brain death. Or maybe she was hoping to provoke a reaction. I opened my mouth to speak.

  Jake grabbed my arm. “Dr. Beaulieu has no comment, but he asks for prayers for his wife and unborn child.”

  I wanted something besides prayers. I wanted all these assholes out of my face. I wanted privacy. And time to grieve. And control over Elle’s fate.

  I wanted Adam dead.

  All I had was a court date. The truth was that, even if medical technology could keep Elle’s body going long enough for the baby to become viable, the court might take one look at Adam’s advanced directive and tell the hospital to turn off Elle’s life support. Prayers? Hell, I needed more than that.

  I had no patience for the reporters. They were exploiting our tragedy. Paige Cartwright practically poked her microphone in my mouth. “But, Dr. Beaulieu, if Elle had an advanced directive, doesn’t that mean that you’re using her body against her will? Isn’t forcing her to remain on those machines for the duration of her pregnancy akin to rape?”

  “What?” I yelled. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Easy.” Jake’s hand landed on my shoulder. “We have no comment.”

  I stood, stunned, knowing I should back away, so entirely incensed that if the newswoman had been a man, I would have punched her. I could see the manipulation, and still, I couldn’t budge.

  Cartwright cocked her head to one side. “But don’t you want to explain your position? I would love to interview you, Dr. Beaulieu,” she said.

  “You aren’t serious,” I answered back. “I’m trying to save my family, and you just compared that to …” I couldn’t even say the word aloud. “You’re a sadistic opportunist.”

  The flash of her eyes betrayed an emotional response; perhaps it was contempt or perhaps it was satisfaction. “I didn’t suggest she became pregnant through rape,” Cartwright said. “But forcing Elle to vegetate on life support against her will for the sake of pregnancy, which is by all reports unlikely to succeed, is akin to rape.”

  Jake pushed me behind him. “Don’t say anything.” Jake turned to Cartwright. It was easy to see even he was straining to keep his tone level, easy to see she was hoping he wouldn’t or that I wouldn’t.

  “You’re trying to provoke a sound bite with the use of that word,” Jake said. “We have no comment.”

  Predatory, the reporters closed in around us.

  “Merriam-Webster defines ‘rape’ as an act or instance of robbing or despoiling or carrying away a person by force,” Cartwright said. “It’s defined as an outrageous violation. Elle McClure said she didn’t want to be kept alive on machines. Isn’t this an outrageous violation of her will? You’re forcing her to vegetate on life support. Isn’t that, by definition, rape?”

  Cartwright was prepared, reading from memory etched on some neural pathway. Elle could do that with her eidetic memory; she could tell the page and the paragraph of something she’d read. But all similarity between Elle and this witch ended with that one simple talent. Elle would never prey on someone shredded by grief. Elle never preyed at all.

  And Paige Cartwright did it for a living.

  “Get out of my way,” I said, grinding my teeth.

  One cameraman stepped sideways, and Jake and I shoved our way through the breach in the wall of reporters.

  And still Paige Cartwright continued: “Women have been used to produce offspring, forced to produce offspring for tyrants. For kings. For fascists.”

  “There is no equating one situation with the other,” Jake said, nearly as indignant as I was.

  “Women in Nazi Germany were impregnated like livestock and forced to bear children for the fatherland.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake.” I spun around, my hands balled into fists. “This child wasn’t forced on her. We conceived this child together—in love. She would insist that we save our baby. Now get out of my face.”

  “Come on, Matt. Let’s go.” Jake pulled at my arm.

  I stood fast, glaring at the reporter. Cameras were rolling. I could almost see the glee around me. Headlines. “Husband of Stricken Astronaut Explodes When Questioned.” I forced my voice to level. “Elle loved children. Loved them.” I pushed through the crowd without looking back again.

  At the courtroom door, Jake finally made eye contact
and exhaled loudly. “I tried to prepare you. Don’t rise to it, particularly not inside the courtroom. Not out there either. The judge might see the news. I admit I didn’t see that one coming, and she used some seriously inflammatory language, but it’s over. Now forget about it. We have to go into the courtroom and be in the moment. But don’t comment at all next time.”

  I nodded but was still shaking with rage. I breathed in and out and proceeded through the heavy courtroom doors.

  As Jake and I took our places, I noticed that seated next to my mother was a dark-eyed, middle-aged man, tapping his sharpened pencil on a legal pad. Adam sat in the gallery just behind them.

  Jake leaned in. “Your mother’s new attorney, Paul Klein. Works for a decent-size firm as a litigator, mostly involving trusts, but he used to litigate medical malpractice.”

  The court officer announced the judge’s entry. We stood.

  Once seated, Judge Wheeler shuffled papers in front of him. “First let the record show Mrs. Linney Beaulieu is now represented by Mr. Paul Klein. Next is the Order to Show Cause. Attached is an affidavit with what purports to be an advanced health care directive signed by Elle McClure. This one names one Adam Cunningham and gives him Elle McClure’s medical power of attorney. Mr. Sutter, I’ll hear from you.”