The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  At the fork, I turned down Wolf Neck Road, remembering all the times we had snuck down there to be alone. After I reached the driveway, I trudged out onto the field. Because of the dark and because of the frozen layer of snow, I couldn’t be entirely certain if I had arrived at the right place, but I pulled a crushed rose from my pocket, one I’d picked up from Dad’s funeral, and I dropped it on the garden for Celina.

  It was now or never. I cut a path to the house. The dog barked as we climbed the porch steps. Before I had a chance to knock, the door pulled open, but Elle didn’t answer. It was that guy she was with the previous Christmas when she had only acknowledged me in a “Matt, this is …” What the hell was his name? Adam, something.

  “Hi,” he said. “Can I help you?”

  Elle bounced down the steps, wearing a pair of flannel pj pants and pulling a camisole over her head. Her lacy blue bra disappeared. “Oh my gosh,” she said when she saw me. “Matt, I wasn’t expecting you.”

  Obviously.

  “Adam, you remember Matt? Matt Beaulieu, Adam Cunningham.”

  “Oh. Sorry about your loss, man.” Adam extended his hand to me. His handshake was strong and sincere, and there was something a little south of the Mason-Dixon Line in his accent.

  And I hated him.

  “Thanks.” I hadn’t thought this through. Although, in my defense, Elle hadn’t mentioned this asshole on the drive up or in any other conversation we’d had in the past two days.

  Elle bit her lower lip, and squatting to rub Lucky’s ears, she avoided looking at me—or at Adam.

  “I’m headed back to New York tomorrow, and I wanted to, you know, thank you for driving me home.”

  “Sure, no problem.” She stood.

  “We’re staying for a couple of days.” Adam draped his arm around her, and she seemed to fit there, comfortably. He continued: “I drove up this morning so we could go skiing tomorrow. Ah, do you want a drink or anything?”

  “Water would be great. For Lucky. In a bowl. We were out for a run. I saw the light on.” What a fucking lame excuse, especially since the house wasn’t visible from the road.

  Adam disappeared to the back of the house. Elle shifted her feet, but didn’t offer me a seat. It was as though she couldn’t wait to be rid of me.

  I was stuck, waiting for water for the dog. “You and him?”

  “We live together, so yeah. About a month ago we started living together. We both want to work for NASA. Did I tell you I won a summer internship?”

  “No. NASA. That’s great.” I tried to gather my breath, my pride. I tried to sound like this news that she was living with this guy didn’t faze me. Instead I blurted out, “Are you happy? I mean, do you love him?”

  “I wouldn’t be with him if I didn’t. But this really isn’t any of your business.” She looked away for a moment, squeezing her eyes shut. “It’s been years. We haven’t even talked in years.”

  Her anger pummeled me. I never meant to hurt her, yet she had punished me deliberately, and continued to do so now. Yes, I was wrong, but so was she. “Not talking wasn’t my choice. I tried to talk to you.”

  She glared. “I don’t want to do this. I especially don’t want to do this right after your dad’s funeral.” She balled her hands into fists and covered her face. “I don’t want to hurt you, but if I tell you how angry I’ve been, I will.”

  “Oh, Elle, come off it. You’ve wanted to hurt me ever since it happened. And you have. Silence is as scathing as confrontation. Get it over with. Say it. I was a bastard.”

  Her chin jutted out, then she lowered her eyes and softly said, “You were.”

  “And I’m sorry. It was the worst mistake I’ve ever made.”

  She sighed, a long and heavy morose sigh. “Look, we were young. Stupid. What happened with us didn’t even mean anything. Between my mom dying, and my dad’s alcoholism, and having to stay home to take care of Christopher, I was just trying to find an escape. I picked lucky you to be the vehicle. Then the baby made me understand the consequences of playing house.” She stopped speaking abruptly and clapped her hand over her mouth, looking back toward the kitchen.

  “He doesn’t know?”

  “Of course not. Why would I tell him?” she whispered.

  “I don’t know. I guess if—”

  She stepped so close I could feel her seething words. “Do you tell every girl you meet you got your girlfriend pregnant when you were in high school?”

  “No, but—”

  “What do you want here? You want me to tell you I’m still pining away for you? That I waste my time, telling a great guy like Adam that I screwed you the first chance I got. Stud that you were, you knocked me up? I told him we went out. I told him it ended badly. Look, you met some sorority girl who swooned and spread her legs willingly. Good for you. At least it gave me someone to blame for all my troubles. I used you to pin all my disappointments on. Pin the tail on the ass.”

  It was like she’d written a completely different version of history than I had. I stood in shock for a moment, absorbing her blistering analysis, and decided that if she needed to see it that way, I’d let her. But I would not pretend that was how I remembered it. “It wasn’t like that for me, Peep. I loved you, deeply loved you. I didn’t want to break up. I wanted to be with you—I wanted—you. That girl, she got in the way—one night. One night. What happened, happened because I’d had too much to drink, and I wasn’t thinking. I never planned to cheat on you.”

  I took Lucky’s leash and headed for the door. Within seconds the night air tore into me, and I found myself shivering, not because of the temperature but because of Elle’s coldness. I wondered if I’d hurt her so much that I’d made her this way or if she’d always been so jaded underneath.

  “Wait! Stop. The water for Lucky.” Elle padded down the front steps in her bare feet. The walk still had a layer of ice at its edge, Jack Frost etches, brittle and cold.

  Adam followed behind her, pulling off his sweater, and he tugged it over her head. It hung to her midthigh. It was such a goddamned transparent gesture of possession that I wanted to kill him.

  “Can you give me a minute with Matt?” she asked him.

  He kissed her temple. “Sure, I’ll be inside, babe.”

  She watched him return to the house, a house they seemed to share. “Matt,” she said softly. “I didn’t mean—that you meant nothing to me. But it doesn’t mean anything now. Or it shouldn’t. We were kids. It just seemed so powerful at the time because it was the one good thing I had to cling to. You were the good thing. You helped me survive the most difficult events I’ve ever faced.”

  With only the porch light for illumination, her pupils were as wide as if she’d been tripping on belladonna. If someone looked at her features one by one, they would probably have thought she was homely. Her nose was a little wide. Her cleft chin a little pointy. Her mouth—well, yes, her mouth was a perfect bow. And the intensity of her eyes had me from the time she was a little girl when we used to play staring contests on the front porch. She wasn’t perfect, but she was so vibrant that she was intoxicating. I was under a spell and unable to look away.

  She touched my forearm. “I do still care about you. I—I loved you. I did. And—I’ve missed you. God, Matt. I want to stop being angry. It takes so much energy to be that angry. Can we, maybe, talk like friends do, from time to time? I mean, I’d like to reciprocate. Be there for you now. You know, losing your dad.”

  “I don’t need your pity, and I don’t want it.” I turned from her and started walking, but Lucky was still slurping up the water, and I was snagged when I reached the end of his leash.

  “What about my friendship? Do you want that?” she asked.

  Adam stood at the door, watching. And I wondered if she would marry him. “Does he treat you well?” I asked, looking at the house.

  She twisted to the door and smiled at him. “Yes. He’s patient.”

  “And old, Elle. Jeez, he looks like he’s thirtysomethi
ng.”

  She lowered her gaze and shook her head. “He wants to take care of me. He waited a long time. We knew each other for a couple of years before we got together.”

  “I see.” But I didn’t want to. I flipped to the first other subject that came to mind. “What’s with you and your father? Christopher said something about you aren’t getting along with him.”

  “Daddy will be okay about Adam after he gets used to the idea we’re living together,” she said.

  Shit. That change of subject failed miserably.

  Elle’s teeth began to chatter. It was freezing, yet I didn’t want her to go back inside. To him. She would be with him. That night. Christ. Or maybe they had just been together.

  “If you want, call me sometime,” she said. “Maybe you and a girlfriend could come down to Princeton. It’s pretty around there. There are millions of restaurants.”

  “Or you could come up to New York.” Maybe Adam could stay home.

  She shrugged.

  “Sure. I’ll do that,” I said, never intending to. But I did.

  A month later I called. And I continued to call almost every week for as long as Elle lived there. After she moved to Houston, it didn’t take long for me to figure out Adam’s schedule and that it was better to call when he wasn’t home. Elle talked more freely in his absence. We quickly fell back into the most solid of friendships. And I rationalized that as long as she was a part of my world, as long as I had her in my life, I could survive.

  27

  After Elle’s Accident

  Day 10

  I knew this much for certain: the baby would not survive if my mother won her lawsuit. And the baby had to live for me to justify what I was doing to Elle. For two conscience-crushing hours Mom testified that Elle would rather die than rot away in a hospital bed, and she described how Elle looked now, drooping, stiffening, flattening, unable to swallow, unable to see or hear. “If Elle knew what was happening to her she would be terrified.”

  I couldn’t dispute my mother’s argument, and truth can devour rationalizations.

  Still I rationalized and told myself Elle didn’t know what was happening, and therefore she was not afraid, and unlike her mother, she was not sensing waves of unbearable pain.

  “Your cross, Mr. Sutter,” Judge Wheeler said.

  Jake stood, buttoned his suit jacket, and shook his head as if he were searching for words. But he knew. He liked his witnesses to feel they had the upper hand before he targeted them. “Mrs. Beaulieu, you said you had a close relationship with Elle.”

  “Yes.”

  Acting troubled, Jake tapped his upper lip with his index finger. “I would think you would want to do anything you could to help your daughter-in-law.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Elle ever indicate to you that she wanted children?”

  A flutter of recognition entered my mother’s eyes as Jake laid his trap. Through a series of questions he insinuated that because Mom already had nine grandchildren, the baby Elle was carrying didn’t mean all that much to her. It wasn’t true, it wasn’t fair, and I didn’t care. Jake pounded question after question at my mother, all aimed at showing how much Elle had wanted a child, how Elle grieved when she miscarried, how she named the babies even before they were born. And when he spoke about Dylan, the sheer heaviness of my son’s absence hung like a dirge. It took a few moments for me to refocus my attention to the testimony.

  “After Dylan’s death …” Jake counted on his fingers. “About seven months ago, did Elle confide in you about her desire to try to have another baby, Mrs. Beaulieu?”

  “Yes,” Mom said, shifting in the witness box.

  “Did you discourage her from trying to conceive again?”

  Mom’s eyes narrowed slightly, her defenses raised like the quills on a porcupine. “We were all concerned about her health.”

  “Did you discourage her?”

  “I told her to consider adoption. Matt wanted her to consider adoption, too.”

  “What did Elle say to that?”

  “She knew I was right, but she was too stubborn to admit it.”

  Jake shook his head. “If she was too stubborn to admit it, she never said she agreed with you, did she?”

  Mom hung her head. “No. She wanted to have a baby. Is that what you want me to say?”

  Jake walked over to our table and appeared to be glancing at his notes, but he was simply giving Mom’s response a dramatic pause.

  After a minute Jake continued, “Mrs. Beaulieu, in your earlier testimony, you stated that you and Elle had discussed the Terri Schiavo case.”

  “Yes.”

  “Just for clarification’s sake, Terri Schiavo was the Florida woman who fell into a persistent vegetative state after she suffered a cardiac arrest in 1990, is that correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Her husband, Michael Schiavo, petitioned the Florida court to discontinue Terri’s life support after a number of years had passed. Her parents opposed. Are we discussing the same case?”

  “Yes.”

  “You stated that you had a conversation with Elle regarding the Schiavo case in January of 2005.”

  “Yes.”

  “Earlier you stated Elle thought the courts should rule to remove Terri Schiavo’s life support. How many years after Schiavo went into a persistent vegetative state would that make this conversation?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If Terri Schiavo had been in a persistent vegetative state since 1990, and the courts were deciding in 2005, how much time had elapsed?”

  “Fifteen years, I guess.”

  “And Elle’s accident happened how long ago?”

  Mom stared at her hands. “Only ten days ago, but you don’t understand. Elle was terrified of being on life support. Under these circumstances, ten days is a long time.” Mom’s voice broke.

  Jake poured a glass of water and offered it to my mother. “Are you ready to continue?” he asked her.

  She nodded.

  “Terri Schiavo was on life support for fifteen years,” Jake said. “And Elle has been on it for ten days. And there’s another difference, isn’t there? Mrs. Schiavo wasn’t pregnant, was she?”

  Mom drew a deep breath and appeared to be holding it.

  “Mrs. Beaulieu, I realize this is difficult, but—”

  “No. Terri Schiavo wasn’t pregnant.”

  “Did you ever ask Elle if she would have supported the withdrawal of life support had Terri Schiavo been pregnant?”

  “No, there was no reason to discuss that.”

  “Did Elle ever state that under the circumstances she is currently in, pregnant and brain injured, what she would want done in her behalf?”

  “Specifically? No, but …” Mom looked down at her hands again. “I know she didn’t want to be kept alive.”

  “But she never discussed this scenario, did she?”

  “This exact scenario, no.”

  “One more thing. Earlier you indicated Elle didn’t want her father to make health care decisions for her, correct?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And that’s because he insisted her mother be kept on a feeding tube long after she could eat, correct?”

  “Yes. Alice would have died within days if nature had been allowed to take its course.”

  “At the time Elle’s father was Elle’s next of kin, but after Elle married Matt, he would be considered her next of kin, wouldn’t he?”

  A puzzled expression fell over my mother’s face. “Um, I guess.”

  “Did she come to you and ask that you act on her behalf because she was concerned that Matt would not act as she would wish?”

  Mom hesitated. “She probably thought that Matt would take her off life support.”

  Jake repeated, “Did Elle ask you to act on her behalf once she had married Matt?”

  “No.”

  “Thank you. Nothing further.” Jake returned to the seat beside me.

  “Redirec
t, Mr. Klein?”

  “Not at this time. I’d like to call my next witness, Adam Cunningham.”

  Judge Wheeler looked at his watch. “Yes. We’ll hear from him after we reconvene at one o’clock sharp.”

  After speaking with Jake for a few minutes in one of the conference rooms where attorneys and clients meet, I decided to swing by the hospital during the recess.

  “Don’t let the reporters provoke you,” he said. “No comment, no comment, ad infinitum.”

  I raised my hand in acknowledgment and bolstered myself for the onslaught of cameras and microphones. Alas, no one awaited me in the hollowed-out halls. Relief.

  Not until I left the courthouse did I understand where the reporters had gone. Across the street in Lincoln Park, the Pro-Life protesters had set up some kind of demonstration. And curiosity getting the better of many of the good people of Portland, a crowd was gathering on this late August lunchtime. The reporters were circling, looking for a story, an angle, or a headline.

  Furtively, I peeked up as I strode the circumference. I had fifty-five minutes to make it to the hospital, see Elle, get an update, and return before Adam testified. I didn’t want a distraction.

  Then I saw my mother, cornered between the wrought-iron fence and a circle of people holding life-size baby dolls in her face as if my mother didn’t know more about infants than any of them—as if she’d never helped a baby be born.

  Christ. I stopped and swallowed, glancing back at the courthouse. There were security guards there. Would they leave to assist her? Did I actually have to step into this?

  I inched forward, then stopped to pull out my phone to call the police. Someone shoved my mother, and I barreled forward. “Get away from her,” I yelled. “Get out of the way. What’s wrong with you people?”

  The crowd hardly parted, but people, even angry people, yield more readily to a six-foot-two-inch man than to a sixty-some-year-old woman. Funny that these people who believed they were standing up for weak, unprotected babies were willing to attack an old woman who had brought countless children into the world, a woman who’d saved more than a few babies’ lives.