The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

  A little more than a year later, on February 1, 2003, traveling at twelve thousand miles per hour, the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up during its reentry. As Houston waited for confirmation in silence, the television stations broadcast what usually went without note. I mourned for every one of the crew, but I felt grateful for Elle’s safety. Atlantis was scheduled for the following year.

  NASA grounded the Space Shuttle program while they investigated and concluded that a suitcase-size block of insulating foam broke off the external tank and damaged a heat tile on Columbia’s left wing.

  As a spectator with a vested interest, I watched the news, popped onto NASA.gov every day, and covertly hoped the Space Shuttle program ended forever. But after the safety experts came up with a number of rescue scenarios, officials gave the program the go-ahead.

  However, Elle’s scheduled flight to Hubble remained problematic. Rescue would be impossible from the telescope’s orbit. If the shuttle were damaged during takeoff, it would not have sufficient fuel to make it to the International Space Station to await help. Thus Elle’s mission was scrubbed.

  “So close to bliss,” she said. “Adam thinks they’ll assign me to another mission.”

  Screw Adam, I thought.

  My relationship with Carol moved forward or backward according to how much our surgical rotations overlapped or conflicted. If someone asked me if I had a girlfriend that winter, I probably would have said no, instead categorizing our relationship as friends with benefits. But during the early spring of 2003 Carol and I began spending more time together. Our rotations were in sync, and so were we. I all but moved into her place, leaving a razor and toothbrush and a drawer full of clothes. There was nothing official, not even a key, and I didn’t stay there in her absence, but sometime, somehow, we became a couple.

  Dr. Shah told me to close as he snapped off his surgical gloves. He wandered back to the MRI and studied the film one more time while I put in the last few sutures.

  “Get him to the recovery room,” Shah said. “Write the operative note and postop orders, and I’ll check in after I speak with his parents.”

  “Will do,” I said, not envying Shah the task of delivering the grim prognosis.

  As the team rolled our patient past OR 7, I saw Carol through the window. Both in the fifth year of our residencies, Carol’s in pediatric surgery, mine—of course—in neurosurgery, we were both logging many hours in the OR.

  Ten minutes later I was sitting in the recovery room, charting on the eight-year-old boy. And there wasn’t a damn thing we could do. Sure the biopsy would determine the treatment, but he would still be dead before he reached middle school.

  Carol smiled at me as she slipped into the chair next to mine, her surgical mask pulled down around her neck, her black hair still hidden beneath her OR cap. Her warm eyes met mine, saying something more than the hello she murmured aloud.

  “I don’t know how you do it, working with kids.” I leaned back in the chair.

  She pulled my chart over and skimmed my entry. “Damn. Brain-stem glioma. Poor little guy.” Furtively, she glanced around then she took my hand in hers.

  I tried to shift the conversation. “What kind of case are you coming from?”

  “Oh, an easy one,” she said. “A pyloric stenosis repair. Some things are easy to fix. Six-week-old comes in with projectile vomiting. I rehydrate him, find the cause, and after a quick in-and-out surgery, he goes on to live a normal life. Happy ending. Not all of them are, but I get a lot more happy ones than not.”

  “This one won’t have a happy ending,” I said, pointing at the boy’s chart.

  She pulled my knuckles to her mouth, kissed them quickly, and let my hand go. “That’s outside your control.” She ran her finger along my cheek. “You know what I love most about you? You genuinely care about your patients.”

  “So do you,” I said, but my gut clenched on her words. What she loved most—about me? Yes, we were … sexually intimate, but we had never—even in the heat of the moment—ever uttered—the four-letter word love.

  The sound of the infant’s wails split the silence of the recovery room; the smallest patient is capable of making the loudest sound. Carol jumped up even before the nurse summoned her.

  “Dr. Wentworth? I need an order for pain medication.”

  “Be right there,” Carol said. Then she turned back to me. “Let’s stay home tonight and drive out to the beach in the morning.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let’s stay home.” The word swung down like a pendulum finding its equilibrium, swinging back and forth, slowing at the center point. Home. The word. The word love. And I was at home with Carol, more and more. And oddly, I almost added, I love you. But I bit my tongue. The only woman I’d ever told I loved her was Elle.

  Nevertheless, as I watched Carol cross the room, as I watched her write orders then stop by the crying infant’s crib, as I watched her lay hands on the child to soothe him, I realized there were things I loved about this woman, too. And for the first time I felt like I could be happy if I allowed her to get close, if I let myself love her.

  The next day we drove out to her family’s beach house in the Hamptons for the weekend. Although I’d been there before, as we pulled up, I saw the place differently. In spite of my desire to move home after I completed my neurosurgical residency, I could see the appeal of the big-city lifestyle, at least Carol’s socioeconomic version of it: an apartment with a park view and a doorman, a second home on the beach. Even with the late April rains, I loved the ocean. This wasn’t so bad.

  That evening, in the Wentworths’ not-so-humble cottage, Carol and I were curled up together in front of an expansive stone fireplace. I thought she must have fallen asleep; she was so quiet and still. In the distance the sound of the surf pounding the beach and rain pattering on the roof could lull anyone into dream. This was good, I thought. I had everything I could want: a career and a beautiful girlfriend. I very quietly whispered the words “I love you.” Maybe I was practicing, trying it on for size.

  Surprisingly, Carol shifted and regarded me with her eyes full of insecurity. I never thought she required support from me. Yet her voice warbled. “What did you say?”

  For a moment I hesitated. I didn’t need to retract what I believed was the truth. “I said I love you.”

  She lit up. We kissed in a way that was no longer only about sex. It was as if she’d been waiting for those words, those three little words. The funny thing was it had never occurred to me that someone like her, someone so poised, so perfect, would need the validation of words. “You love me?”

  “Yeah,” I said, almost laughing, liberated by the revelation that had started in the recovery room the previous day.

  “I love you, too. Wow.” She took my hand and pulled me off the sofa. “Come on.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know. Let’s run outside in the rain. Let’s …” She threw her hands around my neck. “I don’t know.”

  I kissed her forehead, then her mouth, and I started undoing the buttons of her blouse. “You are beautiful. I should have said how much I care about you sooner. And as much as I like running on the beach, let’s not do that right now.”

  The story was in the Times the following Monday. That’s how I found out that NASA gave Elle’s mission the green light.

  “Damn it, you could be killed,” I said to Elle, who was on the other end of the phone line. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “You don’t understand how important Hubble is to the exploration of space,” she said.

  A moment of silence followed while I searched for a convincing argument to make her surrender her dream. I never would have made it as a lawyer. “The last shuttle crew are all dead, Elle. For most of the families, there was nothing left to bury.”

  Her voice took a solemn tone but one not lacking in conviction. “Actually they did find remains. And it was a terrible tragedy, but every one of Columbia’s crew knew exactly what they were risking. We all do.
I’m going. I’m not afraid of dying up there.”

  I wrung my face as I stared out the window of Carol’s Tribeca loft. The two of us, Elle and I, had each traveled a long way from our childhood days in Maine when we thought we were having an adventure walking the shoreline of the Harraseeket River.

  “But—” I said.

  “I know you worry, but I need you to be happy for me,” she said.

  “But—”

  “But nothing, Matt. But nothing. Just be my friend. Wish me luck and say a prayer or two if you need to.”

  After my less than enthusiastic response to Elle’s announcement about Atlantis’s launch date, our weekly phone calls fell off for a while.

  On Memorial Day weekend, Carol and I stole a little time away from the hospital, a weekend in the Caribbean. There were a couple of children, a little boy and a girl, five or six years old, maybe twins, sticking their faces in the water with snorkeling masks and ogling the fish. And somehow Carol and I started discussing “our” children, what they would look like, and how we would teach them to swim. When we returned to New York, we picked out an engagement ring.

  My mother came to the city in early June to meet the Wentworths, wearing her best off-the-rack dress from Macy’s. Carol’s mother wore something not off-the-rack. Something designer. Couture. Nevertheless, Mom looked great, better than she had when my father was alive. She’d shed her matronly pounds, started running, and taken up yoga; small town or not, she held her own with the future in-laws in their Park Avenue penthouse.

  After dinner, we gathered on their balcony. My mother stared at the city lights, one finger pressed to her lips. She withheld the clichéd reaction to the Central Park view. Instead, she said something that must have sounded completely inappropriate to the Wentworths. “Elle would hate it here, wouldn’t she, Matt?”

  The sky glowed that urban pink, devoid of stars. I knew immediately what Mom meant. I’d thought it a million times about New York.

  “Elle?” Elisabeth Wentworth asked.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Mom said. “The view is spectacular, of course. Elle’s a family friend, my goddaughter actually, and she’s like my own. She works for NASA now—in the astronaut program. She wouldn’t be able to see the stars if she lived in New York. She’s such a stargazer.” Mom scrutinized my face.

  Carol knew that Elle and I had been close as kids and that we still talked frequently. Carol also knew that Elle and I dated for a while in high school, but she didn’t know about Celina or that I’d stuffed my feelings for Elle down into the toes of my shoes. All Carol knew was Elle was a girl who grew up next door, a woman who remained my friend.

  Yet somehow, I hadn’t found a way to tell Elle about my engagement to Carol, and my mother knew I wanted to deliver my own news.

  Mom turned to Carol’s parents. “I’m terrified because NASA’s chosen Elle for one of the upcoming shuttle flights. Next spring.”

  “I thought hers was canceled,” Carol said.

  “It was,” Mom said. “But they got the go-ahead a few weeks ago.”

  “I had no idea.” Carol peered at me. “Did you know that?”

  “I thought I told you.” I smiled at my future wife, who was so radiant she would outshine just about any constellation. And all I could think about was Elle.

  After Mom and I went back to my apartment that night, I lay on the sofa, imagining how Elle would react. I dialed her number, and Adam answered with a throaty hello.

  “Hi, it’s Matt. Can I talk to Elle?”

  He grunted.

  I heard her whisper, “Who is it?” Sheets rustled. Her voice came directly through the receiver. “Matt? Is something wrong?”

  “No, not at all. I have news. I’m getting married.” I blurted it out. Maybe it was like downing bad-tasting medicine in one gulp, except I was spitting it at Elle instead.

  “Oh my God,” she said with a tone that conveyed more surprise than enthusiasm. “Just a minute.” I heard more rustling of fabric and what sounded like a door clicking closed.

  “Elle, are you there?”

  “Yeah. Who? Carol? You’re marrying her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow. I didn’t foresee that.”

  I almost said that I hadn’t seen it coming either. As if it were something that had just happened to me. As if I were not a willing participant. But the truth was that in a spontaneous moment I allowed myself to be happy again. With Carol.

  “I didn’t think you were serious about her,” Elle said. “But then, you’ve been seeing her a while, haven’t you?”

  “Two years,” I said, noticing her lack of enthusiasm and the silence that fell between us before she finally asked another question.

  “How did you propose? On bended knee?”

  “No. Nothing that pedestrian.”

  Again, there was a pause, too much of a pause for the quiet to be comfortable. “Oh,” she said. “Pedestrian, is it? Well, congratulations are in order. I—I don’t know what to say.”

  Suddenly I remembered stopping at the beach and walking the length of it hand in hand with Elle. I remembered asking her words that I didn’t exactly ask Carol. But with Elle, I did go down on bended knee.

  “So … when is Adam going to make an honest woman out of you, Peep?”

  She snickered. “You sound like my dad. Actually, Adam has asked. I’m not ready.”

  “Why? Didn’t he ask you on bended knee?” I tried to make it sound as if I were teasing her.

  She cleared her throat. “It’s not that. I have … other career goals. And …”

  “And what?” I suppose I hoped she’d say she hated him.

  She whispered, “I want children. After I get married, I still want children.”

  “He doesn’t?”

  I heard a squeak, and I was uncertain if it was her voice or static in the phone line. “Anyway,” she said, “why get married if you’re not ready for kids?”

  She hadn’t answered my question, but I didn’t pursue it. I didn’t want a picture in my head of Adam and Elle toting around a kid. Then she flipped the circumstance, and in her reciprocal question, I heard a tense undercurrent. “Will you and Carol have children?” Elle asked.

  “I guess,” I said. That was Carol’s and my plan. Get married. Have two-point-five children. And we would teach them to swim and snorkel in exotic locales. “It’s strange to talk about this with you.”

  “I know.”

  I swallowed hard before I dug up the courage to speak. “I still think about our baby, Peep. Sometimes.”

  “Oh, Matt.” She sighed, and I could picture her with her hand pressed to her mouth.

  Adam’s voice came through the receiver. “Elle, tell him you were occupied, and come back to bed.”

  “Oh God,” she said softly. To me. Then she called to him. “I’ll be right there. Just give me a minute. He’s getting married.”

  “Married? Tonight? Come on, Elle. I’m lonely in here,” he said.

  Shit.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  Sure, I was fine, if feeling homicidal was fine. “It sounds like you were busy. Good night, Elle.”

  June 4, 2003

  Dear Matt,

  You incited a riot. Adam’s almost as furious at me as I am at him. Of course, that isn’t directly your fault. But immediately after I informed him of your nuptials, Adam proposed to me.

  Again. Damn.

  Hey, babe, why don’t we get married?

  I’m tired of “Hey, babe.” I’m not a baby. And I don’t want to marry him. So why am I still here? In the past when Adam brought up marriage, I said not until after I’ve left the astronaut program. This time he had an answer. We should get engaged now and married as soon as this mission is over.

  Right.

  Stalling, I said I didn’t have time to plan a wedding. His response? He would plan the entire event.

  Yeah. He’d like that. Control this. Control that.

  So I replied that planning a
wedding was the bride’s job. An unfortunate choice of wording. He assumed I meant yes, I would be said bride. And to seal the contract, he pulled out an engagement ring. A ring!

  I had to say no. How do you tell someone with whom you’ve shared everything for eight years that you never thought it would last forever? I suppose that makes me insensitive. He wanted marriage almost from the beginning. I told him I wasn’t ready, but I should have said I’d never be ready. All he wants is his career. He doesn’t want children. And I love my job, but I want babies, too. I want it all.

  Last month when I was late, just two days late, Adam blew a galvanized gasket. It’s not as if I was happy about the possibility now. The mission had just gotten the go, and I would have had to forfeit my spot. God, that would have killed me, but I would not have had a choice. Thank goodness, I wasn’t pregnant. Still, I can’t believe that a week later he had a goddamned vasectomy—snip, snip.

  Talk about illuminating moments, epiphanies. Over the last few weeks I’ve realized how little respect he has for me. He didn’t even say, what do you think about this? He just went off and came home sore, expecting me to wait on him. Right.

  But I’ve said nothing. What should I say? That I want him to be the father of my children? Again. A lightning-bolt moment. No. I don’t. He’d be a terrible father. He doesn’t like children, not even neighbor children. I don’t want to marry him. So, I said nothing.

  In the beginning we were good together, and we’re compatible for the most part. Shouldn’t that be enough? Maybe if I didn’t want a family, it would be. Why is this so difficult? I feel like part of me is surrendering. All this wasted time I’ve spent with Adam.

  I foresee a point when I’ll want to leave Houston, when I’ll want to go home and teach at a college. And then I hear his words. Teach? In Maine? What a waste of your aptitude, Elle. Adam rails, and I shrink. He said I was too selfish to apply myself, that anyone could teach basic physics, but most people couldn’t understand magnetohydrodynamic waves even under threat of death.

  Okay, my brain is wired in such a way that I can. So? Does that mean I have to exist on a two-dimensional plane, focused on a single aspect of the universe? I want more. I want to teach. I like seeing understanding dawn in someone’s eyes. Or is Adam right that I am not willing to make the sacrifices real scientific discovery requires?