The Promise of Stardust

by Priscille Sibley

Elle loves Matt

  I whipped the book back up. The first date inside was December 25, 1988.

  Dear Matt,

  Mom did her Christmas shopping before she got so sick she couldn’t. Can you believe it? She knew I’d been writing these letters as a sort of journal, and so she bought a hokey-pink version, as though I’m a little girl. I’m not. I don’t know if I’ve ever been like that. I’m certainly not now.

  Daddy hit me last night. It was an accident. He didn’t even see me there. When you saw the bruise, you went after him. Fortunately, your dad pulled you back. Then in the scuffle, Dennis got a little better look at my expanding waistline and figured things out. It’s Christmas, but I’m not Mary, and you’re not Joseph. And now your dad knows I’m pregnant.

  Merry Christmas. It’s more like a Christ-mess.

  Peep

  January 20

  Celina

  January 21

  Celina

  January 22

  Celina

  Every day for weeks after the miscarriage, that’s all Elle wrote, Celina’s name. You could see where she’d left the pen point pressed into the paper at the end of the a, like she’d paused and considered writing more. The name looked so lonely there, and it occurred to me, I’d never seen the name written down. It occurred to me that it could have been spelled with an S instead of a C. It occurred to me that I, too, had always pictured it with the letter C.

  Then Elle began to talk about her mother again. I flipped the page.

  February 16, 1989

  Dear Matt,

  I was talking to Linney and said I had a headache. She told me to get some Tylenol from the medicine cabinet. That’s not the only thing in there. I found the leftover Percocet—from when you broke your leg. And I thought, I could give these to my mom. Only Linney walked in and yanked them out of my hand.

  I begged her. I begged her. She won’t help. She said they were only for the person they were prescribed for.

  February 17, 1989

  Dear Matt,

  I can’t stand it anymore. Too much has gone wrong. They’re going to put Christopher and me in foster care. We’ll probably get split up. Linney said she’d try to get custody of us, and she got a temporary order tonight. She swore, at the very least, she’d manage to get Christopher. Me? Well, that’s more tricky because of you. I guess she’s right about that. I’m scared. And I want to be with you, too. Really with you. But we can’t. What if I got pregnant again? I wanted to keep Celina. I loved her.

  And there’s Mommy. I don’t want to leave her to go to a foster home. I should be here. No one else fights for her.

  I begged Linney to help my mom.

  Peep

  February 18, 1989

  Mom is dead.

  I keep saying the words out loud, but they don’t make sense.

  She’s dead.

  Finally. After months, my mom is dead.

  I didn’t want her to die, and I don’t want her to be dead. But it’s better, right? She isn’t suffering anymore. God, how she suffered.

  I thought we should help her—ease her pain. I begged the nurses. I begged Daddy. I begged everyone to give her more pain medicine. No one would do it.

  Last night, after we came back from the social workers, Linney brought me back to my house. She doesn’t want me to sleep at her house because she thinks you and I will have sex again. Maybe we would. I want you to hold me right now. I need you. But Linney brought me home. And Mom was moaning. It’s worse at night. Linney could see that. The nurse had some problem with her husband and Linney said she’d stay until the nurse could take care of it. Linney gave Mom more pain medicine. Extra. Your medicine, Matt. She showed me how to crush the pills if I needed to give my mom another one later. And maybe it’s sick, but I was grateful that you had broken your leg last summer. That’s terrible, right?

  But then the nurse came back. And Linney left. I stayed with Mommy all night. She got quiet, and it was like for the first time in forever she seemed comfortable. I drifted off to sleep with my head resting on Mommy’s pillow. When I woke up, she’d stopped breathing. She just stopped breathing. It was my fault. Mine.

  I don’t know anymore if it was the right thing. She’s not suffering. But she’s dead. And I’m never going to see her ever again. I miss her. So much. I need her. Christopher needs her. And Daddy. Oh God. Did the extra medicine kill my mom? Did I kill her?

  Peep

  I stared at the page. Holy shit. There were no more entries in the diary—only blank, yellowed pages.

  I had to think this through, absorb it. Elle didn’t kill her mother. Alice had been dying for months, long agonizing months. If giving an extra dose of pain meds hastened Alice’s death, that probably made Elle more saint than murderer. Hell, if I’d remembered pills were left over from my broken leg, I would have dosed Alice myself. What bothered me was that my mother did it and left the house, left Elle alone, left Elle to blame herself.

  I took the diary and returned to Elle’s hospital room.

  The nurse was suctioning Elle’s trach. “She’s doing okay. More secretions, but she’s okay.”

  Elle silently coughed again.

  “I’m going to write for an EEG.” I went to the desk, stared at Elle’s chart, and scribbled down the order. I stared into her room, and after some minutes of numbness I realized I still had the diary in my left hand.

  In the morning I could lock it away in my safe-deposit box. I could tell my mother about it, and convince her I was desperate enough to stoop to blackmail. God. I stood up and wandered out to the parking garage. Had my mother participated in a mercy killing?

  It was an act of mercy.

  I found my car, popped open the trunk, and saw the dried-out sedum and hardy mums. I’d bought them at a nursery Elle liked in Yarmouth the day before the accident. I’d come home, planning to surprise her. She met me at the car with the mad idea of seduction and baby making, not knowing she was already pregnant.

  We started arguing instead. She wanted a baby, and I was afraid of losing her. When Phil called me to come in and assist him with an emergency, I bolted. The last night we would ever share, and I left. No. I bolted. I didn’t get home until after midnight, and then we watched the Perseids, putting the rest aside. I forgot about the flowers in the trunk of my car. Now the plants were deader than dust—like all my good intentions.

  I dropped the diary into the trunk, opened the driver’s door, and sat in the car. I was planning to blackmail my own mother. I was trying to keep Elle alive when this was the one thing—the only thing—that truly terrified her. Who the hell was I becoming? A father, I hoped.

  After a while I returned to Elle’s side. The nurse was right. Two, maybe three times a minute, Elle took spontaneous breaths. It wasn’t enough to sustain her.

  I repeated Elle’s neuro exam. Nothing else had changed. No miracle was coming.

  Or maybe there was a miracle—waiting and doing somersaults.

  I settled in again, watching the ventilator make Elle’s chest rise and fall. She’d take a breath on her own. Then the ventilator. Again the ventilator. Still the ventilator. Then her.

  Phil entered the room and sat down beside me.

  “How was court?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “I said she wasn’t in pain, and she wanted children.”

  I looked up at him. “She’s taking a few breaths.”

  “I heard,” he said. “Her brain stem didn’t herniate, but I told you what her cerebrum looked like. She’ll never have any meaningful quality of life.”

  “You don’t think she’s feeling any pain,” I said.

  “No, Matt,” he said. “No pain.”

  I closed my eyes, and we sat in silence for a few minutes. He went through the motions of doing another neuro exam on her, no differently than I had done not long before. As he checked her reflexes, he said, “In court, I didn’t say any more than I had to about how she believed that the quality of life trumped the longevity by miles.”
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  “Okay.” I didn’t have enough energy left to get into the debate of whether or not I was wrong again. It might not be ethical to sacrifice one life for another, but morality be damned. My heart was breaking, truly breaking. The thickness and heaviness in my chest was something that could only be heartbreak. I said, “If you think I’m indifferent to what this has done to Elle, to her dignity, you’re wrong.”

  “No. I don’t think that. I thought I should tell you what happened there. Listen, I had to come back to the hospital anyway. I have to take the Nguyen kid back to the OR. He’s developing hydrocephalus from the accident.”

  “Shit.”

  “I know, but I can fix that. I wish I could fix Elle.”

  40

  Day 24

  Two days later, with Clint leaning against the sink, I digested the lab report. Elle was going into kidney failure. There were two possible causes: the APS could have thrown a blood clot to one of her renal arteries or the antibiotic treating her pneumonia had seriously damaged her kidneys.

  Elle was damned either way.

  “It’s probably the antibiotic,” he said. “I changed it. We can hold off on dialysis for a while.”

  The word dialysis gave me that kicked-in-the-balls feeling. Even if her body were healthy, the odds against saving the baby were staggering.

  “The good news is the antibiotic is doing its job. The pneumonia is resolving,” he said.

  Medical treatment had substituted one form of execution for another. I couldn’t trust my voice to utter a single syllable.

  “I’ll keep you posted,” he said as he left.

  Despite my efforts to stay awake, I found my head in an odd upright kink against the wall or the window more often than not. In my REM sleep, I dove into blackness, where I dreamed of stacks of cartons falling on an empty baby crib, Elle’s body in a casket, an urn with her ashes, and holding a shotgun in my mouth.

  I pulled into a parking slot along Back Bay next to my mother’s car. Mom opened her door, slammed it shut, and climbed into the passenger seat of my Taurus.

  “I was so happy to hear from you, honey,” she said.

  I called her just hours before and suggested we meet, but I still didn’t know quite how to blackmail her.

  “Are you going to tell me what’s on your mind?”

  I stared at my hands. “I needed to get out of the hospital,” I said, thinking I didn’t want to have witnesses overhear our discussion.

  “I’ve taken a leave of absence,” she said. “I was thinking I could come in and relieve you, so you could take more breaks.”

  My heartbeat throbbed in my ears. “I don’t trust you near Elle.”

  “I’d never hurt her.” Mom averted her gaze.

  “You aren’t coming near her. You got that?” I snapped.

  “I have a responsibility to her.” She hugged her purse to her chest. “This is killing me, fighting with you, trying to make you face such a hard truth. It doesn’t get easier, being a parent.”

  “Why don’t you give me a chance to find out for myself?”

  “Oh, Matt. Under any other circumstance.” She stared straight ahead and blinked. “You have to be realistic.”

  “Blythe says—”

  “She’s wrong. Blythe is wonderful, as good as they get, but she doesn’t have a milligram of pessimism in her. And no matter what you think Elle would have wanted under these circumstances, she was just so damned terrified of ending up like Alice.”

  “It’s not the same. Elle’s not in pain.”

  “Maybe not, but she didn’t want this. I love Elle as much as if she were mine. I do. Not more than I love you, but she’s like my own. I doubt you remember this, but Alice spent a couple of weeks in the hospital when Elle was a baby.”

  “I know. You love her. You’ve always loved her. You took care of her when she was a baby. None of that’s relevant. The fact is Elle is my wife. That’s my child.” I considered how I was about to commit blackmail against my own mother. This was a line I thought I’d never cross. “I have a diary Elle wrote. From the day Alice died.”

  Mom shifted, her head cocking to one side. “That must have been difficult to read.”

  “You killed Alice.”

  The blood drained from my mother’s face.

  “You used the Percocet they prescribed for me when I broke my leg the previous summer, and you spiked Alice’s feeds with it. I’m not completely horrified, but let’s face it, Mom; you killed her, and you left Elle alone to watch her mother die.”

  Mom shook her head. “You don’t understand.”

  “I understand everything. If you don’t withdraw your petition to remove Elle’s life support, I’ll go to the authorities with this.”

  “You wouldn’t. I didn’t kill Alice. I—”

  “You put her out of her misery? Okay, I’ll buy that. The police might not.”

  Mom stammered before she found words. “I didn’t do it. But maybe I should have. No maybes. I should have, but all I did was crush one pill and add it to the feeding. One. I showed Elle how to do it. There were eight pills left. I told her she could slip one in every six hours as Alice needed them—if the nurse had gone to the bathroom or stepped out for a smoke.”

  “You’re saying Elle overdosed Alice?”

  “I don’t know. It may just have been time. Elle said it was her fault that Alice died. I was always afraid to ask what happened to the last seven pills.”

  “I don’t believe Elle would have done it. And it says in here that you gave her the Percocet. Not Elle.”

  Mom stared at her hands. “I don’t know. During the night Alice stopped breathing. Maybe it was a coincidence. Maybe it was from the one pill. Maybe it was just time. God knows, it was long overdue.”

  I rubbed my temples, not wanting to believe that either Elle or my mother intentionally killed Alice. Their purpose was to make her comfortable. These days in hospice care, it’s routine: we make the patient comfortable.

  “You have to accept that Elle didn’t want to live like her mother.”

  “No, she didn’t. But Elle is not in pain. No pain. She isn’t feeling anything, and even if she were, she would have done anything for her child. I would do anything for this child.”

  Mom shook her head. “It’s so early. It’s almost impossible that she could hold on long enough to give birth to a living child. Not with her history of miscarriages. Even when she was pregnant with Dylan, she went early. She gave me her medical-decision-making powers, and then she gave them to Adam. She never asked you, did she?”

  Now it was my turn to shake my head.

  Mom covered my hand with hers. “I know what I said in court, but she must have known deep down, you’d never be able to pull the plug. Matthew, if you love her, and I know you love her, you have to let her go.”

  Maybe my mother was right in one regard. I had never let go of Elle.

  41

  Five Years Before Elle’s Accident

  When Mom set the loaf of still-warm corn bread in front of me, driving through nine hours of traffic became worth it. She plopped down at the head of the table. “How’s Carol? I was surprised you were coming home without her.”

  “She’s working this weekend.” Which meant Carol was pulling an on-call stint for three straight days. I scarfed down a buttered slice of heaven. With my mouth still half full, I mumbled, “It’s hard getting up here together with our schedules.”

  Mom’s lips tightened, and I expected another snarky remark about Carol, the city girl, as Mom called her. Instead Mom changed the subject. “Elle was home from Houston, but she’s gone.”

  My head snapped up. “I haven’t seen her in ages.” Or talked to her since I told her Carol and I were engaged—although I’d tried. There’d been a few e-mails, a few voice mails. “Elle’s been a little distant lately, busy preparing for the Hubble mission.”

  My mother grimaced as she stirred her cocoa. “I’m so proud of her, but after the Columbia disaster the idea of he
r climbing into that shuttle terrifies me.” Mom forced a smile onto her face. “She was driving to Acadia tonight. It’s too bad you missed her.”

  I shrugged as if it didn’t matter while I calculated the odds that I could find Elle if I drove the three hours up to the national park. The last time I was up there, cell-phone coverage was virtually nonexistent, so I concluded it unlikely.

  “She’s homesick,” Mom said. “She’s planning to move back here in the next few years.”

  “Really?” Elle hadn’t told me that, although I suspected a move home was more about how Mom interpreted Elle’s words. Mom probably said, “Don’t you want to move home, Elle?” To which Elle probably replied, “Of course I do.”

  We all wanted things we couldn’t have.

  “Unfortunately,” Mom said, “Adam loves NASA.”

  Right. Adam. Pain in the ass as usual. “If I could talk Carol into moving to Maine, I would.”

  Mom seemed to roll her words around on her tongue for a moment before she actually spoke. “It’d be nice to have you two close enough for Sunday dinners.” Carol and my mother in the same town, sharing recipes. Now there was an image.

  A change of topic was in order. “Do you want to know something funny? There’s this guy, Phil Grey. He’s finishing his neurosurgery fellowship this month. He’s from Brooklyn. You know, he has the swagger, the New Yorker attitude. Yankee fan.” I shook my head, that I, an avid Sox fan, would befriend a Yankee fan. “Brilliant doctor, though, fantastic surgeon.”

  “You’ve mentioned him.”

  “He heard me talking about Maine and how much I love it, so he and his wife decided to come up here on vacation last year. Three hours in, they decided this was where they should settle. A neurosurgical group offered him a position—Welsh and Sanders. Phil’s moving to Maine, and I’m spending the rest of my life in the Big Apple. Ironic, huh?”

  “So he’s the one taking over for Sanders?”

  “No. I think he’s replacing Welsh. Welsh is retiring. Sanders is only fiftyish; I talked to him before I began my neurosurgical residency.”