Christmas Under the Stars

by Karen Swan

  But they all were. Life wouldn’t stay the same no matter how much they wanted it to. Poor Meg knew that better than any of them, although Lucy was bothered by her friend’s sudden, out-of-the-blue urge to force more change. Then again, she mused, Ronnie always did that, making her sister feel inadequate, like she wasn’t good enough.

  The town was busy, the hotel full and Lucy smiled as she passed a small group of her own guests – a Portuguese party – that she’d checked in herself earlier. ‘Hi there, finding your way about OK?’ she asked as she passed them.

  They all nodded appreciatively, smiling brightly, cameras in their hands.

  ‘Just let me know if you need any further information or some recommendations for dinner,’ she said cheerily, leaving them with a wave.

  She looked in the windows as she walked, checking her reflection, and was pleased to see how her profile was now definitely beginning to look ‘officially pregnant’, if she pushed her tummy out. After the utter shock of that little blue line coming up and everything with Mitch, the fear of telling Tuck, and then the morning sickness that seemingly only cookies could cure, finally, finally things were turning around for her: the bump was becoming a proper bump – not a lump – her skin would start to glow, her hair would get thick like Meg’s and at the end of it all, she’d have a baby, a beautiful baby that would make her and Tuck a proper family.

  She stopped outside a boutique, her eyes on the tall, slender mannequins, but she didn’t feel jealous; she didn’t wish she was still like them now. She had something they didn’t.

  . . . Although that top was lovely.

  She tipped her head to the side, lips pursed consideringly – if she went up a size, or three . . . ? – when a sudden flash of light caught her eye in the window’s reflection. Across the road, the door to La Senza, the lingerie boutique, had opened. Tuck . . . !

  She went to turn, to call out to him, but then she saw the bag in his hand and realized he had bought something. And from the size of the bag it was something small. Small and lacy?

  She gasped and smiled, watching in the reflection of the window as he sauntered up the street, back towards the Titch shop. She didn’t dare move; she didn’t want him to notice her lest she ruin his surprise.

  Instead she pushed open the door to the boutique and enquired after the top in the window. She wanted to look pretty tonight.

  Chapter Twelve

  His lungs felt as though they were bleeding but he wouldn’t stop. He had to keep going, to make it back down to the parking lot in this one run. The light was fading – there wasn’t time to go back to the top and do it again – and besides, Mitch had done it in one; he’d done it that day last fall when Tuck had gone to the factory to sign off on the new Titch prototypes. Mitch – who’d been more involved with the retail and networking side of the business – had taken advantage of the quiet phones and good weather to sneak a ‘recce’ of the route they could take for the short mountain film they were planning on shooting this summer, and he’d been flying high by the time Tuck had got back, a six-pack of beers on the desk in readiness for pressing the ‘play’ button and showing his old friend what he’d achieved.

  Tuck had felt his stomach drop several times as he’d watched the video – impressed as Mitch had bunny-hopped the bike up two-metre-high boulders, springing on the back wheel like a pogo stick, using one fallen tree as a bridge to traverse a deep narrow crevasse, another as a barrier to stop the front wheel, flip the bike over in a somersault before landing on both wheels and continuing down the trail as though nothing much had happened.

  And now it was his turn . . .

  Tuck knew the first tree was coming up. His thighs were burning from the lactic acid build-up as he pedalled and bounced and hopped and balanced the bike from the top of the mountain to the bottom, but he refused to ever once let his foot touch the ground. He’d gone over the trick so many times in his head, watched Mitch’s clip over and over so that the neural pathways in his brain knew exactly what he had to do and when. He knew the question wasn’t could he do it, but did he dare . . . ?

  The path was springy with fallen pine needles but the bike’s suspension was beginning to creak, a sure sign he was at the limits of its – and his – capabilities. He knew that a hundred metres or so from now, he would take a sharp left and the forest floor would drop sharply, a sudden chasm three – maybe four – metres wide, ripping open the stone bedrock. That fallen tree was his only way across to the rocks on the other side.

  He slowed as he approached, coming out of the seat and momentarily forgetting the pain in his legs as his eyes took in what, until now, had been only a dare behind a screen. The tree was huge, the base covered in a dark, slippy-looking moss, the blond bark stippled with rough psoriatic patches. He couldn’t see to the bottom of the narrow gorge – not without getting off the bike – and he balanced for a few moments, hopping lightly in place as he worked out how to get the bike onto the tree. Mitch had come in from the left but the snowmelt had riven a channel that eroded the level. He looked at it from the right, where the land level was higher.

  Barely giving himself time to think about it, he coiled his body tight and with a burst of power, pulled up on the handlebars, bringing the bike under him as he landed, hopping in place wildly for a few more moments as he tried to get his balance, now fully able to see the drop into the gorge from this vantage point.

  A jet of adrenalin and anger shot through him as he stayed up on the pedals, weight forwards, and began inching over the ‘bridge’. The trunk was rutted and uneven but he took it slowly, keeping his eyes on a spot perpetually five centimetres ahead of the front wheel, not once looking down on either side. He felt a visceral sense of relief as he crossed it within moments, the pine floor carpeting the ground beneath the tree again, and he hopped down with joyous ease.

  Allowing himself to sit back in the seat, he followed gravity’s pull down the mountain and the miles rolled beneath his wheels; he felt the silence like a weight on his back, his aloneness amplified beneath these thousands of hectares of giant pines, the whirr of the air slicing through the wheel spokes his only companion. He felt scooped-out and hollow. His friend was never coming back. Never again would he hear him whoop or yell, ‘Hell, yeah!’ down a mountain, never again would he have someone to share this love, this crazy, wild streak that made them seek out adventures on the mountains and in return, feel so wedded to this – their – patch of the planet. It was what had made this home, but everything felt different now he was on his own.

  He’d tried to keep life the same – like doing this, right now. Like going to the ice-hockey qualifier the other week with the girls, so determined was he to make things feel normal. But it hadn’t been. Lucy had been bitching all night about her jeans feeling tight, even while she chowed down on buckets of junk; and Meg had looked drugged and spectral, like a hologram of herself. And neither one of them had made a sensible comment about the match or the team, gossiping between themselves about God knows what as he had sat there, feeling more empty than at any time since Mitch had died, feeling like a ghost in his own life, the black shadow trailing him everywhere, joined to his heels, stitched to his soul.

  There was no new normal. He kept his routines the same. He hit the studio to work on the films every Tuesday and Thursday nights, but the sight and sound of his friend, alive still on the screen, was almost more than he could bear. He still went to Bill’s for drinks with the guys on Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays but they all talked shit and he didn’t care what a single one of them had to say. As for Lucy and the baby . . . this baby they had never planned, never even talked about; she’d just gone and done it, like it wasn’t anything to do with him anyway, like it was going to make everything better. A Band-Aid baby.

  He was so angry with her, most of the time he couldn’t bear to look at her; and his anger only grew that she clearly didn’t get it. He felt like she’d trapped him, played a trick and now she was falling apart, letting herself go
, always looking at him with anxious eyes, wanting to know where he’d been on the one hand, pushing him away in bed on the other.

  He knew he had to get his head straight. He was drinking too much and Barbara – always eagle-eyed anyway – was even more alert at the moment. Several times he’d caught sight of her watching him from her apartment window when he’d come home late. What was she doing? Logging his movements? He shook his head, feeling angry again – he was trapped, watched, monitored, assessed . . . and always found wanting.

  He hopped down three stepped boulders, the bike landing with a groan on the last jump. The back wheel skidded out and he almost – almost – had to put a foot down to save himself from falling and he felt another spike of adrenalin in his hands, knowing he’d have to go back to the top and start again, failing light or not. His pride would demand it.

  But he was so close now. Another 300 metres’ descent and he’d have done it. It would be another thing he could share with his friend, the only way he had to be close to him any more. Pushing Lucy to the back of his mind, he focused on the final hurdle – quite literally. He knew exactly where the tree was going to be. He would be able to see a waterfall just to the right of it, the path forking beyond it, taking the left back to the parking lot.

  And so it was. The vista unfolded exactly as he’d seen it on Mitch’s Go-Pro and he readied himself, knowing that this was it – the pièce de résistance. Mitch had aced it, heading straight for the barrier as though it was a foam pit, not an immovable object that would catapult him into the air and hurl him, quite possibly, towards a broken back.

  He gulped down air, his limbs fizzy with anticipation as he headed straight for the toppled tree, knowing he had to keep his nerve, just let the physics do the work – if he hit the tree dead on, he could somersault over it. Momentum was all he needed; that and self-belief.

  Mitch had done it. He could too. He could! This was his homage to his friend, his apology.

  He pedalled faster, eyes on the massive trunk that blocked the path. ‘Just believe,’ he told himself, only metres away, his fingers straining to squeeze the brakes, his will stopping them, knowing if he braked he’d still go over the tree anyway, but just leave the bike behind him.

  But logic and instinct are two different things and as he saw the bulk of the tree – the weight of it, the utter immovability – his courage failed and his fingers automatically squeezed, the bike slowing dramatically and suddenly in that final stretch, so that when the front wheel nudged the trunk, momentum indeed carried him over, but somersaulting him alone through the air, the bike toppling back down on the wrong side of the tree.

  He landed heavily, arm first, his body ringing with pain. He would have yelled profanities into the dusk but he had no breath with which to do so, for he was winded too and for several long moments he lay convulsed on the ground, his body twisted as his chest heaved, trying to get air back into his lungs.

  By the time he did, the pain in his wrist and elbow were hitting a crescendo and he blinked his eyes shut, trying to control the deep throb in his bones. Was his arm broken?

  He wiggled the fingers, just, and knew it wasn’t, but he was badly bruised, his joints sprained. He fell back and lay there in the pines, his skin badly grazed, his body wrenched and wretched.

  He had failed. Again.

  It had all been for nothing.

  Mitch could still beat him, even in death.

  Meg stood on the porch, wrapped in her blanket, Badger sitting at the top of the steps by her feet, his ears up and watching a stag tread lightly just inside the treeline. She was lucky. At her elevation, the skies were clear, the sun at a low slant behind the ridgeline and the shy-peeping moon a sliver of its fullest self. Below her, Banff was in cloud, thick white plumes like a steaming, rolling sea on the valley floor, only the jagged peaks of Mount Rundle piercing through like mermaids’ rocks.

  It was cooler up here than in town too, at least three degrees, and she clutched the blanket tighter, her eyes falling every few seconds to the digital alarm clock she had brought through from the bedroom. Seven ten.

  She looked west towards the brighter skies, her eye line falling to where she had practised with an outstretched arm and closed fist. How accurate was his alleged fly-by, she wondered? A few minutes—?

  Spot on.

  Suddenly, her gaze hit on a diamond in the sky. At first she wasn’t sure – was it just a star? A normal, common-garden star? But no, it was travelling, moving fast, a tail of light streaming behind it.

  She gasped as it sped through the air, knowing that was it – the International Space Station.

  And Jonas was up there. She actually knew someone in that thing!

  She laughed, the impulse surprising her as much as it did Badger as she shot her arm out, waving madly, knowing it was ridiculous, knowing he couldn’t see. But he’d sent her a smiley face, he’d said he’d be waving. Wasn’t it just too insane to think he was waving back to her right now?

  She pressed her hands in a steeple to her mouth as she watched it draw closer. She couldn’t believe how fast it was covering distance, nor how brightly it shone, the sun demonstrating its almighty power with one last dazzling burst on the Space Station’s reflective panels before it sank below the horizon for another day.

  She watched for another minute, feeling overwhelmed, as though she’d been part of something more – something bigger, cosmic – even if it was only as a spectator. It never would have occurred to her to look up, beyond her own world, her own life, that she might know someone whose world vision was so big, he’d needed to get off the planet to realize it.

  Suddenly she ran inside and pressed all the buttons she knew to press, red lights turning green, dials flickering into life, that crackly static bringing the world into the bedroom. If she could see him, surely she could speak to him too?

  ‘Hello?’ Her eyes went to the sticker on the side of the rig. ‘This is uh, Volcano X-ray Four, uh, Dog, Dog, uh, Elephant, over. Calling Jonas Solberg. Can you hear me, over?’

  She pressed the button on the receiver and waited but it sounded different from before – noisier, ‘dirtier’ somehow with lots of interference, too many voices leaping in and out of reception.

  She looked at the frequency coming up on the digital display: 145.800 . . . where she had left it from the first and second times she’d spoken to him. Should she move it? When she’d moved it that first night, it had seemed to move through the airwaves, finding empty pockets, rather like tuning the TV in the days before digital.

  No. Surely it was better to stick with what she knew? That was little enough! She tried again.

  ‘Volcano X-ray Four Dog Dog Elephant calling the International Space Station. Jonas, can you hear me, over?’

  Still nothing. She stood up and leaned over the desk, her face turned up as she stared out of the window. She could still see him, the bright shooting star almost directly in front of the cabin – albeit hundreds of kilometres away.

  ‘Jonas, can you hear me? It’s Meg Saunders! Volcano X-ray Four Dog—’

  ‘I can hear you all right,’ he said suddenly, his voice as loud and clear as if he’d been in the next room. He appeared to be laughing.

  ‘Jonas? Is that you?’

  ‘Copy that. This is November Alpha One Sierra Sierra calling Volcano X-ray—’ He broke off laughing again.

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ she chuckled, bemused by his own amusement. ‘Over.’

  Pause. ‘Your call sign—’

  More laughter.

  Oh, God. ‘Aren’t I doing it right? Over.’

  A few seconds passed and he was back again. ‘You’re doing it perfectly,’ he said, but she could tell – somehow – that he was still smiling. It’s funny, she thought, how you can hear a smile in a voice. ‘It’s good to speak to you, over.’

  ‘And you. And guess what? I can see you! I’m watching you right now! Over.’

  Silence.

  ‘Can you see me waving?’ he repl
ied.

  It was her turn to laugh. ‘No, but I waved to you anyway . . .’ She could hear him laughing again. ‘Thanks for your email. Are you nervous about your airwalk? Over.’

  Another pause. Another chuckle. ‘The spacewalk today? I am nervous, yes. It’s always a big deal. We have a Japanese cargo ship docking next week so we have to check everything’s OK. Over.’

  Meg waited for the words to transmit to her, a bubble of static making her eyes dart to the display. She looked back out the window. She could still see the speeding bright dot, like a silver bullet, but it was moving away from her again, too soon, too fast. ‘It’s today? But I thought you said it was tomorrow? Over.’

  ‘Yes, it was when I wrote the email. Sorry, I’m already in tomorrow . . . We follow Greenwich Mean Time so it’s quarter past three in the morning on board here, over.’

  Meg gasped. ‘Oh, my goodness, why are you still awake then? Shouldn’t you be sleeping? Over.’

  ‘Yes.’ His voice sounded distorted, someone else cutting over them. ‘. . . cause of the emai . . . ondered if you might make contact. It’s nice chatting with a familiar voice . . . ver.’

  Meg’s mouth opened in surprise. He liked chatting to her? ‘I . . .’ Interference spiked again, buying her time. She changed the subject. ‘Have you done spacewalks before? Are they scary?’

  She waited for his reply.

  ‘. . . veral times . . . airy moments. Once there was a meteor show . . . a bit close but it was fine . . . the end, over.’

  And to think that she’d spent her day doing a stock inventory! ‘Do you have to do them regularly? Over.’

  She chewed on her thumbnail as she waited for his response, her eyes tracking the bright dot, which was ever more distant in the sky now. A few minutes and he’d be out of range. Interference was picking up again.