Under a Dark Sky

by Lori Rader-Day

  “There she is,” the guy said. I looked up, startled. He was watching over my shoulder. I turned to find another beautiful creature approaching from the lakeshore, this one with a sheet of sleek honey hair and milky pale skin. The hair was probably dyed, but who could argue that she shouldn’t bother? My own pale reflection couldn’t compete with that. Not now, not ten years ago. “Hon?” the man called, waving her in. “Come meet someone.”

  “Hey,” the woman said, smiling wide. She had a crooked eyetooth, but the flaw only made her prettier. I liked that she had decided to let that crooked tooth have its place. She leaned in to shake my hand. “I’m Hillary. You must be, uh . . .” She looked uncertainly toward her boyfriend.

  “No, I’m—”

  “A new friend,” the guy said.

  “Are you staying in the park, too?” Hillary asked.

  “That’s, uh . . .”

  “We’re so excited about tonight,” she said. “I want to sleep all day until it gets dark so I can stay up all night.”

  This was pretty much the same schedule I’d been keeping, minus the part about sleeping at all.

  “Hills has been studying the constellations to get ready,” the man said. The way he looked at her made me think of long-ago feelings. The trouble with marriage was that time accumulated over top the things that had brought you together and hid the gleam of those first shiny impressions. Here was brand-new love, pink and fresh as a newborn.

  “Malloy,” I said, pulling the name from memory.

  His attention wrenched from the girl. He seemed to see me for the first time. “Yeah,” he said. “I—wait, are you with—? Have we met? I can’t place you, I’m sorry.”

  Dev and Paris were coming along the back of the cars. She pouted, and he petted at her. She wore a hefty diamond on her left hand but no band. Theirs was a relationship with at least a few miles on the odometer. I looked back at Malloy and Hillary, who clung to one another. The first couple would ruin the second. It would be tiring to watch, like a nature program marathon, predators tearing cute little rodents to pieces all day.

  “You don’t know me,” I said. “I was just leaving.”

  Paris squealed and ran up to Malloy. She tucked herself against him for a hug. He had to untangle himself from Hillary to make it work. Over Malloy’s shoulder, Paris eyed the other woman.

  “At last,” Malloy said, turning himself out of Paris’s embrace. “Pare, Dev. I want you to meet Hillary. Hills, you’ve heard me talk about—”

  “But now he only talks of you,” Dev said.

  “I’m so excited to meet you,” Hillary said, shaking Dev’s hand.

  “I don’t want to interrupt your reunion,” I said. “But could I get you to move your car?”

  “You’re not staying at the park?” Malloy said.

  “Only,” Paris said, crossing her arms, “to stay at the park would mean she was staying with us. Some mix-up.”

  A fierce feeling of ownership of the suite rose inside me. Just because there were more of them, didn’t mean I had less title to the room and the shared spaces. Paris had left out the part where they’d made the same mistake Bix had.

  “Oh, yeah?” Malloy said. He pulled Dev in, pounding him on the back a few times the way men did to keep their embraces active and sportsmanlike. “That’s great. The more the merrier. The sky is pretty big, after all, so there’re plenty of stars to go around.”

  I WENT TO fetch my suitcase. Malloy was the openhearted one in the group, that much was clear. But after I let the wave of indignation pass over me, I saw Paris’s side. Friends trying to recapture their youth and sense of belonging—they had no need of an extra. I could leave now and be done with all this. I’d have to find another way to get back on track. Some other way that hadn’t already occurred to me. I opened the door.

  “—thought we were supposed to be honoring memories here or whatever the hell we’re doing. You can’t hide in the bathroom the whole week.”

  Upstairs, another young man sat sidesaddle on the bannister, his black sneakers dangling in the air. He was bearded, stout. Behind him, a door was open. Inside, another woman stood at a vanity and fixed her face in the mirror, her curly red bobbed hair turned to him.

  “I can’t believe he—”

  “Martha.” He’d had his hands raised, gesturing, but, seeing me in the doorway, dropped them and hopped off the bannister. He hurried down the stairs. “It’s great to meet you,” he said, drawing out the words as he reached for and pumped my hand. “We missed you guys getting in. We’ve really been looking forward to this, haven’t we, Martha?”

  Martha emerged from the bathroom and laid her hands on the rail overlooking the downstairs, another queen surveying all she commanded. She had a wild smile forced onto her pale, freckled face. Her eyes locked with mine, and the fake smile, painted a vibrant red, turned into something else. Her eyes lit up, feasting on me as she took her time down the stairs, one finger trailing along the railing. “You’re not Hillary.”

  Hillary and Malloy were just behind me, so entwined as to have difficulty getting through the door. They laughed their way in.

  “Oh, right,” the bearded man said. “I’m sorry— Who are you?”

  “This is our new neighbor,” Malloy said. “Roommate, actually. She’s in the suite in the back.”

  “The suite?” Martha said. She and Paris exchanged looks.

  I was starting to understand the alliances and divisions: The group of friends, tight in college, all the stars in their constellation swirling around Malloy and his easygoing grin. And then Hillary, the new girl. It would be just like old times, except not at all. Not with new people.

  Malloy’s wuzzy gaze on Hillary hadn’t wavered. He didn’t care that another stranger was in the guest house because he couldn’t see anything but her. Another stranger, in fact, helped cut the tension.

  “So you’re . . .” the bearded man said again.

  “Eden,” I said. “Eden Wallace. There was a mix-up with the reservations.”

  “There was?” Martha said, looking toward Dev. He shook his head.

  “Oh, that’s fun. I think it’s one of those things,” Hillary said, her eyes on Malloy. “Like in the movies?”

  No one knew what she was talking about. Martha and Paris fought down smiles.

  “The meet-cute,” Hillary said. “I think that’s what they call it.”

  “You’re cute,” Malloy said. “This is Eden, everyone. Eden, this is everyone. And this is my darling Hillary. Isn’t she wonderful?”

  THE REST OF everyone turned out to be Sam, with the beard and the belly, and Martha, she of the pin-up lipstick and red curls. They were not a couple, as it turned out, just friends from college who hadn’t brought anyone with them and had agreed to share a room to make things tidy.

  Of course, without me in the suite downstairs, lodgings might have been just as easily divided up.

  There were hugs between the friends and more careful introductions between Hillary and the others as I stood with my suitcase at my feet. I had meant to be gone by now, but the car from Indiana still sat behind my car’s bumper. I glanced toward the kitchen, where a yellow-faced clock over the stove ticked away the minutes. A window allowed a beam of sunlight to wash over the kitchen, but the angle of light was getting tricky. If I left now, I might get stuck in traffic. I would definitely get stuck in traffic. I lived in Chicago, where getting stuck in traffic was the price of admission. What I hadn’t been caught in, in even the shortest days of winter since Bix had died, was darkness. What would I do, if the sun went down while I was still driving?

  Pull over, turn on an ineffective overhead dome light? Wait all night as the battery on the car died and the darkness enveloped me? I pictured, instead, reaching for the door handle and flinging myself into oncoming headlights. And then the swirling lights of emergency, the news cameras catching it all for the sake of those at home. News at ten and eleven.

  I didn’t know where the end of my sanity wa
s, but I thought it might be just there, in the near shadow of nightfall. But hadn’t I come here to face that possibility? That I might not ever make it back from here? And if I did, could I even be returned to the woman I was before I was this small, cowering rabbit of a person? I had to get back to who I had been—or who I would have been without Bix’s influence. I had no other choice.

  I pulled up the handle on my suitcase, clicking it locked. The group went quiet, then rallied. Paris pulled Martha away and toward the kitchen, and Sam followed.

  “Come on,” Malloy said to me. “You have to stay one night. Get what you came for.”

  He had no idea what I’d come for and how likely it was I’d fail to achieve it. Or how many night terrors might arrive in the meantime. “I came here for different reasons than you and your friends,” I said at last.

  “We just came to . . . get to know each other, have fun,” Hillary said. Malloy pulled her in tighter and put a kiss on top of her head. She looked uncertainly to where the other women were whispering heatedly in the hallway on the other side of the kitchen. She seemed to buoy herself. “And to see the stars, of course.”

  “I didn’t actually come to see the stars,” I said. Without Bix to guide my sight upward, I probably would have failed the test anyway. I might have attempted to take a few photos during the day, but I couldn’t really imagine how I would have broken through the fear that kept me locked up tight under bright lights each evening. And even this new plan of somehow talking myself through a single night of darkness, unaided, was a tall order. I took a shaking breath. “It’s hard to explain.”

  “Her husband died,” Dev said from the couch.

  Hillary made a sound, her hand shooting to her mouth. I had lost track of Dev since we’d gotten through introductions—or more to the point I’d forgotten he existed. I shot him a look. I hadn’t wanted to bring up Bix again. Not in front of young love. Young, delicate, exposed, pink-belly love.

  Malloy’s face was a mask when his smile was tucked away. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  It had been long enough now that I often tried to brush away condolences. What to say? “Thank you—”

  “This is their anniversary,” Dev said.

  Hillary made another sound.

  “Well, uh, Tuesday, actually,” I said. “But this—yeah. This was his surprise for me. Surprise.”

  “Oh, no,” Hillary breathed. She moved toward me, letting Malloy’s arm drop from her shoulders. “Oh, no, now I get it.”

  Dev shrugged and let his head sag to the back of the couch.

  “You do?” I said.

  “You wanted to be alone,” she said.

  I was surprised that she, out of all of them, seemed to understand it. Not that it made any sense at all, since alone was all I ever was. The scenery. I had banked on the change of scenery taking me somewhere I had literally never been. I had the SLR Bix had bought me slung around my neck, a gift to get me started learning, and I had. But now the memory card on the camera was empty, brand new. I hadn’t taken a single shot since his death. He had given me this life, these ambitions, and now this place. He had made this all possible. Surely, if nothing else, I could find the gratitude not to waste it.

  “Alone with the sky,” she said. “With heaven, maybe?”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. Over on the couch, Dev snorted, coughed, and joined me. Once I had started I couldn’t seem to stop. “I’m not—” I tried. “I’m not a—what’s the word? I don’t even know.”

  “Pilgrim,” Malloy said. He wasn’t laughing but he had taken Hillary back under his arm to make her comfortable with the hysterics. “We’re all pilgrims.”

  Dev shook his head and lay back again, the hint of a smile still on his face. Sam wandered in to see what was so funny. The women, I assumed, had gone to see the suite, to make Paris at home there before anyone else thought to stake a claim.

  I had been thinking zealot. “Did you go to some—what school did you all go to?” I said.

  “State,” Malloy said. His grin rebuilt itself. “Not some weirdo religious enclave, if that’s what you wondered. I meant on this earth. We’re all pilgrims here upon the earth, sometimes not for long.”

  If anyone else had said it, I would have torn through him with cynicism. But Malloy seemed to mean it, to understand our fleeting situation here in this house and in this world better than anyone else could. I couldn’t quite laugh at him. For some reason, what he said comforted me, more than most of the platitudes I’d already accepted as condolences. Pilgrim made sense to me. I felt like a lowly traveler, anyway—temporary and small against the coming nightfall. My life had shrunken to the tiniest pinprick, like a solitary and distant star in the night sky. I had come here for—something. Bix had wanted us to be here. I wanted to understand why, and when I did, by Tuesday at the latest, I wanted to call Griffin back and tell him what to do about the house. Very tall order.

  But to figure it out—well, I couldn’t go back home just yet. That’s where it all waited. All of it: his things, the bills I soon would not be able to pay. The failures of our life lived there as well as my absolute loss at how to move on.

  How many lights could I leave on in the suite without the rest of them noticing? Without some well-meaning ranger coming to tamp down the glow, which would surely go against the park’s rules, if the light leaked outside. It was too late to get home before dark now. I’d been lulled by Malloy’s smile, by Hillary’s innocence, by their brand-new, bright-eyed relationship.

  The house was silent, somehow strangely respectful. Malloy squeezed Hillary to him. They couldn’t bear to be out of touch with one another’s skin, even as they waited for me to agree to gate-crash their first night.

  Love. It made no sense.

  Wait until they knew. About Bix. About everything. Wait until I had to explain the anniversary was a milestone I wasn’t sure we would have reached if Bix had lived to see it.

  Chapter Three

  Malloy rolled my suitcase through the kitchen and into the back hallway. Paris and Martha slid out of the suite ahead of my entrance, snickering and avoiding eye contact with me.

  “Did you see the weird self-guided tour markers on the way in? The silhouettes?” Malloy said. “We drove down to the viewing area and they’re all along the way, these strange flat people standing along the road, pointing out facts and stuff. Historical figures, I guess, but—damn, they are creepy. I kept thinking someone was running out into the road. Braked hard every single time.”

  Inside the suite, homey and fussily decorated in beach house whites and blues, I inhaled deeply. The room had one tall window with sheer curtains. It would have to be covered. The breath came out as a sigh.

  “Look, don’t stay if you don’t want to,” Malloy said, taking the case across the sitting area to the foot of the bed. He looked around. “Nice. But so what? It’s a nice room and we’re fun people, but if you’d rather go home, don’t let me bully you into staying.”

  I hadn’t decided what I’d rather do, but I found myself going along with this plan. One night. I could do one night, couldn’t I?

  It cheered me up to think I might. This man. His confidence was catching.

  “I hardly think you’re a bully,” I said. “Malloy. Is that your first or last name?”

  “The only name I answer to,” he said. “You know what I mean, though. We can roll this suitcase right back out, if you want. I can stop trying to convince you that you should stay. I’ve, uh, been known to talk people into things sometimes. There are people like that, you know? Some of them not as good intentioned as I like to think I am.” He raised an eyebrow at me and I nodded. I knew about that. “Anyway. You should make up your own mind.”

  I had no problem imagining this guy convincing a woman to take a chance on him or talking one of his friends into whatever scheme he had in mind. “Was this group trip your idea, then?”

  “Not even close,” he said, turning to the window. He seemed to think better of his ton
e and softened it. “I brought the kayaks. I’m nothing if not game for a week on a lake. But apparently we have some things to work through before we can enjoy ourselves. There’s an agenda, God help us.”

  “It sounds like you’re here for group therapy,” I said. “Paris said it’s the anniversary of your graduation.”

  He turned a wary smile my way, as though waiting for a punchline. “Yes, it’s that,” he said. “Five years. In June.”

  It was June now. I waited.

  “Next June, five years a year from now,” he said.

  “So it’s the anniversary of something else.”

  He made a sound in his throat. “When your husband died,” he said, “did you ever find yourself having to console other people? Like, instead of getting on with the greatest loss of your own life, you became responsible for everyone else’s grief?”

  “Oh, yeah.” I sat on the edge of the bed. “They want you to give them permission to be fine with it. Meanwhile you’re not fine.”

  “Or you are, because life goes on. Eventually. Even when you thought you didn’t want it to. But some of us,” he said, nodding his head to the other room, “have not had our fill of mourning.” He sucked his teeth for a second. “That sounded so cruel. I’m such an asshole.”

  “So who was it?”

  “The love of my life, as a matter of fact,” he said. I remembered what I’d asked him outside at his car, his answer, my misunderstanding. I felt myself blush. He had been flirting a little, though. Handsome men liked to keep their hand in, their skills sharp. Maybe I was cute enough to flirt with. Or maybe I was safe, a few years older, a widow, his girlfriend nearby. Someone to humor and jolly into a better mood.

  “Really?” I said, nodding toward the door, through which his gorgeous girlfriend could be found.