Under a Dark Sky

by Lori Rader-Day

  I guess that was another reason I had come to the park, even if the darkness scared me, even if I knew being here would bring up memories of Bix. While I was busy being bad cop, he’d been trying to nudge me toward happiness. Probably because he felt terrible about his own misdeeds, to be sure. There were plenty of those and more I hadn’t even known about until too late. He was a good apologizer. He had to be, right devil that he was. But in certain moments, he was also ridiculously sweet, like the time he found a scarf in that particular shade of blue I loved and brought it home for me, no reason.

  He was full of surprises—had been. Finding the reservation paperwork among his things was a good example. Why had he planned something for us so far out on the calendar? So out of character, but I’d finally backtracked what must have inspired him.

  Once, I’d told him about camping under the stars as a kid, the one thing I remembered doing with my parents that helped me see them as regular people, just trying to do their best. One of the few fond memories I had of my dad, actually, was the two of us sitting on a picnic table—the tabletop, not the bench—throwing old Halloween candy corn to raccoons.

  There’s another story I’d told Bix that he must have forgotten, or he wouldn’t have thought to bring me here. After our dad died, Michele and I were shuttled around the aunts and cousins for a couple of weeks. “She’s not well” is what the women would say to each other over the tops of our heads, meaning our mother. After a week with our mother’s cousin Dab—Dab Holt, I’ll never forget—who had a cigarette in her hand every second of her waking life, we finally were allowed to go home. We arrived in Dab’s land-cruising boat of a Buick, smoke roiling out when the doors opened. We hadn’t had a chance to grieve, not with Dab on the case. Life had been too different those last few weeks to notice that life would never be the same. That first night back home when I wandered, crying from a nightmare, into my mother’s room, she took me right back to my own bed. “We’re not going to start any bad habits,” she said, but she left the light on for me. I hadn’t been afraid of the dark, but afterward I made up any story to keep the lights on. I didn’t have to try hard. Leaving the lights on was easy, and so my mother let it go. It was a very bad habit, actually, and it took until I went to college to talk myself out of it, to love the night sky, finding freedom in walking home from a party with friends. Drunk, we’d point out the constellations we remembered. “Which constellations did you remember?” Bix had asked when I told him this story. By then we lived in Chicago, where you couldn’t see many stars at all. Just the guy with the belt, I had said.

  My parents were both gone by the time I met Bix. He wanted to hear the stories of them, even the terrible stories, when they hadn’t been doing their best, not by a long shot. Michele would barely discuss our childhood. Hers was different enough, anyway, being five years older. We never talked about the other guy with the belt, or the welts across our legs for slight offenses. Michele liked everything and everyone tagged and filed away.

  But Bix had wanted to know. It was only fair, given the number of tales from the front I had absorbed: impossible stories, impossible nights, each one of them. How many nights had I cradled him while he cried and choked over what he’d been put through over there, over all the terrible things he’d seen? He suffered, those nights, and I suffered with him. Sometimes, in the middle of one of his night terrors, I was the enemy. All the lights on, small comfort.

  So one night, lying in bed, I told him how the raccoons lined up at a safe distance and begged on their haunches, their little fists greedy for the candy. It had started out a charming story, fun. And then I found the heartbreak in it. That’s how it felt, I told him, to lose a parent so young, even a bad parent. You sat back and watched from a safe distance as the world passed, your hand outstretched for sweetness. Why were those raccoons the only thing I got to keep? And then he’d held me while I sobbed about all that was lost, all I might have remembered if I’d only been paying attention. Nobody pays close enough attention, he’d said, stroking my hair. The lights, on.

  But he had. The blue scarf. The photography lessons. This trip.

  All the times I’d left the lights on for him, he must have decided we could both use a date with the nighttime sky. Finding the reservations and the socked-away cash, I had had the most overwhelming feeling of gratitude for Bix and for who he was. Who he really had been, despite everything.

  Make no mistake: the score would never be even. Since the funeral, I’d had a hard time not looking back over our entire relationship, turning over every episode with suspicion. Turning over moments that I’d thought I had forgiven. This trip reminded me of the moments when we got things right, when we had been paying the right amount of attention to each other.

  Click. When I came back, blinking, to this world, I stood at the water’s edge. The sand shifted in the retreat of a wave.

  Hillary’s voice, impatient. “Eden, hello?” I turned around. I’d passed the opening to the clearing. She was waving me back to where the others were already climbing inland from the beach.

  The clearing was as I’d imagined it, a wide patch of closely clipped grass surrounded by a crescent of woods. A rocky ledge separated the clearing and the beach, lined with brush and dotted here and there with the flowers of prettier weeds.

  “Well,” Paris said. “This was worth the trip indeed.”

  “Now we know where it is and where the opening is,” Malloy said. “So we can come back in the dark.” He had his arm, predictably, around Hillary as he spoke, bolstering her physically and against anything his friends wanted to say. They pulled away from the group, sat on the grass, hip to hip, and turned inward, their faces tipped toward one another.

  On the other side of the clearing, Dev lay on the grass and coaxed Paris down next to him. Martha and Sam wandered down to the rocky barrier. He still carried his wineglass and offered it to her. She shook her head, curls swinging.

  I was left in the center of the clearing, alone. Across the water, a blue-gray whale of another shore drew my attention. More Michigan? I had lost track of my geography. Above, the sky had gone a bit gray, too. Without a turnaround in the weather, there would not be much to see of the stars tonight for anyone.

  I had not had much practice with sky gazing. Normally, the sky was a painted plane of blue and, from what I remembered of night, black, dotted with the sparkle of tiny white specks. A theater backdrop on which lives played out. But now, maybe because the dark sky park had forced me to consider it, I had a feeling of the sky’s vastness. It was not a landscape, a surface, but—everything else. When you thought about it, when you let in the concept of deep space, of stars, of our galaxy and those beyond it, of a universe without end, of forever—what forever really meant—it was too much to take in. My tiny understanding of it rested upon my skin until, without warning, the wide abyss sank in and then stretched out from me in all directions. The creeping loneliness I had been keeping at bay rose up in my throat, a choking panic.

  I held the back of my wrist to my mouth to keep from making a noise. The others didn’t need to know I was losing my mind.

  I let go of the sky and focused instead on the in and out of my own breath, on the steady ground, the prickly grass against my bare feet.

  The water, all the way to the horizon. The wide-open sky.

  Breathe in. It would pass. Breathe out.

  These episodes of panic, though more rare, were worse than the minutes I’d been losing to my drifting focus. In these moments, I was present, all too much, every second experienced fully and horribly. I could feel the strangulation of my airways, each capillary end shriveling, every dying cell fraying out. The forward march of life and its eventual end, keenly felt as it happened.

  Breathe in. Breathe out.

  When at last I recovered myself, I took a deep, shuddering breath and glanced around. Only Dev seemed to remember I was there. He raised his eyebrows at me. I had dropped my sandals in the grass.

  “That’s enough nat
ure for me,” I said when I knew I could speak clearly. I grabbed my shoes and headed for the opening again.

  At the beach, I looked back. Malloy and Hillary were following, Paris and Dev dusting themselves off to come along, Sam and Martha turning to join them. Ducklings, and I was mother.

  I didn’t get it. They were supposed to be the best of friends, old friends desperate to be together again. I’d seen how Bix’s Army buddies were when they got near one another. Wars would be refought and won, right there at the dinner table, and maybe if we stuck around long enough, someone would say something real and people who rarely cried in mixed company—Army and non-Army—might shed a few tears. They were tight. They would have died for one another. Some of them had. And once you felt that way about someone, you pretty much did forever.

  And yet these people didn’t even seem to know how to enjoy one another’s company. They didn’t even know how to be at a lake house. Only Dev and his wet swim trunks on the newel post had dipped a toe in the water. But he’d done that before the rest of them had arrived. Now that they were all here, they couldn’t be separated for more than a few minutes before roll was called, before the one who got away was rounded up and nosed back into the group. They seemed to be waiting for something to happen, or not letting it happen by keeping vigil.

  Tomorrow. Tomorrow I could leave and never think of them again.

  Inside, the wineglasses were topped off. Malloy chose a long couch and stretched out, leaving room for Hillary to nuzzle up next to him. Paris and Dev took the love seat but didn’t cuddle; Sam slid an ottoman from the corner over into the group. Martha stood by until Sam offered her a corner of his seat, then made herself comfortable on the floor with her back up against the couch underneath Malloy. He reached forward and ruffled her hair.

  My box of crackers had been left open on the counter, empty. The scavengers. The bottle of wine that Dev had attempted to open still sat on the counter with the screwdriver sticking out of the cork. The corkscrew had been tossed to the side, kept handy. Their plan was to subsist entirely on squashed grapes?

  I tossed the box into the recycling bin. In the living room, they were finally starting to talk. I edged out of the room as they peppered Malloy about work, his family. My experience told me Malloy was a man used to people wanting to know all about him. And maybe he’d been trained to expect such attention from this collection of friends. They folded in around him, disciples.

  Bix had had that way with people. He hadn’t been movie-star handsome the way Malloy was, but he had a different kind of magnetism. People wanted to talk with him. They wanted to tell him their stories. If I sent him to the convenience store for a gallon of milk, he’d come back a half hour later than expected with a tale from someone he’d met in the checkout, or from someone whose car he had jumpstarted in the parking lot. He was always helping someone, always handing over ten bucks to a sob story. It was kindness. It was fine. We had ten bucks to give, certainly. But it wasn’t the money or the missing half hours here and there I’d come to resent. To other people, Bix was a hero. But he gave himself away. He was picked to pieces by all the people who relied on him, asked things of him, saw a sucker coming from a mile away. What was left, at the end, wasn’t much.

  That little bit leftover, I’d had to share. Of course, I hadn’t known it at the time or I might have put up a fight. At least, that’s what I told myself.

  I listened to the friends’ low voices for a few minutes, poured out my glass in the sink, and turned toward the suite.

  “Not staying up to see the Dippers and stuff?” Malloy called after me.

  “I’ll catch them next trip,” I said. He smiled at me as though he thought I was joking. I was joking—I would never come back to this place—but I was also going to my room. “Nice meeting you. Good night.” The rest of them didn’t bother to try to talk me back.

  In my room, I found my phone facedown on the floor near the bed. Must have dropped it. I checked the time and then the service. Nonexistent. I might have been able to text my sister to tell her what a cock-up Bix’s plan had turned out to be. But I didn’t have enough bars to take the call she would have made in response. My sister leapt at chances to talk about Bix’s mistakes.

  I turned on the radio and listened to the calming voice of the local announcer. Live? Probably recorded. I lay down on the bed and went back to my phone, trying to get Photoship’s app to load. No good. The signal was that weak.

  On the radio, the voice was talking about the dark sky park. I sat up. “. . . In the greater scheme of this galaxy of planets and stars, we are specks of stuff bumping along and into one another,” the voice said. “All the things we have and have built, more dust. If you think a galaxy is a big playing field, consider the universe we know beyond ours, and galaxies we know that spin out there, all the way out into the great unknown. You may think of it as nothingness, but then you may have also looked up into our own clear blue sky today, high of seventy-six degrees the guys down at the weather station tell us, and thought it empty.” I snapped off the radio before I could hear anymore. I didn’t need any dust-to-dust nonsense right now.

  My phone churned. Not enough connectivity to see Photoship. All I’d left on there were the odds and ends of the early photography efforts, anyway. Bits and pieces, literally. My specialty. The corner of something, the edge, a close-up view so zoomed in as to make the object foreign. I liked surfaces and textures, the bright shine of the sun on a tabletop or a reflection in a window, glint and glare filling the viewfinder, everything obscured, everything lost to the light.

  I had taken all the photos of Bix down.

  And the accidental self-portrait, from when I first received the camera. That had come down first, of course.

  I’d taken it by sheer ineptitude, like someone who checks to see if the gun is loaded and shoots themselves between the eyes. In the photo, my eyes are open and curious, my lips parted. The effect is of a moment, an honest moment in a life. It wasn’t attractive or artful. And yet I posted it to Photoship and for a while, before I had learned things I hadn’t known about my life and taken it down, I had enjoyed that photo and my wide-open countenance. Now when I thought of that photo, I knew it showed a woman about to be shot between the eyes.

  A WHILE LATER I woke from a doze, fully dressed on top of the still-made bed. The room was bright. It could have been any hour of the day—noon? No, early morning, still dark. My eyes darted around the room, checking the lamps. All on, all good.

  I’d been dreaming that I was standing among the friends in the kitchen. I had the sense of an unfinished conversation, of wanting to go back and finish what we’d had to say to each other, of being pulled away.

  I heard a noise in the other room. I sat up, blinking. Someone bumping into one of the chairs at the counter in the kitchen. Then a voice, a whisper, and another noise, this time a low groan that I hoped wasn’t sexual. Hadn’t I called it with this bunch?

  The extra blanket I’d hung over the window facing the lake had fallen to the floor in a pool. I slid off the bed to fix it up again, fighting off a wave of nausea at the sight of the dark window behind the thin drapes. Hands shaking, I tucked the edge of the blanket back over the curtain rod and pulled it down to cover the night.

  Another noise, this time closer, in the hallway outside my room. I looked toward the bedside clock. Two in the morning was not a late hour for a group that had come to see the stars. Not for a group of people planning on a bonfire by the beach.

  But then the suite and its separate entrance was mine, if only for the night. I hadn’t been firm enough on that.

  I went to the door and reached for the handle, ready to scold. But the image of the dark hallway beyond rushed at me and I froze. Footsteps sounded on the other side of the door, quick, and then a door, the back door, wrenched open and flung against the wall.

  I raced to the window, hesitating only a moment before pulling the blanket and the curtain back to reveal the tiniest sliver of blackness. My
eyes caught the rush of someone moving off north toward the public beach, but it was far too dark out to see who it was. And then I couldn’t hold the night back anymore. I let the curtain back and pressed the blanket to the edge of the window frame. When I stepped back from the window, my breath was ragged.

  I crawled back into bed, still fully clothed but this time under the comforter. I lay in the bright room staring at the ceiling.

  Who had a late-night fight? Paris and Dev seemed the likely pair, since they seemed to run hot that way. Paris did, anyway. Dev ran whichever way Paris wanted him to. Funny that they’d ended up together at all. Not that I cared—a couple where one person had all the power didn’t interest me. Marriage was supposed to be a pairing, not an ongoing strongman competition. But then a lot of what I knew about marriage I’d learned after I’d already signed up for it. A lot of what I knew I would never wish on anyone. You learned as you went when it came to love, and some of the lessons came by way of the roughest road.

  I could feel myself drifting off into that delicious place between sleep and wakefulness. Maybe it was the long drive in the day before or maybe the guest house had lulled me into a sense of security I hadn’t known in a while. I hadn’t taken any of the pills I carried around to make myself available for sleep and yet I was drowsy, comfortable.

  Dreams crept back in. Bix lay in the bed next to me, and I threw my arm around him, tucking up against his warm back. My dream self cuddled in for the night, but in my sleep I began to feel uneasy and angry. We were in our bed, but also at the park, just as he’d planned. What was he doing here at the lake, after all he’d done to me? All of it, but also the dying, the being dead. These were unforgivable actions. In the dream, I noticed the moon glowing through the open window, and then I woke, choking.