Under a Dark Sky

by Lori Rader-Day

  “. . . Orion, Cassiopeia, the Dippers, the bears, my personal favorite Cygnus, the swan, which looks like a simple pair of wings, but contains thousands of planets and star clusters,” the voice said. “There they are, right above our heads, marching across the sky—nah, of course you know better than that. You’ve been hanging out on the dial with me long enough to know that’s us gliding around on our axis. We’re the ballerina up on our toes, spinning. Those stars are as fixed as anything in our expanding universe. But there they are, on schedule, season to season, night to night. Except that someone at some point charted them out and drew those invisible lines, turning a clutch of stars, distant and unknowable, into characters from the stories they liked. That’s something, isn’t it? That’s like me looking up and finding Sherlock Holmes and his deerstalker cap in the stars. Why not? Orion’s belt is up there. Why not a hunting cap or . . .”

  I must have slipped off again for a while, because Sam’s snoring woke me next. The radio was still talking. “Finding shapes in the scatter of stars is an act of organization in the face of chaos,” the voice said. “An act of faith, if you think about it—faith that the little things you do can matter, can mean one da—dang, one darn thing.

  “All the visible stars are accounted for, taken up with dogs and crabs and centaurs and stuff. Beyond that, there are stars without name, without number. You and I don’t have access to deep space discoveries to put a name to the shapes they make. NASA knows the names of some of them. But the ones we can see? Got named up a long time ago. I guess I wish they’d left a few open patches for us, you know? To point to the sky and say, ‘Here’s what I see. Here’s who I am. These are the stories I like to tell.’”

  I sat up and blinked at the radio. The soothing voice was gone and had been replaced by someone reading off commercials for a feed and seed store. I fumbled for the switch and finally got it to shut up.

  I was so tired, as though I’d been traveling, awake all night while the world slept. Sam wasn’t snoring now. Was he awake? Waiting to see what I would do, just as I waited to see what he would? I couldn’t imagine he was the killer. He had successfully lulled me into trust.

  The next time I woke, it was to the sound of water running in the bathroom. Through the partially open door, Sam threw back an inch of the dark wine remaining in one of the cups, then filled it with water and threw that back, too. He saw me watching. “Hair of the dog. Can I use some of your toothpaste?”

  The full cup of wine by my bed was gone. I nodded and sat up. My toothbrush hadn’t made it to the hotel, and his was locked in his room, so we took turns chewing an inch of paste off our index fingers. I avoided myself in the mirror.

  Sam used the bathroom again, this time with the door closed, while I pretended I couldn’t hear him taking a piss. I decided to change clothes while he was in there and was just lowering my T-shirt over my bra when he stuck his head through the door.

  “Oh, sorry.” He closed the door again.

  “I’m done,” I said.

  He came through the room, his eyes lowered. I was touched by his gentle breeding until I realized his respectful distance made me feel like someone’s old maiden aunt. What was wrong with me? Maybe I’d been without male attention a little too long. Or maybe the quality of that attention, when I’d had it, hadn’t been quite what it should have been.

  When Sam reached for the door, he looked back. “It’s Sunday. Martha had breakfast reservations set up for today,” he said. He thought it over for a second. “I’m sure they’re still showing up. You should come.”

  “I don’t think anyone wants that.”

  “I wouldn’t mind you being there,” he said. “Like that buddy system Paris tried to start up. If we’re all together, well, then at least we know where everyone is. Fewer surprises that way.”

  He opened the door and waited. I didn’t like surprises, either. And I was curious. And maybe a small part of me would rather be among them, listening in, making my own judgments. That’s how you avoided a surprise—by paying attention, by watching the still surfaces for currents underneath. I stepped out into the cool morning air, fresh after the closeness of the room. I inhaled as deeply as I could and then let it out, feeling better already. Sam smiled at me in a knowing way. We had survived it, this night.

  The door opened two rooms down. Hillary emerged, eyeing us. The smile fled from Sam’s face. He stepped away from me.

  “Interesting,” Hillary said. “So now I guess I know how some people get over the grief of widowhood.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hillary, when pressed to join us, said she would rather eat out of the Hide-a-Way’s garbage bin. We left her to it.

  Martha’s breakfast spot was a place deeper into town, in a mostly residential neighborhood with shaded sidewalks and lawn sprinklers already at work. The houses were small, tidy, with flowering plants weaving through trellises at the front doors. The sun was shining, too, the full day ahead and the sky blue. Outside the café, a hand-painted sign welcomed visitors, and a long bench provided room for an extended family waiting for their table. Two little girls, their pigtails jouncing, ran along the bench and into their parents, who patiently provided another round of tickles that sent the girls back along the bench. Sam watched after the girls with a little smile, holding the door for me. Under his breath, he said, “Here we go.”

  The place was crowded except for the table in the center of the room with Paris presiding over four empty chairs. Her eyes found me immediately and sharpened. Upon arrival at the table, Sam pulled out a chair for me. “I only asked for a table of five,” she complained.

  “Yes,” Sam said. “Harsh reality, Paris. There are only four of us, now. And Hillary—” He glanced at me. “Hillary had other plans.”

  Paris’s eyelids fluttered as she looked away. Dev arrived from wherever he’d been and sat at her left. He reached over and held her hand, but she pulled it away. “Sure,” she said. “I guess we’ll just fill Malloy’s seat with anyone who happens by. I passed a homeless man in a dirty snow jacket on the way over. Why not him, too?”

  “If only I didn’t join you for breakfast, you could continue your reunion as though nothing had gone wrong.” I picked up a menu, though I wasn’t hungry. Martha was making her way from the restrooms, her eyes on me.

  “Really?” she said to Paris.

  “That’s what I was saying,” Paris said.

  Martha sat on the other side of Sam, who reached out to give her a pat on the back. She threw him off. “I suppose this is your doing,” she said to him.

  “I thought we could risk having some toast together,” he said. “What’s the harm?”

  “The harm is,” Dev said, “that Malloy was murdered.”

  His voice carried a little further than the others’ had, and the tables near us grew quiet for a moment. We all stared at our menus and waited for the crowd noise to rise again. Normally my cheeks would burn with shame and attention, but now I found that I didn’t care. I was going home today. I was getting away from these toxic people and their problems. How long could this breakfast of the damned drag on?

  “Surely you understand our concern,” Dev murmured.

  “Malloy’s death is no fault of mine,” I said.

  “And you invited the other one, too, I suppose?” Paris said. “She was just too busy or we’d have the whole sordid gang back together again.”

  Sam shrugged and held up his hand toward someone behind the counter. “Could we get all the coffee over here? Seriously, all of it?”

  Paris glared at his arm in the air but then her face cleared and she turned her attention to the mug in front of her, a strange contemplative look directed toward its every detail. Dev and I locked eyes. Something had just shifted in the air, but I had no idea what it was.

  A young waiter who looked as haggard as the rest of us came out with a steaming carafe and worked his way around the table.

  “I wouldn’t be at the same table as that other one,” Mar
tha said, holding her hand over her cup. “Could I get some herbal tea?” she said to the waiter, dimples in place.

  “Tea?” Sam said.

  “Herbal tea,” Dev said. “You know that’s not tea, right? It’s, like, flowers.”

  “We should be having mimosas,” Paris said, watching Sam over the top of her mug.

  “Ugh,” Martha said. “Not me but you go ahead.”

  Paris turned her calculating look on Martha.

  “So,” Dev said. He cleared his throat. “Did anyone get any sleep?”

  Sam snorted, and no one else had anything to say. I couldn’t decide if their silence came from the awkwardness of my presence at the table or if they would have been just this weird as a table of four. One of them had just been killed, after all. And one of them, perhaps, was a killer.

  Without Hillary there, I could feel them all placing their hatred upon her absence. If they could talk themselves into her having done it, their tiny world was still safe, if lonely and depleted of Malloy’s charm. Even I found myself thinking that the danger lay away from this table. When I looked around at them and considered the odds, an itchy feeling began under my skin. I shouldn’t have come. But then if I hadn’t, maybe they would have spent their breakfast chatter on my guilt instead of hers.

  The waiter came back and took orders, but decisions were hard to come by. Finally Martha and I ordered some toast. When it came, the jams were shared between us. Martha nibbled sadly at her plain buttered toast and wouldn’t ask me for the pot of jam. The others picked over plates of eggs and bacon. Martha made a face at Sam’s heaping plate. “What?” he said. “It’s going to be a long day.”

  “Terry and Clare might arrive today,” Dev said. “We’ll need our strength.”

  “Terry and Clare?” I said.

  None of them wanted to talk to me.

  “His parents,” Paris finally said, her voice soft.

  Martha threw down her toast and spit the bite in her mouth into a paper napkin. “I can’t—I literally don’t know how to face them,” she said, flapping her hands at her eyes to save her makeup. “I mean . . . what do we say? What if— Oh, God, what if they think we had something to do with this?”

  I pictured that screwdriver in the bottle. They’d be fools to believe any other theory. But remembering Bix’s mother and all the long days we had spent with one another coming to grips with the way the world had gone on without us, I felt a wave of sorrow for these unseen parents. They might have thought the dangers were all behind them. Malloy hadn’t choked on something too big for his infant throat, hadn’t waddled into a neighbor’s backyard as a toddler and drowned in a pool. He hadn’t lost a game of chicken on a dark road as a teenager, hadn’t fallen in with the wrong crowd.

  Or at least, that’s what they must have thought.

  And now he was dead. What a waste.

  “Stop it,” Martha shouted.

  The restaurant went quiet in the wake of her voice. She was looking at me. “What?” I said. “What am I—”

  “You’re mourning him, and you have no right,” she said.

  I glanced around. Most of the other diners were trying to recover themselves, but some were taking no pains to hide they were watching. “I— It’s hard to explain,” I said. I tried to pull my voice down to the level of our table. Dev, at least, leaned in to hear me. “Once you’ve experienced it, you have a lot more empathy. I was only thinking of his poor parents—”

  “You’re not the only one who’s ever experienced loss,” she said. The sharpness of her voice cut through any attempt of the other diners to get back to the business of breakfast. For a moment, I was standing back at Bix’s funeral, watching the woman in the navy blue dress approach, knowing something terrible would come out of her mouth. You’re not the only one. “So save the lectures,” Martha said. “They are special people with a special son—” She started blinking and flapping again. “I just saw them a couple of months ago, and they—they were so . . . They are amazing people. They don’t need you thinking about them or talking about them.”

  “They do,” I said. I dug into my purse for some money and threw it down on the table. “Try to imagine how much loss you feel and compound it by—no. There’s no number. They lost their son. Maybe their only child, I don’t know. Think about that before you try to own all the grief over Malloy.”

  I stood up. The restaurant watched, as one.

  “Let’s just all go,” Dev said, looking uneasily around the room.

  Martha picked up her toast and sat back. A red curl over her forehead bounced. “I’m not done yet.”

  “I’ll stay with her and pay up,” Paris said. “You can walk ahead.”

  Dev frowned at them in turn. “Sam?”

  “There’s still bacon on my plate,” Sam said. He was looking at Martha in a way I recognized. Who had been not good enough for Martha, in particular? “I’ll be there in ten.”

  Outside, the long benches in front of the restaurant were empty except for one woman still wearing a coat she must have decided on earlier that morning, when it was cooler. Her head turned to watch as we passed. The coat was bright blue, the color a child would pull from a pencil box to color the sky.

  The sky overhead tried to cooperate, the day warming up. We stood on a peninsula of land, water in every direction. Hundreds of people had made plans to be here, soaking in the sun, taking the ferry over to the island, sunning themselves, generally wringing every daylight moment out of their lives. We started walking toward the police station. Not for the first time, I wondered how I had come to be this person I was, stunted and helpless to the ticking of a clock, while the world spun around me. I had never been the person squeezing more out of life.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Dev said after a few minutes of walking. I was churning hard, making him stretch his stride to keep up with me, but he was doing it, and taking the exercise better than I was. At a street crossing, I stopped and wiped at my hairline.

  “You people have an interesting idea about the bounds of friendship,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a friend so devoted a zookeeper as Martha.”

  “Martha’s OK. She’s just . . . lonely, I guess.”

  I gave him a look. I knew lonely.

  “No, you know how when you were young—”

  “Thank you.”

  “—I don’t mean just you. When you’re young, everything is so vital and vibrant and wild and out of your control, and all those relationships are volatile,” he said. “You feel everything so intensely, right? Stay with me. But then with time, with real life, with love and work and all the things that life brings, you start to wonder if you’re doing something wrong. You still love your old friends, all those old relationships that were so fiery and passionate and maybe, OK, maybe a little bit fueled by drama and alcohol and crushes—” He shook his head and started across the street again. I followed, hurrying to keep up with him now. “Nothing in adult life blazes quite like your memory of the way it was.”

  “Except that memory is faulty.”

  “I remember the bad, too—the intensity, good or bad, that’s what I remember.” He seemed to want the confirmation, so I gave in.

  “If it’s intensity you’re looking for, I hear parenthood is a pretty good distraction from the humdrum of adulthood,” I said.

  “Wrong,” he said. “That brings on a new kind of mundane. And if your kid turns out to be other than you hoped—” He seemed to go somewhere else for a moment and then he shook his head and continued. “If anything, having kids must cut down on spontaneity, time, focus. Where’s the passion you used to feel for where you might go in life? Where’s the awe of learning something new? What happened to the way your gut used to drop when you thought about kissing someone for the first time? What happened to meeting new people and staying up all night talking through your philosophies?”

  “I don’t drink that much anymore,” I said. “Philosophies at midnight are for people who pack multiple cases o
f wine and no food for a week at the lake.” I hadn’t had quite the same youth Dev had, and now, of course, I didn’t think of things like first kisses.

  He scoffed and walked faster while I thought about the vehemence of the rant. “Are you having second thoughts about marrying Paris?”

  He stopped abruptly, nearly tripping me up. “That is not what this is about.”

  “OK, great. You’re madly in love.”

  “I am.”

  But was she? We stared at one another. I would never ask, though he was daring me.

  “OK,” I said, at last. “So Martha . . .” I was reminded of Hillary’s theory that each of the women wanted Malloy for her own.

  “Martha wants things to be the same as they always have been. She is to be pitied,” Dev said. Then a wry smile. “Except—except didn’t I just say the same thing? That it was better then, in a way, than it is now? It was certainly better two days ago.”

  We turned and kept walking, this time in full silence. I was remembering all the times I’d had to pack our lives and move across the country. By the time Bix retired from the Army, all I wanted was to go somewhere and stay. I wanted things to be predictable for a while, stable. The same. I just wanted to stop time for a minute. It all went so fast. It wasn’t exactly the same thing that Martha wanted, but I could see her point. The good old days, though, were never as good as you remembered. Maybe that was Dev’s position. Of all of them, he seemed like the one ready to move on, get married, live a life. He was only stopped by the fact that Paris was the least ready.

  At the front of the police station, he straightened his shoulders and held the door for me. Another gentleman. Breakfast, forgotten.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The police station was like a dentist’s office in a bad neighborhood. Dingy, but clinical. The front desk was protected by bulletproof glass, all conversations forced through a slot low over the counter.

  We each had forms to fill out, typed statements to annotate and sign, but first they wanted us to wait. That seemed to be the plan, anyway. Dev and I sat in the waiting room alongside a slumped man in a zip sweatshirt with—best guess—dried vomit at the shoulder. I wondered who he might be picking up, who would be in worse straits than this guy, until I saw that he had been handcuffed to his chair. I forced Dev to slide down a seat.