Stars Go Blue

by Laura Pritchett

  Now Carolyn is cutting open a bag of wheat germ, and it makes Renny crazy, how healthy Carolyn has become. All of a sudden this interest in fish oil and vitamin B and wheat germ. Trying to stave off dementia, she knows. Renny picks five spices that she knows she hasn’t used in at least a year and throws them in the trash.

  “Turmeric,” Carolyn says, as she glances from the trash can to Renny. “Turmeric helps stave off dementia. Don’t throw it away.”

  Then Carolyn opens her mouth to say something else, stops, starts, stops. Renny thinks she looks like a fish gasping for air, and it makes Renny’s heart do an odd flutter. She loves Carolyn, actually, which is why she wouldn’t let her take Ben in. She wants Carolyn to have some semblance of a life.

  Renny hears Ben singing from the bedroom cool, clear, water. He must be up from his nap. She turns and watches Ben come out of the bedroom, stop at the dining room table, stare down at his white scrawny legs. She can see him pause, see him register the fact that he is without his jeans. Sees his indecision. Sees him working through the situation. Sees him, thank god, turn around. She hates him. She pities him. She’s sorry. She’s angry. She’s grateful he knew enough to return to the bedroom.

  Carolyn is stirring the oats and wheat germ, yakking away mindlessly in her stupid good-natured way. Just like the dumb dog, who now wants to come in, but instead of decisively barking, as a normal dog would, it offers a mediocre whine outside the door. Renny sighs and lets the dog in and, meanwhile, watches Carolyn move about the kitchen.

  “Mom, this is the first winter in twenty years that we can leave the ranch. The kids are all fine. Billy is in Europe for another two weeks, and Jess will go stay with Leanne. Del and I want one vacation. Can you watch Satchmo?”

  Renny watches the dog track muddy snow globs across her kitchen floor and sighs her new favorite kind of sigh, which is when she vibrates her lips together so that she sounds a little like an irritated horse. Carolyn, her daughter. In a baggy stained white T-shirt with CHEYENNE FRONTIER DAYS cheaply ironed on the front and jeans and dirtied tennis shoes. Carolyn, her daughter. With no makeup and a red nose from a cold and the same ponytail hairdo she’s had since she was a teenager, only now streaked with gray. Carolyn, her daughter, who probably hasn’t giggled in, well, Renny doesn’t know how long. She knows her daughter deserves a vacation and yet why does her daughter get to go on vacation? Both are simply true at once. She’d like to go to some little village in Mexico.

  Carolyn is now standing over the stove, pouring a capful of vanilla into a pan, and then scraping the last of the honey from the mason jar, moving the reluctant crystallized globs. “Mom? Del and I need this. Need it. I realize you need a vacation too. Take one when we’re back. I’ll come and stay over here with Dad. He should stay. Travel will confuse him. But where do you want to go? A cruise? A flight? What would you like to do on your own? Besides this ranch? What makes you happy?”

  Renny turns away from the honey—something about it is so beautiful that her heart hurts—and looks down at the dog on her kitchen floor. The last time she was single and free was nearly fifty years ago, back when she’d enrolled at the university, was studying agricultural sciences, even a little Spanish, helped out at the 4-H club, and met Ben, and she can’t remember that younger hopeful version of herself, can’t remember what it felt like, can’t remember when she noticed that all those doors had closed, can’t fathom how it will be to be single again. The truth is, she has no idea what she wants to do now. It’s not that she hasn’t thought about it. It’s just that nothing seems right.

  The dog is on its back, its belly exposed, its front teeth bared, wanting a belly rub. “Your dog is a mutant,” she says, and then she takes the pork chops from the refrigerator and starts to trim the fat off. “The only good thing about my life is the fact that I have a Cutco knife.”

  Carolyn glances at the knife and then at the pork chop. “Okay. Where’s Dad?”

  “He’s getting dressed. Take him on a walk. I think your oven probably works fine. You’re just coming up with excuses to come over here so you don’t have to live your own life. You think you’re checking up on us. But really, you’re just bothering us, Carolyn. I don’t want to watch your dog. I’m busy. My hands are full.”

  “Mom, come on. Anton is coming over to feed the cattle and everything, and he’s got Ruben as backup. Satchmo can’t stay alone in the house all day. That’s cruel. I’ve got everything else taken care of. And believe me, Mom, my oven is broken. I want to make granola and my oven is broken. I don’t know why you won’t leave, Mom. Go with a tour group. Go with me. Go alone. You’re acting like a martyr.”

  Renny snorts. “I wish. That would be a luxury.”

  “A martyr who is roasting at the stake. But every once in a while you take hunks of burning logs and fling them at people.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you’re a mean and bitter martyr.”

  “For heaven’s sake. I am not.” And then, because Carolyn’s comment has made her cranky, she adds, “At least I’m not mean with silence, like Jess.”

  “Jess’s silence is not mean, Mom.”

  “All silence is mean.”

  Carolyn tilts her head. “Mainly, I agree with you. But her silence is simply watchfulness. She’s eighteen. She’s like Satchmo. She’s young. She’s been through a lot. Cut them both some slack.”

  “No,” Renny says, throwing out a few more spice cans. “I will not.” She turns from the pork chops and watches Carolyn stir the melting honey-oil-vanilla in with the oats, and she can see that Carolyn is also delighted at the simple beauty of liquid honey. That’s one nice thing about Carolyn that Renny has always liked: her simple curiosity and appreciation for small wonders. Rachel never had that, even as a child. Rachel demanded too much. She expected things to be beautiful, or perhaps just didn’t even notice if they were or were not. But Carolyn noticed, noticed from the very get-go.

  “Look at that,” Carolyn raises her spoon, watching the honey fall in a cascade down into the pan, and smiles a calm smile. “Mom? I had a nightmare the other night. I couldn’t get any words out, my throat wouldn’t work, and I was so scared. I just needed to say something and I couldn’t and so I was trapped, really trapped. I woke up and thought, ‘God, is this what he feels like?’ Does he tell you what it’s like?”

  Renny looks in the cupboard and pulls out a can of green beans. Back when she loved her family, and there was a family to love, and back when Ben was there to smile over a dinner gone right, she grew beans and froze them herself. She hasn’t had a garden in a decade; all that work for naught. None of those fresh vegetables helped his brain. Or his heart. “Sometimes he talks about it. Once he said it was like being on a horse. First, like the disease was like being on a horse that was walking. And then trotting. And it is turning into a gallop. An out-and-out run.” She leans to look out the window. “And I am not a mean martyr. I have a fundamental spark. Jess does not. In that way, she reminds me of Rachel, and I worry she’s going to end up like Rachel.”

  “Well, Mom, it’s nice you care. Just be gentler.”

  “Gentle gets nothing done.” Renny looks out the window and sees the horses gallop up to stand in the vee of the fence. Their breath mists out, one of them shakes, and one nuzzles the other’s hindquarters. They are involved in some sort of game, known only to them, and it makes them happy, and that makes them beautiful.

  Carolyn looks over her shoulder and sees them too. “So, Mom? Dad sees clearly that it’s coming? The disease is galloping into his mind?”

  “I think more that his mind is galloping into the disease.”

  Carolyn pours a canister of oats into a roasting pan and then a bag of almonds, then pours the melted honey over the oats and almonds. “And so he knows.”

  “What? That he’s dying? Dying a first death, before a second? Yes, he knows. He knows it’s going to be horrible. And it is, Carolyn. It is.” And suddenly, deeply, so much that i
t makes her gasp, Renny wants to tell Carolyn about the sodium pentobarbital. She opens her mouth, closes it. Feels her throat tighten. No, she won’t. She won’t do it. Because it’s Ben’s choice, and because it is that much of a hell, and Ben is trapped and scared and she can feel it. And because some silence is a gift. Instead, she finds herself saying, “I’ll watch your damn dog. While you go to Mexico.”

  The corner of Carolyn’s mouth lifts, but still she is silent. A few of the oats fall out and sizzle at the bottom of the oven.

  “It bothers me too, Mom. That Ray has been let out of prison. ‘Earned time.’ We all wish for a bit of that.” Then she whispers, “That’s why I need to go, right now, and get out of here. If Ray is free, I need to go. I swear, in certain ways, that guy keeps killing us all.”

  BEN

  Is it possible they know? He stands in the living room, trying to size up the situation. Renny is speaking to Carolyn in a calm, cadenced voice, and the surprise of this startles him into stopping. He has always thought of himself as an alert deer, ears lifted for the details, to avoid Renny’s usual oncoming crashness. He smiles, and then smiles because he has not, after all, forgotten to smile, and because he has not forgotten how to observe and mark the measure of a man or a moment.

  He has had his entire life to prepare for death, and he remembers, as a boy, a preacher telling the congregation exactly that. He sat between his parents in the small church in Greeley and stared at the filtered light and his mother took his hand. When you arrive at the door of death, the preacher had said, your main job is to open the door with courage and the sure knowledge that you have lived well and that you have become yourself. Let death find you with your chin up, your eyes steady.

  His mind holds that moment perfectly; not one detail is missing. On this topic, he can think clearly. It pains him that he has fallen short of that goal. Fear bloomed as he got older, bloomed more at his diagnosis. From time to time, too, he has failed in courage. When his daughter died, when he built his cabin. Those were times he flinched. Perhaps the preacher could have advised him on what to do in that case. Perhaps the younger version of him should have been less confident that he’d meet death with his chin up.

  He and Renny have never healed. They had loved each other, when the ranch was new and they worked, side by side, buying cattle, putting up fences, doctoring calves. Then came their newborn daughters, who grew into toddlers that waddled after chickens and threw rocks at fresh piles of manure. Then their daughters grew up, arguing themselves through their teenage years, and yet so interesting that he felt as if he could stare at them forever. Then one died. He built a cabin. He and Renny lived on opposite ends of the ranch. This is when he felt both the lovely grace of solitude and the frightening qualities of empty sound. It feels now like a sin. He should have said he was sorry. He’d been too stubborn and cowardly to ever properly apologize, and this has been the greatest sin of all.

  Five years ago, Renny tells him. He stares into the kitchen and stares at the spot on the floor where they all got axed apart. Like a round of wood being split. Rachel’s pickup in the driveway, her running to him, her mouth open trying to speak. Ben was frozen. He had been reading to Renny while she cooked. He stood. His mouth opened. Rachel’s eyes, so scared, so full of suffering. He looked past Rachel to Ray. He’ll never understand that. How he stood, and froze, and looked. And even after the gun shattered the air and his daughter still, he was frozen.

  His daughter that died left behind two kids, and he remembers their names today, Jess and Billy, which gives him the rotting sense of hope that his mind will clear and words will come and appear on his tongue as they should, and that the tip of his tongue will grow back as it should. The daughter he hears talking in the kitchen raised her own two kids, plus Rachel’s two kids, like a mother cow that has a grafted calf or two. A good mother.

  He thinks to go into the kitchen, with the two talking women, but he stays put, hiding. They’re talking about him. He stops, stares at his slippers. He’s wearing a colorful Western shirt, with button snaps, because they are easier. Gray pants. Yes, he is all dressed.

  But something is missing, something important. He backs up, quietly, turns back around, toward the bedroom. Something is at the edges of his mind, but he can’t quite catch it. Then he remembers: There is one bad thing he’s done he can’t undo, and one he can.

  He has to write it down before he forgets. He finds a notebook on his dresser and a pencil and writes it:

  1.Genes. Watershed. Can’t fix.

  2.Ray. Water runs backward. Fix.

  He sits on his bed and stares at the dark wall of his bedroom. Ranchers know genes; he bred his cattle to exhibit certain traits. In fact, he knew more about EPDs than most anyone. Expected Progeny Differences. How to determine the traits of the sire’s offspring. He knows that he has bad DNA. Bad genes. He has been the watershed. He has been the source. And god how he hopes that the water has been pure. He never meant.

  The other danger. Ray.

  He needs the slip of paper that tells him where and how to get there. He stands up and digs around until he finds it, in yesterday’s jeans, and slips it into the pocket of the pants he’s wearing. He must be careful.

  Funny how he wasn’t angry with Ray while Ray was in Cañon City prison. Not angry, just sad. His brain never considered Ray much. When he was in prison, Ray used to write notes of apology and memories and excuses and send them to Ben and Renny. Renny used to tack them up at Violet’s Grocery alongside the HAY FOR SALE and FREE KITTENS signs and it was some need of hers to communicate this thing that was tearing her apart. But he found it inappropriate, as he did most of Renny’s behaviors, and he would drive to the grocery and take them down. That he remembers.

  But then last week they heard that Ray had been released. Del told them. Second-degree murder charges, is that what they were called? A class 2 Felony. Time was up. Or not really. How many years for one life? But there was earned time. Good behavior. No one, not even the judge, can accurately calculate the sentence. Like a math problem that can’t be solved. Like a life. No one can calculate. No one knows. Del had sat them down at the kitchen table and said all this. He had presented them with a waxed bag with two Fern’s Very Famous Cinnamon Rolls and had said, “Renny and Ben, I wanted to tell you. Jess and Billy know. You’ve probably been notified, or you will be. But I wanted to tell you myself. Ray’s been released from prison. His time was up. He’s going to Greeley—” and here Del glances at Ben, because Ben was born and raised in Greeley, and then he adds, “Just thought you should know.”

  A switch flipped, then. Ben couldn’t help it, but he started having conversations with Ray in his head each day, all day. He says, Out, Ray, out, but Ray is still in his brain. Ever since Del told them, he has been walking and saying Out Out Out and walking more and saying Out Out Out and yet Ray has moved into his brain. Ray has moved into his brain, right next to the disease.

  The conversations fill his mind like chickadees coming in for bread crumbs, always there, always there even when you try to shoo them away.

  Out, coward.

  Out, bully.

  Out, small man. Drinking too much. Depressed. Feckless. So you say. But why? Because you’re selfish.

  Too lazy to be a good human. Lazy coward.

  He heard something in that meeting he goes to that is not true. The woman said that it’s very hard for people losing their memory to realize when they’re moving into the new stage, the one where you don’t remember that you have a remembering problem. But that is not true. He can tell. It is happening now, and he can tell how little time he has left. He knows. He knows he has to hurry. So that he can have this conversation for real. He wants to hold Ray up to his face and say it all. He will tell Ray all these conversations and then they will be out of his brain.

  He will finally say these words. He will get them out of his brain. Because courage is fear that has said its prayers. The perfect words come to him in a flash.

  He
has already prayed and asked forgiveness from the universe. If he has upset the natural order of things. He has nearly forgiven himself. He has always been a gentle man, and in part, that has been the problem. He must rise up and be fierce for once. He has asked forgiveness for his gentleness and not fighting more for Rachel to come home, for not fighting when Rachel raced into his house, for not noticing fast enough that Ray had a gun and was raising it, and for tackling Ray three seconds too late (exactly three because he has counted so many times), and that he has not done more good in his life. At least he can do this.

  He has this disease with his brain—he can’t remember what it’s called—and he knows it gets worse. That’s why Renny moved him back to the farmhouse, made him leave his little cabin. He remembers that room, how Renny found scraps of paper in his kitchen and stared at them a long time and said oh god, oh god. The names of his friends and the vet and his address and his hometown. He heard oh god oh god and he had been ashamed and scared. That is when she took him to the doctor who studies brains and she dumped the slips on the doctor’s desk. The doctor asked him so many questions that his head hurt and then the doctor said, “I’m sorry,” and then talked about a drug called Aricept (for some reason he can remember that) but he had not taken it because Renny, at her computer, had read things that made her worry.

  “A stupid crapshoot,” she had said.

  “A stupid crapshoot,” he says now. Meaning not just the brain drug, but life. Although he reminds himself over and over that he got dealt a fairly good hand. Not great, but good. He could do without this disease, and he could do without a dead daughter, but the rest has been a fairly good hand.