November Sky
Page 24
“Believe me, darling, those attacks are permanently a part of the past. I was terrified when the car kept going faster and faster downhill, and I couldn’t brake. My last thoughts were of you before I lost consciousness: that you mustn’t think that in any way I’d intentionally caused the accident and left you. Then everything turned black.”
His statement had been confirmed by the police. An English couple traveling right behind him on the steep mountain road said Nick had kept strictly to the speed limit. It turned out the brakes on his rental car were defective. And Lisa, the production assistant, told me in a quivering voice in the hospital that she had a terribly guilty conscience because she hadn’t felt well the day of the accident. Nick noticed and asked her about it. When she admitted she had a dreadful migraine, he made a snap decision to get into the car for her to get the food. And came within a whisker of being killed . . .
I was overcome by the conflicting feelings the words in his letter generated. His beautiful declaration of love moved me. But at the same time, I again felt the horror over his accident and everything we’d gone through together. I was painfully aware that I could just as well have found and read that letter in the knowledge that Nick was actually lying in some cemetery. A lump formed in my throat as I attempted to explain to my husband why I’d taken the envelope out of the box.
He smiled. “I don’t blame you for being curious. But your face is chalk-white. Let’s get some air.”
He stood up, pushed the curtains aside, and opened the large living room windows. I breathed the cold air deep into my lungs. The dizziness that had seized me vanished. I slowly got to my feet, letter in hand, and went over to the window. I looked out into the frosty November night and high up into the velvety black sky, where the full moon shone round and white and a sea of innumerable stars sparkled.
Nick walked over behind me. He put his hands on my belly, right where our baby I was going to tell him about that evening had been growing for several weeks. I felt the consoling warmth of his body at my back, his breath on my neck, and I silently thanked fate for his mental recovery and survival. I fervently wished we’d have many happy years together with our future children. At that moment, one of the countless stars in the firmament fell in an arc, leaving a trail of light behind before going out. While I stared outside in amazement, Nick carefully took the letter out of my hand, tore it up, and let the pieces of paper drift out the window and into the dark garden.
“Our bad times are finally past, sweetheart. We don’t need that anymore.”
I protested, “But it was such a beautiful declaration of love.”
He took me by the shoulders and turned me around to face him. Then he kissed me and said, “You don’t need it in writing that I love you. I’ll prove it to you in reality as often as you wish.”
“True love is never all spent. The more you give, the more you have left.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars
About the Author
Photo © 2014 Marleen Reichenberg
Marleen Reichenberg was born and raised near Munich, Germany. Before publishing her first novel in 2012, Reichenberg studied law and worked for several years as a lawyer. She currently lives in southern Germany with her husband and two children.
About the Translator
Photo © Nina Chapple
Gerald Chapple is an award-winning translator of German literature. He received his doctorate at Harvard and went on to teach German and comparative literature at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. He has been translating contemporary German-language authors for over forty years. His prose work includes two books by the Austrian writer Barbara Frischmuth, The Convent School and Chasing After the Wind, completed with cotranslator James B. Lawson; Michael Mitterauer’s probing history of Europe from 600 to 1600, Why Europe? The Medieval Origins of Its Special Path; Anita Albus’s wonderfully idiosyncratic book On Rare Birds; and Bernadette Calonego’s English-debut thriller, The Zurich Conspiracy—plus three other titles for AmazonCrossing and 47North. He lives in Dundas, Ontario, with his wife, Nina, an architectural historian. When not translating, he can usually be found studying birds, butterflies, and dragonflies; reading; or listening to classical music.