The Space Between the Stars

by Anne Corlett

  “It was something you could control,” Lowry finished.

  Jamie didn’t answer for a long moment. All those times she’d battened down the hatches against her mother, her stepmother, Daniel, she’d always felt under siege. Like her silence was something that had been forced upon her, not something she’d chosen. Had there really been a stubborn little nub of satisfaction, right down at the bottom of it all? She turned over a couple of memories, examining them. Daniel, after the baby, begging her to talk to him. Her stepmother, coming up with idea after idea for things they could do together.

  “Yes,” she said. “I think that was it.”

  “Understandable enough,” the old man said. “And the situation wasn’t of your making.”

  “No.” Jamie’s throat was dry. They were approaching the heart of it, and she wasn’t sure she was ready to slice open those old stitches and expose the damage she’d done. She had to force the words out. “But there’s something else.”

  Lowry waited.

  Jamie rubbed her face again, her breath shuddering in her chest. “I’d been here for part of the summer, and my father asked me if I wanted to stay longer. My mother had been really hard to live with. My father must have realized.” She glanced at the folder on the desk. “Actually, it was probably my stepmother who picked up on it.”

  “Were you close to her?” Lowry asked.

  “No. But I think I probably should have been.” She brushed her hand over the page of handwritten notes. “Anyway, my father asked me if I wanted to spend more time here. I said yes, and he talked to my mother about it. They had a blazing row. I heard the whole thing, and when she put me on the spot, asking me if I really wanted to leave her on her own, I said yes. I think I’d just had enough, so I gave her a straight answer for once. She went mad, screaming at me, telling me I was breaking her heart, saying I hated her, that I’d probably be happy if she were dead.”

  She looked down at her hands. This was it. The hard little lump she’d always been able to feel at the heart of her life. She had to say it. She’d come this far, and the story felt like it had a sort of momentum.

  She looked up again, meeting Lowry’s compassionate gaze. “I said I wished she were dead. I said I did hate her.”

  “You didn’t mean it, though.”

  She gave a half smile, bitter as old blood. “I think I did. In that moment, I really did.”

  “What happened?” Lowry asked, but he must have figured it out by now. She’d given him enough to piece it together. Maybe he thought she needed to say it.

  “She slapped my face. Knocked me right across the room. Then she cried and tried to hold me and said she was sorry. I wouldn’t let her touch me.” She gave another bitter smile. “Not much change there, to be honest. But I wouldn’t talk to her or look at her. I called my dad to come and get me, and I moved in there for the rest of the summer. I didn’t tell them what had happened, just that we’d had an argument. When school began, I refused to go home. All hell broke loose. She kept calling and calling and I wouldn’t speak to her. She got a lawyer, who must have told her there was no way of forcing a fourteen-year-old to live with her if they didn’t want to.”

  “You must have been very angry with her,” Lowry said.

  “That’s the thing,” Jamie said. “I don’t remember feeling that angry. I just felt heavy and stuck. It was like a sort of inertia. Like this was the situation, and it was just easier if it didn’t change and I didn’t have to deal with any of it.”

  “There are different sorts of anger,” Lowry said. “Not all of it’s about screaming and shouting and hating.”

  “Maybe,” Jamie said. “Anyway, there were a couple of days when she didn’t call, and then two police officers came to the door here and said she was dead.”

  “Did she kill herself?”

  Jamie gave a small, tight smile. “No. Not quite. She fell down the stairs drunk and broke her neck. Doctor said there was so much alcohol in her system she probably hadn’t been sober for days. So there you go. I said I wished she would die, and she obliged me.” Lowry was silent, and she gave him a mocking, cynical look. “Isn’t this the bit where you tell me it wasn’t my fault?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Maybe it would have happened anyway. Maybe it wouldn’t. All I can say is that nothing that happens is down to just one person, or just one action. It was part of life. Yours, and hers, and your father’s.”

  “Part of life’s rich pattern,” she said. “Is that honestly what you’re telling me? That it meant something?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying at all. If there is a pattern, it’s way beyond our understanding. Maybe we’re just not clear-sighted enough. Too much getting in the way.”

  “If none of it means anything, then what’s the point?” Jamie was suddenly bone-tired, as though she’d run a marathon in the time it had taken to tell him that short, sad story.

  “Life is its own point,” Lowry said. “It’s just a series of moments, some of them memorable, some of them not. There’s no redemption but what we’re prepared to grant to ourselves. No point when we’re finished becoming what we’re going to be. There’s just this breath, and the next one, and the next one. Each one of those breaths, each of those moments helps to shape us. And then there’s other people. Sometimes we figure out a way of rubbing along together. Sometimes we break someone else, or they break us.”

  “Then maybe it’s better to keep your distance. If you don’t get too close, then you can’t hurt one another.”

  “Really?” Lowry gave her a keen look. “Tell me this, then. How long did you stay with Daniel?”

  “And look how that worked out.”

  Lowry raised an eyebrow. “You’re telling me you were with him all that time and didn’t have a single happy moment?”

  Jamie gave an irritable shake of her head. “Of course not. We used to be happy. But it didn’t turn out well in the long run.”

  “The long run’s not what it’s about,” Lowry said. “Not from where I’m standing anyway. It’s the now that you feel. Everything else is just what you imagine, or what you remember, and that’s only secondhand living.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “I can’t tell you that,” Lowry said with a faint smile. “I can only tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to Lindisfarne, I’m going to grow vegetables. Raise chickens. Think about things I haven’t taken time to think about for a long time.” His smile faded. “Help Rena, if I can. What about you?”

  “I don’t know. Shouldn’t I feel differently about it all now that I’ve come back here and told you what happened? Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work?”

  Lowry smiled again. “Do you need me to answer that?”

  Jamie found an answering smile. “Just another moment, right? I don’t even know why I told you all that.”

  “It’s the preacher effect,” Lowry said with a quick grin. “It makes people come over all confessional.” He grew serious. “I think it’s because they’re not really talking to you. They’re talking to whatever god they believe in. And that means they’re really talking to themselves.”

  Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Shouldn’t you be telling them that God is listening when they talk?”

  “The thing about being a preacher is that everyone fills in the gaps in what you say. They decide for themselves what you believe in. And most people assume that’s a single, all-powerful god, sitting up there on a cloud and watching us all run about making mistakes.”

  “It’s kind of part of the job description, isn’t it?”

  Lowry shook his head. “Religion’s about what you do, not what you believe. God’s the smallest part of it. If there were a god up there watching us, and we were all living good and generous lives and looking out for one another, then he . . .” He gave another small smile. “Or she, for that matter, could just shut up shop
. They’d have no purpose anymore.”

  “You don’t believe?”

  “I do believe,” Lowry said. “But if you mean in the traditional sense, then no, that’s not where my faith lies. Not anymore. Maybe it never did. I believe that people make their own gods, out of whatever they have to hand.”

  Jamie looked out at the shifting face of the ocean.

  “What about me?” she said. “If I were in the market for a god, what would you suggest I use?”

  Lowry smiled. “This place,” he said. “The sea, the sky, the people who came here with you. You build your gods out of the same materials you use to build your life.”

  “All this way, and you’re telling me I still have work to do?” she said, trying to make a joke of it.

  “Always,” he said, and walked away, pausing at the door. “We’ll be on the beach, when you’re done here.”

  CHAPTER

  25

  When Lowry had gone, Jamie moved about the room, picking things up and putting them back down again, pieces of the conversation replaying in her mind. There was a dog barking somewhere. Not far away. Some family pet, wandering and confused. A pause, and then it started up again, closer this time, a flurry of noise that carried an impression of a frantically waggling rear end and a thumping tail. And was that a voice, almost lost under the barking? Lowry was no doubt being subjected to the overexuberant attentions of a lonely dog.

  She looked down at the page again.

  I’m getting this wrong.

  A footstep echoed in the hallway, and she turned, expecting to see Lowry. Instead a small tan-and-white dog came waddling in, lopsided and arthritic, tail thumping from side to side.

  And then her stepmother stepped into the room and said, “I knew it would be you.” She was leaning on a walking stick, and her hair was lighter and thinner than it should have been. She should have been steel-gray, ash-gray, not this pale, wispy shade of age. “Of all my girls, I knew you’d be the one who came home.”

  “Home?” Jamie said, irrelevantly, her voice sounding small and far away. She shook her head. “I don’t . . . I mean, I thought . . .”

  Then she was shaking: great shuddering tremors that started somewhere deep inside her. She put her hands to her face, hiding her eyes for a moment. When she took them away, she’d be alone. This wasn’t real.

  When she lowered her hands her stepmother was still standing there.

  Those scribbled words took on life, echoing through Jamie’s thoughts as though her stepmother had spoken them out loud.

  I’m getting this wrong.

  No. She’d never said it, but she should have. Years ago, she should have turned to this woman and said, It’s not you. This is just the way it is.

  The space between them felt wrong. The thought of taking the first step was like falling, but someone had to cross the room.

  She took a step, and then another, and another, and then she had her arms around her stepmother, and the other woman was holding on to her.

  Thank you . . . knew you’d . . . sorry . . . love you . . . love you . . . love you.

  They fit together better than Jamie remembered, the older woman curled against Jamie’s more sturdy frame. There were still places where bones knocked against one another, or where a curve and a hollow didn’t quite slot together. But it was close enough.

  They held on to one another for a long, long moment, the older woman gradually becoming more real and solid in Jamie’s arms, like a developing picture, slowly warming into focus. She could feel her stepmother’s heart beating hard inside her too-slight frame. She could feel how close her bones were to the surface, how thinly her skin was stretched over those bones. She could feel things that shouldn’t be there, hard swellings running to either side of her stepmother’s spine.

  She pulled back slightly.

  “What . . .” she began, but her stepmother eased herself away.

  “Can’t have everything,” she said, with a faint smile. “Surviving one thing doesn’t mean that something else won’t come calling.”

  “Is it . . .”

  “Yes, it’s cancer.” Her stepmother was brisk. “I was in remission, but it came back a few weeks ago. I found a lump in my neck, and a few days later they were all over.” She gave another little smile. “Like it didn’t want me to be in any doubt about its intentions this time.”

  “No.” Jamie couldn’t work out what was happening. The moment was the wrong shape, and she couldn’t get hold of it. All the space between them, all the odds they’d beaten, and her stepmother was telling her it might be just a fleeting instant before the statistics won out after all. “We can go to Newcastle. The hospital. I can find the right drugs, work out . . .”

  “Jamie.” Her stepmother put her hand on Jamie’s arm.

  “It went into remission once. We can beat it. We can.”

  “Jamie.”

  No. She tried to say it again, but there was a hard lump in her own throat, as if her stepmother’s cancer were contagious.

  Her stepmother’s arms came around her again, gentle and patient, and for once it didn’t feel wrong to let someone hold her as she cried.

  After a few moments she lifted her head and wiped her arm across her face.

  “Sorry,” she said, with another deep, shuddering breath. “It’s just . . . I came all this way, and I never thought you’d be here.” She rubbed her face again. “How did you survive?”

  “I was in isolation,” her stepmother said. “And I suppose I was so full of system-boosting drugs that even the virus didn’t stand a chance.” She gave Jamie a sad, tender look. “You were alone, weren’t you? You left him.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I spoke to him on the comm,” her stepmother said. “I’d written to you on Alegria. Daft and old-fashioned, I know. But I was telling you I was going to die, and it didn’t feel like something I should say in a mail. Daniel opened it, and called me. He told me you’d gone. That was just before the virus hit Alegria. When we had the first outbreaks here on Earth, I tried to send you a comm message, to say good-bye, but it cut off.”

  “That was from you?”

  Her stepmother nodded. “It got through?”

  “Just a blank message. I thought it was Daniel.”

  “Maybe he survived too,” her stepmother said. “If . . .”

  “He did.” Jamie looked away. “He’s on Alegria.”

  Her stepmother nodded and didn’t ask any more. “I need to sit down,” she said.

  Jamie helped her to an armchair. The dog trotted over and lay down on her stepmother’s feet as the older woman looked up at Jamie.

  “I thought it would be you who made it back, if any of you did,” she said. “The other two . . .” Her voice broke slightly. “They weren’t good at being on their own. My fault, I think. But I thought perhaps you’d be strong enough.”

  “I wasn’t alone because I was strong. Pretty much the opposite.”

  “You were strong,” her stepmother said. “What you had to deal with—”

  “I didn’t deal with it.” Jamie cut across her. “Not by a long shot.”

  Her stepmother looked down at her hands, rubbing her thumb across one knuckle. The skin there was so fine that it looked translucent, the bone almost glinting through. “We just made things worse, didn’t we?”

  “No.” Jamie tripped over the tail end of her stepmother’s question. It suddenly felt like they needed to say all these things as fast as they could. In case there’s not another time. “You did everything you could. It’s just that . . .” She stopped, gathering her thoughts, feeling for a way through their shared and tangled history. “I couldn’t talk about it,” she said eventually. “That’s all.”

  “I should have realized,” her stepmother said. “I should have let you talk about it in your own time.”

 
Jamie shook her head. “There was no my own time,” she said. “What happened, it just happened and I don’t think there were any magic words you could have said that would have made things any different.”

  Her stepmother was about to speak, but then she shifted in her seat, her face creasing with pain.

  “Are you all right?”

  “My back.” The older woman’s breathing was growing labored and she started to scrabble at the arm of her chair. “Can you help me? Jamie, please, I need to sit up a bit.”

  Jamie slid a hand around her stepmother’s back, not sure whether she was going to hurt her, and between the two of them they shuffled her up a little.

  “That’s fine, that’s fine.” The older woman drew a rattling breath. “Just give me a minute.”

  “Are you okay?” Jamie was hovering, not sure what to do. “Can I get you anything?”

  “No.” Her stepmother’s breathing was steadying, and she relaxed her grip on the arm of her chair. “Sorry. If I don’t get into the chair just right, my back spasms. I keep thinking I’m not going to be able to get back up again and I’m going to die here, stuck in the chair. Sorry. What were you saying? My memory’s playing up a bit. I keep phasing out.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Jamie said. “I’m here. How have you managed on your own this long?”

  “I haven’t been alone. There are a couple of monks out at Lindisfarne. They’ve been making sure I’m all right.”

  A voice spoke from the doorway. “Jamie?”

  She looked up to see Lowry.

  “Hello again,” her stepmother said, then added to Jamie, “We met outside.”

  “Finn’s getting a bit restless,” Lowry said. “I’m assuming you’re not coming with us, so I wonder if it’s worth getting settled in here, so he knows what’s what.”

  He’ll be the only one who does, then, Jamie thought. Aloud she said, “I’ll be there in a little bit.” Then a thought struck her. “Who’s with him? Callan?”

  Lowry shook his head. “He’s gone with Gracie to check that hotel for a comms link. Rena’s there.”