The Space Between the Stars

by Anne Corlett

  “Do you want to come with me later?” he said. “To dump the vials?”

  “Okay,” she said, and walked off toward the beach, where Finn was drawing pictures in the sand, the sea making little rushes toward him and pulling back just short.

  • • •

  The sun was setting by the time the concrete was set. They took the boat out to a deep trench just off the coastal shelf. Callan wrestled the bucket over the side, and they watched it sink, faster than Jamie had expected, as though the sea were in a hurry to swallow it.

  “It feels like someone should say something,” she said. “Like a burial at sea.”

  “Good riddance,” said Callan, and he turned back to the helm.

  As they headed back, the sky was growing heavy with a thick layer of cloud, and the air was ominously still and muggy.

  “I might sit out for a while,” Jamie said.

  He glanced up at the sky. “Looks like it’s going to rain.”

  “You don’t have to join me.”

  “It was just an observation,” he said mildly, his eyebrows going up at her tone.

  “Sorry.” She glanced away. “I’m just . . .” She made an incoherent gesture.

  “I know. Look, I brought some beers back from the pub. We could probably both do with a drink.”

  “Are you asking me on a date?” she said, and immediately wished she hadn’t. It was all that shock and stress draining out of her, and leaving her a little silly and reckless. “I mean . . .”

  He gave her a quick grin. “Yes, you’ve caught me out. It’s my best seduction technique. Get a girl shot, then offer her beer. And a patch of damp sand to sit on.”

  “You didn’t get me shot.”

  His smile faded. “I didn’t do much to stop it. I should have just gone straight for the gun.”

  “It’s over.” Somehow saying that to him made her believe it more herself. “You get the beers. I’ll get the rug.”

  Finn was in the kitchen with her stepmother, who seemed to be giving him a cookery lesson. Jamie stepped lightly past the door, not sure why she felt the need to sneak about. She retrieved the sea blanket from her room and went quietly back downstairs and out of the house.

  When she got back to the harbor, Callan was holding a couple of open bottles of beer. They went down to the band of smooth sand just clear of the waterline, and Jamie shook out the blanket, wincing as the movement pulled at her shoulder.

  “Here.” Callan caught the corner and laid it out. “It’s heavy.”

  “It was my grandfather’s. We always used it on the beach. When it was blowing a gale we were the only ones who weren’t hanging on to our picnic rug to stop it from taking off.”

  “Was I supposed to provide a picnic?” He sat down on the rug.

  “The beers will do.” Jamie hesitated, not sure of the appropriate distance to put between them. That other night, out on the sea, being close had seemed right and natural, but neither of them had mentioned it the following day. Then events had intervened in the most dramatic of ways, and she wasn’t sure if the moment had been knocked aside, never to return. Rena was dead. Lowry was dead. She didn’t know what was left.

  Callan glanced up at her with a questioning look, and she pushed away the crowding thoughts and sat down, leaving a few careful inches of space between them. They sat in silence for a while, swigging their beer and watching the sea. Then Callan leaned back on his elbow and looked at her.

  “So do you think . . .” He broke off and held his hand out, palm up. “Rain.”

  A large drop landed on Jamie’s arm, and she looked up to see the sky blurring and the surface of the sea beginning to blister.

  “Picnic’s over, I guess.” Callan drained the last of his beer and sat up.

  Jamie wedged her bottle into the sand and brushed her hand over the rough burr of the rug. “My sisters and I used to flip the blanket over and get under it when it rained. With the oilskin side up. Everyone else would be running back to the campground and the cottages, and we’d be here, three humps under an oilskin rug. Everyone must have thought we were crazy.”

  Callan gave her a long, unreadable look, then tossed his empty bottle onto the soft sand behind them. “Here.” He caught hold of the edge of the rug and yanked it up over their heads. Their upper bodies were under cover, but their legs were sticking out. The rain was growing heavier, hammering down hard enough to leave round dents in the smooth sand. Jamie’s jeans were growing stiff and heavy, and she made an unsuccessful attempt to tuck her legs up.

  “I don’t fit as well as I used to,” she said.

  Callan looked up at the edge of the rug, considering. “Okay,” he said, sliding in behind her, so that he was lying down in the fold of the rug. “There you go.”

  “Well, that works for you,” Jamie said.

  “Plenty of room under here.” He nodded toward the patch of rug next to him.

  Jamie hesitated for a long moment, then let her breath out in a huff of resignation and lay down next to him, her injured shoulder uppermost. The top of the rug settled on top of them, leaving just a sliver of space through which she could see the rain flattening the surface of the sea. They were both lying on their sides, tucked together like spoons, and she felt him shift so that his chest was pressed against the curve of her back. A few drops of rain ricocheted under the edge of the rug, splashing onto her bare arms.

  She reached over to tuck the rug down, but Callan’s arm came over her, pulling her against him.

  “Plenty of room,” he said again, quieter this time.

  She lay breathing in the familiar musk of the old rug. She thought she could feel Callan’s heart beating where his body was tight against hers. Then he lifted his head a little, leaning over her, his breath warm on her face. For a few heartbeats she lay still. All those moments when they’d glanced off one another, never quite finding a fit. She felt him breathe out again, and she knew all she had to do was turn her head. A small movement, but it didn’t seem small.

  The next breath.

  As she turned and kissed him, the rug shifted, letting another flurry of rain whip in. She tried to roll around, to put her back to the gap so that she could keep on kissing him without worrying about the rain, but her shoulder jarred against him, and she breathed in sharply.

  He pulled back and looked at her. “You okay?”

  She nodded. “Just my shoulder.”

  “You want to go inside?”

  She shook her head. “It’s still raining.”

  He searched her face for a moment, then nodded and leaned in to kiss her again, starting at her mouth and moving along her jaw and around to the back of her neck, lifting her hair so that he could work his way from vertebra to vertebra down the line of her spine until her shirt got in the way and he had to abandon that exploration in favor of another. One hand twined in her hair, while the other slid around to the front, drawing small circles over her ribs, each one drifting a little lower. When he reached the waistband of her jeans, she stiffened a little.

  “Okay?” he said again.

  She nodded, not trusting her voice. As he eased the button of her jeans undone, she lifted her hip slightly, trying to help him but triggering an awkward moment of close-quarters wriggling, all colliding limbs and tangled clothing. Eventually she managed to kick free of her jeans, and somehow he extracted himself from his, and then there was that first shock of unfamiliar skin on skin, but it passed so swiftly that she almost forgot this was the first time they’d been here. As his leg slid in between hers, she took another slow breath in, and on the outbreath she leaned back into him, until they were pressed so close together that the next step seemed easy and inevitable.

  • • •

  Afterward they lay quietly, his arms wrapped tight around her.

  “The rain’s stopping.” He lifted the edge of the rug to look out.r />
  Jamie pulled his hand back. “It might start again. Better stay here for a while.”

  He kissed the back of her neck. “Any idea what we could do?” She could feel the smile in his voice, and she felt her chest expanding, like some constricting bands of tension had fallen away.

  “No clue,” she said. “Game of I Spy? Quick round of—”

  She broke off with a gasp of laughter as his hands created an instant distraction. Then he said her name, low and quiet, and she didn’t feel like laughing anymore.

  The rain stopped, leaving only the sound of the sea as a low, insistent soundtrack.

  Funny, she thought. All those millions of miles, all those worlds, and all she’d ever felt was too much, too close. And then it all spiraled and twisted down to just one moment, in one little corner of a world she’d tried to leave, her body wrapped so close around another that you couldn’t have slid even a breath in between them.

  She thought that if she didn’t say it now, she might never say it at all. But the only word there was for this didn’t seem right. Not for all the bits and pieces of him and of her and of the two of them together. So she told him slantwise, in fragments and snatches of words, in random moments and random thoughts. Seeing him for the first time. The bullet glinting in his side. When he spoke softly to Finn. When he said no, wanting her. His ship, falling from the sky. His hand on her hip in a night-sunk garden. No pattern, no conclusions, just This is how it is.

  And when she was done, he smiled—she could feel the shape of it against her neck—and brushed the line of her body with his palm, the calluses snagging at her skin, and she thought, Yes, that too.

  She often rides on the beach in the early morning, when the tide has washed the sand clean and no one has been out to break up that smooth expanse.

  She’s tried to persuade Callan to learn to ride, but he just says, Old dog, new tricks.

  It’s like flying, she once told him, but he just said, It’s not, and turned away. She thought he was angry, but that evening, when she took Emily up the beach to Bamburgh, he brought his dinghy and raced her along the shore.

  The old man, he calls himself. But he feels younger to Jamie than he did before. Maybe it’s because the life he lived has gone, and taken years with it. Being with him isn’t what she thought it would be. There’s more room in it than she remembers from those years with Daniel. Sometimes he goes off in his boat for days, alone, or with old Gray, the fisherman from Lindisfarne, and it never occurs to her to think that his going away has anything to do with her.

  There are more people filtering in all the time, seeking the sea, just like Lowry said. They buried Lowry on Lindisfarne. Rena too. Their graves are next to one another, in the shadow of the ruined abbey, and when you sit there you can hear the sea. In those first days, Jamie felt like the world had lost some of its gravity. She hadn’t realized how the old preacher had held them all together, keeping them in a loose orbit around one another. With him gone, it felt as though they were all just passing through, and for a while Jamie wondered if there was any reason to stay. There was her stepmother, of course, but they both knew that reason would fall away sometime.

  As it turns out, the older woman is still with them. Her life is unraveling, growing thin and flimsy, but she still sits out on the patio overlooking the sea, wrapped in blankets and propped with cushions. She’s tired, she says. Almost ready to go. But not yet. Not quite yet.

  A fortnight or so after the night on the turbines, a couple of hikers turned up and never left, and a week later a boatful of people who spoke no English. Brother Xavier set up a school on the island, and now they can talk, a little. Odd words, complicated gestures, and a lot of smiling and nodding.

  Gracie came back after a few weeks. She’d met a woman who was trying to get an old steam engine working, and now it runs down the eastern coastline, bringing a surprisingly steady trickle of survivors into Alnwick. Whenever they turn up, Elsie mails Jamie on the network she set up, and someone goes down to meet them. If Jamie goes she always gives Walton a wide berth, although she sometimes thinks they should go and check on the old people. But not yet. Not just yet.

  It was a few weeks after Lowry and Rena died that Jamie saw the shuttle. It arced through the sky early one morning, dipping low as it disappeared into the west. That evening a group of people turned up, carrying few possessions and a story of a failed attempt to make the old world live again. When they started to disperse, a figure detached from the rear of the group, hanging back as though unsure she was welcome.

  Mila was thinner than Jamie remembered her, and more nervous, her story emerging in short bursts. After each flurry of words she’d stop and bite her lip and look over her shoulder. After she’d been there a while, Jamie asked her, not sure she wanted to know the answer, if she’d seen Daniel.

  “They all looked the same,” Mila said. “The ones in charge. Most of them stayed, I think. The ones who were left.”

  Mila went on to Lindisfarne with a couple of other survivors, but after a few days she returned. She said it was too quiet on the island. Jamie found her a cottage with a view of the sea, but she knew the girl didn’t always sleep there. One night she knocked on Callan’s door, when Jamie was with her stepmother. He didn’t tell Jamie exactly what words were spoken, but she thought his no was probably a kind one. Afterward Mila cried and told Jamie she was sorry, and Jamie found that it wasn’t too much of a hardship to hold her until she was quiet.

  There’s a chill in the air this morning, and Emily is sluggish. He doesn’t want to get his feet wet in the tongue of seawater lying across their path, and he sidesteps to avoid a line of marks on the sand. He never likes stepping in other hoofprints. Jamie doesn’t know why.

  She can always tell who’s been out before her. There’s a pattern and a language to the prints, but she doesn’t recognize the shape of these. And they’re coming from the far end of the beach, not from behind her. They end at the edge of a smooth round of sand, marked by a circle that looks like it was drawn with a stick. In the middle there’s a name, one that she doesn’t know. Beside the circle there’s a scuff of human and equine prints, and then the regular line reasserts itself and heads off toward the dunes, as though something had attracted the unknown rider’s attention.

  Jamie looks down at the name. It seems like something a young person might do. There are a few youngsters here now. A couple of children who survived because they had no one to hold on to them, and a fifteen-year-old girl who doesn’t talk about the time before. Mila sometimes plays with the children on the beach. They skim stones badly, and build elaborate castles, their laughter an echo of all those summers from long ago.

  The children were a double-edged blessing at first. Jamie couldn’t look at them without performing an ever more complicated series of calculations, all circling around the same question. Which one would be left alone? Then one of the women from Alegria started to feel sick in the mornings, and suddenly the world was a different shape from what they’d thought, with a long line of possibility stretching out in front of them.

  Not long after the Alegrian group arrived, Callan went off with Gracie to find their shuttle. The engineer came back full of plans to get the fuel to the Phaeacian, but Callan was quiet and noncommittal. Jamie tried to speak to him about it, but he snapped at her before taking himself off on his boat. When he came back, he brought her a handful of sea glass as an oblique apology. One of the pieces of glass was rubbed to a smooth curve on one side, shot through with lines of amber and gold. On the other side there was a sharp break across the surface, the glass clear and unscuffed by the waves. She looked at it and thought, Yes, that’s it. That’s what we do to one another.

  That night she tried to write a letter to Daniel. After an hour or so the page was covered with crossings-out and half-formed thoughts. In the end she just wrote, I’m sorry. We didn’t fit. My fault, and yours, and other people too. I di
d love you, but it wasn’t what you needed it to be.

  She wanted to say more. She wanted to tell him about all those other versions of themselves, all those other somewheres where things were different. The somewhere they kept trying till it broke them. The somewhere they never tried in the first place. The somewhere they got it right. And between all those somewheres, there were worlds being born and galaxies dying, and the two of them were just tiny fragments of something they’d never understand.

  None of it sounded like something she’d ever say, so she left it alone, rolling the letter up and sliding it inside an old glass bottle, which she took down to the headland.

  She threw it into the outgoing tide, along with the amber sea glass. Perhaps they’d stay together, as some things did. Perhaps someone would find the bottle one day, with the piece of sea glass lying a few feet away, its crack smoothed away by the slow, patient grind of the ocean.

  • • •

  She looks at the name in the sand for a moment longer, wondering how it might fit into what they’ve made here. Then she hears her own name called, thin and faint across the waves. Callan is sailing close to the shore, and Emily pricks up his ears, anticipating a run. But today she smiles and shakes her head, waving Callan on. When he’s gone, she puts her hand on her stomach, and nudges Emily back around toward home.

  She’ll tell Callan soon. Not quite yet. When she tells him, they’ll both start trying to put the pieces together to find a pattern. They won’t be able to help themselves. And there’ll be all sorts of things that will have to be sorted out and fitted in.

  But for now it’s just a possibility, just a fragment of what’s left of them all, of that old zero point zero zero zero one statistic.

  And it’s enough. For now, it’s enough and so much more.

  Readers Guide for

  THE SPACE BETWEEN THE STARS