The Promise of Stardust (36 page)

When I came out, Jake was plodding down the slope with a soft-sided blue cooler slung over one shoulder and extending his other hand to me. He rolled his eyes. “It seemed like a good idea to meet here, but the media is all over the place. Let me handle them, though. Don't give them a statement again.”

I shook my head. “Shit, no. I don't want to talk to them. Particularly not to that crazy witch.”

“Remember what I said about watching your mouth. I want you to look like a choirboy, especially after you snapped at that reporter in the men's room. You're starting to look like a hothead.”

“I could have said ‘bitch.' ”

“Not funny. I'm serious. The last thing you need is to come off as a misogynist right now.”

Although I didn't appreciate being told to behave myself, I yanked open the back door and held it wide for him. “At least the property is big enough that they can't see the house from the road.”

He preceded me into the kitchen and then the living room, where I dropped the duffel bag with Elle's letters and diaries on the coffee table.

“The oversize property is the only good thing about living out in the boonies,” he said, opening the cooler. He pulled out two foil-covered sandwich-size blocks and a Caesar salad. “No one makes paninis like Yvette. Turkey artichoke.” He turned on the oven and threw them on the top rack. “So update me. You said your father-in-law is sober when you called me to come out. Have you heard any more about the Pro-Lifers hassling your mother?”

“Some little stuff at the hospital.”

A blank expression fell over his face and I supplied the details. “Seems some people don't want her to be their nurse. I can't say that I blame them right now.”

He nodded. “That's too bad. I used to like your mother. I think I liked the care packages she sent you at college even more than you did. Does she still make those butterscotch cookies?”

I shrugged. “Doubt she'd bake you a batch right now.”

“True. No matter. Yvette sent blueberry tarts. Just you wait.” He pulled out glazed tarts that looked like they belonged on the cover of a gourmet magazine, and they smelled even better.

Everyone wanted to feed me, but I'd lost my appetite when Elle fell, and even incredible food couldn't resurrect it. We sat down at the table and I ate a little anyhow.

Jake twisted his neck from side to side making it pop like a chiropractor had just cracked it. “When I said it might get ugly, I didn't expect this already, but it might get worse. I hope not.” He gestured toward the duffel. “Now, down to business. This is actually very simple; you hand me a stack of letters or diaries, and I read them. No associates, just one of your oldest friends, trying to save your unborn child.” Jake reached for one of the journals, and I almost felt sick to my stomach, like there was a Peeping Tom watching Elle through an open bedroom window.

“Simpler still,” I said. “I'll read them. Meanwhile, you go through the video.”

“Video?”

“DVD. Our wedding. You said you wanted to see any video of Elle, to see if there was anywhere she talked about family. I think there might be some from her niece's Baptism, too, but Christopher would have that.” I dumped a carton of Elle's books and notebooks in front of Jake. “And these are what Keisha found in Elle's office. She has notes embedded in the margins. Maybe there's something where Elle weighed in on abortion. I'll invest my time in her letters.”

“You could trust me to be respectful of her privacy.” He pulled out his glasses and sat down in the wing-backed chair.

I nodded once. “It's not a matter of trust, Jake. She didn't write the letters ever expecting anyone to read them.”

By the time he'd gone through Elle's college notes, he found one or two notations that he thought he could use. While he watched our wedding video, I left the room. I figured I'd look at it later, preferably alone.

Elle wasn't much for public displays of affection, but on that day we did kiss to glass clanking. Both of us teared up during our vows. It was nothing unusual, nothing which proved anything other than we were in love.

I sat on a wicker rocker on the front porch and flipped on the light to read one of her entries. She opened it by writing about NASA and some new anti-micrometeor technology they were developing. But a few paragraphs in, I started paying attention.

Woo
…
there I go again, getting dizzy
.

Elle's handwriting thinned out.

There, better now. I should tell you tonight. I'm a little worried about how you're going to react. You'll probably go into doctor overdrive, but it will be fine. I hope it will be fine. I don't want to lose another baby. It's happened so many times I feel like a murderer, like it's my fault. And it is—at least medically. But if I can bring this one into the world, maybe I can forgive myself for failing our others
.

She dated it the day she told me she was pregnant with Dylan.

I stepped off the porch and walked through the darkness to the garden Elle planted after Celina died. For a week that spring we drove from nursery to nursery, finding the plants she wanted for the flower bed. In the years between, the lilac bush we planted had grown huge. The tulips and crocuses burst up out of the ground every spring. Irises. Peonies. Daisies and black-eyed Susans. Echinacea. Sedum. Mums. We buried Dylan's ashes there, too. Elle sublimated her grief by pouring her love into this garden.

I crumbled beside it and wept for the family we should have had.

The screen door creaked open. “Matt?” Jake called from the front porch.

In darkness, he couldn't see me. I cleared my throat. “Yeah?”

“What are you doing out there? You're not talking to a reporter.”

“No.” I pulled up my T-shirt and wiped off my face, then climbed back to the porch.

Jake dropped into the wicker rocker when I reached the steps. “You okay?”

“Sure,” I said.

“The wedding video has something we can use.”

“What?”

“It's nothing earthshaking, but I'd like the judge to see her talking, to see her as a real live woman with dreams and hopes.” He paused. “When I married my wife, my mother-in-law staged a big production, doves, a horse-drawn carriage, about a thousand people.”

“I remember,” I said. Jake and Yvette married straight out of college—before he even went to law school.

“Your wedding was very simple,” he said, “but it had something, I don't know, sincere. It was the real deal, you and her.”

“Yeah. We love each other. I've had other relationships. Good ones even, but when Elle and I were apart, during the years our relationship was platonic, she was always the one. I know that sounds sappy.”

Jake didn't say anything for a minute. “It doesn't. Look at Vette and me. We've been married for fifteen years now. We have a daughter. It's the best part of life.”

“You two were young,” I said, suppressing my envy of his healthy family.

He smiled. “Obscenely young. And not prepared, but once Janey was born, we were determined to make it work. And”—he knocked the arm of the rocking chair—“so far so good.”

“How old is Janey now?”

“Almost thirteen.” He pulled a picture of his daughter from his wallet and passed it to me.

The girl stood on a balance beam with the pointed toe and arched back of a gymnast.

“Lucky for her she looks more like Yvette,” I said.

Jake bellowed a hearty chuckle. “Yeah. Very lucky. She's a good kid,” he said as I passed the photo back to him. “And hopefully yours will look like Elle.”

Jake's words kicked me back to the reality of the moment. “Yeah, like Elle,” I said. Or like me. It didn't matter a bit as long as the baby was healthy. How many times do people say those words with no real grasp of how very precarious life is? But I hoped that someday I'd be the proud father showing off our kid's picture.

Jake must have realized the implication of his words because he didn't say anything else for a while, and I returned to reading Elle's journal, getting lost in her voice again, until finally he asked, “How many more of those diaries do you have?”

I shrugged. “She was prolific, chronicled everything from her time at NASA to the day she got a bad perm. I'm skimming most parts.”

“Did you ever think she kept track of everything because she was planning to write a memoir?
The Adventures of an Astronaut Heroine
?”

“You don't get it. She wrote because she was private. These were her innermost thoughts. These are things she chose
not
to share. I knew most of this, but not every little nuance. Her mind could orbit around a situation and … I'm skimming most parts.”

“Let me skim with you.”

“You can see this one.” I passed him the one passage about how delivering Dylan would have helped her forgive herself. “Can you use it? I'll make a copy of the page.”

He scanned it. “Yeah. This is good. I need more like this. Let's refine your search. Home in on the times when life threw her curveballs—her mother's death, her previous pregnancies.”

“I did. She didn't write then. I organized them, chronologically. Nothing for months after her mother died. Nothing from after Dylan's death either.” I rubbed my eyes with my palms.

“Her first pregnancy?”

“Only the beginning of it. She was still writing letters back then.”

“Well, that's when she would have decided on whether or not to abort.”

“You don't want to see those letters,” I said.

“Why? She considered having an abortion?” he asked, looking horror-stricken.

I swatted a mosquito. “Yeah. And it's weird because by the time she told me she thought she was pregnant, she had dismissed the idea, or at least she acted as if it was out of the question. In the last letter she wrote about it, she was leaning toward terminating.”

“Any idea what changed her mind?”

“None.”

“Too bad. That's the entry we'd need.” He smacked his forearm. “I'm going inside. These mosquitoes are wicked. You got any gin?”

“No,” I said, standing to follow him. “Neither of us drinks much.”
Gin
. Gin made me think of Prohibition, and Prohibition made me think of Elle. Her great-grandfather ran whiskey during Prohibition all around Casco Bay. Elle said that was why there was a trapdoor in the attic. It was where he stashed his supply. The compartment was just one of many secret spaces we had stumbled upon. Elle discovered another just last spring in the butler's pantry. Maybe she kept the missing letters in some other hidden closet I didn't know about.
Damn
.

“Listen, Jake, I'm going to crash. It's after midnight.”

He glanced at his watch. “Yeah. I'll see myself out. I want to meet you for breakfast before the hearing.”

As soon as he was gone, I bolted up the attic steps. Where were the other stash zones? Not necessarily in the attic, but it seemed the logical place to start.

I tugged up floorboards. I moved the trunks and the dollhouse. Nothing—save the already discovered attic and pantry compartments. On impulse, I pulled out Alice's diaries and quickly bundled them up in a bag.

Where else would a bootlegger keep his bounty? Under the stairs? No. And by the end of the night, after ripping apart the attic, the basement, and the barn, I concluded that, if Elle hid her letters somewhere, she meant them to stay hidden. I slunk back inside, defeated.

At the top of the stairs, I stopped in front of Dylan's room, a room he never entered, a room I didn't think either Elle or I addressed in the time since. We simply closed the door. At least I did. Now I switched on the light. The crib was still situated along the inside wall. I could hear Elle say, “This old house is drafty enough. We don't want him near a window.”

The morning light poured through the transom. Another night without sleep. Another futile night. The telephone rang and my adrenaline-driven heart leaped into a race with fear. No one called that early in the morning unless there was trouble. The caller ID said Longfellow Memorial, the hospital. “Dr. Beaulieu, this is Evie, your wife's nurse. You asked me to call if there were any changes.”

“And?”

“We've had to increase her oxygen. Her blood gases deteriorated overnight. They're shooting X-rays right now.”

“Jesus,” I said, with sharp panic rising in my gut. “Make sure they shield the baby.”

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