Page 1 of The Last Stars in the Sky
ONE
November
“It’s the next left.”
My voice comes out a bit too sharp, and I see Daniel’s mouth purse as he flicks on his turn signal—unnecessary because we haven’t seen another car in over thirty miles, but city habits die hard, I suppose. In the backseat eleven-year-old Ruby, having been asleep for the last hour, shifts and then sighs before curling up again, like a snail. Fourteen-year-old Mattie, sitting next to her, holds her phone up, squinting at its bright oblong screen in the darkness, as if it contains all the answers of the universe, which to her, of course, it does. Or at least it could, if only it still worked.
“There’s nosignal.”
There hasn’t been a signal since just after we crossed the border two hours ago, so this complaint is not new. At least without a signal she can’t complain about the social media apps I deleted from her phone, resolutely, ruthlessly, because at some points as a parent you have to wake up, like a slap to your face,finally face your own inertia anddo something, even if it makes things worse. Especially if it does.
Now I remain silent as Daniel slows down and then turns the car into the dirt-and-gravel road leading right down into the woods, a dense, impenetrable thicket of evergreen on either side of the track. The tires crunch on the gravel, loud in the sudden, hushed silence of the car. I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
Welcome home.
Or not.
We drive in an increasingly taut and expectant silence down the road, the trees on either side of the narrow dirt track looming above, dark and menacing, or maybe that’s just me, reading into a difficult situation. After all, none of us really want to be here.
Thanksgiving is in just over a week, and we’re meant to be having turkey, watching football, relaxing—reveling—in our comfortable home back in Westport, Connecticut, in front of the big-screen TV, the turkey in the oven, spinach dip and pita chips on the coffee table, a bottle of red breathing on the sideboard. Except that home isn’t ours anymore and we had nowhere else to go but here—my parents’ ramshackle cabin in rural Ontario, Canada that hasn’t had a single visitor in seven years.
This is a chance to reset, I remind myself. Reboot. Refresh. Re-something. Take deep breaths and mindfully remember what is good about life, what we’re grateful for…or so all the glossy magazines and curated Instagram feeds tell me. All I need is a matcha iced tea and the space to recalibrate. Throw in a yoga mat and it’s all good.
I close my eyes against the dark, winding road. It didn’t take much to make me cynical, and yet I still want to believe in it all. I want to believe that six weeks away from reality is really what we need to restart our lives, get them back, better than ever. What actually happens between Thanksgiving and Christmas, anyway,besides holiday parties and Christmas concerts, a never-ending merry-go-round of pointless social events to the frantic soundtrack of ‘Carol of the Bells’ and endless trays of luridly frosted Christmas cookies? We’ll leave it all behind—school, the social stuff, the news, the worry—and we’ll come back stronger than ever. Wewill.
Daniel will get a new job, Mattie will straighten out, Ruby will rebalance. All at Lost Lake, in the isolated backwoods of Ontario, Canada.
I realize, belatedly, that I have not included myself in that equation, mainly because I don’t yet know how I fit into it. In any case, I have my doubts as to whether any of that will happen. The truth is, we really had nowhere else to go.
“Shouldn’t we be there by now?” Daniel’s voice sounds loud and a tiny bit strident in the quiet confines of the car, and it makes me jump a little.
“It’s two miles from the start of the road to the cottage,” I tell him. Remind him, because he’s driven it plenty of times, as I have, although not since the kids were small. Sam, my oldest, now at Clarkson College in upstate New York, was only eleven when we last came here for a vacation, the summer before my dad died. I picture Sam hanging between the two front seats, poking his head toward the dashboard, as eager as a puppy. That was a sort of golden age of the cottage—young-enough kids who didn’t mind the isolation, as long as they could swim and canoe and fish. Epic games of Monopoly, toasting marshmallows on the fire, sitting with my head on Daniel’s shoulder after the kids had gone to bed, watching the fire die to embers and feeling that bone-deep sense of peace only this place could bring.
Seven years later, I am trusting in that promise.
I’ve wondered, in a distant sort of way, why we never went again, after my dad’s funeral that next winter. We always meant to but, every time we were poised to make actual plans, wenever did. Memories made it too hard. Teenagers resisted the remoteness. And five hundred miles, a lot of it on back roads, made it easy, or at least easier, to keep putting it off.
Until now.
“I don’t really remember the cottage,” Mattie says, like a confession, her voice hushed. She’s forgotten about the lack of phone signal, for the moment at least. “Besides from photos, I mean.”
“It might not look like the photos, not anymore,” I warn. I’m bracing myself for a falling-down wreck; Darlene, a kindly local woman my mother hired years ago as an ad hoc caretaker, has been coming by every so often to make sure the place isn’tactuallyfalling down, but seven years of emptiness take its toll on a house, especially here, with the harsh winters, the endless snow, the mice.
“We should be there soon, surely…” Daniel half mutters as the car grinds into a lower gear. “I remember this hill.”
“It’s another half-mile.” I know every inch of this road,still. I spent every summer of my childhood up here, bare feet in the dirt, legs crisscrossed with bramble scratches, mouth stained with raspberry juice, face freckled from the sun. The last seven years suddenly stretch behind me like a vast and empty tundra of time, when I made myself stop thinking about the cottage. About what it meant to me, what it could have meant to my kids.
Another turn, and we’ll come to Lost Lake, glinting silver under the moonlight. I find I’m holding my breath, leaning forward—and yes, there it is. A darkly opaque oval, fringed by dense evergreens; it is no more than a swathe of blackness now, a stretch of emptiness. The moon, however, is hidden beyond a bank of clouds, so there is no silvery reflection, but I know the lake is there, simply by the space. The darkness.
“Are we there yet?” Mattie asks, her voice caught between impatience and anxiety. She has even less of an idea than me of what to expect.
“Almost…” Daniel mutters, although I can tell from the way he is squinting ahead at the road that he doesn’t realize how close we are. He doesn’t know every turn and bump the way I do. This place is part of me in a way I can’t explain, not to my husband. Not even to myself.
“Remember the rock,” I say quickly, just as the bottom of the car scrapes hard against the granite boulder in the middle of the road, gray flecked with pink, opposite the old barn. Daniel curses under his breath.
“Dad.” Mattie sounds both impressed and scandalized by his unexpectedly fluent swearing.
“Sorry.” Daniel passes a hand over his face. “Long day.”
