Page 24 of The Last Stars in the Sky
Slowly, after what feels like an age, and still looking suspicious, Kerry nods. “Okay, fine.”
From the sofa, Darlene’s eyes flutter open, and she smiles at me.
“You are your father’s daughter,” she says, “looking out for everyone just like he did.”
I look away from her without replying because right now, as I eye up the wood and wonder what’s in it for me, I don’t feel like my father’s daughter at all.
TEN
We load everything up as twilight falls, the darkness dropping like a curtain as the air sharpens with cold. Mattie and I heft boxes and suitcases into the bed of the truck; now that Kerry has agreed to come with us, it seems she wants to take everything. She’s packed all of Darlene’s clothes, her toiletries and trinkets, her cookbooks and dishes that we definitely don’t need. I’ve got my eye on the firewood and the chickens, but Kerry seems more concerned that we bring her mother’s decorative plate from the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977.
She flutters around Darlene while we heft and hoist; neither Mattie nor Ruby have said a single word and I’m starting to worry. I should have talked to them about all this first, I realize. More importantly, I need to listen. But the parenting books that tell you, so pompously and portentously, how you need to set boundaries and give consequences and listen without judgment, blah, blah,blah, are not really relevant when it comes to end-of-the-world scenarios.
In any case, I know I need to have a conversation with each of them. I need to offer reassurance, even if I don’t know what that could possibly be.
It is completely dark by the time we finish, and the truck is completely full. As I look around the emptied house, I feel a pang of both sympathy and solidarity for Darlene; how would I feel, if I had to walk away from the cottage and all it represents? Of course, I did that already back in Connecticut, but still, I don’t think it felt like this. Darlene, Kerry told me, was born in this house and has lived here ever since. It belonged to her parents, who passed it down to her. And now she might be walking away from it forever.
I wonder when I will get used to all the endings we now encounter. I wonder if I should.
As we prepare to leave, Kerry helps Darlene up from the sofa. It seems the nitroglycerin has helped because, with her daughter’s assistance, Darlene is able to walk to the truck, and then clamber, slowly and painfully, into the front seat of the cab.
“Aren’t you going to lock it?” I ask Kerry when she walks away from the front door after merely shutting it. She gives me a look I’m starting to recognize, as well as dislike—scorn mixed with weariness, like she simply does not have the energy to explain everything to me.
“What’s the point?” she tells me with a shrug, and she gets in the truck.
Mattie and Ruby have already climbed into the backseat of the truck’s cab, and I can’t see their expressions in the darkness. Already I’m starting to regret inviting Kerry and Darlene to live with us. It’s not exactly an invitation I can rescind, and there can’t really be anyhint, hint, nudge, nudge, it’s time for you to leavescenario. I’m becoming more aware by the second that I don’t actually know these people. Why did I invite them to move in with us basically forever?
Oh, right. Because I had no choice. No matter what optimism Daniel was clinging to, I know I can’t go into survivalist modewithout a little help. Hopefully, Darlene and Kerry really can help us.
I start the truck, and it coughs and gasps into life. We drive back to the dirt road without seeing a single person or car.
Later, after Darlene and Kerry have gone to bed and the cottage is quiet, I sit curled up on the sofa by the fire and gaze unseeingly into the glowing embers. The last few hours were a hassle of unloading and unpacking, helping Darlene into the cottage, wondering what on earth I was doing. Trying not to think about Daniel, where he might be, what might have happened to him, while actually thinking about him all the time, the background noise to everything.
Now Kerry and Darlene are both asleep, Darlene in the guest room and Kerry in the box room. Mattie moved up to the loft without a word of protest, which alarmed me. It’s not natural, the way the girls are silently drifting through their days, like ghosts. But then nothing about life right now is natural.
I lean my head back against the sofa and close my eyes, knowing I should go to bed yet unable to summon the energy to move. I miss Daniel with an intensity that feels like a physical pain, a gnawing of my insides, hollowing me out.Howcould I have sent him out there, with no way to be in contact, no possibility of understanding what dangers he might face? And yet what choice did I have?
“Mom?”
I open my eyes and see Mattie in her pajamas, standing by the ladder to the loft. “Sweetheart, it’s late.” It must be nearing midnight.
“I couldn’t sleep.” She walks toward me slowly, hesitantly, until she’s standing by the fire, gazing down at the glowingembers just as I was. “Where do you think Dad is?” she asks softly.
“I don’t know.” I pat the sofa next to me and, to my relief and gratitude, she comes, snuggling in the way Ruby does and resting her head against my shoulder. I can’t remember the last time we’ve sat like this; it’s surely been years. “I hope he’s crossed the border,” I tell her quietly. “That was going to be the tricky part, I think.” Although God knows, it’s probably all going to be a lot more thantricky; it might be impossible.
“But if he hasn’t?”
“I don’t know, Matts. I—I suppose it’s a good thing he hasn’t been sent home yet.” But has he been arrested? Attacked? I’m not going to stoke those fears in my daughter. I don’t want to stoke them in myself. Daniel is sensible, smart, cautious. All good things in a situation like this.
“What do you think it’s like out there?” she asks. “I keep trying to imagine it, and I just can’t.”
“No, I can’t either.” Which is something of a mercy.
“Sometimes…” Mattie ventures, “I wonder if this is all a big hoax. I mean, besides the electricity being out, nothing’s really changed, right?”
“Not for us,” I agree slowly.A hoax. I’m thinking of the picture of fire and devastation on the TV screen, the president’s voice on the radio.If only. “I know what you mean, though,” I tell my daughter. “It feels so unreal. I almost want to drive to Corville or somewhere, see what it’s really like. How everyone is affected.”
I don’t actually mean it, but Mattie lifts her head from my shoulder to look at me seriously. “Could we?” she asks. “Could we drive somewhere and see?”
