Page 4 of The Last Stars in the Sky
I build up the fire and then put the coffee on, having first to fill the coffeemaker with water Daniel got last night from the lake. Just as there was throughout the winters of my childhood, there is now a big barrel in the corner of the kitchen, our fresh water for the day. He thought it was all something of a lark, strapping on the head torch he brought from home and picking his way down the stone steps to the black expanse of the lake, which hasn’t frozen yet, although chunks of ice bob in its freezing waters. He filled two buckets, and, huffing and puffing, brought them back up, time and time again.
“This will get me into shape,” he exclaimed, and I was glad that he was willing to enter into the spirit of the thing, although I wondered if he still would a couple of days from now. Well, it was only for six weeks. We could all manage that.
All in all, I’m amazed that most things in the cottage still actuallywork, when everything is seven years old at the very minimum, but they do. The coffee machine sputters and hums to life, and soon the comforting smell of fresh coffee fills the kitchen. I take a mug and, wrapping my hands around it for the much-needed warmth, I head to the living room.
The fire is a cheerful, welcoming blaze and I curl up on the sofa. Outside, it is still dark, but I make out the shape of Lost Lake as dawn creeps along the horizon—the dock jutting out, the leafless trees on the shoreline, its surface in the early dawn light still dark and opaque. I realize I’m eager to go out and explore, to reacquaint myself with the haunts of my childhood. Reacquaint myself, even, with the girl I used to be.
Spending my summers here—and all my school vacations up until about age sixteen, when I finally put my foot down, and found a summer job waitressing at a Sizzler back home in New Jersey—shaped me, more, perhaps, than anything else in my life has. It amazes me, now that I’m back, that I managed to avoid truly thinking about the cottage for seven whole years. I managed to forget what it was to me, whoIwas when I was here, and live my Westport life—running a home, a family, and a book club—without much more than a flicker of sentimental regret for all those summers and holidays, weeks, months and even years—in this place, my home.
A sigh escapes me, and I take a sip of my coffee. For twenty years, I reflect, I’ve managed to fill up my life with what now seems like the paltry and the insipid. At first, it was all well-intentioned, valuable even; after an unexpected pregnancy—Sam—right after Daniel and I got married, I became a stay-at-home mom, thinking it would only be for a few years that somehow slid into a decade without me even realizing.
Having had to give up my entry-level position in publishing, I made being a mother my career—organic everything, all the baby and toddler classes, perennial parent volunteer, dedicated class mom, on and on, ad nauseam, until I started to annoy myself with my own earnestness. And then, as some kind of self-protective measure, I started to make fun of it all, in a self-deprecating sort of way. When your kids are teenagers, you don’twant tostillbe the mom who brings in the pumpkin-decorated cupcakes for Halloween.
At that point, I toyed with the idea of restarting my career, but after a decade and a half out of the workforce, and only a couple of years’ early experience in it, it felt impossible. Who, really, wants to hire a 42-year-old as an entry-level editorial assistant? And as Daniel was making good money—wasbeing the operative word—I had no desire to hire myself out as a lunch lady or retail assistant just for the fun of it. But that didn’t leave me with very much—the aforementioned book club, tennis twice a week, and making sure every year of our lives was documented in curated photo collages going up the stairs was never meant to be my life’s ambition. But what is?
I think of the girl I was in this place, the girl who strode through the raspberry patches, mindless of the scratches, who plucked a leech from her leg with scornful fingers, who barked at a bear to make it run away.
Iwas that girl, and yet I can’t quite believe it. I’m not sure if I can remember how to be her again, or even if I know how to try. I look at her and I see a ghostly Laura Ingalls, a TV-toned fantasy; and yet once she was real. Wasn’t she?
As I watch the sun coming over the tops of the evergreens, I wonder if that’s part of the reason I wanted to come back here—to find myself in this place again, before it—and that version of me—is lost forever.
In the weeks before we lost the house and life as we knew it blew up, I began to dream of the cottage—or, really, have nightmares. In my dreams, the place was always falling apart in a dystopian, mystical sort of way; the lake had turned into a treacherous swamp, filled with writhing snakes; or, in one vivid dream, huge slug-like creatures that surfaced from the dark depths like malformed walruses and then sank again, bubbling back into the dark water.
The house fared no better; in one dream it was on fire; in another a great big pit had opened up in the living room while I backed away in terror, clutching Ruby to me. In yet another dream, lava flowed down the hill outside, a great, molten river rushing toward us as we huddled in terror, right here by the fireplace. I always woke up from these dreams first gasping from fear, only to have it replaced by relief that it wasn’t real, and then an ache of realization that in some ways it sort of was.
You didn’t have to be Freud to know why I was having the nightmares. My mother’s nursing care was expensive; a few months earlier my brother, as executor of her estate with power of attorney, had emailed my sister and me about the necessity of selling this place. Not that it would sell for very much—fifty acres in the back of beyond, even with its own small lake, wouldn’t fetch more than a couple hundred grand Canadian, if that, but my brother wanted to be rid of it, had for years, which was understandable considering none of us came here anymore. I was the one who held on, arguing it was for my mother’s sake, but really it was for mine.
And now I’m here, having this last gasp of cottage life, while framing it as a necessary reset for my family. We’ll have to sell it in the spring, I know; my mother needs the money for her care, and Daniel and I obviously can’t afford it now. The prospect still hurts me, though. Even if I’ve been avoiding it for most of the last decade, this place still claims a part of my soul.
I finish my coffee, add a log to the fire, and then head to the kitchen to make a start on breakfast. I want to banish the melancholy thoughts of what once was and do my best to live in this moment, simple as it is. This is why we came here, I remind myself. Not because we didn’t have any choice, but because this was the best one. And bacon frying is the best smell to wake up to, especially with a lake now shimmering under wintry sunlight,the fog hovering over the water beginning to melt away in ghostly shreds.
Nobody wakes up until the bacon and scrambled eggs are warming in the oven, and I’m on my second coffee, standing by the window as the last of the mist rolls across the lake, like fragments of a dream. The water is a deep greenish-black and as smooth as glass, the sky above the color of pewter, with pale patches of fragile blue breaking through, like hope itself.
The trees that densely fringe the lake are either leafless and skeletal-looking, all barren branches and claw-like twigs, or thickly, densely evergreen, utterly impenetrable, a forbidding wall of nature stretching toward the sky. The dock, I can now see in the morning light, has rotted; half of it completely gone, the other half fallen into the lake, now no more than a tumble of mossy planks. After seven years, I shouldn’t be surprised at the extent of the decay, and yet so much here is still the same. The old canoe, made of red tin, is still hoisted up on the beach, from when my dad last pulled it up there, after he’d taken Sam fishing.
I remember that morning perfectly—the sun shining high above, the sky so blue it almost hurt to look at it. The whole day hurt, in its purity and beauty, because I knew that it was almost certainly the last time my dad would take my son fishing; he had terminal cancer, and his prognosis was in months, not years. He died just four months later.
Even now I can picture him and Sam heading down to the dock, my dad with his rod and tacklebox, Sam trotting next to him, alert, excited, jumping up and down a little. I see my dad steadying Sam with his hand on his shoulder as he clambered into the boat, making it rock to and fro. The eagerness on Sam’s face, to finally be out on the lake with his beloved grandpa; I think even he, at that age, sensed the solemnity of the moment, and yet also felt its joy.
“Do I smell bacon?”
I turn, managing a smile as Daniel comes out of the bedroom, dressed as I am, in fleece, sweatpants, thick socks. His hair is sticking up in several directions, and he has a day’s growth of silvery beard. He looks like a mountain man in the making, and I can tell he’s pleased by this version of himself.
“I don’t think I’ve slept so well in years,” he exclaims, as he heads into the kitchen. “It’s so quiet here.”
“The girls must have too,” I reply, “because they’re still asleep.” Although, glancing at the clock above the mantle—something else that’s still working, after Daniel wound it last night—I realize it’s only just after seven o’clock. Still early.
Daniel comes back into the living room, holding a mug of coffee. “I forgot how beautiful this place is,” he says, his gaze on the lake. The mist has now cleared, the sky already lightening to blue from the gray, like color bleeding through cloth. The lake shimmers beneath the watery sunlight. “Why didn’t we come up here more?” he muses.
“I don’t know,” I reply, although I sort of do. Because a cabin in the woods with teenagers isn’t much fun. Because a water park or Disney World always seemed like an easier, if more expensive, alternative. Because five hundred miles always felt too far, and I was afraid to so much as brush up against the memories I knew would still be here, ready to crash over me the moment I opened the door.
Daniel gives me a direct look. “So, what should we do today?” he asks, and I’m not sure if it’s a challenge—a not-so-subtlewhy are we here again?—or that he needs a project. For months, we’ve been like this, a continual parry and thrust of barbed questions, meaningful sighs, deliberate silences. Neither of us can quite keep from showing, in myriad, minuscule ways, how injured we feel, each one of us the wronged party, and yet I know, Iknow, we both are. We both contributed to this messin our own ways, even if I can’t let go of my anger. In truth, I haven’t tried all that hard.
“That’s up for discussion,” I say in as upbeat a tone as I can. “Make this place more habitable for the next six weeks, I guess? Mattie wants to move into the small room, so we’ll have to shift some boxes. We should check on the firewood in the cellar too—we’ll probably need more. And a good vacuuming. Darlene has done a great job, but there are still a lot of mouse droppings everywhere.”
“That’s life in the woods for you,” Daniel remarks sagely, and I smile and nod. He loved it here, back when the kids were little; a week or two every year when he could pretend to be a mountain man, get out the chainsaw, drive the truck. He was good at it all, too, I remember; far handier than I was with a power tool, taking the vagaries of cottage life—mice, mosquitoes, damp—in his easy stride.
“And we’ll need more water,” I add, because already I know that will be a constant refrain—up and down the steps to the lake several times a day. “Maybe that can be Mattie’s job. It might be good for the girls to have chores here. Feel part of things.”
