Page 75 of The Last Stars in the Sky
Daniel walks slowly toward the stump on the side of the road. Although someone has done their best to cover it with branches and brush, the tree has been chopped down; the axe marks are fresh. When he touches the stump, his fingers come away with traces of sawdust. It was cut recently.
Silently, Sam walks over to join him. “What…?” he breathes, when he sees the hewn stump.
“It’s a decoy,” Daniel says quietly. “We cut a few trees before I left, to make outsiders think no one is here. Mom must have cutsome more.” At least he hopes that’s the case. It must be why the gate is gone, the grass grown tall.It must be.
For the first time, he feels a wild, drunken lurch of hope.
“We can drive around it,” he says, and Sam frowns.
“Can we?”
They do. It isn’t easy, lurching through the long grass, half in a ditch, bumping and jostling, wheels spinning for a few seconds, but they do it. They crest the hill by the barn, Daniel swerving around the rock in the road, which is still there and somehow makes him feel almost happy. Some things haven’t changed.
In fact, they haven’t changed at all—he doesn’t swerve far enough, and the rock of pink-flecked granite scrapes the bottom of the car. Sam winces. Daniel actually laughs, the first time in memory.
They keep driving—down the hill, around the bend, the cottage obscured by a stand of birch trees. In November, they’d been bare, but now they are leafy and green, and they hide the view of his home. Of his family.
Then, finally, the cottage comes into view. For a second, Daniel breathes easier. There are signs of life—the stretch of lawn that once served as a badminton court has been turned into a vegetable patch. On the driveway an old stump is being used as a chopping block for splitting wood; a well-worn axe that belonged to his father-in-law rests next to it. He pulls in front of the block, parks the car, and steps out, looking around in surprise and wonder.
He sees a greenhouse, made of what look like old windows, erected by the side of the house to catch the sun, and filled with burgeoning tomato plants; there is, amazingly, what looks like a deer hide pegged to a washing line, to dry. Signs of industry, of invention, are everywhere—another vegetable patch by the oldgazebo, and a wooden locker by the porch that Daniel suspects is asmokehouse, of all things.
He’s amazed, and unbelievably heartened—until a woman comes down the porch steps, holding what looks like a machine gun, aimed unwaveringly straight at his heart.
“Who the hell,” she asks in a level voice, “are you?”
Daniel stares at this stranger with a gun as his stomach hollows out once more. “Who the hell areyou?” he asks in just as level a tone.
“None of your damned business.”
“Actually, it is, because this is my house.” He stares her down, remarkably unfazed by the gun leveled at him. He’s had a lot of guns aimed at him in the last few months. He’s aimed a few of his own.
But he can’t think about any of that. He won’t.
“Where,” he asks this woman, this invader, “is my wife?”
“Daniel!”
Alex’s cry pierces him right through, and Daniel pivots to see her running from the front of the house, stumbling in her haste, her arms outstretched. She looks wonderfully the same and yet impossibly different—her hair is nearly completely gray, her body sinewy and strong, her skin weathered and tanned. She has aged, and yet she also looks younger. He can’t make sense of the anomaly as she rushes into his arms, hugs the breath out of him.
“I thought you were dead,” she whispers, her lips against his throat.
His arms close around her out of instinct, slowly drawing her to him; he’s too dazed to act any faster than that.
“I know,” he says quietly. Sometimes, he thought he was dead too. Sometimes, he wanted to be.
“Mom,” Sam says softly, and Alex wrenches herself out of Daniel’s arms to hurl herself at her son.
“Sam,Sam,” she cries, weeping openly. Then Mattie and Ruby are running toward them—Ruby has grown three or four inches at least; she has that lovely, gawky coltishness of a young teenager. And Mattie, Daniel thinks in amazement, looks like a woman. There is a hardness in her face, a knowingness, that makes him both sad and thankful.
Then they are all hugging and crying, but after a few seconds, Mattie and Ruby step back, wiping their eyes, and the tears subside. They are all left staring at each other, shaking their heads, with far too many words to say and yet none that can fill the void stretching between them.
“How…” Alex begins, and then shakes her head firmly. She doesn’t want to know. Daniel doesn’t want to tell her.
“There’s someone else here to see you,” he says quietly, and then he goes to the back of the car and opens the door.
“Jenny,” he says quietly to his mother-in-law, half dozing in the backseat, scrawny and small and almost entirely diminished. “You’re home.”
Alex lets out a stifled cry, her hands pressed to her cheeks, as she glimpses her mother in the back of the car, blinking dazedly up at her.
