Page 3 of The Last Stars in the Sky
“You can sleep in the loft, for now, with Ruby,” I tell her. Some long-ago instinct makes me save the guest room for, well, guests. Sam can use it when he comes in a week; after that, we can move Mattie and Ruby around as they like. “Tomorrow we’ll clear out the little bedroom,” I continue, “and you can have that, if you’d rather, although I think the loft might be warmer. Heat rises, you know.” I try to smile, but my lips feel funny. I can’t escape the feeling that I’m stuck in a time warp. Everywhere I turn, I expect to see someone else—my father, who’s dead; my mother, who has been in a nursing home for five years, clinging to the last fragments of her memory; or my old self, who is long gone.
“Why don’t you help me get the groceries from the car?” I suggest. I turn to Ruby, who has been wandering around silently, her thumb in her mouth even though she’s eleven years old. “Rubes?”
“What?” She glances at me, blinking slowly, lost in her own world as she so often is; at least it seems like a peaceful place.
“Can you help with the groceries?”
Another blink, and then she silently follows me out to the car, along with a harrumphing Mattie. As we step outside, I breathe in the freezing air, and tilt my head to the sky, which is scatteredwith a million stars. There are so many that they blur together, a jumbled canvas of connect-the-dots.
“Look,” I say to Mattie, nodding upward, but if I’m hoping for an isn’t-nature-great moment of bonding, it falls spectacularly flat. She gives me a typical teenaged glare and stomps over to the trunk of the car, hauling out one of the cardboard boxes of groceries we bought in Kingston, a city by the border and the last major outpost before we headed deep into the woods. Mattie takes the box and stomps back into the house.
“See the stars, Ruby?” I try again, and my younger daughter simply smiles at me.Sam might appreciate them, I think with a sigh as I reach for another box of groceries. He’s only been gone for three months, enjoying freshman life at college, but I miss him, more than I expected to. After three or so years of being mostly monosyllabic, communicating by grunts, he turned pleasant and chatty right before he left. He texts me more now than he spoke to me a year ago, which feels like a bittersweet victory, and yet one I’m grateful for. He’s planning to come for Thanksgiving; he’s meant to fly to Ottawa the Tuesday before, in just one week. I know he’ll love it here, the way he used to, with an enthusiasm that isn’t marred by teenaged angst or anxiety. I can’t wait to share it with him again.
Mattie and Ruby and I finish bringing the groceries inside; I bought a ton because the nearest supermarket is forty minutes away and I wasn’t sure when we’d next be able to get there. Besides, there is something about being so far out in the sticks that makes you want to bring in the supplies, hunker down.
“Is there Wi-Fi?” Mattie demands, as I start stacking cans in the pantry; Darlene swept it all out, emptied out what had been there the last time I came—the ancient bags of sugar and flour, the dented cans of fruit and vegetables. They must have been quietly moldering for all the years someone was supposed to come up but never did. First me, with my vague promises,then my sister, floating the idea of working remotely from here for a few months. My brother, too, talking of turning the place into some sort of business, a vacation destination for the tourist looking for the seriously remote. None of it came to anything, which was completely unsurprising.
“There’s no Wi-Fi,” I tell Mattie. “At least not like there is—was—at home, but there is a satellite that connects to the TV, and you usually can get some internet access through that.” Not much, though; emails and single pages are pretty much all its speed offers; TikTok scrolling or YouTube streaming will definitely not happen. “It hasn’t been turned on yet, though,” I tell her, keeping my voice matter-of-fact but also enthusiastic, “but maybe we can make it work.”
Mattie gives me a disparaging look. “So, what’s the point of having it if it’s not turned on?”
“I thought we could take a break from all that, for a little while,” I say as lightly as I can because it’s still a difficult topic for Mattie, not to mention a painful one for me. Two weeks ago, she was suspended from school for having marijuana in her locker, which prompted me, among other things, to take a look at her phone—and discover a world I would have much rather had not existed at all, and definitely not in relation to my daughter.
Now she lets out a growl of frustration and hurls that phone onto the sofa, the ultimate act of teenaged melodrama. It’s usually attached to her hand.
“What are wedoinghere?” she cries wildly, and I glance at Daniel, who is crouched in front of the fireplace, propping kindling into a pyramid like a proper Boy Scout. He’s too busy with his fire-building skills to notice Mattie’s outburst.
What we’re doing here, I think, is getting away from everything that was bad back at home. The social media. The toxic friends. The older, drug-dealing boyfriend. The lies. The shame. So maybe it is a good thing we’re in the middle of thewoods, away from all the influences that were derailing Mattie’s life at an alarming speed, faster than I could even keep up with.
“Look!” Ruby exclaims, and points to the fire that Daniel has started, a few small flames tentatively licking at the kindling. He grins and straightens, and something in me aches at the look of pride on his face. That’s something I haven’t seen in a long time. And yes, it’s only a fire, and a small one at that, but right now I want to hold on to what is good; I want to nurture it. I smile at him.
“That looks great.”
Mattie lets out another groan and reaches for her phone again. I go back to the kitchen and resume unpacking, finding a surprising little lift from stacking cans in the pantry, hauling sacks of flour and sugar, packets of pasta and rice. The twenty-first-century version of homesteading, I suppose, including plenty of stuff for the freezer.
After a few moments, Ruby comes in and starts poking around, while I wonder if I should make hot chocolate, turn this evening into something celebratory.
“Look.” Ruby tugs at my sleeve and then shows me a photo she’s taken from the front of the fridge—faded and old, its corners curled up. It’s of my father and me; I must be about ten. We’ve been fishing in the lake, and we’re holding on to our rods like walking staffs. He’s smiling down at me, a look of laughing tenderness on his face, and I’m grinning straight at the camera, my gaze blazing with fierce pride and joy, my finger hooked through the mouth of a rainbow trout. I don’t actually remember the moment, but I remember the photo. My dad reminisced many times about how proud I was, how I’d reeled that trout in like a pro. “It was your Walter,” he said fondly, naming the fish from the old movieOn Golden Pond, one of our favorites, about cottage life.
I wonder if the lake still holds any trout, if my daughters will want to fish, never mind actually touch those slimy scales.
I smile at Ruby. “That was me and Grandpa, way back when.”
She nods, smiling back, and puts the photo back on the fridge.
I take a deep breath, will the memories back, and keep unpacking.
TWO
I wake up when the sky is still dark, just starting to lighten at its edges, because I’m so cold. The fire must have gone out in the night, and I can see my breath, a frosty puff in the air, as I huddle under the heavy comforter, Daniel snoring gently next to me. It felt strange to sleep in my parents’ bed, like I was stealing something, or maybe pretending. Daniel snuggled right down, though; we lay close to each other—closer than in our king-sized bed back home—but not quite touching, which felt apt.
This morning, there is frost etching the inside of the windowpanes in delicate patterns of wintry lace, and when my feet touch the icy wooden floor, even in thick, woolen socks, I suppress a gasp. Next to me Daniel stirs and then burrows deeper under the covers. I reach for a few more layers—fleece, scarf, slippers—and then head to the living room to build up the fire.
Last night we were too tired to dig out the electric heaters from the little box room, but we should today, definitely, and see if they still work. I tried to make a jolly game of it all, going to sleep in the freezing cold—heaping blankets on beds and finding the hot-water bottles under the sink, along with quite a few mouse droppings.
I tried, but I don’t think it worked. Everything felt too strange, too hard, and when I looked outside it was sodark, relentlessly so, my eyes straining to see something, anything, under the pale light of a sliver of a moon. I used to find the quiet and dark peaceful, at least I think I did, but now it unnerves me. Mattie stood next to me in her shortie pajamas, shivering theatrically, while I told her to put on some extra layers.
“I know you have them, and it’s cold here, Matts, really cold.” I tried for an encouraging smile, although I suspected she was being difficult on purpose because she was angry. What fourteen-year-old kid wants to upend her life to spend six weeks in rural Canada? Not this one, at any rate.
