Page 8 of The Last Stars in the Sky
Corville is exactly as I remembered it, everything unapologetically unchanged, from the hardware on the corner to the bridge over the Bonnechere River, to the Country Depot feed store and supermarket on the outskirts of the town, on the road out to the larger town of Pembroke, another thirty miles away. The only difference in the whole town is a tiny, hipster-ish coffee shop by the bridge, advertising lattes and free Wi-Fi, and I notice as we drive past, completely empty.
There really isn’t much to see in Corville, but Daniel had a look at the truck and four-wheeler this morning, and he wants to get some spare parts from the hardware, and I’d like to stock up on a few more groceries. Even though I bought plenty in Kingston, there are a couple of gaps, and who knows when we’ll be back here again? I somehow doubt that Ruby and Mattie will want to experience the delights of Corville for a second time.
“People actuallylivehere,” Mattie remarks in a wondering tone as we park in town; the parking lot is mostly empty, and half the stores are still shuttered. While Daniel goes to the hardware, Mattie, Ruby, and I will stroll around.
“Don’t be a snob, Matts,” I say cheerfully enough. “It’s a perfectly nice place.” Although I fear any town withouta Starbucks or an Abercrombie will seem deficient to my daughter. “Let’s walk down by the river,” I suggest.
I can’t remember the last time I’ve been down here, under the bridge, where the water rushes by in white, frothing rivulets, diverting around several, large flat rocks that stretch far out into the water.
The girls wander alongside the river, glancing at the rocks, perfect for stepping out onto, but neither of them does, and why would they?
That isn’t the kind of life we’ve lived—which has been sanitized, suburban, and safe. Even “risky play” at school is supervised, a series of balance beams and knotted ropes where kids can play only with careful instruction and teachers present.
“Let’s go out on the rocks,” I suggest, and Mattie looks at me in her typical teenaged disbelief, scathingly eloquent in her silence. It’s like a superpower, the way teenagers can give such excoriating looks of sneering disdain. Do they practice in the mirror, or is it a skill they obtain at a certain age, like getting your Hogwarts letter, aged eleven?Here is how you sneer…“Come on,” I say, my tone somewhere between cajoling and insistent. “It’ll be fun.”
“The water’s very cold,” Ruby says in a small voice. She has always been very cautious, to the point of timidity.
“It’sfreezing,” Mattie corrects, folding her arms. “No way.”
Their intransigence saddens rather than irritates me. They’rechildren. Where is their sense of fun, of adventure and play? “I’ll go first,” I say, and I eye the first rock. As I size it up, I realize it is a little farther away than I thought. It’s a matter not simply of stepping from shore to stone but of having to make an honest-to-goodness flying leap. I am, for a millisecond at least, going to be entirely airborne.
“Well, Mom?” Mattie says, and there is a laughing challenge in her voice that makes me brave. I jump.
I hear Ruby’s quick intake of breath as I land on the rock, stumble slightly, and right myself. My heart is pounding. I turn to my daughters, arms spread out, smile in place. “See?”
Mattie shakes her head. “Why do you want us to do this so much?”
Because I want to them to have fun? Because I need to prove something to them—or to myself? I don’t exactly know, but for some reason it feels important, this little leap into the river, far more, I know, than it actually is.
“The view out here is amazing,” I reply, as if that’s an answer. Mattie huffs. Ruby hunches her shoulders and looks down at the water rushing by fast, foaming white. I stare out at the river, tumbling over rocks, rushing forward, and wait for one of them to act.
Then Mattie lets out a long-suffering sigh that makes me smile. “All right,fine,” she says, and, crouching a little, she leaps onto the rock with me, as nimble as a ballet dancer, legs outstretched, hair flying, except like me she stumbles as she lands, and we end up clutching each other for a few taut seconds as we stagger around. I realize I can’t remember the last time we’ve touched each other. Hugged, or even given a pat on the arm.
Mattie releases me quickly, dropping her arms and stepping away. I pretend it’s no big deal as I turn to Ruby. “Rubes?”
“I don’t know…” She nibbles her lip, eyeing us on the rock as if we’re all the way across the Grand Canyon. For her, maybe we are.
Ruby has had low-level anxiety about a lot of things, ever since she was little. Not enough for a diagnosis, and I know because I’ve taken her to several specialists over the years, to try to figure out why she has her quirks—a hatred of seams, a fear of loud noises, periods of selective mutism. Acronyms have been bandied about—OCD, GAD, PDD. None of them have stuck, andin the end, the doctors decided Ruby was just Ruby, quirks included. And right now, she looks like she doesn’t want to jump.
“Come on, Ruby,” Mattie says, surprising me. “It’s not too bad, and itispretty cool out here.”
My heart surges with love and pride and gratitude. Mattie’s encouraging remark is something so small, and yet it’s progress. “Only if you want to, Rubes,” I tell my youngest daughter. “But Mattie’s right. It is pretty cool out here.”
And then, without warning, my daughter jumps. She flies through the air, her expression one of total terror, her strawberry-blond hair flying out from underneath her bobble hat, before she lands practically on top of me. I grab her, and so does Mattie, and for a few precious seconds we’re all in a strange, desperate hug, and it feels like the best thing that’s happened to me in a long time.
Then we separate, and, after a few seconds of wandering about what is essentially a very small space, Mattie lets out a bored sigh, and Ruby asks if we can go back now. But it still happened, I tell myself. No one can take that away from me.
We make the jump a second time with a bit more confidence and then we head back up to meet Daniel in front of the hardware, before going to the supermarket to stock up on a few more staples. I buy five more five-pound sacks of flour, another two dozen eggs, along with an entire cartful of other stuff. Daniel shakes his head wryly even as he pulls out his credit card, happy enough to go along, despite the cost.
“What is it about the cottage,” he asks in a musing sort of way as we box up the groceries, “that makes you want to start homesteading or something? Buy a cow and a plow and, I don’t know, a barrel of salt?” He smiles good-naturedly, and I smile back, enjoying the feeling of complicity.
“My mother and I used to pretend we were pioneers,” I tell the girls as we push the cart toward the parking lot. I have asudden, piercing memory of picking wild strawberries with her in a meadow halfway around the lake. Kneeling in the sun-touched grass, prizing the tiny strawberries from the fragile plants like red pearls from an earthy shell, filling up a drinking glass of green plastic, and presenting it to her like a treasure. I had slipped a few into my mouth as I picked, my lips and chin stained scarlet with juice.
“Pioneers,” Ruby says, her eyes alight with interest. “How?”
“We were picking strawberries,” I explain, “wild ones that are really, really tiny. I was getting impatient and so she said we should pretend we were pioneers, and that we needed the strawberries to survive.”
“Strawberries to survive,” Mattie repeats a bit scornfully, but then she remembers that this is her grandmother, whom she loves, and she adds in a grudging sort of apology, “That sounds like Granny.”
