The Stars Are Fire

  —

  After another hour, Tom, who has always been an unusually good baby, whimpers. Grace lifts away the gauze she used for a tent and discovers that her son’s face and neck are bright pink. When she presses a finger to his cheek, it leaves a clear white spot that slowly fades.

  “Oh, Tom,” she says, lifting him up.

  Would Rosie have given her child a sunburn? Never. Rosie would have come with an umbrella and a little cap for Eddie and would have held the infant the entire time.

  —

  A sunburn doesn’t fade in a day. By dinnertime, Tom has crinkles around his eyes. Gene says, when he walks in the door and catches sight of his son, “What the hell happened to Tom?”

  This is just before he says, “My mother’s in the hospital.”

  “For what?” Grace asks.

  “Cancer in the breast.”

  The news hits Grace at the back of her head. She offers to get a babysitter. “We can go to see her. I’ve got new roses we can take.”

  “I’ve already been,” Gene says, putting his equipment on top of the kitchen table, as if the plates and cutlery weren’t already there. “I’ve been there all afternoon.”

  Grace sits heavily, coffee crystals falling from a spoon. “When did you find out?”

  “Last week, when I took the kids over. She’s having the surgery Monday.”

  “And you didn’t say anything to me?”

  “She didn’t want you to fuss over her.”

  “I don’t fuss, you know that.”

  Gene gazes at his raw son. “They’re going to take the adrenal gland and her ovaries, too.”

  “My God,” says Grace. “Why the adrenal gland?” She is fairly sure she couldn’t point to the adrenal gland in her own body.

  “Get rid of all the estrogen. Same with the ovaries.”

  “Both?” Grace asks.

  “Ovaries?”

  “Breasts,” she says.

  “Of course,” Gene answers, looking at his wife as if she were a moron.

  —

  When Grace is honest with herself, she finds that no part of her wants Merle to die. If that were to happen, Grace would lose her husband to grief, and her children would have no Nana.

  “Maybe after the surgery,” Gene says mollifyingly. His mother’s illness is not, after all, Grace’s fault. “We’ll visit together. I’m going back now, just to calm her fears.”

  “Is she frightened?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  Gene kisses Claire and Tom and opens the door.

  “Give her my love,” Grace calls, surprising Gene and herself with the word, one she has never used in any situation involving her mother-in-law.

  “I will,” Gene says, but Grace knows that he won’t. Why upset his mother with a name Merle can’t abide?

  —

  Because Tom’s skin begins to peel, Grace deliberately misses an appointment with Dr. Franklin.

  —

  After the surgery, Gene’s mother wants to die. Specifically, she believes she is no longer a woman.

  —

  Gene spends more and more time with his mother, which turns out to be fortuitous, because Mrs. Holland dies ten days after surgery from a blood clot that travels to the heart. Gene believes his mother went willingly. Grace, who never had a chance to visit, believes that when the clot hit, Gene’s mother didn’t know or wish a thing.

  —

  “How’s Gene?” Rosie asks a few days after the funeral when she and Grace are sitting in Rosie’s backyard watching the children. Rosie has completed several loads of wash in Grace’s machine.

  “He’s managing.”

  “Truth.”

  “He’s awful. I feel guilty. He makes me feel guilty.”

  “How so?”

  “If I had gone to see his mother once in a while, she wouldn’t have gotten breast cancer.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  “Yes, well.” She thinks a moment. “But you know what? It feels true.”

  It feels true that she might have wished her mother-in-law gone. Not dead, just gone. It feels true that she caused the hurtful night in bed, even though she sort of knows she didn’t. She does know, however, that it’s been too long since she and Gene have had sex. It feels sort of true that she doesn’t want to start up again.

  —

  One morning, when Grace is feeding the children, she hears, through the screened window, the surf smash against the rocks two streets over at the beach. It isn’t that she has never heard the surf from her house before; it’s that it seems especially noisy this clear summer’s day, a paradox that perplexes her.

  With Claire walking beside her and Tom in the carriage under a small umbrella Grace rigged to the hood of the carriage, she visits the beach. She can’t get any closer than the sidewalk opposite the seawall, breeched every time a tall wave comes at it. She has never seen the surf so high. She notes that the residents of the houses that sit directly across from the seawall have come out to stare. Claire jumps up and down and shivers with delight and fear. Just as it seems that a wave will send its spray so high that it will cross the street and catch her, it pounds the wall and slithers away in the undertow.

  A woman Grace has never seen before stands beside her and says, “If it takes the house, I got nothing.”

  “It won’t do that. There’s no wind.”

  “It isn’t even high tide yet,” the woman, in a green housedress, points out.

  If Grace paid any attention to the tide chart that Gene pinned to the inside of the cellar door, she would know this. “There must have been a storm out to sea.”

  “Beats me. Scary as hell though.” The woman seems to have a small head, but it’s an illusion because it’s covered in pin curls. She must have bad eyesight, though: Few women would wear glasses outside the home. Hers are oval in slender gold frames. “You live on the street, too? I haven’t seen you around,” the woman asks.

  “I live two streets back.”

  “Oh well then, you’re all right.” The woman stares at Grace’s children. “George and me, we couldn’t have them.”

  “I’m sorry,” Grace says, taken aback by the revelation. “If you wanted them, I mean.”

  “I wanted them all right. As for George, I can’t say. He’s long gone.” Arms crossed, the woman asks through thin, tight lips, “You like your husband?”

  “I do.”

  “You hang on to him. Life’s too damn hard without one.”

  Grace watches her retreat into her house. Will she board up her windows? Fill sandbags? Should Grace have offered to help? How the woman must hate her and her house safely two streets back with a husband and two children in it.

  The surf rises as high as the trees behind her. The spray wets the road. What are these messages from elsewhere? It’s impossible at this moment not to think the sea menacing. To give it a mind, and an angry one at that.

  —

  In the evening, when Grace is making dinner, Rosie calls to her over the side fence to tell her of the accident. When the waves settled, two men and a young boy, maybe seven or eight years old, visited the beach to fish. One of the men went into the water to untangle his line and was swept out to sea in a riptide, a not uncommon occurrence after a storm. The other man ran for help while the boy screamed and did jumping jacks on the sand.

  “The fisherman drowned, and the lifesaving service is waiting for his body to wash ashore,” Rosie says. “Nobody in town knows the men.”

  “And what about the boy?” Grace asks.

  “It was his father. Awful, isn’t it?”

  A few minutes later, after Rosie leaves, Grace stands with a potato and a peeler in her hands, her wrists resting against the lip of the sink, and cries. She didn’t for Merle, and yet she does for a fatherless boy and a man she has never known. The sea claimed its prize after all.

  “What’s wrong?” Gene asks as he walks into the house.

  “Onions.”


  She can’t tell Gene about the accident without fear of tearing up. Gene will register once again that she didn’t weep for his mother.

  —

  Gene’s grief is as Grace imagined it. He hardly speaks at the dinner table. Even Claire has stopped chatting to him. Usually, he will say one sentence to Grace, as if fulfilling his husbandly duty. More often than not, it’s an odd fact she can’t do anything with.

  “You can go a mile a minute on the Turnpike.”

  “That’s fast.”

  Gene doesn’t respond. He’s done for the evening.

  —

  Rosie says, “Give him time. When Tim’s father died, it took him two years to get back to normal.”

  “My mother, too,” Grace says, rounding four down to two. “But these are important years for Claire and Tom.”

  “Gene doesn’t interact with them at all?” Rosie asks.

  “Nothing.”

  Rosie dips her fingers into the sand. She’s fully clothed and has on a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses while she sits under an umbrella. Even so, she can only stay an hour on the beach. Today the waves run like children up the sand.

  “How is he in bed?” Rosie asks.

  Grace blushes, hoping her tan hides her embarrassment, her despair, her relief. “The same,” she says.

  “Tim was a madman. It was all he wanted to do.”

  “Proving he was still alive,” Grace says.

  “One part of him was alive all right.” Rosie flops back onto the sand, stretching her arms over her head. “I couldn’t walk for months,” she cries, making it clear she loved every minute.

  Grace finds this nearly incomprehensible. Is Rosie to be envied or pitied? Envied, if it makes her as happy as it seems to. It’s an arena in which Grace can add nothing, Gene not having been near her in more than two months.

  —

  Grace decides it’s her duty to help to relieve her husband’s grief. She gives herself a sponge bath in the washroom and dresses in her cotton nightgown. She lies on her stomach in the bed and draws the nightgown high up on her thighs. She has left the top sheet to dangle from the foot of the bed. This is as clear a signal as she can possibly give her husband without discussing the matter.

  She can hear Gene’s tread on the stairway. He walks into the room and stops short. He seems to be looking at her, but she can’t hear the sounds of him undressing. No belt unbuckling, no stepping out of his shoes, no sliding of cloth along his legs. She bites her lip and puts her face directly into the pillow. She’s aware of him sitting on his side of the bed, the mattress depressing, then the sounds of the belt, the shoes, the pants. He lies beside her and brings the sheet up, making sure it covers her shoulders, almost but not quite touching her with his fingers. Then the slight tug on the sheet as he rolls away from her.

  Embarrassment paralyzes Grace, and it’s not until she hears Gene snore that she dares to move her body so that she lies on her side, facing away from him. For an hour, she is awake. Does grief depress a man’s sexual drive? It didn’t depress Tim’s. Does her husband no longer find her attractive? Did he dislike Grace’s display? What would happen, she wonders, if she turned in the bed and shook him awake and asked him why he ignored her? Would he pretend not to know what she was talking about?

  A new sensation claims her then, a drawing down of hope, of contentment diminishing and sinking into her stomach. She endures the feeling, not quite understanding it, for as long as she can bear it. Then, as if fighting for her life, she wrests the sheet away from her and stands. She descends the stairs and finds her cigarettes in the kitchen. With shaking fingers, she lights one and takes a long drag. The panic eases, and she sits at the kitchen table. The kitchen is hers. Well, it’s always been hers, but in the dark there are no chores to do, leaving it an oasis. She lets the air through the screen wash over her face. Her shoulders relax, and she leans against the chair. There’s a rustling in the rich summer foliage. From somewhere, a snippet of music, a voice. Under the nearly full moon, the house behind hers shines white. She flips her ashes into a glass on the table, and the disturbance of the ash sends a distinctive smell her way. Gin? She holds up the glass. There’s a half inch of liquid at the bottom. Does Gene have a drink when she goes up to bed? A quick one to steady his nerves? To drown his sorrows? She remembers coming down in the morning and finding glasses in the sink. Water glasses, she thought. He must have rinsed those out well. But this one smells of ashes and gin. For how long has he been drinking in secret? She ponders the wisdom of leaving the glass with the ash in it on the table, so that he will know she saw it. She might even leave the stub of her cigarette there, too. Which raises the question of whether she was meant to see the glass, to know that he was drinking.

  —

  A succession of dry sunny days is something to discuss, to remark upon. Brides in veils walk out of the Methodist church believing the weather a benevolent sign from Heaven. Grace, with her children in the carriage, watches them and tries to decide which couples will be happy together and which will not. The bride in the satin cap that allows her veil to billow out behind her, and who clearly cares more about the picture that is being taken of her than she does about the groom, even removing his hand from her arm, is doomed, Grace thinks. The bride who flinches at the big openmouthed kiss her new husband bestows upon her, causing her to trip over her own dress, will have a tough go of it. But the young woman in the pale blue bridal gown, who walks out of the church talking in whispers to her husband, who bends down to hear her and then smiles, as if at a private joke, has it made. The brides delight Grace. New life, new possibilities. She holds Claire up so that she can see them.

  “Isn’t she beautiful!” Grace exclaims.

  —

  The muggy days of late August upon them, Grace drops a plate in the sink with the realization that she has missed her period for three months. She sits heavily at the kitchen table, her hands gone cold. She feels her abdomen, which tells her nothing. She balls the cloth of her skirt into her fists. She closes her eyes and counts.

  Seconds later, she remembers the only night that could have produced the child. She puts her forehead to the table and counts again.

  She sits up straight. The baby inside her is a product of a terrible night. Gene will know. He can add as well as she.

  When the child inside her is born, Tom will be fourteen months old. She will have three children under the age of three. Not quite Irish triplets, but close.

  She studies the wrinkles in her skirt where her fists balled the cloth. She’s aware of sweat trickling inside her sleeveless blouse. She takes a dish towel and sticks it straight down between her breasts to wipe away the moisture there and then lays the towel at the back of her neck. Gene will say they can’t afford three children. Or perhaps, feeling guilty, he’ll say nothing at all.

  She will have to tell Gene. No, she won’t. She’ll let him look at her and wonder. He will have to say it aloud. By then he’ll have done the calculations and will know the night on which they conceived the child. Grace wonders if the way the sperm is put into the woman affects the personality of the child. No, of course not. She knows a wives’ tale when she hears one.

  —

  The heat reduces them to looser versions of themselves. Grace lacks the energy to cook a proper meal, but can’t get away with sandwiches. Some afternoons she picks up the hose in the backyard, bends her head, and lets the cool water run down her neck and back and hair, shivering with physical pleasure. At night she can’t bear the cotton nightgown, the fan at the window moving sweltering air from outside to inside. She worries about Tom, who develops a bad diaper rash. Grace knows she has to visit Dr. Franklin to confirm the pregnancy. Her mother guesses soon after Grace knows. Grace says, “I don’t want it.”

  Her mother’s eyes widen. “Promise me,” she says.

  “I promise,” Grace replies, knowing there’s no alternative. Perhaps if she lived in Portland or Boston, she would know where to go for such a thing.
But she’s never heard of anyone in Hunts Beach who could help her get rid of a fetus. Probably Dr. Franklin knows how, but she can’t ask him. He wouldn’t do it anyway.

  —

  During the first week of September, Grace begins to wish for rain. All the brilliant sunshine feels unnatural. She knows others think it, too, but don’t mention it for fear of triggering the endless rains of spring. As if a thought could trigger weather.

  —

  Grace makes herself bigger dresses. Her mother buys her a maternity blouse and helps her daughter let out the elastic in her skirts. The first evening she dons these clothes, Gene says, when he walks into the kitchen, “You’re pregnant.”

  “You noticed.”

  “How far are you along?”

  “Guess.”

  There’s a long silence. Grace knows she’s on dangerous ground.

  “Are you happy about it?” asks Gene.

  “Are you?”

  Grace doesn’t expect an answer, and she doesn’t need one.

  “I hear the water level in the lakes and ponds is low,” he says.

  “Is that right?”

  “I’ll be out mowing the lawn.”

  Through the window, Grace watches her husband push the mower, trailing clouds of dust behind him.

  —

  Grace makes an appointment with Dr. Franklin, a man who wastes no time in small talk, who enters houses and walks straight up the stairs to the patient’s room before the family even knows he’s there. He studies Grace’s chart.

  “I thought so,” he says. “This is your third in less than two years.”

  “More or less.”

  With a gesture, he makes her spread her legs. “You need any information about protection?” he asks as he inserts his fingers into her vagina.