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⬅️ Previous chapter
Late December, 2009
“Gin.” Grace spreads her cards on the kitchen table. “Ma, wake up. I got gin.” She prods her mother’s shoulder. “Ma.”
Francesca pries her eyes open, struggling against the gravity of sleep. “Whose turn is it?”
“I got gin.” Grace taps the center of her card array.
Francesca nudges the three of clubs with an index finger spindly as a heron’s leg. Grace applied the flame-red polish yesterday and there’s a chip already.
“Where’d you get that three of clubs?”
“You discarded it last turn.”
“I did not. I knew you needed it. I would never . . .” Her eyes dart from the card to her daughter and back. “Sei fuori. You cheated.”
The corners of her mother’s mouth twitch. Grace laughs. Francesca laughs.
They laugh until tears stream.
“Some things never change,” her mother says. “You always were a sly one.”
That always is an embellishment on the true history that her mother left when Grace was seven and remarried soon after. She chose a new life over her own daughter.
“Want some lunch?” Grace asks. “I think we have salad stuff. Maybe some turkey.”
“Salad is like eating paper now,” her mother says. “Everything tastes like cardboard. Or dirt or soap. Or crayons.” Her face contorts.
Her doctor, worried about weight loss, ordered Francesca to drink Ensure. She says it’s like gelled chalk. Nothing makes it palatable, not even a shot of anise.
“What would you prefer?” Grace asks.
“A bowl of my minestrone.”
“Sorry, we’re fresh out.” Her mother cooked by heart since childhood with her mother, grandmother and aunts back in Sardinia. She’s too weak to cook anymore.
“You still have the recipe cards?” Francesca asks.
“Of course.” Her mother is unsubtly angling for her to cook. So far, she’s managed to resist. There’s no excuse; she has plenty of time on her hands.
The fridge holds four cans of plain seltzer, a carton of orange juice, two dried-out lemons, three eggs, half a stick of organic unsalted butter, two mystery casseroles from friends, and over a dozen jars of bottles of various condiments and sauces.
“Ma, why do you have fish sauce?”
“I took a Thai cooking class at the Y last year.”
Grace peers at the sell-by date. “You mean, in 2006?”
Her mother shrugs. “It was that long ago?”
Grace lifts the foil to peer into the casseroles. “Looks like tuna hot dish and some sort of beefaroni thing. What do you feel like?”
“Besides poisoned, exhausted, and loopy?”
“Yeah, besides that.”
While Francesca eats a few bites, Grace finds a journal in the kitchen desk. Floral hardcover, gold-foil title script: Dreams. Her mother wrote lists in her neat, European hand. Page one: Clean gutters. Paint porch columns. Call plumber about downstairs sink. Page two: library books with due dates from two years ago. Tony Hillerman mysteries and John Grisham thrillers. The rest is blank.
Her mother has no reason to be content or optimistic, but neither is she resigned. She answers any and all intrusive questions from her doctors, including the most intimate about her bodily functions. She follows their every order, so strong is her desire to remain here, with the living. But her veneer of invincibility has begun to crack as her vitality sloughs off.
After lunch, Francesca opens her birthday book, a large spiral-bound notebook to track birthdays and store cards in pockets for each month. Grace pictures her thinking, These January cards aren’t going to mail themselves. Fatigue drags on her.
“Ma, you fell asleep again.” Grace tugs the pen in her mother’s hand. Francesca’s fingertips are numb from the chemo, but she can still grip a pen.
“That’s mine. Get your own pen,” she slurs.
The loose pen left a stray mark on the card. Francesca turns it into a flower.
“Who’s Suzanne?” Grace asks.
“One of my bridge friends.”
“Let me at least address them for you.” Grace pulls the book closer. She scans pages colorful with watercolor flowers and outdoor scenes. The pockets are crammed with blank cards. The name of the month tops each facing page. Her mother has listed names and birthdays in at least three pen colors. A project years in the making. January and February each have close to a dozen names.
April has nine cards. May fourteen. Who’s going to send those cards? Or the March ones, the way things are going.
Grace finds the page for June. Her birthday is logged in blue pen as Margherita Grace. She studies each card and chooses the one with a fat orange cartoon cat wearing a pointy party hat. Above the cat: A little bird told me it was your birthday. Below the cat: So I ate it. Inside it says, Treat yourself. Sleep all day. Grace places the card in front of her mother.
“Ma, sign this.”
Her mother takes forever to sign it, To Grace, love always, Mom, then dozes off sitting upright. This time the pen falls out of her hand and rolls to the edge of the table where it stops, half on, half off.
One night, as Grace tucks Francesca into bed, her mother says, “I’m happy to have you here.”
Grace pushes through her awkwardness to reply. “I’m happy to be here. And I’m glad you’re here too.”
“I’m glad to be here. Not in this condition. Better than the alternative.” Francesca manages a tired smile.
It’s frightening to see her so frail. Strange to admit how close death is. Grace feels its presence stalking. Tugging not only on her mother, but on her, too. Lurking on the other side of a musty, threadbare curtain. Grace never wants to decline into sickness, clinging weakly to life. But she has no control over any of it. That’s what scares her.
“I’m impressed by your dignity,” she says to Francesca. “How you’re handling all this.”
“What choice do I have?” She closes her eyes and lets the weight of her head sink deeper into the pillow.
They sit in silence. How light her mother was, all slick angles, as Grace lifted her out of tonight’s bath. She wrapped her in a soft pink towel like a child.
“I don’t have to like it though.” A tiny smile pricks the corners of her mouth with amusement at the futility of her defiance.
Downstairs, Grace sorts through the mounting stack of medical bills. She can’t make sense of any of it and resists wasting time on hold with the insurance company. Her mother’s finances aren’t robust. How is it possible in the twenty-first century that a life-threatening illness can bankrupt someone? The unfairness of it is breathtaking.
Grace stands alone in her mother’s kitchen, gripped by the terror that only reality can inflict. Her mother was unable for the first time to get out of bed. She lies upstairs in sweet docility, if not resignation.
It’s like her mother is being sucked through a thick wall of gelatin to the other side. She appears still to be here, in this place, with Grace. But her ever-diminishing body is slipping through the gelatin, taking her speech and actions with it. Grace is in a tug-of-war, trying to pull her back because that’s what Francesca wants, or what Grace wants. Would it be wrong to stop reaching out and tugging? Wrong to let her go?
Grace brings a tray up, orange juice and a buttered English muffin. Francesca talks about her childhood.
“In many ways, it was idyllic. Sardinia is beautiful, full of wild, natural places. Fish, wild fruit, berries, gardens overflowing, shellfish. Every food imaginable. Lemons, figs, tomatoes, artichokes. We roamed all over. Never worried who I was or where I belonged. Everyone was family.”
She picks up the English muffin, studies it, replaces it on the plate. “I took it all for granted. Then I left.”
Grace would never leave such a place. To be known like that, and loved. “If it was such a paradise, why didn’t you return?”
“Sardinia is small, too small for other ideas. It was painful to leave, but I had to live my life.”
Grace has never considered what it was like to be a young woman arriving in a foreign country knowing no one. “How long were you here before you met Dad?”
Her mother laughs. “One day. We met at the housing office, applying for apartments. He was a marvelous dancer.”
“That was fast.” Grace screens a rom com in her head. After the meet-cute, they flirt on date nights and fall in love, but her mother gets skittish and calls it off—she has a serious purpose, not to be distracted. They drift apart, he dates around, time passes, they bump into each other on campus, argue, sparks fly, they kiss, one thing leads to another, and here we are.
“If you could go anywhere, do anything, where would you go?” her mother asks.
“Somewhere people have known me since I was a baby,” Grace says without thinking. “Where old women knit booties for me before I was born. Where people stay for generations and tell stories about the old days that grow more outlandish with each telling. People accept each other, even the strange ones. Especially the strange ones. Their traditions persist season after season, year on year.”
“Well, you’ve just described Sardinia,” her mother says. They both laugh. “Is that what Holland Island was like?”
Grace closes her eyes and leans back in her chair. Holland Island belongs to her alone. She feels an odd resistance to sharing it with Francesca. “I just described every after-school special I watched as a kid. Utopia’s not real, Ma.”
“Oh, don’t be so cynical,” her mother says. “What makes you happy? I mean, truly happy?”
Behind closed eyes, Grace sees the women picking crabs at the Star Crab Company with her grandmother. She hears them harmonizing in four parts. Smells her grandfather’s coveralls after a day on the water. The vinegar her grandmother put in the bucket to soak them before washing. She sees the long narrow wood tubs in the peeler shed, hears the burble of water circulating among molting crabs. Feels the weight of the multi-colored quilt held on a dozen women’s laps in the church basement. Gooey marsh mud glooshes between her toes. Metallic smell of life mingling and merging with death. The light goldens through shallow grasses where crabs swim and mate.
Holland Island was a real place. But it’s gone now. A spasm of grief wells up into a gasp.
Grace clears her throat and rubs her eyes. “Is this where you tell me life’s too short, follow my bliss?” She stands to lift the tray with the uneaten muffin. Her fingers cramp from gripping it. Her throat is stripped and raw. “Children get to be happy. Adults have to survive.”
Her mother makes it downstairs in the early afternoon fully dressed to entertain Evelyn. She’s brought fig jam and honey. “Sweetness to ring in the new year,” she says, kissing Francesca’s cheek.
After their brief visit, her mother’s smile is radiant. “What did you two talk about?” Grace asks.
“She said I know what I came here to do and dedicated myself to it. She said it’s a beautiful thing. A gift.”
“You came here to teach math to hormonal seventh graders?”
Her smile beams on. “You might be happier, Grace, if you considered whether what you came here to do is best served in the current form you’ve chosen.”
“I can’t even say what I came here to do. Since when did you start talking like an Instagram influencer?”
Francesca laughs. “Maybe knowing I’ll die soon makes me more willing to say what I think. I know you look down on me for my choice to teach those kids—wait, hear me out—I don’t fault you for it. When I was your age, I was full of fire and grit, too.”
Grace’s fire lately is more a pile of embers struggling to stay lit. The grit is real, though. It’s been rubbing her raw all over.
“I want you to know I’m very happy teaching hormonal seventh graders. I love my students.”
Grace notes the use of present tense. They both know she’ll never teach again.
“I love when they light up with discovery. Even when they struggle, I know they’re learning what they’re made of. Bit by bit, they fall in love with themselves. I see into them, past the pimples and the angst and acting out. I see their big-S Self. I have a gift to awaken that self-love. They say teaching is a calling and it’s true. It really is. Maybe you have that gift, too.”
Grace laughs. “You’ve clearly never seen me in a classroom.”
Francesca sighs. She yawns. “Bring your love of the natural world to these kids. Awaken their innate love for it, too.”
“To what end? So they can feel as betrayed by all the destruction as I do? So they can dread the future, too? Heartbroken and pissed off?”
“Oh, my dear. You carry too much. You can help them to experience wonder and awe. Feel alive, welcome, at home. Before . . .” Her head droops.
“Before?”
She defies gravity to look up. Her face is clouded. “I was going to say, before it’s too late. But who am I to predict anything? We can’t ever know if it’s too late. All we can do is . . . admit that we care.” She yawns again and pulls her feet out of her slippers. “I’ll just lie down here for a little nap. Help me settle.”
Grace checks her watch. No way are they making it to midnight. New Year’s Eve is just another day of waiting for the inevitable.
Grace can’t leave Francesca alone, so Ned has been dropping by to play games—three-player bridge (her mother’s favorite) and Trivial Pursuit (so Grace can win at something). Grace makes him leave before her mother wakes in the morning, which he accepts with good humor. To give her a break, he books a cabin for an overnight on New Year’s Day.
Francesca’s church friend comes to stay with her. She brings containers of black-eyed peas, collards, and pork roast—her family’s traditional start to the new year. Grace would be surprised if her mother eats any of it, but she thanks her and puts it all in the fridge.
The cabin is near Montrose, Pennsylvania, because Ned wants to see where she works. Grace hasn’t been back up there since November. In the end-of-semester crush, she’s been too busy to share her career woes with Ned.
He says the stargazing will be epic up there, away from city lights. His enthusiasm is touching. She feels awe not from the night sky, but at the water’s edge among crabs and herons, in marshes and forests, and in the daytime sky, flying with hawks. She’s moved only by places she can smell and feel. Places that smell and feel and see her.
The road north from Scranton tracks between open snow-covered fields and beneath arching bare branches. Grace is mesmerized by the scenery, imagining it from above, wishing she was flying. The patchwork of fallow fields, tired towns, and frozen forests would unfurl beneath her, sensible and orderly and clean.
“It’s beautiful here,” Ned says.
“The snow covers the ugliness.”
“Ugliness? This landscape is objectively enchanting.”
She studies his profile. “You see what you want to see. I know what’s beneath the surface. The damage is hidden, but it’s real, it’s there—in the ground, the water, the air.”
“I believe you. And the surface counts, too. It’s like a children’s storybook or a fairy tale. Makes me feel happy.”
As they near the cabin, the sun slips into a quiet goodbye, the signature of a cloudless day. “Aw,” he says, “I was hoping for a spectacular sunset. At least it’s clear for the stars.”
“Goody,” she says.
The cabin smells of musty socks, wet wool, and old ash. Ned draws a deep breath and smiles. “Ahhh. It’s perfect.”
“Smells like a mangy dog,” Grace says.
“I know, right? Perfect.” His bear-hug leaves her feet dangling.
She builds a roaring fire in the stone fireplace, and they eat the chili he brought sitting on couch cushions on the floor. Ned heats hot chocolate to carry in a thermos outside.
They trudge through thick snow to an Adirondack bench and settle into Ned’s heavy wool plaid blankets. She snuggles in, pleased to imagine him planning this very scene.
“Would you believe I called the owner to ask if this bench pictured on the website is really here?”
“Of course you did.”
“I was ready to bring something from home, if necessary.”
The cold is as deep as the night. Grace buries her face in Ned’s shoulder, wishing they were back inside by the warm fire. The homey smoke-smell mocks her.
He cradles the back of her head, then shifts so he can kiss her. Somehow his hands on her cheeks are warm, his good cheer like an internal furnace. She wants to crawl inside him and curl up like a cat.
“The moon is waning gibbous, but we should still be able to see plenty of stars,” he says.
Grace has no objections to the night sky. The stars glint random as a child’s spilled glitter.
“Ever wonder what you’re doing here?” he asks. “I mean, here, here. Like, why?”
“All the time. You?”
“I used to, when I was younger. I couldn’t shake the feeling I don’t belong here.”
Grace groans. “That fucking feeling.”
“Right? Drinking helped for a while. Until it didn’t.”
She shivers and he pulls her closer. As if that were possible.
“But look—it’s all so . . . amazing. And we get to be here to see it. Not for free, though. The price is, we have to be here in these awkward bodies that get cold and sick and need to eat and pee and sleep.” He throws the blanket over their heads to kiss her deeply. “It’s not all bad, though,” he whispers. “We get to do this.”
She presses into him. She wants to say, I feel so lost. She wants to tell him all that’s happened. But she can’t ruin this moment with whining and complaining. Like the loser she is.
You should tell him, Dr. Hack chimes in. My Aldo and I talked about everything. We were great childhood friends, you know. I even married him in a church, the one and only time I ever went inside one.
It’s not a good time, Grace thinks. Just let me spend—
Time isn’t yours to use like currency. It’s borrowed. You’re here as a guest. In a blink, you’ll be gone. What are you waiting for?
“Okay, I found Orion,” Ned says. “See those three stars there?” He points, dislodging the blanket. Frigid air jolts Grace back. “And the reddish one and the blue-white one? Just think how many light-years away they are. That light was there before humans came down out of trees.”
He’s wrong.
“Uh huh, amazing,” Grace says.
Alnitak is 1,262 light years, and Betelgeuse is 642.5 light years away.
“See them?” Ned asks.
“I think?”
“The night sky is like a time machine,” Ned says. “We’re only now seeing light that’s many thousands of years old.”
He makes a pretty philosopher, but he’s no astronomer.
“You’re way off,” Grace says.
“Huh?”
“They’re, like a thousand light-years away. Or, hundreds.”
He pulls back to give her a hard look. Grace gasps from the cold. “Are you messing with me right now? I thought I was the star guy and you’re—”
“Well, you’ve misjudged me.” She rewraps the blanket and pushes into him. His body is a furnace.
Give me another one, Grace thinks in a commanding tone. A star or constellation. Anything.
What about Gemini? That’s ours, after all.
“Show me Gemini,” Grace says to Ned.
“Okay, let’s see. Why that one?”
Grace has no idea.
Oh, come on, Grace! Dr. Hack chides. It’s ours. June 2 birthday? Gemini?
Astrology? Grace thinks with incredulity. You can’t be serious.
Non criticarlo. Don’t knock it. The sky is full of stories. The Twins, Castor and Pollux—
You should haunt him instead. You two have more in common.
“See there?” Ned points. “East of Orion, see the lines of stars extending from the brightest two? Those are the twins—”
“Yeah, I know, Castor and Pollux.”
“Right.” He shifts, recrosses a leg. “Are you sure this isn’t a set-up?”
“How far away are they?” Grace asks.
Dr. Hack is ready. Pollux is 34 light-years. Castor is about 51, if I’m not mistaken.
“Oh, I don’t know, thousands? Millions?” Ned says.
Grace laughs. “You have no idea, do you? It’s not even a hundred.”
Tell him about me, Dr. Hack says. No more until you tell him.
Are you insane? No way. Grace shifts to tuck her left leg under her right.
“Seriously, this is weird.” Ned sounds hurt. “I thought we’d have a nice, romantic time. I’d show you a few stars, share my love of the night sky—"
“And you can’t stand that I know more than you. Admit it.”
Ned sighs. The air brakes on a truck squeal in the distance. Even here. In the supposed middle of nowhere.
“That’s not the point,” he says finally. “It’s not . . . Not about who knows what. It’s about wonder. I mean, look at that.” He sweeps an arm skyward, throwing the blanket off. The blast of frigid air takes her breath away. “The night sky has fascinated and, and . . . awed people for centuries, for millennia. The whole show is so much bigger than we can ever comprehend.”
“Okay, okay, sorry,” she says, disgusted with herself. Her father was competitive like this, and she hated him for it.
They settle back into their rewrapped cocoon. The stars wink and shimmer. Some bright, some dim, some white, pink, or blueish. Patterns dance. The velvet dome feels intimate, like it’s theirs alone. “You’re right. It is pretty amazing.”
Tell him about me, Dr. Hack urges.
Grace sighs. Go away.
Aldo and I shared everything, and we’ve been married for sixty-five years.
Ned drinks some hot chocolate and offers her the thermos with a chocolatey kiss. The warm sweetness melts her resistance. “Okay, here goes. My mother named me for an Italian astrophysicist because we have the same birthday. June 2nd.”
He nods. “So that’s why you asked about Gemini.”
“You know the signs of the Zodiac, like, off the top?”
He laughs. “Doesn’t everyone?”
She shakes her head and settles against him. “You’re so . . . you.”
“Did you see that?! A shooting star!” His boyish eagerness is irresistible.
I can take you there if you want. Dr. Hack says.
“Where?” Grace says aloud.
“You missed it, sorry. Maybe we’ll see another. Keep your eyes peeled.” He pulls her close for a kiss. “Who is this mystery namesake?”
“Her name is Margherita Hack. She’s like the Neil deGrasse Tyson of Italy. The weird thing is . . . I sometimes hear her . . . Like, in my head.” There. Happy?
Ecstatic.
“Wait. You have an invisible friend? Is it like when you speak to starlings?”
“I don’t—”
“I heard you. And your mother too, remember?”
She feels exposed, mocked.
“Hey.” With his arm around her shoulder, he pulls her close. “I’m not here to tease you. I’m genuinely curious. You fascinate me.”
Grace has never trusted anyone with her inmost secret places. Those are hers alone.
Dr. Hack presses her. Tell him more. He wants to know you better.
Grace sighs.
Ned stretches his legs long and crosses them at the ankles. “Until I was about . . . fourteen? Fifteen, maybe, I interviewed people in my bathroom mirror. I would play both parts. Me, a famous TV journalist and them, an actor or politician or football player—”
“It’s not the same. You were a kid.”
“I’ve never told anyone that.” His voice is low, nearly a whisper.
“Did you always want to be on TV?”
He laughs. “As you know, I have a face for radio.”
“I like your face.”
“And I love yours.”
Just tell him. He’ll be impressed.
“I doubt it,” Grace says aloud.
“It’s true,” he says.
Grace pulls him close to kiss him, taking refuge in his openness.
He shifts onto his back, pulls her on top of him, and tucks in the blanket. She drops her head into the crook of his neck and inhales deeply. He smells of wet rocks baked by the sun.
The cold and the cocoa lure them close to sleep. Time stretches. Their breathing slows and syncs.
“Dr. Hack says she wants to take us to the stars,” she murmurs.
“I’m in, let’s go,” he exhales. “We’ll dream of following her to rise weightless in the velvet night . . .”
“. . . and swirl into deep space toward a pulsing light . . .” she whispers. “Toward a thousand million flashing beacons. . .”
“. . . each a blooming flower. . .”
They drift into the cold quiet and dream-travel together to galaxies beyond galaxies.
Where indifferent fire glows and spirals from pinpoint to eruption.
Stellar wind shimmers through nebulae and star nurseries,
humming deep histories into far futures beyond limits or longing.
Blood red swirls from an ivory center, casting azure-cobalt light into carbon-black space.
A hidden chef spreads plasma of copper crimson bronze seasoned by hot pink flashes.
Grace and Ned glide through a glowing gateway to a
cosmic smile that ellipses into a
bridge of stars, a thin-stretched thread of new life.
Star-clouds collide.
Molten lava arms spin gold from light.
Apricot spots fleck a rust river flowing in a nickel bed.
A mycelial mat of ghostly white filaments weaves a tangerine lemon burst.
Embryos tango.
Light sleets.
Jets birth a song written
into every human life
in every moment
ongoing.
Marvelous, no? Dr. Hack’s voice is gentle with pride.
“Marvelous,” Grace says. She opens her eyes to gaze at Ned’s peaceful sleeping face.
He stirs and looks into her.
Grace’s heart leaps the same as when she launches her glider. “I just had the wildest dream. Dr. Hack—"
He nods and smiles. “I know.”
“You too?”
He kisses her. “I have a good feeling about this.”
“I love you,” she says. “And your radio face.”
Next chapter ➡️
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Gemini by Jina Choi from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0)
This chapter is simply brimful of a gentleness as yet unseen in Grace.
And, at last, she said the words! Yes!
Hypnotic writing Julie, perfectly narrated - I cannot seem to stop myself dwelling on the fact that you chose June 2nd for Grace and Dr Hack's birthday... no wonder I love Grace so much!
Oh wow. Dr. Hack suddenly takes center stage and what a force of good for Grace. For someone so grounded in logic, her acknowledgment and sharing of Hack’s liminal presence feels monumental.