Originally published in Ploughshares in Winter 1998-99, this story was reprinted in the anthology This is Where We Live, edited by Michael McFee, listed as one of 100 Notable Stories of 1999 by the editors of Best American Short Stories, and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

The Night Sky

By Peter Turchi

Rodney shifted the heavy wooden console a few inches each night, hoping the hotel manager wouldn’t notice the newly revealed depression in the commercial-grade carpet. By the end of the week he could comfortably stand at the far left hand side of the desk—actually a long laminated counter—and see the entire picture without distortion. He stood there now, watching the final minutes of a National Basketball Association playoff game.

Having decided to drop out of college at least until the fall, he had taken the night clerk job with the expectation that he would witness clandestine, even exotic behavior. At first he imagined every lone late-night arrival to be a criminal one step ahead of the law, every couple to be engaging in strenuous, costumed intercourse. Occasionally a couple checked in whom he was sure were having an affair—local address, no bags, more excited than weary—but the unresolved mysteries of the hotel’s guests soon gave way to the tedium of long, quiet hours. On a typical night he watched television until 12:30, then read a paperback until the sun beamed over the forested mountains beyond the opthamologist’s office across the street.

Rodney had briefly considered the circumstances of a woman who had been staying on the second floor for nearly two weeks. She gave a local address, and one of the maids said her room was empty except for toiletries, a few clothes, and some papers, but there was no sign of a man—or, for that matter, another woman. Rodney saw her blue sedan enter the parking lot every night between midnight and one, always from the west, not from the highway exit. She appeared to be in her sixties, and her body was heavily rounded in a way that made it difficult for Rodney to stay interested in her secret, whatever it was. From the way she walked it seemed she meant to climb the stairs, unlock the door, and collapse onto the bed.

Elizabeth did not collapse but sat on the edge of her bed, ignoring two upholstered chairs flanking the small circular table centered under a hanging lamp. In two weeks the bed had become hers, the way this room had become hers; while she hadn’t moved the furniture, or taken down the undistinguished landscape print of the surrounding mountains, she felt as intensely identified by this room as by any room she had ever lived in. Her feet ached, but she did not remove her shoes. Instead she took off her glasses, setting them on the bed beside her, and cupped her face in her hands. Even this room, lit by a single fixture just outside the bathroom door, was too bright, and too large; only by pressing her hands over her forehead and eyes could she contain the world long enough to concentrate.

Though the effect was lessening, every night the opening of the hotel room door filled her with as much guilt as any illicit lover ever felt; she thought of Terry’s affair, his childish, stereotypical mid-life boyhood—though she wasn’t convinced he had felt any guilt before she confronted him. They hadn’t talked about when he had felt guilty. She knew enough, and Terry said enough. Only recently had she wondered if it would have been better to have talked it all through. In the years since, there had been a terrible vulnerability in their marriage, as if someone had let a poisonous snake loose in the house. For months you might forget about it, but one day, in the laundry room, you would catch a glimpse of mottled coils, or you would remember how, when you first moved here, there had been mice.

Given any opportunity, Terry would have discussed it. He believed in talking through every problem, every disagreement. Silence frustrated him. She knew how badly he wanted to explain it all, to tell her why he had gotten involved with his other woman, why he would never do it again—and, since telling her everything would relieve him, she would not let him talk. Take it with you to your grave, she remembered thinking. The memory made her shoulders knot, her forehead tighten. She had been embarrassed and ashamed, having fallen for his lies and excuses, refusing to believe that all the situational cliches of movies and television were coming true.

What she was doing now was no cliche. She had never heard of anyone doing it before. She imagined she knew how it felt to be a bad soldier: one who believed in the cause, but who nevertheless ran from battle. To add to her shame, her guilt and cowardice, Terry was quick to tell everyone that he had asked her to stay here. To lie was his idea.

They had known he was sick; two years ago the doctors hadn’t been able to remove all of the cancer. Last month, when the dogwoods and tulips were blooming, they learned the inevitable had grown closer. “The situation,” Dr. Foote told her, was worse. They could try the chemotherapy again, but at best it would slow the disease’s progress. Rachel, who missed two classes to be there, had put one strong arm around her. Anticipating the worst, Elizabeth thought she might slump heavily, but when the news came she felt strangely buoyant; it was as if someone had just told her the earth was inside out. As if she had stepped into a marsh and found herself peacefully suspended. Then discovered she was not quite able to walk, not able to swim.

Terry refused the chemotherapy. “I want to go out hairy,” he said, trying to cheer them up. “I want apple pie and cheesecake—I want a goddamned prime rib.” They talked of travel: Hawaii, Southern France, Australia, or back to Scotland, where they had spent the summer over a decade ago. “The South Pole,” he proposed. “Just to see a circle of those male emperor penguins holding eggs on their feet.” In a serious moment, he admitted he didn’t want to be far from home.

“I could take incompletes,” Rachel told him. She was in her junior year at the state university in the city, majoring in education and theatre, playing varsity volleyball.

“No need,” Terry said. “But if you’d like to come around for dinner more often, I think we could find an extra plate.”

So that’s how he’s going to be, Elizabeth thought. Stoic. He had succumbed to weakness the first time; the radiation and chemo had made him miserable. He was embarrassed about having been such a bad—scared, needy—patient. Bob Martin, one of her colleagues in the math department, had given her a quotation about “the kingdom of the sick.” It ended, “sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”

Those first nights after Dr. Foote quietly estimated two months, six at the outside, they stayed awake together to consider and reject travelling plans, meals he would enjoy while he was still hungry, movies he wanted to see, friends and family who should visit. Then Terry began to return to routine. He watched the day’s sports summary at eleven, attended to his teeth—first flossing, then brushing, then massaging his gums with a special, small-bristled brush the dentist had prescribed—then read around in a magazine or a book until it fell on his chest. She would prod him awake; he would set the book on the floor, turn off his bedside light, and roll onto his side. He offered a single kiss, scented with the faint remains of aftershave or, more often now that the weather was warmer, sour perspiration.

Elizabeth could not sleep. After dinner she busied herself with the dishes and cleaning, then they would take a walk. She taught trigonometry and geometry at one of the county high schools, and there was grading to do. Her department was one of four state-wide participating in a three-year study of the effective teaching of national standards, so two or three times a week she was obliged to log onto a computer bulletin board and correspond with other participants in the study. When she couldn’t concentrate on that, she went back down to the living room. Some nights they played backgammon; others they watched television, or a movie. When the sports came on she got ready for bed, and when Terry came to the bedroom she pretended to read, or to sleep.

A woman at the hospital had given her information on counselling for family members of patients with terminal illnesses. This is what they would talk about, she thought: gathering important papers, evaluating your financial situation, learning how to take on new responsibilities. Elizabeth paid their bills and balanced the checkbook, and they made decisions about investments together. When Rachel was born, Terry insisted on buying what Elizabeth argued was far too much life insurance; when the policy arrived, he pretended to read from the envelope: “You May Have Won a Million Dollars.” She wasn’t scared about money. She worried about being alone, and her worry surfaced in absurd details. He did things to the cars and lawnmower, things she had never bothered to ask about, and now it was unthinkable. In the yard, he pruned what needed to be pruned, thinned what needed to be thinned, watered and fertilized with results such that friends were always asking him for advice. He knew how the Christmas decorations were most efficiently packed in the storage space under the stairwell, he knew what colors of stain they had used on the house and trim three years ago, he knew how to program the VCR. All things she could learn. Things she dreaded having to learn.

What haunted her most was his physical presence: his thin, graying hair, his crooked teeth, the mole on his neck. Even the faded paisley pajama bottoms seemed a part of his body. He breathed through his mouth, but when his allergies were bad or he slept on his back he snored loudly. He had an office-worker’s paunch, a flabby belly with an appendectomy scar. At one time or another she had had nearly every inch of his skin in her hands, on her tongue. The memory of those moments of intimacy most terrified her now as he lay beside her, large as life. There was something the boys at school were saying this spring, one of those momentarily popular all-occasion expressions: Dead meat. It could be used as a threat (You touch me again and you’re dead meat) or an expression of resignation (As soon as I saw the first problem, I was dead meat). Like a bee at a picnic, the phrase buzzed behind and beside and around every thought. She hated the way Terry looked when he slept.

In the middle of honors geometry one morning she paused, exhaustion passed over her, and she suddenly had no idea what she had been saying. Angela, one of the eager front-row girls, offered politely, “You were reminding us about the theorems.”

What theorems? Elizabeth thought. What class is this? The moment, horrifying, stretched on. She thought she would have to leave the room.

“I’m very sorry,” she said. “I seem to have lost my train of thought.” Aaron, an exemplary student, suggested with great diplomacy that she had been referring to their work with triangles and cones in the fall to demonstrate the relationship of analytic geometry to demonstrative geometry. “Thank you,” she said, genuinely grateful, and went on.

The next day she sat in her room during her free period meaning to write comments for the awards ceremony, only to be awakened by her fourth-period class.

That weekend she told Terry, “I have something horrible to confess.” He had been describing his plan to kill all the grass on the slope down to the driveway and create a new flower bed.

He looked up from his drawing.

“I don’t think,” she began, then realized what she had been about to say. I don’t think I can sleep beside you again. “I haven’t been sleeping well,” she said.

“I know this is ungentlemanly,” he told her, “but you’ve looked absolutely exhausted. I thought it was end-of-the-year overload.”

He must have known, but he wouldn’t say it. She didn’t want to cry. She was so tired. “Maybe it is,” she allowed.

Terry suggested, “Why don’t I sleep in Rachel’s room tonight?”

“No.” She spoke more loudly than she intended. She wanted to tell him, Stop being so generous.

She said, “You should have the big bed. I thought I’d try Rachel’s, just until I catch up on my rest. I don’t think I told you, but Friday I actually dozed off at my desk.” She hadn’t meant to tell him now.

“Have I been snoring?”

“No more than usual. I really think it’s me.”

Terry smiled at her across the dining room table. “I’ll miss you. But whatever, sure. Get a good night’s rest.” He picked up a catalogue. “I’m thinking about making this border heaths and heathers, and they’re not going to have a chance in the clay we’ve got here. With the retaining wall, we’ll essentially create a huge planter. The summer heat might be too much for them, but they shouldn’t get any afternoon sun if this works out…”

Rachel’s room offered no comfort. The past accumulated on Elizabeth’s chest the way she imagined it would if she were the one dying. Meeting Terry at school, that first awful date, the wonderful Indian dinner, seeing Casablanca in that horrible smelling theatre, his clumsy proposal, her mistake with the wedding invitations, first jobs, trying not to get pregnant, then trying to, losing the first two, finally getting all the way through with Rachel…why was she the one feeling this way, as if the door to the past was about to be shut tight, locked, sealed off? Why was she the one who felt she was suffocating, being drawn toward an unavoidable horror? Laying in her daughter’s bed tortured her; she was the child, the one who couldn’t understand, couldn’t accept the simple fact. Was Rachel thinking these things? Rachel had forgiven Terry the affair; did that somehow make it easier for her to accept this? Elizabeth pictured the three of them as an isosceles triangle, then realized the sides should be uneven. Were Rachel and Terry closer to each other than she was to either of them, or was Terry the distant point? She pictured triangles turning like images on her computer monitor, turning in space but also distorted by time. She imagined three triangles, one to represent the way each of them saw their family—or was it that she saw it three different ways? She saw the triangles overlaid, imagined her parents, Terry’s, the other woman, Rachel’s roommate and boyfriend, the two children she had lost—all points on a star, then distinct stars, some bright, some faint. She tried to count them all.

She awoke without having slept. Her head ached, her body was sore. Sunlight pierced the curtains, glaring over Rachel’s high school memorabilia. She smelled coffee, which Terry no longer drank, so must have brewed for her. Lying in her daughter’s bed, she thought, I want someone to take care of me. Repulsed by her selfishness, she rose to shower.

“I’ve been feeling guilty,” Terry announced. Sitting on the edge of the jetted tub, he handed her a warm cup when she finished drying off. With the word guilty, the snake dropped into view. He continued, “I’m guessing these new beds, hardscaping, plants, mulch, the whole nine yards, will run two thousand dollars.”

In this room, the trees in front of the house filtered the sunlight. Despite the coffee, Elizabeth felt a chill. “Beds plural?”

“Still that one area, but I’m thinking it needs some steps.” Squinting, she saw he was cleaning her glasses for her. He held them out. “I could be talked out of that. Anyway, my argument is it’s still a lot cheaper than the chemo. Or a trip to the Loire valley. However you want to think of it.”

Vision corrected, she glanced into the mirror expecting to see bags under her eyes. Craving sleep, she drank coffee.

“You know,” she told Terry, “it’s fine with me. Whatever you want to do.” She headed toward the closet, leaving him on the side of the tub.

“If you’re serious,” he called after her, “I’m going to call some people, get some estimates on the labor.”

The walk-in closet allowed just one person to stand between the lines of clothes, shoes regimented below, sweaters stacked on the head-high shelf. She put her hand out, comforted by the cloth all around. She should put a pillow down in here.

When she came out he was sitting on the end of the bed. Their room, like Rachel’s, got the morning sun. The light angled across Terry so that his outline, particularly his head, seemed to glow. He was already gone.

“Sleep any better?”

“It helped.” She pulled on a sweatshirt, fighting off the chill.

“You,” he said, “are a rotten liar.”

But you’ve always been such a good one, she thought.

When that night was no different—she last checked Rachel’s clock, a wall-mounted Elvis Presley whose hips shifted with each tick and tock, at 3:45, but doubted she drifted off before 4:30—she nearly wept from exhaustion. Now the phrase that repeated itself was a throbbing, I’m so tired, so tired. It reminded her of a Beatles’ song, but she couldn’t recall the rest of the lyric. The thought of going to school the next morning was nearly unbearable.

“Maybe I should try a hotel,” she suggested at lunch, trying to sound facetious. She made chicken salad sandwiches. She was starving; she had no appetite. Her body didn’t know what it wanted. Sleep.

“You don’t feel sick?” Terry asked. “You aren’t being a martyr?”

“I feel all right,” she said, carrying the sandwiches through the sliding glass door to the patio. “I’m just—”

She couldn’t stop; tears pooled in her eyes. “I’m so tired!” She sat heavily on one of the comfortless wrought iron chairs, one of Terry’s choices. They looked like something in one of the fine homes magazines, but she had never liked them. Now she thought, I shouldn’t have to sit in this hard chair.

That night, after the awkwardness of checking in, certain even the desk clerk knew what she was avoiding, she turned on the television for distraction, laid down, and woke with the alarm she almost hadn’t bothered to set.

Rachel moved back home. There was only a week left in the semester, followed by final exams. She was glad for the excuse to have more time near her father, but worried about her mother. Even when she was rested, Elizabeth carried a hint of desperation around the edges, a woman on the verge. She devoted herself to her work at school, staying late as extra-curricular projects met their end, had the members of the math team over for their annual dinner. They finished third in the state this year.

Rachel had a lifeguarding job for the summer, her ongoing gig at the country club pool. The pay was good—lifeguards were in high demand these days, she had turned down a dozen jobs—but she wondered if she shouldn’t be doing something more career-oriented by now. She thought about applying for a position as summer school tutor, but the idea of staying indoors all day was too dreary. Maybe next year.

She immediately understood her father’s plans for the hillside.

“We can put the heathers in this fall,” he said, handing her the plant list, “but most of the perennials should wait until spring. Not the daylilies, or the peonies. But the butterfly weed and echinicea and liatrus. I’d rather let the beds settle over the winter.” He had bought a planning kit which included a large green cardboard grid, the surface treated so it could be written on with a wax pencil. The kit also included dozens of stickers, green branches on smaller and larger circles meant to represent plants. Terry, who had been a design engineer for a tool company, had carefully measured off the length and curve of the hillside and transcribed it here, to scale.

“What are these big ones?” she asked, pointing to the largest circles, each pencilled with a number 7.

“Dogwoods. I was thinking two white, one pink.” He had gone back and forth over the steps. In the current plan, they didn’t appear.

“I’ll have to label all these,” he admitted. “I’ve got names and numbers there on the list, but it’s a mess. I’ll mark which come from which catalogs. Most of them you should be able to get around here.”

He wasn’t deceiving himself; he knew he wouldn’t see the work finished. That’s why Rachel decided she would spend the summer helping. It was impossible for her to think of preparing the ground without picturing his grave being dug, but she liked the idea that, instead of a tombstone, he would have this: not just the yard, with the footbridge he had built over the creek that rarely ran, and the hemlocks and sugar maples he had planted when he and her mother built the house, but this last creation, his attempt not at immortality—plants had their cycles, in a dozen or fifteen years the heathers would be spent—but at life transferred.

As Terry had feared, the best landscapers were booked at least until August. Rachel suggested he hire strong arms and backs; as long as he supervised, they didn’t need experienced help. Reynolds, a biology major she had been seeing, and his friend Christian had intended to spend the summer travelling, but those plans were stalled by lack of funds. Soon she found herself impatient sitting high in the lifeguard chair, oiling herself hourly to ward off skin cancer, watching the swimmers all around her: children hoping she wouldn’t see them running on wet cement, some pretending to drown, some straining to dunk each other, one or two people floating, and a few calmly treading water, making slow progress against the length of the pool. At six o’clock she could put shorts on over her suit; at home she would find Terry measuring, adjusting the strings tied to pegs across the slope, as Reynolds and Christian dug.

“The bottom course of timbers is the slowest,” he reassured them as the young men sat, shirtless, drinking beer from bottles. “Once they go in level, we’ll get the rest up in two days, three at the most.”

“I need calluses,” Reynolds told Rachel, showing her his hands. Blisters had formed and torn open.

”Doesn’t that hurt?”

He held up the bottle. “I take one of these every hour.”

They were all inspired by Terry’s refusal to complain. Occasionally he would stop in the middle of leveling a spot, walk a few steps away, and slowly sit. Sometimes he looked down; sometimes he rested his forehead on his knees, so that the brim of his baseball cap tilted high, revealing arches of hair. Reynolds and Christian responded by continuing their work; when Rachel was there, if her father looked particularly drawn she would walk over and sit behind him, put one leg on either side, and lean her chest against his back. Not today, she thought. Not yet.

On one of these occasions he must have read her mind. So softly she could barely hear, he said, “I’m not going anywhere.” She couldn’t tell whether he was optimistic or resigned.

A moment later he raised his head. She stared at the back of his neck, the soft creases of flesh, the mole on his left side. He said, “I worry about your mother.”

She nodded. Then said, “She’s scared.”

He didn’t respond. At times like this, she believed her father had secrets. Other times she knew there was nothing as simple as a mystery, no dramatic revelation. She wanted him to tell her about his parents; his life, beginning with his earliest memory; everything he had aspired to; every possibility he had decided against. But that was too much; and there was no single thing she most wanted to know. She wanted what only he could tell her, the way he would tell it. She wanted him.

With his left hand, Terry covered her knee. Squeezed.

Elizabeth came home for dinner. From then until bedtime their schedule was the same as ever, except that she stayed dressed while he read, and when he finally dozed off, instead of prodding him, she sneaked away. That’s how it felt.

“You don’t have to wait,” he told her one night. “Unless, of course, you want to see the baseball highlights.”

Elizabeth said, “I want to be with you.”

Come watch the dying man, Terry thought. His anger rose closer to the surface each day.

He said, “Maybe we should do something.” True, his time felt precious. Even so, he liked baseball, had always liked baseball, the game without a clock, and reading the boxscores didn’t replace seeing the day’s homeruns and final outs.

“Let’s sit outside,” Elizabeth suggested. “It’s beautiful out tonight.”

He watched the Orioles’ centerfielder disappoint Boston fans with a ninth-inning homer, then tapped the remote control. “Sure.”

On the patio, Rachel had been about to turn on the floodlights when Elizabeth said, “Let’s just look for a minute.”

He looked at the worksite, where the first layers of timbers were finally straight and level. The boys were strong, but they didn’t appreciate what dirt could do to a wall. If the rebar didn’t extend deep into the ground, if the timbers weren’t stepped slightly back, in a few years the pressure of the earth would push them forward. The boys had been impatient, but now the hardest work was finished.

Eyes adjusting to the dark, he looked at the curve of hemlocks around back, the rhododendron silhouette that concealed a mahogany bench. He had intended to sink a pond there, with lilies and cattails and fish. He looked up at the maples and oaks, the tulip poplar with its tall, crooked trunk. He had meant to cut that down. Poplars were fast-growing, weak, and this one was close to the house. But there had been a poplar in their yard when he was young, and so this one lived, protected by sentiment. Was that foolish? Was he being foolish again, dragging them all through this construction? How should he be spending this time? He intended to make lists for Elizabeth, reminding her what to do, explaining things he had done. Was this an act of ego? The world would go on without him.

A bat flitted by.

Elizabeth said, “There’s the Big Dipper.”

“Where?” Rachel asked.

Elizabeth pointed out the arced handle, the angled bowl. “Isn’t there a way, once you’ve got the dipper, to see the North Star?”

That jogged a memory. “Follow the handle?” he asked.

“Just two of them,” Elizabeth corrected. The longer they looked, the more stars appeared, as if their very looking created dots of light. “But which ones?”

“Look North,” Rachel said logically. But now there were countless stars visible, with no telling which was the benchmark of their sky.

They all slouched in their chairs, faces tilted back as if to receive the light of the sun, or a dentist’s drill. Rachel asked, “How many constellations do you know?”

The sparks above them revealed no design. Terry turned his head, wondered if the reddish one was Mars.

“Well, the Little Dipper,” Elizabeth said. “And Orion.”

How many nights had he done this? How many times had he looked up without ever bothering to locate himself among the stars? He remembered the childhood diversion of sitting on a sofa or bed, tilting his head backwards over the edge, and imagining the world where he would walk on ceilings, step up to pass through doors, duck under tall furniture. He remembered the sound of his mother’s old canister vacuum drawing closer, its yellow light shining as she threatened to suck up his hair. What could he have been? Five?

“Here’s what we’ll do,” he told his wife and daughter. “We’ll get a good book, and maybe a star chart, and we’ll learn the constellations together.”

The next evening, after Reynolds and Christian had finished their beers and the coals had grayed in the grill, Rachel arrived.

“Hey,” she said from the bottom of the hill. “It’s a wall.”

The retaining wall, now two feet high and forty feet long, with angled ends anchoring it in the hill, was nearly finished. After laying the top row they would give all of the timbers a final coat of stain with the sprayer. He had bought locust, which wouldn’t rot, but he wanted the extra protection.

“Do lifeguards eat tuna?” he called as she brought two plastic bags from the car.

“We aren’t picky,” she told him. “Around four o’clock I nearly ate a toddler.”

He watched the boys watch his daughter follow the brick walkway to the patio. In cutoff shorts over her close-fitting swimsuit, strong legs leading to worn sneakers, her long brown hair pulled through the gap in back of a baseball cap, she looked like an advertisement for summer.

“I went hog wild.” Rachel set her bags on the iron garden table and began pulling things out. “I found two computer programs on the solar system, a neat-looking old book by the guy who wrote Curious George—remember, about the monkey?—a glow-in-the-dark star chart, and another little book that tells you the names of everything.”

Terry looked and read the title, A Guide to the Night Sky. “Everything but a telescope.”

Reynolds said, “You know that camera shop in the mall? They sell binoculars and lenses. I bet they’d have them.”

Rachel put her purchases back into their bags. “More beers?” she asked the boys.

Terry felt it coming, and when Rachel came back with three bottles, having already twisted off the caps, and sat casually, knees spread the way girls’ never spread their knees when he was young, the wave fell onto him. She would get married, have a house, children, job, a life so long that this day, if she could remember it, would be a faint moment in the distant past. He would be memories to her; to her children he would be photographs and occasional boring stories. Standing on the patio beside the stone wall he had built, surrounded by greenery he had planted, outside of the house he designed, he felt like a ghost. He would be forgotten the way fire forgets coal.

“I’ll be back,” he told them, both to remind them that he was there and to reassure himself. Sitting on the living room sofa, he gathered his strength, as he had to more and more often. He would not think this way. He would not yield to self-pity. As much as he wanted to talk about it all—the fatigue, the irrational hope, the betrayal of being eaten from the inside, the crush of regret—he would not. He would not ask Elizabeth for forgiveness, because now she had no choice but to forgive him. He would not pray, because his entire adult life he had been a non-believer. He would not ask why no one asked him what he was thinking. He had been genuinely relieved when Elizabeth suggested spending a night in Rachel’s room; it was at night, after he worked to read himself to sleep, that his fate confronted him. Now he could curl on his side without worrying Elizabeth would stop pretending to be asleep. She pretended during the day as well: she never mentioned that he stood less and less, moving from one seat to another, that he no longer reached for or held anything over his head, that his stride was shorter. He wanted to make love with her, but he refused to ask, because she could not refuse. And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and write them not. This was his gift to them.

Terry had been right: Mars.

“Without a telescope,” Rachel reported, “we should eventually be able to see all of the planets except Neptune, Uranus, and Pluto.”

The three of them sat on the patio in the dark. Elizabeth had brought one of the captain’s chairs from the den.

“As for constellations,” Rachel continued, glancing at the dimly glowing star chart in her hand, “there’s the Big Dipper. The pointers, on the outside, go up to Polaris. The handle and top of the dipper are half of the spine of Ursa Major—the end of the handle would be the tail. And Polaris is the end of the handle of the Little Dipper.”

“Slow down,” Elizabeth said.

“Little Richard,” Terry told her. “Right next to the Big Bopper.”

“You see Polaris?” Rachel asked.

Elizabeth said, “I think so. That one?”

Rachel pointed. “That one.”

“What’s that other bright star, on the left?”

Terry told her, “That’s the sun.”

“Kochap,” Rachel corrected. “The end of the dipper. Now you should be able to connect them with those one, two…”

“I see it,” Terry said. “Three stars in between, and another brightish on the far corner, for the bottom of the basket.”

“Dipper,” Elizabeth corrected. “Going that way.” She drew a line in the air with her finger. “As if someone is pouring something out of the Little Dipper into the big one.”

After installing the computer programs, Elizabeth had poked around in them. You could visit the planets, click so they slid into cutaway views, click them into orbit, animate Saturn’s rings, learn the years Neptune was more distant from the sun than Pluto and, disturbingly, see how the sun would eventually devour Venus, Mercury, and perhaps even Earth five billion or so years from now. With one click, the screen filled with the theoretical view from their longitude and latitude on this very day at this very moment. In a box in the lower right-hand corner, seconds ticked into minutes, minutes into hours. Time could be sped up, reversed, or stopped altogether. The sky could be viewed from Athens or Sydney, the globe could shift to put, say, Saturn front and center. With one click, stars were labelled; with another, the lines of the constellations were drawn; with yet another, elaborate drawings of mythological figures appeared. Three more clicks left the stars, dots of light on a monitor, alone.

“And that,” she said now, wishing the real sky were as bordered and orderly, “must be Cancer’s southern claw.” It was out before she thought.

“Where?” Terry asked.

Elizabeth pointed it out.

Terry stared at the specks of light. Then said, “Well. No hard feelings.”

The next night was overcast. H.A. Rey claimed, in his book, that coping with an obscured view was part of the challenge of learning the stars, but without the Big Dipper they were lost. Turning on one of the outside lights, Rachel read to them from A Guide to the Night Sky. “Listen to this: ‘Many of the most recently-recognized constellations have no stories attached to them. These include Antila, the air pump; Fornax, the furnace; Horologium, the clock; and Norma, the carpenter’s square.’ Did you guys know about these?” She continued, “‘However, the vast majority of the constellations, particularly those most easily perceived by the unaided eye, carry with them tales which reveal little about the heavens, but much about those fascinated by wondrous objects afar.’”

Listening to her daughter’s voice, Elizabeth found unexpected comfort. She was rested now. Each night the hotel bed welcomed her, its sheets pulled tight, the room vacuumed, a fresh bar of soap recently released from its wrapper resting by the sink. She was almost ready. At first she had only wanted to tell someone how angry she was. One night, searching for relevant discussions on the Internet, she came across a group of people talking about friends and relatives who had died horribly: drunken driving, Russian Roulette, a brain hemorrhage. She had thought that on the computer, anonymous, she would be able to talk openly, but instead she simply lurked. It was the right word for how she felt. She recognized expressions of grief and loss familiar from bad books and television; they struck her as unoriginal, insufficient, and true. As her daughter’s voice continued like a song she wanted to hear again, Elizabeth reached out in the direction of her husband.

Rachel remembered some of these stories. Reading this book’s condensed versions of myths was similar, she thought, to looking at the stars; each chapter seemed unnaturally abrupt, but if you knew the context, there was sense to it all. Tomorrow she would buy a telescope, a strong one, so they could see everything. Early this morning, before the pool opened, she and Reynolds had made love in the clubhouse. “He’s so brave,” she had told him, thinking of her father even then. Every day that summer, the title of her job mocked her. What could she do? The wall was finished, the planting diagram complete. Terry explained that few people grew heathers this far south, but at their elevation, if the drainage was improved, and the bed had plenty of peat moss, they should thrive. The red and orange perennials would draw hummingbirds, and butterflies. She asked questions, wanting to be able to finish what he had planned. What she couldn’t ask him was, if her mother wouldn’t sleep in the house now, what would she do once he was dead? Were they patronizing him, pretending they would keep this house, that they could keep what was his, without him to possess it?

Terry vaguely recognized a few of the stories of the constellations. What eluded him was the physics of the stars. Rachel had read them an article from the paper about an astronomer who claimed to have found another sun, a sun one million times brighter than the Earth’s, but so far away that it had never before been seen. How could that be? A million times brighter than the sun, and impossible to see.

He had always meant to read more of the classics. For half his life he had been aware of all the pursuits that would, in all likelihood, remain unpursued. And now, when he should feel free to take risks—go hang gliding, what’s to lose?—he had dedicated his strength to self-control. He had thought at least he could stop the damned flossing every night, even brushing; but when he did, the next morning his teeth felt dirty. In some way he was grateful for the small irritation, the distraction.

Aaron, Elizabeth’s best honors geometry student, was a textbook overachiever, preparing for tests by creating his own. In three years he would be accepted by both Harvard and Yale; in fifteen he would be a successful cardiovascular surgeon. Tonight he sat up in bed, eating orange slices, re-reading Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, occasionally pausing to make notes. He had amused himself by removing the orange’s peel whole, then flattening it, which made him think map, and then Gerardus Mercator, the cartographer whose collection of maps was the first to be called Atlas.

Above their heads, beyond the trees, constant in a boundless night, the stars stood fixed by shapes they yearned to know. Cetus. Cepheus. Andromeda.