The Stars Are Fire



In the library, Grace starts a fire in the grate. She and her mother drag the sofa in. Her mother makes up the two beds, so that they are ready for evening, though it is only ten in the morning. After Grace gathers her small family into the library, she wants to lie on the bed and think of Aidan.

She changes the children’s clothing, and then enters the frigid bathroom just off the library to change her own. It’s so cold, she doesn’t want to sit on the toilet seat. She has brought from Merle’s closet a wool sweater, pants, and a scarf. After she wraps her coat around her and puts on her gloves, she places Merle’s mink turban on her head; there’s a great deal of wood to bring in and to store just outside the library door. From her mother-in-law’s closet, she’s taken the warmest and smallest items she could find for her mother. Marjorie swims in the mink jacket but doesn’t refuse it.

Before Grace leaves the bathroom, she opens the medicine cabinet to see if Aidan left anything behind. But the metal shelves are empty.


By eleven o’clock in the morning, Grace, Claire, and Tom have made a fort out of all the pillows and cushions; they play in it in woolen coats, as if they were outside and making an igloo. Marjorie has braved the frigid kitchen to bring spoons and small plates, so that Grace and Claire can delineate the “kitchen” from the “living room.” Tom, delighted to be playing with his mother’s and sister’s full attention, crawls and rolls and delivers deep belly laughs. He sits on plates and knocks over cushions, eliciting his sister’s fury. When it’s time for their naps, Grace crawls into the fort, her legs sticking out, and reads them stories. She, too, falls asleep with her head in the kitchen.


Grace stumbles, snow blind, outside. She squints in the bright sun. The world is covered in white, which seems, with its crusty surface, to be a heavy blanket of sparks stretching as far as she can see. Even the ocean has frozen near the shoreline, and she can see blue water only a hundred feet out to sea. These blasts from nature that make it so hard to live are sometimes beautiful. The fire, in its essence, was sublime; the quiet world around her covered in snow is as still as glass.

The beauty makes her miss Aidan with an ache that feels unbearable. She replays the night they had together, moment by moment. Will she spend her life missing him?

Two boys with shovels call to her from the bottom of the long driveway. She can’t hear them, but she nods vigorously. Whatever they will charge her when they make it to the top, she’ll pay. She steps inside the house to search for stray coins.

The silence in the house is haunting. The music, which was magical, has vanished. When she entered the old Victorian, she heard the piano and Aidan playing it. The loss is in her skin, along her backbone.


Grace takes the children out to see the magic blanket. Tom claps his mittened hands and laughs. Claire steps into the snow, which swallows her. To help Claire, Grace sets Tom, for just a moment, onto the shoveled path, itself now deep in snow. She stops Claire’s tears by making a snowball and teaching her to throw it. Turning, Grace discovers Tom facedown in the snow. She brushes him off and sits with him on the stoop. Claire makes tiny ineffectual snowballs that barely dent the white blanket.


The following day, the power returns, but it’s an hour before anyone notices. It’s only when Grace rounds the corner to the sitting room with a reading lamp lit that she sees Aidan in his usual chair. She gasps with happiness; he’s returned to her! The illusion lasts only a second, however: She covers her eyes and bends forward to protect what little self she has left.

After a few minutes, she enters the kitchen and flips all the switches.

“Oh, thank God,” her mother says.

Grace might say the same, though she is fizzy with longing.


That evening, Grace and her mother wash all the bedding, dry it, and remake the beds. The children seem to like sleeping on the third floor with their toys and their grammy. Marjorie is pleased, and Grace is relieved. She needs a night to herself.

In her room, Merle’s room, she turns the light on in the closet to look for warmer clothes suitable for job hunting in the snow. She happens upon a brown wool suit, half hidden and overshadowed by the more beautiful dresses surrounding it. She tries on the jacket and decides that if she wears a sweater under it, it will fit her. The skirt, however, is too wide. Grace takes the skirt to the bed, examines it, and realizes that it has an elastic waist. If she gently gathers the elastic, she can make the skirt work. It will have bulges at the hips, but the jacket will cover them. She removes the brown skirt from its hanger and sits with it on the bed. While studying the hem, she feels hard lumps inside the wool. Weights. Women sometimes put them in the hems of thick material to give a skirt more drape. With a pair of snipping scissors from the dressing table, Grace begins to cut the stitches of the hem. After a foot, Grace tilts the skirt so that the weights will fall out. Instead of a weight, however, a ring falls into her palm.

Grace drops it onto the bedspread as if it had singed her. A large sapphire is surrounded by diamonds in a gold setting. The ring is too big for Grace, but she isn’t at all interested in the fit. Instead, she’s curious about why Merle felt it necessary to hide it in the hem of a dull brown skirt.

She shakes all the weights out of the hem. There are six rings: a large diamond set in gold; a silver dinner ring with a massive emerald; a ruby surrounded by pearls; another diamond ring, this one set with two sapphires on either side; and a large ruby, multifaceted, in a gold setting. Grace lays them out side by side on the bedspread. Apart from movie reels of Jewish refugees hiding their valuables in their coats, Grace has never heard of such a thing. Did Merle not trust her staff?

Hundreds of dollars’ worth of jewelry dot the bedspread. Did Gene know about this? Did Merle tell Gene as she lay on her deathbed? To think that Grace might so easily have taken Merle’s clothes to the Salvation Army! Did Merle undo her own hems when she wanted to wear the sapphire and diamond ring? Was the large diamond her engagement ring, put away after her husband died? More curious still, are there other treasures hiding in the wardrobe?

Grace stands and paces Merle’s room, glancing from time to time at the gems on the bedspread. She slips a cigarette from the pack in her pocket, lights it, and inhales deeply. With the rings alone, she would have a deposit for a house for her mother. Grace could buy a car. But the treasure on the bed is contraband. It doesn’t belong to her. If anything, it belongs to Gene, and until Gene is declared dead, if he did indeed die, it’s his to keep or to sell. But does she really believe this? If she has assumed that the house is hers by right of marriage to a missing husband, isn’t she entitled to its contents as well?

No. Sleeping in Merle’s house was an act of desperation. Selling her jewelry is a tacit admission that Grace’s husband is dead. Grace doesn’t know the contents of Gene’s will, or even if he has one. She has never seen such a document, having always assumed they would get around to writing them someday in the future. But did Gene, knowing what he stood to inherit, write one after his mother died?

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