The Stars Are Fire

“No. It isn’t. I don’t know whose blade it was. Are you really imagining I would get a job and bring the boss home to live with me? I worry for you, Gene.”

“You’ve been lying to me all along,” he insists. “How could you not tell your own husband that you once had a job?”

“How could you not tell your wife-to-be that you were marrying her because she looked like your true love?” she counters.

“That’s ancient history,” he says.

“Not to me,” she says. “It’s a fresh cut to me.”

“You want to discuss that now?”

Beyond Gene’s back, Grace sees the door open and Claire put her head outside. Grace shakes her head back and forth in an exaggerated manner and says a loud, “No!”—the message not for Gene but for her daughter.

“I have marital rights,” Gene states, but Grace is unable to respond. She wills Claire back into the room. Go inside and shut the door, she begs in her mind.

“You can’t ignore that,” he adds.

With growing horror, Grace sees that Claire is all the way out of the bedroom and moving toward them.

“Let go of Mommy!” the girl cries as she pushes out her hands.


The fall is so brief, so light, that she doesn’t have time to be afraid. The weightlessness is shocking, the house soundless. Did Claire cry out? Possibly she did. Grace can’t hear Gene. Did he fall, too?

She touches a middle step with her foot, another step with her hip and thigh, and then shoots into the far corner of the landing. She lies still. Messages of pain begin to reach her brain. She grabs the banister and tries to pull herself up. She can’t stand, but she can turn her body enough to see that there’s no sign of Claire. She hears the distinct rhythm of two-stepping below her. Gene, descending.


By the time Grace crawls up the stairs and into the bedroom, she finds Claire on her cot lying faceup with her own blanket over her. Tom is huddled into her side, sucking his thumb and sleeping deeply. Pain hits her. Left wrist, right ankle, and a searing all along her right hip and thigh. She crawls to the space next to the cot and lies down on the floor. She doesn’t have to move right this minute. She needn’t disturb her children just yet.


Claire, subdued, doesn’t mention the night before, even when Grace is icing her ankle in the kitchen. When Grace looked at herself in the bathroom, a purple bruise spread from her hip to her thigh. Her left wrist is swollen and will need ice as soon as Grace is done with her foot.

How to explain to a child that a push against one person can knock the next person down? What must seem like magic to Claire has to be explained to her. She guesses Claire feels responsible for her mother’s fall. Grace can’t let her daughter go another hour with confused feelings.

“Claire,” she says, smiling, “I need to talk to you.”

Her daughter shyly walks to her. Grace smooths her hair and lifts her chin so that they can look into each other’s eyes.

“I won’t pretend that last night wasn’t scary,” Grace says. “It was. But your daddy wasn’t going to hurt me.”

“Yes he was! I saw.”

“He had hold of my arm because he wanted me to pay attention to what he was saying. I understand why you came out of the bedroom—you were curious, and you were afraid for me. Those are good instincts. And what you did wasn’t wrong at all. You pushed into Daddy so that he would let go of me. And that’s exactly what happened. He let go of me. But because I lost my balance, I fell down the stairs. Your daddy didn’t push me. It was just an accident. Do you understand?”

Claire responds by moving closer to Grace, laying her head down on her lap and flopping her arms over her mother’s thighs.


With her children in the backyard, and her foot taped, Grace stands at the kitchen counter with a pencil and a pad of paper. She knows from long experience that sometimes a list is the only way from one side to the other.


She waits two days until the throbbing in her foot has subsided and she can put weight on it. She dresses the children in matching summer suits and informs them that they are going on a bus ride into town. Claire, who seems to have forgotten the incident in the nighttime, follows Grace from dresser to closet to dresser as she gets ready, asking questions about the bus. Do we ride up high? Will we have to sit with other people? Can you buy candy on the bus?


Because Tom and Claire fight for space at the window, Grace makes them kneel on the seat and share the view. A headache that started with the fall onto the landing seems, with successive days, to have lodged deeper into her brain. She wants to lie down and sleep for a week, but the urgency of her mission in addition to the need to keep the children from falling off the seat keeps her alert. They pass empty land where houses have not yet been rebuilt but where wildflowers and tall grasses provide a kind of lush landscape. The soot from the fire has been an effective fertilizer. Both children are silenced when they reach the city: so much to look at in so short a time. Tom leaves sweaty handprints on the window.

From the bus stop, Grace takes each child by hand and crosses a number of streets in search of Jensen, Jeweler to the World. Jensen greets Grace with a quizzical look. Claire seems dazzled by all the watches and rings and bracelets and necklaces in the cases. Grace’s purse is heavy with the bounty from Merle’s clothing, and when she tips the contents onto the top of the glass case, she feels more like a thief than she ever has. Jensen is at first skeptical and stares at Grace as if she might be a fence. She tries to keep her own personal guilt from showing on her face.

“My family and I have to move to Boston in order to find work,” she tells Jensen. “We have no house to sell; we have only this jewelry that my disabled husband inherited from his mother. You remember when I was in here before.”

“Yes, of course,” he says. He stares at the jewelry for so long that Grace thinks he might ask to see the will. When he glances up, his face is lit.

“Let’s write out an inventory first,” he says.

Grace glances at the children. Claire is holding Tom up so that he can see the diamond rings.

Grace checks the inventory against the items on the counter. Jensen walks to the front door and flips the sign from OPEN to CLOSED. When he returns, he begins to assign a number to each item, numbers he shares with Grace. There are fifty-seven pieces. Jensen uses his adding machine to arrive at a total. He rips off the slip of paper and lays it on the glass counter so that Grace can see the sum.

$45,655.

If Jensen is cheating her, Grace doesn’t care.

“I’ll have to sell these first before I can pay you,” he says.

“I need some of the money now.”

“The best I could do today would be a check for five thousand dollars. I’ll send you the rest as I sell the pieces.”

Grace studies the man and makes a critical decision. “I trust you,” she says. “I’ll take a check for seven thousand dollars now, and in a week or two, I’ll send you my address. I would, however, like a receipt for the lot.”

Across a counter sparkling with precious gems, Jensen and Grace shake hands.


“Claire, how about we spoil our lunches with ice cream cones?”

“Yes, yes, yes,” crows Claire, knowing she must use her words.

Tom, sensing something great in the air, claps his hands and smacks his mouth.

At the bank, the children, sated, are content to sit in the chairs provided for customers. Grace asks to speak to the manager and explains to him, when he arrives from a back room, what exactly it is that she will need.


The weight of her purse lessened from having transformed jewelry into paper money, Grace walks the kids to the used-car lot. Ralph Eastman, in stained seersucker jacket, rushes out to greet them.

“I know you,” he says, pointing a finger at Grace. “The Little Sister. Does the Little Sister want to buy another car? What happened to the old one?”

“The Buick is just fine,” she says, “and I’ve come to pay you the balance of what is owed to you.”

Anita Shreve's books