20
She sat beside Connell on the top step, wondering about all the fuss people made over the constellations. The webs of light poorly described the forms they were meant to evoke, and even if she’d known what those forms were, she doubted she could have suspended her disbelief enough to see them characterized there.
On an average night the stars glimmered weakly, if they were visible at all, but that night they were unusually prominent. This was another reason to move—maybe in the suburbs he could see the stars well all the time.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“A lot of stars,” he said. “What about you?”
“There’s the Big Dipper,” she said.
“And the Little Dipper.”
“Yes.”
“And the North Star.”
“Yup.”
They had come to the limit of their knowledge. She was relieved to have a son who didn’t spew forth a stream of facts about the sky when he looked up at it. One fear in marrying a scientist had been that her children would be ill-equipped to live in the world of ordinary men.
“I like to imagine people thousands of years ago looking at the same stars,” he said.
She smiled at his philosophical tone.
“And people in the future long after we’re dead,” he said.
A shudder came over her. She was the one who was supposed to put it into perspective for him, not the other way around. She had lived through the loss of two parents and witnessed death nearly every day at work, and yet she was spooked to hear him invoke their inevitable finality.
“Come inside,” she said. “It’s late.”
“I want to see if the stars get brighter the later it gets.”
“It’s a school night.” She felt her grip on her temper begin to slip. The males in her life refused to cooperate with her. “You can investigate this in the summer.”
She stood in the hallway watching him trudge to his room. Then she found herself stepping back onto the stoop and looking again to the night sky, trying to divine what ancient people might have seen in it—animals, hunters, maybe kings. Nothing came into focus, except when she thought she saw a dog with a long leash around its neck. When she looked up again it was gone.
That night, when she couldn’t sleep, she concentrated on the steadiness of the stars, their transcendence of human sorrow and confusion, the reassurance offered by the unfathomable scale of geologic time.