Page 58 of Under the Stars

Harlan

Winthrop Island, New York

The night falls without a whisper. If you stand along the ridge of Little Bay Point and stare across the water in the light from the fingernail moon, you will not see so much as a ripple.

He sits in the cropped meadow grass and removes his shoes, one by one.

The ground is still warm, the air heavy.

From somewhere to his left drifts the echo of a relaxed, hearty laugh—the kind of laugh you make when you’re sitting outside with a friend or two and a bottle of beer, a glass of wine or whiskey.

He has enjoyed plenty of such laughs. Life is not all sorrow.

When his mother died, over a frozen January weekend during his sophomore year of college, he remembers staring at her waxen body in its casket and feeling a defiant resentment mingled in with all the pity.

She had died alone, in bed. He had telephoned her on Sunday at dinnertime, like he always did, and she hadn’t answered.

When he called again an hour later and the phone rang and rang, he dialed up a neighbor—his best friend’s mother, two houses down—and told her where to find the spare key.

Poor Mrs. Olson. She sat in the third pew behind him, blowing her nose on a handkerchief while he stood there staring at this face that looked like a doll made in his mother’s image, and he thought, Was it all for him?

Your whole heart? Wasn’t I good enough to live for? Did you want him that badly?

Now, of course, he understands a little better. Now that this disease is eating him alive—these greedy cells that gobble up his pancreas and lymph nodes and, before long, everything else. Liver and brain and bones.

He just wants to be with Coop.

—

There was some dinner party years ago—another life, the life he had before he lost his son—where somebody posed the kind of question you pose at dinner parties, to get some conversation going.

If somebody handed you an envelope containing the exact hour of your death, would you look inside?

Most of the guests had said no. Ignorance is bliss. Why darken your remaining days with the shadow of death?

Harlan had stared at the puddle of wine in his glass and imagined Providence Dare holding her pen in the candlelight, inscribing her story over the winter evenings as she waited for her child to be born.

How all those people boarded a steamship one night, expecting to arrive in New York Harbor the next morning, to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner with friends and family, and instead they drowned.

No time to put their affairs in order. No way to say goodbye to those they loved.

Just annihilation. A sucker punch from God.

He spoke up. Nope, he said. He would rather know.

When the phone rang this morning and Meredith’s voice awakened in his ear, Meredith’s voice that was so beautifully trained to convey the appropriate feeling that you couldn’t tell if she was acting or not, he knew the hour had arrived.

The charges against Audrey had been dropped. Her husband had been formally arraigned for kidnapping, larceny, attempted murder, resisting arrest, fraud—he can’t remember all the charges, just the gleeful drawl of Meredith’s voice as she told him.

The Irvings came around, she said. Once they read that manuscript.

He put down his phone and stared out the sliding doors to the grassy slope, the twitching water held in place by a layer of hot, thick cloud.

It’s time, he thought.

—

He takes out the bottle of pills from his pocket.

Your basic opioid painkillers, nothing fancy.

There is a note in the other pocket, equally unfussy, directing the reader to contact Meredith Fisher at Greyfriars, and where to find his will and other papers.

(Atop the desk in the study, leaving half his assets to various charities and the other half split equally between Meredith and Audrey, POD.) At least when you receive a death sentence, you have a little time to put everything in order.

Sell what can be sold, give away what can’t, all assets ready for distribution at the push of a button.

Nothing left to do but swallow the pills, one by one.

When the bottle’s empty, he lies back in the grass and stares at the sky. A ridge of thunderstorms passed by in the afternoon, leaving the air clear. New York City illuminates the horizon to the west, a hundred miles away; Long Island to the south, New London to the north.

But the heavens above him are speckled with stars.