Page 18 of With Stars in Her Eyes

Courtney

My toes squinched in the green shag carpet of my living room.

For the first time ever, I had asked Sam if I could leave my shift at the store early. The day had been quiet, and I wanted to get home before Nic got in tonight to stay with me while attending a restaurant expo in Wichita.

If I failed again, I didn’t want an audience.

Thea had said she never wanted to risk losing the magic of photography by doing it on someone else’s terms, and I had known exactly what she meant.

I had thought that picking up my bow again would just make me remember everything that I lost months ago, but I had not considered that there was a personal magic in music for me.

I crossed to the dining room and rummaged in my old tote bag that I always lugged with me to shows. The torn piece of paper I’d been searching for was all the way at the bottom. One side of the paper was covered in Demetrius’s elegant handwriting.

Courtney Starling Untitled Record #1: Potential Track List

It was followed by a list of tracks in order with asterisks next to those that would made the best lead singles. “Astrolabe” had five asterisks next to it. On the other side there was the first draft of what I wrote for the press release about the record.

I wrote most of these songs on a road trip across the country I took with my cousin when I was twenty-three.

He didn’t know at the time it was actually my escape.

He didn’t know I was still bleeding from the abortion that had saved my life in every way imaginable.

But I wrote “Astrolabe” on a beach alone near a café with a ship and astrolabe on the logo.

It was the night before I decided to leave my marriage.

I was leaving my religion too. I was staring out at the Pacific waves thinking about nineteenth-century sailors who only had the stars to show them the way.

I hope everyone who feels like they’re drowning or lost in darkness can have a moment in their life that shows them that they already have what they need inside themselves to help them find home.

—Courtney Starling

I had even signed the draft with my real name without thinking.

While Demetrius was bent over the board with headphones on one ear, making a few last adjustments, I slid the paper to him. His eyes were glistening as he read, though he wouldn’t admit it. After reading, he turned the paper over and began writing the track list.

Without knowing how I got there, I sat behind my cello with my bare toes gripping the shag carpet. I lifted the bow and pulled it over a string, letting the note echo around the room.

Maybe all my work to put up walls around the different spheres of my life was backfiring now. The idea of not playing music because I had fucked up my career was ludicrous.

Music had saved me over and over again. That magic that Thea found in photography… that’s what music was for me.

I spent years excavating my true self from being buried and fossilized by a religion that had sunk into every deep crevice of who I was.

In childhood I worried my heart-deep passion for music was a sinister, lurking idol looking to draw me away from “the faith” if I wasn’t careful.

But music was how I fit the fractured pieces of my soul back together when I realized that what I thought was a bedrock of wisdom was actually nothing more than dusty lies.

No matter how afraid I was or how uncertain my future was after wrecking my career, I could still refuse to lose the one thing that had always been my tether.

Music .

Because no matter what role I was playing, I could do this. I could play.

Even if it’s just for me. Even if I never walk onto another stage. Even if I never record again.

This is mine.

My fingers shook with nerves.

But I convinced them to keep hold of my bow. The familiar motions of tuning turned into the first song I had ever played on the cello. My audition song for Yale. I played through every song on the Violet Trikes setlist, and every song on my album.

I don’t know how long I played, but when I stopped, my fingers were aching with a satisfying kind of pain.

A knock on the door interrupted my thoughts.

I pulled the curtain and found Sam on the small back deck holding her grandma’s ancient Pyrex casserole lugger. She looked almost frozen, but her smile was so broad it nearly hurt me to look at it.

I yanked open the sliding door. “How long have you been out there?”

“Not that long.”

“Your lips are practically blue.”

“My coat is toasty.” Sam’s chattering teeth weren’t helping her case.

“Your coat is about five minutes away from sprouting icicles. Come in.”

“Can I come in too?” said a voice from the other end of the small porch.

“Nic?”

I turned to find my cousin leaning on the column, with tears in his bright-green eyes to match the ones in Sam’s.

I yanked him into my arms and then pulled away to look at his face.

In the stark porchlight, it struck me we had both aged a lot in the over a decade since I wrote “Astrolabe.” My brain stubbornly insisted on thinking about Nic as if he were a kid because he was a couple years younger than me.

But in reality, we were both in our thirties now.

His cheeks had chiseled, and his eyes were lined after years spent in a long succession of kitchens.

He even had premature silver mixed into the stubble on his cheeks and chin.

With a pang of anxiety, I noticed he was paler than usual, but maybe it was just because he had been driving all day.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were coming in early?”

He shrugged and sniffed once. “I’m not sorry I didn’t.”

Sam was blowing her nose just inside the door and then threw the box of tissues at Nic.

Nic took one and then he held it out behind the small brick retaining wall.

I shivered as I walked across the deck to look down.

Jeannie was sitting on the stairs. She let her tears fall without shame, then she gathered me up in a crushing hug.

When she pulled back, she used the clean tissue in her hands to wipe my face instead. I hadn’t realized I was crying too.

Jeannie sniffed to hide what might have been a sob. “Well, if we stay out here any longer, we’re either going to freeze our asses or our faces off, and neither prospect seems attractive to me at the moment.” She shoved Nic inside ahead of her and then pulled me and Sam behind.

Sam unzipped the casserole lugger, releasing a divine smell into the kitchen. “I bet you’re hungry after that. I feel like we need champagne or something.”

Nic twitched his head toward the front door. “I got a bottle of that fancy zero-proof champagne from a potential vendor today. I’ll grab it from the truck.”

I bent to pick a small piece of browned, cheesy potato out of the dish. “I take a couple months off playing and you three are acting like I—”

Sam swatted my hand away. “ Shush, and let us be happy for you.”

“Sam, you didn’t cook this, did you?” Jeannie said warily.

“ Rude ,” Sam said.

“But… did you?” Nic asked when he returned to the room. He gave Sam a sidelong glance as he put the bottle of champagne on the counter. “Because I could also whip us up some—”

“Fine. No. Abbott was procrastination-cooking again.”

“Thank god.” Jeannie patted Sam’s arm. “Kiddo, you are a woman of many, many talents. You have two Ivy League degrees. You own a successful business.”

“And you still won’t eat my cooking?” Sam glared.

“I just feel like in my seventy-two years on the planet I’ve already done my share of suffering.”

Nic and I snorted in unison as we began to set out dishes.

The four plates were heaped with food, and we all sat around the dining table. Nic found champagne flutes in the cabinet.

“Abbott still hasn’t turned in that big paper?” I asked.

Nic poured Coca-Cola into my glass, knowing that there was absolutely no way I could drink even nonalcoholic champagne without my head making me regret it. He filled the other flutes without comment. It was nice to be around people who didn’t make me feel weird about this.

“To Courtney making us all cry like babies with her incredible, wonderful, fantastic—”

I coughed.

“To new beginnings,” Jeannie said with an uncharacteristic note of gravity in her voice.

“Hear, hear.” Sam clinked glasses with each of us and then downed half her glass. “He’s finishing it now. This is tort reform tater tot hot dish from during the day today. He made too much.” Steam curled up from my plate.

This might be the best thing I had ever tasted, or maybe I was just hungry as fuck and potatoes in any form were basically my love language.

Nic took a bite of his own. “This is delicious, but why didn’t Abbott make tort reform torte ?”

Sam shook her head. “We were out of cocoa powder.”

Nic chuckled.

“He’s using studying as an excuse, but I think he’s boycotting leaving the house because he says this much snow on the ground months after Christmas is against his religion, and he didn’t want to run out to the store.”

Jeannie twirled the melted cheese around her fork. “I think I like this better than the Spaghetti Habeus Corputtanesca.”

“That pun was a little bit of a stretch though.” I grimaced.

“He could’ve done better.” Sam nodded. “My favorite is still the Amicus Brie-f Bites, but I’m a sucker for figs.”

I shoveled food into my face at a rate that would have been pretty alarming to anyone except the people currently seated in my dining room.

Every now and then I would drift from the conversation, my gaze returning to my cello.

I tugged on the new earring and wished I could tell Thea how much our conversation today had meant to me.