Set the Stars Alight Read online

  “Lucy.”

  “I’m Dashel,” he said. “Dash.” He walked away in exactly the opposite speed of his name, slow and thoughtful, looking over his shoulder and offering a clumsy wave.

  The next night, when Lucy and her parents sat on the porch of their little brick home, eating cinnamon toast and reading from Peter Pan as the crickets began to sing, she saw that same thoughtful walk in silhouette, going round about the fountain.

  “Sometimes stories are more real than you think,” Father said, gesturing at the book in Mother’s lap. “Take the lost boys, for instance.” He tipped his head toward the fountain. “And take that boy. I thought he might just come ’round.”

  “You know him?” Lucy narrowed her eyes, looking between the boy and her father’s laughing eyes.

  “Who do you think told him he should go to the fountain yesterday?”

  “But . . . you were at the watch shop then.”

  “Yes, but you weren’t.” He had a glimmer in his eyes, one that turned to compassion as he looked again at the boy who was casting furtive glances their way. “He spends every night alone in that flat. Lives there with an aunt . . .” He looked ready to say more, but a cloud crossed his face and he simply said, “She’s not there much. So I may have told him in passing when to happen upon the fountain.”

  Lucy’s heart beat quicker. “What exactly did you say he’d find, Dad?”

  Her father shrugged mischievously. “A shooting star.”

  “Dad!” Her eyes grew wide in embarrassment.

  “What? It’s what you are, Lucy—light on the move. What else would you call that?”

  Lucy groaned, dropping her face to her hands. Her father . . . Would he never tire of writing a fairy tale with his every word?

  Mum tipped her head toward the fountain. “Why not go and invite him over, Lucy?” She had the prettiest hair—golden and wavy, where Lucy’s was black and straight around her freckled face. Cruel irony for a girl named after light. The only thing they shared were wide eyes, “bluer than blue,” Dad liked to say.

  And so she invited the lost boy into their circle. That night, and the next, and the next—until it was just expected that Dash would be there for dinner each night. The brother she’d never had. The friend she hadn’t known she’d needed.

  two

  London

  2002

  “Hey, Matchstick Girl,” Dash said one night. He had learned that her bedroom was once the place where sticks became matches, and the name had stuck. “Did you hear about the supernova?” He was always asking about some astronomical wonder or another.

  She gave him a sideways glance and a half smile, which she knew he would take to mean “no” as well as “please tell me everything you know about the supernova,” and he proceeded to fill her head with scientific jargon she hardly understood until he finished rambling, out of breath and red in the face with excitement.

  Pausing in the dragon’s lair she tilted her head quizzically. “And now . . . for us mere mortals, if you please?” Dash was brilliant. And she suspected he had no idea at all.

  “Lucy.” He shook his head back and forth in mock disappointment, but she knew he relished this part most of all. “A supernova is a gigantic burst of light like you’ve never seen before.”

  “You haven’t seen one, either.”

  “No, but I will, one day.”

  Once inside the cottage, Lucy’s mother placed a mug of chocolate in Dash’s one hand, and her father a screwdriver in the other, and they set to work building the telescope Lucy’s father was coaching them through. As they worked, Simon the watchmaker told his riddles, and Penny the gardener propagated lilacs and schemed great schemes for fountains, follies, and all manner of courtyard beauty. For many years ago, Gerald W. Bessette had seen her green thumb, dubbed her the resident gardener, and increased their stipend.

  At precisely seven o’clock, the watchmaker packed away his tools and opened a palm toward Lucy as if to give her the floor. She stifled a smile, put on her serious face, and pulled the watch on its long chain from her pocket. With a quick snap, she held it out for all to see and uttered her favorite words in all the world: “Let the story . . . begin.”

  And with that, the walls fell away from their narrow cottage and imagination swept them to far-off lands, the world around them transformed in Father’s rugged cadence. The growl of the Underground beneath them tumbled straight into their tale as the sound of the waking dragon. Or the roll of a storm-tossed ship. Or once, even, the dwellers of an underground city.

  “Pay attention now.” When Dad said things like “Pay attention,” he made it sound like an invitation.

  Mum chimed in. “Pay attention. From the Latin ad tendere.” She loved her Latin. She pronounced the scientific names of her plants as if they were magnificent treasures, not just clumps of soil and plucky seedlings clinging to her knuckles.

  “What’s that mean?” Lucy asked.

  “It means to stretch toward.” Mum slid a plate of lavender shortbread beneath their noses. “Pay attention to those cookies, too, will you?” She winked.

  Dad cleared his throat. “As I was saying . . .”

  “Oh, hush. Time enough for biscuits, too.” Mum placed one in his hand.

  He ate it in one giant bite and returned to his story. “Now, picture it, children.” He ran his hand around a yellowing globe. “Here we are, this tiny island nation. Green and lush, surrounded by ocean. And here”—he slid his finger across the ocean, down, down, until he tapped the desert stretches of Australia—“nearly the bottom of the world, is another island nation. Forget the trees and grass of England. Imagine sand and rock the colour of rust. The only trees in sight are those made from metal, by man, for shade. The outback stretching as far as the eye can see.”

  Lucy felt parched, envisioning it.

  “Here,” Dad said, “light is born.”

  A myth, then. A legend of the sun’s birth, or fire’s origin, or . . .

  “Coober Pedy,” he said, leaning forward. “The underground city.”

  “Like Poseidon’s palace?” Lucy remembered his story of jeweled iron and coral, twisting together into a fortress under the sea. She inched forward. “Or the Shadowlands, or the Deep Realm, or Bism!” Mum had finished reading them The Silver Chair only last week.

  “Or the Dwarf Cities,” Dash said, reaching for The Fellowship of the Ring and leafing through it. “The realm of the Longbeards. What was it called? Doom . . . Kad-doom . . .

  “Khazad-dûm. Beneath the Misty Mountains. Yes, like all of those . . . but real.”

  Lucy felt reality push back against his claims. “But you said light was born there. We know that can’t be real.”

  “Have a listen. There at the bottom of the world, you might go travelling across the desert. You might see signs of life. A lemonade stand sitting empty upon the stretching desert plains. Trucks abandoned, no driver in sight. A cross aboveground—but no church to be seen. Heat scorching the earth, dust storms tearing across the land with a mighty roar!”

  Dash jerked his head up as Dad hollered the last word.

  “Where are all the people?” Dad asked, palms up.

  “Beneath ground,” Dash said. “But why?”

  “You are a scholar of the highest pedigree, Dashel Greene. They live there—they have their doors in the hillside and have dug homes for themselves right out of the earth. Hollowed bookshelves out of the limestone walls, vaulted intricate carved ceilings in their church to rival the artistry of the Sistine Chapel. Rooms and reaches and swimming pools and everything you can imagine, all there underground. But why, you ask?”

  He waited. His watch tick-tocked, spinning a spell.

  “Water runs down into the earth there. Seeks out all the cracks and chasms, the broken places, and sinks deep, bringing with it mineral deposits. It lands in voids—empty places caused by faults, the shaking of the earth. Or places fossils once lay. The water does its good work, depositing something called silica, the
n just”—he raised his hands and wiggled his fingers, as if performing a magic trick—“vanishes.”

  “You mean evaporates,” Lucy said. “The water evaporates.”

  “Isn’t that what I said?” Father winked, his dark bushy brows scrunching. “And what do you suppose it leaves behind?”

  “Mineral deposits,” the girl said. “You told us.”

  “Yes, Lucy. But don’t you miss the wonder, all covered up in the big words. Peel them back and see what lies beneath.”

  “Beneath the mineral deposits?” Dash furrowed his brow. “You said it yourself. Darkness and emptiness.”

  “Indeed there would be, if not for the miracle. The darkness is filled . . .”

  Dad reached out his arm, beckoning his wife’s hand. She laced her fingers into his, smiling and keeping his secret. She had heard this before.

  He held her hand out toward them as Lucy held her breath, heart beating.

  “With light,” he whispered. He turned Mum’s hand this way and that, letting the pale light from the room’s solitary window skim over the gem on her finger. It lit into an explosion of colour beneath its cloudy surface.

  “They are mining opals, there in Coober Pedy,” he said. “Just think. In the dark, beneath the scorching heat and sandstorms above, they live cooled by the earth, and pull colour and light from its belly.”

  Mum laughed. “You make it sound so fantastical.”

  “Ah, but it is. You remember that, children. You mine for the colour and light in the dark, in the harshest terrain. Because these truths . . . as dazzling to the mind as they are . . . are only echoes.”

  “Echoes of what?” Lucy was always anxious to cut right to the heart of the matter.

  “The truest story of all.”

  And so it went, night after night, story after story stitching Dash into the fabric of their family.

  It seemed things would stay that way forever. That they would always be together like this. But something changed for Dash as time ticked by.

  “Why do you study the stars, Dash?” Lucy had asked one day in the reading room when she was thirteen and he fifteen. They were sitting sideways on their chairs, legs draped over the wingbacks’ arms, feet almost touching. And yet even so close, she felt the distance growing between them, attributed it to the galaxies holding so much more than she could.

  He shrugged.

  And she waited.

  He turned a page.

  She cleared her throat.

  At last he swung his legs over the edge of the chair to sit properly. “I don’t know,” he said, looking at her, then out the window. “I guess . . . my relatives, they bounced me around so much when I was a kid after Mom and Dad . . .”

  Here, Lucy sat up properly, crossing her legs in the chair, giving him her full attention. He never mentioned his parents.

  “Wherever I moved after that, everything was different. Time zones. Weather. Buildings. Food. Music. All the things that tell a person what home is. It changed every time.” He dropped his gaze then, staring at his black Converse shoes. “Except the stars.”

  Lucy ached for him. Wished he would have a home with them forever, that he wouldn’t always have to wait to enroll for school each year until the last second, unsure of whether his aunt would continue to be based out of London or move on, as she often spoke of doing, to New Jersey.

  “The stars are your home,” Lucy said quietly, wanting him to know she recognized this truth he had shared and would hold it carefully. Maybe she was younger than him, but she could still understand. And her heart was for him.

  He shrugged again. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”

  He returned to his study of black holes, and she lifted her book to read again, too, but watched wide-eyed as the years continued on and Dash drifted farther from her still.

  His teachers saw special things at work in his mind. Words like genius, prodigy, and untapped potential floated around. Lucy’s mum had gone to parent-teacher meetings in his aunt’s stead, for she traveled away from home more and more for business. Lucy attributed his intelligence to all that time alone spent in books, with entire universes as his constant companions.

  They moved him up, made provision for him to begin university classes at sixteen—one of them being a class on Shakespeare.

  One night, Lucy vaulted a Shakespeare quote at him—something about the stars—but instead of taking a crack at it in their usual fashion, he had just looked up at the stars and quoted one back.

  “‘I am constant as the northern star, of whose true-fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament.’”

  His eyes were sad, then, as he turned to her. Her chest ached, and her hand wanted to reach out and take his—to squeeze away the loneliness of his pain-filled life. To banish the heartbreak of a father who had left him, as she’d eventually learned, of a mother who’d given herself to a substance that had taken her from him, and of the aunt who did not care to even know the nephew who had dwelled beneath her roof for a quarter of his life.

  Something changed in that moment. Many things changed, actually, knocking into one another like the swirling lines of dominoes they had once filled the courtyard with. The breath went from Lucy’s lungs as she saw before her not the lost boy, but the young man, whose gaze no longer lingered on his oversized feet through thick glasses but lifted to the horizon, to the sky above, searching.

  And as he lifted his gaze to these new horizons, he was looking right over her. Past her.

  She felt for the first time the irony of a love that had been there, subterranean, for longer than she’d known. Love that was already beyond her grasp.

  She was too late in realizing, too young to do anything about it. And too dim to compete with the stars that had captured his mind. As his professors put it, his bright future was limitless. Meanwhile, her teachers said things of her like “her time will come” and “still waters run deep” and “she will find her place.”

  The sadness in him gathered something fierce up inside of her. “Dash,” she said.

  “Hmm?” He didn’t look at her. Only out the reading room window, past the city lights.

  She didn’t know what she should say. What could she offer him? “That Shakespeare quote . . . Do you mean you are constant? Because you are. There’s nothing you can’t do if you set your mind to it. I believe that, Dash. You can do anything.”

  It broke her young heart to say it, for she knew that in all likelihood, his limitless potential would take him far from her. Probably for good.

  “No,” he said. “It’s just . . . alone. The star, I mean. In that quote.”

  “That’s not true.” She stood, her book thudding to the ground. “It’s surrounded by lots of stars. You’re surrounded. I mean . . . by us. I mean, you . . . and us.” This was not going well. Stop flopping over your words like a fish out of water. She took a breath. “You’re not alone, Dash. You’re ours.”

  He did not look at her for a long while. And when he did, it was from a far-off place. “You have a good life, Lucy.”

  “We do, Dash. It’s yours, too.”

  He shuffled his foot, his height no longer lanky but sure.

  “You . . . live in a fairy tale.”

  The words slammed into her. “No I don’t,” she said, defensive for her, and for him. Fairy tales did not feel like this.

  “It’s not a bad thing,” Dash said. “It’s just, not many people live in a family like yours, Lucy. Stories by the fire and dinner under stars and all that. It’s good. I mean, it’s amazing. Hang on to it.”

  His eyes pleaded with her, and her ribs ached in silent reply.

  “I-I will,” she said, her voice small, with a sense that she’d been uninvited to some very deep place inside of Dash.

  She wanted to knock him on the head, get him to understand that her family was his, that this life was his, too. But he had shadows in his past, and there was a part of him he did not want to let her into, judging by his abrupt jump to his fe
et and quiet stride away.

  Their meetings changed after this. He studied the stars, then their galaxies. She fought the dreadful anchored feeling of being left behind, throwing her heart and mind the other direction—into the deep, deep depths of the sea. She pulled books of maritime history, shipwrecked mystery, ocean currents from the shelves and always, always the mystery of the lost ship HMS Jubilee, which had made an appearance in several of her father’s stories, and whose disappearance gripped her imagination.

  She hated the new distance between them, and hoped that somehow, someday he might let her back in.

  three

  “Hang on to it.” Dash’s words about her family followed Lucy to the seaside in his place that spring. But how was she supposed to do so, when Dash—an integral part of her family—was slipping farther away? Though he was meant to come with them, at the last moment his attendance was specially requested at a maths tournament.

  In spite of his absence, Lucy enjoyed a glorious week, with days spent reading her atlas, the ocean itself climbing sand to greet her toes, chasing wild flora with her mother, and marveling at the skies with her father. She packed for the return home with mixed feelings, but she was eager to see Dash and her cottage filled with the love and laughter of family.

  They loaded the suitcases into their borrowed car through a downpour of rain, Mum blessing the skies for not unleashing until today. As they approached London, Mum turned to smile at Lucy in the back seat. “How about we repot the French hybrid lilac when we get h—”

  And all went screeching and black after that. Bits of sirens and raindrops breaking through. Glimpses of Father at Lucy’s side as she lay in a strange white room. Bright lights and the smell of rubber gloves and medicine.

  And finally, the waking up to what was most certainly no fairy tale. A home half-empty. The French hybrid shriveled crisp and brown in its too-small pot.

  Father stroked her hand gently as they sat side by side in silence each night as she slowly came to understand . . . Mum was gone.