What Stars Know

It’s a clear and quiet night when Margaret steps onto the deck in her slippers. Quiet is, of course, the modus operandi of Pleasant Ridge Neighbourhood Development and Conservation Area, thanks to the HOA’s quick intervention into such nuisances as barking dogs, and children, and talking, and whispering, as noise might disrupt someone’s outdoor floor meditation or game of golf. But not tonight, where there is only soft wind through suburban corridors of new builds and streetlights. Margaret walks straight through their gleam on her way across the road, to the golf cart path lining the space between houses. It’s warm enough that she doesn’t need a dressing gown, and the path is flat and familiar; she needs no flashlight to see by. Why call the place a ridge when there is no ridge to speak of, nary a hill as far as the eye can see? Only roofs upon roofs upon roofs. Golf green. More roofs.

On the golf path she passes dark windows and looming fences. All the lives lived in those houses; all the books read, the dishes scrubbed, the meals cooked. Lunchboxes packed. It was spaghetti bolognese tonight—Bill’s aunt’s recipe, which includes, of all things, bell peppers. It was passed down by notecard and, when that turned to dust, written down in a notebook she keeps in the cabinet with the extra bags of flour and sugar. The red sauce is too watery for Margaret, but that’s the way Bill likes it, with anemic shreds of onion and only a touch of salt; she has to keep an eye on his blood pressure since he will not. The bell peppers gave her heartburn—she keeps burping in little gulps—but in their backyard garden she grows them in the summer, as Todd used to eat them like apples, and there’s no use letting them go to waste.

Off the path she veers, and onto golf course. Her slippers smack-smack against her heels as she passes over the stripes they mow into the grass. Pushed up against the edge of the course, with a fresh row of fencing abutting one end, is the golf course pond. The moonlight shining on it is unobstructed by a single cloud. Fog rises from its surface, inviting and strange, like the lake of Arthurian legend, waiting to belch forth a maiden with a mossy blade. Todd loved those kinds of stories. The Princess Bride, Labyrinth, Willow—whichever ones had the campiest fire effects and the largest armies of trolls. For Halloween one year, Margaret hot glued glow-in-the-dark plastic stars to a cone-shaped hat she’d shaped out of sheets of leftover felt from a craft store liquidation sale. In the pictures, Todd is standing on the porch with the hat half-tilted atop his bowl cut, smiling through several lost teeth, swamped in swathes of wizard robe.

Does he remember that costume, those days? Does he think of her? By now he will be in his early forties, half a lifetime into a downtown desk job; a Niagara Falls snowglobe on his desk, next to a framed picture of him and his wife when he had more hair and she had no crow’s feet. Yes—a beer gut, a silver Amex card, Crocs by the back door for his gardening. Margaret’s phone will ring at six on a Tuesday, him telling her he’s coming over for dinner and bringing the kids.

She kicks off her slippers and reaches for the hem of her nightgown, then pauses. It’s not as though there are cameras watching the pond, or are there? It won’t matter soon, anyways. Get a load of this, Homeowners Association. Margaret shucks off the nightgown and drops it in a puddle of satin. Needlelike spikes of short grass between her toes, then the cold mud of the pond bottom; careful steps over cattails, and then there’s only water, and her feet are submerged, then her ankles and knees. She sloshes forward until the cool water meets the puckered skin of her c-section scar. She shivers.

The water ripples out from her, making waves of the mirrored stars. Further into the pond, as the trees and roofs and world fall away, her view of the stars is so vast.

Talk to me, she tells them. They can see him from here in a way she can’t. They must know something.

When it first happened she would go for walks through the entire map of golf cart paths, unslept and half-crazed, golf carts honking at her as she trudged along the pavement, plodding and unforgetting as a revenant. Some part of her brain believed that Todd was hidden in one of these houses, that to find him all she had to do was be there at the right time: be in that mysterious somewhere at some undefined moment she would only know when she stumbled across it. Try as she might, she did not stumble across it, but she never stopped waiting to. Nowhere else in her life had she ever had the dogged certainty that she did then, seeing behind every tree a glimpse of his silken head or the white flash of his baseball jersey. All it would take was one more look, one more walk, one more call to the police and to the local news, one more night awake staring through the window at her backyard and willing him to come walking through the trees from wherever he’d been.

She dunks her head beneath the pond surface, then her whole self. Water in her ears, her eyes. She keeps her mouth shut at first. Exhales air in slow, burbling bubbles. She’s weightless in the depths this far into the pond. The cloudy water stings and blurs her vision, but she can see the stars from beneath the surface, winking pinpoints of light like fireflies. That was the last thing Todd asked her after his game, if he could go with the other kids to catch fireflies under the bleachers. Margaret drifts downward, arms outstretched, feet searching but not finding the bottom. How deep can a pond be until it becomes a lake, until it becomes an ocean? Every year it seems to grow with the rains that come more and more often these days. That’s why they had to replace the fence. The quiet presses in on her eardrums, all-consuming and ambient. Margaret has no more air left as she listens to that silence and hears it beckon.

Until she hears something else. A voice whispering Mom: a voice from somewhere nearby, somewhere underwater. Then louder, directly into her ear, like someone waking her up in the middle of the night for a glass of water. Mom.

She surges to the surface, breaking it open, gasping for air and choking on its sweetness. She splashes, flails, struggles all of a sudden to stay afloat, with a sharp cry coming out of her lungs, loud enough to wake the dead or the neighbourhood at least. Somehow she moves towards the shore, shivering, the world all shades of blue and black, everything rendered flat by the moonlight. When at last she is close enough to the shore for her feet to touch the bottom, she takes clumsy leaping lurches through the water, through swirling mud and flattened grasses. On the golf grass she stumbles, falls to her knees, allows herself a moment to breathe. Her heart pounds, so alive.

Finally she paws at her nightgown and throws it over her dripping hair, tugs it around with arms akimbo as she looks for the neck hole. She’s up and moving before it settles fully around her frame. She has to move fast, because of what she knows: that he’s on her porch now, standing in the yellow light. Moths flit around his head, looking for the moon. He’s twisting his baseball hat in his hands, gathering up the courage to ring the bell the way he used to wind up his arm for a pitch, and he’s saying I’m sorry Mom, I’ve been gone so long, I got lost. I was hurt, but I’m fine now, I just wondered how you were.