And All the Stars That Never Were
Above Hayley’s crib
was the sign, black magic marker on white poster board,
The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings
.
In sophomore English class, Kelly Ashton, along with the rest of the students, had been forced to memorize and recite lines from
Julius Caesar
. Her own lines had been the entirety of the
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him
speech, which she hadn’t paid much attention to, and had delivered in a monotone that reflected the desperate chore of remembering all the words. The other kids were the same. As they recited their lines one by one she began to fall asleep. There was some excitement when Russell Harmon, whose only role in sophomore English had been to provide comic relief, attempted to disrupt some other kid’s speech, sitting in the back of the room with a spiral notebook wire shoved up his nose to make the kid laugh, but the kid didn’t laugh and when Russell Harmon tried to get the wire out of his nose he couldn’t, twisting the pointed end into
his skin so that he had to be led, bleeding, down to the nurse’s office. But after that the dull routine reestablished itself. Then Tristan Mackey got up with his partner, a kid named Boyd who labored through his lines like he was digging them up with a shovel. But when Tristan Mackey spoke she began to wake up. He wasn’t remembering, he wasn’t reciting, he wasn’t trying out a British accent like some of the more ambitious ones. He was just
saying
, just
talking
, and she leaned forward at her desk and rested her chin on her hands and started to listen, and all of a sudden Shakespeare started making some kind of
sense
to her, because Tristan Mackey was
good
. And then at one point he looked at Brutus, this kid Boyd whose nose was pointed to the ground, whose face was beet red, and Tristan Mackey let out a long sigh and his eyes went to the window, to the melting icicles dripping along the roofline and the slushy snow out in the street, the sparkling of the snow in the bright morning sun, and for a second she could hear truck tires hissing down the road and she could hear the radiator at the back of the classroom ping, and then Tristan Mackey said as naturally as if he were talking about the weather or what he was going to do after school, “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” And her eyes filled with tears and she pressed them hard against the knuckles of her thumbs. And that night in bed she opened her English textbook and by the light of the bedside lamp, hearing on some level the dog scratching at her door and her mother cackling in the next room at something on TV, she read the words over and over, and she understood in a deeper way than she’d ever understood anything before what it was that Tristan Mackey, not William Shakespeare, meant: that it was up to them, to
Tristan and to her and to Boyd if he could pull his head out of his ass, and to Russell Harmon down in the nurse’s office with a wire stuck up his nose, and to anybody else who might be alive enough to listen, to find their own way to get the fuck out of this life, get the fuck out of this town, get to a place of their own devising where there wasn’t any fate and there wasn’t any God and there was only a clear, clean space above it all, a breath you could take and a windowpane you could look through to a world where everything below, everything boring and stupid and sad, melted away.
And so when Hayley was born, when it looked to everyone around Kelly Ashton—her drunk mother and her brainless friends and her boyfriend, Aaron, who had already stuck around longer than he had any reason to and whom for that reason she could no longer respect, and to Russell Harmon no doubt if he even knew anything about it, and to Tristan Mackey too if there was anyone to tell him down there at college—like she was stuck in this town forever and she was never going to do anything with her life and would just stay there and drink too much and lose her looks like her mother, she wrote out the words in black magic marker and taped them above the crib.
And so tonight, as always, she read the words, and she changed Hayley’s diaper, thinking how, soon, Hayley would be in the Pull-Ups, and telling her so, saying
Big girl, big girl
, and tickling her tummy. Then she dressed Hayley in her pj’s and transferred her to the playpen, banging her knee on the bed frame in the crowded room for the thousandth time as she did so, and then to make sure Hayley was happy in there, she squeezed the squeezy doll several times until Hayley got interested and started doing it herself, sitting there in the playpen
with her blond hair dangling in her eyes. She put the picture books in there carefully too, leaving them open to the pages Hayley liked so they would get her attention when she tired of the squeezy doll, so that she wouldn’t start crying before Kelly was safely out the door, because if she did that, if she started crying, if she kept crying, it wouldn’t be until after Hayley was safely asleep that Kelly could convince herself to leave. Then, holding her breath, she snuck out of the room, closing the door about halfway, and then real quick went to the refrigerator down the hall in the little apartment, the fucking apartment she’d lived in with her mother since she was fourteen, and mixed up a bottle with the formula, even though Hayley shouldn’t need a bottle anymore but then there would be hell to pay come bedtime if not. She had to do it herself because she couldn’t trust her mother to do it right—measuring the right amount of formula into the water, shaking it, shaking it, putting it in the fridge. Then checking herself one last time in the bathroom mirror, one last time, running her tongue over the uneven bottom teeth and thinking goddammit at her mother for never getting her braces, and she had to get out the tweezers again because the eyebrows just weren’t
even
, not quite, and then her hair, toss it a little this way, lower her chin, look at the eyes, and was this blouse getting too tight on her, could she still wear it, because the bathroom mirror wasn’t any good for seeing that and she didn’t dare go back down the hall to the bedroom. She could hear Hayley talking in there—
Sam I am, green eggs and ham
. She’d better get the hell out quick if she was ever going at all, so she explained everything to her mother one more time, her mother there in the easy chair with the Coors Light next to her on the table, like some drunk old man, was she sure
she knew the cell phone number, did she understand that the bottle was already made up in the fridge, did she know when bedtime was, would she make sure to take Hayley out of the playpen in no longer than half an hour, tops, and was she going to
stop after this beer
, mother,
this
one, not the next one and not the one after that, all right she didn’t have time to argue, she would call to check on Hayley soon. She opened the apartment door and stepped out onto the landing in the warm summer dusk and she took a deep breath and thought
not in our stars but in ourselves
, because there was still time and opportunity to be something bigger than she could be in Garnet Lake, Idaho. She had the looks and brains to make it happen.
She was going downtown to meet Tristan Mackey, who was turning out to be an asshole when you got right down to it, not at all the Tristan Mackey who had liked her all those years, not at all the Tristan Mackey who had created a new world for her that day long ago in English class. He’d fucked her and now he wasn’t all that interested. She knew the type, but hadn’t pegged him as that particular kind of disappointment. She was angry at herself more than him. It had been a long time since she’d allowed anyone other than herself to get her hopes up. But, so, he’d asked her to a dart match, not a nice restaurant in town, not on an actual
date
, just
maybe she could come to the dart match to drink beer with “the boys,”
as he’d called them condescendingly, too good for them all obviously, whoever they were, but all right, it wasn’t too late to show him the mistake he was about to make.
But when she walked into the 321 and looked toward the back of the bar the first person she saw was Russell. Russell, cheerful Russell, good sweet Russell, silly Russell, stupid
Russell, my God what could you do with him and what could you tell him about himself and about who he really was and how would you go about it anyway. Poor Russell whom her heart went out to, who drove up Baldy Mountain with her one time to get a good view of the northern lights even though he really didn’t care anything about them, who told her how his father left him, whom she told about how her father left her. Russell was a dead end. Russell was a loser. He was Hayley’s father, but that didn’t count for much in his case, and she’d never had the heart, or maybe not the necessary lack of common sense, to let him know. But then she hadn’t seen him in a long time, either.
Her father had been the manager of a men’s clothing store. He dressed, she could still remember, in crisp gray slacks, in a clean white-collared shirt, in a square-shouldered jacket, a blue tie, and he smelled of good cologne. His socks were sorted in a dresser drawer from lightest to darkest. His shoes were on a shoe tree. His face was smooth and his thin blond hair was just so. He was quiet and he smiled a lot and he did the best he could even though he was relatively poor. Then one day when she was ten he had fixed her breakfast and he had laid out her clothes and helped her get ready for school (her mother was never up for that sort of thing), but when they walked out the door to get in the car he was still dressed in his boxer shorts and undershirt. She’d laughed—
Daddy
, your
pants
—and then she’d seen something like terror in his eyes, and after that nothing had ever been the same.
There had been times when he was all right, sure, sometimes months on end when he would get back to the old routine, the socks lined up neatly in the drawer, which she checked
whenever he wasn’t around, as if it were a medical chart of some kind or the psychology test with the inkblots, and the ties and the neatly pressed suits in the morning, the eggs and bacon cooked just so, the drive to school during which he never exceeded the speed limit, the same comforting words when he dropped her off, the
See you this afternoon, honey
, the
Have a good day
, but then, inevitably, more and more, there would come the day when he went to the grocery store four times to buy bread, the day when he would canvass the neighborhood, go door-to-door asking the neighbors to show him plat maps of their property lines, even the neighbors who were several doors down, the day when he would suddenly exit the house naked to go grab the newspaper, or, once, to adjust the idle on the car. The doctors disagreed—was it the onset of Alzheimer’s? A brain tumor? Schizophrenia? Manic depression? He showed up at the doctors’ offices dressed perfectly every time, perfectly in control of himself. The CAT scans were negative. He passed all the standard tests. At times Kelly Ashton suspected that it was all a performance of some sort, and it was only when she remembered the look on his face that first time when he stood at the door in his boxer shorts that she could put aside the suspicion.
Then there had been the Saturday when he left the house to go to work, his suit pressed, his tie perfectly even and tight, his socks chosen carefully from the lined-up pairs in the drawer, and did not come home. A Forest Service employee found his car parked along the High Drive, far up in the Cabinet Mountains, and he was never seen again.
Russell Harmon could disappear that way. Or not exactly that way, not in a way that was so complicated and sudden, was
more mundane and predictable and slow, but it was something to keep in mind. So she smiled at him only slightly, no matter the feeling she had all of a sudden, the same one she always had when she first laid eyes on Russell, that he needed her protection, no matter the feeling all of a sudden that his simplicity could be a way of protecting her, that what she saw as Russell’s simple good nature might be a way out, a way to reconcile herself to living in this town, with Russell and Hayley, forming a pleasant little family that would let her leave behind thoughts of big things and deep things. But she was here now to meet Tristan Mackey, who represented something entirely different, which was genius, which was possibility, which was the stretching of her life beyond the confines of this town out into the greater world, a world in which she had not been very often or for any length of time, but which promised the chance of recognition, of being able to find the self you dreamed of and make the dreamed self and the actual self one and the same. That couldn’t happen for her in this town. And so she held out some hope—based on the fact, she knew, that he had been pretty crazy about her at one time—that despite his recent indifference there was still a way to hitch a ride out of here with Tristan Mackey. He was going places, and she could too.
And yet this was nothing more than “dart night.” She swore to God, men had no imagination sometimes, not even the smart ones. You couldn’t help but be an underling if you didn’t even know, or weren’t able to keep in mind, that you
had
any stars. So tonight would be to remind him.
And so after sitting at the bar for just a while, really not long enough for Russell to be going to the bathroom twice—Was he doing it to get a look at her? Was he drunk this early? Did
he have some sort of medical problem?—she took her glass of merlot and headed to the back, past the Red Hook sign and the framed photos of Garnet Lake in the old days, the muddy streets, the towers of felled timber at the old landing along the lakeshore, the old schoolhouse that had been razed to make room for the commerce park, and she liked the warm glow from the overhead lights hung from the high ceiling and the sound her heels made on the hardwood floor and the view of Sand Creek out the window, and she was glad to discover, because she’d never been in here before, because she’d hardly been to any bars in town, having been saddled by the time of her twenty-first birthday with a baby to nurse and then a full-time job to pay for rent and child care afterward, that at least the place wasn’t a total dump. She could forgive Tristan Mackey a little bit.