The Giver of Stars(103)

Fred was watching her. There was something so pained and raw in his expression that she felt hollowed out by it. He hid it, reaching for the axe. ‘Well, I guess I might as well do the rest of these while I’m here.’

‘Margery will need them. When she comes home.’

He nodded, his eyes on the blade. ‘Yup.’

Alice waited a moment. ‘I’ll fix you something to eat … If you’re still happy to stay.’

He nodded, his eyes still downcast. ‘That would be good.’

She waited a moment longer, then turned and walked back into Margery’s cabin with the empty glass, and the sound of each whack of the blade splintering the wood behind her made her flinch, as if it were not just the wood being rent in two.

The food was terrible, as food cooked without heart often is, but Fred was too kind to comment on it, and Alice had little to say, so the meal passed in an unusual silence, accompanied only by the rhythmic croaks of the crickets and frogs outside. He thanked her for her efforts and lied that it had been delicious, and she took the dirty plates and watched as he stood, straightening stiffly as if the wood chopping had taken more out of him than he’d let on. He hesitated, then walked out onto the stoop, where she could see his shadow through the mesh of the screen door, looking out at the mountainside.

I’m so sorry, Fred, she told him silently. I don’t want to leave you.

She turned back to the plates and began scrubbing furiously, biting back tears.

‘Alice?’ Fred appeared at the door.

‘Mm?’

‘Come outside,’ he said.

‘I have to do the pl –’

‘Come. I want to show you something.’

The night was possessed of the thick darkness that comes when clouds swallow the moon and stars whole, and she could only just make him out as he motioned to the swing seat on the porch. They sat a few inches apart, not touching but linked by their thoughts, which, underneath, wound around each other’s like ivy.

‘What are we looking at?’ she said, trying surreptitiously to wipe her eyes.

‘Just wait,’ came Fred’s voice, from beside her.

Alice sat in the dark, the seat creaking under their combined weight, her thoughts tumbling as she considered her future. What could she do if she didn’t go home? She had little money, certainly not enough to find a house. She was not even sure she would have a job – who was to say that the library would continue without Margery’s fierce steerage? More importantly, she could hardly stay for ever in this small town, with the looming cloud of Van Cleve, his rage and her ill-fated marriage hanging over her. He had got to Margery, and he would surely get to her too, one way or another.

And yet.

And yet the thought of leaving this place – of no longer riding these mountains, accompanied only by the sound of Spirit’s hoofs and the glinting, dappled light of the forest, the thought of no longer laughing with the other librarians, stitching quietly beside Sophia or tapping her foot as Izzy’s voice soared into the rafters filled her with a grief that was visceral. She loved it here. She loved the mountains and the people and the never-ending sky. She loved feeling as if she was doing a job that meant something, testing herself each day, changing people’s lives word by word. She had earned every one of her bruises and blisters, had built a new Alice over the frame of one with whom she had never felt entirely comfortable. She would simply shrink back if she returned, and she could already taste how easily it would happen. Baileyville would become a little interlude, fade into another episode that her parents, tight-lipped, would prefer not to refer to. She would pine for Kentucky for a while, and pull herself together. Then, after a year or two perhaps, she would be allowed to divorce and she would eventually meet a tolerable man who didn’t begrudge her complicated past, and settle down. In some tolerable part of Lowestoft.

And then there was Fred. The thought of being parted from him made her stomach cramp. How was she supposed to bear the prospect of never seeing him again? Never seeing his face light up simply because she had walked into the room? Never catching his eye in a crowd, feeling the subtle heat that came with standing alongside a man she knew wanted her more than any other? She felt that every day they were together now, even when no words were spoken – the unspoken conversation that ran, like an undercurrent, under everything they did. She had never felt so connected, so sure of somebody, had never wanted somebody else’s happiness so keenly. How was she supposed to give that up?

‘Alice.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Look up.’

Alice’s breath stopped in her throat. The mountainside opposite was alive with light, a wall of glinting fairy lights, three-dimensional among the trees, winking and twinkling as they shifted, illuminating the shadows of the inky dark. She blinked at it, disbelieving, her mouth open.

‘Fireflies,’ he said.

‘Fireflies?’

‘Lightning bugs. Whatever you want to call them. They come every year.’

Alice couldn’t quite take in what she was seeing. The clouds parted and the fireflies glinted, mingled, traversed upwards from the illuminated shadows of the trees, and their million luminous white bodies melded seamlessly with the starry night sky above, so that it seemed for that moment that the whole world was carpeted with tiny golden lights. It was such a ridiculous, unlikely, insanely beautiful sight that Alice found herself laughing out loud, both hands pressed to her face.