The Stars Are Fire(21)

For hours, Grace is left to contemplate a man on a cross on the wall opposite, a particularly lurid depiction of suffering. Why would a member of a medical staff put a woman in a room with such a grim reminder of death? The placement of the object is dictatorial, suggesting that the patient ought to pray to ease her sorrow, or to realize worse things have happened to countless others, or to contemplate the story that came after the cross, the one about an afterlife, a door that closed to Grace when reason overtook her childlike fantasies.

Is she meant to repent? For lasciviousness in the spring? For the challenge to her husband?

She wonders if she ought to ask to have the gruesome object removed.


On Grace’s third day of rest, the rough nurse barges into her room with the news that the bed is needed in the emergency room for a husband and wife with serious burns.

Two people with burns in a single bed?

Grace stands at once, but her womb threatens to fall out of her body. She bends to keep it with her, but it’s a sensual illusion.

“You need to squeeze your honeypot tight from inside,” says the nurse, appearing to demonstrate what might be a tightening of the vagina, but looks more like a woman desperate for a pee.

Grace can only nod.

“But quick now, get your clothes on. You’re going home.”

“I have no home, and I haven’t any clothes.”

“No clothes, really?” the nurse asks, not at all concerned by the disclosure of no home to live in. Who has a house anymore? “All right. Change your pad. Get yourself cleaned up. You’ve had no fever, no infection. I’ll be right back with clothes.”


The man with the pickup truck is waiting for her when she emerges into sunlight. The young volunteer has called him on her behalf. He steps around and takes her arm. “My wife and I send our deepest sympathies,” he says in the way of a man who has never learned any other words to express the inexpressible. “I’m a little afraid to put you in the truck again…” He trails off, acknowledging that it was there that the baby died.

“I’m sorry,” Grace says, “I’m not sure I know your name.”

“Matthew,” he says. “My wife is Joan.”

“And I’m Grace.”

“Yes.”

“Where do you live?” she asks.

“Cape Porpoise.”

“When the fire got close,” she says, “we thought of escaping to Cape Porpoise.”

“Good thing you didn’t. The fire did a lot of damage. We were saved only because my son devised a way to suction water from the sea to the house. It worked. The fire passed us over.”

Grace studies Matthew. He doesn’t look old enough to have a grown son. “Smart young man,” she says.

Matthew smiles. “He’s eleven.”

Grace laughs. “Brilliant boy.”

“Well, you know what they’re like. A genius one minute, a moron the next.”

“I don’t yet, but I expect I will someday.”

“My wife says your children are super. She’s been missing the little ones. She said to tell you straightaway that you’re welcome to stay as long as you like.”


Matthew and Grace drive through the residue of hell, everything blackened, the trees dark jagged shapes, a gas station exploded, the road itself charred. Shells of automobiles sit at angles to the road, and Grace hopes that the passengers were able to flee ahead of the fire. They pass a lump of metal, an object that might once have been a black Ford, a vehicle to which Grace refuses to assign meaning.

They turn down a winding road that runs through what was once forest. They pass a burned barn, a chimney to mark the spot where the farmhouse stood. Grace notes places where the fire crowned, leaping from treetop to treetop, singeing the upper branches, but leaving the trunks and the ground untouched. A lone house with wash on the line shocks Grace, not only for its presence amid so much devastation, but for the uselessness of a wet wash that will only trap the cinder dust from the mild breeze. By suppertime, the wash will be gray.

But to have a house, to have running water, to have sheets…


Grace has on a nurse’s uniform with a woolen cape to keep her warm, white nurse’s shoes that pinch. She hasn’t a dime to her name.

She’s aware of coves that lead to the ocean. Matthew turns at one and travels along a dirt road. He stops the car at the only house standing, a shingled cape, the land behind it then dropping off to dark blue tidal water that moves in to fill the cove twice a day.

Before she is out of the truck, Claire runs to greet her. Since Grace can’t pick her up, she kneels and hugs her daughter with so much force that Claire struggles to get away. But then the girl is back for more, tumbling onto her mother. Grace can hear Matthew chuckling. A screened door slams. When she glances up, she sees Joan, Matthew’s wife, holding Tom. Matthew helps Grace stand, and with Claire clinging to her leg, she takes her son from the woman. She wants to smell her boy, to make sure he hasn’t lost his baby scent. He burbles, a grin across his face. When he starts to kick his feet in happiness, Grace gives him to the woman who has cared for him.

“I can never thank you enough,” Grace says.

“They’ve been a joy to have.”

With her prematurely gray hair and wide nose, her dress tight at the waist and at the bust, Joan is not beautiful; but her smile is so warm that she seems beautiful to Grace and, she imagines, to Matthew, who beams at her.