5

The Sky and the Stars
and the Music

All afternoon, as she worked with Ford putting the final touches on the October issue, Abby had not been able to rid her mind of the image of the fiddler Devin Connor with his eyes closed and his face turned toward the sky. The music swirled through her mind like wood smoke, permeating her senses with its haunting refrains.

“Abby, come back to earth,” Ford said for the third time in an hour. “That photograph doesn’t go there; it goes here.” He leaned across her and clicked the mouse, dragging the photo across the screen. “It’s nearly five. How about if we call it quits and finish this tomorrow?”

Relieved, Abby left Ford to tidy up the office and made a quick exit. She had intended to drive out to the Farmer’s Market, pick up a few fresh vegetables for dinner, and make Mama a real meal rather than a collection of leftovers stir-fried in the wok.

But she didn’t. Instead, she found herself heading in the opposite direction, northward up the Blue Ridge Parkway, past the watershed, past Craggy Gardens, all the way to Mount Mitchell.

It was nearly dusk by the time she pulled into a deserted overlook, dug in her bag for her cell phone, and punched in her home number. After four rings, the answering machine picked up. Her mother would hear it, even if she wouldn’t answer the phone.

“Mama, it’s Abby. I’m going to be a little late, but don’t worry. I’ll fix dinner when I get home. If Neal Grace shows up, tell her not to go anywhere tonight.”

She hesitated for a second, then added, “Love you. Bye.”

For a second or two she waited, watching until the green screen on the phone went to black. Then she got out and sat on the warm hood of the car, facing the mountains.

Below her, evening mist hung like stretched cotton in the layered valleys between the mountain ridges. The setting sun illuminated the clouds above the farthest range with a red-gold hue, and the sky deepened from blue to dusky purple to navy.

Abby could feel it in her body—a creeping lethargy, as if earth’s gravity were gradually increasing and no one else had noticed. Every morning the weight seemed greater, the sheer effort of existence more demanding. Every night the yoke lay more heavily upon her, the burden of making a living, caring for Mama, trying in vain to keep Neal Grace connected to the family.

And remembering not to scream out loud where anyone could hear.

What had become of the life she had always envisioned when she was younger and the branches of the world hung low with ripe possibilities, waiting to drop fruit into her hand? Her heart answered before her mind had a chance to object. She knew what had happened. John Mac had died.

Abby had never subscribed to the unhealthy notion that marriage was “two halves seeking to form a whole.” She had been whole when she met John McDougall, and no one on earth would have described him as half of anything. They hadn’t needed each other to make life complete.

And yet, when they fell in love, something miraculous had happened. Abby had found herself opened to an entirely new dimension of light and depth and color and music, as if she had been living in black and white and suddenly turned the corner to find the world painted with a thousand brilliant hues. John Mac’s love for her—and hers for him—changed everything.

She soon discovered he had a gift for changing lives. As director of Blue Ridge Enterprises, a small nonprofit organization, he helped the underprivileged develop sustainable businesses. He pointed with pride to the city’s numerous restaurants, shops, and home-based endeavors now owned and operated by men and women who had once lived on welfare and fed their families with groceries from the shelves of local food banks.

Everyone who knew John McDougall loved him. When he and Abby married, their elaborate reception was catered, free of charge, by Christine, a single mom whom John Mac had helped turn her cooking and baking skills into a profitable business. They were chauffeured to the ceremony by Willie, who now owned a fleet of eight stretch limousines, thanks to John Mac’s assistance in financing his first taxicab.

Abby had been so proud of him, so awed by his selfless giving. Every life he touched was transformed for the better, including hers. With John Mac, love was the norm and loneliness a distant memory.

Abby had never even considered that her residence in this bright new world might not be permanent, that someday she might have to return to the old black-and-white, two-dimensional life. Until a drunk driver in a speeding car ripped away the light and color and shrouded her world in shadow.

Now she was back in that gray, flat land, and she had no idea what to do next, where to go from here.

What kind of life could she build without the man she loved? How could she regain the light and the color and the music? Abby wasn’t certain. She didn’t know what she wanted— only that this wasn’t it, this daily grind of deadlines and sameness and stress.

She ought to be grateful, she supposed. She had an interesting job, a beautiful old house that had been in her family for generations, a healthy bank account, good friends. But no one else, not even those who knew her well, could understand how she felt inside. The gnawing in her gut, the tensing of every nerve, the black hole at the pit of her being that threatened to swallow her whole.

The final rays of sunlight faded from the high clouds. Abby turned her face up toward the darkening sky. Behind her closed eyelids, she could see the image of Devin Connor, playing his fiddle first to the heavens and then to the laughing child in the stroller. She could hear the childhood tune, its simple threads woven with passion and purpose into an intricate melody. Twinkle, twinkle, little star . . .

She opened her eyes. At the edge of the horizon, where the ebony hips of the mountains butted up against the sky, the first star winked on. Like a small, bright candle beckoning her forward.

Still Abby sat there, watching. As the darkness deepened, more stars appeared—thousands, millions of them, close enough to touch, yet a lifetime away. Galaxies upon galaxies, calling to her, whispering secrets on the humid night air.

Abigail Quinn could not understand the voices of the stars. And yet for the first time since John Mac’s death, she felt a tiny stirring within her, the weak but determined heartbeat of hope.

Abby’s newfound sense of promise vanished the moment she stepped foot over the threshold of her own home. Mama sat unmoving on the sofa in the living room—in the dark. Abby could hear rock-and-roll music coming from upstairs. Obviously Neal Grace was home, sequestered in her room.

Stifling her annoyance, she made a sweep of the living room, snapping on lights, until her circuit brought her back around to her mother. “What are you doing sitting in the dark?” she said.

She hadn’t intended it to come out as an accusation, and yet her tone betrayed her. As soon as she looked into Mama’s eyes and saw the wrinkled, sagging face streaked with tears, she regretted her harshness. She sat down and took her mother’s hand. “Mama, what’s wrong?”

Her mother said nothing, just lifted one shoulder—the right one, the good one—in a shrug.

Abby closed her eyes and prayed for patience. Then her nostrils caught the lingering scent of something charred, and she jerked her head up. “Mama, did you use the stove today?”

Like a naughty child caught in an act of disobedience, Mama lowered her eyes. “Yeshh. Baked cookies for girls.”

“You baked cookies for the girls?” Abby repeated. “What girls?”

“NeeGrace and T’rese.”

“Teresa? You mean T. J.?”

Mama nodded. “But I burned ’em. And spilt the milk.”

Abby shook her head. “Ah, Mama, what am I going to do with you? You know you shouldn’t be trying to cook when I’m not here. You could hurt yourself.”

“Sorry.” Mama bit her lip.

“It’s all right.” Abby gave her mother a quick hug. “I just worry about you. Promise you won’t do it again?”

When Mama nodded assent, Abby got to her feet, extended both hands, and forced her face into a smile. “Come on, then. You can keep me company while I fix supper.”

Together they shuffled into the kitchen, Abby slowing her pace to match her mother’s. When Mama was settled in one of the chairs next to the table, Abby turned her attention to the problem of dinner. She opened the freezer and peered in.

“We’ve got two family-sized entrees: one chicken pasta, one lasagna,” she called over her shoulder. “Which one do you want?”

“Chicken,” Mama said.

“OK, chicken it is. That’s Neal Grace’s favorite anyway.” Abby retrieved the chicken pasta from the freezer and read the instructions to herself as she removed the shrink-wrap. Preheat to 350. She turned toward the stove and saw a little red light glowing next to the oven controls. Not only had Mama burned the cookies, she had forgotten to turn off the oven. “Step one,” she muttered. “Looks like the preheating’s done.”

Edith saw the red light on the stove the minute she came into the kitchen. She had hoped Abby wouldn’t notice, or that there might be a chance for her to cut the oven off when Abby’s back was turned. No such luck.

She braced herself for another lecture, but apparently her daughter thought she had suffered enough for one day. Instead of commenting, Abby simply slid the foil pan into the oven and pulled a bag of romaine and a couple of ripe tomatoes out of the crisper in the bottom of the fridge. “Want to help me make salad?”

Edith nodded. Abby washed the vegetables, patted them dry with a paper towel, and set them, along with a big wooden bowl, on the table in front of her. Then, apparently reconsidering her initial salad strategy, she took the tomatoes back. “I’d better do the cutting,” she said.

Abby, of course, wouldn’t let her near a knife. Suppressing a sigh, Edith began tearing the lettuce into smaller pieces. Even this small task was a challenge, because her left hand didn’t work so well anymore. She had to think about every move—how to grab each leaf between her left thumb and forefinger, hold it, and then tear pieces off with her right hand. It was a good thing the pasta would take forty minutes to bake. By then, she might have the lettuce finished.

Surviving a stroke had proved to be much more humiliating than being found dead on the living room carpet. In one terrible instant, Edith had become a child again, unable to tie her own shoes or cook a meal in her own kitchen. For weeks after she first left the hospital, she couldn’t even go to the bathroom or take a shower alone. Why, she wondered, did a stroke have to split a body down the middle like that? She would have given up her good leg in a heartbeat and been happy for the wheelchair if she could only have had the use of both hands . . . and her face . . . and her voice.

The worst challenge of a disability like hers—perhaps any disability, Edith suspected—was not so much the physical hurdles, but the fact that people around her, even her own daughter and granddaughter, treated her like a slow-witted child, as if paralysis of body equaled senility of mind. Ever since that dreadful night when the EMTs had dragged her back from the brink of eternity, she had been moving in reverse, shrinking, diminishing. The world had turned upside down, and without warning or permission, she had become her daughter’s daughter.

True, she couldn’t play the piano or wield a sharp knife any longer, or even bake cookies without burning them around the edges. But her mind was every bit as acute as it once was, and she longed for real dialogue rather than the infantile interchanges that masqueraded as conversation. She was certain if she had to answer the question, “How are you feeling today?” one more time, she might run screaming from the room—except that she could neither run nor scream.

Abby turned from the cutting board at the sink and tossed a handful of tomato wedges into the salad bowl. “How are you feeling today, Mama?” she asked.

Edith tried to arch her eyebrows and roll her eyes, but only one side arched and rolled, and she was pretty sure the effect was lost on her daughter. “Fine.”

Abby sat down opposite her at the table. “Look, Mama, I know how difficult this is for you—”

As if, Edith thought, borrowing one of her granddaughter’s favorite phrases.

“I know you’d love nothing more than to be back here in the kitchen, cooking meals for us, the way you always did before you had the—well, you know. Before.”

Before the stroke, Edith’s mind supplied. You can say the word without shocking me. I live with it every day.

“Anyway,” Abby went on, “I wish you could do all those things, too. But I worry about you. I don’t want you to get hurt. You’re my responsibility; I have to take care of you. And I can’t always be here to keep an eye on you. Do you understand?”

I ought to, Edith thought. If I’m not mistaken, this is a verbatim repetition of a lecture I gave you once—oh, about forty-five years ago. But it was simpler to give in than to attempt an argument. “Yes.”

“All right, then. We have an agreement?”

Edith gave a lopsided nod. “Yes.”

“Good. Because I need to be able to go to work without expecting the fire department or the police to come calling at my office.”

I get it, I get it. Enough, already, Edith’s mind shot back.

Abby glanced at the clock over the sink. “Dinner will be ready in about half an hour. I think I’ll get out of these pantyhose and heels. My feet are killing me.”

Edith laid a hand on her daughter’s arm. “Wait,” she tried to say. “We’ve got thirty minutes to ourselves. Can’t we talk?”

But the words came out garbled, and Abby misunderstood, or was only half listening. “Talk?” She smiled and patted Edith’s hand. “I know. It’s hard for you to talk. That’s OK. I understand.”

And then she was gone, leaving Edith alone to concentrate on tearing the lettuce into little pieces.

Dinner was a sullen, silent affair, with Neal Grace offering little except to complain about the chicken pasta.

“I understand T. J. came home with you after school,” Abby said, working hard to assume a pleasant tone.

“Yeah. So what?”

“It wasn’t an indictment, Neal Grace. It’s called conversation.”

“Right.” Her daughter raised her head and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “OK, here’s some conversation for you. How about calling me ‘Neal,’ like I’ve asked you to a hundred times, instead of ‘Neal Grace’? It makes me sound like a baby, or some kind of redneck.”

Abby sighed. “I’ll try, I’ll try.”

Neal Grace glared at her. “Fine.”

“Fine,” Abby repeated.

But she couldn’t just leave it at that. Something was wrong with her daughter, and she felt compelled—or at the very least, obligated—to find out what it was.

“Neal Grace—excuse me. Neal. What’s bothering you, honey? If you need to talk, you know—”

“If I needed to talk, I’d be talking, now wouldn’t I?” Neal countered. “Nothing’s wrong. Just drop it, OK?”

“Is everything all right at school?”

“School’s fine.” She finished off a tomato wedge and looked around the table. “Is there any more salad?”

“A little, I think. You haven’t touched your pasta.”

“I don’t want it.” Neal got up, went to the kitchen, and returned with the big wooden bowl.

“What do you mean you don’t want it? It’s your favorite.”

Neal rolled her eyes. “It’s got chicken. I’m a vegetarian.”

“Since when?” Abby cast a glance at Mama, who had a bit of pasta sauce dripping down her chin. She leaned over and wiped her mother’s mouth with her own napkin, then turned back to Neal.

“Since—I don’t know. Since now.” Neal scraped the last of the romaine onto her salad plate. “Eating meat is cruel to animals.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Abby laughed, trying to lighten the mood. “The original cheeseburger girl is giving up meat? Now, that’s a switch.”

“Maybe it’s time for a change,” Neal said. She finished her salad and tossed her napkin on the table. “May I be excused?”

“Don’t you want dessert? There’s ice cream, and Granny Q made cookies this afternoon.”

“They’re burned,” Neal muttered, avoiding her grandmother’s eyes. “Besides, I’ve got homework.”

She bolted for the stairs before Abby could say another word.

Edith followed Abby to the kitchen and watched while she put away the leftovers, made a pot of decaf, and loaded the dishes in the dishwasher. It was no use trying to help. Abby wouldn’t let her do anything, anyway.

“It’s a nice night,” Abby said when the kitchen was clean. “How about if we take our coffee out on the porch?”

They went outside and settled themselves, Edith in the chaise lounge and Abby in the swing that hung suspended from the rafters. The street was quiet, and through the tops of the trees they could see a few stars in the dark sky. From somewhere in the distance, music drifted on the night air.

“It’s a little chilly out here. Do you want a sweater?”

Edith shook her head, but Abby got up anyway and went into the house. She came back with a sweater and the small lap-sized afghan from the back of the sofa. She draped the sweater around Edith’s shoulders and patted her on the back. “That’s better, isn’t it?”

Sure, Edith thought. You’re cold, so I have to put on a sweater. She shrugged it away from her shoulders and let it drop onto the back of the chaise. Abby, not to be outdone, left the swing for a second time and readjusted it.

For a long time they sat in silence, sipping at their coffee and listening to the sounds of birds rustling in the trees and the distant music. On just such a glorious evening, Edith recalled, Sam Long had sat on this very porch and proposed to her—probably with Mother and Daddy peering out at them from behind the curtains. On a thousand such evenings, she and Sam had snuggled together in the swing he had built himself, talking and laughing and planning together until the mantel clock struck midnight. And until recently, she and her daughter had spent countless hours on this same porch, deep in conversation about Abby’s photography and the people John Mac helped and Neal Grace’s successes and failures.

If only they could talk that way again.

Abby sighed. “I don’t know what to do about Neal Grace,” she said. “I feel as if I don’t even know my own daughter anymore. What on earth is going on with her?”

Edith’s heart leaped, and she turned toward her daughter to respond, to discuss the child they both loved, to try to find a solution—together. But then Abby went on musing, and Edith clamped her mouth shut again. Abby wasn’t talking to her. She was simply rambling to herself.

“That music,” Abby said. “It reminds me of a man I met today up on Pack Square. A fiddler named Devin Connor. Kind of a mountain man, I guess. At least that’s the kind of music he plays. He didn’t seem to have much—I don’t suppose he would, if he’s fiddling on the streets for quarters. But there was something about him, something intriguing. He was so gentle and kind. And I never met anyone with so much passion for his music. He played ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ for a toddler in a stroller and had that child absolutely entranced. I have an appointment to interview him tomorrow for the magazine. I can’t wait to find out what makes him tick . . .”

Edith laid her head back against the cushion of the chaise and stared at the stars as her daughter’s voice continued to wash over her. Clearly Abby didn’t expect a response. She rarely had the patience to wait for one these days.

The music came down from somewhere in the hills and seeped into Edith’s soul. And in the sky and the stars and the music, she found herself drawn close—very close indeed—to that place where time meets eternity and the man she loved beckoned to her from the other side.