Authors: Gael Baudino
“I'm sorry I can't come out to Denver. I'm really busy at work. I can't take the time.”
Can't take the time?
Lauri had asked about a weekend. Diamonds and cut glass. Diamonds and cubic zirconium.
The stars hung in the dark room, blazing at her when she closed her eyes, shimmering faintly when she opened them. She was not groggy, but she was not exactly conscious either. “I understand,” she said quietly. “It . . . sounds like you've got something going now with Ron, and . . . that's just the way it works out. Or doesn't work out, depending on where you are.” There was no accusation in her voice, no despair. It was calm understanding. It was the starlight.
For a moment, there was silence from Los Angeles, then: “What kind of a crack is that? What did you expect, running off to Denver like you did?”
“Running off? Sweetheart, we talked about it. We agreed on this kind of separation, and you thought it would be good to join me here if we patched things up.”
“I only said that because I knew you wanted it.” Carrie was being maddeningly patient again.
“Wanted it? I wanted to stay with you.”
“I
like
Los Angeles.”
“Then why did you agree—?”
“I just told you.”
Lauri fumbled. They had agreed. It had seemed so straightforward at the time.
She felt confused, flushed. Her face and her ears were burning. She bit her lip. “I . . . didn't see it that way,” she managed.
“Well, if you can't handle reality, I can't help you. I ran interference for three years, and I'm not doing it anymore.”
“What do you mean running interference? I supported you for half that time while you went to school!”
“You're going to have to get used to this, Lauri.”
Anger balled itself into a hot coal in her brain. “Look,” she said, “I'm flying out to the coast. I want to talk to you. No more of this telephone crap. Just you and me. We've got to settle this.”
“What?”
“I'll be out tomorrow. I'll come by the apartment after you get off work.”
“But—”
“See you then.” She hung up without waiting for an answer. She knew Carrie would be there when she arrived. It was not like her to run from a confrontation. At least not physically.
***
She called Hadden from the airport the next morning and explained that she would not be in to work that day. She also told him why. “I'm sorry,” she said. “I've got to do this. If you can't keep me on at TreeStar, I understand.”
“I'll see you in the office when you get back,” was his response. “Don't worry about the time. There's no problem. Good luck.”
United Airlines had been obliging enough to have a seat available, and she had put the fare on her credit card without even considering what it would do to her budget. She did not care. She was at the gate three hours early and sweated through two arrivals and departures before her flight came up.
When she had boarded and buckled in, though, she realized that, during the last several hours—since, in fact, she had hung up on Carrie—she had missed the stars. As the plane taxied, therefore, she sighed and closed her eyes, turned inward, looked for them. Faintly at first, but then flashing into full brilliance, they appeared.
She relaxed. She had been angry, agitated, and she had lost them. Or rather, she had ignored them. They seemed to be always present now . . . if she was willing to look.
She kept her eyes closed as the 737 picked up speed. The stars soothed her, comforted her. She laughed quietly at Hadden's story about the Elves. She was sure that he had made it up to take her mind off her worries. What a guy. What a boss! Hadden was one in a million. And so, she was certain, was Ash. Lucky people they were to have found one another.
Airborne. Wheels up. The plane climbed, banked, and climbed again. Lauri kept her inner vision on the stars, and, lulled by the quiet light, sank into a half trance. She could feel her body, the plane around her, the moving currents of air that rushed pas the fuselage. She could even feel the earth beneath her, the earth that was by now thousands of feet away, the earth that was rolled and convoluted in the forested wilds of the Rocky Mountains.
Wood, stone, water. And about her, the rushing air. And within her, the stars. She was picking out variations now: an oddly shaped cloud, a hawk—maybe a sparrow hawk—flying below, a particular lake and a whitewater river flowing toward the lowlands. For an instant, among the stars, she saw it clearly, in perfect and precise detail. Curious as to what she could see physically, she opened her eyes, leaned toward the window, and looked down past the gleaming wing. She froze then, and her clenched teeth barely contained her cry.
It was all there, just as she had seen it among the stars, but now there was more. Much more. Infinitely more. The starlight mingled with her physical vision, and she was suddenly connected with what she saw, as though, like the stars, it were within her. She had contemplated the stars, had touched in friendship a sparrow hawk, but now she was abruptly one with an immense expanse of land and water. The sun warmed her, rivers flowed across her, and she was aware of the imponderably slow changes wrought within her by the days and the years. Her trees rose up, lifting sun-warmed branches toward the skies. Within her, deep within, at the dark, quiet roots of her mountains, there was life, and growth, and she knew the eternally renewed potentials that she could manifest.
The vision overwhelmed her in an instant, and tears were running down her face by the time she pried herself away from the window and closed the shade.
There was no one in the adjoining seat to notice, but a steward was passing by just then. “Can I get you something, miss?”
She looked up at him, and, just for a moment, just for a microsecond, she really saw him, total stranger though he was, and she knew him. She saw his life as a unit, as something whole and complete, and she knew the sorrows and the joys that wove through it—the college degree he had given up because his girlfriend had become pregnant, his grief when the child was stillborn, the small apartment in Idaho Springs—knew everything, and looked through his eyes and saw herself in tears at something she could not understand . . .
The vision faded. She blinked at him.
“Maybe . . . maybe some coffee,” she whispered.
***
The coffee—hot, butter, homely—grounded her into a more conventional reality. She finally looked out the window again to find that the landscape was now landscape and no more, and she realized that it had been the stars that had given her that small glimpse of infinity, that, in fact, she could repeat the experience if she wanted to.
Hadden had said that she was growing. But growing into what? Hadden . . .Ash . . . both of them bright with some undefined radiance, the light of the stars shining in their eyes. Web too . . . she had seen it in Web. She was
sure
she had seen it in Web.
She was still shaking. Deliberately now, she closed her eyes, found the stars, and let them calm her, but this time she kept her awareness to herself. Whatever was happening, it appeared that she could control it to some extent. Opening her eyes, she stared at the back of the seat ahead of her, sighed.
Burbank Airport was small, compact, and reasonably efficient. By midmorning, Lauri was on the familiar Los Angeles freeway system in a rented car. Carrie would be at work—she had six or seven hours to kill—and after grabbing an early lunch, she headed up the coast.
Eleven o'clock on a Tuesday morning: traffic was light. She cruised along the coastal highway until the beaches were isolated and sandstone cliffs and scrub formed a backdrop for the road. Eventually, she pulled off onto the gravel and climbed down the incline to the sand. The place was familiar: she had been there before. Which argument had it been that time? Money? No, too common. Careers? That was more likely. Something abstruse, something about which one could vent one's anger delicately,
pro forma
, without getting too involved.
She remembered that there was a hollow under a rock outcropping that was dry at low tide. She had curled up there once, wondering what it would be like to let the waves come in, little by little, the water rising higher . . .
But it was high tide, and so she sat on the warm sand and watched the breakers. Yellow sun. Golden sand. Blue water. They all looked slightly different from what she remembered. The colors were brighter, more intense. Details were sharper. She looked at a tangled strand of kelp and saw the intricacy of the pattern it formed as it sprawled half in and half out of the water. The stars were still with her, she realized, and she could not but wonder what would happen to her now if she let them take her as far as they had on the plane.
Her hands, resting on the sand, tensed. She might not come back. It was frightening . . . but it was tempting, too.
But she was not going to run away. She would confront Carrie that evening, in the living room of the shabby apartment they had shared for forty-three months. There had to be a distinct ending to their partnership. Even a corpse needed a signed piece of paper and a funeral to qualify as being legitimately dead.
The wind came in, warm and fresh and smelling of salt, and Lauri was strongly tempted to discard her clothes and plunge into the water. But she stayed where she was, knees half drawn up, hands clasped around her legs, hair tangling in the breeze. She had not been to the coast in months, and she was drinking it all in, just as, even now, she was letting the starlight inundate her, little by little, rising higher . . .
Her face and ears were burning again, and she shut her eyes, dropping into the night sky that she now carried within her. The ocean flowed, the stars shone, the wind roared.
Inundating her, rising higher.
When she became aware once more, the sun was blazing into her eyes, the horizon on fire with the reds and golds of sunset. She gaped at it. Had she been asleep? Hastily, she checked her watch, and it confirmed that she had lost the entire afternoon. Thinking back, she could remember the stars, and that was all: one long, continuous dream of starlight.
She got up, less stiff than she expected, and made her way along the beach, up the stony incline, back to her car. Her steps were firm and sure, but she felt odd, as though she were not quite at home in her own body, and when she slid behind the wheel and closed the door, she looked at her hands. They were exactly what she expected . . . but not quite. She could not say what it was at first, but as the sun set and the shadows fell, she saw, faintly, a soft shimmer. And it did not stop at her hands.
Growing . . .
She drove south to Malibu, stopped at a gas station, and used the rest room. The fluorescent glare brought with it a harsh sense of reality, but it did nothing to mask the shimmer that had, seemingly, become one with her flesh. And as she washed up, she noticed that she looked younger, less strained.
Less strained? What the hell was going on?
She found the pay phone outside, fed it coins, and dialed Hadden's home number, grateful now that he had given it to her. He caught it on the second ring. She could have sworn he was expecting the call. Perhaps he was.
“Hadden? Lauri here.”
“Yes?” How did he manage to put so much reassurance into a single word?
Confronted now with actually having to talk about it, she nearly collapsed into blubbering, but the stars upheld her, and her voice was, even to her own ears, surprisingly controlled. “What's . . . what's happening to me?”
“Talk to me.”
“I just blanked out most of the day staring at the goddam ocean, and now I'm
glowing
.”
Silence for a few seconds. Then: “It's a little hard to talk about it over the phone—”
“Well, you're going to have to, because I can't teleport back for a guest appearance in Denver. At least not yet. Give me a few more days.” She held up her hand. The streetlights were making the shimmer more distinct. She suddenly worried that people might notice. But no: she had not noticed Hadden or Ash. At least not before.
Before? Before what?
“Relax, Lauri. You're fine.”
“Fine. Sure. I've got enough stars inside my head to keep Palomar busy for a year, and you say I'm fine.”
“Are you frightened?”
“Ask me when I'm not so scared.”
More silence. She could almost hear Hadden weighing his words.
“Lauri,” he said at last, “do you remember what I was saying about the Elves?”
“Yeah. What about it?”
“It was true. I wasn't joking.”
The words spun in her head. “Tell me exactly, Hadden,” she said. “Try to keep it simple. I'm not thinking too clearly right now.”
“OK. Close your eyes. Find the stars.”
She did so. Her thoughts slowed, calm returned. “Right. It was true. So tell me.”
“Lauri,” he said softly, “you've got the blood. It's waking up in you. When it wakes up, it takes over. It's changing you.”
She stared through the glass walls of the phone booth. Traffic. Bluely glowing streetlights. Glistening ocean.
“Lauri?” Silence. “Lauri?”
“I'm . . . I'm here. I'll be all right.” She found the stars, breathed deeply, was surprised that she was not shaking. “Is there anything I should . . . like . . . do?”
“Just be gentle with yourself. Stay calm. You'll probably notice some . . . physical changes along the way.”
She felt her smooth face. “I have. I look about eighteen.”
“There will be more. If you run into trouble, find the stars and let them settle you. Call Ash or me at need.” He paused. “I wish I were there with you.”
“It wouldn't help,” she said, still watching the traffic. “I have to go it alone.”
“Have you seen Carrie yet?”
“I'm on my way there now.”
When she had hung up, she went back to the rest room and brushed out her wind-tangled hair. It was then that she saw that Hadden was right about the physical changes. She stared for a few minutes, heart beating in fear, and then she found her stars and finished her hair, arranging it so that it covered her ears completely.
***
Time—even six months—gives perspective, changes viewpoints, and when Lauri turned off Old Cahuenga Boulevard and onto the dark side streets that wound, maze-like, into Hollywood Hills, she found that what had once been familiar and common was now laden with a sense of distance. She did not live here. She was but a visitor, one who would stay for a few minutes and then depart, taking these same dimly lit streets down to the bright thoroughfares once again . . . going off to wherever it was that she called home. And when she parked and stepped out onto the dry grass the divided the street from the sidewalk, the feeling became even more distinct: the apartment building, the cars, the scrubby trees—everything about her was trapped somewhere between the familiar and the strange, as though she could neither claim it as her present nor let go of it enough for it to become mere memory and nothing more.