Stargazer

Chapter 4

8

Just when Aurelle was hoping to tell people about her and Tim, Keith Martin died.

It happened during a freak diving accident at the Martins’ cottage up north, at the start of the summer of 1994. He knew better, is all anyone could say, in hushed voices. The neighbourhood buzzed with gossip, thinly veiled as concern. He must have misjudged the distance. He hit something. His poor parents. His poor sister. How can they ever enjoy the cottage again? What will become of it? And then, invariably: It’s a magnificent summer home; have you ever seen it? Massive, custom-build. Looks like it’s part of the rock and forest. So unique. And the interiors are gorgeous. It was featured in Toronto Life, did you know? I wonder if they’ll sell it. It’s got to be worth a fortune.

Tim had been there when it happened, with a bunch of the same friends who were regulars at the Taylors’ Toronto home. He hadn’t seen it. None of them had. They had all still been sleeping up in the cottage. Apparently, only his sister had been there, down at the dock, when he died. Aurelle overheard all of this from someone else; not Tim. Her own brother, Matt, hadn’t been there; he was at home that weekend, on a date with a girl he’d been seeing a lot of lately. After Keith’s death, Aurelle noticed that Matt spent almost all of his time with the girl, Tammy, as though he could replace grief with love, trading one intense feeling for another.

Suddenly, their house, the fun house, Casa Taylor, shrunk in the shadow of the grief next door. They closed the front door more quietly; there was a lot of shushing on the back patio, even though the lots were very large and the houses far apart. It felt like any whimsy, any happiness, had to be limited to the indoors in case it wafted over the fence and caused any further pain to the impenetrable grief of the Martins.

Despite the extremely private nature of the family, the funeral was enormous. Students from both Glenn Algar and St John’s, as well as their families, packed the church. Aurelle looked at all the people there, shaking their heads and frowning sadly, but then, slowly, bored, whispering, looking at their watches or flipping through hymnbooks. They weren’t bad people or anything, but there is only so long someone can stand quietly, even for death or God.

The boys on the rowing team had rallied together and spent all their time with one another in the days preceding the funeral, mainly at one boy’s house who, Aurelle suspected, had a quieter home. They were pall-bearers, and when, finally, they carried Keith out of the church, they looked to Aurelle like tired children: their eyes red from crying, their shoulders shaking. Keith’s parents sobbed in the front row while his sister, Diana, stood stoically erect, her hand resting lightly on her mother’s back. Aurelle noticed how strong she looked. She remembered then that Diana was also an athlete. Aurelle didn’t pay much attention to sports at St John’s, but even she had noticed that the Martin girl had become something of a star in the past year or so. Keith had brushed off any achievement while he was alive, saying that she surely had lots of time for training since she was a friendless loser. ‘She’ll probably win the Olympics of virginity,’ he’d said once. Aurelle knew that Keith was cruel, but his absence was notable and his funeral felt like the end of something.

Aurelle watched Tim carrying the coffin and wanted to be sad for him – and she was, she insisted to herself. She was sad. But she was also late. In spite of the bowl of condoms her mother kept in the powder room for the teens – another mark of how cool she was – there had been one or two slip-ups, moments really, when she thought on it, moments so frantically fast that it seemed implausible that they could lead her here. She picked at her lips nervously. Her fingers moved to her stomach while everyone watched the procession; she jerked them back when her mother leaned in, squeezed her shoulders and whispered, ‘Are you OK, sweetie?’

In the car on the way home, Marianne looked over at Aurelle in the passenger’s seat. ‘Do you ever see Diana? Keith’s sister? I’ve never seen her with your gang.’ The rest of the family had ridden with their dad, but Marianne had wanted to pick up some food for the Martins and Aurelle had offered to come with her.

‘No, I don’t know her,’ she said now, watching a couple standing at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change. ‘Well, I mean, not really. We have a couple of classes together.’

Her mother nodded thoughtfully. ‘She and her parents don’t really seem to socialize much, do they?’

‘I guess not.’

‘Maybe you should reach out to her,’ her mother said, looking at her before moving through the intersection.

Aurelle rolled her eyes. ‘Mom, I’m sure she has her own friends.’

Her mother tsked under her breath and muttered, ‘Whatever you say.’

She didn’t tell Tim she was late. Initially, when she still believed it was a far-off idea, she had thought that the stress of it would bind them even closer. There was, admittedly, something thrilling about it, mostly because she was certain her period was just around the corner. It even felt like it. Many of her friends had had ‘pregnancy scares,’ and the brush with real life was a charge. She loved Tim furiously and deeply. She had taken to sleeping with one of his T-shirts: she lay it over a pillow and put her arm on it, fantasizing that they were living an adult life somewhere and were able to sleep the night together. But Tim’s shock over Keith’s death had consumed him and he had withdrawn from Aurelle, spending time mostly with the team, and elsewhere. They had never met outside her house, and so she felt condemned to stay there in case he returned.

But then something shifted inside her, and Aurelle realized that it might be real. She had been feeling tired and nauseous, and, while it took her a week or so to connect the dots, it occurred to her that this might be a real pregnancy, that this might be morning sickness plaguing her during the day. She knew so little about actual pregnancy – that mythical villain, something that could not actually happen, not really. She had only spoken to Tim on the phone, late in the night, the cord wrapped many times around her wrist. Their conversations were clipped, both of them preoccupied with other things. Tim was quiet, his mind somewhere else entirely – away from her, away from this life. Aurelle felt like she was treading water, her head just above the surface. In the midst of the shock and grief around Keith’s death, all of the seniors were receiving their acceptances to universities, and Tim was no different. He’d been accepted at Queen’s and Western and his life had a forward trajectory that Aurelle was beginning to see may not include her, just as surely as his smell was fading from the T-shirt on her bed.

Are you OK? She had taken to asking him, not sure what else to say. When can you come? She couldn’t resist saying it while at the same time hating the thought of being one of those girls. Are you mad at me? And then, inevitably, it seemed to her later, he suggested that they should take a break.

‘Things are so crazy right now,’ he said. ‘I can’t keep you waiting for me, it’s not fair to you.’

‘I’ll wait,’ she had insisted. ‘I’ll wait forever. I don’t mind. I want to.’

‘No, it’s not right. I’m going to be leaving soon,’ he told her detachedly, and it felt like he was already at a great distance. ‘It’s not fair to you,’ he repeated, as though she cared what was fair to her when this was what she wanted. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be in a relationship right now, what with Keith dying and everything. I feel too f****d up to be with anyone.’

And then, in that panicked moment, she almost told him – but she was stunned into silence. It would scare him further away, she thought. Be still, she told herself. Maybe things will go back to how they were.

School was over. The windows opened and the family and friends returned slowly, but not Tim. Some of her brother’s other friends came by, but Aurelle stayed on the top floor in her room, looking out the window at the sky. Her life had changed radically, too, but no one noticed, none of them. Nothing, everything, had changed. A fan rotated, keeping the rising heat at bay. Aurelle lay on her bed, the covers a tangle around her, her head barely propped up with pillows. Days passed. Clouds moved over the sun. She wandered through the house in clothes that approximated pajamas. The family buzzed around her, everyone with things to do, sport activities, work events, passing through the kitchen, the living room, the front hall. Life as usual. Her mother kissed the top of her head as she rushed about. Her father gave her shoulders a squeeze. Have you eaten, hon? You look pale. There’s food in the oven. Call me if you need anything. Byeee! Bye!

Her first breakup, if they’d ever been together. No one had known they were sleeping together, but that made it sound only physical, superficial. She was a fool. She was humiliated. No one knew. Aurelle thought of her fingers wound around his, she thought of his thumb on her earlobe. She was grief-stricken, then guilt-ridden in the face of the real grief surrounding her. They used to have a phone signal. He’d call and let the phone ring once, then she would know to call him back. There had been nothing for two weeks. She had hoped against hope that he would come back to her. Even just for s*x. Maybe he knows, she thought, daring to consider what lurked in her heart. Maybe he knows and he thinks I’m a s**t. Maybe he’s told everyone. She considered trying to get rid of it. She was wracked with embarrassment and shame, mostly because while her whole relationship now felt a figment, this thing was real. The thing in there, she thought, touching a finger to her soft midsection. She was afraid. She put it off. Avoiding, escaping, pretending. She didn’t want to know.

And then, one afternoon when she was lying in the cool of the basement, staring mindlessly at the TV, the sound of her brothers and their friends in the pool coming dimly through the open window, her mother came down the stairs.

‘Aurelle, honey?’ She said, her voice carrying a falseness to it that made Aurelle immediately alert.

She sat up. ‘Yes?’

‘Diana is here,’ she said lightly, gesturing with her arm up the stairs, out of sight.

Aurelle looked at her and mouthed, Who?

‘From next door. Come on down, Diana, honey. She’s sitting down here in the dark for God knows why,’ Marianne laughed, and Aurelle watched as a figure appeared around the corner.

Diana stood there, tall and slim, wearing a long, tailored summer dress. She lifted a hand and said, in a low voice, ‘Hello.’

‘I saw Diana on my way out,’ Marianne elaborated, ‘and invited her in. Maybe you two can hang out together.’ Aurelle looked at her mother in barely disguised shock, but she ignored this, continuing on. ‘There’s food in the fridge down here, but you should go outside! It’s a gorgeous day!’

Diana was looking at Marianne. She said, quietly, ‘Thank you, Mrs Taylor.’

‘It’s Marianne, hon. We don’t stand on ceremony here.’ She put an arm around Diana and gave her a one-armed hug. Diana seemed to almost close her eyes and lean in, and Aurelle felt embarrassed for her. Then Marianne looked at her watch and trilled, ‘Oh God, I have to go. Bye, girls!’ And she skipped away, leaving Aurelle sitting on the couch with her hands in her lap, the TV playing a daytime soap she’d taken to watching.

Diana moved into the room and sat on the arm of a large chair covered in what Marianne called a ‘happy’ botanical pattern replete with bees and wild plants. She crossed one leg over the other and stared at the TV. Someone shrieked outside and there was a happy splash. Aurelle also turned her attention to the TV but, even though she knew the plot and all of the characters now, she couldn’t pay attention or enjoy it any longer. She looked at Diana out of the corner of her eye.

‘I’m sorry about your brother,’ she said.

Diana nodded.

Aurelle thought about this, then said, ‘I guess that’s what people say to you all the time now, right? You must get tired of it.’

Diana shrugged and said, ‘One day no one will say anything.’ She cleared her throat. ‘One day no one will even know who he was.’

Aurelle was shocked by the blunt force of this statement. ‘Yeah. Shit.’

‘Whatever,’ Diana said, lighter now. ‘No one knows what to say. But obviously I don’t either.’

The stars of the soap opera began kissing passionately, and Aurelle sniffed and said, ‘You want to do something?’

‘Sure.’

‘We can’t go in the pool because my brothers are in it.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘Right. Sorry, that was stupid. You probably don’t want to swim because of…’

‘It’s OK. I actually really like swimming. Maybe another time.’

There was a pause. Then Diana said, ‘Do you want to go for a walk?’

‘Yeah, sure.’

They got up and went to the foyer to put their shoes on. Aurelle opened the front door and they stepped out, squinting at the sun.

Someone called out, ‘Aurelle! Aurelle Taylor!’ and she turned, heard the click of a camera held by a large man standing across the street.

‘Come on,’ Diana said in her ear and took her arm, wheeling Aurelle away from the house while she herself turned to face the camera. Her bobbed hair swinging around, her face hard and stony.

Later, that photo, which seemed a miss to the paparazzo at the time, would be printed over and over again. It would be captioned and analyzed, it would head off articles and think pieces. Aurelle Taylor and Diana Martin. It was their first day together.