To The Stars
“Let’s take the telescope outside and look at the stars.” My fifteen-year-old daughter stands in the hallway, still in her wrestling gear, her hair a nest. I’ve already taken off my coat.
“Please,” my other daughter, hands clasped, chirps from the kitchen. She is eight and wearing pajamas. Instead of a jacket, she wraps herself in a beach towel, and jams her feet into her boots. There is paint on her cheek.
My instinct is to find an excuse. The spontaneity of my youth collapsed long ago into a black hole and there are always things to do. Pants to wash, forms to sign. For a week, an empty jar of peanut butter has sat upside down on the pantry floor.
Before I reply, my daughter dumps her backpack, and moves past me, to fetch the telescope from the living room. She doesn’t bother to fold the tripod, choosing instead to drag the whole unit through a milky way of shoes and bags and yesterday’s lunch containers. Her sister trails behind, towel dragging like a pilled train. “Come on, Mom,” she waves.
I grab a pair of gloves and fling my coat over my shoulder, nearly knocking a plate off the counter. It’s a decorative plate the texture of braille, hand-painted in yellows and blues, featuring a woman’s profile, her chin up, defiant and assured. She looks nothing like me. My parents brought it back from a medieval Tuscan town twenty years ago. I had just graduated from university.
A finger of clunky wire is strung through a hole in the back for mounting. The hole, however, is not centered, so the plate never hangs properly, causing the subject to cast her eyes downward. It’s the reason the plate is on the counter and not on the wall. The Latin expression Ad Sidera is scrawled across the top like a halo in imperfect blue letters. To the stars. I move it to the centre of the island for safekeeping.
When I step outside, my oldest has the scope fixed on the moon. Tonight, it’s a waning crescent, brilliant and thin. Clouds drift. Deer tracks cut across the front lawn. I sit on the step as my youngest daughter digs through the dead garden and unearths a skipping rope.
“Why can’t I ever get the moon?” My oldest fidgets with the aperture, nudges the tripod, and returns her face to the eyepiece. Her blond ponytail drapes down her back. She shines the flashlight from her cellphone on the mount, and makes an adjustment.
“Dunno,” I reply, uselessly. I’d tried to set the telescope up when it arrived two Christmases ago. My father had paid for it, a family gift. I had selected this particular model based on its ‘user-friendliness.’ My twelve-year-old can do it! One of the reviews had declared. For months, after the kids had gone to bed, I hauled the telescope outside, turned the knobs, and cranked the levers, read and re-read the instruction manual, worn and spread across my lap. I couldn’t get it to work. When I looked into the eyepiece, I saw nothing. I began to wonder if I’d had a stroke. Periodically, my father would email or call, and ask how the telescope was going. And each time I would lie and say it was great before punching myself in the face and dragging it outside to try again.
“Ah, there.” My oldest steps aside as her sister drops the skipping rope, and rushes to the foot of the scope. She hunches slightly, face suctioned into the viewfinder and gasps. I can see the moon fine from the front steps.
When I was young, my mom would make popcorn and hot chocolate, and drag a jumble of sleeping bags out to the back deck to view the Perseids. Though we lived in suburban Halifax, our backyard was far-reaching, dark and dreamy. Light was limited to a few streetlamps and the flash of a passing frigate in the harbor below.
I have vague memories of climbing into my sleeping bag, the puffed sleeves of my nightgown bunched around my ears, salt on my lips, the smell of wood smoke and sisterhood teasing the air. When I share these memories with my mom, she tells me they’re false. “You ate all the popcorn. More than both your sisters combined. You never drank your hot chocolate, and you seldom made it into your sleeping bag. And when you did, you zipped yourself inside and tried to logroll over everyone.” I deny it. “You spent most of the time barefoot, tearing around the yard, terrorizing the neighbor’s dogs and disturbing the peace.” She laughs, an exhausted laugh. “And when we finally went inside for the night, you were always the last to fall asleep.”
My youngest points to Orion. Other than the Big Dipper, it’s the most reliable constellation. We see it every time we pull in the driveway. My oldest centers the telescope beneath it and within seconds has the lens focused and ready for viewing. Her younger sister pushes her out of the way. “Orion was a Greek hunter.” I don’t know how she knows this. She spends no more than three seconds examining the image before disappearing around the side of the house with a stick.
My oldest sits cross-legged. “Come see,” she says. “It’s easier if you sit down.” I plunk beside her, the paving stones rough and January cool. She’s taller than me now. “I had a test today in bio,” she says, while I bring my left eye to the mechanism. I see fuzz. “It was on the circulatory system.” I switch eyes and the constellation slowly comes into focus. “Did you know that ten capillary beds fit inside a single strand of hair?” I pull away from the telescope. We both look up.
Fresh out of university, I lived in St. Vincent and the Grenadines. I had been assigned to intern at a woman’s handicraft cooperative in Palestine but resurgence in sectarian violence caused the position to be cancelled, and I was reassigned to the Windward Islands. I was ill equipped and naïve, adding zero economic value to the island’s chamber of commerce. I spent most of my time counting money and reconciling balance sheets from the city’s new car park. But at night, there was the sky. My co-worker, around my age, drove me to the top of a hill, the road steep and riddled with potholes, dancehall music whining from the speakers. He parked and we climbed onto the roof of his white Toyota Celica in the Caribbean black and he said, “This is how you watch the stars.”
Sometimes I load Google maps on my laptop, zoom in on the island and follow the Leeward Hwy north from Kingstown in search of the hill’s location. I try to go back to that time. Back to the start of the millennium, the start of adulthood, the hood of his car, the moment I looked up and realized I was nobody and knew nothing.
“You have to come see this.” My eight-year-old stands in front of the garage, arms flailing. “I think it’s a UFO.” A small plane, toy-shaped and lit up like a birthday cake zips across the sky. It flies low and obnoxious while commercial flights blink delicately thousands of feet above. My oldest chases the Cessna with the telescope but it moves too quickly. “Ask Siri what planes are flying overhead,” my youngest shouts. I yank my phone from my pocket. Siri provides a detailed list: WestJet, Skylink, Central Mountain Air, each with flight numbers, altitudes and angles. “Did you find it?” she asks. I show her my phone. “They’re all too high.” She frowns, I shrug. The small plane disappears, preparing to land in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. It starts to get cold. I eye the door.
Two years ago we drove thirteen hours to Wendell, Idaho, a small town of under three thousand people. Other than a grocery store that sold shoes and fireworks, Wendell is home to one of the state’s premier wrestling academies. We brought our kids there to work with a former Bulgarian superstar. A bungalow was attached to the gym and we shared it with two other families. One family had nine kids. If you forgot to lock the bathroom door, someone would barge in. My husband and I slept side by side in single beds, while our kids fanned out on the floor in sleeping bags. One morning, I woke at four and couldn’t get back to sleep. I crept out of bed, tiptoed through suitcases and children of varying sizes, and slipped out the front door. I sat on the step, the interstate to my back, and the scent of urine sharp in the air from the neighboring dairy farms. I fixed my gaze upward. Thousands of stars emitted a hazy white glow. How in the hell did I get here?
My daughter drags the telescope across the paving stones, the tripod’s rubber feet skidding, and sinks into a deep squat below a cluster of stars. They resemble a handful of change. She fiddles with a knob, and motions for me to sit next to her. “How many stars do you see?” she asks. I tilt my head and squint. “I don’t know. Maybe, ten? Twelve?” She checks the viewfinder.
“I’m going in,” my youngest says, leaving behind a debris field. The beach towel is heaped in the driveway, the skipping rope knotted to a tree. The door slams shut.
“Now look,” my oldest says. I stretch my neck, and maneuver my eye into place. Nothing. I blink, and try again. The cluster comes into focus. There aren’t ten stars but twenty. Maybe thirty. I pull away and return, three times. I can see stars in the telescope that aren’t there without it. I laugh and notice my daughter smiling beside me, a teenager, assured and bright. I hoist myself up off the ground and open the door. She carries the telescope inside.
Someone’s put a banana peel on the decorative plate. I toss the peel in the compost bin and wipe down the surface. I text my mom. I tell her about the invisible stars. How they are there but you just can’t see them. Then I ask her about the plate. Why Ad Sidera, why that one? I wait for her to reply and note the jar of peanut butter still on the floor. I pick it up and put it back on the shelf. There’s enough for a sandwich.
I always thought you were destined for something big, she types.
Like what? I reply.
I don’t know, but you had me convinced.
I type lol, because what else? And then, goodnight. I replace the lens cap on the telescope, tuck the plate inside the cupboard, a star no one can see, and turn off the lights.
Ali Bryan is an award-winning novelist and creative nonfiction writer who explores the what-ifs, the wtfs and the wait-a-minutes of every day. Her first novel, Roost, won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction. Her second novel, The Figgs, was a finalist for the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour and her YA novel, The Hill, was longlisted for the 2021 Wilbur Smith Adventure Writing Prize. Her short stories and essays and have been published in literary journals and magazines in Canada, the US and the UK. She lives in the foothills of the Canadian Rockies, where she has a wrestling room in her garage and regularly gets choked out by her family.