Set the Stars Alight, Page 3

  No longer a child at fourteen, but feeling more lost and childlike than ever, she began to understand that it wasn’t just Mum she had lost. She pruned and deadheaded the lilac, watering it, repotting it, moving it from sunny spot to sunny spot as the light shifted. But it would not come back.

  And neither would Dad.

  He was there . . . but he was gone. He smiled at her, but the smile was so unnatural, so untrue, that it broke her heart over and over again. Gone were the riddles and stories.

  Gone was Dash, except for the books he left on her doorstep. He did not know how to enter their broken lives any more than they knew how to bring him back in. Not with Mum gone.

  Light itself. That was what Dad called Lucy. So one day, when he did not even get out of bed, she put on her best dress, brushed her stick-straight black hair, and pulled down his cup from the kitchen shelf. It had a coating of dust inside, so she rinsed it, dried it, taking care around the chip, and brewed him his favorite chamomile, just as Mum used to.

  When she cracked open the door of her parents’ room—his room, she reminded herself—she found him sitting in the dark, holding Mother’s watch. His chin trembled and he moved the back of his fist over his eyes, stifling a moan that sounded, to Lucy, like all the pain she felt caught up inside of herself. He took the face off Mum’s watch, stopped the ticking hands, and clicked the tiny, fragile face back in place with a click so soft and final it made Lucy’s hands shake.

  The cup echoed her trembling upon its saucer, and Father saw her for the first time. His eyes grew wide and pooled deeper with tears.

  “Oh, my girl,” he said in a ragged, shuddering breath. And that was all. She sat on the edge of his bed and leaned against him, feeling the tremble of his chin upon her head, the silent tears baptizing her hair as his large palm ran itself over, and over, and over her head, pressing her close to his broken heart.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  She whispered the same. But it had not been enough . . . for then, he was gone.

  “A week and no more,” he explained, “and I’ll come back ready to be the father you deserve, Lucy.”

  She had not understood. Even after the kindly Mrs. Richards, who lived on the third floor in Candlewick, came down to stay with her in Father’s absence, explained. “He just needs time, dearie.” She was kind but a stranger, when all Lucy wanted was her family.

  And so she took herself to Dash’s door once again. Not to summon the lost boy home . . . but clutching hopes that the lost boy could help her find her way.

  four

  Dash answered her knock, beheld her with solemn face, stepped into the hallway, and closed the door behind him, as if he refused to let his own flat’s emptiness seep into her newly acquired emptiness. There was something new in him. Where before they had shared camaraderie, now his presence held protectiveness, too.

  “Dash, I . . .” Lucy’s voice burned. She had not spoken of her grief yet and did not know how to put this great billowing pain into words. “I don’t know what to do.” It was all she could manage, but he took up where her words failed.

  “It’s okay, Matchstick Girl,” he said. “Come on.”

  Just two words: Come on. No treatise on healing or hope, no magic cure . . . but somehow they infused her with hope all the same. As if this boy, who knew how to be alone and still live, was promising to show her how to be okay.

  They stopped to tell Mrs. Richards where they were going, and Dash grabbed Lucy’s atlas. After proper instructions for when to be back, Mrs. Richards waved and watched them from the gates of Candlewick all the way until they disappeared down the street.

  Lucy looked at the calendar at the ticket window and thought how strange it was to see a date there when time was all a blur, when she did not even know what day of the week it was. August 28, 2004. The numbers baffled her.

  What baffled her more was how Dash, at sixteen, felt suddenly so grown up. Though she had traveled the Tube many times over the years, she saw a different side of him as he navigated their journey as one accustomed to fending for himself. His slim height looked solitary but assured here in the crowd, rather than gangly as it did at home. Perhaps he had been right—her life had been a fairy tale, compared with his.

  And now he could show her how to live the other sort of life.

  She followed him down into the station’s maze of stairs and passageways, past a busker fiddling a folk tune that sounded like it belonged more at a country ball than in a sweaty dark tunnel.

  As she stood at a fork in the station, wondering which way to take, Dash leaned down and whispered, “Greenwich.” A thrill went through her. For while Greenwich was not far, it had felt in all their armchair conspiring like a distant promised land.

  The Tube swayed and clicked along, beginning to feel like an embrace around her broken self. Dash opened the atlas of oceans in Lucy’s lap.

  “Are you shore you want to bring this big book?”

  Lucy gave a confused look. “What? You’re the one who said to—”

  His deadpan face flashed mischief. “Shore,” he said. “Get it? Oceans . . . shore . . .”

  “Oar not,” she said dryly.

  “Whoa, way to barge into my joke, Matchstick Girl. Sea what I did there?”

  It was the silliest thing. Puns cheesier than the Harrod’s cheese counter. But for the first time in weeks—she felt her spirit lighten. Even a smile began.

  And then, right in the middle of a pun spree sprouting the beginnings of hope . . . the Tube stopped. The lights cut out, speed slowed . . . and then nothing. Just darkness, too many stories beneath the sunlight and fresh air above.

  Slowly emergency lights clicked on, giving a yellow glow to the worried murmurs coursing through the train. Someone mentioned the Twin Towers attack from almost three years before. Was this . . . that? An attack?

  Lucy slammed her atlas shut, every muscle going tight in her body.

  “Hey,” Dash said, leaning close. “Fear knot.”

  Lucy swallowed.

  “Get it? Knot?” He tapped her atlas.

  Lucy tried to keep from shaking, but her hands trembled. The last time everything went dark . . .

  She pressed her eyes closed, willing away the visions of sirens and the smell of rain. It was more than a memory. It was as if the Tube had slammed her right back into that car crash. She felt too small, not enough for this. Her breaths came quick and shallow.

  Dash laid his hands on hers. “It’s gonna be okay, Matchstick Girl. Probably just a power outage. And what does a power outage have on a girl who is . . . How does your dad say it?”

  “Light?” She eked the word out.

  “Light itself. Listen, we’re gonna be okay. Here.” He reached for her atlas, and she hated how childish she felt. Opening the book between them, he looked around. “Look at that.” He held up a hand at a sign touting Jubilee Line. “It’s meant to be. Show me where you think the Jubilee is.” He tapped the atlas. It was open to the page showing the South Pacific.

  “Not there,” Lucy said, feeling her hands begin to steady as she flipped the pages, showing him her most recent theory about its location—the Strait of Gibraltar.

  They passed two hours turning pages and swapping theories, until the stalled Jubilee Line felt more like a safe hideaway than a threat to her life. He leaned in close and told her of a poem he’d learned in school.

  “A poem?”

  “Relax. No Shakespeare, I promise. It’s called ‘The Old Astronomer.’ About a brilliant astronomer on his deathbed. Near the end it says, “‘Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.’

  “See?” He gestured at their dim surroundings, the darkness. “Nothing to fear here.” Offering theories about deeper meanings, they talked on about the poem. It felt magical and heavy. She didn’t quite know what to do with it but wanted to love it, for Dash’s sake, for the way he’d seen her through the grip of fear
and not made her feel ridiculous. She felt her being return from that faraway cold scene of the crash and back into the present.

  When the Tube finally started moving and they emerged in Greenwich, blinking in the sun, a joy overtook her like none she’d ever felt, to be in the wide world again. This place, high on a hill and looking down on London Town, held hope. Home to the National Maritime Museum and the Royal Observatory, with the prime meridian splitting time right between them, it seemed to declare that Lucy and Dash, though on diverging paths, need not be so separate from each other after all.

  But two things had changed forever down in the Underground. Though they had weathered the ordeal and she had risen to the surface triumphant in the journey, from that point, small dark spaces clawed at her, made her feel trapped and breathless, a second away from returning to the moment that had taken Mum. And that day she stopped seeing Dashel Greene as the lost boy. For he had found her in the dark, and given her a home.

  five

  The watchmaker changed, too. Though he phoned every night, counting down the days until he’d come home and assuring her he loved her, he never told Lucy where he’d gone. When he returned he was different, somehow. Present. Scarred and sad, but . . . he was hers again, claimed back from the dark place she had found him in.

  Dash came again to the evening fires, and while it took some time for the stories to resume, her father began to instruct them on the art of riddle-making, as if it were the most natural thing in the world with which to break the silence.

  “The secret to a good riddle,” he told them one night, his voice trying and not quite succeeding to reach the peaks and valleys of his old magical tone, “is to begin at the end. Know what your answer is, and slowly drop clues. Your listeners won’t know they are clues, of course—not until they lean in.”

  He swallowed, managing to find a smile. He played with some gears on his small worktable, piecing cogs together until they fit just so, taking them apart, doing it again. “That’s what your mother used to say.” He put his hand on his head in thought, subconsciously rubbing it as if Penny had just plopped a clump of lichen on his hat from a tree, this time from way up in heaven. “What was it she called it? To stretch toward.”

  “Ad tendere,” Lucy said, her heart quickening at being able to offer her father this gift—a lost phrase of her mother’s. How horrid to lose those details in the fog of grief. Loss upon loss. She vowed to breathe life back into her father whenever she could.

  “That’s it.” He smiled in earnest this time. “Pay attention. Make a practice of digging for clues.”

  Lucy glanced at Dash, who shared her concerned look. Neither of them, apparently, quite understood what Dad was getting at.

  Lucy fixed her eyes on her father, eyes wide and waiting.

  “So,” he said, “riddlers we shall become. Something to set our hands to. I shall give you two clues, and you shall find a story. And along the way, we will dig for light. Continue to tell the stories of this world’s wonders. I think we could all use a bit of that, don’t you? Some reminding of what the Maker of such a world can do?”

  He looked so fragilely hopeful then, all Lucy could do was nod, though she still did not understand.

  “Good,” he said, ruffling her hair. “I think it’s our duty to keep the stories, to pass them on. It is our duty—and our honor. In a world as dark as ours, we—that is, people—forget how to see the light. So we remind them by telling the truth, fighting the dark, paying attention . . . setting the stars alight. There are things shining brightly all along, if we will notice.”

  “You make it sound as if we’re in a battle, Dad.”

  He folded his fingers around her small hand. “So we are, my girl. So we are. But it is a battle that can be won by holding fast to hope . . . and light. We’ll keep telling the stories, finding the clues. Gather them up, Lucy and Dash. Taking note of the good, the true, the just, the miracles hidden at every turn is like . . . a deliberate act of defiance against the darkness. Build a . . . ” He paused, searching for a word and not finding it. “Your mother was always the one with the words. Gather the stories into a . . .”

  “Compendium?” Dash offered, pushing his glasses up as if unsure whether he should speak into this moment.

  “Yes!” Dad pointed at Dash. “A compendium.” He blew his cheeks out. “You kids have had more than your fair share thrown at you. Stick together. Gather the clues. Don’t give up. And remember—every good riddle has a safeguard built into it, a way for the seeker to solve the riddle, when all else fails.” He grew serious again. “If ever anything should happen to me—if my stories should stop—watch for the safeguard. It’ll come.”

  six

  And so began the gift. Dad giving, and giving, and giving them stories. True ones, made-up ones, and some a mysterious mingling in between. “To remember the God who is coming, and coming, and coming to find your heart,” he’d said. “Wherever you are, whatever’s happened. With every miracle around every ordinary corner.” It did not feel like he was riddling them, only continuing his nightly stories.

  As she grew, it felt as if he was withholding some great story behind them all, but she began to understand that the stories were perhaps his own way of fighting the darkness. But even more, they were his way of giving her a way out of hers. They reached into her grief, spinning one step at a time into place, forming an invisible staircase out of the pit she had found herself in. And Dash was always there too, always faithful.

  Until one day the thread between them was snipped. Cut quick, when Dash did not come. When she went to fetch him from his flat, the door stood propped open, revealing dark emptiness, with moonlight falling across the cold floor. Lucy felt for the first time what Dashel had felt all his life: forgotten.

  She had turned to go when a scrap of paper on the table caught her eye. She knew it was for her before she even read her name, printed there in his stick-straight writing. Dash always wrote with fine-tip permanent marker. “No sense writing something down if you don’t mean it,” he’d once told her.

  Unfolding it now, her heart sank at the sight of only a few lines. She didn’t know what she’d hoped for. A novel? A letter? A map to find him, perhaps?

  But instead, it read:

  To the Matchstick Girl. I had to go . . . my aunt had a job offer she couldn’t say no to, over in the States. She said it was time I returned to my roots. I know my roots are here, if they’re anywhere—right out by our fountain—but I’ve got to go. I’ll write as soon as I can. I won’t say good-bye to you, because I know it’ll never be good-bye for us. Not ever.

  And that was it. She turned a circle, slowly, in that empty flat, hating the paper in her hands. Anger boiled up in her at Dash. For leaving, for not saying good-bye, for so many things.

  When she and her dad looked through the telescope that night, she missing Dash and his glasses and his supernova quips, he tried to encourage her as she had him in the midst of his darkest hour. “When things seem dark, Lucy, that’s when you fight for the light.”

  The next night she’d found a book on her pillow, tied with a length of twine and a lilac tucked underneath. Dad’s work again, with a nod to Mum in that lilac.

  Into the Void: The Search for the HMS Jubilee, bound in scarlet.

  “Dad,” she said, warmth in her voice at his thoughtfulness in hunting down a book on one of her favorite subjects. She dove in, devouring the accounts of seafloor searches, underwater trench excavations, all in search of the famed lost ship that had vanished with a traitor aboard during the Napoleonic wars.

  True to his promise, Dash sent a letter from New Jersey. A few lines meant to be a friendly hello, but only enlarging the hollow place inside of her. She tried to hide it but felt Dad’s compassion as he watched her, the determined set of his jaw.

  A year later a postcard from Harvard in Massachusetts announced he’d been admitted to the astronomy and astrophysics programme. Next stop the moon! But not before stopping back at Candlewick t
o pick you up, Lucy. If you’re not diving the ocean depths and finding the lost ship Jubilee by then, that is.

  His words made her smile, that time. Less of the longing, more of a joy for her friend. For his dreams, his home in the stars. Time, as she had learned, did soothe the rough edges away from wounds, even if the wounds still ran deep and a distant ache remained. And the pain was once again stifled by the appearance of another book on her pillow, a biography of the traitor Frederick Hanford, the man who absconded with the Jubilee and disappeared without a trace.

  She heard from Dash a few more times over the years, and soon she was neck-deep in her own studies at university. She wondered, sometimes, looking up at the domed ceiling in her beloved Oxford library, how Dash was doing.

  And she wondered where he was when she desperately needed him more than a decade later. For as Dash found his place in the world, the watchmaker had fallen ill. Lucy declared she would put her master’s degree on hold, but Dad didn’t allow it. “I’m not going anywhere,” he said stubbornly. “Chase that mystery, Lucy. Find your answers.”

  She was researching the Jubilee, and it gave her father, in particular, a spark of joy to see the elements of his fireside tales igniting a flame in her.

  But Lucy was as stubborn as he, and so they found a middle ground. She moved home, working on her thesis from afar with special arrangement from her mentor and professor, Dr. Dorothy Greenleaf, and she tended to the watch shop at Cecil Court to be nearby on Dad’s bad days.

  She got lost in the pages of the British Museum’s reading room for hours at a time, emerging to lay the fire at night when the watchmaker no longer could, his health failing faster. She sat beside him when a stroke stilled the work of his hands, but not his heart, and she filled the silence with her own stories procured from the annals of history.

  It was Lucy who “put his affairs in order”—the doctor’s words, uttered with compassion, shattering her world with one gentle blow. And it was Lucy who, walking the rooms of the too-empty cottage at thirty years old, felt her pocket watch’s warm, engraved metal slip from her hands and fall to the ground. It sliced through those old dusty sunbeams and winked back at her from the creaking floorboard. In that same spot where Dash used to sit, glasses sliding down his nose as he worked the screwdriver to adjust the telescope they were building . . . before he disappeared.