Stars Go Blue by Laura Pritchett

Author:Laura Pritchett [Pritchett, Laura]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023901
Publisher: Counterpoint

RENNY

When Renny calls Anton and blurts out that Ben’s missing and she’s already checked the house and outbuildings, Anton gets up out of bed and dresses and drives through the night and snow. When he arrives, he does what she asks, which is to drive out back to check the cabin and the fields, just to make sure Ben hasn’t wandered back to his favorite places. She could do that herself but she wants to stay near the house in case Ben is there, hiding, or if he comes in suddenly. There are so many crannies in a farmhouse, and on a farm, and she gets the flashlight and the dog and walks through the outbuildings again—the haystack, the shed where Jess hangs out, the corrals, the chickenhouse, the old root cellar—hollering Ben’s name. It’s freezing out and she wants a hot bath and she wants to go to sleep. But she is also jittery, and now that she doesn’t know where Ben is, or whether he’s alive, she feels like an electric wire. She sees her confusion like a huge gaping hole. She thought they had communicated with each other in the cemetery today. She thought she had understood.

She looks in the barn last, looks for the bottle and syringes. They are, as she predicted, gone. But where is Ben? She realizes he must have gone outside to do it, which makes sense. Better in the natural world, better to not leave a home with the stain of death. The kitchen, for instance, has never felt the same since Rachel died there. She understands, then, that they will find him frozen out in a field somewhere, looking up at the sky.

It’s then, rounding the corner of the barn, on the way back to the house, that something catches her eye that she can’t quite place until slowly it comes to her. The old brown Ford is missing.

This is unexpected: He hasn’t driven for a long time. She’s surprised that he would remember all the tiny steps that are taken for granted: the right key held steady and put into the right slot and turned in the right direction. Much less the right gear, the backing out, the driving away. It’s the technical things he’s had the most problems with. He can do uncomplicated things that require only one item: shovel the sidewalk, sweep the floor, dig in the irrigation ditch. But small fine-motor-skill things requiring many steps, no.

She stands in the snow, hands jammed into her jacket, and blinks at the empty space by the side of the barn, still stunned. She remembers when they first set eyes on each other: she from the mountains of Colorado, he from the plains, meeting at the college where they both studied agricultural sciences, and how the university building was a huge complicated mess—designed by a madman, no doubt—and she was lost on her first day of classes. She was as confused then as she is now. But she remembers how she

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