Sometimes Jennifer Torrance thinks that her husband Martin’s telescope is an exploration, a method to find a place where he can escape from his impending retirement, their mortgage that needed renewing at the new rates, and his worries about their son, Steve. Martin was never that interested in space, but he had always been fascinated by the stars.
“Orion’s up,” he told Jennifer, inviting her to look.
“Winter,” she sighed, squinting to look through the eyepiece.
Jennifer was a summer person, loved sunlight, bright blue skies with fluffy clouds. She had tried to imagine being in a space capsule, darkness surrounding them, foolishly cruising too close to a hungry black hole. Maybe that was what had already happened to them. There were so many things they didn’t talk about, failures they didn’t want to recognize. Nights when a late wrong number put terror into both of their hearts. Western area codes. It might be about Steve, from the police or a hospital.
“He’ll call when he’s ready,” the Vancouver counselor had said the last time they had called, sounding impatient about their unanswered questions. “And he says he’s not doing the drugs anymore.” It was third counselor Steve had been assigned to; the turnover in the department was high.
Steve had said he had stopped using drugs so many times before, as many times as there were stars in the sky, as far as Jennifer was concerned. When he was a little kid, he had spent hours with Martin and the telescope, could see things with his bare eyes that the adults couldn’t see.
She shivered and went back into the warm house, the place that Steve had tried to escape from so many times, not just physically, but mentally. Martin followed her with the telescope, put it in its case, and sat at the kitchen table.
“You gonna watch the capsule splashdown later?” she asked.
“No,” he said, reaching for the coffee pot, even though she could smell that it had been sitting on the stove too long, acrid and disturbing, like the coffee they had endured in church basements, sharing their sorrows with other parents of troubled kids.
He let the sugar granules fall off the spoon into the dark liquid, like the Pleiades shooting downward into the summer sky, more lovely than fireworks.
“You should clear your Google history, honey,” Martin sighed.
She bit her lip and didn’t reply. He had a “no news is good news” attitude but she checked every day, sometimes twice, had a Google alert for Steve Torrance, even though he was probably using a different name now.
“You should get out of the house more,” Martin continued, stirring in the sugar, making cosmic swirls when he added the cream. “See all your friends from the church again. They must miss you.”
The ones showing off cute new grandchildren and bragging about their adult children with advanced degrees, the successful ones buying monster homes in Rockwood? she wanted to ask, but she said nothing, just sipped her black bitter coffee, wondering when she would have to make Martin use milk instead of cream. She didn’t remind him about all the money they had spent on three unsuccessful rehabs and private counseling.
He patted her arm, and she tried to smile, but it hurt her face. They went and watched the news, more record-breaking opioid deaths in Vancouver. In the beginning, she would have been shaking, asking Martin to change the channel. Now, eight years later, she had learned to take deep breaths, put part of herself on a sunny beach. Now she forced herself to watch.
There was a shot of fentanyl powder, showing how toxic it could be, even in small amounts, and she had to close her eyes. Later, in bed, she looked out the window and wondered if the shining stars were made of deadly substances. She dreamt that Steve was splashing down on crack rocks, shattering into tiny deadly particles.
