And so it went, night after night, story after story stitching Dash into the fabric of their family.
It seemed things would stay that way forever. That they would always be together like this. But something changed for Dash as time ticked by.
“Why do you study the stars, Dash?” Lucy had asked one day in the reading room when she was thirteen and he fifteen. They were sitting sideways on their chairs, legs draped over the wingbacks’ arms, feet almost touching. And yet even so close, she felt the distance growing between them, attributed it to the galaxies holding so much more than she could.
He shrugged.
And she waited.
He turned a page.
She cleared her throat.
At last he swung his legs over the edge of the chair to sit properly. “I don’t know,” he said, looking at her, then out the window. “I guess . . . my relatives, they bounced me around so much when I was a kid after Mom and Dad . . .”
Here, Lucy sat up properly, crossing her legs in the chair, giving him her full attention. He never mentioned his parents.
“Wherever I moved after that, everything was different. Time zones. Weather. Buildings. Food. Music. All the things that tell a person what home is. It changed every time.” He dropped his gaze then, staring at his black Converse shoes. “Except the stars.”
Lucy ached for him. Wished he would have a home with them forever, that he wouldn’t always have to wait to enroll for school each year until the last second, unsure of whether his aunt would continue to be based out of London or move on, as she often spoke of doing, to New Jersey.
“The stars are your home,” Lucy said quietly, wanting him to know she recognized this truth he had shared and would hold it carefully. Maybe she was younger than him, but she could still understand. And her heart was for him.
He shrugged again. “Yeah,” he said. “I guess.”
He returned to his study of black holes, and she lifted her book to read again, too, but watched wide-eyed as the years continued on and Dash drifted farther from her still.
His teachers saw special things at work in his mind. Words like genius, prodigy, and untapped potential floated around. Lucy’s mum had gone to parent-teacher meetings in his aunt’s stead, for she traveled away from home more and more for business. Lucy attributed his intelligence to all that time alone spent in books, with entire universes as his constant companions.
They moved him up, made provision for him to begin university classes at sixteen—one of them being a class on Shakespeare.
One night, Lucy vaulted a Shakespeare quote at him—something about the stars—but instead of taking a crack at it in their usual fashion, he had just looked up at the stars and quoted one back.
“‘I am constant as the northern star, of whose true-fixed and resting quality there is no fellow in the firmament.’”
His eyes were sad, then, as he turned to her. Her chest ached, and her hand wanted to reach out and take his—to squeeze away the loneliness of his pain-filled life. To banish the heartbreak of a father who had left him, as she’d eventually learned, of a mother who’d given herself to a substance that had taken her from him, and of the aunt who did not care to even know the nephew who had dwelled beneath her roof for a quarter of his life.
Something changed in that moment. Many things changed, actually, knocking into one another like the swirling lines of dominoes they had once filled the courtyard with. The breath went from Lucy’s lungs as she saw before her not the lost boy, but the young man, whose gaze no longer lingered on his oversized feet through thick glasses but lifted to the horizon, to the sky above, searching.
And as he lifted his gaze to these new horizons, he was looking right over her. Past her.
She felt for the first time the irony of a love that had been there, subterranean, for longer than she’d known. Love that was already beyond her grasp.
She was too late in realizing, too young to do anything about it. And too dim to compete with the stars that had captured his mind. As his professors put it, his bright future was limitless. Meanwhile, her teachers said things of her like “her time will come” and “still waters run deep” and “she will find her place.”
The sadness in him gathered something fierce up inside of her. “Dash,” she said.
“Hmm?” He didn’t look at her. Only out the reading room window, past the city lights.
She didn’t know what she should say. What could she offer him? “That Shakespeare quote . . . Do you mean you are constant? Because you are. There’s nothing you can’t do if you set your mind to it. I believe that, Dash. You can do anything.”
It broke her young heart to say it, for she knew that in all likelihood, his limitless potential would take him far from her. Probably for good.
“No,” he said. “It’s just . . . alone. The star, I mean. In that quote.”
“That’s not true.” She stood, her book thudding to the ground. “It’s surrounded by lots of stars. You’re surrounded. I mean . . . by us. I mean, you . . . and us.” This was not going well. Stop flopping over your words like a fish out of water. She took a breath. “You’re not alone, Dash. You’re ours.”
He did not look at her for a long while. And when he did, it was from a far-off place. “You have a good life, Lucy.”
“We do, Dash. It’s yours, too.”
He shuffled his foot, his height no longer lanky but sure.
“You . . . live in a fairy tale.”
The words slammed into her. “No I don’t,” she said, defensive for her, and for him. Fairy tales did not feel like this.
“It’s not a bad thing,” Dash said. “It’s just, not many people live in a family like yours, Lucy. Stories by the fire and dinner under stars and all that. It’s good. I mean, it’s amazing. Hang on to it.”
His eyes pleaded with her, and her ribs ached in silent reply.
“I-I will,” she said, her voice small, with a sense that she’d been uninvited to some very deep place inside of Dash.
She wanted to knock him on the head, get him to understand that her family was his, that this life was his, too. But he had shadows in his past, and there was a part of him he did not want to let her into, judging by his abrupt jump to his feet and quiet stride away.
Their meetings changed after this. He studied the stars, then their galaxies. She fought the dreadful anchored feeling of being left behind, throwing her heart and mind the other direction—into the deep, deep depths of the sea. She pulled books of maritime history, shipwrecked mystery, ocean currents from the shelves and always, always the mystery of the lost ship HMS Jubilee, which had made an appearance in several of her father’s stories, and whose disappearance gripped her imagination.
She hated the new distance between them, and hoped that somehow, someday he might let her back in.
three
“Hang on to it.” Dash’s words about her family followed Lucy to the seaside in his place that spring. But how was she supposed to do so, when Dash—an integral part of her family—was slipping farther away? Though he was meant to come with them, at the last moment his attendance was specially requested at a maths tournament.
In spite of his absence, Lucy enjoyed a glorious week, with days spent reading her atlas, the ocean itself climbing sand to greet her toes, chasing wild flora with her mother, and marveling at the skies with her father. She packed for the return home with mixed feelings, but she was eager to see Dash and her cottage filled with the love and laughter of family.