In the Stars

She was watching the stars again. She believed that they held secrets in them, perhaps even words spelled out across the dusky canvas of the sky, waiting for someone with the patience to read them. When the world didn’t make any sense, and she felt like no one understood her, she would go onto the roof at night and watch the stars. Sometimes she would almost believe that she could see the messages, but she could never fully understand them, which she blamed on the wine she would always be drinking during those stargazing sessions.

On that night, however, the stars held no secret message to her. They were just white dots of paint thrown with abandon upward, and their lack of extraordinary made her sad. She knew in her heart that the chance she would ever truly see something that wasn’t influenced by wine and hope was very small. She knew that in her hunger, even desperation, to discover the secrets to the things she did not understand, she had lost sight of rationality. 

What did it really matter anyway, she thought. She wouldn’t be seeing the sky for much longer. 

She was still having a hard time accepting what the doctor had told her that morning. Although she supposed, it didn’t really matter if she accepted it or not. She closed her eyes tightly and behind her eyelids, she could see imprints of the stars. She would miss them. She hoped that wherever she went after there would be something as lovely as them to look at. 

******************************************

He couldn’t stop thinking about her. After six years in his position, he had learned that it was frugal to allow what happened at work to cling to him. He had learned to view his patients as something separate from himself; as math problems that he would try his best to solve, but know when to put aside. 

He couldn’t place what was different about her. She had sat quietly while he told her the diagnosis in the gentle, soothing voice that you eventually perfected after years of delivering death sentences. He knew what to expect in situations like these. Everybody reacted differently, and he had gotten good at predicting the response. She would weep, he thought, because she looked so fragile, and her voice was barely a murmur when she had answered his questions.

So when she did nothing at all, he was surprised. It was almost as though she had not heard him; her expression was blank, her posture did not change in the chair. It was uncomfortable, he was used to handing people tissues, patting their back, bearing their grief-filled rage. 

He did not know how he was supposed to respond to nothing at all. 

“Miss Lavigne,” he said quietly, “Did you hear me?”

She continued gazing out of the window of his office, but she nodded, a barely perceptible motion of her head. He didn’t know what he should say, something about her eyes, impossibly wide and as startlingly blue as the autumn sky, made his words stick in his throat. 

He thought, sudden and surprising himself, that it wasn’t fair that someone like her had to hear such news. He didn’t even know her, and yet he felt bitterness at God, or whoever made decisions such as these. She was lovely in the kind of way that you have to look closely to notice. A loveliness that once you do notice, makes it seem impossible that you ever did not.

He cleared his throat, wincing at how loud it sounded in the silence that filled his office. “Miss Lavigne,” he began again, “Do you have any questions about your diagnosis?”

Finally, she looked at him. She seemed to see him for the first time, and he thought that she looked almost surprised to find him sitting there. He suddenly felt as though he was intruding on something, that he did not belong there. 

“Do you believe in fate?” She asked, in a surprisingly clear voice.

He didn’t know what to say. As a doctor, as a man of science and biology, there was no room for fate in his world. 

“No,” he said, “I don’t believe that there can be fate.”

She looked down, and he felt, for some reason, as though he had said the wrong thing. He found himself talking, pulling pamphlets from the drawers of his desk and pushing them across to her, as though she would find the answers in them. He heard himself telling her about treatments, that it was never too late, all the while knowing that his words had no impact on her. 

When she left his office he found himself temporarily immobile, stopped in his tracks by the sudden realization that for her, the entire world had stopped. He had never realized before her the true morbidity of his job. He wondered what it must be like to be a labor and delivery doctor, to give people life instead of taking it away. 

He had never thought about it this way before, he realized, not before he met someone whose life might have meant something to him, eventually, if she had the chance to live it. 

*********************************************

She called in sick to work the next morning, for what would be the last time. In a week she would be forced to quit her job and would regret that last day she was not really sick, and pretended that she was. 

That morning, though, she was not thinking about the days and weeks that were coming, and instead of the day before, and the doctor that had told her that she was dying with the calmness of someone giving the daily weather report. 

She wondered what he thought about when he sat behind his mahogany desk and told people that they were not, as they originally thought, invincible. She wondered if he ever wondered what it felt like to find out that your body was betraying you. 

She was surprised to find that she did not hate the doctor as she thought she would. Instead, she was curious about him, and to her great surprise pitied him for having to look into people’s eyes day after day and tell them the thing that they so greatly did not want to hear. 

On that morning she called in sick to work and ignored the texts from her friends who wanted to hang out. She googled Osteosarcoma Stage IV and found out that she was, most likely, going to die. She didn’t cry, instead, she turned off her phone and went outside and walked to the park. It was summer on the cusp of autumn, the leaves green with gold highlights, and the sky so blue it hurt to look at. She walked until her bones ached with such a sudden ferocity that she had to sit down, and her chest felt as though it had been bound with several rubber bands. 

She sat on the bench until she could catch her breath again, and realized with a sudden stark jolt of reality that she was dying. She found it all surreal, sitting here in the park on a beautiful day, and underneath it all, she was dying. Suddenly she couldn’t stand the beauty of the day, and abruptly rose and started toward home, despite the pain in her ribs.

When she got back to her apartment there was a message on the phone from her doctor, asking her in a self-conscious voice if she wanted to meet at a coffee shop, to talk, he said. He left his number and she found that she was not surprised, as though she knew this was going to happen all along.

*************************************

He didn’t know what made him call her. He knew it was wildly unprofessional, much less tactful, given their positions, and yet he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He wondered what she was doing if she was alone, and then, before he could stop himself, he found himself finding her number in the patient information and dialing. He told himself to hang up as it rang, and yet for some reason he didn’t. 

He couldn’t believe it when she actually called him back.

He was waiting at the coffee shop first, wondering what on earth he was doing there, when he saw her walk through the door. She stood in the doorway for a minute, her eyes searching the room until they found his. She was, in his opinion, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, in that she clearly did not believe that she was. 

When she sat down in front of him and smiled nervously, a gesture that completely transformed her face, he wondered why, when he finally found the one, she was not for him to have after all.  

He didn’t know what he was supposed to say, despite the fact that he was the one that called her in the first place. And when the words finally came, unbidden, they were nothing he would have expected. “I thought about your question you asked me yesterday,” he said, “About fate.”

Her eyes widened in surprise, but he rushed on. “I still don’t know if I believe in it,” he said, not realizing that it was true until he said it, “But I want to find out.” 

For a moment she didn’t say anything, and he couldn’t breathe, then finally she said, hesitantly, “I think you do. Believe in fate, I mean. Otherwise, why would you be here right now?”

              ******************************************

She couldn’t say what happened that day in the coffee shop, but nothing was the same afterward. At her second appointment, they talked for an hour beyond her slotted time, despite the fact that he had other patients to see. 

She had never met a man like him, someone who wanted to hear what she had to say, who listened as though her words had meaning to him that even she did not understand. When they talked, she felt something in her chest awaken, something that she had never even realized was sleeping. 

She couldn’t sleep because of the pain medicine that he had prescribed to keep the deep ache in her bones away, and she found herself lying awake into the night thinking about him. How when he touched her she felt like something made of glass, fragile and beautiful. How when he looked at her, he seemed to see more than a patient who was sick, and yet he was her doctor. 

She wondered more and more what it was that he saw when he looked at her. She looked in the mirror, and all she saw was pale skin and wide shadowed eyes, nothing that was special in her opinion. And yet the day after her first appointment he called her again and asked her if she wanted to go to dinner with him, where they talked about what seemed like everything except for her health. 

And she found herself, without really meaning to, finding a life in her that she did know was there. A life that filled her up and pushed away the pain in her bones, a life that was stronger than the thing that was taking it away.

**********************************************

He knew, even as he did, that it was hopeless to fall in love with her. And for a long time he denied that he was. He could not pinpoint the exact moment that he realized that he had fallen for this woman, his patient, but somewhere along the way he undoubtedly did. 

Perhaps it was the day that he told her, as gently as he could, that any treatments they might do would most likely not work. It was the hardest thing he’d ever had to say to a patient, and yet she did not flinch or look away. They decided together that she would not undergo any treatments or procedures except the ones that would take away as much of the pain as possible.

Maybe it was when they went to the harbor and sat on a bench overlooking the bay because her chest hurt too much to walk. How her hand felt the first time he took it, on the bench that day, and how sweet her lips tasted the first time he kissed her, while the sunset on the water in front of them. 

He tried to keep their blossoming relationship secret from his colleagues, but they found out soon enough. When he was called into his superior’s office, he was sure that he was about to be fired, and was shocked when his superior looked at him with tired eyes and told him that he hoped he knew what he was getting himself into. That he wasn’t going to tell him he couldn’t do it because the only person it was going to hurt in the end was himself.

He knew that, but at the same time, he knew that there was no way he could stop now.

Love, he realized, was not something that any science could explain. Love was not what he had grown up believing it was from movies and television. It was the strength it took to carry the woman you loved to her bed when she was in too much pain to do it herself. It was the way you stopped in the middle of a passion-filled moment because she couldn’t catch her breath. 

Love was a thousand beautiful, painful moments that once he lived them, he didn’t know how he could without. 

*************************************************

In the beginning, it was her and him. In the end, it was them. When every moment is limited, there is no time to waste. They married on the beach, just them and a priest with the waves in the background. She looked pale and lovely in her white gown, and when he kissed her the priest thought that he felt the true presence of God for the first time in his fifty years. 

One week after their marriage she had to go to the hospital, for what would be the last time. He slept in her bed with her, and the nurses gathered to look at them, the doctor who fell in love with the dying woman. 

He wouldn’t let anyone else care for her, and they let him, even though it broke all the rules. He wept quietly when he slipped the needle under her skin that made her sleep when the pain got too much. One morning she awoke before he did, and watched him sleeping in the chair at her bedside, the sun illuminating the grief that etched lines around his eyes.

She thought then that it was pointless for her to die because she could not be impressed by angels after what she had found with him.

On one day when she was awake and the pain was not that bad, they talked quietly about all the things they would never get the chance to. They tried to fit a lifetime of words into one day, and found that it was better to just lay in each other's arms. 

“Don’t let me hold you back,” he said.

“You are my wings,” she whispered. 

“Wait for me,” he said.

“I’ll be there,” she promised.

******************************************************

Afterward, he did not lose himself in his grief, because he knew that was not what she would have wanted. He stopped working as an oncologist, and instead delivered babies, preferring to bring life into the world than watch it leave. Every time he helped a newborn take its first breath, he thought of her and imagined that she was with him, guiding his hands. 

And when the pain made his chest ache, and his grief felt palpable, he would go outside and look up at the night sky, at the stars. It was there that he felt her presence the most, when he could almost feel her beside him. 

He would lay and look up at the sky, and imagine that she was leaving him messages in the stars, and all he had to do was look hard enough to find them. And sometimes he thought he could, when the stars were bright and he knew that she was there, waiting for him. Painting all the words she never got to say, where only he knew to look.