The copper dome of the Whitlock Observatory caught the last copper light of sunset, its patina glowing like an old coin held to a flame. Somewhere below, a service door groaned shut.
Sadie Brennan pressed her spine flat against the limestone wall of the east stairwell, her pulse loud in her ears, her sneakers scuffed white with dust from the unused fourth-floor corridor. She could still taste the root beer on her tongue from the drive-in earlier, the sweetness of it gone now, replaced by something metallic. Anticipation, maybe. Or fear. The two had started to feel the same lately.
"You sure he's up there?" she whispered.
Declan Maddox stood one step below her on the landing, his sketchbook clutched against his chest like a shield. The sketchbook was always with him, leather cover softened from use, pages dog-eared, the elastic band around it snapped and retied twice. In the half-light his face was all shadow and angles, jaw set, eyes fixed on the door at the top of the next flight. He had not said much since they'd cut through the faculty parking lot. He hoarded words the way other boys hoarded cigarettes.
"He said ten," Declan said. His voice was low, almost a murmur, the faint Irish lilt of it surfacing only on certain vowels, the way his grandmother's used to before she passed. "He's always up there."
"And if he changed his mind?"
"He won't."
The certainty in it made Sadie look at him. The certainty, and the small lift at the corner of his mouth, the almost-smile that meant he knew something she didn't. Declan collected professors the way other kids collected concert tickets. Mr. Albright, who taught him Arabic on weekends. Mrs. Kowalski, who let him use the darkroom after hours. Now this: a man who ran the observatory, who had apparently agreed to break a half-dozen university rules because a seventeen-year-old boy had asked nicely and brought him a jar of his mother's blackberry jam.
"You bribed him with jam," Sadie said.
"I brought him jam," Declan corrected. "There's a difference."
"There's really not."
He shrugged one shoulder, the movement small and economical. He had been getting thinner since the spring. His shirts hung off him. His mother had stopped coming to school concerts. His father had started going to court. Sadie knew the shape of his family's unraveling the way you knew the weather, from a distance, in fragments, in the things people stopped saying out loud.
She followed him up the last flight of stairs.
The rooftop door was heavier than it looked, iron-core, and it opened onto a wind that carried salt and cut grass and the faint chemical tang of the cooling towers two blocks over. The roof was flat, graveled, ringed by a low parapet. In its center sat the observatory: a round stone building with the copper dome on top, a slit cut through the metal showing a stripe of violet sky. A wooden ladder leaned against the dome's exterior. A single light burned inside, yellow and warm.
A man stepped out of the observatory door. He was tall, narrow-shouldered, with a gray beard trimmed close to his jaw and reading glasses pushed up into hair that had once been red and was now mostly silver. He wore a cardigan the color of moss. He looked, Sadie thought, like someone who had been expecting them for a long time and had simply run out of ways to pretend otherwise.
"You must be Sadie," he said.
"Yes, sir."
He studied her for a moment, the kind of study that wasn't rude, only thorough. Then he looked at Declan, and something in his face softened.
"You didn't tell me she was going to ask me hard questions all night," he said.
"She won't," Declan said. "She'll ask you impossible ones."
The professor laughed, a short, surprised sound, and gestured them inside.
The interior of the observatory was small and cool and smelled of machine oil and old paper. The telescope rose through the center of the room on a brass column thick as a man's thigh, its tube long and dark, the eyepiece waiting at the top of a wooden ladder of its own. Charts papered the walls. Star maps, spectral charts, a photograph of a woman standing next to a much younger version of the professor, both of them squinting into the sun.
"That's my wife," the professor said, following Sadie's gaze. "1974. We were in Baja. She insisted on the photograph."
"She's beautiful," Sadie said.
"She was."
He said it without weight, the way you said things that had long since settled into the shape of your life. Then he bent to the telescope and began the slow ritual of opening the dome.
The dome turned on cast-iron wheels with a groan that vibrated through the floorboards. The slit widened. Above them, the sky peeled back, and the first stars came through, faint at first, then brighter, then the whole east alive with them.
"Orion's rising," the professor said, almost to himself. "Right on schedule."
Sadie's throat tightened.
She had grown up under this sky. She had known since she was small that the stars were there, that the Milky Way was a pale smear over the coast on the clearest nights, that her grandfather had taught her the names of the constellations from the deck of a boat rocking in the harbor. But knowing and seeing were different countries, and right now she felt herself crossing a border.
Declan set his sketchbook on a side table and opened it to a fresh page. His pencil was already in his hand. He did not look up.
The professor adjusted the telescope, hands steady, movements practiced. "Tonight we're after the Orion Nebula. M42. A stellar nursery, if you will. A place where stars are being made. Roughly 1,344 light-years from this rooftop."
"How far is that in real miles?" Sadie asked.
The professor smiled. "About seven hundred and ninety thousand trillion. But who's counting."
She laughed, the sound coming out higher than she meant it to.
Declan's pencil moved. He was drawing the curve of the dome, or the professor's shoulder, or nothing at all. Sometimes his drawings were of things that weren't in the room.
"When you're ready," the professor said, and gestured her toward the ladder.
She climbed. The wood was smooth under her palms, polished by decades of hands. The eyepiece waited, a brass ring set into dark metal. She bent to it, and the universe opened.
At first there was only black, and a scatter of points so bright they burned. Then, as her eye adjusted, the points resolved into shapes: a belt, a sword, a shoulder, a knee. And there, hanging below the belt, a smudge of green-gray light, soft as breath on glass, wider than she had imagined any single thing in the sky could be.
She forgot to breathe.
"That's it," the professor said from somewhere behind her, his voice low. "The Orion Nebula. Hydrogen and helium and a little dust, and the light of stars that haven't been born yet, reaching us now because the universe is, among other things, very patient."
She stayed there a long time.
When she finally climbed down, her legs were unsteady, and Declan was watching her from his stool, his pencil paused, his face unreadable in the low light.
He had not looked through the eyepiece yet.
"Go," she said. "It's yours."
He shook his head, almost imperceptibly. "I wanted you to go first."
"Why?"
He considered the question as if it had a real answer. Then: "Because you'd tell me what it looked like. And I wanted to know what you'd say."
The professor made a small, thoughtful sound in his throat.
Sadie's cheeks warmed. She turned to the charts on the wall to hide it.
"Declan," she said, after a while. "Tell me what you see."
He set his pencil down.
He climbed the ladder slowly, each rung deliberate, as though the act deserved ceremony. His sneakers found the wood without sound. At the top he paused, one hand on the brass ring, the other hanging at his side where his fingers had been tapping a rhythm against his thigh all night.
He bent to the eyepiece.
Sadie watched the back of his neck, the fine dark hair that curled there, the way his shoulders went still in a way they never quite managed in class or in the cafeteria or walking down the hall with his head down and his sketchbook pressed against his chest like armor.
Seconds passed.
She found herself holding her breath the way she had before, when it had been her face against the metal, when the nebula had unspooled into something her chest couldn't quite contain.
When Declan climbed down, he moved like someone who had walked into deeper water than he meant to and come back out changed.
"Well?" The professor, gentle.
Declan didn't answer right away. He returned to his stool, but he didn't sit. He stood beside it, one hand on its back, looking at Sadie as if he were seeing her for the first time, or the hundredth, and the difference between those two things had suddenly collapsed.
"It looks like what you see when you close your eyes after staring at a candle," he said. His voice was strange, hushed. "Like the dark behind your eyelids has texture. Like the dark isn't empty after all."
Sadie laughed, a small bright sound that startled even her.
"Poet," the professor murmured, and began to dismantle the eyepiece with careful hands.
Outside, the fog had thickened. The hill was a suggestion of shape, the observatory a lantern waiting for no one. The path down would be dark and damp and full of the smell of salt and pine.
Declan offered his hand.
She took it.
His palm was cool from the metal, slightly rough at the base of his fingers where graphite had stained the whorls of his skin. They walked in silence for a while, their breath making small ghosts in the air, their footsteps muffled in the grass.
"You didn't take your coat," he said, after a quarter mile.
"I forgot."
"You always forget."
"You always remember for me."
He tugged the jacket from his own shoulders and dropped it over hers without breaking stride. It smelled like him: cigarette smoke from his mother's ashtrays, though he'd never smoked one himself, and the dry earthiness of his charcoal sticks, and underneath that, something clean she could not name.
The path curved toward the coast.
"The cliffs?" she asked.
"If you want."
"I want."
The cottage emerged from the dark, low and dark-roofed, its windows unlit. His mother's car was gone from the drive. She was in Seattle again, at whatever hotel she favored this month, drinking whatever she drank, calling no one.
Declan skirted the house without looking at it.
The cliffs were a ten-minute walk through a stand of wind-twisted spruce, then a scramble down lichen-pale stone to a shelf of rock that hung above the sea. The Pacific threw itself at the base of the cliff in long, slow swells, the sound of it a low ceaseless argument. The air tasted of brine and cold and something mineral from the rocks, and the rocks themselves were slick with spray, and Sadie's canvas sneakers slipped once, and Declan's hand caught her elbow, and they stood there for a moment breathing hard, the dark enormous around them.
"Come here," he said.
She went.
He led her to the place where the rock shelf widened into a sort of terrace, where the grass grew in sparse silver tufts, where someone had once laid flat stones in a crude path. He knew this place. He had been bringing her here for two months, and each time he had walked her a little further along the edge, a little closer to the part of himself he kept behind the sketchbook.
They sat on the rock, their legs dangling over the edge, and below them the sea exhaled white foam into the dark.
He didn't speak for a long time.
Sadie pulled his jacket tighter around herself. She could feel him beside her, the warmth of him through the canvas of her sleeve where it brushed his arm, the way his breathing had slowed since they'd left the observatory, the way his stillness now was a different stillness from the one he wore at school.
"I keep thinking about what the professor said," he said at last.
"Which part?"
"That the light reaches us now. That the nebula is already something else by the time we see it. That we're always looking at the past."
Sadie considered this.
"That's true of everything," she said. "Not just stars."
"Yes." He was looking out at the water, but his voice had that inward quality she had come to recognize, the slight catch that meant he was choosing his words with unusual care. "It's true of this summer. By the time I realize what's happening, it'll already be over."
She turned her head.
He turned his.
The fog had made a halo around the hidden moon, and in that faint, diffuse silver, his face was a study of angles and hollows she had drawn a dozen times in her mind without ever quite capturing the way shadow pooled at his temple, the way his lashes cast a small, precise shadow on his cheekbone.
"Why would it be over?" she asked.
"Because you'll go. You'll get out. You'll go somewhere bright and full of people who deserve to be near you, and I'll still be here, sketching the same rocks I've been sketching since I was twelve."
Her throat closed.
"Declan."
"Let me finish." He was looking at her fully now, and the earnestness in his face was almost unbearable. "I'm not saying that to make you feel sorry for me. I'm saying it because I want you to know that I understand. That I know what you need. That I would never ask you to stay."
"You haven't asked me anything."
"No." A small, crooked almost-smile. "I'm too afraid."
The wind moved across them, carrying the spray, and the salt of it settled on Sadie's lips, an honest, uncomplicated taste. She thought of her father's kitchen, the kettle going cold on the burner, the bills fanned across the table. She thought of the T.A. at the university who'd hinted at her, and how she had been hungry and flattered and slightly sick with herself afterward. She thought of all the wanting that had lived in her for seventeen years, and the strange, sudden peace of sitting beside someone who did not ask her to perform.
"Then don't ask," she said. "Don't say anything. Just stay."
He leaned toward her.
She leaned toward him.
The distance between their faces narrowed to inches, to breath, to almost nothing. She could see the faint shadow beneath his eyes. She could see the small cut on his lip where he'd worried it all day. She could see the way his pupils had blown wide in the low light.
"Kiss me," she whispered, and the words felt like standing at the edge of a cliff and stepping off, except she was not falling, she was choosing.
He did.
The first touch was barely a touch. His mouth found the corner of hers and rested there, asking without asking. She turned her head a fraction, and then his lips settled fully against hers, soft and dry and tasting faintly of spearmint gum, and she tasted salt and something else that must have been the cherry balm she had applied three hours earlier, now returned to her from his mouth.
His hand came up to the side of her face. His thumb rested along her cheekbone. His fingers slipped into her hair at the temple.
She made a small sound against his mouth, involuntary, and felt him respond, a tightening in his shoulders, a deeper press, the kiss going from question to answer, from careful to certain.
The sea kept its rhythm below them. The fog kept its slow wheel around the cliff. Somewhere in the spruce a single bird sang a phrase, three notes up, three notes down, three notes up again, as if practicing.
When they broke apart, neither spoke for a long time. Sadie pressed her forehead to his shoulder. He rested his chin on the crown of her head.
"Declan," she said into the canvas of his shirt.
"Mm."
"When I leave for college. You could come."
He was quiet for so long she thought he had not heard.
"Anywhere," he said finally. "I'll go anywhere you go."
"Anywhere?"
"The moon, if you wanted the moon."
She lifted her head and looked at him, and his face was open in a way she had never seen it, no sketchbook between them, no careful distance, just Declan, fully himself, as terrified as she was.
"Even Seattle," she said, testing it, watching him for the flinch.
His mouth quirked.
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it."
She laughed, and the sound surprised her again, and he laughed too, and they were both laughing into the dark with the sea below them and the stars hidden above, and his hand found hers on the cold rock and laced their fingers together, and they sat for a long time in the silver fog, neither of them quite ready to go back.
They did not go back that night. Not right away.
The fog thinned around them in slow veils, and the bird in the spruce gave up its practice, and the tide went out so gradually that Sadie did not notice until the rocks emerged dark and shining where there had been only the suggestion of water. Her legs had gone numb against the cold stone, and Declan's shoulder had become the warmest place she knew, and when she finally stirred, it was only to press closer, to feel the rise of his breath, to listen for his heartbeat through the canvas.
"We should go," he said, but he did not move.
"I know."
"Before someone calls my mother."
"I know."
Neither of them moved.
At some point, she must have dozed, because when she opened her eyes the fog had lifted and the stars were out, hard and bright above the black water, and Declan was watching her with an expression she could not name, something between wonder and grief, as if he was memorizing her.
"What?" she said, and her voice came out sleep-thick.
"Nothing. You had sea salt on your eyelashes."
She reached up to touch her face, but he caught her wrist, gentle, and kissed her knuckles, one by one, slowly, as if counting them, and she forgot whatever she had meant to say.
They walked back along the headland path with their fingers linked, the gravel soft under their feet, the air suddenly colder away from the rock, and at the place where the path forked toward her house and his, he stopped and looked at her for a long time.
"Same time tomorrow?" he asked.
"Every time," she said.
"Same place?"
"Where else would we go."
He kissed her forehead, and then her mouth, and then he went down his fork, and she stood for a moment listening to his footsteps fade, and then she turned and walked home through the tall grass, and her father's light was off, and the house was silent, and she climbed the back stairs without turning on a lamp, and she lay in her narrow bed with her hands over her heart and did not sleep for a long time.
The summer went on like that.
Some mornings she woke to the smell of salt and the thought of him, and some mornings she woke to the sound of her father coughing in the kitchen, a wet, rolling sound that lived in his chest and would not leave. She began to count his pauses on the stairs. She began to notice the way he leaned on the counter when he thought no one was looking. He had always been a quiet man, but he was quieter now, and the quiet had a texture to it, a weight, like the fog on the cliff.
She did not tell Declan.
Not at first.
There were only so many days left, and she meant to spend them with him.
They met on the cliff at the same hour every evening. Sometimes they talked. Sometimes they didn't. Sometimes he brought his sketchbook and drew her in quick, sure strokes, the charcoal whispering against the paper, and she watched his hand move and felt the strangeness of being seen that completely, of being translated by someone who loved her. Sometimes she read aloud to him, fragments of Mary Oliver, Neruda, the worn paperback of Leaves of Grass she had carried since sophomore year. Sometimes they just sat, shoulder to shoulder, listening to the surf.
He told her about his mother in pieces, dropped like stones into still water. About the way she stood at the window of the big house and watched the road as if she were waiting for someone who was never going to return. About the way his father had not been home in three months. About the way she had stopped crying and started arranging things, the silver, the linen, the dried flowers, as if order could hold the world together if she just got it right.
"She won't talk to me about it," he said one night, picking at a piece of lichen on the rock. "She just asks if I've eaten. As if that's the important thing."
"Maybe it is," Sadie said, and he looked at her, surprised, and she shrugged. "Maybe that's how she loves you. By making sure you eat."
He was quiet for a long time.
"I want you to meet her," he said finally. "Before you leave."
"Okay."
"She's going to like you. She's going to pretend she doesn't, but she will."
Sadie smiled and said nothing, because she understood, even at seventeen, that liking and approval were not the same thing in that house, and that the Maddoxes had their own language for love, and it was not always kind.
The call came on a Tuesday in late August.
She was on the porch, reading, the book open in her lap, the late sun warm on her bare feet, when her father came to the screen door and stood there for a moment before he spoke. He had a way of standing, she would realize later, that she had never noticed before, the way he held his hands at his sides as if he had forgotten what to do with them.
"Sadie," he said. "Come inside, honey."
She knew before she stood up. She knew before she crossed the threshold. She knew in the way her body went cold in the August heat, in the way her hands went numb around the book, in the way the porch boards seemed to tilt under her feet. Some knowledge comes not from the mind but from somewhere lower, somewhere older, somewhere in the gut where the body keeps its truest ledger.
Her mother had been sick for a long time.
Her mother had not told her.
Her mother had been sick for a long time, and her mother had chosen, for reasons Sadie would spend years trying to understand, to carry it alone, and her mother had died, quietly, in the small house in town where she had lived since the divorce, with her sister holding her hand and the window open to the sea air, and her mother had not called, had not warned, had not given Sadie the chance to say goodbye.
She did not scream. She did not cry. She sat at the kitchen table and looked at her father's hands and understood that he had known, had known for months, had been keeping the secret too, had been eating dinner with her and asking about college and listening to her talk about Declan while her mother was three towns away, dying.
"Why didn't you tell me," she said, and her voice came out flat and strange.
"Honey."
"Why didn't you tell me."
"Because she asked me not to. Because she wanted you to have your summer. Because she said, and these were her words, she said, 'I want her to have one thing that was just hers.'"
Sadie stared at him.
Then she stood up and walked to the sink and turned on the cold water and held her wrists under it until they went numb, and her father sat at the table and did not move, and outside the window the porch light came on for no reason, and somewhere down the beach a bonfire was burning, and she could smell the wood smoke and the salt and the late asters, and she thought, I will remember this smell for the rest of my life.
She called Declan from the hall phone, and he came on his bicycle, and she met him at the end of the lane, and she did not have to explain.
He got off the bike and stood there, breathing hard, his hair wild from the ride, and she walked into him, and he held her, and she did not cry, not yet, she would not cry for days, but she held on to him as if the cliff were crumbling beneath her, and he held on, and they stood in the dark while the night cooled and the bonfire smoke drifted over them and the stars came out one by one above the spruce trees.
"I'm so sorry, Sadie."
"She didn't tell me."
"I know."
"She didn't tell me, Declan."
"I know."
She pulled away and looked at him, and his face was wet, and she realized he was crying for her, and the realization broke something open in her chest that would not close for a long time.
The funeral was on a Saturday.
She wore the green dress her mother had bought her for graduation, the one with the small white collar, and her aunt had pinned a sprig of rosemary to her lapel, and in the back row of the little church on the hill she sat between her father and Declan, and the light through the stained glass fell across her hands in patches of red and blue.
Her father held one hand. Declan held the other.
She had not known, until that moment, how much a hand could mean. Her father's hand was rough and warm and shaking almost imperceptibly, the hand of a man who had fished the cold water for forty years and had never learned to speak of what he felt. Declan's hand was cool and steady and very still, the hand of an artist, the hand that drew her, and she held on to both of them as the minister spoke, as her aunt wept quietly in the second row, as the woman from the flower shop carried the lilies to the front in her thin, white arms.
She did not hear the words.
She heard the sea, somehow, though she was miles from it. She heard the gulls. She heard the small, sharp cry of her own breath when the minister said her mother's name and she understood, finally, that the world had changed and would not change back.
When it was over, when the people had come and gone and the lilies had been carried out and her father had gone to find the car, she sat in the back pew with Declan beside her and the empty church around them and the colored light pooling on the floor.
"I don't know what to do," she said. "I don't know how to do this."
He did not tell her it would be okay. He did not tell her time would heal it. He did not tell her any of the things people say when they do not know what else to say.
He sat with her in the quiet for a long time, and then he turned to her, and his face was open in that way she had only seen once before, on the cliff, the night they had promised each other everything.
"We'll make something of it," he said, low and steady, his Irish-American lilt thickening with the weight of what he meant. "Out of all this. Out of her. Out of us. We'll make something beautiful, Sadie. I swear it to you."
She looked at him.
His eyes were red. His hands, when she took them in hers, were trembling.
And she believed him. Not because she was seventeen and in love, though she was, and she had been. But because he meant it, because he was already drawing it, because she could see it taking shape behind his eyes the way a sketch takes shape behind the charcoal, line by line, shadow by shadow, the thing that was not yet there becoming the thing that would be.
"Okay," she said. "Okay."
The stained glass threw its colors across her mother's empty pew, across the quiet floor, across the two of them sitting hand in hand in the back row of the little church on the hill, and outside the door the sea went on with its patient, indifferent work, and somewhere, on a cliff above the water, the fog was already gathering again for the evening.