Stars

On Clara’s fiftieth, she left California for the city of rain and roses, where she’d stomped down forest paths at twenty-one to meet a woman, wine-drunk, enchanted by stars and a love that was finally unforbidden, wind grazing her chopped hair, her lover’s scent of cloves and moonlight setting fire to words like sin, abomination, God’s wrath.

Somehow, she couldn’t hold on: at thirty, sitting across from her godly husband, their giddy toddler dashing between them, Clara’s mind zoomed to those stars and from some safe, dark place between tall pines, she heard herself say, It’s over.

The bizarre formality of courtrooms had always felt like a play – the judge, Ella’s father’s suit, Clara’s voice off-key like a child forced to sing in a choir as she read her statement, as if they were teenagers trying to remember their lines, except the grit of Ella’s words grated her mind like sand: Daddy’s girlfriend takes me to church and she says kids need a mom and a dad and she makes me call her ‘Mom’ because you’re a sinner.

Now, on Clara’s fiftieth birthday, brown grasses rearranged themselves into crisp air and dark pines, while texts, calls, acrid accusations rose like bubbles in her mind: broken family, backslider, unfit mother. But her daughter was grown now, safe, and so the bubbles floated up into a bruised thundercloud sky and popped.

At nightfall, Clara parked and stepped out, letting her feet guide her down forest paths, no secret lover’s hands greeting her but no commandments either, and she inhaled the rain, feeling her chest expand, surrounded by glowing green fireflies, and let herself be wooed once again by the stars.