Sammy Got a Star (Chapter 2)

Dan was upstairs while the kids played outside. He was in his bathroom, brushing his teeth, rubbing the sleep from his worn and baggy eyes. A cough came from the adjacent room and he peeked his head in promptly.

“You ok, hon?” he asked into the humidified room, sun rays gleaming upon the hardwood, reflecting a blinding morning across the hovel.

“Fine babe,” she responded, her voice hoarse and low. “Morning cough, you know.”

He brushed and spat out the residual paste into the sink and cleaned his mouth. He sauntered over to the bed and lay down next to the woman. He leaned over and kissed her on the head. Outside the sounds of children wafted through the open window. She smiled. Dan’s heart skipped a beat. “Sammy and his friends had quite the time.”

“I know. I heard it all night,” she said with a grimace as another cough rustled her acquiescent state.

“I’m sorry Mar. Those guys get rowdy when they’re together.”

She smiled and pushed herself up to sit with her back against the headboard. She reached her arms out and pulled him to her. She was so frail. “I’d sooner this house be a ruckus than dead silent.”

The sentiment set a bittersweet pulse through Dan’s being as he wrapped his arms around her. They held each other for a while. Mary’s eyes were closed as she ran her hand through Dan’s hair, taking time to grab tufts of it between her fingers, combing it out for knots as she always did whenever they were together. Dan rubbed her back and sniffed the crook of her neck, taking in a whiff of the woman he loved and vowed to spend his life with. Never again would he meet someone who he loved more, and he knew that when they met.

“He told me about how he went to his star. Great idea you had there. Maybe our boy will be an astronomer like his mama – astronomama. Anyone ever call you that?”

She giggled. He was always so cute and knew how to make her smile. “Believe it or not. Any name, pun, or catchy title you can think of, I’ve probably had it directed towards me.”

“Guess I’m not as original as I thought,” he said, looking off, feigning sadness.

“You never were, but you keep trying. That’s why you’re good.” She lay back against the headboard and let her hand fall on top of his. He turned his palm to hold hers gently.

“I think the day I come up with something original will be the day that I will be ready to meet my maker. That will be the day where I start to believe that God hasn’t left us to fend for ourselves.”

“Ye of little faith,” she chided him. Mary wasn’t religious, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t privy to religious experiences. Scouring through the recesses of space and having lights of all sorts from faraway places makes people see things, sometimes unexplainable things. “Maybe God won’t come to you in any way you expect.”

“Well, I’ve seen too many white-bearded men to believe that He isn’t just some two-bit pony act in Brooklyn.”

She laughed, giving him a curious look. “How often are you in Brooklyn?”

“Beside the point.” He looked at her mischievously, and she let out a burst of laughter. He laughed along with her.

“I’m glad I found Sammy’s star before anyone else could.”

“Tell me the story again.”

She tilted her head back and stared off towards the ceiling fan for dramatic effect. “Well, it was one of my late nights. I had coffee buzzing through my system, and I was just analyzing some of the spectrometers, searching for black holes – yada-yada, the usual. My hair was a mess and I probably smelled like day-old cheese–“

“I love it when you smell like day-old cheese,” he said mockingly.

She slapped his chest and continued. “We weren’t having much luck tracing any distortions of light and we were getting discouraged. Conrad and Linda were throwing a ball around, waiting for the results of one of their searches. Beep! Beep! The computer finished, and I went over to check out the data. The results came back negative. We had searched the night sky a hundred thousand times over in the ten years I worked there. My boss, an ex-NASA mission commander/astrophysicist, barely ever showed his face anymore, leaving me to handle most of the work and the delegation of duties. The money from the grant was running out. But this night – oh this night, God reared his shifty head and bellowed in my face.

“I was scouring a couple of pictures, pictures of a sky that could only be seen by the naked eyes a billion light years away. I did this sometimes as a therapy back then, perusing through the catacombs of darkness, rolling through the recesses of space where time and matter come undone. I was tired, and my eyes kept shifting in and out of focus, doing weird things to the pictures. The stars would shift, expand, contract, and recede into the background. My eyes darted around the page as this happened and that’s when I saw it – back there, way in the back – the nosebleeds. It was a star the looked as if it was in transit around something, warping its shape, giving it more of a horseshoe-type visage. I looked and looked again, then I got the four other eyes in the office and they confirmed. We typed in the coordinates of the star and had the infrared scope do a scan. Guess what astromama found?”

“A black hole?” he asked, knowing full well what the answer was, having heard this story countless times.

“A black hole.” She was giddy with excitement. This story always brought it out of her. “But that wasn’t the most exciting part of the night. I had saved the lab, getting the first real picture and dimensions of this spatial-temporal distortion, and I also was another woman in a long line of women that beat men.” She smirked at Dan who raised his eyebrows in recognition of his wife’s triumph. “I was staring at this picture for a while when I saw something dim in the background, barely noticeable to the untrained eye, but there it was. A tiny red dwarf – so small and cute that the first thing I thought of was our sweet boy, and I knew it had to be his. So, before I even told my boss about it, I sent into a request to buy a star, giving them the coordinates of the star to save them the trouble.” She raised her hands. “And there you have it. Our son has a star now.”

“Sammy’s star.” Dan’s voice trailed off. He looked at his watch and saw that it was getting late in the afternoon. He jumped up. “I’ll shower before the nurses get here.”

She looked askance, pouting her lips and casting her eyes down. “Stay for a few more minutes Danny?” She looked up with that overaccentuated, puffed-out lower lip, and those big doe eyes. He just laughed and dared not fight the pull of her unbeatable tractor beam back into bed. When he was back in her arms she smiled and nuzzled his cheek.

“You’ve found my weakness,” he said playfully.

“And you are mine.” She kissed his forehead and they lay there for a while, basking in the morning afterglow, ushering in the afternoon.