Chapter 25
THE RESOLUTION
The next two weeks, the last of my residency, passed quickly and easily. After a few days, I could feel the fabric of my life healing from the marks Aster etched into it. He had come from a dream and had disappeared back into one.
I ordered a new laptop online, and it arrived at the lighthouse early enough for me to transcribe everything I had written by hand and add several more chapters, a few tens of thousands of words that checked off necessary plot points and grounded me more in the book.
My vision for my project remained strong.
Even without Aster and his colorful demonstrations, I found myself sucked fully into the prose, with a strong ending waiting before me like a distant finish line.
Only now I didn’t follow Captain MacGregor as much in his doomed path.
I followed his daughter looking through a window. The one who lost but still survived.
During this time, I focused on local exploration.
I found a series of tourist shops two blocks away, places I hadn’t thought of since my early excursions with Aster, and I spent almost a full day buying souvenirs and gifts for family.
Among these, I purchased a sleek blue fountain pen and notebook both emblazoned with the word Aster in a colorful gold copperplate.
Maybe the branding was a coincidence, but I couldn’t resist the call of the name, and I bought the small kit on sight.
I also spent plenty of time at the beach, swimming and wading and sunbathing but avoiding the nearby Childress cemetery. An instinctive superstition warned me to stay away from it, not to taint their memory with the blood on my hands.
August was cooler than July. Over the last few days of my residency, the beach became a place for sitting and reflection more than recreation. I watched the seagulls and made sure to pause whenever I wanted to enjoy the moment.
Sometimes when I went to the beach, thoughts of Aster resurfaced and threatened to tear me away.
I let them pass when I could. Aster had said he wanted me to finish the book or kill him.
Maybe he’d lured me to the top of the tower and threatened to throw me over because that was the only way he could get me to do it, to finish him.
On my last day, I packed my bags. I had bought a postcard featuring the Illumination Point lighthouse at one of the local stores.
In the blank text patch on the back, I now wrote a sincere apology for the damage to the mirror in the bathroom and an offer to pay any incurred expenses, with my contact information underneath.
After lunch, I packed away my computer and decided to pay one final visit to the top of the lighthouse tower.
After the storm, I’d felt no reason to come back here. Even the thought made me wince and relive the feeling of terrible lightness that came when I threw Aster over the edge. Even looking at the catwalk made tears form in my eyes.
The lighthouse tower was quiet. Sometimes as I walked I imagined that I heard a second pair of footsteps behind me, but every time I stopped, the other steps stopped as well. I blamed the echo on the stone tower’s unusual acoustics.
I didn’t feel alone here. I reached the top and spent a long moment searching the shadows for movement, for a sense of another presence. Nearby the waves continued crashing in a rhythm that sounded reassuring.
When I felt ready, I stepped outside onto the catwalk, where the scene had taken place.
It was a windy day. I hadn’t noticed that until now.
The wind felt less consequential lower to the ground, but at this altitude, it caught my hair and blew over my face so hard that I forced a squint to look around.
At first I looked out to the ocean. I imagined Aster standing beside me, leaning forward and resting over the narrow railing like he had that one morning when he had first feared becoming mortal.
Suddenly it seemed that he had known how this was going to play out between us all the way back then. He wasn’t afraid of dying. He was afraid of what it would take for him to enable me to write the book.
I shook my head and looked at a duo of seagulls as they circled a portion of nearby beach. Aster hadn’t known any of that. He couldn’t see the future nearly as well as I could. If he was afraid, it was only because he didn’t know.
The thoughts came to me unbidden: the memories, the lurking shadow of his voice and the the way the stars had glittered through his eyes. The substance that dreams were made of.
Gradually my gaze lowered, crossed from the sky to the sea, from the sea to the beach, from the beach to the rough grass higher up on the shore. Not an inch of it remained untainted by my time with Aster.
I bit my lip, and I didn’t know I was crying until it was too late. I also didn’t know why my brain kept trying to make sense of everything, to attribute meaning to a series of events that weren’t meant to be understood.
So many of my questions remained unanswered. Now I could never learn what Aster was. I’d never have a chance to share a future with him. I’d never know what could have happened if everything hadn’t fallen apart so badly in the end.
I tried to pinpoint a moment where it went wrong.
A single conversation. A misunderstanding.
A conflict in vision. So much of our problem could have been solved if it was one of those simple issues that came with a single solution.
But it wasn’t, and the more I thought about it the more I wondered if Aster and I had been ill-fated from the start.
The word disaster came to mind. Disaster, from the Greek words dis, meaning evil, and aster, meaning star. The word disaster literally means “evil Aster” or “evil star,” implying something terrible beyond anyone’s ability to fix—implying that Aster himself had been fallen from the start.
A cloud covered the sun and caused a shadow to fall over the lighthouse tower. I took it as a cue that the time had come for me to say goodbye to this place and leave these memories behind, so I turned and left the catwalk.
Before loading the car, I walked through the lighthouse quarters a final time.
I had tried to place everything the way it had been before I left it.
I’d swept the crumbs from around the kitchen table, the remnants of the shared sandwiches and wine.
I closed the secretary desk and put away the woven blanket Aster had wrapped himself around when he said he wanted to leave this place.
I spent too much time in the bathroom, searching for any last glass splinters that could have fallen onto the grout between the tiles, and I placed the note in a conspicuous location.
Later I would be relieved to find that I would never need to repay anything—either a new mirror was installed free of my needing to pay anything, or the mirror had never been broken.
The funny part was that after I got into my car and drove away from Illumination Point, past the short drives of tourism shops and the Red Sails Cafe and the racks of scarves and sweatshirts available for a discount, away from the waves on the shore and the seagulls flying around the coast, my own thoughts on the matter changed.
I couldn’t settle on how much of what I remembered had been real, how much had happened and how much I had invented.
My parents insisted that I had called them before their visit and told them to call it off because of a time-sensitive element of my work.
I still didn’t remember calling them at all.
As far as I was concerned, Aster had taken my phone while I wrote and passed on a deceptive cover story to keep them at bay so that he and I wouldn’t be separated.
But if Aster had never happened, then how else could I have explained the gap in my schedule?
Much of the summer I couldn’t account for.
Aster had kept me in a delirious trance while I worked.
The writing had gone well, but the hours themselves had passed like hours in the middle of the night, without my awareness.
It didn’t seem possible that I could have done that much on my own in my solitary quest for greatness.
But I didn’t know. And I couldn’t know.
There was only one certainty I could rely on as I moved forward from my stay at the lighthouse.
I had wanted to create something of merit while I was there.
I wanted to carve out a legacy that would live past me and beyond my years, to tap into something greater and more human than I was that would give me a name in the literary annals.
While I still didn’t know the outcome of the project that I had started, I had full assurance that the person I was as a writer and what I had to offer could stand on its own.
Aster had come to me out of my desire to create something great—and he had achieved his goal, even in the most twisted way he could have gone about it.
He told me that I could either write the book or take his life. When I’d tried to keep both, I realized I couldn’t have either, so Aster pushed me in the one direction that would force me to choose.
I’d been obsessed with the process, with the project, with my relationship with the project.
I had planned and re-planned, analyzed every corner and perfected my skills in the craft, and the only obstacle that eluded me was myself.
Aster had removed that piece in forcing me to throw him over the edge, freeing me to capture the words that had been waiting for me in perfect form from the start.
My novel, Aster, might not have been enough to forge history, but it would remain forever as a monument between the two of us and what we had shared.