Chapter 1 - Alexei #3
Stars had never meant anything to me before.
They were facts. Scientific phenomena. Things that existed because physics demanded they exist, burning through their fuel until they exploded or collapsed, indifferent to the creatures that named them and told stories about them.
But Marco looked at them and saw breathing light.
Marco looked at them and saw hope poking through darkness.
I remembered that.
I would remember that for years, for all the years I didn’t know I would carry him with me. That single sentence would burn in the void like a star itself.
“What is your favorite?” I asked. The question surprised me. I didn’t ask questions like that. I didn’t care about answers like that.
But Marco lit up again, delighted to be asked.
“That one.” He pointed at a star slightly brighter than its neighbors, low on the eastern horizon. “I call it la stella della speranza. The hope star. Because whenever I look at it, I remember that even in very big darkness, there is always a little light. You just have to look for it.”
He turned to look at me, his hazel eyes reflecting the stars he loved. “Do you have a favorite?”
I looked up at the sky, at the thousands of points of light scattered across the darkness, and realized I had never looked at them as anything other than data. “No.”
“Then you can share mine. When you are sad or lonely, you can look at the hope star, and you will know that somewhere, I am looking at it too. And then we will be looking at the same thing, even if we are very far apart.”
The pressure in my chest grew. It was uncomfortable.
“I’m never sad,” I said. Marco studied me for a long moment, his eyes too knowing for his age.
“Then you can look at it when you are nothing and remember that there is light behind the dark. Even for you.”
I stared at him.
“I see you, you know,” he smiled. “The nothing inside. It is very big. Very scary. But it is not all of you. There are little parts that are not nothing. I can see them hiding.”
No one had ever seen me.
No one had ever looked at the void and found something other than emptiness.
“You don’t know me.”
“No,” he agreed easily. “But I know the stars. And you look at them the same way I do. Like you are looking for something. Like you hope they might have an answer to a question you don’t know how to ask.”
I looked away, up at the sky, at the hope star he had claimed as his own and now shared with me.
Then Marco reached into the pocket of his trousers. “I have something.”
He pulled out a ribbon.
Pale blue satin, frayed at both ends. Cheap, probably cut from a package or old dress or gift wrap. It was wrinkled from his pocket and softened by handling, worn thin in places where small fingers had rubbed it over and over.
He held it out to me.
“What is that?”
“My brave thing.”
“Your what?”
“My brave thing,” he repeated, as though it were obvious. “When they put needles in me, I hold it. When Mama cries, I hold it until I can make my face happy again. When the stars are too far and I can’t see the hope star from my bed, I hold it and pretend I can feel the light through the dark.”
He pushed it toward me. “You can have it.”
“I don’t need it.”
“Yes, you do.”
“No.”
“You do,” Marco insisted, his voice rising with urgency.
I didn’t move. So he took my hand.
No one took my hand.
He placed the ribbon in my palm, his small fingers folding mine over it one by one, making sure I held it properly. His touch was gentle.
“There,” he said. “Now you have a brave thing too.”
“What if you need it?” I asked, and heard my voice come out strange.
Marco smiled, his gap-toothed grin radiant in the starlight.
“I am already brave.”
It was a child’s answer.
Proud.
Foolish.
Beautiful.
I usually saw humans as clumps of cells that needed to be studied, but when I looked at him, I didn’t analyse him. I just saw a human being, small and sick and impossibly bright.
“You should go back.”
“To the hospital?”
“Yes.”
He made a face, his nose wrinkling with disgust. “You sound like a doctor.”
“You look like you are going to collapse.”
“I’m not.”
“You are sweating.”
“It is warm.”
“It is cold.”
He looked offended by the evidence, as though my observation were a personal betrayal.
Then a shiver passed through him.
Small, but I saw it, the way his shoulders twitched, the way his skin pebbled, the way his jaw tightened to stop his teeth from chattering.
Marco wrapped his arms around himself.
“I only wanted to see the garden,” he whispered, and the bright thing in his voice dimmed again. “I only wanted to see the lemon trees and the stars.”
For some reason, I hated the way his voice changed when he said it.
I hated the fact that something so small could want something so simple and still have to steal it. That a boy had to run from a hospital in the middle of the night just to see the sky.
I stood.
“Are you leaving?”
“No.” I removed my jacket and draped it over his shoulders.
It swallowed him. The sleeves fell past his hands. The black fabric made him look even smaller. His eyes widened.
“This is very nice.”
“It is a jacket.”
“It is a very nice jacket.” He ran his fingers over the fabric with something like wonder. “It is soft.”
“You are cold.”
“You are cold too.”
“No.” I was never cold. The emptiness inside me didn’t register temperature the way other people did. He looked at me with sudden seriousness, his small face solemn.
“Thank you, Alexei.”
My name sounded different in his mouth.
I wanted him to say it forever.
We sat there a little longer.
Marco told me about a stray cat behind the hospital.
He told me his father could whistle with two fingers loud enough to make birds fly out of trees.
“He taught me but I can’t do it yet. My mouth is too small.
But when I am bigger and my mouth is bigger, I will whistle so loud the whole town will hear. ”
He looked up through the leaves at the sky, at the hope star, at the thousands of other lights scattered across the dark.
Then he told me something that rattled me to my core. Something that would forever be engraved in my heart.
“If I don’t get better, I will become a star.”
My heart skipped a beat. “What?”
“Grandmother told me. When people we love go to sleep forever, they become stars. So they can watch over us. So they can poke holes in the dark and let the light through.” He smiled, his eyes fixed on the sky.
“If I don’t get better, Mama and Papa will be very sad.
So I will have to become a very bright star.
The brightest one. So that every time they look up, they will see me.
And they will know I am okay. They will know the dark is not so scary, because I am making holes in it. ”
The void inside me fractured.
“You will get better,” I said, and the words came out harder than I intended, like a command to the universe.
Marco turned to look at me, surprised by the intensity.
“Maybe,” he muttered gently. “Or maybe I will become a star. Either way, I will be okay.”
He reached over and touched my hand, the one holding the ribbon.
Something burned behind my eyes, an unfamiliar sensation, like pressure and heat, like something trying to escape.
I had never cried.
Not once in my life.
But something in my chest hurt in a way I had never experienced, something that might have been the first tentative stirring of something human.
“You talk too much,” I said, my voice rougher than I had ever heard it.
Marco laughed brightly.
“I know. Mama says my mouth never stops. Papa says I will talk to God when I get to heaven and God will say, ‘Please, Marco, let me speak,’ but I will keep going.”
He leaned his head against the stone bench, still wrapped in my jacket, his eyes drifting closed.
“I am a little tired,” he admitted.
“You should go back.”
“In a minute.” His voice was growing softer. So I sat with him while he looked at the stars through half-closed eyes, his breathing evening out, his body slowly relaxing inside the too-large jacket.
Eventually, voices called from somewhere beyond the garden wall.
Italian. Urgent. Marco stiffened, suddenly awake.
Then another voice came, a woman’s voice this time, shaking around his name.
“Marco!”
His face changed.
Guilt. Relief. Fear. Love.
All of it at once, too much for his small features to contain, overflowing like water from a cup.
“I have to go.” He tried to stand too quickly and swayed, his hand shooting out to catch the bench.
I caught his elbow, steadying him.
He slipped my jacket off and handed it back with great care.
Then he touched my closed fist where the ribbon still rested.
“Keep it,” he said.
The woman called again, closer now, her voice breaking. “Marco!”
Marco turned to run, then stopped. He came back one step. Then another.
Before I could ask what he was doing, he rose onto his toes and pressed a quick kiss to my cheek.
It was nothing.
A child’s thank-you.
Warm lips against cold skin for less than a second.
But it burned. Like the first fire ever kindled in an endless dark.
At the edge of the garden path, where the shadows gathered, he looked back once.
Only once.
Then he vanished between the hedges and the night swallowed him.
I sat on the steps until the sky began to lighten, bleeding from black to purple to grey to gold. The ribbon stayed in my hand, then in my pocket, pressed against my ribs where I could feel it with every breath.
It was the first time I had ever felt anything real.
And because I never saw Marco again, it would also be the only time.
The next morning I tried to find him.
I walked the streets in daylight, retracing my path from the night before. I asked a shopkeeper if he knew a boy named Marco whose father worked at the estates, whose mother scrubbed floors at the big houses.
The man shrugged, wiping his hands on his apron. “There are many Marcos,” he said. “Many boys. Many fathers who work. What is the family name?”
I didn’t know. Marco had never told me.
Another person said there were hundreds of families who worked on the estates, cooks, drivers, gardeners, housekeepers. They came and went. No one kept track.