The Astral, or, Till the Day I Die. V. J. Banis

by rain, it spread out before her in all its immensity, seeming to go on and on forever before it collided with the purple-gray mountains in the distance.

      She turned off Mulholland to weave her way down Laurel Canyon into the valley itself. It was Saturday, nearing Christmas, and traffic was busy. People were intent on going here and there, some of them chatting with companions in their cars, some of them appearing to talk to themselves. They looked happy, sad, frenzied, spaced out, the whole gamut of human expression. The sidewalks were mostly empty. People didn’t walk much here, though there were groups of children playing, and a mailman plodded wearily along his route, a terrier yapping at him from behind a wire fence.

      Perhaps after all it wasn’t so bad to be alive. She still had her grief. Probably she would have that within her for the rest of her life, but maybe there could be room as well for the rest of it, the common threads of humanity that held life together.

      Her mother was still in her bathrobe, not one of those pink and frilly woman’s things, but a man’s white terry cloth robe, several sizes too big for her. Somehow Catherine found it endearing.

      Sandra was surprised to see her, and faintly alarmed, not sure what to expect. She had been worried since she arrived at Dominique’s yesterday and found Catherine gone. Several times she tried to phone, but there had been no answer. Now, suddenly, here Catherine was, stopped just inside the front door.

      “It’s funny,” Catherine said in the way of greeting, “I was thinking that no matter where you have lived or for how long, coming to your mother’s house is always ‘coming home’.”

      Sandra gave a timorous smile. “Strange you should say that. I said almost the same words to your grandmother many years ago.”

      “Oh, Mom,” Catherine said, and then they were in one another’s arms, both of them crying and talking at the same time, and even laughing, and it was minutes before Sandra could steer them into the kitchen.

      They sat at the little table there and had coffee and bagels and cried and laughed some more and after a while, to the great good pleasure of both, their chatter settled into the kind of frank, woman-to-woman conversation they had enjoyed so often together in the past.

      They spoke of Becky, the first time Catherine had been able to speak of her to anyone: of how precious she had been to both of them, and they shared the horror they had suffered over what had happened, and the anger that had been too long suppressed.

      “I’ve been so selfish,” Catherine said, “I was so wrapped up in the pain of losing a daughter, I forgot that you had lost a granddaughter.”

      “I felt as if I had lost a granddaughter and a daughter.” She made of it less a rebuke than a statement of fact that produced another round of tears and hugs and a spilled cup of coffee.

      “It’s all right, really, I do understand,” Sandra said as she mopped up the coffee. “When your father died—it’s nearly ten years now—but I thought for a long time that my life was over. I simply couldn’t imagine how I could go on without him.”

      “It’s so strange, you seemed at the time to be handling it so well.”

      “I wasn’t any better at sharing my pain than you have been. We’re two of a kind, I suppose. The point is, time is the answer. It’s such a cliché, but time is what does it. It’s early days yet. Wait, be patient, the wounds will heal. She’ll never leave you, and that’s all right too. It just won’t hurt so much when you think of her. When I think of your father now, it’s mostly with pleasure.”

      They both thought of that for a moment while Sandra got up to pour some more coffee.

      “Do you ever,” Catherine asked and hesitated slightly, “Do you ever miss the, you know, the physical part?”

      “Sometimes.” Her mother smiled shyly. “Until he got sick, your father was a very passionate man.”

      Which Catherine found awkward to contemplate. One never wanted to think of one’s parents that way, though she was sensible enough to realize how altogether silly that was.

      “But you’re still young.” Her mother was fifty-four and could surely pass for ten years younger. “Haven’t you ever thought about finding someone else?”

      “Yes. I actually did, well, ‘see’ someone a few times. You remember Mr. Adams, the widower?”

      “Johnny Depp?” Catherine said with an incredulous laugh—that was their nickname for the neighbor across the street, who did indeed look uncannily like the actor. “Are you telling me you slept with Johnny Depp?”

      “He’s a very handsome man.” Her mother gave her a stern look, which quickly deteriorated into a giggle. “And slept is not quite the right word. He always went home afterward.”

      “Well?” Catherine raised an eyebrow. Inwardly she was scoring her mother some serious points. Mr. Adams, “Johnny Depp,” couldn’t have been more than thirty-something. A teacher, he had been married only a few years when he lost his wife in an auto accident. Despite the obvious efforts of numerous women in and out of the neighborhood to provide solace, there had never been any suggestion that he was seeing anyone—until now.

      Sandra shrugged. “Well, nothing, really. Oh, not that he wasn’t very willing, and so far as I can say, he seemed to have all the moves right. It’s just that for a woman, for some women anyway, at least for me, it doesn’t really work on a purely physical level, it needs that special something. Not love, necessarily, but something more than just bodies banging together. I think for me, if he’s someone special, a private glance across a room is very thrilling, and if he is not, it doesn’t make much difference what he brings to you in looks or technique or, if you want to know, size.”

      Catherine gazed pensively into the distance. “I think you’re probably right. I think it’s the same with me.”

      “You’re thinking of Walter?”

      Catherine looked directly at her mother. “I was thinking of Jack McKenzie,” she said frankly.

      “Oh.” Sandra sounded not particularly surprised.

      “I seem to have loved him forever. And to have been unhappy about it nearly as long.”

      “Oh, my dear, love has nothing to do with happiness. You can be quite happy with someone and not love him. And you can love him and despise him at the same time. It’s something spontaneous and, it seems to me, quite unmanageable. And endless, too, I don’t think once you love someone you can ever really stop loving, although you can certainly end the relationship.”

      “I’d have to agree. I know I tried hard enough to get Jack out of my heart, but try though I will, he’s still there.”

      “I don’t think I shall presume to advise you on that score. You remember your Dante, don’t you? When he first starts his journey it is Socrates, the intellect, who guides him, but when they reach a certain point, he turns the job over to Dante’s beloved Beatrice. Which was Dante’s way of saying, as I see it, there comes a time when reason be damned, you have to let your heart lead the way.”

      What a dope I have been, Catherine was thinking, to have deprived myself of this wonderful woman.

      * * * *

      She stopped at the mall again on her way home. At the entrance to Macy’s Christmas department, she had to pause to steel herself. All the bustle, the noise, Christmas music piped over speakers, the babble of voices and the jangle of cash registers. In the far corner a line of children waited to see a thoroughly unconvincing Santa. Or perhaps the children were happy to allow themselves to be deceived—children were often wiser, she thought, than parents gave them credit for being.

      She made herself go in. She picked up two strings of lights, and got a third one for good measure. Four boxes of ornaments, that ought to be enough, wouldn’t it? Tinsel, some garlands. She even got an angel for the treetop, and immediately named it Becky.

      Those purchases made, and they