Kathleen Thomas
The Distance Between Stars
(To Caroline Herschel)
I.
The first time we meet you, my mother and I are in a room at the shelter. On a small table by the window, someone has placed a storybook and cups of hot chocolate. I taste the sweet warmth as my mother reads to me.
In the story, you are sick with typhus. You have been ill before, once with smallpox. After you recovered, you were told to hide your face, so your scars did not show.
But tonight, when your fever breaks, my mother turns the page, and we see a drawing of a child looking at the stars. “Caroline,” my mother whispers, as though you are in the room with us. “We will be safe here.”
II.
Spring is here and the days change into the bluest blues. My mother finds a job at a nearby library. After school each day, I wait for her inside the large rooms with high ceilings, long bookshelves, tables and chairs. On days when it is raining so hard we cannot leave till the storm ends, Mother shows me books with photographs of people from long ago. In the one of you, your face is turned to the side as if part of you is lost, like a note left pressed between pages. Or are you looking for someone who walked out into the rain?
III.
The photograph my mother showed me was taken by Julia Margaret Cameron who received her first camera after her children were grown. Years later Julia said, “I felt my way through the dark.“
Once late at night Mother tells me she believes photographs reveal unseen distances, immeasurable spaces.
The light bulb in our room flickers, and then goes dark. Mother rests beside me. I feel her fingertips draw imaginary circles on my arm “We must find another place soon,” she says.
But I want us to stay here, inside the circles she draws in the dark.
IV.
The first book of Julia’s photographs is published fifty years after her death, by her great grandniece, Virginia Woolf.
When I find a copy of this book, I see the photograph my mother believed was you, is not you but your great grandniece, daughter of your nephew John, the only son of your brother William.
There are no photographs of you, only drawings, lines without dimensions.
V.
In fragments from your diaries, I read that you recorded what William saw as he looked through the telescope with you by his side. When he retires at the end of each day, you calculate stellar movements and compute the distance between stars.
On rare occasions you and William go to visit other astronomers. They offer scones and tea. They discuss recent discoveries of the universe with William. You are barely noticed.
Only later are you recognized. Only later when I read your diaries do I begin to understand. double stars, the formation of comets, all you went through.
VI.
On our last evening in the shelter, my mother and I look through the book we read the night we first arrived. She hesitates before turning each page. When we reach the end, I ask, “Why are we leaving tomorrow?”
She brushes back wisps of hair from my forehead. “It will be good to have a place of our own.”
Before tomorrow I must tell her I want to stay in this room where we met you.
Sometime during the night, I hear a rustling sound. I call for Mother, but she does not answer. Outside our window, I see her in the moonlight. She raises her hand, waves to someone in the distance. I see the silhouette walk toward her. I am sure it is you.
VII.
There is an image I hold onto from a time we first met: In the image a young woman walks on a winter night with a child by her side, their belongings in a paper sack the woman carries.
“Hold tight to Mother’s coat,” she says, “So we will stay together.”
Somewhere in the walk, the woman begins to cry. “It is just the cold,” she says and turns her face aside.
When they reach the shelter, a lady opens the door, takes them to a small room with a table by the bed where they will be warm. On the table they will find a book.
Inside the book they find a story. Inside the story they find a young girl who looks through the darkness to measure how close the stars are.
Kathleen Thomas is a nurse and teacher who combines the healing and creative arts in her practice. Her fiction has appeared in MoonPark Review, Apple Valley Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Sleet, The Ekphrastic Review and other publications. She is a past recipient of a Florida Individual Artist Fellowship in Fiction and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Sometimes she teaches creative writing to children, and they teach her about dinosaurs and moonlight.
