Stars are solitary entities. Doomed to loneliness for their own protection. Other objects surround them: planets, the occasional comet or space junk, but ultimately all are insignificant. In the rare cases where two stars do come together, not close enough to touch, but in distant proximity, it spells their destruction. They pull each other in, waltz and spin closer until that sacred moment of contact. They explode. Both are destroyed with a force that can be detected on the other side of the galaxy. The kind of energy that throws probes off their orbit and exposes astronauts to radiation of unknown consequence. Then: gone. Two stars consumed by the void they tried to escape. When these stars reach supernova there are two potential outcomes: a black hole that sucks in everything, even light itself, into an endless void. The void that can swallow a galaxy. Or they become a nursery. A place for rebirth where the death of two stars will create another.
“Becca and I, we’re stars,” Alexis mumbled into the speaker.
“I know you think that.” Josef’s voice crackled through wilderness static as Alexis topped another hill at the end of the Trans-Canada Highway.
The ring caught early May sun through the windshield. White gold shone against her puffy red fingers. Port Alberni drug stores didn’t carry aloe vera this early in the year but at least sunburns are the fastest way to a tan. The three diamonds, one the size of the mole on Josef’s back and the other two are closer to toaster-crumb, refracted light into rainbow shards around the Toyota’s leather interior. Ironic, though Josef might not have thought so.
“It has been scientifically proven.” Alexis shot back, hands squeezed into the hot rubber steering wheel. “I want to set this right. For you.”
“For us.” Those words came through the speaker loud and clear. Three diamonds in the sunlight.
“For us,” Alexis repeated, more breath than words.
“Monday?” The raise at the end of Josef’s words: Alexis didn’t know if it was from confidence or fear.
“Yes. This will be fine by Monday.” She would at least speak with conviction, even if it wasn’t true.
“I’m sorry about your parents. They insisted on coming.”
“Monday, Josef.”
“I love you.”
“I love you too.” Alexis took a hand off the wheel and tapped “end call.”
Becca and Alexis were as close to stars as humans could be. That same predictable and doomed orbit followed from their inception. When Becca swept through lab first year, cool and attentive, Alexis was pulled in by her gravity. Pride flag hung freshly on her dorm wall and head newly shaved, they ended up in bed together after two weeks. It wasn’t that Becca didn’t care about what they learned, or who Alexis was. No, quite the opposite. Becca had a passion that burned in the back of her eyes but a stoic lip that promised: whatever happens, it will be okay. Alexis wanted it to be okay. Maybe that was why Alexis kept coming back. After Rudy, after Sara, after Lila. It would not be after Josef. There would be no one after Josef. That same passion Becca had, lit up Josef’s whole face and shook him until excitement took him bounding around the room. He had an energy that could electrify a room over a pencil designed for space travel. That energy acted as Alexis’s sun in the grey Vancouver skyline. Alexis loved Josef, a gentle and quiet love that sits across the room from each other and reads books by candlelight when the power goes out. Becca was a doomed cycle that sucked Alexis down a black hole whenever love tried to rise.
One year and seven months was when Becca always dragged Alexis down. She could mark it on a calendar to two weeks ago when Josef and she had a date at the Shameful Tiki Room. Alexis should have known something was wrong when her Dad skipped the Canadian Pharmaceutical Convention (CPC). He’d rescheduled his own divorce around it when Alexis was twelve, but he missed it for a casual dinner at a kitschy bar. Her mom insisted the divorcées sat opposite Alexis and Josef. Big grins you could only achieve with a coat hanger plastered on their faces. Alexis’s mom jabbed her father in the ribs when his coat dared brush her arm.
Josef’s hand rested on Alexis’s thigh. Not a romantic touch, he wouldn’t dare be that bold. He was the kind of man who would still ask her father for permission to propose, which he had. A gentle squeeze, top tissue between the folds of his palm: the “I told them not to come” confirmation.
“Beautiful night.” Her mom tittered away, making the same statements she made in the cab ride as they crawled past weight loss and fertility clinic billboards.
“They only serve nachos.” Her dad glared over the rim of his glasses, the same look he gave a competitor’s ad in a newspaper no one read.
“Those are the specials, sir.” Minimum-wage waiter formality never left Josef’s vocabulary, the traumatic ticks of grocery bills paid at Shoppers Drug Mart in toonies. Now they shopped at Whole Foods, every Wednesday morning when the fresh produce came in, a weekly date in the quiet of seven a.m. aisles.
The waiter came by, side-eyes and exaggerated nods when drink orders were placed. Conversation idled away, talk about jobs no one cared about.
“I’ve taken up macramé. Alexis helped me start an Etsy shop.”
“Alexis and I have been considering a bigger apartment. My job might let me work from home part-time.”
“Might sell the company, reinvest in property and call myself retired.”
One year and seven months was not a long relationship. Time stacked together from their liminal rendezvous, Becca and Alexis would have been together four years. At thirty-one, one year and seven months would be enough. The ring was coming, Alexis knew that: caught Josef snooping through her jewelry box when she got home from work. Alexis loved him: he never hid who he was. The kid who accepted pantsings in middle school as the price of being an individual. The man excelled in university and encouraged his childhood-bullies to try for promotions with an “I know your daddy drank” forgiveness. The kind of forgiveness that understood the need to cut ties with Becca, in person, to be better for him.
Through the haze of internal monologue, Alexis mumbled a thanks to the waiter without noticing the mistake in her drink order. Champagne hadn’t been on the menu. Alexis took a swig, four sets of eyes from Josef, her parents, and the waiter distorted by factory glass. Metal clinked against her molars. Head back, eyes wide, Alexis rolled the shape over in her mouth. Not like this. Josef was on the floor — maybe in distress or embarrassment. Alexis opened her mouth and a ring popped out, covered in spit. Before Alexis could count how many diamonds, Josef peeled it out of her palm and held it back to her face. A string of saliva spun like a Bolas spider in the AC.
“Alexis Woes, I am not a poet or I would compare you to a summer’s day. No, I’m an office manager with a mundane life but I can promise you amazement in mundanity. I make no great claims but I promise to love you.” With shaking hands he slipped the ring onto her finger. No, you idiot, you’re supposed to wait until after. “Alexis Woes, will you marry me?”
The words from every romantic movie, the words that got every phone camera in the bar out with lights on. The tiki heads looked cheap in white, industrial glow. Words were coming, champagne bubbles in her brain that floated from her lips and popped in the anxious silence.
“I need to talk to Becca.”
She should have picked up the butter knife and lodged it in his eye. At least someone would have spoken. Instead, mouth-agape silence. The waiter looked like he might drop his phone he went so pale. More spit slipped out of her mouth and onto the back of her hand.
“Okay.” No shudder in Josef’s voice, no tears in his eyes. He spoke with the serenity of a man with a noose around his neck.
He took her hand and led her to the front hall, shuffled through hung jackets with his fingertips.
“Back on Monday. We have a meeting.” He slid her jacket over her shoulders and pressed car keys into her hands. The passion behind his eyes was gone.
The final road up to Tofino wasn’t much different from the rest of the Trans-Canada highway. Trees so thick in all directions, Alexis understood why Big Foot hunters existed. A new smell of ocean air mixed with the build-up of sweat and BO soaked into leather seats. In May, cars lined the road, mostly student vehicles with duct-taped side mirrors and bumper stickers for political candidates who lost.
Becca and Alexis wouldn’t have been much different on their first trip. Alexis wished she hadn’t seen Becca since their first relationship dissolved ten years ago. Then she could say that when Becca told her to go home with someone else, Alexis did and proceeded to delete Becca from her life. She didn’t. Relationships came and went, every two years a status changed to “it’s complicated” and they happened to end up in the same spot for a weekend, a campground they both couldn’t forget. Alexis wished she wanted it to stop but Becca was better than a night alone between heartbreaks.
Driveways dotted the roadside. Expensive signs made to look cheap marked each entrance: yoga studios, hostels, competing surf shops that shared a driveway. The only directions listed on the “Rainforest Peak” Facebook page were to turn right once you saw downtown. Could have been folksy advertising if not for the pixelated, comic sans header.
Ocean water glinted in late afternoon sunlight. If Alexis drove closer, she could have made out the individual crests of waves between scattered islands and orange whale watching boats in the harbour. Angular buildings and townhouses, that hadn’t changed in fifty years, rolled up in tiers from the dock. Trees and another fifteen minutes of road stood between her and the city proper. Time to turn left. A neon-orange garage-sale arrow marked fifteen feet of gravel followed by another kilometre of uneven dirt. Mud kicked high enough to splotch the passenger side mirror and trees scraped the roof like a B-list horror movie. Early leaves that had already given up sprinkled through the sunroof. She should have closed that.
The sign for “Rainforest Peak Campground” looked inexpensive. Unlike the driftwood signs that dotted the main road, Rainforest Peak was hand-painted on a repurposed real-estate sign. The paint streaked and chipped to reveal the eye and bright red logo of the original realtor. The word “Rainforest” curved downward to end in a mutant d-shape. Alexis grabbed the reservation off the passenger seat and hopped out into the muddy driveway. Doc Martens were intended as hiking shoes, but they cost far too much for anyone to wear them in the wilderness. Josef would have reminded her of that.
Two other vehicles sat in the driveway: a school bus painted in Mystery Machine teal and a dark blue Ford. Smoke streaked bus windows revealed wooden crates covered in raw cloth, probably the best excuse for furniture. The Ford required much less rumination, Alexis knew that car by its cramped back seats and illegally tinted windows. Becca had come. Alexis didn’t text Becca, never did, just posted on the Rainforest Peak page:
“So excited to stop in next weekend. Hope to catch up with old friends!”
Based on the rotation of women in her profile pictures, she suspected Becca didn’t have big plans to cancel. Alexis’s heart didn’t flutter the way it used to: the child-like nervousness, instead, a pang deep down in her stomach, like the crash of water when a bubble pops. The same void that chased her from the Vancouver skyline. For a busy city, the Vancouver nights felt empty. There are only three stars in that sky, the rest crowded out by neon signs and 24-hour parking lots. Three times they had done this. Two-year cycles that ended in the same place: each other. No matter how happy the relationship, at one year and seven months life sucked out of it. Alexis’ thoughts didn’t return to Becca. That happened after the inevitable messy dissolution. Instead, her mind left and routines continued on autopilot. Meal prep on Monday nights because weekends were the only time she and Josef had for sex. Groceries on every Wednesday morning. The relationship became an empty orbit, consistent as gravity.
The Ford was empty. Becca must have already set up camp.
Alexis turned away from the car park, the only difference between it and the campground was the house and rotten pasture-fence between them. The porch squelched with each step and water pooled between her boot treads. This was a rainforest. Mountains rose on all sides and disproved this spot as any sort of peak but, the dense trees and foreboding mountains blocked out lights from nearby hotels and artisan shops. For an instant, you could forget the cars lining the main road and the roar of motorboats that filled the harbour.
She pressed the doorbell. Silence. That same non-satisfaction from a crosswalk button that does nothing to change the signal. Lights were on in the upper windows. Alexis swore shapes moved beneath the living room curtains. A dog barked, a deep and sonorous Rottweiler growl. A metallic rattle came from the other side of the door. Then another, and another.
“Back door, darling.” A woman’s eye peeked through the crack between the door and frame, her face obscured by chains and still-extended straight locks.
“So sorry. I’m already registered. I wanted to let you know I’m here.” Alexis held the green-stained paper in both hands and crammed the email signature against the woman’s extended nose.
“Out back.” Her voice crackled like firewood or the skin on her face.
“Sorry for the bother.” Alexis turned and stepped down the first two stairs before the creak of her voice continued.
“Are you alone, darling?”
That was the first line in every horror movie. Maybe Alexis should have taken a hint from the aggressive tree branches.
“I’m meeting someone,” That was the second. “A bit later.”
“You need help with your things?” The old woman blinked so slowly it must have taken her true effort to reopen her eyes.
Alexis glanced back at the Toyota, the stack of gear pressed against the back window in their neon-nylon packaging, blue and white tags still attached. The sun touched mountain tops.
“Maybe getting it to the campground?”
The door clicked closed and more metal slid. One, two, three, four. The door creaked open again and a hunchbacked woman stood, pink bunny slippers and a roller behind her right ear. She took a step forward, a second pause between each movement and her left leg an inch behind. Alexis didn’t know how she expected to make it across her driveway, nevermind through the mudflat campground.
“Your husband coming?” She slid a knobbed hand around the porch rail, right leg then left.
“No. That’s not it.” Another glance at the ring on her hand. Three diamonds, as many stars as could be spotted on the Vancouver skyline.
Despite her cautious movement the old woman walked with surprising speed, the steps a formula she had perfected over the years.
“You know what, it’s fine.” Alexis hopped down the stairs and offered an arm to the woman to help her turn.
“Nonsense.” The woman touched down on the mud driveway, dirt and grime slid up the sides of her bunny slippers.
Another growl from the living room door. You can tell a guard dog by its bark.
“Halt dein Maul! Jetzt!” The woman shouted, the croak of age in her English gone and replaced by an authority Alexis hadn’t heard since private school.
“Hurry up. Open.” The woman waved her knobby arm, exposed to the elbow from her floral housecoat.
Alexis pressed a button and the trunk clicked before it slowly rose. Sleeping bags and thermal blankets toppled into the mud with a squelch.
How did Becca do this so easily? Alexis had already lost her kneecaps to the mud from an hour of fussing with metal clips. Whenever Alexis and Becca camped, back when they first started, she never looked at the instructions. The tent went up with her hands on automatic and her mouth running about how she should get Alexis to do it next time. She never did. The instructions lay in the mud next to Alexis, the directions printed in aqua blue ink against light grey paper would have been difficult enough to read without the glare of low sunlight off plastic film. Walmart’s furniture had clearer instructions. Perhaps they couldn’t afford the same people for their tents. Alexis glanced back at the paper, then to her own set up on the brown earth. All the pieces laid out as shown: perfect lines of flimsy metal poles and folded brown canvas. Was a page missing? The tent was half erected in the next image. Alexis refolded the laminated pages, set them aside in the dirt and took the longest pole in her hand. There were only six pieces, maybe seven; it couldn’t be that difficult. Alexis turned around to grab the paper once again, only to find it was gone. Becca stood and reflected yellow light bounced up to catch her face. Green eyes flecked with gold and lips always slightly apart. She claimed it was from an overbite as a baby. Her right canine was still crooked, guess she never got dental insurance.
“MEC?” Becca tucked the paper in her back pocket and rolled up the sleeves of her orange flannel. Who in their right mind chose to wear orange? Must have been from the men’s section.
“Cheaper.” Alexis wove her hands into the opposite sleeves, knuckles white from the winter-cold still buried in the earth.
“Walmart.” Becca knelt, took a pole in each hand, and snapped them together with a black plastic nub. Just as before, the tent materialized in front of her. “You always were a shit camper.”
She gestured to a stack of metal knobs Alexis had left by the bag. Her skin barely brushed Alexis when she handed them over, but warmth radiated when she drew close.
“You might need a fire,” Becca said. She got back to her feet and attempted to dust the dirt off her knees. Mud worked deeper into her jeans.
Alexis managed a nod, six-year-old butterflies resurrected in her stomach.
Becca placed a hand on her shoulder, warmth flooded through her again, a tidal wave of contact.
“If you need kindling or anything, stop by.” She lingered for a moment, eyes on Alexis, and hers hyper-focused on the mud splash across her jean cuffs. Then Becca walked off, squelch of mud under her boots.
The canvas of the tent still lay folded in the center. That would be easy enough: clip it onto the outer posts. The sun remained half visible above the surrounding mountains. Fire would be the next priority. Alexis walked towards the treeline with that same sickening squelch. Becca sat at her tent, red and black with a dipped overhang, in the shadow of a pine. Three houses had put up firewood signs along the Trans-Canada. Alexis should have grabbed a load on her way up, but she hadn’t carried cash in the last three months.
Beneath the treeline, the world felt hours ahead. Slivers of orange light slipped through leaves but none fully illuminated the ground below. Only enough light to cast more shadows, to turn gnarled roots into wolverines or hide a sole-cutting sharp stone. Alexis took a moment to roll her wool socks over the edge of her jeans to protect against the damp cold that snuck beneath her clothes. Sound died here, swallowed by layers of decay. Wind rustled the trees above, but it played like a silent film from the darkness below.
Each time Alexis found a fallen twig, stuck out like the mast of a shipwreck in the sea of once-orange-now-brown, it bent in her hand. Still green underneath, a recipe for smoke more than fire.
When Alexis and Becca first dated, over ten years ago in their first terms of university, Becca kept plastic stars on her ceiling. The Science Center novelty-souvenir kind. Becca claimed that one day she would sleep under real stars: out in the light reserve at Mauna Kea, Hawaii. What else was worth suffering through physics class? Becca claimed her ceiling was already arranged into constellations, but Alexis had never seen them before. Becca blamed that on a childhood in Vancouver.
“Don’t you know there are only three stars there?”
That night, they lay in the almost darkness listening to the muffled sound of heavy metal two storeys up. Her basement apartment had no windows, probably illegal but it accounted for the dirt-cheap rent. Once the desk lamp went off, the entire room was cast in a dim phosphorescent green: the half-translucent colour you’d expect in jellyfish. The two women lay on one half of the twin bed, sheets kicked down to the baseboard from activity and the general heat of the unventilated room. In the dark, Alexis could only make out the gentle rise and fall of Becca’s chest, illuminated by the glint of sweat.
“Nothing ever touches.” Becca’s words came out in a deep exhale, barely spoken.
“What about ten minutes ago.” Alexis shifted onto her side. The rolls of Becca’s skin twisted and green layers of shimmer writhed with each breath.
“That’s not real touching.” She let a leg relax and the reflection shifted again. “Space gets in the way.”
“Space?” Alexis shifted her head onto Becca’s shoulder. The position made awkward by clasped arms. Becca didn’t move them to bring her closer.
“Atoms. Gravity. Like magnets.” Becca’s skin slid against Alexis and their fingers intertwined. All Alexis saw were the lumps of her breasts eclipsed by stars. “If things actually touched, they’d be destroyed. Like an atom bomb, supernova. We approach the limit but never reach.”
“I was never good at math.”
“It’s lonely, Alexis.”
“It’s not.” Alexis rolled over, no more stars, no more green, only heat. “We’re never alone.”
Darkness again, full night descended in less than twenty minutes. There was no green light here only the kind of black where Alexis couldn’t see her hands. Above her, there was no difference between tree and sky. Perhaps it was only trees. Alexis turned, each direction led nowhere, absence of sound. An orange light peeked between slanted trunks, not so distant and further obscured by a bright red overhang. Becca’s form sat, back to Alexis and fuzzy in the firelight. Beyond the trees, back beneath the sky.
“Didn’t have time?” Becca continued to poke her fire with a fresh cut branch.
“Too wet.” Alexis plopped next to her, not too close, a forearm-reach away.
“Get up.” Becca got to her feet, dusted hands off on her jeans even though they were covered in more mud than her skin. She leaned over and dipped the far end of her twig into the flames. For a minute silence hung between them, only broken by the pop of greenwood. Becca drew the stick back and a candle sized flame burned on its tip. “Let’s go.”
“It’s too wet.” Alexis insisted, palms open at the edge of the flames, golden-marshmallow distance.
“I found some.” Becca choked up on the stick, shielding the flame from the down-slope winds with her broad shoulders.
Christmas-procession style, she walked towards the trees.
Alexis scrambled to her feet, boots slipped from under her and she ended up with a hand planted inch deep in the mud. Another moment of stabilizing and she followed Becca’s silhouette into the treeline.
Becca took up post near and old pine, minuscule flame still clutched between both hands.
“Are you going to help?” Alexis rifled muddy hands through the leaf-covered floor, crisp pine needles clung to her hands and wedged between her skin and the ring to prick her fingers.
Becca watched, statue-still and symmetrical aside from that hidden tooth. “Congrats.”
“What?” Alexis caught the briefest glance of her own engagement ring, mostly covered in mud. How was she supposed to get that out? “Not yet. I need to break the curse.”
“What curse?”
Silence hung between them, interrupted only by the crackle of the make-shift torch as fire meandered down its length. Embers popped and drifted to the moist forest floor. It wasn’t wildfire season yet.
“Becca, are we stars?” Alexis tried a branch between her fingers: it bent and sprung back to its original position.
“Sometimes.”
Alexis turned to her but Becca’s eyes remained focused, green mixed with the orange of her fire.
“You said gravity keeps things apart.” Alexis continued. She found another branch, this one obviously green even in the dim light.
“It does.”
“Then how do we stop gravity?”
“We don’t.”
“So we’re trapped like this? This cycle, every two years, to have our lives fall apart.”
“It’s not our lives.” The stars shifted from Becca’s eyes and her gaze locked on Alexis. “It’s yours. Every two years you fall apart. I’ve never claimed to be together, if I was, I wouldn’t be here.”
Alexis stayed still, mud crept across her fingers, between the diamonds of her ring. She wanted to deny it: to prove that Becca was as trapped as her. They were Binary Stars, locked in orbit until their destruction: an inevitability they could not escape, as constant as gravity.
“You come back to me and I let you.” Becca’s voice was cold. Not the usual alto-rumble. Her words became lost among tree roots.
Heat rushed from Alexis’s scalp. The ring on her finger bit ice-cold into her skin. She did not come here for this to be her fault. She came for this to be better. To start anew, destruction and reformation, real reformation. “Why then? Why do you let me? You broke things off.”
“Alexis, I said I didn’t love you, not that I didn’t care.”
The cold spread deeper, past the mud splatter on her wrists. “Say you don’t.”
“What?” Becca scrunched her brow, thick eyebrows made darker by the undercast of her flame.
“Say you don’t care. That you hate me.” Alexis trained her gaze on the forest floor, she could make out leaves in the mush but lost them again when tears clouded her vision.
“No.”
“Why!” Tears felt warm compared to the cold void in her stomach. “Let me get over you.”
Becca paused or maybe she spoke, her words swallowed by the forest. “I didn’t lie to you then and I won’t now.”
Alexis faced her, tears tracked sideways on her tilted face. Her eyes locked with Becca’s, though maybe she didn’t feel the same way. She probably couldn’t see Alexis beyond the aura of her tiny flame. “Say it. Let me go.”
Becca looked away, scanned the leaves above them instead of those on the ground. “Alexis, this is all you.”
Alexis willed her legs to move but the cold locked them in place, she didn’t know if it came from inside or out. Her breath hiccupped and chest heaved. A sob scraped her throat but she muffled it between closed lips. This didn’t fix anything, she should have said no. “Becca, I love you.”
“And maybe once, I loved you.”
“But not now?”
“Not now.”
“And no hatred.”
“You never hurt me.”
Alexis could make her. She could take that stick and scar her with it. That would spark hatred, give a binary answer: yes or no, no in-between. Her legs shook, bent for too long, and her knees met dirt. More cold seeped beneath the fabric. How could she? How could she want to hurt anyone, claim she loved them despite it. She left Josef alone in that starless night because she couldn’t face him, couldn’t look at him with the thoughts that ran through her head: if they got married she couldn’t go back to Becca. Even with Becca here, when she finally wasn’t what she wanted, she would do anything to make her that. Alexis wiped her eyes and mud smeared across her cheek. She couldn’t do this, not to either of them.
“Alexis?”
“I’ll sleep in my car if it gets too cold.” Her voice came out clearer than she expected, low but unbroken by the flutter of her breath.
She got to her feet, dusted hands on her pants and turned back towards the open sky. She walked past Becca, feet still firmly planted and flame between both hands. The fire had dwindled halfway down the stick. Becca dropped it to the ground and crushed it with the heel of her boot. The stick snapped and the forest went dark aside from the stars between branches.
Becca might have been two steps behind her or remained in those trees for the rest of the night, Alexis didn’t know. She went to the car, unlocked it but put her keys in the cupholder. The ring slipped off her mud-slick finger easily. She had no fire or dashboard glow to see by, but her phone flashlight caught prismatic glints among the black mud. A power washer might be able to get it out. That was the least she could do. On her dim phone screen, another solitary light against the leather interior, she made out the white NO SERVICE message. It would be thirty kilometers before she could call Josef.