NONFICTION | Kerri Goers The Pleiades

NONFICTION

The Pleiades

For Andrea

By Kerri Goers

We climb the wooden stairs to the edge, lift one leg over and then the other, and lower ourselves into the hot tub. It’s eight o’clock at night. The sky is darker at your ranch, fifteen miles outside of Trinidad. A half-moon hangs low — two on the face of a clock. The stars are more visible here at 6,555 feet, than the 665 feet of Iowa, denser and spread across the sky in long swaths like sugar spilled across a floor. I know little of constellations or planets. Where is the belt of Orion? Those sisters: The Pleiades? Can we see Jupiter in this Colorado night sky? Venus? As children, you and I looked only for the North star, the Big and Little Dipper.

The jets in the tub cut out. It is quiet; only the lapping of the water against the side of the tub is audible, slowing to stillness.

“We usually go inside after we see a shooting star,” you say.

You aren’t in the tub with us. You’re wrapped in a large, green Selk bag, which resembles a sleeping bag with legs. You affectionately refer to it as Gumby. The port they placed below your right clavicle is covered with a large plastic dressing from which tubing extends out and down your chest – like stubborn long arm tendrils of Russian sage stretching out from the root – to the medication pump you are wearing in a fanny pack at your waist. Your chemo infusion isn’t done until tomorrow. You sit next to us, in Gumby, sipping hot tea.

We watch the stars.

The heated water soothes my legs and back. I’m aware that your body, full of vitriol, aches everywhere. You want this simple comfort for us, so we try to be soothed.

The birds are silent. The only noise is a distant sort of humming.

“There!” your husband says, and you draw a quick breath. He points at the sky: a shooting-star. I missed it.

We stand, step out of the tub, towel dry, and wrap ourselves in thick terrycloth robes while you wait for us, sipping your tea. We pull the cumbersome lid over the steaming water and snap it in place. By the light of our headlamps, we make our way back to the house, along the gravel path.

Before we go in, I look up at the sky. I look again for a shooting star because of course, my sister, there is something, for which, I desperately wish.