a bite of the squid, which was warm and sweet. “Might I show you something?” he asked.
Everyone nodded, and he walked over to a pair of bicycle taxis. After telling the drivers his intentions, Ian and Mattie got into one seat, while Georgia and Holly occupied the other. The drivers pedaled hard, and the contraptions gathered speed, easing into the empty road. Two-hundred-year-old storefronts passed. Streetlamps flickered. Mattie and Holly reached out to each other and clasped hands. One driver smoked a cigarette while his companion spoke to him in Vietnamese.
The bicycle taxis turned down a dirt road, rumbling ahead like a pair of racing tortoises. As the lights of Hoi An faded behind them, the stars strengthened. Coconut trees bordered the road, rising high, their fronds whispering in the wind. Soon the surf could be heard. A beach appeared, gray and massive.
Ian paid the drivers and asked them to wait. Taking Mattie’s hand, he led her forward, toward the sea. Georgia and Holly followed, talking about the beauty of the night, which seemed to increase with each passing step. Layers of stars, as countless as the grains of sand beneath their feet, sparkled in a sky that was filled with too much light to be considered black. A few hundred paces to their right, a group of Vietnamese had gathered around a bonfire and were singing. The bonfire partly illuminated the nearby sea. The singing mingled with the crashing of waves.
“Here’s a beaut of a spot,” Ian said, lying down on the sand twenty feet from the water and seemingly a handbreadth from the sky. “This is what we’d do in the bush,” he added. “When my mates and I were young. Sometimes we’d light a campfire. We called it a bush telly. But it was better to watch the stars in the dark.”
Mattie, Holly, and Georgia also moved to the sand, staring up. At first, no one spoke. The sky twinkled. Occasionally, shooting stars flashed past forgotten constellations, disappearing above the sea. Several satellites—no more than specks of light—drifted, their steel hulls reflecting sunlight from the other side of the world. No moon was present. Nor were any clouds. The sky was alone with its worlds and histories and monuments.
Georgia realized that her ex-husband, despite his role as a museum director, as someone who loved beauty, had never encouraged her to do anything like gaze at stars. “What do you see?” she asked, listening to the waves, watching a satellite.
Holly gathered sand in her hand and let it fall through her fingers. “I think the shooting stars are the best. It’s like . . . an invisible giant is waving a bunch of candles above us. And they’re going out, splash, splash, splash, when they fall into the ocean.”
“How about you, Mattie?” Georgia wondered. “What do you see up there?”
Mattie saw her mother in the stars, saw the beauty and grace and strength of someone who had made her feel free. But she wasn’t sure if she should say as much. She didn’t want to make her father sad. On the other hand, she didn’t want to lie to Georgia either. “I . . . I see my mother,” she finally replied, tears gathering in the hollows below her eyes. She felt guilty that she hadn’t thought about her mother all day. And now, looking at the sky, she feared that she would forget her mother’s voice, her face. Feeling panic rise within her, she reached for her father’s hand. He took her fingers in his, squeezed her flesh, and she knew that his thoughts followed in the footsteps of hers.
“Your mum was beautiful,” he responded, unsure what to say in front of Georgia and Holly. “And you’re right. She was just like this sky. She wasn’t a single star, but a heap of them.”
Mattie blinked, her tears stinging. “All of them.”
“You know what else is beautiful, luv?”
“What?”
“The four of us, lying here next to the South China Sea, looking at this lovely sky. We’re four friends. Four mates, really. And I reckon that’s a beautiful thing too.”
Mattie nodded, squeezing his fingers. “We’re . . . kind of like a family.”
He stiffened, turning toward her. “A family of friends.”
Georgia, who lay on the other side of Mattie, wished that she could see Ian’s face, that he would build a campfire with Holly’s help, and that the girls could throw sticks into it while she rested her head on his chest. Yet she would never encourage him to touch