Angie was quite worried. Since she received that call from Marvin saying that he had been arrested, she was feeling anxious.
She just couldn't get to sleep without knowing exactly what had happened. She had put little baby Eugene to sleep in his crib, and now, she was endlessly turning in her sheets without being able to fall asleep herself.
It was quite unsettling to know that her husband was in detention somewhere on another continent. Although he said on the phone that he was safe and she shouldn't worry.
What had happened at the museum? Had the plan succeeded or failed? She couldn't know. All she could deduce was that at least something went wrong, since Marvin got arrested.
And where was Fluffy now?
After some time spent awake asking herself thousands of questions, Angie finally fell asleep.
But it wasn't a calm and profound kind of sleep. It was a bit strange and fuzzy. She had some dreams.
In one of them, she arrived into a glade in the middle of the woods during the night. The glade was full of high grass and surrounded at a distance by dark trees.
She recognized that place. It was not the first time she was there. She already went there in real life.
Yes, she could remember that place now. She came a few times in that glade together with Marvin some years before that. It was more or less at the beginning of their relationship. This was the place where they used to go to watch the sky at night with Marvin's telescope.
It was the perfect spot to gaze at the stars, since it was in the middle of nowhere, with no one else around, and no visual pollution. It was completely dark down in the glade. They could barely see each other, but were completely undisturbed by city lights or houses around. There was just the calm, peaceful wilderness, with an incredibly deep and sparkling sky above.
In her dream, Angie felt the same kind of awe that she felt back then, walking in a devoid land, under the vault of heaven. The stars up there were incredibly big and bright, shining with eternal majesty. The Milky Way was flowing overhead in full brightness.
And now, Marvin was also with her in the dream. It was weird, because although it was a dream, it gave an impression of vivid reality. And everything was seemingly unfolding in the exact same manner as the first time they came.
It was a warm summer night. The high grass was rippling under a soft breeze. The fragrant darkness all around was haunted with dark green shadows of distant beechen and maple trees. Everything was so peaceful.
Marvin was struggling with the telescope.
"First, we have to aim at the North Star" he explained. "Once we find it, we can fix the mount of the telescope."
He was rotating and tilting the viewfinder in every direction looking for something up in the sky.
"Ah, here it is! I think it's this one. It is at the tail of the constellation Ursa Major."
"Ursa Minor." corrected Angie.
"Yeah, whatever. It works just the same."
He was trying to impress her, but she was more of an astronomy nerd than he was.
It made her smile again in her dream, just as it did back then.
"Now, with its coordinates, I should be able to find it… Hum… Let's see… Where are you, damned planet? Oh, here! Gotcha. Come and see this, Angie."
She put her eye at the telescope's eyepiece and saw it. Here it was. A bright tiny spot circled with a fragile ring of light, trembling in the obscure depth of the telescope. Saturn with its ring!
"Oh, wow! That's so beautiful." she said.
"Pretty cool, huh?"
"Yeah, especially when you think about the distance that separate us from Saturn. And our eye can actually see it! It's almost magical."
After that, they just sat on the grass and admired the sky with the naked eye.
Marvin explained pointing his finger upward "You see, this one is Aquila. And this one… hum… Leo, I think. Or Sagittarius. Oh and this one, you see? It has the shape of the letter 'W'. It's Lyra."
"Cassiopea." corrected Angie.
"Oh, look! Have you seen that?"
A shooting star went across the sky. And then a second one. In fact there were plenty of them.
Marvin said "Oh wow! We should make a wish."
"It's a meteor shower." explained Angie. "These are actually the Perseids."
"The Perseids?"
"Yes. They are called this way because, you see, they all seem to come from the same spot located in the constellation Perseus. Here. That spot is called the radiant."
"So these shooting stars are comets?"
"No, in fact these ones are debris left by the comet Swift-Tuttle. Particles of dust and ice. When the Earth crosses the stream left by the comet, those debris burn through its atmosphere. That's why we can see them."
"Wow, you know stuff!"
"Of course I do."
"Hum. It's funny…"
"What's funny?"
"Look at the time."
And he showed his watch. The digital display was indicating 3:33 A.M.
"See. It's really the case we make a wish."
"Okay." agreed Angie. "Let's make a wish."
She wanted to wish something good for her son. It was strange, she realized, because at the time when the dream was supposed to take place she had not yet a son.
This thought introduced maybe some kind of disruption in the continuity of her dream. And as it often happens in dreams, a simple thought was enough to make something new occur.
It wasn't anymore the way in which things had unfolded in reality, because now, the sky had changed. Something huge, a pure wonder, had appeared overhead.
"What's that?" thought Angie.
It was as if the nightly sky had opened and now a distant object was visible in plain sight. It looked like a bright galaxy. It was a mesmerizing haze of light, a dreamy cloud that was occupying a huge portion of the sky.
"Is it possibly that it be… the Fluffy galaxy?"
The vision was ringing with a distant echo, shrouded in pure cold light.
"What an amazing night. I wish we were there again." she heard Marvin say.
When she woke up in the middle of the night, the first thing Angie noticed was that the clock was displaying 1:11 A.M.
" I have two hours and twenty-two minutes left…" she thought without knowing why. "…two hours and twenty-two minutes before 3:33 A.M."
She raised her head from the pillow.
"What does this mean? Could it be…? Maybe…"