Lost Stars (19 page)

“You took my telescope? You stole my telescope?”

“No—​Carrie, I—”

But it was too late. It was starting to happen: the screaming, the shaking. My face went red, my hands trembled. I was ready to shake something, break something, hit something, to lunge and snarl at my mother, a Tasmanian devil of a person now, screaming and screaming, kicking, waving my hands as Rosie and Dean tried to hold on to me. “I can't believe you! That's my
telescope!
” I headed toward my mother but she moved and I hit the wall instead. I hit it and hit it and hit it and hit it, and I was screaming, “What's the matter with you?” but was I saying that to her or to me—​
What's the
matter
with you?
—​until I felt another hand take hold of mine and pull it back to my side and squeeze it, allowing some anger to leak out. Then a squeeze of my shoulder. I felt my whole body exhale. Rosie. Rosie held on to me until my body stopped flailing.

Many other lost souls had stepped out onto the porches of their cabins now, out of the cool shadows of the monastery, and they were staring at us. I didn't care. I didn't care about anything anymore. I was going to finish ruining my life and then maybe jump off a bridge. Or at least jump off a footbridge.

Our mother said, very quietly, “I just wanted to have a little piece of you.”

“Well, you can't,” Rosie said. “We'll be taking this with us.” She attempted to hoist the telescope, but it was so heavy. I was spent now, plopped cross-legged on the ground, still catching my breath. Dean had crouched next to me but now he stood and lifted the telescope. Or, he tried to. It was too bulky and heavy for him, too, and somehow he started to laugh, and Rosie chuckled, and I almost laughed too. I couldn't believe it. I was actually, sort of, kind of laughing. The only person not laughing was my mother, who sat on the step to her cabin, head in hands, crying.

I would have liked to grab the telescope and throw it over my shoulder, to make a dramatic exit, but my back was still sore from not bending my knees as Tonya had instructed. None of us could lift it, so we had to take it apart: the finderscope and the equatorial mount and the Poncet platform. Dean helped too, not looking at me but attending to the project with his usual handyman skill. It took a ridiculously long time, so long that my mother's community of monks stopped watching us. But my mother stood there, helpless, arms folded across her chest, whimpering, “I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I love you I'm sorry I love you.”

Finally I said, “I get it. I believe you.” But I didn't look at her again.

Dean carried the bulk of it, I carried the stand, and Rosie carried the manual. Betty had kept the manual with it—​she probably never even really learned out how use it.

My mother ran after us and she grabbed me, wrapped her arms around me, tight as a boa constrictor, but I just stood there, arms affixed to my sides, as if I were her prey, already suffocated. I couldn't have lifted my arms to hug her back even if I'd tried.

Rosie shared the back seat with the
bulky telescope parts.
None of us looked at one another or talked as we pulled away. I didn't care anymore. I knew that was the end of me and Dean. He'd seen it, the true horror that hid inside me. No one could tolerate that, even my own parents. We sat there for a few minutes. I don't think any of us knew exactly where to go or what to do now.

“Here, put this on,” Rosie said, taking the tape from her Walkman and handing it to me in the front seat. Dean turned the radio on.

I pressed it into the tape deck. Gloria Gaynor's powerful voice came bursting out. “I Will Survive.”

“Rosie—​you like disco? I had no idea. You were only three when this song came out. You were still on Raffi.”

“‘I Will Survive' transcends all musical genres,” she said. “It's pure genius.”

Rosie. Who knew?

Dean and I looked at each other and smiled, and then I thought maybe, actually, somehow it would be okay.

We drove in the dark night, north, back toward our little town. I realized that I'd been sweating in the cabin and now I had that post-sweat chill, my whole body exhausted and dampening Dean's shirt.

The sky was black now, and cloudless, with a thin sliver of moon and constellations erupting above and around us, Lyra and Hercules and Sagittarius. Rosie stared out the window, her hand around the telescope and her cheek leaning against the side of the car.

“There's a blanket in the back,” Dean said to her, and Rosie got the worn plaid wool blanket and snuggled beneath it.

Dean's brow seemed to be permanently furrowed. I could only imagine what thoughts he was lost in, the ways he was trying to conjure up to let me down easy, to remove himself from the path of my wrath. He put a tape in. John Lennon singing “Mother,” a song that used to rip right through me even when mine was around.
You had me, but I never had you.

“So, I have a question,” Dean said. My stomach knotted up.

“Do I have to answer it?”

“I'm afraid so,” he said. I stared up at the Scorpion constellation's gleaming frame. Was there some way I could sting myself with its tail? Was there some way I could ascend to the heavens and get out of this thing where I screwed up my life on Earth over and over again?

“What is your favorite song?” Dean asked.

Oh. My whole body sighed with relief. I laughed, probably too hard. “Oh, crap—​that is a really hard question.”

“You have to answer.” He was smiling, but he didn't seem all there somehow. This was all filler so he could slip away unnoticed. Still, if we were going to make small talk and pretend nothing had happened, this was probably the best small talk there was.

“Well. Okay. Actually, my favorite song when I was six was ‘I Will Survive.'”

“Already demonstrated to be of timeless value,” he said. “Go on.”

“The first record I bought with my allowance was Elvis Costello,
My Aim Is True.
”

“Marked improvement in your taste.”

“I'm really into
Velvet Underground & Nico
right now,” I said. “‘I'll Be Your Mirror.'”

“Awesome.”

“Um, I love X—​‘Fourth of July.'”

“A great song.”

“I'm not saying it's my favorite, just that I really like it. Maybe this should just be a list of great songs. ‘Bohemian Rhapsody'? Queen? Stevie Wonder's ‘Superstition'? But then there's Marvin Gaye—​anything on
What's Going On
. Anything on Bob Dylan's
Desire
. I feel the need to include a Joni Mitchell song here. ‘Blue'? Who has a favorite song? How is that possible? My mind is actually exploding right now.”

“It was a trick question,” he said. “It's not possible.”

“So not fair,” I said.

“You guys are total music nerds,” Rosie called groggily from the back. “I like Bob Seger.”

Dean and I both groaned. “Rosie—​watch out. You're going back on my shit list.”

“Bon Jovi? Whitney Houston. Madonna?”

“Great-looking, not actual good music,” Dean said.

“Kenny G?”

I put my hands up. “Stop it, you're hurting my ears!”

“Cyndi Lauper?”

Dean shook his head, but I said, “I can give you that one.”

“Prince?”

“Is that a real question?” I asked her. “Do you dare to suggest that someone doesn't like Prince?”

“Michael Jackson?”

“Everyone in the entire world likes Michael Jackson,” I said. I took the tape out from the glove compartment, put it in, and turned the volume way up.

“The Girl Is Mine” blasted from the speakers.

“You do realize this is the worst song on the album, right?” asked Dean. But Rosie sang it anyway, loud and off-key, and I loved her.

When Rosie was asleep in the back again, and the windows were down, the soft night sky on our arms, Dean cleared his throat. “Listen . . .”

I didn't want him to finish. He was going to pre-break up with me. Or say he just wanted to be friends. Or say that he couldn't hang out anymore because he didn't want to get attacked with a shoe.

“No, you don't have to—”

“No, listen, okay? Just listen.” He checked in the rearview mirror to make sure Rosie was still asleep. “Listen—​it's okay. What happened back there. I totally get it. It's freaky, but I get it. Don't think . . . you know . . . don't think that I won't . . .”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“But, I do have a question,” he said. “A real question.”

“Well,” I said. “You're in luck.”

I told him everything.

Pablo the arborist's daughter wasn't at their country house, and I stayed in her room and I did as any fourteen-year-old girl would do, or so I thought—​as my friends and I did whenever we were babysitting: I rifled through her things. Then, when my dad and Pablo went out and got stoned on the deck—​as if I didn't know what they were doing—​I went through Pablo's wife's and daughter's things, and I compiled a stash: an opal and diamond ring, a silver bracelet with carvings of moons and stars (my favorite), an owl pin with tiny rubies. I even took the little framed greeting cards off the wall in the daughter's room and put them in my purple duffel bag with the red handles: one picture of a peace dove, the delicate olive branch balanced in its beak, the other a photograph of a sculpture of two stone bodies wrapped around each other. I was so psyched. I barely had any jewelry, and I loved those pictures.

My dad said I wanted to get caught. He claimed I left my notebook open on the kitchen table to the page where I described the loot in detail—​bragged, he said, about the haul. My mom couldn't call up that old-fashioned defense of hers:
She's just a kid, Paul, leave her alone.
She couldn't say anything.

Then it was all four of us in the kitchen, Rosie, just turned ten, and my dad and my mom. He put me in a chair and interrogated me while my mom sat empty-eyed in the corner and Rosie was just sitting there looking astonished and genuinely frightened on my behalf.

You're a thief,
he kept saying. I tried to run out of the kitchen, but my dad blocked the door and then it just happened. I grabbed a knife from the kitchen counter, and I held it against Rosie's throat, and I said,
Let me out of here, or I'll kill her.

The blow from the backside of my father's hand was sudden and strong, and then I was on the ground, my father standing over my crumpled body with his hand pointed at me like a gun, and he said,
Don't you dare touch my daughter.
And the three of them left and locked the door, and I just lay there on that cold and dirty tile screaming and sobbing.

I think I fell asleep. Eventually I heard the click of the door unlocking. I stood up and brushed off my dirty clothes, a colorful tie-dye T-shirt and a jean skirt. I walked out of the kitchen and passed my father, his eyes red from crying or pot I didn't know and didn't care, out of the front door and over to Soo's, and I didn't come home for a week.

Soo's mom didn't mind. She'd always liked me better than she liked her own kid—​
Soo, you slob, pick up your room,
to Soo, and
Carrie, honey, how you doing? Come over and tell me what's new,
to me. My mom and dad didn't even call.

And then one day my dad appeared in front of Soo's house in our dented crap-brown Buick, and I came out and got in and he started the car and we didn't talk until I saw that we weren't headed home, when I said,
Where are we going?
He didn't look at me. He just said,
I'm taking you to a shrink.

I told Dean now what I told the therapist then: the full length of my confession. All the stealing from babysitting gigs and all the gross shit I'd already done with boys and all the cigarettes and pot and drinking I'd already starting doing with Greta and Soo and how I'd put myself in all manner of unseemly situations and how many times I just could not calm down. I unleashed it all.

“I think I thought that some part of me was going to be saved when I told her all that stuff,” I said to Dean. “That I would have a real-life ally.”

“I get it,” he said, his lips still turned down.

“So, then the therapist decided to be the worst human being in the world and told my mom and dad, and they told all the people I babysat for, and I lost all my jobs, and everyone knew, everywhere I went, and then I didn't feel like being alive anymore, and I said so, so they locked me up in the hospital for a week and pumped me full of drugs, and when I got out, each family that I babysat for came to our house and asked me what I'd stolen and if I'd taken drugs or smoked cigarettes around their kids. And I hadn't, but they seemed like they didn't believe me.

“After that I was pretty much banned from babysitting, and the only job I could get was as cashier at my dad's friend's clothing store. So, that was my summer job last year, but this year I got canned and my father sent me to boot camp. Before that, I was mostly sitting around, making a mix tape for my funeral.”

Finally, I was done. I exhaled. Dean knew everything, and after that, I'd never see him again and that was fine because nothing was ever going to happen between us anyway. “Everything with my dad and pretty much every other human in this town has just gotten worse and worse.”

Dean shifted gears again as we neared the exit. Freckles even on his fingers. I loved freckles so much.

“That's probably the name of our album,” he said. “
Mix Tape for My Funeral.
”

“Something's wrong with me,” I whispered, trying so hard not to cry. “I'm some kind of crazy.”

He was silent for a minute, and in that time, the whole world was opening and closing, full of possibility and defeat. “Yeah, something's wrong with me, too,” he said finally. “You know what's wrong with me?”