Lost Stars (4 page)

“You've grown,” Mr. Kane said now, smiling at me as if I were a normal kid while he measured my feet. Maybe he was the one person in town who didn't know all the sordid details of my past. I waited for him to say something about the shoes—​why would a sixteen-year-old girl want shitkickers?—​but he just made small talk with my dad, who became his old chatty self. My father loved strangers. It was much harder for him to talk to people he actually knew.

On Monday morning, my father did me the favor of getting my bike out of the shed and strapping the hardhat to the rear rack himself. “You can keep the bungee cord,” he said.

“Wow, Christmas.”

He didn't laugh, just patted the bike to send me on my way. Rosie was standing at the screen door, watching the whole thing.

“What are
you
looking at?”

“You,” she said.

I heard it again. The music. From the other side of the fence. One of my favorite Elvis Costello songs, “Alison”—​
I know this world is killing you
.

I begrudgingly took the bike from my dad.

“You know where it is, right?”

“Yes, Dad, I know where it is. It's in the park. Where I had birthday parties number one through twelve.” Where Ginny's ashes had sifted into the wind.

“You have to be there in twenty minutes. You should go.”

It was the most normal conversation I'd had with him in weeks, or maybe months. Maybe a year. The first day of junior high, I stood in this same yard with this same bike and had a similar conversation. Except Ginny was alive then and my mother was still around and my father wasn't so mean and Rosie was a benign blur of a kid instead of the embodiment of perfection to which I would never live up. My mother had taken me to the mall to buy the bike, one of the rare moments of alone time with her—​that's what happens when you're the middle child. Really, the only thing that remained of that day was my bike, my dear old bike: a twelve-speed Fuji Espree, sparkly gray-blue. Its beauty was marred, I thought, by that hardhat.

“And I expect you to be home right after.”

“I know.”

“If you're not here by five twenty, you'll be grounded for the rest of the summer.”

I pushed the bike away from him, toward the street. “I know.”

As I hopped on and pedaled away, I could just make out the outline of the long-haired boy, sitting on the steps with his guitar.

And that's how I came to be pedaling down Avenue of the Pines, the long road lined with white pine trees that formed the entrance to the state park. It always made me feel like I was embarking on an adventure, the narrow road that would open to some magical vista, the arrival in Shangri-La as the vast green fields came into view. But I always had to pass the spot where the small white cross was still affixed to the tree. Or—​maybe it still was. I didn't look.

When I pulled up to the park's offices, set in the wide flat parking lot where my mom had taught me to ride my bike, I stood for a minute by the bike rack, wondering how I could get out of this, first-day-of-school anxiety mixed with a muddy dread. But it was 9:07, and I was already late, and the only way to slink along to safety was to walk in. So I did. I followed the handwritten signs to a fluorescent-lit room with kids seated at too-small elementary-school-style desks.

A tall fellow with thick, sculpted arms and a name tag that read
Lynn
stood in the front of the classroom, smiling beatifically.

“How ya doin', ma'am?” I said to him, fake-tipping my hat, but he failed to appreciate my humor. He must have grown those muscles to make up for the feminine name.

I slid into my seat and surveyed some of my companions, many of them from my grade, kids I hadn't talked to for ages. I barely had classes with any of them, since I was a year ahead in math and English and science—​history was my shortcoming—​and at lunch and gym and any other intergrade activity, I was with my older friends. How had so many of them become ingrates and inmates and screwups and outcasts like me?

We scrawled our identities on
HELLO MY NAME IS . . .
name tags, but I vaguely remembered some of them: Kelsey and that scrawny boy named Jimmie and, crap, Tonya Sweeny. Great. I wrote
Caraway
on my name tag just to freak them out, to show that I was different. For once in my life, I was glad that I didn't belong.

Lynn handed out black and white composition books and golf pencils with the park's logo on them. Also black fanny packs (blech) and small hammers, all of them branded by the park.

“Thank you so much for coming,” he said.

“Did we have the option not to?” I asked, looking around, assuming my compatriots in forced labor would commiserate. But nothing. Staring straight ahead, which seemed strange for kids who were purportedly troublemakers. They were a compliant set of miscreants. Lynn didn't smile either; I wondered if my father had called ahead to warn him of my history of misdeeds.

“We're pleased to welcome you to the inaugural Youth Summer Workforce Camp.”

“It's camp?” I said. “Yay. Color wars!”

Only the skinny boy, Jimmie, laughed and then stifled it when Lynn looked at him. The flatter my jokes fell, the greater the itch to tell them.

“Not that kind of camp,” Lynn said, his voice laced with so much syrupy understanding that I had to fight to keep from rolling my eyes. “We'll be teaching you some basic construction skills, as well as familiarizing you with the native flora and fauna of the park.” He said this as if he were offering us free rein at Sizzler, or an extra week of school vacation. “Each week we'll work on conservation and improvement projects. And by the end of the summer, you'll be able to see the fruits of your labor.”

Tonya looked pleased. I wondered what she'd done to land in here.

Lynn told us that he was finishing his masters in psychology and took this job because he loved working with kids and wanted to share the power of nature and how good it felt to do hard work and how much he loved the low grumble of hunger in his belly after he'd been out in a field, reaping or sowing or building or tearing something down. “I'm really excited to work together,” he said, his John Lennon glasses reflecting the sun. I stopped listening, instead opening my notebook and doodling—​I was very good at drawing flowers, and I could just spy the heads of pink roses unfurling above the windowsill. It reminded me of that song by the Jam. And of that boy. And his guitar.

“Caraway?” Lynn was standing in front of my chair. From the looks of it, he'd been saying my name. “You with us?”

I slumped in my seat. “Yeah, I'm with you,” I said. “Do I have a choice?”

Lynn took it easy on us that first day. Just a hike around the park to show us the massive calcium deposit that had formed around a geyser—​a streaky white-and-rust-colored mass that looked like a giant's half-rotten tooth—​and the spots along the creek where the sweet orange flowers called jewelweed grew.

“Jewelweed has healing properties,” Lynn said, picking a few buds and passing them around. Each of the kids did their due diligence, studying the delicate orange petals, but I just passed it on to Tonya, who was sweating in her off-brand JCPenney version of an Izod shirt, with a fox instead of an alligator, dark smudges beneath her armpits. I tried my best to smile at her when I saw the way she was pressing her arms down against her sides, trying to hide the watery stains.

The only other person I knew who was obsessed with Mars, Tonya was the one I had taken with me to the NASA exhibit down at the New York State Museum in Albany when we were thirteen, to see the
Fourth Planet from the Sun
exhibit. I had sort of, kind of, wanted to talk to her about it when the Mars Ares rover disappeared into the ether earlier this year, erasing our chances of knowing the planet better.

Now Tonya was closely examining the petals of jewelweed. “This is awesome,” she said. “Very interesting that it has this translucent stalk.” She pressed it between her fingers. “There's gold liquid inside.”

“That's the healing salve,” Lynn said.

She touched one of the seedpods nestled inside the flower, and it popped out. “Amazing,” she said. She looked at me for a minute, the first time we'd made eye contact in weeks or months or years, who knew? She probably assumed I would share her enthusiasm for the biological profile of jewelweed, but I stayed silent.

Lynn had taken us to the path along the creek that ran through the center of the park. Farther up the path, at the crest of the hill, the observatory loomed. Stone steps led up to it, but it had been closed, of course, thanks to the public revelation of the observatory as teenage party spot. Or because of budget cuts, which was what the park gave as the official reason. Between here and there, the walkway was muddy and worn away. It would have been hard to get to even if it were open. Even if I could have handled it.

“What are we actually doing?” I asked Lynn, who had crouched beside a rut in the dirt; the other kids circled around him.

“We're identifying the optimal spots to build the footbridge,” he said, as if that should have been obvious to me.

“Um,” I said, “shouldn't you leave that footbridge stuff to the professionals? I do not have an impressive history with woodworking projects.”

Lynn stood up and smiled at me so earnestly that it was like bright lights shining in my eyes. “Kids, listen up: don't tell me that you can't do something. Tell me that you want to learn to do something—​that you don't know yet, but you will. Got it?” He took his own hammer out of the loop on his pants and held up a shiny nail. “Look,” he said. “This is a hammer. This is a nail.”

“And this is your brain on drugs,” I said.

“You may not know how to use them now,” he continued, ignoring me, “but by the end of the summer, we'll have built a bridge in the park. And”—​he emphasized this last part—​“with each other.” I fake-gagged, but I couldn't get a laugh out of anyone.

By the end of the afternoon, my boots were caked with mud, I had dirt under my fingernails, and I was exhausted. My summer job at Dot's Duds had mostly involved sitting on a chair, folding accessories (many of which ended up in my pocket), and stepping out to smoke cigarettes that I'd stolen from Dot. But, of course, I had told the therapist about that, too. I was essentially unemployable because of her, even though technically I'm pretty sure her big-mouth-ness was illegal, or at least unethical.

Before we left, Lynn had us sit in a circle beneath the very welcome shade of a beechnut tree and write in our notebooks about our impressions of the program after day one. I had already lost my golf pencil, so I told Lynn, “I'm gonna do mine in invisible ink.” But he gave me his own pen, black and green marbled, heavy and cool to the touch.

“This is one of my most prized possessions,” he said. “Make sure you give it back. A good pen is hard to find.” Around me, my fellow inmates were furiously scribbling. I just wrote, “I hate this job already,” and closed the notebook tight. I kept his pen.

My father wasn't home when I pulled my bike into our yard. As I went to lean it against the house, I heard the sound again, the music. Somehow I missed the side of the house and the bike came crashing down, right on my foot. I yelped.

“You okay?”

It was the boy. He was tall enough that he could see over the fence, and he was holding his guitar in his left hand. His hair was messy, hanging in front of one eye. He was too cute to look at.

I was somehow hoping that if I didn't move, he wouldn't see me, wouldn't see the hardhat and the work boots caked with mud and the dirt that had wedged beneath my fingernails and my mother's old flannel shirt and my godforsaken canvas painter's pants with my brand-new shiny hammer hanging from a loop.

I just said, “Ummmm.”

And that was it. Then I turned and ran into the house and stood at the screen door, and I could almost discern his movements behind the fence. He stood there for a minute, then returned to the big house's porch and sat down with his guitar. He sang a little bit off-key, just the tiniest bit flat, a hint of twang in his voice. I loved twang.

For some reason I was out of breath, as if I had one-time adolescent asthma. There were two things that helped me breathe: pot and singing. So I trudged up to my room, taking my filthy clothes off as I went, and got a joint and changed into a tank top and cutoffs and bare feet, and got my guitar—​a beat-up old Gibson with a rich, bell-like sound that my mother had played in a band in college. I opened the window and climbed out onto the roof of the porch with my guitar. I didn't look toward Mrs. Richmond's giant fancy house. But I could hear. He was playing a song by Squeeze: “Goodbye Girl.”

I went out to my corner of the roof with my guitar. The sun was setting, zodiacal light glinting off the horizon. And very softly, I played along with the simple song: D, then A, then D, then G. Maybe not loud enough for him to hear me. I didn't know.

And then my father was yelling, his voice surely carrying over the fence: “Caraway, get off the roof! And you left your filthy clothes all over the floor. Come down here this instant and pick them up!” My father yelling, my real name, my filthy clothes. The music stopped. On his side too, the music stopped.

The point of our being in the park,
besides to rehabilitate us, was to build a footbridge. Most of our summer-long program, Lynn declared, would be spent designing and constructing a three-hundred-foot bridge that would span the muddy, makeshift walkway from the giant calcium deposit, across the creek, and all the way to the stone steps of the observatory.

“It's possible that they'll be reopening it at some point,” he said. He didn't look at me throughout the announcement. Did he know?