Lost Stars (5 page)

“So let me tell you how this is going to work,” he continued. “We'll choose a design. We'll do some waymaking, which is what they call making a path in England.” He offered no explanation of why we should be learning the British version, but okay. “We'll be learning all the steps and all the tools needed. Got it?”

The kids nodded their heads.

“Got it?” Lynn asked again.

A few said “Yes!” or “Got it!” but that wasn't good enough for our lead Boy Scout, Lynn. “Let me hear you say it!” he shouted. And then the whole group, everyone but me, shouted, “Got it!” Tonya yelled the loudest, and most enthusiastically, of all. Maybe she was competing for the title of most rehabilitatable. Lynn leaned back, arms crossed, a satisfied smile on his face.

“I'm going to pass this around for inspiration,” he said, displaying a book called
Footbridges from Around the World,
waving his hands past the cover like a car-show model.

“This is a thing?” I asked.

“What do you mean?”

“People care about footbridges enough that they published a whole book about them?”

“Yes,” Lynn said. “People care about all kinds of things that you have never even heard of.”

While I waited—​with breathless anticipation, of course—​for the book to come around to me, I adjusted the calculations in my notebook. I'd started them earlier in the year, when I knew that Vira was on its way. It had been discovered back in the 1600s by Dmitri Sergeevich Alexandrov, a kind of tragic figure in the history of physics, Newton's shadowy nemesis. It always traveled in an elliptical path around the sun, just as we did. At last count, it was still zooming its way past Mars at 128,000 miles an hour. It was still more than two hundred million miles away.

I couldn't imagine how footbridges would possibly be more fascinating than comets, and I was prepared to just pass the book on, as I had with the jewelweed. But then I saw a couple of them as Jimmie handed it to me. There were ones made out of whole logs; ones with curved side rails, painted red; one with zigzagging planks like Jenga; one made out of arched rock.

“How do they get that to stay that way?” I asked. Apparently I hadn't voiced a rhetorical question, because Tonya answered me.

“It's how an arch works,” she said. “Two weaknesses that form a strength when they lean together. Basically just two forces, one downward and one outward.” She said this as if she really wanted to say “dumbass” at the end of her sentence. We had not had a real conversation for almost two years.

“Right,” I said, as if I'd known the answer all along. Which I should have. “It's defying gravity.”

“No, dumbass,” she said, quietly enough so that Lynn didn't hear. “It's
using
gravity. ‘Every force has an equal and opposite force,' as I'm pretty sure you know.” I looked down at my still-newish work boots. “They're pushing against each other, and that holds them in place.”

“Right,” I said again. There was one in which the handrails and posts were made out of a tangle of vines, storybook style; one with flower boxes all along the sides, long, weeping flowers hanging toward the water, weirdly beautiful and sculptural; and some really boring ones with plain old sticks of wood at the end.

“Ours will be like the ones on the last few pages,” Lynn said, and I felt the small descent of disappointment.

I hated it. This was no surprise to me, and probably not to my father, but by week two, after the introduction to weeding and elementary hammering, it seemed to surprise Lynn.

“Caraway?” he said, walking up to me and putting a hand on my shoulder as I vaguely picked at some weeds that were doing their best to choke the path that wound through a grove of cypress trees. Why had I told him my real name? “Need a hand?”

“No,” I said. I crouched down, or at least I tried to, but the boots were still stiff, the leather unforgiving, and it was hard to bend with my ankles held captive inside them. My canvas painter's pants were too scratchy. My mother's gardening shirt, green and blue and black plaid, which I'd somehow grown attached to, was now covered in dirt. I reached for a weed and yanked on it, but it was tenacious and it didn't come with me as I leaned back. I ended up falling on my butt. I looked up to see if any of the other kids had noticed, but they all seemed perfectly focused as they wrested unfriendly vines from the ground.

The morning had started with a brief presentation on the kinds of flora and fauna found in the park, what was good and what was harmful and what to go toward and what to avoid as we began to weed and clear the path.

I had doodled in my journal through the whole thing, making 3D letters of the lyrics to that Jam song—​no matter where he roams he returns to his English Rose—​so I really had no idea what we were supposed to be doing here. Weeding, apparently, in the spot where we would eventually build the footbridge: a youth chain gang.

A breeze drifted in and the park turned golden and hazy. I leaned back with my park-issued trowel in my hand and watched as a red-winged blackbird landed on a cattail in the swampy stretch a few hundred feet from us. Beyond the field, I could see the curved gray walls of the observatory. I tried not to think about why it was closed. Then I tried not to think about the boy. I thought about the boy.

“I'm hungry,” I said, and no one replied. “Ugh, this is hard.” Still nothing.

“Just try to enjoy that feeling of hunger, of how hard you're working for it,” Lynn said. “It gets easier and easier.”

“That's what my mom used to say, and then she left because nothing got easier,” I said, and that shut him up. I didn't know why I said that, let that tidbit of information, normally kept locked away, slip. I knew better than to trust professionals in the mental health field.

“Try it like this,” Lynn said, and he grabbed a clump of timothy grass by its base, where the stem disappeared into the ground. It slid right out.

“Okay.” I shrugged, and did as he said. And, yeah, it slid right out.

“It feels really good to make one small adjustment and have everything align, doesn't it?”

How one person could smile so much, at so many tiny and unimportant observations, was beyond me. Except, okay, yeah: it did feel a little bit good to make one small adjustment and have everything align. But I wasn't going to say so.

We were working in a small group in the field, and it reminded me of my parents' honeymoon photos. They had gone to a city in Sicily, an under-the-radar place called Enna, which was one of the highest elevations on the island (not to be confused with Etna, the giant volcano). It offered the magical combination of clear views of the sky for my father and particularly good growing conditions for herbs, which appealed to my mom. That was where they picked the rosemary and the caraway and saw the occultation of Regulus, when an asteroid passed in front of the Regulus star, blocking its light. They'd found everything near and dear to them in one beautiful place. They had photographs of the old women in black scarves amid the fields of herbs, and if I squinted just right, we looked like that here in the park, except we were wayward teens amid the weeds in hardhats and canvas pants.

It seemed as if hours had gone by, and we'd barely made a dent in those weeds, and I was sweating and stinky and so bored of listening to Kelsey and Tonya compare notes on the members of Duran Duran.

“Simon is totally my boyfriend,” Kelsey said. She was very small, even smaller than I was, with coffee-colored skin and a frizz of black hair.

“No, it's Nick—​that hair. Totally decent,” said Tonya. She'd grown heavier since we'd stopped being friends, and it seemed like it was kind of hard for her to breathe with all the hard work. I thought about offering her some water from the cooler, but then she said, “I am so totally having Nick's babies.”

Their happiness, to me, was like some giant balloon expanding in my face. I had no choice but to pop it. Duran Duran was just not acceptable.

“They're all gay,” I said. “You know that, right?”

Their faces took on the potent combination of surprise and annoyance, while Lynn's eyes widened in what looked like fear and his mouth shut sharply. This was foreign territory for him. He was great at talking about hard work and the variety of promising construction tools, but homosexual teenage icons? Not so much. Tonya scrunched up her face and shook her head.

That cocktail of shame and satisfaction swirled inside me, and I moved over to another section of the path. I took another cassette out of my old worn backpack and changed Big Star to Hüsker Dü in my Walkman, then put the headphones over my ears and pretended to concentrate on the task at hand, the untamable weeds spilling over the land.

I also pretended that I couldn't see Lynn's crazy muscly calves as they stood before me, weird bulbous hairy calves that ended in olive-colored socks and brown leather hiking boots—​he was some kind of cross between a hippie and an army sergeant.

“Caraway, um.”

I kept picking at the plants.

“Caraway?”

Finally he reached and carefully took my headphones off my ears. “Caraway, we need to watch our language and make sure that we don't say things that could be construed as”—​he paused, collected himself—​“or rather, interpreted as insulting. Okay?” He offered me that wan smile. Lynn. I kind of liked him. He was a nice guy. Probably shouldn't be forced to shepherd a bunch of unruly kids like us. “Okay?”

“I know what
construed
means,” I said. I kept looking at the weeds, limp in my hands.

He said, “Okay.”

Lynn told us to break for lunch and to get our journals, and he passed out Styrofoam cups of water and carrot sticks as we unpacked our lunches and sat on hollow logs and, in theory, reflected on the work we'd been doing and how it made us feel.
I feel hungry,
I wrote with Lynn's pen, and
Carrot sticks just aren't cutting it.
And then:
Lynn is afraid of gay people.

Then I turned to the back and futzed with my calculations, applying Kepler's Second Law of planetary motion—​the closer the object got to the sun, the faster it would go. It was getting closer now, and if I kept charting its movement, kept up with my calculation, I'd know for sure, all on my own, when we would see it. Just thinking about it made my whole body exhale. It released me from my own head and sent me to the stars.

As we were packing up to return to the land of forced labor, Tonya sauntered by. I saw her looking at my notebook, and my equations, and I shut the book sharply.

She didn't even look at me. She just said, “Duran Duran is not gay. That's Boy George.”

After lunch, each kid returned to stockpiling the weeds, bales of the unwanted green that we were going to take over to the industrial composter—​Lynn's face absolutely bloomed at this announcement. I returned to my task, lazily pulling at what was left of the weeds.

I had the smallest pile, I noticed. Tonya's was the biggest, and she'd not only been dutifully tugging at the weeds all day but had started acting as some kind of coach, or maybe a drill sergeant, to the rest of us. “Soldiers, commence weeding,” she'd said when we started. And now, “Troops—​pull up those roots.” I noticed she had worn-looking dog tags on a ball chain around her neck.

“I lost,” I said to her, holding up my pathetic pile.

“It's not a contest,” she said. “You only lost to yourself.”

Oh, please,
I thought, but honestly I was too tired and sweaty to even say it.

Then Tonya looked more closely at my pile. “Carrie, you're not supposed to touch that,” she said as I wrested my last batch of weeds from the ground. For some reason, all the kids had left patches of plants untouched.

“Why not?” I said. I had only one work glove on—​they were so stiff that I found it hard to get a grip with them on—​and I used my bare hands to take hold of the tall stalk with serrated leaves and an eruption of sad-looking small yellow flowers at the top.

“Were you listening this morning?”

“Listening?” I asked as Lynn came over to check on us. I smiled up at him, but he was frowning. “Sure. I was listening.”

“I don't think you were,” Lynn said. “Come with me.”

He took me back to the park offices and washed my hands with special soap. “I don't know if it's going to work,” he said. “That was a lot of wild parsnip.”

“It sounds delicious,” I said. “If I liked parsnips.”

“It causes a terrible rash.”

It was quiet in the bathroom, the industrial green paint soothing in the late afternoon sun, the tile cool. Lynn dried my hands with a graying towel and looked up at me. “You're funny, Caraway,” he said.

“I know.” He didn't seem amused by that.

“But that doesn't mean you can get out of things. That doesn't mean you're excused.”

“I know that, too,” I said, looking down at my hands that seemed poison-free. For once: poison-free. He was holding the towel, and my hands were in it, nesting in the cloth.

“You can do this,” Lynn said. Did he know the sordid tales of my youth? Or was he just saying that I could handle the hot sun and the rigorous demands of weeding and footbridge building? He handed me a bouquet of jewelweed to rub on my hands.

I wanted to answer him, but something was stuck in my throat. It was hard to talk. The only thing that came out was a whisper: “I don't know if I can.”

The boy wasn't there the next few
afternoons when I rolled my bike into the yard after work. For this, at least, I was grateful. I didn't want him to ever see me with my hardhat and shitkickers and flannel shirt again. Maybe he'd left for good. Maybe he had been visiting Mrs. Richmond and had already gone home. Maybe he was an apparition, a vision of the future. I hoped so. If he wasn't real, I hoped he would be someday.