Lost Stars (6 page)

My father had put a moratorium on leaving the house or having visitors, but the phone, thank god, was now within limits, and when I talked to Soo that night, she spoke of Justin and Justin and Justin. I picked at the calluses on my fingertips, my badges of pride, grown there after years of playing guitar, and I tried to listen, but with every word about their upcoming co-adventure at college in the wilds of western New York, my chest tightened more.

“Do you think they'd ever let us room together?” she asked me. “Does that happen?”

“Hold on, I just happen to have the manual on co-ed collegiate cohabitation right here,” I said.

“Ha ha.” We fell silent for a minute, something that happened more often it seemed. And in that silence I reached for my default vocabulary; the only way to explain what was occurring here on Earth was to use the stars.

“Accretion,” I said.

“Oh, boy. I think we're getting into some astrophysics again.” Soo had gotten a D in physics, though I'd tried to tutor her. Too much vodka had made that endeavor challenging.

“It's when an object in space grows by attracting more matter through gravity—​it just pulls more stuff toward it.”

“And this metaphor fits because?”

“You're all leaving. Just taking it all with you and leaving.”

In her silence, I heard reproach and rejection—​too needy, too nerdy, too young. Or maybe guilt, or sadness that she was going and leaving me behind. I couldn't tell anymore.

And then Soo changed to her chirping, happy tone. “Hey—I met a neighbor of yours at the record store the other day. Dean something or other. He's staying with your neighbor Mrs. Richmond for the summer—​that's his aunt or something.”

I stopped playing with my calluses. My hands were starting to feel a little itchy.

“Carrie? You there?”

“Mmm,” I said. “I hadn't noticed.”

“Well, he's cool,” she said. “He has a summer job fixing bikes at Reinventing the Wheel, and he plays the drums.”

“Mmm,” I said again. Dean: I just loved the sound of it. Sweet and solid and kind of grown-up.

“He has long hair,” she said.

I took a deep breath and let it out as slowly as I could, the same way I did when I was smoking. Only there was no joint and no cigarette, just this tidbit of information floating along the wires between us.

“Anyway, I invited him over tomorrow night. Do you think your dad will let you come out? We miss you. And it's Friday!”

I didn't know. I didn't know how to get my father to relent. He had two modes: taciturn or screaming. It had been a long time since I'd seen anything in between.

When my father and Rosie came in the door, I was at the dining room table, writing in my park-issued notebook. I was not chronicling my adventures in nature—​at least not the way they wanted me to—​but I had taken up three pages with a few of my most cherished Vira memorabilia items, including a black-and-white postcard from 1890 that my mom had found in a flea market down in the Catskills, showing the Meeanee Observatory in New Zealand. In it, Vira was a fiery streak of light in the background, that same exact ball that was coming around now. Vira was trapped, doomed to repeat itself, its journey like that of Sisyphus, for millennia.

I drew another elliptical orbit path. The comet at aphelion was almost four billion miles from the sun, the farthest distance it would go. But it had long passed that point and was now headed back again. Toward us. It was getting closer all the time.

“We got Kentucky Fried Chicken,” Rosie said, shoving a cardboard bucket in my face. “Here's yours.”

My mother had never, not once, let us have fast food, and my father had told us when we were little that it wasn't actually chicken that they served. He'd called it “Kentucky Fried Rats.” But that was before. Now we had it once a week.

I gently moved the greasy bucket off my papers and managed to push the word
Thanks
out of my mouth. Every time my father and I were in the same room, this terrible unease circled us.

“What are you doing?” Rosie asked suspiciously. “Are these plans for a mail bomb?”

I rolled my eyes at her. “Just trying to figure out when the comet will get past Jupiter's orbit.”

“It's closer than I thought,” my father said, putting one hand down on the table and leaning over me, forgetting for a minute that he normally reacted to me as if I were irradiated.

“Yeah, but there's a giant bummer part of it, which is that it's looking like it's going to be close to the horizon, so not so easy to see.”

“Maybe if it's low, it'll be easier for you, since you're so short,” Rosie said, looming over me with her extra four inches—​she wasn't even done growing yet, as she enjoyed pointing out during our brief periods of social interaction.

My father studied my calculations, losing the veil of disapproval and becoming the man formerly known as Dad, hand curled around the black stubble on his chin in contemplation, finger tracing the figures.

“No, I think the best way to see it would be if we had the old telescope,” I said. Maybe I could take advantage of this moment of goodwill and my two weeks of hard work to get the one thing I really wanted back. That is, the one thing I wanted that I could actually have.

But my father's face went dark again, and he retreated back into himself, a switch turning off inside him. “Yes,” he said. “That would be great.”

How cruel, I thought, to agree with me and still not return the telescope. He turned and walked away. Even Rosie's eyebrows furrowed as she watched him leave, his shoulders now slumped.

“You missed something,” Rosie said, pointing to the top left corner of my sketch. “The perihelion is only 0.4 AUs. It's only, like, thirty-nine million miles from the sun. It's way closer to us than this.”

“Oh—​okay.” Usually I blamed my mistakes on too much pot and alcohol, but I'd been too busy pulling poisonous plants from the ground to get wasted. Must have been too much exercise and fresh air. I said something very rarely uttered to Rosie: “Thanks.”

She hid the twinge of a smile in indifference. “Whatever,” she said, “Rye Bread.”

By Friday my hands were red and swollen and itchy, but I still had to go to work and I still had to wear work gloves—​Lynn gave me a temporary pair and told me to wash the other ones with some bleach to get the wild parsnip oil out—​and I still had to feed the weeds (minus the parsnip) into the industrial composter, which, contrary to Lynn's prediction, was not one of life's great joys.

It was so hard to concentrate. I vacillated between having imaginary fights with my dad—​demanding my telescope, pointing out the ways he'd wronged me—​and daydreaming about the boy. His name was Dean. He had long hair. He played drums. He knew how to fix bikes. Had there ever lived a more promising creature?

Our last assignment of the week was to start clearing the path—​we had poured wild parsnip killer on it, and those innocent-looking stalks were now withered. We spent the whole day walking along the future trail, mapping out just where it would go, finding the exact spot where it should cross the creek.

“Where do you guys think the best spot is, based on our research?” Lynn asked us.

“Probably just the place where it's narrowest,” said Jimmie, the little guy with the unibrow, who for some reason was always standing next to Tonya. Aw, Jimmie. I felt sorry for him.

“The narrowest spot in the creek?” Lynn asked. “I can understand why you'd think that, but there are other considerations, including the height of the crossing, how level the two sides are, and what's in the way—​are there really big tree roots, for instance? So, I want you guys to look around and see if you can find some ideal spots. Pair up,” he said, instructing Tonya and me to go together. Great.

“Fall out, troops,” Tonya called out, and instead of revolting, they fell right in line, toy soldiers all of them. They seemed to have accepted her unofficial role as drill sergeant—​maybe boot camp was really working on them.

We plodded around the side of the creek, our ridiculous boots gaining another coat of mud. Tonya crouched every couple of feet, carefully inspecting the ground.

“Hey, Lynn,” she called, after finding a large flat and root-free spot. “What about here?”

Lynn hurried over to us, then called for the others to join. “Yes, that's just the spot I was thinking of,” he said. Tonya beamed. I wished I had a book about footbridges, anything to read so I could look away from this scene.

After lunch, we wrote in our notebooks. I drew with Lynn's pen the red-winged blackbird that seemed to follow us from site to site, and I wrote down some lyrics—​
all this dark matter in the universe that can't be seen, but still its forces pull on me.
But I didn't write about what I'd learned or how the program was changing my sense of self. I ignored Lynn's writing prompts. What was the difference, anyway? It wasn't like anyone was going to read it.

At the end of the day, Lynn handed me a sealed envelope. “Take this home to your parent or guardian,” he told us.

“Man, I wish I had a guardian,” I said. “That would be so much better.”

Tonya's face seemed to cloud over. “That's what you think,” she said. I remembered what Tonya's house was like, dim and dirty, the presence of her wheelchair-bound grandmother everywhere, with the faint scent of pee. Even when her father was briefly home from the navy, which was rare, he was fierce and scary, and her mother had died when Tonya was little, before I even knew her. I felt a small pit right in the center of my chest, the size of an olive, but powerful, when I thought about her home.

When Rosie was five, Ginny and I brought her to the front row of our elementary school auditorium so she could see the visiting magician up close. She was smart even then, smarter than us, and she kept yelling out the secrets to his tricks. “It's up his sleeve!” “There's a little space in the bottom of his hat!” Finally the magician turned his gaze on her, transformed from kind to venomous, and said, “Little girl, it's time for you to leave.”

Ginny and I took her outside, and she seemed totally unfazed. Back then I used to love having two sisters, one older and one younger. We'd have all these adventures that had nothing to do with my parents; we were a team. They loved Ginny the best and then Rosie. I knew that, and I knew that being alone with my sisters was the only way we'd be even. With Ginny gone, I still came in last for favorite kid.

Ginny had asked Rosie, “What did it feel like when the magician yelled at you?”

She just shrugged her shoulders and said, “It felt like oops.” And Ginny just tousled her hair and hugged her and said, “Okay, sweetie,” and I knew she was one of the world's great big sisters.

I always thought that should be the title of my autobiography:
It Felt Like Oops.
Subtitle:
One Screwup after Another.

Now Lynn said, “Bring it to whoever is responsible for you.” He said it to the group, but I knew it was addressed to me, Caraway the Insensitive. He already seemed less inclined to regale me with his mini pep talks and more inclined to ignore or correct me. Maybe I had it really good compared to these kids. I could afford new boots. I had two parents who were legally responsible for me, even though I hadn't seen one in three months and the other one hated my guts. I had friends. At least I had friends.

When I got home, I locked my bike against the fence and took off the boots and hardhat and presented the envelope to my father. My hands were still red, a little bit peeling.

“Look how hard I worked,” I said, making jazz hands in front of his face.

He said, “Mm.” He seemed 10 percent less like my enemy.

He took the manila envelope from me and unlatched the metal clasp, looking at me all the while, his expression deadpan. He was scary this way. He used to be the happy-go-lucky science teacher, his glasses smudged, his hands callused from playing guitar in the evenings on the porch while my mother cooked her culinary masterpieces of galettes and tartlets and soufflés that she'd learned at cooking school, all the stuff I claimed to hate (Soo's Korean mother made Shake'n Bake and Kraft macaroni and cheese; I just wanted to be normal). I didn't really hate it. In contrast to the TV dinners that now filled our freezer, it seemed amazing.

He handed me my measly minimum-wage paycheck and showed me the paper, a carbon copy that looked suspiciously like the document I'd received on the last day of school. My one saving grace was that I got A's and B's, no matter how many times I skipped out or went to school stoned. I was a good student. Rosie had once knocked on my head and said,
There's someone smart in there. I can hear her calling from the jail you've put her in.
“They give you report cards?” I asked. Could this job get any lamer? I didn't see any letter grades on the thin paper, but there were handwritten notes. That was almost scarier.

“Sort of.” He tucked it back into the envelope, but when he looked at me now, there was less glare in his eye.

“Why do I get a report card?”

“It's more like a progress report. It's a pilot program. They're giving and receiving feedback.”

“Well, what a happy, reciprocal relationship. So what's the feedback? What's my grade on footbridge preparation? I can tell you right now, I am not going to get an A in footbridge building. I wasn't any good at shop either, if you recall.”

When we made wooden bowls in shop class, mine was the only one that was unsandable—​the whole inside scratchy and rough. My teacher, Mr. Feinstein, had tried sanding it for a few minutes and then said, not terribly apologetically, “I have no idea what you've done or how to fix it.” Just another variation on my theme. I gave the messed-up bowl to Ginny, who used it for her collection of dangly earrings. “I love it,” she said when I handed it to her. She laughed at the still-splintery parts and said, “Don't worry—​it's perfect.” And then, when she thought I wasn't watching, she slipped her drugs below the dangly earrings.