Light from a Distant Star (3 page)

“I’m sorry,” she said, hugging herself with a quick shiver even though the June night’s muggy heat still hung in the kitchen.

“That’s twenty minutes off your next night out,” her mother said.

“Mom!” Ruth protested. “That’s the problem. Everyone’s curfew’s later than mine, so they’re all having fun, and I don’t know what time it is, and—”

“But you’ve got your watch,” Nellie interrupted. Big mistake. Huge, she realized, following Ruth up the stairs.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Ruth hissed at the door to the attic stairs. Her mouth tightened and her eyes swam with a drowsy, unfocusable disgust. She smelled funny. Sweetish, like dried herbs.

“I just want to tell you something.”

“What?”

“Shh.” Nellie pointed upward. To privacy.

Her room was brain-boiling hot. It would be awhile before the window air conditioner cooled it off. But that was the deal, it could only be run when Ruth was up here. Piles of clothes were everywhere, even on her unmade bed. She turned and pulled her shirt over her head. Her back was lean and tanned. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Some girls didn’t have to, they were so small, but not Ruth. She was like their mother—big breasts, small waist, and one of those rear ends so perfect that when she walked, it took on a life of its own. She put on her nightie, then stepped out of her pink shorts, leaving them where they dropped. She sat down hard on the bed. “So what’s so important?”

Nellie’s brain was fuzzy. Her face burned and her eyes stung. It wasn’t just the heat, though. Ruth’s bra was hanging halfway out of her shorts pocket. Needing to absolve her, Nellie asked if she’d gone swimming in the Hoffmans’ pool.

“No,” she sighed, collapsing back onto the bed. “We just kinda hung out.”

“Where?”

“We ended up at Colleen’s.” Looking up at the ceiling, she grinned.

“Dellastrando?” Colleen was younger than Ruth, only two years older than Nellie.

“Yeah.”

“In the house?” A forbidding place, muscled teenage boys jamming baskets, dribbling in the wide driveway, their music-thumping cars constantly coming and going. Passing by, Nellie would quicken her step, stare straight ahead. Things happened there. She just knew it.

“No, out on the deck. The screened-in part.”

The gazebo. For Nellie, the most exotic structure in all of Springvale. “Was it just girls?”

“No!” Ruth crowed.

“So, who then?” There, again, that strange, deep ache.

“Some guys. You know. Patrick and his friends. They were showing off their …”—she lowered her voice—“… tattoos.”

Tattoos. So there it was, the beginning. Of what Nellie couldn’t be sure. But her heart raced and she averted her eyes from the hard swell of nipples against the nightie’s thin, blue cotton as Ruth described the red tattoo around Patrick’s left bicep, a jagged design, like barbed wire. So what was the big secret, she wanted to know.

But now Nellie didn’t want to tell her. The news gave her none of the pleasure she had expected. None at all. Only a dingy heaviness.

“Are you serious? Oh, my God, I can’t believe it. Why would Mom do that? I mean, the Paradise! How cheesy is that? Even I know it’s a strip club.”

W
ITH ONLY A
few weeks left before school let out for the summer, Nellie’s mother still hadn’t figured out what to do with her two youngest while she was at work. There’d been vague talk of overnight camps and different community programs and Ruth’s babysitting them, but as the days dwindled, it had come down to Nellie minding Henry. Ruth had gotten a job scooping ice cream at Rollie’s takeout window.

Nellie and her brother were walking home on one of their last school days when Jessica Cooper caught up with them. Jessica could be mean, especially to Henry, but she and Nellie’d been friends since kindergarten and if Nellie was nothing else, she was deeply loyal. And besides, Jessica didn’t have an easy life. Not really. The fourth born out of seven, she was bookended by six of the best-looking and smartest kids in town. By this time, though, Jessica and Nellie had little left in common, other than huge appetites. But Nellie was death-march skinny, while Jessica was gaining so much weight so fast that she’d been put on a strict diet, which only made her more bitter about her mother and more furtive about food. Whenever they had money, they’d stop at the little grocery store on their way home, but that day Nellie refused. Last week Jessica had bought two Snickers bars and stolen two. Today in the cafeteria she had been caught taking an extra brownie. She’d been accused before, but this time the lunch lady insisted she turn out her pockets. Everyone snickered as fudgy chunks and crumbs fell onto the floor.

School had always been a trial for Jessica. She did well in math but could barely read. The language arts specialist took her out of the classroom every morning at nine-thirty. That daily walk to the door, then down the corridor was a trail of unending shame. On Saturdays from ten to twelve a private tutor came to the house to work with her. Fifty dollars an hour, but the Coopers were rich. Nellie thought so, anyway. Through the years she had overlooked Jessica’s many failings except for one: her hatred for her mother. It was chilling.

“Sometimes I wish she’d just get cancer and die,” Jessica would say.

You don’t mean that, Nellie had long ago quit saying. Because she’d finally accepted that Jessica did. You could hear it in her voice—a malevolence that would curl her plump mouth into the most frightening smile. Maybe it was because Mrs. Cooper was so nice and so strikingly beautiful; maybe that’s what Jessica couldn’t bear—the contrast between mother and daughter. Mrs. Cooper was exquisite, her inky black hair a perfect widow’s peak over her high-boned ivory complexion. Seven children and trim as a model, which, it was said, she’d once been—in New York City. She was the lead soprano at Sunday’s eleven
o’clock Mass, where Mr. Cooper and their well-dressed brood filled an entire pew.

Not that Nellie ever saw them there. Hers wasn’t a churchgoing family. Benjamin and Sandy were friends of the Coopers, though not the socializing kind. Just people you’d either grown up with or known forever, and knew you could count on. The relationship had become especially important in the financial struggles of this last year. Her mother had finally persuaded her father to sell the store. The business was losing money daily and the only person even remotely interested in the property was Andrew Cooper. He owned the buildings on either side of Peck Hardware.

“Come on!” Nellie called back to Henry, who was deliberately lagging behind.

“He’s such a little prick,” Jessica said.

“Shut up!” Nellie snapped and came to a dead stop, waiting for her brother. She knew what he was up to. He wanted to lose Jessica so they could stop at the junkyard to look for boards. So far, though, there’d been no ditching her. Huffing breathlessly with a quick skip every few steps, she’d kept pace.

“See you tomorrow,” Nellie said when they came to the tall wooden gate. The last time Jessica had been with them, she’d climbed up into the hayloft. Seeing her legs dangling through the opening, Charlie had yelled at her to “get the hell down from there!”

“I’m not doing anything wrong!” she’d yelled back, which enraged Charlie. He called Nellie’s mother, who said they were never to bring anyone to the junkyard again.

Jessica said she wanted to come in, too. No, Nellie told her, she’d been fresh to her grandfather and she couldn’t. Yes, she could, she said, it was a public junkyard. No, it was private, she told her. That’s stupid, Jessica said, pushing open the gate.

“You can’t go in,” Nellie said, pulling it back. She pointed up at the sign. “See. Warning. No kids allowed.” It actually said,
WARNING. KEEP GATE CLOSED
.

Her eyes narrowed and her lips moved as she peered up at the sign. Again, Nellie said good-bye, then followed Henry inside. For the last
few weeks he’d been building a tree house in the enormous swamp maple tree in their backyard. With most of the floor done, he needed boards for the walls. The junkyard never got much lumber, but now Charlie was on the lookout and pleased to save it. Seeing Henry root through the teetering piles had sparked Charlie’s interest in his only grandson. The skittish little crybaby might just be turning a corner. And who knows, he’d recently told his daughter, Sandy, the boy might even want the business someday. “Maybe,” had been her kind but listless reply. With her husband and father running the two most dead-end enterprises in town, it was a painful thought.

While Henry rummaged through old metal signs and sheets of tin, Nellie went in search of Charlie. His empty chair was just inside the barn door alongside the rusted green TV tray that held a coffee can filled with sand and cigarette butts.

“Charlie’s resting.” The dark voice fell like a shadow. Max gestured toward the house. Charlie’d gone over to lie down. He was getting those pains again. Nellie didn’t know what pains he meant. Every few years Charlie seemed to be having some new ailment or surgery. Did she want to go inside, he asked, meaning the house. She said no. Ordinarily she would have, but she didn’t feel right leaving Henry alone behind the barn with this strange scowling man hovering around. He made her nervous. And a little scared, the way he’d seem to be looking at you yet wasn’t, both at the same time. So she asked where his dog was, in a strong voice so he’d know she was not the least bit uneasy alone in here with him. He’s around someplace, maybe out back, Max said, adding that Boone’s favorite place was a worn-down spot in the dirt close by the barn wall where the sun shone from noon on. All those words seemed to unnerve him.

“Is it comfortable up there?” She gestured up at the loft, wanting to put him at ease. Actually, herself as well. Nervous chatter, her mother called it, but talking was her best skill, and a way to seem more confident.

“Pretty much.”

“Must get hot though, huh?”

He shrugged. “It’s okay.”

“So you must be pretty adaptable then,” she said easing past to
get outside. She didn’t want him to think she was looking down her nose, judging him just some loser, another of Charlie’s transient laborers, skulking around the place for a few days or sometimes just a few hours—even if he probably was. She might not think all people were the same, but she did try to treat them the same.

“I guess.”

“That’s the most important thing of all. For us humans, anyway.”

“Oh yeah?”

“It is, I read that. It’s not just survival of the fittest; it’s about, like, how you fit in, how you adapt to things when they change. Like
Homo erectus
,” she called as he walked away. She caught up. “That whole line’s extinct, which is pretty amazing when you think how long they were here. A million and a half years, and now”—she clicked her fingers—“they’re gone. My father says they never really developed the right tools.”

“Tools, huh, well, your father oughta know then,” he said, walking faster now toward the clanging that was coming from the back of the barn.

She trailed after him, one more person who found her annoying. Sometimes with so much to think about, so much churning in her head, it was hard to keep it all contained.

Henry was struggling to pull a board out from under a rusted snow-blower. His face was red and his feet were braced under him.

“Hey!” Max hollered. “Don’t do that! You’re gonna—”

“It’s okay!” she snapped. “Charlie said he could. Whatever wood he finds.”

“That tips, he’s gonna get hurt. Here,” he said, lifting the snow-blower off to the side so Henry could yank out the board. Its underside was black with mold and shiny slugs. “Careful the nails—they’re all rust,” Max warned, then said to wait a minute. He’d go get a hammer.

Seeing Max leave, the dog rose from his sun-baked hollow. He came over to sniff Nellie’s outstretched hand. He looked at Henry.

“Tell him to go,” Henry said through clenched teeth as Boone sat close, wagging his thick tail. Henry froze. She hated seeing his mind go blank like that, filled only with fear.

“He’s just tryna be friendly, that’s all,” she said.

The barn’s side door squealed open and Max returned with a long hammer. He banged out the rusted nails. The bent ones he had to knock straight, then wrench out. He wasn’t saying anything and neither were they. Aside from hammering, the only sound was Boone’s tail hitting the ground, reminding her of Miss Schuster’s metronome the three months she took piano lessons, and how tense she’d feel with the relentless beat. Ruth was the musical one in the family, not her. It was stories she most cared about, even then. Mysteries of the human condition, something she’d heard her father say once. Lately she’d been thinking a lot about that, the way life could change so suddenly, like her best friend Paige moving to Maine last year and her mother having to work, which left her stuck with Henry every day now.

“So how old’s your dog?” she asked, to make up for her rudely silent brother.

“Three or four. Don’t know for sure, though,” Max said.

“How long you had him?”

“A while.”

“Couple years?”

He stopped hammering and glanced up. “Time.” He shrugged. “Kinda runs together after a while.”

“You don’t keep track? Like the day, what month it is?”

“Eh,” he grunted clawing out the last nail. He handed Henry the board, then began picking up the dropped nails.

What’s that mean
—eh?
she wanted to ask but knew better. Instead, she put her hand on the dog’s warm blunt head. “I’d say five or six, that’s what I think.”

Boone’s growl shot up her fingertips to her elbow before she heard it. His wiry black fur stood on end, and he tensed, back arched, back legs bent, ready to spring, just as the ugliest dog she’d ever seen suddenly came charging at them from nowhere. With his liver-spotted white face and piggish little eyes and wide back, he looked to be a good part pit bull.

“Boone!” Max commanded as his dog strained for the attack.

But it was her brother the snarling, bandy-legged creature had targeted. Whether fear was the beast’s quarry or the threat of Henry’s instinctive step back with the board raised like a shield, it didn’t matter.
The intruding dog sprang, knocking him down flat on his back. “Now!” Max said, and with that, Boone leaped, his jaw closing on the dog’s thick neck. Amazingly, Henry still clutched the board, covering his face as he screamed, and Nellie screamed, kicking now at both dogs whose vicious battle was being waged on top of her brother. Max kept swinging the hammer against the beast’s back, but the blows had little effect. Henry shrieked and his torn shirtsleeve hung bright with blood. Bending, Max picked up the crazed dog as it kicked and struggled against him. Boone ran snapping at Max’s heels as he slammed the dog hard as he could against the side of the barn, merely stunning him. The dog lunged, and Max swung the hammer into its head with a sickening, lethal thud. Its long dying squeals pierced the warmth of that June afternoon. There was a chunk missing from Henry’s forearm.