Light from a Distant Star (33 page)

“No! I’m just saying, it’s … it’s just been really hard, that’s all.” She picked up her napkin and daubed her eyes, sniffling as Lazlo took her free hand and held it in both of his.

“I know. But you’ve gotta turn the page, Sandy.”

“I know. I know, but, you see, then I had this other tenant. I was even going to let her move in with a cat, of all things, but then you said you were going to move back, so I told her no, and then you changed your mind, and by then it was too late. She’d found another place.”

Miss Schiff. Nellie couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Her mother was either crazy or a liar. Or maybe a crazy liar. A desperate crazy liar, apparently a good one, because now Lazlo was trying to convince her how absolutely sincere he was in his decision. In fact, he’d even sign a lease if she wanted him to, he said, hesitantly, as if expecting her to insist that wouldn’t be necessary. It never had been before.

“Well, now that you mention it, that’s probably a good idea. That way you’re protected, too.” She took a quick sip. “This is just the best tea. Isn’t it, Nellie?” She gave a little cough behind her hand, trying to hide her discomfort.

“It’s good,” Nellie said. A weak response, but she had ruined the moment as surely as if she’d taken a knife to their hearts. She was embarrassed. From then on, she would regard her mother with distrust. And with an uneasy respect. Part of her understood. Somebody in the family had to get tough.

E
VERY DAY SHE CHECKED THE MAILBOX FOR A LETTER FROM
Max. A week had passed since she’d written. She didn’t think she’d said anything to offend him, but she wrote another letter. Mostly it was about Boone and how happy he was. She wrote about things she hadn’t done but wished she had, like taking him for long runs through the woods and crashing through underbrush after him, even following him along an upended swamp maple that had fallen at an angle, lodged between two pines. She wrote about how he kept making her throw back slobbery tennis balls for him to retrieve, and about his diving into the mucky brook for sticks, then emerging in a triumphant muddy mess. She didn’t mention his being tied to the abandoned truck for weeks or that the twins had taken him home. Or that he wasn’t the least bit interested in her because Boone had long ago learned how to get by in this hard world: the truth, but what would have been the point?

Into her thoughts came one of those conversations a kid half listens to but doesn’t quite get, the tangled strands now suddenly making sense. Her father had been telling Lazlo about the historian’s responsibility to recognize the difference between literal truth and ideal truth. When it came to Boone, she had chosen the latter, a story of life as it should and might still be, so that Max wouldn’t give up hope.

Some things were absolutely true. Charlie was the same, she wrote, except for an outbreak of shingles that finally sent him to the doctor. Wanting it to be a long letter, one that would help pass the time in his lonely cell, she wrote about how Lazlo had moved in, and how Henry had half the roof done on the tree house, and even though Max didn’t know him, how Tenley Humboldt had installed a floodlight aimed directly
at the tree house. It came on with a motion detector, so they’d be illuminated if they went into the tree house after dark, which was a really strange sensation, like being in a space ship. She told him a little about Ruth and the reason she was finally acting human again, which was because Patrick Dellastrando had practically told her to get lost. She’d gone from heartbreak to grievous insult, now to a state of general dreariness. Nothing could make her too angry or too happy. She was flat-lining through the days, off to the takeout window every afternoon, then home at night no later than nine to shower off the vestiges of hot fudge and strawberry sauce before stopping in Nellie’s room to philosophize about how life sucked and what a raw deal she’d gotten, having a father who didn’t care if she even existed. Nellie even told Max about Danny Brigham but not that she’d intercepted his letter to Ruth.

She also wrote about how much fun it was hanging out with Krissie Potek again. Not only didn’t Krissie mind Henry always tagging along, but she actually thought he was funny, a quality lost on Nellie lately. She thought Max would find it interesting that Krissie was a good fisherman (“or is it
fisherwoman
?” she wrote, she wasn’t sure). Krissie had been fishing with her father and older brother ever since she could remember. She said she’d asked her father if Nellie could come next time they went, but so far it hadn’t happened. Krissie had admitted that while her father liked teaching, he didn’t really like kids that weren’t his own too much. So what do you think that’s all about? she asked Max, hoping to engage him, and, if not, at least make her letter seem more conversational. She pictured him dragging in from the hot, shadeless prison yard (doing what? she wanted to ask, but figured she’d save that for her next letter) and looking forward to stretching out on his bunk and reading her letter again, probably for the third or fourth time that day. Maybe no one else cared, but he’d know she did.

“Well, anyway,” she wrote on the twelfth page, “school starts in three weeks.”
And the trial, a couple weeks after
, though she hadn’t written that, but probably would in her next letter. Her family might be dreading the trial, but it had occurred to her that Max might be looking forward to it. Given the chance to finally tell what had really happened that day, he’d be moving that much closer to freedom.

Jessica’s calls wanting Nellie to go hang out with her or asking to “come here” had gotten so persistent that, now, everyone checked caller ID before answering the phone. The message box—squawk box, her father called it—was filled with her plaintive begging and infuriated demands that Nellie please, please call her back. “Goddamn you, Nellie!” she finally screamed in one. “I know you’re standing right there listening to this, you selfish bitch. Pick up the phone! Pick up the goddamn phone!”

A brutal mistake and Jessica knew it, immediately calling back, and for the rest of the day leaving messages of apology and regret, but it was too late. The entire Peck family had played the message, even Nellie’s mother, who listened in shocked silence. When Nellie played it for Krissie, she hugged her arms and said, “That’s scary. That’s really scary.”

“She’s like the last person I’d be scared of,” Nellie laughed.

“She’s just so mean. Her feelings, they’re not, like, normal. Like when she hurts people, that funny look she gets,” she said, which surprised Nellie.

Krissie was usually making excuses for Jessica. Because Mrs. Potek and Mrs. Cooper were good friends, it was a loyalty Nellie’d had to swallow. But apparently not anymore. Krissie began telling her how last May, Mrs. Cooper had complained to the high school principal when Mr. Potek refused to let Patrice Cooper take a makeup test when she got a B on her math final. Mrs. Cooper said Patrice had told Mr. Potek right before the final how sick she felt, but he had made her take it anyway. That B had kept Patrice from being class valedictorian, and the complaint had gone into Mr. Potek’s record.

“You’re kidding.” Nellie couldn’t wait to tell Ruth.

“My mother couldn’t believe it. She was, like, really upset.”

“I bet.”

“My father said she’s not the nice, sweet lady everyone thinks.” Krissie grimaced. “But you can’t tell anyone that,” she added, wide-eyed. “He’d kill me.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t,” Nellie said, eagerly repaying the confidence with her tale of Jessica’s sending Henry home so she could show her Louis’s stash of pot and then how Mrs. Cooper had flipped out on her
with Jessica giving it right back, and Nellie feeling trapped like she was in some kind of asylum where the guards were as crazy as the patients.

“Really?” Krissie whispered, her long black hair falling across her pale face.

“Yeah,” she whispered back. With Jessica out of the picture, it would be good having Krissie to herself.

“Wow. So maybe that’s what’s wrong,” Krissie said. “Maybe they’re all screwed up and Jessica, she’s the only normal one.”

“I don’t get your logic.”

“I know,” Krissie admitted. “But now I feel bad for her.”

“Well, don’t,” she said, and would wish she hadn’t.

S
HE’D QUICKLY FOUND
her seat in the back row. The first few minutes of class were noisy with students’ looking for their seat assignments. Mrs. Duffy was their homeroom teacher. She stood by the door scanning her chart to make sure no one switched seats. Mrs. Duffy was young and pretty but really tough. And very pregnant. Nellie tried looking everywhere but at her big, round belly, which just didn’t seem right somehow for a teacher. No matter how hard Nellie tried not to, she kept thinking about how she’d gotten that way. Roy and Rodney Shelby came in and sat next to her in the back row. She smiled, but they stared straight ahead. “Hey!” she said across the aisle. “How’s Boone doing?” she asked Roy, who was closer. He nodded, then hunched over his notebook. Charlie had told her mother that Mrs. Shelby had asked if they could keep Boone for good. Charlie had said he didn’t care. Unfortunately, Charlie hadn’t been caring about much lately. It wasn’t just the shingles, her mother said, but the trial and having to testify. Nellie knew how nervous she was starting to feel.

“What’s that?” She leaned across the aisle to see Roy’s drawing. He ripped the paper from his notebook and passed it to her. A quick sketch, but it was a perfect likeness of Boone with his head tilted to one side. She’d forgotten the twins’ talent for drawing.

“Excuse me, Miss Peck. If you don’t mind,” Mrs. Duffy said, already halfway up the aisle, with her hand out.

“It’s just a dog,” she said, eyes level with her belly as she snatched the paper. “His name’s Boone,” she added, hoping to defuse Mrs. Duffy’s anger, but she was already crumpling it up. Nellie shook her head in blurry disbelief, so angry the lenses on her glasses were fogging up.

Krissie glanced back with a sympathetic pout.

“There’ll be no notes passed in this class, thank you very much!” Mrs. Duffy declared, waddling to the front of the room. She dropped the ball of paper into the wastebasket. “And from now on, save your drawings for art class, Mr. Shelby.” She glanced at the little squares on her chart. “Roy, that is.”

Roy squirmed, shrinking miserably into his seat. To Nellie’s knowledge, and they’d been in school together since first grade, neither twin had ever been reprimanded by a teacher.

“Thanks anyway,” Nellie whispered, but he stared straight ahead.

The bell rang and Mrs. Duffy checked her chart. One empty seat. The intercom sputtered on as Mr. Perkins, the new principal, began a staticky speech welcoming everyone, himself included, to Timmony Middle School, an experience he likened to an astronaut returning to Earth from the moon, and if it was a joke, he’d either forgotten the punch line or lost his train of thought. Nobody seemed to get it. Even Mrs. Duffy looked puzzled. Then, as the Pledge of Allegiance was ending, the door opened. Hand high over her belly, Mrs. Duffy looked back as her tardy student slipped behind his desk with a wink.

Not only hadn’t Bucky Saltonstall gone back to wherever he’d come from (by then Nellie’d lost track of his tall tales), but he was enrolled at Timmony. In eighth grade, team B, her homeroom. After the announcements, Mrs. Duffy called Bucky up to her desk. As she spoke, she sniffed at him. He kept shrugging.

“Excuse me, class,” she said, getting up. She and Bucky left the room. Twelve minutes into the very first day of school he was being escorted to the assistant principal’s office, late and smelling of cigarettes. His turned-out pockets contained only a book of matches, and a fifty-dollar bill. Following school board–mandated protocol, Mr. Hadley drowned the matches in a glass of water. The money was another matter. Arriving within minutes, wearing a yellow rain poncho over her
housecoat, Bucky’s grandmother explained how she must have given him the fifty by mistake, as lunch money, thinking it was a five-dollar bill. Bucky said he’d walked to school behind two construction guys who’d been smoking, which is how the smell must’ve gotten on him. Obviously, his grandmother agreed, sniffing his head. There should be laws against smoking near children, she declared.

Bucky looked handsome in his new school clothes. His thick, sun-tipped hair had been trimmed, and in this new setting Nellie was impressed by his manners. As the day went on, even Mrs. Duffy seemed to be softening a little. Bucky was very smart and way ahead of practically everyone in math, except, of course, for Roy and Rodney, runners-up in last year’s state math tournament. “Yes, sir or no, ma’am,” Bucky would answer teachers, a maturity she found stirring. His voice was deeper than the other boys’ and he was a head taller than most. He sat by himself at lunch and ate slowly, all the while looking around. He seemed so self-contained, at times even mildly amused, more like an observant adult than a loner. At recess he cruised the playground, hands in his pockets, moving from group to group, pausing to watch them playing basketball, soccer, Hacky Sack. Nellie was playing foursquare with Krissie, her cousin Betsy Potek, and Brianna Hall, the most beautiful girl in eighth grade. Jessica stood on the sidelines, demanding to play, even though she knew she had to wait her turn. Their ball handling was flawless. Nobody wanted to suffer Jessica’s tirades once she got in, her inevitable name calling and cries of cheating.