Light from a Distant Star (4 page)

“Help! Help! Help!” Nellie screamed, sickened by her little brother’s torn flesh.

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Max yelled, running toward Charlie’s house with Henry wailing in his arms. She chased after them past the open gate where Jessica stared in at the chaos.

It took twenty-two stitches to close the deep wound in Henry’s arm. For weeks afterward he woke up with nightmares. All construction on the tree house stopped. His arm hurt too much. The thick scar would be with him forever.

Max’s wrist and arm had also been bitten, but he wouldn’t let the EMTs do anything. He was all right and would tend to it himself. The carcass was tested for rabies, but the results came back negative. With pictures of the bloody hammer next to the dog’s crushed skull, the story was front-page news for two straight days. One more reason to close down the junkyard, some of Charlie’s neighbors were quoted as saying. The place was an eyesore and getting worse. Trouble just waiting to happen. Charlie blamed the Shelbys, saying he’d chased that dog off before, but when her mother called, Mrs. Shelby denied it. Probably afraid of a lawsuit, Nellie’s father said, which prompted Sandy to call Clem Billings, the lawyer who’d handled Ruth’s adoption by Benjamin. She even went door to door in the old neighborhood of her childhood, but nobody knew for sure. Nellie knew one person did though. Jessica. She denied opening the gate. Denied seeing where the
dog came from. Claimed she’d been waiting on the corner for them to come out. When she heard all the barking and screaming, she ran back and found the gate already wide open. Nellie didn’t believe her. Somehow she knew Jessica was responsible for everything. Just as she knew Max was a hero straight from the brittle, yellowed pages of
Get Tough!
by Major Fairbairn. In that moment of danger, he had reacted with courage and self-reliance. That Max had beaten a living creature to death without so much as an outcry or shudder, continued to amaze and repulse her. It had given a chilling new meaning to the last sentence in the Major’s preface: “Once closed with your enemy, give every ounce of effort you can muster, and victory will be yours.”

Meanwhile, she had taken over the wood-scavenging detail. Under the swamp maple there grew a pile of two-by-fours and broken lengths of molding and baseboard harvested from construction Dumpsters she and Henry had located around town. He pointed and she did all the work. Getting his tree house built had taken on new importance. Dolly Bedelia had moved into the little apartment at the back of the house. And the tree house looked down on her windows.

T
HINGS WERE GETTING INTERESTING
. T
HERE WAS THE NEW
boy from New York. Buckminster Saltonstall, who introduced himself as Bucky, so that’s what she called him. He’d be spending the summer with his grandparents. Nellie and Bucky were the same age, but he acted a lot older. For one thing, he smoked. When she told him it was against the law, that he could get arrested for even trying to buy cigarettes, he said Springvale was the deadest place he’d ever been, and with his dad an Air Force pilot, he’d lived in a lot of places.

Most of what he said was bull crap, but whenever she saw him she got goose bumps. His eyes gleamed with intensity and a scary, thrilling wildness. He wasn’t sure how many spy planes his father had shot down because the missions were so secret only the president was ever told about them. She gave that a
maybe
. He said his mother was a famous soap opera actress. That rated a somewhat shaky
maybe
—hard to prove because, believe it or not, the Pecks were the only family in the free world without a television. Two years ago when theirs went on the fritz, as Benjamin put it, he convinced Sandy that they’d be better kids without its insidious influence. All that did was leave Nellie pretty much out of touch, clueless, about practically everything normal kids talk about.

Which was probably another reason she’d stayed friends with Jessica. At her house she’d just hand over the remote and let Nellie watch whatever she wanted. Of course she hadn’t seen Jessica since the attack on Henry, so she was way behind in
Survivor
episodes, but she did have some principles.

Anyway, Bucky had arrived just in time. He said he’d built tree houses all over the country. Some in Europe, even. At first Henry was
jealous. After all, the tree house had been his idea. When he wasn’t sulking below, he’d be hollering up criticisms.

“What’s that board for?” He came charging off the steps.

“The window,” Bucky yelled down.

“We don’t have any windows!”

“An opening, then,” Bucky called as he nailed the board in place.

“Well, that’s stupid. It’s just gonna let rain in,” Henry said.

Bucky leaned out. “Aw, sorry, Hank, but last time I looked, we don’t have a roof.” He said it like a question, something they weren’t allowed to do, ever. (Benjamin’s rules of comportment, according to Ruth.)

“No, but I’m gonna.” Henry stormed inside, slamming the door behind him.

“What’s the hair across his ass?” Bucky asked. Another reason he seemed older, his foul mouth.

“Calling him Hank, for one,” Nellie said. “And the tree house, he thought of it first, and now you’re doing it.”

“Jesus! You asked me!” He flung the saw over the side and climbed down the ladder. He hopped on his grandmother’s ancient bike and pedaled furiously out of sight. Bucky was always taking off like that, either offended or angry.

Selfish maybe, but she didn’t mind seeing him go. The tree house was almost finished. They’d run out of wood, so the back wall was only knee-high, but it was four o’clock. Perfect timing. The bathroom light went on in the apartment. Nellie sat down and rested her chin on the last board they’d just put in and watched through the glassless opening.

Dolly Bedelia leaned over the sink, splashing water on her face. She was just waking up. She usually left for work about six and didn’t return until after midnight. Nellie’s bedroom was in the rear of the house so when she’d hear her loud old car pulling into the driveway, she’d creep to the window and watch Dolly hurry up the steps onto her narrow porch.

With her platinum hair and long-legged swishy walk, she was the most glamorous woman Nellie’d ever met. “Anywhere you think, cutie,” she kept sighing the day of her move. Nothing seemed to faze her. Nellie and Henry were helping carry her things into the tiny apartment. She’d arrived with nothing packed, her few possessions tossed
into the backseat and trunk of her car—clothes, shoes, a frying pan, some dishes, and makeup. On the dashboard were her mouthwash and toothbrush, still wet. Her aunt and uncle came later with a bed frame and floppy mattress, a card table, two folding chairs, and a crooked floor lamp. Watching from the window, Sandy told Benjamin she’d made a terrible mistake. But then the next day she brought Dolly into the small barn behind their house and gave her a sagging wicker love seat to use until she got a couch. A few days later, when Dolly was at work, she had Max come over to help Benjamin carry an old mahogany bureau from the barn into Dolly’s bedroom. Nellie wondered if Dolly even wanted the love seat and bureau, but she knew it made her mother feel better. Having the place furnished like a real apartment probably made Dolly seem like a real tenant.

Even in frayed jeans and a baggy sweatshirt, Dolly was beautiful. And barely out of her teens, according to Nellie’s mother. After high school Dolly had given community college a try. Six weeks later she went to New York City, which to Nellie seemed another cosmic connection, this exotic creature entering her life from the same place, at the same time as Bucky Saltonstall. In the city Dolly and her roommates had shared a studio apartment. Nights, she’d worked in a pizza shop, devoting her days to auditions and acting lessons. The closest she’d gotten to her big break was as an extra in a mob scene, hundreds of panicky, screaming people running through Central Park. It was a science fiction horror movie that still hadn’t been released. Prerelease, Dolly called it.

Dolly had come back home a few months ago, but after another fight with her stepmother she moved in with her old boyfriend. When that fell apart, she ended up on her aunt’s couch. Though Nellie’s mother pretended she was only trying to make the best of the situation, her tenant’s girlish bewilderment was growing on her. One minute she’d be trying to prove how tough she was, then the next she’d be in hopeless, helpless tears.

A few days after she moved in, a young man came to visit. His shaved head gleamed as he rang the bell. There was a spiderweb tattooed on the side of his neck. From up here in the treehouse, Nellie had a perfect view. She and Henry were crouched low, spying on the
next yard, hoping to see Tenley Humboldt burst from his house, pellet guns blazing. Louisa Humboldt had called last night with her annual complaint about the family of woodchucks living under the Pecks’ old barn. Electric fences, smoke bombs, human hair, wads of chewed bubblegum, fox urine, traps—her poor brother had tried everything to keep them out of his vegetable garden, but they kept burrowing new tunnels under the fence. So if Ben and Sandy heard any loud noises, they shouldn’t be alarmed. It would only be Tenley shooting at woodchucks. And just to be on the safe side, the children might want to play on the other side of the house, she had added. Nellie’s father asked to speak to Tenley, and Louisa went to get him. She came back on, saying her brother was busy and couldn’t come to the phone. Well, just tell him they’d be doing their best at their end to get rid of the woodchucks, Benjamin said. But Tenley shouldn’t be out there shooting guns in his backyard. Not only was it dangerous, it was against the law. And as she did every year, Louisa had whispered not to worry. Tenley was feeling very frustrated, that was all. And besides, he couldn’t stand loud noises.

Below the children the young man had grown tired of ringing the bell and was banging on the door. His back was still turned when Nellie scurried down and ran into the house. On the other side of their first floor bathroom was Dolly’s tiny kitchen. Nellie knew from previous tenants that if she pressed her ear to the thin wall and the rest of the house was quiet enough, she could hear a lot.

“Stop it!” Dolly pleaded as the banging continued.

“I just want to talk! That’s all,” the young man shouted. “Please!”

“No. I can’t have any guys in here, my landlady told me.”

Nellie wasn’t sure about that, but then again her parents had rules for everything, according to Ruth, so maybe. After the young man finally left, the radio came on with Dolly singing along in a high, clear voice. She never cooked except for instant coffee. When she woke up in the morning, she’d sit on the side porch in her purple bathrobe, smoking a cigarette while she sipped her coffee. Smoking wasn’t allowed inside the apartment. A lifetime of Charlie’s secondhand smoke stinking up the house and his daughter’s clothes and hair and eventually
killing his wife, who had died of emphysema, had made Nellie’s mother hate cigarettes.

Nellie went back out and climbed into the tree house. Henry was behind the barn, checking the Havahart trap her father had set, though no woodchuck was ever dumb enough to enter it. Dolly’s bathroom window had steamed up. All Nellie could make out now from her leafy perch was someone pulling open the shower curtain, then stepping out of the tub. A few moments later with the smell of cigarette smoke in the air, she climbed down and trotted around the back of the house, kicking the soccer ball.

Dolly’s hair was wet and her silky robe was tied around the middle. Barefoot, she sat on the rickety green rocker with her legs crossed. She didn’t say anything, just kept rocking and puffing away, but Nellie could feel her watching. She kicked the ball the length of the yard, then back again. She flipped it onto her knee, then bounced it high trying to head it, once, twice. Third time she did and her glasses fell off.

“That’s cool,” Dolly said.

“Yeah, I been working on that,” she said fumbling to put her glasses on.

“You play on a team or something?”

“I used to. Not anymore though.”

“How come?” After one long, deep drag, she flicked the butt over the railing. There was a circle of white filters in the grass. Obviously, Nellie’s mother hadn’t seen them yet.

“I like playing—I just don’t like the whole game thing. The competition, coaches always yelling and saying I’m not trying hard enough.” Actually, she wasn’t very good, not coordinated enough, according to her more athletic sister.

“Yeah. I know what you mean. That’s the part I didn’t like either.”

“You played soccer?” She’d been kicking the ball closer so that now she was right at the railing.

“Just gym class. Sports, it wasn’t my thing. Dancing, that’s all I cared about.”

“So that’s good. I mean, you’re still doing your favorite thing then, dancing.”

“Yeah. I guess. It’s a hard life though. You know, performing, having to be, like, ‘on’ ”—she made air quotes a lot—“all the time and …” Her voice trailed off. “We’ll see.”

“Do you sing, too? At the place? That place, where you work.” Nellie couldn’t get the word out. Maybe because they seemed to be talking about two different things and saying it would make her into someone else.