Lost Stars (15 page)

“Okay,” I whispered. “Okay.”

“I love you, but you have to stop feeling so sorry for yourself. You're smart and loved and adorable, so just figure out what you have to do to survive and do it.”

Greta had never been mad at me before. I had learned to shield myself from my father's anger, since it hardly ever wavered, but in front of Greta, I was shaky and sweating and shamed.

“Okay?” she said. She squeezed my hand. “Okay, Carrie?”

“Okay.”

She smiled at me, but I knew I couldn't stay with her, either.

Clearly not ready to be trampled on, the footbridge-in-progress wobbled under my tight hiking boots. The rain plinked around me, seeping into Soo's semi-useless yellow rain slicker as I rolled my bike along with me, my backpack affixed to the rear rack with my father's bungee cord. It had been ages since I'd been in the park at night, and I'd never been here alone (discounting the time I got extra stoned and lost the rest of the group while I wandered in circles for hours, or maybe just minutes, calling for them). What a shame, really, that this was the night to be solo beneath the stars: I couldn't even see them.

The observatory door was locked, but years ago Ginny had shown me how to prop open the window, stained glass that was framed with now-rotting wood. I was eleven, and Ginny was watching out for me while my parents took Rosie to the doctor for her never-ending tests during that period when they thought she had narcolepsy. (It turned out she just had magical powers of sleep.)

Ginny and I had stopped at the bottom of the steps, then pushed our bikes slowly up them. She had her Walkman on and Supertramp was leaking out of it, an alluring and confusing sound, since I was still into Huey Lewis and the News back then.

“It's closed,” I said when we got up there. And she laughed and tousled my hair as if I were five, not just two years younger than she was. She was in her hippie phase, her dark hair long and glossy and straight, her earrings enormous gold hoops.

“You're such a rule follower, Car.” It was not a dig, and I didn't take it that way. It was an invitation. “C'mere, let me show you.” She stood on one stone that jutted out past the others in the wall. She put her hands by the wood-framed window—​it wasn't rotted back then—​and pushed in a little bit and then up. “It's easy,” she said. Everything felt easy when I was with her. Everything felt both wondrous and safe.

Inside, below the glass ceiling, the stars glowed and Ginny pointed out the constellation of Hydra, the water monster.

She wasn't opening the window toward juvenile delinquency, really. She wasn't trying to corrupt me. She was trying to set me free from the parental force of gravity.

Now the observatory had a ghostly quality, its round shape, its dark stones looming over the flat green fields. It was our fault that the observatory was still closed, as if the parks department were still waiting for the cloud of taint to evaporate, even after two years.

I pressed the window open and squeezed inside, scraping my leg on the stone walls as I scaled them. “Crap.” My backpack landed with a thud on the hard stone floor. Damp and echoey, the interior was lined with old and faded exhibits about the history of sundials and how craters are formed. I looked up to the domed window atop the observatory, remembering the night it opened when I was little, Orion's belt gleaming and all that hope blinking in the stars. I flicked the light switch and only the palest light washed over the room.

I wanted to go home, but I knew I couldn't. I looked at my own charts in my notebook, the careful pencil drawings I'd done of the elliptical orbit. That was one relief: it wouldn't be tonight. I wouldn't miss it. Not yet.

Two benches stood against the walls, each clad in dark red velvet, worn now and threadbare in spots, but good enough for a bed. I took off the wet boots, rolled up the rain slicker into a makeshift pillow, and lay down. I was so weirdly calm. Not scared to be alone in the park at night. Not scared to be homeless-ish. Not scared to be lying down in the very spot where, two years earlier, Ginny had snorted five lines of cocaine through a one-dollar bill, then washed it down with the contents of her flask, while I watched at the stained-glass window.

After Ginny left home that night, I had sneaked out and ridden my bike, curious to see her glamorous life, the boys and the drugs and the music. I'd ridden up to the observatory and leaned my bike against a white pine tree. The lights of the observatory had glowed warm and orange against the blue-black night sky, and the sounds of the Misfits leaking from the boom box grew louder as I approached.

I'd stood on a bench outside the stained-glass window, and I saw her; I saw what she did, and my feet seemed to slip out from under me and the bench wobbled, and I grabbed on to the windowsill and yelped, and they'd all looked up. Ginny looked up.

I dropped to the ground and heard her say, “Shit. My little sister. I have to go.”

She called after me, came after me as I escaped into the woods to get my bike, then crouched down and watched. Watched her friends try to get her to stay, tell her she was too wasted to drive, watched her shrug them off and hurry down the hill to our car, wobbling and yelling and waving people away, angry and sloppy and mean—​and she got in the car while Greta and Soo forced themselves in.

I didn't say anything, not then, not later. I wasn't supposed to be there, but I'd been there and I'd watched her do all of that, and I'd never said anything, not even after I rode my bike home and found she wasn't there. Not after the phone rang later that night: the sheriff calling to tell us our lives would never be the same.

The observatory was cold and dank, and it was good enough. Maybe the comet would be here soon. Maybe, like the Paiute Indians used to think, it signified the end of this world and the start of the next.

No, I wasn't scared to be there. But once the tears came, there was no stopping them.

In the morning I felt as hung-over
as I had a couple of months ago when Tommy and I drank too many wine coolers and ended up in the back of his car, the horribleness of it almost good, confirming for me everything anyone ever said about me. Oh, for a coffee, which apparently I liked now, and a grilled bran muffin at the Woolworth's lunch counter, the beautiful fluff of my own bed, my guitar, my records, my friends.

In last night's clothes and without my shitkickers or hardhat or flannel shirt, I made my way down to our construction site, Soo's hiking boots still a bit sloshy around my feet. The last time I went hiking with my mom, she led me and Rosie and a grumbling Ginny up Mount Tremper to forage for boletus mushrooms, her careful instruction and the pictures she showed us in her
Encyclopedia of Fungi
guiding us so that we wouldn't accidentally pick something poisonous.

This was when Ginny was changing, though I didn't realize it then. Her wonder was turning into some kind of unwillingness, some reluctance or refusal to embrace us, or at least our parents. She'd worn her Walkman and kicked rocks all the way up, and when we got to the top, she'd sat looking at the view and taken off her headphones, slipping them over my ears.

“Listen to this,” she'd said. “It'll make you feel better about everything.” I remember wondering why she felt so bad, but, yeah, Leonard Cohen's “Hallelujah” was amazing.

It stung to conjure up those memories, even the bittersweet ones. It was easier to believe that I had never been part of a happy family so I wouldn't have anything to miss. I felt like the planemos we'd learned about at the end of last year: rogue planets that had been kicked out of their own solar system, with no home stars to circle around.

The sheer amount of sobbing I'd done the night before had left my eyes buglike swollen, my shoulders achy. Funny, the footbridge-in-progress felt like a refuge. It was so much cooler there along the creek, and I could see, as Lynn would say, the fruits of several weeks' labor. Yes, indeed, the planks I'd lain atop the concrete piers were less precise than Tonya's, but I loved the way the bright wood looked against the dark soil, the way our creation snaked up toward the observatory. I had to admit it: I was actually looking forward to the day's work, a chance to free my mind from its endless spinning.

The rest of the crew arrived, and I said hi to Tonya. She looked at me and said, “Okay. Hi. What the heck happened to you?”

“Long story,” I said, turning away, but I could feel her staring at me.

“Um, you okay?” she asked. “You look like hell.”

“Thank you.”

“No, I just—”

But thankfully Lynn had arrived and waved us over to him.

“Good news,” Lynn said. “This afternoon we're having a little field trip after we screw the planks together and while we wait for the adhesive to dry. We have a guest today, a biologist and arborist who studies trees, and we're going to do some testing on our trees to find out how old they are and if they're still healthy.”

My initial reaction was to conjure up a number of snarky remarks, but they were quelled by the dangerous feeling in my gut.

“Caraway? Where's your hardhat?” Lynn asked. “Where are your boots?”

I shrugged.

“And long pants? And your hammer? Where's your fanny pack?”

Everyone was looking at me, a thousand blinking eyes waiting for an explanation or at least my signature retort. I had none. Nothing. I had nothing.

“I hate that fanny pack,” I said.

“Do you want me to send you home?” he asked. “Because I can do that.”

No,
I wanted to say.
I don't want to go home.
I wasn't being defiant. I was being defeated. If he sent me home, my father would surely kick me out or commit me to the nuthouse. I essentially had no home to go to, and by this afternoon, I now realized, the park would cease to be a refuge too.
The arborist.
I couldn't escape myself. Enemies everywhere.

“No,” I whispered. “Don't send me home.”

Lynn narrowed his eyes at me. “Come with me.”

Lynn took me over to the park office and helped me cobble together an outfit from the lost and found: pants two sizes too big, held on with the bungee cord from my bike, and a hardhat for a person three times my size.

“How do I look?” I asked, twirling around so that the hardhat wobbled on my head.

Lynn actually laughed. “You look great. There's a job opening for a scarecrow at the end of the summer.”

“Ha,” I said, but I was still holding back tears.

The truth was, I wanted to work. I wanted to participate. At least 50 percent of me wanted to ally myself with Tonya, who could stab the end of her six-foot pry bar into the dirt to tamp it down and then carefully lay a track of pine along it, her face set and determined, brow furrowed in concentration, tongue sticking slightly out as she lined up the slats and then—​
whack
—​slapped that nail expertly into place with her Youth Workforce hammer. An almost imperceptible look of satisfaction passed across her face before she caught me staring at her and narrowed her eyes and said, “Are you getting paid to just stand there and watch me?”

“I don't have a hammer,” I said. Every inch of me was fatigued, too tired to fight. I sat down cross-legged and took my notebook out from my backpack and worked on the standard equation for an eclipse, very pointedly ignoring her.

“You're kidding!” Tonya said. “Carrie, you're being ridiculous.” She handed me her hammer. “Here,” she said. “Use mine.”

Jimmie had looked over at us, and the way he nodded his head and furrowed his brow at her—​as if asking,
You okay?
—​suddenly I just knew it. I knew all about them. I had nobody, but somehow Tonya had a boyfriend.

“Oh god—​you're a couple?” I closed my notebook and put my hand on my belly, faking a hearty laugh.

“Yeah, so what? Ever since disco night at Civic. Which, by the way, is awesome.”

I couldn't stop laughing, even though it wasn't a real laugh. “That is too funny.”

The look of hurt alarm that rooted in her features—​it was fierce. I could feel it like a force whipping from her chest. It nearly knocked me over, but I stayed in place.

“You are the cruelest person I have ever met.”

I waved it away. “Me? You're the drill sergeant, ordering everybody around, pretending to be so competent, pretending like you don't care that you're queen—​make that king—​of the nerds, when you wish you could be cool.”

“You just proved my point,” she said. She had stopped tamping the dirt temporarily, pausing to take in the pure evil of me. “The worst thing that ever happened to you was when you decided to pretend to be somebody else, when you decided to cloak your inner nerd in some ridiculous thing where you pretend to be cool.”

I couldn't remember for a moment how to speak, couldn't identify the liquid of emotion that was now drowning my body. Oh, right. It was regret, all manners and shapes of regret. I regretted everything—​I'd made my sister drive when she was wasted and I couldn't get a boyfriend and I'd screwed up all my babysitting gigs and Soo hated me now and I hadn't begged my mom to stay and I had failed my father who'd tried so hard to protect me and I'd been disobedient and rude to Lynn, and I'd been the cruelest person in the world to Tonya. It was me, after all. It wasn't some troll who'd occupied the bridge beneath my heart. It was me.

“
Cloak your inner nerd,
” I said. “That's kind of poetic. That should be a lyric.”

She rejected my hint of a smile, the tiniest offer of peace, and returned to the planks of wood.

“You think you're so much better than us because you have older friends, but those people are so screwed up. You know how they're going to turn out? Just like their parents.”