Lost Stars (21 page)

“I know.”

“No, for real, they don't suck.”

“I
know.
” She still seemed to be waiting. “I actually like them, okay? Sorry I said that before.”

She shrugged. “Okay, then. We're good.”

She was still hanging around, so I said, “What?”

“So, we're going to that dance thing at Civic again.”

“Oh.”

“You coming, or what?”

“What? Me?”

“Yeah, nimrod. You see anybody else here?” Was she joking? Was she plotting her revenge, get me to show up at the dance so she could publicly shame me, à la that movie
Carrie
? If only I had that Carrie's supernatural powers.

I wrapped the bungee cord around the hardhat and took a chance. I said, “Okay. Maybe.”

I realized that I hadn't talked to Soo since she wouldn't let me stay with her. Greta, either. They were leaving in less than a month, and clearly they'd already moved on. I tried not to concentrate on the ache that brightened in my chest when I thought about them. Instead I put on a sparkly top and my cutoffs and the sandals with the little bit of high heel, and I brushed my hair out so that, in theory, it was full-bodied (when in actuality it was just frizzy), and I put a sparkly comb on one side and some blush on my cheeks and some blue eye shadow on my eyes. I looked in the mirror and pretended that I looked okay.

Then I took my bike out and stood for a minute in the cool night. No guitar. No sound of his ailing car. No music coming from the house or the whisper of Mrs. Richmond's leather boat shoes on the lawn. Maybe he was so scared of me that he'd left town altogether.

I rode my bike downtown and stood outside the club. I'd been there a thousand times, drunk and swaying to my favorite local band, the Figgs, but never had I attended a wholesome gathering such as this. A gray K-car zoomed past me, Jimmie driving and Tonya in the front seat and Kelsey in the way back, “Funky Town” blaring from the stereo. They parked and walked toward the club, but I rolled my bike into the alley and waited, spying on them. Jimmie was wearing a clay-colored suit with wide lapels and a frilly light blue dress shirt underneath, and Tonya had some sort of pastel spaghetti-strapped getup that sort of worked on her.

After they went in, I locked my bike and went inside. Civic had been transformed into a school-age dance, with patriotic red, white, and blue bunting. It was not necessarily my idea of a cool hangout—​it didn't have much compared to Soo's tricked-out basement—​and I wasn't sure if it was ironic or not. But the music, I had to admit, was good. “I'm So Excited” and “That's the Way I Like It” and “Love to Love You.” I loved Donna Summer. I was ready to admit it. In this drug-free crew of science nerds who had mostly bad taste in music, I was weirdly happy.

I watched from the doorway as Jimmie and Tonya took to the dance floor. Jimmie. He was super happy and nice and a weirdly great dancer. Tonya was even better. It was like a scene from
Saturday Night Fever
with a much more unlikely cast. And it was kind of the best thing ever. I stood at the doorway and watched until Tonya suddenly looked my way. She stopped for a minute in that sea of moving bodies, trained her eyes at me, either to invite me in or shoo me away. I didn't wait to find out which.

Dean wasn't in the yard when I got back.
I stayed home for a couple of nights, reading about Dmitri Alexandrov's discovery of Vira (he had named it after his daughter, whose name meant “faith”) and learning all the chords to Bowie's “Life on Mars?” and eating crappy food with my dad and Rosie. I kept sitting out on the roof, playing loud, waiting for the notes to draw Dean out, but he never came. I ignored the slow-growth sickening feeling in my stomach, tried to tamp it down with denial.

Once, when I was sitting out on the roof, fiddling with the telescope, I saw Mrs. Richmond leaving to go to her BMW station wagon.

“Hi,” I called out to her—​something I had not done before in sixteen years of next-door-neighbordom.

She stopped and smiled. “Carrie. Hi. How are you?” She seemed perfectly friendly and not at all like she knew that her nephew was in the slow and torturous process of breaking my heart.

“I'm kind of good,” I said. “How's Dean?”

She hesitated, opening her mouth, taking a breath in, then exhaling and pausing again. “He's okay,” she said. “He's good. Thank you for asking.”

Then she got in her car and drove away.

Another time I saw Mrs. Richmond and my dad talking, heads huddled together, and for a flash I thought,
What if those two are getting together?
which led to the delightful fantasy of living in the same house as Dean, not to mention having an actual yard, cable TV, and a dishwasher, and I was happy again before I remembered how sad I was, how much I would miss my friends, and how the boy of my dreams had seen the real me and vanished. They were probably conspiring to keep us apart, Mrs. Richmond asking my dad to keep me on our side of the fence and not infect Dean—​healed now, no longer broken—​with my particular brand of crazy.

What distracted me from all that misery was the fact that Rosie and I were having actual conversations from time to time, and that apparently—​Bob Seger and Madonna aside—​she was developing an interest in actual music. She asked me to make her a mix tape, so I put aside the one I'd started for Dean and worked on a starter tape for a budding audiophile. I put a little bit of everything on it, from the Band's “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” to Kate Bush to Blondie, to the Specials' “Ghost Town,” and Tom Waits and the Silos and the Figgs and NRBQ and Janis Joplin, who knocked Rosie's socks off the way she had mine. Some Neil Young and some R.E.M., too.

One time I had the urge to talk to her about that night, the other worst night of my life, and of hers, but I couldn't bring myself to do it.

A whole week went by, and Earth moved .3 milliseconds away from the sun, the days slightly shorter and a little bit cooler, the full moon winding down to its three-quarter gibbous form. I knew soon Soo would be leaving, and Greta and Tiger and the rest of them. And possibly Dean. But the phone stayed silent, and no rocks at my window and no guitar from the yard and no calls from anyone.

I came home from work that Thursday afternoon, exhausted from actually doing the physical labor that was asked of me. My dad and Rosie were out, but there was a manila envelope on my bed. Maybe it was from Dean? Maybe it was a forty-five of some rare import that would rearrange my world for the three-and-a-half minutes of the song? Maybe it was a breakup letter, even though we were not technically going out. A mix tape? I couldn't open it. Instead, I searched through my records to resume makingthe mix tape for him, the boy who had disappeared.

I lay down with my headphones on and put on Kate Bush, “Wuthering Heights,” a song I'd had to stop listening to after Ginny died because it made me cry too hard. She sang about how it got dark, and lonely, on the other side from the one she loved. Finally I screwed up the courage to open the envelope. It said
READ THESE
on the front and was filled with smaller envelopes. I poured them out on the bed. My mother's letters. All of them. Apparently my father had rescued them from the trash every time I threw them out. A few had pizza stains on them—​he must have dug deep for those. They all reeked of caraway.

In the beginning, they were short and loving and vaguely apologetic.

Dear Carrie,

I'm writing to you from my room in the Dharma Mountain Monastery. It's a truly magical place. The rooms are spare and a bit cold, but outside it's so still and quiet and dark, and the sky lights up like that phosphorescent bay in Puerto Rico that we went to for your dad's 40th birthday. It's absolutely alive with stars. There's no phone here, so this is the only way I can touch base with you.

I'm not planning to stay long, just enough to clear my head so I can come back and do a better job taking care of you and Rosie. It must sound crazy to you, that I'd want to spend a week or two not speaking a word to another human being, but it just seemed like the best way to move forward—​by stepping back. I'll be home soon. I love you. I miss you.

Love,

Mom

Dearest Caraway,

Well, as you likely know, the three weeks came and went. It has been amazing. Truly amazing. I've thought about things that had been absent from my mind for decades, little memories from childhood that had long faded—​my mom in her lilac-printed muumuu, digging wild onions from our lawn. The tiniest, most beautiful little moments. It's so strange that Ginny's absence seems to have created an avalanche of these memories, thoughts, and feelings that had been waiting for me to have some crisis so they could swoop in to soothe me.

And they have—​I've been soothed. At the very least, I've been made aware of just how much more healing I need. So I've signed up for another three weeks. I can't make phone calls, but if you come here, I will be able to walk down outside the property's boundaries and talk to you. Just write to me and tell me when you'll be here. Or take the bus and walk the half mile up Mulberry Road, and you'll see the gate—​you can't miss it, this amazing wrought-iron gate in the shape of those Japanese sloped roofs, and there are these incredible Japanese gardens with cherry blossoms and a koi pond and a whole wave of jewelweed. There's a magnificent herb garden here. It's lovely. I'd love you to see it. So come. Let me know that you're okay and that you're okay with me doing this.

I love you,

Mom

Dearest Caraway,

I haven't heard from you. Is that because you're angry at me? I wouldn't blame you, but I hope that someday you'll understand. The session ends in two weeks. I'll be home then. I'll hold you and love you, and we'll go to the movies and eat terrible popcorn, and I'll even let you have a soda. I've mostly had brown rice for five weeks anyway.

Love,

Mom

Dearest Caraway,

I love you. How are you? You must be furious with me. You will be angrier when I tell you this: I'm staying for another round. One more month. Well, six weeks in all. Please tell me you'll take me back when I return, that you'll allow me to be your mother again. I am now, and will always be your mother. I just have to get back to the place where I'm not so worried that I'll harm you. I just don't want to harm you. That's why I'm here.

Please, Carrie, please.

Mom

They went on like this, letter after letter of them. They grew increasingly fretful, then angry. Why hadn't I written? Why was I punishing her when she'd already been punished? Had I stopped loving her? The longer my silence, the more she needed to stay away and be silent herself. The letters became more frantic, begging me to write back, to come see her, to tell me she could, should, come home.

And then, the last one.

Okay, Caraway. I'm ready. I'm going to tell you what happened that night.

I told your father that I was leaving him. You may not have known this—​I don't know what you knew and what you didn't—​but I was having an affair. I was having an affair with Mr. Feinstein—​well, Barry. Your old shop teacher. It was a cowardly and shameful thing to do, but sometimes people do terrible things to get out of a relationship. They aren't brave enough to face someone and say, “I don't want to be with you anymore,” so they withdraw or fight or cheat—​they try to get the other person to be the grownup and end things. So that's what I'd done. I'd bruised and bullied your father until he told me he would leave me—​that way he looked like the bad guy. This is what we were in the midst of that night. Your father and I were yelling at each other like children—​worse than children. Oh, it was despicable, that I could ever have talked to him that way, your gentle and warm and loving father, who would have done anything for you girls. But the truth is I'd talked to him that way many times. I treated him the way Miss Hannigan treated those orphans in
Annie
—​remember
Annie
? You loved it so much. I cursed your dad and called him names, and he took it. He didn't fight back. Maybe that's what I wanted: for him to fight back.

But Ginny was the one to fight back. She found us arguing in the living room, and she stood up for your dad. She told me not to talk to him that way. She told me I was a traitor and a liar. She used the word
bitch,
and worse. She called me as many names in one breath as I'd called your father in a lifetime, and I hit her. I hit her really hard. She fell to the floor. She was gasping for breath, she was so shocked and so hurt, her face red from my hand. There was blood at the corner of her mouth. I hope to god you never make your own child bleed. Oh, it was the worst moment of my life, a moment that I knew then I'd never be able to take back. Your father may have forgiven me for Mr. Feinstein and for all those names I'd called him, but never for that. Your father rushed to her and helped her up, but she seemed to hate him as much as she hated me right then, maybe because he hadn't protected her, or maybe because he hadn't left me when he should have. I don't know. I just know that it felt like she had fled, even when she was in the room with us. She took the keys and left, and I thought, “I'll never see her again.” That's what I thought. I thought she'd run away and would be pregnant by 22, like I was, and angry and out of love by 39, just like me. But I let her go. I didn't stop her. I just thought she was already gone.