What Came From the Stars (3 page)

He had cut all around the picture of Alice on the cake. He had cut around her and her bridle. He had cut along the thin line of icing that led to her balloon. He had cut around the balloon. And then he had somehow lifted the whole thing out of the ice cream cake and put the piece onto her paper plate—perfectly.

“Do me,” said Patrick Belknap.

“I don’t know how I did that,” said Tommy.

“Me,” said Patrick Belknap.

So Tommy cut out the figure of Patrick Belknap with his accordion and his balloon and his string. And then he lifted the whole thing out of the cake and put the piece onto his paper plate—perfectly. Again.

“That is amazing,” said Mr. Burroughs.

Tommy felt that he should be amazed himself. But he wasn’t. It seemed like the most ordinary thing in the whole world. He cut out James Sullivan with his spinning football, and then Harriet Pulsifer with her sheet music (she wanted to be a composer), and then George Bisbee with his microscope (he wanted to be the first person to see an atom), and then tiny Jeremy Hereford with his peanut butter sandwich, and then everyone else, and he put the pieces of ice cream cake onto paper plates—perfectly. And when he was all finished, Mr. Burroughs asked if he could cut out a piece where he wasn’t tracing around the shapes, and Tommy reached over to a part of the cake that hadn’t been touched yet and began to carve out a long funnel that curved and curved around itself and then flared out at the end, except that the top of the flare bulged and reached over the opening.

When Mr. Burroughs asked what it was, Tommy Pepper looked at him, surprised that he didn’t know, since it was so obvious: It was a hanorah, of course—which is what Tommy told him.

“A hanorah?” said Mr. Burroughs.

Tommy nodded. He couldn’t believe that Mr. Burroughs wouldn’t know what a hanorah was—or that he would admit that he didn’t know what a hanorah was.

Mr. Burroughs went over to the dictionary to look it up while Tommy lifted the hanorah out of the ice cream cake and put it on Mr. Burroughs’s plate.

“Oh my goodness,” said Alice Winslow.

“H-A-N...” called Mr. Burroughs from the dictionary.

“O-R-A-H,” said Tommy.

“It’s not here,” said Mr. Burroughs.

Tommy walked over, licking his fingers. “It’s got to be there,” he said.

Mr. Burroughs shook his head.

“You play it after a victory in battle, and also after Second Sunrise on the first day of the new year,” said Tommy.

“There’s only one sunrise a day, Tommy,” said Mr. Burroughs.

Tommy nodded. “I know,” he said. But then, suddenly, he didn’t know. Was there only one sunrise a day?

Patrick Belknap asked if they could eat the part of the cake that hadn’t been served yet, and Mr. Burroughs—who was still at the dictionary—said they could if Tommy wanted to cut it up, which Tommy did. He decided that he should cut up the rest in straight lines, which wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be. By the time he was done, he was sweating a little bit—probably because it was such a warm day. He decided he had better give the cake knife back to Mr. Burroughs, who had pulled out another dictionary from his desk drawer and was looking through the
Hs.

He never did find
hanorah.

But he did give Tommy Pepper his Dumb Birthday Present. It was a saltshaker. No one laughed. They were too filled with amazement to laugh.

That afternoon, Tommy walked home with his lunch box—or whatever it was now—in one hand, and his sister’s hand in his other. Patty was in first grade, and she knew the way home and didn’t need to hold on to her brother’s hand. She even knew how to take the bus home, except taking the bus meant she had to ride with Cheryl Lynn Lumpkin and her mouth. But there were days when they wanted to walk home together because Patty was a little bit scared—and not because of Cheryl Lynn Lumpkin. Tommy knew this. He held on to her hand whenever she wanted.

He never told her how glad he was to do it.

They decided to go home the long way today, and so kept on Water Street and passed by the pavilion for Plymouth Rock and crossed the parking spaces and took the steps down to the harbor beach, where the water of Plymouth Harbor was rustling up the tiny stones and releasing them, and rustling them up and releasing them. Tommy looked past the boats and the long spit that marked the end of the harbor, and then out toward the bent horizon where the faraway buoys were tolling. And Tommy Pepper realized that he missed something. He missed it terribly.

Patty let go of his hand and started to poke around the dark and shining mussel beds.

He missed the second sun.

He missed Hengest.

And the sky was entirely the wrong color. The blue was so dark for this time of day.

He took his notebook from his backpack and pulled out a sheet of paper. Then he searched around in the backpack for something to draw with. He could find only a stubby pencil, but it would have to do. Quickly he sketched in the horizon—with Hengest shining too—and then he drew in the spit of land, the harbor, the boats. He drew in the ripples of the water. He drew in the tangy scent of the dark mussel beds. And he drew in the sound of the stones being pulled back and forth and the tolling of the buoys. And he drew in Patty, poking among the shells, and the tiny crabs underneath that she couldn’t see, and the way they were scuttling back and forth, and the tidewater that had seeped below the sand and was dragging it out in etched canals. He drew in the iodine smell of the seaweed, and how the seaweed waved back and forth under the water when the tide came in. He drew in...

Tommy stopped. He blinked. He made his hand move away from the paper. He tried to open his fingers, tried again, and finally got them to drop the pencil.

He looked at what he had drawn. He listened to it. He smelled it. He felt it.

Then, quickly, he crumpled it all up. The sound of the grinding stones grew less, less, less, then nothing. He stuffed the crumpled paper into his backpack. He left the stubby pencil lying on the sand.

“Patty,” he called, and held his hand out to her.

She looked at him.

His hand was trembling a little.

Tommy and his sister walked home quickly—until Patty started to run to keep up, and Tommy slowed down. Every time they stopped at a corner, the iodine smell of the seaweed came up to him, and he couldn’t tell if the smell was on the wind coming inland, or if it was coming from his backpack. He decided not to take a chance, and when they passed a trash can, he took out the crumpled paper and threw it away. He thought he heard the sound of pebbles pushed by water as it fell. And was the tolling only from the buoys out in the harbor?

They walked past the neat boutiques and shops with flower boxes filled with late petunias, past all the restaurants for tourists and the parking lots for tourists and the trim information booths for tourists, and past the long green lawns of those who could afford to live in big white houses by the sea—past all the smaller houses with not such long green lawns, and then smaller houses with very little lawns, and then smaller houses with hardly any lawns at all and hemmed in by scraggly hedges.

And when those houses gave out, the road sort of coughed, stuttered, and then died into a gravel path that went up sharply into the sand, passing the sign advertising
PILGRIMWAY CONDOMINIUMS COMING SOON! UPSCALE SHORE LIVING!

Beyond that sign, Tommy’s old and lonely house tilted against a dune. It had no green lawn at all. Only scrub and sand all along the railroad-tie steps up to the house that had once been white, but the paint had blown away long ago. It had a center fireplace, and only a few bricks were missing from the chimney on top—which was also tilted.

The door squeaked when Tommy and Patty opened it, the floor of the front hall squeaked when they stepped on it, and the stairs squeaked when they dropped their backpacks onto them. Tommy thought that the house had been leaning against the dune so long, it was tired and ready to give out—something like his father these last few months.

Tommy had never once had a friend over to his windblown, leaning house. Patty hadn’t either. Probably, Tommy figured, they never would.

Tommy went on back to the kitchen. This floor didn’t squeak as much because it was covered with a layer of blue floral linoleum, but he could see through the holes in the blue linoleum to the red floral linoleum beneath it, and he could see through the worn patches in the red floral linoleum to the broad wood beneath. Someday, his mother and father had said, someday they’d take up the horrible linoleum. Someday they’d level the planks and sand them smooth as soap. It was a project his mother and father had wanted to do together.

Someday.

His father was there, making a birthday cake. A chocolate frosted chocolate birthday cake, which Tommy loved so much, it didn’t matter that it was leaning too. “How was your day?” his father asked.

“Good.”

“What did you do?”

Tommy went over to the cake and ran his finger along the chocolate icing that dripped onto the plate.

“Dug up dinosaur bones.”

“What did you do with them?”

“Sold them to the Museum of Science in Boston for a small fortune.”

“And your share of that is...?”

“Five hundred thousand dollars.”

“Not bad for one day’s work.”

“It only took a couple of hours,” Tommy said.

“Not bad for a couple of hours.”

“It’ll do.” Tommy walked over to the largest worn patch of blue floral linoleum over the worn patch of red floral linoleum. He crouched down and picked at it. “Do you ever wonder what the floor would look like if we pulled all of this up?”

His father licked the chocolate icing from his fingers.

“Do you?”

His father shook his head.

Tommy looked down at the patches. “I do,” he said.

His father licked his fingers again, then looked out the window to the sea. “Your mother used to wonder,” he said quietly. Then he went back to icing the leaning birthday cake.

“Should we try it?”

His father shrugged. He frosted the birthday cake.

It was always like that. One mention of Tommy’s mother and there was nothing left to say.

Tommy went upstairs. He lived in the loft that spanned the whole house and which had been his parents’ studio before he was born, his mother painting portraits at one end and his father painting seascapes at the other. Tommy wasn’t sure how they both fit, since even though a loft sounds like a whole lot of room, Tommy could only stand up in the very middle of it—otherwise the ceiling came down to knee height over the floor. There was, however, a window at the south end that looked out over Plymouth, and a window at the north end that looked up the coast as it bent outward. So with the windows open, it was always cool in summer. And with the chimney squatting smack-dab in the center of the loft, it was always warm in winter—until the fire went down. After that, Tommy could see his breath shimmer in the freezing air.

And always, always, always there was the sound of the waves, the restless back-and-forth of the ocean, filling the harbor and emptying it, filling the harbor and emptying it.

That night, Tommy and Patty and their father cooked out on the dune. They heated up the clam chowder from the day before and dripped maple syrup on cornbread and boiled new carrots from their garden and poured out the first of the cider. Then Tommy’s father and sister ran back into the house and they brought out the leaning chocolate frosted chocolate birthday cake, stopping every few steps to pick up the one candle still lit and to light those blown out by the sea breeze. It was getting colder and darker, and already the first star was showing over the water—but Tommy didn’t care. It was his twelfth birthday. He had been alive for four thousand three hundred and eighty-three days. He had been alive with his mother for four thousand one hundred and twenty-six of them. He had been alive without his mother for two hundred and fifty-seven of them.

In the dark, the chain around his neck glowed softly beneath his shirt.

His father and Patty got the leaning chocolate frosted chocolate birthday cake to the firepit with some of the candles still lit. Patty had brought plates and forks and the Birthday Cake Knife, which Tommy took.

“Wait a minute!” said his father. “We have to sing before you cut it.”

So he did. “Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!” he sang, and Patty swayed side to side with the rhythm, smiling, and the sea breeze stroked the blue-gold-red embers bright.

And with that wind in his face, and looking at the sea, and feeling the light fall on him from the first star, and with those he loved beside him, and his mother gone, gone, Tommy felt the chain warm, and he began to sing too. He sang of parting and of grief. He sang of friends and loved ones who must leave him. He sang of the loneliness of one star without another. He sang in a high keen, as high-pitched as wind, and he felt the melody twine with the strange starlight, and heard the sound of Hreth rising out of the ocean, and he sang of that too.

And when he finished, he looked at his father and at Patty, who stared at him in amazement and wonder. And he saw in his sister’s eyes that she was a little afraid.

“What?” he said.

Then the wrath of the Lord Mondus kindled against Young Waeglim, the last of the Faithful Valorim, who neither trembled nor faltered in the Council Room of the Ethelim. Great was the anger of the Lord Mondus and great the torment he promised. Even the hearts of the O’Mondim—if hearts they had—moved with pity.

And when Young Waeglim would not reveal where he had sent the Art of the Valorim, the Lord Mondus imprisoned him deep beneath the Reced, where the Twin Suns never shone, where the soft moonlight of spinning Hreth never glimmered. Young Waeglim did not tremble at his lonely doom, but as he was carried down from the Tower, lower and lower into the depths of the Reced, his eyes searched out each window, as if he might take within himself its light. And when he came at last to the final pane, then it was that Young
Waeglim burst upon the O’Mondim with the might of twelve, and more than a few of the Faceless would never again feel the covering of the cool sea. But Young Waeglim was finally dragged below into the darkness, down to levels even the Valorim had never seen, but which the Lord Mondus had discovered through his Art. Down so that the glow of torches grew feeble. Down so that even the O’Mondim trembled at the weight of rock above them.