Where the Stars Still Shine (2 page)

“Ready to go?” she asks, as I get in the car. She tries to light up a smoke, but her hands are shaking. That troubles me in a way I can’t identify. I take the cigarette from between her lips, light it, grab a quick drag, and hand it back. She flashes a smile, and for a split second I see the girl she used to be. The girl who held my hand as we walked to the bus stop on the first day of kindergarten. She was impossibly beautiful then, with her platinum pixie hair and bare legs ending in battered Doc Martens. People stared at her, and my heart felt too big for my chest because she was
my
mom. We reached the stop, and she perched on the back of the bus bench while we waited, smoking a cigarette.

“You’re gonna do fine at school,” she said that day, blowing the smoke up and away from me as she stroked the back of her hand over my cheek. “A girl as smart as you can do anything.”

I believed her then, when we lived in a real apartment with houseplants, pictures on the wall, and a tiny balcony that overlooked a river. She worked at a
coffeehouse near the park, and when the bell rang at the end of the day, she was always there, leaning against the empty bike rack. Now I don’t get complacent because we don’t ever stay.

“Where are we going?” I ask, as Mom pulls away from the curb.

She always has a plan. Even when we sneak away at three in the morning, she has our next future mapped out in her head.

“Oh, I was thinking Colorado might be nice,” she says, which surprises me. We usually head toward warmer climates when the weather gets colder. “What’s the capital of Colorado?”

When I was little, she’d help pass time on long bus rides by quizzing me on the state capitals. I graduated to countries as I got older, but she had trouble remembering all the countries, let alone their capitals. Her fallback has always been the states, even though they’ve been burned into my memory for years.

I groan. “I don’t feel like playing this game right now, Mom.”

“Humor me.”

“It’s Denver. The capital of Colorado is, was, and always will be Denver.”

She blows out a puff of smoke that gets sucked through the crack at the top of her window. “Are you sure?”

“I’ve been sure since I was six.”

Mom laughs. “You could learn to ski in Colorado.”

I roll my eyes.

“Well, you could,” she insists. She reaches over and strokes my cheek with the back of her hand. Her fingers are rough from washing glasses during her bartending shift. “A girl as smart as you can do anything she wants.”

I don’t say anything. Because if I did, I’d tell her she’s wrong. I can’t get a library card. I can’t window-shop at the mall with friends. I can only wait for the day she gets paranoid because the man at the gas station looked at her funny or she
just knows
the women she passed on the sidewalk were whispering about her. Then we leave. I don’t say anything. Because if I did, I’d tell her I don’t believe her anymore.

We’re headed west on US 34 when blue lights flash from behind, and my heart slides up into my throat. I hold my breath, waiting for the patrol car to shoot past us after its actual target. It can’t be us, because Mom always follows the speed limit. She uses turn signals. We wear our seat belts.

“He’s probably after someone else,” she says.

Except traffic on the highway is thin this time of night, and when my mom pulls over onto the gravel at
the side of the highway, the patrol car follows. The inside of the Corona is awash in blue light that illuminates her face. My insides go cold when I see an expression there I’ve never seen—fear.

“Mom, what did you do?”

“Nothing,” she whispers. “I didn’t do anything.”

The deputy reaches the car and she cranks down the window.

“Something wrong?” She flutters her eyelashes and smiles at the young deputy standing beside the open window. The fluttering pings off him as if he were wearing a flirt-proof vest. She’s only thirty-three, but years of smoking and drinking—but mostly the running—have made her old before her time.

“Ma’am.” The deputy leans down to her window as a second patrol car pulls in front of the Toyota. This is not good. “I’ll need to see your license, registration, and proof of insurance, please.”

She puts on a show of searching her purse for the imaginary documents while I gnaw my frayed thumbnail. Her driver’s license is long expired, this car is not registered, and there’s no way in hell we have car insurance.

“I must have left them in my other purse,” she says.

“Do you know why I pulled you over tonight?” the deputy asks. Through the dirt-streaked windshield,
I watch another officer emerge from the second car. He’s older and a little heavier than the first deputy.

Mom shakes her head. “No, sir, I don’t.”

“Your left taillight is out,” he says. “And I was going to suggest you get yourself to the nearest auto supply store and get that fixed—”

“Oh, I will,” she interrupts. “We’ll be waiting in the parking lot the minute they open.”

“—but I ran your license and discovered the plate was reported stolen, so I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the car.”

The old hinge squeaks as he opens the door, but Mom doesn’t move. She just sits there. Stunned. As if it’s only now that she realized she is not invincible. That time has caught up with her.

“Ma’am,” the officer repeats. “Out of the car, please.”

When I was seven and we lived in a tiny town called Kearneysville, I got sick with a really high fever. For three days I wove in and out of consciousness, dizzy and unsure if I was awake or dreaming. That’s how this feels.

“There must be some kind of mistake,” Mom insists, as the first officer fastens a pair of handcuffs around her wrists and tells her about her right to remain silent. “The plate was on the car when I bought it.”

This is probably not true, since her life is a carefully crafted house of cards, constructed of lies and
teetering on the brink of collapse at every moment. When they discover the truth, a stolen license plate will be nothing. Because twelve years ago, after she and my father divorced, my mother abducted me. I’m numb as the deputy leads her to his car. Wasn’t it only an hour ago that I wished we’d stop running? This is not what I meant.

“Don’t tell them anything,” Mom says. Her features are distorted through a watery film of tears that turn her into someone I don’t recognize. “Keep your mouth shut.”

The door beside me opens. My legs shake as I get out of the Toyota, and I grab hold of the door frame to keep from falling down. My world has tilted like the floor of a carnival fun house.

“Is she your mother?” the second deputy asks.

Mom has never had a contingency plan for getting caught, so I don’t know what to say that won’t throw her under the bus. My eyes fixed on the hole in my left sneaker, I nod. “Yes, sir.”

He transfers me to his patrol car. Assures me that I’m not under arrest. Asks my name. My throat is a desert, and my lips are chapped when I lick them. What do I say that won’t betray my mom? How do I keep the truth from coming out?

“Callie.” I’ve had so many identities over the years,
plucked from baby-name books, television shows, and fairy tales. Once Mom dared me to name myself after the next intersection, and I spent a month as Loma Linda Charles. A laugh bubbles out of my throat as I think of that, but it’s not funny, really. I’m scared. “Callie Quinn.”

He closes the door and confers with the first deputy for a few minutes. Then the arresting officer gets into his car and pulls out onto the highway. The blue lights go off, and the car with my mother inside is swallowed up by the darkness.

The second officer returns. On the other side of the cage, he types something into his computer. What it tells him is a mystery he doesn’t share; he only offers me a grim smile in the rearview mirror before we drive off into the night, leaving the Corona at the side of the road with my life zipped up in a brown tweed suitcase.

Leaving my guitar behind.

All I have left is an evil eye bead that doesn’t work—and me.

The man standing in the sheriff’s office lobby the next day—the one with his hands jammed deep in the pockets of his jeans—is a stranger, but I recognize him the same way I recognize my own face. The brown of his eyes. The slope of his nose. Cheekbones. Jawline. And the way he worries his lower lip is so familiar that I’m not surprised to discover myself doing the same thing. I run my fingers over my chapped lips and wonder if he’s as nervous as I am. My father.

He doesn’t match up with the picture in my head. Mom usually likes them stocky and pugilistic, with bashed-in noses and thick forearms. Aging men who drink whiskey and drive muscle cars older than her. But in this man I can still see the boy-next-door he used to be.

“All set, hon?” The dispatcher is a woman named
Ancilla, whose puffy grandma hair and bifocals are a strange contrast to her dark-green law-enforcement uniform. But it was Ancilla who sent the deputy to fetch my belongings from the Toyota. She let me sleep in her guest bedroom while she washed my dirty jeans. Fixed me waffles with real butter and maple syrup for breakfast. Took me shopping at Target, where she bought me a red peasant-style top with tiny turquoise flowers embroidered along the neckline. I can’t remember the last time I wore something that didn’t first belong to someone else. Can’t remember ever wearing something so pretty.

Her hand is a comfort on my back as she urges me forward. I want to dig in my heels the way the characters do in cartoons, leaving grooves along the hallway tile. Instead, I take the step.

“Will, um—is my mom okay?”

“She’s holding up real fine,” she assures me. “And Judge Daniels is a fair man. He’ll make sure she gets the help she needs.”

The help she needs?
What does that mean?

Before I can ask, we’re through the swinging door and into the lobby, and my father’s arms are wrapped around me.

“
Korítsi mou
.” His words are low and deep and choked, and I’m overcome with a déjà vu sensation. I
don’t understand those words, but I’m sure I have heard them before. “You can’t possibly know how much I’ve missed you.”

His cheek rests on top of my head and my face is pressed into the warm, clean smell of his T-shirt, but I’m stiff inside the circle of his embrace because everything about this screams
wrong wrong wrong
. All these years I’ve believed my father didn’t love me, that the only reason he wanted me was so that Mom couldn’t have me. I need that to be true because if it’s not, it means she didn’t just lie to everyone else. She lied to me, too.

“I’m sorry.” He pulls away. “I didn’t mean to overwhelm you. I mean, you don’t even—” He reaches out as if he’s going to stroke my cheek, and when I flinch the sadness in his eyes fills the whole room. His hands slide into his pockets. “You don’t even know me.” He looks up at the ceiling and exhales, and when he looks at me again, his eyes are shiny. “But I’m really,
really
happy to see you.”

I have no idea what to say, so I pull my lower lip between my teeth and let the saliva burn.

“May I—?” He reaches for my suitcase and guitar, but I tighten my grip on both and shake my head.

“You take care now, honey.” Ancilla comes to my rescue one more time, handing me a business card with
her name printed on it. “If you need anything at all, you give me a holler, okay?” I nod and she pats my back. “Have a safe trip home.”

Home.

The word makes my eyes sting, but I don’t want to wipe tears on my new red shirt and I don’t have a tissue. I’m blinking to keep them at bay when my father pulls a crumpled Kleenex from his jeans pocket.

“It’s clean,” he says, and I let him take my guitar for a moment so I can blot my eyes. “Well, mostly. I, um—I’ve been kind of a mess ever since I got the call. I came as fast as I could.”

A hurricane of anger swirls inside me, and I have to fight to keep from hurling my suitcase across the room and screaming until my throat is raw. How could she do this? How could she take me away from someone who talks to me with a voice thick with tears and offers me a ratty tissue when I’m crying? How could she?
How could she?

A hate so intense I think it could burn me alive flares in my chest, followed by a wave of sorrow that snuffs the hate. Mom has been my entire world for twelve years. I love her.

“So I don’t know what, if anything, your mom has told you about me,” he says, opening the trunk of a silver rental car parked outside the sheriff’s office. I put in
my guitar and suitcase. “My name is Greg. You can call me that if it makes you more comfortable.” I’m relieved I don’t have to call him Dad. “I, um—I’m remarried, and my wife, Phoebe, and I have two little boys, Tucker and Joe.”

He flips open his wallet to show me a family portrait. Phoebe is girl-next-door pretty with hair the color of a wheat field. The older of the boys shares her coloring, while the other is a miniature version of Greg. He resembles me, too, which is just … weird. Their family is perfect and happy, and I wonder if there is room in the picture for a seventeen-year-old girl. Do I want to be in that picture? Do I have a choice?