The Same Stuff as Stars

by Katherine Paterson

  “You can’t do that.” Her voice was sharper than she’d meant it to be. “Someone else lives there now.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Well, I guess it’ll have to be the sugar shack, then. You could bring me out something to eat, couldn’t you?” He gave a short laugh. “I’m like to starve.” So he had run away and was expecting her to hide him. She wanted to tell him to go away, to go back to wherever he was supposed to be, before the cops came pounding on the door again, before what little was left of her world got broken into a million pieces. Instead, she walked beside him up the driveway, with his left hand on her right shoulder. She was sure the weight of it would leave a mark, like a handprint, right through her jacket and sweatshirt and onto her skin. “Sooner the better. I’m ready to eat a horse.” He squeezed her shoulder before he let go and headed for the sugar shack.

  She watched him disappear inside, her heart pounding. What was she to do with him? If she told Grandma, Grandma was sure to call the police. Wayne was right. The old lady didn’t like him—was scared of him, more than likely. She herself should probably call the police, but you can’t call the police to take away your own daddy. If only the star man were here. She glanced across to the trailer, but there was no car there. Miss Liza had said to call whenever she needed help, but this wasn’t the kind of burden to lay on the crooked shoulders of an old lady. She went into the house. She needed time to think.

  “You’re late.”

  “Am I?”

  “What you been up to?” The eyes from the figure in the rocker were narrowed in suspicion.

  “Nothing. I just got off the bus. It must have been late today.”

  The old woman stuck out her lip in a pout. “I ain’t had no lunch.”

  “Grandma! I left you a sandwich in the fridge. I told you it was there.”

  “I didn’t feel like peanut butter.”

  “Well, what do you feel like?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t have no appetite lately.”

  Angel wanted to scream. How could she figure out what to do about Wayne in the sugar house while Grandma was in here acting for all the world like a spoiled seven-year-old? She opened the refrigerator door. There wasn’t much inside. A little milk, one egg, the heel ends of a loaf of bread, a half jar of grape jelly, a dish of leftover peaches. No ham, no meat of any kind. Men always expected meat, didn’t they? “I guess I better hightail it to the store before it closes,” she said.

  “No!”

  The sharpness of the command made Angel turn quickly.

  “It—it gets dark too soon. I don’t want you to leave me here in the dark by myself.”

  “It’s okay, Grandma, I can get off the bus at the store tomorrow and bring stuff home then.” She went to the cabinet. There were always beans in the cabinet. She didn’t think she’d ever bought any. Sometimes it seemed like the beans got together and multiplied on the shelf. “I’ll just heat up a can of beans, okay?”

  “Hmmph.”

  She took the grunt for a yes. As she stirred, her mind went back to Wayne. It would be cold out there in the sugar house. Should she try to sneak him a blanket? She could take him the peanut butter sandwich Grandma hadn’t eaten, but there wasn’t much else. Well, it wasn’t her fault he came without any notice. She tried to ignore the churning in her stomach.

  “Why don’t you come over to the table to eat your beans, Grandma?” She had the feeling the old woman hadn’t moved all day. At first she thought Grandma was going to refuse, but she grunted her way out of the rocker and across the short distance to the kitchen table.

  The only sound at the meal was the noise Grandma made with her lips as she ate. Finally, she said, “You scared me, Angel.” The long white hair growing out of the mole on her nose was trembling as she spoke.

  “How did I scare you?”

  “I thought you was running out on me for sure.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Well, you was out last night late and then you was late coming home.”

  “I haven’t got anyplace to run to, Grandma.”

  “Some folks don’t need no place. They just go.”

  Like Wayne. Like Verna and Bernie. Like the star man.

  “Well, I got better sense than that. ’Sides, I just about got you trained to the five major food groups. I wouldn’t want to have to start all over with somebody new.”

  Grandma gave a tiny hint of a grin.

  ***

  Angel did her homework at the kitchen table, all the time trying to figure out how to get the sandwich and a blanket out to Wayne, trying not to hate him for mixing up her life worse than it already was. She thought Grandma would never go to bed, and even after she had, it was a long time before Angel could hear the snores that proved the old woman was dead asleep.

  She took the quilt off the bed in the room that should have been Verna’s. She couldn’t bring herself to take Bernie’s, even though it was a single. In the kitchen she got a Mason jar and filled it with water, grabbed the wax-paper-wrapped sandwich, and crept out to the sugar shack.

  She pushed open the door. “Daddy?”

  “I thought you wasn’t ever coming.” She couldn’t see his face, just the shape of him sitting on the floor, leaning against the case of encyclopedias.

  “I had to wait until Grandma was asleep. I didn’t think you wanted me to tell her you were here.”

  “No. No. I’m sorry. I’m just starving to death. What you got?”

  “Just a peanut butter sandwich and some water. But I brought you a blanket. And tomorrow I’ll go to the store and get something better.”

  “No need for that. We’re going to be out of here before morning.”

  The leftover sweet smell of years of boiled sap stung her nose, mixed with the smell of mold and sweat and—The words burst out: “Have you been smoking?”

  “Just a couple cigarettes. It’s cold as hell in here.”

  “What if you start a fire?”

  “Verna warned me you was a little Miss Worrywart.” He gave a sort of chuckle. “I’ll be careful, promise.”

  “And smoking can kill you.”

  “You do care about your old daddy, don’t you?” He patted the floor beside him. “Here. Keep me company while I eat.”

  She sat down beside him, not knowing quite what to say. She wanted to ask why he was here and was he really on parole, but the words stuck in her throat.

  “Remember that time we went to the fair and I won that bear for you?”

  “I still got him,” she said.

  “You’re kidding! You still got that damn bear?”

  “Yeah.”

  He put his right arm, the one holding his sandwich, around her shoulder so that some of the peanut butter smeared on her jacket sleeve. “I can’t hardly believe that. You kept that bear all these years? I never.” He pulled her close and took a bite of the sandwich in front of her face. She liked the feel of his strong arm around her shoulder. The only sound for a long while was his chewing the sandwich, Grandma’s sandwich.

  “I gotta go back in, Daddy,” she said, getting up from the floor.

  “Hold it a minute. I got to tell you something. Real good news.”

  She stood by the door, waiting.

  “I’m not ever leaving you again. Ain’t that great?”

  “I don’t understand. You said...”

  “I’m taking you with me. That’s the reason I come back. To get my angel girl.”

  She began to tremble so hard that she leaned against the door and grabbed the knob.

  “Angel?”

  “What, Daddy?”

  “Ain’t that great news?”

  “Yes, Daddy.” Why didn’t it feel like good news?

  “Now, you go to the house and pack whatever little things you need to take along and then come right back. My buddy promised he’d be here round midnight, and best I can make out”—he was holding his wrist up, trying to see his watch—“it’s past eleven already.”

  Her
teeth were chattering, and her legs wobbled so much she could hardly make it to the kitchen door. She stole into the house and up the stairs. Yanking the green suitcase out from under the bed, she threw it on top of the quilt. There was no way her hands could work well enough to fold her clothes. She just grabbed them out of the drawer, stuffed them in the bag, and shakily pulled the zipper. Then she crept back downstairs, closing the kitchen door behind her as quietly as she could. Everything about her was shaking except her mind, which felt like her mouth had that time the dentist at the clinic punched it with a huge shot of Novocain.

  He was standing just inside the sugar shack door when she opened it. “You came,” he said, drawing her in and closing the door behind her. “I was afraid you wouldn’t.”

  She nodded in the darkness. This is what she’d wished for, wasn’t it? That he’d never leave her again?

  He sat down against the encyclopedia shelves. “We’ll show old Verna, won’t we?” he said.

  What did Verna have to do with it? “I don’t understand.”

  “She took my boy, but she ain’t getting my angel girl.”

  What did he mean? That she was only something to be kept from Verna, like some piece of property he didn’t want stolen?

  “Yeah, soon as they let me out this morning, I knowed it was my one and only chance. I’m going to take you so far away she’ll never see you again. How about Florida? Would Florida suit you, baby?”

  Florida? What was he talking about? Even if he really was on parole, he couldn’t go running around wherever he pleased. Angel knew enough about the system to know that. “They won’t let you go to Florida without permission, will they?”

  “Hell, they won’t even let you go to the bathroom without permission, but you don’t have to worry about that, baby. Your daddy is doing the worrying from here on out.”

  “Daddy?”

  “Yeah, angel girl?”

  “I forgot my bear. I need to go back and get my bear.”

  “You got a thing about that bear I give you, don’t ya? Sure, go get your bear, baby, just hurry, okay? He’ll be here before long.” She started for the door. “And Angel, if the old witch has any cash, better bring that, too.”

  “All she’s got is her Social Security, Daddy. You can’t take that.”

  “Hell, she owes me a lot more than that for all the crap I took off her.”

  Angel couldn’t move. He wanted her to steal from Grandma.

  “Go on, baby, we ain’t got much time.”

  She left, pulling the door shut behind her, but instead of going into the kitchen door, she turned, making a wide circle toward the back fence, and then ran like the devil was at her heels to the trailer. The star man’s car was still missing, but maybe—yes, the door wasn’t locked. People didn’t seem to bother locking doors out here in the country, though they ought to—you didn’t know who might turn up. She flopped down on a couch under the window and sat there panting until she got her breath under control. Then she waited.

  Finally, she heard the sound of a car coughing up the dirt road and saw the lights as they swept left into Grandma’s driveway. Wayne came out of the sugar shack. She couldn’t hear what he was saying to the driver, but by the moon’s light she could see him beside the driver-side window, his head bobbing up and down in agitation and then swiveling toward the house as if looking for someone. At one point he picked up some gravel out of the driveway and flung it at one of the upstairs windows. That’s the wrong window, Daddy. That’s Verna’s room. At last he walked around and got into the passenger seat and slammed the door and the car drove off. He never even looked in the direction of the trailer. As the car backed down to the road, she could just make out the shape of her suitcase standing by itself in the middle of the driveway, where Wayne had left it.

  When the sound of the motor died away, she sat, like somebody frozen. He had come to get her, and she’d run away from him. Little Miss Obey All the Rules. That’s what happened to people who always obeyed. Life went whizzing by, and they just sat there cold and lonely like the ice in the South Pole. She didn’t have any tears. A real daughter would have cried for her daddy, who was leaving her and running away to Florida and probably ruining his life.

  It was almost morning before she made herself get up from the couch to go to her own bed. The star man’s things were all around her—his books, his telescope, even the smell of him. Where had he run to? She would have gone with him if he had asked her to. No, how could she have thought that she could leave Grandma? Someone had to be her Polaris.

  ***

  She crept back into the house, but she couldn’t sleep. Her brain was like a little car on a giant amusement park ride, going up and down and round and round, upside down and flinging her from one side to the other, making her want to vomit. She would have screeched out loud if she hadn’t been afraid that Grandma would hear.

  The next day she got through school, grateful that the numbness was back in charge of her brain. She spoke to no one at school. She didn’t even stop to see Miss Liza when she went to the store. She hardly spoke to Grandma that evening. They ate a silent supper, and when the phone shrilled, they both jumped in their seats. They sat transfixed, listening to the phone scream, watching it vibrating on the wall.

  “Well,” Grandma said after the seventh ring, “you’d better get it. It might be Bernie.”

  Angel forced herself up from the chair, walked to the phone, and lifted the receiver, not daring to hope it was Bernie, and praying it wasn’t the police or social services. It was a stranger, asking for Mrs. Morgan. Female strangers meant social services.

  “They want you.” Angel turned to Grandma, breathing hard.

  “If they’re selling, I ain’t buying.”

  “Mrs. Morgan can’t come to the phone right now,” Angel said in her Verna voice. “Can I take a message?”

  “This is the Central Vermont Hospital,” the voice said. Oh, God, not Bernie. “We have a Ray Morgan here as a patient. He wanted Mrs. Morgan to be informed of his impending operation.”

  “Who’d you say was having an operation?”

  “What’d she say?” Grandma was on her feet. “Lemme talk.” She came and took the phone out of Angel’s hand. “This is Miz Morgan,” she said. “What’s going on?”

  There was nothing for Angel to do but wait. At first, she could only feel relief that the call was neither about Bernie nor the police asking after Wayne. It wasn’t even Welfare on her tail. It took several minutes before dread like icy fingers began to claw at her. Who was in the hospital? Ray Morgan was dead. Grandma had said so.

  Grandma wasn’t saying much, mostly nodding, as though to show the caller she understood. She was obviously getting a lengthy explanation, at the end of which, she said, “How ’bout doing that once more in English?” Another explanation. “Oh. Oh. Yeah. Okay. No, I guess not. Okay. Yeah.” After which she hung up. When she turned away from the phone, her eyes were wide, like an animal caught in the headlights of an onrushing car.

  “He’s gonna die,” she said. “I just know it.”

  “Who? Who’s going to die?” Angel could hardly breathe.

  Grandma made her way back to the rocker like a person in great pain. “Santy Claus,” she said and began to rock, her eyes and face still paralyzed.

  NINETEEN

  Stardust to Stardust

  Grandma, there’s no such thing as Santa Claus.” She could feel a chill spreading to her stomach as she said it.

  The old woman looked up at her with eyes as sad as a little child’s. “Well, I guess you ought to know.”

  “Still, someone has been helping you out all these years. Was that Ray—your son Ray?” The star man?

  “I ain’t got no sons nor grandsons nor great-grandsons neither.”

  “The woman from the hospital said Ray Morgan.”

  “And just what does she know about anything?”

  “The man who’s in the hospital told her he was your son Ray. She was just passi
ng his message along.”

  “My Ray died a long time ago. He went to the army and died in that there Vietnam. He never come back to me.” She closed her eyes and began to rock. “The government took away my baby boy, and he never come back.”

  She didn’t want to ask, didn’t even want to know, but she had to. “Then who—who’s living in your trailer?”

  “What do you know about somebody living in the trailer?”

  “Me and Bernie were looking around the property, and we peeked in the window. Somebody lives in there.”

  “You got no right to go poking your nose in places that ain’t none of your beeswax.”

  “I know. But I did it anyhow.”

  “You ain’t seen nobody around, have you?”

  “Well, the first night we were here, Bernie thought he saw a man down in the yard with a gun.”

  “You ain’t seen nobody then?”

  She wanted to lie. She didn’t want the star man to be Grandma’s strange, not quite alive, son.

  “I asked you, Did you see anybody around?”

  “Well, somebody kept bringing us groceries. And I knew it couldn’t be Santa Claus like you said.”

  “I’m a crazy old woman, Angel.”

  “No, you’re not! And I’m not going to let you use that for an excuse. You don’t want me lying to you. Well, I’m sick and tired of you lying to me.” Her voice was high pitched and much louder than she meant for it to be.

  “You tell me something first.” The old woman leaned forward, suddenly cagey.

  “What?” asked Angel.

  “You tell me how come you’re all interested in stars?” There was no use lying, but she didn’t know how to begin on the truth. So she just stood there, trying to think.

  “You seen Ray. I know. There is two people around here who is star-crazy. One is Liza Irwin and the other is Ray Morgan. I know you seen Liza, but I’m thinking you been sneaking out at night to see Ray.”

  “How could I see Ray? Ray is dead. You said so yourself.”

  “I said my Ray was dead. They killed him over there, and the thing that come back was this—this zombie. You know what a zombie is?”