Stars in the Grass

by Ann Marie Stewart

  “I told your mom I wanted to help. I’m good at painting and even better at shopping,” said GramAnna.

  “Anything else you want to do on your birthday?” Dad asked.

  “Hey, why don’t we go out and shake the trees?” Matt suggested. Grandpa looked confused.

  “Ohio-style,” Dad clarified.

  “But it’s such a mess …,” Mom cautioned.

  “It’s Abby’s birthday, remember,” Dad said. “It’s her call.”

  “You’re right.” Mom smiled. “And purple does seem to be the color tonight. It can be dessert.”

  I grinned, thinking about mulberry cobbler. That was the only answer needed. Matt knew the drill and got out a sheet of plastic while I found a large plastic bag. Then we headed to the lot next door with its two mulberry trees laden with reddish-purple berries. We’d have to move quickly; the sun was starting to go down. Matt spread the plastic blanket.

  “I get to shake first!” I yelled as I climbed the tree and shook the limbs as hard as I could. At first it sounded like a rush of wind rustling the leaves. Then the tree rained mulberries and it sounded like a summer storm. Only the ripest fell. We popped berries into our mouths, and soon our hands were stained with purple deliciousness. I checked the bottom of my bare feet and they were purple, too.

  Matt tipped the plastic to the center until a valley formed in the middle with a hill of dark mulberries. Then we picked up the corners of the tarp and poured the berries into the bag. Matt readjusted the tarp and I climbed back up and resumed shaking. Grandpa and GramAnna just laughed.

  “Beats blackberry picking with all those thorns.”

  “Yes, but these trees are a mess.” Dad picked up his foot and revealed a purple sole. “Ask Renee how she likes cleaning up after the kids when they play in the field.” Dad grabbed a branch and began shaking it, the rustle of leaves and branches drowning out whatever else he had to say. After ten minutes, the tree was clear of its ripest produce and Matt and I sat down to eat mulberries. I liked to suck on them and squish them against the roof of my mouth with my tongue, then swallow without chewing so the seeds wouldn’t get stuck in my teeth. By the end, no matter what we did, our fingers and faces were purple with the sweet juice. Grandpa just kept smiling and laughing. I could tell he was getting a big kick out of mulberry picking, Ohio-style.

  “Do you still use that camera we gave you?” Grandpa asked.

  “You want to get a picture of the purple people?” Dad asked.

  “I was thinking about the movie camera and that projector.”

  “I haven’t used it lately, Dad.”

  “Do you suppose we could have a movie night? Maybe see some old films?” Grandpa was never one to ask for much, so he had Dad’s attention. “I feel like I missed a lot,” Grandpa added, his voice full of regret.

  “We could do that. I’ll talk to Renee,” Dad said.

  Mom must have thought it was a good idea, because the next day, after GramAnna made fettenballs and Sinterklaas cookies (even though it wasn’t Christmas), we settled into the living room to watch old family movies. I’m not sure why, but we only shot movies on holidays and at big events, never the ordinary ones.

  Each reel ushered in another year of holidays and guests. Thanksgiving arrives and so do the guests, and then the camera pans to everybody at the dinner table and then there’s Matt and me by the tree opening gifts. We could trace our ages by the presents opened: a plastic doll, a book, a tricycle, a bike.

  Easter comes and I am dressed in the Douglas girls’ dresses and a white hat and gloves, and then we are running around the backyard picking up eggs. Grandpa and GramAnna, Mom, Dad, Matt, and I all laughed and chattered and added our own sound effects and narration. The short reels of us have been spliced together, each event separated by a white flicker at the end of the tape, and a clicking sound, and then suddenly we are celebrating something new and we are a season older.

  In a few minutes, we watch Matt go from a baby in the hospital to sitting up in a house I don’t recognize. Then Matt is wobbling, then walking, then running away from Mom. Dad is swinging him upside down, and then Mom comes over to stop Dad. Just when I’m almost bored of baby Matt, the tape flickers and there I am at the hospital and Dad is holding me. But then there is a skip in time and I see GramAnna and Grandpa with me, and then there’s Matt at the bus stop for kindergarten. When at last I see me again, I am walking.

  Dad stopped splicing reels together after that, so Dad has to keep stopping every three minutes to put in a new one. Each time he changes a reel, he rewinds the previous one. We beg him to let us watch ourselves go backward and sometimes he lets us, but most of the time he tells us it’s hard on the machine. Sometimes I don’t know if I can believe him. Is it really hard on the machine, or is it hard to know we can’t go backward in time? While the reel rewinds in darkness, we talk about what we’ve just seen and try to guess what’s coming.

  When the next reel pops up, we see Mom, Dad, Matt, and me projected on the living room wall, our mouths forming words that nobody can hear. Sometimes I can read lips. And then one year we are about six and twelve and someone is about to enter the picture and change our lives.

  There is a baby and Mom is holding him in a hospital bed. He’s wrapped in a bundle and the camera seems to close in on his tiny face. The picture is as shaky as Dad’s hands on the day of Joel’s birth. Then we are at home and Dad is on our front porch holding the baby, and Matt is pointing to the baby and I run up the sidewalk to see him for the first time. I scrunch up my nose and look back at the camera. There is a long pause and I know what everybody is telling me to do, but I frown and shake my head instead until at last I obey. I bend down and kiss the baby and then pop back up and scrunch up my face again.

  Everybody in the living room laughs at first and then they stop. Unsure. Now all the events on the wall have a baby in them. And that baby is the center of everything, whether tugging on the Christmas tree and being pulled away, or planting his chocolate birthday cake all over his face, or ripping into presents. And then he’s on his tricycle and smiling and waving hello or blowing kisses good-bye.

  And then there is our car, loaded and packed like we’re going on a trip. But what we don’t know yet is that we don’t want to take that trip. Dad straps the last suitcase on top, waves, and gets in. I am jumping up and down, but Matt is standing still with his hands in his pockets. Joel is the second-to-the-last one in the car and he crawls into the front on the floor. The doors slam and the car slowly drives away, except I know the camera has to stop and that Mom must later join Joel in the front seat. I look to Dad, wondering how much is on that reel and whether we can finish it, and whether I even want to. In our living room, the tears are running down Dad’s face.

  There is a motel swimming pool in Iowa where we’re standing in our swimming suits, and then a geyser at Yellowstone, where we stopped for an hour. Then there is Grandpa’s barn next to the river, cows grazing in the field, roses lining the walkway to a white house. Mom smiles shyly and waves the camera away. GramAnna is wearing an apron and her thick gray hair is bundled in a bun on the back of her neck, and Grandpa has on a plaid shirt and jeans with suspenders. He’s a short, stout man, and he’s scratching the back of his head the same way my dad does when he’s nervous. Dad does a slow pan of the animals in the field and then the camera quickly returns to Matt, who has climbed on Grandpa’s tractor. He waves at us.

  And then we are at Birch Bay, and we are playing in the sand and I remember Mom filming from the shore. I know the camera will soon stop shooting, and I don’t want it to stop. Joel stands there with a piece of kelp and all at once I have returned to the place where I was happiest and saddest, and then there is no more and the reel goes to white and the end of the tape keeps going round and round, making a sound like a card stuck in the spokes of a bicycle wheel.

  We didn’t talk. The projector hummed, leaving a white circle on the wall as our only light. After a long time, Dad shut off the proje
ctor, the room fading to black and the fan quieting.

  “When was that developed?” Matt asked at last, so softly I could barely hear him. And then I considered what that meant. Nobody had taken our picture in almost a year, but somebody had touched the camera. Dad looked to Mom.

  “I did it,” she said softly. “I just wanted to see him again.” She leaned back on Dad and he put his arm around her.

  “I’m glad you did, Renee. Thank you.” And Dad bent down and kissed her. We had looked back and we had survived.

  Before they left, GramAnna had repainted my room “lavender sunset,” bought me a new Lava Lamp, cut out pink and purple wallpaper flowers and glued them on my walls, and made new hotpink floral curtains. Matt said he’d have to wear sunglasses in my room. My room. Best of all, Grandpa got me a dark purple bean bag chair. It was my room, and decorated the way it was, it didn’t feel so much like somebody was missing.

  On the day they were leaving, Grandpa and I had breakfast together, and then I ran upstairs to get my homework. When I came back down, Dad and Grandpa were talking seriously and Mom was making breakfast for GramAnna.

  “You can come back,” Grandpa said kindly, his eyes warm, and his smile so soft and kind. I liked everything about my grandpa, and I’m not sure why his heart was bad, because it seemed to be functioning quite well that morning.

  “Dad, you know I can’t. I didn’t want it then and I don’t want it now. I’m sorry.” Though his words could have sounded mean, his voice was gentle.

  “Well, what exactly do you want?” Grandpa asked.

  “What’re you guys talking about?” I interrupted.

  “None of your business, Miss Nosy,” Mom said.

  “Your ears are too big for your head,” Dad added.

  “I’m just curious.”

  “Well, let’s just say Grandpa and GramAnna would have preferred my caring for a herd rather than a flock,” Dad tried to explain. The weight of it seemed heavy, until my father suddenly stood taller, straighter, and the two of them headed out the front door.

  On this cool, misty spring day, there was the promise of afternoon warmth. Memorial Day had come and gone; summer was coming.

  “Did you know those are from GramAnna’s garden?” Grandpa asked, pointing out the budding rosebushes lining our walk. I shook my head. I had no idea they could be transplanted from so far away. I wished my grandparents weren’t visitors, and that they would transplant more than their rose cuttings, but I knew they couldn’t stay. I didn’t want to think about it, but a part of me knew I would not see them for many years. Or maybe never again. When I was nine, I learned that these things happen.

  The car was loaded with their suitcases and ready to leave, even if I wasn’t ready for them to go.

  “Say good-bye to Grandpa,” Dad said, but I couldn’t. Was it my last time? As Grandpa opened his car door, I ran to give Grandpa and GramAnna another hug. Good-byes and hellos are unpredictable.

  “I love you,” I said again. The words everybody wishes they’d said when life is fragile and they don’t get another hello. I returned to the front porch where Dad pointed to the roses, which were tipping ever so gently. And then I noticed from one stem to another a delicate spiderweb, highlighted by dew.

  “Gossamer,” Dad said in a whisper, and I startled in recognition of a long-ago word from a long-ago time.

  “Gossamer,” I agreed, smiling back at him. “Gossamer.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Each day in June was warmer than the last, and I found myself increasingly drawn to the coolness of the basement—and my dad’s company. If Dad was concentrating on a clock, I could ask him the kinds of questions I used to ask him before Joel died. Sometimes he had answers to questions I didn’t know to ask. I didn’t know that the roots of a weeping willow reach out as far as the branches above it or that it takes sixteen hundred light-years to fly to a constellation.

  And so I spent the last afternoons of school in Dad’s basement, surrounded by time and something more.

  “How come grown-ups don’t like birthdays?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s not that we don’t like them,” Dad said. “Some of us still believe a person needs one day a year to be recognized.” Dad smiled. “But some of us don’t want to be reminded we’re getting old. Or maybe I should say older.”

  “But the party,” I said; then the cuckoo clock behind him interrupted by announcing the half hour. “You and Mom don’t care about having a party or getting presents at Christmas. How come?”

  “The party and presents are nice, but that’s not what’s important. The people are.” I thought about my party and how the bowling, cake, and stuffed monkey were not what was important. Just my nine friends—even if they were a little crazy sometimes.

  “Maybe I’m getting old,” I said, resting my elbows on Dad’s worktable, my chin in my hands.

  The basement was almost as good as the crawl space under Miss Mary Frances’s library table or the hollow beneath Miss Patti’s front porch. I tried to think of some other topics. Anything that would keep Dad talking and listening.

  “I used to look forward to holidays,” I continued. “Back when I was a kid. But then the big day is over and there’s just a big letdown.”

  “I remember that. It’s almost like everything before December twenty-fifth is more fun than the actual day of Christmas.”

  “You think so, too?”

  “Of course,” Dad said, looking up. “And I’m not even a kid,” he added. “But we’re not really talking about Christmas, are we? We’re talking about birthdays.”

  “Well … sort of …,” I admitted, feeling my face flush.

  “It’s okay to look forward and celebrate your birthday again,” he said softly. Dad rubbed his forehead and then sighed. “And Abby?” Dad looked down sadly. “You’re ten, but you’re still a kid. Be a kid for as long as you can.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. Now I was the one who didn’t want to talk. My eyes stung with the faded longing to display ten fingers. Now it seemed like such a silly gesture.

  “Did you know the daily rotation of the earth is slowing slightly?” Dad said, changing the subject. “It kind of feels like this year slowed down, didn’t it?” he asked. “Like there’s a lot of gravity. The more gravity, the more time slows down.”

  That made sense. Things had been pretty grave around here and definitely slow. Gravity.

  “And how about this one: Time slows down the faster you go. As you approach the speed of light, time approaches a standstill.” That sounded backward, but I nodded as if I understood. “So what about when people say, ‘Time flies when you’re having fun’?” he asked.

  “This year sure hasn’t flown! It took forever.”

  “Not every year will be like this last one,” Dad said. “Please be my hopeful little girl again.”

  “Hopeful big girl,” I corrected.

  “Please look forward to things,” he encouraged. “It reminds me to do it, too.” Dad pulled me to his side.

  “What do you look forward to?” I asked. “I mean, when you’re old, do you still look forward to things?”

  Dad paused and then fingered the hands of the anniversary clock, looking to the clock on the wall for reference before setting the big hand.

  “First of all, young lady, I’m not old. And second …” Dad paused. He was starting to sound like his old preacher self, with three points and all, and it made me smile. “Second, when you get older, you appreciate each day a bit more because they all go too fast.”

  I studied him, the man who could move time.

  “I didn’t really answer your question, did I?”

  I shook my head.

  “I haven’t been looking forward to anything.” Dad took out the oil pen and put a pin drop on the mechanism. “But I’m going to try, honey.”

  “What’s the third point?” I asked suddenly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Dad, you always have three points. What’s the third po
int?”

  “You know me too well,” Dad said with a laugh, and then admitted, “I guess I do have something I look forward to.” Dad set his tools aside and dusted the top of the clock. He squirted something on his rag and then polished the brass until it was shiny. I waited.

  “I think I’ve forgotten Joel’s voice. I just want to hear it again.” Dad’s voice had a ragged edge to it, as if snagging across polyester. “Sometimes I try to imagine the sound of it, but I can’t hear it anymore.” He stared up at the basement door as if Joel might come running down. “How could I lose his voice?” Then he looked at me and very deliberately added, “So when I get to heaven, I know I’ll see Joel come running and I’ll hear him say, ‘Daddy’s home!’” His voice cracked, and if my heart could break, it did.

  “I wish you felt the same way about me,” I blurted out.

  “Oh, Abby, I love you. I love you so much!” He looked at me with sad eyes. “I just love you differently. You are special in different ways.” He paused, then quietly added, “You’ve always lived up to your name.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.” I rested my head on his shoulder. “I don’t know much about that peacemaker stuff.”

  “That’s not what your name means,” Dad said. “It’s Hebrew and it means ‘A father’s joy.’”

  A father’s joy? A father’s joy. My name meant something. Abigail was her father’s joy. Abigail was also speechless.

  “If I miss Joel and his voice, it isn’t because you’re not enough,” Dad continued.

  “And Renee?” I asked, pressing for more.

  “Reborn,” he said in a whisper. I put the meaning of my name together like pieces of a puzzle. I didn’t feel so small and invisible. I was a father’s joy reborn.

  “I was so excited when Matthew was born. A gift from God. I loved him so much that I worried whether I could love another child as much as him. But then you arrived. I was so happy to have a little girl, a daughter.” He smiled in remembrance.