My mouth hung open. “That’s not mine.”
“This is going to be good,” he said. “You’re going to tell me it’s Rosie’s?”
“It’s not mine!” she called down.
I could feel the hatred coming off him in waves. For all the preciousness, her exalted place at the top of the family food chain, Ginny had been the most corrupt. She was into things—with drugs and with boys and with stealing and with cheating—that would have shocked my parents straight into the mental hospital. Ginger on drugs and having sex? Never. She would never. I remembered the shock, the betrayal in my parents’ voices once they found out what she’d been up to that night. Even now, two years later, it was as if he couldn’t admit Ginny’s failings. He still wanted to believe that night was some one-time kind of thing. The evidence before him still couldn’t indict her; it was only proof of what was wrong with me.
The worst part, my most grievous sin, was that I was still here—the bad one, the one who disgusted him. The rage welled up in me—I could beat him at the hate game—and shook through my veins, probably the same way that coke had shaken through Ginny’s body that day. It was a supergiant star, swelling to five hundred times its original size, then freezing until it burned bright red.
But my words came out flat. “How could anybody hate his own kid like that?”
“Hate you?” he said, his hands on his temples, pretending to be shocked that I’d say this previously unacknowledged truth. “Why would I be so angry, so confounded, so concerned, if I didn’t love you so much? Why do you think I won’t let you on the roof? I don’t want you to jump off it.”
His hands were parted like that painting I’d once written a paper on, Mater Dolorosa with Open Hands. The painter was named Titian, otherwise known in Venice as “the Sun Amidst Small Stars.”
All I could say was “Ha.”
He sat down, defeated, shaking his head. My father had given up. He’d given up on me. I’d broken him, and he was going to let me descend into the void because there was nothing else he could do to stop me. “What is going to happen to you?”
“How the fuck should I know?” I was going to scream at him more, but when I opened my mouth, some other sound came out, as if I’d channeled a sea lion, a terrible plaintive barking.
Crap. Crying. Crap crap.
It was Ginny’s. All that stuff was Ginny’s. And even with the evidence neatly settled in the bowl between us, I was the bad guy. I was going to tell him that, but when I started moving my lips, all I said was, “I want my mommy.”
Chapter 10
Quiet as a cat burglar, I crept out my window, onto the porch roof, checking for any sign of my dad or Rosie. None. Then I heard his footsteps and crouched down.
“Carrie?” he called from inside. “Honey, are you there?”
Who you calling honey? I wanted to ask, but I kept my mouth shut. There was no way I could slink back in the window and out of my room, walk past Rosie, and suffer my father’s glare, my misdeeds all reflecting in the frame of his tortoiseshell glasses. Finally his footsteps filtered away.
I stood up on the porch roof, ready to slide down to the ground, but as I did, I saw a figure in the yard next door. It was Mrs. Richmond. I froze, hoping that would make me invisible. She was in the middle of taking the garbage out to the curb, and she’d stopped to look at me. Then she nodded, the slightest little movement of her head, and resumed dragging the trash cans.
The streetlights flickered as I rode to Soo’s, my shoulders drooped in defeat beneath my backpack, which contained my wallet, my Walkman, three mix tapes, my notebook, three Fender guitar picks, my flannel shirt, and a change of underwear. My father hadn’t kicked me out. He hadn’t shouted ferociously for me to leave. But he’d made up his mind about me once and for all. I was a black hole of a human being. I felt as if I were dragging my whole body behind me, reluctant to pedal forward but refusing to go back.
The door creaked as I let myself into the house, where Soo’s mom lay, eyes at half-mast, on the couch, her tired but pretty face in the flicker of the TV light. Johnny Carson, interviewing a Tibetan monk.
“Carrie,” she said smiling, sleepily, the only adult left in our town who appreciated my presence. On the back of their plaid couch sat an afghan, orange and brown zigzagged, which I spread over her. She sat up a bit, hand to her head as if a fire raged in there. She seemed as rickety as a grandmother. “You know what’s going to happen, Carrie?” she asked. I shook my head. She was scaring me. “You’re going to get old. Your face is going to droop. There’s going to be all sorts of body parts sagging on you that you never thought possible.”
“Mrs. Shaughnessy—”
“Sweetie, really. I want you to know something. This is the best. This is the happiest time of your life. So drink it in. Drink it in.” She raised her glass to me, which was somehow one of the most sorrowful things I’d ever seen. “Don’t forget to be happy.” And with that, she gulped her Scotch and soda and laid her head back on the couch.
The stairs creaked as I went up slowly to Soo’s room. I knew what I’d find in there, but still I knocked, lightly, then louder when I had no response.
“What?” Soo called, her voice laced with annoyance.
“It’s me,” I whispered.
She opened the door, naked but wrapped in her zebra-striped sheets—this month’s décor included hot pink and animal print. “Time After Time,” saddest song ever, hummed in the background.
“What happened?” she asked. Her eyes and lips were puffy and red—the combination, I assumed, of being wasted and fooling around.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. Nothing. It’s just—I can’t go back there right now. I can’t go back.” I tried to hold in my tears. “Can I sleep here, please?”
Soo hesitated for a moment, looking behind her and then back to me. “Justin’s here,” she said, apologetically but firmly. She was good like that—she knew how to be pretend-adult. It was probably why I’d attached myself to her, why, that week after the funeral, I’d ended up at Soo’s house night after night, just watching the way she moved, the way she took care of her mother and hosted the gang of shell-shocked teenagers. She’d taken me under her wing, almost literally: wrapped her arm around my shoulders the third night after the funeral and told me, “It’s okay, kid. You’ll get on the other side of it. We all will.”
We were sitting in the basement, which was done up ’60s style with macramé and beanbag chairs and beaded curtains back then, and everyone else was out attempting to illegally procure beer from Purdy’s Liquor. It was just me and Soo, and she’d said, again, “You’re going to be okay.”
But I’d shaken my head, back and forth, with such force that she couldn’t keep her arm around me, try as she might. I couldn’t stop, just shaking and shaking it as if that would ward off the tears, because I was terrified of the tears. If one leaked out, I’d cry forever. Finally, Soo grabbed my head in both her hands to stop me, and she stared hard at me. She wasn’t trying to soothe me or calm me. She’d gone into serious mode.
“Everybody misses her,” Soo had said. “We’re all scarred. We’re all going to be a mess together.”
Somehow that had stopped the shaking of my voice and my head, and I breathed slower and pulled my head back from Soo’s hands and looked at my lap. Then I screwed up enough courage to raise my head and look at Soo. She wasn’t like Greta, the red-blond goddess, glossy and model-beautiful. Everything about her was quieter, but stronger somehow, and I knew in that moment that I had an ally. She was scarred like me, but literally—a mean snarl of scab lined her abdomen for two months afterward. Soo and Greta had both been in the car with Ginny. They’d forced themselves into it as Ginny peeled away. They’d walked away from the crash, almost unscathed. Almost.
She liked that scab, Soo had told me. It was, in a way, all she had left of Ginny.
Now I waited, blinking, for her to offer me a sleeping bag on the floor or tell me to go dow
n and sleep in the basement until she could come down to be with me or—hey, better yet—to send Justin home so I could stay. She seemed to be waiting too. For me to leave. She blinked her puffy eyes and licked her chapped lips. What had they been doing in there? Probably something totally amazing that I would never in my life experience. But, okay. I’d be a nun. A runaway nun. Too bad my parents had ditched religion long before I was born.
“I can’t,” she said. “Not right now. But can I, like, get you anything? Till later?”
I couldn’t look at her, couldn’t understand whatever she was trying to say to me in some I’m-not-a-virgin-anymore-and-I’m-in-love code. Instead, I looked past her, into the sliver of room that she had deigned worthy of my view. Her hiking boots sat in her open closet, the same waterproof hiking boots I’d borrowed when I’d hiked with my mother in the Catskills two years ago, when my feet were a little bit smaller. Behind them was her rain slicker, hanging on a hook.
Now I screwed up the strength to meet her eyes. “Yes,” I said. “There’s something you can do.”
It was a long ride to Greta’s house in Soo’s rain slicker and slightly-too-small hiking boots, all the way to the other side of town in the slowly increasing rain. I knew I looked like a vagabond, and I did for a while consider ditching the bike and sticking out my thumb. But for all the recklessness, I was still wary of strangers, of hitchhiking, of getting hurt, or worse. Some part of me really wanted to live, even though I wasn’t sure what for.
I passed the cemetery where I’d first drunk whiskey and the playground where I’d taught our old dog Peaches to go down the slide and my old elementary school where I’d first seen Ginny smoking a cigarette while she waited for me. She often used to do that: get off the bus three stops early and stand at the entrance of the elementary school, which got out twenty minutes later than the junior high and high school. She’d lean against the wall in her leather jacket and her torn blue jeans, and smoke, her shiny hair perfectly mussed. She looked like Madonna. She really looked like Madonna. And I would emerge from the school, immersed in my mousiness, the dumb-colored brown hair and the glasses and the braces and the used L. L. Bean backpack slung over my shoulder, and I would be so proud that she was my sister, that I was attached to her.
I stopped in the middle of the street for the short break in the rain. It wasn’t the comet, but the Perseids, the pre-Vira meteors, raced overhead, and I shivered. I could see just the faint spark of them in between the thickening clouds. “Ginny, are you there?” A meteor shot across the sky again. It was magical. It really was magical. “Ginny?” I waited. What was I waiting for? Did I really think she’d say something back? “Ginny. I just miss you so damn much.” I tried to muster something profound to say to her. “Everything really went to shit when you left.” But there were no more meteors. The clouds moved in again, and the whole sky went quiet.
I knocked lightly on the door, and eventually Greta answered.
“Hi, sweetie,” she said, and stepped aside to let me in as if she’d been waiting for me. “Come and sit.” She patted the couch, that same couch on which her dad had passed out. “It’s okay,” she said. “He’s asleep in the bedroom.” Her smile could cure cancer. “Tell me.”
I spilled it all out, about waiting incessantly for Dean to like me and about my dad’s rage and Soo’s rejection. She looked at her own hands, folded in her lap, while I talked. Part of me felt horribly guilty. I knew she’d had a rough time with her dad, and I knew now that she worked hard for the few lovely items of clothing she had that fit her body so perfectly. But I was drowning, and I needed a human life preserver. And Ginny wasn’t there to be it. And neither was Soo.
“Carrie,” Greta said finally, “she was my friend too, you know. I was there too.”
I managed to speak with a shaky voice. “Yeah, but …”
“No but. I was there too. I was in the car, for god’s sake. Soo was too. We saw it—her. You’re not the only one who’s having a shitty adolescence.”
“Okay,” I whispered. “Okay.”
“I love you, but you have to stop feeling so sorry for yourself. You’re smart and loved and adorable, so just figure out what you have to do to survive and do it.”
Greta had never been mad at me before. I had learned to shield myself from my father’s anger, since it hardly ever wavered, but in front of Greta, I was shaky and sweating and shamed.
“Okay?” she said. She squeezed my hand. “Okay, Carrie?”
“Okay.”
She smiled at me, but I knew I couldn’t stay with her, either.
Clearly not ready to be trampled on, the footbridge-in-progress wobbled under my tight hiking boots. The rain plinked around me, seeping into Soo’s semi-useless yellow rain slicker as I rolled my bike along with me, my backpack affixed to the rear rack with my father’s bungee cord. It had been ages since I’d been in the park at night, and I’d never been here alone (discounting the time I got extra stoned and lost the rest of the group while I wandered in circles for hours, or maybe just minutes, calling for them). What a shame, really, that this was the night to be solo beneath the stars: I couldn’t even see them.
The observatory door was locked, but years ago Ginny had shown me how to prop open the window, stained glass that was framed with now-rotting wood. I was eleven, and Ginny was watching out for me while my parents took Rosie to the doctor for her never-ending tests during that period when they thought she had narcolepsy. (It turned out she just had magical powers of sleep.)
Ginny and I had stopped at the bottom of the steps, then pushed our bikes slowly up them. She had her Walkman on and Supertramp was leaking out of it, an alluring and confusing sound, since I was still into Huey Lewis and the News back then.
“It’s closed,” I said when we got up there. And she laughed and tousled my hair as if I were five, not just two years younger than she was. She was in her hippie phase, her dark hair long and glossy and straight, her earrings enormous gold hoops.
“You’re such a rule follower, Car.” It was not a dig, and I didn’t take it that way. It was an invitation. “C’mere, let me show you.” She stood on one stone that jutted out past the others in the wall. She put her hands by the wood-framed window—it wasn’t rotted back then—and pushed in a little bit and then up. “It’s easy,” she said. Everything felt easy when I was with her. Everything felt both wondrous and safe.
Inside, below the glass ceiling, the stars glowed and Ginny pointed out the constellation of Hydra, the water monster.
She wasn’t opening the window toward juvenile delinquency, really. She wasn’t trying to corrupt me. She was trying to set me free from the parental force of gravity.
Now the observatory had a ghostly quality, its round shape, its dark stones looming over the flat green fields. It was our fault that the observatory was still closed, as if the parks department were still waiting for the cloud of taint to evaporate, even after two years.
I pressed the window open and squeezed inside, scraping my leg on the stone walls as I scaled them. “Crap.” My backpack landed with a thud on the hard stone floor. Damp and echoey, the interior was lined with old and faded exhibits about the history of sundials and how craters are formed. I looked up to the domed window atop the observatory, remembering the night it opened when I was little, Orion’s belt gleaming and all that hope blinking in the stars. I flicked the light switch and only the palest light washed over the room.
I wanted to go home, but I knew I couldn’t. I looked at my own charts in my notebook, the careful pencil drawings I’d done of the elliptical orbit. That was one relief: it wouldn’t be tonight. I wouldn’t miss it. Not yet.
Two benches stood against the walls, each clad in dark red velvet, worn now and threadbare in spots, but good enough for a bed. I took off the wet boots, rolled up the rain slicker into a makeshift pillow, and lay down. I was so weirdly calm. Not scared to be alone in the park at night. Not scared to be homeless-ish. Not scared to be lying down in the
very spot where, two years earlier, Ginny had snorted five lines of cocaine through a one-dollar bill, then washed it down with the contents of her flask, while I watched at the stained-glass window.
After Ginny left home that night, I had sneaked out and ridden my bike, curious to see her glamorous life, the boys and the drugs and the music. I’d ridden up to the observatory and leaned my bike against a white pine tree. The lights of the observatory had glowed warm and orange against the blue-black night sky, and the sounds of the Misfits leaking from the boom box grew louder as I approached.
I’d stood on a bench outside the stained-glass window, and I saw her; I saw what she did, and my feet seemed to slip out from under me and the bench wobbled, and I grabbed on to the windowsill and yelped, and they’d all looked up. Ginny looked up.
I dropped to the ground and heard her say, “Shit. My little sister. I have to go.”
She called after me, came after me as I escaped into the woods to get my bike, then crouched down and watched. Watched her friends try to get her to stay, tell her she was too wasted to drive, watched her shrug them off and hurry down the hill to our car, wobbling and yelling and waving people away, angry and sloppy and mean—and she got in the car while Greta and Soo forced themselves in.
I didn’t say anything, not then, not later. I wasn’t supposed to be there, but I’d been there and I’d watched her do all of that, and I’d never said anything, not even after I rode my bike home and found she wasn’t there. Not after the phone rang later that night: the sheriff calling to tell us our lives would never be the same.
The observatory was cold and dank, and it was good enough. Maybe the comet would be here soon. Maybe, like the Paiute Indians used to think, it signified the end of this world and the start of the next.
No, I wasn’t scared to be there. But once the tears came, there was no stopping them.
Lost Stars Page 11