Lost Stars

by Lisa Selin Davis

  Chapter 11

  In the morning I felt as hung-over as I had a couple of months ago when Tommy and I drank too many wine coolers and ended up in the back of his car, the horribleness of it almost good, confirming for me everything anyone ever said about me. Oh, for a coffee, which apparently I liked now, and a grilled bran muffin at the Woolworth’s lunch counter, the beautiful fluff of my own bed, my guitar, my records, my friends.

  In last night’s clothes and without my shitkickers or hardhat or flannel shirt, I made my way down to our construction site, Soo’s hiking boots still a bit sloshy around my feet. The last time I went hiking with my mom, she led me and Rosie and a grumbling Ginny up Mount Tremper to forage for boletus mushrooms, her careful instruction and the pictures she showed us in her Encyclopedia of Fungi guiding us so that we wouldn’t accidentally pick something poisonous.

  This was when Ginny was changing, though I didn’t realize it then. Her wonder was turning into some kind of unwillingness, some reluctance or refusal to embrace us, or at least our parents. She’d worn her Walkman and kicked rocks all the way up, and when we got to the top, she’d sat looking at the view and taken off her headphones, slipping them over my ears.

  “Listen to this,” she’d said. “It’ll make you feel better about everything.” I remember wondering why she felt so bad, but, yeah, Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” was amazing.

  It stung to conjure up those memories, even the bittersweet ones. It was easier to believe that I had never been part of a happy family so I wouldn’t have anything to miss. I felt like the planemos we’d learned about at the end of last year: rogue planets that had been kicked out of their own solar system, with no home stars to circle around.

  The sheer amount of sobbing I’d done the night before had left my eyes buglike swollen, my shoulders achy. Funny, the footbridge-in-progress felt like a refuge. It was so much cooler there along the creek, and I could see, as Lynn would say, the fruits of several weeks’ labor. Yes, indeed, the planks I’d lain atop the concrete piers were less precise than Tonya’s, but I loved the way the bright wood looked against the dark soil, the way our creation snaked up toward the observatory. I had to admit it: I was actually looking forward to the day’s work, a chance to free my mind from its endless spinning.

  The rest of the crew arrived, and I said hi to Tonya. She looked at me and said, “Okay. Hi. What the heck happened to you?”

  “Long story,” I said, turning away, but I could feel her staring at me.

  “Um, you okay?” she asked. “You look like hell.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No, I just—”

  But thankfully Lynn had arrived and waved us over to him.

  “Good news,” Lynn said. “This afternoon we’re having a little field trip after we screw the planks together and while we wait for the adhesive to dry. We have a guest today, a biologist and arborist who studies trees, and we’re going to do some testing on our trees to find out how old they are and if they’re still healthy.”

  My initial reaction was to conjure up a number of snarky remarks, but they were quelled by the dangerous feeling in my gut.

  “Caraway? Where’s your hardhat?” Lynn asked. “Where are your boots?”

  I shrugged.

  “And long pants? And your hammer? Where’s your fanny pack?”

  Everyone was looking at me, a thousand blinking eyes waiting for an explanation or at least my signature retort. I had none. Nothing. I had nothing.

  “I hate that fanny pack,” I said.

  “Do you want me to send you home?” he asked. “Because I can do that.”

  No, I wanted to say. I don’t want to go home. I wasn’t being defiant. I was being defeated. If he sent me home, my father would surely kick me out or commit me to the nuthouse. I essentially had no home to go to, and by this afternoon, I now realized, the park would cease to be a refuge too. The arborist. I couldn’t escape myself. Enemies everywhere.

  “No,” I whispered. “Don’t send me home.”

  Lynn narrowed his eyes at me. “Come with me.”

  Lynn took me over to the park office and helped me cobble together an outfit from the lost and found: pants two sizes too big, held on with the bungee cord from my bike, and a hardhat for a person three times my size.

  “How do I look?” I asked, twirling around so that the hardhat wobbled on my head.

  Lynn actually laughed. “You look great. There’s a job opening for a scarecrow at the end of the summer.”

  “Ha,” I said, but I was still holding back tears.

  The truth was, I wanted to work. I wanted to participate. At least 50 percent of me wanted to ally myself with Tonya, who could stab the end of her six-foot pry bar into the dirt to tamp it down and then carefully lay a track of pine along it, her face set and determined, brow furrowed in concentration, tongue sticking slightly out as she lined up the slats and then—​whack—​slapped that nail expertly into place with her Youth Workforce hammer. An almost imperceptible look of satisfaction passed across her face before she caught me staring at her and narrowed her eyes and said, “Are you getting paid to just stand there and watch me?”

  “I don’t have a hammer,” I said. Every inch of me was fatigued, too tired to fight. I sat down cross-legged and took my notebook out from my backpack and worked on the standard equation for an eclipse, very pointedly ignoring her.

  “You’re kidding!” Tonya said. “Carrie, you’re being ridiculous.” She handed me her hammer. “Here,” she said. “Use mine.”

  Jimmie had looked over at us, and the way he nodded his head and furrowed his brow at her—​as if asking, You okay?—​suddenly I just knew it. I knew all about them. I had nobody, but somehow Tonya had a boyfriend.

  “Oh god—​you’re a couple?” I closed my notebook and put my hand on my belly, faking a hearty laugh.

  “Yeah, so what? Ever since disco night at Civic. Which, by the way, is awesome.”

  I couldn’t stop laughing, even though it wasn’t a real laugh. “That is too funny.”

  The look of hurt alarm that rooted in her features—​it was fierce. I could feel it like a force whipping from her chest. It nearly knocked me over, but I stayed in place.

  “You are the cruelest person I have ever met.”

  I waved it away. “Me? You’re the drill sergeant, ordering everybody around, pretending to be so competent, pretending like you don’t care that you’re queen—​make that king—​of the nerds, when you wish you could be cool.”

  “You just proved my point,” she said. She had stopped tamping the dirt temporarily, pausing to take in the pure evil of me. “The worst thing that ever happened to you was when you decided to pretend to be somebody else, when you decided to cloak your inner nerd in some ridiculous thing where you pretend to be cool.”

  I couldn’t remember for a moment how to speak, couldn’t identify the liquid of emotion that was now drowning my body. Oh, right. It was regret, all manners and shapes of regret. I regretted everything—​I’d made my sister drive when she was wasted and I couldn’t get a boyfriend and I’d screwed up all my babysitting gigs and Soo hated me now and I hadn’t begged my mom to stay and I had failed my father who’d tried so hard to protect me and I’d been disobedient and rude to Lynn, and I’d been the cruelest person in the world to Tonya. It was me, after all. It wasn’t some troll who’d occupied the bridge beneath my heart. It was me.

  “Cloak your inner nerd,” I said. “That’s kind of poetic. That should be a lyric.”

  She rejected my hint of a smile, the tiniest offer of peace, and returned to the planks of wood.

  “You think you’re so much better than us because you have older friends, but those people are so screwed up. You know how they’re going to turn out? Just like their parents.”

  “They’re not.” Somehow I was whispering. “They’re good people.”

  “You guys think you’re so cool, with your drugs and that stupid band. That band is really terrible.
You know that. I know you know that, Carrie.” She paused. “You know those people are not your real friends, right? They only have you around because they feel guilty. Everybody knows that.”

  “What are you talking about? You think you did anything when Ginny died? You think you showed up at the house and took care of me? No, you didn’t. Nobody in our whole school did anything except Soo and Greta and Ginny’s friends. They were the only ones who cared that she died.”

  “That’s not true,” Tonya said quietly, but I could see that she, too, had regret pooling around her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what to say. And it seemed like from that moment on, you had decided to be just like her. Mini Ginny.” I didn’t look at her. “We used to be friends,” she said.

  Was that supposed to be an apology? An explanation?

  “Now we’re not,” I said. It was just a fact, as plain as Ginny’s death, as her body burned into ash. Both of us standing, Tonya with a shovel, me with her hammer, staring at each other like Old West fellas in a duel.

  “What seems to be the problem here?” asked Lynn.

  “There’s no problem,” I said in my brightest voice, picking up my own park-issued collection of wood screws—​which was always far heavier than I expected—​and rifling through it in a vague attempt to mimic actual work. I put a few on top of my notebook and pretended to sort through them.

  “She hasn’t done a single thing all morning,” Tonya said.

  “Screw you, Tonya. I’m wearing a bungee cord. How hard can I work?”

  “Caraway—​Caraway.” Lynn held his hand out toward my chest, even though I hadn’t moved, hadn’t lunged at Tonya the way I’d wanted to. See? I was getting better. “No one is accusing you of anything, but it’s true that I have seen you standing here for the last hour while the rest of us—”

  “This is bullshit,” I said, now collecting the energy to be angry.

  “Please don’t use that kind of language here, Caraway—”

  It was as if I’d made the decision, but also as if I hadn’t. Some part of me said, Screw it. Let’s ruin this. Two paths, and I took the one most traveled, in which I destroyed all that was good.

  “I will use whatever language I want to use!” I shouted, throwing my notebook down on the ground, all those weeks of calculations and pages of lyrics subsumed by dirt. “Language has no inherent meaning, and if you think the word bullshit is a bad word, that’s your problem. It’s just four letters strung together to make a sound, okay? You think woolly mammoths got offended when someone made the wrong sound?”

  Lynn stopped trying to calm me down or talk to me. Instead, he took a deep breath and dropped his head to his chest and whispered.

  “Oh my god, are you praying?”

  I wanted to escape so badly, but now all the kids had stopped their toiling and were standing there watching me, watching Lynn with his hand still raised, like Diana Ross in “Stop in the Name of Love,” his head bent and his mouth making those delicate wisps of sound.

  “I can’t take this shit,” I said, and a force just started pushing me. It pushed me to throw my hardhat into the ditch below Tonya’s footbridge, and it pushed me to pull wildly on my hiking boot and to fall while I was doing it, mud all along the right side of my crappy, enormous Wrangler jeans, and then to finally free my foot from the boot and to give up on the other, grunting all the while, and stomp off with one muddy-socked foot and the other one still imprisoned in the boot, hobbling, the mud making slurpy sucking sounds as it tried to snag my feet, tried to hold me back. But no. Nothing could hold me back. Not the fading sounds of Lynn’s protests, the hoots and hollers of the other kids, or Tonya calling, “Yes, I do think woolly mammoths would be offended if one of them made the wrong sound. And bullshit has eight letters.”

  I kept trudging, knowing that all of them were watching my limping, muddy figure disappear, swallowed by the dark canopy of evergreens.

  I walked for what seemed like days, though was probably only, like, thirty minutes, muddy and one-shoed and muttering all the things I should have said, all the snappy and sharp-tongued comebacks I should have called forth to defend my honor. Occasionally my internal ranting was interrupted by crying. This was it, the thing where I couldn’t calm down, where I could only volley back and forth between rage and despair.

  And then, from across the field, I saw them. My compatriots stood in a circle, gathering around and laughing, and I thought I even saw a Hacky Sack bobbing in the center; nothing like a common enemy—​me—​to bring the group together. A sea of weeds between us, and nobody wanted me to cross it.

  “Caraway?” Lynn called, spying me from beyond. Maybe not nobody. “Come join us, please.” For some reason, I came.

  I stood outside the circle that had coalesced around one white pine with a few needle-less branches reaching toward the sky. Ginny’s tree stood less than fifty feet away, across the street, that white cross staring at me from the bark.

  “So, we’re trying to find out if this tree is healthy enough to keep standing,” the man was saying.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  Pablo smiled. “Carrie. Nice to see you. How are you?”

  I stayed on the edge of the circle. “I’m a wreck,” I said, blowing my nose on my sleeve. “Why are you here?” I repeated. Every single kid, plus Lynn, was staring at me.

  “I helped found the program, to help young people develop an interest in science careers. I’m the one who told your dad about it.”

  “Caraway,” Lynn said, still trying powerfully to smile. I had to give it to the guy—​he had a deep reserve of positivity on which to draw. “Caraway?”

  “What?” I snapped. “Will you please stop calling me that?”

  Lynn nodded and asked me very quietly, “Are you okay?”

  I looked at Pablo and the white cross and the dying trees and the smiling supervisor and the nice kids my own age. “Is that a real question? Because if it is, I’m pretty sure you can answer it.”

  Lynn took me by the shoulder and led me away from the group to sit beneath a tree. To sit beneath that tree. To sit beneath the tree.

  “So, Caraway,” Lynn said, taking my notebook out of my backpack, which he’d carried with him from the site.

  I froze, thinking he’d found the parts where I’d written about his disparagement of gay people or my critique of his John Lennon glasses (no uncool person should ever don such spectacles; it’s like playing “Imagine” as elevator music), but he’d opened it to the page where I’d written I’m so sick of myself, I want to be someone else. I’m so sick of all this sky, I just want to die.

  “I need to talk to you about what you’ve written in your notebook.”

  “They’re lyrics,” I said.

  He didn’t blink, didn’t betray any kind of emotion. “I know there have been incidents.”

  “Why? How do you know? Did she get to you, too?” The blood rose to my cheeks. “What do you know?”

  “A lot,” he said.

  “You know about my trips to Disney World?”

  “Is Disney World the psychiatric emergency room?”

  “Yes.”

  He said, very quietly, “Then, yes, I know.”

  “How?” I asked. “How do you know?”

  He had those big hands pressed together in front of him, a prayer laid down on that patch of grass. “I know because I was looking for a babysitter for my kids that summer, and the Tellers had given me your number, and before I called, they had found out about the struggles you were having. So they told me.”

  “You don’t have a struggle,” I said. “Maybe you engage in a struggle. Maybe you just struggle.”

  “Okay. They let me know that you were struggling. Is that better?”

  “No,” I said. “This is not better. I’m not the one with the problems. My dad has a problem. Tonya has a problem. Friggin’ Pablo the arborist has problems!” I was yelling again, a sharp sound that surely could reach the group.

  Lynn
stayed the picture of calm, his gaze steady upon me, exposing me and comforting me at the same time.

  “Listen, I have sworn off anything to do with therapists, so if you’re planning to perform any psychology voodoo on me, you can forget about it. You don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

  His gaze stayed steady as ever, and there was so much kindness and understanding in it that I couldn’t stand it. I grabbed my notebook and made to leave.

  “Listen, Caraway. Your mom leaving you like that—​that’s the kind of thing you just can’t do. She can’t just do that. I want you to know that—​it’s against all the laws of nature. It’s—​it’s okay to be devastated by that.”

  “I’m not devastated.”

  “Okay. But I want you to know that the amount of loss you’ve endured—​it could knock down even the strongest of individuals. It doesn’t mean that it’s okay for you to talk to me like that. It doesn’t mean that it’s okay to not do your work, or to be unkind and ungenerous. It just means that you’ve been given a truly raw deal, and I’d be mad about it too if that happened to me. I, for one, would be devastated.”

  I couldn’t catch my breath to say anything more. All I could do was leave.

  I stood outside Reinventing the Wheel, my bike leaning against me. I had changed back into my cutoffs and put my mother’s flannel on, but I was still muddy and one-shoed. When Dean walked out, I waved to him, forgetting for a minute that I looked like a homeless person, and then, when I realized it, not really caring anymore.

  He walked over. “Um, wow,” he said. “They’re really working you hard.”

  It was the first time I’d really smiled all day.

  “Hey, Dean? I have a question.”

  “You’re in luck.”

  “Can you take me somewhere?

  “Um, yeah,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”

  I swallowed. “To my mom’s.”

  “Yeah, but …”

  I waited for him to say he couldn’t, waited for him to wriggle out of being with me. Instead he pointed to his own bike-grease-stained clothes. “Maybe we should change first?”