Rules for Stealing Stars

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “Morning, family,” she says, and just like that, because she’s decreed it, we are a normal family for a delicate instant.

  “It’s late,” I say. “We’ve been waiting for you.” I nod toward Dad. He’s wrapped up in a book with an old green cover and a bunch of Post-it notes.

  “Silly. Let’s be glass-half-full girls today. It’s late morning, but it’s not afternoon yet!” Astrid smiles, and I swear I haven’t seen her smiling with actual teeth in months and months. It’s not her style.

  “That’s nice,” Dad says. He’s smiling too, a real smile that goes to his eyes and even wrinkles his forehead a little. He heads to his favorite armchair on the porch, which is right off the kitchen, but if we are quiet enough, he won’t hear us. I get a look at the spine of his book. Sleeping Beauty.

  “Where were you yesterday? Did you go somewhere? Were you hiding? Marla and I went to your room and you weren’t there and Mom fell and—” I don’t leave space in between my questions for answers, but Eleanor doesn’t seem concerned about that anyway. She shakes her head. That’s when I notice gold in her hair. At first I think it’s summery blond streaks that we all get from the sun, but when I look more closely, it looks more like tinsel.

  “Your hair . . .”

  Eleanor tries to run her hand through it, but this morning her hair is knotted and half wet, and I know from the dampness of it and the way it glimmers that she has been somewhere. Again. She looks rained on, by both water and strands of gold, and she smells like pine trees and clouds, if clouds have a smell.

  All my sisters giggle and I want to laugh with them, but it’s too close to crying, and I think if I let anything out, it will all come out.

  “We should make a perfect kitchen,” Marla says. “Dollhouse stove. Apple pie. Red checkered curtains.” She’s looking at Astrid, who nods like she knows what Marla’s talking about, even though Marla is making no sense at all.

  “This is a kitchen,” I say. It is the world’s lamest sentence.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Marla says. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “But I am worried about it,” I say in such a small voice I think it is even less hearable than a whisper.

  Mom hobbles into the kitchen. Her ankle’s all wrapped, and she’s in Dad’s old robe. It doesn’t fit her at all.

  I’m sleepy again, on command. The sight of her makes me tired.

  The opposite is true for Marla, who comes to life when Mom’s around. She throws her arms around Mom’s middle and heaves out a hefty “MORNING!”

  “Not now,” Mom says. She sort of flicks Marla away with her hand. Marla’s face goes from happy to an angry frown.

  “I’m going upstairs,” Marla says to all of us and none of us. Eleanor and Astrid pop to attention and scamper after her.

  “Can I come too?” I call after them. “Please?” The please is pathetic, and we all know it. Mom even winces on my behalf.

  “Not right now,” Astrid says. “Maybe later, okay?”

  But Eleanor shakes her head like later is totally not going to happen.

  “Give me a hint about what you’re doing up there,” I say. I won’t follow them if they’ll only tell me a tiny bit, let me in on even a small sip of the secret.

  Astrid pauses on the stairs. She likes riddles and clues and mystery. She thinks, all dreamy, her eyes rolled up to the ceiling.

  “We’re here, but not here,” Astrid says. “We can go almost anywhere, but not move at all.” She leaps up the rest of the stairs.

  I get up and half follow her, but stop myself before I’m too pathetic. I’m stranded, standing near the bottom of the stairs.

  I picture monsters and dragons. I picture black holes and haunted rooms. I picture fairies and princes and treasure chests. I picture all the things I’ve always been told aren’t real, but must be.

  Mom drags me back to reality, though. There is nothing more real and less magical than Mom’s dark moods.

  “Your sisters should be nicer to you. I should have included my sister more,” Mom says, shaking her head at how quickly the girls ditched me.

  “You don’t have a sister,” I say. Mom never talks about growing up, but I’m sure I would have heard about a sister if she’d had one.

  “But I did,” she says. Her eyes are red and confused. Even as she says the words, she looks like she doesn’t believe them, and I know she’s not totally in her right mind at the moment. Usually in the mornings she’s pretty present, but not today.

  “You did?” I say, one foot pointed in the direction of Astrid and Eleanor’s room, and the other foot pointed toward Mom, wanting to understand what she’s telling me.

  “No. No, never mind,” Mom says. “I don’t want to talk about this now. I’m tired. I need some time alone, Silly.” It’s not the first time she’s said something strange and wrong, but it was so specific and odd, the claim that she has a sister, I have to tell Astrid and Eleanor and Marla.

  We need to be in this together. They can’t leave me out here with Mom and her disconnected thoughts while they have some grand adventure.

  Plus, I need to know what they’re doing up there. What secret thing the twins have been up to the last few summers, and that Marla is all of a sudden allowed to do too.

  Four

  Mom follows me upstairs. I thought she needed alone time, but sometimes Mom’s moods change so fast it’s hard to keep track, like she’s playing some complicated kind of Ping-Pong with herself and I’m watching, trying to keep score.

  She opens the hall closet, steps in for a moment like she’s looking for towels or the vacuum cleaner, but comes out empty-handed.

  “Mom? What’s in there?” I say. I’m hovering outside the twins’ room and would rather be in there, but not until Mom is tucked away in her bed for the rest of the day.

  Mom runs her hands straight back through her hair. It is fine and unwashed, so the strands stick and don’t fall back into place. She sighs, a rickety sound that smells and sounds like cigarette smoke. She promised she would stop smoking.

  “You think something’s wrong with me!” she says. Her lips wobble. Her hands shake. She doesn’t usually explode in my direction. I’m not important enough to explode at. “You think I’m a terrible mother. I don’t understand why you hate the family so much.”

  “I didn’t mean it,” I say, but I’m stuck doing a strange math, the kind that is way too advanced for me. I don’t have any idea how we got from me asking what she’s doing to her being a terrible mother, but I’m squinting and counting on my fingers and speeding up my mind, trying to figure it out. “You’re a great mom! I love the family. I wanted to hang out with the girls. I wanted to make sure you didn’t need help with chores or anything. I didn’t mean to be rude.” I’m talking fast and loud and pretty much praying that my sisters will hear me and save me.

  They don’t.

  “I’ve done the best I can,” Mom says. She hangs her head and I imagine an enormous eraser, big enough to erase everything I’ve ever said that makes her feel this way.

  “You’re such a good mom,” I say. “You’re the best mom.” I lean against the bedroom door and kick my heels against it a little, wish I’d learned Morse code when the boys in my class were all super into it two years ago. I could call for help through the pounding of my feet.

  “So ungrateful,” Mom says. Her mouth is turning down into its mean look, which I have seen from afar but never up close. These are the kinds of things Mom says to everyone, but never to me. This is the kind of conversation that always seems about to happen, but she’ll ask Eleanor or Dad or Astrid to take me to my room before it spirals out of control. This is the first time Mom hasn’t protected me from herself, and it hurts, makes me sick a little, but also reminds me of losing my first baby tooth or learning to read or getting on the bus for the first time. I’m joining my sisters. I’m growing up. They can’t deny it anymore.

  “I expected so much more from you,” Mom goes on. “I’m so disappointed
. Why do you think I’m like this? I never got what I wanted. You never give me what I want. You don’t care about anything or anyone but yourself.” She’s talking to me, but also to a place on the wall next to me, her eyes shifting back and forth. I don’t know if it’s more terrible when she’s looking right at me or when she’s lost track of me and is speaking to the wall. “You’re a terrible disappointment as a daughter.”

  I can’t think of a way to escape, but Dad saves me before it gets more desperate. He’s on his way up the stairs.

  “Gretchen!” he says, surprised at her words, I think, and maybe the swaying of her body. It looks like she’s on a ship, not stable ground.

  I get it. We’re on rough waters.

  “It’s fine,” Mom says with a slur, and I bet she doesn’t even know what she’s said, but I do and Dad does, and I have to wave my hand and shake my head and smile like it’s totally okay and we’re having some normal mother-daughter chat.

  Mom starts yelling at Dad almost right away, and I should be relieved that he directed her away from me, but I don’t want her to be yelling at anyone.

  When the yelling reaches the highest volume imaginable, the door to the twins’ bedroom finally cracks open, and a hand, Astrid’s, pulls me inside. The yelling is only moderately quieter behind the door, but my sisters huddle around me, and when I nestle my head into their arms and shoulders and close my eyes, I can almost block it out.

  “Are you okay?” Astrid whispers right into my ear, so that I can admit only to her if I’m not.

  “Has that ever happened with you and Mom before?” Eleanor asks, but she knows it hasn’t. She knows this is the day I have moved from special little Silly who needs protecting and turned into just another one of the girls.

  It’s weird, how something can feel good and bad at the same time.

  “What’d you do to upset her?” Marla says.

  “I hate this house,” I say, which doesn’t answer any of them, exactly, but also answers all of them, I think.

  Five

  The curtains are drawn and the room is dark, except for a crack of light peeking through the bottom of Eleanor’s closet. Astrid and Eleanor picked out heavy navy curtains when they decorated their new room, and they almost never leave them open, so it’s night in here even when it’s daytime everywhere else. Astrid says she works better with just a few night-lights on, and Eleanor is almost never inside anyway. So the way the closet light breaks through the darkness right now is unmistakable. A cut in the night.

  I know instantly that’s where their secrets are kept.

  I guess closets are where we all keep our secrets. Dad keeps the books that are too adult for us to read in his closet. Astrid and Eleanor have always kept pictures of boys they like in their closets. In my closet in our old house I had a story I wrote about me being LilyLee’s sister and living with LilyLee’s family. Of course now there’s only other people’s discards in my closet, which is yet another reason to hate the New Hampshire house. I don’t even get a place to store my secrets.

  Mom’s secrets must be in closets too. Maybe she keeps extra bottles in there or something.

  “I want to go in,” I say, pointing to the line of light below their closet door.

  “No!” Marla says, her voice cracking and desperate. A whole complicated series of looks are exchanged between the twins, and I understand that even if Marla was invited in before me, we’ll always be the younger ones and they’ll always have each other.

  “She needs it too,” Astrid says to Eleanor. “Don’t you think?”

  “I’m more than a whole year older,” Marla says. It’s not the first time she’s used that as an argument for something. She’s a stickler for a certain kind of fairness: if she wasn’t allowed to swim to the deeper part of the lake until she turned eight, I shouldn’t be allowed to do it until I turn eight a whole year later. Since she got a new bike when she turned ten, I shouldn’t have one when I’m only nine. She wants her extra year on me to matter in some measurable way, whereas I’d rather pretend she and I are twins too, able to do everything together like Eleanor and Astrid.

  “You can’t leave me out there with Mom when you’re all in here,” I say, not realizing how true that is until I’ve said it. If there’s a tornado, you all hold hands and anchor one another so that no one gets swept up alone. We are in the middle of a tornado, and it’s not okay for them to hold on to one another and sacrifice me to the spinning, violent force. “It’s not about how old I am. I can’t do it all by myself. Didn’t you hear how she talked to me? I can’t be included in that but not included in this.” I get a pang of fear that they won’t listen. That I’ll have Mom calling me a disappointment on the other side of their bedroom door while they all escape into secrets without me.

  “I shouldn’t be lonely when I have three sisters,” I say, like feelings and families are simple scientific facts. Cause and effect.

  There’s a certain kind of shock on Eleanor’s face, and I think she’s never heard me say so many words at once, and so clearly.

  “We’re in charge, okay?” she says.

  I nod. It’s not anything new. They’re always in charge.

  Marla makes a series of noises that must be the beginnings of words that she doesn’t know quite how to finish.

  Eleanor pulls the door to her closet open, and there’s nothing inside but one of Astrid’s dioramas. Not even a very good one. It’s a basic park scene: aluminum-foil pond, green construction-paper grass, toothpicks with green pom-poms on top for trees. Orange Play-Doh dots that are meant to look like goldfish swimming in the reflective pond. Tissue-paper roses. It’s pretty vanilla for Astrid, who usually likes her diorama trees pink and her diorama ponds covered in glitter.

  “Do you like it?” Astrid says. I don’t know if she means the diorama or the way they’ve positioned it in the middle of the closet. I shrug. “Like, is it a place you’d want to visit?”

  “It’s a park,” I say, which isn’t an answer. “It’s a nice park,” I amend, not wanting to say the wrong thing.

  Astrid steps into the closet. Eleanor steps in beside her. Marla’s next, and it’s a pretty tight squeeze. I’m not sure there’s room for one more.

  I step inside and Eleanor closes the door. It goes dark and I close my eyes, a funny reflex I have when a room goes black.

  Marla starts to giggle. Hearing Marla giggle is so new and strange I wonder if she’s choking before realizing what the sound is. My eyes open because of the smell of roses. It’s strong. Overwhelming. I wonder if Eleanor’s secret boyfriend has bought her some new perfume that she’s spraying like crazy.

  That’s not it, though.

  The ground is covered in green and yellow spikes of grass. At my feet there’s a glassy pool of water. A small pond. I think I even see little orange fish swimming around right beneath the surface. I rub my eyes. There are roses everywhere, growing right out of the ground and not in bushes. We are in a very pretty park, the size of a baseball field.

  I don’t understand the things I’m seeing.

  “We’re in a park,” I say. My feet won’t move, and my sisters don’t look confused enough, given what’s happening.

  “This is the best it’s ever been, isn’t it?” Astrid says to Marla and Eleanor. Eleanor nods and her eyes widen, but Marla shrugs, unconvinced.

  “It’s probably a good diorama,” Marla says, her voice tight and fast, not leaving any room for other theories.

  “Maybe all four of us together make the closet stronger,” Astrid says. “We should have brought Priscilla in earlier.” The sun’s bouncing off the pond and her white-blond hair and the tips of our noses.

  “Cautious is good,” Eleanor says, but she’s glowing in the sun too, and her jaw and elbows and shoulders look looser.

  “What happened?” My voice screeches. They’re all too calm. “How are we in a park? Is it . . . a time machine? Is this what you do? You go to parks? How do they— What do they—” I was so gung ho about having
an adventure that I hadn’t considered the way an adventure actually feels—prickly and terrifying. I want desperately to hold on to something steady, but nothing feels real or anchored here. “Help me understand.”

  “We bring in the dioramas,” Marla says. I can tell she’s trying to make it sound like she’s done it a million times before, even though last night was the first time. “And they become real.”

  I start laughing, because it is a completely insane conversation that we’re having.

  “So Astrid’s magical?” I say, thinking of the way her hands move so gracefully when she’s making the dioramas. There’s some magic there.

  “The closets are,” Marla says.

  “This closet makes dioramas real,” Eleanor says, “but Astrid’s closet doesn’t work.” She crosses her arms over her chest. “This is the magic closet. The others aren’t, okay?” She’s speaking French basically. Or Japanese. Or pig Latin, which I know is supposedly really easy to understand, but I never am fast enough to keep up with.

  “Enough with the talking! Look what I made for you!” Astrid says. She picks up a handful of grass and throws it at me. I’m surprised it smells real.

  I finally take a step. The grass pokes the bottoms of my feet, and silky roses swipe my ankles. Immediately, I want it all. Not only the park and the smell of the outdoors and the way sunlight glints off the shiny pond. I want more. It’s a funny impulse, given how much I now have at my fingertips. Like getting everything I want for Christmas but already making my Christmas list for next year.

  I try to list every diorama Astrid’s ever made in my head, or at least the ones I saw strewn all over their floor and furniture yesterday, but there are simply too many. Furry ones and sparkling ones and scary ones and perfect ones. She makes them, tweaks them, dismantles them for parts constantly, so it’s an ever-changing collection of universes. Astrid’s imagination is vast and strange and unexpected. And apparently, we now have a way to live inside it.

  I’m goosebumping and blinking.

  It smells like a park but also like a home. Birds, bright-blue ones, swoop in the sky and land on Eleanor’s shoulders. They flap their wings against her face, and it seems to relax her.