Rules for Stealing Stars

by Corey Ann Haydu

  When we get to the kitchen, Mom’s unwinding with a photo album. I peek over her shoulder. The pictures are of Mom when she was Marla’s age, and another little girl who looks a lot like me.

  I elbow Marla, hoping she’ll see the photos and start asking questions, so that I don’t have to. Maybe I’m wrong and Mom has mentioned her sister before. Maybe we really are bad daughters who don’t care about anything but ourselves, like Mom says when she’s been drinking.

  But Marla is too focused on Mom’s face and the expressions passing across it, instead of what is causing those expressions to occur.

  “Mom? Will you come to my room?” I say, like I’m supposed to. I step closer to her and ignore the way she smells. I want a better look at the pictures.

  “Why?” Mom says.

  I hadn’t thought about an answer to that question. I thought she’d follow me upstairs simply because I’d asked, even though that’s never happened before.

  Silly, Silly, Silly. I call myself the name I hate, as punishment.

  “I have a bunch of questions about your sister,” I say. It’s not what I mean to say. But my mind gets too hyper and too hazy when Mom is sick, and I make terrible decisions. It’s all queasy regret the moment the word sister comes out of my mouth.

  “You saw her?” Mom says. Her voice is far away, except that it’s right here. The strangeness of that gives me chills. New Hampshire gives me a chill in general. It is never hot here. Only ever warmish with a breeze. I want one hot day.

  “You mentioned her. Is that her in the pictures?” I say. Marla stands next to me with her mouth open and her arms loose at her sides, like my stupidity is making her stupid too. I think I can hear Eleanor and Astrid mumbling in the bathroom, and I wish I could tell them to be quiet.

  Mom rubs her temples. She takes a sip from her glass of wine. Then another. Her teeth are already stained a scary purplish color.

  I try to guess at how she’s feeling and how she’ll respond. But there are a thousand options, and whichever one I think it will be is probably wrong. There’s always some new response, some strange hiccup that I hadn’t expected.

  “She won’t let me in,” Mom says, her finger tracing the heart-shaped face of the girl in the pictures. “She won’t come out. I can’t get her.” I feel my forehead scrunching up so much that I’m giving myself a headache. Or maybe Mom’s giving me a headache.

  “Can we talk about it in my room?” I try again, knowing full well it’s a lost cause. I got distracted and sloppy and ruined everything. Typical.

  “You don’t have a sister,” Marla says. “Mom doesn’t have a sister.” She elbows me without moving her gaze from Mom’s drooping face.

  “You think I didn’t care enough about her?” Mom says, hearing something entirely different than what was said. “You think it was my fault?”

  “No!” Marla says. “I don’t know!” Mom gets off her stool and drains the rest of her wine. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. It’s not very graceful. One of her feet hooks around the other, and she stumbles. “I didn’t know,” Marla says. I want to cover her mouth. I should say something so that Marla stops speaking, but I’m mute. “You’ve never mentioned her before.”

  “You think I forgot all about her,” Mom says. “You think that’s the kind of person I am!”

  Mom’s moving toward the cabinet that holds more bottles, and Marla steps in front of her, blocking her path.

  It happens fast, while I’m trying to think of more words to get Mom calmed down or talking about something else, something less upsetting.

  Marla takes one step closer to Mom, and Mom grabs

  Marla’s wrists. One in each hand.

  I look away.

  I am the kind of sister who looks away.

  Marla yelps, a surprised, animal sound, and I run up the stairs, straight into my closet.

  Twelve

  I lie in the warm pink light of my closet for a long time. Nothing else in the room changes, only me.

  When I come out, I knock lightly on the twins’ door. It’s dark. I stayed in the closet long past bedtime. Past whatever happened in the moments after Marla’s terrible yelp.

  Eleanor answers the door in her pink nightgown. The rest of us wear shorts and tank tops to bed, or worn-out pajama pants with Christmas trees on them, the kind we get some years from Dad. The years that Mom doesn’t feel like doing Christmas, so Dad has to buy all the presents.

  “I messed up,” I say.

  “No kidding. I didn’t get to the birthday party. We were all stuck here. And don’t think we don’t know what you were doing in your room.”

  “And Marla—,” I say, wondering why Eleanor cares more about her secret boyfriend than she does about our sister.

  “I’m mad at Marla, too, don’t worry,” Eleanor says, like I’m worried about sharing the blame. Sometimes I think Eleanor doesn’t know me at all.

  “Is she okay?” I say. Astrid rolls out of bed and stands in the doorway with Eleanor.

  “She’s Marla,” Eleanor says with a cruel shrug. Eleanor’s not that cruel, though. I have a feeling they don’t know what happened.

  I guess I don’t really know what happened, either.

  Maybe nothing happened. I didn’t really see. Marla makes a big deal out of small things. Marla’s been known to make loud noises in quiet moments, to exaggerate to get our attention.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I did everything wrong.”

  “I give up,” Eleanor says, and she really does sound like she’s given up. “Everyone can do whatever they want.” It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard Eleanor say. All she’s ever cared about is telling us what to do and how to do it. All she’s ever wanted are rules and for her sisters to follow them.

  “I won’t go in my closet anymore,” I say, but I know that’s not true. If Eleanor is going to be sad and Mom-like, I’ll need the closet even more. If I won’t be allowed in their closet anymore, I’ll need my own.

  Astrid reaches out and touches my arm, the place where it bends.

  “We don’t know what your closet is for,” Astrid says.

  “It’s for me!” I say, even though I know that’s not what she’s talking about.

  “We don’t know how it works. We understand Eleanor’s. And we know mine is bad. And we know Marla’s doesn’t work. Yours is too mysterious. We’d tried it once a long time ago and it didn’t work, but now it does and we don’t know anything about what it does. Do you really want one more unpredictable thing in this house?” Astrid says. She’s talking about Mom, of course, but ignoring the fact that something could be unpredictably wonderful, not only unpredictably awful.

  “So you went in your closet and it felt funny?” I say, drastically changing what Astrid said. I don’t want to call her closet the bad closet. I want to leave room for it to be something else.

  “It was a long time ago,” Astrid says. “And we didn’t need another closet. It was ugly. It made things bad. Things we brought inside. And us. It made us bad, too.”

  I try to think through all the summers we’ve had here to place which summer Eleanor and Astrid might have gone inside the bad closet. Which summer they acted bad or strange or unlike themselves.

  I remember a week last summer when they tried Mom’s wine. It was late at night and they were being loud in their bedroom, and when I walked in, Astrid was hugging a bottle and Eleanor was wearing sunglasses and a life vest. They moved in slow motion, and it took a lot of giggling and slurring for them to articulate that they wanted me to leave.

  They never thanked me for not telling Mom and Dad.

  “Was it last summer that you went in the bad closet?” I say, but Eleanor shakes her head to end that part of the conversation. She’s mad at me and desperate to make sure I feel the deep, dark crevices of that anger and disappointment.

  “All I wanted was to get out of this stupid house for five minutes. You had one small job and you couldn’t even do that right,” Eleanor says. I’v
e never seen her like this, like Mom. Ready to explode with only a tiny push of an invisible button.

  “I’m sorry. I saw these photos she was looking at and I got all weird and you know when I’m around Mom I can act sort of—”

  “Silly, it’s late,” Eleanor says. “I’m tired. I had a bad night. You shouldn’t be pretending you’re, like, mature enough for this stuff. It’s okay. We don’t expect that from you. That’s why we take care of you. Because you need us. And we thought you might be ready for more, but clearly, clearly you’re not.”

  “Okay,” I say. But it isn’t.

  Thirteen

  I go looking for Marla in the morning.

  She’s not in her sad, gray-walled room with its tarnished brass bed that she begged Dad for. She’s not in the kitchen or the TV room. She’s not on the porch next to Dad, stealing the comics section from his paper. She’s not in the bathroom with the claw-foot tub that she likes to take long baths in. I think maybe I’ll check in Mom’s sewing room, but we’re not supposed to go in there, and I don’t want to get myself or anyone else into any more trouble. I even approach Mom and Dad’s room, but I can hear Mom’s heavy breathing, and I don’t think she’s awake.

  Eleanor and Astrid have the television on downstairs. I hear loud voices and cheesy music and the volume moving up and down every few seconds, because Eleanor likes it loud and Astrid likes it quiet. I should not sneak into their room without asking. I’m in more than enough trouble with Eleanor already.

  But I have a creeping feeling about Marla, and I need to know where she is, I need to see that she’s okay.

  Guilt is this thing that feels gray and heavy. It’s a cement wall between me and the rest of the world. Sleeping and eating and writing LilyLee are stuck on the other side, with me stranded over here, unable to do anything at all.

  I’ll do anything to tear it down.

  So I head into Eleanor and Astrid’s room. The beds are made. The shades are drawn. Eleanor’s closet door is open, and nothing interesting is inside.

  Astrid’s closet door is closed.

  I look under the beds and take an extra-long look at Eleanor’s closet, in case somehow Marla is hiding in the back.

  She isn’t.

  She is in Astrid’s closet. The bad closet. Alone. I know it.

  “Marla?” I say at the closet door.

  “One second.” Her voice sounds far away.

  “Are you really in there?” It is a stupid thing to say, but I say stupid things when I’m nervous.

  “One second. I promise, Sil,” she says. Marla calls me Sil instead of Silly when she likes me, which is almost never. I stand outside the door with the world’s straightest back and widest eyes.

  I do not open the door. It’s pretty possible that I don’t want to go in there, curious or no.

  The things Astrid said about her closet—vague half sentences—were creepy. Eleanor’s mouth—the way it turned down and got crooked when she talked to me last night—was even scarier.

  It would take a lot for Astrid to avoid something magical, I think. Eleanor likes night-lights when she’s sleeping and flashlights when she’s camping and explicit itineraries when she’s doing anything else. But Astrid is her perfect counterpart. She likes playing hide-and-seek in pitch black and sleeping outside instead of in the tent and running off for a little while when we’re on the beach, terrifying everyone but most especially Mom.

  I’m not sure I want to see anything that Astrid is too scared to explore. Even if Marla likes it.

  After all, Marla is odd. She likes poetry and worrying and the way things look in the rain. She likes Mom more than Dad. She likes eggs more than pancakes. She likes burnt toast and asparagus. She likes the New Hampshire house.

  Of course she’d want to check out the bad closet, whatever that means.

  When Marla opens the door, the magic lingers, like with the other closets.

  There are flowers on the floor. Not stems, only petals. Layers upon layers of them. They are so purple they are nearly black, and they have a mean-looking sheen.

  There is what looks like a tiny house. Doghouse-size. Made of piles of stones. I think it would be hot to touch. Or very, very cold, maybe. There are wings flapping so fast that I can’t see what’s attached to them, but the wings are silver and look sharp. The closet walls are dripping a dark-pink fluid. It is thick and strange—not water or slime or pasta sauce. More like wax. Glowing, gorgeous, luxurious wax.

  It is beautiful.

  Not beautiful in a way I understand. But beautiful.

  It looks the way I sometimes feel late at night when I don’t want to think about Mom anymore—heavy and purple and dripping and strange.

  “Wow,” I say. I’m not sure the word comes out, or if it’s just my breath, which I can see in a blast of air, since it is freezing cold in the closet.

  Marla holds one of the petals up to me, and I wish it would fade already. In my closet it would.

  “You’re keeping the magic alive,” Marla says.

  “What?”

  “Touch this,” she says. She looks focused, like she’s solving a math problem, and I think if I obey she’ll close the door and make it all go away. So I touch the petal.

  It shimmies and shudders. It grows.

  “It’s you,” Marla says. “Come farther in.”

  I step back instead. The edges of magic start to fade. I take another step back, and the sharp corners of the things in the closet blur. The too-strong, too-sharp, so-sweet-it-hurts smell of a thousand flowers grows fainter.

  “No,” I say. “It’s not me.” I take another step back. The magic recedes further. The petal in Marla’s hand crumbles and disappears.

  “You’re what’s special. I mean, me too, I think. But you most of all. It wasn’t the combination of the four of us in Eleanor’s closet that made it all better. It wasn’t some sisterhood power. It was you.”

  I take four more steps back and everything else in the closet disappears, and we are looking at Astrid’s normal, empty closet, and not at some awful, beautiful, weirdly familiar nightmare.

  “I did it all on my own,” Marla says. “No diorama. Just, like, me. It sort of . . . looks the way I feel.”

  My heart hiccups. The magic didn’t stay, wasn’t growing the way it seems to when I’m in the closets, when I’m in control. But still.

  “I brought things inside late one night too. But I don’t need to bring things in. I only need me and my feelings and that’s it. I mean, I can’t do it in the other closets. You can do special things in all the closets, I guess, but at least this one closet lets me do stuff. It’s a way better closet than Eleanor’s. It’s like your closet, right?”

  I don’t like the way her Marla-feelings looked.

  “No,” I say. “It’s not anything like mine.”

  “Well. I wouldn’t know,” Marla says. “You haven’t invited me in yours.”

  Her hand touches my forearm, and I can’t believe how icy it is. So cold it’s nearly hot, like I’d imagined the stone house might be. Right on that strange and mysterious line where the two extremes become one.

  “Are you okay?” I say, because she doesn’t seem the same.

  “It’s so cozy in there,” Marla replies, which is not at all true. “I wish I could make the magic stay. Make it stronger. Use it in all the closets and be in control all the time. I hate that you’re able to do things I can’t do. Do you focus your mind? Did you know it was you that made things grow and move and become even more magical?”

  “I’m not sure I’m anything special,” I say. If I was so powerful, I wouldn’t have let Marla be alone with Mom yesterday and I wouldn’t have ruined Eleanor’s night and I wouldn’t feel the way I do right now—small and breakable.

  “Eleanor and Astrid don’t have what you have. Or what we have,” Marla says. “They have their twin thing and Eleanor’s closet, but they need those dioramas. You’re so used to thinking they’re the best, you haven’t even considered that ma
ybe they’re not.” She rubs her hands together like a villain in a movie, so I take one of her hands to make it stop.

  “That buzzing thing in there looked sharp. Like it could hurt you.”

  Marla nods. “It hurts a little, I guess, if it flies into you. But it’s so pretty. And funny. It, like, teases, you know?”

  I think of the lightbulb that shrank and turned pink and playful with me. “Sure,” I say. “I mean, I guess. It looked sort of mean. But it sounds like it’s, um, nice?”

  Marla’s other cold, cold hand grabs mine. I don’t want to tell her how scared I am, but I can barely feel my fingers. I don’t like any of it. I feel the opposite of the delicious UnWorry in my closet.

  “Please don’t tell,” she says. Her eyes are too dark for her face, too dark for the sister I’ve known for all of my eleven years. And her hands are too cold to belong to a girl, especially in the summertime, but I try to ignore both of those things, because her voice is so soft and nice and she has that look of calm that I know I’ve felt before. “I need something that’s mine too,” she says.

  I can’t argue. Especially not after last night.

  We eat breakfast, and I try to talk to Marla about the bad closet and about what happened with Mom last night and about how to stay safe and have magic and how we should tell Astrid and Eleanor about what we saw.

  “Beach!” Marla says in nonresponse, a cheerleader all of a sudden. Usually when we go to the lake during the summer, Marla sits on the dock and rips splinters of wood from its surface and complains about sand being in her sandwich. Today she is too eager and in this old bathing suit that must have been Eleanor’s or Astrid’s before hers. It seems especially cruel to get bathing suits as hand-me-downs.

  “We should ask Mom if it’s okay,” I say. She has strange and specific rules about the lake, and new rules pop up all the time. We can’t go before noon or after three. We can’t go with boys. We have to be no more than five feet away from one another at all times. We have to bring a cell phone.