Rules for Stealing Stars

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “I asked Mom not to talk about that,” Dad says. He looks at each of us, to see what we know. Eleanor and Astrid know nothing, so their faces tense and twist. “There’s no reason to know every sad thing in the world. And Mom doesn’t quite remember what happened correctly.”

  “But where’d the sister go?” I say. “Mom says she’s stuck.”

  Dad scratches his head like a gorilla. “She died, honey. A long, long time ago.”

  “Is that why Mom’s so sad?” Marla asks, of course.

  “What are you talking about?” Eleanor says. She’s never been the last to know anything, so she’s extra confused. “What sister?”

  “You know how we’ve talked about ghost stories?” Dad says. He relaxes, figuring out a way to talk to us in his language. “Sometimes people are haunted. And ghosts aren’t white things in sheets. They’re the scary bits of the past that follow us around. You understand?”

  Like this, I think. Like the way we’ll all carry this summer around forever. The way we’ll be haunted by Mom and her sickness and the twisty-turny way it unfolds.

  “Mom’s haunted?” Marla says. Dad shakes his head and shrugs and nods, all in a row. I don’t know what it means.

  Eleanor and Astrid probably have a billion questions, but no energy to ask them. And I’m pretty sure Dad’s wrong about the sister being dead and that he doesn’t know what I know—that Mom thinks her sister is caught in a closet. Now that we know about the magic closets, I know anything is possible.

  Then Dad’s gone and Astrid’s looking for crayons to put in her diorama and we’re left waiting to see what happens next.

  Not happily ever after at all.

  I go to my room and they follow me. That has never happened before. I’m supposed to follow them.

  I empty my closet of the “Twelve Dancing Princesses” experiment and decide I’m stupid for thinking there was anything to it.

  “You’re supposed to tell us everything you know,” Eleanor says.

  “I tried,” I say.

  “I wasn’t sure,” I say.

  “Marla knew too,” I say.

  I don’t say that I think Dad’s wrong. That I think the mysterious sister is caught in a closet. That Mom has been searching for her for weeks.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, but Eleanor doesn’t reply, and Astrid gives the weakest smile that ever was, and Marla pulls her knees to her chest and cries.

  Nineteen

  It’s not long before I am desperate to go back into a closet.

  Being angry with Dad turns into being worried about Mom, and that turns into this gray-colored anxiety that replaces all the blood and air in me. Like I’m filled with cold, shivering sludge.

  “Is your diorama done?” I ask Astrid. Her door is partially open, and she’s cross-legged on the floor with glue and sunflower seeds and felt and pipe cleaners and this tiny turquoise elephant I’d forgotten we each had from Christmas stockings a few years ago.

  “Not yet. We need an extra-good one,” she says.

  “I really didn’t know anything about Mom’s sister,” I say. “You know sometimes she says things, and she said it when she wasn’t feeling well, and I thought maybe it wasn’t—”

  “Everything out here is so, so sad,” Astrid says, cutting me off. “Maybe we don’t need to know anything else about Mom and Mom’s life and stuff. I’d rather play with the closets.”

  “Me too,” I say, but it’s not quite true, and if I can’t be honest around Astrid, I can’t be honest around anyone. “Sometimes.”

  I crane my neck to see if Eleanor’s in there with Astrid, but she’s not.

  “Eleanor’s getting ice cream?” I say. Astrid wipes something away from her eye—an eyelash? A tear? I can’t tell—and nods. I should have guessed.

  I picture Eleanor with a cup of chocolate chip and her not-that-cute, not-that-secret boyfriend, and I think I get it. It’s like a closet too. Being in love is probably a place that’s far away from this place—sweeter and more romantic and her own.

  And I’d bet anything that for a time, being a twin was sort of like a closet too. A private kind of magic all their own. Maybe that’s why Astrid and Eleanor don’t seem as in tune with the closets as Marla and me. They don’t need them as desperately.

  “This diorama’s going to be amazing,” Astrid says. “Better than a vacation.”

  “Of course,” I say. We’re quiet for long enough to hear Marla still groaning in the next room. “Hurry up with it, okay?”

  I think we both know how quickly everything’s changing. A little bit more shifts every day. Every day Eleanor stays with her secret boyfriend a few minutes longer and Mom does something a little stranger and Marla gets a little grumpier.

  Another thing I think might be true: every day Marla’s wrist turns a new color. Every day she adds another bangle to her pile of bracelets. Things we’ve won at arcades and carnivals and gotten as treats in goody bags and bought at the mall and gotten as stocking stuffers. Bracelets I’ve never seen her wear before.

  “I’m scared,” I say. It feels good to hear it out loud.

  “We won’t lose Eleanor,” Astrid says. “That guy’s not half as cute as Henry.”

  I don’t know how to say I’m more scared of losing Mom. I leave Astrid so that she can perfect our next diorama, and I wander the house looking for solutions.

  There’s a pile of fabric in the sewing room, next to the sewing machine. I go through all of it, and find something dark blue and velvety. I think it was going to be for Astrid’s wizard costume last Halloween, but Mom was really sick in the fall, so she didn’t make costumes for any of us. We had to get store-bought.

  I don’t know why the fabric is out here now, but I know it’s not because Mom was getting a head start on this year’s costumes.

  The fabric is amazing, and Astrid would have loved it slung over her back for Halloween, but I can use it for something even better now. There are yards upon yards of it, and I lug it all to my closet. I hang it from the bar and the hooks and place it on the ground. The closet is darker and softer by the time I’m done.

  I look around my room for more things to add. I stick plain metal and yellow and purple thumbtacks into the velvet. I have a mobile of the planets and an inflatable globe that I bring inside. Dad has this Astroturf he uses to practice his golf game indoors: a strip of fake green grass, and I sneak into his office to borrow that too. It fits pretty well. For good measure I throw pink pipe cleaners onto the fake grass and twist a few of them around the clothing rod above my head.

  It doesn’t look pretty. It looks the way a lot of my craft projects look. I don’t have Astrid’s skill at making the ordinary look extraordinary. I don’t have her eye for detail. I don’t glue things with care. I almost don’t want to close the closet door. I don’t want to feel the sink of disappointment at my sloppiness. I don’t want it to be confirmed how messy and uncoordinated I am. How badly I need my sister’s supervision.

  I should wait for Astrid to make a perfect diorama, but I need to feel okay now. I can’t wait.

  I step inside. The door clicks shut and I squeeze my eyes. Squeeze myself.

  When minutes have passed and I can’t stand the suspense any longer, I let my eyes open.

  It’s night in the closet. It’s a velvety, navy-blue night.

  I trip, even though I was standing still.

  The thumbtacks have been transformed into stars. Some are gold, the color stars are supposed to be. But the others are neon yellow or purple and glowing, alien-like and strange against the surface of the night I created. The pipe cleaners have turned to vines that wrap around themselves and the rod, which somehow still stretches over my head, but now into infinity, since the walls have vanished and been swallowed up by the night. More pink vines worm their way over the ground, which is a fluorescent green, but instead of being fake plastic turf, it is actively growing at the pace of a centimeter a minute.

  It is beautiful.

  Not only beaut
iful—strange. It is everything I placed inside the closet, but better. Weirder. Alive.

  I lie on the ground and look up at the stars I have created. When I was little, Astrid and I used to talk about rearranging the stars in the night sky to make our own constellations. I have done exactly that now.

  The closet stops feeling like a closet. It is timeless, placeless space. The grass tickles my arms as it grows at its ridiculous rate. Soon, if I look to my left or right, I can barely see above the growth. That doesn’t matter, as long as I can look up at the stars.

  When Mom was doing well, she asked me once what I like so much about the stars. I wasn’t sure. “The sparkle?” I said, but that wasn’t right. “That there are so many? Or that they are all there but sometimes you can’t see them, but when you can see them, they’re the best?” Mom nodded along with all of it. She used to be a good listener.

  “They don’t really sparkle,” she said after a while. I was squinting my eyes to better see the shapes they made in the sky. It was working. “They glow. It’s warmer, sweeter, deeper than a sparkle. They glow, and make things seem unending and okay.”

  “They glow,” I said.

  “How bad can it be in a world where you only have to wait until night to see the sky glowing, telling you warmth can always, always poke through?” She sighed after she spoke, and I thought that was it, that was the moment when Mom would shift from sad to happy, from sleepy to awake.

  I want to hold a star.

  One star in particular seems to glow in my direction.

  I’m warm and golden feeling.

  I could never feel this way without the magic, without the help of the closet and the stars and the night sky I made myself.

  I could never feel this way in any other part of the house.

  I reach up on my tiptoes and grab at the night I created. Something warm hits my palm, and I close my hand around it and pull down. The star dislodges from the sky without much trouble. It has a bit of a heartbeat. An unusual thump of heat in my hand.

  I am holding a star.

  I keep thinking about the sad, lost way my sisters and I have been wandering around the house and the road to the lake, and the takeout dinners Dad thinks we like ordering and the piles of fabric in Mom’s sewing room that never get turned into anything.

  I think about Mom at the police station and Dad using all his energy to smile and Eleanor choosing to spend Christmas and New Year’s and spring break and Sunday mornings with her secret boyfriend instead of us. I think about Marla.

  I think about Mom’s sister.

  And it’s all so sad that it feels like I won’t be able to handle it. Like I won’t be able to leave the closet and face the real world.

  So I do what I’m certain the closet wants me to do. What I’m allowed to do but my sisters can’t. I take that little star with me.

  Only yesterday, Marla was completely unable to take a tiny handful of dirt out of the closet, but something inside me tells me I can steal something magical from this sky.

  Maybe it’s my sisters telling me I’m special, or maybe it’s some twin-like bond I have with the closet, but I know how badly I want to take something with me into the real world, and I feel sure the closet will let me.

  Because the closet gives you what you need, and I’m special, when it comes to closets, and I need this.

  The star buzzes in my hand, and I decide that is confirmation that this is what I’m supposed to do.

  The rest of the fantasy night fades away when I head back into my bedroom, but I manage to hang on to the star. It doesn’t fade with the rest of the magic.

  My sweaty hand is strangling its glowing heat. When I look at it in the bright light of my bedroom, it’s even more startling: pointed and throbbing and a golden-orange color that I have never seen before. Sunset Nectarine. Pumpkin Marigold Moon. Autumn Candlelight.

  Maybe when I grow up I’ll be in charge of naming new Crayola colors.

  I put it in my jewelry box. It’s smaller than the palm of my hand, the size of a half-dollar, which Eleanor used to collect. I don’t think the jewelry box is the best place for it. But I’m not sure there are any rules for where to put a stolen star.

  I think at least it will help me sleep, and it’s about time to sleep now. I don’t know how it came to be night, but the thing about watching the stars is that you can watch for three minutes or three hours and it feels exactly the same.

  Twenty

  In the very early morning I think I can hear the star. A pretty buzzing noise, like a mosquito who has mastered the violin.

  I check on it, in its box. It glows, winking warmth at me.

  I hear something else too. Astrid and Eleanor’s door opening and clicking closed. Slippered feet tiptoeing. Marla’s door opening and closing.

  Because of our lifetime of summers spent in this house, I know the sounds of the doors perfectly. Like being able to tell the difference between Mom’s footsteps and Eleanor’s, I know from the squeak and click which door is being opened and who is doing the opening.

  I leave my room and wonder if my sisters have the same door-sense that I do. They must, because Marla opens her door before I reach it. Her hair is wild and her eyes are black. I step inside her room.

  “You went back in,” I say. Marla’s lips are almost purple. Her skin has lost all the color it had been building from our time on the beach and is nearly translucent. “You look awful.”

  “Everything’s okay,” Marla says. Her voice is an unusual register, low and new, like she has a cold. “I’m great. You should go in. You need it. You need to go into Astrid’s closet.” She takes a step or two toward me, and even the way she’s walking doesn’t seem familiar. Her hand touches my elbow, and it’s ice.

  “What did you see in there?” I say. I think there are tiny cuts on her hands and forearms. I look at her feet, and they look hurt too.

  “Roses,” Marla says. But they obviously aren’t the roses from Astrid’s dioramas. They aren’t the pretty grass-growing roses we saw in Eleanor’s closet. They aren’t even the dehydrated rosebushes from our Massachusetts backyard.

  “And thorns?” I say, reaching my forefinger to the torn palm of her hand.

  “I guess.”

  “What else?”

  “Only the roses,” Marla says, like she’s recalling the best dream she’s ever had. The best dream anyone’s ever had. “Black roses covering every inch of the closet. Can you think of anything more beautiful? I was so sad, and that’s what it made for me. I’m going back in, but I wanted to grab a pair of scissors, so I can try to take some of the roses out.”

  I don’t like the idea of scissors in Astrid’s closet. I don’t like the idea of Marla in there at all, but especially not with sharp objects that could grow larger and sharper.

  Scissors with a mind of their own. I can’t think of anything worse.

  I know Marla won’t be able to take anything out of that closet. And Marla knows she wasn’t able to get anything out of Eleanor’s closet.

  I could help her, I guess. But I won’t.

  “I’ll go in with you later if you make breakfast with me now,” I say. It’s a lie—I have no intention of ever going in that closet again—but I need to distract her. “We can make something special for Mom.”

  Marla lights up. She doesn’t snap out of her strange state, but she smiles a more familiar smile.

  “She really needs something special,” Marla says. “She’s had such a hard few weeks. I was going to bring her one of the roses, but maybe breakfast is better. She’d love breakfast, I bet.”

  It sounds like the kind of thing Dad says when he’s pretending Mom’s not super sick. My stomach lurches, and I don’t know if it makes me a bad daughter, but I would never, ever give my star to Mom. It’s all mine.

  We head to the kitchen and I help Marla make pancakes. There’s a basket of freshly picked blueberries on the counter. Probably Eleanor went blueberry picking yesterday with her secret boyfriend. It’s exactly
the kind of annoyingly romantic activity I’m sure they’re constantly doing. I throw some of the blueberries into the batter.

  Marla does the bacon. She knows how to burn it for Mom and doesn’t mind the fiery-hot oil that spits off the pan when it’s frying.

  Marla flips the pancakes and I know they won’t taste as good as if Eleanor or Dad made them.

  Eleanor and Astrid come down, still half asleep but smelling bacon and blueberries and butter.

  Astrid sits on the counter and eats berries straight from the basket.

  Neither of them says anything about the scratches all over Marla’s hands and feet and arms, but Marla throws on Mom’s old gray sweatshirt, which was folded over one of the stools. It’s strange on her—too big in most places and smelling all wrong for a girl our age. I almost ask her to take it off. We all have to work hard to be less like Mom, not more like her.

  “I didn’t say you could have those berries,” Eleanor says. “I was going to make muffins for—for my friend.” She still won’t say his name. Which is probably safest. And fine by me. I don’t need to know it. Astrid used to make handmade cards and woven leather bracelets for Henry. When Mom found out about them, she took away all of Astrid’s leather strings and the rubber stamps she used to make the cards.

  “You can’t do that,” I say. I don’t want to know what Mom would do if she found out about this secret boyfriend. We don’t need any more Big Events, that’s for sure. We need to keep things calm and have all our adventures in the safety of my and Eleanor’s closets.

  “We thought Mom could use a nice breakfast,” Marla says. I roll my eyes. I am really becoming awful.

  “I didn’t pick those for Mom,” Eleanor says. She has that pre-crying look—pink, watery eyes, but not actually letting the tears out.

  “Mom’s not here,” Dad says. We hadn’t heard him come down.

  “Did she go for a run?” I say. I sound too excited. When Mom’s going on morning runs, it means she’s on the road to recovery.

  “No. She’s Away,” Dad says. We hear the capital A of the word, even if we can’t see it when he speaks.