Rules for Stealing Stars

by Corey Ann Haydu

“Calm down. It feels good,” Marla says. A squiggly line drawing wraps itself around her, like a snake. She giggles, as if the floating drawing feels more like a hug than a threat, but I don’t buy it.

  The rain hits harder. It pinches my skin and leaves little marks. For a moment there is a red bruise everywhere a raindrop has hit. I watch my skin as it polka-dots itself with pain, fades, and polka-dots itself again.

  “I’m going to be sick,” I say. I want to reach for Marla’s hand, but I don’t want to risk the squiggly black line wiggling itself around me. I don’t want to touch it. The drawings that have hit my ears and the top of my head were hotter than I’d have expected.

  The bug is all kinds of creepy and crawly. I’m going to cry, but I can’t get a big enough breath to get a sob out.

  “I hate it in here,” I say. Marla dances in the rain. I can tell she is in charge of this closet, even if it’s Astrid’s.

  If Astrid’s right, that this closet takes on our feelings, then of course Marla has control. Her feelings are the darkest and scariest and biggest. Hers are the most on the surface. Her feelings are the kind that scare me.

  “Make it stop,” I say. In my closet, I have control over the elements, and I look to Marla for reassurance that she has some kind of control in here. She shrugs. “Make it STOP,” I say. I’m screeching now. I’m not even scared of Eleanor and Astrid hearing us. I can’t see the closet door through all the chaos, and I wonder if Marla knows where it is. If she can get us out. If she ever will.

  “Which part?” she says. Her voice is light, airy, Astrid-like. Not Marla-like at all. She’s smiling at the phantom scribbles, the still-growing bug, reaching her fingertips out to touch them.

  Once when Mom let me stay home from school, we watched a hypnotist on TV. I wasn’t really sick, and she knew it. She said sometimes we all need days to stay in our pajamas and watch TV and not worry about anything other than what will make us happy in that moment. She stayed in her robe too. It was before she stayed in her robe all the time. We ate cheese and crackers. She drank a big glass of jewel-colored red wine, and she let me have four glasses of chocolate milk, even after it dribbled down my chin and onto the couch pillows.

  The hypnotist talked in a low, monotonous voice and convinced audience members that they were roosters and made them dance every time someone sang “Happy Birthday.” The way Marla is acting reminds me of those hypnotized audience members. Same wide eyes. Same slow movements. Same ability to be one person one moment, and another person the next.

  I snap my fingers. That’s what the hypnotist did to snap his subjects out of their trances.

  It doesn’t work. Marla still has a funny smile on her face, and she hasn’t blinked in several long minutes.

  The pen in the air writes words, finally, but not any I recognize. It writes the name LAUREL over and over and over. I don’t know anyone named Laurel. I don’t know that I even like the name Laurel.

  “Who’s Laurel?” I say. “Why is it doing that? Does it mean something? Are we supposed to do something?” I know I am asking too many questions and not leaving any room for Marla to answer them.

  “You should really breathe,” Marla says as an answer.

  I see the door through a patch of not-written-on space, like a bit of fog has cleared, and I rush for it.

  “Sometimes it sticks,” she says. I pull and she’s right. The door is sticking.

  “You do it,” I say, stepping away. I still feel like Marla is in charge of everything in here, from the writing to the creepy dark-orange color to the black leaves with black veins floating around us and starting to pile below my feet. I am wishing I had worn shoes, or slippers at least, because even the crunch of the leaves under my toes hurts a little more than it should. Not as badly as glass might, but sharper than leaves usually are.

  “No thanks,” Marla says. She sits in a pile of leaves, covering her feet with them, the way we sometimes cover our feet in sand at the beach. “I like the name Laurel, don’t you?” she says. I pull at the closet door again. It feels like it might give in to me, but pulling hard doesn’t seem to help.

  “Marla. We have to get out! We can’t stay in here!”

  “Mom liked the name Laurel,” Marla says. “She told me once.”

  “Just, like, randomly mentioned liking that name?” I breathe and hold the doorknob and try to open it with my mind, without pulling or pushing or turning anything. There’s wind in the closet, and the rain is rushing down harder and faster. My wet hair keeps blowing into my eyes. The wind is picking up the now-wet leaves and throwing them around us.

  “Put it together, Silly,” Marla says. “I bet Laurel is her sister. I really, really bet it is.” She gets up and bounces on her toes again, parts of her all dark from the closet and other parts of her lit up with excitement. “We have to get Laurel, that’s what it’s telling us. We have to go save her. Bring her to Mom. Then Mom will be fine.”

  The pen writes LAUREL even more ecstatically, so Marla might be right, but if Laurel is Mom’s lost sister, it could also be a warning that we will end up like her: stuck, like Mom obviously thinks Laurel is.

  I don’t know that the closets have things they want us to do. They’re only supposed to give us what we need. And the bad closet is giving Marla what she needs—hope that she can save Mom.

  The wind almost knocks me over.

  “I don’t care about Mom, we need to get out!” I say. The light dims even more; we are entirely in shade and shadows.

  Marla gives me a long look. I can’t quite decipher it.

  “You’re not scared,” I say. Any normal person should be scared. I beg the door to open. Marla sighs and shrugs. I twist the knob and it pops open, like it was never stuck at all. I hadn’t realized my heart was captured in my throat until the door opening released it and dropped it down to my toes. The feeling of a roller coaster as it rises and then drops too quickly, all of a sudden. Fear.

  “Let’s go,” I say, reaching to grab Marla’s hand but changing my mind. I don’t want to touch her. She doesn’t look like my whiny, sometimes mean, always disgruntled, smallest big sister. She looks like someone else. Someone I don’t want to be near.

  Twenty-Four

  Eleanor’s night-light is on, and I can see that Marla’s face is wet.

  Her face is wet and her Mets T-shirt is ripped and her lips are so dry they are cracking. They are rocky deserts.

  I am trying to keep us quiet, so we can sneak back out of Astrid and Eleanor’s bedroom, but Marla is moaning. Quiet moans, but loud enough to interrupt the flow of sleeping breaths.

  “Mmmm?” Eleanor hums out into the dark.

  “Mmmm,” Astrid responds.

  “Ughhhh,” Marla groans back.

  “Shhhh,” I say. I cover Marla’s mouth with my hand, but she’s already lying down, finally out of the closet, and curling over her own stomach, circling her ribs with her arms like she may puke.

  “Let me back in,” Marla groans again, more loudly. “I have to go back in. I came out too soon.”

  I don’t feel that way. When I leave my closet or Eleanor’s, I have the UnWorry. I feel new. But exiting Astrid’s closet, I mostly feel tired. And nervous. And then even more tired from how nervous I am. And above all else, relieved to be out.

  “Mmmmm,” Eleanor calls out, and this time I hear her body shift around on the bed, the squeaking springs, and I swear even the flutter of her eyelashes as she shifts from asleep to a little bit awake.

  “Come on, get up,” I whisper in Marla’s ear, but she’s not going anywhere, and I guess neither am I.

  “Marla?” Astrid says. It seems impossible, how dark their room is in the afternoon with the shades pulled down. It makes me even more lonely for our old house, where the curtains always let at least a little light in. Marla doesn’t answer, but I note that Astrid called her name and not mine, which makes me think that Astrid knows Marla has been sneaking in here from time to time. That maybe I haven’t been carrying this secret
all on my own after all.

  “I’m here too,” I say, keeping my voice low in the tiny hope that Eleanor will fall back asleep.

  “Silly? Who’s in here? Is Mom okay? Where’s Dad?” Eleanor says, popping up in bed and scrambling for the lamp.

  “Mom’s fine, I assume. Dad’s in his room,” I say.

  “Marla?” Astrid says, and Marla moans in response. “LIGHT, Eleanor! My God, it’s not like it’s hard to find!” Astrid rarely gets mad, but when she does, it is sudden and certain.

  “I’m not even totally awake!” Eleanor says. A few things drop on the floor, miniature crashes. She is obviously swatting her arm around, searching unsuccessfully for the switch, and when she finds it we are all shocked into the light and can all see just how terrible Marla really does look, hugging herself on the floor.

  “You aren’t okay,” Eleanor says. She’s sleepy from her nap, so her voice sounds like some combination of cat and frog and horse.

  “I think it’s food poisoning or something. I mean, otherwise I’m great,” Marla says. Her eyes are dark again: navy blue instead of pale blue. She looks more like Mom than ever, with her ringed eyes and chapped lips and messy clothes.

  And her frown.

  “It’s not food poisoning,” Eleanor says. They must have noticed our wet clothes and strange expressions and the open door to the closet. The twins have been set into motion. Eleanor turns on more lights, closes the door to Astrid’s closet, grabs her cup of water to give to Marla. Astrid goes to Marla’s side to feel her forehead and lift her from lying down to sitting up. I mostly wring my hands and worry.

  I don’t need to be worrying. Eleanor has done exactly this before, taking care of Mom. She and Astrid have a routine down. Eleanor calls out commands, and Astrid follows them in a calm, focused way. They seem more comfortable now than I’ve ever seen them. Like this is what they do best.

  “I’ll go back in the closet,” Marla says between whimpers. “I feel fine in there. It’s better for me.” Luckily, she’s too tired to actually move. Astrid keeps a hand on Marla’s forehead and another on her knee, and that’s basically enough to keep her still for a good long while.

  Eleanor sits down next to the rest of us when she has finished all the little chores around the room: blanket straightening and hair brushing and Advil getting. “We told you not to—”

  “You were wrong!” Marla says. “It’s a good closet. It’s telling me what to do. It cares. You guys don’t understand. But you will. You’ll see.”

  Marla is smiling. It’s a warm, lit-up smile, one I’ve maybe never seen on her face. Nothing like bitterness or sadness or rage behind it.

  “Look in the mirror,” Eleanor says. “You do not look okay. You need to see yourself. You’re not seeing what we’re seeing, okay, honey?” Eleanor has a handheld mirror, a silver thing that is heavy and engraved and beautiful, like from a fairy tale. But it’s not so useful in terms of actually being able to see your reflection. It was passed down to her from Dad, who said it was from his family. I wonder who his family might have been, that they’d have something so magically beautiful. The glass is old and spotty and yellowed. Eleanor picks it up and shoves it in Marla’s face. Marla shakes her head in a polite kind of no, thank you, and she pushes the mirror away.

  “Let me back in,” Marla says, keeping very still.

  Astrid gets up and heaves Marla over her shoulder with a grunt. Astrid doesn’t exactly look strong with her willowy limbs and graceful-meets-unfocused way of moving through the world. But she holds Marla steady, and opens the bedroom door with her other hand. Marla kicks at Astrid’s middle, but Astrid doesn’t even stumble. I assume they make it all the way down the hall to Marla’s room like that.

  “You didn’t tell us she was using the bad closet,” Eleanor says when we’re alone. “What are all these secrets you’re keeping? What is going on with you?”

  “You don’t tell me everything,” I say. I want to argue that Marla is totally fine, and Astrid and Eleanor are overreacting, but in the wake of Marla rolling and retching on the ground, we’d both know it was a lie. “You haven’t been around. You don’t care. You have a whole new family with your secret boyfriend.”

  Eleanor rolls her eyes. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” she says, small, quiet words that sound sad instead of mean. They hurt, but I know she doesn’t mean them to hurt me. I think about LilyLee and the way her mom always makes sure she has sunblock and the newest greatest books. How once a summer they go to Canobie Lake Park and ride the rickety roller coasters, the whole three-person family.

  If Eleanor’s secret boyfriend’s family is anything like that, I guess I get it.

  “Did you go in the closet too?” Eleanor asks. We are both sitting cross-legged. Our knees are touching. I can hear Astrid and Marla whispering down the hall, and I wonder how it is that Dad hasn’t woken up in the midst of all this excitement. I don’t answer Eleanor, so she asks again. “Silly. Did you go in? Did you see it? Did you like it? Did you have your special powers in there, too?”

  “No,” I say. “I didn’t like it. I don’t like it. But Marla does. Did you see her smile? She was so happy.”

  “That’s not what happy looks like, okay?” Eleanor says. “Maybe you haven’t seen it in a while, but that’s not it.” Eleanor looks sad for me.

  Astrid comes back into the room and crawls into her bed. It’s not even dinnertime yet.

  “Go to Marla’s room, Silly,” she mumbles. Astrid never calls me Silly, so it hurts. I stand right up; I felt too small sitting like that. “She’s sick. And scared. And you wanted to be involved. So go help her.” This pinches too. Eleanor opens her mouth. I’m not sure if she means to stand up for me or agree with Astrid, but she changes her mind and purses her lips.

  “What if Marla goes back in?” I ask.

  “You won’t let her,” Astrid says. It is final and certain and sleepy.

  Twenty-Five

  I don’t eat dinner. I don’t sleep.

  I have to wake Marla up in the morning. I shift around in the bed a lot, after a whole sleepless night here, and clear my throat, and “accidentally” throw my arm into her stomach.

  “Oh, sorry,” I say when she opens her eyes. There’s a brief second of her trying to remember why I’m there, and then she sort of shakes her head like it needs to be cleared out. “You feeling better?” I get out of bed right away. Marla doesn’t smell great in the mornings, and the whole room feels small and hot, all close and raw and in need of an open window and a lit candle.

  Marla doesn’t open her windows or have a collection of sweet-smelling candles in her room.

  “Better?” she says like she doesn’t understand my question. She scrunches her nose. She must smell and feel how rotten her room is right now too. “Let’s get breakfast. You want to go get something? I bet no one’s making anything, but we could grab bagels down the street.” Marla and I have never gone to the bagel shop together. That’s something I used to do with Mom when we were awake before everyone else, back when she was doing well. It was a summer tradition, almost better than the pancakes and bacon on Sundays.

  As far as I know, Marla doesn’t even like bagels.

  “No more bad closet, right? You saw how we almost got stuck?” I’m hanging out near her door, ready to leave as soon as she confirms that she is not crazy. It sounds like Dad is awake. I can hear folky guitar music playing on his extra-special, don’t-ever-touch-them speakers.

  Marla shrugs.

  I’m panicking. It doesn’t matter what Dad says. I know Mom’s sister got stuck. I know we could all get stuck. I know the closet was writing us a warning.

  “I like it in there,” Marla says. “Maybe Mom’s sister liked it in there too. Maybe Mom would have liked to stay in there. She doesn’t seem that happy out here.” Marla doesn’t look scared. She doesn’t look sick anymore either, or sleepy, or angry, or any of the ways I’m used to Marla looking.

  “You need to be scared,” I say. I’m afraid if
I say too much, she will cut me off entirely, but what I want to do is yell at her about safety and insanity and closets and locked doors that never open.

  Marla looks at me. It is a hard stare. The kind that doesn’t budge, doesn’t blink. It is a stare I can feel from my burning face to my tingling toes. I’m not sure what she’s looking for, what assessment she’s coming up with, but she doesn’t say anything else on the subject.

  “Bagels,” she says instead, just when I think the stare might actually suffocate me. “We definitely need bagels. You like that blueberry cream cheese, right?”

  “Right,” I say. Marla nods, like we’ve solved everything, and pushes past me to open the door the rest of the way.

  Everyone else is already downstairs. Astrid and Eleanor are opening and closing the fridge like it’s a magic trick, where every time you look in again you might find something new. Dad is looking at his paper but flips the pages so quickly I’m not sure he’s actually reading it. They are all pajamaed, with fleece jackets unzipped but on, since the door to the porch is wide open and the New Hampshire morning chill is intense today. It’s an immediate reminder that it won’t be summer forever, that fall is running right behind and will catch up someday soon.

  “We’re getting bagels!” Marla says. Her voice is too loud for the morning, and more important, too loud to be coming out of Marla. Dad jumps in his chair. The paper makes a startled, rattling sound. Eleanor and Astrid slam the refrigerator door shut again and spin toward us.

  “How nice!” Dad says when he recovers his voice. He smiles and looks vaguely proud, like he has somehow brought his daughters closer together in our time of crisis. “You should go get some money from Mom’s drawer! Wouldn’t that be nice? Like she’s buying them for us. She would love that.” Mom has a drawer in the kitchen where she throws dollar bills that were shoved in pockets or left on the counter. I hate that one of the only things that might be good about this morning—a hot bagel with blueberry cream cheese—is going to be taken over by Mom, or by Not-Mom, the Mom who exists only in Dad’s head.