Rules for Stealing Stars

by Corey Ann Haydu

  “Uh-huh, of course,” he says, and his head keeps on nodding. I nod at Marla, too, asking her with my chin and my eyes to leave the room. Eleanor and Astrid left the instant Dad asked who wanted to talk to Mom, thinking, I guess, that if they left the room they wouldn’t have to officially say no. “Remember. She’s not one hundred percent herself yet, okay? She might sound a little spacey, but don’t worry about that.” I remember from other times Mom’s been Away that it takes a little while for her to sound like herself again. They put her on some medicine that helps her but also makes her sound a little like she’s half dreaming. It’s maybe the reason we don’t like talking to her on the phone very much when she’s Away.

  Part of the reason.

  Dad closes the swinging door connecting the TV room to the kitchen, Marla scampers upstairs, probably to listen in from the upstairs hallway, which hangs over the TV room, but for now I am alone with the phone and the number Dad already tapped in. I press Talk, and the receptionist puts me through to some hallway phone that I guess the people living there are allowed to use.

  Mom answers so fast that I know she’s been waiting there for a while.

  “You’re there,” I say.

  “I’m here,” Mom says.

  I have to inhale and exhale before speaking again.

  “I saw you last night,” I say, because I am terrible at openings.

  “It’s so good to hear your voice,” Mom says at the same time, missing my sentence that makes no sense.

  “You and Dad. The fairy tale. The princesses. The closet.” This is not going well. “Laurel.”

  “Silly . . . ,” Mom says. She sounds tired more than anything, even though Dad says part of what she is in Arizona for is “rest.” I’m waiting for her to sound fully awake. I’m waiting for her to be the way she looked in Marla’s closet last night.

  “Mom.”

  “I want you to tell me about the lake,” she says. “And LilyLee. And what you have been drawing and writing and watching and listening to. I want to know who is winning the most often at Monopoly and which of your sisters you are angry at today and whether or not you’ve made any new friends, and . . .” Mom’s getting kind of breathless at this point, and she’s run out of things to say or maybe is waiting for me to break in and start gossiping away, but that’s not why I took the phone from Dad.

  “We went into Marla’s closet. And saw things. We’ve been seeing things. And I need to know if Laurel is really dead or if she’s stuck. And how she got stuck. And I understand why you’re so sad and we want to help you, but I’m not sure how. But Marla thinks she knows. Would you want Laurel back, if we could bring her? Is that what we’re supposed to do?” I haven’t said this much to Mom in months.

  “Marla’s closet . . . ,” she says, part dreamy, part confused. “You know, that was my closet when I was little.” I feel the cusp of her believing or maybe remembering, but then it pulls away. It’s a wave in an ocean: lapping my feet one moment, drifting away, lost forever the next. “Is that a new game you’re playing?” There’s a flutter of sound in the background, and the connection gets fuzzy.

  “No! The closet!” I yell, bringing my mouth close to the phone. “We see things in there! Things I don’t understand!”

  “You’re not in my closet, are you? Not the closet in the sewing room?” Mom sounds panicked. “That one’s locked, Silly. You can’t go in there, okay? No going in the sewing room. I’ve always told you that.” Her voice shakes. I can hear other patients in the background asking her to get off the phone. They only have a few minutes of phone time a day, since they share the one hallway phone after their cell phones are taken away. I guess those are the types of things I’m usually trying to forget.

  “You’re not listening!” I say. Marla has appeared by my side. I hadn’t noticed her coming down the stairs. Eleanor and Astrid are there too. All of them, suddenly, pulling at my elbow, at my hand, at my fingers, trying to get the phone away from me.

  “What are you doing?” Eleanor whispers, pinching the skin of my arm so hard I almost do drop the phone.

  “Mom. I know you know what I’m talking about. ‘The Twelve Dancing Princesses.’ The magical closets. The bad closet. Your sister. What do we do?” I say, trying to hold on to the phone while my sisters wrestle me to the ground.

  Marla manages to get the phone out of my hands, and she runs to stand on the coffee table while she distracts Mom with talk of the raccoons that have been digging into our garage late at night and the color she wants to paint her room when Mom gets back. It must work, or Mom’s phone time runs out, or Marla has wandered into a spot without cell service, because soon Marla’s off the table, and I’m still on the ground, and everyone’s yelling at me.

  “What were you thinking, telling her that?” Marla says.

  “She’s confused. You can’t tell her that stuff now. She’s, like, on medicine. The kind you were on when you broke your ankle. The loopy, weird kind,” Eleanor says, shaking her head.

  “You probably freaked her out!” Astrid says. “You freaked us out!”

  “You can’t make decisions without us. We’re doing this together. You can’t . . . we brought you in because we trusted you. . . .” Eleanor gets up and starts pacing the room. I’m almost surprised Dad hasn’t come back in from the porch, but that’s what he’s like lately. He wouldn’t notice if we burned the house down, probably. He’s not going to notice some loud voices and bumping bodies.

  Eleanor lets out an end-of-the-world, end-of-her-patience sigh. It is long and loud and smells like orange juice and toothpaste.

  “I think we should stay away from the closets altogether,” she says at last.

  “Stay away!?” I can’t control the screech in my voice. The last thing we need to do is stay away. We need to go in more, to learn more, to figure it all out.

  “Of course you want to stay away,” Marla says.

  Eleanor crosses her arms over her chest and rolls her eyes. “Everyone calm down. We can go to the lake when we’re sad. Or watch movies. Or make sundaes. We don’t need the closets.”

  “Now that you have your secret boyfriend you don’t need them,” I say. I’m so sick of Eleanor and the way she wants to control everything but also not be part of anything. I can’t stand the new way she dresses. The happy way she practically skips out of the house to see him. Her cell phone strapped to her hand at all times like a security blanket. “You’re in love,” I say. “You don’t need tulips growing from the sky. You have a boyfriend. You don’t need closets. Or us.”

  Eleanor blushes. Hard.

  I know the look. It’s the look you get when someone says something true, but you don’t want it to be true. Something true that you haven’t admitted is true. Eleanor’s face twists through embarrassment and discomfort into anger and defensiveness.

  “That’s insane,” she says. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Why would you even say something like that? It’s mean.”

  “Silly’s right,” Marla says, looking too proud of herself.

  “I . . . think Priscilla’s right too,” Astrid says in her smallest voice. A mosquito buzzes against the window screen, and the birds sing outside and wind blows the leaves in the trees. Eleanor looks to Astrid like she’s never seen certain things about her before, and maybe she hasn’t.

  Eleanor straightens her shorts so they sit correctly on her waist. She smooths her hair. She runs her hands down the sides of her shirt. And she leaves.

  Twenty-Nine

  Eleanor does not come back. She calls in the early evening and asks Dad if she can stay over at her friend Jodi’s house, and he says yes. LilyLee’s mom would have made sure to get on the phone with Jodi’s parents to check that everything was okay with them. LilyLee’s dad would have asked a bunch of questions and brought over cookies for her to share with her friend and told her what time he would pick her up in the morning.

  Marla passes me a note like we’re in class and not at home. It says, We shoul
d tell Dad about the secret boyfriend. We should tell MOM.

  I almost say yes, because when I’m angry I want to do something big. But instead I shake my head. Not hard enough probably, because Marla looks like she still might do it.

  Dad tells us to order whatever we want. We’ve had so much pizza and Chinese food that we decide to try Indian, even though none of us have ever had it and Dad will probably hate it. He doesn’t like much of anything when it comes to food. When the food arrives, it smells delicious and tastes even better. Dad has a few bites of chicken and asks about our day. I want to ask him, too, about what I saw in the closet, but Marla sits on one side of me and clamps her hand down on my thigh whenever I open my mouth to say anything at all.

  “Where’s Eleanor?” Marla says, her voice all fake-innocent and her eyelashes fluttering like a cartoon character.

  “With a friend,” Dad says.

  “Oh, that boy?” Marla says. Astrid kicks her. Not subtly. Not under the table. Full-on kicks her, in the shins, hard enough that Marla cries out and hugs her leg to her chest.

  “A boy?” Dad says. He sounds like a person waking up from a very intense dream who doesn’t quite know what’s going on. “Eleanor is with a girlfriend. She doesn’t know any boys here. None of you do. No boys. Your mom says.”

  “She’s not with a boy!” Astrid says. Her voice is desperate, the way it sounded when she fought with Mom about Henry. I remember sitting on the stairs in the Massachusetts house, watching Mom and Astrid battle it out.

  “You have to take care of your sisters!” Mom said, yelling so loud I swear the house shook. “You can’t run around with boys! You have to be a good sister. You think you’re so great you can just run off and leave your family to do whatever you want? That’s not how it works.” Then Mom started crying, which she always did during fights. It made them so unfair. “You hate us. You don’t care about us. You’re irresponsible.” This was the worst, when Mom started listing things that seemed irrelevant and strange, a pile of feelings she insisted we felt, interpretations of things we said that she was positive were exactly right. Arguing made it worse.

  But Astrid stood up for herself.

  “My sisters don’t need me watching their every move. They’re not stupid. They’re not going to wander into the middle of a street or off a cliff! I’m a good sister. I’d never let them get hurt. But what I’m doing isn’t hurting anyone. I love Henry!”

  Then the part I never think about happened.

  Eleanor was in her room, listening from there. Marla was listening from the basement. But I saw it from the stairs.

  Mom pushed Astrid. One hand on each shoulder. One hard slam. I looked away before Astrid hit the wall. I looked away before I could see how bad it hurt.

  And because I’m a truly terrible sister, I didn’t say anything about it to anyone.

  From the way Dad’s shaking, and the tone of his voice when he tells us not to joke about boys around Mom, I think he remembers it too. I think he saw what I saw, a year ago.

  I hate my memories. I hate the person I am, the one who turns away and hides. The one who could save everyone but doesn’t.

  I think Marla hates that part of me too. They probably all do.

  I have not had a chance to look at my star since early morning, and the effects are wearing off. I have a headache, and suddenly I’m hating eating with plastic forks and knives. I’m hating these new spices and the yellow of the curry and the red of the rice. I’m hating the sound of the television—Mom would never have let us watch this much—and the sick feeling in my stomach when I think too hard about the drowsiness of her voice on the phone today. When I think too hard about anything at all, to be honest.

  Much later, when I should be asleep, I stay up reading different versions of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” and looking for clues about my father. Some illustrations look a little like him, but none of them describe what he’s like or what to do if you find out your father’s from a fairy tale.

  After midnight I hear Marla’s door squeak, the floor creak, and her footsteps traveling past the stairs, past my room, down the hallway. Toward the bad closet. I can practically feel the chill and the darkness and the pinch of whatever terrible creature might be buzzing around in there.

  I listen to the way she sounds on her tiptoes, an almost not-sound that is really socks against carpet. I hear the almost not-click of the twins’ door opening. She is nearly perfect at doing it soundlessly, but not quite. I grip my sheets. My chest is tight and my fists are tighter, and I should definitely stop her before she goes in there. But instead I scrunch my toes so that my feet basically become fists too. I watch the curtains make waving shadows on the ceiling. I think about my star in the jewelry box across the room and picture it glowing at me, keeping me calm.

  I hope that Astrid will wake up, but I know she’s a heavy sleeper and Marla is excellent at being stealthy and silent.

  I do not follow Marla into the bedroom. I don’t save her from the closet.

  I try to talk my body into leaving the bed, but I can’t. It’s stuck. A thousand pounds or so of fear are keeping me down.

  It’s not like I didn’t know I was afraid of Astrid’s closet. I mean, obviously I am. Any sane person would be scared of that closet. But I didn’t realize I had the kind of paralyzing, gray-colored, dizzying fear that I used to only have for snakes and the shows Mom sometimes watches on TV about murderers who look like elementary school teachers.

  I stay awake for an hour at least, waiting to hear Marla’s featherlight feet tiptoe back to her room.

  I’m a terrible, terrible sister, for not going in there to stop her. Or join her. Or do something, ever, to help someone. Like, really. I’m the worst.

  Thirty

  The next morning, Dad makes pancakes, which is alarming since it’s Thursday and not Sunday at all.

  “We’re going to visit your mother!” he announces. He puts a Mickey Mouse pancake on my plate, and what I think is supposed to be a dog pancake on Astrid’s plate. He manages a pretty good heart pancake for Eleanor, who got back early from “Jodi’s.” Dad seems unconcerned with everything but the shapes of the pancakes and Mom. He is always, always very concerned with Mom.

  I wonder what would happen if I visited the memory version of him in Marla’s closet and told him all my worries. Would he be more helpful? Would he get it? Would he be a different kind of Dad, like LilyLee’s, who checks on her grades and asks a million questions when we go to the mall, and pulled me aside once when LilyLee was sad about another friend to ask if I could tell him what was going on because he was so worried.

  “No, thank you,” I say. I take a bite of the Mickey Mouse pancake’s ear.

  “That was an announcement, not a question, Silly,” Dad says. He keeps a smile on his face, but I am pretty sure there’s a frown hidden underneath.

  “I can stay here with the girls,” Eleanor says, like she is forty and not Astrid’s twin.

  “I’m not leaving you alone in the house,” Dad says. He laughs, to show how zany he thinks we’re being and that we are obviously not serious. “You all going nutty? Don’t you miss your mom?” Astrid shakes her head, but that’s only because she has forgotten to listen to the whole rest of the conversation. “You can go to the lake today while I get all the details settled,” he says. “We’re going to leave in a few days. None of you have ever seen that part of the country. It will be wonderful.”

  I think about the Arizona postcards. The ridiculous amount of brown and tan and brownish tan. The prickly cactuses that seem to replace trees there.

  “I would miss trees,” I say. “We need trees. To breathe and stuff. And also, stability.” Stability is a word the school counselor used when we all talked with her last year when Mom wasn’t doing well. She kept saying it over and over to Dad, until he started repeating it too. Their whole conversation was just a repetition of that one word. Pretty weird.

  “Oh, you’ll like the trees there!” Dad says, missing
the point entirely. “Very different! Sparse. Unique.” He nods. At least he agrees with himself. The rest of us clearly do not agree with anything he’s saying.

  “We’re not going,” I say. It is not usually up to me to speak for all of us. That’s Eleanor’s job. But I’m older now. I’ll be twelve in two months and three days.

  I want to explain why it’s impossible to leave: not only am I not ready to see Mom with her bracelets piled on one wrist and some new sunny attitude or something, but we also have the closets to worry about. And the girl who’s stuck inside. And the way they save me from how impossible every day seems otherwise.

  If I really want to see Arizona, I’ll have Astrid make a diorama of it for Eleanor’s closet.

  “I have postcards,” I say. “I know what it looks like. And how Mom is. We talked. So, I think I’m good. And I like the postcards.” I emphasize the words postcards like it is going to have some very deep impact on Dad. He laughs, but stops when I don’t laugh along.

  “We’re a family, Silly,” he says carefully. He gives me another pancake. He is definitely convinced pancakes are the key. “Now, where’s Marla? I know she’ll be excited.” I look around and take count. It’s not like I have seventy-five sisters or anything. I’m not even one of twelve. But sometimes I have to list us out to realize who is missing. Silly, Eleanor, Astrid, I say in my head, making sure to count myself, because I am always the first person I forget.

  I look up at Astrid and Eleanor, to see if they have been doing the same calculation I’ve been doing, but they’re quicker and faster and older, so they’ve already cleared their plates and run up the stairs, and Dad is looking like he wants to scold them, but can’t because they put their dishes in the sink like they’re supposed to.

  “We better not have this very important conversation without Marla,” I say in the least-desperate voice I can muster, which is still very, very desperate. I run up the stairs and straight into Astrid and Eleanor’s room, because that is the one and only place everyone would be.