“Let her keep it,” Astrid says. She holds the box with the star inside to her chest, and I wonder if she can feel the heat radiating right through her sweatshirt to her heart. God, I hope so.
I give Eleanor an enthusiastic nod.
“You have to return it eventually,” Eleanor says. She sounds unhappy to be budging, but even she isn’t sure what is right and what is wrong at this point. Even Eleanor doesn’t know the rules.
“I will.”
“I don’t trust you anymore, I don’t think,” Eleanor says.
“Well, you’re gonna have to try,” I say. It’s the closest I’ve come to telling Eleanor how to live her life instead of her telling me.
So I stole a star. Borrowed a star. Because when you are sad, you need a little help, sometimes, getting happy again.
Thirty-Six
We still don’t know how to get Marla out, after all that.
I’m scared we’ll forget her. I know time is running out, if what Astrid says is true. She’ll fade more the more time she’s in there.
I don’t want the three of us to be wandering from room to room, looking for our sister without knowing we are looking for our sister.
She’s one of us. We can’t pretend she was never here.
Dad is already starting to forget. He was made for forgetting, I think. He forgets the closet and the palace and the champagne river, I’m sure. He forgets what Mom has done to our family. He forgets where he put his keys. He forgets that he is a prince from a fairy tale.
He never forgets the happily-ever-after fairy tales, though. Those he always, always remembers.
I think when you are from a fairy story, you can only remember the things that are here in the real world. Once Marla is in the closet for more than a whole day, she disappears from his world.
The terrible forgetting starts at lunch. Dad comes home from work to have lunch with his girls and doesn’t ask about Marla. He does look confused, at least. He spends a lot of time craning his neck to get a good look at the front door and the stairs and the bathroom.
“Marla’s on a walk,” I say. “That’s why she’s not here.”
He squints at me.
“Okay,” he says carefully. “Okay, good. Walking’s good.” He gets lost in spreading mayonnaise on white bread, and I elbow Astrid so hard she hiccups.
“Marla might be gone for dinner, too,” Astrid tries. Eleanor shakes her head at us.
“Was she going to come over for dinner?” Dad says. The words hurt. I basically grab the sandwich out of his hands when he’s done assembling it. I eat it in exactly three bites and rush upstairs to sit outside Astrid’s closet. Palm to the door, I whisper for Marla to come out.
I don’t want to forget her too.
Thirty-Seven
Dad doesn’t set a place for Marla at dinner. He sits me and him on one side of the table, the twins on the other.
“Marla called and told you she wasn’t coming?” I say. I want him to remember. Eleanor slumps in her seat and starts shoveling overcooked peas into her mouth. We spent the entire day doing things to the hinges of Astrid’s closet door. We used screwdrivers and hammers and wrenches and even a drill. We used a lighter, thinking maybe we could melt the metal.
It didn’t matter. The closet door did not open.
We all know, but don’t want to know, that we can’t do anything to fix the situation. Marla has to want to come out, but every day she’s in there she’s farther away, less and less of the Marla we know.
“Marla,” Dad says, thoughtful and strange.
“Yeah. Marla,” I say, gesturing to the place where she isn’t.
“I don’t think I’ve heard from her,” he says. The words come out slow and questioning, like he knows he is supposed to know what I am asking about but actually he doesn’t understand at all.
“Don’t you think you, um, should?” I say. Astrid and Eleanor are silent. Astrid is peeling the skin off her chicken, and Eleanor has nearly finished eating already.
Dad stares at me. He moves his lips a little, trying to form the right word, the right sentence, but coming up with nothing.
Thirty-Eight
I read with Dad in the living room before bed, trying to craft the perfect way to tell him he is starting to forget his middle daughter and that he needs to get with it.
It is harder than you’d think, to phrase that right.
He eventually stands up and stretches. “I’m gonna hit the hay, Silly-Billy,” he says. His tall frame lumbers toward the staircase, but I can’t quite let him go.
“Dad?”
He turns to look at me over his shoulder. But instead his gaze catches on the row of framed photographs he hung on the wall when we moved in. There are four pictures, one of each of his daughters. School photos. The kind with accidentally bad hair and forced smiles and weird backgrounds. But Dad likes every picture of us. Always has.
His eyes linger on each picture, one by one. Mine: pigtails and ugly pink shirt. Eleanor: perfectly parted and combed hair, hint of lip gloss. Astrid: messy bun on top of her head and an enormous green turtleneck sweater. Marla: closed-mouth smile and the top of her gray dress.
Dad tilts his head. He points to the last picture but stops himself from saying anything.
“Marla looks good in that picture, right?” I say. I stand up, like that may somehow help him remember her. I’m tempted to shake him, thinking maybe the memories of his daughter are jammed up somewhere between his toes and his brain and I need to get them out.
“Yes?” he says. “I don’t remember putting that one up. Did you do it yourself? You know I asked you to check with me before nailing anything in.” He’s not taking it down or anything, but my heart drops. He thinks I’ve hung a photograph of some random friend on the wall.
“You put it up, Dad,” I say. My voice is shaking and my eyes are burning and my heart is all kinds of wilted and heavy. But I stand up straight and say it loud, so he doesn’t forget.
“Huh,” he says, and shrugs before heading up the stairs.
Thirty-Nine
We leave my star outside Astrid’s closet door. I don’t want to let it leave my bedroom, but for Marla, to save my sister, I’d do anything, I guess.
I didn’t know that about myself.
We stay up all night watching my star and the unmoving closet door. The three of us can’t all lie down on Eleanor’s twin bed, but we can sit on it and let our heads nod sleepily when we get so tired we need a mini nap. We do not sleep longer than a mini nap. We can’t afford it.
The star does throw a tiny splash of warm, orangey light on the door. But over the hours, as the night gets darker and colder and more filled with sounds of crickets chirping and owls hoo-hoo-ing, the little bit of light grows. The warmth grows too. Doubles, triples its reach. Soon the heat is hitting my forearms, my toes, my neck. The light is strong but soft, like it’s coming from a huge, powerful candle, and even Astrid stops nodding off.
“What’s your star doing?” she says, leaning in to me. I didn’t know I was old enough for Astrid to lean against. I didn’t know I was old enough to take care of my sisters.
“I don’t know. I’ve never left it out,” I say. “Maybe it’s saving Marla?”
“I’m telling you, Marla has to save herself,” Eleanor says. But she’s opening her arms wide so that the star’s magical heat can hit her body more easily, so it can rush right to her heart and fill her up.
The star gives off a bit of a shimmer. I hadn’t noticed it before. It’s a sparkling kind of glow. It reminds me of an eye shadow that Eleanor has been putting on recently when she’s sneaking off to see her secret boyfriend.
The room is swimmy and glowy and glittery and foggy and so pretty I almost forget about Marla completely.
Almost.
Until I think I hear the door creak.
“It’s happening!” I say. Astrid and Eleanor look at me funny. “The door! You hear it, right?”
They shake their heads.
The door isn’t opening.
It was the house creaking, the way the New Hampshire house always creaks.
Around six in the morning the sun starts to rise, and the three of us fall asleep in the warm glow of the star that I thought might solve everything but didn’t.
Forty
Marla has a letter from Mom in the morning. And a package.
“Oh my God,” Astrid says. Dad looks up over his newspaper.
“Oh, yes. I wasn’t sure what to do with that one,” Dad says. He looks utterly confused. He has no idea who Marla is. But he guesses, quite correctly, that he should know who Marla is.
“I’ll open it,” I say.
I wish Marla were here to open it, and short of that I wish Eleanor were here to be in charge of the situation and decide what to do, but she snuck out sometime while Astrid and I were sleeping in. I don’t know how, except that maybe the star gave her extra energy. She left a note. It said she was meeting “him” at the lake for an early morning swim and a bagel but that she’d be back soon. It said she was sorry, she should be a better sister, she should try harder, but that she needed her mind to think about something else for a minute.
I don’t know if I’m mad or jealous that she’s gone. We should all be in it together, sweating it out with no breaks. But it’s easy for me to say that, when I have no one else.
All I have is my sisters and my closet and my star.
“I’m going to head to work,” Dad says, a little dreamily. He blushes and looks away from the package and the letter.
“You don’t want to see what Mom sent?” Astrid says. She’s getting in on my game too, determined to get Dad to pay attention, remember, say Marla’s name, miss Marla.
Dad pretends not to hear, but he’s redder, so I know he’s heard. He leaves.
I open the letter first.
My Marla,
I’m so sorry. That isn’t enough.
I’m staying in Arizona for as long as they tell me to.
It will be a long time.
Someday I’ll tell you everything. Some of it I don’t remember, but I’m trying to. Here’s what I do know: you can’t escape the very sad things. You can lose them for a little while, but they’re fast and they’ll eventually catch up. And you have to make room for the very beautiful and magic things. Whether they are hidden in closets or right out in the open, on the sparkly surface of the lake, or in the taste of pancakes and bacon on Sunday mornings.
Love,
Mom
Sometimes a thing makes you happy and sad at the same exact time. Relieved and scared.
The idea of Mom not coming back for a long time gives me all those feelings. Astrid crumples up the letter. Throws it on the ground. Maybe Astrid is only angry, and I guess maybe that’s okay too.
“Don’t open the package,” Astrid says. “I don’t want to see anything else.”
“She said she doesn’t remember everything,” I say.
“But I remember everything,” Astrid says. “Maybe Marla’s right, to leave. Maybe we should all be starting over like Eleanor. Or maybe you’re right, bringing things out of the closet so that the real world is less awful. Maybe I’m the only one who is doing this all wrong.”
I’ve never seen this look on Astrid’s face. It’s all screwed up and flushed. She’s uncertain and sad. She’s not spacing out, staring into the distance or getting lost in a shoe-box diorama. She’s right here, feeling everything.
I hug her. She collapses into me and cries. Sometimes I forget how many feelings we’re all, each of us, storing inside. Maybe Astrid stares into the distance because she’s trying to leave them all behind.
“I remember everything too,” I say. It’s something I can give my sisters. Something certain and fierce. The things I’ve seen, and my promise that I won’t lose the memories. We stand like that for a while, with Astrid crying and me rubbing her back and wondering at the sudden way I’ve become the one doing the comforting instead of the one being comforted and protected. “I’m not looking away anymore,” I say.
Astrid pulls back. Her eyes are watery and sad and she needs me. She doesn’t have to say it this time. I already know it. And I think I almost deserve it. To be needed.
“Look,” I say, when Astrid has calmed down enough. “We have to open the package. Maybe it can help. The last package we got helped me learn about Laurel. Maybe this one will do something.”
Astrid nods once and I open it.
Inside, layered in so much bubble wrap you’d think it was fine china, is a painting. Oil, like Marla used to do. Small. Imperfect.
It is a night sky. Navy and gray and a little bit black.
No moon.
But stars. So many stars. Dozens of orange-gold stars.
In a corner, there’s Mom’s signature, and something else. A few words that are too small for me to read. Astrid makes a hmm noise, like they mean something to her, and I’m about to ask, but she turns it over so fast I don’t have time, and once we see the back I forget all about the front.
On the back, a note from Mom.
If she’s already gone, go get her.
Dad won’t remember her if she’s in there.
Remind her what the world has.
The real world. The one we live in.
PS: If all else fails, it’s all inside you.
Forty-One
We try to call Mom, but some other patient at the rehab answers, and she doesn’t understand what we’re saying because it’s so noisy in their hallway.
“Gretchen! Gretchen! Our mom Gretchen!” we say over and over again.
“Napkin?” the lady on the other end says. She sounds sleepy and confused. “Kitchen?”
“Gretchen!” I yell.
The lady hangs up.
We call Eleanor and tell her to come home immediately.
“Don’t go,” a boy says in the background. “Let’s get back in the water!” I picture Eleanor shaking her wet head, little droplets flying off her hair. I try very hard not to picture her kissing him good-bye. I don’t love the idea of Eleanor kissing.
“You have an idea?” she says.
I launch into a description of the note and the painting Mom sent, but Eleanor stops me before I get very far.
“Okay, okay, I’m coming. Deep breaths, Silly. I’ll be there.”
“You always have to go,” her secret boyfriend pouts in the background, and I think I hate him, regardless of how much she likes him.
“My sisters need me!” she calls out to him, while hanging up on me. She’ll be here in, like, two seconds. She’s a fast runner.
We get more fabric from the sewing room.
I can’t stop myself from trying the sewing room closet.
After all Mom’s warnings, the door isn’t even locked.
Inside are photo albums and music boxes and dolls and little-kid paintings. The leftovers from Laurel’s childhood. The person she was, the fact that she existed, are all hidden in the closet. I want to know if it’s magic too, but I’m too scared to shut the door. I only want my closet.
“We’re saving our sister,” I say, as we look at the place where forgetting happens.
The three of us stand outside my closet, ready and shaking and stuck between hopeful and hopeless. We have fistfuls of construction-paper stars and glitter and yellow thumbtacks. We have as much black fabric as we could scrounge up. We cut up Mom’s black wool coat and my navy-blue fleece robe. We are ready.
Except.
I’m a little scared that I’ll somehow get stuck too. I guess it wouldn’t be a terrible place to live, in a starlit sky that goes as far as my imagination asks it to. But still. I’d miss breakfasts with Dad and the lake and Marla.
I would really, really miss Marla.
I can’t get stuck if I don’t want to get stuck. If I want to be out here, the closet can’t keep me. But Astrid and Eleanor look scared too.
I’ll have to go in first. I’ll have to show them it’s okay.
I
go inside and they follow. We keep the door open as we hang the fabric. Keep the door open while we glue and tape and pin and nail the construction-paper stars to the ceiling, walls, every inch of the closet. We are going to need a lot of stars.
“It’s only the sky,” I say before closing the door. I know they’re frightened, and I am too, but the sky and the stars aren’t anything to fear.
The shift happens the moment the door is closed. Fabric turns to sky, paper to stars, and we are inside the most chaotic, crowded night sky you’ve ever seen. The brightness of the stars almost hurts my eyes. The darkness is huge, too, unstoppable. Usually even in New Hampshire, which has, like, three people in it, I can see some lights when it’s dark out. Other houses. Neighbors’ bonfires. Headlights. Whatever. There’s more than the sky and the stars in the real world.
But in here there is only black and navy meeting up in strange patterns, and stars glinting in even stranger patterns, and me and Eleanor and Astrid taking it all in.
“What do we do?” Astrid says. “Do the stars, like, fall? Are they shooting stars or something?”
“We get them. We pull them out of the sky,” I say. I pretend, for my sisters, not to be nervous.
I stand on my tiptoes. They don’t hold me very well, and I sort of stumble, trying to keep my balance.
“You’ve got it,” Eleanor says.
I try again. Remember to breathe this time. Tense all my muscles, from my toes to my legs to my stomach and shoulders and everywhere in between. I reach my hands up high above my head and right away feel the warmth of dozens of little stars glowing at me. Some of them have pointy edges and jab my fingers when I wave my hands around trying to get ahold of one.
Astrid joins me. She doesn’t simply stand on her toes. She leaps into the air, both hands swinging. An animal-like oof comes out of her mouth, and she pulls a pile of stars out of the sky.
“Oh!” I say. It hadn’t occurred to me to do anything but pick them out one by one. But as soon as Eleanor sees how easy it is, she jumps too, bending her knees deep and making her own growl of effort as she leaps. Soon it is a shower of stars. Eleanor and Astrid bat them out of the sky, taking down five, ten at a time. I push them into a pile, like glowing rocks, but basically weightless. I want to bury myself in them.
Rules for Stealing Stars Page 18