“That must be enough,” I say.
“More,” Eleanor says. “We should have brought a ladder. Silly? Can you fix it?”
I don’t know what she means. I’m smaller than both my sisters. I’m smaller than most people my own age, even. I can’t reach. I look at her funny and wonder if she needs a reminder about my tininess.
“Make the room smaller. Do your Silly-thing,” Eleanor says.
I’d forgotten again. I’m special.
Maybe not in the shiny-haired, long-legged, super-athletic, pretty, talented way that Eleanor is. And not in the artsy, in-her-own-universe, creating-masterpieces-out-of-wire-hangers-and-cotton-balls way that Astrid is. But in some small way that right now is actually huge.
I get back on my tiptoes. Reach my hands over my head. And wish the stars closer.
The night shrinks to the size I’m picturing in my mind. I pick stars, one by one. It feels wrong to swat at them, to treat them like they are candies or beads that you can scoop into a plastic bag. They require more care than that.
I handle each star with the same gentleness I did my first star. Loving the warmth. Loving the way it helps me breathe more easily. Loving the strange, perfect color.
We don’t leave any stars in the sky. By the time we are done, we are gathered around a pile of glow.
“Wow,” I say.
“Wow,” Astrid says.
“Wow,” Eleanor says.
“How do we get them out?” Eleanor asks. She has stars in her pockets and her hands. We all do, but there’s not enough pockets or hands to fit them all.
“I only had one,” I say. Astrid plays with a star in one of her hands. Rolls it between her palms and even sniffs at it. “And I think I’m the only one who can take them out. I think it’s part of me being, um, special.”
“I bet I know how to get them out,” Astrid says.
I don’t ask. I don’t need to know. Whatever she says, we’ll do. Because Astrid is nothing if not strange and wonderful and chock-full of the best kind of impulses, the kind that gives her the ability to make her dioramas to begin with, and bring them to the closet, and explore the world around her without fear.
She shivers, and I’d bet there are goosebumps even on her fingertips, her neck.
Astrid puts a star on her tongue. Swallows. Then another. And another.
Astrid is eating the stars.
Forty-Two
“A strid!” Eleanor says, so loudly Astrid almost drops the stars in her hands.
Astrid’s mouth is too full of stars to respond. But she’s not grimacing or throwing up or changing into a lizard or a potato or anything, so something tells me it’s okay.
I put a star in my mouth too. We have a whole galaxy to get through, after all.
It doesn’t have a taste, so much as a feeling. It doesn’t really have weight or substance, so it’s more like swallowing hot air than an actual real thing. It’s warm inside me, but that’s it.
“It’s okay,” I say to Eleanor.
“I thought we were bringing the stars to Marla,” Eleanor says.
“I think we are,” I say. I don’t even know what I mean. Neither does Astrid. But between the stars I can fit in my pockets and tucked into the tops of my socks and the ones being swallowed so we can carry them out of the closet, we are making some serious headway on the pile. And I guess that’s sort of all that matters.
We don’t get full from the stars. We don’t get much of anything, except warm and ready to get Marla. Eleanor finally swallows one too.
“How’d you come up with this?” she says to Astrid, who is now devouring the things with an even confidence, a kind of determination I haven’t seen her have maybe ever.
“This thing Mom said,” Astrid says. “At the end of her note. ‘It’s all inside you,’ she said. Like, the night sky and the world and the ability to get Marla. It’s inside us. Or we can put it inside us. I thought she meant believe in yourself, or whatever. And maybe she meant that too. But it occurred to me that sometimes Mom can be sort of literal. And that we need both things—help from the outside and power from the inside? I don’t know. It’s stupid.”
Eleanor stares at Astrid like she’s an alien, which she sort of is, so I get it. I stare too. Because Astrid sees something and makes something else out of it, and I want to know how to do that. How to take a clothespin and make it a birch tree. How to take a shoe box and make it a universe. How to take a letter from Mom and make it a solution. How to take words and stars and fear and swallow them down, make them part of the whole.
I eat three more stars, and then the pile is gone and it’s time to save Marla. And hope that Marla wants to be saved.
I let us out. I’m still scared. I’m overwhelmed by the fast swallowing and all the warmth that is now both inside and in my hands, my pockets, slipping into my shoes. But it feels good to turn the knob and get a smile from Eleanor and a hip bump from Astrid.
We are able to hang on to the magic of the stars. We move farther and farther away from the closet, but the stars stay bright. We did it together, with my specialness and Astrid’s imagination and Eleanor’s solid, steady self. A little bit of magic and a lot of us.
Then we are in front of Astrid’s closet and laying down stars I took out in my hands. It’s a strange kind of ceremony.
There is only that one crack at the bottom of the door where light can get through, so we line all the stars against that space, in a row.
“Marla?” I say, putting my mouth up to that space. “We’re here. We’re here waiting for you, and you can come out.”
There’s a long silence, and we all hold our hands together like we might be praying but we probably aren’t.
“Hi,” Marla’s tiny voice comes through the door. Breathy, like Astrid’s. Tired. Not whiny at all. “I can’t come out. The door won’t open. And I don’t want to anyway.”
“Marla!” I say, and Astrid and Eleanor echo me.
“What’s that light?” Marla says. She doesn’t sound excited. She doesn’t sound much of anything.
“Stars,” I say, matching her hushed tone.
“I don’t need stars,” she says. “But they’re warm. I can feel them. They’re warming it up in here.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty cold in there, huh?” I say. I look to Eleanor and Astrid. They’re saying absolutely nothing. “Bet the warmth, um, feels good?”
“I don’t mind the cold,” Marla says, but there’s a little question at the end of the sentence, like maybe she’s not totally sure of herself. “I sort of like the cold, actually. It’s refreshing.”
But I can see her fingers poking at the tiny crack between her side of the door and ours. Reaching toward the warmth.
“We want you out here with us,” I say. I press my hands against the closet door, remembering I have warmth and glowiness inside me, too. Remembering that we have a bit of magic in ourselves. I look at my sisters and nod to the door. They snap to it, finally, and touch their own hands to the door of the closet too.
“Whoa! What’s that!?” Marla says. At last her voice has a sprinkle in it of something aside from boredom and giving up.
“It’s us,” I say. “We’re here. All of us. For you. To get you out.”
“I’m really okay in here. Actually, it’s probably better for everyone if I stay. . . .” Her voice sounds even closer, though. Like her mouth is pressed right against the wood, like her whole body is trying to fit itself through the crack.
“We’re not okay with you in there,” I say. It’s so very true.
“We need you out here,” Eleanor says at last.
“There’s this tree here,” Marla says. “It has gold strawberries on it. I mean, strawberries don’t even grow on trees, right? But there they are. They’re gold. And delicious. And the skies are sort of purple. And, I don’t know, I’m okay in here. I fit in here.”
“No,” Astrid says now. She presses more of her weight against the door. “You belong with us.”
“Hey, Marla?” I say. I notice a tiny nick in the wood on one corner of the door. A little place where the wood is splintering, which is funny, since hours of hammering and punching the wood did nothing to make it crack. “Laurel’s not actually in there. You need to know that. Laurel never got caught in a closet. She died a long, long time ago, like we were told. She died in the lake, actually. We saw it in your closet. You don’t have to be stuck. You’re stuck because you don’t want to be out here. But we’re here. And we want you to come out.”
Marla doesn’t say anything. Her fingers stay at the bottom of the door, reaching, reaching toward the stars.
Forty-Three
“Answer us, Marla!” Eleanor screeches.
I pick at the nick in the wood. Another tiny, tiny splinter breaks off. The more I touch the wood, the more it gives in to me.
“Push,” I whisper. I don’t want Marla to know we can penetrate the door, but I think maybe we can. The combination of her maybe wanting to come out and the three of us being sated with swallowed stars is bringing a new kind of strength.
We push, but the door doesn’t budge. I pick at the little splintered part, and another speck flies off.
“Laurel’s in here with me,” Marla says. “Protecting me. Like a mom.” She whispers the word mom. If I really think about it, we’ve all been whispering the word mom for a while now. Like it’s a swear or something.
“She’s . . . You’ve seen her?” I say. Eleanor is sweating, drops of it rolling from her forehead to her chin, from her shoulder to her wrist, I assume from her hip down to her ankle, too.
“I can feel her in here with me,” Marla says. I pick some more at the door. If I were to take down the entire door at this splinter-by-splinter pace, Marla would be, like, eighty by the time I got her out. I poke Astrid to get her to try too. Quietly, of course.
“Whatever you feel in there isn’t real. Isn’t Laurel,” Eleanor says. “Laurel was a real little girl. She looked like Silly. And she drowned in the lake. Mom only thought she was in the closet sometimes because she was too sad to admit the truth. You only feel Laurel’s presence because the closet’s giving you what you want. It’s not real.”
“She’s right,” I say, because Marla trusts me most of all, and I know that now.
“But what you really need is to be out here with us,” Eleanor says. I stand up, and we all three hold hands.
“We have to take what we absolutely need from the closet, and leave the rest,” Astrid says. I think of the stars and know that we need to learn how to be strong without them too, but sometimes the magic is needed. Sometimes things hurt so much you have to turn outside yourself for a lift. “We need each other,” she says.
Marla’s quiet.
“Hey, Marla?” Astrid says. A little glow is coming off her. Like the stars have been digested, and now she’s emanating their extra-glowy warm energy. I look to Eleanor, and she’s on the golden side too. The room is so warm from all the stars on the floor that it’s hard to tell, but I think our temperatures are rising. I think the surface of my skin has changed. I don’t get the feeling that it will last. “We’re here now,” Astrid says. “You don’t have to be scared. Or lost. Or whatever. You don’t have to be anything. You can be Marla.”
“I’m a princess in here,” Marla says, but she doesn’t sound the way I’d imagine a princess sounding. She doesn’t sound that excited about it. “I can be anything in here. Like Mom was. You showed them Mom?”
“I showed them Mom,” I say.
“She was happier in the closet.”
And maybe I don’t totally disagree. She looked so, so happy in the memories in the closet. So pretty and free and in love. In the real world, I’ve never seen her look like that. I move my mouth around, trying to find words to say. Eleanor is doing the same, both of us opening and closing our mouths like fish. We’re all trying to figure out if maybe Marla and Mom had it right, and we should all stay trapped on the other side.
But.
But.
In spite of everything, Mom’s sadness and sickness and the tragedy of her sister and everything else that’s gone wrong, she chose our world. She didn’t choose the closet. She let it go.
Her problem wasn’t leaving the closet, it was working so hard to forget real life.
I catch sight of the window in my peripheral vision. The blinds are open for once, like Eleanor or Astrid needed to remember how pretty pine trees and blue sky are. Outside that window is a sunset. We have spent the whole day visiting closets and gathering stars and waiting for Marla to come back to us, and now the day is changing back into night again. And at first, that’s all I think, when I see the splash of pink and blue and yellow and orange and purple outside the window. But then I see how incredible it is that all those colors are marking the sky.
The real sky.
The sky in the real world.
It is a watercolor. It is magical and strange. I guess I thought it was amazing that I could make the sky pink in my closet, forgetting that the real sky can make itself pink any day it wants.
And it’s just as magical, when it’s in the real world.
I want to say all this to Marla, and so much more. That the closet is not nearly as magical as the way the sunset is an entirely different color every night. The closet is not as magical as the fact that some days a sunrise is heartbreakingly beautiful and other days it is just light coming into darkness and isn’t worth the five-thirty wake-up call at all. The closet is not as magical as the unpredictability of the lake’s temperature or the strength of the ocean’s waves, or how many blooms will appear in the garden from one year to the next.
Even a dandelion poking up in the middle of a field of green grass is beautiful, when you stop to notice it.
Plus, there are pancakes and bacon, like Mom said. And crickets chirping. And wacky weather patterns. And people who make you laugh even after you’ve been mad at them for days, and pennies dropped in the middle of the woods, and so many books, and the bite of popcorn with the most butter on it, and Astrid wearing her hair in French braids, and Eleanor’s knees when they are freckled from the sun, and Marla’s inability to pronounce the words February and restaurant and bureau, and Dad’s terrible jokes and the smell of a shampooed head and hours-long games of Monopoly and even, sometimes, Mom laughing or singing along with pop songs we didn’t think she’d ever heard of.
I can’t say all of that. I put both hands on my throat, like I might need to protect my heart from leaping right out of there.
“I bet you can’t even guess what color the sky is here tonight,” I say instead. “Your sky in there is always purple, which is pretty, but out here . . . Can you guess?”
“Blue,” Marla says, certain. So, so sure. And I would have been too, if she’d been the one asking me. “Blue or black, I guess, if it’s late enough.”
“Nope. Not blue tonight. Pink,” I say. “And orange. And tomorrow it might be gray. Or pure white. Or nearly purple. It’s impossible to say.”
I know I’m glowing now. I can feel it, and I’m not sure if it’s from eating all those stars, or from remembering everything that I don’t hate, everything that isn’t the worst, but there it is. A glow. A warmth. A star, inside me, like Astrid said.
I pick a little more at the splinters. They are coming off faster now, this corner of the door coming to pieces, but it won’t be enough, if she doesn’t want it.
“Pink,” Marla says.
“We forgot what was out here. We all forgot,” I say. Eleanor nods, which of course Marla can’t see, so I elbow her to make her say it out loud.
“I’m scared of how sad Mom is,” Marla says. I almost make her repeat it, that’s how small and blue and quiet the words are. But we all pause, and I think there’s some delay that helps us hear the words, and we know not to make her say them again, because they are the saddest, scariest, worst words.
“Mom’s who reminded me of all the nice little things in the real world,” I say. “Mom’s rememberin
g. She wrote you a letter. She sent you a package. She wanted you to remember how nice it can be out here.”
I dig at the weak parts of the door.
Astrid and Eleanor do too.
And on the other edge of the door, on the far, dark side of the closet, Marla digs too.
Forty-Four
The sound of Marla’s fingers digging into the wood on the other side of the closet makes my heart race.
“The warmth feels good,” she says. I don’t want to question what’s made her change her mind, and that’s as good a reason as any.
That, and finally saying the truth.
“We’re all scared of how sad Mom is,” Astrid says. She matches Marla’s low, shy tone, and Eleanor and I dig more, hoping Marla can feel the glow of agreement and safety and general okayness.
She does.
The door comes to pieces.
Marla is there, on the other side, looking like she always does, but different because we missed her and we know now just how much it means to be sisters.
“I thought Mom forgot all about her lost sister in the closet. I didn’t know she could never come back, that she had died. I thought she was another person Mom didn’t love enough. That she didn’t care enough to save her,” Marla says.
I know, from the shake in her fingers and her huge, oversize gulp after she says it, that she was waiting for herself to turn into a whisper, a voice without a body too. She was waiting to be forgotten.
But we didn’t forget her. We couldn’t.
And that’s the thing she hadn’t expected. That’s what Marla didn’t count on.
That we would always, always remember her.
Forty-Five
“Eat these,” Astrid says, when Marla is on the carpet and we have our backs to the closet, in case looking at it funny will somehow make it pull us back in. She points to the stars, and Marla shivers.
Rules for Stealing Stars Page 19