by Juliet Bell
We had wised up this time. No bare feet, no hypothermia: we had our dads’ sleeping bags. If there is one thing you can count on Walter Mackenzie for, it’s having a decent sleeping bag. I think he was still surprised, even after a few days, to be in a real bed again. He told me he kept dreaming he was in Haiti, a place he’d never been, riding around on a motorbike in a strangely yellow light.
Rosie was the one who wanted to do a midnight feast up on the roof, as a way to say good-bye. I was surprised the GM let us, and she probably wouldn’t have if I’d asked the wrong way. (“Me and Rosie want to …” or “Can we, like, go up on the roof?”) But since I used good manners and the correct grammar, she said Fine. She even gave us two slices of cake, wrapped in tinfoil, as a kind of blessing.
It wasn’t easy to get all our gear up there. I used the beat-up old cooler as a stepping stool, then handed things up, with Rosie hanging half off the edge like a bat and Lou running around excitedly below. In the end we had sandwiches, cake, oranges and a thermos of cocoa. We ate and drank bundled up in our sleeping bags, under the big, cold, black New Mexico sky.
The peacocks paced back and forth suspiciously, but kept their distance.
Once we were settled, munching sandwiches, we talked about the trail ride we had taken earlier that day. It was my last time at the Circle C, though Carlos told me I’d better come back because Paloma’d be waiting for me. Carlos had decided my butt was in good enough shape by now, as he put it, so Rosie and I went out on the mesa together with Lola and Carlos, keeping to a walk or trot to be safe. Even so, it was a thrill for me to be out in the scrubby, rust-colored landscape at last. I finally felt I’d earned those boots Abbie’s mom had bought for me what felt like a thousand years before.
“You remember Kepler?” I asked Rosie.
“I know.” She gave a sigh. “I can’t believe we haven’t nailed it—”
“No, not that Kepler.” I was thinking of my first time at the Circle C. “The one I made up—that horse I was supposedly always riding back home in Santa Rosa?”
“Oh. Yeah.” She laughed. “Wasn’t he a ‘pinto palomino’?”
“Yep. Pretty unusual horse.” I could still feel the hard smack when I hit the ground that day. You have to get back on the horse, like everyone says, but the truth is, you never forget a bad fall. “Maybe I’ll try to find somewhere to ride when I get home, though. It’s not like there aren’t plenty of horses in Santa Rosa. My dad said he might go with me, if he visits.” The dim light helped hide the doubt on my face about my dad showing up. You never did know with him. Still, riding horses with my dad sounded good. It beat bowling.
Rosie and I stared up at the stars, wrapped up for warmth.
“You can see Orion really well tonight,” Rosie said.
“Oh, yeah? All I know is the Big Dipper.” It shouldn’t have been true of the granddaughter of Edward Mackenzie, but it was. Some things, like star knowledge, aren’t genetic: you have to acquire them all by yourself.
“Let me show you.” So Rosie traced out for me the four outer stars of Orion, and then the three close together within, that were seen as his belt. “Orion’s a hunter, you know,” she told me. “Some people call these three stars the Three Kings, or in Latin countries the Three Marys.” Her uncle Ignacio had taught her all this stuff. Rosie showed me Orion, and then Castor and Pollux, and then how a couple of stars on the end of the Big Dipper pointed the way to the North Star, sometimes called Polaris.
This was my first real lesson in who was who up in the heavens. The North Star seemed like an especially good one to know. The one fixed brightness in the sky: once you found that, you would always be able to figure out where you were.
“This may sound weird,” I told Rosie, “but that makes me think of my mom.”
“Your mom?” She turned away from the stars for a minute. “How is she doing?”
“The story is she should be ready to go home in a couple of weeks. Though she’s going to have to take it super-easy.” Auntie Irene had promised she was going to teach me how to cook, because I would have to be my mom’s main caretaker for a while. So far in life my main specialties were mac and cheese and cereal in a bowl. I was going to have to expand my range. “But they say it’s looking like she could get better.” Could: I didn’t want to jinx it.
“What a relief,” Rosie said. “My abuelito said she would. Remember?”
“Yeah.” I took a sip from the thermos cup of hot chocolate, then handed it over to her. “You know,” I told Rosie, “before we said good-bye, my mom told me it was possible she might die while she was in Seattle.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” It was a relief to finally tell someone this. It had been one of those things I’d thought of, over these past weeks, anytime I couldn’t sleep. “She said she didn’t think it would happen, and anyway if she started to get a lot worse, they’d let me know and fly me out there right away. The flight takes three hours. She said, ‘Even if I’m dying, I won’t go that fast. I’ll be polite and wait for you to get here.’” She had been trying to make a kind of joke about it, I realized later, but I wasn’t laughing. I knew she must have been really scared, too—that was why she was trying to be light.
“What would happen if your mom died?” Rosie’s voice was soft. “I mean—to you?”
“Yeah, I wondered about that.” Nobody had a lot of confidence that my dad would suddenly pull himself together, I don’t think. “I asked her.”
The moment was burned into my memory, like a brand on the flank of a horse. Mom had been woozy and exhausted. It was one of our last days in Santa Rosa. There were all kinds of chemicals, not to mention cancer cells, running through her veins, and she really wasn’t up for this heavy a conversation. Neither was I. But she must have felt she had to have it—maybe someone told her she should talk to me about death, since no one else had. There was a social worker named Grace at the hospital who sometimes tried to chat with me, but Grace found our situation tough. I think she had lines ready for husbands and wives and kids of people sick with cancer, but not one that included divorce. The divorce threw her off.
My mom didn’t answer what I was truly asking her: Who will look after me if you disappear? I’m not sure she knew how to. So she went the cosmic route instead.
“She told me,” I said to Rosie, “that I should think of her as going back to the stars. She said that’s all we’re made of anyway—that it’s all the same stuff—” Stuff, Grandmother: Stuff! “You know, light and energy and matter.” I looked up at the sky, trying to imagine that those sparkling tiny diamonds were really gigantic balls of fire and dust a million miles away. It still made my brain curdle to consider it. “And so, if she died, I wasn’t supposed to feel too terrible, I was just supposed to look up at the stars and know that she was somehow back there with them, floating around in the galaxy.”
We were both quiet a minute, looking up at the constellations, thinking it over.
“I’m not sure that would make me feel much better if it was my mom,” Rosie said finally.
“No,” I agreed. “It didn’t make me feel better either.”
This seemed a kind of depressing subject for a midnight feast. “Hey,” I said to cheer us up, “you want some cake?” Cake is a great way to clear the air. I told Rosie that Grandmother’s cakes were one of the things I’d miss when I was back home. And, in spite of the racket they made, the peacocks were another.
As if they heard me talking about them, a few of the birds cried out, a high midnight cry, from the cottonwood trees in the distance.
“You know,” I said, suddenly remembering what the GM had told me. “My grandfather planted those cottonwood trees in the pattern of the Big Dipper a long time ago. As a gift to my grandmother.”
“That’s cool.” Rosie was impressed. “I still wish we could have known our grandfathers.”
“Yeah. It’s neat that you talk with yours, though,” I said. “I’ve never heard a peep out of Edward.”
“What is that?” Rosie sat up, alarmed.
“Just Lou, snuffling around. Lou?” He gave a small, reassuring bark. “He’s always finding stuff buried around here. He dug up some weird small skeleton a few days ago—I think it may have been one of my grandmother’s old pet skunks.”
“Pet skunks?”
“It’s a long story.”
Rosie rolled her eyes. Those crazy Mackenzies. She’d been hearing more stories from Ignacio about the old days, so nothing surprised her anymore.
Then her face changed. “You know what, Ella? If I accidentally found the ‘stolen’ Kepler’s Dream, that’s what I’d do.”
“What?”
“Bury it.”
“Bury it? Like a bone?”
“Yeah, you know—hide it somewhere.” She sounded excited—like she had just dug up something interesting. “They knew they couldn’t walk out of here carrying Kepler’s Dream. So they found a place safe to keep it. Till they could come back, later.” Her eyes were glittering. “Like when Mrs. Von Stern was away on vacation. In Peru.”
There my grandmother would be, in the ruins of Machu Picchu, while at home …
“Though the problem is,” she added, “then it could be anywhere. This is a big place.”
She was right. Whenever I looked at my plan, I could see how much there was to it: the area by the Librerery; the whole back tangle; the scrubby bushes around Miguel’s cabin; and the shed, near the cottonwood trees …
“Wait a second.” The shed. The cottonwood trees.
I stood up, my sleeping bag falling down to my feet. “It wasn’t Abercrombie. Or Jason.”
“What do you mean?”
“It was Jackson!”
“Jackson?” Rosie was surprised. “But he’s the only half-decent one.”
“That’s right. Maybe more than half.” I thought of those odd, coded conversations he and I had had. “Jason should have just chilled”: hadn’t he said something like that? “They found the book in the cooler. But then they fought about it; Jackson didn’t want to be part of some scheme with Jason and Abercrombie making off with the Killer Dolphin. So he hid it again. I think for him it was like a game.”
“OK,” Rosie said. “So what was the game? Where do we look?”
I remembered Jackson staring hard at the picture I had been drawing that afternoon. He wasn’t just wondering whether I was interested in architecture.
“Polaris,” I told Rosie. “He wanted me to find Polaris.”
“What does that mean?”
“Come on!”
By now we were pretty good at clambering around in the pitch dark, so we got back down off the roof without breaking our necks. Lou had caught the spirit of the hunt—like I said, he had a good nose, and he could smell excitement in the air.
We made our way to the large, cratered area near the driveway. I showed Rosie as well as I could what I meant about the trees forming the Big Dipper. We looked up into their black and spooky limbs, inhabited by drowsy peacocks.
“Well, if this is the Big Dipper,” Rosie said, making her own astronomical calculations, marking the line from one tree-star to another, “Polaris is over there. By the shed.”
We both knew this area well. It was cluttered with feed bins, the odd shovel or hoe, random old junk. In any normal mood it wasn’t a place where I’d have wanted to be fumbling around in the dark—there were snakes in Albuquerque, I was pretty sure, and I wasn’t completely over thinking there were monsters, too, or ghosts—but by now I was so hot on the trail of the Dream that I stopped caring about anything else.
We went into the shed and clattered and clunked around the old shelves for a few seconds, until my hand touched something padded and clothed. It felt human, almost.
I yelped.
“What?” Rosie came over and felt what I felt: a soft, cushioned wrapping around something large and rectangular that had to be …
A book.
We took it back out into the starlight. And there, almost glowing in our hands, was the Somnium seu Astronomia Lunari, Kepler’s Dream. It had been wrapped up carefully, in a T-shirt that said POLARIS: FIND YOUR TRUE NORTH.
I thought of Jackson wishing me luck with our search and murmured, under my breath, “I hope he finds his, too.” Rosie didn’t pay attention. She was busy taking in the sight of this many-times-described object.
“Here, can I look?”
I realized that through all this time of hunting for Kepler’s Dream my friend had never seen the book itself. She only had my word to go on that it was an important and luminous thing. So we opened it up, carefully, and paged through the moon, the demons, the vivid colors.
“Wow.”
It was the same thing I’d said, I remembered. No wonder we made good partners. “It’s incredible,” Rosie breathed. “Like—a book of magic.” Even in the middle of the night the gold shone. As if it were treasure.
Then we both got cold.
“Let’s go inside,” I said, and we made our way back toward the house.
The moment we opened the main door, we realized that light was coming from the kitchen and voices were talking together, low. This was a surprise. I would have thought the grown-ups would be safe in their beds, dreaming of Haiti, or maybe of Peru.
“You go, Ella—you show it to them,” Rosie whispered. “I’m going back to my dad’s cabin.”
“No! Are you kidding?” I held her arm. “We’ve got to do this together.”
“It’s OK. It was through teamwork that we found it.” My friend looked at me, and there was a warmth in her eyes that reminded me of Miguel. “But you know what? This is for your family. Your dad, and your grandma. Right now, it should just be you.” She smiled, then gave me a quick hug. “Bye, Ella. I’ll miss you. Good luck with your mom. Write me. ’Kay?”
“I will. I’ll miss you, too.” There was more to say, but I didn’t want to start crying. That would put us right back at square one, where she was the tough one, and I had no grit. Rosie turned around and wandered down the dark path to join Miguel, who would be inside carving birds, or drinking hot chocolate, or maybe just staying up by the fire, ready to sit with his daughter and hear about our great success. I half wished I could join them.
But my job was to step out of the starlight and go inside my grandmother’s house, where I would show her and my father Kepler’s recovered Dream, or Astronomy, of the Moon.
July 25, Seattle
Dear GM,
Well, I made it to Seattle. There are mountains here, too, but they’re different from the Sandias. They’re white, not pink, and look like the pictures you see on bottles of spring water.
My mom says to tell you hello. The hospital she’s in here is fancier and more high-tech than the one in Santa Rosa. The doors make a sci-fi swish when they open and shut, and her germ-free room is ultra-clean. She has a view out of it, though, which she says helped her not go completely stir-crazy all those weeks. They are letting her outside now. I can wheel her out in the roof garden sometimes, which is a sign that things are going OK.
She said I ought to write a big thank-you to you for taking such good care of me while she had to be in here. So:
Thank you!!
Mom and I are going to work on a thank-you present for you, too, when she’s a bit better. Maybe a coupon for a trip to Cape Canaveral or a chunk of moon rock or something.
Lou is very bored hanging around in our motel room. I bet he wishes he could play with Hildy. He sends his regards to you. (Though I never understood that: What does it mean to send a regard? Isn’t a regard a look? How can you send someone a look, and why is that a good thing?)
I’m still working on my grammar and my language, as you see, so that should make you happy.
I hope your trip to Machu Picchu is amazing. Send us a postcard. My mom and I are planning to go there together one day. Maybe Rosie can come, too.
Please tell George hi, and no
offense, but I think the Giants are going to shock everyone and win the World Series. That’s just one girl’s opinion.
I hope you’re reading something good and enjoying a nice piece of cake.
Love,
Ella
EPILOGUE
I DID FInD Her aGaIn. SHe WaS rIGHT THere, WHere SHe was supposed to be. Just like Polaris.
I can’t tell you how weird it was to walk in through the hospital doors in Seattle with my dad, going up to see my mom. I was nervous. I would have liked to have Lou with me, or more likely Auntie Irene, but this first reunion was a Mackenzie-only affair. Just the three of us. But if that combination had never made sense in the past, why should it start now? Some constellations of people just aren’t meant to happen.
Still, at least Dad had been to the hospital before, so he knew his way around.
When the elevator stopped at the right floor, my heart started pounding. Nurse Faye came up to us, a small, round henlike woman with an encouraging smile and a soothing voice I recognized from the telephone. She smiled at my dad and said to me, “Hello, Ella! I’m so glad to meet you at last,” and gave me a warm hug, which was unexpected but made me feel a bit better. “Your mom is very excited to see you,” she added. “Come on, her room is along here. You’ve sanitized your hands, right? The good news is you don’t have to wear a mask anymore to go in.” And she ushered us toward one of the many gleaming, huge silver doors along a bright corridor. “I want you to know your mom is an incredible fighter, Ella. She’s inspired everyone here.”
Swish, the door went as it opened, and in I walked to the place where my mom had spent six weeks in (mostly) Solitary Confinement while I had been falling off horses and getting back on them, eating cake and chasing imaginary thieves.
“Ella, sweetie!” Mom said. She was sitting up in bed wearing a thin toothpaste-colored gown I didn’t recognize.
It was her.
I went over on shaky legs and put my arms around her for as long as either of us could stand it, and until I had finally stopped crying and laughing into her soft, familiar neck. In a way, that was easier at first than seeing her. She looked different from the picture I had in my head—worn out, like she had come back from a long, long journey—but as soon as I caught a glimpse of her face, or heard a snatch of her voice, I knew it would be all right. She wasn’t an alien at all but still, in spite of the high-tech room, the disease and Aunt Miranda’s blood, my mom.