Luckily he did answer, pulling open the door and looking from Winter down to me and back up again, like he couldn’t understand what two soaked girls were doing standing on his porch. His gaze lingered on Winter for a few extra moments before he said her name. “Winter?”
She nodded, and if the smile on her face was a clue, she was too happy to speak. Instead, she wrapped her arms around him, and after a second of surprise, he did the same, hugging her tightly. “It’s been years,” I heard him say into her shoulder, and then he looked at me and said, “And this must be Star.”
My heart swelled. If Emily Dickinson had any poems about hearts, I bet she would have described them as balloons. “Hi,” I said, and my bag felt suddenly heavy. There was so much to tell him, to show him. How was I going to get it all out?
“Come inside,” he said, inviting us in. His house was so warm, warm enough to walk around barefoot. Which I presumed he did most of the time, judging by the basket of shoes by the door. And he didn’t smell like rubber at all, I noted as soon as he turned to close the door. He smelled like … fresh laundry.
“Does Carly know you’re here?” he asked, and then he answered his own question. “Of course not. She’d throw a fit. Come on, both of you. Take off your shoes. Let’s go sit by the fire.”
Heavenly Donuts! He had a house with a fireplace!
I couldn’t wait to go back to school on Monday and tell the next person who made fun of my trailer that my dad lived in a big house with a fireplace and that his carpets were spotless.
And then he looked at me, and I saw that his eyes were brown. I got his eyes, I thought.
I sank into a velvety couch and put my hands out to catch the heat from the fire that burned in a real brick fireplace. The wood made popping sounds as it burned, and a yellow glow filled the whole room.
Winter sat down next to me, and Robert next to her.
“You’ve really grown up, Winter,” he said. I wanted him to say something about me, but he kept his eyes on Winter, on her hair, her face, her hands. Winter wouldn’t look at him, though, and kept her eyes locked on the fire.
She tried to speak, but hardly anything came out. A few silent moments passed before she turned to me and said, “Star, tell Dad about your club.”
And then he was looking at me, so I sat up as straight as I could and told him about the Emily Dickinson Club, leaving out a few parts that were embarrassing, such as the number of people in it. “I wish a few more people would join,” I told him instead.
“Are all your friends already in it?” he asked.
“Yeah,” I lied.
“Well,” he said, “not everyone likes Emily Dickinson, I guess. Don’t worry about it, because you don’t want them in your club anyway. They’d just bring the whole thing down, don’t you think?”
It wasn’t quite the answer I was hoping for. I still wanted more people to join, but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings. And it was probably very good advice for a fifth-grader who actually had friends.
He smiled at me, and I was glad I hadn’t said anything, because when he smiled, that whole Ferris wheel came to a screeching halt. Both my feet were on the ground, and I realized that this whole time I’d been a little scared—scared that he would be exactly how Mom said he was. Deadbeat, uncaring, not even able to remember our names or birthdays, busy with more important things like his new wife.
Then Winter said, “I’m pregnant.”
And his smile evaporated. “Pregnant?” he half whispered. “How?”
“You’re pregnant?” I said. Her stomach didn’t look any bigger than usual. She looked tiny in the glow of the fire, smaller than Mom after she’d talked to the landlord.
Then he asked her, “What are you going to do?”
It was not at all the reaction Mom would have had. Mom would’ve screamed, then shrunk down to half her size. “How could you be so stupid?” she’d say. No, not that, because that’s what she’d said after Winter’s principal called her, and this was an even bigger deal.
I didn’t know what Mom would do if she found out.
Winter was still looking at the fire, but her eyes were flat. The fire reflected in them, but she wasn’t seeing anything. “I dunno,” she said, in answer to Robert’s question.
“Have you told anybody?”
“Yeah. You.”
He stood up, his hand around Winter’s arm. “Come here. Let’s go talk about this … somewhere else.” He said the last two words with his head turned my way. Maybe he thought I was too young to understand, but my fourth-grade teacher had told us about how girls get pregnant. And even if she hadn’t, Gloria had given me a rundown the year before at a Heavenly Donuts while Mom took Winter out to buy maxi pads and new underwear.
I stayed on the couch until they left the room, closing the door behind them, and then I followed. Whatever they were saying, I needed to hear it so I could push away the worry forming between my ribs. Would Winter ever be able to leave Sarah Borne if she was pregnant? What if she had to drop out of school completely, like Mom?
Mom said she had lost everyone when she was pregnant. Her parents, who kicked her out of their trailer, and her college friends, who stopped talking to her once she left school, and even the other people in her old trailer park, who called her horrible names and told her she had ruined her life.
All Mom had left was Gloria. But Winter didn’t have anyone like Gloria.
She just had me. And what could I do?
Winter and Robert talked in low, low voices out in the hallway. Even with my ear pressed against the door, I couldn’t make out what they were saying. After a minute their footsteps began thudding back toward the living room, so I raced back to my spot on the couch and straightened my skirt out.
The door opened. “Ready to go?” Winter asked.
I wasn’t ready, but Winter’s eyes told me that it wasn’t a question. Robert, with his hand on Winter’s shoulder, wasn’t saying anything.
I got up and followed Winter to the door, digging my toes into the carpet so I could feel its softness one last time and remember it forever. Robert walked us to the front door, staying in his nice, warm house while we stepped out onto the cold, wet porch.
There was still so much I wanted to say to him, about the club and about the Ferris wheel. Had he even known I was up there when he saw Winter all those years ago? But instead, I said, “Will you send me a card for my birthday?” He peered at me, so I added, in case he had forgotten, “It’s in July. July ninth.”
“You want me to send you a birthday card?” He said it like the idea made no sense. Like he didn’t even know what birthdays were.
“You sent Winter one,” I told him. “I can wait until I’m thirteen, if you want.”
Not one bit of confusion left his face. “Well, sure, Star. I guess I could do that. But Winter’s my daughter,” he said. “That’s why I sent her a birthday card.”
“But I am, too,” I said. How could he have forgotten that? I thought maybe Winter had scrambled up his brain when she told him she was pregnant.
“Oh, no,” he said. His eyebrows sagged. “Is that what your mother told you?”
The wind cut into my skin, sapping away all the warmth from the fire. I knew what he was saying before he said it, but I couldn’t make myself speak or move. I could only stare up at him and hope that he wouldn’t say what he was about to.
“Star,” he said. “I’m not your father.”
And, piece by aching piece, the Ferris wheel fell completely apart.
It was a long drive back to California.
Rain cascaded down the windshield as the sky grew darker and darker, and with every bump in the road, my bag thudded against my legs. Winter kept rubbing at her eyes, but I didn’t bother, because it wasn’t like I was going to just stop crying.
After a while, though, my tears slowed, and I was able to choke out the words going around and around in my head. “Who do you think my dad is?”
“I don’t know, Star
,” Winter said.
“I bet Gloria knows,” I told her. “Best friends tell each other everything. I bet Mom told her.”
Winter stared silently at the road. Her hands gripped the steering wheel tightly, like if she didn’t hold on, she’d fall right out of the pickup.
I watched the droplets on the windshield, grouped together like little puddles. They’d found one another, while I had just splattered on the cement. A cold feeling of loneliness was spreading out from my chest. I wondered if Winter felt the same way.
“What are you going to do?” I asked her, because I certainly didn’t know what I was going to do.
“Dad gave me—” She paused, then started again. “Robert gave me some money.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know yet,” Winter answered, and her grip on the wheel slackened. “Anything could happen …”
But I did not think anything could happen. Hope is not a Ferris wheel, I decided at that moment, because instead of getting closer to Dad, I’d gotten farther and farther away. And unlike a Ferris wheel, which would bring me back around again, this time I was stalled at the top.
Maybe hope is a Gravitron. It looks fun at first—until you’re inside, and it’s spinning so fast, your head pounds. Then the ride ends, and you vomit. And when you get off the ride, you can’t even walk because you’re so dizzy, and nothing looks right anymore.
“Star,” Winter said after a while. “You have to stop crying.” I sniffed, waiting for Winter to put her arm around my shoulders or tell me that things would get better. “Mom will know something’s wrong if you go into the trailer crying. We saw the redwoods today, remember?” She tightened her fingers around the steering wheel, her knuckles turning white. “That’s all we did.”
I checked my bag to see if I’d packed any tissues, but there were none. Just Eddie’s big red book and all my starred school papers. For a few miles I thought about saving them. Maybe someday I would meet my real dad, and I could show them to him.
But I pushed that thought away, out of my head. It was all built on a bunch of hope, and I didn’t have any of that left.
So after I dried my face with those papers, I ripped them into confetti.
The trailer was heavy with the smell of hamburger. It hit me all at once when we walked in, and I wanted to gag. No wonder Winter was a vegetarian.
“Hi, girls,” Mom said. She stood by the stove, stirring a pot, her apron strings dangling at her sides. “I’m making spaghetti sauce. But, Winter, there’s a couple cans of tomato soup in the cupboard if you want that instead.”
“I’m going to take a nap,” Winter said, to me, or Mom. Or the trailer. The mattress creaked as she climbed onto her bed, and I didn’t know where to go. I was lost inside the trailer. I almost took a step toward Mom, almost went over and tied her apron for her.
But I didn’t.
Because what I’d realized between Oregon and California was that Mom had lied to me. She had been lying to me my whole life. She had convinced me that I wanted to be on that Ferris wheel so that I would never, ever find out that she’d lied.
“Mom,” I said.
“What, Star?” she said without turning around.
But I couldn’t say anything. I wanted to pull the truth right out of her, say something mean and horrible, something that would hurt her. But I couldn’t, because then Mom would know that we hadn’t gone to see the redwoods. My throat burned, having to swallow those words.
“What, Star?” Mom said again.
“Nothing,” I said. That word came so quickly and easily, but it left a bitter, battery-like taste in my mouth. “I’m … not hungry.” These words came easily, too, and I knew Mom would be a little hurt that she’d spent so much time making a delicious spaghetti sauce that her daughter did not want to eat.
But it was a very little hurt compared to what I felt.
I spent all Sunday with a headache, a headache that didn’t actually hurt. My head just throbbed with the memory of Robert’s house and how close I’d been to having a dad before it all fell away. Now I was back to having nothing—not even a PS at the end of a birthday card.
And Winter was back to not talking to anyone, and now that included me, too. Not that I could have talked to her about anything I needed to, since Mom was always in the trailer. Still, I wasn’t sure if Winter had stopped talking to me because she was sad about being pregnant or because now she knew I was only her half sister. Which doesn’t make sense, because I didn’t feel any different about Winter, except maybe sadder because I’m not fully related to my favorite person in the world.
But thinking about how much Denny hates his half brother, I wondered if maybe Winter felt differently now, too.
It seemed that way when she breezed out of the trailer Monday morning without a word or even a look.
While I shoveled soggy cereal into my mouth, and Mom and Gloria talked over donuts, I decided that I did not want to go to school. I did not want to sit at my desk or talk to anyone or watch Mr. Savage scratch his beard. I didn’t want to pretend that I still cared about the Emily Dickinson Club.
So I told Mom I didn’t feel well.
“Do you have a fever?”
“No.”
“Does your stomach hurt?”
“No.”
“Then go get dressed.”
I stuffed my high-tops into my backpack along with all the papers and binders and books that I wasn’t even sure why I had anymore, and I left. I took a very small detour on the way to school, to a dead-end street with only two houses on it, one of which was for sale. It took me about ten tries, but I finally managed to throw the high-tops so that they wrapped around a telephone wire.
The closer I got to school, the more I didn’t want to be there, and the slower my steps got. I was only two blocks away when my feet just stopped.
Eventually the morning bell rang, but I still didn’t move.
I don’t know how long it was before I started walking back to the trailer, since I don’t have a watch or a cell phone, but I knew it couldn’t be 11:00 yet, so when I got to the Treasure Trailers entrance, I snuck behind the tinfoil man’s trailer. His tinfoil blinds shifted a bit, but he didn’t come out, so I sat down and waited for Gloria’s car to go cruising by.
Gloria drove off a few minutes later, with Mom in the passenger seat. When I walked in the door, the clock above the stove read 11:05, which meant Gloria was late for work, and everyone in Mr. Savage’s class was going to PE.
Since I wasn’t in school, I decided I should try to learn something. So I took out my club notebook and reread some of the Emily Dickinson poems I’d written down all those weeks ago. Maybe she mentioned hope somewhere else and gave it a more accurate description. I was in the middle of “I heard a Fly buzz when I died,” when I heard the truck tearing across the gravel and then pulling into our designated driveway.
A few seconds later Winter walked in, jumping when she saw me at the table. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I cut school,” I told her.
“Oh.” She kicked off her combat boots. “Me, too.”
This was the first time I’d ever heard of Winter cutting school, but when I told her that, she said, “I do it all the time.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really. Don’t act so surprised.” She tore open the refrigerator door and began pulling out all sorts of things: cucumber, horseradish, cream cheese. I caught the loaf of bread she tossed me and set it on the table for her, then watched her make the world’s most disgusting sandwich.
“Didn’t you have your club today?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I mean, yes. But I’m gonna cancel it.” I’d only just decided that, but once I said it, I felt a little lighter. Like I’d been trying so hard the whole time to start a good club and make some actual friends, when all along I shouldn’t have been trying at all.
I half expected Winter to talk me out of it, but she just said, “Good,” and took a bite o
f her sandwich. She must have felt the same way.
“What do you think I should do about Dad?” I asked, thinking maybe she’d have a good answer to that. Her mouth was full, so she had to finish chewing before she answered.
“I dunno,” she said, and then took another bite.
“Do you think I should try to find him somehow?”
“Star,” she said, spewing little chunks of food across the table, “I don’t know, okay? I don’t even know what I’m doing. Can’t you just figure something out on your own for once?”
Her words made me wince. Not just the words but the way she said them—like she was absolutely sick of me. I wanted to apologize, but I wasn’t sure what to apologize for.
The phone rang, and Winter jumped up to grab it. “Hello?” she answered. “Yes, this is Carly Mackie.” Winter narrowed her eyes at me, and I squeezed my hands together in my lap. “Yes, she’s home sick. I’m sorry I forgot to call. Good-bye.” She hung up the phone and told me, “Don’t cut school anymore. You’re gonna get both of us in trouble.”
She finished her sandwich in silence, then stomped out of the trailer without saying good-bye. I listened to the truck peeling out of the lot, thinking that Emily Dickinson’s poem should have been about loneliness instead of hope, because that’s what was perching in my soul. No Mom, no Dad, no friends, and now, no Winter.
I didn’t have a single person left.
I threw out all the Emily Dickinson poems and cut up my club notebook with heavy-duty scissors. As I tossed all the strips of notebook into the dumpster, I thought about what I was going to do next. What I had to do, since Mom wouldn’t tell me the truth.
I went back to the trailer and stood in front of Mom’s door. She never locks it, so I went right in and started looking around for the key to the shed, opening drawers and being careful to smooth out the clothes inside so she’d never know I was in there.
I found the key in Mom’s nightstand, hidden under a framed photo of Winter and me. Winter was six in the picture, maybe seven, and I was a baby. She was holding me, trying to lift me up off the ground.
Hope Is a Ferris Wheel Page 9
