Light from a Distant Star

by Morris, Mary Mcgarry

  Eventually, Lazlo moved across town into a bigger, more modern apartment with James, his frequent visitor at Oak Street. Lazlo had come back to visit, but only a few times, and he was always in a hurry.

  After Lazlo, came the downturn. The apartment stayed empty for a month. By then any vacancy meant financial hardship. With the store income a dribble at best, Sandy had counted on the rent to buy groceries and pay bills. Her job at Frederic’s helped a lot and her client base was growing, though still small. She had worked right after Ruth was born, but quit when she married Benjamin, who shared her belief that a mother’s place was at home. Most of her clients were still walk-ins, but people liked her, and her girlfriends were supportive, recommending her and coming in for touch-ups and trims they barely needed. The other stylists were Carolyn, Kris, and Lizzie, who used to do Sandy’s hair. Frederic was a small, dramatic man with a blond goatee and a tan that was sprayed on weekly. He absolutely “adored” Sandy, and paid her minimum wage.

  Warmhearted and generous, Sandy Peck was always ready with a helping hand, so what could she say when Lizzie asked if her niece could look at the empty apartment. She had just broken up with her boyfriend and needed a place to stay. Lizzie had had it with the girl’s sleeping on her pullout couch. In spite of Sandy’s misgivings, she had agreed to show the apartment to Dolly Bedelia.

  “She’s an entertainer at the Paradise,” her voice rose past the open cellar door.

  “The Paradise?” Nellie’s father said.

  “Out on Route Nine?”

  She had called him down to remove the dead mice and reset the traps. The stiff little carcasses had been in them for days. Maybe weeks. It was his most hated chore.

  “Entertainer, what’s that mean?” He spoke nasally, probably holding his breath, Nellie thought.

  “Singer? I don’t know. But Lizzie’s always saying how she’s got this amazing voice.”

  A bag crinkled—her father opening the paper casket.

  “Not that kind of place though, is it?” he asked.

  “What I’m hoping is she won’t like it, the old tub and no shower.”

  “Lazlo’s works okay, the one he hooked up.”

  “Except for running out of hot water all the time.”

  “So, tell her that.”

  “Believe me, I will.”

  “Doesn’t seem right, does it?”

  “I know, but the last thing I need right now is some ditzy pole dancer moving in.”

  “I meant them. Look, they’re not even full grown.”

  “They’re still mice, Ben. Vermin. Coming up through the walls into the cupboards and—”

  “What do you mean, ditzy pole dancer?”

  “Oh, God, I don’t know. How do I get myself into these messes?”

  “Because you’re very kind.”

  “No. I just talk too much, that’s the problem.”

  “Speaking of which, guess who came in today?”

  “Ben! I hate it when you do that. Just tell me.”

  “Andy Cooper.”

  “Oh, thank God! Did he say how much?”

  “I turned him down.”

  With the furious stomping up the stairs, Nellie barely made it around the corner onto the recliner.

  “For now!” Her father followed her mother into the kitchen, the bag of dead mice a dry rattle with every appeasing gesture. “Just for now, that’s what I told him. I just need some time, Sandy. A little more time.”

  “To do what, Ben? To do what?”

  “To finish.”

  And in the stark silence that pulled the walls together, she felt it once again, deeply, her mother’s disappointment and her father’s determination to overlook her desperation, no matter the cost.

  AN ENTERTAINER WAS moving into the apartment. She couldn’t wait to tell Ruth. When she’d told Henry, all he’d said was “So?” It was Friday night and Ruth had gone out after dinner to meet her two best friends in the park. Supposedly they were going to Rollie’s for ice cream, then to hang out at Brenda Hoffman’s house afterward. The Hoffmans had an amazing playroom, with its own bar, pool table, Ping-Pong table, huge television, a conversation pit lined with leather couches, and sliding glass doors leading out to the Gunite swimming pool. Not that Nellie’d ever seen it, but at that point in life, Ruth was her Vasco da Gama, returning from her great adventures with detailed descriptions of exotic worlds, and if she was lucky and showed enough interest—but not too much—romantic relationships.

  “I probably shouldn’t be telling you this,” she would begin, and Nellie’d already be getting that dull pelvic ache. Especially when it was about Patrick Dellastrando. Nellie wasn’t sure why, because she truly found him repulsive—hairy arms and legs, a man’s deep voice, and a perpetual five o’clock shadow. He was a grade ahead of Ruth, but he lived around the block, so their frequently crossed paths had long seemed a kind of cosmic destiny to both sisters.

  Ruth was twenty minutes late. On weekends her curfew was eleven. School nights she couldn’t go out except to the library. It was amazing how many projects she’d recently been assigned. Anyway, at 11:20 Nellie had come down from bed, claiming hunger, a plausible excuse because to listen to her mother tell it, all she did was eat. Constantly. Her mother was folding her work laundry on the kitchen table, mostly lavender towels and black smocks. Nellie was slowly eating toast with peanut butter, trying to drag it out, when Ruth came through the door. Even without glasses, the first thing Nellie noticed was her sister’s rashy face, then her wrinkled shirt, and the funny way she was looking at them. Like through a fog. Her pupils seemed to fill her eye sockets.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, hugging herself with a quick shiver even though the June night’s muggy heat still hung in the kitchen.

  “That’s twenty minutes off your next night out,” her mother said.

  “Mom!” Ruth protested. “That’s the problem. Everyone’s curfew’s later than mine, so they’re all having fun, and I don’t know what time it is, and—”

  “But you’ve got your watch,” Nellie interrupted. Big mistake. Huge, she realized, following Ruth up the stairs.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Ruth hissed at the door to the attic stairs. Her mouth tightened and her eyes swam with a drowsy, unfocusable disgust. She smelled funny. Sweetish, like dried herbs.

  “I just want to tell you something.”

  “What?”

  “Shh.” Nellie pointed upward. To privacy.

  Her room was brain-boiling hot. It would be awhile before the window air conditioner cooled it off. But that was the deal, it could only be run when Ruth was up here. Piles of clothes were everywhere, even on her unmade bed. She turned and pulled her shirt over her head. Her back was lean and tanned. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Some girls didn’t have to, they were so small, but not Ruth. She was like their mother—big breasts, small waist, and one of those rear ends so perfect that when she walked, it took on a life of its own. She put on her nightie, then stepped out of her pink shorts, leaving them where they dropped. She sat down hard on the bed. “So what’s so important?”

  Nellie’s brain was fuzzy. Her face burned and her eyes stung. It wasn’t just the heat, though. Ruth’s bra was hanging halfway out of her shorts pocket. Needing to absolve her, Nellie asked if she’d gone swimming in the Hoffmans’ pool.

  “No,” she sighed, collapsing back onto the bed. “We just kinda hung out.”

  “Where?”

  “We ended up at Colleen’s.” Looking up at the ceiling, she grinned.

  “Dellastrando?” Colleen was younger than Ruth, only two years older than Nellie.

  “Yeah.”

  “In the house?” A forbidding place, muscled teenage boys jamming baskets, dribbling in the wide driveway, their music-thumping cars constantly coming and going. Passing by, Nellie would quicken her step, stare straight ahead. Things happened there. She just knew it.

  “No, out on the deck. The screened-in part.”

  The gazebo
. For Nellie, the most exotic structure in all of Springvale. “Was it just girls?”

  “No!” Ruth crowed.

  “So, who then?” There, again, that strange, deep ache.

  “Some guys. You know. Patrick and his friends. They were showing off their …”—she lowered her voice—“… tattoos.”

  Tattoos. So there it was, the beginning. Of what Nellie couldn’t be sure. But her heart raced and she averted her eyes from the hard swell of nipples against the nightie’s thin, blue cotton as Ruth described the red tattoo around Patrick’s left bicep, a jagged design, like barbed wire. So what was the big secret, she wanted to know.

  But now Nellie didn’t want to tell her. The news gave her none of the pleasure she had expected. None at all. Only a dingy heaviness.

  “Are you serious? Oh, my God, I can’t believe it. Why would Mom do that? I mean, the Paradise! How cheesy is that? Even I know it’s a strip club.”

  WITH ONLY A few weeks left before school let out for the summer, Nellie’s mother still hadn’t figured out what to do with her two youngest while she was at work. There’d been vague talk of overnight camps and different community programs and Ruth’s babysitting them, but as the days dwindled, it had come down to Nellie minding Henry. Ruth had gotten a job scooping ice cream at Rollie’s takeout window.

  Nellie and her brother were walking home on one of their last school days when Jessica Cooper caught up with them. Jessica could be mean, especially to Henry, but she and Nellie’d been friends since kindergarten and if Nellie was nothing else, she was deeply loyal. And besides, Jessica didn’t have an easy life. Not really. The fourth born out of seven, she was bookended by six of the best-looking and smartest kids in town. By this time, though, Jessica and Nellie had little left in common, other than huge appetites. But Nellie was death-march skinny, while Jessica was gaining so much weight so fast that she’d been put on a strict diet, which only made her more bitter about her mother and more furtive about food. Whenever they had money, they’d stop at the little grocery store on their way home, but that day Nellie refused. Last week Jessica had bought two Snickers bars and stolen two. Today in the cafeteria she had been caught taking an extra brownie. She’d been accused before, but this time the lunch lady insisted she turn out her pockets. Everyone snickered as fudgy chunks and crumbs fell onto the floor.

  School had always been a trial for Jessica. She did well in math but could barely read. The language arts specialist took her out of the classroom every morning at nine-thirty. That daily walk to the door, then down the corridor was a trail of unending shame. On Saturdays from ten to twelve a private tutor came to the house to work with her. Fifty dollars an hour, but the Coopers were rich. Nellie thought so, anyway. Through the years she had overlooked Jessica’s many failings except for one: her hatred for her mother. It was chilling.

  “Sometimes I wish she’d just get cancer and die,” Jessica would say.

  You don’t mean that, Nellie had long ago quit saying. Because she’d finally accepted that Jessica did. You could hear it in her voice—a malevolence that would curl her plump mouth into the most frightening smile. Maybe it was because Mrs. Cooper was so nice and so strikingly beautiful; maybe that’s what Jessica couldn’t bear—the contrast between mother and daughter. Mrs. Cooper was exquisite, her inky black hair a perfect widow’s peak over her high-boned ivory complexion. Seven children and trim as a model, which, it was said, she’d once been—in New York City. She was the lead soprano at Sunday’s eleven o’clock Mass, where Mr. Cooper and their well-dressed brood filled an entire pew.

  Not that Nellie ever saw them there. Hers wasn’t a churchgoing family. Benjamin and Sandy were friends of the Coopers, though not the socializing kind. Just people you’d either grown up with or known forever, and knew you could count on. The relationship had become especially important in the financial struggles of this last year. Her mother had finally persuaded her father to sell the store. The business was losing money daily and the only person even remotely interested in the property was Andrew Cooper. He owned the buildings on either side of Peck Hardware.

  “Come on!” Nellie called back to Henry, who was deliberately lagging behind.

  “He’s such a little prick,” Jessica said.

  “Shut up!” Nellie snapped and came to a dead stop, waiting for her brother. She knew what he was up to. He wanted to lose Jessica so they could stop at the junkyard to look for boards. So far, though, there’d been no ditching her. Huffing breathlessly with a quick skip every few steps, she’d kept pace.

  “See you tomorrow,” Nellie said when they came to the tall wooden gate. The last time Jessica had been with them, she’d climbed up into the hayloft. Seeing her legs dangling through the opening, Charlie had yelled at her to “get the hell down from there!”

  “I’m not doing anything wrong!” she’d yelled back, which enraged Charlie. He called Nellie’s mother, who said they were never to bring anyone to the junkyard again.

  Jessica said she wanted to come in, too. No, Nellie told her, she’d been fresh to her grandfather and she couldn’t. Yes, she could, she said, it was a public junkyard. No, it was private, she told her. That’s stupid, Jessica said, pushing open the gate.

  “You can’t go in,” Nellie said, pulling it back. She pointed up at the sign. “See. Warning. No kids allowed.” It actually said, WARNING. KEEP GATE CLOSED.

  Her eyes narrowed and her lips moved as she peered up at the sign. Again, Nellie said good-bye, then followed Henry inside. For the last few weeks he’d been building a tree house in the enormous swamp maple tree in their backyard. With most of the floor done, he needed boards for the walls. The junkyard never got much lumber, but now Charlie was on the lookout and pleased to save it. Seeing Henry root through the teetering piles had sparked Charlie’s interest in his only grandson. The skittish little crybaby might just be turning a corner. And who knows, he’d recently told his daughter, Sandy, the boy might even want the business someday. “Maybe,” had been her kind but listless reply. With her husband and father running the two most dead-end enterprises in town, it was a painful thought.

  While Henry rummaged through old metal signs and sheets of tin, Nellie went in search of Charlie. His empty chair was just inside the barn door alongside the rusted green TV tray that held a coffee can filled with sand and cigarette butts.

  “Charlie’s resting.” The dark voice fell like a shadow. Max gestured toward the house. Charlie’d gone over to lie down. He was getting those pains again. Nellie didn’t know what pains he meant. Every few years Charlie seemed to be having some new ailment or surgery. Did she want to go inside, he asked, meaning the house. She said no. Ordinarily she would have, but she didn’t feel right leaving Henry alone behind the barn with this strange scowling man hovering around. He made her nervous. And a little scared, the way he’d seem to be looking at you yet wasn’t, both at the same time. So she asked where his dog was, in a strong voice so he’d know she was not the least bit uneasy alone in here with him. He’s around someplace, maybe out back, Max said, adding that Boone’s favorite place was a worn-down spot in the dirt close by the barn wall where the sun shone from noon on. All those words seemed to unnerve him.

  “Is it comfortable up there?” She gestured up at the loft, wanting to put him at ease. Actually, herself as well. Nervous chatter, her mother called it, but talking was her best skill, and a way to seem more confident.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Must get hot though, huh?”

  He shrugged. “It’s okay.”

  “So you must be pretty adaptable then,” she said easing past to get outside. She didn’t want him to think she was looking down her nose, judging him just some loser, another of Charlie’s transient laborers, skulking around the place for a few days or sometimes just a few hours—even if he probably was. She might not think all people were the same, but she did try to treat them the same.

  “I guess.”

  “That’s the most important thing of all.
For us humans, anyway.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “It is, I read that. It’s not just survival of the fittest; it’s about, like, how you fit in, how you adapt to things when they change. Like Homo erectus,” she called as he walked away. She caught up. “That whole line’s extinct, which is pretty amazing when you think how long they were here. A million and a half years, and now”—she clicked her fingers—“they’re gone. My father says they never really developed the right tools.”

  “Tools, huh, well, your father oughta know then,” he said, walking faster now toward the clanging that was coming from the back of the barn.

  She trailed after him, one more person who found her annoying. Sometimes with so much to think about, so much churning in her head, it was hard to keep it all contained.

  Henry was struggling to pull a board out from under a rusted snow-blower. His face was red and his feet were braced under him.

  “Hey!” Max hollered. “Don’t do that! You’re gonna—”

  “It’s okay!” she snapped. “Charlie said he could. Whatever wood he finds.”

  “That tips, he’s gonna get hurt. Here,” he said, lifting the snow-blower off to the side so Henry could yank out the board. Its underside was black with mold and shiny slugs. “Careful the nails—they’re all rust,” Max warned, then said to wait a minute. He’d go get a hammer.