Light from a Distant Star

by Morris, Mary Mcgarry

  Charlie didn’t want to go fishing. He said she and Max could still go, but then Max changed his mind, too. He said they’d go next time Charlie felt more up to it. They offered to drop her off, but instead, she hung around the junkyard, watching Max throw a threadbare tennis ball for Boone to spring after, then fetch back in his sticky muzzle. Charlie was fanning himself with a broken fly swatter, half the stick missing. He was telling about the old days, how busy it was here, especially weekends. He’d had two, sometimes three men working for him. And a dog in the yard, useless as it was.

  “People took better care then. Something broke down it got fixed, and the only place in town for parts was right here,” he said swatting the chair arm. “Still, you had to keep an eye out. I mean, human nature, take what you can and the hell who owns it. Best one though was Armand Lussier. Butcher at the A&P. Stole the place blind and married to the homeliest woman around. One of them, you know—he demonstrated—jutty-out jaws. Anyway, she took in laundry for all the fat cats in town, probably even your grandma Peck—pretty sure Charlotta wasn’t doing up her own undies and sheets,” he said, his inclusive wink meant to keep her from telling on him. “The peckity Pecks,” he explained to Max, who’d just thrown the ball again, “they always lived high—new car, new clothes. Anyway, one day Armand comes in and he’s telling me how the old mangle’s gone Democrat and the missus, she wants a new one. ‘No way,’ Armand said he said; he’ll just fix the one she’s got. ‘I know you got one inside,’ he tells me. Says he’ll pay for parts. ‘Well, I got one, sure,’ I tell him. ‘Old as hell—thing is, though, it works.’ Told him I’d sell it to him. Fifteen dollars and his in trade. He acts like he can’t believe it. Next day, back he comes, only this time with a bag of bones and gristle for the dog. Same thing, he says, by the way, dumping the bag out for the dog, coupla parts, that’s all he needs. Fifteen dollars and your old one, I say, so off he goes. Next day, guess who’s back? Armand! Same bag of bones, same offer, so I refuse. Well, next couple days the old dog, he’s dragging around, shitting his brains out. But I don’t think much of it. Then he’s dead. That very night, the gate chain’s cut. Next morning, guess what’s missing? The fucking mangle!”

  “He fucking poisoned your dog?” Max asked, hand resting on Boone’s tensed head. “I mean, Jesus, what’d you do?”

  “Fucking poisoned his!” Charlie yelped with a pump of his fist that Nellie just knew was dirty. He leaned close to Max and whispered behind his hand. “… didn’t get near as good as I gave,” was all she heard. Both men erupted in the kind of wheezy snickering that kept them from looking her way. She felt bad. Charlie’s swearing was one thing. Even though she was used to it, she still didn’t like it, and knew not to tell her mother, because that’s just the way he was. But Max’s swearing in front her, now that was a disappointment. She’d really thought he was better than that, a finer person. And why that was, she couldn’t begin to explain, other than that skill she had, that keen sense of a person’s worth.

  “Best part, though, was the fucking mangle!” Charlie gasped. “Overheated one day and burned his house half down.”

  “Sweet Jesus!” Max’s arm reared back.

  If a dog can be ecstatic, Boone surely was. Waiting, his tail beat the dirt, then with the ball’s release, he took off, grinning, she thought. A few minutes later, Charlie said he was going in “for a snooze.” After he left, Max slapped his thigh and said, “Well.” He looked slowly around the yard. Well, what? she wondered, slowly realizing well meant it was time. Time for her to go. Whimpering low on his haunches Boone kept picking up the ball and flipping it into the air, desperate for Max to throw it again. Max just sat there. She shared Boone’s hunger for the dark-eyed man’s attention. A word. A look, anything.

  She picked up the ball. Wanting to engage both dog and master, she threw it hard as she could down past the barn. Boone whimpered and wiggled, but never stood or chased it. Max’s wait continued in the uneasy stillness. As much as he wanted her to leave, she was determined to stay.

  “How come he won’t go get it?”

  “He knows not to.”

  “How?”

  “I got work to do,” Max said.

  “That’s okay. I can help. I’m a pretty good worker.”

  “You better be going now.” He gestured at the house. “Charlie’s inside.”

  “I’ll just wait. I don’t care. Nothing else to do,” she said.

  He got up. Boone stayed put, but she followed Max into the barn. He turned.

  “Go on back out!” he said. Ordinarily, his pock-whiskered scowl would have sent her running, but not then.

  “I’ll be quiet.”

  “You shouldn’t be in here.”

  “Charlie lets me.”

  His mouth puckered with sourness. “Well, Charlie ain’t here.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t be talking to me like that, okay?” he growled and went outside.

  “I’m sorry,” she said close on his heels. She really was. “I was just wondering about your brother, that’s all. What you said, about tracking deer. How’d he get shot?”

  He started digging again. The shovel’s scrape and ping through the gravelly dirt gave her the shivers. She knew she should go, knew he didn’t like it, but leaving would be an admission. She just wasn’t sure of what. Mostly she felt let down, sad, without knowing why. Something needed saying, but it wasn’t up to her. She was the kid, after all.

  “We were going over a stone wall. Him first, then me. He was a year younger’n me. Twelve, but always faster. Smarter, too. We’d been out all day. By then it was getting late.”

  In spite of the way it played out in his voice, distant and labored with the rhythm of methodical digging, she saw them, the two brothers, burst from the dusky woods, panting, the dry crunch of brush underfoot as they raced each other.

  “Almost suppertime. Not that it mattered,” he grunted and dug, his back to her the whole time. “I mean, Merrill, he’da lived in the woods if he could, eating squirrels and snakes. Frogs, he didn’t care. But not me, all I wanted was to get back. I started running. He went first. Nothing to it, I mean the wall couldn’t’ve been but two and a half feet, but I mustn’ta been looking. My foot caught, snagged kinda, in between the rocks, and down I go. Which is when it happened. The gun going off. Just that one shot. I don’t know.” He paused, foot on the shovel. “Hard to figure.”

  The gun blast. She’d heard it, too. Still was, in her bones. “That’s awful,” she finally said.

  “Yeah. They never got over it, specially my mother.”

  “But it wasn’t your fault.”

  “To them it was,” he said, jamming his foot down on the shovel, hard.

  She must have left soon after that. She wasn’t sure what more was said or even if she said good-bye. The most she’d remember were the sweat circles darkening his back as he kept on digging and digging, not for, but against something.

  WHEN SHE GOT home, they were waiting, her mother by the sink, arms crossed, staring out the window, and her father next to her, peeling carrots.

  “Sit down,” she said, then called up the back stairs for Ruth to come down, which seemed to take forever. Nellie kept asking what was wrong? Had something happened? What had she done? Where was Henry?

  “Just wait,” her father said. He peeled another carrot into the mound of thin orange strips.

  “Why? For what?”

  Her mother followed Ruth into the kitchen. They couldn’t look at her. A crime of enormous proportions had been visited upon their house. The damn bikes, it had to be. The fact of Henry’s absence made her knees go weak. Had he been arrested? Was she next? This might be their last private time together. Her poor parents. Last night with Ruth, and now this. Her father cleared his throat and put down the peeler. Surprisingly enough, he would be enumerating the charges.

  Insensitivity, they wanted to think, and, they hoped, not out-and-out cruelty. He put on his glasses. His orange-stained fingers rem
oved a once-crumpled sheet of lined paper from his breast pocket. He unfolded it. “Stepchild,” he read. “Half sister, never a 100 percent real member of the family?” He shook his head. “Ruth is your sister. Your sister! Nothing else. Plain and simple.” Looking over his glasses, he stared at her.

  “I know!” she cried, overwhelmed with relief. She grinned at Ruth.

  But they continued staring, as if at some vicious intruder who’d stumbled into their lair.

  “How could you? How could you say those things to your own sister? Your only sister.” Her mother sobbed, then tried to stop, and with her shuddering gasp Nellie’s father drew her mother into his arms.

  “But I didn’t mean it that way,” she tried to explain.

  “Not a 100 percent real part of the family.” Ruth wiped her nose. Now, she was crying. “What way did you mean?”

  “Legal. You know. I mean … not being … from birth,” she stammered, mind racing and weak with the futility of it all. What could she say? That she had tried to help her family, who now, in their wounded solidarity, believed the worst and had turned against her? It hadn’t been intended as cruelty.

  But to them it was … to them it was.

  Chapter 10

  IT WAS A HOT SATURDAY NIGHT. THEY’D GOTTEN PERMISSION TO sleep in the tree house again. Not with Dolly though, her mother said, cringing at the suggestion. Nellie had asked, just in case. She was already worried that Dolly’d feel bad if she saw them up there. No food, her mother said, just water, they both had to be covered with bug spray, and they were to pull the ladder up after them. She’d even had Nellie’s father cut a section of plywood that fit over the opening. They had fresh batteries in their flashlights. Then suddenly, at the last minute, they had Jessica Cooper. Earlier that afternoon she had called to invite Nellie to the movies with her and her older sister Patrice. It was with great relief that Nellie’d told her she had to sleep in the tree house. Her mother was making her because Henry needed someone up there with him. Why can’t Ruth do it? Jessica asked, adding how unfair it was that Nellie always got stuck minding Henry. Ruth had to work, Nellie said—only partially true. Her shift would end at eight, but ever since her poorly received letter, Ruth was barely speaking to her, so she sure as heck wouldn’t be doing Nellie any favors. And she was making the most of her new role: the misunderstood outsider. No one dared look at her the wrong way.

  “We can’t even have snacks,” Nellie complained to underscore her regret. This was Jessica’s fourth invitation she’d turned down in as many days. “Just be nice. Please,” her mother had whispered yesterday when Jessica called again. They were still waiting for Mr. Cooper to get back to them with an offer. Every time the phone rang they’d look at each other. Her mother couldn’t understand why they hadn’t heard anything.

  “Just call him,” she’d said earlier at breakfast. “Find out what’s going on. Maybe he’s getting cold feet.”

  “These things take time,” Nellie’s father assured her. He opened the newspaper. “Market analysis, appraisals. You know Andy—he’s a stickler when it comes to details.”

  “And I’m a stickler when it comes to losing the house because we’re so far behind in the taxes.”

  “That’s not going to happen,” her father scoffed.

  “How can you say that?”

  The children all looked up.

  Her mother’s voice had pitched to a new level of shrillness. “How can you sit there calmly reading the paper when the only money coming into this house is what I make?”

  He put the paper down. “It’s going to be all right, Sandy.” He stared up at her. “Trust me.”

  “I am. I have been. I want to.” She stared back.

  He put his hand around her wrist, and she winced. If it weren’t for the tenderness in his voice, Nellie might have thought he was hurting her. “This is a small town. We’ve lived here all our lives. We know people. They know who we are. And that’s what this is about. A level of trust, and maybe it’s not something you can add up in dollars and cents, but it’s still there. It’s moral tender, that’s what it is.” He smiled but she looked away, quickly, too quickly.

  NELLIE AND HENRY had been hauling their sleeping bags up into the tree house when Jessica called back. She told Mrs. Peck that she’d asked her mother if she could come sleep in the tree house, too. Her mother said it was fine with her, as long as Mrs. Peck approved.

  “You what?” Nellie gasped.

  “I thought you asked her. That’s the way it sounded.”

  “Well, I didn’t! And I’m not going to! No way am I spending the night with Jessica Cooper!”

  “You have to.” Her mother was white lipped. “Besides, she’ll be here any minute. Her sister’s driving her.”

  No sooner said than the bell rang. Red cheeked and giddy with delight, Jessica stood in the doorway, hugging her pillow and carrying two grocery bags.

  “No food in the tree house. Sorry,” Nellie said, ready to close the door.

  “That’s okay,” her mother said from behind. “Come on in, hon.”

  Patrice Cooper couldn’t get Jessica’s sleeping bag and flashlight out of the car fast enough.

  Henry stared in horror as Jessica climbed into the tree house behind her. But she had arrived well supplied: a box of Oreos, a large bag of Fritos, Gummi Bears, a bag of Snickers bars, bubble gum, and a six-pack of Coke. She’d had Patrice stop at the supermarket on their way, which of course her sister had been only too willing to do. Better than having to drag Jessica to the movies with her and her friends. Bouncy and sweet with a broad toothy smile, Patrice had been class president, salutatorian, varsity basketball captain, queen of the senior ball, and in another month she would be going to Notre Dame on a tennis scholarship. She stood in the yard talking to Nellie’s mother, who was congratulating her on her many achievements. Behind them, a curtain fluttered in Dolly’s window as she peeked out at the fabled Patrice. At the time, Dolly had seemed so much older, though Nellie would later realize that they were probably only two or three years apart.

  Earlier, before Nellie knew Jessica would be coming, she’d brought out Ruth’s old CD player. She wasn’t going to play it at first, because she didn’t want to have to listen to Jessica’s snickering disbelief that Nellie didn’t even have an iPod when she was on her second one. But as darkness enveloped their leafy aerie, they had already eaten half the Oreos and all of the Fritos while Jessica entertained them with wild tales about her two weeks at Camp Crazy, as she called it. Nellie and Henry were as repulsed as they were fascinated by her detailed accounts of near drownings and getting lost in the woods; having to ride the wildest horse and being bucked off; the mountain cave where counselors smoked pot and had sex; a fistfight between two schizoid girl campers, which she broke up and, in the process, got a black eye; and then the night the boathouse caught fire and burned to the ground before the fire trucks could even get there. And romance—she was still getting love letters. Her mother had read one last week. When she realized that Jessica’s boyfriend was sixteen, she forbade her from writing back.

  “But my friend Krissie says he can write to me there. That way the bitch won’t know.”

  Nellie bristled. Krissie Potek was her friend, too. Jessica’s snarl had backed Henry against the wall. He crouched in a corner, his headlamp shining on Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. The weekend before, her mother had bought the set at a yard sale. Henry’s goal was to finish the series before school started, which might well happen at the rate he was going, reading night and day, Nellie mistakenly told Jessica.

  “So he’s got OCD, then,” she said.

  Ignoring her, Nellie turned the music on low so it wouldn’t bother Dolly or the Humboldts.

  “Now what do we do?” Jessica sighed, popping open another Coke. “Jesus!”

  “Look!” Nellie showed her the stack of magazines. People and Us, Glamour and Vogue, all from the salon. Her mother always brought them home before they got thrown out.


  “They’re all, like, old!” Jessica said, checking dates and flipping them aside.

  “They’re still interesting,” Nellie said. She should have known better. Enthusiasm, it was like showing blood.

  “Yeah, if you’ve been in a coma for six months.”

  Getting through the rest of the night would be rough. Nellie opened People and read, intently, for Jessica’s benefit. It was the story of a boy who had disappeared from his family’s campsite near Lake Tahoe. His mother had zipped him into his sleeping bag, kissed him and his older brother goodnight, then went into her own tent, where her husband was reading. (Henry’s headlamp was giving her the creeps. Every time he moved, jagged light streaked off the walls.) In the morning, when the family woke up, the boy was gone. Sleeping bag and all. Just disappeared. No one had heard a thing. Not even his brother beside him on the mat. She closed the magazine. Barely a breeze, and yet the wind chimes on the Humboldt’s patio kept tinkling. The green bulb in their garden lamppost cast a creepy glow through the trees and bushes.

  Lights still burned in Dolly’s apartment, but it had been a while since there’d been movement inside. Footsteps were coming down the driveway, Nellie aimed her flashlight into the yard. Her parents both waved. They’d gone for a walk, her father said, and wanted to check on them before they went inside.

  “Oh! And a warning!” her mother called up and Nellie’s hair stood on end. She reminded them of the rabid skunk that had been spotted in the neighborhood recently. If they heard anything, they weren’t to come down. No matter what. What if it comes up here, Jessica asked. Nellie’s father assured her that skunks can’t climb trees. Prowlers can, Jessica said. Trying to keep her voice down, her mother came closer and asked Jessica if she was scared. Maybe sleeping out here wasn’t such a good idea after all. No, Jessica said quickly. She wasn’t scared—she’d be fine.

  After Nellie’s parents went inside, Jessica pulled out her pink cell phone and dialed a number.