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Light from a Distant Star

Page 23

by Morris, Mary Mcgarry


  “We’ll be fine,” her mother murmured, which Nellie heard as a cool stillness. This was her mother’s happiest time, though lately she’d barely been able to keep up with all the yard work. Nellie’s father had taken over the lawn mowing, but after beheading the front-yard petunias with the Weed Whacker, her mother had reclaimed the trimming.

  Her mother’s sweaty, red shoulders were flecked with soil from the weeds she was so furiously yanking out. Grunting, she leaned in farther to pick up the long, dusty worm she’d just displaced. She dropped it, wiggling, into a hole and smoothed soil over it. The backs of her mother’s legs were getting burned. Nellie took a few steps to the side trying to shield her from the sun.

  “I can’t see,” her mother called up from the shadow and Nellie moved.

  She loved her mother, but not with the same easy pleasure that she loved her father. An ache was how she loved her mother, with a sympathy she did not understand.

  A bee buzzed close by her ear. She screamed and ran toward the porch.

  “Nellie!” her mother chided, rattling through the tool bucket for her trowel.

  “I might be allergic, too!” she said, coming back. Like Ruth, who carried a bee-sting kit in her purse.

  “Don’t worry, you’re not.” Her mother sat back on her heels and stretched.

  “But what if I am? You don’t know. What if a bee stings me and my tongue swells up and I can’t breathe, then what do I do?”

  “Well, then I’d run inside and get Ruth’s EpiPen and give you the injection.” Her mother seemed amused. “You don’t think I’d let anything happen to you, do you, Nell?” She got up and put her arms around Nellie. “Do you?” she asked, and Nellie shook her head. “Well, what is it, then? Come on, hon, you can tell me; you know you can.”

  “I’m gonna tell the police about Mr. Cooper, I have to!” she blurted and her mother stepped back.

  “No, you don’t have to. And you won’t. Absolutely not. Do you hear me? Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  She nodded. “But I don’t think you understand,” she said in a small voice, determined not to look away from her mother’s stare. Even with the bee at her shoulder she would not flinch.

  “Oh, my God, Nellie, you’ve really got to stop, you can’t keep doing this. You’re only thirteen so you think everything’s so simple, but it’s not.”

  “I don’t think it’s simple. I didn’t say that.”

  “No, but you want it to be. Because you’re very idealistic—you always have been and that’s wonderful, but comes a time, Nellie, when you’ve gotta listen to us, and trust us. Your parents. You just have to.”

  “Even if I’m right and you’re wrong?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Nellie,” her mother sighed. “You know what I think? I think a lot of this is drama, okay? And I’m not trying to belittle you or make you feel bad. Because we’re girls, we’ve all been through it. Sometimes we get these feelings, these ideas, not so much in our head but in here,” she said, tapping her chest. “And they can take on a life of their own, and before we know it, it’s like an obsession, we can’t even think straight anymore. So not another word about this, okay, hon? Please? Things are hard enough right now, don’t you think?” Her bucket rattled as she picked it up and started toward the house.

  That’s why loving her mother was so complicated, Nellie thought as she struggled to push the heavy wooden wheelbarrow into the barn. Because they weren’t the same, they weren’t at all alike, which made her feel bad for both of them.

  Chapter 16

  IT MAY HAVE BEEN THE DWINDLING DAYS OF SUMMER OR MAYBE Henry just felt safer now, but he had resumed work on the tree house with a feverish intensity. The rickety walls had been cross-braced. The roof was almost finished. While scouring the neighborhood for usable boards, he’d discovered a house on Cork Street being renovated. He had climbed into the Dumpster when a carpenter drove up and caught him trying to hoist an old window over the side.

  “What the hell’re ya doing in there?” the carpenter yelled, so Henry told him. His tearful honesty was rewarded when the carpenter not only put the window in his truck but dropped it off at their house on his way home from work.

  Right after breakfast Henry headed out to the tree house only to be ordered back inside. He had to wait until at least ten. Last night Miss Humboldt had called to say that Tenley hadn’t been feeling well lately, and the early morning hammering was disturbing his sleep. At ten sharp Henry’s labor began. Bang bang bang rang his steady hammer strikes through the open window. It was a beautiful morning, sunny and crisp, its perfection tinged by the fading hydrangeas, a sure promise of fall, another day nearer the start of the new school year. The phone kept ringing. Every time it did, Nellie cringed, afraid it was Miss Humboldt. So far the calls had all been for Ruth from her friend Torrie. This last one had been going on for almost an hour, and Nellie had to use the phone.

  “Hang up!” Ruth barked when Nellie lifted the receiver again. She told Ruth she’d been on the phone long enough and she needed to call the salon to ask if she could go to Charlie’s because Ruth would be home with Henry. “Hang up! I’ll be off in a minute! Just hang up!” Ruth yelled, and Nellie realized Torrie was sobbing on the other end of the line. She hung up without another word.

  Soon after, Ruth came thumping down the back stairs into the kitchen. She slumped over the table glaring while Nellie dialed the salon. Of course she could go to Charlie’s, her mother said, sounding rushed. When all her chores were done, she added.

  “That’s really rude, you know, picking up the phone every two minutes!” Ruth said when Nellie hung up.

  “It wasn’t every two minutes,” Nellie said, wiping off the counter-top.

  “That was a really private phone call,” Ruth said.

  “Well, how was I s’posed to know?” She turned on the water and wrung out the sponge.

  “Every time you picked up, Torrie, she was, like, a wreck.”

  Nellie didn’t say anything.

  “The thing is, she’s having a really hard time,” Ruth called over the running water.

  “That’s too bad.” Feigning disinterest, she shut off the water and started to leave.

  “And it’s hard on me, too. Being the only one that knows, that is.”

  “How come? I mean, how come you’re the only one?” Nellie had no clue what she was talking about, but if she asked, she’d never be told.

  “The thing is, her parents think she’s such a saint, and, plus, her mother’s this big pro-life fanatic.”

  “Oh,” Nellie said. Maybe Ruth thought she’d been listening on the line. Or maybe she just needed a sounding board.

  “She wants me to bring her in to the clinic. On Thursday. And I said I would, but I don’t want to, and I don’t know how to get out of it. I mean, I feel like I’m letting her down, but then there’s the other part of it. You know what I mean?”

  She didn’t, but she nodded.

  “I just keep thinking, I mean, what if Mom had done that? I mean, I wouldn’t be here right now. I never would’ve happened. For Torrie it’s just like this awful problem she’s gotta take care of, and then when she does, everything’ll be the same, back to normal again. But not for me it won’t. I mean, if I help her, it’ll be like getting rid of myself in a way, because I know what the other part of it’s like. The being unwanted part.”

  For a moment they just looked at each other. Her sister’s eyes were red and glistening, but she wasn’t crying. Nellie was.

  “Mom wanted you. You know she did,” Nellie said, rubbing her nose on the back of her hand.

  “Yeah, but she was the only one,” Ruth said, then burst into tears. “My own father, he just took off.”

  “But he was in high school—his family made him.” Or so the story went.

  “He’s not in high school now.”

  Again, Nellie nodded. They were both sniffling.

  “You know how many letters I’ve sent him? Four! And he hasn’t writte
n me back, not one single letter.”

  “Maybe he didn’t get them.” Her mind was racing. If she gave Ruth the letter she’d hidden, she’d be in huge trouble, and Ruth would be even more hurt by her father’s brush-off.

  “That’s what I keep thinking,” she said.

  Outside, the hammering suddenly stopped. There was a car running in the driveway. Then a knock at the door. It was Detective Des La Forges, asking for their mother. He wanted to tell her something. She was at work, Ruth said, quickly adding that he shouldn’t go there looking for her. It would be too upsetting. The jowly faced man said he understood. He’d call her later at home.

  Nellie was leaving for Charlie’s when Ruth told her to wait. She looked in the refrigerator for something to give him.

  “Here,” she said, wrapping the end of last night’s meat loaf. “Tell him he can heat it or make sandwiches with it.”

  She walked to Charlie’s, not quite sure what to make of it all. Maybe her father was right, and life would get back to the way it used to be, happy and simple, when everything was still possible, even Max’s innocence. And her own.

  She walked around the junkyard, calling for Charlie. He wasn’t in the barn, and she couldn’t tell whether he was in the house or not because the front door was locked. Figuring he might be in the woods, checking on Boone, she followed the narrow path past rusting barrels, junked oil tanks, half-buried paint cans, and the bittersweet vine–entangled shells of old stripped cars. She was ashamed. Charlie was an environmental menace, but she couldn’t very well report her own grandfather, could she? And yet wasn’t that what was wrong in the world, people always looking the other way, making excuses, each lie and omission shoring up the next. Afraid to tell the truth, afraid to take a stand. Like her trying to rationalize the irrational sight of Mr. Cooper huddling in bushes mere feet from the doorway to a murder. The fallout had to be considered, her father had said. The collateral damage. But didn’t every action cause a reaction? Wasn’t there always fallout? Why was Mr. Cooper’s reputation more important than Max Devaney’s? What if Charlie’s hazardous waste was seeping into groundwater that fed the very springs they’d filled their gallon jugs from? She thought of how her father had pointed up at the brilliant night sky and explained that some of those stars were dead, and had been for millions of years. You can’t tell the difference with the naked eye. But the light still exists. Though she couldn’t have explained how, she knew it was all connected in that unfathomable, unnamable way of things that exist both in and outside the realm of childhood experience.

  Once she was beyond sight of the house, the going got rough. In their spindly struggle for light, trees grew closer here, some shooting straight up from the queer hummocky ridges marking decades of bulldozed debris. The weedy mounds glittered with bits of broken glass. Until the town had served him with a court order, Charlie had been dumping trash out here for years, his own and for anyone else willing to pay. No questions asked. When she finally came to the old truck, Boone was gone. Only the thick, frayed rope dangled from the truck bed.

  “Hey, Boone! C’mere, boy, c’mere, Boone!” she called, waving away mosquitoes as she headed deeper into the woods. Traffic sounds in the distance meant she was nearing the outer reaches of Charlie’s property. Thinking she’d heard voices, she stopped and called again for Boone, but softly, almost in a whisper. It occurred to her then that she was all alone, and if anything happened, no one would know she’d come this far into the woods. She decided to head back but wasn’t sure of the path. No need to panic, she kept telling myself. After all, these woods were right in the center of town. Sooner or later she’d come out onto a familiar street.

  “Kun-ka-too!” came a dull shout, followed, as if in answer, by a long piercing cry, whether of pain or surprise she couldn’t tell, but every hair on her frozen body stood on end. Here it was, the very moment she’d been preparing for, and not a single hold came to mind. She could barely breathe. Footsteps. Crackling twigs. The leafy rustle of parting branches, and suddenly Boone sprang at her, wiggling and whimpering happily. Someone had been running behind him and now came to a dead, panting stop. He was tall, dressed in black with red slashes crossed across both cheeks like war paint. It was one of the twins, Rodney, and on his heels, Roy, also in black. Yellow-and-bright-green circles had been painted on his cheeks. His acne-pocked nose glistened with sweat.

  “Hey!” she called with a nervous laugh. She braced her feet to keep Boone from knocking her down. They both just looked at her. She couldn’t tell if they were embarrassed, but she knew she was. She’d caught them at something strange and they all knew it.

  “He got untied,” Roy said. Even in school he was always first to speak.

  “We were tryna catch him,” Rodney said.

  “Well, I got him now,” she said, as if this were all perfectly normal.

  “Okay,” Roy said, and Rodney nodded.

  “So you guys’re what, Indians?” she asked.

  “Native Americans,” Roy said. “Passamaquoddy.”

  “Who’re they?”

  “They used to live around here,” Roy said.

  “A long time ago,” Rodney said, and she asked how he knew. Because of all the artifacts they’d found, he explained as they began to walk with Boone trotting behind. She followed them over the rise, then down the densely wooded incline that ended behind their house. At least from here she’d find her way home.

  “Wanna see some?” Roy asked, sliding open the black metal door of their garage. Cars hadn’t been parked in here for a long time. But there were two odd-looking bikes covered with homemade gadgets and gizmos. Each bike had a small motor attached to the hub of the back wheel. The garage was filled with unrecognizable metal contraptions. Some resembled modern art structures with gleaming pylons attached to metal discs by coiled springs. Others seemed to be wacky machines with moving parts, levers, chutes. Rodney was demonstrating one fashioned from a car battery, clock face, radio innards, and a narrow circuit board connected by thin wires to a series of spur gears that, turning, produced a deep robotic voice that droned, “Warning, warning. Security has been breached. Warning, warning. Once unleashed, the force will destroy you. Warning—”

  “Cool,” she said as Rodney aimed a remote that clicked it off.

  “It works off of infrared beams,” Roy said. “But the detection range is still too short.”

  “Yeah,” Rodney agreed.

  “Cool,” she said.

  Sweat beaded on their fuzzy upper lips. She tried not to look at it.

  Now Roy was showing her the weather instrument he’d been working on. Not only did it measure humidity, but could detect changes in air pressure hundreds of miles away. She was pretty sure such a device had already been invented but didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Elbowing each other out of the way, the twins moved excitedly from gadget to gadget, pushing buttons and turning wheels. Lights flashed, motors hummed, bells rang as their voices overlapped with eager descriptions. It was like being inside the belly of some huge mechanical beast, and she was their first guest. Boone sat by the door, clearly used to the cacophony.

  What about the artifacts, she asked, and Roy slid a large flat box from under a workbench that was covered with tools and cans of spray paint. Inside were dusty arrowheads, chips of earthen pottery, and oddly shaped stones that he said were used to make digging implements as well as hunting tools. To Nellie it all looked like a bunch of rocks, but the twins treated it with great respect. Roy was talking about Chief Passaconaway and the Great Spider Mother. Rodney kept interjecting facts and elaborating on Roy’s details. They’d been digging for years, they said. The artifacts were so easy to find because most of the junkyard had never been disturbed.

  “In fact, we just found a whole new place,” Roy said.

  “Yeah, down by the willow trees,” Rodney added.

  “Just scoop your hand in the muck and there it is,” Roy explained.

  “All kindsa stuff,” Rodney said.


  “C’mon, we’ll show you.” Roy lurched for the door.

  When she said she’d better bring Boone back to her grandfather’s, their faces fell. They’d found the dog last week, roaming the woods, so they’d been feeding him. He’d been hanging around ever since. That was nice of them, she said, but she had to give him back. Charlie was taking care of him for someone else.

  “Taking care of him!” Roy sputtered. “Poor dog, he never even had water.”

  “So we did, we filled his bowl,” Rodney said. “Brought him treats, too.”

  “I know, but his owner, he wants Charlie to have him,” she said. “That’s what he said.”

  “He’s the one in jail, right?” Roy asked, and she said yes.

  “He killed our dog,” Rodney said. “It was in the paper. My mother saw it.”

  “That was your dog? The white pit bull? He bit my brother. He, like, almost killed him, but Max saved his life. I was there. I saw the whole thing. Believe me, that was not a good dog.”

  “He broke off his chain!” Roy said.

  “Max was a hero,” she said.

  “We used to see him. He didn’t think we did, but we did. We weren’t s’posed to talk to him. My mother said he was strange.”

  “She thinks everyone’s strange,” Rodney interjected, grinning every time she looked at him.

  “He followed us,” Roy said. “We’d look around and he wouldn’t be there, but then he would. He’d be, like, hiding.”

  “Yeah, like, behind a tree or something.”

  “That’s weird,” she said.

  “Yeah, maybe he wanted to kill us, too, that’s what my mother thinks anyway,” Roy said.

  “And that’s really weird,” she scoffed.

  “Yeah, he even talked to his dog. Sometimes we’d hear him: ‘So what d’ya think, gonna rain today or what?’ ” Rodney said, and his almost pitch-perfect imitation of Max’s deep voice gave her the creeps.

  “Well, I better get going. C’mon, Boone!” she called from the doorway, holding out the packet of meat loaf, but the dog remained rooted at Roy’s feet, looking at her. She called again, this time with more urgency, but he didn’t move, and it made her sad. It seemed as much a rejection of Max as of her. Boone knew Max wasn’t coming back, and he knew she hadn’t tried to help him, and he knew Charlie didn’t care, so he’d made his choice. Her face grew hot as she stood there. “Just so you’ll know—Max—he never killed anybody. The only reason he was watching you is because he used to have a brother, too. He said that, how you reminded him of him and his brother. That’s all he was doing.” And with that she marched off, but down their road. She might be afraid of going back through the woods. But she wasn’t going to be afraid of speaking her mind.

 

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