Light from a Distant Star

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Light from a Distant Star Page 32

by Morris, Mary Mcgarry


  They’d made an appointment with Dr. Willington, Ruth told her, but had canceled it when she reminded them that Alicia Boudreau was Dr. Willington’s stepdaughter. Alicia was in Nellie’s class.

  “So now they’re checking out shrinks from some other town,” Ruth said from her desk. She was doing math homework on her calculator.

  “I don’t care,” Nellie said, moving around her room. She’d come up looking for a clear cover for her history report. She was only allowed in here with Ruth’s permission, and never alone.

  “Well, you should. You should care about something, don’t you think, instead of yourself all the time,” she said, and Nellie rolled her eyes.

  “So are you gonna go?” Nellie was reading the most recent letter from her sister’s “real” father, as Ruth took great pleasure in saying. Alongside his newspaper clipping, the letter was tacked to Ruth’s bulletin board. He’d invited her to come stay with him and his family for a few weeks next summer: “The girls can’t wait to meet their big sister.” Nellie bristled, wondering where she’d fit into this new constellation, half stepsister, step half sister?

  “Well, yeah! I just need enough for the plane ticket.”

  “How much is that?”

  “Three thousand.”

  Might as well try and raise enough for a ticket to the moon, she wanted to say but didn’t. The dribs of Ruth’s forgiveness were still being eked out. Sometimes she made it seem as if Nellie was the reason her father had ignored her existence from birth.

  “What about him, your real father, can he give you any?” Nellie knew he couldn’t.

  “I’ve already got eight hundred, and Mom and Ben’ll help. Soon as they sell the store. Few more weeks and we’ll be rich, rich, rich.” She swiveled around on her chair. “Hey, how come you’re not friends with Jessica anymore?”

  “I don’t know.” Nellie hated it when she called him Ben.

  “Well, you must know. You always used to be friends.”

  “Well, for one thing, she’s really mean. Especially to Henry. And she steals stuff. And she’s always talking about how much she hates her mother. She even said she—”

  “Well, guess what,” Ruth interrupted, rolling closer on her chair. “Guess who Louie Cooper wants to go out with?” Grinning, she held out her arms. “Moi!”

  “He’s a drug dealer!”

  “Oh, my God.” Ruth shook her head. “You’ve gotta stop, you can’t keep doing this, Nellie. It’s—”

  “But it’s true! I saw it. With my own eyes. Jessica showed me. Bags of it, pot, in his room. She took the key down—she showed me.”

  Ruth wheeled back to her desk, opened a drawer and pulled out a clear plastic cover. “Go,” she said, flipping it onto her bed. “Will you please just go?”

  WHEN THEY FINALLY saw Lazlo’s completed painting, she and Henry were disappointed. They stared, not knowing what to say. It looked like their tree house, but it didn’t. His was a nest of boards and sticks, without nails or bolts, more image than structure. More hope than reality. An idea that with the first strong wind would come crashing down.

  “What do you think?” Lazlo asked.

  “Very nice,” they answered in unison. “I like the colors,” Nellie added.

  “Our tree’s bigger though,” Henry said, and she pressed against him, hoping to stop him there.

  “You’re right,” Lazlo said, taping more bubble wrap around a painting. He’d been packing them for his booth at Art in the Park. “Mine’s not as substantial as yours.” The wrapped paintings were stacked by the front door, waiting to be carried out to his car. It was Saturday and her father and mother were both at work. Not wanting them to stay in the house all day, they’d left a list of things to do. After helping Lazlo, they were supposed to walk down to the store and help their father pack up all the junk in the cellar. Every day he brought some to Charlie’s. Mr. Cooper had finally gotten financing. He was hoping to pass papers on the property sometime before Christmas. It was up to the lawyers now, only a matter of scheduling, he’d assured her father.

  “And,” Henry said, peering closer, “we don’t have electricity in our tree house.

  The tree house in the painting glowed against a darkening sky. “Maybe it’s just a reflection,” Lazlo said, lifting it off the easel to be wrapped. “Or a candle, or the Humboldt’s motion detector.”

  “How come you don’t know?” Henry asked, and Lazlo laughed.

  “That’s so not the point, my young philistine,” he said, then waving a strip of bubble wrap toward the kitchen, asked him to get his car keys. They were hanging over the sink. Henry cringed back. Each gestured for the other to do it.

  He asked you, Nellie mouthed, pointing, then seeing her brother’s fear, forced herself to enter that tiny kitchen where Dolly still lay even with gleaming vinyl flooring and fresh paint, her head near the table, her soiled feet by the cupboard door. Had she run in here trying to escape to the cellar? Or was this where her killer had found her? The door had been painted, forever obscuring Max’s bloody thumbprint. Had he left it on his way in or his way out? The only signs of struggle had been in here. She snatched the key from the hook and hurried back to Lazlo.

  “How can you live in here?” she blurted. “Don’t you get freaked out?”

  “Sometimes. But don’t forget this was my home a long time before that happened. Plus, I didn’t know her like you guys did,” Lazlo said as they carried out the larger paintings first. He arranged them in his trunk, layering blankets between the frames. “That’s probably the hardest part. Right?”

  “She wasn’t a very nice lady,” Henry declared.

  “What’re you talking about? You hardly even knew her,” Nellie snapped, which triggered one of those volleys of bickering they’d had so many of lately.

  “Like that time she was mean to Max, I heard what she said.”

  “So did I.”

  “Not all of it. You went inside, and she said if he didn’t stop bothering her, she was gonna call the police and tell ’em he shouldn’t be hanging around us kids all the time. He said something, so then she called him a pervert and he got in his truck real fast and peeled out.”

  “I knew that.”

  “No, you didn’t!”

  The tree house painting took up most of the backseat. She rode up front with her brother squeezed in back, close against the wide silver frame strapped firmly in place by a seat belt.

  “If we crash, Henry” Lazlo called back, “your one mission is to save the painting. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” Henry answered. “But what if I can’t? Who gets saved, me or the painting?”

  “Well, thank goodness Nellie’s here. She’d have to save you while I’m rescuing my painting. Unless,” he laughed, looking back in the rearview mirror, “we have to sacrifice you for the sake of the art. And sometimes that happens.”

  She looked out the window. Sacrificed—but for the sake of what? Convenience, comfort?

  “I’m more important than a painting!” Henry protested.

  “Who says?” Lazlo laughed.

  “I’m a person!” Henry called back.

  “Who says?” Lazlo laughed.

  Their sparring continued all the way to the park. What was Max doing on this warm fall morning as he waited for the jury to decide what the rest of his life would be like? The leaves on the trees were edged in reds and yellows. The park was already filling with people, anchoring their tent poles into the ground. No matter what they decided, Max had been serving his sentence for a long time. Life couldn’t be that unfair, it just couldn’t.

  She and Henry helped Lazlo carry his display tent. They walked up and down the paths trying to find number fifty-six, his assigned spot. Many of the artists knew Lazlo. “That’s too bad,” a pretty young woman was telling him. Number fifty-six was on the far end, on the other side of the bandstand. Lazlo looked discouraged as they dragged the metal poles and rolled canvas to the last numbered placard. They were at the end of the longes
t path, next to a trash barrel.

  “How about over there?” Nellie pointed to all the space in the middle of the park where vendors were setting up pizza, frozen slush, and popcorn stands. A balloon cart had just arrived.

  “We can’t. There’s no numbers,” Lazlo said.

  “There will be now,” she said, picking up the placard and heading toward the food vendors, but Lazlo raced after her and took it back. He’d stay where he’d been assigned. But that’s not fair, she said, and Henry agreed. Nobody was going to come down this far. Such was life, the luck of the draw, Lazlo sighed; not everybody could get the best location.

  “But you got a bad one last year, too. And you didn’t sell any paintings, remember? Not one single one,” she reminded him. She knew because at the end of the day they’d helped carry them all the way back through the park to his car. She felt bad. She could tell she’d embarrassed him. But what was the point of going to all this trouble when nobody would see his paintings?

  “This’ll be fine.” He worked quickly in his remote spot, lacing the canvas to the poles. They held them straight while he pounded the stakes into ground. “Plus, I’ll be in the shade here.”

  Deep darkness was more like it with all the trees and bushes, but she kept quiet. It took three trips for them to carry all the paintings to Lazlo. When they were finished, he tried giving them each five dollars, but they told him they’d get in trouble if they took it. He insisted, saying not to worry—he’d take the heat for them.

  When they got to the store, their father was in his office, talking on the phone. He seemed very distracted, almost as if he’d forgotten they were coming. The lights were on, but the store was empty. There were still some items left on the shelves that he hoped to clear out with the week-long going-out-of-business sale he was planning in November. He told them to wait; he had to take care of the call first. Henry asked if they could go across the street and get something to eat, but her father said to wait, just wait. He had no sooner closed the door to his office when a lady came into the store, carrying two chrome towel rods. She needed four new screws for them. Nellie said she’d get her father.

  “This is the second day,” she overheard him say when she knocked on the door. He hurried out of his office. “Connie,” he greeted the woman who gave him the towel rods. She told him what she needed.

  “Shouldn’t be much longer now,” she said, following him to the back of the store. “Can’t imagine they want to be doing this all weekend long.”

  “Just a quick minute,” her father said, excusing himself. He opened the door to the cellar and told Nellie and Henry to go down and start filling boxes.

  The harsh odor of moldy wet earth made them both sneeze. Her hands were quickly filthy. Part of the cellar had a dirt floor, which was where most of the oldest junk had been tossed. Old signs, pipes, buckets, wooden boxes of everything from rusty siphons, shelf brackets, loose nails and sheets of ceramic tiles, covered with soot and cobwebs. Henry counted sixteen water-stained bags of solidified concrete. It was pretty obvious their father hadn’t been taking care of business for some time. They started dragging boxes to the bulkhead door.

  After the customer left, their father came downstairs. They filled the trunk and the backseat with boxes, then drove to the junkyard. Charlie met them at the gate. “Better’n a cane,” he said of the rusted grocery cart he was pushing. His hair was matted and he smelled of stale urine, but he was delighted by the arriving junk.

  “Just pile it all up, and I’ll go through it later,” he directed, pointing to the barn. He leaned on the cart handle while they unloaded the car. When something caught his eye, he’d fish it out of the box and drop it into his cart. “Brackets’ll go fast,” he said. “Anything wrought iron.” The front of his shirt was stained with food and his long fingernails were dirty. He started to cough, the deep rumble in his chest doubling him over the cart. He began to wheeze, unable to catch his breath.

  “C’mon, Charlie, let’s go in the house.” Her father held his arm and guided him slowly inside.

  Unloading the rest of the car went faster without Charlie picking through every single box. When they’d finished, her father still hadn’t come out so they scurried up into the dark loft and stood staring at the bare cot, the sag of its body contour, deep, as if someone had only just risen from it.

  “You think he’ll ever come back?” Henry asked.

  “Maybe,” she said, and then her father was calling from the bottom of the stairs.

  He drove home very fast. All he said was that Charlie wasn’t doing well. Soon after they arrived, her mother and Ruth rushed out to take Charlie to the emergency room. In the time they were gone, almost two hours, Nellie’s father cooked hot dogs and beans and canned brown bread for dinner. They had just started eating when Lazlo came next door.

  “Sit down, I’ll get a plate,” her father said, already taking flatware from the drawer. Lazlo said he had to show them something. He stood over the table grinning with his hands behind his back.

  “You won, didn’t you?” her father said, and Lazlo held up his blue ribbon. First prize. They burst into applause, then passed it around the table.

  “And!” Lazlo said, sitting down. “Some lady from New York and her husband want to buy it! A thousand dollars, can you believe it! And it’s all because of you,” he said to Henry.

  “And Nellie,” her brother said, which gave her that hollow feeling she often had lately when the happiness around her seemed more the absence of something than a presence.

  The judges’ unanimous choice had been the tree house painting, and tomorrow there would even be a picture of it in the paper, Lazlo told them as he spooned the dark syrupy beans onto his plate.

  “It’s about time,” her father said. “Some good news. Finally.”

  IT WOULD BE another hour before her mother and Ruth came home. Hearing about Charlie made Nellie sad. He’d been admitted to the hospital. Chest X-rays showed a large mass on both lungs. For now, they were telling him it was pneumonia, which her mother said was kind of true. Tomorrow they’d know more and could better explain it to him.

  “He was so strangely calm,” her mother said. “As if he already knows.”

  “He probably does,” Nellie’s father said.

  “Poor Charlie,” Ruth said, teary-eyed again. “He just looked so small, the sheets up to his chin.”

  “He’s never been very big, hon,” her mother said, patting her hand again.

  “He thinks he is, though,” Nellie said, then with everyone staring at her, she tried to explain that she wasn’t being disrespectful. All she meant was that he never backed down from anybody or anything no matter what they thought or said, “Kind of like in the manual, what Major Fairbairn says. How just a little exertion and you can make even the strongest, most powerful prisoner obey you. It’s like this strike force—boom boom, you just …” Her jabbing fists dropped and her voice trailed off.

  “That’s random,” Ruth said, shaking her head, wide-eyed.

  NELLIE WAS IN bed when the phone rang downstairs. She heard her mother’s and father’s voices. The hospital, she assumed, then was relieved when the house fell quiet again. She’d been reading a book from the school library, The Light in the Forest. John Butler had been four years old when the Lenni Lenape Indians stole him from his white family, renamed him True Son, and raised him as their own. If Ruth did go to Australia, maybe her real father would give her another name, maybe one from his family, his mother’s or grandmother’s. Or maybe some kind of strange Australian name, she mused, staring up at the ceiling’s hairline cracks, like rays in the plaster streaming out from the old brass light fixture. If she did go, Nellie knew she’d never come back, and then what would happen here, to all of them? Well, one thing, with the third floor empty, she could move up there, but she’d keep her sister’s room exactly as she’d left it.

  Her eyes were starting to close when there was a knock on the door. Both in their bathrobes, her mother and father
came into the room. They knew it was late, they whispered, but they had to talk to her. Her whole body stiffened. Charlie—she could tell.

  “Oh, Nellie, my sweet little girl,” her mother said, sitting on one side of the bed. Her father sat down on the other. Her mother kept shaking her head. “I blame myself. I should’ve just let that apartment sit empty. That was the beginning. From that point on, everything’s just been a mess. The whole summer, it’s just been so crazy.” She took Nellie’s hands in hers. “And then the trial, we never should’ve let you do that.”

  “Well, what choice did we have, Sandy? I mean …” her father said softly.

  “We should’ve had her talk to someone.”

  “Well, it was going to happen, regardless.”

  “But she’s a child. Look at her, we forget she’s a little girl. She shouldn’t’ve had to have all that pressure on her. We weren’t thinking. It’s like we just threw her to the wolves. We did, didn’t we?” she said, starting to cry. She hugged Nellie, who let herself collapse into her mother. “We didn’t protect you, and now you’re paying the price.” Her mother kept stroking her back.

  Nellie still hadn’t said anything. Part of it was aching to be held and comforted and part was confusion. What was the price? Did they think something was wrong with her? That she was disturbed? Crazy?

  “The verdict just came in,” her father said, and she pulled free. One look, and she knew. “They found him guilty, hon,” he whispered.

  “That’s not fair!” she cried. “It’s not right, and you know it’s not!”

  “Shh, shh,” they kept saying, though their sadness and concern were for her, for her state of mind, her already fragile moral equilibrium. They had no doubt of Max Devaney’s guilt. Whether in rage or cold blood, he had murdered an innocent young woman, gone home to freshen up, then returned to install the hot-water tank and wipe down the crime scene, hoping to cover his tracks. Simple as that, their most compelling evidence his bloody fingerprint just inside her door. And just below it, where it had fallen to the floor, the bloodied strip of rag that had been on his hand. Everything else was insubstantial. Even the scrapings under Dolly’s broken fake nails yielded no traceable DNA. The few fingerprints they did find were unidentifiable. In that always messy apartment the killer had taken both time and care to wipe off practically every surface. And he’d used one of the bigger pieces of that same green-and-white striped cloth from their ragbag in the cellar.

 

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