Follow the Stars Home

by Luanne Rice

  “I love you, Julia,” Dianne said. “Don’t be scared, okay?”

  Dianne didn’t say any more. She knew she couldn’t make Julia understand with words. Pointing at the crashing surf with one hand, she gently pressed Julia’s belly with the other again. It’s all the same. It’s all the same thing. Don’t be afraid of a little storm inside. Don’t be afraid, my love.

  Alan’s office overlooked the harbor. Dianne wondered whether he was up there now, seeing her truck out his window. It made her feel better-yet nervous, and crazy, all at once-to think he was.

  She didn’t want to think about why, but she couldn’t stop remembering how easily she had rested her head on his shoulder the previous night. He had held her tight, and she’d felt desire starting to grow. Thinking about his muscles, feeling his strong arms around her, knowing that they had once wanted each other. They had kissed once, a million years ago.

  She stared up at his office. Was that him, standing in the window? She saw a figure silhouetted in the glass, staring down. It had to be. She felt flushed, as if he had caught her watching him. Sliding down in her seat, she felt her heart beating hard. All these years of angst, and she felt it still.

  “That’s Uncle Alan up there,” Dianne said.

  “Daaaa,” Julia said, waving her hands.

  Dianne looked across the boatyards. There was the oyster shack where she’d lived with Tim. Where they had conceived Julia. What had Dianne been thinking? Life with Alan would have been too easy, too comfortable and predictable? She had had to choose his brother, the scoundrel with scars and a broken tooth, just to prove that she was super-woman? That she could love Tim McIntosh into staying home, into mental health?

  There was Alan standing by his window. It looked as if he were on the phone, staring over the water. He was tall and strong; he filled the window. Standing there, not moving or walking away, she sensed his amazing focus. Dianne couldn’t stop staring up at him.

  “Dlaaaa,” Julia said. She sounded distressed, as if she was hungry or wet. The fussing got worse, and she started to cry.

  “Okay, honey,” Dianne said calmly. “We’re going home.”

  Dianne felt so overwhelmed with reality. Glancing up at Alan, she wanted him to see them and come down. She needed someone to hold her, tell her everything would be okay, she was doing a good job. Thinking again of Alan’s arms around her, she nearly broke down. She felt deserted right then. In the shadow of Alan’s office, within sight of the old oyster shack, Dianne closed her eyes and held Julia’s hand.

  Alan stood at his window, finishing up a phone call. Was that Dianne’s truck down by the wharf? What was she doing here in the pouring rain? If he told Martha to stall his patients, hold his calls, he could grab a jacket and see what was going on. But just as he decided to head out, Dianne drove away.

  Alan was having a busy day. A three-year-old patient had swallowed some Monopoly houses, and Alan had spent the morning trying to determine how many. One? Thirteen? The frantic mother had walked in just as her son was popping one into his mouth. He got down another before she’d stopped him. X rays revealed three, so Alan had put the family on stool watch and sent them home. Now he picked up the phone on his desk and dialed a number in Nova Scotia.

  “Yeah?” came the voice. It was low and gravelly, the voice of a cartoon bad man.

  “That’s nice,” Alan said. “This could be the International Dolphin Council wanting to throw you research money, and you’d scare them right off.”

  “I got their money already. Why should I kiss their asses again? Trouble with you doctors is, you put too much emphasis on bedside manner. Waste of everyone’s time, in my opinion. Not that you asked.”

  “Hi, Malachy.”

  “Hi, Alan. To what do I owe the honor?”

  “Honor?”

  “Sure. Busy young doctor like yourself calling me.”

  Alan pictured Malachy in his wheelhouse. Since retiring from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, he had started his own operation in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. He lived and worked on an old tugboat, recording marine mammals to study the ways they communicated. Strange work for a guy whose own communication skills were shaky at best.

  “What’s it like up there?” Alan asked.

  “Clear and fine. You coming up?”

  “Too much work to do.”

  “I’ve got a great idea. Make all the sick kids better fast. Give yourself till Christmas. Then you can quit doctoring, come up to Canada, and listen to whales all day. I could use you.”

  “Sounds tempting,” Alan said.

  “So what’s holding you back? Stick a sign on your office door, tell ′em all good riddance, and come on up.”

  “Good riddance,” Alan said, trying out the phrase as he stared at his wall of pictures-infants and children, his patients, all smiling out at him.

  “What’s the SMB gonna do?” Malachy asked. “That’s my only concern.”

  “The SMB …” Alan said.

  “Yeah … All those chicken pot pies are gonna go to waste. Those chocolate layer cakes and pullover sweaters.”

  “You should be so lucky,” Alan said.

  “They steer clear of me,” Malachy said. “The lovely ladies of Nova Scotia. One wife was enough for my lifetime.”

  “Could be the skull and crossbones you’ve got on your door,” Alan said. “Or the way you answer your phone.”

  “Quit picking on old coots,” Malachy said, “and get to the point. I was out six hours with the hydrophones last night, and I’ve got two reels left to listen to. What’s going on? Kids got you down?”

  “They eat their toys.”

  “Ehhh,” Malachy chuckled. “Mine ate a starfish once. He survived. What else is bothering you?”

  “My niece,” Alan said, staring at Julia’s folder.

  “Tim’s girl?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “She’s eleven years old now. More wrong with her than right, Mal, and it’s been that way since the beginning.”

  “I know, you think I don’t remember the soap opera? What’s different?” Malachy asked, all the abrasion gone from his voice.

  “Why do you ask that?” Alan said.

  “You’ve been standing by for eleven years-something’s got you churned up all of a sudden. What is it, she’s taking a turn for the worse?”

  Alan stared out the window. “Not yet.”

  “But she will?”

  “Yeah. You hear from Tim?”

  “I hesitate talking to him about you, just as I’m slow to talk to you about him. You know? Might cause trouble. What does her mother say?”

  “She knows the facts, but she doesn’t want to see them exactly. She’s—”

  “Don’t say ‘in denial,’” Malachy growled.

  “I won’t,” Alan said. His mentor had taught him to avoid jargon, to never trivialize situations with catchphrases that sounded like they belonged in magazine articles. “But that’s the idea.”

  “Look,” Malachy said. “You’re the best pediatrician spit out of Harvard in the last twenty years. Bar none. You’re doing everything for that child … she’s in good hands. That’s all you can offer.”

  “Seems like there should be more,” Alan said.

  “I told you way back when, it’s easier being an oceanographer,” Malachy said, his voice almost soft.

  “Yeah, and sometimes I wish I listened,” Alan said.

  “How’s she doing?”

  “Julia? I told you, she—”

  “No, the mother. Dianne.”

  Alan felt very cold. His heart was beating fast, and he felt it in his throat. “Is that you asking, or someone else? Is he up there with you?”

  “It’s me asking.”

  “She’s good,” Alan said, realizing that Malachy hadn’t answered his second question. “She’s very good.”

  “Glad to hear it,” Malachy said. “It was never her fault.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Al
an said, feeling an old anger grab hold. “It never was.”

  “Lousy thing, one brother stealing the girlfriend of the other.”

  “She wasn’t my girlfriend,” Alan said. “We had only that one date.”

  “That might be what you told yourself, but it wasn’t how you felt. You should’ve spoken up when you had the chance. You tried to keep the peace, and now you’re paying the price.”

  “Huh,” Alan said, staring at the rough harbor.

  “You all right, Alan?”

  “I want to settle this,” he said.

  “Settle with Tim, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s about time,” Malachy said. “No use poisoning yourself, holding everything inside.”

  “So much for keeping the peace,” Alan said.

  “What was so peaceful about it?” Malachy asked. “I’d like to know.”

  “I get your point, Mal,” Alan said. “So, if you see Tim, if he just happens to pull up to your dock, will you give him a message? Tell him I want to talk to him. Right away.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open,” Malachy Condon said.

  Buddy walked in from the rain, drenched and swearing. Sitting on the floor by the puppy’s cage, reading Anne of Green Gables and watching TV, Amy ignored him. She heard him slamming around in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboards much louder than necessary. If there was one thing Amy had learned from her afternoons with Julia and Dianne, it was that positive attitudes were far superior in all ways to negative ones.

  Let him swear, let him rage, Amy thought as she struggled to concentrate on the book Dianne had given her. She tried adopting the same approach to Buddy that was working so well with David Bagwell: feeling sorry for him. Anyone that mean was pretty pathetic, a very sorry human being. But as Buddy moved toward her mother’s door, the sympathetic approach flew out the window.

  “Don’t go in there,” Amy said.

  “Excuse me?” Buddy asked, one hand on the doorknob.

  “I said”-Amy swallowed-“leave my mother alone.”

  “I’m not going to be told what I can and can’t do in my own home,” he said. “Not by you, not by your mother.”

  “We live here too,” Amy said. Her heart was thumping again. For courage, she tried to bring Dianne’s face to mind. But she was too lost in the monster maze for it to help.

  “Shut up, Amy,” he said. “You might try turning off the TV while you read. Your last report card was nothing to write home about.”

  Amy’s report card was her second sorest subject after the fact that her mother spent most days in bed. Feeling herself shrivel up like a salt-sprinkled slug, Amy made herself stare at Buddy. “You hurt Mommy,” she said.

  “What’d you say?”

  “You hurt her,” Amy said. “I saw.”

  “Leave fights to the grown-ups,” Buddy said. “You don’t understand nothing about it.”

  “Anything about it,” Amy said. “Not nothing.”

  “Wise mouth, just like your mother. She’s a show-off bitch, so why should you be—”

  Amy’s eyes filled with tears. How could some rat like Buddy say that about her mother? How could her mother stay under the same roof as him-and keep Amy there with her? Before she knew it, she was on her feet, flying across the room.

  “Don’t say that about her.”

  “You heard her last night, singing ‘You’ve Got a Friend’ like she has a voice. Stupid, that’s what she was. Karaoke night without a stage.”

  “That’s her and my father’s song!” Amy yelled, staring up at him.

  By the stunned look on Buddy’s face, Amy could see that he hadn’t known. He grabbed Amy’s arm and twisted it. His ugly face came to a point, his lips and eyebrows and cheeks meeting at the end of his nose.

  “You wanna rub my face in it?” he asked. “Then let’s see how you like it.”

  Buddy had never been rough with her before. He yanked her arm, pulling her across the room. Amy screamed, but all Buddy did was throw her down while he opened the puppy’s cage. Cowering in back, the puppy’s eyes were wide with terror. Buddy tore him out of the cage, flinging him across the room.

  “Buddy, please,” came Amy’s mother’s voice. It was weak and thin, full of fear and panic. “Leave her—”

  “Rub your nose in it,” Buddy said, jamming Amy’s face down into the puppy’s newspapers. “See how you like it, little smart-ass.”

  Amy’s mother was screaming, tugging at Buddy’s arm, and Amy was gagging and crying. The smell choked her, stinging her eyes and the back of her throat. The puppy, in his terror, must have squatted on the carpet, because the next thing Amy knew, Buddy had let go of her neck and was kicking the dog.

  “Goddamn son of a bitch,” he bellowed. “Stupid fucking animal. You no-good, mangy mutt-get me a sack. Get me a sack right now.”

  Amy’s mother ran into the kitchen after him. Amy’s face was wet with tears and barf and puppy pee. Her mother was begging him to calm down, Buddy was knocking things over in his rage to make a sack materialize from deep in the utility closet. Amy had no doubt that he intended to drown the dog, and that made her head clear in a hurry.

  The puppy had run under the bed. Following him into her mother’s room, Amy didn’t hesitate. Buddy, for all his vileness, had given her an idea. She yanked a spit-yellowed pillowcase off one of the pillows. Crawling straight under the bed, she didn’t waste time with any sweet talk. She just shoved the puppy inside.

  Then, with Buddy knocking things left and right in the kitchen closet, cursing out all women, Amy’s father, James Taylor, and the weak-bladdered puppy, Amy ran out of the house. The puppy tussled in the sack, scared half to death.

  “Going somewhere better,” she promised the puppy as he bumped against her back. “Somewhere much, much better.”

  The puppy yelped and wiggled. His claws were sharp, and he tried climbing Amy as if he were a tree sloth and she were a tree. His jaws snapped in the darkness, occasionally getting her shoulder and the side of her head. In her haste she hadn’t grabbed a jacket or hat. She was barefoot-and she didn’t have real beach feet yet.

  She heard tires squealing. Buddy always peeled out when he was mad. Cutting through backyards, Amy ran two streets over. Her feet hurt, and her shoulder was bleeding from where the puppy kept biting her. She was crying but silently. She had had plenty of practice hiding her tears, and this wasn’t the time to have some neighbor deciding to drive her home.

  A car glided around the corner toward Amy. It wasn’t Buddy, because the muffler didn’t sound like a machine gun mowing down an entire village. Amy was crying so hard, she almost couldn’t see. She looked over her shoulder, past the puppy flailing in the sack. The car was a truck. It was green. It had seaport and aquarium stickers in the window.

  “Hey there, Amy,” Dianne said, grinning as she rolled down the window. “How about a lift?”

  “Help me, Dianne,” Amy wept, almost dropping the dog as she opened her arms wide. “Help us, please!”

  Dianne drove straight home. Amy sobbed the whole way. The way she looked over her shoulder made her seem like a fugitive on the run. Julia was silent. Her hands drifted questioningly in space. When they had parked the truck and unlocked the workshop door, Amy ran inside. Crazy-eyed, she stood in the middle of the room, clutching a writhing bag. Blood dripped down her upper arm.

  “Amy, what happened?” Dianne asked, approaching slowly.

  “I had to take him,” Amy said. Her feet were planted on the floor, her body was tense as a spring. She held the bag with a kind of mad purpose, like a zealot about to commit a terrorist act in the name of patriotism.

  “Take who?” Dianne asked. “Honey, you’re bleeding….”

  “Can I let him out?” Amy asked, starting to cry again. “My arms are tired.”

  “Yes-” Dianne said.

  Amy lowered the bag, which appeared to be a filthy pillowcase, and a black puppy scrambled out. He was all legs, like a young deer. The whit
es of his eyes flashed with terror. Squatting where he stood, he peed on the wood floor. Then he dashed under the daybed in the corner.

  Dianne walked straight to Amy. She approached her gingerly, unsure of what she might provoke. The child was shaking, pale, close to shock. Her lips were bluish-pink, and they opened and closed like a little fish. She stared at Dianne with helpless longing, and when Dianne opened her arms, Amy ran straight into them.

  “You’re safe,” Dianne whispered to the sobbing child, not knowing exactly what she needed to be safe from. “I promise.”

  “It’s the puppy I’m worried about,” Amy cried. “His name is Slash, but I can’t call him that. It’s an awful name. We have to think of something else. …”

  “Yes,” Dianne said, looking down at the blood, at the darkening red marks on Amy’s neck. “I agree. He’s much too sweet for Slash.”

  Helping Amy take off her shirt, she saw that the bleeding had come from where the dog had scratched and bitten her. Amy said almost frantically that it hadn’t been his fault, that he’d been scared and confused, that he hadn’t meant to hurt her. Dianne agreed that he probably hadn’t. The cuts were superficial, and she washed them gently with soap and water. But there was one mark the dog hadn’t made.

  All along Amy’s shoulder, at the crook of her neck, was a purple handprint. Dianne could see the palm mark, the four fingers on Amy’s collarbone, the thumb pressing down her back into her angel wing. There was no medicine Dianne could rub on the bruises. Staring at them made her sick to her stomach.

  “Amy, who did this to you?”

  “No one,” she said.

  “I don’t mean the bites. You have a bruise here that—”

  “I bumped my shoulder,” Amy said. “Getting the puppy out of his cage.”

  Dianne tried to breathe. Whoever had hurt her couldn’t have left more blatant evidence if he or she had tried.

  “Did someone hit you, Amy?” Dianne asked, and she found her voice shaking.

  “No!”

  “You can tell me, honey. I promise it’s okay—”

  “I’m fine,” Amy said. “It’s just the puppy. I wanted to show you the puppy.”

  After letting Dianne rock her for a few minutes, Amy became anxious. She checked under the bed for the puppy. Raising her eyes, she looked for Stella: nothing but gray ears showing in the basket. Then she looked out the window. Finally, she went to sit with Julia. Pulling her chair close to Julia’s, she put her head down on Julia’s tray. Julia’s hands formed delicate patterns in the air, as if she were trying to soothe her friend.