Follow the Stars Home

by Luanne Rice

  Giving up for now, next he headed for Gull Point. Slowly driving down the dead end, he peered at the house, the homestead of the witches who’d stirred this hornet’s nest up in the first place. The Robbins ladies. Mother and daughter and freak of nature. Three holier-than-thou bitches who liked to mess up other families because they were unsexed and unsatisfied. Women like that couldn’t be happy unless everyone else around was dry and alone, hating men like they did.

  Peeling out, Buddy laid rubber all the way up the road, away from Gull Point.

  Last but not least, he drove down his street. His old street, he thought, remembering the most bitter no of all: “Leave.” There was the house. A dump compared to the condo he was staying at now. A royal dump. But Buddy was ready to sacrifice. He’d give up his bachelor luxuries-a fridge full of Mol-son, premium cable, Penthouse in the bathroom-to return to his rightful place, if only she’d ask him nice.

  Nice, he thought, driving slowly by. It would have to be nice. The curtains were open. He could see in the front windows, and he narrowed his eyes, hoping for a glimpse of Tess. She loved him, whether she wanted to admit it or not. They had had plenty of tender moments, their sex was wild, he knew how to treat her like a queen. Sure, his temper got the better of him sometimes, but that was just his passion coming out.

  You couldn’t make it in rock and roll being Milquetoast. Tell that to Dr. Saint Alan. Buddy was all about fire and passion. U2, that Irish band, had nothing on Buddy. Buddy was metal, screaming with anguish and heartbreak and dying of love. Dying of love. Tell that to Dr. Nine-to-Five. Dr. Suburb, Dr. Perfect.

  Driving back the opposite way, Buddy slowed down even more. Okay, there she was. Tess was walking outside into the backyard. It was a sunny day, and she had a basket of laundry to hang on the line. Clothespins in her mouth, she hung the clothes. Amy’s shirts, her jeans, her underpants. Tess’s nightgown, her bra, her panties. Buddy’s laundry should be in there. Buddy’s laundry needed washing too.

  Parking across the street, he felt angry watching Tess hang up wash that wasn’t his. It seemed like another no, another way he was being left out. Beyond the anger, though, was love. That’s the thing not many people understood: Buddy was all about love. Buddy would die for this woman, no questions asked. He gunned his engine, just slightly. She didn’t hear.

  “Love you,” he said out loud.

  Tess pulled the line, hung another shirt. The sunlight turned her hair auburn.

  “Love you,” Buddy said again. He kept his voice low. He didn’t have to shout. That much he knew. If their connection was half of what he thought it was, he barely had to whisper.

  “Hey,” he whispered, staring at Tess, his eyes boring into her skull.

  Some cars passed by. Buddy slouched down a little. He wouldn’t want that CWS bitch catching him there. He checked his watch: two-thirty. Amy would be heading home from school. Her bus wasn’t due for twenty minutes, but Buddy didn’t want to take unnecessary risks.

  “Hey,” he said again. “Love you. See you, baby.”

  Tess brushed her hand across her ear as if chasing away a bee. Probably picking up Buddy’s vibe, but didn’t know what it was. She was okay. She was A-okay. Not beautiful, not brilliant, not the hottest woman he’d ever had. But to Buddy, Tess was all right. She was his.

  October stayed mild, and then one day snow flurries fell. One day the temperature plummeted twenty-five degrees. Amy had gone to school in overalls and a T-shirt, but when she got off the bus at Gull Point, she was freezing, running through the falling flakes to the studio. Throwing open the door, she yelled hello. Orion jumped all over her, licking her face.

  “Hey, boy,” she said, petting him. “Good dog.”

  No one but Stella and Orion were there. Amy frowned. Had she made a mistake? Usually she visited Dianne and Julia every Thursday afternoon. She missed coming more often, but she didn’t want to act like the old days, give her mother the idea that she preferred this family to her own.

  Looking up, she saw Lucinda coming across the yard. She was carrying a big bowl. White flurries danced in the wind, brushing the marsh grass and blowing along the ground.

  “Where are Dianne and Julia?” Amy asked. “Is something wrong?”

  “They’re in the house,” Lucinda said. “Julia has a cold.”

  “Just in time for winter,” Amy said, looking out the window.

  “I made popcorn,” Lucinda said, offering Amy some. “It’s a tradition Dianne and I thought of when she was a little girl-we’d make popcorn the first snow of every year.”

  “Because it’s white and fluffy?” Amy asked, munching.

  “I guess so,” Lucinda said. “Because it’s festive.”

  “Can I see Julia?” Amy asked, looking across the yard.

  “Um,” Lucinda said. Amy knew the answer was no, and that sent a knife into her heart. She felt awful, and she wasn’t sure why: Was Julia really sick? Or did Amy feel bad because she was being banished from Robbins family life?

  “How come?” she asked quietly. “Is Dianne mad at me?”

  “No,” Lucinda said. “Not at all. It’s just that Julia’s lying down upstairs, and Dianne wants her to rest. She gets so excited when she sees you.”

  “I’m her best friend,” Amy said.

  “Yes, you are,” Lucinda said. They settled down on the window seat, the bowl of popcorn between them, and Amy relaxed a little. She liked being with Lucinda. Their drive back from Canada had made them close, and Amy imagined this was what it would be like to have a grandmother.

  “Tell me about school,” Lucinda said. “What did you learn today?”

  “I wrote a poem for English class.”

  “You did? Tell me about it.”

  “It rhymes,” Amy said. She felt a little embarrassed. All the other kids were writing in free verse. Flowing diary-type things about getting shot down in love, hanging out at the beach, sad thoughts of suicide.

  “Shakespeare rhymed,” Lucinda said. “Keats rhymed. Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop.”

  “Amber made fun of me.”

  “Well, Amber …” Lucinda said as if that said it all.

  “It’s about the apple gardens,” Amy said. “Up on Prince Edward Island.”

  “Really?” Lucinda asked, sounding excited.

  “Yeah.” Amy felt in her pocket. The poem was there, folded up. She felt like bringing it out, showing it to Lucinda. But she stopped herself.

  “I’d love to see it,” Lucinda said.

  “It’s dumb,” Amy said.

  “Sometimes writing a poem or a story is easier than letting people see it,” Lucinda said. “It takes a huge amount of courage to let someone read your work. It’s like letting them look into your heart.”

  Nodding, Amy felt the paper. It was closed in her fingers. She didn’t want to hurt Lucinda’s feelings by not showing her the poem, but she was too scared to move her hand. Lucinda was exactly right in what she had said, and Amy wasn’t that brave.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to mention to you,” Lucinda said. “It’s a contest.”

  “Huh,” Amy said, squirming. She wasn’t the winning type. Amber had won the Halloween costume contest when they were in third grade, and David Bagwell had won a prize for hitting the bull’s-eye at Ocean Beach. Amy had never won anything.

  “It’s a writing contest,” Lucinda said. “Down at the library. Short stories by anyone who feels like entering. Entries have to be in by Thanksgiving; they can be about anything you want, any subject at all, no more than fifteen pages long-typewritten, double spaced.”

  “I don’t have a typewriter,” Amy said. “Or a computer.”

  “We do,” Lucinda said, gesturing toward Dianne’s desk.

  “I’m not really a writer,” Amy said, thinking of writers as rich, brainy people at the heads of their class. “I just wrote this poem….”

  “That’s what writers do,” Lucinda said. “That’s all they have to do to become writers:
write.”

  “Huh,” Amy said, feeling her poem again.

  “Apple gardens,” Lucinda said gently.

  “Like the ones we went to,” Amy said. Looking around Dianne’s studio, she gazed up at Stella’s shelf. The cat was up there, in her basket. Just below, Amy saw a shelf where Dianne kept wonderful things: a bird’s nest with eggs in it, some pebbles from the black sand beach, and the four withered apples.

  Amy remembered picking up the apples from the ground. They looked smaller now, dry husks. Their trip to Canada seemed a million years before. Life at home had started off so promising, but lately Amy had come home from school and found her mother napping. She had come here wanting to see Dianne and Julia, and she wasn’t going to be allowed.

  “See, I haven’t seen your poem,” Lucinda said. “But I’ll bet it’s wonderful.”

  “Maybe you’re just saying that,” Amy said, tears coming to her eyes. “Because you don’t want to hurt my feelings.”

  “I wouldn’t lie about a poem,” Lucinda said. “I’m a librarian, telling the truth about poetry is a rule I’ll always keep.”

  “Then why would you think—”

  “That your poem is wonderful?” Lucinda asked. “I’ll tell you why. It’s because you have your eyes wide open, Amy Brooks. You see the world real and true, and you watch its people with kindness. If you wrote a poem about an apple garden, it would be filled with your heart. I know that.”

  Amy’s eyes spilled over.

  “And any story you wrote would come from the same place.”

  “Stories are supposed to be exciting,” Amy said. “About orphans and islands and, I don’t know, families on the prairie.”

  “Or about lonely girls and beaten puppies and walks through an apple garden,” Lucinda said.

  “That sounds like me,” Amy said.

  “You are certainly worth writing about,” Lucinda said.

  Lucinda passed Amy the bowl, and the girl took another handful of popcorn. Outside, the snow flurries had stopped. The marsh looked brown and still. Amy wondered when the winter storms would come. She thought of Julia upstairs in the house, and she wondered whether her sand castle was still there.

  “Lucinda …” Amy said.

  “What, dear?”

  Amy hesitated. She didn’t know how to say she wished she could go see Julia, that she wanted to be part of their family again, as she had been during those days last summer. Why did everything have to change? Her throat ached. The four apples looked so tiny, way up there on the shelf. She had to close her eyes to catch their cidery smell, to bring back that day in the garden.

  Reaching into her pocket, her hand closed around her poem again. She handed it to Lucinda, and without trusting herself to say good-bye, Amy ran out the door toward home.

  Julia was wheezing. Her eyes were shut, her lids stuck together with yellow crust. Dianne dabbed them with a damp cotton ball. Alan said Julia probably just had a cold. Even so, Dianne felt nervous. She had known Amy was coming over that day, had been looking forward to seeing her, but she wanted to keep Julia isolated. There were so many germs floating around at school.

  “How’s your back?” her mother asked.

  “What?” Dianne asked. “Oh. It’s fine.”

  “It doesn’t look fine,” Lucinda said.

  Dianne had thrown her back out carrying Julia upstairs. She had felt the strain the last few days, but everything had been fine until she’d felt the pop-something in her lower back letting go. She had to hold herself in a strange twist, favoring the right side.

  “It’s fine, Mom,” Dianne said.

  Lucinda settled down in the rocking chair. She had her half-glasses on, and she was reading something-a letter maybe. Dianne turned back to Julia, working amber crystals off her yellow eyelashes with the cotton ball.

  “What’s that?” Dianne asked without turning around.

  “It’s a poem,” Lucinda said. “By Amy.”

  “Really?” Dianne asked, smiling. “Will you read it?”

  “Mmm,” Lucinda said, reading intently.

  “Mom?” Dianne asked, feeling Julia’s head to see if she had a fever. “Will you read Amy’s poem to us?”

  “I can’t, honey,” Lucinda said, rocking. “Amy didn’t say I could. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to ask her.”

  Dianne nodded. She felt hurt, a pang in her heart. Amy hadn’t been over much in the last few weeks, and she missed her a lot. She understood that Amy had her own mother, her own home, but that girl had added so much to Dianne’s existence. She had brought Julia to life. Made her laugh, understood her language, treated her like a best friend. If only Julia didn’t have this cold, Amy could be visiting with them now.

  “Is it good?” Dianne asked, admiring her mother’s respect for Amy’s literary privacy.

  “It’s wonderful,” Lucinda said, never taking her eyes off the single sheet of lined paper.

  Alan got to Dianne’s house late that night. He had come straight from the hospital, from doing rounds. He came whenever he could, spending every minute he could with her. Turning into her driveway, he noticed an old car parked in the dead-end turnaround. Alan walked out to the street to see who it was, and the car peeled out. Alan stood there watching the taillights, unsettled because he had glimpsed the driver, who looked like Buddy Slain.

  Lucinda stood in the kitchen, cleaning up. She smiled when Alan walked in, kissing him on the cheek. This was becoming a pattern. He didn’t live there, but he was sleeping with her daughter, and Lucinda seemed to accept it. Even was happy about it.

  “I saved you some clam chowder,” she said. “I’ll heat it right up. Salad and bread, a glass of cider …”

  “Thanks, Lucinda,” he said. “That sounds great. Listen, have you noticed anyone parking on the street lately?”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “But teenagers sometimes do. It’s a regular lovers’ lane down here some nights. The dead end, and all …”

  “That’s probably it,” Alan said, peering out the window again. The old car had had a teenage look to it, with rock band stickers on the windows and the muffler hanging by baling wire. He wished he could remember Buddy’s car, but he had never paid much attention. “Is Dianne with Julia?”

  “Yes,” Lucinda said, her lips tightening. “You’d better go on up.”

  Alan patted her shoulder. He climbed the stairs. The lights were dim, which meant Julia was asleep. Coming down the hall, he could hear her breath. It sounded loud and rattling, as if she were verging on pneumonia.

  Dianne sat stiffly in the rocking chair by Julia’s bed. She beamed at the sight of him, watched as Alan listened to Julia’s heart and lungs with his stethoscope. But when she tried to stand, to give him a kiss, she cried out.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “My back,” she said sheepishly.

  “What happened?” he asked, touching her spine.

  “Oh, I pulled something.”

  “Carrying Julia upstairs?” Alan asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Alan helped her to the twin bed where Amy had slept during the summer. Just sitting down caused her so much pain, her face twisted up. Alan eased her onto her side, then onto her stomach. He put the pillow on the floor so she could lie flat.

  “How’s her breathing?” Dianne asked, her voice muffled.

  “A little rough,” Alan said. “I brought some antibiotics for her. Lie still.”

  “Okay,” Dianne said.

  He pushed her shirt up. It was a faded blue cotton shirt with long sleeves, very soft and frayed, and as he worked it up to her shoulders and his hands slipped along the sides of her back, her skin felt smooth and warm. He began to knead her shoulders, feel along her spine. She flinched sharply.

  “Is that the spot?” he asked.

  “It hurts,” she said.

  Alan lightened his touch. He felt excited by her naked back, by the feel of her body. Leaning down, he kissed the back of her head.

&nb
sp; She moaned softly. Reaching around, she took his hand. Guiding it to her lips, she kissed the back of his hand. Gently he eased her arms down at her sides, straightening her spine. She drew in a long breath, letting him do his work. He leaned down to kiss her ear. He rubbed hard in places, soft in others. He worked on each vertebra, counting downward toward her sacrum. She sighed with pleasure. Across the room Julia’s breathing was coarse but steady.

  “That better?” he whispered into Dianne’s ear.

  “Much,” she whispered back.

  Alan nodded. The light was warm and low. He was with his family, the girls he loved. He wanted to seem calm, to help Dianne relax. She hadn’t just strained her back; she was carrying around a load of tension. But inside Alan was churned up.

  He knew that things were getting to be too much for Dianne. Julia was too big for her to be carrying up and down stairs. They needed a room on the ground floor. Things were changing this fall, and they would continue to change. Dianne sensed what they didn’t know for sure; she had begun spending almost all of her time with Julia, in the house, away from her studio and her work.

  Julia was taking the turn. Alan couldn’t see what lay ahead, but he felt it coming. He looked across the room. She lay on her side, eyes closed, body drawn into a crescent. She was as much his baby as if she’d been born his daughter instead of his niece. His throat ached with the pain of wanting to be her father, to adopt her before she died.

  “Oh, that feels so good,” Dianne murmured.

  “Good,” Alan whispered. “Just enjoy it.”

  “Mmm …” Dianne said. Her eyes were closed, face turned to the wall. Alan rubbed her back, drawing the covers up around her sides, her breasts, thinking she might be feeling cold. He wanted to take her into her bedroom, make love to her. But not tonight. Tears had come to Alan’s eyes, and he ducked his face to dry them on his shoulder. But they just came back.