Lost Stars (14 page)

“No, but I meant to—”

“What is the matter with you, Carrie?” he said, standing up, revealing the full extent of his imposing frame. “You stay out all night. You take drugs. You have tantrums. You sabotage yourself by disobeying me and doing things that get you in trouble. I thought you were starting to do better, but you're making it impossible for me to trust you.” His voice was eerily calm.

“Also, she lies and she steals!” Rosie called from upstairs.

“Really. I want to know: what is wrong with you? How can you be so smart and so dumb? Honestly? Honestly, Caraway, I'm getting to the point where I don't even care. If you're going to resist every one of my attempts to help—”

“Oh my god, publicly shaming me is your attempt to help?”

Dean could probably hear me screaming, but it had happened too quickly to stop it. My father had plucked me so violently from that unusual pool of gratitude and calm I'd been swimming in. “Checking me into the hospital? Sending me to juvie boot camp?”

My father talked right over me. “If you're going to drug yourself into oblivion, I just can't help you. I can't help you anymore.”

“Drugs? What drugs?”

He took the wooden bowl I'd made in shop class all those years ago off the end table next to his chair of gloom. I had taken it from Ginny's room the night after the funeral, and I hadn't touched it other than to put her flask and her little brown bottle of coke and her still-full minis of Jäger and Bushmills in there, underneath her pile of dangly earrings. I don't know why I kept them. Some kind of proof, or punishment, something so I wouldn't forget what I'd done and what I'd seen.

My mouth hung open. “That's not mine.”

“This is going to be good,” he said. “You're going to tell me it's Rosie's?”

“It's not mine!” she called down.

I could feel the hatred coming off him in waves. For all the preciousness, her exalted place at the top of the family food chain, Ginny had been the most corrupt. She was into things—​with drugs and with boys and with stealing and with cheating—​that would have shocked my parents straight into the mental hospital. Ginger on drugs and having sex? Never. She would never. I remembered the shock, the betrayal in my parents' voices once they found out what she'd been up to that night. Even now, two years later, it was as if he couldn't admit Ginny's failings. He still wanted to believe that night was some one-time kind of thing. The evidence before him still couldn't indict her; it was only proof of what was wrong with me.

The worst part, my most grievous sin, was that I was still here—​the bad one, the one who disgusted him. The rage welled up in me—​I could beat him at the hate game—​and shook through my veins, probably the same way that coke had shaken through Ginny's body that day. It was a supergiant star, swelling to five hundred times its original size, then freezing until it burned bright red.

But my words came out flat. “How could anybody hate his own kid like that?”

“Hate you?” he said, his hands on his temples, pretending to be shocked that I'd say this previously unacknowledged truth. “Why would I be so angry, so confounded, so concerned, if I didn't love you so much? Why do you think I won't let you on the roof? I don't want you to jump off it.”

His hands were parted like that painting I'd once written a paper on,
Mater Dolorosa with Open Hands.
The painter was named Titian, otherwise known in Venice as “the Sun Amidst Small Stars.”

All I could say was “Ha.”

He sat down, defeated, shaking his head. My father had given up. He'd given up on me. I'd broken him, and he was going to let me descend into the void because there was nothing else he could do to stop me. “What is going to happen to you?”

“How the fuck should I know?” I was going to scream at him more, but when I opened my mouth, some other sound came out, as if I'd channeled a sea lion, a terrible plaintive barking.

Crap. Crying. Crap crap.

It was Ginny's. All that stuff was Ginny's. And even with the evidence neatly settled in the bowl between us, I was the bad guy. I was going to tell him that, but when I started moving my lips, all I said was, “I want my mommy.”

Quiet as a cat burglar, I crept
out my window, onto the porch roof, checking for any sign of my dad or Rosie. None. Then I heard his footsteps and crouched down.

“Carrie?” he called from inside. “Honey, are you there?”

Who you calling honey?
I wanted to ask, but I kept my mouth shut. There was no way I could slink back in the window and out of my room, walk past Rosie, and suffer my father's glare, my misdeeds all reflecting in the frame of his tortoiseshell glasses. Finally his footsteps filtered away.

I stood up on the porch roof, ready to slide down to the ground, but as I did, I saw a figure in the yard next door. It was Mrs. Richmond. I froze, hoping that would make me invisible. She was in the middle of taking the garbage out to the curb, and she'd stopped to look at me. Then she nodded, the slightest little movement of her head, and resumed dragging the trash cans.

The streetlights flickered as I rode to Soo's, my shoulders drooped in defeat beneath my backpack, which contained my wallet, my Walkman, three mix tapes, my notebook, three Fender guitar picks, my flannel shirt, and a change of underwear. My father hadn't kicked me out. He hadn't shouted ferociously for me to leave. But he'd made up his mind about me once and for all. I was a black hole of a human being. I felt as if I were dragging my whole body behind me, reluctant to pedal forward but refusing to go back.

The door creaked as I let myself into the house, where Soo's mom lay, eyes at half-mast, on the couch, her tired but pretty face in the flicker of the TV light. Johnny Carson, interviewing a Tibetan monk.

“Carrie,” she said smiling, sleepily, the only adult left in our town who appreciated my presence. On the back of their plaid couch sat an afghan, orange and brown zigzagged, which I spread over her. She sat up a bit, hand to her head as if a fire raged in there. She seemed as rickety as a grandmother. “You know what's going to happen, Carrie?” she asked. I shook my head. She was scaring me. “You're going to get old. Your face is going to droop. There's going to be all sorts of body parts sagging on you that you never thought possible.”

“Mrs. Shaughnessy—”

“Sweetie, really. I want you to know something. This is the best. This is the happiest time of your life. So drink it in. Drink it in.” She raised her glass to me, which was somehow one of the most sorrowful things I'd ever seen. “Don't forget to be happy.” And with that, she gulped her Scotch and soda and laid her head back on the couch.

The stairs creaked as I went up slowly to Soo's room. I knew what I'd find in there, but still I knocked, lightly, then louder when I had no response.

“What?” Soo called, her voice laced with annoyance.

“It's me,” I whispered.

She opened the door, naked but wrapped in her zebra-striped sheets—​this month's décor included hot pink and animal print. “Time After Time,” saddest song ever, hummed in the background.

“What happened?” she asked. Her eyes and lips were puffy and red—​the combination, I assumed, of being wasted and fooling around.

I shook my head. “I don't know. Nothing. It's just—​I can't go back there right now. I can't go back.” I tried to hold in my tears. “Can I sleep here, please?”

Soo hesitated for a moment, looking behind her and then back to me. “Justin's here,” she said, apologetically but firmly. She was good like that—​she knew how to be pretend-adult. It was probably why I'd attached myself to her, why, that week after the funeral, I'd ended up at Soo's house night after night, just watching the way she moved, the way she took care of her mother and hosted the gang of shell-shocked teenagers. She'd taken me under her wing, almost literally: wrapped her arm around my shoulders the third night after the funeral and told me, “It's okay, kid. You'll get on the other side of it. We all will.”

We were sitting in the basement, which was done up '60s style with macramé and beanbag chairs and beaded curtains back then, and everyone else was out attempting to illegally procure beer from Purdy's Liquor. It was just me and Soo, and she'd said, again, “You're going to be okay.”

But I'd shaken my head, back and forth, with such force that she couldn't keep her arm around me, try as she might. I couldn't stop, just shaking and shaking it as if that would ward off the tears, because I was terrified of the tears. If one leaked out, I'd cry forever. Finally, Soo grabbed my head in both her hands to stop me, and she stared hard at me. She wasn't trying to soothe me or calm me. She'd gone into serious mode.

“Everybody misses her,” Soo had said. “We're all scarred. We're all going to be a mess together.”

Somehow that had stopped the shaking of my voice and my head, and I breathed slower and pulled my head back from Soo's hands and looked at my lap. Then I screwed up enough courage to raise my head and look at Soo. She wasn't like Greta, the red-blond goddess, glossy and model-beautiful. Everything about her was quieter, but stronger somehow, and I knew in that moment that I had an ally. She was scarred like me, but literally—​a mean snarl of scab lined her abdomen for two months afterward. Soo and Greta had both been in the car with Ginny. They'd forced themselves into it as Ginny peeled away. They'd walked away from the crash, almost unscathed. Almost.

She liked that scab, Soo had told me. It was, in a way, all she had left of Ginny.

Now I waited, blinking, for her to offer me a sleeping bag on the floor or tell me to go down and sleep in the basement until she could come down to be with me or—​hey, better yet—​to send Justin home so I could stay. She seemed to be waiting too. For me to leave. She blinked her puffy eyes and licked her chapped lips. What had they been doing in there? Probably something totally amazing that I would never in my life experience. But, okay. I'd be a nun. A runaway nun. Too bad my parents had ditched religion long before I was born.

“I can't,” she said. “Not right now. But can I, like, get you anything? Till later?”

I couldn't look at her, couldn't understand whatever she was trying to say to me in some I'm-not-a-virgin-anymore-and-I'm-in-love code. Instead, I looked past her, into the sliver of room that she had deigned worthy of my view. Her hiking boots sat in her open closet, the same waterproof hiking boots I'd borrowed when I'd hiked with my mother in the Catskills two years ago, when my feet were a little bit smaller. Behind them was her rain slicker, hanging on a hook.

Now I screwed up the strength to meet her eyes. “Yes,” I said. “There's something you can do.”

It was a long ride to Greta's house in Soo's rain slicker and slightly-too-small hiking boots, all the way to the other side of town in the slowly increasing rain. I knew I looked like a vagabond, and I did for a while consider ditching the bike and sticking out my thumb. But for all the recklessness, I was still wary of strangers, of hitchhiking, of getting hurt, or worse. Some part of me really wanted to live, even though I wasn't sure what for.

I passed the cemetery where I'd first drunk whiskey and the playground where I'd taught our old dog Peaches to go down the slide and my old elementary school where I'd first seen Ginny smoking a cigarette while she waited for me. She often used to do that: get off the bus three stops early and stand at the entrance of the elementary school, which got out twenty minutes later than the junior high and high school. She'd lean against the wall in her leather jacket and her torn blue jeans, and smoke, her shiny hair perfectly mussed. She looked like Madonna. She really looked like Madonna. And I would emerge from the school, immersed in my mousiness, the dumb-colored brown hair and the glasses and the braces and the used L. L. Bean backpack slung over my shoulder, and I would be so proud that she was my sister, that I was attached to her.

I stopped in the middle of the street for the short break in the rain. It wasn't the comet, but the Perseids, the pre-Vira meteors, raced overhead, and I shivered. I could see just the faint spark of them in between the thickening clouds. “Ginny, are you there?” A meteor shot across the sky again. It was magical. It really was magical. “Ginny?” I waited. What was I waiting for? Did I really think she'd say something back? “Ginny. I just miss you so damn much.” I tried to muster something profound to say to her. “Everything really went to shit when you left.” But there were no more meteors. The clouds moved in again, and the whole sky went quiet.

I knocked lightly on the door, and eventually Greta answered.

“Hi, sweetie,” she said, and stepped aside to let me in as if she'd been waiting for me. “Come and sit.” She patted the couch, that same couch on which her dad had passed out. “It's okay,” she said. “He's asleep in the bedroom.” Her smile could cure cancer. “Tell me.”

I spilled it all out, about waiting incessantly for Dean to like me and about my dad's rage and Soo's rejection. She looked at her own hands, folded in her lap, while I talked. Part of me felt horribly guilty. I knew she'd had a rough time with her dad, and I knew now that she worked hard for the few lovely items of clothing she had that fit her body so perfectly. But I was drowning, and I needed a human life preserver. And Ginny wasn't there to be it. And neither was Soo.

“Carrie,” Greta said finally, “she was my friend too, you know. I was there too.”

I managed to speak with a shaky voice. “Yeah, but . . .”

“No
but.
I was there too. I was in the car, for god's sake. Soo was too. We saw it—​her. You're not the only one who's having a shitty adolescence.”