Lost Stars (17 page)

“Oh, hey,” I said. I hadn't even known she knew our names.

“Hi, Mrs. Richmond,” Rosie said. “Our shower's on the fritz, so Miss Construction Worker over here is cleaning herself up. I hope that's okay.” Rosie. She should have been the oldest daughter. She was the only one with any sense or manners.

“It's fine,” she said, resting her LeSportsac bag on a table by the door. “I haven't spoken with you since the funeral.”

I couldn't think of anything to say in response. I didn't even remember talking to her there. The receiving line, the sea of people greeting us, grieving with us, was still a blur. I only remembered what happened after: Janis Joplin and the wind in my hair and the roller rink and the drugs and the strobe light and the kiss.

“How are you? How's your mother?”

“Um,” I said. “I don't know?” Even Rosie had no answer.

Mrs. Richmond must have heard every fight my father and I had ever had, heard every terrible word we'd said to each other, and now I was standing in her kitchen not even knowing how my mother was.

“Well, she has to clean herself up, and I have to get home,” Rosie said. She sort of smiled at me, and I sort of smiled back.

“Yeah,” I said. “I'm shedding dirt on your rug.”

“Upstairs and to the left,” Mrs. Richmond said. As I headed out of the room, I heard her say, “Don't worry—​I won't tell your dad.”

And like that, the world was filled with hidden angles. Rosie. Mrs. Richmond. And Dean.

Their guest bathroom was all white and had a skylight above the shower. I could have stood in there forever, under the hot spray, staring up at the sky, but then there was a polite knock at the door.

“Carrie?” Dean said quietly.

“Um, yeah?” I didn't hear anything, so I turned the water off. “Dean?” Was he going to come in? Was this how it was going to happen, while I was naked and dripping on their white bathmat, soft and plush as rabbit's fur? Well. Okay. Okay. My breath grew shallow and my face reddened, but oh. Okay.

“I have a towel for you.” The door opened a crack, and his arm came through, and I took the white towel from him and wrapped it around myself. Then I waited a breath, screwing up the courage to open the door more. But he was gone. I exhaled. Oh.

I changed into my clothes and headed for the stairs, passing what must have been his room. It was mostly bare—​he hadn't lived there long, after all—​with a blue comforter over a twin bed, a big boom box with a Sam Cooke tape next to it, and his guitar and a mini drum kit of a snare and two toms. And a book, lying face-down on his bed:
How to Forgive . . . Yourself.

When I got to Dean's car, Rosie was leaning against it, holding her Walkman and her ratty stuffed hippo that she called Beanie.

“What's up? I said thanks for the clothes, right?”

She opened the back door to the car. “I'm going too.”

I looked at Dean, but he shrugged. “Up to you,” he said.

“Why do you want to go?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“I don't know. I mean, why do you want to go?”

“Why do
you
want to go?”

I shook my head. There were so many reasons, and also none. “I guess I don't know either.”

“Please?” Rosie said. “I don't have any friends with cars.”

“Do you have any friends?” I asked, smiling. It had been weeks, maybe months, since I'd joked with Rosie.

“Yes,” she said. “At least one. Mrs. Richmond and I are tight.”

I laughed, and I felt the beginning of a slow release between us. “Okay,” I said. “You can come.”

I had to send Rosie back to the house to get one of her seed-filled envelopes with the return address of the monastery to which my mom had retreated. I stood by the car with Dean as she went around the fence and tiptoed into the house, closing the screen door oh-so-quietly.

We waited there in a silence I couldn't interpret. I wondered if Dean was turning away from me, slowly, retracting like Vira, the way it hid behind Neptune's orbit for decades at a time.

Rosie came back with Beanie still in tow and an unopened envelope that she handed to me.

“Why didn't you open them?” I asked her.

“Because you never opened yours.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Because I'm the little sister,” she said, opening the car door. “I learn everything from you.”

“Oh, I missed that part,” I said. She had already climbed into the car. I bent down to look at her. “Maybe it was all the times you called me a dumbass and said I was stupid and stuff.”

“That's part of my job as a little sister too.” She stuck out her tongue at me—​somehow she did this in a good-natured way—​and closed the door.

“Um, you guys ready?” Dean asked. He had assumed an awkwardness that was different from the way he normally was, or at least as normal as I'd known from the last four weeks. Dean took out a map and studied it against the return address on the envelope, running his fingers down the lines of highway from here to there.

“It's south,” I said. “About two hours, I think. That okay?”

“Sure. Yes,” he said. I couldn't read him. He'd gone a little robotic. Maybe it was due to the fact that I'd shown up at his work looking like a hobo. And I thought the hardhat was bad. “What do you want to listen to?”

I looked through his tapes. Among the Black Flag and Hüsker Dü and Replacements and Michael Jackson in his glove compartment were “Notorious” and “Rio.”

“Are you serious? Duran Duran?”

“They're my sister's,” he said. “No—​really, they're my sister's.”

“I like Duran Duran!” Rosie called from the back.

“Sure, sure,” I said, pushing the cassette into the car stereo. “Hungry Like the Wolf” came howling out. “It's your sister's.”

“It's torture!” he said. “Make it stop!”

“No way.” I turned it up, and Rosie and I sang along.

“When you sing it, any song sounds good,” he said.

Oh. Oh. I couldn't think of anything but
oh.

“Keep singing.”

Oh.

When the tape ended, I suddenly felt so tired. I leaned my head against the window and listened to the rumble of his sort-of-falling-apart car on the highway. Rosie, the almost-narcoleptic, had already fallen asleep in the back, her head leaning on her stuffed hippo.

“I have a question,” he said.

“You're in luck.”

“What was your sister's name?”

“Wow, you always have the least-fun questions.” I reached down to the console to leaf through the tapes again. “Her name was Ginny. Her real name was Ginger. We're all named after spices,” I said, slightly nauseated from embarrassment as I said it.

“I wondered,” he said, shifting gears. His hand brushed up against mine, and he held it there for a second, and I forgot everything that sucked in my life. He seemed to be coming in and out of focus, drifting toward me and away.

Before he could ask me anything else about her, I said, “I have a question.”

“You're in luck.”

“What did you do? What was the freak-out?”

“Oh, yeah, that.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That.”

He took a curve slowly, and for a minute we were the only car on the highway, no oncoming headlights to pierce the darkness.

“It wasn't one freak-out.”

“Okay,” I said, stretching out the
a
sound, leaving room, I hoped, for him to continue.

“It was, as my father said, ‘a cascade of bad decisions that was about to drown me.'”

“Poetic, but could you be a little more detailed, please?”

“Okay, you want to know what happened? I'll tell you.” He started driving a little faster. “I skipped school about halfway through last semester and went up to Squire Rock and got really high and drank a lot, because, come on, what else do you do when you're skipping class? And then I challenged this kid Benny to jump off the rock with me into the quarry.” He paused. “And then for months after that, I could not stop playing the movie in my head of Benny hitting the rock and landing in the water and going down and down, and me trying to grab him, and the way blood looks underwater, like a feather coming apart, you know, like dandelion seeds or something. And of Benny in the hospital with his totally useless legs for the rest of his life.”

“Oh, god. Oh, that's horrible. That's hard.” I wondered if I should talk about the physical properties of blood versus water, its higher viscosity making it flow more slowly, if somehow that would help him feel better—​if physics could make him feel better too. “Was Benny a good friend of yours?”

Dean let out one grunt of laughter, but it was a sound full of self-hatred. “Barely at all. He was kind of a fan of the band, which is probably why he agreed to do something so incredibly stupid. I was such an asshole.”

It was very hard for me to imagine this. I was pretty sure I was sitting next to the nicest human being in the world.

“So then I stopped going to class and I quit the band and I couldn't sleep and I just couldn't figure out why I should bother with anything. Like, anything. So my dad fired me—​he has an auto body shop, and I was fucking up the oil changes—​and kicked me out of the house and told me he wasn't going to pay for college until I got my shit together. I still didn't care. I just went from couch to couch and I stayed up all the time—​like, every night—​and drank until all my friends got sick of me too, and basically I didn't have anywhere else to go and I was out of money, and you know what? I might as well just tell you. I was out there in the middle of town, totally crazy, screaming, and I broke a bunch of car windows and all kinds of ridiculous shit.”

“That sounds bad,” I said. Understatement of the year.

“They called it a psychotic break.” He looked at me from the side of his eyes. “But I'm not broken anymore. Or, at least, I'm less broken.”

“Psychotic fix?” I asked.

“Psychotic repair?”

“Should that be the name of our band?”

“It's a terrible name.” He hadn't looked at me since his confession.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “Is it worse than the Psychedelic Furs?”

“Point taken,” he said. “How about the Black Holes?”

“Now, that is a great band name.”

His car shook as he sped up a little more, as if trying to zoom past all the information he'd just bestowed upon me. “So now you know.”

“Oh my god,” I said. “Dean.” My hand felt so leaden, too heavy to lift from my lap, but I managed to slip it on top of his, just for a second. “That sucks. I'm so sorry. That sucks.” What I didn't say was that I knew exactly how he felt, all those swirls of shame and anger and regret and fear, and I wanted to tell him that, to tell him that I understood and he wasn't alone and he wasn't guilty and he wasn't bad.
Maybe I should tell him now,
I thought,
make him feel better about his own mistakes
. But I still didn't want him to know about me. I was a beast and I didn't want him to know. “Would it be bad if I sang ‘Lonely in Your Nightmare' right now?”

He managed a laugh. “I think we both know that Duran Duran is never a cure.”

There were a thousand things I should have said to him, but instead I turned on the radio and searched through the few stations that made it through these dense mountains until I found a song I liked.

“Listen—​you have to change that. I hate the Smiths,” Dean said.

“You hate them?”

“Yes. Sorry. I hate them.”

“Really? You had a psychotic break, and you hate the Smiths, the band of all depressed people?”

“I wasn't depressed. I was just temporarily crazy,” he reminded me. “I refuse to endorse them.”

I sang the lyrics, about a bus crashing into us, about how great it would be to die by his side. What a heavenly way to die.

“Careful,” he said. “I'm crazy. Don't give me any ideas.”

I couldn't think of any way to tell him that I'd screwed up even worse than he had.

“Listen,” he said quietly, slowing down again. “I wound up in the psych ward, if I'm going to be totally honest. And then my aunt called.” He paused. “My rich, noncrazy, psychiatrist aunt. So this is the deal: if I can show them that I can keep it together for the whole summer, I can go back to school. I can go back.”

“Oh, the psych ward,” I said, because I didn't want to tell him that I never wanted him to go back. “You don't have to tell me about the psych ward, Dean. I know it well.”

I knew he had another question. And I had an answer. But I didn't want to give it yet, and I didn't have to. We'd arrived.

We pulled onto a dirt road next to a tiny, hand-painted sign that said
DHARMA MOUNTAIN MONASTERY
. The darkness was a cloak around us, punctuated by stars, brighter and more numerous than I'd ever seen them: sequined disco fabric in the sky.

“Holy shit,” Dean said. He peered forward so he could see from the dashboard.

“Right?”

Rosie was still asleep in the back seat. At the top of the hill was an A-shaped stone building, an ancient sort of church with a modern barnlike addition tacked on the side, with a roof that rose from the ground like a ski slope. It had windows all along the side, aglow with yellow light. All around us, tucked into the dense woods, were tiny cabins. The land was covered in gardens and flowers and benches and gazebos, all these places for, apparently, silent meditation. It was somehow both completely quiet and alive in animal sounds: a coyote's howl, an owl's hoot, the croak of crickets, nocturnal creatures scurrying through the woods.

We stopped in the parking lot and just sat there for a minute. Dean stared in front of him and I looked out the window at the buildings, the gold of the windows against the blue of the night. It looked forbidding and inviting at the same time. It was colder up here and I shivered in my short-sleeved shirt.