Where the Stars Still Shine (19 page)

“Mommy always makes it in a ball first,” Tucker says, as he bounces.

I ignore him, swabbing at Joe’s dirty bottom with a handful of baby wipes as Tucker informs me his mother doesn’t use that many wipes and that she always straps Joe down so he won’t roll off the table.

“Oh my God, Tucker, shut up!” I snap. “I’m not your mommy.”

He doesn’t stop bouncing, but his bottom lip pokes out and I feel bad for yelling at him as I manage to fasten the clean diaper around Joe—being careful not to put it on backward—and snap up Joe’s jeans.

“Okay, Tuck, let’s go back out and finish watching the movie, okay?” I smile at him, trying to show that
I’m not mad at him anymore, but he looks at me with wary eyes.

He bounces once more and leaps off the bed, shouting that he’s flying through Gotham City. Tucker falls as he lands, hitting his head on the corner of a wooden toy box. At first he is silent and I think he must be okay, but then he lets out a howling cry. I put Joe down and kneel beside Tucker. There’s a spot on the edge of his forehead where he made impact—red in the center with an instant bruise around it. It’s not bleeding, but it has already started to swell.

“I want Mommy,” Tucker wails, his words punctuated by gasping breaths as he tries to push me away. “I don’t want
you
. I want Mommy.”

He won’t stop asking for Phoebe, and I don’t know what to do. It looks like an ordinary bump on the head, but what if he has a concussion? What if he’s bleeding internally? I don’t want to have to call his mother and tell her I messed up, and I don’t want to call 911 if it’s really just a bump, but how can I be sure?

“Oh, God,” I whisper. “What do I do?”

Greg comes into the bedroom—like the answer to some unsaid prayer—and my brother practically throws himself across the room. In his father’s arms, his sobs reduce to sniffles.

“What’s going on?” Greg asks, pushing aside Tucker’s
hair to look at the spot. I focus on my bare feet, my face hot with shame. “What happened?”

Tucker sucks in a shuddering breath. “I bumped on the toy box.”

“What were you doing when you bumped on the toy box?” Greg holds Tucker’s face in his hand and looks first into his left eye, then the right, checking for signs of a concussion. I should have thought of that.

“Flying across Gotham City.”

“Were you jumping on the bed again?”

Tucker nods. “But Daddy—”

“Are you allowed to jump on the bed?”

“No.”

“I didn’t know,” I offer.

Greg puts Tucker down. “You’re okay, buddy. Go out to the freezer, get the bunny pack, and I’ll check on you in a couple of minutes.”

“Bunny pack!” Tucker shouts, his tears forgotten as he rushes out of the room. Joe toddles after him, leaving Greg and me alone.

“I’m so sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s not your fault, Callie,” Greg cuts me off. “It’s just a bump.”

“Yeah, but I promised Phoebe I wouldn’t let her down.”

He pulls me into a hug and kisses my forehead. “You
didn’t let her down. Tucker did. He’s not allowed to jump on the beds.”

“But—”

“Look, accidents happen all the time,” he says. “When you were … oh, maybe seven months old or so, I put your baby seat on the kitchen table. I turned my back for just a second and you rocked forward. The seat fell off the table, landing facedown—
your
face down—on the floor.” Greg rakes his hand through his hair. “When I turned you over, there was blood on your mouth and I couldn’t tell where it came from. I completely freaked out and rushed you to the emergency room, where I was sure they were going to tell me you’d suffered permanent brain damage and send me to jail. Three hundred bucks later, it turns out you tore that little flappy skin thing inside your upper lip.”

I stick my tongue in the space between my gums and my upper lip and touch that connection. “It’s called a frenulum,” I say.

Greg smiles the way I smiled when Tucker said “stalagmite.” “The point is, Cal, what happened today could have happened on anyone’s watch. Even Phoebe’s.”

“I didn’t know what to do,” I say. “If you hadn’t come home—”

“Well, it wouldn’t hurt for you to take a first-aid class so you feel more confident, but you’re a smart girl. You’d have figured out that it wasn’t serious.”

“So, did Phoebe send you to check up on me?”

Now it’s Greg’s turn to look at his feet. “Yeah, well—I’m sorry about that. She was worried, so I told her if I could get away from the office, I’d come.”

Through the open door behind him, I can see Tucker watching the movie, reciting the words along with the characters as he holds a blue rabbit-shaped ice pack against his forehead. Even though it doesn’t feel great that Phoebe and Greg didn’t completely trust me with the boys, I’m relieved my dad was here when I needed him. Again.

“No,” I say. “I’m glad you came.”

“How about we pretend I was never here?” Greg asks. “Maybe let Phoebe think you handled it all on your own?”

I smile. “Deal.”

He leaves and I return to the living room, settling on the couch with Tucker and Joe. They both fall asleep before the movie ends, Tuck slumped against my shoulder and Joe’s face snuggled into the side of my neck. I can feel his soft breath against my skin. It feels kind of … peaceful.

The ending credits are rolling when Phoebe comes home.

“Hi.” She keeps her voice soft and low so she won’t wake the boys. She peels Joe away from me, kissing his hair as she cuddles him against her. My shirt is damp
with baby sweat, but he doesn’t wake as she carries him into the bedroom.

I scoop up Tucker and put him down for a nap on his rumpled-from-jumping bed. He mutters something about wanting to watch the movie, but falls back asleep before he’s fully conscious. Phoebe lifts the side rail so he won’t roll out and gives him a kiss. These little things make it impossible for me not to like her. Her love comes out in all the tiny details and makes me long for everything I never had.

“What happened to his head?” she asks, as we walk back out into the living room.

I tell her, hoping she won’t be angry with me. Instead, she shakes her head and a tiny smile flickers across her lips. “Aside from that,” I say, “and maybe some oatmeal in Joe’s hair, everything else was fine.”

Phoebe chuckles. “If we survive Tucker’s childhood, it’ll be a miracle.” She twists her braided ring around her finger. “Anyway, I really appreciate your being here when I needed someone. Thank you. I’ve been judging you based on your mom and that’s not fair.”

“Yeah, but you don’t really know me,” I say. “So I guess it makes sense.”

“I’d like to know you. If that’s okay?”

I nod. “Sure.”

We fall into an awkward silence.

“I should, um—” I aim my thumb over my shoulder in the direction of the backyard. “Theo’s expecting me at the shop soon. I should probably get ready.”

As I head for the door, Phoebe says my name and I turn back.

“Did Greg stop by?” she asks.

I consider telling her the truth so she can feel bad for not trusting me, but I shake my head instead. She looks a little relieved as I lie. “Nope.”

“I love Christmas,” Kat says, as we loop sponge garland around a fresh evergreen decorated with multicolored starfish, plastic crustaceans, bleached sand dollars, and white lights. All along Dodecanese, the holiday decorations are going up today, as if we’ve crossed some invisible Christmas meridian, leaving regular December behind. The utility poles are ringed with strings of lights, a life-size plastic Santa stands outside the door to one of the soap shops, and even the pilings along the dock are circled by a glittering red-and-green garland. “The best part is the break from school, but I love the music, the decorations, picking out just the right gifts for people, and even the Christmas Eve services at church. You should come.”

The holidays have always been hit or miss when it
comes to my mother. Some years she’d go all out—decorating a Christmas tree, visiting Santa, and hanging stockings near the window, since we didn’t usually have a chimney. Other years—ones I now recognize as years when she was depressed—we’d have nothing at all. Once she wore her pajamas from December 24 until New Year’s Day. My holiday feast was a packet of microwavable maple- and brown-sugar oatmeal, and by the end of the week her hair was shiny with oil and she smelled so bad I couldn’t sit beside her. I didn’t mind the oatmeal so much, but I felt like a ghost whenever she looked through me as if I wasn’t even there.

The best Christmas—also the worst—was when we lived with Frank. He took us to a Christmas-tree farm out in the country, where we chopped down the biggest tree on the lot. He tied it to the roof of the car with twine, and when we got back to the house, Mom put on holiday music. We sang along with Brenda Lee as we decorated the tree, and for Christmas Eve dinner, Frank fixed baked ham and my favorite cheese potatoes. I went to bed that night buzzing with anticipation of what I’d find under the tree on Christmas morning. But when I woke up, not even the American Girl doll whose dark brown curls and brown eyes matched mine could erase the memories of what happened in the night.

We left a month later. It was sudden and immediate
because Mom was having what must have been a manic episode. I was building a snowman in the front yard when she came out of Frank’s house with our suitcases already packed. As I followed her to the car, my mittens soggy from the snow, I asked about my doll.

“We don’t have time for your stupid doll.” She slammed the trunk and snapped that I needed to get in the car before Frank came home from work because it was his car.

As we drove to the bus station, I started to cry. Mom thought it was over the doll, and she made a promise—that she never kept—to buy me a new one.

“Just like it,” she said. “Or, an even better one.”

But it wasn’t about the doll.

I was crying because I was so goddamn happy to be leaving.

“What do you want for Christmas?” Kat asks, interrupting my memories.

I want traditions. Eggnog. Peace on earth, goodwill toward man. I want to kiss Alex Kosta under the mistletoe. I want memories untarnished by ugliness. I want all of that without feeling guilty about wanting it. And I want my mom to get help—although peace on earth is probably a more realistic goal.

“I don’t know.” I stick my finger between the pincers of the plastic crab I’m holding and swing it back and
forth. “Maybe I’ll ask Santa to help me design a website, so Theo will stop asking me if I’ve finished it yet.”

Kat’s eyes roll back and she shakes her head at me. “Dude, why are you still torturing yourself over learning code? This is not something you need to know, especially when the Internet is full of do-it-yourself website builders. Google it and move on. Do you want to go Christmas shopping this weekend? We could go down to Tampa after work on Friday.”

“Okay.” I nestle the crab on one of the branches. “The idea of Christmas shopping is a little—”

“Surreal?”

“I’ve never really done it before. I mean, it was always just me and my mom, and I didn’t have enough money to buy her anything.”

Kat smiles wide. “It’s kind of exciting, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“So, beside your mom, who are you going to buy presents for this year?” She wriggles beneath the tree and plugs the cord into the outlet. As I settle the last crab into place, the lights flicker on. Our ocean-themed Christmas tree is one of the prettiest things I’ve ever seen.

“Well, you, Greg, Phoebe, Tucker, Joe, Yiayoúla, Al—” I catch myself before I say Alex’s name. “And, um, maybe something for Theo.”

Kat doesn’t seem to notice my misstep. “That’s cool,”
she says. “Maybe you can help me pick out a present for Nick. I’m totally stumped.”

“Sounds good.”

I gather up the empty decoration boxes and stack them in a corner of the back room. It’s about time for my lunch break and I’ve been thinking it might be time to try something other than hummus and Coke. When I come out, my grandma is standing in the middle of the shop, admiring the tree. She’s wearing a pair of jeans with a celery-green cardigan open at the neck to reveal her fine clavicle bones, and again it strikes me that I am a younger version of her.

She smiles when she sees me. “There’s my sweet girl. I’ve come to take you to lunch.”

“And me?” Kat makes puppy-dog eyes and tucks her hands up under her chin like paws. “I’m hungry, too.”

Yiayoúla pats her cheek. “Next time, Ekaterina. There are things I need to discuss with Callista.”

Kat shoots me a “what does that mean?” look and I answer with an “I have no idea” shrug, although I suspect my grandma wants to talk about Alex and his mom. I was hoping she’d forget, but it seems like she has a very long memory.

“Bring me back a Coke?” Kat asks, and I nod as I follow Yiayoúla out onto the street. She tucks her hand in the bend of my elbow and leads me to a narrow
restaurant that smells of char-grilled meat and olive oil. We’re seated at a table near the back and my grandma waves off menus, placing our order in Greek.

“Today we try something different. A specialty.” She folds her hands primly on the table and gives me a look loaded with questions.

“I’m not going to do it.” I don’t look at her as I unwrap my silverware. “You can tell my dad that I’ve been seeing Alex if you want, but his relationship with his mom is none of my business.”

Yiayoúla doesn’t say anything, and it feels as if the volume in the restaurant has gotten louder. In her silence I can still hear what she wants from me. I scrape the tines of my fork down the place mat, leaving score marks on the paper as I avoid her eyes. She unfolds her napkin and places it on her lap as the waitress returns with glasses of water. It all feels so heavy.

“It’s not fair,” I say, when the waitress is gone.

My grandmother’s slender shoulders rise and fall. “Life isn’t fair.”

Fury sweeps through me the way the dust storms whirled through that tiny crossroads town in New Mexico—and oh my God, I’ve forgotten its name. How could I have forgotten already? Pieces of me are falling off, getting lost.