Light from a Distant Star (43 page)

“I knew that.”

“No, you didn’t!”

The tree house painting took up most of the backseat. She rode up front with her brother squeezed in back, close against the wide silver frame strapped firmly in place by a seat belt.

“If we crash, Henry” Lazlo called back, “your one mission is to save the painting. Got that?”

“Yes, sir,” Henry answered. “But what if I can’t? Who gets saved, me or the painting?”

“Well, thank goodness Nellie’s here. She’d have to save you while I’m rescuing my painting. Unless,” he laughed, looking back in the rearview mirror, “we have to sacrifice you for the sake of the art. And sometimes that happens.”

She looked out the window. Sacrificed—
but for the sake of what? Convenience, comfort?

“I’m more important than a painting!” Henry protested.

“Who says?” Lazlo laughed.

“I’m a person!” Henry called back.

“Who says?” Lazlo laughed.

Their sparring continued all the way to the park.
What was Max doing on this warm fall morning as he waited for the jury to decide what the rest of his life would be like?
The leaves on the trees were edged in reds and yellows. The park was already filling with people, anchoring their tent poles into the ground.
No matter what they decided, Max had been serving his sentence for a long time. Life couldn’t be that unfair, it just couldn’t
.

She and Henry helped Lazlo carry his display tent. They walked up and down the paths trying to find number fifty-six, his assigned spot. Many of the artists knew Lazlo. “That’s too bad,” a pretty young woman was telling him. Number fifty-six was on the far end, on the other side of the bandstand. Lazlo looked discouraged as they dragged the metal poles and rolled canvas to the last numbered placard. They were at the end of the longest path, next to a trash barrel.

“How about over there?” Nellie pointed to all the space in the middle of the park where vendors were setting up pizza, frozen slush, and popcorn stands. A balloon cart had just arrived.

“We can’t. There’s no numbers,” Lazlo said.

“There will be now,” she said, picking up the placard and heading toward the food vendors, but Lazlo raced after her and took it back. He’d stay where he’d been assigned. But that’s not fair, she said, and Henry agreed. Nobody was going to come down this far. Such was life, the luck of the draw, Lazlo sighed; not everybody could get the best location.

“But you got a bad one last year, too. And you didn’t sell any paintings, remember? Not one single one,” she reminded him. She knew because at the end of the day they’d helped carry them all the way back through the park to his car. She felt bad. She could tell she’d embarrassed him. But what was the point of going to all this trouble when nobody would see his paintings?

“This’ll be fine.” He worked quickly in his remote spot, lacing the canvas to the poles. They held them straight while he pounded the stakes into ground. “Plus, I’ll be in the shade here.”

Deep darkness was more like it with all the trees and bushes, but she kept quiet. It took three trips for them to carry all the paintings to Lazlo. When they were finished, he tried giving them each five dollars, but they told him they’d get in trouble if they took it. He insisted, saying not to worry—he’d take the heat for them.

When they got to the store, their father was in his office, talking on the phone. He seemed very distracted, almost as if he’d forgotten they were coming. The lights were on, but the store was empty. There were still some items left on the shelves that he hoped to clear out with the week-long going-out-of-business sale he was planning in November. He told them to wait; he had to take care of the call first. Henry asked if they could go across the street and get something to eat, but her father said to wait, just wait. He had no sooner closed the door to his office when a lady came into the store, carrying two chrome towel rods. She needed four new screws for them. Nellie said she’d get her father.

“This is the second day,” she overheard him say when she knocked on the door. He hurried out of his office. “Connie,” he greeted the woman who gave him the towel rods. She told him what she needed.

“Shouldn’t be much longer now,” she said, following him to the back of the store. “Can’t imagine they want to be doing this all weekend long.”

“Just a quick minute,” her father said, excusing himself. He opened the door to the cellar and told Nellie and Henry to go down and start filling boxes.

The harsh odor of moldy wet earth made them both sneeze. Her hands were quickly filthy. Part of the cellar had a dirt floor, which was where most of the oldest junk had been tossed. Old signs, pipes, buckets, wooden boxes of everything from rusty siphons, shelf brackets, loose nails and sheets of ceramic tiles, covered with soot and cobwebs. Henry counted sixteen water-stained bags of solidified concrete. It was pretty obvious their father hadn’t been taking care of business for some time. They started dragging boxes to the bulkhead door.

After the customer left, their father came downstairs. They filled the trunk and the backseat with boxes, then drove to the junkyard. Charlie met them at the gate. “Better’n a cane,” he said of the rusted grocery cart he was pushing. His hair was matted and he smelled of stale urine, but he was delighted by the arriving junk.

“Just pile it all up, and I’ll go through it later,” he directed, pointing to the barn. He leaned on the cart handle while they unloaded the car. When something caught his eye, he’d fish it out of the box and drop it into his cart. “Brackets’ll go fast,” he said. “Anything wrought iron.” The front of his shirt was stained with food and his long fingernails were dirty. He started to cough, the deep rumble in his chest doubling him over the cart. He began to wheeze, unable to catch his breath.

“C’mon, Charlie, let’s go in the house.” Her father held his arm and guided him slowly inside.

Unloading the rest of the car went faster without Charlie picking through every single box. When they’d finished, her father still hadn’t come out so they scurried up into the dark loft and stood staring at the bare cot, the sag of its body contour, deep, as if someone had only just risen from it.

“You think he’ll ever come back?” Henry asked.

“Maybe,” she said, and then her father was calling from the bottom of the stairs.

He drove home very fast. All he said was that Charlie wasn’t doing well. Soon after they arrived, her mother and Ruth rushed out to take Charlie to the emergency room. In the time they were gone, almost two hours, Nellie’s father cooked hot dogs and beans and canned brown bread for dinner. They had just started eating when Lazlo came next door.

“Sit down, I’ll get a plate,” her father said, already taking flatware from the drawer. Lazlo said he had to show them something. He stood over the table grinning with his hands behind his back.

“You won, didn’t you?” her father said, and Lazlo held up his blue ribbon. First prize. They burst into applause, then passed it around the table.

“And!” Lazlo said, sitting down. “Some lady from New York and her husband want to buy it! A thousand dollars, can you believe it! And it’s all because of you,” he said to Henry.

“And Nellie,” her brother said, which gave her that hollow feeling she often had lately when the happiness around her seemed more the absence of something than a presence.

The judges’ unanimous choice had been the tree house painting, and tomorrow there would even be a picture of it in the paper, Lazlo told them as he spooned the dark syrupy beans onto his plate.

“It’s about time,” her father said. “Some good news. Finally.”

I
T WOULD BE
another hour before her mother and Ruth came home. Hearing about Charlie made Nellie sad. He’d been admitted to the hospital. Chest X-rays showed a large mass on both lungs. For now, they were telling him it was pneumonia, which her mother said was kind of true. Tomorrow they’d know more and could better explain it to him.

“He was so strangely calm,” her mother said. “As if he already knows.”

“He probably does,” Nellie’s father said.

“Poor Charlie,” Ruth said, teary-eyed again. “He just looked so small, the sheets up to his chin.”

“He’s never been very big, hon,” her mother said, patting her hand again.

“He thinks he is, though,” Nellie said, then with everyone staring at her, she tried to explain that she wasn’t being disrespectful. All she meant was that he never backed down from anybody or anything no matter what they thought or said, “Kind of like in the manual, what Major Fairbairn says. How just a little exertion and you can make even the strongest, most powerful prisoner obey you. It’s like this strike force—boom boom, you just …” Her jabbing fists dropped and her voice trailed off.

“That’s random,” Ruth said, shaking her head, wide-eyed.

N
ELLIE WAS IN
bed when the phone rang downstairs. She heard her mother’s and father’s voices. The hospital, she assumed, then was relieved when the house fell quiet again. She’d been reading a book from the school library,
The Light in the Forest
. John Butler had been four years old when the Lenni Lenape Indians stole him from his white family, renamed him True Son, and raised him as their own. If Ruth did go to Australia, maybe her real father would give her another name, maybe one from his family, his mother’s or grandmother’s. Or maybe some kind of strange Australian name, she mused, staring up at the ceiling’s hairline cracks, like rays in the plaster streaming out from the old brass light fixture. If she did go, Nellie knew she’d never come back, and then what would happen here, to all of them? Well, one thing, with the third floor empty, she could move up there, but she’d keep her sister’s room exactly as she’d left it.

Her eyes were starting to close when there was a knock on the door. Both in their bathrobes, her mother and father came into the room. They knew it was late, they whispered, but they had to talk to her. Her whole body stiffened. Charlie—she could tell.

“Oh, Nellie, my sweet little girl,” her mother said, sitting on one side of the bed. Her father sat down on the other. Her mother kept shaking her head. “I blame myself. I should’ve just let that apartment sit empty. That was the beginning. From that point on, everything’s just been a mess. The whole summer, it’s just been so crazy.” She took Nellie’s hands in hers. “And then the trial, we never should’ve let you do that.”

“Well, what choice did we have, Sandy? I mean …” her father said softly.

“We should’ve had her talk to someone.”

“Well, it was going to happen, regardless.”

“But she’s a child. Look at her, we forget she’s a little girl. She shouldn’t’ve had to have all that pressure on her. We weren’t thinking. It’s like we just threw her to the wolves. We did, didn’t we?” she said, starting to cry. She hugged Nellie, who let herself collapse into her mother. “We didn’t protect you, and now you’re paying the price.” Her mother kept stroking her back.

Nellie still hadn’t said anything. Part of it was aching to be held and comforted and part was confusion. What was the price? Did they think something was wrong with her? That she was disturbed? Crazy?

“The verdict just came in,” her father said, and she pulled free. One look, and she knew. “They found him guilty, hon,” he whispered.

“That’s not fair!” she cried. “It’s not right, and you know it’s not!”

“Shh, shh,” they kept saying, though their sadness and concern were for her, for her state of mind, her already fragile moral equilibrium. They had no doubt of Max Devaney’s guilt. Whether in rage or cold blood, he had murdered an innocent young woman, gone home to freshen up, then returned to install the hot-water tank and wipe down the crime scene, hoping to cover his tracks. Simple as that, their most compelling evidence his bloody fingerprint just inside her door. And just below it, where it had fallen to the floor, the bloodied strip of rag that had been on his hand. Everything else was insubstantial. Even the scrapings under Dolly’s broken fake nails yielded no traceable DNA. The few fingerprints they did find were unidentifiable. In that always messy apartment the killer had taken both time and care to wipe off practically every surface. And he’d used one of the bigger pieces of that same green-and-white striped cloth from their ragbag in the cellar.

So Max would spend the rest of his life in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed. For the next few days she could barely eat. Charlie had terminal cancer. Her mother begged him to at least try chemo and radiation, but he didn’t see the point. He’d had a good life, he said, and wasn’t about to mess it up now. His plan was to get a little stronger,
then go back home and do what needed doing. Charlie was only getting sicker and no one wanted to hear about her troubles anymore. She was thirteen years old and it was time to think about her family.

“Care what happens to us for a change!” her mother had lashed out a few nights before when she pushed her plate away, saying that every time she thought of Max she felt sick to her stomach.

“Sandy,” her father tried to soothe her. “Some things, Nellie just needs to say, that’s all.” Which only made her mother cry.

“Come here, honey.” Her mother held out her arms. “I’m sorry. Daddy’s right,” she wept, though that didn’t mean there’d be any more talk of Max Devaney, Nellie knew. As far as her mother was concerned, he’d gotten exactly what he deserved.

Do what needed doing
, Charlie’s words had become a calming and urgent mantra.

O
VER THE NEXT
few days her father tried to answer her questions. She couldn’t understand why they hadn’t told her many of the details before the trial. That way she would have been better prepared. He was driving her to school for the third morning in a row. He thought she’d overslept again, but the truth was she didn’t want to run into anyone. He was the only person she could talk to, the only one listening, or at least with any patience. Everyone else had moved on.

“Like the rag, I wouldn’t’ve said that,” she groaned as he pulled in front of school.

“No, Nellie. Now, stop thinking like that. That was just one thing, one element among many. And besides, this was completely out of your control. It’s just something you were caught up in. And what happened, happened. Both before and after, and you have to accept it.”