Lost Stars (18 page)

“Take this,” Dean said, handing me his rugby shirt. I slid it over my head. It smelled like him, like his sweat and that lotion he used on his hands to get the grease off and something pine-ish. It just smelled so good.

“So . . .” he said. “What's the plan?”

“Oh, was there a plan? I should have made a plan. Right. A plan.”

Rosie came to life in the back seat, rubbing her eyes, then scooching forward to put her hands on the headrests of each of the front seats.

“People,” she said, “let's do this thing.”

And that's how I found myself at the imposing wooden door of the monastery, knocking lightly. I turned around to look at Dean and Rosie, waiting on the stone path a few feet behind me.

“Again,” Rosie said, and I knocked again.

“Oh, for crying out loud, let me do it,” she said, moving past me and unleashing three loud raps. When the door creaked open, a guy in an orange sort of toga thing, with wire-framed glasses and a big nose, peered from behind it. He smiled at us in a way that I'm sure was intended to be peaceful and, well, Zen, but it only made me feel disdainful. I wanted to roll my eyes so much that they'd fall right out of my head. He seemed to be waiting for us, so Rosie said, “We're looking for Betty?”

The monk's smile seemed to turn sad, but he didn't move.

“Oh, about yay big,” Rosie said, raising her hand to the height somewhere between her tall self and little tiny me. “Grayish hair, long, usually in braids or something?”

“She's our mom,” I said to Mr. Can't Stop Smiling. “She's probably never mentioned us.”

“She can't talk,” Rosie reminded me.

“Technicality,” I said.

He motioned for us to come in and installed us on a bench just inside the door. It was a wooden thing that looked like it was chopped out of a tree and crudely fashioned to ensure maximum discomfort. The inside was cold and echoey, all that stone interrupted by the occasional stained-glass window, with pictures of lambs and pastures and rivers and starry nights. The three of us seemed to have agreed to take a vow of silence too. We just sat there, hands on knees, quiet as the night, until we heard footsteps down the hall.

I let that sound grow louder and louder as it neared, but I didn't look until those familiar Birkenstock sandals came into my peripheral vision. I still didn't look up, and Dean and Rosie both stayed next to me. Her smell of patchouli wafted through the air. Then she bent down so we had to look at her, both me and Rosie, we had to. My mother was ex-beautiful; she still had those piercing green eyes and a long, straight nose, her top lip jutting slightly out above the bottom, so it looked as if she was always ready to kiss, but her whole face seemed permanently sad. She wore a flowing robe-looking thing, purple with tassels; the whole scene was
Little House on the Prairie
meets the Grateful Dead. She had always been a hippie type, but well put together, like Ginny. She had worn her hair in long braids, since it was easier to stuff behind a hairnet when she was at the restaurant where she worked; the one thing she hated about cooking was the hairnet. Now, with her hair unleashed, she looked a little bit like a crazy woman who lived in the woods. Well, yeah. That made sense.

If I'd imagined this moment at all, it included my mother's tears, thousands of hysterical tears while she flailed at our feet begging for forgiveness. But instead she had that same annoying half smile as the monk, her eyebrows tipped into the shape of concern, eyes full of questions, but I didn't see penitence anywhere. What kind of lapsed Catholic was she? She put a hand on each of our knees, then turned and smiled and nodded at Dean, as if she'd known him for ages. I didn't look at him. I didn't want to see what he was making of all this madness.

“Hi, Mom,” Rosie said, her voice like a bored teenager, disengaged. I felt sad for Rosie. She'd been abandoned too, by her sister when she was ten and now by her mother, at twelve and in the height of her awkward phase and with her too-big, rose-colored plastic glasses—​the cheapest frames at the store—​sitting hunched in the cool light in the austere monastery to which her mother had retreated without her.

My mom stood up then, and, unwillingly, my eyes followed her. Was she turning to leave? Was that it? Rosie stood too, and my mother pulled her in close. Rosie let herself be pulled but kept her arms by her side, not returning the embrace. Why did she get hugged and I didn't? Not that I wanted to be hugged.

“Mom,” I said, “what the hell? Really, what the hell?”

She put a finger to her lips and motioned with her head for us to follow her.

We walked behind her in silence, the longest five minutes of silence in the history of the universe, none of us looking at one another.

“Come inside,” my mother said finally, opening the door to the cabin as if she'd been expecting us for weeks or months. She stretched her mouth in an odd shape. “I've barely said anything in thirteen weeks,” she said. “It feels kind of funny.”

I pressed my lips and nodded, affecting, I hoped, a look of bored indifference.

“I'm so glad you came.” She was formal, more like Mr. Roarke welcoming me to Anti-Fantasy Island, or Julie, my truly terrible cruise director from
The Love Boat.

“This is Dean,” I said. I didn't know how to introduce him. My friend? My potential bandmate? The boy most likely to break my heart?

Dean nodded at her and said hi. My mother said “Welcome,” to him, that stupid serene smile on her face, her hand gesturing as if she were one of those busty ladies on
The Price Is Right,
revealing to us Showcase #1: the parallel universe of a monkette in the Catskills who had abandoned her kids.

Inside her cabin, the walls were bare wood, undecorated. There was a hot plate and a little refrigerator that hid beneath the sink, a small table and a plain wooden single bed on which sat a needlepointed pillow with the word
Bliss
in white writing on a blue background. In the corner was a portable record player and a few albums. The only thing on the fridge was a picture I'd drawn in eighth grade of a supernova, which was basically just an ice-cream-shaped rainbow, affixed with a Maylor's Funeral Home magnet.

“The funeral home gave you a
magnet?
” I asked.

She shook her head. “The world is a strange place.”

“Um, yeah, you're telling me.”

Ah, small talk. Not my thing. Apparently not Dean's, either. He decided to closely inspect the wood. I thought he was just trying to cover up his discomfort, but then he said, “This cabin has amazing tongue-in-groove woodwork,” after which his face turned red and he went back to burying his face in the carpentry.

“All the residents work on building additional cabins,” my mom said. “We learn carpentry skills while we're here.” Oh, so she was at boot camp for wayward adults. Perfect.

“So you're a resident here?” asked Rosie. “You live here now?”

“I don't know,” my mom said.

Then Rosie asked, “What does
dharma
mean?”

“There's no one translation from the Sanskrit to the English,” she said.

“Well, that's helpful,” I said.

“It has something to do with living your life right according to the cosmic laws.”

“Whatever that means, I don't think you're doing it,” I said.

“Probably not,” she said to me. “I wish I knew how to.”

Rosie sat down on the bed, pressing Beanie against her face, and Dean sat next to her. My mother and I stood. Everyone seemed to be waiting for me, but I was waiting too. I didn't know exactly what for, but I was waiting.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Well, I've been cooking,” she said. “A lot of curries, which I know you girls don't like. You prefer cheeseburgers.”

Rosie scrunched up her nose. “I'm a vegetarian now,” she told my mom.

“Is that right?”

Rosie nodded. “Except for Kentucky Fried Chicken and pepperoni pizza.”

“And TV dinners,” I said. “And those space ice cream bars you got me for my eleventh birthday, which are probably full of chicken fat or something.”

“Really?” my mom asked. She looked horrified. “You still have those?”

I shrugged. “They last for fourteen years.”

She looked at her lap and said the only thing she could muster. “I'm sorry. That's no way to eat.”

And maybe that was what I had come for. Maybe I'd just wanted her to apologize to me. She had never stuck up for me. Never challenged the therapist, never defended my honor. But here I was, on the edge of being homeless and unemployed and friendless, all before I'd even started my junior year of high school, and I needed something else.

Betty got up and put on a record—​Simon and Garfunkel's “America,” a song I loved no matter how uncool any of my contemporaries thought Simon and Garfunkel might be. It was a song my mom and dad used to sing together, their voices majestically harmonizing. They'd briefly been a folk-rock duo, thinking they could make a go of it that way before they procreated and had to pay the bills and she got into vegetarian cooking and he became a science teacher: plants and planets. Only one letter of difference, but worlds apart.

I remembered my mom singing to me in my bedroom, her cool hand on my back, the controlled tremor of her voice, clear and raspy at the same time. I could see, all at this moment, each time she'd stepped in to protect me from heartache: my first sleepover when she had to come get me in the middle of the night; the time Dana Palma scratched my left cheek; when our cat Sebastian was run over by a car—​an endless litany of moments of actual mothering. And then she was just gone. The craziest part of it, the part that was making my face red and my hands shake, was that she seemed to see absolutely nothing wrong with what she'd done.

Rosie yawned, rubbing Beanie against her face again.

My mother smiled at her. You could almost believe that the smile was genuine, that she cared. “I gave you that, Rosie. Do you remember?”

Rosie nodded, her eyes wide behind her dowdy glasses. She looked so young now—​I could see her at five, being presented with the purple hippo and clinging to it so tightly, so thrilled to have this dumb thing she had coveted. She looked five again somehow, only there was a layer of fear in her eyes as my mother spoke.

“I won it at the county fair. Tossing those rings around the old glass Coke bottles. Your father said it was rigged and I could never do it—​it was a matter of physics. But you wanted that hippo so badly that I just kept trying, and finally, I remember it was a yellow ring that landed on the bottle and I remember that little ding it made and then the three of you”—​here she choked up—​“jumped up and down and squealed, and the man took the hippo down from the hook on the ceiling and gave it to Ginger, and she handed it to you, and you were so happy.”

By now Rosie's lips were quivering and, dammit, mine were too. How could she tell this story, this story about her moment of being a good mom—​no, the best mom—​as if she weren't a monster?

“You girls,” she said, whispering and crying at the same time. “I miss you so much. I miss you every day.”

“Then why the hell don't you come back?” I asked, my voice rising now.

“I wanted to. I want to come back. I thought you didn't want me to.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” I said. “Why wouldn't we want you to?” Rosie had come to stand next to me, arms crossed, suddenly seeming much older and wiser than her years. “What are you doing here? We're falling apart without you.”

“I'm not,” Rosie said. “I'm fine.”

“Fine,” I said. “It's me, okay? I am falling apart.”

Dean hadn't said a word this whole time. I couldn't even think about him right now, about what he must be making of this whole crazy mess, of me and my self-described falling-apartness. But then he was there, standing next to me too.

The song stopped, that beautiful static of the record, and then the next one started, “Kathy's Song,” and I knew Rosie was remembering how my mom used to sing that song to us at bedtime too.
The only truth I know is you.

“What the fuck?” I said. Everyone looked at me but my mom. “What the
fuck?
”

“I was going to come up here for a weekend, maybe a week,” she said, leaning her back against the sink. “But then I just couldn't leave, not until I knew you had forgiven me. I just needed to know that I wasn't going to do harm to another daughter of mine.”

“So you decided to never talk to us again. That's not harmful.” I sort of felt relieved. Okay. That happened. The person formerly known as my mother had fully disappeared from the planet, and I would never get her back. I didn't ask what she meant by harming another daughter—​I was just so disgusted by her line of reasoning that I barely registered Dean's hand, holding mine.

“I just, I thought maybe it was more generous to leave than to screw you up, too.”

“Jesus,” I said. “You think disappearing off the face of the Earth didn't screw me up?”

“I just needed to fix myself up so I could be a decent mother,” she said.

“This is your version of decent mothering?” I yelled. “Have you heard of verbal irony? Or maybe self-delusion?”

Rosie started to cry in earnest now, and I put my other arm on her shoulder and squeezed it. I figured Dean would leave. What had he gotten himself into, this ridiculous family drama of someone he'd never even kissed? But he just held my hand tighter.

“Don't make me say it again,” my mother said in a whisper-cry.

“Say what?” I asked.

“What's in the letter.”

“What are you talking about? You are totally crazy.” I turned to Rosie and Dean and said, “Let's go,” feeling a strange shell of calm come over me. But then, as we stepped outside the cabin, I noticed it, pointed toward the sky. My father hadn't thrown it out. He hadn't hidden it from me, hadn't punished me by its removal. It was here.