Lost Stars (20 page)

“What?” I screwed up the courage to look at him.

“I like crazy chicks.”

I sort of laugh-cried and accidentally spit on myself and said, “Oh, crap,” and waved my hand in front of my face as if trying to erase the spitting moment and then I was embarrassed about that, too, and I put my hands over my ears and then on my legs—​I just couldn't stop moving them.

“Here,” Dean said, grabbing my left hand and putting it on his thigh, the rough jeans, the knee bone beneath it. And he put his hand over it and kept it there. But his mouth was set in a dangerous shape. Maybe that was the look he got when he was retreating, even as he sat there next to me.

Dean pulled up in front of our house. Rosie got out and stood on the porch, waiting for me to follow her.

“Do you want me to go in with you?” he asked, but I got the feeling he didn't want to. I stayed in the front seat, not wanting to leave the perfect retreat of his car.

“No,” I said finally, popping the door open. “Listen, if I don't come out alive—”

“Carrie—” He grabbed my wrist. I waited, still, terrified, eager, everything all at once. He leaned into me, his face so close to mine.

“Yeah?”

He looked at me for what felt like a long time. And then he said, “Nothing.”

That summed it up. Nothing. I handed him back his rugby shirt. I was calm now, but the whole chemical compound seemed to have shifted between us. The visit with my mother already seemed to have happened days, weeks ago. I may never have gotten my mother back, and I may never have gotten Dean, but at least I had my telescope.

“Where have you two been?” my father asked.
Did he ever leave that chair anymore? He looked as haggard as my mom, though he didn't sound angry—​maybe because Rosie was gone too, he was worried instead of pissed.

“We went to see Mom,” Rosie said, as if it were an everyday occurrence. Sometimes I liked Rosie. Now was one of those times. She headed toward the stairs with the stand, while I held the heavy metal body of the telescope in my arms. “We took back Carrie's telescope.”

All he could muster was “I see that.” He stood up and began to walk toward me and I instinctively moved back, toward the stairs.

“Before you ground me, don't bother,” I said. “I'm getting my things. I'm leaving.” Weirdly, I didn't sound mad, either. It seemed like we had just come to the end of the line. I'd move into Soo's after she left for school in three weeks, then come back for my telescope. Or I'd hide in Mrs. Richmond's basement. Or I'd follow Dean back to Oregon, where someday, after four thousand hours of driving around in his car, we'd kiss. “You don't need to worry about me anymore.”

I started up the stairs with parts of my telescope tucked under my arm, heading toward my room. Or at least I tried to, but it was all so heavy and my back still hurt and my fingernail was still bruised and my already-healed hands still had that tender layer of new pink skin. Rosie had already ascended and passed out on her bed, but I was stuck down there at the bottom of the stairs, the victim of gravity.

“Don't,” my father said. “Please.”

“Don't what?”

“Don't leave.”

“Why?” I said from the third stair. “Don't you want to get rid of me?”

My father furrowed his brows and opened his mouth, somehow stunned at my question. “Get rid of you? Is that what you think I want?”

I nodded.

“No, no. Carrie. I love you, and I want you to be okay, and so far you're not.”

“I am okay,” I whispered. “I am.”

“I love you,” my dad said again, and I hated him for saying it, because his hating me had been the fuel that kept me running. “I already lost one daughter. I can't bear to lose another.”

It was too much for me to hear. I'd always figured that his stinging rejection came from his sense that, if it weren't for me fleeing and Ginny racing after me, he'd still have his pride and joy, her shiny hair and beautiful eyes, her weird genius for remembering the half-lives of every element on the periodic table even though she got C's in chemistry by the very end. But maybe not. Maybe he really didn't know.

I felt like I needed to flee. I needed to be alone in my room with the telescope, me and my old metal friend, and I tried to stand and haul it up, haul it away from my father and his terrible sadness and love, but it was just too heavy. It was all just too heavy.

“Can I help you with that?” he asked me, gesturing toward my telescope.

“Um. I don't know. What are you going to do with it?”

He said, “I'm going to set it up so we can look for the comet.”

And that is how, at the end of the longest night I'd ever had that didn't involve tremendous amounts of alcohol and drugs, I came to be sitting on Ginny's old carpet with my father, who, for almost two years now, had been my biggest nemesis. Before Ginny died, Soo had decorated the room in a kind of Hollywood glamour look: coral colored walls and black and white bedding and a fluffy white rug, Christmas lights strung around the window; all of it was perfectly preserved. Her room had windows on three sides and skylights. It had always been the best for stargazing, but none of us ever went in it.

“I need to tell you what happened that night,” he said.

“I don't know if you do.”

But he pressed on. “Ginger heard us fighting, your mom and I. You must have heard us too.”

“I don't know,” I said. “I can't remember anything else about that night.”

“I mean in general. You must have heard us fighting.”

I shook my head, turning the handle of the screwdriver in my fingers. “I thought we were, you know, a happy family. We weren't?”

“Your mom and I weren't happy, no.”

I digested this information, tried to fit this piece into the puzzle of our family history.

“What about all those hiking trips to the Catskills? All those trips into the city to the planetarium? You guys weren't happy?”

He put the smaller parts of the telescope in a line on the rug. “Of course we had happy times. Of course. It just kind of . . . it just kind of went sour, past its expiration date.”

“Your marriage is not food, Dad.”

“No, I know. I just wasn't sure we could resurrect it.”

“What does this have to do with Ginny?”

“She heard us that night,” he said, his voice catching. “She heard us fighting. It was a bad fight.”

“What does that mean—​a bad fight?”

“It means . . . it means . . . It's hard for me to say.”

“Just say it.” I said. “Get it over with.”

He couldn't look at me. Instead he screwed the alt-azimuth mount to the base of the lens. “You have to ask your mother,” he said. “She has to be the one to tell you.”

“This is the world's most unsatisfying conversation,” I said, though in some ways, I was relieved. If it was that awful, maybe I didn't want to know.

“We had this terrible fight, and Ginger walked right into the middle of it, and she ran out of the house and took the keys to the car so we couldn't even go after her. That's why Pablo had to drive us to the police station.”

I shook my head at this. “You think that's why she died? You think that's why she drove your car seventy-five miles an hour down the Avenue of the Pines and crashed into a tree?”

“I think that had something to do with it, yes,” my father said quietly. “Maybe not the fight. Maybe it was because we pretended that we didn't know what Ginny would do after she got in that car.”

He was absolving me in that moment—​offering me the chance to let myself off the hook, or at least to take my secret with me to the grave. But I couldn't. I couldn't let him walk around thinking it was him when it was me. He had his hands in his lap now, and he was staring at them, his right thumb and index finger stroking the left ring finger, still optimistically encircled in a gold band.

“You didn't know,” I said. “But I did.”

His hands stopped. He looked up.

“I was there,” I said, and I was whispering, but I had never said this before to anyone anywhere—​not the therapist and not Dean and not Soo. No one.

Now I told my father about sneaking out and peeking in the window of the observatory and seeing her, bending her head over that rolled-up bill, snorting and drinking and tipping her head back and laughing with her mouth wide open, but maybe crying too. She was a mess, a real live mess.

“I saw Ginny doing that, and I didn't know what it was, but I knew it was bad,” I told him. “And right then Ginny looked up and saw me and saw that I'd seen her, and she called out my name, but I just hid in the woods until she got in the car, and then I got on my bike and rode away. I rode home. She came after me, but I just came home and went to sleep. I didn't stop her. And then—” All emotion lifted out of my body, as if it had been carried away by a helium balloon. “She died.”

He was quiet for a long moment, that terrible hard quiet of a therapist waiting for the patient to speak. But it was he who broke the silence.

“Where was I?” he asked. It seemed very difficult for him to form actual words. They seemed to come choking out of his mouth.

“You were upstairs, I think.”

“And where was Mom?”

I swallowed. “I don't know.”

“Right. Because we were here. Because our daughter had stolen our car, and we weren't smart enough to borrow a car and go after her or call the police. Because I listened to your mother, even agreed with her, when she said,
Lay off—​she's just a teenager. Let's let her be. Let's choose to trust her.
We had never admitted to each other that we knew what Ginny and her friends did. We just pretended that she didn't drink and take drugs and do god knows what with her boyfriends. Sometimes I still pretend that, because if I pretend I didn't know, then it's not my fault. So we pretended. And we did nothing. And she died.”

He reached out and squeezed my shoulder for a second, as if he'd temporarily forgotten that I was the worst screwup in our family history. Or, well—​maybe not.

“You're no more to blame for her death than any of us,” he said. “She was upset, and she was on drugs, and she had the car, and all those parts of the equation added up to that terrible sum,” he said. “Elements combine, explosions happen. You of all people know that. You and Isaac Newton and Dmitri Alexandrov.”

I shrugged and looked at the floor. I wanted to tell him that he wasn't to blame either, but his temporary kindness was so foreign that I had to keep my eyes down. Then I just said, “Okay,” and he said, “Okay,” and the telescope was done.

Even though I'd gone to bed at two a.m., I slept better that night than I had in weeks: undrugged, with at least a hint of peace in our household. It rained softly in the early dawn, and I thought as I stirred that Dean was throwing pebbles at my window, but it was just the sound of droplets pecking at the glass. I looked over at Mrs. Richmond's house, willing Dean to make his way out, willing him to be here for his favorite part of the day, the arrival of hope, but the windows over there stayed dark.

In the morning I slipped on my fanny pack and painter's pants and put my hardhat on the bike and tied up my shitkickers, and I didn't even hate them. At least, I didn't hate them as much.

“I'm off,” I said to Rosie and my dad, who were reading the newspaper and eating raisin English muffins in the kitchen. I wasn't entirely sure how to speak to them like a normal human being, or if the events of last night meant that we were now on normal human being terms.

“Have a good day,” my father said.

“Break a leg,” said Rosie.

“I'm not acting in a play,” I told her.

“Break a footbridge, then.”

“That's also not the intended purpose of my day.”

“Build a footbridge,” she said again, turning to the science section of the paper.

“Okay,” I said. “That I can do.”

Everyone stared, slack jawed, as I arrived at work. I tried to pretend that this was a regular day, that the previous day's antics were all figments of their imaginations.

“So, Carrie, to what do we owe this honor?” Lynn asked. Was it possible to ignore him, pretend he wasn't standing there munching on his customary carrots? He seemed neither friendly nor angry, though I couldn't really hear that well behind my headphones. “Carrie?” He tapped on my headphones, and I pushed them back until they were draped around my neck.

“Um, I humbly ask for permission to wear my hardhat and toil for minimum wage,” I said. “Completely voluntarily and not because I'm unemployable.”

Lynn slanted his eyes and scrunched up his mouth, considering.

“Please,” I said. “Can I come back to work? I need some jewelweed.” I showed him the scrape I'd gotten from scaling the stone observatory walls.

“Okay,” Lynn said, screwing up his lips, furrowing his brows. He was clearly disappointed to see me, but something—​fatigue or the soft heart of a therapist type—​told him to let me stay. “As long as you've got the right-sized hardhat.” He didn't smile at me, just nodded and said, “Give me back my pen.” I reached into my bag and gave it to him.

Then there was silent toiling, interrupted by the occasional grunt, and Tonya put on her Walkman, and I put on mine and listened to the Bee Gees sing “To Love Somebody” and I felt kind of okayish. And okayish was strange, but I could handle it.

After work, as I was affixing my hardhat to the back of my bike, Tonya walked by.

“For the record, disco does not suck,” she said to me. “You like disco, Carrie.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I could hear you listening to it on your Walkman. The Bee Gees do not suck.”