Lost Stars (3 page)

“Good mix,” Tommy said, nodding his head, hand stroking his stubbly chin like he was appreciating Van Gogh's
The Starry Night
(as if Tommy would know what that was). Apparently Tommy was talking to me again. “Except that Hüsker Dü shit is totally screwed up.” The song was “Don't Want to Know If You Are Lonely.”

“I'm known all over town for my screwed-up-ness,” I said. Which, sadly, was true. I could feel Tommy looking at me, now that he was drunk and swaying. “And, Tommy, Hüsker Dü is rad.”

We all drank and drank and drank and then we smoked and smoked and smoked. For a long time, I put my head on the back of the couch and looked at the drop ceiling, all those little pockmarks like some kind of constellation that I couldn't quite figure out, a map I couldn't read. Every time I looked down from the ceiling, people were making out—​Soo and Justin, Tiger and Greta. Tommy studied the record covers in faux oblivion. Tommy. So not my type. Short hair, thick wrestler's body, not so smart, too into Rush. I liked them tall and skinny and long-haired and into Big Star. At least in theory I did.

Somebody passed me a joint, and I took a long hit and laid my head back again and listened to the song that was playing now, the Velvet Underground with Nico's smoky voice singing “I'll Be Your Mirror”:
Reflect what you are, in case you don't know.
The song ripped open a hole in my chest, and for a minute it was hard to breathe.

When I looked up, my vision blurring, Justin had his hand on Soo's face like they did it in old movies and they both had their eyes open and they kept stopping to look at each other and squeeze hands.

“Get a room, why don't you?” I called, my words all slurry and echoing in my own ears. Soo looked over at me, her eyes fierce. And then she left. She just left me there,
Bye-bye, baby, bye-bye.
She probably went upstairs to her bedroom, and I knew what she was doing there, something I'd never done even though I'd thought about it once last year when that nineteen-year-old boy Anton Oboieski was on top of me and I knew everyone else was doing the same thing in the rooms all around me but then he opened his eyes for a second and narrowed them at me, as if realizing only then that I wasn't Ginny. When he closed his eyes again, I pressed against his chest and said, very softly, “Sorry,” and grabbed my plaid shirt and leggings and crept out of the room, waiting with a warm, undrunk beer until the rest of them were finished. Since then, I'd let those boys do so many things to me but that one thing—​I was just saving that one thing. I was holding on to it in the hope that someday I'd want somebody and he'd want me, too. The same amount.

Now Tommy grabbed me and shoved his hand down my shirt, and I was enveloped by the whole thing, the music and the drugs and the meaningless touches. I just left my body and let it happen, let him grope and paw and lick and kiss. I let myself get erased.

It was almost five in the morning by the time I got home. Justin had come back to retrieve me, driving Soo's Le Car, and now the two of them were dropping me off as I groaned, prostrate on the back seat.

I forced myself to sit up when we got to my block. “I gotta walk from here,” I said, even though I had vertigo. I pushed the door open and hung my head between my knees.

“You drink too much,” Justin said. I waited for Soo to object but she didn't. I liked the protective shield my friends provided more than I liked alcohol, but Justin didn't know that. And besides, it was they who had introduced me to all the illegal substances I now regularly consumed. Everything was their idea.

“Yeah, I do everything too much,” I said. “This has been pointed out to me before.” The therapist had said to me,
I believe you have some kind of impulse disorder and essentially feel all of your emotions too strongly to regulate them.

To which I had replied,
Have you ever heard of the term
fuck off?

I scooted out of the car and hobbled down the street, past Mrs. Moran's and the Chins' and Missy Tester's house. One pinpoint of light shot across the sky, the beginning of the meteor showers, the preview to Vira, and then it was really quiet in that perfect small-town way, crickets and rustling leaves, and I so did not want to be alone.

I crept up alongside the fence that separated our yard from the big house's grounds, toward the back door of our house. Amid the low sound of the crickets and the occasional thrum of a car driving down Grand Street, I heard something. Someone was playing guitar, somewhere over by Mrs. Richmond's. I recognized it—​the lick from the Jam's “English Rose.” Whoever it was played all those notes almost perfectly but really quietly, so you wouldn't hear it unless you came right up close. Which I did. I walked up to the fence and stood on a metal pail to get a look, because I wasn't sure if I was making it up or not, what with my head throbbing in that terrible coming-down-from-being-wasted way, and my stomach reeling from all that watery beer.

On the front step of the big house sat a boy—​or, not a boy, but maybe a college kid—​with a beat-up Guild on his lap, picking out the notes and occasionally stopping to look up at the cornflower blue early dawn sky. He was tall and thin and had long hair, and he had on a worn blue-and-yellow-striped rugby shirt and ripped jean shorts and combat boots with the laces undone, and he was beautiful. He was just beautiful. Then I somehow kicked the pail out from under me and it clanged and the boy looked up and I swore he saw me as the light went on in my father's bedroom. I scampered inside and forgot to shut the screen door slowly and it slammed. The whole house shuddered.

I slinked up to my room. My father was standing outside my door, arms crossed, hair all spiky and bags under his eyes from interrupted sleep.

Rosie called, “You woke me up, you jerk,” from inside her room. Rosie could fall asleep almost anywhere instantly, and slept hard, so this was a rare and unwelcome event. She opened the door and threw her hands in the air. “Get yourself some help.” Then she went back into her room and collapsed on her bed.

My father didn't say anything. He just watched as I went into my room and shut the door.

I took out my
Saturday Night Fever
record, wiped it clean with the red velvety lint brush that seemed like the most luxurious thing in my life sometimes, and I placed the stylus oh-so-gently on the record and plugged in my headphones, so big and fluffy, giant leather clouds over my ears. I put the needle on track five, “If I Can't Have You.”
Don't know why, I'm surviving every lonely day . . .
I lay down on my Snoopy-in-space pillow and cried along with the beat, just cried and cried until I fell asleep.

Somehow I slept the entire day, squirming to life in my bed at four p.m. I woke up with my head throbbing, the sun bright in my window and making me squint. I breathed in and felt that tentacle-ish pain in my chest—​I almost liked that sensation, the ache of having smoked far too many cigarettes the night before. It was a kind of trophy.

Outside my room, my father waited. Had he been there all night? All morning? All day? But no. He'd clearly been out somewhere, for he stood there very calmly, holding a sea-foam-green hardhat and a brochure. I could make out the pictures: young people smiling happily in those same hardhats amid a backdrop of tall pines.

“What in god's name is that?” I asked, rubbing my knotted, bed-headed hair and fake-yawning.

He handed it over to me, placed the hard plastic right in my hands and pressed them against it.

He said, “I figured out what to do with you.”

It started in that strange, atmosphereless time
two years ago, right after Ginny died, when my father took me on what he'd termed a “special time trip.” We traveled by train up to his friend Pablo's country house in Vermont, hours of staring out the window as the trees grew thicker and the sky clearer and I thought about when we'd scattered my sister's ashes by the observatory. I kept seeing that moment over and over again: my sister as dust, gone back to nature. Occasionally on that train ride, my father would squeeze my shoulder with one hand and I'd feel my whole body soften. We barely said a word the whole time.

His friend was a nice shaggy hippie fella—​a professor of biology at the local college in our town, who studied trees and did his research up there in that dense forest. I occupied myself by sitting in front of the fire in Pablo's living room and leafing through his
Illustrated Encyclopedia of Outer Space.
I got fixated on the idea of absolute zero, the lowest possible temperature: –459.67 degrees. Why, I wondered, wasn't there an infinitely low temperature? It made me feel better, as astronomy always did: there were constants in the universe, if you knew how to look for them.

Pablo took us into the dense forest and hand-drilled into a sapling and pulled out a straw-shaped cross-section of it to show us all the rings; each ring counted for a year of the tree's life. “It's just a little bit older than your sister was,” he said. I think he meant to make me feel better, but nausea rose inside me at his words.

Before Ginny died, that was how it felt when I got upset: like I was about to throw up. Ginny used to be the one to talk me down, to stand at the door of my room and say, softly, “Caraway, take a deep breath, come here, hold my hand,” then lead me into her room and put a record on—​the Beatles, usually, because they were the ones we listened to the most as kids—​and sit with me until the red drained from my face.

It had always been bad, but after Ginny was gone, it turned into something else, something crimson and throbbing and powerful and mean, something I couldn't control. Everything that happened after that trip, the trail of burned bridges, the fights, the tantrums in the middle of the street, my banishment not just from Pablo's house but from every babysitting gig I'd ever had, and the visits to the place my father assured me would be better for me in the end—​it was bad. But it wasn't me.

He wouldn't call it boot camp. “It's a work program,” my father said as he took me to Kane's, the shoe store downtown, to get the boots I'd need for the job. Clearly this was a directive and I had no choice, but I didn't object because I wanted to be with my friends, and if this was what I had to do, okay, I would do it. Except for one really big problem: the shoes.

“I have to wear shitkickers?” I threw my hands up when I saw the ochre-colored leather work boots he'd picked out for me. “Dad!” I knew the intensity of the whine rivaled a Valley Girl, but I wasn't joking. What could be a stronger boy repellent than a hardhat and shitkickers? The
Flashdance
phase had come and gone; the national obsession with the dancer/welder had faded.

All he said was “Yes.” He used to talk to me all the time. Used to take me with him onto the roof and look through the telescope, adjusting the focus until I could see the bright lights of the nebula sparkling in the sky. Used to whistle all the time—​an old standard called “How High the Moon.” Even gave me an Ella Fitzgerald record with it on there for my collection once. Before. Now it seemed all the sound had leaked out of him; he was too deflated for words. “And you'll need to wear long-sleeved shirts. There are some of your mother's old flannel ones in her closet.”

“Great.”

For the last couple of years, since Ginny died, my dad had been keeping track of everything I did, everywhere I went. Which was nuts because up until then I'd been so careful, so scared of everything. I'd never drunk or done drugs or kissed a boy or gotten detention. I'd had these mini fits, and whenever I had fights with friends, my old friends, I'd fall onto my bed and sob and sob, but it all seemed sort of normal—​or at least a second or third cousin of normal. And then all of a sudden, I had my dad's eyes on me. But not my mom's eyes, because she'd started to check out pretty soon after that, retreating to her room for increasingly long periods of meditation, followed by vociferous crying. She stopped enforcing the few rules she'd agreed to: no sleepovers on school nights, all homework done before we could watch MTV, no dessert until we'd eaten all the vegetables on our plates. It was as if she'd decided that nothing she did could protect us, so why try?

But my dad, he tightened the restrictions and the reins. I'd never needed a curfew before, but now he'd glue his eyes to his watch. He'd sniff my breath—​I started keeping packs of Dynamints in my coat pocket. He'd beg me to call him if I was at a party, rather than get a ride home from anyone who might have been drinking. And I'd say, “Dad, Dad—​cut it out. I won't get in any car like that, okay?” But I did. Over and over, I did. And he'd ground me more and press harder and tell me not to see Soo or Greta. He'd tell me they were bad influences, that their parents were bad influences. He'd beg me, he'd yell at me, he'd take away my privileges, and finally, as a last resort I guess, my telescope. He'd never told me that he'd done it, but by then he'd pretty much stopped talking to me anyway. He took it away when my mother left for her mountaintop rehabilitation, where she was going to silently meditate for three weeks, even though that was thirteen weeks and four days ago. Her clothes were still hanging like ghosts in the closet, but at least I could bear to see them, to touch them. Ginny's room, at the back of the house, remained closed.

In the beginning, we'd asked my father every day when Mom was coming home. “Three weeks,” he'd said. Then, “Eighteen days.” “Two weeks.” “Twelve more days.” “Another ten days.” “One week.” “Three days from now.” “She was supposed to be back yesterday.” She was supposed to be back a week, two weeks, three weeks ago. And finally: “I don't know.” And then we'd stopped asking. She never called, but a couple of times a week letters appeared, with seeds shaking inside them. I put them all right in the trash.