Lost Stars (9 page)

“Don't worry about it. You've clearly got plenty,” he said. He started taping around the sides of the door so glue wouldn't get on the frame. “So, what do you love about astrophysics?”

“Oh my god, everything.” So much for not elaborating. “What's not to love?”

“That's not that helpful an answer for a science-free brain like mine. My brain likes English lit. Ask me anything about Shakespeare and I can tell you, but biology? All I remember is placebo.”

“You mean a paramecium. Or an amoeba?”

“See?”

I started slathering the glue on the door. Naturally I got more glue on my shoes than on the door. “Tell me a quote from
Macbeth,
” I said.

“What?”

“You said ask you anything about Shakespeare. That's the only play I could think of.”

“You couldn't go with something easy like
Hamlet
—​‘To be or not to be'?”

“You said anything.” I glued up around the corners of the door, too thick and drippy, but Dean didn't seem to mind.

“Oh. Okay. Um, ‘Yet do I fear thy nature. It is too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the nearest way.'”

“Very impressive,” I said. “What the heck does it mean?”

“Um, it means that Lady Macbeth is worried that her husband is too nice to take hold of the crown. She thinks he needs to be a worse human being.” He didn't look at me as he said this, just kept taping as he asked, “Can you answer my question now?”

“Okay,” I said. I turned toward him. “Here's the thing that is so totally mind-blowing. Are you ready?” He nodded, looking happily skeptical. “This is kind of just a physics thing in general, but we are all made of the same atoms, the same molecules—”

“What's the difference between an atom and a molecule?”

“Well, an atom has a nucleus with some protons and neutrons and maybe some electrons.”

“Right, right,” Dean said, joke-pretending to understand, rubbing his chin in a faux-intellectual way and allowing his mouth to curve into a smile.

“And a molecule is kind of when two or more atoms bond together. Right?”

“Right,” he said again, still smiling, which made it hard to keep looking him in the eye.

“The coolest thing is that we're all made of atoms from old stars that died or exploded. They've just been recycled over and over again into different shapes.”

The skeptical look remained on his face, along with the smile, as he tested the foam to see if it was sticking. “So a cow may once have been a dinosaur?”

“Sort of,” I said. “That dinosaur decomposed and went back into the soil and broke down into nitrogen and such and nourished a cow two hundred million years later. We're all just star stuff, packaged over and over again.” I swallowed. I hadn't been expecting the threat of tears. “And that's why, sometimes, I feel like someone who died is still kind of here. I almost feel her here.”

“Her?” Dean asked.

“Or—​anyone. It's weird, I know. It's not like I believe in ghosts or anything.”

“It's not weird,” Dean said. “Or—​it's not
that
weird.”

“I just sometimes feel that person's presence because I know her atoms are all around.”

“It's not weird,” he said again, and I sort of had this feeling that he wanted to put his arm around me, and my shoulder touched his shoulder, and then Tiger came up and inspected what we'd done, and said, “Very nice work, kiddos. But ours is sort of falling apart.”

Dean left to help Tiger and Greta, and in came the floater. Tommy walked up the stairs. I'd finished the layer of glue and now was working on affixing the MDF board over the door, but I was way, way too short for that.

“Let me help you with that, little lady,” Tommy said.

“Give it a rest, Tommy.”

But I did have to let him help me align the top of the board to the door and hold it in place while I grabbed the drill.

“I'll do that,” Tommy said.

“That's okay.”

“No, really, let me.”

“Fine,” I said, handing him the blue Makita. Tommy may have had a BMW, but Dean had his own drill. “That's not the right screw, Tommy. That's drywall. You need wood.”

“Oh, right,” he said, swapping out the screw and trying to drill it into the wood, but it rolled around and eventually dropped to the floor.

“I'll do it,” I said. For once in his life, Tommy said nothing. I stood on my tippy toes on the top step to reach the top of the door, and Tommy stood on a step behind me, pressing against the board to hold it in place. I could feel his breath on my neck, and maybe because it was familiar, it activated something in me. I felt stoned by proxy, even though I hadn't had anything since I'd emptied my stomach contents in the bathroom the week before. I felt turned on in some way that also disgusted me, but that was pretty much my relationship with Tommy.

Tommy put his head close to mine. “You know he's crazy, right?” he whispered.

I stopped drilling. “What? Who?”

“You know,” he said. “Dean. He's crazy.”

I turned around, the drill in my hand. Tommy's face was very close to mine, his almost handsome, stupid face. I literally could have killed him. Or kissed him.

“You guys good up there?” Dean called.

“I think your expertise is needed,” I said, still staring at Tommy, hoping to maim him with my non-dilated pupils.

Dean came up the stairs slowly. Tommy didn't turn around or move out of the way or even stop staring at me until Dean said, “I got it, buddy,” and slowly, Tommy descended the stairs. He kept looking at me, backing up, until he semi-tripped at the end and pretended he'd meant to do that.

Dean either didn't notice or pretended that he was enthralled with the quality of my drilling, which did seem to have improved since earlier in the week.

“This looks good,” he said. “I think we're pretty much done.”

“Oh. We're done? Oh. Okay.”

“Yeah, we just have to wait for it to dry.”

“Oh. Okay. So.”

“Yeah.”

“I guess we should test it to see if it works,” Dean said. “You guys, cue something up loud, and Carrie and I will go upstairs and see if we can hear it.” Oh.

Someone put on the Violent Femmes, and Dean and I stood outside the door. “Well, okay, it's not the world's best soundproofing job,” he said. We could still hear the lyrics—​
just kiss off into the air.
“But it's a great song.”

“This album is just one really good song after another,” I said.

“I know, man, I know,” Dean said. He'd called me man. Obviously I was too good with a drill.

“So, yeah, I gotta get to work,” he said.

What could I say to that? I shrugged and raised my eyebrows, some combination of “Whatever” and “What the hell?” The Violent Femmes sang
Good feeling, won't you stay with me
just as Dean turned to go.

And then, for some reason, I hated
my job 12 percent less. We had now cleared and weeded and leveled the path, so we had to install concrete piers that the wooden slats of our footbridge would rest on.

“This is a three-hundred-foot bridge, so we're talking a pier on each side every three feet. That's around two hundred of these things, laid out perfectly,” Lynn said. “It's ambitious, but then again, so are you.” Even Tonya seemed a wee bit annoyed by that one.

Lynn had pulled his tan pickup truck full of one-foot concrete piers to the side of the creek and opened the flatbed.

“You guys ready to earn your stripes?” he asked, which was apparently some sort of rallying cry that actually inspired my compatriots in misadventure. “Yes!” the kids said. Perhaps the program had worked, and all of them, save for me, were already reformed.

“Do the stripes come in hundred-dollar-bill form?” I asked.

Lynn said he would push each concrete pillar to the end of the flatbed and two of us would lower it down to the ground, then roll it to the selected spot along the path. “You and Tonya work together,” he said.

I said, “Oh, great,” but forced my lips into a smile when she shot me a look.

“The important thing is to use your legs, not your back,” Lynn said as he stood above us, the cylinder of concrete poised and ready to come to us.

“I'm trying to think about where else in life I can apply that advice,” I said to him.

“This is not a joke,” said Tonya. She had one side of her body braced against the truck, ready for her concrete present to descend. “You can really hurt yourself.”

“Okay, okay, fine,” I said. “Let it rain.”

“On three,” she said, bending her knees as she placed her hands beneath the concrete block. I did as she did, without bending my knees. She glared at me.

“I'll be fine,” I said. “I come from a long line of laborers.”

“Huh, that's not what I remember,” she mumbled. Then, “One, two, three.”

We hoisted the block, and indeed, there was a sharp streak of complaint from my back.

“Ow,” I said. “It must have really hurt to build the pyramids.”

“Not as much—​they all lifted with their legs and not their backs,” Tonya said. “Now roll.”

We placed the cylinder on its side and rolled it, or tried to roll it, but my back was calling out to me with each move I made.

“Pull your weight, wacko,” she said. Did she really mean that, or was it just one of her many nonadorable pet names for her co-workers? Surely she knew. Surely word had gotten to her of the therapist and my dad plotting against me to lock me up, the screaming in the street and cursing, my late-night stumbles home, picked up by the police for curfew, the stomach pumping, and the thing with Rosie. Surely she knew.

We rolled the cylinder over the rough grass as I checked to make sure it was a wild-parsnip-free zone. Finally we made it to the first spot, that shallow black hole of earth.

“Now move the bottom over so we can slide it in.”

“What side is the bottom?” I asked.

“The side that says ‘bottom.' Some genius.”

“I never said I was a genius.”

“Yes, you did.”

“When?”

“In Mr. Carson's class.”

“Wait—​Mr. Carson? You mean earth science? First semester freshman year?”

“Yes.” Tonya had her arms folded now, and one foot atop the cylinder to keep it from slipping.

“We were in that class together?”

“I hope this is a joke,” she said, and then, realizing that it wasn't, “We were lab partners? We did the model of three faults in the earthquake unit?”

I smiled. “Yes, I remember it. Sort of. I was high throughout the entire thing.”

Some fuzzy version of a memory returned to me—​not so much of Tonya but of the metric ruler and the physiographic map of the world, with its wonderful contours that made me psyched to be on Earth for once instead of staring at it from a billion light years away. It had been a long time since I'd felt that way. First semester freshman year was the beginning of the end.

“And yet you still got an A, am I right?”

I shrugged.

“You seem to be totally unaware that you're leading a blessed life.”

I bent down again, my back screeching as I moved Tonya's leg and positioned the concrete cylinder, then slid it into the spot. “Thank you, Reverend, for that inspiring sermon.”

Lynn primed us in using bullet levels—​adjust the pier until the air bubble rests in the center of the pocket of water—​to show us when the concrete piers were perfectly flat on the ground. But since they were in sets, they also had to be the same height as each other.

“You might be doing some digging and tamping, or building up a bit under another pier,” Lynn said. “This is about perfection.”

Luckily my partner in perfection was Tonya, who was an absolute whiz with a bullet level and a concrete pier.

“Carrie, that is definitely not straight,” she said, looking at the level; the bubble had floated over to the left side.

Magically, Lynn appeared. “She's right, Caraway. You know, none of this will work if you don't do your part. It's up to all of us.”

I sighed, but I went ahead and took my concrete pier off and tamped down the dirt below it and placed it back and used all the force of my five-foot frame and my now completely angry back to set it in place. Then I checked the level again.

“See?” asked Tonya. “Was that so bad?”

It was not.

“Now we just have to do a hundred more.”

For some reason, I kind of didn't mind.

Riding home in the afternoon down the Avenue of the Pines, my muscles sore, the most unusual feeling came over me, some strange smile that crawled out all on its own. Even in my work boots, my hardhat strapped to the back of my bike with the bungee cord, I sort of felt like the skies over my head were clear, despite the bit of cloud cover that had rolled in.

Then I saw Tommy's BMW coming toward me; he somehow seemed to be in the park whenever I was. He stuck his hand out the window and called, “Nice hardhat, Rye Bread.”

He was gone too fast for me to come up with a witty retort, but I felt enough shame that I forgot to keep my head down, and when I looked up toward the dark canopy of white pine trees that laced together, I saw it. The cross. Tiger had climbed up that tree and nailed it to a low-hanging branch, so it was almost watching over that spot. The white cross.

My front wheel wobbled and twisted in front of me, so fast and so strong that I had no chance to right it, and I just toppled onto the pavement, almost into the road, cars honking. My side scraped, I sat there stunned for a minute as a beige pickup truck pulled over.

“You okay there?” Lynn said, hopping out.

“I'm okay.” I stood up and dusted myself off. It stung a little on my right side, but I was more shocked—​and embarrassed—​than hurt.