Star in the Forest (7 page)

Then we came to Colorado. And here, every day I found out new things he didn’t know and couldn’t do. He couldn’t ask the lady at Walmart
where the garbage bags were. He couldn’t pronounce the name of my school. He didn’t know about the silent
e
rule. He probably didn’t even know how many American ants it took to eat one sandwich.

Sometimes I liked being the expert. I felt proud explaining that in English,
j
makes a
j
sound, not an
h
sound. Or asking the guy at Ace Hardware if the fifty-percent-off Christmas lights were already marked down. Or reading the sign over the pink ice cream, which said it was peppermint, not strawberry.

But sometimes I wished we could go back to the day of the picnic by the stream, when Papá knew everything and could do anything. Back to a time when I’d never heard of
deportado
or
secuestrado
. Back then, I would never, ever—not in a million years—have imagined that these things could happen to Papá.

On Wednesday, I went to school. It distracted me a little from imagining Papá locked in a dark room with bad food.

Crystal was extra nice to me. “Your hair looks pretty,” she said, even though it was the same as always.

“You didn’t find Star, did you?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I left a bunch of bologna there, but I think the squirrels just ate it.”

At lunch, over mushy cafeteria pizza, she explained how to add and subtract fractions, since I’d missed it in math class. On her napkin, she drew a picture of a pizza with ten pieces. “That’s ten tenths,” she began. “And each of these pieces is one tenth.”

After she finished, I thought of the $10,000 Mamá needed as one pizza. She had $5,000 left from selling Papá’s truck, which was $5,000/$10,000, like half the pizza. And she had $1,000 saved in the bank, which was like one piece of pizza. So she had to beg all her friends and relatives and people she worked with for $4,000 more, which was like four slices of pizza. Problem was, each of her friends only had a little bite-sized piece of pizza. This meant she was on the phone all the time, searching for the
four-tenths she needed, saying
secuestrado, secuestrado, secuestrado
.

The word had started hurting, like a little needle, stabbing me. I didn’t want to go home and have to hear it again all afternoon. “Want to go to the forest today?” I asked Crystal.

“Yeah,” she said. She made her voice low and serious. “Zitlally, we need to make a plan.”

In the forest, we leaned against the tires of the truck, with our heads back and eyes closed and mouths open. The sun was shining onto our faces, straight into our mouths.

We were eating sunshine.

That was Crystal’s idea. She said that when she was little and there wasn’t any food in the house, she’d go outside and eat sunshine. She’d find
patches of it shining through tree leaves and lick it up with her finger. It always made her feel better.

That’s what we were doing in the car part forest, trying to feel better.

Crystal smacked her lips. “Yum.” Then she said, “Zitlally. Where’s your dad?”

I thought about saying Antarctica or Madagascar. But I couldn’t think of another country that fast, and if I said Antarctica or Madagascar, she’d know I was copying. Anyway, why lie? Even if she told other people about Papá, they’d figure she was lying. But really, I didn’t think she’d tell anyone.

“He’s kidnapped.”

“Oh my God!” Crystal said.

And I spilled out the whole story, even the part about how he didn’t have papers. I tried to end on a positive note. “We don’t think they blindfolded him, at least.”

“Well, that’s good, I guess.” She sat quiet for a minute, thinking, and I could practically see the
thoughts firing off like comets in her head. She was smart, I realized. The way she’d explained fractions at lunch, even better than our math teacher could do—that’s what made me realize how smart she was. There was a whole galaxy of smart thoughts in her brain, all lit up like stars.

Suddenly, her head snapped up and she said, “That’s it!”

“What?”

Her eyes were blazing, like a meteor shower was happening behind them. “Guess who your dad’s spirit animal is, Zit?”

For a second I didn’t say anything. Then, quietly, I said, “Star.”

“Exactly. Right when Star went missing, your dad went missing.”

Of course, I’d known this all along, but now that Crystal said it out loud, I knew what I had to do. “If I get Star back, my dad will come home.”

Crystal patted my shoulder. “I’ll help you find him.”

“Thanks,” I said, and she kept patting my shoulder.

“It’s my duty as your best friend,” she said. She rested her hand on my back. “Plus, your dad’s life depends on it.”

Our plan was to knock on the door of every single trailer in Forest View and ask if they knew anything about Star. There were two hundred trailers total. We knew this because each one was numbered, black numbers on a white sign over the door, except for some trailers where it had fallen off and no one bothered to put it back up. We decided to do forty trailers per day, or one-fifth.

So, in five days or sooner, we’d find Star. Or at least information leading to Star.

I just hoped Papá could hold out for that long.

It’s amazing how many different kinds of people there are in this world, even in this trailer park.

Some people were nice, and smiled sadly when
we asked about Star, and said they’d pray for him. One lady offered us a puppy to take Star’s place, but we said no thanks. It was Star we wanted, not any other dog in the world besides Star.

Some people didn’t open the screen door. They looked up from the TV and called out “What?!” And when we asked about Star, they grunted “No.” Some people acted like we were dumb because we didn’t know Star’s breed and he didn’t have tags.

Crystal talked most of the time, and I hung back, feeling shy. “Hi!” she’d say. “I’m Crystal and this is my best friend, Zitlally. …”

In about one-third of the houses, no one spoke English, so I had to speak Spanish. After the first one, Crystal said, “Wow! You’re smart! You speak two languages perfectly!”

I’d never thought about it that way before. I liked thinking about it that way. I especially liked thinking,
Wow, Mamá’s smart. She speaks two languages, and even if her English isn’t perfect, she still
speaks two, which is more than most people. And Papá speaks three!

For three days, we went from house to house, carrying a notebook to mark off which houses we’d been to, and also to write down clues. But no one knew anything. Our page titled
Notes
was blank.

Meanwhile, over those days, Mamá collected the $4,000 she needed in bits and pieces. On the fourth day, Saturday, she went to send the money from the Tienda Mexicana just outside Forest View. I didn’t go with her because I didn’t want to get behind on our forty trailers per day. And good thing I didn’t, because on the fourth day, something happened.

In trailer #142, a little kid, maybe four years old, with wild black hair, answered the door.

“Is your mom or dad here?” Crystal asked.

He stared.

I asked him in Spanish.

He shook his head.

“Any grown-ups or big kids?” I asked in Spanish.

He nodded. “But Nora’s asleep.”

After I translated, Crystal bent down to his level and looked him straight in the eyes. “Have you seen a well-trained, fit, handsome white dog about this tall with a beautiful black star on the back of his neck?” Then she said to me, out of the corner of her mouth, “Ask him in Spanish, Zit.”

I did, except I didn’t know how to say
well-trained
or
fit
, so I skipped those parts.

The boy said, “A long time ago. When it was still cold.”

“Where?” I said.

He pointed to the trailer next door, #143. “Mr. Ed got a dog but it kept digging holes everywhere and my mom said she was calling the dog police to take him away.”

“And then?” I asked.

“And then the dog was gone.”

When I explained everything to Crystal, her eyes got big. “Could be Star,” she said.

“Could be,” I agreed.

We thanked the boy and went to trailer #143.

We rang the doorbell.

No answer.

We knocked.

No answer.

We pounded with our fists.

No answer.

We peered through the window. It was dirty and the blinds were down but we saw a sliver of a very messy living room, packed with furniture and boxes and magazines and junk. No sign of Star.

Beside the trailer, in a patch of gravel, was a lopsided truck with a falling-off bumper. Lacy bits of brown rust peeked through the orange paint. This truck would have fit right into the car part forest.

Behind the truck was a small, scrappy yard, mostly mud and dirt with some grass around the
edges. Sad-looking, forgotten-looking junk was piled up against the side of the trailer—an old refrigerator and a vacuum cleaner and a toaster oven. And at the back sat a little shed, with peeling red paint and the roof half caved in.

“Listen!” Crystal said.

I listened.

The faintest sound came from the shed, a high whine. A whimper. An animal in pain.

I creaked open the metal gate and walked to the shed. Crystal followed. We creeped around it. The whimpering was louder now. There were no windows, only a door with an open padlock.

“Should we open it?” I asked.

“We have to,” said Crystal.

And she took my hand in hers and I squeezed it, hard, and with my other hand I opened the door, just a little, just enough to see in. A thin line of light came through the door and lit up Star.

“Star!” Crystal shouted.

“Star!” I shouted.

For a long time we hugged him. He stopped whimpering and licked us all over our faces and up and down our arms. And then, our eyes got used to the darkness, and we saw that Star was hurt.

There was a torn-up strip of a blue flannel shirt tied around his front leg, right where the leg met his body. Silver duct tape was wrapped over the flannel. The shirt was dirty and stained with blood. Some of the blood looked old and brown and dried. Some looked fresh and red and new. And it stank so much it covered up Star’s naturally good dog smell.

His nose was dry and he seemed thirsty, but the bowl beside him was empty.

“He’s been kidnapped,” Crystal said solemnly.

“Secuestrado,”
I whispered to myself. And then, more loudly, I said, “Let’s get him out of here.” The place was creepy, full of old, broken machines, lawn mowers and Weedwackers and chain saws and tools and wheelbarrows. Toward the back were bags of dirt and bottles of weed poisons and stacks of old plastic boxes and fishing
rods. It smelled like old metal mixed with dirt and chemicals.

“Think he can walk okay?” Crystal asked.

“He has to,” I said. “At least three-fourths of his legs work okay. He can do it. He’s strong. He’s Star.”

“We better hurry,” Crystal said. “His evil kidnapper could be back any minute now.”

And that’s when the door swung open and daylight blinded me.

I blinked a few times, and then I saw him, the evil kidnapper, looming over us, holding a pointy-tipped cane above his head.

He was old, maybe seventy, and his hair was white and clipped close to his skull and his face was all wrinkles and brown age spots and big ugly moles and warts and black dots and heavy bags pulling down his eyes. His fingernails were like yellow claws clamped around the cane. He was skinny, with a flannel shirt hanging from his bones, like the one around Star’s leg, only his was red and
black with a holey T-shirt underneath, and little white hairs poking out the neckline. He hardly had lips, just two tiny slivers of chappedness a shade darker than his pasty skin, and bubbles of spit at the corners.

He lowered his cane.

Crystal stood up and held out her hand. “You must be Mr. Ed.”

“Speak up, child,” he said. “These ears ain’t what they used to be.” His words creaked out like he was an old machine himself, like his voice was something that needed to be oiled.