Why the Star Stands Still (Gives Light Series) (12 page)

Mickey looked from Rafael to me.  She tried very hard to keep the emotion off her face--I could see it--but I could see something else there, too.  Something like longing.  This little girl, I thought, warmed and saddened at the same time.  Eleven homes in three years.  A real prize for a mother.  It didn't surprise me that Mickey had never known togetherness.  She'd never really known a family.

"Okay," Rafael said.  "C'mere."

I held Mickey's hair for her while Rafael swabbed her skin and sterilized the needle.  It's weird how completely unfazed she seemed.  Most kids I know aren't too keen about getting poked with sharp objects.

"You know," I started talking.  I wanted to calm her down, but I wasn't at all certain she needed calming down in the first place.  "Rafael's good with tattoos, too.  Have you seen the ones on his neck?"

"Uh-huh."

"Did you know he gave me a tattoo?  I bet you can't guess where it is."

"
You
?  Yeah, right."

She let out a tiny little gasp when the needle slid through her ear.  I squeezed her shoulder.  Just as quickly, Rafael pulled the needle out and clipped an earring in its place.

"How do I look?" Mickey asked.  She turned her head my way.

"You look beautiful," I said.  An iron rose hung delicately from her lobe.  "Like a wild prairie rose."

Mickey's face lit up with a wide smile.  I found it unexpected--and maybe she did, too.  She quickly tried to hide it behind her long hair.

The next few days saw no change in the downpour.  Lightning flashed across the sky; thunder boomed and rattled through the drab gray forest.  I was starting to worry the beech trees would uproot.  If they did, I thought, we'd probably be okay; we weren't particularly close to any copses.

Mickey, evidently, was more worried than I was.  She sat in the sitting room wrapped up in a pendleton blanket, her eyes darting continually toward the wide windows.  She flinched whenever lightning lit up the room.

I didn't want to embarrass her.  I sat next to her and handed her a strong cup of yaupon tea.  She sat sipping it without a word.

"Hey," I said to her, quietly, and nodded toward Rafael.

He sat slouched in his armchair, busily reading his way through a hardcover book.  His eyes roamed like wildfire across the pages.

"Want to play a prank on him?" I whispered.

Her lips tilted slowly in an unkind smile.  "How?"

"Rafael?" I said.

He lifted his head.

I smiled, eyebrows dancing.  "Could you get us another cup of tea?"

"Sure," he said.  He closed his book over and stalked off to the kitchen.

I reached underneath the couch cushion and pulled out a second book.

"What's that?" Mickey asked, and reached for it.

I made sure to keep it from her grasp.  "A naughty book," I said.  "You can read it when you're older."

"Why are there handcuffs on the cover?"

"Never mind that."  I slipped the paper cover off the binding.  "Go switch the covers," I said.

She giggled mischievously, the most beautiful little sound I'd ever heard.  She swapped the book covers and brought both of them back to me.  I dog-eared a page in the naughty book and tossed it on Rafael's seat.  Its twin got stuffed beneath the sofa.

"Here," Rafael said when he returned.  He handed me a mug of yaupon tea.

"Thank you very much."

Rafael sat down and opened the wrong book.  Mickey buried her face in her pendleton blanket.  She was laughing, I realized, and couldn't control it.  Like a ripple effect, I started to laugh, too.

Rafael was halfway down the page when he slapped the book closed and threw it over his shoulder.

"I'm going to kill you," he swore, flustered, teeth gritted.

"We got you!  We got you!" Mickey shrieked.

The days waned.  Still no end to the monsoon in sight.  One night I was listening to the rain washing over my bedroom window when the door creaked open and Mickey slipped inside.

"Can I sleep downstairs?" she whispered.

Rafael turned on the lamp.  "Want a snack?"

The three of us trailed down the stairs and into the kitchen.  Rafael lit the lamp next to the doorway.  The rain was loud and pattering against the window above the icebox.  Mickey drew back, apprehensive.

"Help me make cookies," I said.  I tossed a handful of coals into the box beneath the stove.

Mickey was silent, her tongue poking out of her mouth, when we mixed the butter and the cream cheese.  Rafael dug through the cabinets, grumbling, in search of acorn flour.

"You look kind of like the archangel," Mickey said to me.

I smiled quizzically.  "What do you mean?"

She rolled her eyes at me.  "Didn't you ever see that picture of Michael when he tosses the devil out of Heaven?  His hair's curly and long and blond."

"Maybe I'm his long-lost evil twin," I said.

"You look a lot like him.  But you're fatter."

I choked on nothing.  Rafael grinned mercilessly at me.  I swung the goop-covered spoon at his head.  Splat went the dough, all over his lank hair.

"I was named after Michael," Mickey said proudly.

"Were you, sweetheart?" I asked.  Rafael poured a ewer of water into the wash tub and dunked his head in.  I tossed him a dish towel.

"Mom said so.  She said she prayed to Michael that she'd miscarry.  She didn't have the money for an abortion."

I met Rafael's eyes across the kitchen while he was towel drying his hair.  He looked stunned, and a little ill--and I felt more uncomfortable than I could ever remember being.  Usually I don't like to judge people; I feel as though none of us can ever fully know what it's like to have the thoughts and the emotions of another human being.  But what kind of mother tells her daughter a story like that?  Did she ever even consider how badly it would affect her daughter's confidence?

"I'm very glad you're with us, Mickey," I said.

She licked the batter from her thumb.  She perused me with distrusting eyes.

"How long?" she asked.

I looked at Rafael again.

"We were kind of hoping you'd stay with us," Rafael mumbled.

"How long?" she repeated.

"As long as you'd like," I said.  "It's all up to you."

I ran a wet rag along the messy counter.  The cookies had another ten minutes to bake.

"I know what you're doing," Mickey burst out suddenly.

Rafael spun around, a candy bar in his mouth.  He looked to me like a little boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

But Mickey wasn't yelling at Rafael.  She was yelling at me.

"You're going to make me love you," Mickey said.  "Both of you.  Then when I
really
love you, you're going to get tired of me!"

"We'll never get tired of you," I said.

"Everyone gets tired of me!"

Rafael started, "Michaela--"

She turned on him.  And then--I hardly knew what she was doing--she pulled her shirt over her head.

"Look!" she yelled at him.  "This is where she stabbed me!  This is where she tried to kill me!"

I couldn't see what she was referring to.  I could only see the freckles on her back, her shoulders hunched in dejection.  But Rafael--he saw.  His eyes jumped from Mickey to me, then back again--then back to me.  His eyes were wide with horror.

I took Mickey's shoulders in my hands.  I spun her around.

On her chest were thin, silver scars--three of them in total.  The approximate size and shape of a knife blade.

Stab wounds.

I didn't have to wonder anymore why her mother had gone to prison.

Mickey wasn't crying.  I think she must have had that instinct drained out of her very long ago.  In all other regards, though, her face made for the saddest picture I had ever seen.  She looked scared, and lost, and defeated, and no kid should ever look like that.

I hesitated.  I dug my fingers underneath the collar of my turtleneck.  I pulled it down.

Mickey's eyes jumped from the hardwood floor to the scars on my throat.

"I'm just like you," I said.  "See?  We're the same."

Mickey hiccoughed, her eyes round.  I wanted to laugh--although I couldn't place why.  I wanted to run my hands over her hair and hug her.

"Put your shirt back on," I said.  "Let's go have cookies."

We milled out into the sitting room, the three of us, and sat on the rug by the window, the hearth flickering warmly.  Mickey wrapped herself up in her pendleton blanket.  Rafael scooped a cookie off the ceramic plate and crammed it into his mouth whole.  I honestly didn't know which of the two had the stronger sweet tooth.  I kind of felt like I was playing host to a family of sharks.

"Who cut you?" Mickey finally asked, wiping her hands on her blanket.  I didn't have it in me to rebuke her.

"A bad man," I said.  "He liked to hurt women."

"But you're not a woman."

Rafael opened his mouth as though he were about to protest.  I jammed another cookie into his mouth in order to deter him.  "No," I agreed, with the smallest of smiles.  "I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Rafael chewed.  He swallowed.  He tugged on his damp hair, something he only ever does when he's nervous.

"My dad was the bad guy," Rafael said.  "The one who liked to hurt women."

Mickey looked between Rafael and me as though she might uncover whatever dishonesty we were hiding from her.  But we weren't.

"Your dad was really bad?" Mickey asked.

"He was a serial killer," Rafael said.  "He killed seven women."

He looked away, tugging on his hair again.  "He killed Sky's mom."

Mickey looked puzzled.  "But Racine..."

"Not my step-mom," I explained.  "My mother.  The first woman my father was married to."

"The one who listened to pop music."

I can't tell you why that made me smile as it did.  "That's the one."

"So..." Mickey said.  "Rafael's dad killed your mom, and then he tried to kill you?"

"Yes."

"Why?"

I smiled, and the muscles in my face felt tired and strained.  "I don't know, honey," I said.  "Some people are good and some people are bad.  It's impossible to know why.  But," I said, "I think it's a good thing that you can never understand it."

"How do you mean?"

"It means you're a wonderful person, of course."

She peered shyly at me from beneath curtains of long, brown hair.

"Michaela," I said.

"Mickey," she said.  "I don't like that name.  I hate my whore of a mother."

"I hate her, too," Rafael agreed.  And he said it so passionately that I didn't doubt him.  Then again, Rafael doesn't do anything dispassionately.  "But you can't use that word."

"Why not?  It's just a word."

"Alright," Rafael conceded gruffly, "you can use it, but only when it's the three of us."

"Awesome!  That's more than my last foster mom let me do!"

I smiled at Rafael.  "You were conned."

"Shut up, Sky," he said, bashful and disgruntled.

"Mickey," I tried again.  "If you want to stay with us--or if you want to leave--that's entirely up to you.  I'd like to think you're in charge of this.  But I'd also like to think you can consider us your friends.  When something's bothering you, or something's making you sad, you can tell us about it, you know."

Mickey fell silent, her eyes tracing the pattern of the blue rug.

"My mom always hated me," she said.  "She said it was my fault my dad left her.  I don't know my dad, never met him...  He left when she was pregnant with me.  He didn't want me, either."

I wanted more than ever to take her into my arms.  I just didn't know how she'd react.

"We want you," Rafael said.

Mickey looked sideways at him.

"I've wanted you for a long time," Rafael said.  "I was waiting for you."

"He was," I told her, smiling mutedly.  "Every day you didn't come, he got even crabbier, if you can believe it."

"
That
must have been scary," Mickey said.  I couldn't help but noticed she sounded pleased.

I carried the empty ceramic plate to the kitchen.  Maybe tomorrow I'd remembered to wash it.  When I returned to the sitting room, I found that the lamp was turned off.  Firelight danced across Rafael and Mickey's faces.  Mickey was bundled up in her pendleton blanket, a quilt underneath her.  Rafael must have made a trip upstairs without my noticing.

"C'mere," Rafael said, and gestured to me.

Warmed from the inside out, I lay on the quilt with the two of them.  Rafael tossed his arm around me.  Mickey wriggled her way between us.

"Show me your tattoo," she demanded of me.

I rolled up my left sleeve.  A tawny atlas moth rested beneath my shoulder, wings ragged, worn with age.