Light from a Distant Star (19 page)

“Very likely the blows on his throat and in the small of his back will cause him to drop his rifle or will knock his helmet off his head. Retaining your hold around his neck with your left arm, drag him away backwards,” the major wrote.

There would be no dragging Bucky away. “Bitch!” he cried, turning on her with fists raised. “I’m gonna smash your fucking ugly face in.”

“Try it,” she growled, instantly realizing just how confining an arena was their little house in the night sky. “Go ahead, just try it!” she warned, mind racing through fragile pages to The Bent-Arm Hold.

“Your opponent has taken up a boxing stance.… Seize his right
wrist with your left hand, bending his arm at the elbow, towards him. Continue the pressure on his wrist.… Immediately step in with your right foot, placing your right leg and hip close in to your opponent’s thigh.…”

She was readying her left hand when Bucky lunged across the creaky floor, knocking her into the rough wall. A long board popped out and the whole tree house shook, propelling Henry into the action. On her knees, she groped along the floor for her glasses.

“Let her go!” Henry shouted, lashing Bucky’s back with his headlamp.

“Stop it!” Jessica screeched, trying to scoop up the spilled candy. “Jesus! Stop it, will you stop it!”

“What in God’s name is going on out here?” her mother shouted from below.

“Nellie!” her father’s voice boomed. “You and Henry, get down here! Right now! And you, too, Jessica,” he demanded a little more kindly as she peered out at him.

Last one down the ladder was Bucky. No one spoke as he ran from the yard.

T
HE NEXT DAY
they were sitting with their father in the Humboldt’s brilliant living room, heads hung both from shame and the glare as they waited for Tenley Humboldt. Sunlight poured through the picture window sheers onto the gilt-streaked mirrored squares covering the walls. The tables were glass topped and all the furniture was white, even the carpeting, while everything else was golden: lamps, vases, picture frames, and an assortment of birdcages in which lifelike yellow canaries stared out vacantly from lacquered perches.

Their parents had explained that Tenley Humboldt was a very nice man who in the privacy of his home dressed in women’s clothes.

“Nothing wrong with that,” her father had said, her mother nodding as Nellie and Henry dared not make eye contact.

Last night, as Miss Humboldt had earlier told them, she and her brother had disagreed once again about selling the house. The big old place was just too much work for her. She wanted something smaller,
preferably one of the new town houses being built out on Riley Road. She blamed herself, she said, for not easing into things the way she’d always done with Tenley. Instead, she’d just told him flat out that a real estate agent was coming in the morning to give them an appraisal, which just pushed poor Tenley over the edge. And then, to be taunted and pelted with missiles (
MISS-eyels
, she pronounced it), well, that had been devastating.

“I don’t know—I don’t think he’s coming down,” she sighed, looking toward the wide staircase. “I told him he didn’t have to, but …” Her voice trailed off.

“If he doesn’t, that’s fine,” Nellie’s father said. “Don’t worry about it, Louisa.”

“Well, I do, Ben, I do. You have no idea how much I do.”

“We can always come back.”

“It’s …” Her hand flew to her quivering mouth.

“Same as a thank-you—it’s never too late for an apology.”

“It’s all just such a shame.” She struggled to contain her tears.

“I know. Their friend …” Her father cleared his throat. His embarrassment was painful to see. And now on top of it, he and her mother were barely speaking. She thought he’d been too hard on Jessica Cooper, who’d gone home last night, sobbing. Actually, he’d barely said a word to Jessica, but that was her way, having such a meltdown that no one would dare reprimand her. “But still,” he continued, “they were the ones in charge. Their responsibility—”

“I mean, the whole thing, and now …” She gestured at them. “… this,” she said weakly. “They’re just children. They shouldn’t have to—” She wiped her puffy red eyes.

“Oh yes, they should, Louisa,” he said sternly. “They have to. Better learn now, than go around thinking anyone different from them’s not quite right. We’re all odd ducks, every single one of us, and they know that. Right?” He peered down at his children.

“Yes, sir,” Nellie and Henry answered softly, in guilt and giddiness, afraid to look at each other. Their father saying they were all odd ducks had always been their signal to quack.

A door squealed open above them. Tenley Humboldt stood at the top of the stairs for what seemed the longest time, wearing men’s clothing,
Nellie was relieved to see. He descended each step slowly, head trembling slightly as he tried to look their way but couldn’t. Her father nodded and they jumped up.

“Hello, Ben,” he said. His small, raspy voice reminded Nellie of something fragile—wings, she realized, the brush of moth wings close to the ear. Even his handshake seemed more flutter than grasp. Never having been this close, now she was alert to every detail. The man looked faded, his skin the same drabness as his shirt and pants that hung on his skinny frame in folds, his fine hair pulled tightly back in a thin ponytail. He was wearing a narrow turquoise bracelet, but no necklace. They’d come to apologize, her father said, patting her arm, and so she began. Mr. Humboldt couldn’t make eye contact, which only prolonged Nellie’s stammered apology. He seemed so delicate, in such distress that she was desperate for him to know that
they
hadn’t thrown the candy bars at him, they’d never do something like that, and that the person who had wasn’t even supposed to be up there with them and never would be again, he could be sure of that. He and Miss Humboldt both.

“And as far as I’m concerned, people should do exactly as they please. Which means wearing what they want to wear, and … and … doing what they want, because we’re all the same underneath … the clothes we have on, whichever ones they are, I mean.” She looked around wide eyed, relieved to see everyone staring down at the floor.

“Henry,” her father said softly.

“And I’m sorry, too.” Henry’s voice was so shaky she was afraid he might cry. “Sometimes I get picked on and I don’t know why.” He swallowed hard. “It always makes me feel bad. But then … then, I think, well, maybe it’s them. Maybe they don’t have a nice life or something. I don’t know.” With his timid shrug, her father rubbed Henry’s head, and she knew that never again would she tolerate unkindness or injustice, especially to someone as good as her brother.

“That was very nice,” Miss Humboldt said, touching her cheek.

“Some things just need saying from time to time,” their father said. Nellie knew he was feeling the same about Henry that she was.

“They certainly do,” Miss Humboldt agreed.

A moment of uneasy silence followed as they each fixed on a place
to look, anywhere but at poor Mr. Humboldt’s misery. Head trembling, he reached into his pants pocket, twice. “Here.” He held out two handfuls of Snickers bars. When no one took them right away, he dropped them onto the glass coffee table then slipped into the next room and closed the door.

“He’s afraid of animals eating them. Chocolate’s not good for them. In fact,” Miss Humboldt added, trying for a perkier tone, “some even die from it.”

“Dogs.” Henry nodded.

“Yeah, but that’s if they eat a lot,” Nellie said, grateful to be making their way back from such dense, prickly woods into a conversational clearing.

“Probably depends on the size dog,” her father said.

“Yes,” Miss Humboldt said absently. She was looking toward the door. And Nellie felt her yearning—Tenley, her brother, in there needing her to keep him safe, and for as long as she could, she would.

D
AYS LATER, IN
the early morning, Nellie opened her window and saw something on the lawn. She ran outside and picked it up, a cellophane-wrapped bouquet of pink carnations wet from the dewy grass. Never too late for an apology, her father had said. Bucky, she thought, dropping it into the wastebasket, his cowardly way of telling her he was sorry. When her mother came down for breakfast and found the flowers in the trash, she took them out and arranged them in a vase of water.

“I just found them,” Nellie answered honestly when her mother asked who’d brought them.

For a week their fragrance filled the kitchen, sometimes making her smile for no reason at all.

S
O THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED, THE WAY SHE REMEMBERS IT, ANYWAY
. Funny how some details seem so compressed. Like the letter, for instance. Maybe it did come a while before, but once she started keeping secrets and trying to make strangeness seem perfectly normal, then pretty soon, events started running together, exactly what was said and by whom, and the reason for this or that, eventually all twining together like a house built of twigs, fragile and unsecured, because each enfeebled fact depended on another, and that one on the one before, until in the end nothing seemed true anymore.

With almost another week of rain, they’d been pretty much stuck inside, she and Henry, that is. Ruth was back and forth to work, though most days she got out early. The ice-cream business slowed way down in bad weather. Maybe if Ruth had come home instead of lying and going to Patrick Dellastrando’s house that day, then she might have gotten the letter herself. And it wasn’t as if Nellie’d been looking for it. Bringing in the mail was about it for excitement. That and listening to the drama that was Dolly’s life with her television droning in the background. It was hard to untangle the soap operas and reality shows from her own misery, sobbing in bed, sobbing into her phone, pleading, demanding to be taken seriously. She was sick of waiting around, doing nothing while he did exactly as he pleased. It was way more than money and if he dared say that again, ever, then she was just going to call the bitch, that’s what she’d do, call the bitch and tell her exactly what was going on here. After all, she had a life to live, too, and he better get used to the idea because she wasn’t going to be treated like this anymore. And there wasn’t a thing he could say or do that was going
to make her change her mind. Had he ever once said
that
to the bitch?
Timing!
What the hell’s that supposed to mean? Silence. And this time, a thud. Something hitting the wall.

“I’m a good person,” she began to wail. “Doesn’t he know that?”

Nellie couldn’t tell whether she was talking on the phone again or to someone in the apartment. She pressed closer. Her ear so often at the damp bathroom wall had made a grease mark on the wallpaper.

“Why’s he doing this? It’s not fair! It’s so fucking not fair! Why? Why?” she moaned, then fell into hysterical sobbing, and no one answered or spoke a soothing word back.

Ruth’s letter must have come during that same rainy week. The ink on the damp envelope was smeared. She remembers standing on the porch, staring at the blurry postmark.
Australia
. She ran to put the letter in her bottom drawer, under her shorts. Ruth was in trouble again for missing her curfew two nights in a row. She’d been grounded, and with her resentment so deep it seemed simpler to hide the letter than have her on the next plane to Brisbane. The following day Nellie took it out and held it up to a lightbulb, but she couldn’t see through the envelope. Next she tried slipping a knife under the seal. All that did was rip a ragged tear in the flap. That left her little choice. She ripped it open the rest of the way. She would read it and then decide what to do next.

And not much of a pen pal, Nellie decided, relieved. She peeled back the brittle flap of linoleum on her dusty closet floor and slipped the letter underneath the loose board, then piled her shoes and junk back on top. Daniel Brigham’s lack of interest would only hurt Ruth’s already frazzled feelings, so really, what was the point? He had tried to be polite, but he might as well have been writing to a perfect stranger, which, in a way, he was. He didn’t know her, didn’t care to, so that was that. Why make things any more tense around here? And they certainly were tense. Mr. Cooper still hadn’t called, and Dolly had been right on the verge of being evicted when she’d somehow come up with two months’ rent, both pleasing and frustrating her mother, who only wanted to be rid of her.