Rules for Stealing Stars (14 page)

Twenty-Five

I
don't eat dinner. I don't sleep.

I have to wake Marla up in the morning. I shift around in the bed a lot, after a whole sleepless night here, and clear my throat, and “accidentally” throw my arm into her stomach.

“Oh, sorry,” I say when she opens her eyes. There's a brief second of her trying to remember why I'm there, and then she sort of shakes her head like it needs to be cleared out. “You feeling better?” I get out of bed right away. Marla doesn't smell great in the mornings, and the whole room feels small and hot, all close and raw and in need of an open window and a lit candle.

Marla doesn't open her windows or have a collection of sweet-smelling candles in her room.

“Better?” she says like she doesn't understand my question. She scrunches her nose. She must smell and feel how rotten her room is right now too. “Let's get breakfast. You want to go get something? I bet no one's making anything, but we could grab bagels down the street.” Marla and I have never gone to the bagel shop together. That's something I used to do with Mom when we were awake before everyone else, back when she was doing well. It was a summer tradition, almost better than the pancakes and bacon on Sundays.

As far as I know, Marla doesn't even like bagels.

“No more bad closet, right? You saw how we almost got stuck?” I'm hanging out near her door, ready to leave as soon as she confirms that she is not crazy. It sounds like Dad is awake. I can hear folky guitar music playing on his extra-special, don't-ever-touch-them speakers.

Marla shrugs.

I'm panicking. It doesn't matter what Dad says. I know Mom's sister got stuck. I know we could all get stuck. I know the closet was writing us a warning.

“I like it in there,” Marla says. “Maybe Mom's sister liked it in there too. Maybe Mom would have liked to stay in there. She doesn't seem that happy out here.” Marla doesn't
look scared. She doesn't look sick anymore either, or sleepy, or angry, or any of the ways I'm used to Marla looking.

“You need to be scared,” I say. I'm afraid if I say too much, she will cut me off entirely, but what I want to do is yell at her about safety and insanity and closets and locked doors that never open.

Marla looks at me. It is a hard stare. The kind that doesn't budge, doesn't blink. It is a stare I can feel from my burning face to my tingling toes. I'm not sure what she's looking for, what assessment she's coming up with, but she doesn't say anything else on the subject.

“Bagels,” she says instead, just when I think the stare might actually suffocate me. “We definitely need bagels. You like that blueberry cream cheese, right?”

“Right,” I say. Marla nods, like we've solved everything, and pushes past me to open the door the rest of the way.

Everyone else is already downstairs. Astrid and Eleanor are opening and closing the fridge like it's a magic trick, where every time you look in again you might find something new. Dad is looking at his paper but flips the pages so quickly I'm not sure he's actually reading it. They are all pajamaed, with fleece jackets unzipped but on, since the door to the porch is wide open and the New Hampshire morning chill is intense
today. It's an immediate reminder that it won't be summer forever, that fall is running right behind and will catch up someday soon.

“We're getting bagels!” Marla says. Her voice is too loud for the morning, and more important, too loud to be coming out of Marla. Dad jumps in his chair. The paper makes a startled, rattling sound. Eleanor and Astrid slam the refrigerator door shut again and spin toward us.

“How nice!” Dad says when he recovers his voice. He smiles and looks vaguely proud, like he has somehow brought his daughters closer together in our time of crisis. “You should go get some money from Mom's drawer! Wouldn't that be nice? Like she's buying them for us. She would love that.” Mom has a drawer in the kitchen where she throws dollar bills that were shoved in pockets or left on the counter. I hate that one of the only things that might be good about this morning—a hot bagel with blueberry cream cheese—is going to be taken over by Mom, or by Not-Mom, the Mom who exists only in Dad's head.

“I've got it,” I say, so that Mom's not the one buying. “Allowance.” Dad crinkles his eyes in confusion. He's probably not sure whether to tell me how nice that is, or to insist that we use Mom's money so we don't forget for a minute that she exists.

Eleanor and Astrid zip up their fleeces and remind
Marla and me to get ours, and I guess we're all walking over there together now. Eleanor and Astrid have not smiled.

We should not stop at the mailbox on the way to the bagel store, because I really, really want to actually get a bagel and eat it in peace, to the sounds of Dad's lame folk music and rapid-newspaper-page-turning. I want Marla's mood to stay strangely gleeful for a few hours, and to watch television with my sisters, and maybe even to run down to the lake for a swim and a game of Marco Polo, which Mom tells us is a terrible, dangerous game but which we can't help loving for its loud yelling and splashing and stealthy swimming. Maybe, if we can convince Dad, there will be some hamburgers burned on the public grill at the beach that we haven't used all summer.

I want it to look and feel like summer.

But. We stop at the mailbox.

A package and letter have come for Astrid.

There's a postcard for me that says Mom is proud of me.

There is nothing for Marla.

Astrid reads her letter out loud and overenunciates the part where Mom asks how Marla is doing. Marla sits on the lawn in protest and doesn't look at how huge and ridiculous Astrid smiles.
Look! See! Mom loves you!
her smile says.

“I'm going to my room,” Marla says.

“We agreed to go get bagels, so let's do that,” Eleanor
says. “I think it would mean a lot to Silly. And we all had a long night taking care of you. So let's do what the family wants now.” She crosses her arms. I raise my eyebrows at Astrid, who raises hers back at me.

“I'm okay,” I say, because the last thing I want is Marla stomping her way to the bagel place and all the way back and giving me that hard stare she gave me earlier.

“Marla's fine. Everything's fine. We're getting bagels. We're going to eat them in the kitchen together. You can spend the rest of the day in your room, if you want. Now, what else did Mom give you, Astrid?” Eleanor says.

Astrid takes out the little gifts Mom included in her package: a turquoise stone on a small silver chain and a tiny dream catcher with pretty white feathers hanging off it.

“Give them to me,” Marla says. There aren't many things I really love about my sister, but I love that she asked outright instead of pretending it is okay to not have received any presents or letters from Mom yet.

“Okay,” Astrid says, because Astrid doesn't need anything. Astrid sort of lives in a world where necklaces and dream catchers and sick moms don't really exist anyway.

“You want to talk about it?” Eleanor says. She doesn't sound sympathetic, only matter-of-fact. That's how Eleanor is now.

“We can get the bagels, okay? Happy?” Marla pockets
the little gifts and doesn't say thank you. It's getting too hot for our fleeces. The morning is turning into not-morning, and the sun is summer-strong and we are right in its path.

“You want to talk about Mom not sending you stuff?” Eleanor clarifies, but not very nicely.

Astrid starts walking toward the store. She doesn't have it in her to be part of our fights. Or she really wants bagels.

“I'd be mad, so I don't blame you. No one blames you,” Eleanor says. “But you can't throw a tantrum every time you're sad about Mom. We're all dealing with that.”

Marla turns around, kicking up some grass. “I'll be inside,” she says. The door slams behind her, and Eleanor and I are alone.

Eleanor sits in the grass, taking the place where Marla was.

“Astrid can do it herself,” Eleanor says. It surprises me, how quickly the air whooshes out of her, how fast she goes from totally-on-top-of-it adult to defeated little girl. Littler than me. She pulls her knees in to her chest and rests her forehead there. “Wait with me, okay?”

I sit down next to Eleanor. There's a zero percent chance Astrid is going to remember what kind of bagels I like, but there is a one hundred percent chance that she'll come up with something wacky—peanut butter on garlic, cinnamon raisin and salt paired together with cream cheese in
between. It's always an adventure with Astrid.

“Does Mom hate Marla?” I say. I always thought Marla was Mom's favorite, but with her bruised wrist and the envelopes without her name on them, I'm starting to think I got it all wrong.

“I think Marla reminds Mom of herself,” Eleanor says.

“Is Marla like Mom?” It's the question I can't stop asking in my head, so I might as well ask it out loud now.

Eleanor pulls up a chunk of grass. It's the kind of thing I usually do, not her. “I don't know.”

“Have you heard the name Laurel before?” I say. I'm wondering if it's slipped out of Mom's mouth the way so many other things have in bad moments.

Eleanor looks at me almost cross-eyed.

“Sure, we all have. It's on the bench by the lake,” she says.

“What bench?” There's the dock and the light playing on the ripples of water and the sticky sand and the not-as-sticky sand, and the minnows that I try not to think about, and the underused grills and the lifeguard stand down a ways, but close enough to watch us.

“The bench,” Eleanor says, too irritated to have to explain it to me. “You know. Brown. Wood. Little metal plaque thing that says ‘In Memory of Laurel' on it. It's, like, in the grass before the sand. Under the birch tree.”

I know the birch tree. I like to rip long pieces of papery white bark from it, even though Astrid says that is bad for the environment.

I guess I can picture a bench, too, but I always sit in the grass or in the sand or on the dock where my legs can dangle into the water. I would never sit on a bench at the beach.

“Mom sits on it a lot,” Eleanor says, as though with enough words I'll eventually remember.

“I think Laurel was Mom's sister,” I say. I'm tired of all the knots and tangled information I have in my head. I want someone to comb it out for me.

“The dead one?” Eleanor says, like there may be more sisters and more secrets, which I guess wouldn't be that surprising anymore.

“I think she's stuck,” I say. “Marla and I think that, maybe. That she's in the closet.”

I wouldn't say it if I didn't have my secret star in my jewelry box. I wouldn't say it if I didn't have a little drop of magic just in case Eleanor says we can never go in the closets again.

Eleanor takes a few very deep breaths.

“You know I found Mom in your closet when we first came here,” she says at last. I can't tell if she thinks I'm stupid or crazy or right. “She wouldn't come out. She slept in
there. It was that night we let you sleep in our room. We didn't want you to see.”

“I would have been okay,” I say.

“It would make sense, sort of,” Eleanor says. “Dad says the best stories are the ones when everything clicks into place, right when it's at its most confusing.”

“Laurel,” I say.

“Laurel,” she says.

One second later, Astrid's in sight.

“I did all berries!” she says, practically skipping toward us with a huge brown bag of bagels. “I combined every kind of fruit cream cheese with every kind of fruit bagel. Blueberry cream cheese on strawberry bagel. Grape jam on raspberry bagel. It's impressive.” Astrid's smile makes me smile. It's so big and wide-eyed and out of proportion.

“Sounds like a feast,” I say. I want to match Astrid's energy.

“It is!” Astrid says. “We're gonna make today good, okay? We're gonna be okay. All of us.” She hands me a bagel. I don't know what it is exactly, but her bright eyes and warm face make me take a huge bite. It's a combination of jam and cream cheese, an explosion of tastes that drips down my chin and onto the grass.

Eleanor giggles. So does Astrid.

I miss Marla even though she's only a few feet away, in the house. I wish she were here for this.

“We'll take it from here,” Eleanor whispers, right when I thought we were in it together. She rubs my knee, and I can't believe I'm still stupid Silly to her. It makes me miss Marla even more. “Astrid and I will figure out this whole Mom and Laurel and closets thing.”

“Why?” I say. I want her to know I want to be part of it all. That I
am
part of it all.

“You already messed up everything with Marla, honey,” Eleanor says. It's the meanest thing she's ever said to me, and she says it so, so nicely.