Rules for Stealing Stars (19 page)

Thirty-Five

A
strid tries the door, but I decide they can't leave, so the door doesn't budge.

I ask the memory closet to show us what happened to Laurel, and brace myself for a mirror-image memory of Marla getting stuck in the closet. Instead the ballroom memory fades and we end up at the lake.

The lake looks about the same as it does now—the water's a little darker, there's no grill, the bench that Eleanor reminded me about isn't under the birch tree—but the birch tree is every bit as tall and thin and sloping as I've always known it.

Young Mom and Young Dad are on the dock. Her legs
are over his, and their noses are touching. They kiss every third moment.

“Oh my God, oh my God,” Astrid says. She's still recovering from the ballroom, and it's too much, I think, seeing Mom and Dad on our dock in a whole new memory. My heart's pounding too. I know what's coming before I see it.

Laurel rushes into the lake. She swims out far, farther than we've ever been able to go. Past the dock and the buoys and the sandbar.

Mom doesn't see. She doesn't yell after her or glance in her direction to check on her, like she's always telling us to do with one another. There's no lifeguard. There's not even a lifeguard stand.

Mom and Dad won't stop kissing and batting their eyelashes and making dopey love-faces at each other.

“I love you,” Mom says maybe for the first time or the hundredth, it's impossible to tell.

Laurel swims out so far that Mom and Dad can't hear the splashing and the flailing, or don't notice it in their love-bubble, but Eleanor, Astrid, and I can see it.

I don't turn away. The speck in the distance that is Laurel vanishes. She's gone.

“Get us out of here,” Eleanor says. She puts her hand on my shoulder, and Astrid wraps her arm around my other shoulder.

“That's enough,” Astrid whispers, and she's right, it is. I've seen enough.

We walk away from the lake and find the closet door past the birch tree. We find the closet door and leave it all behind.

We can't leave Marla's room for a good, long minute or two. We can't speak or move or think.

I can't think, at least. Maybe Eleanor and Astrid are managing some thoughts.

I'm weeping. Throat-hurting, dripping-wet weeping. “I made so many mistakes. I thought it was okay, I thought it was okay,” I say. “I should have told you about Marla. About her wrists. I knew but I didn't want to know.”

I kept too many secrets. I turned away from too many things. I'm going to be sick.

“How did Mom forget everything?” Astrid says. “How could Mom forget her little sister and what happened to her?”

“She thought it was her fault,” I say, understanding in some strange way. “She probably used to visit memories of her in the memory closet. After. And then at some point I guess . . . she couldn't anymore. The closets stopped being magical for her.”

“But she kept trying to go back into all the closets,”
Astrid says. I think we're all remembering listening late at night to Mom pacing to different doors, each one creaking open in its own distinct way, Mom's louder and louder sighs when she didn't find what she needed inside. Sometimes I'd even wake up to Mom in my room, checking inside my closet. I'd pretend to sleep through it.

It only ever happened on the worst nights with the most wine.

“I have one more thing to show you,” I say. I'm ready to let them in on the last secret. I shouldn't have had any to begin with.

We go into my room. Eleanor and Astrid keep looking at the door, because really we should be in their room, finding a way to save Marla. But I have to show them what I've been hiding first.

“It's a good thing,” I say. “Or I think it's a good thing.”

I go to the drawer and open the box. I'm scared that when I open it up it will be a box of nothing, and I'll be even more alone.

The star is there, though. Tucked inside the velvet casing, like I left it. Warm, brilliant, radiating. I lift it up.

“Priscilla?” Astrid says. She leans over the box and lets the light of the little star hit her face.

“Is that a . . . what is that?” Eleanor says.

“A star,” I say. Astrid nods and moves closer. She closes her eyes and hums an appreciative sound at the way it feels and looks.

“Like, from the sky?” Eleanor says. Her forehead is wrinkling in confusion. Her whole face, actually, is wrinkling in confusion. She takes a step closer to me and Astrid and the star. She reaches one finger toward the light, but retracts it right away.

“From the sky in the closet,” I say. “I sort of stole it. Borrowed it. I borrowed it.”

“Drop it!” Eleanor screams, almost. But I don't. I hang on even tighter. I need it, need it, need it.

“It's good,” I say. “I swear. It's protective or calming or good luck or something. And anyway, I'm going to put it back. I'm only borrowing it, while Mom's gone and stuff. I needed a little magic of my own, you know? Something special.”

“You have a whole closet of special whenever you want it,'” Eleanor says. She reaches for the box, but Astrid clamps it shut and takes it from my hands. As soon as its light and warmth are trapped back in the box, I'm sadder, more scared.

“I needed something out here,” I say.

“You were so sweet and small and polite for so long,” Eleanor says, like we're at the funeral of my former self.

“Let her keep it,” Astrid says. She holds the box with the star inside to her chest, and I wonder if she can feel the heat radiating right through her sweatshirt to her heart. God, I hope so.

I give Eleanor an enthusiastic nod.

“You have to return it eventually,” Eleanor says. She sounds unhappy to be budging, but even she isn't sure what is right and what is wrong at this point. Even Eleanor doesn't know the rules.

“I will.”

“I don't trust you anymore, I don't think,” Eleanor says.

“Well, you're gonna have to try,” I say. It's the closest I've come to telling Eleanor how to live her life instead of her telling me.

So I stole a star. Borrowed a star. Because when you are sad, you need a little help, sometimes, getting happy again.

Thirty-Six

W
e still don't know how to get Marla out, after all that.

I'm scared we'll forget her. I know time is running out, if what Astrid says is true. She'll fade more the more time she's in there.

I don't want the three of us to be wandering from room to room, looking for our sister without knowing we are looking for our sister.

She's one of us. We can't pretend she was never here.

Dad is already starting to forget. He was made for forgetting, I think. He forgets the closet and the palace and the champagne river, I'm sure. He forgets what Mom has done to our family. He forgets where he put his keys. He forgets
that he is a prince from a fairy tale.

He never forgets the happily-ever-after fairy tales, though. Those he always, always remembers.

I think when you are from a fairy story, you can only remember the things that are here in the real world. Once Marla is in the closet for more than a whole day, she disappears from his world.

The terrible forgetting starts at lunch. Dad comes home from work to have lunch with his girls and doesn't ask about Marla. He does look confused, at least. He spends a lot of time craning his neck to get a good look at the front door and the stairs and the bathroom.

“Marla's on a walk,” I say. “That's why she's not here.”

He squints at me.

“Okay,” he says carefully. “Okay, good. Walking's good.” He gets lost in spreading mayonnaise on white bread, and I elbow Astrid so hard she hiccups.

“Marla might be gone for dinner, too,” Astrid tries. Eleanor shakes her head at us.

“Was she going to come over for dinner?” Dad says. The words hurt. I basically grab the sandwich out of his hands when he's done assembling it. I eat it in exactly three bites and rush upstairs to sit outside Astrid's closet. Palm to the door, I whisper for Marla to come out.

I don't want to forget her too.

Thirty-Seven

D
ad doesn't set a place for Marla at dinner. He sits me and him on one side of the table, the twins on the other.

“Marla called and told you she wasn't coming?” I say. I want him to remember. Eleanor slumps in her seat and starts shoveling overcooked peas into her mouth. We spent the entire day doing things to the hinges of Astrid's closet door. We used screwdrivers and hammers and wrenches and even a drill. We used a lighter, thinking maybe we could melt the metal.

It didn't matter. The closet door did not open.

We all know, but don't want to know, that we can't do
anything to fix the situation. Marla has to want to come out, but every day she's in there she's farther away, less and less of the Marla we know.

“Marla,” Dad says, thoughtful and strange.

“Yeah. Marla,” I say, gesturing to the place where she isn't.

“I don't think I've heard from her,” he says. The words come out slow and questioning, like he knows he is supposed to know what I am asking about but actually he doesn't understand at all.

“Don't you think you, um, should?” I say. Astrid and Eleanor are silent. Astrid is peeling the skin off her chicken, and Eleanor has nearly finished eating already.

Dad stares at me. He moves his lips a little, trying to form the right word, the right sentence, but coming up with nothing.

Thirty-Eight

I
read with Dad in the living room before bed, trying to craft the perfect way to tell him he is starting to forget his middle daughter and that he needs to get with it.

It is harder than you'd think, to phrase that right.

He eventually stands up and stretches. “I'm gonna hit the hay, Silly-Billy,” he says. His tall frame lumbers toward the staircase, but I can't quite let him go.

“Dad?”

He turns to look at me over his shoulder. But instead his gaze catches on the row of framed photographs he hung on the wall when we moved in. There are four pictures, one of each of his daughters. School photos. The kind with
accidentally bad hair and forced smiles and weird backgrounds. But Dad likes every picture of us. Always has.

His eyes linger on each picture, one by one. Mine: pigtails and ugly pink shirt. Eleanor: perfectly parted and combed hair, hint of lip gloss. Astrid: messy bun on top of her head and an enormous green turtleneck sweater. Marla: closed-mouth smile and the top of her gray dress.

Dad tilts his head. He points to the last picture but stops himself from saying anything.

“Marla looks good in that picture, right?” I say. I stand up, like that may somehow help him remember her. I'm tempted to shake him, thinking maybe the memories of his daughter are jammed up somewhere between his toes and his brain and I need to get them out.

“Yes?” he says. “I don't remember putting that one up. Did you do it yourself? You know I asked you to check with me before nailing anything in.” He's not taking it down or anything, but my heart drops. He thinks I've hung a photograph of some random friend on the wall.

“You put it up, Dad,” I say. My voice is shaking and my eyes are burning and my heart is all kinds of wilted and heavy. But I stand up straight and say it loud, so he doesn't forget.

“Huh,” he says, and shrugs before heading up the stairs.