Rules for Stealing Stars (20 page)

Thirty-Nine

W
e leave my star outside Astrid's closet door. I don't want to let it leave my bedroom, but for Marla, to save my sister, I'd do anything, I guess.

I didn't know that about myself.

We stay up all night watching my star and the unmoving closet door. The three of us can't all lie down on Eleanor's twin bed, but we can sit on it and let our heads nod sleepily when we get so tired we need a mini nap. We do not sleep longer than a mini nap. We can't afford it.

The star does throw a tiny splash of warm, orangey light on the door. But over the hours, as the night gets darker and colder and more filled with sounds of crickets chirping and
owls hoo-hoo-ing, the little bit of light grows. The warmth grows too. Doubles, triples its reach. Soon the heat is hitting my forearms, my toes, my neck. The light is strong but soft, like it's coming from a huge, powerful candle, and even Astrid stops nodding off.

“What's your star doing?” she says, leaning in to me. I didn't know I was old enough for Astrid to lean against. I didn't know I was old enough to take care of my sisters.

“I don't know. I've never left it out,” I say. “Maybe it's saving Marla?”

“I'm telling you, Marla has to save herself,” Eleanor says. But she's opening her arms wide so that the star's magical heat can hit her body more easily, so it can rush right to her heart and fill her up.

The star gives off a bit of a shimmer. I hadn't noticed it before. It's a sparkling kind of glow. It reminds me of an eye shadow that Eleanor has been putting on recently when she's sneaking off to see her secret boyfriend.

The room is swimmy and glowy and glittery and foggy and so pretty I almost forget about Marla completely.

Almost.

Until I think I hear the door creak.

“It's happening!” I say. Astrid and Eleanor look at me funny. “The door! You hear it, right?”

They shake their heads.

The door isn't opening.

It was the house creaking, the way the New Hampshire house always creaks.

Around six in the morning the sun starts to rise, and the three of us fall asleep in the warm glow of the star that I thought might solve everything but didn't.

Forty

M
arla has a letter from Mom in the morning. And a package.

“Oh my God,” Astrid says. Dad looks up over his newspaper.

“Oh, yes. I wasn't sure what to do with that one,” Dad says. He looks utterly confused. He has no idea who Marla is. But he guesses, quite correctly, that he
should
know who Marla is.

“I'll open it,” I say.

I wish Marla were here to open it, and short of that I wish Eleanor were here to be in charge of the situation and decide what to do, but she snuck out sometime while Astrid
and I were sleeping in. I don't know how, except that maybe the star gave her extra energy. She left a note. It said she was meeting “him” at the lake for an early morning swim and a bagel but that she'd be back soon. It said she was sorry, she should be a better sister, she should try harder, but that she needed her mind to think about something else for a minute.

I don't know if I'm mad or jealous that she's gone. We should all be in it together, sweating it out with no breaks. But it's easy for me to say that, when I have no one else.

All I have is my sisters and my closet and my star.

“I'm going to head to work,” Dad says, a little dreamily. He blushes and looks away from the package and the letter.

“You don't want to see what Mom sent?” Astrid says. She's getting in on my game too, determined to get Dad to pay attention, remember, say Marla's name, miss Marla.

Dad pretends not to hear, but he's redder, so I know he's heard. He leaves.

I open the letter first.

Sometimes a thing makes you happy and sad at the same exact time. Relieved and scared.

The idea of Mom not coming back for a long time gives me all those feelings. Astrid crumples up the letter. Throws it on the ground. Maybe Astrid is only angry, and I guess maybe that's okay too.

“Don't open the package,” Astrid says. “I don't want to see anything else.”

“She said she doesn't remember everything,” I say.

“But I remember everything,” Astrid says. “Maybe Marla's right, to leave. Maybe we should all be starting over like Eleanor. Or maybe you're right, bringing things out of the closet so that the real world is less awful. Maybe I'm the only
one who is doing this all wrong.”

I've never seen this look on Astrid's face. It's all screwed up and flushed. She's uncertain and sad. She's not spacing out, staring into the distance or getting lost in a shoe-box diorama. She's right here, feeling everything.

I hug her. She collapses into me and cries. Sometimes I forget how many feelings we're all, each of us, storing inside. Maybe Astrid stares into the distance because she's trying to leave them all behind.

“I remember everything too,” I say. It's something I can give my sisters. Something certain and fierce. The things I've seen, and my promise that I won't lose the memories. We stand like that for a while, with Astrid crying and me rubbing her back and wondering at the sudden way I've become the one doing the comforting instead of the one being comforted and protected. “I'm not looking away anymore,” I say.

Astrid pulls back. Her eyes are watery and sad and she needs me. She doesn't have to say it this time. I already know it. And I think I almost deserve it. To be needed.

“Look,” I say, when Astrid has calmed down enough. “We have to open the package. Maybe it can help. The last package we got helped me learn about Laurel. Maybe this one will do something.”

Astrid nods once and I open it.

Inside, layered in so much bubble wrap you'd think it was fine china, is a painting. Oil, like Marla used to do. Small. Imperfect.

It is a night sky. Navy and gray and a little bit black.

No moon.

But stars. So many stars. Dozens of orange-gold stars.

In a corner, there's Mom's signature, and something else. A few words that are too small for me to read. Astrid makes a
hmm
noise, like they mean something to her, and I'm about to ask, but she turns it over so fast I don't have time, and once we see the back I forget all about the front.

On the back, a note from Mom.

Forty-One

W
e try to call Mom, but some other patient at the rehab answers, and she doesn't understand what we're saying because it's so noisy in their hallway.

“Gretchen! Gretchen! Our mom Gretchen!” we say over and over again.

“Napkin?” the lady on the other end says. She sounds sleepy and confused. “Kitchen?”

“Gretchen!” I yell.

The lady hangs up.

We call Eleanor and tell her to come home immediately.

“Don't go,” a boy says in the background. “Let's get back in the water!” I picture Eleanor shaking her wet head, little
droplets flying off her hair. I try very hard not to picture her kissing him good-bye. I don't love the idea of Eleanor kissing.

“You have an idea?” she says.

I launch into a description of the note and the painting Mom sent, but Eleanor stops me before I get very far.

“Okay, okay, I'm coming. Deep breaths, Silly. I'll be there.”

“You always have to go,” her secret boyfriend pouts in the background, and I think I hate him, regardless of how much she likes him.

“My sisters need me!” she calls out to him, while hanging up on me. She'll be here in, like, two seconds. She's a fast runner.

We get more fabric from the sewing room.

I can't stop myself from trying the sewing room closet.

After all Mom's warnings, the door isn't even locked.

Inside are photo albums and music boxes and dolls and little-kid paintings. The leftovers from Laurel's childhood. The person she was, the fact that she existed, are all hidden in the closet. I want to know if it's magic too, but I'm too scared to shut the door. I only want my closet.

“We're saving our sister,” I say, as we look at the place where forgetting happens.

The three of us stand outside my closet, ready and shaking and stuck between hopeful and hopeless. We have fistfuls of construction-paper stars and glitter and yellow thumbtacks. We have as much black fabric as we could scrounge up. We cut up Mom's black wool coat and my navy-blue fleece robe. We are ready.

Except.

I'm a little scared that I'll somehow get stuck too. I guess it wouldn't be a terrible place to live, in a starlit sky that goes as far as my imagination asks it to. But still. I'd miss breakfasts with Dad and the lake and Marla.

I would really, really miss Marla.

I can't get stuck if I don't want to get stuck. If I want to be out here, the closet can't keep me. But Astrid and Eleanor look scared too.

I'll have to go in first. I'll have to show them it's okay.

I go inside and they follow. We keep the door open as we hang the fabric. Keep the door open while we glue and tape and pin and nail the construction-paper stars to the ceiling, walls, every inch of the closet. We are going to need a lot of stars.

“It's only the sky,” I say before closing the door. I know they're frightened, and I am too, but the sky and the stars aren't anything to fear.

The shift happens the moment the door is closed. Fabric turns to sky, paper to stars, and we are inside the most chaotic, crowded night sky you've ever seen. The brightness of the stars almost hurts my eyes. The darkness is huge, too, unstoppable. Usually even in New Hampshire, which has, like, three people in it, I can see some lights when it's dark out. Other houses. Neighbors' bonfires. Headlights. Whatever. There's more than the sky and the stars in the real world.

But in here there is only black and navy meeting up in strange patterns, and stars glinting in even stranger patterns, and me and Eleanor and Astrid taking it all in.

“What do we do?” Astrid says. “Do the stars, like, fall? Are they shooting stars or something?”

“We get them. We pull them out of the sky,” I say. I pretend, for my sisters, not to be nervous.

I stand on my tiptoes. They don't hold me very well, and I sort of stumble, trying to keep my balance.

“You've got it,” Eleanor says.

I try again. Remember to breathe this time. Tense all my muscles, from my toes to my legs to my stomach and shoulders and everywhere in between. I reach my hands up high above my head and right away feel the warmth of dozens of little stars glowing at me. Some of them have pointy edges and jab my fingers when I wave my hands around trying to get ahold of one.

Astrid joins me. She doesn't simply stand on her toes. She leaps into the air, both hands swinging. An animal-like
oof
comes out of her mouth, and she pulls a pile of stars out of the sky.

“Oh!” I say. It hadn't occurred to me to do anything but pick them out one by one. But as soon as Eleanor sees how easy it is, she jumps too, bending her knees deep and making her own growl of effort as she leaps. Soon it is a shower of stars. Eleanor and Astrid bat them out of the sky, taking down five, ten at a time. I push them into a pile, like glowing rocks, but basically weightless. I want to bury myself in them.

“That must be enough,” I say.

“More,” Eleanor says. “We should have brought a ladder. Silly? Can you fix it?”

I don't know what she means. I'm smaller than both my sisters. I'm smaller than most people my own age, even. I can't reach. I look at her funny and wonder if she needs a reminder about my tininess.

“Make the room smaller. Do your Silly-thing,” Eleanor says.

I'd forgotten again. I'm special.

Maybe not in the shiny-haired, long-legged, super-athletic, pretty, talented way that Eleanor is. And not in
the artsy, in-her-own-universe, creating-masterpieces-out-of-wire-hangers-and-cotton-balls way that Astrid is. But in some small way that right now is actually huge.

I get back on my tiptoes. Reach my hands over my head. And wish the stars closer.

The night shrinks to the size I'm picturing in my mind. I pick stars, one by one. It feels wrong to swat at them, to treat them like they are candies or beads that you can scoop into a plastic bag. They require more care than that.

I handle each star with the same gentleness I did my first star. Loving the warmth. Loving the way it helps me breathe more easily. Loving the strange, perfect color.

We don't leave any stars in the sky. By the time we are done, we are gathered around a pile of
glow
.

“Wow,” I say.

“Wow,” Astrid says.

“Wow,” Eleanor says.

“How do we get them out?” Eleanor asks. She has stars in her pockets and her hands. We all do, but there's not enough pockets or hands to fit them all.

“I only had one,” I say. Astrid plays with a star in one of her hands. Rolls it between her palms and even sniffs at it. “And I think I'm the only one who can take them out. I think it's part of me being, um, special.”

“I bet I know how to get them out,” Astrid says.

I don't ask. I don't need to know. Whatever she says, we'll do. Because Astrid is nothing if not strange and wonderful and chock-full of the best kind of impulses, the kind that gives her the ability to make her dioramas to begin with, and bring them to the closet, and explore the world around her without fear.

She shivers, and I'd bet there are goosebumps even on her fingertips, her neck.

Astrid puts a star on her tongue. Swallows. Then another. And another.

Astrid is eating the stars.