The Stars Will Shine (15 page)

“So is he…Are they…” I start.

“They’re just gonna crash at the house there.”

“Okay, good.” I fold my hands in my lap and pretend not to see Trevyn’s sideways glances at me.

Chapter Ten

I don’t go to work for an entire week after that party. I ignore both Trevyn’s and Amber’s texts. I don’t even read any of them because I don’t want to feel the guilt that’ll come from knowing the words I’m ignoring. Instead, I hole up in my room under the covers of my bed for entire days, illegally streaming television shows on my laptop. I don’t go down for dinners—still haven’t yet this summer—but I go down around one o’clock in the mornings, long after everyone has retired to their rooms for the night, and eat cold leftovers. There’s always leftovers, always a meal carefully stored away in a plastic container ready for me to heat up, and I hate that Aunt Miranda does it for me, that she does me any favors at all.

My dad calls me one evening. I see his face and number light up the screen of my smartphone
, and I just stare at it like I’ve done every time he has called this summer, until it finally stops ringing. When the screen goes black, my eyelids fall shut. I keep them that way for a long time, breathing in slowly through my nose. When I open my eyes again, I stare at the orange wall before me until my vision fades to black around the borders.

My mom’s face swims before me, but it blurs in and out, mixing with the orange. Panic squeezes my chest as I fight to keep her there, a terrible fear arising that I’m starting to forget her face, her laugh, her touch.

“Mom,” I say aloud, reaching my fingers to trace the fading face that floats before me. I squeeze my eyes together and feel a tear drop down my temple to the back of my neck, pressed hot against my pillow. When I open them again, she’s gone. I flip onto my stomach and press my face into my pillow, suffocating myself until my body instinctively pulls away for air. “Why did you leave me?” I say to her. “Why did you leave me all alone?”

There’s a knock at my door, bringing me back to the lonely emptiness of my room. I fist my hand. “Go away.”

“It’s Aunt Miranda.”

“Go away,” I repeat, frustration turning my voice course.

“I’m not leaving, Delilah.”

I growl into my pillow. With what feels like the weight of an ocean on my back, I push myself up and drag my feet to the door. A second after I open it, I return to my bed and pretend to fix the white sheets I found on my bed yesterday—probably Aunt Miranda’s doing—so I don’t have to meet her eyes with my red-rimmed ones.

“Your father just called me,” she says. I don’t respond. “He says you haven’t been picking up his calls.”

I fold the sheet corner, tuck it under the mattress, and tug down at the hem so it falls nicely, a trick I learned from my mother a long time ago. Then I move to fluff my pillows. Aunt Miranda lets out a heavy breath.

“You know my brother loves you very much—”

“Just stop it,” I say, whipping around and holding up a hand. “Stop with it all, alright? Stop acting like you care about him or about me or about what goes on in our lives.”

“How can you say that, Delilah?” Her face falls, the lights dimming in her eyes, and for a second I let myself believe she’s really hurt by what I’ve said. It sends a thrill through me at the same time it twists my heart. Her lips are parted as though she’s disoriented by my words, her eyebrows drawn together. “How can you stand here and tell me that I don’t care about you or love you after I’ve welcomed you into my home? And after all these years when your father had questions about raising you, I was there for him—for
you
.”

“Shut up,” I say, my teeth clenching. Saltwater fills my eyes and threatens to spill over. “Don’t try to act like you are or were ever a mother figure to me. Before this summer, we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other for six fucking years.”

Aunt Miranda’s shoulders fall. She looks like she could crumble to the floor. I realize then that she looks exactly like my father did right before he sent me away. I have this tendency to exhaust people, to burden them, to wear them down until they give up hope.

“I’ll leave,” I say. Her head shoots up, pain across her face.

“I want you to stay.” She stands straight again and reaches toward me, but when I pull away, she slowly drops her hand back to her side. She regards me in earnest, her hands flipped so that her palms face me at her sides, as if to open herself to me. “I want you to stay.”

Then she leaves without another word, her hand shaking as it rises to cover her mouth.

I steal their wine that night. In the shadows of the hallway outside the pantry, I watch Uncle Jim emerge, a bottle of rosé in hand, from the cellar below the pantry floor. He locks the floor door behind him and slips the key into the pocket of his gray dress pants, taking it with him to their master bedroom.

I try the door latch once, though I know it’s no use without the key, then lie in wait instead.

An hour and a half passes before my aunt and uncle’s bedroom light clicks off.

Another hour passes before I make my move.

Fortunately, their door opens silently. I crawl along the floor, searching for Uncle Jim's pants, all the while listening to make sure their snores stay steady. When I find the pants in their closet, folded neatly in his laundry basket for Christ’s sake, I dig around in the pockets for the key. Of course, Uncle Jim wouldn’t be so stupid as to toss his wine cellar key into the dirty laundry, so I click their closet door closed and tap on the dim light of my cell phone, dampening its intensity with my shirt, to take a look around.

A quick scan of the closet reveals a key hook board by the door, from which roughly twenty keys hang. Luckily, every hook is labeled nicely and neatly, so I slide the small gold key that hangs below the label “Wine Cellar” off its hook and take off with it.

Back in the pantry, the key proves to be correct.

I lift the cellar door and make my way down the spiral staircase that leads to a white-walled room, lined with wooden racks upon which sit rows and rows of unopened wine bottles. I wrap my arms around myself, not used to the cool temperature in here, and meander along the rows of wine. Reds, whites, rosés…They’re all here for the taking.

I lift a bottle of Merlot from the top of a stack and read the label.

KYLER WINES

2011

Merlot

Sonoma Valley, CA

“Let’s see how good your wine is, Uncle Jim,” I say, smiling smugly to myself. I squeeze it under my arm and slide a bottle of their Chardonnay off another shelf.

After returning the key to its proper hook, I head up to my room with my two bottles of wine and a wine opener from the kitchen.

And I drink.

And drink.

All of it. Every last bit.

I consume until my head hurts, until my eyes burn with a want for sleep, until my body feels heavy against the bed, even as I spread myself wide to distribute my weight. Sleep wants to come to me, but my mind won’t let it. Heavy eyelids do nothing to console me. Instead, I start to cry, unable to stop myself.

Thoughts of my mother, the last time I saw her face, swarm me. Her tired eyes, the way impending Death brought with him a gravity that sagged the skin of her skeletal arms. Her hollowed cheeks made me want to run in fear because she didn’t look like her. She wasn’t her…She wasn’t my mother. As she lay in that hospital bed, there was an unseen monster that hovered over her, sucking out her soul. If I could have seen him, he would have been swathed in shredded black cloth, his skin a dead gray color, his eyes empty holes.

My bed sheets feel like ropes, ensnaring my limbs and binding me to the bed, and no matter how much I toss and turn, sweat soaking my skin and hair, I can’t break free from them or my memories.
I sob into my pillow. Until those horrible last memories of my mother fade into other dark memories. Until my eyes dry out and I’m left thinking of Tommy. Tommy, whom I looked to for love and comfort, and who left me feeling everything opposite.

It’s dark in my room. I’m waiting for Tommy to come, hoping for him to. He’s here tonight—I heard Dave and him playing video games downstairs about an hour ago—so I think he might. But there’s always a part of me that waits for the night he’ll stop showing up in my room altogether.

The door creaks open. I shift upward onto my elbows, expectant, my heart thundering like it does whenever he visits me. Tommy slips into the dark as if he’s just one of the shadows and quietly shuts the door behind him. In the next second he’s at my bed and his hands are running up my arms. His fingers wrap themselves in my hair, his lips find my neck, and he whispers, so close to my ear, that I am beautiful. My heart leaps, just as it does every time he says something like that.

It isn’t long—it never is—before he takes off my pajamas and drops his pants. Before his body covers mine and he moves inside of me. And when it’s all over ten minutes later, I finally get the courage to tell him what I’ve always felt.

“I love you,” I whisper. Tommy smiles at me, but it looks a little sad. He runs his hand softly through my hair and backs away, pulling up his pants as he goes.

“Good night, Delilah,” he says, but he’s not looking at me. He’s looking everywhere but at me. And then he’s gone, and I’m all alone in the dark again.

“I love you,” I say once more to the emptiness of my room. It floats from my lips like a ghost in a graveyard, and by the sinking feeling inside of me, I know those words will haunt me for the rest of my life.

Do you ever have some memory that stays with you—maybe something embarrassing or shameful you did that now you wonder why you were ever so stupid? And for some reason, even after years and years of life going on, it still guts you every time it passes through your mind…because you can’t seem to let it go?

Well, Tommy is that for me. I’ve never been able to let him go.

Chapter Eleven

“Will you go shopping with me?” Leah tugs lightly on my hand. It’s a Saturday afternoon, and I’ve been staring absently out the living room window, probably looking lost. Now, disconcerted, my eyes snap to her. She’s wearing a hairband with a bright red bow on top to hold her blonde hair back, and she’s beaming up at me.

“We could go to some of those boutiques near your work.” The work I haven’t been to in a week. “I saw this really cute dress in the window of Lacey’s Boutique.” Which is the shop right next to Miles of Vinyls. “It would look perfect on you!” she goes on.

Honestly, I don’t want to go anywhere near Miles of Vinyls right now, purely out of shame for leaving Trevyn and Amber hanging.

“Uh…” I search for an excuse, but she’s looking at me like she’s sure I won’t turn her down, and I can’t find it in me to shatter the joy that is glistening in her eyes. I scratch the back of my neck with a sigh and force a smile. “Yeah, sure. Let’s go to the boutiques.”

Leah sprints to her room and is back out before I’ve even had time to fully register what I’ve just agreed to. So that’s how I find myself in the dressing room at Lacey’s Boutique, trying on a deep blue lace dress, befitting the store name. With a vintage loveliness, the dress falls to my mid-thighs and hugs my small frame. Leah practically rejoices like a choir of angels when I come out of the changing stall.

“Oh my gosh!” she cries. “It’s beautiful, Delilah! You have to get it. It’s so…It looks so…On you, it’s…” And then her hands press to her cheeks and she shakes her head in wonder, like she’s never seen something so breathtaking. While Leah has a tendency toward the dramatic, I do agree, if not a little reluctantly to myself as I self-consciously pull at the quarter length sleeves, that the dress looks good on me.

Leah comes up behind me, reaches up high on her tiptoes and snatches my hair tie right from my hair, which sends my dark strands cascading past my shoulders. And for a moment, it’s all I can do to stare in the mirror before me and not fall weakly to my knees. It’s all I can do to keep breathing because I have never looked more like my mother than I do right now in this dress with my long, wavy hair.

Mom used to wear things like this all the time. She was the type to dress up for an ice cream outing. And it wasn’t to bring attention to herself—she was naturally beautiful and would draw admiration even if she were in sweatpants and a tee-shirt two sizes too big. It was just that she loved fashion, and she loved the sense of feeling natural but looking good.

I grew up without her there to teach me things like that. God knows Dad and Dave had a hard time raising a girl without her around. Dad nearly had a heart attack the first time he bought me tampons. Stressed, sweating, and stuttering, he kept asking
me
what to do and I, of course, had no clue at the time. At the sight of all the blood, I just thought I was dying. He was totally unprepared, like me starting my period was way out there from left field. Maybe he thought he still had a couple years to study up on me being a girl, and there I was surprising him with a pop-quiz. It’s true, a call to Aunt Miranda saved the day on that one.

“You should really buy this dress,” Leah says to me. I tilt my head to the side, still taking in my reflection. “You
have
to.”