What Came From the Stars

  A chain. Green and silver. Heavy.

  “Is that your present?” said Patrick Belknap.

  Tommy nodded. He held the chain in the light.

  “What a dumb present,” said James Sullivan.

  If you only knew, thought Tommy Pepper.

  The chain wasn’t glowing now. Maybe it only glowed in the dark. But even without the glowing, Tommy had never seen anything like it before. It seemed like there were four, or five, or six metal strands that wove around themselves, and sometimes a whole strand looked green, and sometimes a whole strand looked silver, and sometimes it all seemed to be changing from green to silver and back to green again.

  “It’s not dumb,” said Alice Winslow. “It’s beautiful.”

  “He got a beautiful chain for his birthday and you don’t think that’s dumb?”

  “I got an accordion for my birthday,” said Patrick Belknap.

  “Don’t need to say anything else, do I?” said James Sullivan. He leaned back and looked under the table. “Is that a new lunch box?” he said.

  “No,” said Tommy Pepper. He dropped the chain over his head and tucked it beneath his shirt. It felt warm. It felt like it had been made for him.

  “Is that an Ace Robotroid Adventure lunch box?” said James Sullivan—and he wasn’t saying it because he wanted to know.

  Patrick Belknap leaned back too. “It sure looks like one,” he said.

  Tommy Pepper closed his eyes again. Doomed.

  He reached down and felt for the lunch box. The chain slid warmly across his chest. If only he could be somewhere else—like a galaxy or two away. Or at least someplace where grandmothers didn’t give their twelve-year-old grandsons Ace Robotroid Adventure lunch boxes. He ran his hand over the front of the lunch box and felt the cheap metal buckle under his fingers. His grandmother had waited in line and paid a lot of money for something that buckled the first time you touched it?

  An authentic Tom Brady-signed football did not buckle the first time you touched it.

  “So that’s what you were hiding,” said Alice Winslow.

  James Sullivan was snorting chocolate milk out of his nose. “I’d hide it”—snort—“too,” he said. Snort. “Let’s see.”

  Tommy grabbed the lunch box. He felt his doom weigh heavily upon him. But what else could he do? He pulled the lunch box out from underneath the table and laid it in front of them. “My grandmother...” he began—then stopped.

  It wasn’t an Ace Robotroid Adventure lunch box.

  The whole thing had flexed and bent. It was shaped sort of like an egg, but balanced perfectly so that it didn’t roll at all as it rested on the table. Where the red cape of Ace Robotroid had been there was now a swath of bright sunset—actually, sunsets, because there were two suns going down over a strange sea. And where Ace Robotroid had been holding his flag, a startling blue moon was rising, and it looked like it was spinning quickly. Really. Spinning. And in the last light of the two suns, and the first light of the blue moon, streams of silky fog hovered a foot or two above the surface of the water.

  “What is it?” said Alice Winslow.

  Tommy Pepper reached out and slowly put his fingers on one of the suns. Hnaef, he knew. How did he know? But he knew. Hnaef, First Sun. Hengest, Second Sun.

  “Does it open?”

  “Of course it opens,” said Tommy Pepper, and he pressed on the two suns. The thing split open on invisible hinges and inside was his hard-boiled egg, still wrapped in a napkin. “My lunch box,” said Tommy.

  He reached in, took out the egg, unwrapped it, and slowly ate it.

  Alice Winslow, Patrick Belknap, and James Sullivan stared at the setting suns.

  After lunch, Tommy’s class went back to Mr. Burroughs’s room. Usually they went right outside for recess, but Mr. Burroughs always had ice cream cake when it was someone’s birthday—and he gave out the Dumb Birthday Present. Not as dumb as an Ace Robotroid Adventure lunch box, but almost as dumb. Tommy walked back, holding the lunch box in front of him with both hands. It seemed that Hnaef and Hengest were getting lower on the horizon, and the blue moon—Hreth! The moon was called Hreth!—was rising brighter and higher. The fog had disappeared and the water was pulling out with the changing tide and the whole thing felt—he couldn’t quite believe this—wet. It felt wet, as if his hands were on the water. Or in the water. He kept looking to see if it was dripping, but it wasn’t.

  He put the lunch box in his locker—Hnaef really was touching the horizon now—and he went into Mr. Burroughs’s classroom to cut his cake. It was already melting a little around the edges and dripping on Mr. Burroughs’s desk, but Mr. Burroughs still made everyone sing “Happy Birthday to You”—Patrick Belknap played his accordion—and everyone clapped and then Mr. Burroughs handed Tommy the cake knife. It was, as usual, a beautiful ice cream cake, mostly because Mr. Burroughs made it himself, and baking, he said, was the highest of all arts, because it was the only one that you could enjoy with the eye and with the stomach.

  Every sixth-grader who had eaten one of Mr. Burroughs’s cakes agreed.

  It was all white frosting and yellow cake and ice cream sheets, and on top were bright balloons of every color with strings made of icing that led to pictures—also made of icing—of every single person in the class. There was Patrick Belknap trying to hold his accordion up and play it at the same time. James Sullivan spinning his authentic Tom Brady-signed football. Alice Winslow holding a bridle for her horse—the horse wasn’t on the cake. Jeremy Hereford eating a peanut butter sandwich to put on weight.

  “Go ahead and cut it,” said James Sullivan, and Tommy Pepper lowered the cake knife.

  A few of them started to laugh when Tommy began cutting. Then the laughs stopped. Things got really quiet when Tommy held up Alice Winslow’s piece.

  “Oh my goodness,” she said.

  “Are you all right?” said Tommy.

  “How did you do that?” said Mr. Burroughs.

  “Do what?”

  “That,” said James Sullivan, pointing at the piece of cake.

  Tommy put the piece of cake on a paper plate. He looked at it.

  He had cut all around the picture of Alice on the cake. He had cut around her and her bridle. He had cut along the thin line of icing that led to her balloon. He had cut around the balloon. And then he had somehow lifted the whole thing out of the ice cream cake and put the piece onto her paper plate—perfectly.

  “Do me,” said Patrick Belknap.

  “I don’t know how I did that,” said Tommy.

  “Me,” said Patrick Belknap.

  So Tommy cut out the figure of Patrick Belknap with his accordion and his balloon and his string. And then he lifted the whole thing out of the cake and put the piece onto his paper plate—perfectly. Again.

  “That is amazing,” said Mr. Burroughs.

  Tommy felt that he should be amazed himself. But he wasn’t. It seemed like the most ordinary thing in the whole world. He cut out James Sullivan with his spinning football, and then Harriet Pulsifer with her sheet music (she wanted to be a composer), and then George Bisbee with his microscope (he wanted to be the first person to see an atom), and then tiny Jeremy Hereford with his peanut butter sandwich, and then everyone else, and he put the pieces of ice cream cake onto paper plates—perfectly. And when he was all finished, Mr. Burroughs asked if he could cut out a piece where he wasn’t tracing around the shapes, and Tommy reached over to a part of the cake that hadn’t been touched yet and began to carve out a long funnel that curved and curved around itself and then flared out at the end, except that the top of the flare bulged and reached over the opening.

  When Mr. Burroughs asked what it was, Tommy Pepper looked at him, surprised that he didn’t know, since it was so obvious: It was a hanorah, of course—which is what Tommy told him.

  “A hanorah?” said Mr. Burroughs.

  Tommy nodded. He couldn’t believe that Mr. Burroughs wouldn’t know what a hanorah was—or that he would admit that he did
n’t know what a hanorah was.

  Mr. Burroughs went over to the dictionary to look it up while Tommy lifted the hanorah out of the ice cream cake and put it on Mr. Burroughs’s plate.

  “Oh my goodness,” said Alice Winslow.

  “H-A-N...” called Mr. Burroughs from the dictionary.

  “O-R-A-H,” said Tommy.

  “It’s not here,” said Mr. Burroughs.

  Tommy walked over, licking his fingers. “It’s got to be there,” he said.

  Mr. Burroughs shook his head.

  “You play it after a victory in battle, and also after Second Sunrise on the first day of the new year,” said Tommy.

  “There’s only one sunrise a day, Tommy,” said Mr. Burroughs.

  Tommy nodded. “I know,” he said. But then, suddenly, he didn’t know. Was there only one sunrise a day?

  Patrick Belknap asked if they could eat the part of the cake that hadn’t been served yet, and Mr. Burroughs—who was still at the dictionary—said they could if Tommy wanted to cut it up, which Tommy did. He decided that he should cut up the rest in straight lines, which wasn’t as easy as he thought it would be. By the time he was done, he was sweating a little bit—probably because it was such a warm day. He decided he had better give the cake knife back to Mr. Burroughs, who had pulled out another dictionary from his desk drawer and was looking through the Hs.

  He never did find hanorah.

  But he did give Tommy Pepper his Dumb Birthday Present. It was a saltshaker. No one laughed. They were too filled with amazement to laugh.

  That afternoon, Tommy walked home with his lunch box—or whatever it was now—in one hand, and his sister’s hand in his other. Patty was in first grade, and she knew the way home and didn’t need to hold on to her brother’s hand. She even knew how to take the bus home, except taking the bus meant she had to ride with Cheryl Lynn Lumpkin and her mouth. But there were days when they wanted to walk home together because Patty was a little bit scared—and not because of Cheryl Lynn Lumpkin. Tommy knew this. He held on to her hand whenever she wanted.

  He never told her how glad he was to do it.

  They decided to go home the long way today, and so kept on Water Street and passed by the pavilion for Plymouth Rock and crossed the parking spaces and took the steps down to the harbor beach, where the water of Plymouth Harbor was rustling up the tiny stones and releasing them, and rustling them up and releasing them. Tommy looked past the boats and the long spit that marked the end of the harbor, and then out toward the bent horizon where the faraway buoys were tolling. And Tommy Pepper realized that he missed something. He missed it terribly.

  Patty let go of his hand and started to poke around the dark and shining mussel beds.

  He missed the second sun.

  He missed Hengest.

  And the sky was entirely the wrong color. The blue was so dark for this time of day.

  He took his notebook from his backpack and pulled out a sheet of paper. Then he searched around in the backpack for something to draw with. He could find only a stubby pencil, but it would have to do. Quickly he sketched in the horizon—with Hengest shining too—and then he drew in the spit of land, the harbor, the boats. He drew in the ripples of the water. He drew in the tangy scent of the dark mussel beds. And he drew in the sound of the stones being pulled back and forth and the tolling of the buoys. And he drew in Patty, poking among the shells, and the tiny crabs underneath that she couldn’t see, and the way they were scuttling back and forth, and the tidewater that had seeped below the sand and was dragging it out in etched canals. He drew in the iodine smell of the seaweed, and how the seaweed waved back and forth under the water when the tide came in. He drew in...

  Tommy stopped. He blinked. He made his hand move away from the paper. He tried to open his fingers, tried again, and finally got them to drop the pencil.

  He looked at what he had drawn. He listened to it. He smelled it. He felt it.

  Then, quickly, he crumpled it all up. The sound of the grinding stones grew less, less, less, then nothing. He stuffed the crumpled paper into his backpack. He left the stubby pencil lying on the sand.

  “Patty,” he called, and held his hand out to her.

  She looked at him.

  His hand was trembling a little.

  Tommy and his sister walked home quickly—until Patty started to run to keep up, and Tommy slowed down. Every time they stopped at a corner, the iodine smell of the seaweed came up to him, and he couldn’t tell if the smell was on the wind coming inland, or if it was coming from his backpack. He decided not to take a chance, and when they passed a trash can, he took out the crumpled paper and threw it away. He thought he heard the sound of pebbles pushed by water as it fell. And was the tolling only from the buoys out in the harbor?

  They walked past the neat boutiques and shops with flower boxes filled with late petunias, past all the restaurants for tourists and the parking lots for tourists and the trim information booths for tourists, and past the long green lawns of those who could afford to live in big white houses by the sea—past all the smaller houses with not such long green lawns, and then smaller houses with very little lawns, and then smaller houses with hardly any lawns at all and hemmed in by scraggly hedges.

  And when those houses gave out, the road sort of coughed, stuttered, and then died into a gravel path that went up sharply into the sand, passing the sign advertising PILGRIMWAY CONDOMINIUMS COMING SOON! UPSCALE SHORE LIVING!

  Beyond that sign, Tommy’s old and lonely house tilted against a dune. It had no green lawn at all. Only scrub and sand all along the railroad-tie steps up to the house that had once been white, but the paint had blown away long ago. It had a center fireplace, and only a few bricks were missing from the chimney on top—which was also tilted.

  The door squeaked when Tommy and Patty opened it, the floor of the front hall squeaked when they stepped on it, and the stairs squeaked when they dropped their backpacks onto them. Tommy thought that the house had been leaning against the dune so long, it was tired and ready to give out—something like his father these last few months.

  Tommy had never once had a friend over to his windblown, leaning house. Patty hadn’t either. Probably, Tommy figured, they never would.

  Tommy went on back to the kitchen. This floor didn’t squeak as much because it was covered with a layer of blue floral linoleum, but he could see through the holes in the blue linoleum to the red floral linoleum beneath it, and he could see through the worn patches in the red floral linoleum to the broad wood beneath. Someday, his mother and father had said, someday they’d take up the horrible linoleum. Someday they’d level the planks and sand them smooth as soap. It was a project his mother and father had wanted to do together.

  Someday.

  His father was there, making a birthday cake. A chocolate frosted chocolate birthday cake, which Tommy loved so much, it didn’t matter that it was leaning too. “How was your day?” his father asked.

  “Good.”

  “What did you do?”

  Tommy went over to the cake and ran his finger along the chocolate icing that dripped onto the plate.

  “Dug up dinosaur bones.”

  “What did you do with them?”

  “Sold them to the Museum of Science in Boston for a small fortune.”

  “And your share of that is...?”

  “Five hundred thousand dollars.”

  “Not bad for one day’s work.”

  “It only took a couple of hours,” Tommy said.

  “Not bad for a couple of hours.”

  “It’ll do.” Tommy walked over to the largest worn patch of blue floral linoleum over the worn patch of red floral linoleum. He crouched down and picked at it. “Do you ever wonder what the floor would look like if we pulled all of this up?”

  His father licked the chocolate icing from his fingers.

  “Do you?”

  His father shook his head.

  Tommy looked down at the patches. “I do,” he
said.

  His father licked his fingers again, then looked out the window to the sea. “Your mother used to wonder,” he said quietly. Then he went back to icing the leaning birthday cake.

  “Should we try it?”

  His father shrugged. He frosted the birthday cake.

  It was always like that. One mention of Tommy’s mother and there was nothing left to say.

  Tommy went upstairs. He lived in the loft that spanned the whole house and which had been his parents’ studio before he was born, his mother painting portraits at one end and his father painting seascapes at the other. Tommy wasn’t sure how they both fit, since even though a loft sounds like a whole lot of room, Tommy could only stand up in the very middle of it—otherwise the ceiling came down to knee height over the floor. There was, however, a window at the south end that looked out over Plymouth, and a window at the north end that looked up the coast as it bent outward. So with the windows open, it was always cool in summer. And with the chimney squatting smack-dab in the center of the loft, it was always warm in winter—until the fire went down. After that, Tommy could see his breath shimmer in the freezing air.

  And always, always, always there was the sound of the waves, the restless back-and-forth of the ocean, filling the harbor and emptying it, filling the harbor and emptying it.

  That night, Tommy and Patty and their father cooked out on the dune. They heated up the clam chowder from the day before and dripped maple syrup on cornbread and boiled new carrots from their garden and poured out the first of the cider. Then Tommy’s father and sister ran back into the house and they brought out the leaning chocolate frosted chocolate birthday cake, stopping every few steps to pick up the one candle still lit and to light those blown out by the sea breeze. It was getting colder and darker, and already the first star was showing over the water—but Tommy didn’t care. It was his twelfth birthday. He had been alive for four thousand three hundred and eighty-three days. He had been alive with his mother for four thousand one hundred and twenty-six of them. He had been alive without his mother for two hundred and fifty-seven of them.