The Chaos of Stars

  I’m tired and my head aches and it’s a relief that today, at least, I have something to do here. First the break-in, and now the ridiculous coincidence about Orion’s—Ry’s—name. My brain has been set on overdrive, and I can’t get it to calm down. The fact that all of my mother’s junk for the new exhibit finally showed up actually makes me excited. A day spent supervising the unpacking of a bunch of cracking, chipped depictions of my mother replacing my father’s missing manhood with one made of clay, or nursing miniature pharaohs, or poisoning the sun god?

  It’s oddly comforting.

  My phone buzzes in my pocket as I hurry out from under the enclosed walkway to the front of the museum . . . which is surrounded by police cars with their lights on. Four of them are pulled up on the sidewalk surrounding the stairs.

  Floods, what is going on? I slide through a small gap between two of the cars and take the stairs three at a time in my stilettos. As soon as I go through the blue door, a police officer walks up to me, blocking my way.

  “It’s okay,” Michelle says, sounding like it’s anything but. She’s flanked by two other officers, both of whom are writing on pads. “Isadora works here.”

  “What’s wrong?” I ask, eyeing the congregation of uniformed men suspiciously. Why would they be here, too?

  “There was a robbery attempt last night,” Michelle says.

  If I had known San Diego was so crime-ridden, maybe I would have opted to stay with my geriatric sister Essa, who works for a library in Cairo. “What did they take?” I ask.

  “They didn’t get anything, but a driver was seriously injured.”

  “Wait, driver? The delivery was attacked?”

  She nods. “Right when the truck with your mother’s artifacts got here. One of the security guards was opening the back door when the driver was jumped. Fortunately we had more security on duty. They came out and the robber ran off.”

  “That’s good. I mean, bad.” I shake my head. “My brother’s house was broken into just last week.” I pause, rubbing my arms against the chill that’s settled there. “Wait, you don’t think they’re connected, do you?”

  One of the officers next to her, a kind-looking man with a shaved head, frowns. “Did you have anything related to the exhibit? Anything that tied you to the artifacts?”

  “No.” Well, besides Sirus and me, who are genetically tied to them. And my amulets that were smashed up. But obviously no one thought they were valuable or worth stealing. “They didn’t take anything. The police figure it was some guy looking for prescription drugs.”

  “Probably no connection then. Still, keep a close eye out from now on, and if you see anything weird—here or at home—let us know immediately.” He hands me his card, then leaves as another officer waves him over.

  I put the card in my wallet, then look back at Michelle. “How did the robber know the truck was getting here?” We didn’t even know it would be here today. Michelle called last night after she found out what time it would arrive to make sure I was ready.

  “That’s what we’re trying to figure out. The current theory is that whoever it was didn’t know—they must have been watching for it.”

  “Who would want to steal a bunch of old crap?”

  Michelle raises her eyebrows. “Isadora, you do know this exhibit is priceless, right?”

  I resist the urge to roll my eyes. You can’t throw a rock in my house without hitting some “priceless” artifact. “Is the driver okay?”

  She looks away, like she doesn’t want to answer me. “He’s in the hospital.”

  I swallow against my suddenly dry throat. “Will he be okay?”

  “They aren’t sure yet. Most of his major organs are failing.”

  “He was shot?”

  “No. They think poison, but they have no idea what.”

  A shiver trails down my spine. That doesn’t sound good. None of this sounds good. I hate that the museum now feels as exposed and vulnerable as Sirus’s house, and I can’t help but think the only connection—even though it makes no sense—is me. But why would any robber think we’d store that kind of stuff in our house?

  Michelle shakes her head like she’s trying to brush off the same chills plaguing my arms. “Anyway, we’re closed today, probably tomorrow, too.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “When we reopen, I’ll recruit you to help decorate the big hallway we’re converting into a new wing for the exhibit. Your mother said you’re good with design.”

  A strange, warm feeling floods through me. It feels suspiciously like pride. My mother said that?

  “What in the holy heck is going on?” Tyler yells from where she is being blocked entry by one of the police officers.

  Waving wearily, Michelle says, “Fill her in. I’ll send out an email with more details and when we’ll reopen.” I nod, then walk to Tyler in the entrance. She lets me take her by the elbow and escort her back outside. We sit down across the street, watching the lights from the cop cars.

  “Well, I didn’t see that coming,” she says as I finish telling her everything. “But it’s really your mom’s stuff? As in, it belongs to her? Can people even own ancient Egyptian artifacts?”

  I shrug, not sure how to answer. “I guess they can.”

  “You guys must be, like, obscenely rich. Did you travel everywhere when you were growing up?”

  “We’d go to Cairo every once in a while, and visit some of the cities around us, but it was mainly day trips to the Nile.”

  “Fancy cars?”

  “Don’t have one.”

  “Please tell me you at least have a private jet.”

  “I don’t think my parents have ever even been on a plane. The flights here were my very first time.”

  “Oh, for the love. Some people should not be allowed to be rich.”

  I shrug. “And apparently some people will kill to get rich.” I look back at the doors. Today the building looming over us feels vaguely sinister. Who else has been watching it, waiting? Are they still out there? Are they watching me, too?

  “Yeah, that sucks for the driver. Well, I promise to think about him on our days off.” She pulls out her phone and texts furiously while I lean back and let the sun play on my face. The clouds are spotty today—it feels miraculous that there isn’t a total cover. I miss dry heat. I miss the way you can feel the air when you breathe it in, like the landscape is making you part of itself, entering you with every breath.

  Sirus told me that in the fall they get Santa Ana winds like the desert. It’s his favorite time of the year; I can’t wait.

  I look at Tyler. “You want to come to my brother’s house? He has a . . . television. And a swimming pool.”

  Tyler stands, offering me her hand. “Yes. I absolutely want to. But today Scott’s over at Ry’s house. Something about video games. My car’s over here.”

  She starts walking, and I hesitate on the steps. “You know, I think . . . I’m just gonna go home.” I feel shaky and nervous, and the thought of being around Ry doesn’t promise an improvement on that.

  “Why? We have a day off!”

  “I remembered I’m supposed to help my sister-in-law with some remodeling stuff.” She wants me to do the nursery. Working in pastels makes me want to strangle myself with pale-pink curtains, but she said she had something else in mind. We were actually going to plan it tonight since she’s at work all day. However, Tyler doesn’t need to know that.

  “Yeah, but she can’t be counting on your help today because you had work! So you’re not missing anything you’re expected to be there for.”

  I curse inwardly. She wasn’t supposed to figure that out. I can’t admit it’s because I don’t want to see Ry. It’s too weird. And it’s even weirder that I can’t stop thinking that it’s weird. It shouldn’t matter what his name is. It shouldn’t.

  It still does.

  “Can you just give me a ride home, please?”

  She sighs. “Sure. But I am not happy.”
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  Tyler drives away after making me swear to call if I finish early. I feel genuinely bad about lying to her, so I slip out of my heels and walk upstairs to the spare room. If I actually work on it, it wasn’t lying.

  The room is completely blank, not even curtains on the window. Ideas for a retro polka-dot theme spin through my mind. Large circles on the walls, painted in contrasting colors. Circles cut out of Styrofoam and plastered to the ceiling, painted the same color but for a textural accent. Round-back rocking chair with a circular ottoman.

  There’s nothing but potential here, and I can’t wait to get started. As much as I loathe the idea of wasting all of the work on a baby, I can have fun with this. And it will prove to Sirus and Deena that I should do the rest of the house, too.

  I pull out my phone and call Deena. “Hey, I’m home early and wanted to start on the room. You said you had an inspiration folder?”

  “Yes! It’s in the box marked ‘tampons and bathroom stuff.’ I didn’t want Sirus to see it.”

  I laugh, cradling the phone against my shoulder. All of the boxes have been opened, and the one she told me about is empty. “Are you sure? There’s nothing here. What am I looking for?”

  “It’s just a black binder, one of Sirus’s childhood scrapbooks. It has a lot of pictures of murals and ancient Egyptian art. I wanted to do a theme nursery.”

  Oh, floods. She wants me to create the room I spent my whole childhood working on.

  No. This isn’t a tomb, and it’s not mine. I can do it for her.

  I pick up the box again, shake it. “I don’t see it anywhere. All of the boxes are open. Are you sure Sirus didn’t move it?”

  “No, he’s not allowed in that room, he wouldn’t have. No one has been in there.”

  Then it hits me—the memory creeping down my arms in a physical sensation like I’m being watched. This bedroom door was open. It was open, the day of the break-in. I’d never seen it open before. Deena always keeps it closed. “This room is the first room in the hall,” I say, my voice soft. “Maybe it was the intruder.”

  “Why would someone take it?” she asks, bewildered and hurt.

  I have no answers.

  I wake up with a gasping start from the nap I’d only just fallen into. Every noise the house makes sounds suspect. Hopefully the thing with the folder really is just a misunderstanding and we’ll find it in some weird place later, but I feel like eyes are watching me. And I can’t quit thinking about that driver being attacked and poisoned. Somehow that scares me far more than him being shot would have. Shooting is impersonal; it only happens in movies.

  Poison is something my family understands intimately.

  The dark corners of the house seem alive, menacing, and I can feel myself starting to lose it. I don’t want to be alone. I want to be with someone who always makes me feel lighter. I walk out to the porch and pull out my phone.

  “I knew you’d call,” Tyler says without saying hello.

  “I didn’t get my daily dose of Tyler at the museum today.”

  “Tyler deficiencies can be fatal, you know. I’ll come get you right now.”

  “Thanks.” I’m so grateful I don’t even know how to express it. However, when it’s not Tyler’s small Toyota that pulls up but rather Ry’s beautiful truck, I’m torn between that gratitude and annoyance.

  “Hey,” he says, climbing out of the truck and walking up the short, cracked sidewalk to where I’m sitting on the porch. “Tyler told me to come pick you up.”

  “Of course she did.” I ignore his extended hand and push myself to standing. Ry manages to be a couple inches taller than me even in my heels. Huh. I’d hoped I would be taller than him. I really like being taller than people.

  I follow him to the truck. “Did you hurt your leg?” I ask. He has a slight limp I’d never noticed. Not that I was noticing things about him now, like the way his dark hair somehow reflected gold bits in the sun, or how his shoulders created a straight, strong line across his back. Or the pronounced bump of a callus on his middle right finger.

  “No, I’ve always had a limp. It runs in my family.”

  So he isn’t perfect. Physically, I mean. I don’t mean that. He’s not perfect at all.

  I hate Tyler.

  Ry tries to beat me to my side, but I manage to slide in before he can open the door. He gets in, and the truck engine turns over much too quietly. I wish it’d roar. I wish it’d growl so loud I wouldn’t be able to hear my own thoughts. I hate that I’m scared in a place I should feel safe. I hate that it’s spread to my work. I hate that I’m so self-centered that I think it somehow revolves around me.

  I want to call my mom.

  I won’t.

  Ry drives confidently, eyes on the road, and I watch him shift gears to see how it’s done. I should probably learn how to drive. “You never did tell me what you like to do for fun,” he says.

  “Interior design.” If he laughs, I will disembowel him. And I won’t even put his guts into ceremonial jars for embalmment—I’ll scatter them across the dirt. I’ll toss them into the garbage disposal.

  “So you’re an artist.”

  Oh. Well, that was unexpected. “I guess.”

  “That’s really cool. I’d love to see your designs sometime.”

  I’m caught off guard again. I don’t know how to respond, so I change the subject. “Where are we going?”

  “My house. Tyler and Scott are there already.”

  I try to tamp down my intrigue. People’s homes say so much about them, and even though it will really only say stuff about Ry’s parents, I’m still interested.

  “How do you and Tyler and Scott know each other? Do you all go to the same school?”

  “I actually met Tyler at Balboa Park last summer. We don’t go to the same school. But I like them. Neither of them cares that I have a tendency toward being antisocial, and Tyler never tries to flirt with me. Scott doesn’t, either.”

  I roll my eyes. “So that’s your main requirement for friendship? They don’t hit on you? Is that like a regular problem in your life?”

  He shrugs noncommittally. “Isn’t it in yours?”

  I frown, thinking of all of the guys I interact with. I do get hit on a lot at the museum. I just don’t care because I’d as soon be left alone.

  When I don’t answer, he smiles. “It’s hard to be friends with girls most of the time.”

  Oh, shut up. He is not saying that he’s too good-looking to be friends with girls. But then again, at the beach there were a high percentage of beauties sitting very close to us and/or sauntering repeatedly past. And he never looked up once. I snort. “You poor handsome thing. If only you were ugly, then girls wouldn’t have to throw themselves at you all the time. I could break your perfect nose for you, if it’d make your life easier.”

  He raises his eyebrows as if he’s considering it, then shakes his head. “I think my mom would be upset,” he says finally, a genuine note of regret in his voice.

  “Maybe next time, then.” What if he had really asked me to? I laugh. I can see it, me trying and failing to break his nose. I’m not actually a violent person, in spite of being raised on bedtime stories of war and conquest and murder. I was also raised on stories of sex, and I’m not interested in that, either.

  We leave the main road and wind through neighborhoods that are familiar, though I don’t remember why. I can see glints of the ocean from here, and then we pull up into a driveway.

  A driveway I already know.

  Oh, floods. My mockery echoes perfectly in my ears. Of course. Of course it’s his house we parked at when we went to the beach.

  “Yours?” I ask, my voice coming out as a pathetic squeak.

  He nods, a smile pulling apart his full lips. I fight back the shame burning in my face. Yes, my comments were rude. But Ry could have told me it was his house, instead of letting me look like a jerk.

  We get out of the truck and climb the broad steps. Ry pushes one of the massive, carved white dou
ble doors open. It’s like we’ve stepped into a museum of Greek antiquities. The floor is polished marble, with black tiles scrolling a pattern around the borders of the entry.

  A bust of a woman, the pure definition of beautiful, is on a pedestal front and center, and various other sculptures line the room. Almost laughably out of place is a single humongous framed photo of a chubby, cherubic little boy, face smeared with cake as he laughs at the camera.

  “My parents take our heritage very seriously,” he says, his voice solemn but his eyes twinkling as he looks at me to judge my reaction.

  “Really? I dunno, it’s kind of understated.”

  He laughs appreciatively, and I’m relieved that at least he has a sense of humor about the whole thing.

  “The tile work is amazing,” I say, wanting to make up for my earlier mockery, and because it’s true. This floor is gorgeous.

  Tyler pokes her head out of a side hall. “There you are! You okay, Isadora? Your call seemed panicked.”

  I wave my hand dismissively. “I’m fine.” There are no bogeymen. I need to get over this.

  “Good! I’m glad you came. Come on,” she says. We follow her through a hallway with dark wood paneling and the same marble floor, but covered in a plush, ornate rug.

  I approve of the TV room we go into as Tyler runs off to use the bathroom. Someone seems to have abandoned the formality of the rest of the house—framed movie posters dominate the walls, and the biggest television I’ve ever seen in my life takes up the entirety of one wall. A full bar lines the back of the room.

  I wouldn’t change a lot. The movie-poster thing is really cute. I’d use shadow-box frames and backlighting though. Switch out the L-shaped sectional for one long couch and a few movie-theater-style armchairs. Heavy drapes to block out the light better—the white shutter blinds are totally out of place. Redo the beige walls a pale gold, keep the baseboards their rich cherry color, and, ooh, put in maroon velvet drapes covering not just the wide window but the entire wall. Taking the fun atmosphere of the room up a notch or two. Also, a popcorn machine on top of the bar so the whole place smells right.