Cage of Stars

  Chapter Twelve

  Since the course work for my junior year was already finished, I spent the time before Christmas getting ready to take my college exams. With my mother, I reviewed the essentials of all I learned in algebra I and II, geometry, and precalc, as well as biology, chemistry, and physics. With my father, I reviewed vocabulary and the differences among words: A raccoon is to a polar bear as a Muslim is to an Islamic extremist. A carpenter is to an architect as a choreographer is to . . . You get the picture. I studied a flip book of words no ordinary person ever uses in real life: ascetic, amalgamate, amortize. We went over the hero and the antihero, the protagonist and the antagonist, the individual’s relationship and obligation to society, the individual’s knowledge of and abuse of power, the individual’s relationship to nature, the individual’s alienation from society as expressed by his search for harmony with nature, the individual’s journey inward as represented by his journey over the course of the novel—as in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I was madly bored by the individual.

  So stuffed with knowledge, I felt like a carrot-spice muffin—a treat made from stuff that would otherwise be too good for you to enjoy.

  Once I got my dates, I went to my father’s high school on two different days and chewed my way through six pencils.

  We waited for my scores. My father said, “You’ll shine, Ronnie.”

  I said, “Dad, there were words on those tests, like ‘deleterious,’ that I never saw before in my life. I should have studied Latin. I couldn’t even find a root word to work from, except ‘delete.’ It sounded like a side dish on a deli menu.”

  “But that was the right root word. Deleterious means having a harmful effect on someone, subtracting something,” my father encouraged me.

  Since I was a minor and they were addressed to my parents, when the scores for my tests came, I had to wait, both times, on pins and needles, until my father got home. Right away, both times, I knew from his face that there was something to celebrate.

  I got a combined 1500 on my SATs and 34 on my ACTs.

  “Well done,” my father said simply. But he was beaming.

  My mother said, “Oh, Ronnie, my sweetheart. My bright, beautiful girl.”

  Rafe said, “Go, go, Ronnie,” and we all laughed at him. Mama insisted on calling my grandmother.

  Grandma said, “Veronica, I’m not surprised. You are a survivor.”

  Since that summer, I’d been turning the away-from-home thing over and over in my mind, and I figured this was as good a time as any to bring it up. “I’ve been thinking,” I told my folks, “that I might not go to BYU. I might . . . With these scores, I might apply to some other places.”

  My mother looked a little alarmed. “Far from here?” she asked.

  “Maybe,” I ventured. “I really liked the ocean.”

  “You don’t go to college to look at scenery,” my father said. “On the other hand, there’s nothing wrong with considering other places. I wouldn’t suggest Berkeley, but there’s Yale. . . .”

  “Yale?” my mother squeaked.

  “I’ll get a scholarship,” I told her. “And since I’m young, I can work a whole year before I start. I can save up my money.”

  “You’re not going to save up Ivy League tuition baby-sitting and cleaning the Sissinellis’ house,” Mama said.

  “I thought I might train as an emergency medical technician, and work at that from when I’m eighteen until nineteen,” I said.

  “You’ve given this thought,” Papa said.

  “It’s a worthy thing to do, Papa,” I said. “And in cities, EMTs can make more than twenty thousand dollars a year—so with that, and my savings, it might take me a little longer than most people. . . .”

  “Is being a doctor something you feel called to do?” Mama asked me. “Or is it just a glamorous idea?”

  “I’ve known I’d be a doctor since I was a kid,” I told them. “I’ve known since Becky burned her hand.”

  “It’s not easy to have such a demanding profession and raise a family,” Mama told me.

  “But people do it,” I told her. “I might not get to have so many children, unless my husband stayed home or we switched off working—”

  “Whoa!” my father said. “That’s something you really have to think through. If the mother is the sole breadwinner in a house, wouldn’t the man feel diminished?”

  I looked my father right in the eye. “Not if he was like you,” I said.

  He looked at me right back. “You know, you’re right,” he said.

  A few months later, just as it got warm, for my sixteenth birthday, my mother came up with an idea that knocked my socks off.

  She hosted a dance.

  For me.

  As if I were the Pine Mountain equivalent of a debutante.

  It was a sweet, goofy gesture on her part. It just wasn’t their style. It wasn’t anyone’s, but ours especially. I know she meant it to make up to me for . . . so much, for the past, the coats from Sears, the silence when I left my childhood and turned thirteen. And probably also a reward for doing well in school, a combined graduation and “nice job” gift, for all the meals I’d cooked and diapers I’d changed, for cleaning the house and ironing Papa’s shirts, for the hours I’d spent searching the Net for what I was supposed to be learning in my sophomore year and part of my junior year and then basically teaching it to myself, giving myself tests and sending in the scores. It was as if Mama’d slowly awakened from a coma or from a long sleep—she started responding to questions by blinking her eyes, then learned to sit up and then walk. It was strange having her around, humming, making biscuit dough and pies. Whenever she’d walk into the kitchen, on good days, fully dressed and with her hair done up, I’d jump.

  The recovery started with little hints. Mama got out projects, not just the knitted hats, which her hands made without thinking, and set to work on them. She made blankets for new babies expected in our family, a wedding quilt for one of my father’s nieces, whose husband had died many years before in a farming accident and who was about to marry again. She went to work, and Women’s Relief, even to the center in town that distributed food to the needy. She would still stop, sometimes in the middle of a sentence, and stare out at the shed, but then she wouldn’t go blank and leave the room, to slip back under the quilts. She would begin to cry. The crying seemed like a comfort. She would cry and pet the sketches of Ruthie and Becky she’d drawn for their funeral, which my father had matted and framed. When my father came in, she would kiss him. He seemed very relieved, and the walking at night slowed down. There were times I could hear him down in the kitchen, also crying—the big, sloughing sobs that men do. But I would also hear Mama come out and say, “Lunny,” and lead him into their room.

  They were slowly returning to normal, and I thought that I was, too. I’d convinced myself that my mourning was about to become sweet memories, and that might have happened if things had gone along as they were.

  The party just seemed like one more proof we were turning the corner.

  I didn’t know how to react.

  Our lives for the past few years had been quiet and very private, deliberately.

  Only this last summer, for the first time since my sisters died, had I gone down to camp out with my friends and cousins near the creek at the Pioneer Days reunion. The previous two years I’d stayed away, and my cousins Bridget and Bree had respected my space. I didn’t go anywhere except with Clare, and then only once in a while—Christmas shopping in Provo, lessons, Sunday school, Young Women’s if I was interested in the topic. I did my service at Guiding Gait, the rehabilitation stable I donated Ruby to. Ruby remembered me, and when she saw me, she would clomp over to me and whicker like a filly until I climbed into the paddock. And then she would lay her big head on my shoulder. It was always hard to leave her, but I had Jade.

  The only bad thing about the party was that I didn’t get to dress up for it until after the first surprise, when about fifty people took my
picture with my mouth hanging open like a fish on land and burdocks sticking out of my hair. I’d been grooming Jade. To make it a real surprise, my mother had told me that when I was finished, I should stop and ride Jade up to the church building and bring her back a UPS package someone had left there for her by mistake. She didn’t know how big the package was, she said.

  I got to the front step, and suddenly all these people came running out of a tent set up in back and yelled, “Surprise!”

  I about fainted.

  Then I made Jade wheel and kicked her up to a trot back to the house and set the land speed record for taking a shower and changing into a long skirt and the Pima cotton peasant blouse I’d bought on Cape Cod. I washed my face, put on moisturizer, eye shadow and blush, and lip gloss with a brush, then shook my hair down and twisted each piece around with my fingers. There were pictures of me then, too, looking pretty. But the first pictures of my only birthday party were of me in my Lady Dragons T-shirt, all dirty from bathing my horse. And in time, I treasured them even more.

  With Clare’s help and me having no idea, Mama had invited every boy and girl I knew, including any available cousins my age, some of them all the way from Arizona. Serena came, though Miko was away in Europe for his school break, and she gave me a forest green DKNY sweater—real cashmere, which I still have—from both of them. I danced with everybody. I opened so many presents, it was like a baby shower. My parents gave me an iPod. Clare had gone to a mall in St. George and made me a CD of her singing every song that was special to me, from “Respect” to my favorite hymn, “O My Father,” to “Somewhere over the Rainbow” to “Everybody Hurts” to “Il mio tesoro.” My cousins pitched in and gave me a portable sewing machine; it weighed about six pounds, and with it I could sew anything. I got boxed CD sets and Gap jeans and two hand-knit mohair scarves from Sister Barken. And my grandpa Swan, totally out of his quiet character, sent me the sweetest thing of all, my grandma’s wedding gown. It wasn’t like Ceci’s, because my grandma Swan had been a bigger woman. She’d died in a car accident ten years before, when, as Grandpa wrote, he’d thought she was as good as living forever. But she’d always wanted one of her granddaughters to wear her gown, and Grandpa figured I was the one. Instead of satin, it was sewn of old watermarked silk; and with its long puffed sleeves that gathered tight at the wrists and its train that could be caught up in a loop, Grandpa said it was meant to look like a riding habit, because Grandma had horses in her blood, just as I did.

  Everyone seemed to want this to be the happiest birthday I’d ever had

  And it was.

  There was even a deejay, who played everything from Motown and Abba to bleeped hip-hop and techno classical, and my father’s famous root beer, and a cake the size and shape of a sunflower, with golden candy beads all over it. It was past midnight before the last guests went back to the cars they’d hidden all over the place and drove away.

  “Why did you do this?” I asked my mother the next morning after church.

  It was Sunday, so we would have to wait to clean up the tent they’d borrowed until the next day, so as not to violate the Sabbath. But that was fine with me. I liked the Sabbath because after meeting I could lie around and read, as long as it was something decent. And in recent months, it had been a time I spent alone with my mother, while my father took Rafe on short walks.

  As we sat together, she explained, “You deserved a treat, a celebration of just Ronnie. You never faltered. You never used the tragedy as an excuse for stepping over the line.”

  “Is that it? Just because I did what I was supposed to?”

  “Grace under pressure, I guess.”

  “Thank you, Mama,” I said.

  But that wasn’t all there was to it. My parents were telling the truth about rewarding me. But it turned out that they had what you would call, if my parents were a different kind of people, an ulterior motive.

  They had two.

  I don’t mean to suggest they would really have tried to ease a shock with a bribe. But I know they hoped it wouldn’t hurt.

  On Monday, my mother let me sleep in, and when she woke me up, she sat down with me for some chamomile tea. I made toast and gave Rafe a bite every time he ran past me. He had a face full of frosting with little gold sugar beads in it. My mother said, “He got into the leftovers of the cake. I’ll never figure out how. You couldn’t open Tupperware until you were four. I still have a hard time.”

  Then she took my hand.

  She said, “Ronnie, in September, Dad and I will be married twenty-five years. I’m almost forty-five years old. You’re almost a young woman. And so I wanted you to know before I told anyone else: We’re having a baby.”

  Floored for the second time in forty hours, I said, “Are you past where . . . ?”

  My mother said, “Yes. It’s a boy. He’ll be born right around, well, the due date is November seventeenth.”

  I gasped. “Did you plan that?”

  My mother laughed.

  She laughed, and before I was pleased, I was completely disgusted.

  “No,” she said. “We didn’t plan it at all. I thought I was having menopause. I’m not even sure we have the dates right.” This verged on too much information, so I changed the subject.

  “But won’t it remind you?” I asked, my voice like the ring of flint.

  “Yes,” she said, “and that’s hard. But I believe that Ruthie and Becky had a hand in this, honestly. That they wanted to send Rafe and this new soul to us from their position in paradise, knowing what we can’t know.”

  “How do you know it’s a boy? Because you’re not . . . you know . . .”

  “Showing. I am, but I wear all these smocky things. And I had a test called a CVS.” I knew she wouldn’t have had an abortion for any reason.

  “You wanted to know it was a boy to prepare yourself.”

  “Yes, I guess. It’s easier. I would have welcomed a little girl, a little girl like all my girls, but I wanted to be prepared for how I’d feel.”

  “I’m glad you’re happy, Mama.”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “Of course,” I said. “I just all of a sudden feel disloyal to them. To Ruthie and Becky. Being happy. Having a party. Going on with our lives.”

  “Do you think they’d have wanted us to grieve forever?”

  “No. But yesterday morning, before I knew about the party, I rode Jade to the graves, to bring flowers. And I had the sense that there was something I should know that I didn’t. I guess this was it.”

  My mother got up and poured Rafe juice into his sippy cup. She had never regained the weight she’d lost after my sisters died, so even with a thread or two of gray in her dark hair, she looked younger than she was. She still carried Rafe everywhere on her back in a pack, and he was a big boy. Now she would have to stop that. But she never let Rafe out of her sight. There was no question of his going down to the stable with me, as Ruthie and Becky had. She would never have let me take him up on Jade. I was worried she’d make him a scaredy boy, keeping him so close. I supposed another baby would help. I still couldn’t quite believe it.

  Then my mother said, “I don’t think that’s what they wanted you to know.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I’ve imagined myself telling you this a hundred times since we decided, Ronnie. And I still don’t know if I’ll find the right words.”

  “Go on,” I said. “Are we moving?” I was hoping she’d say yes.

  “No. We’re . . . going to forgive him.”

  There was no question about whom she meant. Stunned, I let my hands fall in my lap. For some reason, I thought of my iPod and my sweater, and of how all of it was meaningless stuff now, blasted into ash by one sentence. I thought of my weeks on Cape Cod and all the college applications I’d sent for, all meaningless paper. But I still had to know what she meant, so I asked, “How?”

  “Don’t you want to know why, first?”

  “If you want to tell me. I have to be total
ly honest, Mama. I don’t care.”

  “Right before we found out about the new baby, your father was awake, trying to read, just in torment, sitting down and getting up. I was watching him, and I could tell there was something he wanted to say but was afraid to. Usually, it doesn’t do any good to try to pry information out of your father. But I decided to try. I asked him to share with me. He sat down on the bed and said, ‘Cressie, we have to forgive him. We’ll never be free unless we do.’ And suddenly it made perfect sense to me. The letters from his parents are so filled with contrition and bewilderment. They don’t understand what happened any more than we do. And I don’t want you to think that they suggested this. They didn’t. It’s our choice.”

  I couldn’t speak. All the old feelings kindled inside me, like firewood that had dried, and went up in seconds. Scott Early had already been let off the hook. Now we were going to make sure he felt all better about it.

  Those little graves. Jade cropped the grass while I’d placed a Mason jar of wild geraniums on it, which probably were dead by now because it had been so dry. I’d talked to Ruthie and Becky, my hand stroking the ring of their hair on its thin silver chain, telling them about my wish to be a doctor who helped children and how they had helped me make that choice. Telling them about the huge whale in the ocean, with its gentle murky eyes. Assuring them that they would be next to my heart as long as I lived and when I finally lay down beside them to wait for that waking-up morning, as the old gospel song said. How could anyone look at those tiny headstones and have the desire to forgive the man who made them necessary?

  “Mama,” I finally choked out around a lump made of anger and tears I would not allow myself to shed, “don’t you think this is a betrayal of Ruthie and Becky? Can’t his own family take care of him? Are you so happy that you feel like forgiving everyone for everything, because of the baby?”

  Are you off your nut? I really wanted to ask.

  “I struggled with those very questions after we decided, Ronnie, and I still struggle,” said Mama. She quietly folded and smoothed the quilt on her lap. “But I can’t mother Rafe and this baby and you with this . . . this shard of hatred in my heart. I don’t expect you to understand, until you pray and study it, that we’re doing this for ourselves, not for him. He’s . . . a good person, Ronnie. For the past few months, he’s been going out . . .” I gripped the table, and my mother added quickly, “Not alone. He goes with other patients, and has visiting privileges; he wears a bracelet and stays over with his family, and his wife—”