Cage of Stars

  “I don’t want to hear this,” I said.

  “I told you, Ronnie, this is for us,” she pleaded.

  Not for me, I thought, definitely not for me. Not for me, who held my sisters as they changed from cuddly little monkeys to stiff, cold little dolls.

  “I hope the Father can help you see this, Ronnie,” said my mother. “I can’t see into your heart right now.” Lucky you, I thought, because it is a coal, and you are at the center of it. “We know that this is the right choice for us, and we’ve spoken with the mediator at the hospital. He’s setting things in motion. There will have to be a period of preparing, for Scott Early and for us. We’re not the first people who have ever done this. Not by far. It’s becoming a way to replace revenge with reconciliation. As the procedure goes forward—”

  “Count me out,” I said flatly.

  “Ronnie, this is a decision we’ve made for our family,” Mama said, a hint of the Bonham steel in her voice.

  “Thank you for the party, Mama, and the iPod, and Jade, and all your love. Thank you for Rafe,” I told her. “Thank you and our Heavenly Father for Ruthie and Becky. My sisters. Your daughters. And Scott Early’s mistakes. I guess he’s over them. I’m not. Please, Mama, don’t speak of this to me again.”

  As I walked away, I could hear the quiet catch of breath that meant she was beginning to cry. Cry, I thought. Go on and cry. I didn’t look back.

  Chapter Thirteen

  You should go with us, Ronnie,” Mama told me. “You of all people need to be released.”

  I didn’t answer her. I just kept working on the scarf I was beading for Clare’s birthday. Hobbies. I had about four hundred hobbies all of a sudden. Jade shone like her name. I made earrings. I whittled. I made brooches from antique buttons, taken from the box that was to have held Becky’s dolly clothes. My Christmas presents were almost finished.

  “Veronica Bonham,” Mama said.

  Ignoring her was not okay. In the rest of the world, our teaching at Family Home Evening had said just the week before, it was wrong that young people set the rules for everything—what people wore, what they said and how they said it—that ours was a culture of young people. My father said that people used to want to grow up, and now they want to grow young. I could lip off to my mother, but not like a kid on TV. I couldn’t say what I thought, which would have been, “This sucks.”

  She didn’t know that was why I wasn’t opening my mouth.

  “Ronnie?” Mama finally said sharply. “Answer me.”

  “You didn’t ask me a question.”

  “All right, miss. Why are you refusing to do something that is so important to your father and me? Except that it will make you uncomfortable? Do you think we’ll be comfortable? Do you think it will be like a picnic? This is going to be the hardest day of our lives.”

  “Honestly, I’m sorry for that. But I can’t go,” I said. “It would be a lie. It would violate my beliefs, as I understand them. You didn’t raise me to be a liar, even to make you happy. And on top of that, I’m afraid.”

  “There’ll be an armed guard in the room at all times.”

  “I’m not afraid of him,” I said, shaking my head. My mother was so wise, but she could be dense. “I’m afraid of seeing him. I’m afraid of the memories. The dreams are bad enough. They had stopped, but now they’re back. You were not there. You were not there alone at first.”

  “Darling, that hurts me. Do you think we want you to suffer? It’s just the opposite. Don’t you think we fear the same things?” my mother asked me. “But we think that this is the only way that we can get rid of some of those feelings. Clean them away.”

  “Mama, every person carries things in a different way,” I said, my scalp tightening. “They say you don’t dream in color, but I do.” I decided, for the first time, to tell my mother about the nightmare. “Like last night. It was the same as that day, only I got the chance to save Becky and Ruthie. Scott Early comes walking across the lawn, and he’s shivering. I throw him that old coat we keep for going to shovel in the stable. Then I point Papa’s gun at Scott Early, and though in all the other dreams I’ve shot him, this time I just hold the gun on him until the sheriff comes. The little girls are crying because they were so afraid, and saying who is he, Ronnie, I was so scared, Ronnie, is it okay now, Ronnie, but it is okay because they’re fine. He apologizes, and I’m so relieved . . . and then I wake up. And they’re dead. And you’re going to tell Scott Early that’s okay with you.” My mother sat down with Rafe. “I’ve looked up post-traumatic stress syndrome on the Net.” She nodded. “When you’re so anxious you can’t sleep because you’re afraid of having recurring dreams . . . then that’s what you have. I keep thinking that if I face my memories, I’ll work through it and not have to take pills or go to therapy or anything. I thought time would heal the pain, but it didn’t. Grieving helped. But it didn’t heal. And this cut away everything I’ve done to try to move on. I’ll be, like, twisted, forever. And it’s not your fault. You have to do what you can live with. It’s his fault.”

  “But what if it goes the way your father thinks?” Mama asked. “He was the least likely to forgive, Ronnie. And he roamed and roamed and prayed, and the answer came to him—we can make some of those feelings go quiet, if we forgive him. We’re trying to end his influence over our lives. I didn’t mean that to sound like a speech.”

  “I can’t forgive him.”

  “Ronnie, you can.”

  “Not now. Maybe after death.”

  “He’s doing well.”

  “You said that! I don’t care about the way he was, or the way he is, Mama! I don’t care that he’s doing well. That’s the difference between you and me! I don’t care that he can have a real life if he stays on medication, and we can’t. There’s no medication we can take that will bring Becky and Ruthie back. Or me. The part of me that’s gone, too, Mama! But you didn’t notice! You spent two years asleep!”

  The way I was going on scared both of us, I think.

  I didn’t swear at her, but I was yelling. This wasn’t like reading a book with sex or swear words, like The Catcher in the Rye, where the kid is actually a great kid but swears all the time because he feels insignificant and the bad language is what he uses to hide how much he cares. I felt like he did, except all the little kids had fallen off the cliff, with the killer coming through the rye. I was a fool to think I could ever outrun my parents’ infernal goodness and Scott Early’s curse on me.

  Anyway, my mother just got up slowly, holding her stomach, but not like she was looking for sympathy.

  She didn’t take off on me for what I said.

  She left me alone until the day of the reconciliation came.

  But late that morning, she came slowly up the stairs to my room, where I’d been hiding out since morning. She sat on the bed. I started setting up my pencils on end in a little row, exactly side by side, like soldiers, on my bed table. Sense out of chaos. Line upon line. Since I’d waked up with a little scream, before it was light, I’d been trying to fake an ordinary morning. But all the while, I’d been thinking: I’m giving Rafe his yogurt and Cheerios, and then my parents are going to go sit in a room next to Scott Early. I’m making my bed, and then my family is going to go offer Scott Early their forgiveness. My team, the Lady Dragons, the seniors, Alison and Mackenzie and Dana, are in the quarterfinals at State in Salt Lake, and I could have been with them, if I could have kept my head together; and my parents are going to see my sisters’ killer and see how nice they can be to him.

  Mama put her hand over mine so I’d have to stop arranging the pencils.

  She said, “I see your side, Ronnie. But life isn’t fair. I don’t mean, ‘Oh, dear, this is so unfair.’ This isn’t like losing a job when you did everything right. It was an outrage. I might not see our motives any better than you do, if I were your age. I thought I needed to make you do this. But I won’t. I won’t force you.” Mama gathered up Rafe, who came running in, smiling that little crazy el
f smile. Rafe’s dark hair stuck straight up, which I thought was hysterical. It was like he had a teeny Mohawk. Mama still treated him like a baby, which you couldn’t blame her for. She rocked him to sleep every night.

  Rafe said, “Boo, dragon!”

  “Boo, dinosaur,” I said to him.

  “Ronnie Dragon, don’t cry,” he said.

  “I’m not, Rafiesaurus.”

  But I was, and not from sadness. From fury. From being clean exhausted. From pure frustration.

  “Why am I named ‘Veronica’?” I asked, to change the subject.

  “There was a little girl I knew, probably in first grade, and her name was Ronnie. I thought it was the coolest name,” Mama said.

  “But Veronica?”

  “Well, it’s Hebrew for ‘True Face,’ and when I saw you, I thought, even though you were a baby, you were already you. We had a book of baby names. That’s why the bishop gave you the sunflower for your flower. It looks as though it has a face.”

  “I’m thinking of changing it legally to ‘Ronnie.’”

  “Okay.” I’d expected an argument about that, but she didn’t blink. “It’s your name. Let’s talk about the here and now.”

  “Why didn’t you name me ‘Titania’ or something from Shakespeare?”

  “I don’t think the nickname for that would have been flattering.”

  “It could have been Tanya.”

  “You know how kids are, Ronnie.”

  “You don’t,” I mumbled, “or you would leave me alone. Please, Mama, leave me alone.”

  “Okay. Titania,” she said then, buying time. “I actually did think of that once, when we thought we’d have a baby born in midsummer. But you were a winter baby. We thought of other names . . .”

  “Did you ever tell me other names you thought of?”

  “I might have— Viola. Miranda . . .”

  “That’s why I remembered it, I suppose,” I said, beginning to relax.

  “But that name, Titania, sounded like a heavy metal in the periodic table. Not like the name of a beautiful child. We named Rebecca partly after a name in Ivanhoe, though actually Sir Walter Scott was kind of a bigot. And Ruth. Ruth . . . I had always wanted a little girl named Ruth. But about the mediation, please, Ronnie. Pray about it. There’s still time. We don’t have to leave until after lunch. If you want us to pray with you, we will. In fact, either way, that would be best.”

  “You’d do that anyway. You never leave without praying over me. I have prayed about it, Mama. Remember what you said after Becky and Ruthie died, about your prayers bouncing back at you like rubber balls against a wall? That’s how I feel. There are times when I’ve felt I received the Holy Spirit when I needed help so bad, just to plain live, but I don’t feel that way now. I can’t get to peace about this mediation thing, Mama.”

  “Maybe you’re forcing it, instead of just clearing your mind. Maybe there’s a different way to receive.”

  “Maybe I am, but if it was right for me to go, I’d know it.”

  “Sometimes the right thing is the hardest thing. What would it hurt?”

  “Mama, it would make me sick. I’m glad you’re not going to say it’s basically an order, because I wouldn’t go if you dragged me.” I was shouting again.

  From their bedroom, where he was dressing, my father called, “Ronnie, have respect.”

  “I am respectful,” I answered. “Of what you want to do. I even understand why . . . No, that’s not true. I want to, but I truly don’t understand why. But I’m not trying to stop you. I’d like to stop you, but I won’t try.”

  “When we first considered this, we told you we believed that a good person can do wrong unintentionally,” Papa said.

  “You think Scott Early is a good person?”

  “I think there’s good in him. Now that I know how he lived before this.”

  “No!” I told both of them, more violently than I meant, because Rafe popped up, his eyes and mouth round, his little feet in his Weeboks sticking straight out. He never looked more like Ruthie than right then. “If there’s good in him, there was good in Hitler! There was good in Pol Pot.”

  “It’s not like that. They were madmen. They wanted to destroy, eradicate whole races of people, Veronica!” my father scolded me.

  “So you’re saying one person isn’t as important as a million people. If one person is just as important as a million people, then he’s a madman.”

  “No,” Papa said, “he acted like a madman. He was sick, not just his ego, his whole mind, his spirit. He thought he was acting under orders from someone outside him, and he knew that whoever was giving the commands wasn’t God, because he’s a believer, so he was terribly frightened. And this being, in his head, was commanding him to do this terrible thing, and now he knows—”

  “I’ve heard all that. I’ve heard all that until I’m sick of it. It just lets him be irresponsible for his actions. You can do whatever you want if you have a disease that makes you do it. Okay, he was sick and now he’s well. Then he should go to trial again, now that he knows and understands this, and be condemned and executed as a so-called sane person would have who did this. That’s what would happen to me if I’d done it.”

  “Ronnie!” my mother cried out. “Ronnie, don’t!”

  “Would that bring your sisters back? His being executed?” My father was almost roaring. “You know it wouldn’t. And, Ronnie, Scott Early isn’t ‘cured.’ He will always have this disease. He has to take medication for it the rest of his life, or—”

  “Or he’ll go and kill someone else? Do you think he doesn’t want to? Once he gets out . . . who’s going to make sure that he stays nice, kindly, happy Scott?”

  “Kelly is. His doctors are,” my mother said.

  “Kelly! You talk about her as if she were your friend.”

  “In a way, she is. In a way, she understands this more than anyone else, more than my brothers or sister or Aunt Jill and Aunt Gerry, more than my friends. She understands, and she feels it with her entire soul. She’s a good woman, Ronnie. She takes full responsibility, and she knows what she’s—”

  “You can say that on the basis of some letters?”

  “And meeting Kelly. She’s a steadfast young woman.”

  “Where did you meet her?”

  “She came to see us. When you were in Massachusetts. . . .”

  “That long ago? You let her in our house? That’s why you were so happy to let me go see Serena, and not have your unpaid housecleaner for two whole weeks.”

  “Apologize, Ronnie,” my father called from downstairs.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “But I’m even more sorry you let that person in my house.”

  “She didn’t do it,” said Papa, who’d come up to my room.

  “Look, I can’t believe any of this. I’m in a house where Scott Early’s wife came? Did you show her the ground where they bled? Did you show her the graves?” I was about as close to hysterical as I’d been the night of the TV cameras. “How could you? And not tell me? How could you look at someone who could love Scott Early? Who could touch Scott Early?”

  Mama sighed. “Because she can love him. Jesus could love the sick that others wouldn’t touch. She can love him despite what he did, because she knows that what the judge said was true, that he didn’t have the capacity to—”

  “That’s just an excuse!”

  “You still think that!” Mama was shocked. “Nothing you heard three years ago made you see that this illness was real. . . .”

  “Yes! I still think he should have been in prison, and then the other prisoners would have killed him!” I knew by then much more than I ever wanted to about how prison inmates feel about child killers.

  “Ronnie,” my mother said sadly, “that’s so lacking in everything I believe about you. You’re so compassionate. You understand that schizophrenia is on a gene that’s born in you. It’s not a choice. It’s not something you develop because your . . . because your parents abused yo
u or because you weren’t raised to know right from wrong. Scott Early’s parents raised him, in their way, just as we raised you.”

  “As if you know that.”

  “We have their letters. His father was a dentist. His brother works with his father. His mother and father could be our parents, Grandpa Swan and Grandma Bonham. How do you think his parents feel, knowing what their son did?”

  “Don’t say that! Mama, please don’t. Stop talking or I’ll get up and leave.”

  “You need to know,” she went on. “He studied hard and went to church, and he didn’t get into trouble. And he got sick. You don’t have a choice. Would you hate him if leukemia made him do this? Or a brain tumor?”

  “That’s not the point! You’re saying what Clare said!” I knew what the point was, but I couldn’t find the words. “Just go! Leave Rafe here and go.”

  “We thought, if you didn’t want to go with us, we’d take him, because you’re so upset,” Mama told me.

  “Are you afraid to leave Rafe with me?” I heard my voice go flat. “Are you afraid for the same reasons that—”

  “Ronnie, mercy, no! I just thought that you’d want to be alone, or be with Clare, if you had to think of us going to Stone Gate. . . .”

  “Okay, then, take Rafe with you. He looks like Ruthie. Let Scott Early see my brother.”

  “Ronnie!” my father said sternly.

  “Go ahead. I’d rather go to hell!” I screamed, and then threw myself down on the bed, pulling my comforter over me.

  There was a silence then, as though someone in the room had pulled a gun.

  After a long time, my mother said, “Leave her be, London. She has a right to her own feelings. The Father will help Ronnie. There are things human beings cannot do.” There was a whole continent of heaviness in her voice.