Cage of Stars

  “Who lived here before?”

  “A young woman, well, not as young as you. But she was a nurse and had left a marriage that didn’t go well for her. A lovely girl. Filipino. She finally did marry again. She lived here for three years. Ancaya,” said Mrs. Desmond. “She was good company. A crack card player. Do you play?”

  “Chess,” I said.

  “We’ll have a game.”

  “I would like that. I played with my father.”

  Mrs. Desmond was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “You’ll find I say what I think, Ronnie. Not everyone likes that. I have a feeling you do. What I meant before was, why are you here really? Beyond the studies?”

  “No reason,” I murmured.

  “I thought perhaps you were starting over. People come to California to do that. You told me about your little sisters. I hope I’m not being untoward, but to have two sisters die . . .”

  “It was an accident.”

  “A car accident?”

  I sighed. “They were murdered, Missus Desmond.”

  “In Utah, by a man with a pitchfork. . . .”

  “A weed cutter. You read about it, then.”

  “Quite a long time ago now, wasn’t it? I remember the incident. Yours is an unusual name. I’m an avid reader, particularly about violence. Don’t let that shock you. I’m fascinated by inhumanity in all its infinite variety. I’m amazed at what people will do to one another. You’re not old enough to be in college.”

  “I’ve graduated. I’m seventeen, almost eighteen, Missus. Desmond.” I thought she would feel better if I told her I was almost eighteen, so that was what I told her. Later she found out, of course. “Please, don’t tell anyone about this. I just want to do my work and live quietly.”

  “I can see why you needed the distance between you and that incident,” she said, but not like a busybody. “I’m very sorry, Ronnie. Perhaps this is why you chose this work. To save others when your sisters could not be saved.”

  “Thank you, Missus Desmond. I don’t know. That must be part of it. I don’t mind your knowing. But I don’t think I can talk about it. I think I’ll just turn in?”

  “Do, Ronnie. I’ll put the house to sleep after I’ve watched the boats come in for a time.” She called it that, putting the house to sleep, turning out the lights and locking the doors. She raised one hand in a little wave and said she’d pick up the tea things.

  She didn’t say anything about Scott Early living in San Diego, then or later. But she knew.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On Saturday, I drove into San Diego—thinking every moment of Serena as I fought the traffic, small turns, tip, tip, tip—and bought a telephone book for a dollar. I went to the zoo and sat at a table. It was the most beautiful zoo I’d ever seen. I drank lemonade and was mesmerized by the most amazing performance. Two girls—I suppose they were ballerinas—wore green face paint and leotards covered entirely with leaves to make them seem as though they were vines. Decorated, leafy stilts extended from their arms and legs so they towered, twelve, fifteen feet tall and moved like giraffes. They walked among the children, who didn’t seem to know whether to be terrified or charmed as they looked into those heavy-lidded, gorgeously immobile faces, and then twined themselves gracefully around the trees, where they blended, as if they really were vines. I watched them for an hour, imagining how much grace and training it must have taken to do this. Then I stood in line to see the pandas, because one was the only one-year-old cub in the United States. The cub was nearly as big as the mother, but he pestered her so much—hanging from her legs, poking her ears—it was easy to tell he was a baby.

  Finally, unable to put it off any longer, I sat down again with the phone book to look up their address.

  Even paging through the E’s made me break out in a sweat. But there it was, on Monitor Street, just as the envelope’s return address had said. I thought, then, that I would try to find their church. Knowing what I knew of Scott Early’s family and what avid churchgoers they were, they would immediately have established themselves with a church, in the way I’d read that alcoholics, in a new town, find an AA meeting right away to help them adjust. On top of that, the neighbors would have had to be notified about what Scott Early had done. So it was natural that they would seek out a church, where people would presumably try to be forgiving. They were Lutherans, so I looked for a Lutheran church near Monitor Street. I hadn’t even looked up a church for myself, and here I was searching for Scott Early’s!

  I was soon discouraged. There were, like, fifty Lutheran churches in San Diego and about five near Monitor Street. How would I go to forty Lutheran churches in a semester? Or a lifetime?

  I decided to gamble, and the next morning, I went to the ten o’clock service at St. James Lutheran Church, only two blocks from where Scott Early and his wife lived. First, I drove slowly past their house—a big pink duplex, two apartments one on top of the other—with sage-colored doors. No one came out while I was watching.

  I’d never been in a Lutheran church, and it was mammoth. The hymnals were filled with songs I didn’t recognize, except for “Rock of Ages” and the Christmas carols. I sat in the back and sat and stood when everyone else did; but it was strange not to hear our book or the King James Version of the Bible. The Bible sounds all wrong without the thees and thous. The juice and bread they passed around for Communion looked safe and okay, so I took some. It was when I was leaving that I saw him. He was carrying the tiny baby in a sling, and he looked right at me without seeing me at all. He was a big, open-faced, handsome man with blond hair cut short, barely recognizable as the skinny, pale thing I had seen screaming and writhing in my yard. He looked like a farmer, all tanned and muscular. I hadn’t expected him to recognize me, because I was sure he’d had about as much interest in watching the news as I had. And it had been so long ago. But the old metallic taste soured my tongue, and I felt my hairline pop with drops of cold sweat. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to throw myself under the padded seat I was walking past and hide. Then I saw her. She was adorable. Kelly. I had never seen Kelly in person. She was little and blond, with a Dutch-boy haircut. She came up next to Scott Early and took his hand. A lot of grandmotherly types surrounded her and him, pointing at the baby and making googly noises. All you could see of the baby was a rabbit tail of toffee-colored hair. Kelly looked right at me, too, and she did a little bit of a double take. She must have seen me on television at some point and in court, but I had been three inches shorter then and twenty pounds lighter. Still, I was who I was; but I supposed it was like seeing your bishop at the movies. You don’t recognize the person if she’s out of place.

  How could I have found them, I thought, in the first hour of my search?

  As I watched, entranced, Kelly hung back and posted a notice on the corkboard near the entrance of the church. It was on stationery surrounded with flowers, and it read:

  JULIET NEEDS SOMEONE TO WATCH OVER HER: Day nanny wanted, four days a week and occasional weekends, to care for adorable seven-week-old girl. Mommy must go back to work, because her students need her, and Daddy is studying to be a librarian. Good pay for the right person. Ten holidays. Flexible hours and references a must. Call 672-3333.

  She tacked it up. The worshippers flowed around me, greeting the minister in his lush, satiny robes.

  I waited until almost everyone had left. Then I took down the notice, folded it, and put it into my pocket.

  On the way home, I bought myself a corkboard. I put the notice on it. I tacked up my class picture next to it. And for the next three nights, I tried to shut my mind off to the one while I studied the other. It was Scott Early’s phone number I ended up committing to memory.

  Chapter Seventeen

  I never knew how much my hair really meant to me until the Monday night after class when I went to a salon and let someone chop it off and dye it brown. I had to steel myself not to scream at every whicker of the scissors. My hair was part of how I thought of myself, Ronnie R
apunzel, the girl with the curl; and as I watched strand after strand drop, it was as though I were shedding my skin. Except for my mother’s trims, it had grown for ten years untouched by human hands—tended by me as if it were a rare bonsai or something. Before I had a blow dryer, I would hang my head over the heat register in my room, twining the curls around my forefinger, sometimes for fifteen or twenty minutes. By the time I finished high school, it fell to below my waist, and while I wore it looped in a bun for sports or most practical things, or tightly braided, I wasn’t unaware of the looks I got when I let it hang down to go swimming. It was my crowning glory, as it says in the Bible. A few years back, I’d actually stood in front of my mirror in my underwear, with my hair over one shoulder, and let myself think that my hair was prettier than Lindsay Lohan’s, though I could see my butt was twice as big.

  The stylist was careful to bind and bag it for donation to Locks of Love, an organization that would make it into wigs for little kids who had cancer. Seeing my long, rusty curls in her hand was like seeing a severed limb (although this was before I’d actually seen a severed limb). I couldn’t look in the mirror as she applied the dye and foiled in a few artful streaks; and I felt like hiding my eyes when she asked me brightly, “So, how do you like it?”

  I opened one eye. I peeked.

  I didn’t know what to say. There was a nice-enough-looking young woman there in front of me, but I surely didn’t know her.

  “We usually go the other way. I never met a redhead who wanted brown hair. A natural platinum blonde once, she wanted red,” the woman said.

  The stylist wasn’t a jerk. She’d feathered the hair around my face so it was slightly shorter in front than in back. At least, given how springy my curls were, I wouldn’t look like I was wearing a clown wig. And the style was modern, very “not country” girl. My eyes were suddenly enormous, and my chin came to a point in a way I’d never noticed. The color didn’t look fakey; I looked like an adult, a city chick. It wasn’t ugly or anything. I just wasn’t the kid down the road anymore. But my head felt as though I could float up through the ceiling, as if I’d been carrying a gallon jug strapped to my forehead all those years.

  “It’s great,” I babbled to the stylist, who had a purple streak in her own shoe-polish-black hair. “It’ll be so easy to take care of, and you know, I have to keep it up for my work anyhow, so this will really help. . . .” I couldn’t wait to shove the forty bucks into her hand and get out of there.

  “There’s twenty inches of hair here,” she called after me. “This is the most we’ve ever donated!”

  Wow, did that make me feel great. Another loss courtesy of Scott Early. He might as well have cut it off himself.

  After class, I phoned Kelly and introduced myself.

  “This is Rachel Byrd,” I said, “with a ‘y.’ I saw your ad?” I had chosen my name carefully. Rachel, who cried out in the Bible for her lost children, and Byrd because Becky had written, “A swan is like a birD, but bigger.” I wouldn’t forget it, even in an emergency. Kelly asked if it was possible for me to come over right away, and did I have my résumé with me? “I don’t actually have a résumé,” I told her. “I don’t actually have a printer at present. My parents are sending it to me when they can find a used one they can afford. I’m an emergency medical technician, or at least I’m studying to be one. But I can give you letters of reference. Lots of them. I was a volunteer baby holder from when I was only twelve years old; and I basically helped raise my baby brother because my mother was ill after he was born.”

  The whole time, I was panicking, thinking, reference letters from where? Would Clare send a letter of reference that didn’t have a postmark from Utah? About “Rachel Byrd”? If she would, how would she? And would she send it to Scott Early’s wife? No, of course, she could send it to me. I could say I was going to use it for lots of applications. I could redo it on a printer at school. But who did I know who didn’t live in Utah? My aunt Jill in Colorado? My aunt Juliet in Chicago? Did relatives count? Would west-y locations make her suspicious? No. That was ridiculous. This was California. California was in the West. But I had to think of a way to get around the name thing. White it out, something. I just had to stay calm. Be Rachel with the light brown hair.

  An hour later, I parked in front of the big, pink-colored duplex.

  Kelly and I shook hands. She said immediately, “An EMT. So you must know infant CPR.”

  “I do,” I said. “All the baby holders had to; and I’d learned it in health, too, at home.” In a few weeks, I knew I’d learn it again, in our section on airways. I’d looked ahead in the syllabus.

  “And so much experience,” Kelly said. She spoke in a soft, breathy voice, assured yet almost childlike; and though she was pretty, she looked a whole lot older than she had in the courtroom, or even that Sunday morning in church. There were circles under her eyes, badly covered up by a smudge of makeup, and she was too thin, though her face was puffy.

  “Yes,” I said. “There’s pretty much nothing about a healthy baby I don’t know how to do, even in a crisis.” We were beginning to learn about how a little child’s organ systems were so small, the head so much larger than the body, that it would be perhaps the trickiest part of our job, being delicate but thorough with the presses and pushes and insertions, to avoid doing more harm in the cause of good.

  “Do you want to see Juliet?” Kelly asked. “I wish you could meet my husband, but he’s at school. We only moved here just a couple of months ago, before Juliet was born.”

  I said, “My aunt’s name is Juliet.”

  “Isn’t it the most beautiful name? But it’s sad, too, isn’t it? When you think of her in the play, being only fourteen. I can’t bear it when I think of that. Scott chose her name. I really objected at first. I thought it was bad luck. But now I love it, too. Here she is, my girl!” My skin prickled as if it were something tight I’d outgrown. It was just what I’d always thought about my aunt’s name.

  Juliet, though, was a gorgeous baby, maybe the prettiest baby I’ve ever seen. Her lashes were as long as the end of my pinkie fingernail, and she had soft apricot skin and masses of buff-colored hair, between brown and blond, just like Jade’s. I almost said how much she looked like my little sister when Becky was a baby.

  But in truth, I hardly remembered anymore how Becky had looked as a newborn.

  “She’s spectacular,” I said. I’d picked it up from Mrs. Desmond, who said that about everything from chocolate-chip cookies to TiVos of The Price Is Right.

  “She is wonderful, isn’t she?” Kelly asked. “We never thought we’d have her. My husband was . . . sick. My husband was very sick, and he was in a hospital, for almost five years.”

  Not even close to five years, I thought. It was only four years. Actually three years and eleven months.

  “Is he better now?” I forced myself to ask.

  “He’s totally better. He’s absolutely fine. He didn’t know what was wrong with him, and he . . .” Kelly leaned over Juliet’s basket and tucked her little pillow behind her back. It was like the stabilizing pillows we were learning how to place in class to keep people’s heads from moving when they had a possible spinal injury, except it was tiny. Then she said, “I don’t know how to say this. Scott had a mental illness. Now, don’t be frightened. He’s not dangerous or anything like that. He did something . . . unbelievable when he was sick. He doesn’t remember it, but when he realized it, he was . . . suicidal for months afterward. Don’t worry. You’d never be able to tell now. He’s a wonderful father. He adores Juliet. He’s studying to be a librarian. He was a graduate student in pharmacy before he got sick. It was . . . very bad. He hurt a family’s feelings so terribly.”

  I wanted to slug her.

  I wanted to hug her.

  Hurt a family’s feelings? I could taste that tang on my tongue, and I struggled with the snag in my windpipe.

  But, really, I thought, what was this poor woman supposed to say to a prospective nanny?
My husband murdered two children? And it’s okay because he takes medicine and you won’t have to see him much?

  If she’d told the truth about Scott Early, would anyone except for me on earth have had the guts to work in this clean, spare apartment, with its bouquets of fresh flowers and its few humble, carefully chosen photos and ornaments? Wouldn’t anyone else have run like a deer? Kelly had come here with a purpose, just as I had, but hers was to flee all that was familiar. Perhaps, in a sense, that also was mine, at least in part. I had to make sure if my . . . plan, undeveloped as it was, would hold up in the light of day. But Kelly believed she was at the end of her road to Calvary. She thought that my parents’ forgiveness and her move would make it all better, make it all go away.

  What I couldn’t grasp at all was why she was even here. If Kelly had given birth to Scott Early’s baby and then left him, I might have been able to understand her. She would have been able to have the best of the boy she’d loved before, but not have had to live with an evil man. I could see, already, why my mother considered Kelly a kind and decent person. But she hadn’t left him. She’d hung on like those women whose husbands led them away from their faith, saying they loved them anyway, as the men destroyed the families’ lives through drinking or cheating or gambling or even heresy. Was it lust? Was it a misguided loyalty, a promise even our Lord would never mean anyone to honor?

  But Kelly was a saver.

  I was, too.

  And some people didn’t deserve to be saved.

  This little girl did, though.

  And that would be my job. I just wasn’t sure how, but an idea, light and shifting as a cloud of steam, had begun to float about in my mind.

  “What do you do for work?” I asked Kelly, though I already knew. Good job applicants asked questions.

  “I’m a school counselor,” Kelly said. “You wouldn’t believe the issues kids have today. It seems they’re even worse here than where we come from. They tell me everything from . . . oh dear, their uncle trying to, well, be too familiar, to their mothers worrying that they’re too fat! Well, I guess you would know about the problems teens have, wouldn’t you? How . . . old are you?”