Cage of Stars
“I’m eighteen,” I said. “I’ll turn nineteen on December tenth. I know I look younger. I always have.” My first overt lie. It was at least my real birthday. “My parents are teachers, too.” This wasn’t a lie. My mother had taught us, hadn’t she? “They don’t make much. I have to earn my way. We live in a rural area north of Phoenix.”
Well, it was north of Phoenix. So was Canada.
“Why California?”
“Well, it’s just so beautiful, isn’t it? Sunny all the time, not so hot and dry, and the ocean . . .” I tried to sound like a kindhearted but not too intellectual girl. It was easier than I thought. “I’ve just never seen a more perfect climate than here! I want to learn to surf! And I’m hoping to go to school here, so I . . . wanted to establish residency, to pay in-state tuition? I’m not sure I’ll be able to afford it. It’s expensive here. But it’s possible. I can guarantee you the semester, probably the whole year, at least.” Anything was possible. “At least I could give her a good start.”
“San Diego is something, isn’t it? The most beautiful city I’ve ever seen,” Kelly said, looking dreamy. “It makes you feel as though the people who live here must be happy all the time.”
One wasn’t. The baby chose that moment to wake. She cried sharply, and instinctively I gathered her up. “Hello, princess pea,” I said, and turned to Kelly. “I think you’re going to need a new stretchy here; this one’s a little damp.”
“I have to stop nursing her now, though I’ll pump,” Kelly said, wide-eyed, mournful. She went to a drawer in a bureau they’d painted with polka dots and got a diaper and a stretchy one-piece with a monkey on the front. In a few deft motions, I put it on, first carefully wiping Juliet clean and folding the diaper into a neat little package.
“Even a few weeks of nursing is better than nothing,” I said, remembering Rafe and my mother. “The colostrum is important. It’s powerful stuff. She’ll do just fine, won’t you, Miss Juliet . . . I don’t think I got your last name?”
“Englehart,” said Kelly. “That’s my last name. We . . . used my last name for her. Not because we’re so extra-modern. It just fit. My grandma said it meant ‘angel heart’ in German. That’s just so nice, isn’t it?” I knew exactly why they’d chosen that last name. There were plenty of people who knew who Scott Early was. “Well, what you’d need to do is this: I work from nine to three. My husband goes to school at eight most days, and he sometimes doesn’t get home until five or six. So, I’d need someone to work from about eight to three, four days a week. Scott has Fridays free. And sometimes, not very often, we like to just go have a salad or see a movie . . . so if there was ever a night you could work later, or on a weekend?”
“I could,” I said. “I do need the extra income, though I have to study pretty hard. But I could study, if that’s okay, during her naps.”
“Oh, yes, I don’t expect cleaning or anything from you. Just looking after her things, maybe running a load of wash with the baby detergent. We go through her clothes so fast! And you could have your lunch here. We’d buy whatever it is you like.”
“Well, thanks,” I said. “I could do that. My training is very intensive. And starting in about six weeks, I’ll be doing practicum, and ride-alongs, so I won’t be free every weekend. But my classes are all at night, because I knew I’d need a day job—except on Friday!”
“That really works out!”
“I hope you didn’t mind my picking her up,” I told Kelly. “I should have asked first. But I used hand sanitizer before I came. It’s like a way of life now, that and my rubber gloves!”
She looked at me oddly then, and abruptly she said, “Do . . . Have we met before?”
I felt my heart accelerate into its familiar staccato. Did the brown hair make me look like my mother? Did Kelly recall a photo from a newspaper or a TV shot, of our family, me growling at the TV reporters, or pale on the courthouse steps? Were my looks so distinctive?
“I don’t think so. But I did pick up your job advertisement at Saint James Church . . . Do you know where that is?” I asked innocently.
“Oh, that’s it! We go to Saint James. Do you?”
“I usually go to church closer to where I live, in La Jolla. I totally wanted to live right by the beach! But I’ve been to Saint James.” By my reckoning, I hadn’t told more than one complete lie yet, except my age. Even my name. My father had once told me that it wasn’t illegal to call yourself Donald Duck—movie stars changed their names all the time—unless it was to commit a crime.
To commit a crime.
“That must be where I saw you,” Kelly said. “The people there are so kind. Little miss here has all kinds of grandmothers in the nursery. I can actually concentrate when I’m in church, and . . .” She let out a long breath. “I need that.”
“Me too,” I said.
“Well, I start back to work in two weeks, Rachel,” Kelly said, “and I’m going to interview two other girls. But I really don’t think I need to look any further after meeting you, if you can work for what I can offer, twelve dollars an hour to start. I’m sorry I can’t offer benefits except holidays off with pay. You’d be a freelance contractor and responsible for paying your own taxes. . . .”
“That’s okay with me,” I said.
“Then could you possibly come for a practice this week, and meet my husband, and then start on Monday two weeks from now?”
“I could do that,” I said, a physical sensation, not unlike the pain that travels outward from a sting or a burn, creeping up my arms at the thought of “meeting her husband.” We shook hands, and I patted the baby’s cheek. This is best, I said to Juliet with my heart. I had known all along I would get the job. The red thread, I thought.
I wrote my aunt Juliet that night and asked her to send a letter to me describing my skills in caring for little ones, but leaving out my name, as I didn’t want anyone to think anything strange about me in case they recognized “Ronnie Swan” from the murder case. I’d learned that people tended to judge you if you’d had something bad happen to you, no matter how nice you were. I wrote to my cousin Bridget, who was in college at the Art Institute of Chicago, saying the same thing, asking her to refer to me as “my cousin.”
But before I could do anything more than mail the letters, Kelly called me. “I don’t need any references, though I’ll be happy to read them. Some things you just know,” she said. And I thought, sadly, how right she was. “I spoke to those other girls, and, I don’t mean to sound unkind, but I wouldn’t have let them take care of my cat, if I had one! They were, you know, black nail polish, and one even smoked, though she said she would go outside! And who would be watching Juliet while she was outside?”
“Well, children are the most important thing, and I guess some people take it too lightly,” I said, sort of hating myself for deceiving her.
After class on Friday, I went back to “meet” Scott Early.
It was stunning.
He truly was that nice, hearty man I’d seen in church. He had a confident, gentlemanly manner and a strong handshake. It didn’t change anything, but I was overwhelmed by the power of medical science. Medicine had done this? I had to remind myself that what I needed to do didn’t have anything to do with Scott Early as he was at the moment—but what he had done before and might do later. He looked flat into my face, and I knew he didn’t recognize me from Adam’s off ox. “Are you going to take good care of my little girl?” he asked.
Like you took care of mine? I thought. But I said, “Of course. You don’t have to worry about a thing.” He didn’t have to worry about a thing, either.
They went to a movie. I gave Juliet her bottle, and after opening the window to the soft, salty night, I began studying and memorizing the names of all those bones. I worked for forty minutes, and then, because I couldn’t stop myself, I began to open drawers. For seventeen years, I’d been respectful of others’ privacy. My parents had never even opened the label on a catalog of exercise clothing with my na
me on it. But in just a few months, I’d become an expert and eager snoop, combing Miko’s room and now this.
I started with Kelly’s closet. She had a few work outfits, some jeans and shorts and T-shirts. The shorts and shirts were faded. Even Clare had six or seven pairs of shoes, but Kelly had only four: black heels, brown heels, walking shoes, and a pair of sandals. I went to her chest of drawers. I found sweet, clean underwear, with sachets of lavender tucked in among her bras. Exercise clothes. A wedding veil in a special airtight box. A sexy little red teddy. Birth control pills and some Valentine’s Day cards. There was a plain blue book of handmade paper on top of her sweaters, in the next drawer down. I grabbed it. What did I expect to find? A book of horror stories? A gruesome notebook filled with newspaper clippings? It was just Juliet’s baby book, with her little footprints. “Juliet Jeanine Englehart” was calligraphied on the first page, which was decorated with little silver stars. Kelly had written so much about the first month of her baby’s life that even the borders were filled with her neat, tiny handwriting. I lifted a pile of sweaters. And I saw it then. I knew what it was. A buck knife, the kind used by hunters to gut a deer. My father had one that he hid on top of the cabinets, too high even for my mother to reach. I didn’t touch it, but my hands started to shake. I thought, Here is proof that even she doesn’t trust him. I put the sweaters back carefully.
Scott Early’s side of the closet wasn’t very interesting. He had a plastic set of drawers, like the kind from Sears, with his underwear and socks in it. Jeans, polo shirt, loafers. His bedside stand had two drawers. In the top drawer was a book, a novel about a man who sold his wedding ring and spent the rest of his life trying to find it again, a book about sailing, and a box of tissues. Pills in a carefully marked series of containers: “Morning,” “Lunch,” “Bedtime.” A newborn pacifier. In the second drawer, there was a diary. I sat in the rocking chair. The journal began with Juliet’s birth, but some earlier pages had been cut out. I could see the edges, stiff as a mown hedge.
This is the beginning of my real life. Juliet is awesome. She’s a rose. She’s an angel. There has to be something in my life, maybe the mercy of God, that allows me to have something like this happen to me, because I don’t deserve it. We were having dinner at Sambucco when Kelly’s water broke and the contractions started right away. I had to have the ambulance come, and poor Kels was so embarrassed because it’s “our” restaurant. She was crying and saying, We’re never going to go back there. I wrecked the chair! They took us right up in the elevator. By the time we got to the maternity floor, the nurses were hurrying us up because Kelly was already six centimeters dilated. A few pushes and there she was. It was probably much worse for Kels than she says it was. I wanted to name her “Jewel,” because that’s what she is. But Kelly said that was a country-western name. I thought of Juliet, because it sounded a little like “Jewel,” and Kelly didn’t like that much, either, but she gave in. Maybe she was just tired out. I hope I didn’t force it on her!
The next entry was from September:
Juliet is becoming a real little person. I know she can see, because she looks right into my eyes. I think her eyes will be dark blue, like the ocean. I’m so glad we came here. Colorado is so dusty and dry. I want to teach Juliet to swim. I can’t wait for her to say “Daddy.”
I read the next entry.
I feel so guilty. Kels has to do all the work to support us, and she doesn’t make that much. She hasn’t had a new dress in years. I feel so good, and I’m learning so much, but she comes home all depressed because the kids she sees at school are so troubled. I can’t believe parents can be so lousy. They don’t even think about how their actions affect kids. Kelly told me one father had his daughter going to buy him cigarettes!
I shut the book, slipping the little lock into its place, making sure it opened easily and didn’t need a key. Scott Early’s outrage over parents smoking cigarettes was about all I could take.
Juliet started to whimper, and I changed and fed her, gradually calming myself down. I began to sing to her, “Hushabye, don’t you cry. Go to sleep, my little baby. When you wake, you shall have all the pretty little horses. . . .”
They came home, relaxed and laughing, at nine.
They paid me and hired me.
I thanked them. I promised I would always do my best for Juliet.
When I went downstairs, I thought I heard a faint ribbon of music. I looked back up at the big window at the front of their apartment. The two of them were dancing, holding Juliet between them. My mother danced with Rafe standing on her feet, spinning him around the way he wanted her to until he was so dizzy, he fell over laughing on the rug. But what loomed over me as I watched them was a memory: I was little. Maybe I was six or seven. My mother was dancing to her Motown music and holding the baby’s arm out as if they were partners in a tango. The baby would have been . . . Becky, if I had been that small. The little girl who was me was jumping up and down next to my mother. I could hear my father laughing. What you want, baby, I got . . . My head throbbed, though I never got headaches. I thought of the next line: What you need . . . Scott Early and Kelly looked so happy. They had everything they wanted. The past was the past. For them. The little baby in my mother’s arms was buried in the cemetery now, her quick little legs quiet forever in their black Sunday tights. But Scott Early’s little baby girl was healthy and strong. No one would ever hurt her. I could hardly remember that kind of happy, a happy without an “in spite of” like a rock in the middle of it. Denial was built into human nature, but surely they must think of the murders all the time. They must. They’d had less than a year together since he got out of Stone Gate. Every day must be a gift to them. A new surprise package to open, despite how “guilty” Scott Early felt—guilty because his wife had to earn the living, not because he’d taken two little lives in the time it took to write down that sentence! Every day after he’d done that was a package to open for us, too. A package of obligation, tied up in dirty brown paper. We hated to see the sun go down and dreaded seeing it come up. We barely spoke for a year; Scott Early and Kelly were dancing!
And now, I thought, even my parents were happy. Heavenly Father had given them the mercy of forgiveness and allowed them to let Ruthie and Becky go like balloons released to the sky at a parade. They’d been able to move ahead. Did they think of my sisters every day?
Was I the only one who kept this vigil? Why did Scott Early have a right to his “jewel”? What was amiss with my faith that I couldn’t let go?
I turned away and drove home.
Mrs. Desmond had left a note for me and a plate with a stuffed pepper and mashed potatoes on it for me to warm. It was her bridge night. I loved stuffed peppers, but I simply cut up the food with a fork and flushed it down the toilet, rinsed the plate, and put it in the dishwasher, afterward scribbling a note of thanks. I knelt next to my bed and prayed for the rock to be a ball of ice. I prayed for it to melt.
I got into my bed, shivering, and opened the laptop my father had insisted on giving me. Mrs. Desmond had high-speed cable, to e-mail her daughters daily. I opened Google and searched out places in Texas and Arizona called Second Chance and Safe Haven, where scared girls too frightened or ashamed to tell their parents that they’d given birth could leave their babies to be found and adopted—no questions asked. The programs worked. The babies weren’t dumped in trash barrels; and sometimes the mothers came back, but sometimes they didn’t. After a few months, good parents were found for the little abandoned ones. As if someone had whispered the instructions into my ear, I knew exactly what I was going to do.
Chapter Eighteen
On Monday, Kelly gave me a key to their apartment so I could take Juliet for walks in her stroller on nice days—and they were all nice days. We met every morning at the door, and Kelly gave me a list of things Juliet would need during the day and money if I needed to pick up anything at the corner market. Then she flew out of the door with her briefcase under her arm and her backp
ack over her shoulder. I watched her put on her mascara in the rearview mirror.
Juliet was an easy baby, and Kelly kept her as clean as a rosebud. Every day, I warmed the milk Kelly had pumped and stored the night before and tickled Juliet’s cheek to start her sucking. The first time she smiled, I rummaged through Kelly’s desk and found a disposable camera with a few shots left and took pictures, leaving Kelly a note.
The next day, Kelly met me at the door and hugged me. “I wasn’t here for her first smile, but you saved it for me! Rachel, thank you!”
And that was the first of about thirty times my own craftiness nauseated me. But after that, unable to stop myself, I took pictures of Juliet whenever I could and delighted in finding just the right socks to match her dozens of bite-size outfits, “capri pants,” and “miniskirts.” She was like my own little doll. Holding her tiny hands, playing “doing crunches” by pulling her up to a sitting position, I forgot for hours at a time why I’d come to California. But then I’d be sprawled with Juliet on a blanket in Belleview Park, recognizing patterns in the shadows the leaves made on my hands, making shapes for her with my fingers, when suddenly I would see those intertwined stone hands in Pine Tree Cemetery. And a black film would creep over me, staining me, reminding me that I wasn’t really Rachel Byrd, normal girl, happy in her job, loving school.
I would try, then, to think of Juliet’s new family, who would have waited so long for her, a couple who couldn’t have babies of their own, their joy after I left Juliet, carefully wrapped, fed, and dry, in some safe, lighted space. These havens were protected from the weather, not patrolled by a camera but checked three or four times a night by volunteers. It would all be fine.