Cage of Stars

  “No, because I don’t know,” I said. His face seemed to slacken with relief, and he gave a slight shake of his head. “I honestly don’t know anymore.”

  “Ronnie, we’re going to take you home now. We’ll go talk to the lieutenant, and then we’ll go home. But you have to promise to let me do the talking.”

  Anyone could tell the police officer was confused. There was something “off” about all of it, he said, but he couldn’t figure out where any criminal activity fit in. He seemed to be totaling it up in his mind: I had used a false name, but it wasn’t anyone else’s name. I had concealed my identity, but not for any gain or to perpetrate a fraud. I had worked in the home of the man who killed my sisters, but even his wife didn’t have a bad word to say about me. Finding out that I was Ronnie Swan had prompted Scott Early’s suicide attempt, but I hadn’t told him; he’d found out on his own.

  “My niece, furthermore, instead of allowing the man who murdered her sisters to die, saved his life,” my uncle said mildly.

  “There’s that,” said the officer. He looked me over from top to bottom and said, “Well, you’re free to take her. But leave a telephone number where you can be reached.” We got up, too.

  “Why did you do this?” the officer asked me suddenly.

  “I think from what I can discern,” Uncle Andrew said, “it’s that Veronica wanted to see with her own eyes that Scott Early was not a threat to his wife or child, as he had been to her little sisters. I don’t think she could fully believe her parents’ account. She’s always wanted to know the truth, no matter what it was, since she was a child. And, as a child, four years ago, she went through a terribly traumatic experience.”

  “Is that true?” the officer asked me.

  “Veronica, there’s no reason to say anything,” my uncle told me gently.

  “It’s all true, though,” I said softly. “He’s right.”

  In the parking lot, Mrs. Desmond shook hands with my father and gave him the rent check I had left. “You have a beautiful child,” she said.

  “Thank you for watching over her,” my father said.

  Mrs. Desmond and I didn’t say a word to each other. I just held her and she held me. And we parted. I’ve never seen her again. She wrote me when she moved back to Brisbane. I have no doubt she will be alive when I get the time and money to go to see her.

  When I got home, it was dark. They let me sleep for two days straight, and then my parents gave me the grilling of my life.

  “How could you?” my mother asked me through tears, pacing with baby Thor over her shoulder as I held Rafe in my lap. “How could you put yourself in danger? How could you open yourself to accusations? Why didn’t you trust us, Ronnie? How did we err? Not with Scott Early, but in raising our child? How could you have lied so straight-faced to us? And don’t say that leaving out part of the story didn’t constitute a lie because you know it did. You did this in direct contradiction of us. You did this in direct contradiction of what we believe.”

  “Mama,” I said softly, “I did it in accordance with what I believed. I’m not saying it was right. But it was my agency to do what I believed was right at the time.”

  “And now you are suffering for it!” she cried. “And bringing down on us all the same attention you brought . . . I didn’t mean that you brought . . . that was brought on us four years ago, I meant, you are bringing down all that attention again.”

  “Wait,” Papa said. “Stop now for a moment, Cressie. We’re going too fast. I think Ronnie knows full well that what she did was wrong. And I think the issue here is really Ronnie’s soul and heart, not what some fool might write in a newspaper, that will be forgotten in a week, the next time an actor on Friends gets married or a politician cheats on his wife.”

  Mama looked at him, then at me. “You’re right. I didn’t mean, Ronnie, that you brought that on us. People sometimes think that there are no mistakes. You say what you truly believe even if you regret it later. But what you say when you’re in stress is all mixed and inside out. If you get up from that table thinking your own mother believes you had anything to do with Becky’s and Ruthie’s deaths, my life really will be in vain. And your father is right, it’s foolish to worry about what people think, Ronnie.”

  I said, “Nothing would surprise me, Mama. I know you love me. But I’m not the same kid I was.”

  “But all those nights that you wrote to us about the house where you were staying, and your friends, and about all you’d learned, all the while working in that house, lying to her and to him, intending to take their baby?”

  “She never intended it,” my father said. “Ronnie does what she intends. She intended to go, and she thought she might do something wrong, but instead, thank Heavenly Father, she did something very right indeed. Perhaps she was in the right place at the right time for reasons we don’t know. She saved Kelly more heartbreak than she caused her, in the end.”

  “Please, Mama. You can punish me forever, Mama,” I said, “and I’ll do whatever you want. But you can’t punish me more than I’ll punish myself.”

  Friends came up to me in the days following, at church, on the road; and all of them looked as if they wanted to say something but couldn’t think of what to say. For a week, as Papa predicted, there was a column in a collection of News from Around the Nation on what had happened; but this, too, was inconclusive and odd. My friends in California were quoted. They were puzzled but called me smart and loyal and kind. Mrs. Desmond, in line with her personality, said in a San Diego Sentinel story sent to me by Kevin that it had certainly made for a cracking few months. In general, at first, even my relatives stayed clear. I went to speak to Uncle Pierce on my own and told him how the memory of the Prophet’s words struck me in the motel room that night. He sat for a moment, tapping his fingertips together.

  “Ronnie, I know you think that I am severe,” he said, “but I love you, not only as a child of God, but as a child of my family. I’m simply not . . . demonstrative. I’m more like our father is than how our mother was. And I can’t presume to improve on the lesson given you by our Heavenly Father. It was precisely correct. In the end, Ronnie, we teach ourselves. A sunflower may look like a withered and broken stick in the winter, but in the spring it will rise up new, and turn its face to the sunlight, and grow tall.”

  One night, I opened my computer and IM’ed Clare. We were too old for little-girl things such as instant messaging, but somehow it felt like comfort.

  “Hi.”

  “A L! D U want me to come?”

  “I can’t wait,” I wrote.

  I heard her door bang open, and I was standing with our front door open when she tripped over the step and practically fell into my arms. We held each other up, and I breathed in Clare’s sweet lavender scent, leaning against her and into her warmth. “What happened to your hair?” she asked. (We were so deep.) I thanked God she was home for winter break.

  We sat in my room, and I told her all of it. Everything. From the certainty to the doubts, to the fear, to the recognition. “I don’t want to say that I told you so,” Clare began.

  “But you will,” I finished for her, hugging her again, not quite daring even the whisper of a giggle. I couldn’t believe she was real, flesh. I had been away a mere three months. I felt as though everything was changed—as if outlined in black marker for emphasis, the way I’d done with my geography as a little girl.

  “No, I won’t,” said Clare. “I can tell by looking at you that you already know. Were you absolutely terrified the whole time?” She hugged herself and trembled. She looked so grown. I wondered if I did, too. She didn’t have to ask what had happened to me. What my father called the “tribal telephone” had been at work on that for days.

  I told her, “Not at all. Some of it was scary, but only for a moment. The first time I saw Scott Early. Obviously, when he tried to kill himself. But not talking to the police. Not the things you would think would frighten you.”

  “What about the EMT stuf
f?”

  “That is scary,” I said. “I love it. I’m going to St. George Community College and finish my full course in becoming a paramedic, so that I’ll be able to administer medication, even painkillers, through IV lines and do more complicated medical procedures en route to the hospital, and real assessments. . . .”

  “You don’t sound like this . . . other thing . . . affected you at all,” Clare said in wonderment.

  “It did. You can’t know how much,” I tried to explain. “But not all in a bad way. I saw what I’d done, and I helped Kelly. . . .”

  “But you almost killed—”

  “Clare, no. I didn’t!” I said, and wondered, Would everyone think what Clare thought? “I didn’t do a thing to him.” A vein in my head began to pound. “Yes, I should have stayed here. I never should have gone there.” I tapped my headboard, thinking, and then said, “But I have to tell you that it may not be until this moment that Scott Early fully appreciates what it’s like to nearly leave behind the people you love or what it would be like to be left behind.” I didn’t want to tell her what else had happened to me: a new set of recurring nightmares of Scott Early’s livid face behind the glassine hood of the freezer storage bag, of the apartment door swinging slowly open in the dark, the thump—so like the sound of the door hitting the shed those many years ago. I could do nothing but pray and hope these would fade in time. I put my hands over my face. “Just because I’m happy to see you doesn’t mean . . . I’m totally happy,” I told Clare.

  “But I want you to be happy,” she said. “You can’t blame me for wondering, though. So was it right or was it wrong?”

  “Could anything be both?” I asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’m not sure, either. I know I’m glad he’s safe. I mean that. But I’m glad I’m safe, too. I’m glad I’m home.”

  “That, of course, is the thing I prayed for hardest, when I heard,” Clare said.

  “Let me, just, be me for a little while, Clare. Me with you, here. I don’t want to remember it now.”

  And so, for a while, we allowed ourselves a break from the drama. Clare told me about dating David Pratt; they’d even done some making out—strictly outside the clothes. “I don’t know what will happen when I go away again,” she said.

  “If it’s meant, it’ll last,” I said. “My parents lasted.”

  “It’s a different time from when your parents lasted, Ronnie. He could have anyone.”

  “You could have anyone.”

  “Did you like a boy down there?” she asked.

  I thought of Kevin. “Like a brother,” I said, “not like a love. I did date a boy. He’d been a missionary.”

  “Did you like him?”

  “Sure. But not enough. You know?”

  Clare nodded.

  That weekend, we went to church as a family; and carefully, a little at a time, our community accepted me back into its body. By the time I turned seventeen, it (except for the occasional stare) was as if I’d never been away. Sister Barken sent me a card with a picture on it of someone standing on his head, along with a long mohair scarf in my favorite color, periwinkle blue. Inside it read, “Chin up, Ronnie. People may not understand, but they believe. They believe in you. We believe in you.”

  One night, all four of the Sissinellis came to our house unannounced. Serena and her parents hugged me, and Miko squeezed my shoulder.

  “We came,” Mrs. Sissinelli said, “to give you a birthday present, Ronnie.” She handed me a small box. It was a pair of gold earrings, each with a huge pearl. “Catholics read the Bible, too,” said Mrs. Sissinelli, “and St. Matthew speaks of finding the pearl of great price, which I know is part of your doctrine, and which we believe is the glory of the blessing of Jesus, even hidden in a hostile world. That’s more complicated than I meant to get. I just thought it was appropriate. We just saw these as for you.”

  “Thank you,” I told her. “They remind me of the sea, and you gave me the sea.”

  Miko asked, “What did you do to your hair?”

  I said, “I didn’t want to look like the kid down the road anymore.”

  “Well, you sure don’t,” he said, shrugging.

  “I’m gradually washing it out,” I told them. “It was stupid. I loved my hair. But at least kids with cancer are going to get pretty wigs they’ll never have to curl.” Serena’s eyes filled, but Miko looked down at his shoes. My parents shook hands with the Sissinellis and thanked them for welcoming me home.

  It was fear of the dreams coming back now that I was home again that kept me up all that night. I fussed with completing all the bits I’d gathered in advance to make presents—little things such as plain wooden photo frames or old wooden boxes I’d bought at a thrift shop and mailed back home. Now, I decorated them with shells or wrapped bits of sea glass I’d gathered in California or painted on them with stars and half-moons. In the darkness, I went out to fetch some of my mother’s old art supplies and her hot-glue gun. To get them, I had to open the door of the shed and see the spot where I’d knelt when we played hide-and-seek. All the windows were new and the paint fresh. There was a bright, cheerful light. Old boards had been replaced and new ones caulked. No troublesome drafts. The supplies had been organized on shelves that smelled freshly sawn, with our canned goods stacked neatly beside them. There was a plain but newer futon in there, with a soft mattress. But I could still, from one window, see the place where the picnic table had stood. When my heart began to flutter, I grabbed a fistful of wires, the hot-glue gun, and the tackle box in which my mother once kept the jeweler’s supplies she used for her artwork, and fled.

  It was four in the morning when the pebbles hit my window. I looked out, expecting Clare. But it was Miko, standing down there in his old leather jacket. I put on my jean jacket and went outside in my pajama pants.

  “What were you doing?” he asked.

  “Making Christmas presents,” I said. “Sewing. What do you want?”

  “I wanted to know why anyone I thought was as smart as I thought you were could do something so goddamn stupid,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “If I’ve said that once, I’ve said it a hundred times. It was stupid. But I felt it was the right thing to do. We don’t have to understand everything in this life.”

  “You really think there’s another one?”

  “Absolutely. That was one reason why,” I said. “Because I know I’ll see my sisters again. I’ll have to be accountable. That’s why Mormons get married in the temple for time—which is now—and for eternity, which is forever. So they’ll always be together. My parents will. I will, when I get married.”

  “Damn it, Ronnie,” he said. “You did something nuts. You worried me. And you also never called me.”

  “It wasn’t like you cared so much. And I was busy.”

  “I’ll say,” Miko said with a grimace. “Listen. You’re like . . . a little sister. Always there. Shooting baskets. Shooting guns. Riding Jade. I thought about you a lot. When I heard about this, I practically puked. I thought, how can she be serious?”

  “I’m serious. I’m a serious person,” I said.

  “I’m serious, too, Ronnie. You don’t think of me that way. You think of me as some rich asshole who flies back and forth from one fancy house to another. But I am a serious person. I will save lives someday.”

  “I already have,” I said.

  “Little Miss One Up,” he said.

  “Maybe I don’t think you’re a serious person,” I said. “What do you care? I’m the kid who cleaned your parents’ house, who you laughed at with your stupid friends. I’m the kid you noticed because she was in the middle of a tragedy, on the news. I’m the little kid down the road you saw hundreds of times but only really saw once.”

  “I know when you mean.”

  “I know it, too.”

  “But that’s not the only time I really saw you, Ronnie. I’m standing here in the middle of the night, and I see you.” He
pulled me to him and kissed me, not as he had years before, but drawing my body against him, the way Kevin had with Shira.

  “Not here,” I said, glancing over to see if my parents’ light was still off.

  Holding hands, we ran down to the creek. “I never went into the girls’ changing room,” Miko said.

  “It’s utterly glamorous,” I told him, leading him inside. As I’d hoped, younger kids had chinked up the walls with mud. It looked almost as it had when I was a child. “It’s very dark. It’s probably also completely soaking with mud on the floor.” But the floor was dry and covered with a tarp of plastic. A new generation, I thought. We lay down inside the willow fort, and Miko held me. He kissed me and ran his hands along my ribs. I put my hands under his shirt against his hot back, and none of it felt wrong. The cord in my belly sang.

  “Ronnie, you’re a Mormon!” he said finally, sitting up.

  “So?”

  “I can’t . . . You’re a Mormon! You think an angel came to some kid with bad legs and told him about a new book of the Bible.”

  “You think an angel came to a girl and told her she was going to have the son of God.”

  “I’ve never thought a virgin could have a baby.”

  “Right.”

  “I’ve never thought Jesus made this big appearance in New York State, either, like Eric Clapton on a comeback tour, the way you guys think.”

  “I’ve never thought a priest could change regular crackers into the actual body of Christ.”

  “Come on, Ronnie,” he said, dodging that one. “What could make people think that little Joseph Smith was thinking about religion so much, when he was just this fourteen-year-old kid—that he went out in the woods and saw the apostles! Give me a break.”

  “What about Saint Bernadette, a poor little French girl, seeing the Blessed Virgin—”

  “They didn’t start a whole religion about a kid’s hallucination!”

  “No, they just believed the yucky water from the little spring where Bernadette went would cure people with . . . cerebral palsy and cancer and leukemia—”