Cage of Stars

  Mrs. Emory swallowed then and opened the door. And before my father could make his way over to the ambulance, where the ambulance drivers were just standing with this horrible look on their faces, as if they were frightened even to breathe, I saw Mrs. Emory say a few words to my father. Mama got up from her chair then and went to the door, leaning against the frame.

  She said, “Lunny. Dearest.”

  Papa dropped to his knees, letting the pheasants fall in the grass. He roared and roared and roared at the darkening sky, “Father, please, precious Heavenly Father, take me! Oh, in Your bountiful mercy, most Holy Father, take me, take me, take me!”

  Chapter Four

  The reporters started to call even before the funeral. We had to figure out what calls were coming from relatives and friends and which ones were from the press. The reporters didn’t make it easy. They pretended. TV trucks really couldn’t come and sit on our lawn, so they parked these big white vans with KLUTZ or whatever on it and satellite dishes on top down between the trees, where Scott Early had parked. They filmed people driving down Pike Road, even people headed up to the mountains to hike.

  Because the house was filled with people, including my aunts, who pretty much were concentrating on keeping my mother in bed, and because my father was called in twice to confer with the police, I was the one who answered the phone the first time.

  “Are you Cressida Swan?” asked a woman. Her voice was soft and sweet, like a Sunday school teacher.

  “Veronica,” I told her.

  “Veronica. Veronica, you’re the sister, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “This is the part of my job that I hate,” the woman said. “I’m from the Arizona Republic. And my name is Sharon Winkler. We need to do a story about your sisters’ death, and there is nothing I want to do less than disturb you in your grief. But it’s not fair for the whole story to be about the suspect—”

  “There’s no suspect to it,” I interrupted. “That man killed my sisters.”

  “Well, he’s innocent until proven guilty, so that’s how we have to refer to him. Do you remember anything about him?”

  “I thought you called about my sisters,” I said.

  “I want to ask you if you want a chance to talk about your memories of that day,” she said, and I could hear the soft click of her keyboarding on the other end.

  “No,” I said, “I don’t. There’s nothing about that day I want to talk about.”

  “What were they like?”

  “My sisters?”

  “Yes. Someone should speak for them, you see. Nobody ever speaks for the victim.”

  This made sense to me.

  “Rebecca was in first grade. She was a good reader. She loved to swim and race, and she could run almost as fast as me. With a little kid, you usually pretend to let them win, but I had to try to beat her. She wanted to play basketball like me when she grew up. And Ruth was just a regular, girly little kid. She liked to pretend to have lemonade and cookies for her dolls, even if the cookies were made out of mud. She’d put flowers all over them. She pretended all the time. She pretended she was a princess, and I was her lady maid, or that she was Persephone and I was Demeter, mourning and searching for her daughter after she was taken”—it hit me what I was saying—“to the underworld by Hades. Mourning so that the winter came and all the crops died.”

  “How did she know who Persephone was?” the woman asked. “In fact, I’m sorry. Who is Persephone?”

  “The goddess of the spring, in the Greek myth? I read them to my sisters. It was part of my English work. We would play out stories when I took care of them. We believe that people who die become like gods and goddesses. Not made-up ones. Like God.”

  “You sound like you were with them a lot. Your sisters. Like your parents left you to take care of them a lot.”

  “Not in a bad way,” I said, suddenly frightened, although I didn’t know why. “Not very much, only once a week or less, when my mother took her pots to the galleries.”

  “You sound like you loved them, like they didn’t get on your nerves.”

  “They got on my nerves sometimes. But, of course I loved them. They were my only sisters. They were very different from each other, but they were really . . . cool.”

  “Do you hate the man who killed them? He hurt them with a sword, is that right?”

  “No, my father’s weed cutter.”

  “Was it the most horrible thing you’ve ever seen?” Something about her voice sharpened. It was too eager, as if she knew she was running out of time and had to get to all the gruesome stuff.

  “Obviously it was the most horrible thing that I’ve ever seen.”

  “Do you hate him?”

  “I don’t even know him.”

  “But to do that to little children . . .”

  “He was crying and screaming that he was so sorry. I don’t think he knew what he was doing. He wasn’t in his right mind. He didn’t know Becky and Ruthie. They were just there, and he came across the lawn. It could have been anyone he saw. It could have been me. I . . . I hate what he did.” It was confusing, the way I felt obligated to tell her everything—even more than she was asking.

  “Do you wish it had been you instead?”

  “No,” I told her honestly, and then, “I don’t know.”

  “You wouldn’t have fought to save them?”

  “I would have done anything. I would have shot him, if I’d had to. I knew how to use my papa’s gun. . . .” My aunt Jill was passing through the room, with covered dishes on a tray, right then.

  “Who are you talking to, Ronnie?” she asked.

  “A lady from the Arizona newspaper,” I said.

  Aunt Jill set down the tray and took the telephone. “Why are you doing this?” I heard her say. “She’s thirteen years old. She’s been through something you can’t imagine no matter how hard you try.” She was silent as the woman apparently answered. “No, you don’t know. And I believe you might care, but you don’t have to go home tonight and live with this. She does. We do. I don’t think you’re a bad person. This is your job. But you can’t call our family and ask us to describe things that are so terribly private, right now, when we can’t even begin to understand the loss of my nieces or why this young man did this.” She put down the phone. It rang again. “Don’t pick it up again, Ronnie,” she told me. “Come and see Mama.” I did, but I was nervous every time the phone rang. It rang all day long, until my uncle Bryce took it off the hook.

  I slept and woke up with the first of the nightmares. But I didn’t want to bother anyone. The neighbors had taken in some of our relatives, and others were sleeping in sleeping bags in our library, on the floor. I tried to go back to sleep, but I just lay there, holding my comforter around my shoulders, shivering, my teeth clicking, though the house was snug and warm, wishing it would be morning so I could go down to my mother. When I heard the clink and rattle of the adults getting out breakfast dishes, I went down.

  It was like a bakery.

  People from Cedar City and even from St. George, who knew Mama, and the parents of Papa’s students, all of them had brought rolls or bread, but mostly sweets. I ate a piece of coffee cake, because I realized I had a headache from not eating at all the day before. Then I ate another. I looked at all the Jell-O molds. People say if it weren’t for Mormons, Jell-O would be out of business. That’s a joke, but in truth, I have only been at a celebration twice where there was no Jell-O. We had raspberry Jell-O fish with carrots and mandarin oranges, a grape Jell-O rainbow with mandarin oranges, an orange Jell-O in a bundt cake pan with mandarin oranges.

  I’ve never eaten Jell-O again.

  My mother was lying in bed.

  When I was a baby, our house didn’t have two stories. It was originally just a little cabin with three acres around it. Papa wanted to leave the little settler cabin as the “heart of the house,” but he had to build a family home all around it for all the children they would have. Papa an
d his brothers and friends took a whole summer before Papa began teaching to put on the music room and library, the big porch that went all around, and our pretty rooms and bathroom up under the eaves. There was even a nursery—but it wasn’t used for the longest time because the children came so far apart and Mama couldn’t bear to have them out of her room because she thought they would die and she just couldn’t believe they were here, after losing four. Mama drew in that room sometimes because of the northern light. It supposedly makes drawing show to the best advantage even if you’re drawing not what’s outside, but something that’s inside the room. We also had a guest bedroom that my father called the “lady nest,” because it had a duvet and lace pillows and all sorts of pictures and little collections of shells and music boxes on shelves high up so that Becky and Ruthie couldn’t wreck them by winding the keys backward.

  When he built his and Mama’s room, which Papa said used to be a “summer kitchen,” where people cooked when it was hot, he was careful to put in a huge window that showed the best part of the ridge, where there are no houses. It looked the way it would have looked to the first settlers. He wanted them to be able to see the sun go down every evening, directly across from the foot of the bed. My father loved sunsets so much, they were like friends to him. But that day, my mother was looking away from the big window, away from the little window to the side that opened, at the wall. When she saw me, although she held out her arms, her eyes were not like her eyes, blue flecked with dancing specks of gold, but dull, like puddles of slush.

  “I can’t sleep, Ronnie,” she said. “I just lie here. If I look out the front window, I see the ridge, and remember how happy Papa was when he first showed the window to me. If I look out the side window, if I see the Emorys’ light go on, I think, Now they’re having dinner. Now they’re reading scriptures. Tim has a cold, so his mother is giving him medicine so he can sleep. Now they’re reading the little boys a story. Jamie is upstairs listening to music on the computer. Now the little boys are jumping on their beds, and James is trying to get them to stop. Clare is doing her homework. They’re doing ordinary things, Ronnie. We’ll never do ordinary things again without this on our hearts. Is it wrong for me to want to be free, the way I was before? I watch the lights move through the house, the ones downstairs going off. The bathroom light goes on. Amy and James are brushing their teeth. I could see Clare come over and look at our house before she pulls her blinds. The little boys would be whispering, and James would be telling them this is the last time, they have to settle down right now. It’s like I’m there. I can hear them. Amy is putting on her nightgown. Now their bedside lamps light up. They’re reading. She’s thinking about us, but she has to distract herself, because anyone would, and she thinks about her family, too, and she can’t help but feel lucky. She has every reason to believe that, when morning comes, everything will be the same as it was last night. Just like I did. I thought that, too. Why did I think that? I thought we had all the time in the world, so that I didn’t have to do everything at once. I didn’t have to make Ruthie a trunk for her doll clothes out of that wooden shoebox I’ve been saving for it, because I could do that another day. Do you know how many times she asked me if today was the day I would paint flowers on her doll trunk? And how many times I told her, Soon, Ruth, soon. Things I did or didn’t do without thinking about them, the ordinary parts of every morning and every night, I took for granted. Sometimes, even when I was reading to them, I was thinking about sculpting a pot or finishing a bronze before taking it to be completed, thinking about what it was I’d done that made it look awkward and how I could fix it.”

  I looked at my aunt Jill. She raised her eyebrows.

  “Everybody does that,” I told Mama. “I sing when I’m doing my homework. It’s not like I’m not paying attention.”

  “But I had all those moments to really look at them, give them an extra ten minutes to play in the bath, or curl Rebecca’s hair because she wanted it to look like yours. And instead I put it off until tomorrow. I was going to make them an Advent calendar with a drawing behind every door. I had the paper all ready, handmade paper from a gallery in Cedar City, with little streaks of gold in it. I was going to make it in the shape of a cloud, and behind every little door would be an evergreen tree or a snowflake, each one different. . . .”

  “Cressie,” Aunt Jill said, “you’re the most wonderful mother I know.”

  “I was selfish. I wanted time to myself, to draw or think.”

  “Every human being wants that,” Aunt Jill said. “You love Ruthie and Becky more than you loved anything in your life. Ruthie and Becky and Ronnie and the baby.”

  “I can’t watch the Emorys’ house anymore, Ronnie,” my mother said. “I can’t watch them come out and bring things in from their truck, or watch James out planing a board on his sawhorse.”

  That made me want to run away, because Brother Emory was a carpenter, and I knew exactly what he was making. My sisters’ coffins. My father had asked him, and Mr. Emory stopped everything he was doing for other people to finish on time. Papa wouldn’t let the coffins come from an undertaker. I heard him on the telephone. Papa said he would pay Mr. Emory anything. Mr. Emory said he wouldn’t take a cent; he would do this out of friendship. Or I assume he said that from Papa’s side of the conversation. I heard Papa thank him. My father said he wanted my sisters to sleep in wood made from the trees around our house—and to sleep in their own sheets, with their own pillows, just as they had slept in the plain little beds that Papa commissioned from Mr. Emory when they were little.

  Mama kept on talking. “I can’t watch them because then I’ll envy them, their lives, and that’s wrong, because I love them. They’re my friends. I would never want them to have to be in this . . . in this place on earth with me. But everything they do or what I imagine them doing seems so precious and special to me. Nothing is ever going to feel the same, Ronnie. Taking clean sheets off the line won’t feel the same, because Becky and Ruthie won’t be trying to run under them. Getting dressed won’t feel the same. Food won’t taste . . . I don’t want to eat because I know Becky and Ruthie can’t eat. I try to pray because I know that’s what they’d want. They hated to see me sad, like when I lost the babies. They’re with the babies now, Ronnie. I know that. With their little sisters and brothers. Your sisters are lucky because they will be in the presence of our Heavenly Father; and Papa’s mother, Grandma Swan, will hold all of them tight. But my prayers feel like bouncing a ball against a wall. They come back to me the same as they were before. I know they are in paradise, but this was paradise, too! I can’t imagine ever wanting to make a design. I can’t imagine reading a book, or wrapping a Christmas present. I wish that they were here, even the way they are now, so I could touch them and make sure they’re covered up. . . .”

  Aunt Jill was crying. “Sister,” she said, and meant it both in the honorable sense, my mother being older, and in the family sense, “try to rest. You’re overwrought. Far too overwrought. Try to hide beneath the wing for now. You know how it says in the Doctrine and Covenants, ‘For I shall gathereth them as a hen gathereth her chicks beneath her wings, if they will not harden their hearts. . . .’”

  “My heart is a stone, Jill,” Mama said.

  Aunt Jill wiped her tears on the big apron of Mama’s she was wearing. She said, “I honestly don’t think it’s possible to feel any other way right now, sister. Here. You have to eat some of this. It’s plain garden vegetable soup. A little bread. You have to think of the baby.”

  “I will,” Mama said, and looked straight at me. “My poor angel. Why did you have to endure this? Why wasn’t I here? Why didn’t he kill me?”

  “We can’t know that, Cressie,” said Aunt Jill, and I knew she was trying not to say something my mother would think right then was stupid, like that Becky and Ruthie belonged with God. “We just don’t know. Even faith doesn’t give you the key to mysteries. You have to lean hard now, on us and on Heavenly Father.”

 
My mother waved her hand as if she were brushing off a gnat. “I know that,” she said. “Don’t think I don’t need it. Or appreciate it. But in the end, I have to face this alone. London and I can face this together, side by side, but each of us will be alone.”

  Each of us was alone.

  The second night, the night that the newspaper stories and TV broadcasts came out, all those people, hundreds of them, gathered on our lawn and began to sing “Amazing Grace.” They brought bouquets of flowers and teddy bears and put them by our door. We all sat there, except for Papa, who slipped out the back window of my room and slid down the fire ladder, the way I sometimes did to meet Clare, and went walking up on the hills.

  Finally I said, “Aunt Jill, make them stop. They shouldn’t be here at our house.”

  “Ronnie,” she said, “I think I know how invaded you feel. But these are good people. They want to tell us how sad they are.”

  “But they’re crying!”

  “Of course they’re crying!”

  “It’s not their place to cry! Ruthie and Becky were ours. Now it’s like they’re making them theirs, too.”

  “When children die—” my aunt began.

  “Make them leave, please,” I begged her.

  “Listen, Ronnie. When children die, people give their tears as a blessing. They want to show they share the pain you feel.”

  “But how can they share it? What they want to feel is part of it. It’s like a big show!”

  “I think they mean it kindly,” said Aunt Jill.

  “They might mean it kindly, but I can’t stand them being here. We have enough tears, just in our family.”

  “How can there be too many tears, Ronnie?”

  I turned away from her and opened the door and stared at the crowd of people, who were by now singing “Imagine.”