Cage of Stars

  “Oh,” said Clare.

  “Would your mother?”

  “Talk or want the baby?”

  We heard the shouting then. Bellowing. Shouting from my house. Oddest thing, neither of us got up. If something had gone badly wrong, like my father had cut his foot chopping wood, we didn’t want to know. We didn’t have to say it, but we wanted the adults to take care of it. We just wanted to sit there and be twelve for a very short time.

  But finally Clare got up slowly, and so did I.

  My dad was shouting for me to hurry and get in the car. The baby was coming.

  Chapter Six

  My mother’s labor was practically luxurious.

  For her. Not us.

  She had a lot to occupy her mind.

  We had nothing to do but worry.

  She got into the hospital at about eight that night, and Raphael Rowan Swan was born at midnight exactly, the first moment of December 6. Papa said it was a lucky day, St. Nicholas Day. The rowan tree is a mountain ash. Papa said it symbolizes divine inspiration and spiritual protection from harm in lots of stories and traditions. It’s lucky to have one outside your house, they say, and in old legends from Finland, it’s said the branches and berries are “holy.” If you have one, it grows, as ours did, right into the trunks of Scotch pines and other trees without hurting them—Papa said that would be the way Raphael would grow into our family. Some nature religions use the rowan tree as part of their rituals, and I asked about that. People call it witchcraft, and real witchcraft is evil. I didn’t want evil to touch the baby. Papa said that was poppycock, though; they were just a bunch of people who hadn’t got to the point of choosing the power of our Heavenly Father over a tree. He said that stuff had nothing to do with how pretty the name was and its old meaning, and that the Father understood.

  Anyhow, Raphael Rowan sure protected Mama from harm. At least that night. For all three girls, Mama had been in labor almost a whole day. Not this time. She barely yelped.

  I wasn’t permitted to go into the delivery room, but I wouldn’t have anyhow.

  We were scared that the baby would be sick or have something wrong and that this would kill my mother. We were also scared it would be a girl, Papa as much as I was. All we’d ever had were girls. Whenever Papa came out and said things were going fine-just-fine, he also told me that he wished he’d let them tell him the baby’s gender at the ultrasound. But now he didn’t want to ask the nurses to find the doctor, for fear of alarming Mama and getting her hysterical. Both of them thought before that it would be fun to be surprised. I was horrified by my own feelings. I wasn’t sure I could love a baby girl. Would I be able to even fake a smile? Now or ever?

  I buried my head in A Raisin in the Sun, which Mama had assigned me for over break a long time ago and then forgotten. I kept going back to look at the poem at the beginning. The one by Langston Hughes about a dream deferred. What happens? Does it wither or corrode, or does it explode? I was thinking of my mother’s dream deferred, of enough children to fill that big house with the funny little rooms. Deferred forever. Had Rafe been born three weeks earlier, my mother would have had her four children. At that time of day, we’d probably all have been over here. I wouldn’t have been alone at the house. Definitely my father would have been home, as he got paternity leave for three months; and he wouldn’t have gone hunting and left my mother with a newborn baby. Other ladies wouldn’t have looked away, the way they did if they didn’t know Mama, because they assumed that because she had only a baby and a daughter much older, she’d been widowed young or divorced. She wouldn’t have had to wonder whether this look was something that was in her own mind or really there.

  But the looks she would get now would be for real, if Mama told people the truth of why our family was spread out the way it was.

  In the hospital, everyone already knew. I used to think of nurses like I thought of doctors, as superior people who didn’t gossip or lie. But what I heard outside the room that night, from the obstetrical nurses, made me sick.

  “You know Swan in 204 is the mother of those little girls that got their heads cut off.”

  “Get out.”

  “The sister was involved. My neighbor said the killer was her boyfriend.”

  “That’s ridiculous. She was just a kid herself. Don’t you remember? No, you’re usually on A.M.’s. Her dad was that big, handsome guy who teaches at the high school? And he used to bring her here in the evenings to hold babies?”

  “It was that kid? She was a nice kid. She would never have a boyfriend. . . .”

  “Don’t be so sure. . . .”

  “And everyone knows Mormons don’t let their kids have boyfriends.”

  “I heard the guy was a Mormon priest.”

  “There’s no such thing as a Mormon priest, not the way they have in regular religions. I’m a Catholic, but I know that much.”

  “No, all good Mormon men are priests, and women leaders, just some higher up in our orders. We’re a church with leadership in every home, as well as a council of—”

  “Did you see her on TV? How the sister acted?”

  “Anyone would feel like that. Lisa, her sisters were murdered.”

  “She didn’t have to treat nice people like scum. They were just trying to be supportive.”

  “Mormons think everybody else is scum, no matter who they are.”

  “We do not. Unenlightened, but not scum.” They laughed again.

  My face got hot, and I raised my book to hide it.

  “Do you think the baby will help her or . . . ?”

  “I know I wouldn’t want to have one right after something like that.”

  “Not that she has any choice.” Laughter.

  “Maybe it will be their salvation.”

  “I hope.”

  They bustled back and forth while my mother’s moans rose occasionally to a cry—inside her room telling her she was doing great-just-great and outside saying things like that.

  “Do you think they were involved? On TV, half the time, it’s the parents.”

  “They’re nice people.”

  “Anyone can look nice.”

  It was a small waiting room, and I finally got up all my courage and lowered my book. I coughed.

  I said, “Excuse me. Please don’t say these things. Everyone can hear you. I’m Ronnie Swan. Those were my sisters who died. That’s my mother and father in there. My mother could hear you. Why would you think my mother would hurt my baby sisters? Why would you say such bad things about me? You don’t know me. You don’t know if I’m a bad kid or a nice kid. And my mother wasn’t even there.”

  They all got quiet. You could hear a lady down the hall say a swear word. Then one nice nurse burst out crying. She started to walk away down the hall, but then she turned back and said, “I’m very ashamed. I’m very ashamed about what we said.”

  Another one said, “Me too. We were just being big gossips.”

  I said, “I forgive you. Please don’t say it anymore, though. This is hard enough for us.”

  The not-as-nice nurse got tears in her eyes then. “Do you want anything, honey, like some tea?”

  I said, in a kind of snotty way, I guess, “Just some water. Or a Seven-Up, please. We can’t have tea. And it’s not because Mormons think other people are bad. It’s just the rules. Like my mother said Catholics used to have to eat fish on Friday. And Jewish people can’t have shrimp.” The not-as-nice nurse got me a can of 7-Up, and the really nice one came back from the bathroom, her eyes all red. She sat down next to me.

  “Is there anything I can do to make this up to you? I have a daughter your age, and a daughter who’s seven years old. I’m so sorry,” she said. And then she reached out and held me, hard against her. She smelled all lemony and clean, the way nurses do; and she held me as though she already knew me. “Poor kid,” she said. “You poor little kid.”

  Then the doctor was running into my mother’s room. And I could hear my mom sort of groaning and huffing
and puffing. “Don’t be scared. Looks like your baby is coming.”

  I don’t know why, but I asked, “Do you think the baby will die?”

  “Heavens, no,” said the nice nurse, the one who was a Catholic. “Honey, most babies are healthy. Cross my heart. Wait! I hear somebody crying! Big strong cry! Thank the Lord.” We stood up. My father came out and I ran to him and he picked me up, like when I was little.

  “It’s a boy, Ronnie—a big, beautiful boy, nine and a half pounds,” he said. “Thank the Father.” His eyes were red, too.

  The nurses put a cot in the room for me that night and one for my dad. My mom started to cry only once. She said, “He looks just like Ruth.”

  Now, to me, he didn’t. He just looked like a red, squished, little tiny man, fists held up next to his face as if he were mad. But I’ve observed that this is the first thing all parents say—how a baby who actually looks like any other baby is just the absolute picture of one of their relatives.

  At first, I wouldn’t hold him.

  “It’s okay,” Papa said, “you won’t hurt him.”

  “It’s not that,” I told him. “It’s that I’m afraid he’ll get bad feelings from me. That I don’t love him. I’m afraid I won’t love him.”

  “He’ll teach you to love him, Ronnie,” my father said. “I promise. He won’t take away the hurt from losing your sisters, but he’ll teach you to love him. Babies have a way of healing people. They’re so innocent, and they need you so much.”

  I finally did hold him, when he woke up and my mother was asleep. He held my hand. I stroked his cheek with my fingers. He felt softer than the down under Ruby’s chin. He had lots of dark hair and little rosy stick legs. “It’s you and me, bub,” I told him. But I still couldn’t trust myself. There was a huge gap between him and me, not just in age. He lay there looking surprised, like someone who’d showed up at a party on the wrong day.

  My parents took Rafe home the next morning. My mother was fine, and she didn’t want to be in the hospital. We took this as a good sign.

  It wasn’t.

  She didn’t want to be anywhere else, either. She fed the baby and changed his diapers. But she didn’t sing or talk to him. After a week, my father called the doctor. It wasn’t, like, normal “blues.” The doctor said Mama couldn’t overcome her fear to bond with the baby.

  That made three of us.

  Chapter Seven

  It was after Rafe was born that the panic just smashed into me, like when you’re fouled and it knocks you off the court and into the wall. I’m a strong person physically, but the panic was stronger than I was. It felt like I was made of little twigs. On the day of the murder, even, I didn’t feel overwhelming fear. What I felt was unbelievable wretchedness and anxiety. But not fear. This new companion was someone I’d never met before. It was like what I remembered from having hives when I was little, after I ate my first and only oyster. The itch that kept at me all day, until I was concentrating on nothing except trying not to concentrate on it.

  But the nights were worse. Before I could fall asleep, before the nightmares, the fear would settle like cold syrup in my stomach. I had been a sleeper. Used to dive into my soft bed. Slept like a log. I had a buckwheat eye mask because my father didn’t believe in curtains (“Hell take curtains!” he would say, quoting some poet). I had earplugs because Ruthie snored. Papa once said I considered sleep a sacrament.

  But within a matter of weeks, I could hardly sleep at all.

  Instead, I got obsessed with security. First, it was the locks.

  We had never locked our doors, and we didn’t know anybody except the Sissinellis who did. They did only because they weren’t there half the time and because they had valuable clothes and objects. We didn’t, unless you counted people; and my father had never spent a single night away from home.

  Still, that winter-into-spring, I could think of nothing but Baby Rafe curled up in his wrappie with some horrible person standing over him while my mother slept on and on and on and my father, outside somewhere, walked on and on and on. I would get in bed, set my alarm, turn on my computer, and then up would crawl this creepy idea that maybe I forgot to lock the side door. Papa had his key for the front door, since I’d taken to locking it, but he never even thought about the side door, so I had to. I checked it every night. But then I started wondering if I’d forgotten. I knew I hadn’t forgotten. I never forgot. But maybe I had. Stop it, I’d tell myself.

  I’d start an instant message to Clare, and then I’d have this bizarre feeling in my throat, as if I’d swallowed something like an aspirin without enough water to dissolve it. An acid taste built up on the back of my tongue at the thought of having left a door ajar, practically a neon sign inviting someone to slip into our house. My heart would start to thump. It was totally absurd. But I couldn’t get that thought to go up or down. It stayed stuck. So I would have to go all the way back down there and check that screen door. And the windows. The kitchen windows and the window in the little cellar where we stored fat wood to start the stove and the one in the bathroom my parents kept cracked because of the shower steam. All of them had to be shut.

  Later, much later, a teacher would tell me that the taste in my mouth was adrenaline, a physical reaction to a sound, even if it was a sound I wasn’t aware I was hearing. The sound reminded me of the sound of the shed door hitting the wall the day my sisters died. That sound started me not just remembering the murders, but reliving them with my body—though I wasn’t at all conscious of it. And she was right. I couldn’t sleep because I was having adrenaline rushes, fight or flight.

  The upshot was, I had to be content with little handkerchiefs of rest to try to wipe away the smear of the panic as it dripped, dripped, dripped down on me. I couldn’t think straight. Even physically, I changed. All girls smile at themselves in the mirror, as if we’re having our picture taken for magazines. We can’t help it. We do our hair different ways a couple of times in one morning, even if we’re not going anywhere, and look over our shoulders at ourselves in the mirror. Like, I had to make sure all my curls were distinct, because they were natural for me, but other girls had to use twisty rollers to get theirs. After Rafe was born, I looked in the mirror only to see if I was clean. I was always clean. But my face was like a mask. A mask with eyes in it that were the only thing that looked alive. My mouth didn’t move. When I tried to move my mouth, it opened only a little, like a gasp with a little tip up at the corner. You don’t know, until you don’t have it, that expressions require energy. It would be normal for me to look pale in winter, paler because I didn’t go outside anymore, into the wind and sun. But I looked like I lived underground. There was Mama, who slept like sleep was her job; the baby, who slept like a baby; and Papa and me—two other people pretending to sleep so as not to wake the others up. Except for Rafe, we were basically zombies who sometimes ate, not even together.

  I tried everything in the world to exhaust myself back into my regular routine.

  I ate cookies with warm milk before bed, because sugar, or so I’d learned as a child in health, quiets you down, and so does lactose or whatever is in milk. Once I got started, I ate cookies and drank milk until I sloshed. All that did was make me gain five pounds. Next, I jumped rope in my room until Papa told me I was making their bed shake. I played hundreds of games of solitaire. Finally (bad idea), I opened Becky’s little Book of Remembrances to any page, to see if there would be a message there that would give me some peace. The page I opened read, “I aM RebBeca SWAN. A swan is like a birD, but bigger. I am a very fast runner. The faster runner in my hole class. I want a sled and a dog for Christmas. A sled dog to pull my SLID yup the mountin. Santa comes at Christmas. We have a stove but he has a way of coming through the wall. My Sister is named Sissy. She plays the hoops, but somtime she travling.” That made me want Becky so bad, I had to bite my pillow. I didn’t dare look at any more pages.

  Sissy, Sissy! I wanted to scream.

  “My Sister is named Sissy. .
. .”

  I read The Iliad to try to bore my eyes so badly, they’d have to shut.

  When I did fall asleep, the dreams came. Variations of the original nightmare. I saved Becky and Ruthie; and Ruthie just cried from relief and hugged me, but Becky said, “My Sissy is so brave!” I stood there with the gun in my hand, and Scott Early lay on the ground, bleeding from the leg, like a doll growing whiter and whiter.

  At night, in the lamplight, with the hall darkened, I began to see Becky peek at me around the bedroom door. Always Becky, not Ruth. I’d see the flick of her dark silky hair, the heel of her red Mary Jane shoes. I wouldn’t have been frightened to see Becky—if I knew that there were earthly manifestations of people who died and that they visited the living. I’d have coaxed her into the room, gotten her to sit on the bed, tried to touch her. But though I realized I was having a sort of hallucination from sleeplessness, now Becky scared me. Everything scared me. The boiler going on scared me. A branch that hurled itself against my window with a clatter scared me. A car door slamming up at the Sissinellis scared me. One night, when a small boulder rolled down the hill (and boulders had rolled down and cracked against the ridge rocks since I was a baby), I rolled out of bed like a boulder myself and lay flat on the floor. Then I got up and surfed the Net until it got light.

  When the sun rose, the fear cleared out of my room like smoke through a screen. I could breathe better in daylight. I could let go because I wasn’t holding the world together by myself. I could see the Emorys and the Finns moving around outside. They could hold the world up for a while. But, of course, I couldn’t go to sleep then. I had to get up and do what I was supposed to.

  I knew that Scott Early was in jail. But I got my mind set on the idea that before I could stop him, he would kill Mama or Rafe. Or even Papa. I didn’t think of myself. I don’t know why. I just knew I couldn’t lose anyone else or I would go permanently crazy. You had to have a lifetime quota. I reassured myself that mine was met; I had nothing to worry about. But the fence of my life had been breached, like the Alamo.