Cage of Stars

  So I decided, my mind not quite what it was, that I would try to learn self-defense from online courses and also learn to protect my home more effectively. I asked Papa to set up a firing range next to the barn and teach me how to load the shotgun better and faster. Papa looked at me for a long time before he went to unlock the gun. He didn’t say anything. He spent an evening showing me all over again how to first clean and then load it, faster than before. In the morning, he set up fat chunks of logs with a can on top of each one, the cans filled with rocks that kept them still in the wind. He showed me where to stand.

  I went out there once and did a pretty good job filling the cans with holes. Miko came driving past in his family’s truck and yelled, “Hey, Annie Oakley!” But when I lowered the gun and looked at him, he stopped the car and got out.

  “I’m sorry, Ronnie,” he said. “When did you take up shooting?”

  “It’s something to do,” I told him. I clicked the safety on the gun and broke it so it was useless.

  “I’m used to seeing you shooting baskets at the barn,” said Miko.

  “That’s what I should be doing, if I ever want to play again,” I said. And I sighed.

  “I’d shoot with you,” Miko said. “Baskets, not . . . the gun.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You liked it when I would come over and play ‘make it take it’ with you when you were little.”

  “I’m not little anymore,” I said. “And besides, it’s not your sport.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked, leaning against the truck and trying to make a grass whistle. Even the holes in his jeans were perfect.

  “I mean I’d trash you,” I said. “I don’t mean that in a bad way.”

  Miko put his head back and laughed. “Get your ball, little girl,” he said.

  “I don’t feel like it that much.”

  “Well, now you insulted my manhood, you see.”

  “I said I didn’t mean—”

  “Come on, get your ball.”

  I stood the gun beside the barn and slumped over to the shed. I hadn’t even opened the door of the shed once since, and my breath started to come fast just having to cross the dusty floor to where the mesh bag with my balls in it leaned against an inside wall. I will not act like a nutcase in front of him, I told myself, breathing out slowly through clenched teeth. “You go ahead and start,” I told him, bouncing it to him on the hard-packed dirt.

  “Ladies first,” he said, bouncing it back.

  I drove straight down the imaginary lane, and when Miko started waving his arms in front of me, I just turned my back and shot half over my shoulder. The next time, he was on me when I took my first step, so I faked a shot and then drove in. He used up a lot more effort than he needed to, chasing me. The third time, he leaned in, trying to pike, trying anything to stop me. He did get his hand on the ball for a moment, but I stopped and grabbed it back and pivoted away from him to shoot it over his shoulder. Swish. He was all ready to jump up for it the next time, so I faked a drive to throw him off balance. Miko retrieved the ball after I sank it, and when he threw it, he threw it hard. Since he had some size on me and a lot of upper-body strength, it would have hurt if it had hit me in the gut. But I caught it and rose up on my toes, rolling it off my fingers and sinking it from right where I was, while he stood there with his teeth in his mouth, so far away that he couldn’t have guarded me if he’d tried. We stood looking into each other’s eyes as the ball rolled into some weeds. He had eyes the color of strong tea. I didn’t blink.

  “Shit!” Miko said, kicking the dirt.

  “That’s five—”

  “I can count.”

  “It’s hot,” I said. “We can quit.” Miko was sweating, but since I hadn’t done anything but basically shoot baskets with somebody jumping up and down next to me, I wasn’t. Miko started to laugh.

  “I can count, but I didn’t count on you being so good,” he said.

  “Well,” I said, “it’s not your sport, is all.”

  “I could have beat you.”

  “No,” I said honestly, “you couldn’t. I do this all day, or I used to. I thought I would play in college, but I really don’t think I’m going to have the height. I probably won’t even get as tall as my mother, and they have girls out there who are six feet. I love the game. I wish I were taller.”

  “You’ll be glad you’re not someday.”

  “Maybe.” I picked up my ball and from habit dusted it off with my shirt and let it rest on my hip.

  “I couldn’t beat a little girl. Jesus.”

  “No,” I said, “not this little girl. I don’t mean that in a mean way, either.” Miko swung back up into their truck but didn’t start it.

  He licked his finger and polished something on the dashboard. I didn’t remember him at the funeral, but I knew that he and his family must have come. He said, “Well, I would never hurt you, Ronnie-o. You know how sorry all of us—”

  “We know.”

  “And happy about the baby.”

  “Thanks, Miko.”

  “Who are you going to shoot, Ronnie?” he asked.

  “Nobody,” I said. “I was just goofing around.”

  “Okay. So. Take care, Ronnie,” Miko said softly, and drove off. I watched him and thought that if I had been any other girl, I would have let him make one point, at least; but I hadn’t been in the mood to play girl. The thing was, the ball had felt so good in my hands again. When I picked up the gun, it felt like a clumsy, cold thing.

  Still, I was going to go out there every day and practice with the gun; but the next day I noticed one of those white cars with the windows rolled down I could just tell belonged to a reporter. And I thought, My word, wouldn’t that make a great picture? I turned right back around and walked inside. But I wanted to so badly, it was like an addiction, how I guessed it would be to be hooked on drugs. Thinking about it all the time, imagining how it would feel, breathless from wanting to do it. I asked my father to take me hunting with him, for deer. But he said he didn’t have the heart in him to hunt anymore, for anything living, even birds.

  Then I started having panic attacks. I had to look them up, because if you had one, you would think your heart was stopping.

  A panic attack comes from your head but isn’t imaginary. You really can’t breathe until you blow into a paper bag and recycle your own carbon dioxide. You really can’t stop your heart from feeling like it’s a device stuck on one speed. I found yoga exercises on the Internet; and still, I would be somewhere—in the kitchen, in the bathtub, feeding Ruby, anywhere at night—and one would just happen. It was a good thing I wasn’t out among people, because I must have looked like a nit breathing into the Snackster’s Custard bag I kept in my backpack.

  Finally, I was all out of ideas.

  I needed to be a child, I guess.

  I thought, maybe, since my mother needed her little girls, I would try to be one. So I started to slide in bed next to her to read. I asked her to French-braid my hair—which I actually never could do for myself. It felt reassuring to me, since I was always so cold, just to touch her and feel the textures of her hair and her shawl, to warm my body against her back, which reminded me of the flannel-covered hot-water bottle she gave us when we were sick. But, though we had always been loving to each other, a good mother and a daughter who wanted to be like her, though we had fun and believed we were very much alike, too much had happened for me to crawl back onto my mother’s lap. It was sad. Grace is but glory begun, they say. At least I tried.

  If I’d been able to be my mother’s child again, I might not have done anything else. But it didn’t work.

  I stopped trying after I began to feel that my spontaneous hugs or my dropping down on the end of the bed for no reason was annoying to her. She didn’t act that way, but she couldn’t suppress a little “poof” of irritation if the baby was lying on the bed when I lay down there, too. She was afraid I’d wake him. I could tell it was a strain. Maybe I just never was
little-girl material, because it did seem that I’d been “big” ever since Becky was born.

  I will say that my mother tried, too. For one thing, when she received her lessons for Family Home Evenings, Mama searched for ways to make the stories about kids who used drugs and hit bottom real to me. But one night she smiled and dropped her hands in her lap and got out a game, like chess, that she wanted me to learn because she had a theory that it developed the left side of your brain. She said, “This other stuff has got to apply to you somehow, honey, because none of us ever goes through life without being tempted. But I don’t see it. I feel like I’m trying to teach the Mormon Tabernacle Choir to hum ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy.’ You’re so sensible, Ronnie. You have a gift of common sense.”

  She was so wrong. I was just a scared kid, and nothing made sense to me. I had lost my common sense along with my sisters.

  I wanted to tell her then about the panic.

  But how could I?

  Literally weeks before, she’d touched her little girls in their coffins. She had a new baby whom she held in her arms like he was laundry. How could I put one more thing on her?

  But as I said, she tried, too.

  One morning, she came up and brought me cocoa and cinnamon toast, and she reached down to nuzzle my neck. Then, I could more or less feel her stiffen as she caught sight of the places on the floor where Becky’s and Ruthie’s beds had been. She hadn’t spent a lot of time in my room since their beds were taken down. She put down my cocoa and toast and left. She had almost been smiling. Tears splattered my papers, blurring the ink, and I decided then that I would have to pull myself out of whatever well I was in. I should have talked to the bishop, but he was my uncle, and so crusty and old, or to Sister Tierney, who taught Young Women’s. But I didn’t. It would have helped, but I wouldn’t.

  I knew there had to be something that would make me normal. And being LDS, it had to come from the Holy Father. Why hadn’t I thought of this before?

  A teacher would come to our house after church once every month—not a schoolteacher, but someone from church whose duty it was to check in on us, to see if we were doing okay. Not just for bereaved people. They check in on normal people, too, and if there was an old person who was sick or didn’t have enough food, there would be a family assigned to them to make sure they were okay and got what they needed without being embarrassed.

  The lady and man who came to our house were husband and wife, and the wife helped with Young Women’s. They were Brother and Sister Barken, and they lived so far down the road, we hardly knew them except from church. But I had always admired her, because she dressed so fashionably, in clothes she got from Europe every summer, when they took their four daughters to Italy or France, where they stayed in farmhouses. Sister Barken wanted each of her children to learn languages, even though they were only little, and not just because they might be sent to Spain or Germany on their missions. She once said in Young Women’s, while I was still going, that learning another language was like learning music.

  While her husband talked with my parents about the archaeology of the Golden Plates that were given to Joseph Smith, Sister Barken took me aside. The tradition among Mormon kids is, run when the teachers come; and I had. I was in the little laundry room, folding towels. Although I knew better, all the white and pale blue towels were a little pink, because I was a little distracted and one day I put everything in with my red uniform shorts, the ones with the white dragon on the rear end. The dragon was a little pink, too.

  “You’ve been doing all this yourself, haven’t you,” Sister Barken said, but not in a mean way.

  I lied. “No,” I said, “just this load.” I didn’t want her to think my mother was mental. She had just had the biggest tragedy of her life, and a baby, within a month.

  “Ronnie,” said Sister Barken, “we could look at a passage of scripture that might help you. I had one in mind, from Isaiah. But I think what you really need is . . .” She put out her arms, and I collapsed into them. In her tight, fancy black skirt and jacket, she just sat on the floor of the laundry room, among all those pink towels I was trying to bleach out, and held me until I stopped crying. Then she asked, “What are you worried about?”

  “Everything,” I told her. “The baby. The laundry. My soul. My mother.”

  “The scriptures say that Heavenly Father never gives us a burden that we cannot carry,” said Sister Barken. “But I don’t take that to mean He thinks we have to carry it alone. What are you doing for Christmas, Ronnie?”

  I shrugged.

  “You could come to us,” said Sister Barken. “All our family lives so far away. My girls look up to you so much. They think you’re like Michael Jordan!”

  “Personally, I’d really like that, but I don’t think my parents are up to it, Sister Barken. I don’t know if we’ll even make it to church. We haven’t yet.” We had things in the mail from Grandma Bonham and Grandpa Swan, and little things from other relatives on a side table. But we had no tree; and Papa had given all the presents in pretty paper that Mama had gotten for Becky and Ruthie to Uncle Pierce, for other children who wouldn’t have had presents. We couldn’t have stood it to look at them.

  “Well. You know, this year I’m putting makeup kits that I got in France in all my girls’ stockings. They’re very small still, except for our Lauren, who’s your age; but I thought I would keep the other ones sealed up with our stored things until Caitlin and Stacy and Tonya were bigger. You know, the Prophet says it’s important for a woman to be well-groomed on the outside as well as on the inside. And the funny thing is, a little bit of gloss on your lips and a little mascara is nice. It gives a shine to your face. It helps you feel happier.” I didn’t know where this was going, but I smiled. I usually used Vaseline on my eyelashes because it helped them grow long and not break off as well as making them glisten. “The thing is, I bought an extra, in case one broke; but none did. I would like to give that one to you, Ronnie.”

  “That’s very nice, but no, of course not, Sister Barken. It must have been very expensive.”

  “Well, isn’t that supposed to be something you let grown-ups worry about? It’s a gift to me if you accept it, really. I’ll feel happy.” I didn’t feel happy; but I’d also never had a makeup kit before, and I was curious. “You . . . stay here, and I’m going to run home and get it. You can put those towels through the wash again. I’m going to change out of this suit and we’re going to give the house a spit-and-polish, okay? And then I’m going to teach you how to put on a little makeup so it doesn’t look as though you’re wearing makeup at all.”

  That was what she did.

  She dusted, and her husband and my father swept and polished the floors. Sister Barken took the feather duster to the backs of all the books. She ironed my sheets and my mother’s, before Mama got into bed, so they’d have that crisp, hotel feeling. And then, when Mama was asleep with the baby, she sat down and put a mirror in front of us and showed me how just a tiny bit of shadow that you could barely see made my green eyes look deep and mysterious, and how Frenchwomen put on their colored lip moistener with brushes, just a little at a time. It wasn’t your normal church visit.

  While we worked, Sister Barken talked to me, just a little at a time.

  “Ronnie, you can’t expect to make your parents feel happy,” she said.

  “I wish I could make them feel anything,” I admitted.

  “They will, in time, but, and I know this is hard for you to believe, it’s even harder for them than for you. Having your child die before you is what all the philosophers called the only unendurable grief,” Sister Barken said.

  “Because the parents should have died first?” I asked.

  “Yes, and because you have an entire life on earth ahead of you. You don’t know it now, but that life will be full.”

  “How I feel is, it will be full of time to remember this.”

  “Yes. But in time, those memories of terror will be replaced by memories of sweetness, a
nd anticipation for the reunion with your sisters, who have . . . ascended as martyrs.”

  “I thought martyrs died for their faith,” I said, puzzled.

  “They were innocent, and I would think Heavenly Father would consider them martyrs.”

  I said as gently as I could, “They were in primary. They barely knew their first Bible stories, especially Ruthie. They were ordinary kids.”

  “The way you speak of them, and your love for them, doesn’t make them sound ordinary. They sound very special.”

  “Then why would God let this happen to them?” I knew this was a dumb question.

  “It wasn’t an act of God. It was an act of a human being. Heavenly Father had to let wicked human beings hurt and kill His only Son, our Lord Jesus, not only because there was a plan for this, but because human beings have to have mortal agency. Free will. That’s what makes bad things happen, that and Satan working away at people all the time. God cries with you over this, Ronnie, and just because you can’t come to programs right now doesn’t mean you’re not good. Don’t punish yourself. None of us is as good as we can be, but you’re pretty close.”

  I felt better than I had in days. And I kept that makeup kit until every tiny flake and lick was used up. The brushes I still have, and I wash them every week. Sister Barken said they would last for years, and they have.

  When I showed it to my mother, she smiled.

  “Sometimes we just need a small something you’d never think of,” she said. “And Sister Barken knew what it was. It doesn’t hurt to have a little beauty, even in sadness. And she was right, Ronnie. Your job is not to try to see the meaning in this, but to pray to get beyond meaningless suffering to meaningful grief, good grief. I hope you get the space to do that, with everyone looking at us.”

  My father came into their bedroom then and said, “I pray that they’ll look at us with compassion, not as though we were freaks. Maybe we should consider . . . leaving, Cressie. Leaving here.”

  “But, London, we would take ourselves wherever we’d go,” Mama said. “You can’t run away from you. Ruth’s and Rebecca’s graves are here. Our home is here. Look at the blessing Sister Barken brought Ronnie, and all of us, today. I think we have to stand in our place and wait on the Lord.”