Keeping Safe the Stars (9781101591215) Read online

  When I’d finished drying the last plate, I sat down on the sofa, let Woody Guthrie rest his speckled snout against my feet.

  November 3, 1972

  Dear Mick,

  Outside Nightingale’s and Baby’s footsteps drummed closer in the dirt; in seconds they’d burst through the back door, drop down here beside me, listen while I read whatever words came next. Same way we listened while Old Finn read us Treasure Island. At least Nightingale would. Maybe Baby would take his soldiers into Old Finn’s room, plug his ears and shriek when he heard a word like love.

  I glanced down at the paper.

  Dear Mick,

  How broken my heart is this morning, darling.

  The kitchen screen whined open, then slammed shut. The two of them rushed in, flushed from running. Baby was always looking for a race.

  “You already reading?” Nightingale panted.

  “Not yet,” I lied. I didn’t know how to tell them Justine just broke her heart.

  28

  THE MISSING LIST

  November 3, 1972

  Dear Mick,

  How broken my heart is this morning, darling. Broken for you. I have hardly slept since I got your call last night, and I can’t forgive myself for being off in Spain all the days you tried to reach me. It seems impossible you’ve lost your daughter, Bridget. So senselessly. But I suppose all accidents are senseless. I keep going over everything you told me. That image with the semi. It’s a scene I keep replaying in my mind. I know it must be the same for you. And her three helpless children.

  “That’s us,” Baby whispered. I stopped reading; my heart was in my throat. I never imagined Mama’s death went all the way to France. That someone there thought of what we lost. I read the date again. November 3, 1972. Five days after Mama died.

  I wish that I could be there with you now. I know you understand I can’t leave my students, but if I could, I would. I absolutely would. Would fly home in a heartbeat to be there at your side. How wrong that you should face this loss alone.

  There are no words. Of course. It’s not enough to say I’m sorry. Or to send you all my love.

  I shall say a prayer that all goes well in New Mexico. That the courts proceed with common sense. That you get those poor, dear children with very little trouble because it’s the only right thing that can be done for now. I am glad you’ve hired a good lawyer, although I doubt the courts would award them to that commune. And of course they won’t leave them in a shelter when they have

  a man like you to give them all a home.

  I wouldn’t worry about that old trouble with the war—surely the U.S. government has forgotten you by now. There must be enough unraveling in Washington to occupy their time, and now so many know the war is wrong.

  What can I do from here but send my love? And hold you in my heart?

  Please don’t punish yourself for the trouble you had with Bridget. It’s the way of children and their parents to have these falling-outs. To disagree about choices made in life. And you were sadly right about Serenity, and that leader, Daniel Walker; maybe if she had left she’d be alive today. But being right can’t console you now. The best that you can do is save the children.

  I am here. Please call day or night. Write. I am waiting on your word.

  I love you,

  Justine

  When I finished with the letter we all just sat there silent. Nearly two full years had passed, two years come October, but it felt like Mama’s dying was happening just now. Nightingale wiped a tear off her cheek; Baby dropped his head into my lap.

  “All the way in France,” Nightingale said.

  Baby tucked his hands under his cheek and sighed. “That letter made me sad.”

  “Me, too,” I said. It made me think of Mama gone.

  • • •

  We didn’t read on after that letter; instead we walked out to our peak, the highest hill in Eden, where you could see far into the fields. When we first came to Old Finn’s we used to stand there in the winter, with nothing but the snow, and take turns listing off what Mama was missing up in heaven. Every list started off with us. Then we moved on to Mama’s favorite foods, the songs she liked to sing, Charlotte’s Web, the Beatles, sunflower seeds with raisins, fuzzy socks, our drawings. Anything we did. The more we listed, the more we got to love her. Somehow Mama’s list of missed things kept her there with us.

  It had been a long time since we thought of Mama’s list. Like every lost thing, we gradually got used to Mama gone.

  “Let’s make a Miss List for Old Finn,” I said.

  “Us,” Nightingale started. “I know that he must miss us in Duluth.”

  “Fishing,” Baby added. “Carving. Picking ticks from Woody Guthrie’s fur.” Old Finn loved to dote on Woody Guthrie.

  We dropped down in the grass, stared up at the sky. A shadowed moon glowed white against the pink.

  “Your oatmeal cookies,” Nightingale said to me. “Shakespeare and Thoreau. Mozart and Beethoven. The globe.”

  “Who?” Baby asked. “Is Throw—?”

  “Thoreau.” Nightingale laughed. “He wrote that book about living all alone. Walden.”

  “Oh,” I said. Walden sat on the nightstand next to Old Finn’s bed. “My coffee in the morning. Atticus and Scout. Justine.” I closed my eyes and wondered about love. How long it could last. If Justine loved Old Finn once, why wouldn’t she love him now?

  “Justine?” Nightingale stroked her long black braid. “You think he’d miss Justine?”

  “Well, I’m sure he doesn’t see her or we’d know her,” I said. “So I guess he must still miss her.”

  “But she didn’t help Old Finn when Mama died,” Baby said. “She just stayed in France eating bread and chocolate.” Sometimes Baby picked up bits and pieces I never would expect.

  “She couldn’t leave her students,” I said. “Not all the way in France.”

  “But she knew Old Finn was sad,” Nightingale added. “And he was here at Eden all alone.”

  “Not for long,” I said. “It wasn’t long before we came.”

  29

  SHELTER

  We were sad and scared and heartsick living in that shelter, and every day I’d wake up hoping Mama was alive, sure she’d show up at the main door any minute, scoop us up into her arms, tell us that the sheriff had made some bad mistake. I’d wake up and wait, and then it never happened.

  The best that I could do was tend to Nightingale and Baby, watch over them the way I’d done when Mama was alive. It’s why I’d argued with Miss Hawkins over Nightingale’s braids, and fought hard with Mrs. Traynor when she made Nightingale go without her gowns. It’s why I held that bully Curtis facedown in the dirt for ripping Baby’s blanket and why the tutor, Mrs. Stern, said I had trouble with authority. I had trouble because I had to scrap to keep us safe, to take care of the Stars the way that Mama would.

  It seemed longer than three weeks before Old Finn took us from that shelter, drove us to Serenity, and helped us pack the last of what little we had left. Our clothes and toys and crafts and Mama’s things. Her photographs of Daddy. All the pictures she’d taken of us kids. Looking through her album, I wished she’d spent more time on our side of the camera; I wanted a whole book full of Mama.

  While we packed up at Serenity, Old Finn stood beside us as our grandpa, but he was mostly just a stranger, a quiet, burly man Nightingale and I had only met when we were young. And there he was folding Mama’s shirts and socks and undies, lining her clothes up in a box while our commune family at Serenity streamed in with their good-byes. To tell us they were sorry. To let us know that with Daniel Walker gone Serenity might end.

  “I hope so,” Old Finn growled at Skye. “You people need to make decisions for yourselves, not worship at the altar of some half-baked hippie leader. Daniel Walker wasn’t any kind of god. W
hat was there to follow in that man? Or any man? Bridget should have known better.”

  “Daniel Walker is now dead.” Skye pursed her narrow lips. “Don’t speak ill of the dead.”

  Baby pressed his cheek against my hip and Nightingale flinched the way she did when fights broke out at the shelter. Those three weeks had worn our nerves raw. Any minute an argument could go from words to fists.

  “And my daughter’s dead,” Old Finn said, a raspy choke breaking in his throat. “These children lost their mother. Maybe in the future, when someone asks for loyalty, you’ll make certain they deserve it. Few do. Daniel Walker didn’t.”

  “He didn’t,” Nightingale echoed. She was crouched down in the corner, one long braid closed tight in each small hand. “Or Mama wouldn’t be dead.”

  “You got that right, sweetheart,” Old Finn said. Then he lifted Nightingale up into his arms, even though she was years past being held, and Nightingale roped her legs around his stomach, wrapped her pale arms around his neck, and sobbed into his shirt. And just like that Old Finn was Nightingale’s grandpa, not just some strange man who came to save the Stars.

  “I’m glad to go,” I added to show Old Finn I was on his side. I didn’t want Nightingale to have someone I didn’t. I was too alone with Mama gone. “I really am,” I said to Skye. I said it, but I didn’t feel it in my heart. Serenity was the only true home I’d ever known—I didn’t want to leave the mountains or the ponies, the shanty that we built off in the woods, my mornings in the big stone kitchen learning to bake bread. I didn’t want to leave the last place Mama lived, but Old Finn was the only hope we had. I walked over to Old Finn and leaned a little toward his massive body; he was strong enough to take care of us all. Then I felt the weight of his big hand land steady on my head. Baby nudged his little body in between us, his arms wrapped tight around Old Finn’s solid leg. “There’s nothing for us here with Mama gone.”

  • • •

  I didn’t like to think much of those days, the shelter, my last time at Serenity, or how it was when we first moved to Eden—but lying in that field, remembering Mama’s Miss List, made me think of how we left angel after angel in the snow like some kind of secret message we hoped Mama saw from heaven. We were always trying to find a way to talk to Mama.

  “Remember how it was?” I asked Nightingale and Baby. I didn’t want to have these memories alone. “Those days when we first came?”

  “You didn’t like Old Finn,” Nightingale said. She rolled up on her elbow. “But Baby and I did.”

  “I liked Old Finn,” I said. Nightingale held on to every memory, even ones I wished that she’d let go.

  “No, you didn’t,” she argued. “You said you wished we lived back in Serenity. You thought Old Finn was mean—especially his schooling.”

  “Well, I did hate the schooling.” I sighed. I didn’t like our schooling now; Old Finn still put too much stock in books. And I’d never been made to sit down at a table and do lessons or write sentences I didn’t want to write. But worse was all that number work he gave us—multiplication and division, decimals and fractions. I’d rather spend my hours combing snarls from Scout’s mane. “But that isn’t what I meant, Night.”

  Old Finn was sick; it hurt to think of how slow I was to love him or how quick Nightingale and Baby took to Eden, while I pouted through my reading, refused to do the math. I closed my eyes and thought of those first days, the stubborn way I stood up to Old Finn, how he always laughed at Baby or praised Nightingale’s brain, but there wasn’t much in me that seemed to shine. Then one day out of the blue he asked me to his woodshop, a place he went to work in private, and he showed me how the steady act of carving gave his mind some peace. “Just this,” he said, and slid a tiny chisel down a wing. “Making something out of nothing, working hard to find the beauty in a plain old chunk of wood.” When he offered it to me, I gouged some crooked lines into a block of basswood. Old Finn said I wasn’t going to carve a bird that day, or maybe ever, but I was welcome in his woodshop to work here at his side. Just me. The two of us together learning another kind of lesson.

  I thought about the first thing that I made—a wood-and-nail loom for Nightingale’s birthday—and the patient way Old Finn taught me how to measure so every single nail came out right. And while we worked, we talked about the horses or what it meant to be the oldest or how watching out for Nightingale and Baby would be always up to me, and in between he taught me how working with a ruler was just another way of thinking about math.

  “Remember how we had to wear those horrible Sears snow pants?” Nightingale said. “And we couldn’t keep our mittens out of Woody Guthrie’s mouth? And those plays we got to put on at Miss Addie’s?”

  Those plays didn’t seem that long ago. “I liked it when he’d count those plays for reading,” I said. Nightingale’s scripts were better than our books.

  “You think he told those stories to Justine?” Baby asked.

  “You think he wrote about our plays?” Nightingale asked proudly.

  “Don’t know.” I shrugged. “We only have her letters.”

  I hoped Old Finn never told her how I crumpled up my printing or how I stormed out of the cabin the time he handed me a first-grade spelling book when Nightingale had already finished fourth. I didn’t care that she’d had more years of practice; I wasn’t doing less than Nightingale. Pride, Old Finn had said when he found me in the hayloft. I know now how your mama got your name.

  “If he did,” I said, “I hope he only told the good parts.”

  “Me, too,” Nightingale said. “I wouldn’t want our bad days going all the way to France.”

  30

  NO ONE ELSE’S STORY

  We all agreed to leave the letters for the morning; news of Mama’s dying was just too sad and lonely when night was coming on. Plus Baby said that letter made him think about the shelter, the fat lip he got from David Cane, and Baby’s fretting on that shelter only made my worries worse.

  But when we woke up the next morning, we didn’t have time to read. Woody Guthrie was barking at the window; Sage and Nash were already in our yard, the big black camera there on Nash’s chest.

  “It’s them,” Nightingale groaned.

  “Sage!” Baby tore out of his pajamas, pulled on his dirty jeans and T-shirt, stepped his bare feet straight into his boots.

  “Wait,” I called, but Baby just ignored me; he was out the cabin door before I had a chance to tell him no.

  “Now what?” Nightingale said. “We have to stop that story. All those lies, they can’t be in a magazine.”

  “They won’t,” I said, even though part of me still wanted our story on the newsstands. Pony rides and popcorn. Atticus and Scout.

  “No more lies, Pride.” Nightingale lifted up her finger. “No more talk about that charity.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I won’t bring up the charity.”

  “How you fixed for Sugar Smacks?” Nash asked when I stepped out onto the porch. He gave me his big smile. In just a day his whiskers were moving toward a beard; they both still wore their same old rumpled clothes. Old Finn would never let us go that long without a bath. “Sage wouldn’t get out of Goodwell without another run with Baby. You know kids, they do something once and it turns into a ritual.” He nuzzled Sage’s hair, then set her down with Baby to run off through the yard. Nightingale was wrong; a dad as nice as Nash wasn’t sent here as a spy.

  “So what about the souvenirs?” he asked. He walked over to my shelves of brick and barn boards. “Looks like you already got a little shop set up for display. Your grandpa make this showcase for you kids?”

  “No,” I said. “I built it. Just yesterday. Before we had the storm.”

  “Oh wow!” He whistled. “You all by yourself? Maybe by next summer you’ll have the cure for cancer.” Nash laughed.

  “I don’t think
so,” I said, blushing. It was hard for me to look him in the eye with all the lies I’d told him. “Cancer isn’t much like building shelves.” No one had been smart enough to find a cure for Daddy.

  “No, I don’t suppose,” he said. “But I’d love to see those souvenirs before I leave. Maybe buy a couple for the road?”

  “Okay,” I said. We could use whatever money Nash still had to give.

  “I’m going to Miss Addie’s,” Nightingale called out through the window.

  “Miss Addie’s?” Nash asked me. He sat down on the porch step, stretched his legs as if he wasn’t in a hurry to move on.

  “Just a woman on our property,” I said.

  “Hmmm?” he hummed. “You got a big place here?”

  “Forty acres,” I answered. Old Finn loved his forty acres.

  He took a tiny notebook from his pocket, wrote down 40 acres.

  “Why’d you write that down?” I asked. I didn’t want Nightingale to be right about the file.

  “Just jotting for the story,” Nash said. He slid his notebook back into his pocket. “In case I decide to take this angle after all. Three bright kids and a charity—pony rides and popcorn—all off the beaten track. That’s human-interest writing at its best.”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “So what about those souvenirs?” Nash asked. “I’d love to have a look.”

  “Okay,” I nodded. Nash could buy them quick and go. I brought the basket from our cabin, lined the souvenirs up on the shelves. God’s eyes, Baby’s painted rocks, Nightingale’s pot holders, bookmarks, her crochet crosses, the lanyard that she made. Baby’s animal tattoos he was selling for a penny.

  “Baby’s tattoos are a penny. Every other thing is going for a quarter.” Yesterday we’d decided on a dime, but that was before the Neosporin and the $2.15 we still needed for Duluth. “Except the oatmeal cookies. They’re a nickel each.”