“Laurel!” Mom says, shouting from Dad’s arms. “I’m dancing with you next!” The girl who looks like me smiles. I wonder if this is what fainting feels like. Dizzy and weak and breathless.
“I know about your star,” Marla says before I can say anything. I hug myself at the mention of my star. No one is supposed to know about it. I panic, wanting it here right now. I want to get out of the conversation and maybe even the closet, but Marla’s on a mission. “If you can bring that star out of the closet, why not Laurel?”
“I don’t know what—,” I start, but the look in her eyes stops me. It would be stupid to finish my sentence. She’s seen it. She knows.
“Silly,” she says. That’s it. Just my name. Or my not-name.
“The star is something else. It’s special.” The lights in the ballroom dim a little. Candelabras and chandeliers and lanterns hanging from every doorway all darken enough so that the room quiets down. The music lowers too. There is a hush, but the dancing doesn’t stop.
“She’s special,” Marla says. “Mom’s been looking for her this whole time. We have to bring her out.”
“She’s not like the star. She’s a person. A memory.” “Why don’t you care about Mom?” Marla says.
Young Dad spins Young Mom. Again and again, so much that I think she must be getting dizzy. Mom doesn’t lose her step, not once. She finishes in his arms, pressed against him for a moment, and when they resume their dancing stance, they’re both sort of blushing. I have to look away. It feels like something private, something I’m not meant to see.
“I’ll think about it,” I say, picturing Mom and Dad dancing in our living room to some old-time song on the radio. It would be nice. Embarrassing but nice.
“Couldn’t you watch this all day?” Marla says. “We could get her back. That’s our mom.”
Marla’s content to watch only this moment, but I need to know so much more before I’ll know how I feel about it. There’s another tug of longing for that mother, especially when she breaks apart from Dad to go back to her sister. She combs Laurel’s hair with her fingers and whispers secrets in her ear.
We can hear them talking. Mom’s voice is higher and sweeter. Marla nudges me to listen more carefully, because she’s heard it all before and wants me to feel and think the same way she does.
“Let’s stay here forever,” Mom says to Laurel.
“Let’s bring him out with us,” Laurel says. “Would that help you?”
“You know I can’t,” Mom says. “We tried with the silver leaves and those amazing pastries.”
Laurel grins, and I feel like I’m looking at myself in a mirror. She can do it. She can bring him out if she wants to. She looks the way I felt when I took the star out. She looks the way I feel about that secret, and I know that she has the same secret.
Marla knows it too.
“You can bring people out,” Marla whispers. “They did it. You can do it for Mom.”
The scene fades, the world reorganizing around us, and a moment later we are at the same ball but with different dresses, different music, bigger flower arrangements, more chandeliers.
“What did you do?” Marla says. She knocks the side of her body against the side of mine, a Marla-shove that makes me stumble. I don’t respond to her hitting me, because when she’s like this it’s pointless to argue with her. Like when Mom has had a lot to drink or is recovering from having had a lot to drink or really anytime at this point.
“I wanted a different memory,” I say. “I was curious, and I guess the closet was listening to what I wanted—”
Marla goes for the door. She doesn’t want to see more than the prettiest moment. But I catch a glimpse of what I was wondering about, before she’s able to get through the crowds to the place we entered. There’s Laurel and Dad, holding hands, walking to the closet door together. She took him out for her sister. She tried to save Mom too.
Then the door’s open and Marla is slapping at my arms.
“We have to save her, we have to save her,” she says over and over until snot is dripping from her nose and she runs out of breath.
She doesn’t stop swatting at me. And I let her. It’s what she needs.
Twenty-Eight
I hold my star in my hand before I go to bed and the next morning before I go downstairs. It is the perfect kind of warm: not skin-burning heat, but hot enough to get a little beneath my surface. I am holding something strong and powerful.
I squeeze it and it pulses back at me.