Something in my head lightens, releases, lets go. And the world brightens, tightens, leaps to life.
I wore glasses for a few weeks last year. Then I broke them, and I was scared Mom would get mad if I told her. No one remembered I’d ever needed glasses, so I didn’t get in trouble, but I didn’t get new ones, either. But. For those few weeks that I wore them, even though I looked like a total loser, I loved the world a little more. The colors looked brighter. The shapes were sharp and perfect: circles were perfect circles. Right angles were deliberate and satisfyingly straight. I felt like I understood things about the world, that with those glasses on I was seeing so much more and appreciating more and becoming a new person.
Anyway, that’s a fraction of how I feel with the star in my hand. The harder I squeeze, the clearer and newer and more beautiful everything is. In a few breaths, I feel like I can manage the day, whatever happens. I can manage the memories from Marla’s closet yesterday and Astrid’s closet before and missing Mom and having to eat Pop-Tarts and cereal and pizza for dinner every night.
I maybe don’t even need to go into my closet. I have the UnWorry now. In my hand.
“Who wants to talk to Mom?” Dad says when I’m in the TV room eating my least favorite flavor of Pop-Tart. We are all out of delicious cinnamon. I’m stuck with fake strawberry, which is good, but I’d rather have pancakes.
I rush to his side and he jumps; he’d been preparing himself for the usual quiet and stillness that follows that question. “Silly?” he says. It’s the first time I’ve seen him since watching him yesterday as a young man wooing my mother, and it’s strange, to have that between us now. To know that he once lived in a magical closet and now he lives out here with us. And I guess we make him happy, even though there are no golden trees or turrets or taffeta. And that’s nice, that he loves his life with us so much that he’s forgotten about his life Before.
Marla, curled up on a chair across the room, gives me a shut up look, but I ignore it. We didn’t talk after we left her closet yesterday, after she finally stopped hitting me. Instead we stayed in our separate rooms and took separate bike rides around the neighborhood and didn’t speak when Astrid ordered pizza for us to eat so that Dad could go to some dinner meeting at the university.
“You’re ready to talk on the phone with her?” Dad says, catching some kind of hesitation in the way I’m slow to reach for the phone, and, probably, the way I’m staring down Marla.
“Yep,” I say, and take the phone from his hand. The cell service is bad, and if I move around too much the call will drop, so I’ll be stuck talking to her in the middle of the room. He rubs his head in confusion, like that will somehow dislodge the thoughts and force my actions to make sense. “Can I do it alone, though?” Dad nods with knitted eyebrows and a frown that’s not sad but is thoroughly flabbergasted.
“Uh-huh, of course,” he says, and his head keeps on nodding. I nod at Marla, too, asking her with my chin and my eyes to leave the room. Eleanor and Astrid left the instant Dad asked who wanted to talk to Mom, thinking, I guess, that if they left the room they wouldn’t have to officially say no. “Remember. She’s not one hundred percent herself yet, okay? She might sound a little spacey, but don’t worry about that.” I remember from other times Mom’s been Away that it takes a little while for her to sound like herself again. They put her on some medicine that helps her but also makes her sound a little like she’s half dreaming. It’s maybe the reason we don’t like talking to her on the phone very much when she’s Away.
Part of the reason.
Dad closes the swinging door connecting the TV room to the kitchen, Marla scampers upstairs, probably to listen in from the upstairs hallway, which hangs over the TV room, but for now I am alone with the phone and the number Dad already tapped in. I press Talk, and the receptionist puts me through to some hallway phone that I guess the people living there are allowed to use.
Mom answers so fast that I know she’s been waiting there for a while.
“You’re there,” I say.
“I’m here,” Mom says.
I have to inhale and exhale before speaking again.
“I saw you last night,” I say, because I am terrible at openings.
“It’s so good to hear your voice,” Mom says at the same time, missing my sentence that makes no sense.
“You and Dad. The fairy tale. The princesses. The closet.” This is not going well. “Laurel.”
“Silly . . . ,” Mom says. She sounds tired more than anything, even though Dad says part of what she is in Arizona for is “rest.” I’m waiting for her to sound fully awake. I’m waiting for her to be the way she looked in Marla’s closet last night.