Mom and Dad won’t stop kissing and batting their eyelashes and making dopey love-faces at each other.
“I love you,” Mom says maybe for the first time or the hundredth, it’s impossible to tell.
Laurel swims out so far that Mom and Dad can’t hear the splashing and the flailing, or don’t notice it in their love-bubble, but Eleanor, Astrid, and I can see it.
I don’t turn away. The speck in the distance that is Laurel vanishes. She’s gone.
“Get us out of here,” Eleanor says. She puts her hand on my shoulder, and Astrid wraps her arm around my other shoulder.
“That’s enough,” Astrid whispers, and she’s right, it is. I’ve seen enough.
We walk away from the lake and find the closet door past the birch tree. We find the closet door and leave it all behind.
We can’t leave Marla’s room for a good, long minute or two. We can’t speak or move or think.
I can’t think, at least. Maybe Eleanor and Astrid are managing some thoughts.
I’m weeping. Throat-hurting, dripping-wet weeping. “I made so many mistakes. I thought it was okay, I thought it was okay,” I say. “I should have told you about Marla. About her wrists. I knew but I didn’t want to know.”
I kept too many secrets. I turned away from too many things. I’m going to be sick.
“How did Mom forget everything?” Astrid says. “How could Mom forget her little sister and what happened to her?”
“She thought it was her fault,” I say, understanding in some strange way. “She probably used to visit memories of her in the memory closet. After. And then at some point I guess . . . she couldn’t anymore. The closets stopped being magical for her.”
“But she kept trying to go back into all the closets,” Astrid says. I think we’re all remembering listening late at night to Mom pacing to different doors, each one creaking open in its own distinct way, Mom’s louder and louder sighs when she didn’t find what she needed inside. Sometimes I’d even wake up to Mom in my room, checking inside my closet. I’d pretend to sleep through it.
It only ever happened on the worst nights with the most wine.
“I have one more thing to show you,” I say. I’m ready to let them in on the last secret. I shouldn’t have had any to begin with.
We go into my room. Eleanor and Astrid keep looking at the door, because really we should be in their room, finding a way to save Marla. But I have to show them what I’ve been hiding first.
“It’s a good thing,” I say. “Or I think it’s a good thing.”
I go to the drawer and open the box. I’m scared that when I open it up it will be a box of nothing, and I’ll be even more alone.
The star is there, though. Tucked inside the velvet casing, like I left it. Warm, brilliant, radiating. I lift it up.
“Priscilla?” Astrid says. She leans over the box and lets the light of the little star hit her face.
“Is that a . . . what is that?” Eleanor says.
“A star,” I say. Astrid nods and moves closer. She closes her eyes and hums an appreciative sound at the way it feels and looks.
“Like, from the sky?” Eleanor says. Her forehead is wrinkling in confusion. Her whole face, actually, is wrinkling in confusion. She takes a step closer to me and Astrid and the star. She reaches one finger toward the light, but retracts it right away.
“From the sky in the closet,” I say. “I sort of stole it. Borrowed it. I borrowed it.”
“Drop it!” Eleanor screams, almost. But I don’t. I hang on even tighter. I need it, need it, need it.
“It’s good,” I say. “I swear. It’s protective or calming or good luck or something. And anyway, I’m going to put it back. I’m only borrowing it, while Mom’s gone and stuff. I needed a little magic of my own, you know? Something special.”
“You have a whole closet of special whenever you want it,’” Eleanor says. She reaches for the box, but Astrid clamps it shut and takes it from my hands. As soon as its light and warmth are trapped back in the box, I’m sadder, more scared.
“I needed something out here,” I say.
“You were so sweet and small and polite for so long,” Eleanor says, like we’re at the funeral of my former self.
“Let her keep it,” Astrid says. She holds the box with the star inside to her chest, and I wonder if she can feel the heat radiating right through her sweatshirt to her heart. God, I hope so.
I give Eleanor an enthusiastic nod.
“You have to return it eventually,” Eleanor says. She sounds unhappy to be budging, but even she isn’t sure what is right and what is wrong at this point. Even Eleanor doesn’t know the rules.
“I will.”
“I don’t trust you anymore, I don’t think,” Eleanor says.
“Well, you’re gonna have to try,” I say. It’s the closest I’ve come to telling Eleanor how to live her life instead of her telling me.
So I stole a star. Borrowed a star. Because when you are sad, you need a little help, sometimes, getting happy again.
Thirty-Six