“We need you out here,” Eleanor says at last.
“There’s this tree here,” Marla says. “It has gold strawberries on it. I mean, strawberries don’t even grow on trees, right? But there they are. They’re gold. And delicious. And the skies are sort of purple. And, I don’t know, I’m okay in here. I fit in here.”
“No,” Astrid says now. She presses more of her weight against the door. “You belong with us.”
“Hey, Marla?” I say. I notice a tiny nick in the wood on one corner of the door. A little place where the wood is splintering, which is funny, since hours of hammering and punching the wood did nothing to make it crack. “Laurel’s not actually in there. You need to know that. Laurel never got caught in a closet. She died a long, long time ago, like we were told. She died in the lake, actually. We saw it in your closet. You don’t have to be stuck. You’re stuck because you don’t want to be out here. But we’re here. And we want you to come out.”
Marla doesn’t say anything. Her fingers stay at the bottom of the door, reaching, reaching toward the stars.
Forty-Three
“Answer us, Marla!” Eleanor screeches.
I pick at the nick in the wood. Another tiny, tiny splinter breaks off. The more I touch the wood, the more it gives in to me.
“Push,” I whisper. I don’t want Marla to know we can penetrate the door, but I think maybe we can. The combination of her maybe wanting to come out and the three of us being sated with swallowed stars is bringing a new kind of strength.
We push, but the door doesn’t budge. I pick at the little splintered part, and another speck flies off.
“Laurel’s in here with me,” Marla says. “Protecting me. Like a mom.” She whispers the word mom. If I really think about it, we’ve all been whispering the word mom for a while now. Like it’s a swear or something.
“She’s . . . You’ve seen her?” I say. Eleanor is sweating, drops of it rolling from her forehead to her chin, from her shoulder to her wrist, I assume from her hip down to her ankle, too.
“I can feel her in here with me,” Marla says. I pick some more at the door. If I were to take down the entire door at this splinter-by-splinter pace, Marla would be, like, eighty by the time I got her out. I poke Astrid to get her to try too. Quietly, of course.
“Whatever you feel in there isn’t real. Isn’t Laurel,” Eleanor says. “Laurel was a real little girl. She looked like Silly. And she drowned in the lake. Mom only thought she was in the closet sometimes because she was too sad to admit the truth. You only feel Laurel’s presence because the closet’s giving you what you want. It’s not real.”
“She’s right,” I say, because Marla trusts me most of all, and I know that now.
“But what you really need is to be out here with us,” Eleanor says. I stand up, and we all three hold hands.
“We have to take what we absolutely need from the closet, and leave the rest,” Astrid says. I think of the stars and know that we need to learn how to be strong without them too, but sometimes the magic is needed. Sometimes things hurt so much you have to turn outside yourself for a lift. “We need each other,” she says.
Marla’s quiet.
“Hey, Marla?” Astrid says. A little glow is coming off her. Like the stars have been digested, and now she’s emanating their extra-glowy warm energy. I look to Eleanor, and she’s on the golden side too. The room is so warm from all the stars on the floor that it’s hard to tell, but I think our temperatures are rising. I think the surface of my skin has changed. I don’t get the feeling that it will last. “We’re here now,” Astrid says. “You don’t have to be scared. Or lost. Or whatever. You don’t have to be anything. You can be Marla.”
“I’m a princess in here,” Marla says, but she doesn’t sound the way I’d imagine a princess sounding. She doesn’t sound that excited about it. “I can be anything in here. Like Mom was. You showed them Mom?”
“I showed them Mom,” I say.
“She was happier in the closet.”
And maybe I don’t totally disagree. She looked so, so happy in the memories in the closet. So pretty and free and in love. In the real world, I’ve never seen her look like that. I move my mouth around, trying to find words to say. Eleanor is doing the same, both of us opening and closing our mouths like fish. We’re all trying to figure out if maybe Marla and Mom had it right, and we should all stay trapped on the other side.
But.
But.
In spite of everything, Mom’s sadness and sickness and the tragedy of her sister and everything else that’s gone wrong, she chose our world. She didn’t choose the closet. She let it go.