The Stars Never Rise

“Not well!” Feverish laughter bubbled out of her mouth and spilled into the room. It seemed to bounce off the walls and strike my skull at exactly the wrong angle. “I’m not well. I haven’t been well in a long time. But that’s about to change.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, her gaze pinned me to the spot where I stood. “Fine. You drive.”


“I can’t.” Because I’d sold the car. “Why?” I demanded through clenched teeth, when the anger and confusion and fear became too much to think through. Too much to breathe through. And I only realized in retrospect that I wasn’t asking about her tantrum, or about what she was trying to make Melanie do. “Why did you have us in the first place? You don’t want us. You don’t even like us. So why the hell are we here?”

My mother turned to me slowly. Her eyes flashed again like they had in the hall, as if they were reflecting some light source I couldn’t see.

“He made you, didn’t he?” I guessed in a horrified half whisper. “My dad. He made you have us, didn’t he?”

In my mind—in the stories I’d made up for Melanie when we were little—that was always how it went. Our father fell in love with our mother a long time ago, when she was still young and beautiful. Long before the drugs ruined her body and fried her brain. She was his weakness—the only flaw in a kind, caring man who’d loved us until the day he’d died, when Mellie was still a baby.

I had no memory of him—nothing to contradict the story the way I told it.

“Your dad?” She laughed again, as if the very concept were ridiculous. “Nina, you never had a dad. I married Oliver to keep the Church out of my uterus, but he wasn’t your father. Your father was a very special man with a very special gift, and it took me almost two years to find him. I danced and touched and flirted, and he made a small genetic donation, and Oliver—Melanie’s father—never suspected a thing.” Her gaze was colder and harder than I’d ever seen it, and then suddenly it was blurred by the tears filling my eyes. “Oliver wanted you to be his. I needed you to be someone else’s. But ultimately, you were mine.” Her eyes narrowed. “You are mine.”

My blood boiled in response to the lies she was spewing. They were lies. They had to be. “You’re crazy. The drugs have finally baked your brain.”

“I’m not an addict, Nina.” The kettle whistled, and she took it off the burner without a pot holder. The handle left an angry red mark on her palm, but she didn’t seem to feel it. “Drugs didn’t do this to me.” Her sweeping gesture took in her entire body. Then she turned and stood on her toes to pull a box from the top cabinet, and her shirt rose to reveal emaciated thighs.

I turned off the burner while she set the box on the countertop, flipped open the torn cardboard lid, then pulled out a white pill bottle. “Vitamin E, for my skin and my immune system.” She set the bottle on the counter, then dug out another one. “Vitamin C, to regenerate antioxidants and firm up collagen. Can’t you see how well it’s working?

“Vitamin K.” She set another bottle on the counter, then dug out a fourth and a fifth and a sixth. “Calcium. Niacin. Vitamin A. The rest of these you’ve probably never heard of.” She tilted the box so I could see another half-dozen bottles inside. “The drugs I take are to slow what’s happening to my body, and I’m paying on credit. Which means that someday I’ll have to make good on my debts. You would have figured it all out by now if you were smarter. Your sister would have figured it out if she were older. But I managed to create the perfect combination of youth and ignorance with the two of you. I probably couldn’t do it again if I tried.”

She looked at me then. Really looked at me, studying my features like she hadn’t in years. Maybe ever. And somehow, her scrutiny was even scarier than her neglect had been. “You were perfect, and you never even knew it. You were my perfect, lovely little shell, just waiting to mature. Beautiful on the outside. Flawless on the inside. Until you weren’t.”

For just a moment, as I tried to puzzle through the indecipherable tangle of sentences that dangled from her tongue, I thought she might cry. Her eyes were damp. Sad.

But then her gaze went hard and her jaw clenched in anger. “I drank half a bottle of vodka the day I got the call. My daughter had been declared unfit for reproduction. They’d already snipped your tubes and tied neat little knots in our future by the time they bothered to tell me. Over a runny nose and flat feet! There was nothing I could do.”

My head spun. I backed away from her until my calves hit the couch, and then I sat, because the alternative was to collapse on the floor.

I’d wanted my mother that day like I’d never wanted her before or since. When I woke up in my infirmary bed, near the end of the line of girls all waking to the same devastating realization, I’d wanted my mother to hold me. To hug me and tell me that everything would be okay. That they could come at me with scalpels and sutures and sever my bloodline along with my fallopian tubes, but they could never cut out my thoughts, and they could only kill my dreams if I let them.