A Constellation of Roses Read online

  Jasper manages to drive to our next stop and put the truck in park before he looks over at me. “Don’t forget. What happens on pie deliveries stays on pie deliveries,” he says with a face that’s struggling to look serious.

  “Your secret’s safe with me,” I reply, wiping my eyes. “I’ll never tell anyone that you were chased by a naked man out of Mitzi’s Love Shack.”

  When I remove my hands from my face I see that he’s grinning too. That scar pulls at his eye, and that’s when I realize that it only does that sometimes when he smiles, not every time. I don’t know why, but it seems important.

  Scars tell a story, even when we don’t want them to.

  Five

  WHEN WE GET HOME FROM the tea shop Saturday evening, Mia leads me up to the attic. “This is your room,” Mia says, gesturing around the big room in the eaves of the farmhouse. There’s a bed tucked under the right side wall with a small side table made out of an ancient upright wooden banana crate that someone’s taken the time to nail shelves into. An antique globe-style lamp with pink roses painted on it sits on top of the crate. The left side has a dresser with a mirror over it and a desk, as well as a hanging rack with some hangers on it. The faint smell of fresh paint hangs in the air. The walls are pale blue, and rag rugs are scattered here and there on the dark wood floor.

  “Okay,” I reply, shifting my backpack a little higher on my shoulder.

  “It used to be Connor’s. We tried to freshen it up for you, but we weren’t really sure about your tastes.”

  I look around the room. So, this is Connor’s old room. Connor, my father, slept here. He probably did his homework at that desk. Maybe he had old jeans and ratty socks in that dresser, a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of rum stashed away in the back of the bottom drawer. He’s never felt real to me before now. The sheen of resentment toward him is slowly chipping away, mostly being replaced by curiosity about the man I’d never met, who, to hear it from these women, was practically a saint.

  I don’t answer, so she continues. “I’m sure you’ll feel more like chatting when you’ve settled in. You know I want to hear absolutely everything about you. And I can’t wait to tell you all about Connor. Go ahead and rest while I throw something together downstairs. It’s my turn to make dinner.” She smiles at me. “Pancakes, I think. Connor always loved breakfast for dinner. What about you?”

  I shrug. Sometimes I ate dinner. Sometimes I didn’t.

  “Okay, then. I’ll let you settle in.”

  I listen to her climb back down the creaking stairs. When I hear her shut the door at the bottom of the stairwell, I release a shaky breath.

  Breakfast for dinner. I file this information away, the small note more than I have ever known about Connor. I wonder if he would have liked me. If he might have even loved me.

  But mostly I wonder why he never knew me.

  I look around the attic space. I’ve never had a bedroom like this, all done up and waiting just for me.

  My earliest memories are of being carried out of motel-room beds and laid carefully down in cold bathtubs with a pillow and blanket. Then Mom saying, Lock the door, Trix, and don’t come out till I knock five times. That’s how you’ll know it’s safe. And then the door of the motel room would open somewhere in the distance, and I would fall back asleep.

  I learned to count to five real early.

  I walk over to the bed and put my backpack down on it, taking a moment to run a finger down the seams of the square-blocked quilt, the loosely woven afghans folded at the bottom of the bed. At the edge of the room, I have to lean over so I don’t bump my head on the ceiling. I unload all my worldly possessions, putting away my package of clean underwear in the dresser. There are already a few things in the drawer, like maybe Ember was here while I was delivering pies, figuring out what they had around the house that might fit me.

  Then I look for a good hiding place. In books and movies, there’d be a loose floorboard somewhere in a house this old, but I don’t notice anything that looks useful, so I take my tips, the cash I stole from Ms. Troy and the tea-shop customers, and Mia’s ring, and wedge them between the banana crate and the wall along the floor. It’s not the best hiding place, but I doubt anyone will look there. They’ll check the dresser and under the mattress first.

  When I’ve finished that, I take my sketchbook out of my bag. I settle myself on the bed. The mattress squeaks a little, but I sink down into the layers of quilts and afghans and feather pillows, adjusting them until I’ve made a nest. That’s when I open the sketchbook. I’ve had dozens of them over the years. Some were misplaced, others left behind like the few photographs Mom used to have of us, lost in speedy, dark-of-night flights from eviction or angry dealers. But this one I’ve managed to keep. I flip through the pages. Some drawings are motel rooms, bus stops, and neon signs. Others are shoes I saw on the bus, or the clasped hands of the older couple that I briefly sketched the night I got picked up again.

  A few even have color, from pastels that I lifted from an art store downtown. But my favorites are of the people. I don’t have a photo shrine like Ember does downstairs. But this is my own monument. All the people I’ve loved. All the people I’ve lost, either because I left or they did. There’s one of Charly holding her red plastic cup watching television while the Quinter twins play on the floor of the motel room, so close that their golden curls are touching. And a pastel-smeared one of Mom smoking a cigarette outside the Starlite, in one of those blissful lulls where she swore she was going to get clean and we’d try for another Good Year, smoke twining around her dark hair like shadowy vines. Wendy Yang and me in the back booth of the Jasmine Dragon, the restaurant her parents owned, where we used to study and play and share secrets while Mom was waitressing. Another done in dark charcoal of Shane leaning against the doorway of room 7, as if he’s waiting for me to come back. The neon lights glare off his shaved head, the tip of his tattoo: three black-lined feathers, barely visible above the collar of his jacket.

  Shane.

  I let myself remember, just for a little while. He’d just finished a year in juvie, returning to the Starlite not as a boy who didn’t see me, but as a young man who saw everything. Falling in love with Shane was like getting drunk. A terrible first taste—he’d come over to yell at me for having the television on too loud in room 7 while his mom was trying to sleep. But after that, it was a warm tingling that crept up my fingertips and flushed my cheeks when he stopped by later with Coke-and-cherry slushes from the QuikMart and an apology. Then weeks and months passed, and it was giddy, tumbling laughter, the way his lips felt on mine, his hands on my bare skin. The way he traced my constellation of scars, the way he dreamed of a real house of his own and built it room by room with words murmured into my hair. Until one night when I lay safe in the circle of his arms, there was a room in his house for me, and I was lost.

  Blackout, falling down, lost in love.

  And then came the hangover.

  I close the sketchbook.

  A knock sounds at the door at the bottom of the attic stairs.

  A small creak, as if someone has opened it just a crack. “Trix?” a small voice calls hesitantly. It’s Ember. “Supper is ready. Mama made pancakes.”

  “I’m not hungry,” I reply, picking up one of the pillows and hugging it to myself.

  “They’re chocolate chip,” Ember adds, as if this might make some difference.

  I don’t even bother to answer her. Someday she’ll be just a sketch in this book, a distant memory that has no hold on me anymore. Eventually she closes the door.

  When I sleep I dream of goodbyes.

  I wake up ready to run again.

  I check my phone and see it’s nearly one in the morning. The house is quiet. I can’t do this. I can’t stay here. I don’t know why I thought I could even try for a little while. It’s as if the walls of this attic are closing in on me, and everything feels tight and heavy, like maybe it’s hard to breathe in this house full of pies and quilts. It
feels like Connor is here, the ghost of him looking at all my drawings over my shoulder, and wondering what kind of daughter I am, this strange girl made of sharp edges and secret sketches. I dig out the money and the ring I hid behind the banana crate. When I go downstairs, I’ll snag another twenty from Auntie’s purse and hit the road. Maybe I can hitchhike back into the city, drift away like flour dust in the tea shop’s kitchen.

  I change into my old clothes, zipping my hoodie up like it’s armor that will protect me from the darkness and isolation that wait for me outside on my own again. I jam the rest of my belongings into my backpack, and I tiptoe down the stairs, wincing every time one of them creaks. I open the door at the bottom slowly, but a thud and a clatter on the other side makes me nearly pee my pants. I step out into the hallway and see a broken plate and what looks like a glob of yellow mush on the floor.

  I look up, and Ember is standing in the hallway, her arms wrapped around herself. She must have been trying to come in as I was trying to sneak out. “I thought maybe you could use some pie,” she whispers, reaching up and tugging the earbuds out of her ears.

  There’s a hitch in my chest, a feeling of surprise that she was coming to show me some small kindness without being asked. “Oh. What kind was it?” I know she sees my backpack, and there’s no hiding what I was planning to do.

  “I thought you might need some lemon meringue.” She doesn’t call it Never-Lonely Lemon, maybe because it would make me sound even more pathetic than I am for sneaking away in the night without saying goodbye.

  “I have to go,” I say, my voice cracking a little. I don’t know if it’s an apology or not, but I feel like I have to say it. “I can’t stay.”

  “I understand,” she says. “I make a lot of people uncomfortable.”

  “It’s not you. It’s me.”

  “Isn’t that what they all say?” she asks, her mouth twisting a little like maybe she has a sense of humor when she’s not hiding from the world.

  “I’m not cut out for this. I need to go back to the city.”

  “You’d rather be on your own? Living in motels and stealing?”

  “What do you know about it?” I ask her, my temper flaring. I wonder if she can see the shape of her mother’s ring in my pocket.

  “The caseworker told Mama you were homeless for the last six months. That you ran away from all the foster homes they put you in before that because you didn’t like them. And I know that we’re not perfect, but we are your family. You might give us a chance before you run off again.”

  “I can’t breathe here,” I tell her.

  “I know what that feels like. Come on,” she says, motioning with her hand. “Come outside with me.”

  I eye her warily. Outside is where I wanted to go, but not with her.

  “I swear I won’t touch you. Your secrets are safe.” She puts her hands in the pockets of her pajama pants.

  I wasn’t even thinking about her abilities. I wanted to sneak out without being seen.

  “Fine,” I mutter.

  I follow her down to the first floor, where Auntie is sleeping on the couch in front of the television, which is playing some kind of infomercial. “Don’t mind her,” Ember says. “She sleeps like the dead.” I eye Auntie’s purse, sitting wide open on the small end table by the front door. She’s got a wad of cash in it wrapped up with a rubber band, and I can practically smell it as we pass by.

  We step out on the front porch, letting the door creak shut softly behind us. The night air is cool, the sweet scent of roses heavy on the breeze. Ember sits down on the bottom step of the porch, her slim, bare feet in the grass in front of her. I sit down next to her, dropping my backpack. There’s just enough space between us so we don’t touch. Heat radiates from her skin, along with the faint scent of coconut. She leans back, putting her elbows on the step behind her. “Now look up,” she says with a jerk of her chin toward the sky.

  I lean back, too, and at first it’s hard to believe how many stars are peering down at us. They’re tiny spotlights in the sky shining down on me, and the moon is the largest spotlight of all, glowing brightly with a hazy ring of gold around it. The wind rustles through the roses, which make walls on either side of us where they wind around the stair rails, and without prompting, I drink it all in deeply, breathing in until it fills my lungs and loosens that tightness in my chest.

  “Is that better?” Ember asks after a few minutes.

  I shrug, because I don’t know how to put into words the way the stars and the wind make me feel. So I go back to what I do understand. “I still should probably leave.” There’s a waver in my voice that I don’t recognize.

  “Leave if you want,” Ember says. “I’m going to go get some pie. If you’re here when I get back, you can have some.”

  She treads lightly up the stairs into the house, and she doesn’t look back.

  It would be so easy to leave. Just to get up and walk. I’m good at leaving. Good at slipping away. I learned it from my mom. She slipped away from me, after all.

  But I don’t move. I keep looking at the stars looking down at me. Pulling up my sleeve and tracing the constellation of scars on my arm, I wonder at how we never saw the stars in the city. I never imagined that they would be this bright, and I search for the Big Dipper in the sky, hearing Shane’s voice in my head when I do, remembering how he told me that long-ago travelers, as well as escaping slaves, used the stars at night to guide them, that the Big Dipper would point them to the North Star. Recalling how he’d once traced my scars with his fingertip, his touch feather-light, whispering, They’re not scars. They’re a map. Where will they lead you?

  The fat orange cat appears at my feet and climbs the stairs, twining between my legs. I push him away, but he takes it as an invitation and rubs against my shoulder, his tail flicking in my face. Without warning, it brings back memories of a nearly forgotten evening.

  “Is that what you want for your birthday?” Mom asks as we stand in front of the pet-shop window. There are white, fluffy kittens with gray-tipped ears and paws nestled together in a wicker basket lined with soft flannel.

  “Aren’t they cute?” I sigh, pressing my face to the window. My tenth birthday is right around the corner, and sometimes, if Mom is feeling restless, we take a bus across town and walk down Harper Street and look at fancy things through the shop windows. For her birthday, I stole a butter-soft leather handbag after she admired it for weeks on end, lingering glances and fogged breath against the display-window glass.

  But a purse isn’t like a cat. I know that you need an apartment to have a cat. They won’t let us have one in the motel. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting one.

  “They are beyond cute. I will take all of them, please.” Mom laughs, pretending to hold out her hands for the kittens.

  I smile. “Maybe two, and then they’d never be lonely.” One of the kittens squeezes out of the pile and stretches, its pink tongue peeking out as it yawns. It’s warm, so I push up my sleeves, the skin on my arms still smooth and perfect.

  Mom is feeling silly. “Let us vow that we shall never have a cat until we can get one like this.” She leans forward and checks the barely visible price card tucked next to the basket, her eyes widening. “A registered Persian for five hundred dollars.”

  My face heats. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know.” The kitten notices our presence, and it approaches the window to examine us with its ice-blue eyes.

  “Don’t say sorry,” Mom says. “If you really want one, we’ll get one someday.”

  No, we won’t. Five hundred dollars is weeks of rent. It is the distance between the sun and moon. Even if I stole one, we’d never have a place to keep it. You need a real home for that, not a weekly rented motel room. I remain silent, looking at our reflections instead of the kittens now. I cut my own bangs, and they are uneven, but Mom said I look cute. She even cut bangs for herself, so we look alike and I don’t feel stupid anymore.

  “Hey,” Mom says, nudging my
shoulder. “Just try it. Like making a wish. Say we’ll get one someday. I promise you it will happen.”

  The kitten presses its tiny pink nose against the glass to say hello. I place my finger on the other side, as if it could feel my touch. I close my eyes because you can’t make a wish with your eyes open. Wishes don’t want to be seen, Mom told me once. “We’ll get one someday,” I say. “And we’ll live in a big house, and you’ll never have to work again.”

  “You’re a good kid,” Mom murmurs, putting her arm around my shoulders. “Let’s go inside and ask to hold one. We’ll need to practice.”

  Ember returns with two plates of pie, pulling me out of my memory. She hands me one without a word, careful that our fingers don’t touch as the plate transfers ownership.

  I wonder what will happen if I eat the pie. If I will feel like someone else, someone who doesn’t ache inside. Someone who pets kittens and makes wishes with her eyes closed. Someone who doesn’t run away.

  I take a bite. Lemon. Never-Lonely Lemon.

  It’s a bright burst of citrus at first, then an empty tang follows, the feeling you get when the door closes as someone walks out. But the fluffy meringue softens it somehow, like someone else holding you back, keeping you from screaming at that closed door. The emptiness fades slowly with each bite.

  Ember eats lemon, too. We eat pie together, not speaking, just looking at the stars. The orange cat lies down on my feet like some kind of anchor so that I can’t drift away like I want to.

  After a while, I feel my flight instinct dulling. “I’m going to bed,” I say, glancing up at the sky again. Something about the stars makes me uneasy, and I shift under their gaze. I just want to go back inside and curl up with my sketchbook. I want to look through it until I feel like me again. I don’t know which me, the one who wished for kittens or the one who runs away.