Cage of Stars, Page 3

  Anyhow, we were pretty happy.

  There were about six or seven girls a little younger or older than me around us, plus the girls from basketball, who weren’t all Mormons; and sometimes I stayed over at their houses on weekends. It was nice, too, that they let me—though I was a lot younger. I didn’t make out with boys, but I didn’t mind seeing them flirt and kiss their boyfriends. I liked it, but basketball was totally my thing, especially since I was younger. I played point guard on the Cedar City Lady Dragons—JV at high school, even when I was only twelve. There were even articles in the Cedar City Gazette about me that my mother cut out and put in a scrapbook, calling me the “tiny dynamo.” Coach said I would make varsity by the time I was fourteen or even thirteen because of my speed, though I couldn’t hit the basket even half the time under pressure, although I was Michael Jordan at the barn alone. I was the best ball handler, though, period, better than girls on varsity. I’m not bragging. That’s just true. I could dribble the ball around my feet so fast in the kitchen that Ruthie would fall over on her butt trying to get it and then go hysterical laughing because she couldn’t. My parents came to every game. I had this idea I could get a basketball scholarship, but then I quit growing when I got to five feet six.

  Even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have been able to play anymore. But I still love to play it and see it played.

  Twice a month, Papa drove me to Cedar City, where I was a “baby holder” at The Cedars Hospital. I held little babies who were being given up for adoption or whose mothers were too sick from birth to hold them very much. You were supposed to be fifteen to do this, but Papa assured them I was experienced.

  We didn’t have a TV.

  My teammates asked, “How do you live?” But I got used to it.

  We had one when I was little, and my parents let me watch (so boring) PBS stuff of adults talking about world affairs and not-so-boring animal shows; but when they got old enough, Ruthie and Becky fought over it, so out it went. But we had about forty million CDs, and not just classical or religious stuff, but rock and country, and my father had run speakers that piped sound into the upstairs. I sewed my own clothes by the time I was ten. And by the time I was twelve, I could design and draw my own, and make them, and I was good at it. We had a desk computer and a laptop, because my father said encyclopedias were outmoded the minute you got them, and we needed the information for homework. My mother did preliminary designs on the desk model for her work, and Papa’s students e-mailed him papers and questions. The little girls had games, like Zoo Builder, and a program to teach them to type. Even Becky could practically touch-type by the time she . . . died. The laptop was practically mine, and I hogged it.

  At night, unless it was a Monday and a Family Home Evening, when we had a lesson that was supposed to be good for your life or just played a board game, I read and IM’ed my friends. I liked to instant message my friends, even though I could see the lights in their houses from the bedroom I shared with Ruthie and Becky. My mother once told me about a town that was right up near the North Pole. And it had only about twenty telephones, but one of them had an unlisted number! That was how we were, my best friend, Clare Emory, and me. We could have just opened the window and yelled. But that wouldn’t have been private. Clare and I had computers, but our next-best friend, Emma, didn’t. So Clare would call Emma and tell her what I wrote. We talked about the same things everybody talks about, clothes and boys, school projects and boys. Clare and Emma both had a crush on Miko Sissinelli, too, the way I did when I was old enough to figure out what that meant; but I was the only one who admitted it. Clare would write about her plans to be a singer. She is one, now, in New York.

  Clare never gave up her passion. I did. I gave up basketball. I didn’t like being stared at for something other than a good play or forcing a turnover. I guess I tried to hold on but lost my passion for playing for good after . . . well, after the verdict.

  I hit the math and science then. That was what I liked next best.

  My father taught American literature at the high school, even though I didn’t go there. He taught me, too, in a half hour or an hour a night. My mother did the rest in two hours, and that was it. “It’s amazing how much you can get done in three hours a day without all the marching up and down and the crowd control and pep rallies and nonsense,” my mother told Mrs. Breedwell.

  “Try teaching eight at a time at home,” she said. “All different ages.”

  “I wouldn’t think of it, Sister Anna,” my mother said. “I’d be nutty as a fruitcake.” But she looked away, as if she saw something far off that caught her attention. My mother has pieces she sculpted in the Tate and a glass she blew in the Museum of Modern Art. She used to sell tons of pots and vases to tourists and collectors through galleries all over the West. Papa said she was successful even if she made a hundred dollars a year because she did it doing work she loved. She made a lot more than that.

  And she did love it.

  She doesn’t do it anymore.

  She never did it again.

  This made her pieces much more valuable, but only in the money sense. She’d finished dozens of glasses and ceramics that she’d never shown. When people buy them now, she gets big checks. But she doesn’t care.

  She wasn’t gifted in the area where she wanted to be. Not everyone is, I guess.

  If I think about her talking to Mrs. Breedwell that day long ago, I have to admit my mama wasn’t as happy as some of the others, in a way. The O’Fallons had six children; the Tierneys, seven; the McCartys, six. Clare had four brothers. And, of course, there were the Breedwells. Nobody had less than four. My mother just wasn’t blessed in the baby area. She got pregnant, but it never lasted. Or hardly ever. There were only us three girls in our family, although at the time of the tragedy, my mama was completely over the moon because she was pregnant-past-the-point-of-losing-him with our brother Rafe. (We didn’t know, at the time, that he was a boy. And I say “we” because he was Ruthie and Becky’s brother, too, and so was Thor, although my sisters never got to see the little boys.)

  They would have loved them.

  I loved them, although I was scared to love Rafe too much at first, and my parents were, too.

  Raphael was born exactly two weeks after the day my mother came home and found me, in the yard, holding Ruthie and Becky, Mrs. Emory on the house phone with the police.

  I have to tell it now, don’t I?

  Chapter Three

  I remember all of that day.

  You’d think you wouldn’t. You’d think you can’t imagine what you feel like at a moment like that. You would think it would all be too big. You’d faint. Or your mind would just blink out even if you were conscious. But what’s the worst is that it doesn’t. Or it didn’t for me. I stayed right there, unable to hide for even a moment in some kind of otherworld state like people describe—as if you’d left your body behind. I can remember precisely how there was a spill of blood from Ruthie’s mouth that trickled down the front of my best Saturday shirt, my UNLV jersey, and then no more blood. I didn’t know then that people stopped bleeding when they died. I could see the cut in her neck like a little mouth with puckered white lips, where Scott Early had slashed her. I remember the sound of the radio from inside, of Emmylou Harris singing “If I Needed You.” I remember the smell of the tortilla stew Mama had made and I was heating up for later.

  I remember Scott Early, his short blond hair and his T-shirt and boxers covered with sweat and blood spatters and dirt.

  No tingle of warning from my senses told me to be afraid of Scott Early, once I’d opened the door of the shed. He was like an animal that had been hit by a car, alive but gone, completely out of it. When I ran for the telephone to call 911, I didn’t even think to look behind me to see if he was chasing me with the scythe. Later they told me he’d pitched it out behind the barn, as far as he could, spinning around first as if he were throwing a discus.

  The operator answered on the first ring.

&nbs
p; “A man hurt my sisters,” I said. I was sweating and huffing like Ruby did when she climbed the hill with all of us on her back; but I was trying to stay calm and make sure she understood my words. For some reason, I reached over and turned on the air conditioner. It was still on days later, when it was about fifty outside.

  “Are you inside?” the operator asked. “Are the doors locked?”

  “No, uh, yes, I’m inside, and they’re outside, and I think they’re hurt really, really bad; they’re cut! You have to send a helicopter or they’ll die!”

  “Tell me your address,” the operator said. “And lock the doors now!”

  “There’s no reason, he already did it!” I couldn’t explain why I knew that whatever Scott Early had done to Ruthie and Becky was finished, that nothing else was going to happen. “I don’t, we don’t have an address. We do. We have a fire number, I can’t think of it! We get our mail at the post office box. Send a helicopter or something! Medevac! It’s twenty miles southwest of Cedar City, on Pike Road. We’re the fourth house! You have to come now!”

  “Let me speak to your father,” said the operator.

  “He’s not home! Oh, please. Please. Help me!” I was crying hard then, getting my words mixed up. I could see outside that Scott Early was standing up and sitting down, screaming and holding his head.

  “Let me speak to your mother,” the operator told me.

  I threw the phone against the wall and ran past Scott Early across the yard to Mrs. Emory’s door. Clare was home, but she wouldn’t come out of the house when she heard what I said. Mrs. Emory did, though. She kept right up with me, and I was going as fast as I could, back to our yard, though she was puffing once she got there. Ignoring Scott Early, she knelt next to Ruthie and put her hand on Ruthie’s neck, on the side opposite the cut. And then she looked up at me. I saw the whole thing in her face, plain as plaid.

  “No!” I screamed at Mrs. Emory. “Go home!” I didn’t mean it.

  “Ronnie, honey,” she began, reaching out for me.

  But I kept on screaming, “Don’t touch them!” Clare was standing at the edge of our yard by then, with her hands over her face. I sat down next to Ruthie and pulled her onto my lap. She was all chubby and warm. “Ruth Elizabeth!” I yelled at her. “Ruthie, listen! It’s Sissy! It’s Ronnie!”

  Mrs. Emory was trying to call Dr. Sissinelli but said she was getting the answering machine. “Damn,” she said. It takes a lot for a mother like her to swear.

  When I was holding Ruthie, I thought it was unfair to Becky, so, even though she was tall for her age, I dragged her up onto my lap, too. My arms were streaked in their blood, my legs in their urine. I could smell all of it. Scott Early was spinning around, a living abstract painting done in blood, sprays and spurts on his chest and shoulders and hair. Like modern pictures of Christ.

  “Who are they?” he moaned over and over.

  And then my mama pulled up in her car.

  Mrs. Emory rushed to stop her before she got out, but pregnant as she was, Mama was out and lumbering across the drive and the yard before Mrs. Emory could hold her back. She threw herself on the ground beside us. “Pray, Ronnie,” she said. “Pray as hard as you can.”

  I asked her, “Mama, for what?”

  She stopped. She put her hands on top of her head, pressing down her hair.

  Then she said, “I don’t know. That they’ll live, or if they don’t . . .” She sat back on her heels—Mama was always limber and strong—and began to rock and rock, holding her belly.

  By the time the paramedics finally got there—and this, too, I can’t stop remembering—Becky and Ruthie were already starting to get cool, especially the tips of their little noses and the tips of their fingers. One paramedic put an IV needle in Ruthie’s hand; but the other one, who had tears in her eyes, waved him away from Becky, shaking her head. They kept calling Cedar City on their radios. All the people in our little cluster of houses had come out by then and were standing on their porches. My mother dropped down to sit on the ground, and she reached over and closed Ruthie’s blue eyes. Then she just petted their hair, humming under her breath “All the Pretty Little Horses.” She sang them to sleep with that song when they were babies.

  The sheriff came, got out with his gun drawn, put it away, put a blanket around Scott Early, handcuffed him, and led him into the squad car. They really do push the person’s head down gently.

  When Scott Early was in the car, the sheriff came over to us.

  He asked me what happened, and I told him. I told another person, a police officer who drove up in a plain car and wasn’t wearing a uniform, the same thing. My mother didn’t say anything. The sheriff asked my mother, where was she in the house when it happened? She didn’t answer, so I said, “My mother was in Cedar City. My father is hunting, because it’s Saturday and he wanted to get pheasants for Thanksgiving on a day he doesn’t have to be at work. I was baby-sitting.” The sheriff got red in the face. He began to write on his clipboard. He asked the names of my sisters. He asked if we knew the man who was in the police car.

  “I never saw him before,” I said. “My sisters, they have to get my sisters to the hospital. Do you have to ask me this now?”

  “Do you have reason to believe that he was the one who . . . hurt Rebecca and Ruth?” My mouth opened, but no sound came out. Wasn’t it obvious to him? Then, I was shocked to remember that I was covered with blood. It could have looked to anyone as if I was the one who did it.

  “I was in the shed. We were playing a game. When I came out, they were lying on the ground and that man was sitting on the picnic table,” I said.

  “Blood is all over your—” the sheriff began.

  “That’s because, after I ran to get help, I sat down and held them.”

  “You touched . . . ? I’m sorry,” said the sheriff. He meant, how could I have touched someone who was all covered in blood?

  I looked up at him, and I saw that the fire service paramedic van was going nowhere. It hit me then that the paramedics weren’t trying to make any huge rush to a hospital. Ruthie and Becky were dead. My stomach and my heart could feel that, but not my mind.

  “I love my sisters! I love my sisters!” I screamed at the sheriff. The county ambulance had arrived, and they began trying, very gently, to open my hands from around Becky and Ruthie and lift them onto plastic stretchers. I wouldn’t let go of them. Everyone except my mother was embarrassed.

  “Give us a moment,” she said quietly.

  I told the sheriff, “I held them because I thought there might be a breath of life in them! I thought maybe they could hear me saying not to be afraid. How would you like it if your sister let you die alone? How would you like it?”

  The sheriff helped my mother to her feet and looked down at his own. “Not very much, miss,” he finally said.

  Mrs. Emory took me inside and washed my face and arms and found a clean shirt of my father’s for me to wear and sat my mother in a rocker. “I want to go with them,” my mother said, trying to get up.

  “In good time, Sister Cressie,” said Mrs. Emory. She started a pot of water and made herbal tea and stirred the stew. “Let’s think of the baby inside you, just for a little bit, just for right now.”

  The paramedic van was gone, and the ambulance was about to pull away when my father rattled up in his truck. He jumped out with a slew of pheasants beaded with blood, their minky feathers dulled by death, like Ruthie’s blue eyes. And he was so excited. He assumed the ambulance was there because the baby was coming early, but just a few weeks early, and that everything would be all right. “Where are my girls?” he yelled. “Why aren’t you out here with Mama?”