Finally, on Saturday morning, when there was still no Verna, she went to the phone before anyone else was awake. She put her index finger in the 1 and dragged it heavily around until it stopped. Then she let go, and when the 1 was back in place, started on the 8, laboriously pulling her finger around all ten numbers, calling the only phone number besides her own that she had ever memorized, the one she’d carried around, like the taxi money in her pocket, for emergency use only.
“I need to speak to Mr. Wayne Morgan,” she said to the operator who answered. “This is his daughter. It’s an emergency.”
TEN
The Swan
The operator wouldn’t call Wayne to the phone. She took Angel’s number and said she would give him the message to call. But the phone didn’t ring. Come to think of it, she hadn’t heard the phone ring the whole time she and Bernie had been at Grandma’s. Maybe it didn’t work. Maybe Wayne was trying and trying to call back, but the phone was broken and he couldn’t get through.
When a whole day and evening had passed and still no call, Angel finally blurted out her worry to Grandma. She waited the next morning until Bernie had gone into the bathroom. She shut the door firmly behind him, held tightly on to the knob behind her back, and said quietly, “Grandma, I think your phone’s broke.”
“Nothing wrong with that phone. Just old. Not one of your fancy-dancy kinds, but it works fine. What’s the matter? You trying to make phone calls without asking?” She had been. Long distance, too. “I shoulda asked. But I had to call Daddy.”
“Wayne? You tried to call Wayne at the jail?”
“Yes, I did. I should have asked you, but I was so worried about Mama not coming back—”
“So that’s why he called last night.”
“He called?” Her voice went up to a squeak. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You was asleep. Besides, the dang fool tried to call collect. I ain’t accepting charges for no long-distance phone call. The woman said would I accept a collect call from Wayne Morgan, and I said, ‘Not on your stuffed cabbage. If that boy wants to call he can do it on his own nickel, not his poor old grandma’s.’”
“Grandma! I need to talk to Daddy!”
“What about?”
“Mama. I got to talk to him about Mama. She’s gone, and I don’t know where she’s at or when she’s coming back. I need to ask him what me and Bernie are supposed to do.”
“Do?” the old woman cocked her head. “What do you mean, do?”
“We can’t stay here, Grandma. It isn’t fair to you, and—and—Well, what if Welfare finds us and puts us in foster care? What will happen to us then?” She fought back the tears that were threatening to choke her.
“You silly girl. Ain’t no Welfare woman gonna get you.”
“But Grandma, if they came here...” How was she supposed to explain that this was no fit home for children? “Grandma, children need—Well, growing children need the five major food groups, for one thing.”
“The five major what?”
“Let me outta here!” Bernie was kicking the bathroom door. She moved away, and he fell into the kitchen. “You trying to keep me in jail?” he asked her accusingly.
“No,” she said, and then the tears came. “I’m trying to keep you outta jail, Bernie Morgan. I don’t want you to grow up to be a criminal and leave your wife and b-b-b-break your children’s hearts.”
Bernie looked at her in astonishment. “You not supposed to cry, Angel.”
“Well, I am crying, so there.”
“Oh, hush, hush, the both of you,” said Grandma. “Anybody got a right to cry around here, it’s me. And you don’t see me blubbering, now do you?”
“Grandmas don’t cry,” said Bernie. “Just little kids. So stop crying this minute, Angel. You’re too big to cry.”
She wanted to stop, but she couldn’t. Finally, she turned and ran upstairs and threw herself down on the bed and just boo-hooed big shuddering, slobbery sobs into the thin pillow until it was soaked. In one part of her mind she was watching herself and knew she was getting a strange pleasure out of this uncontrolled wailing—as though a huge plug had been pulled and an ocean of the fears and worries and all the unspent tears of her life were pouring out of her in one torrential flood.
Too soon Bernie was standing over her, making worried little noises.
“Angel. Angel. An-gel! Stop it, you hear?”
But she didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. Didn’t even want to stop. It felt too good to let loose, not to be in charge anymore—not of anything or anyone, including herself. She just might spend the rest of her days like this—crying her miserable life away—with nobody expecting her to be responsible for anything ever again.
“Bernie?” Dimly she could hear Grandma’s voice from the bottom of the stairs. “You leave her alone, all right? Come on down and I’ll fix us some breakfast.”
She could hear Bernie shuffling his feet, trying to decide whether or not to obey. But she wasn’t going to tell him what to do. She was not in charge anymore.
“I’m going down now, Angel, you hear? And as soon as you stop acting like a baby, you come down, too, okay? You hear me?”
She didn’t even bother to nod. He hesitated a minute and then started out of the room. “Crying ain’t going to get you nothing, you know.”
She would have laughed except crying felt too good to interrupt. Then she heard him walk over to his own bed and felt him lift her arm and shove Grizzle under it. She grabbed the bear tightly, buried her face in his soft blue stomach, and just lay curled up there like a baby, hollering her insides out. “When you can control yourself, you can come down and have some breakfast with Grandma and me, okay?” he said before clomping down the stairs.
At last it was over. Her body was as limp as laundry after the spin cycle. From downstairs she could hear the drone of Grandma’s voice and the high staccato of Bernie’s. She hugged Grizzle close, stuck her thumb in her mouth, and fell sound asleep.
***
She woke up, her eyes puffy, her mouth dry and cottony. She didn’t know what time it was or even where she was. She sat up slowly. Grizzle was on the floor next to the bed. She picked him up and automatically dusted him off. She was going to have to take a dust mop to this floor, that was for sure. No wonder Bernie’s allergies were acting up.
She stood up, still not really sure what had happened to her. Something important, she knew that much. She felt heavy from the unnatural daytime sleep. She couldn’t remember ever going to bed in the daytime. And hungry. Her stomach felt plastered against her backbone. Somehow the thought of going downstairs filled her with dread. Why? Then she remembered. She’d made a fool of herself. She’d bawled and screeched and howled like a maniac—and it had felt wonderful. She ought to be ashamed. The real Angel Morgan would be mortified. But she wasn’t. Instead, she was, as Verna would say, “going to put it all behind me and get on with the rest of my life,” whatever that might mean.
The two of them looked up from the table when she appeared at the door, both like little puppies waiting to see if they were going to be kicked or petted.
“Are you eating those dang Sugar Pops again, Bernie?
I swear, you’re going to keel right over from sugar overdose.”
“So?” he said, his chin belligerent, his eyes full of relief.
“So we gotta get some meat and vegetables into you, don’t we, Grandma?”
“I get my Social Security check this week,” the old woman said meekly. “Can you wait till then for the shopping?”
“I guess I’ll have to,” Angel said primly. They wanted her to be in charge, both of them. That was who she was doomed to be, the responsible one. Deep down that was who she wanted to be, wasn’t it? Not that baby up there on the bed, crying and sucking her thumb.
She sighed silently. The rest of her life was going to be just like all the days since that thrilling one when the newborn Bernie had been put into her arms. “Take care of your baby brother now,
Angel,” Verna had said. Angel hadn’t known then what that meant. Now she did. The thrill was long gone, but the duty had become like the sun in the solar system, the center around which all the other parts of her life revolved. Without it, she would likely fly to pieces.
She looked at the two faces turned toward her, waiting for her to tell them that everything was going to be all right. Now she had two troubled, troublesome children to look out for. She straightened up. “I guess I’ll get me some breakfast now,” she said.
“Hmmph,” said Grandma. “Better call it lunch.”
Sometime while she had slept, the rain that had been coming down all week stopped. The sky was an almost magazine-picture blue. The first thing she was going to do was hang the wet laundry outside. Grandma had an old washing machine in her bathroom but no dryer, and yesterday she’d had to hang her and Bernie’s wet clothes all over the house. She got the big woven basket from the bathroom and gathered underwear and T-shirts from around the edge of the bathtub and off the backs of kitchen chairs.
“C’mon, Bernie,” she said, “we’re going outside.”
“I don’t want to go outside,” Bernie said. “There’s nothing to do outside.”
“I got to hang up the laundry. Besides, growing children need fresh air.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be a growing children,” he said.
“Too bad. We’re going out anyway.” She propped the basket under one arm, grabbed his hand, and dragged him out the door.
“Want to help me hang these clothes up?”
“No.”
She took clothespins out of the bag at the end of the clothesline and began to pin up the damp washing.
“That car is gone again,” Bernie said.
She glanced over at the trailer. Could it be that the mysterious star man lived over there? That it was his car that appeared and disappeared as though he went to work every day like a regular person? She put the last pin on a pair of Bernie’s underpants. Then, without a word, she started across the yard toward the broken-down trailer. Looking at it from Grandma’s house, it didn’t seem as if anyone could live in such a place, but if the star man was real and not just a dream, there was a chance that he might live in the trailer, wasn’t there?
She felt daring crossing the weedy field, climbing over the broken-down fence, sneaking to the trailer. It was propped up on cinder blocks and looked unsteady, as if a slight breeze might just blow it off. There were rickety wooden steps leading to the door.
“Where you going, Angel?” Bernie was running to catch up with her.
“Shh. I just want to look—see if anybody lives in here.”
“You better not! It might be the man with the gun. He’ll shoot you dead if he catches you peeping in his house.”
She ignored him, although her stomach gave a little flip at the thought of someone catching her in the act. Everyone knew it was against the law to be a Peeping Tom.
The little window set in the door was dirty. She wiped it hurriedly with her sleeve and put her face against the glass. The inside of the trailer was dark, and in the shadows she could see a dark couch, a tiny oil stove, a sink, and books. Lots of books. No one was in sight, but it must be the star man’s house. Who else would have lots of books? Yes, there by the far wall was the long telescope, on its three legs. Barely breathing, she backed down the stairs. Bernie was standing several feet away, ready to run.
“You can relax, Bernie. Nobody’s home.”
“I wasn’t scared,” he said.
“I know you weren’t. I was just saying that.” And adding more to herself than to Bernie, “It wasn’t a dream.”
“What’s not a dream?”
“Nothing.” She didn’t want to tell Bernie about the star man. She didn’t want to talk about him, much less ask Grandma about him. He was her wonderful secret. Just hers.
***
That night she lay awake, staring out of the tiny window in the eaves. When it was pitch dark and the house silent except for Bernie’s wheezy breaths, she slipped out of bed, pulled on her jeans, and, with her sneakers in her hand, snuck down the stairs and out of the house. She sat down on the back stoop, pulled on her sneakers, and made her way toward a place where she now knew the fence rail was in ruins.
She could see the star man’s outline against the night sky. He was hunched over the telescope in such a way that she could not tell where the man ended and the instrument began. What marvel was he pointing to up there in the sky? The black velvet sky alive with diamonds. Diamonds that were the light from whole systems of worlds millions of miles away, racing through the black emptiness of space for unimaginable years to come to her very own eyes this late-summer night.
Did the stars know about her? Or was she truly nothing—not even a speck of dust—to whatever or whoever was there in those blazing, whirling worlds? I’m here! she called out silently. It’s me, Angel Morgan.
At first, he seemed not to know she was there. She didn’t dare speak out. He was still too close to a man from a dream, despite his very real trailer. You didn’t interrupt people in dreams; you waited to see what they had to say. Without taking his eye from the eyepiece, he spoke at last. “Did you know that always somewhere out there, there is a new wonder to be seen?”
“No.”
He stood up. He had a lit cigarette in his right hand, which he put in his mouth. “There was a time,” he said after taking a deep drag and slowly blowing out the smoke, “there was a time I wanted to be the first person in the world to discover something in the sky. People do that, you know. People not so different from me. Just a few years back a man in Essex Junction discovered a nova. He looked for fourteen years. Every clear night for fourteen years.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth to cough, a rusty-sounding cough. She wanted to tell him not to smoke, that it wasn’t good for him, but she didn’t quite dare.
“How old are you, Angel?”
“I’ll be twelve next April.”
“So fourteen years must seem a long time to you.”
I guess.
“It takes the light from Andromeda two million years to get to earth.”
“You told me,” she said.
“So that doesn’t make fourteen years seem so long, does it?”
“No.”
He took another long drag. “1 stopped looking after only eight years. Do you know why?”
“No,” she said again.
“Because one night I realized I was looking and looking and forgetting to see.” He propped his cigarette on the little stand between the telescope legs and put his eye on the eyepiece again. “I guess that sounds crazy to you.”
“No.” In her daytime world it might sound crazy, but not in this enchanted nighttime universe.
“Here,” he said, drawing her to the telescope. “Right here, meet Albireo; that’s the beak of the swan. They couldn’t see it in the old days, but it’s really two stars.”
The twin stars blinked gold and blue like jewels in a heavenly crown. She wanted to ask him about the swan, since she didn’t see anything like a swan in the sky—just jewels. She didn’t have to ask, as it turned out.
“Long ago,” he began, “people just like you and me looked up at the sky and they began to tell each other stories about what they saw. The stories helped them map the sky.” He put one hand upon her shoulder and laid the other lightly against her ear, pointing her gaze away from the eyepiece to the sky itself. “They called that group of six stars Cygnus, which means ‘the swan.’”
She nodded, though the cross in the sky above her looked nothing like a bird.
“Albireo is the beak. Deneb, that bright star up there, is the tail. The three stars almost in a line making the breast and wings of the swan are Sadr, Gienah, and Azelfafage.”
She giggled, then quickly covered her mouth. She didn’t want him to think she was laughing at him.
He went on seriously. “Sadr means ‘the breast.’ It’s the one in the middle. Gienah and Azelfafage mark th
e wings. And no, I am not sneezing. I’m speaking Arabic. Didn’t expect an old broken-down Vermont country boy to speak Arabic, did you?” She knew then that he was smiling, though it was too dark to see his face clearly.
“I was wondering something,” she said. His joking had made her bold enough to ask.
“Yeah?”
“Do you think that sometimes they told stories about the stars so they wouldn’t be scared? I mean, the universe is so huge, and you look up at the sky and feel so like, well, so like nothing?”
He picked up his cigarette and took another puff. “Could be,” he said, and began to cough again.
“Maybe it’s not my business.” Angel couldn’t help herself; she had to say it. “But it’s not good for you to smoke. It really isn’t.”
“No, and it’s not good for you to stay up so late listening to an old man carrying on. I’ll put out the cigarette, and you get yourself to bed, okay? There’ll be other clear nights.”
She hated to go, but she went, carrying the heavenly swan inside her. She’d look it up and surprise him by learning the names of the stars. She could remember Albireo. How could she ever forget those twin stars? And Deneb—but the others she’d have to practice. They did sound like sneezes.
Maybe there was a library in the village. She’d ask Grandma, tell her that besides the five basic food groups growing kids needed to read lots of books. If there was a library, she and Bernie could walk there and get books to read. They might have a book about the stars that would be easier to understand than her musty encyclopedia. Bernie wasn’t crazy about books. They reminded him too much of school, and he hated school. He’d flunked first grade for spite. He wasn’t stupid, just stubborn. Angel would make him go with her to the library, though. Welfare wouldn’t separate a little kid from a big sister who made sure he ate right and read him lots of books.
At the kitchen door she stopped to take one more look at the sky. She couldn’t find the swan. It was as though it had flown away and lost itself among the stars.