Star-Full Sky

 

IT WAS ABSURD, but in the middle of the night, Odette wanted the photo from Sacramento, the one of her and Mom as saloon girls. She woke suddenly, her wide eyes blind in the dark.

The room around her was full of sleep—Georgie tucked under the covers, in the crook of Odette’s knees, Rex on the pulled-out trundle bed beneath her. Paul, too, was silent in his cage.

But Odette was awake. And somehow, she couldn’t wait until morning to retrieve the picture. As quietly as she could, Odette freed herself from the blankets, tucking them firmly around Georgie. Maneuvering carefully around Rex’s sleeping body, Odette managed to make it to the door without waking anybody. In the hallway, a finger of light glowed from the crack beneath the closed door to her parents’ room; Grandma Sissy’s doorway was dark.

Tiptoeing down the stairs and through the bakery, Odette focused only on being very, very quiet. She barely breathed. And before she opened the bakery’s door to the street, she palmed the little bell that hung from the handle to silence it.

The concrete sidewalk was damp and cold beneath Odette’s bare feet, and the air was seawater-salty with each breath. Above her, the satin sky glowed with starlight. So many stars, thousands of them, uncountably many. They shimmered up there—they vibrated. If each star were a wish, Odette thought, she could use them all.

Just down the street squatted the Coach. Odette hurried toward it, shivering in her nightgown, but as she reached for the silver door handle, she realized that it was probably locked and that she didn’t have the key. Still, she pulled at the handle, just in case. The handle popped forward. The door swung open, and those two little metal steps slid out like an eager tongue to greet her.

It was almost too easy. Odette climbed the two steps and reached behind her to pull the door shut. When it clicked closed, Odette realized that she’d missed that sound, the tinny little noise of the latch catching. It sounded, in an odd and surprising way, like home felt.

“Liz?” came her dad’s voice, from the back of the Coach. “Is that you?”

Odette squeaked, a high-pitched, scared sound. Her throat clenched tight.

“Odette?” Dad asked. He fumbled and swore, and switched on a light. Odette saw that he was in his pajamas, tucked into bed. He was sleeping there, in the Coach. Not upstairs, with Mom. And her throat clenched tighter, with sadness instead of fear, and her eyes stung with tears.

“Honey,” Dad said.

“Do you sleep out here every night?” Odette asked, her voice thick with shame at finding this—her dad, sneaking out to sleep alone, and the look on his face now that she knew his secret.

“Oh, honey,” he said.

“Are you and Mom going to get a divorce?”

There. She’d said it.

“Oh, honey,” Dad said again. “No, of course not.” Then, “I mean, I hope not. We hope not.”

It was too much. Too much by far. Grandma Sissy, and moving so far from home, and the way Rex was, and this terrible thing with Mom and Dad. It wasn’t fair, none of it was fair, none of it was even her fault.

“I just wanted to get my picture,” Odette said. “But I can get it in the morning.” And when she clicked closed the Coach’s door, this time from the outside, it sounded not like home but rather like the end of something.