Where the Stars Still Shine Read online

  “Do you know why I pulled you over tonight?” the deputy asks. Through the dirt-streaked windshield, I watch another officer emerge from the second car. He’s older and a little heavier than the first deputy.

  Mom shakes her head. “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “Your left taillight is out,” he says. “And I was going to suggest you get yourself to the nearest auto supply store and get that fixed—”

  “Oh, I will,” she interrupts. “We’ll be waiting in the parking lot the minute they open.”

  “—but I ran your license and discovered the plate was reported stolen, so I’m going to have to ask you to step out of the car.”

  The old hinge squeaks as he opens the door, but Mom doesn’t move. She just sits there. Stunned. As if it’s only now that she realized she is not invincible. That time has caught up with her.

  “Ma’am,” the officer repeats. “Out of the car, please.”

  When I was seven and we lived in a tiny town called Kearneysville, I got sick with a really high fever. For three days I wove in and out of consciousness, dizzy and unsure if I was awake or dreaming. That’s how this feels.

  “There must be some kind of mistake,” Mom insists, as the first officer fastens a pair of handcuffs around her wrists and tells her about her right to remain silent. “The plate was on the car when I bought it.”

  This is probably not true, since her life is a carefully crafted house of cards, constructed of lies and teetering on the brink of collapse at every moment. When they discover the truth, a stolen license plate will be nothing. Because twelve years ago, after she and my father divorced, my mother abducted me. I’m numb as the deputy leads her to his car. Wasn’t it only an hour ago that I wished we’d stop running? This is not what I meant.

  “Don’t tell them anything,” Mom says. Her features are distorted through a watery film of tears that turn her into someone I don’t recognize. “Keep your mouth shut.”

  The door beside me opens. My legs shake as I get out of the Toyota, and I grab hold of the door frame to keep from falling down. My world has tilted like the floor of a carnival fun house.

  “Is she your mother?” the second deputy asks.

  Mom has never had a contingency plan for getting caught, so I don’t know what to say that won’t throw her under the bus. My eyes fixed on the hole in my left sneaker, I nod. “Yes, sir.”

  He transfers me to his patrol car. Assures me that I’m not under arrest. Asks my name. My throat is a desert, and my lips are chapped when I lick them. What do I say that won’t betray my mom? How do I keep the truth from coming out?

  “Callie.” I’ve had so many identities over the years, plucked from baby-name books, television shows, and fairy tales. Once Mom dared me to name myself after the next intersection, and I spent a month as Loma Linda Charles. A laugh bubbles out of my throat as I think of that, but it’s not funny, really. I’m scared. “Callie Quinn.”

  He closes the door and confers with the first deputy for a few minutes. Then the arresting officer gets into his car and pulls out onto the highway. The blue lights go off, and the car with my mother inside is swallowed up by the darkness.

  The second officer returns. On the other side of the cage, he types something into his computer. What it tells him is a mystery he doesn’t share; he only offers me a grim smile in the rearview mirror before we drive off into the night, leaving the Corona at the side of the road with my life zipped up in a brown tweed suitcase.

  Leaving my guitar behind.

  All I have left is an evil eye bead that doesn’t work—and me.

  Chapter 2

  The man standing in the sheriff’s office lobby the next day—the one with his hands jammed deep in the pockets of his jeans—is a stranger, but I recognize him the same way I recognize my own face. The brown of his eyes. The slope of his nose. Cheekbones. Jawline. And the way he worries his lower lip is so familiar that I’m not surprised to discover myself doing the same thing. I run my fingers over my chapped lips and wonder if he’s as nervous as I am. My father.

  He doesn’t match up with the picture in my head. Mom usually likes them stocky and pugilistic, with bashed-in noses and thick forearms. Aging men who drink whiskey and drive muscle cars older than her. But in this man I can still see the boy-next-door he used to be.

  “All set, hon?” The dispatcher is a woman named Ancilla, whose puffy grandma hair and bifocals are a strange contrast to her dark-green law-enforcement uniform. But it was Ancilla who sent the deputy to fetch my belongings from the Toyota. She let me sleep in her guest bedroom while she washed my dirty jeans. Fixed me waffles with real butter and maple syrup for breakfast. Took me shopping at Target, where she bought me a red peasant-style top with tiny turquoise flowers embroidered along the neckline. I can’t remember the last time I wore something that didn’t first belong to someone else. Can’t remember ever wearing something so pretty.

  Her hand is a comfort on my back as she urges me forward. I want to dig in my heels the way the characters do in cartoons, leaving grooves along the hallway tile. Instead, I take the step.

  “Will, um—is my mom okay?”

  “She’s holding up real fine,” she assures me. “And Judge Daniels is a fair man. He’ll make sure she gets the help she needs.”

  The help she needs? What does that mean?

  Before I can ask, we’re through the swinging door and into the lobby, and my father’s arms are wrapped around me.

  “Korítsi mou.” His words are low and deep and choked, and I’m overcome with a déjà vu sensation. I don’t understand those words, but I’m sure I have heard them before. “You can’t possibly know how much I’ve missed you.”

  His cheek rests on top of my head and my face is pressed into the warm, clean smell of his T-shirt, but I’m stiff inside the circle of his embrace because everything about this screams wrong wrong wrong. All these years I’ve believed my father didn’t love me, that the only reason he wanted me was so that Mom couldn’t have me. I need that to be true because if it’s not, it means she didn’t just lie to everyone else. She lied to me, too.

  “I’m sorry.” He pulls away. “I didn’t mean to overwhelm you. I mean, you don’t even—” He reaches out as if he’s going to stroke my cheek, and when I flinch the sadness in his eyes fills the whole room. His hands slide into his pockets. “You don’t even know me.” He looks up at the ceiling and exhales, and when he looks at me again, his eyes are shiny. “But I’m really, really happy to see you.”

  I have no idea what to say, so I pull my lower lip between my teeth and let the saliva burn.

  “May I—?” He reaches for my suitcase and guitar, but I tighten my grip on both and shake my head.

  “You take care now, honey.” Ancilla comes to my rescue one more time, handing me a business card with her name printed on it. “If you need anything at all, you give me a holler, okay?” I nod and she pats my back. “Have a safe trip home.”

  Home.

  The word makes my eyes sting, but I don’t want to wipe tears on my new red shirt and I don’t have a tissue. I’m blinking to keep them at bay when my father pulls a crumpled Kleenex from his jeans pocket.

  “It’s clean,” he says, and I let him take my guitar for a moment so I can blot my eyes. “Well, mostly. I, um—I’ve been kind of a mess ever since I got the call. I came as fast as I could.”

  A hurricane of anger swirls inside me, and I have to fight to keep from hurling my suitcase across the room and screaming until my throat is raw. How could she do this? How could she take me away from someone who talks to me with a voice thick with tears and offers me a ratty tissue when I’m crying? How could she? How could she?

  A hate so intense I think it could burn me alive flares in my chest, followed by a wave of sorrow that snuffs the hate. Mom has been my entire world for twelve years. I love her.

  “So I don’t know what, if anything, your mom has told you about me,” he says, opening the trunk of a silver rental car parked outsi
de the sheriff’s office. I put in my guitar and suitcase. “My name is Greg. You can call me that if it makes you more comfortable.” I’m relieved I don’t have to call him Dad. “I, um—I’m remarried, and my wife, Phoebe, and I have two little boys, Tucker and Joe.”

  He flips open his wallet to show me a family portrait. Phoebe is girl-next-door pretty with hair the color of a wheat field. The older of the boys shares her coloring, while the other is a miniature version of Greg. He resembles me, too, which is just … weird. Their family is perfect and happy, and I wonder if there is room in the picture for a seventeen-year-old girl. Do I want to be in that picture? Do I have a choice?

  “The boys aren’t really old enough to understand what’s going on,” Greg says. “But they’re excited to have a big sister.”

  Even though they’re right there, captured in the moment with perpetual smiles and matching shirts, I can’t wrap my mind around the concept. I have brothers. Greg closes the trunk and smiles at me. He looks so much younger than my mom, even though they must be close in age. His face is unlined and he doesn’t have a single strand of gray hair. “Ready?”

  I’m not, but I do what I always do when it’s time to leave: I get in the car and fasten my seat belt.

  He starts the engine, and the little digital letter in the corner of the rearview mirror says we’re heading east. Somehow, though, I don’t think Greg has our future mapped out in his head the way Mom did. Mainly because as he drives, he’s working his lower lip, too.

  We don’t talk on the drive to the airport in Chicago, except for when he says to tell him if the heat gets too warm or if I’d prefer a different radio station. Mom always talked—talks—she always talks too much, as if the silence makes her lonely. I don’t mind the soft musical babble of the radio or listening to the hum of the tires on pavement, and I’m glad Greg isn’t flooding me with words I’m not ready to hear. If no one says it out loud, there’s still a chance that none of this is real.

  “Take the window.” Greg gestures toward the far seat in row eight. “You can watch as we take off and land.”

  He doesn’t know if I’ve ever been on a plane before, so his suggestion makes me feel as if he thinks I was raised by wolves. My cheeks go hot with anger, but his expression seems earnest, and I realize maybe he’s being kind. The truth is, I’ve never been on a plane, and I do want to watch as we take off and land.

  Sitting beside the window reminds me of Mom. We didn’t always have a car. Sometimes we rode the bus, buying as much distance as our money would allow. She always gave me the window seat, putting herself between me and the crazies—like the old lady whose lipstick bled into the cracks around her mouth. She was convinced I was her dead daughter come back to life. When Mom refused to give me to her, the woman screamed until the driver stopped and made her get off the bus. The plane to Tampa is different from the bus. It doesn’t smell bad and nearly everyone is smiling. Probably pleased to be escaping the breath of winter that’s been at the back of our necks for the past couple of weeks.

  “Takeoff is always my favorite part,” Greg says, craning his neck to look out the window as Chicago shrinks smaller and smaller. “I guess because the destination—unless you’ve been there before—is ripe with possibility.”

  The city disappears beneath a bank of clouds, and I close my eyes to keep from crying again. With every mile I’m farther away from my mom than I have ever been and I am … lost. Life with her is wonderful and terrible, but at least I know how to be her daughter. I have no idea how to live in Greg’s world.

  “I have something for you.” He holds out a red leather photo album. I take it and open the front cover. Pasted on the front page is a pink birth announcement card for Callista Catherine Tzorvas.

  Running my fingertips over the raised black letters, I speak to him for the first time. “My name is Callista?”

  Greg’s chuckle dies in his throat when he realizes I’m not joking. “You didn’t know?”

  I shake my head, and his eyebrows pull together. I watch as a battle wages on his face, wondering if he’s thinking the same bad things about Mom as I am. When she stole me, she left behind all the parts she didn’t want anymore. Including my real name.

  “It’s Greek,” he says finally. “It means ‘the most beautiful one.’ And Tzorvas”—the tz makes a ch sound when he says it—“means you’re part of a big crazy Greek family whose noses will be in your business all the time, but who will drop everything if you need them.”

  I don’t want to be angry with my mother all over again, so I push the feeling away and turn the page. There is a snapshot of her holding a newborn me, with Greg beside her. They’re teenagers—about as old as I am now—and she’s the beautiful grunge girl I remember. Mom is looking down at me and he is looking at her. He loved her and she wrecked him.

  I exhale as I close the album.

  “Sorry,” he says. “It’s a lot to process, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I made it for, um—it’s yours, so you can look at it whenever. No rush.”

  I rest my head against the little oval window, and for a while I just sit, watching the clouds and the miles pass. Through a break I see what I think might be Tennessee. Mom and I lived there for a few months when I was seven. I remember, because she worked the morning shift at a diner and would sometimes take me to the park to play with other kids. The other moms would circle up to talk—some with babies on their hips—but they never included my mom in their conversations. If she cared, she never showed it. She’d fan herself out on the grass with her portable CD player, chain-smoking cigarettes and singing along with Pearl Jam, her forever favorite band. Tennessee wasn’t as good as our first place in North Carolina—where I still went to school—but we were still happy. And Mom hadn’t met Frank yet.

  “Why did she take me?” I ask.

  “She was scared,” Greg says. “Our relationship was falling apart, and my parents were pushing me to get full custody so they could take care of you while I went to college. Your mom—she was convinced I wasn’t going to let her see you, so she left.”

  He sounds so sincere that it seems impossible that he’s not telling the truth, but in Mom’s version of the story, he is the villain.

  “Do you think she’ll go to prison?”

  “Maybe.” He pushes his hand through his hair. “Probably.” He sighs. “This is not what I wanted for her. Not ever.”

  The conversation is interrupted by the flight attendant pushing the drink cart. Greg orders Cokes, but I feel guilty that I’m sitting on a plane drinking soda while Mom is in jail. Is she scared? Does she miss me? Does she wonder why I haven’t come to see her?

  The captain announces that the weather in Tampa is sunny and warm, and that we’re scheduled to land on time.

  Greg breaks the silence. “Twelve years is a long time. And if you want to know the truth, I’m still pretty pissed off. There’s a big part of me that wants to treat your mom the same way she treated me, but I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be fair to you. So here’s the thing … I want you to stay. You’re my daughter, too, and I want to know you. But if your mom gets out of jail before you turn eighteen and you want to go back, I won’t keep you from her.”

  “Really?” My birthday is in May, only six months away. Half a year. Temporary. And I’ve got temporary down to an art.

  His eyes tell me this is an offer he doesn’t want to make, but he nods anyway. “I promise.”

  Chapter 3

  Another airport, an hour drive, and we finally come to a stop in the driveway of a small yellow cottage in a town called Tarpon Springs. A porch swing propped with floral cushions sways slowly in the afternoon breeze. I wonder if I should recognize this place. Have I lived here? Was this our house before Mom took me?

  “Phoebe and I bought this place a couple of years ago.” Greg answers the question before I can ask it, as he cuts the ignition of the dark-blue compact SUV that was waiting for us in the Tampa airport parking lot. “I
t was a complete wreck, but we gave it new life. I’m an architect, so that’s … kind of what I do.”

  As we walk through the gate of a low white picket fence, the front screen door creaks open and two little boys spill out, launching themselves at their dad. He squats down to their level and lets them bowl him over with hugs. They’re laughing and rolling around on the lawn like puppies when Phoebe comes out. She reminds me of one of those perfect moms from the Tennessee park, with her rolled-up denim capris and sparkly flip-flops. She’s even prettier than her picture.

  “You must be Callie.” She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear before she reaches out to shake my hand. Hers isn’t rough the way Mom’s is; it’s smooth and she wears a braided silver ring. “I’m Phoebe. It’s so nice to finally meet you.”

  “I, um—you, too.”

  Greg untangles himself and stands, brushing bits of grass off his clothes.

  “I’m Tucker,” the taller of the two boys says. He’s the one who resembles Phoebe. “Are you my sister? Because Daddy says you’re my sister. Do you want to see my finger? I have a boo-boo.”

  He extends his hand, and his index finger is wrapped in a bandage with wide-mouthed cartoon monkeys all over it. I’m not used to little kids and unsure of what to say, so I go with, “Cool.” He beams at me, then peeks under the bandage to inspect his wound. It’s barely a scratch, but to Tucker it’s serious business.

  Greg ruffles a hand over his son’s dark-blond head. “He’s three,” he says, as if that’s all the explanation I need.

  “That’s Joe.” Tucker points to his brother. Joe’s fingers are jammed in his mouth and his brown eyes are wary. “He’s littler than me. He’s not even two.”

  “Don’t take Joe personally,” Greg says. “His people motor doesn’t warm up as fast as Tucker’s, but once it does, he’s Velcro Boy.”

  “Velcro Boy!” Tucker exclaims in a superhero voice, and races circles around us, arms extended as if he’s flying. Phoebe catches him up in her arms and gently scolds him—not really scolding at all—that he needs to turn down his volume.