At the moment when Scott Early killed Becky and Ruthie, I was hiding
in the shed.
It wasn’t because I was afraid. I wasn’t afraid to die then, and I’m
not afraid now. It was because we were playing hide-and-seek. My
little sisters always started begging me the minute my parents left
me to baby-sit. “Ronnie, Ronnie, Ronnie!” they would tease me,
pulling on my shirt while I tried to straighten up the kitchen,
“Betcha we can find you this time. Betcha on our chores!” And I
would always give in, warning them that if they didn’t find me, they
were going to spend two hours, until Mama got back, picking up every
crayon and every sticker book in their room.
“This time I’m not kidding, Thing One and Thing Two,” I told them
that day. “I’m not going in there right before Mama gets home and
pull all your clean clothes and markers out from under your bed.”
“I promise, slalomly,” Becky said. I had to laugh. Her teeth were
purple from the berries she’d eaten for breakfast. Becky was as thin
and fast as a minnow in a creek and seemed to live practically on
air. Ruthie was as round and “slalom” as a little koala bear. Her
favorite thing was to eat cookie dough right from the bowl.
They wanted to play outside, because it was a really warm, sunny day
for November, not that it’s ever too cold at the edge of what’s
practically the Mojave Desert. The purples and yellows and reds of
the changing trees that day were as flashy as a marching band.
And so, an hour later, I was crouched down in the shed, behind a big
sack of potting soil and a crate of clay, hoping a spider didn’t
pick that time to crawl up my back. I couldn’t see my little
sisters. But I imagined that they were leaning against the picnic
table, where we ate our supper almost every summer night when the
bugs weren’t bad – our own tomatoes and sweet corn, sometimes with
tacos and black beans – listening to the birds making their
go-to-sleep sounds. Becky and Ruthie most likely had their little
hands over their eyes, counting fast so that they could yell out,
“Ready or not, here I come!” Ruthie would call first, I knew. She
always did, and Becky always shushed her, saying there was no way
she could have gotten to a hundred yet because she, Becky, was older
and she hadn’t got up to fifty. I know they didn’t peek, because I’d
told them peeking wasn’t fair, and that I wouldn’t play unless they
played fair.
That day, though, they never made a sound.
I figured they were counting to a hundred silently, because whenever
we played hide-and-seek, Becky would count straight up as fast as
she could, and Ruthie, who was only four, would say out loud, “One,
two, three, four, eight, fourteen, fifteen, ten.” Becky would get so
confused she’d have to start all over again.
But five minutes went by, and still, they never made a sound. When
it got to be a long time, I opened the door.
And I saw my sisters, lying there like little white dolls in great
dark pools of paint. I saw Scott Early, a young man with short blond
hair, sitting on the picnic table, wearing only his underwear,
sobbing as if they were his little sisters, as if a terrible monster
had come along and done this. Which was sort of what he did think,
though I didn’t know that then.
It was a good thing, a doctor later said to my mother, that Becky
and Ruthie didn’t cry out. It meant that they died quickly. They
barely felt a thing. They must never have heard Scott Early come
walking barefoot across our lawn. The merciful Father shielded them
from fear. Being cut across the carotid artery is a very quick way
to die. I knew that, even then, from biology. But it’s not over in
an instant, and I prayed for months that Becky and Ruthie never had
time to wonder why I wasn’t there to help them. For I was always
there to help them.
Though I was only twelve-almost-thirteen, Mama could trust me to
look after the little girls alone, even if she had to be out in the
part of the shed that was her “studio” or at the galleries, as far
away as St. George, for hours at a time.
“You are as responsible as any mother, Ronnie,” Mama quietly told me
one night, after the time Becky’s hand got burned. Becky had been
impatient that morning for her “cheesy eggs,” and reached up to see
if they were finished while I was cooking. She burned her hand on
the pan. Mama said I had “presence of mind” because I didn’t start
to cry or panic when Becky screamed. I didn’t try to put butter on
the burn, which my own grandma would have done, because that would
have made it worse. From the firstaid section of health class Mama
taught me, I remembered that a burn had to be cooled down with water
right away or the heat inside would keep right on burning the skin
and the damage would go deeper. I put Becky’s hand under the
cold-water tap for five minutes and wrapped ice in a thick towel and
taped it down around her hand. Then I ran, pulling Becky and Ruthie
in the wooden wagon, down to our nearest neighbor, Mrs. Emory, who
drove us to Pine Mountains Clinic ten miles away, between our house
and Cedar City. At the clinic, the doctor, a young woman, placed a
net shield and gauze under a bandage on Becky’s palm. The doctor
spoke so gently to Becky that I suppose it was then that I first
thought I would become a doctor one day myself. I wondered if the
incident meant I was called to it.
Becky had just a tiny scar on one finger after her hand healed. Our
pediatrician, Dr. Pratt, said he wouldn’t have done one thing
different himself, except to drive her to a hospital. But there
wasn’t a real hospital within fifty miles of where we lived at the
foot of a pine-covered ridge. Where we lived wasn’t even really a
town. It was a sort of settlement, for people like my father, who
always said he liked his “elbow room.”
And so, on the day they died, unless paramedics could have arrived
at our house within minutes; and everyone knew that was impossible,
or unless there was a doctor already at our house; and I was just a
child, and Mr. Sissinelli, our neighbor, who was a doctor, was at
his hospital, no one could have saved my sisters.
I must not feel guilty, Mama and Papa told me over and over, in the
days afterward, although I could see in their eyes and hear in their
voices that they felt exactly that way themselves. I was not to feel
guilty for being unable to call for help until it was too late, or
for being unable to get Papa’s gun because he was out hunting for
quail, they said. By the time I opened the door on the sight that
would change me for the rest of my life, it was already too late.
When the police asked questions about why we weren’t supervised, my
parents spoke up. They defended me and their choice of leaving me to
watch my sisters, telling the officers what a responsible girl I
was. I had done just what I should have done. I had been brave. They
said that not even a parent could have suspected that Scott Early
would even find such a remote place, much less grab the weeding
scythe Papa had left leaning against the barn and use it like the
sword of an avenging angel, striking a death blow in seconds.
I listened and I nodded, but I didn’t really believe them. I didn’t
want to cause Papa, and especially Mama, any more pain, but no one
could say I wasn’t guilty. My cousins, and my best friends, Clare
and Emma, and even goofy boys like Finn and Miko, said the same
thing. But it didn’t matter. Even after the panic was gone, and the
worst of the agony, the guilt was always there. It could never be
turned off. The guilt was like using a plain magnifying glass to
focus a beam of sunlight, bringing all that heat together, turning
something soft and bright into something that could hurt. Even love
couldn’t dim it. It was the guilt that made my anger like a burn
that no one ever ran under cold water; and so it kept burning and
burning down to my bones. And as time went by, and other peoples’
cooled down, mine did not. It got hotter, and became a part of me,
and it didn’t heal until long after. Even now, I think the scars
must still be there.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Cage of Stars
by Jacquelyn Mitchard
Copyright © 2006 by Jacquelyn Mitchard.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
