Secret Star Read online

  The song was the important thing; it meant something. Like, there was a star out beyond everything, like, there was hope, there was light—that was what mattered. The singer didn’t matter as much as the song.

  Yet when Tess went to bed that night and lay there with the song fever pulsing in her, not even trying to go to sleep, she daydreamed about him. The singer. In her mind she gave him form, and he was a passionate angel of a man, more beautiful than any man she had ever met, with his heartbeat drumming in his temples and his long hair lifting like a stallion’s mane and a face worth weeping over and under his perfect brows his hot eyes shining like a thousand stars.

  The next day, Sunday, Tess’s day off, Kamo came back to the Mathis place to help clean the cistern.

  Benson Mathis had told Kamo he was welcome to sleep in the shed, but Kam said he had a place to sleep. He showed up in time for breakfast, and then except for lunch he and Tess worked all day. Tess found him good to work with—steady, quiet, didn’t talk constantly or get peevish about little things or sling orders around, which was more than she could say for some people at the IGA. She found it hard to stay on guard against him.

  Cleaning the cistern was a bear of a job. It took both of them to heave the cover off, and then they had to get all the water out with buckets on ropes, and then they had to get into the cistern, which if you are not real fond of dark, cramped, damp places is like crawling into hell. Then they had to scrape out all the gunk that had come down from the gutters, and scour slime off the bottom and sides, then rinse the cistern out with water hauled from the hand pump in the backyard. Then they dipped out the dirty rinse water because they couldn’t just run it off through the spigots because the electric pump wasn’t working. And cleaning the cistern while it wasn’t being used had sounded like such a good idea.

  “You got any more torture for us?” Tess asked Daddy when she and Kamo were finished with the stinking cistern.

  “Sure. I got a list long as my arm.”

  She and Kamo went around and ripped the ratty plastic off the doors and windows. Then they cleaned out the accumulation of winter trash in the shed. Then they went up on the roof and admired their clean gutters and looked for loose shingles and nailed on some new ones. All that time Kam didn’t ask about Tess’s Rojahin father, and she sensed that he was not going to, not when they were working. So as far as she was concerned they could just keep working, and they did, right until dark. When Daddy finally called them in for supper, she was so tired she felt silly.

  Daddy had creamy beeswax candles from the crossroads church stuck in mayo-jar lids for light. “No dessert,” he said cheerfully after the Mathises and guest had devoured half a loaf of bread and a big box of fish sticks. Daddy was in a happy mood. “No sorbet, and no strolling violinists either, but who needs ’em? Give us some music, Tess!”

  In front of Kamo? But why not. The rebel in Tess tried never to care what other people thought. She put the flats of her fingers on the table and started drumming.

  In her head she had been working out a rhythm arrangement for “Secret Star,” and it had been simmering and stewing and brewing in her all day, and when she started drumming it was like starting a nuclear reaction. Fusion. She leaned into a light-speed double-stroke roll and kicked out for things to bang with both feet, she was slapping out eighths with one hand and triplets with the other, popping snare chops against a table leg, drumming till her chair shook, every muscle rocking. Kam looked stunned. In the candlelight his eye shone as big as a half-dollar, and who could blame him.

  Daddy was laughing. “Groove it, Tess!”

  Suddenly she felt like a clown and discovered that she did care what Kam thought after all. Hot-faced, she stopped.

  “Keep going!” Kam exclaimed, but she shook her head.

  “You take drum lessons?” He leaned over the table toward her.

  “A little,” she mumbled. “In school.”

  “You drummed for bands?”

  She shook her head, got up and headed out to the black backyard where there was more work waiting.

  Benson Mathis sat in his wheelchair and watched as Kam got up and followed Tess out the door. Benson Mathis sighed.

  Tess has a secret.

  The way she and this Kamo guy accepted each other without talking made him feel like they had met before Kam came to the house, like Kam might be hanging around for reasons other than work and food. Not surprising. Tess was one heck of a good-looking girl. Didn’t think it of herself, but she was. Big and strong and gorgeous, like a cream-colored ’59 Cadillac Eldorado. Of course, he was biased. His daughter—stepdaughter—wasn’t just the main thing that kept him going; she was the only thing. All he had left of the woman who had been the love of his life.

  And pretty soon, just like her mother had done, Tess was going to leave him. Not for some guy, necessarily, but one way or another she was going to leave. Look at the way she had gone and got herself that job.

  She’s growing up.

  This Kamo guy, now, he was too old for her. Too old and been around too much. That didn’t bother Benson Mathis, because he knew himself to be a good judge of character and he pegged Kam as what they used to call a “gentleman.” Dangerous, maybe, but not to Tess. Had hurt some people, maybe, but would never take advantage of a girl.

  Benson Mathis recognized “gentleman” in Kamo because he strove for that same quality in himself. Do the right thing. Protect women and children. Raise the little girl to grow up sweet and strong.

  Pretty soon I’m gonna have to let her go.

  Still—in a few minutes he would call her in from the yard. Yeah, she had to grow up, but nobody could blame him for trying to put it off as long as he could.

  He relaxed in his wheelchair, closed his eyes, and sighed again.

  I’m a coward.

  Putting things off was one way of hoping they never had to happen. Though he was not consciously thinking of it, in the back of Benson Mathis’s mind there was a shadow. Always there whenever he thought about Tess. The reason he had never taken her to experts to have her memory loss treated. He wanted to put off the day she might remember. He hoped she would never remember. If she did, she might leave him that minute and never come back.

  Tess struggled with the heavy, wet clothing she had put in a tub of soapy water to soak. It was difficult to rinse it thoroughly and hang it up in the dark.

  Kamo had followed her out to the pump. “You know rhythms they never taught you in school,” he said.

  “Huh,” Tess grunted, tipping the heavy washtub. So she’d played along with the radio a lot, big deal. A heck of a lot of good knowing drum rhythms would ever do her. No way could she make a living playing drums, that was what Daddy said and so did everybody else. A person had to do something practical to get by in this world. Anyway, bands didn’t want girl drummers, not if they were guy bands, which they mostly were.

  Kam took one side of the washtub and helped her heave it under the pump, then started pumping. “You planning on going into music?” he called to her above the squeaking of the handle.

  “Not really.”

  “You’re not?” His voice went high, but then he tried to soften it. “You got other plans?”

  Tess shrugged.

  “You crazy, Tess?” She could barely see his face, but she could hear the fervor in his voice. “God, girl, you want to waste your life? You need to go into music. You’re talented.”

  Tess had never much liked being told what she “needed” to do. “I know people who can twirl a baton with their toes. It’s just about as useful.”

  “This is different. My God, you were playing eight-thirteen time in there. And you’ve only had a few lessons? You must have a music gene the size of Milwaukee.”

  “You can stop pumping.” She tipped out the rinse water, grunting and thinking sour thoughts: So how did Kamo Rojahin come to be an authority on eight-thirteen time and music genes? She straightened up to look at him. “You went to Juilliard or something?�
� she asked him, sarcastic.

  There was a silence. Then, “My father was a musician,” he said, his voice so low she could barely hear him.

  Oh, God. Instantly she felt awful. But at the same time she felt terrified.

  “Tess, listen—”

  She turned away from him and started snatching soggy clothes out of the washtub and slinging them at the clothesline as fast as she could for a person who could not see what she was doing.

  “Could you just tell me what your father looked like?”

  “No.”

  “You might be my sister, or my cousin.” He kept his voice very low; Daddy wouldn’t hear. “Don’t you care?” The words quavered. He tried to lighten up. “One way or another?”

  She had only known him a couple of days, and she was still half afraid of him, but yes, damn it, she did care. She cared unbelievably.

  She stood there with a pair of Daddy’s pull-on sweatpants dripping on her feet, and Kamo stood there with his bent hand lifted toward her, waiting for an answer. And she gave it to him by telling him the truth. “I can’t remember.”

  “Huh?” His hand sank slowly down.

  “I can’t remember my father.”

  “You can’t remember?” He spoke slowly, as if unsure of her. “You were too young?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t think so. I—I just can’t remember.” She turned to him even though he was only a shape in the dark. “I’m—there’s something wrong with me.”

  She told him about it, and he stood listening—it was easier to talk to him when she couldn’t see his scarred face. Or maybe she had been needing to talk to someone—but it wasn’t as if she could have told just anybody. There was something about Kamo. She blurted it all out, how she didn’t remember her father or mother at all and Daddy was no help, how her life had seemingly started when she was ten, how she blanked out when she tried to go back any farther.

  “You don’t remember your first day of school?”

  “Nope.”

  “Your birthday parties?”

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Good Lord, Tess.” He sounded uncertain. “Does it bother you?”

  “Kind of, yeah, but kind of no. Not really.” It wasn’t like a person had to remember kindergarten or birthday parties to get a job or do any of the practical things. Okay, she hated her nightmares—but other people had nightmares too, right? There might not even be a connection.

  Right.

  Almost plaintively Kamo asked, “Don’t you ever wonder? Don’t you want family?”

  “I’ve got Daddy.”

  Kamo stood silent. Tess grew afraid.

  “Kam—don’t say anything to him.”

  Kam swiveled his head as if he were looking at her, though he couldn’t see her face in the dark. “He never told you anything?”

  “A little. It bothers him when I ask. Kam, please, don’t go asking him stuff.”

  The back door opened, and there was Daddy, as if somebody had called his name. Against the puny candlelight Tess could see his silhouette as he wheeled his chair so he could look out the screen door. “Tess?” he hollered. She and Kamo had been out there a pretty long time.

  “Just a minute!” she hollered back.

  She got the feeling he thought she and Kamo were doing some kind of boy-girl thing but he didn’t want to say it. “Clothes giving you fits?” he yelled.

  “Yeah, they’re all tangled up.” She rushed to sling the rest of them on the line. Kam came over and helped.

  “How’d he hurt his back?” he asked in a very low voice as the two of them bent over the washtub together.

  “He doesn’t want to talk about that either. He was a bulldozer operator. Some sort of accident.”

  Kam was silent.

  “Kam,” she begged, “please promise me you won’t hassle him.”

  “I keep telling you, I wouldn’t do anything to hurt anybody.” Kam draped the last undershirt over the clothesline, turned the tub upside down to drain, and straightened up to face Tess. “Did he ever tell you your father’s first name?”

  “Sure.” It was on her birth certificate, so she had to know it. “Marcus. Marcus Rojahin.”

  Kamo nodded, as if he knew all along. “My father’s name was Marco.”

  Tess stood stunned. Marco, Marcus, and the same weird last name—could they be the same person? Up until that moment she had not truly believed it could be happening. “Oh, my God,” she whispered.

  “So you see why I’m here,” he said, and he walked off into the night.

  5

  “You want some of this Pepsi?” Butch asked Tess.

  “Sure.” Of course she wanted some. She wanted a soda of her own, but she couldn’t have it, and she hated that. Whenever she was in the IGA she had to look at aisles and aisles of things she couldn’t have, not when there were so many things she and Daddy needed worse. Whenever she went on break she craved the dumb things most people could buy without a second thought: pretty cards in the card aisle, shiny heart-shaped balloons, bunches of flowers. Donuts. Bright markers. Snickers bars. Pepsi.

  I hate being poor.

  “You don’t mind drinking out of the same can, do you?” Butch passed it to her without waiting for an answer. Yes, she did kind of mind, but she drank anyway.

  They were both sweeping up. Grapes made the worst mess, loose ones rolling under the tables and squished ones and shredded leaves and squiggly bits of stem. Tess muscled her big push broom and drank Pepsi at the same time. “You’re in ninth grade, right?” Butch asked.

  “Right.” She smiled at him. Probably he was just being nice, but still, it felt good. She never would have dreamed that a good-looking, popular boy like Butch would act interested in her, even if it was just because he worked with her.

  In the same easy tone he asked, “How old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  “So how come they’re letting you work here?”

  Too late Tess saw her mistake. “No. Sixteen,” she said. “I meant sixteen. I’m in ninth grade but I’m sixteen.” She was talking too fast and her voice wanted to rise. “They held me back. I flunked a couple of grades in elementary school.”

  He had stopped sweeping and stood watching her with that cocky grin of his. “Bull,” he said.

  “Butch.” She managed to keep her voice down, almost whispering; what if Lupe heard, or Jonna? “Please. I need this job. Don’t tell.”

  “You bad girl.” He was smiling, teasing. “You lied. What if I tell?”

  “Butch, please.”

  “Relax, Tess.” He smiled a different way and turned back to his sweeping. “How old are you? Sixteen, right?”

  “Right.” Her voice was creaky, her knees shaky with relief. “Thanks.” He was nice after all. Just for a second there she had felt like he wasn’t.

  “No problem,” he said. “Sometime you’ll do something for me.”

  When she got out of work Tess looked for Kam. She walked all around the building. He wasn’t there.

  She hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. Each night when she walked out the IGA’s back door she was looking for him, but he wasn’t there. All the way up the steep road out of Hinkles Corner and cutting through the salvage yard and down a dirt track past the sawmill and along a tractor path and the creek path and through the rocks and up Miller’s pasture, all the way home she was looking for him, but he wasn’t there. And she didn’t know where he was staying. Sleeping in somebody’s barn, probably, God knew where. There was no good reason for her to be looking for him—it would have been just too bizarre to really think he was her brother—but he was on her mind like the “Secret Star” song. She flunked two quizzes in school those couple of days, and when she thought of Kam her chest felt so hollow she didn’t care.

  Wednesday at work she was flattening empty cardboard boxes, and she had heard “Secret Star” twice and knew she would never in her life get tired of it, when the sweet-faced, sad-eyed woman, Lupe, came back from break and said to
her, “There’s a boy waiting out back to see you when you get a chance.”

  Tess’s head jerked up so quickly her neck cracked.

  “If it’s that ugly-faced one-eyed friend of yours,” Butch said, “tell him to bug off.”

  How the—how did he know about Kam? She gawked at him.

  “He’s been hanging around, asking questions,” Butch said. “Tell him to stay out of my face.” He patted his pocket as if that was supposed to mean something, turned and swaggered away. He often swaggered, but he couldn’t help that; he was a jock. Was he mad? Tess stared after him.

  “He tries to be a big man so his father will notice him,” Lupe said.

  Butch’s father was some sort of Army general stationed at the base in the mountains outside of Canadawa, where Tess went to school. Butch mentioned his father a lot. His father was away at the Pentagon, his father had to go to a meeting with the secretary of state, that sort of thing.

  “Huh,” Tess said, and she went on break.

  The boy waiting out back was Kamo.

  Kam didn’t lean against the Dumpster—he stood straight and still, waiting beside it. “Hey,” he said, friendly but unsmiling, as Tess walked up to him.

  “Kam, this guy I work with says you’ve been asking questions.”

  He acknowledged with a nod. “I was hoping other people around here might know your father.”

  “Oh, great. Just wonderful.” She was glad to see him, yet suddenly she was angry at him. “Talking about me behind my back.”

  “Not about you.”

  “About my father, same thing.”

  Kam said, with passion yet without raising his voice, “What else am I supposed to do? I need to find him. You can’t help me.”

  Damn, he was right. There was nothing else he could do except go away, and she didn’t want that. She let out a long breath and said nothing.

  “Anyway, no such luck,” Kam said more quietly. “It seems like you and Mr. Mathis are kind of new here. Just moved here four, five years ago. Nobody knows a thing.”