“But . . . how? I saw it. I know I did . . .”
George Darling stroked his long chin. “I’m not sure, but I’ve documented it once every year for the past three years, as long as I’ve been studying it. This star, Wendy, it reveals itself for only a few days every year, and never for very long. The clouds have to be just right. It can’t be explained in any of the astrological books I’ve read, or any of the maps I’ve consulted. I’m preparing a paper for Reid, my colleague at Oxford.” He sighed and rubbed his head. “Well, at least I should begin preparing it. In any case, it’s an astrological phenomenon, and I am determined to stake my scientific career on it.”
“But what about the firm?” she asked quizzically. Her father wasn’t a scientist, much to his disappointment. He was an accountant at the bustling law practice down the street. A good job, as her mother was constantly reminding him. George Darling gazed sadly out at the rooftops of their London neighborhood.
“Yes. The firm. That is right. The firm matters.” He said it in such a way that Wendy was sure that the firm didn’t matter one bit. She looked at the ground shyly, making small taps with her tiny black slippers on the window ledge.
“How quickly did John see it?”
She hoped her father would say that John didn’t, that it was something he only shared with her—his eldest daughter, their relationship so special—but of course that wasn’t the case.
“Oh yes, so quickly! John saw it early this morning, before you got up, before the sun came up. He actually didn’t need my help to find it!”
A familiar disappointment rose in her chest. John, always at her father’s heels; John, so prized, so brazenly intelligent, her father’s eyes lighting up at the very sound of his name.
“Say, where is John?”
“He’s giving Michael a bath. It was his turn.”
“Hmm . . .” Her father stepped back, tucking his flannel shirt into his pajama pants. “Well, I should find your mother. She’s probably lying in bed right this moment having nightmares about children falling out nursery windows.”
Wendy stepped back into the nursery, pulling the windows closed. “Thanks for showing me, Papa.”
He gave Wendy an absentminded smile. “Of course, my dear!
When John comes in, will you send him to my study? I’m going to have him help me with some star charting.”
By “study,” her father meant the cluttered extra bedroom stuffed with navigation charts and star illustrations, with socks drying and mobiles of the planets circling overhead, with science textbooks overturned, their ripped-out pages dripping with scribbled notes.
“Yes, Papa.”
George Darling turned and patted Wendy’s head, tucking a strand of her hair behind her ear.
“Night then, Wendy bird.”
He left the nursery door cracked open a few inches, so the light from the hallway could filter through the bedroom, illuminating her brothers’ double beds, stripped down to the blue sheets and thick wool blankets. Their beds were always messy, despite the fact that Liza made them each morning. Wendy’s bed, moved across the room last year by her annoyed father, sat closest to the window. Now she could watch the stars from her bed, see them whirling in the bright night sky. She could watch the snow fall down in endless whorls, or see the occasional blowing autumn leaf dance across the frame. In the winter it had proved to be bitterly cold, and she found herself often climbing into bed with Michael, snuggling against his warm, round body, pushing aside his teddy bear, Giles, and tucking her freezing feet under his warm blankets. His bed always smelled like little boy—like dirt and cookies and worms—but Wendy never slept as soundly as she did when he was tucked securely under her chin, his breath on her neck, her baby brother. Before John woke every morning, she would try to sneak back into her own bed, not wanting to see his judgmental face as she headed across the room.
“Scared, Wendy?”
“No. Just cold.”
“Of course.”
Not that his snide comments would ever make her pull her bed away from the window. That would be taking the stars from her, and that she could not abide. Also, it wasn’t just the stars that she could see from her window. It was a tiny shop, down the street, and the bedroom that she knew sat in the attic of that building . . . Looking over her shoulder, seeing no one, she started to reach under her bed for the letter that she had read four times already today; but figured once more couldn’t hurt. Her hands curled around the paper, folded so gently, the thin papyrus crumpling under her fingers. She hoped that it would still smell like him as she brought it up to her nose . . .
“OWW!” Now there were little boy knees in her stomach, on her chest, feet in her face, a tumble of blond hair.
“Michael! Get off me!”