Prologue
Alina
“You’re an asshole, Danny. You’re always putting them first! What about me? What about me? It’s always ‘the kids this’ and ‘the kids that’. ‘I think they’d like this’, or ‘we should buy them that’.” My mom’s voice travels up the stairs and into my room, waking me with a start as she yells at my dad.
“Dar, shh…you’re going to wake the kids. Keep your voice down. Maybe put the wine down, too, while you’re at it?” my dad pleads, trying his best to diffuse the situation.
The situation known as my mother.
My obviously drunk mother—for the third time this week—Darlene Cassidy. Once a nurse-by-day/alcoholic-by-night, now a full-time alcoholic.
“Are you fucking kidding me right now? The kids? Fuck the kids, Danny. That’s all it’s ever about with you, isn’t it?” she accuses again, her words noticeably slurred. “Want to know something, Daaani-elll?” she taunts, stretching out his name, her voice taking on a mocking tone. “I could give a fuck about those kids. I hate them,” my mom says loudly. It’s a punch to the gut that steals my breath.
She’s my mom, how can she say that? I wonder, as tears start rolling down my cheeks. She wasn’t always like this.
There was a time when Lucky and I went to bed with kisses on our foreheads, and mom’s whispered words telling us how much she loved us. I have so many good memories of the way she used to be, of a time when we were happy. Memories of her letting me win at Crazy Eights and Monopoly, nights she’d sit at the kitchen table helping me with my homework.
It wasn’t always like this.
Darlene Cassidy used to be the mom everyone wanted: loving, caring, funny, and kind. Mom used to work, she had been an amazing nurse and caregiver. She used to bathe and dress and actually leave the house. Our home used to be filled with laughter and love. Now it’s filled with empty bottles, bad moods, hatred, fighting, and what I’d come to realize was neglect towards my brother and me. Now she’s lost, and my memories are slowly being tainted and replaced with images of nights like tonight. She’s become somebody that we used to know.
Suddenly, there’s a sound of shattering glass, making me jump in my bed as I have more nights than not over the last six months, months where her drinking has become more frequent.
“Darlene. That’s enough. They’ll hear you,” my dad tries again, placating, his voice firmer but still a little unsure.
My poor father, I think. He tries, working everyday to keep us afloat since mom can’t now. Daniel Cassidy is carrying the burden alone, trying to be both the mother and father we need as well as the Mom Wrangler, and it’s starting to wear on him. I picture his face. He’s starting to look older, tired, his once bright blue eyes a little dimmed, even when he’s trying to give us attention.
“Like I give a fuck. Let ’em hear. Let that stupid asshole hear how he’s a good for nothing piece of shit, just like his father. Let Alina know that she’s nothing but an ugly little whore. I see the way you look at my husband, bitch!” she screams up the stairs. I picture her swaying in our lime green kitchen, sloppily holding her wine glass, head tilting up to be sure I’ll hear her. “I see—” she starts to continue, her voice sounding closer, but my father snaps, cutting her off.
“Darlene, shut the fuck up, right now!”
“You shut the fuck up! Don’t you ever tell me to shut up. I’ll shoot you in the fucking face. And don’t you think for a second that I won’t.”
Does my mom have a gun?
“Just calm down, Dar. You’re going to scare them. You’re scaring me,” Dad says. My heart thumps wildly in my chest at my mom’s words.
There’s a loud bang as the door to my bedroom flies open. Fear like I’ve never known rattles my body as I anticipate my mother charging in.
Instead, it’s the familiar silhouette of my 15-year-old brother, Lucky—older than me by five years—who meets my eyes instead.
“Let’s go to the treehouse, Alina,” he whispers, “and I’ll try to show you the new constellation we learned about in school today.” He comes in and sits gently beside me on my bed. He clamps a hand on my shaking shoulder. “Here, put this on first. It’s chilly outside.” He passes me my fluffy pink housecoat.
Lucky has been taking me out to the treehouse and teaching me about the stars more and more often over the last six months.
He thinks I’m too young to realize it, but I know it’s so I don’t have to listen to the fighting. So I don’t hear, or risk seeing, my father standing with his arms by his sides in surrender, allowing the woman he has loved more than life to hit him, punch him, and say the most hurtful things, the most hateful of words.
Lucky has always taught me that a man should never hit a woman. Yet, sometimes, when I see Daddy the next day with ice over his eye, or limping around the house after a night when Lucky and I have fallen asleep in the treehouse, I would wish that stupid rule didn’t exist. I know it’s terrible to think, but I want my daddy to stand up to my mother. I want him to make the pain and hurt stop, for himself and for the rest of us. I want him to fix my family, to make our mom love us like a mother should.
“Get the fuck off me, Danny! I’ll call the cops,” my mom screams, making me bolt off the bed, ready to go see Lucky’s stars, because deep down I know the argument tonight is a particularly bad one.
“Lucky, is Daddy gonna be okay?” I whisper, letting out quiet sobs because I can’t keep them in any longer.
“Come on, Alina. Let’s go find the beautiful. The stars are waiting for us,” he says, wiping my cheek and pulling me into a hug before quietly leading us down the hall, through my parents’ room, and out to the balcony, where a staircase descends into the backyard. The sounds of a riot ring out behind us.
“Lucky?” I ask, once we’re crouched in safety on the floor of the treehouse my father had built in the large oak tree.
“Yeah, Squirt?” he says, adjusting the lens of the telescope Daddy had snuck inside for us a few weeks ago.
“Why does Mommy hate us? Is it really ’cause I’m a whore?” I hiccup, repeating the word I’m not so sure I even understand, or if I want to.
“You are not a whore, Alina. That’s a bad word. Never say that about yourself. You’re kind, smart, and beautiful. You hear me? Don’t listen to that woman. She isn’t our mother anymore,” he says, pulling me into a hug as we curl up together on the floor, weeping and wishing on the stars above that by morning life will go on, that things will get better…
Unfortunately, nights like this became a regular occurrence. Thanks to Lucky, I was mercifully distracted by Pegasus, Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, and a bunch of other galactic wonders. Yet my mind was still always reeling, my heart sinking, my mind replaying my mother’s words over and over, despite me willing myself not to. “I wish I’d never had you, Alina Jayne Cassidy!”
I’d asked Lucky so many questions those nights up in the treehouse, while he was showing me all the sights in outer space and captivating my attention. But I’d kept my biggest question to myself, the only real questions I so desperately wanted answered: How could I get there? And would I find happiness way up there in the night sky? Because, according to my mother, happiness comes from beauty. And, even at my young age, she said I needed all the help I could get. “You’re a worthless eyesore, Alina. Nothing but a homely-looking tramp who demands her daddy’s attention all the time. You’re like some cheap floozy who isn’t right in the head.” Girls who look like me? They lose, she said. According to the woman who chose to hate rather than love me, ugly won’t ever find happy here in the real world. So, night after night, looking up at the stars and listening to the muffled screaming from inside the house, I thought of her words, and wished I could find a way to get away from this planet and go up there into space so badly.
One warm summer night, it was the same fight, in the same kitchen. Except, from our treehouse, this time Lucky and I could hear my father finally standing up for himself. “I’ve had enough. The kids have had enough,” Dad shouts. Lucky and I turn to each other, both of us raising our eyebrows at the same time, curious if Dad really meant what he was saying. “I can’t keep doing this. The kids—me. We don’t deserve this shit, Darlene. Something’s gotta give here.”
And it made me feel suddenly hopeful: maybe I wouldn’t have to leave the planet after all? Then, just as quickly, that hope turned to dread.
“I’m leaving, and I’m taking Lucky and Alina with me. They need stability. They deserve a family again.”
That’s when a gun went off, not once but twice. In one of her drunken rages, my mother shot my father straight through the heart, killing him instantly, before turning the handgun on herself and taking her own life.
Lucky held my hand as if he was holding onto me for dear life. All I really wanted from him right then was for him to let me go, and tell me how to get there. I wanted so badly to go get lost in space.
We lay, stiff as boards, on the floor of our treehouse looking up at the sky through the glass panels in the roof, afraid to look anywhere else. After a while, he began to point out all the constellations he knew, over and over—like Cygnus and Orion, like Pegasus, Ursa Major, and Cassiopeia—until a relieved-looking female police officer climbed up and found us lying there, staring at the only beauty left in our lives.