The Girl with Stars in her Hair Read online

  THE

  GIRL

  WITH

  STARS

  IN HER

  HAIR

  ALEXES RAZEVICH

  Copyright © 2017 Alexes Razevich

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictionally. Any resemblance to actual events, locals, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidently and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author. Requests for permission should be sent to [email protected].

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prol o gue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Prologue

  Hermosa Beach, California

  January 1919

  Father had thrown the covers off again. His face and what I could see of his body outside his wet pajamas were slick with sweat and nearly as white as the sheet that was tangled with the discarded blankets. Only his lips were dry, swollen and cracked from the fever. His breath came in hard, wheezing gasps. Blood trickled from his nose. Mother adjusted the white cotton face mask tied over her mouth and nose, then dipped the cotton washrag into the basin of cold water on the nightstand next to the bed. She wrung it out and laid it across his burning forehead.

  It seemed wrong for Father to be so sick in a room this cheerful—walls the clear blue of a summer sky, red-and-blue Turkish rug on the floor, cherrywood four-poster bed, paintings of the sea and ships on every wall—but sick he was.

  Spanish flu. Father had caught it months after coming home from the Great War in Europe. Stupid to survive a war only to come home and die from influenza. Mother and I had been lucky so far—in the months the flu had been killing people all over the world, neither of us had suffered from so much as the sniffles. Every day the newspaper printed the death toll—numbers so high I couldn’t make sense of them. School had been suspended for fear of spreading the disease, but not before seven of my classmates and my favorite teacher from the fourth grade had been struck down. Now my best friend, Moira, was sick with it. And Father. Father was as sick as I’d ever seen someone be, his breathing sounding labored and wet, his lips a terrible shade of blue. I couldn’t bear to think we might lose him.

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” I said to Mother through the cotton face mask I wore.

  She nodded, but continued sitting in the straight-backed wooden chair by the narrow bed, holding Father’s hand as if she could will him back to health with her touch.

  “You have to think about the baby,” I said.

  Mother had just that morning told me she was pregnant, but it’d been obvious for a while now. I was excited about finally having a little brother or sister but was old enough to know that if she got sick, it could harm the little being growing inside her. Over the years, she’d lost three babies before they were born—a girl, a boy, and one too early to know what it would have been. She’d told Father the good news, but he’d just shivered in his fever and moaned, not understanding her words. Mother’s eyes had filled up with tears, but she’d quickly wiped them away, swept a few stray hairs—the same chestnut color as mine—back from her face, and got on with her nursing.

  Down the hall, our Irish setter, Molly, started barking crazily. She only barked like that at strangers, and I couldn’t imagine who could be approaching—not with the big red quarantine signs nailed to the front door and placed in every window that faced the Strand or the empty lots on each side of our house. Not that many people were at the beach this time of year anyway. Only something like three or four thousand people lived in Hermosa Beach year round, and with the flu raging most were staying indoors as much as possible. We wouldn’t be at the beach house now ourselves, normally. We came only in the summer, but Mother had brought us here now, in November, thinking the sea air would help Father recover faster.

  She started to rise, but I said, “I’ll go,” and headed for the door, pulling down my face mask and saying, “Hush, Molly. Hush.” But Molly wouldn’t. She kept jumping toward the door, barking and snarling, her red hackles sticking up high. Through the milk-glass panes of the front door I saw a man standing patiently on the wide wooden porch, seemingly oblivious to the dog barking furiously on the other side. I grabbed Molly by the collar and made her go into the parlor. I shut the door on her but her barking didn’t subside. She couldn’t see the man anymore, but I suppose she could smell him or maybe she’d just worked herself into such a tizzy that she couldn’t shut it down. All that barking was bound to upset Mother and likely Father, too, since it seemed loud enough to penetrate even the deepest delirium.

  I opened the front door a crack and peeked out. Looking past the man, I saw that no one was out on the Strand on this chilly winter day, and the beach immediately beyond was deserted. A cold wind blew past me, and I shivered.

  The man waiting on the porch was the most average person I’d ever seen: average height and weight, mouse-brown hair cut short, and a clean-shaven, ordinary face. He wore a good wool suit and vest, and a gray felt hat. He carried a small black-leather satchel. The only thing outstanding about him was his eyes. They were the shocking clear blue of the Pacific Ocean on the best of days.

  “Excuse me one moment, please,” I said through the crack and shut the door.

  “Where are your manners?” I said sharply to Molly and grabbed her collar again. She didn’t want to go, but I hauled her down the hall and through the kitchen at the rear of the house to the back door. I opened the door with one hand and pushed Molly into the fenced back yard with the other.

  The man bowed when I opened the door fully, and said, “Good morning. I am Dr. Gremhahn. I’ve been told that your father is ill. I can cure him.”

  “That’s a very bold statement,” I said, glancing at his satchel. It was much smaller than the one Father carried to see his patients.

  He quirked his head but kept his expression serious. “You are quite bold yourself, for a girl of—?”

  “Fourteen,” I said.

  He raised his eyebrows a touch at my answer but said, “Is your mother at home? I’d like to speak with her.”

  I left him standing on the porch and started back toward Father’s room. Before I got halfway there, the door opened and Mother came out, wiping her hands on the white apron with ruffles all around that she wore over her dark-blue housedress. Her face mask, like mine, now dangled around her throat.

  “There’s a man at the door who says he can cure Papa,” I said, keeping my voice low.

  Mother’s eyes widened but she said only, “I’ll speak with him. Go sit with your father, please.”

  Father was covered in sweat again when I sat down next to his bed. He must have been dreaming about something horrible, because he moaned and rolled back and forth in his sleep. I took his hand in mine. It was thin and boney, not like the strong hands I remembered from before he went to the war and came home, only to get sick. He never should have gone—he was too old—but they were desperate for doctors over there and he never could le
ave anyone to suffer. I pulled the washrag from the water, wrung it out and laid it on his forehead. This seemed to soothe him, and he was resting easier by the time Mother and the gentleman entered the room.

  The gentleman was either confident or crazy, since he wore no covering over his nose and mouth. Mother had pulled hers up over the bottom half of her face, as had I.

  “Thank you, Cassie,” Mother said, dismissing me.

  I went to the door, opened and closed it, then squeezed myself up tight against the wall so I could watch. Mother and the doctor were much too focused on Father to notice me there.

  The doctor felt Father’s forehead with the back of his hand and then held his wrist to take his pulse. He leaned over close to Father’s face and inhaled a great breath of Father’s raspy exhalation, drawing it into himself, then twisted his head a little, the way someone might when trying to make sense of something he’d just learned. He straightened up, nodded once, and reached into his bag.

  I leaned forward hoping to see what was in his small bag, but couldn’t from my place by the wall.

  He drew out a glass bottle filled with a golden liquid, carefully removed the stopper and dribbled a few drops between Father’s parted lips, all the while muttering words I couldn’t understand but didn’t think were English. He sprinkled more drops up and down Father’s fevered body, taking care to spill several drops on Father’s wrists and ankles. The doctor stood and I thought he was done. But it seemed he wasn’t, because he leaned over Father again, putting his ear up near Father’s mouth this time, and cupped his hand the way people do when they are trying to hear something faint.

  Mother kept her eyes on him as if he were both the most fascinating and most worrisome thing she’d ever seen. I thought that if the gentleman made a wrong move, Mother might bean him with the washbasin.

  He took another small flask from his bag—this one silver, a small version of the type in which some men kept alcohol. I saw Mother stiffen when she glimpsed it, but she didn’t put out a hand to stay the gentleman nor say anything to him. I watched as the doctor upended the silver flask, poured some clear liquid onto his fingers and then ran those fingers over Father’s forehead, making little wavy lines on his skin. The doctor poured a small amount on a spot between Father’s eyebrows just above his nose, and, finally, some on his mouth.

  Father sighed and licked his parched lips, his tongue gathering the drops and taking them in. The doctor sat still, watching Father, waiting for something, I thought, then nodded as though satisfied.

  “Change those sheets,” the doctor said, and he rose and strode from the room. “And open those windows.”

  Mother shot me a harsh look when she spied me standing against the wall, but all she said as she followed the man out was, “Will you have some tea?”

  “Thank you,” the doctor said. “It will sweeten the discussion of payment.”

  Oh, here it comes, I thought, but thought too that this doctor didn’t know my mother. She would never fall for some snake-oil charlatan’s demand for high payment. She might give him a dollar or two, but no more, I was sure of that. If he insisted, she might give him a slap upside the head before sending him on his way.

  “Of course,” the doctor said, “nothing is due until I have proven my worth by restoring your husband to full health.”

  I settled in the chair next to Father’s bed and laid the back of my hand on his forehead, just as I’d seen the doctor do. It seemed to me he wasn’t as burning hot as he’d been before, and his lips were less blue.

  In the morning, just as the doctor had promised, Father was up and around as if he’d never been sick at all. But there was something different about him—a thing I couldn’t put a name to. Something not right.

  One

  Hermosa Beach, California

  July 1923

  Father had gone into town to see his patients. He seemed to do this more now than in years past, and to stay later and later, often not getting home until after I was asleep and leaving again right after breakfast. Mother had gone up to Morse and Morse, the grocers, leaving me to watch baby James. It would have been an easier job if he had still been a baby, but he was a mad, tousle-haired boy in the Fearsome Fours. Chasing after him around the house, stopping him from pulling poor old Molly’s tail, or yanking the tablecloth, rattling the dishes set out for dinner, and causing the candlesticks to fall over was exhausting. Tablecloth-yanking was his latest invention, and it seem to please him beyond measure to watch me dive to catch whatever was about to hit the floor. He never did it around Mother or Father. He saved this trick for when it was just the two of us. Brat.

  I scooped him up in my arms. “Come on, Jimmy. Let’s go outside for a bit.” He squirmed and kicked, but it was only for form. He loved being outside, seeing the people strolling up and down the Strand and out on the beach. He loved digging in the sand, gathering shells, and running along the waterline. I think he loved the beach nearly as much as I did.

  There were plenty of people out today—finally summer and the sun like a big egg yolk in the blue-blue sky. Large beach umbrellas in various colors, set so close together they overlapped one another, covered the narrow stretch of sand between the Strand and the water. I glanced up Santa Fe Avenue as we passed by and saw it was stuffed full of cars. People came from as far away as Pasadena and the San Fernando Valley to enjoy the cooling air at the shore. Men and boys in short pants and women in short-sleeved or even sleeveless bathing costumes happily strolled the narrow Strand, crowded the beach, or played in the gentle surf. The smell of salt mixed with the tangy aroma of hot dogs and sauerkraut or pretzels from the vendor’s rolling carts filled the air.

  We’d been here a week already and would stay until the end of August. My friend Moira, who’d survived the flu, was coming in two days to stay with us until we went back to the big house in Los Angeles. I could hardly wait. I preferred the beach house over the big house—loved the coziness of it and the nearness of the sea—but I missed my friends while we were here.

  Jimmy might have been only four, but he weighed thirty-five pounds. My arms were beginning to ache from carrying him, but I knew that the moment I set him down he’d scoot away. We’d passed the Berth Hotel at Tenth and the Strand, a six-block walk from our house, and were coming up on the bowling alley when I just couldn’t carry him anymore.

  “I’m going to put you down,” I said. “Don’t run off. Take my hand, okay? We’ll go down under the pier.”

  Jimmy nodded solemnly, but I saw mischief in his eyes.

  The moment I set him down and reached for his hand, he bolted toward the water. I chased after him, calling his name, and caught him by the arm before he’d gotten too far.

  Another hand had seized Jimmy’s other arm, and I looked up. It’d been more than four years and I’d seen him only that one time, but I knew him in an instant—the doctor who’d saved my father.

  “Hello,” he said, letting go of Jimmy’s arm and ruffling my brother’s hair. “Do you remember me?”

  “Yes, Sir,” I said. He was wearing a different suit, every bit as fine and well-cut as the one he’d worn the day he came to our house, but out of place among the beachgoers.

  He nodded as if rewarding me for having given the right answer. “Are your parents at home?”

  “Not at the moment, Sir,” I said, “but they should be home shortly.”

  He nodded again, then crouched down to Jimmy’s level and smiled at him, his eyes scanning Jimmy’s face as though seeking something specific.

  “This is my brother, James,” I said. “He wasn’t born when you came to help my father.”

  The doctor looked up. “Oh, I know who this is. I’ve been looking forward to meeting him.”

  A chill ran through me—odd on such a hot day. Had the gentleman spied on us? Jimmy, being Jimmy, was tugging at my arm, wanting to go to the water, even as the gentleman seemed to be memorizing my brother’s face. I half expected him to suddenly turn out to be a gypsy and pronounce
on Jimmy’s future.

  “If you’ll excuse us,” I said. “Shall I tell my parents we saw you?”

  He stood up and said, “Yes, thank you. Tell them I will be by tonight. There’s still the matter of payment due.”

  I turned and watched as he strode away, Jimmy pulling my arm the other direction, toward the water. It wasn’t like Mother or Father to not pay a bill when first presented. Maybe the doctor had never presented his bill. That was possible.

  “Come on,” Jimmy whined, yanking at my arm with all his four-year-old strength. I gave in and we walked down to the shore.

  *

  Mother’s scream tore me from a sound sleep. Thin morning light filtered through the pull-down shade and lace curtains in my bedroom. I glanced at the clock on the dresser: 6:25. I threw off the sheet and ran barefoot toward Father’s bedroom, thinking something must have happened to him, that he fell or was sick again, something horrible to make Mother shriek like that. I realized her scream had come from the nursery just as Father threw open his door and raced down the hall toward that room, with me right on his heels.

  Mother stood by Jimmy’s little bed, her mouth open, sucking in noisy breaths. Her eyes were open wide but she was blinking, too, over and over. Father shouldered her aside a bit and they both stood and stared at the bed, blocking my view.

  Dead. Jimmy must be dead. Babies died unexpectedly often enough that everyone knew some family it had happened to. Tears sprang to my eyes. I crept up and peeked.

  The bed was empty.

  “Papa? Mama?”

  They seemed to spring back to wakefulness at my words.

  “Call the police,” Mother said, but Father was already halfway across the room before she’d even spoken, heading for the kitchen butler’s pantry, where we kept our telephone.

  I slipped my hand into Mother’s and asked in a small voice, so as not to make her more upset than she already was, “What happened? Where’s Jimmy?”