Room for Two Stars

On pancake mornings, Ava cracked the eggs and Carmen caught the shells. Flour got on the counter, on the floor, and somehow on Ava's ear.

They made one pancake shaped like a duck and one shaped like nothing at all. Carmen laughed her big laugh, the one you can hear from the hallway. The whole morning belonged to them.

Then, on a Tuesday, in the soft part of the afternoon, the front door opened and everybody came in talking very quietly. Coats stayed on the hooks. Bags stayed on the floor.

Luis carried a car seat with both hands like it held something breakable, and inside the car seat was a bundle. The bundle was Diego. Ava stood to one side and watched.

When they set the car seat down on the living room rug, Ava knelt and leaned in close. Diego was smaller than she expected. He had tiny fingernails, thinner than paper.

He was asleep, and he stayed asleep, and he did not seem to notice her at all. She looked at him for a long time and decided she had no idea what she thought yet.

After that, the house got busier. A bottle warmed in a pan on the stove. Laundry climbed into towers on the table. Diego rode around on somebody's shoulder, day and night.

Carmen said, "Show me in a minute, mija," and she meant it. Luis started sentences and forgot the ends of them. Nobody was cross. Everybody was just holding something already.

Ava had drawn a rocket with three windows and a dog inside. She held it up. Carmen was rocking Diego with her back to the room, humming the slow hum that makes babies close their eyes.

Ava waited. She held the drawing higher, then not so high. Then she let her arm come down, and the rocket hung by her knee.

That evening she sat on the stairs where the carpet is soft, chin on her knees, and looked down at the hallway light. From up there she could see everybody's shoulders and nobody's face.

It was strange. She had not gone anywhere, and the house was full of people who loved her, and she still felt like something left over on a shelf.

Later she crawled under the kitchen table and put the rocket drawing face-down beside her. Feet went past. The kettle clicked. Somebody said the word bath twice. Ava counted the crumbs near the table leg.

There was no word for how it felt, exactly. It was a bit like being small, and a bit like being invisible, and she did not like either one.

She woke in the middle of the night, and the house was doing nothing at all. No bottle, no humming, no feet. Ava got out of bed and walked down the hallway with one hand on the wall, her bare toes finding the cold parts of the floor. Ahead of her, the window at the end poured a pale silver stripe across the boards.

She climbed onto the window seat, put both hands flat on the glass, and looked up. The sky went on and on above the rooftops, deep as ink, and it was absolutely crowded with stars.

Hundreds. Thousands. Far more than anyone could ever count. Ava breathed on the glass and watched the little cloud of it disappear.

She tipped her head right back. Stars on top of stars, big ones and pinprick ones and faint milky smudges of stars so far away they had gone soft.

The sky had been collecting them for ages and it had never once said, sorry, we're full. It just kept making room.

Then Ava found two stars close together, almost touching, near the top corner of the window. One was bigger and warm gold, the kind that was clearly there first.

The other was small and silver and brand new, as if it had only just been switched on. She looked at them for a long while. She did not say anything out loud.

The gold one had been shining for ages and ages. It knew how the sky worked. It knew where the dark bits were and how to fill them.

And the little silver one, so new it wobbled, was catching that gold light on its side and learning what a star is supposed to do.

After a minute the small one was properly glowing, all on its own, right there beside the big one. Neither of them dimmed.

The sky held them both, steady and wide, and it was not even slightly crowded. Ava pressed her forehead on the cold glass and thought: oh.

In the morning she found things only she could do. She knew that Diego stops crying for the song about the little boat, but not the one about the bus.

She could hear him waking up before anyone else in the whole house. She stood on her tiptoes by the cot and rested one hand on his blanket, and Diego went quiet, because he knew her.

Then Ava cut a star out of paper, gold on one side, silver on the other, and she wrote her name very small on the back. Nobody asked her to.

She laid it in the cot next to Diego, where he would see it when he opened his eyes. Behind her, Carmen and Luis stood in the doorway and did not say a word, only watched.

That night the four of them piled onto the big bed by the window, with the stars out behind the glass. Luis held Diego. Carmen held Ava, one arm right around her, the good tight kind.

"You know what," Carmen said. "You were the first light in this house, and you still are. There is room for both of you. There always was. "

Ava leaned her head on Carmen's shoulder and looked down at her brother, who was, as usual, fast asleep. His fingernails really were incredibly tiny.

She thought he would probably be quite good company in about four years. For now, she was the one who knew his songs, and that was a job worth having.