Crooked Little Heart (13 page)

R
OSIE
did not think her mother was doing very well this spring, and it filled her with a deep concern. Her mother seemed more distracted, sadder. She seemed to be looking around all the time, like you do when you first hear the drone of approaching mosquitoes or planes. She kept this to herself for as long as she could. Then, late in the afternoon on the first really hot Saturday of the year, when Veronica was out dancing at Stinson Beach, playing with her grown-up friends under the hot chalky sun, Rosie discovered her mother lying in bed beneath plain white sheets. The curtains were drawn, and her mother’s face looked as though all the parts that were juicy and alive were gone. When Rosie asked, from the doorway, if she was sick, she said no, no, she was just having a bad day.

Rosie did not want to go into the dark lonely bedroom. She remained at the door trying to figure out what to do.

“Want me to open the curtains?” she asked. Elizabeth shook her head. “You sure?” Elizabeth nodded. Rosie frowned. “Where’s James?”

“He’s taping his radio spot in the city.”

“Mommy,” Rosie implored after a moment of silence. “Veronica put on a tie-dyed dress and went out to Stinson
Beach. Danc
ing.” Her mother rubbed her eyes wearily. Rosie scowled and looked to the ceiling for help. “What could have happened, Mommy, that’s so bad you have to go to bed?” She walked slowly into the dark still room and sat down on the bed. She felt for her mother’s long skinny shin under the top sheet. “You weren’t depressed at breakfast.”

“I stood up Charles,” Elizabeth said finally. “While you were gone. His nurse just called a little while ago to remind me that I was supposed to have come for a visit this morning.”

“God, Mom. Lighten up. I’ll go visit Charles later—I’ll ride my bike over, okay? And James always says we appreciate mistakes in this family. Right?” Elizabeth nodded. “Right, Mommy?” Elizabeth closed her eyes. Rosie sat calmly beside her for a moment, smelling the stale air of the bedroom. She watched her mother for a moment, staring at her unseen eyes. She imagined herself a hypnotist, able to command her mother in perfect silence to get out of bed, to wake from the trance, put bright floral sheets on the bed, and get up and cook. She rubbed her mother’s slender hand until Elizabeth opened her eyes. Rosie looked at her sternly; then, wearing a look of wounded virtue, she got up off the bed and went to open the curtains, the way you would for someone who was lying in bed hungover—the way she used to in the old days. Below, the garden glowed with color. “Here’s what I think we should do,” she continued from the window. “I’ll go visit Charles today; you can go by tomorrow. I think maybe you should get up, put on something nice, and go garden.” She felt bossy and slightly foolish, but she also felt that she was doing the right thing. So she turned away from her mother’s amused gaze, threw open the windows, and with her shoulders thrown back, chest puffed out like Patton’s, she took a noisy breath of the fresh air that wafted in.

E
LIZABETH
sat outside, working in the garden in the late afternoon sun. There was a lot to do, a lot of cutting back and weeding, cutting off dead heads in the rosebushes. You need a garden you can fuss with, she thought. Otherwise, what is the point of having a garden? She studied an outrageous bearded iris, white with a purple border, breathed in the musky perfume of her antique roses, traced the geometric pattern of a fern with a dirty finger, these ferns like exotic doilies. She smiled at her poppies that grew pell-mell near the fence. Leave us alone, she imagined them saying, we’ll be fine.

She stared off into space, missing James. One good thing came as a result of his first book’s good press: a gig on the local public radio station, a five-minute essay once a month on any topic of his choosing. There were drawbacks, the main one being that he had to work with a difficult producer, whose name was Mel. Also, the three-page essays usually took a week to perfect. But they were bringing him a small following, and a few stations up the coast rebroadcast the show via satellite,
and besides, it paid two hundred dollars a shot. So he wrote his essays and some articles and book reviews for some magazines, while waiting for the stamina to begin a new novel.

Her azaleas came in colors from snow white to violet. She had read that the Japanese love azaleas, love the explosion of color, and that lots of Japanese gardens have very old azaleas in them. And therefore, Elizabeth thought, I respect azaleas, because the Japanese know things.

She loved her dark brown irises, so statuesque and velvety, like Eleanor Roosevelt. And she loved her reeds and bamboo and grasses—because this garden was not all about flowers; flowers fade.

But Elizabeth’s real love was and would always be her roses. Sometimes she came out and set up a folding chair, just to sit with them. She experienced a tremendous feeling of force from them, like a low hum or silent white noise—almost a sense of sitting in the middle of waves of rhythm and color. In the morning, wet, the garden felt crisp and clean and new, and in the afternoon, tired; like the rest of us, it had to get through the whole goddamn day. And toward dusk, you could actually feel the garden wind down.

She weeded around a perfect red rose called a Mr. Lincoln, thinking for a moment about how briefly he blooms and how that was one of his most beautiful qualities. And then she blinked, looking up, puzzled by movement across the street in Amy Haas’s empty old house—a blur on the porch, big as a human, disappearing around a corner.

She stared, craning her neck as if this would let her see around the corner, and after a moment she saw a hulking brown shape in the back of the house. Whatever or whoever it was appeared to be bent over at the waist. She couldn’t see well in the fading afternoon light, but she thought she saw someone dark or light brown step out like a shadow from behind a wall for the briefest moment, before disappearing again even deeper in the beams and scaffolding. And suddenly she thought, it’s Luther, stoop-shouldered lumbering Luther. That’s him across the street, watching. Fear flooded her, and she gaped at the deserted structure. Now there was no movement in the building, and—her mouth dry with anxiety—she stood stock-still wondering if she had been imagining things. But what if she had seen him, here, on their street, fifty yards from their home, watching?

She got up slowly, unsteady, not breathing, and went inside to watch from her kitchen window. But there was nothing. Now she was no longer sure. She stood there watching the silent empty house for over
half an hour. No one appeared. Licking her lips, pushing the hair away from her face, she stood watching vigilantly, telling herself she was crazy, but unable to pull herself away. She locked the front door and waited for someone to come home. When, after half an hour, no one had, she picked up Rosie’s racket and, holding it like a club, walked over to Amy Haas’s old house to investigate. There was no sign that anyone else had been there that day, unless it was a deer, for there were only long hoof marks in the new grass behind the house, in the green furring over of the yard.

R
OSIE
felt so clumsy and afraid sitting next to Charles while he slept. His nurse had been surprised to find her at the door and expressed dismay that because it was so late in the day, she didn’t know if he’d wake. But Rosie had thrust her bouquet of yellow tea roses at the nurse and gone in to sit by his bed.

She sat watching him sleep, trying to will him awake by the sheer force of her stare. He smelled so different since he got so sick—of medicines and alcohol, of old clothes like something from the as-is department of a secondhand store. Boy, talk about as-is, she thought, studying his face, his emaciated body under the blanket; he looked as torn and worn as some terrible tweed jacket Luther might wear in early spring, when it was still cool out. Charles seemed barely alive. He smelled like the stuff old people put their teeth in. He smelled like the inside of an electric shaver. He smelled like old hair and soap and toenails. Once she had spent the night here with him after Grace had died, and she had found his electric shaver plugged in to the socket next to the bathroom sink, but the top was off the metal shaver part, and she could see and smell his old hair inside the metal part, and she felt like she was spying on one of his most private places.

There was a plate of orange wedges on the little hospital table by his bed, oranges on an aqua blue saucer, and a number of memories popped into her head all at once, like bubbles—memories of going to the Petaluma dump with Charles all those times over the years, ever since he moved back to town and bought the old Ford pickup. They’d fill the back with garbage and magazines and head up to Petaluma. He liked to put country music on the radio for their dump runs. He drove slowly because he was old even then. It would just be the two of them. Who else would even have wanted to go? After driving on the freeway
for half an hour, they’d leave the main road that ran into Petaluma and head up the little two-lane through the woods that led to the bumpy dirt road that led to the dump. You could smell the sweet decay and smoke way before you got there, and Charles would roll down his window and look over at her with glee. “There it is, doll,” he would say, and they’d inhale it like it was fresh bread baking in the oven, smiling at each other, pantomiming delight. It was the smell of a thousand oranges going bad, a thousand oranges and always some smoke and something strange like ether or a combustible that the dump people must pour all over the garbage to get it to burn or to kill the little brown rats you’d see scuttling in and out of the piles of garbage. The guy at the booth would tell them where to pull in—or rather, where to back up the truck—and Charles would back up to the pit and get out slowly, the way he moved with a little arthritis and just generally being old and no spring chicken, as he was the first to say. And he’d open the back of the truck and he and Rosie would start pulling out stuff, pitching it down into the pit, working alongside other families who were doing the same thing; you’d see an ancient
Life
magazine go tumbling by, one you really wished you could look at, and an old Snoopy doll, or one old brown wing tip with mildew on the toes. There would always be all these odd people, besides the regular dumpers like her and Charles and the other families. The other people were like the dumpees; maybe they were vets or something, she wasn’t sure, but there were always all these mysterious people in Budweiser hats, like rag people who came out of nowhere to paw through all the stuff people were throwing out and load it into their own crummy dumpy cars. And the thing was, Charles would always stop and talk to everyone, like it was right after church, just the way her daddy used to talk to everyone when they’d walk into town together. Charles didn’t go to church very much. But he’d stop and admire something one of the rag people had salvaged, a hubcap or an old toaster, as if he were at the hardware store in Bayview, helping someone pick out just the right crescent wrench.

After a while she had to get up and take the plate of orange wedges out to the nurse, because the smell was making her feel too weird. “I don’t think he wants these,” she explained, handing the plate to the puzzled woman.

“Is he awake?” the nurse asked, with surprise.

Rosie looked helplessly into her face for a long moment. “No,” she
said finally. Shrugging, the nurse took the plate off to the kitchen without another word.

He slept the whole time she was there. She kept clearing her throat loudly, but at the same time she was secretly glad she could just watch him sleep, not have to try to think of things to say. She thought back to that first time he let go of her when she was riding her red two-wheeler and how when she turned back and found him waving to her, she was so afraid because she didn’t know how to turn the bike. She was sure that if she turned the wheels at all, the bike would fall over, so she slowed down as far as she could and kept on pedaling straight ahead, praying for there to be no cars in the crosswalk, which there weren’t, and finally she came to the cul-de-sac at the end of the street where she lived, and she braked gently and slowly turned the handlebars. It had felt like trying to turn a wagon train around, but she hadn’t fallen over.

E
LIZABETH
was walking across the street swinging Rosie’s racket and looking discouraged, as if she had just lost an important match, when Rosie came riding up on her bike. Rosie braked to a stop next to her mother and glared.

“What are you doing, Mama? Why do you have my racket?”

“I … I thought I saw someone hiding over at Amy’s house. I—”

“You were going to hit them on the head with my racket?” Rosie said incredulously. “Why didn’t you take James’s baseball bat? That costs like twenty bucks. And Mommy, if you see someone you think is a bad guy, you call the police. Don’t you even know
any
thing?” She pulled the racket roughly out of Elizabeth’s hand, pedaled across the street to their house, lay the bike on its side in the front yard, and stalked up the garden path, swatting at thin air.

R
OSIE
was so unpleasant at dinner that Elizabeth stopped feeling guilty about having gone to bed. James had gotten home from the city, where he had taped his essay for broadcast sometime the following week, and he had bought Thai takeout with part of the check Mel had given him. They talked about their days. Rosie told him about Charles, how he had slept all day, but she made sure not to include her mother in the conversation.

The food was all so delicious, pork with spinach and peanuts, pad Thai, chicken to dip into spicy sweet-and-sour sauce. Elizabeth savored each forkful, the friendliness of her husband’s voice. Rosie glumly pushed a bite of pork around on her plate with long slow strokes, as if mopping something up, but James and Elizabeth were so glad to see each other that they mostly just talked about nothing in particular.

“Can I come to the tournament with you tomorrow?” James asked Rosie. A tournament had started in Fremont, and Rosie wasn’t scheduled to play until the following day.