Crooked Little Heart (25 page)

Rosie felt wild on the inside, jazzed, like she was on something, although the only thing she had ever been on was a cup of Veronica’s leftover coffee, lukewarm with lots of cream and sugar.

When they caught up with Simone, she wasn’t crying, but mascara was smeared like shadows below her eyes. “I’m going to have an abortion in a couple of weeks,” she said. “I think.” Rosie put her arms around her. They hugged for a long time, while Natalie got in the car and reached over to unlock the passenger door. When Rosie had climbed into the back seat and Simone into the front, Natalie reached into her purse for something and handed it to Simone. It was a hundred-dollar bill.

“I got it for graduation,” she said.

“I have eighty-seven,” said Rosie.

They both looked at Simone. “I have thirty,” she said.

“We’re halfway there,” said Natalie. “We’ll get the rest.”

“Do you have to tell your mom? Does she have to sign—like—a permission slip?”

“Rosie, duh. You don’t get permission slips for abortions.”

“Ask Jason for two hundred,” said Natalie.

S
OMEHOW
Jason got the money a few days later. Simone called Rosie to tell her in a whisper one morning, and Rosie felt her heart sink with disappointment. She felt ashamed and dirty to admit it, but she was mad at Simone for lying and saying she hadn’t gone all the way, for making it seem like if the guy only put it in an inch, it didn’t count as going all the way. Rosie had finally figured it out. Simone had gotten drunk and
gone all the way
. And they could never again be as close as they had been. There was something more important to her than Rosie, their friendship, and their tennis life together. Now Rosie was like this little kid with skinny little legs, and Simone
was
half like a woman. Simone had crossed over. And Rosie felt she should be punished. Natalie had crossed over too. She was on the same side of the river as Simone. They should both be punished. Rosie was standing on the bank alone, a warty river gnome.

So Rosie rode her bike into town with Simone to meet Jason in front of the pharmacy on the boardwalk. The girls got off their bikes and sat waiting on a wooden bench. There were flower boxes everywhere, with geraniums and every color of impatiens. You could see the mountain, the slope of the Indian maiden’s breast. Jason had said he’d be there at two, and Rosie imagined him getting out of his dad’s car, walking into Simone’s arms, telling her how sorry he was that he couldn’t be there, but he loved her and would call. And they would embrace like newlyweds, while Rosie sat on the wooden bench, acting vaguely bored while they kissed passionately, and she would stare at the mountain and watch the fog roll in. But people came and went in a parade of tanned faces, well-dressed little children, mothers mostly in tennis clothes but a few in business suits, men mostly in suits but a few in tennis clothes, teenagers on bikes and skateboards. Finally Simone asked someone the time. It was 2:35, and she turned to Rosie, looking like a dog you’re playing a trick on with hidden cheese, and a moment later Jason’s tennis partner, Mark Evers, pulled up on a mountain bike. “Hi!” said Simone. “Is Jason with you?” Mark shook his head. He was
trying to be cool, but his eyes looked fearful or angry. He reached into the back pocket of his perfectly faded jeans and took out a folded-up envelope. Simone cocked her head and peered into his face.

“Isn’t Jason coming?” she asked.

He flung the envelope at her, but she was too surprised to catch it. It fluttered to the ground like a paper airplane and landed at her feet. She bent forward to study it, as if something alive had fallen from the sky. Rosie looked into Mark’s sharp brown face, and before her very eyes, his face softened.

“Pick it up, Simone,” he said, but she didn’t.

“Where’s Jason?” she asked in a scared, small voice. Mark sighed, got off his bike, lay it on the ground, and retrieved the envelope. “Here,” he said, not unkindly. Rosie’s heart pounded in her ears. After a long moment, Simone took it out of his hand. Mark stared down at his sneakers and then looked over his shoulder. Simone started to say something but stopped. Rosie watched Mark get back on his bike and whip the handlebars around, as though he were riding off on a horse.

“Could you tell him to call me?” Simone asked, and Mark said sure, and pedaled away without looking back.

O
N
the seventh of July, James celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday, and they decided to spend the day at the Russian River—James and Elizabeth, Rosie, Rae, and Lank. Simone and her mother were out of town for the weekend. Rosie had been out in the garden all morning weeding; she charged her mother four dollars an hour and had been working a lot all week. She was apparently saving for something.

James came into the kitchen and kissed the back of Elizabeth’s neck as she stood at the counter making sandwiches. He kissed the top of Rae’s head as she sat at the table stuffing celery sticks with cream cheese. She sang him happy birthday. He bowed and went to the freezer for an ice cream sandwich. He held one out to Elizabeth, who shook her head, and to Rae, who drew back, a vampire recoiling from the cross.

“Please, James. I feel like a pike today. Before they gefilte it.”

“So whom were we talking about?”

“I’m sort of interested in this guy at the gallery.”

“Is he available? Is he straight? Does he speak English?”

“I don’t know. We went for coffee, but I didn’t end up knowing all that much about his circumstances. But clearly he adores me.”

“Well, we like that,” he said and handed her the ice cream sandwich he was working on. She absently began to groom the borders with her tongue. “Did you ask him if you could come over and watch him dance in the shower?” Rae shook her head. “Isn’t that what you usually ask on a first date?”

Rae nodded happily and handed the ice cream sandwich back to him. She had brought a paper plate of homemade meringues flecked with dark chocolate, because it was James’s birthday and because Rosie
had always especially loved them. But when Rosie finally lumbered in and slid down into Rae’s lap, wearing the remains of a pair of cutoffs, a tank top, and a Giants cap, she looked askance at the meringues, as though they were laced with strychnine. Her fingernails were ringed with black crescent moons of soil from the garden. She finally picked out a meringue and ate it in tiny bites. Elizabeth, at the cutting board, opened her mouth like a baby bird, closed it for a moment to make peeping sounds, and Rosie got up, ambled over, and put the last bite on her mother’s tongue like a host.

L
ANK
was standing on the grass outside his house when they pulled up a while later. The sun shone directly on his bald spot, which was surrounded by lovely reddish hair. There was so much forehead now, smooth as a baby’s; it gave him a gentle look. His eyes were closed and his head was bowed as if he were hearing the national anthem. But when they honked, he looked up, clutched his heart with passion, and walked with his arms outstretched toward James in the driver’s seat.

R
OSIE
sat between Lank and Rae all the way up to the river, her knees drawn up because of the hump; she wore a headset, listening to rap music. She could feel their sides and shoulders against her, and Rae’s thigh. Rae smelled like soap, Lank faintly of dog. Rosie wished they could have brought Bruno. He loved to chase sticks even if you tossed them way out into the river. Lank called him his Adirondack-log dog. She would rather have had a dog to play with instead of all the grownups. She hadn’t slept very much the night before. She’d lain there in the dark filled with visions of handsome boys taking her face in their hands to kiss, or leading her out to the dance floor, looking back over their shoulders at her as she walked in slow motion in their wake. Half the night she’d watched matches in her head, rallies she had memorized without meaning to and rallies that might happen one day—endless, deep, hard, heroic. Whenever she saw one of the rallies in which she’d cheated, she blinked hard until a new rally began. The rest of the time she thought about Simone. She tried to imagine Simone having sex, and she thought about the abortion Simone was going to have in five more days, the details of the procedure as Simone had described
them to her—the rod with the suction vacuuming out the little blob of stuff. They almost had enough money now, with Natalie’s hundred, Jason’s two, the money Rosie and Simone already had, a hundred or so they had earned since. Rosie remembered last summer when she and Simone were saving to go to Marine World.

Finally near dawn she had drifted in and out of sleep, into an altered state that felt like she kept entering the chambers of an insect’s eye, those dark bejeweled catacombs. And then she would lounge there, dozing in those burrows, until she jerked back awake.

In the car on the way to the river, she heard the grown-ups talking about Charles, and she turned up the volume on her Walkman and watched the passing view—the dairy farms and golden fields and oak trees on either side of the highway and then the vineyards. When she turned it down sometime later, they were talking about politics, so she turned the volume back up. The next time she turned it down, she heard Lank telling a story over the sound of the rap. She listened like a spy.

“It was one of those dates that was life scarring. These mutual friends of ours thought we were made for each other. ‘Hey, yeah, they both like to read! That’ll work!’ We’re both single, almost the same age, and they tell me how great she is. She’s supposedly got this glorious black mane of hair. Her name’s Gloria, right? They make her sound like the best thing since beer in cans. And she’s got a voice on the phone that makes you want to rush over and start licking her. So I arrange to pick her up at her house. I drive over, full of hope and expectation, and she opens the door, and I almost gasp—‘No,’ I want to scream, ‘no, no—where’s the woman I was talking to on the phone, with the velvet voice?’ Well, she opens her mouth, and it’s her. ‘Hiii,’ she says softly, and I swear to God, I think about faking a heart attack, about falling to my knees and grabbing for my chest: ‘Oh, Jesus, Jesus, my heart—no, don’t call 911, I’ll be okay; I just have to get back to my car. I’ll crawl, I’ll crawl, I’m fine.’ ”

“What did you do?” asked James.

“I said, ‘How nice to meet you, Gloria. Gee, you have a glossy coat.’ ”

Elizabeth turned to give Rae a look of disgust. “Imagine what they would say if we weren’t here.”

“Men are pigs,” said Rae. Lank smiled.

“Look at James and me,” said Elizabeth. “I was looking for someone my height or taller. I was looking for David Niven. Or at any rate I had a picture in my mind, and it did not include chipped teeth and polyester shirts and smoking and Einstein hair.”

“I don’t wear polyester anymore.”

“I know you don’t, darling. All I meant is that you did not exactly fit the fantasy I’d been carrying around my whole life of a Ken doll grown up. I mean, by the same token, I don’t think you were looking for a tall drunk, with a kid and a dead husband and no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up.”

James smiled at her. “Right?” she asked. He shrugged. He wore white T-shirts and Levi’s these days. But now they were the kind cut for slightly older men, with extra room for a bigger belly and butt, and he seemed to be somewhat offended by the accuracy of the fit.

T
HE
river was wide, gray green nearest the shore, deeper and darker little by little until the water on the other side, reflecting the overhung trees and bushes, glowed jewel green. Elizabeth studied the wall of redwoods that towered above a lower wall of willows and bay and buckeye trees, ash and sycamore. An osprey hovered overhead. The water was striped by beams of light, dotted with children in inflatable rubber ducks, grown-ups in black inner tubes floating lazily along. Redwoods rose straight as sentries all along the low hills that framed the river, behind and above every bend, row after row in both directions, like mirrors full of trees reflecting mirrors full of trees.

Elizabeth stretched out on one of the woven mats Rae had brought, and after a minute, Rosie lay down beside her, on her side with her back facing Elizabeth so that even through the baggy clothes her hipbones and shoulder blades jutted. Elizabeth rubbed her back, tracing the bony lines of her girl’s developing body. There were rented green-and-white beach umbrellas everywhere, shading a middle-class crowd of families and bikers, retirees, burnouts. She heard James and Lank talking together on another mat, splashes and cries from the river, dogs barking, sticks being thrown and retrieved, a breeze, babies, bugs. Rae was asking if anyone wanted something to drink, and Elizabeth shook her head and inhaled her daughter’s smells—those doggy feet in the first moments out of their shoes but her hair just
washed. It would never cease to amaze her that she had given birth to such a creature, who once nearly ten years ago had been wading here at this very spot with her father. Rosie in underpants, four years old, thirty-five pounds of bird bone and ringlets and blue Siamese eyes, standing in a radiant shaft of sun, right where the water seemed to change from gray green to the dark emerald. Andrew was not even ten feet away, in the darker band of river. Rosie had waved to her mother, taking one more step toward a bouquet of trees on the shore directly behind her, lit by the same beam that made her look like a vision, and then suddenly she was gone—in the literal blink of an eye, vanished. Andrew’s eyes had veered away for just a moment, toward some canoers, until Elizabeth started screaming. He sloshed through the water toward the flat still surface of the river where his daughter had stood moments before, halfway between the two shores. He started pulling up empty handfuls of water while Elizabeth splashed toward where he stood. They gathered armfuls of water to them, crying for others to please help them, please, please, and after a minute or so, Andrew’s arms drew Rosie up and out of the water—Rosie blue and still. They bounded to the dirt beach, Elizabeth keening behind them, Andrew breathing into Rosie’s mouth as he ran with her to shore. And then the miracle happened. Rosie threw up water, gagging, choking, breathing.