Crooked Little Heart (36 page)

“I
NEED
to tell you a secret, Simone,” Rosie said, standing in the doorway of Simone’s bedroom. There had never been and never would be a messier place than this room. Even Rosie’s looked relatively together compared to Simone’s. It was so bad that it was almost scary, especially when you tried to imagine the person who lived here having a baby. A baby could get lost in here, starve to death under a pile of tube tops. “I can’t tell you here,” said Rosie. “We need to be outside.”

The girls rode their bikes up to the site of the old Miwok Indian village. Now the area was mostly covered with houses, but there was still one side of a low hill that the town had preserved where nothing could be built; in the summer and fall the younger children still slid all the way down the hill on their butts, using sides of cardboard boxes like sleds. Charles used to bring her up here when she was little, and while she slid down the hill, he would find arrowheads and spearheads made of obsidian and scrapers made of antlers that the Indians used to clean the hides of deer and rabbit. He had found a whistle made of bone once but had given it to the museum.

Rosie got off her bike and sat with her back against an old oak tree, gnarled, battered and scarred as if it had been hit by lightning. The leaves were brown now in the summer, round and itchy looking, like moths. The Miwoks practically used to live on mush made out of mashed acorns. Rosie believed that she would have made a poor Indian; she did not actually even like oatmeal or Cream of Wheat. Also, she did not think it was playing fair to use scrapers made from antlers to clean deer hide. She spread her knees so she could study the clearing of soft dirt in front of her. She looked over at Simone, who was using her round belly as a worktable at which she was weaving a tiny pot holder of pine needles.

“So say it,” said Simone. “Say what the secret is.”

“I can’t.”

“What could be worse than what I did? Slutty old me?” Rosie gaped at Simone, surprised. Simone crinkled up her nose at Rosie, the way she did at boys sometime, and Rosie looked down. She began to fashion a village in the clearing for the little ants who were scurrying about,
a mound of grass and flower petals for the ant children to use as a haystack, a pile of pebbles for cannonballs, a raft made of sticks on which to float down the river.

“What I did was the worst thing an athlete can do.”

Simone was silent at first; they could hear the shrill chirp of crickets in the afternoon heat.

“You’ll feel better if you just say it.”

Pedal and steer, pedal and steer; who would be holding on?

“Simone?”

“Uh-huh? Uh-huh, Rosie?”

“There were some matches this summer, when the people I was playing—Deb Hall once, Marisa DeMay—well, a few others, too, and they hit shots on really important points, like four games all, deuce, where if you won the game, you’d probably win the set. And even though I know you’re supposed to give your opponent the benefit of the doubt, I didn’t. I mean, all I did was to call these incredibly close shots—I mean incredibly close shots—out, when maybe there was a tiny chance that they were in. And I was sure, I was almost sure they were out—but you know, once or twice the girls acted like I was cheating them.”

“Well, that’s just ridiculous. I know you would never cheat, Rosie.”

“Well, the girls think I cheated.”

“That’s none of your business what the other girls think. That’s what my mother always says. It’s just your business what you think.”

“Yeah?”

Simone nodded. Rosie was buzzing inside with anxiety. She squinted at Simone for a moment.

“Simone?”

“Uh-huh.”

“I think I did cheat.”

Simone scowled. “Oh, Rosie. You didn’t cheat. That’s ridiculous. I’m your
part
ner. Just stop that.”

Rosie opened her mouth, about to respond, and then she closed it again and dropped her head back so she could stare up through the ladder of branches above them. There were so many branches and so many leaves that a dozen feet up everything blurred and you could almost believe that the treetop disappeared into the clouds like a beanstalk.

“Does your mom know?” Simone asked after a while, as she wiped at her eyes with the back of her hands.

“Not yet. Hey. Why’re you crying?”

“Because I’m sad. And because it’s so great to not be the only person who messed up. It’s not so bad as when it’s just you.”

Rosie thought this over, nodded.

“Hey, Simone?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you think you still like me the same?”

“Like you mean before you told me?”

“Yeah.”

“I know I do. But I don’t actually think you cheated.”

An ant walked into a rose petal and then, like a little windup bumper doll, turned and scurried in another direction. “Simone,” Rosie said firmly. “I did.” She nodded, so Simone could see how solemn and true she was being. “
I
know just what I did, Simone, and I knew then, too. I could see their balls were in. They bounced in and they were so close and the point was so important to me right that second that I called them out.” She raised her shoulders to her ears in a slow shrug, took a long deep breath, and another. Simone looked at her like she was crazy at first, and then awe widened Simone’s face, and Rosie knew that Simone was beginning to believe her.

Rosie reached forward and began gathering up all the parts of her village, the grasses, the pebbles, the petals, the little black ants running all over; she gathered it all in the center as if for a giant bonfire. She had a strange feeling of calm, of balance, even as her heart raced. Her whole face was wreathed in apology, in shyness and shame, but she also felt something inside her, patient, attentive, wild, alert, like a wolf who was not hungry, who was not going to hurt anyone.

T
HAT
evening James came into Elizabeth’s corner at the window seat and sat down at the far end.

“Is Rae okay?”

“Oh, yeah, sort of. She’s going to try and cancel Mike.”

“And you?”

“I’m kind of a mess, and I’m also okay. How about you?”

“I’m lonely—I’m missing you and I’m missing me. I’ll tell you what
I’m missing most, Elizabeth. I always feel that you know what’s important to me and that you will catch me when I fall. But if you don’t know what’s important to me, then how will you know when I’m falling?”

“I’m falling too, though, James.”

“But you mostly don’t act like it. That’s why I think it’s so hard for me to figure out what to do. You have us—me and Rosie and Rae and even Lank. You take care of us. You save us.”

“But who’s going to save me?”

“We are. I am. But I don’t know what to save you from.” She reached out to stroke his face and he closed his eyes. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

She did not feel that anything had changed, but she was glad for his warmth, for his kind attention. He wanted to crawl into her, she could tell, flooded with relief as he was to be on friendly terms again. Sex was the handy way to do it, the punctuation that says, We’ve come through this again. It wasn’t erotic so much as driven by something more mammalian, or maybe more marsupial. She relaxed into his body, and they began making love for comfort, not looking for the transports of sex where you want to lose yourself in the ether of it all. What they wanted was to find each other again and, in doing so, find themselves. Narcotized though she was by the sex and reconciliation, Elizabeth bolted awake from a dream at daybreak. In the endless silence of the neighborhood and the house, she felt weighed down by a blanket of dread and the sense that someone else was there, lurking in the corners, hidden in the blue-gray morning light of the bedroom. James was asleep beside her, but she looked around, gazing at the smoky shadows. She thought she felt Andrew’s presence, a gentle ghost the color of rain, standing out in its lightness against the obscurity of the dawn. But then she felt the shape grow murky, change from tall and straight to stooped, and she knew then that it was Luther who had been in the room, if only in her dream.

She saw him leaning against a windowpane, stubbing out a cigarette in the soil of a potted ivy on the windowsill. She could smell the smoke, watched him give her a crooked smile, like he knew something important he wasn’t going to share.

She realized with a start that she’d never actually seen him indoors. He was always outside; what need had he ever had to be inside? She
squeezed her eyes closed to shut him out, but saw him anyway peering down from above, as if he’d really been there, watching her sleep. Now she suddenly wasn’t sure who it was, this phantom, this man who was in their house. Was it Luther, was it Andrew? She wanted the phantom to come back, wanted to see Andrew again, and she opened her eyes to the morning’s first light. And in that light she understood that she had been dreaming of Luther.

She could almost see him still, could pick up the dream where she’d left off; she felt him turn and walk away in his well-tended raggedness. Who was stitching up the tears in his clothes for him, who did his darning? She noticed his hands hanging at his sides as he moved away. They were dirty, as if he’d been digging, and he moved with an inexorable slowness that was somehow chilling, for it suggested that he could be moving quickly if he chose.

H
ALLIE
called the next day, the morning after Rosie and Simone came home from San Mateo with runner-up trophies in doubles. They had lost in straight sets to Deb Hall and Sue Atterbury. They had beaten Deb and Sue twice so far and lost twice. They were tied now for the number one ranking. Rosie was furious; Simone had played the worst tennis of the year, now that she was fatter and sluggish in the heat. On top of this, she had been alternately weepy and mean. So Elizabeth watched Rosie take the phone call from Hallie, sullen, withholding, pigeon-toed, not saying much. Then she began to melt, laughing at something Hallie said, then looking up at Elizabeth and rolling her eyes to show she wasn’t really buying it. Elizabeth went to the kitchen to give her some privacy; after a while Rosie came in.

“Can I go over to Hallie’s today?”

“Yeah, I guess so. If that’s what you want to do. Do you need a lift?”

“No. I’ll ride my bike.”

Sometime later Elizabeth watched her pedal off, and then she went out to work in the garden, full of foreboding. That goddamn trampoline. Why, after all that Rosie had survived—nearly drowning in the river, all those hours spent on freeways getting to tournaments, all those hours with Luther’s eyes on her—did she need to risk breaking her neck at play?

Elizabeth got to her feet, wanting to rush to Hallie’s house, drag Rosie home with her, keep her safe. Boing, boing boing, she heard, the springs straining away from the horizontal frame with each bounce on the canvas. And she knew she was nuts, that this was compulsion and therefore about something else, but she didn’t know what. She went inside and looked up Hallie’s number.

“Hello, Marilyn,” she said when Hallie’s mother answered. “This is Elizabeth. Just checking in. How are the girls doing?”

“I can see them from here. It’s just Hallie and Rosie today. They’re having a ball. Rosie’s on the trampoline right now—whoa!”

“What?”

“She just did a back flip. All right!”

“How on earth did she know how to do a back flip?” This was how the little girl in
Life
magazine broke her neck thirty-five years ago.

“Well, she’s very athletic obviously, and Hallie must have taught her. Whoa!!”

“What!!”

“She just did another.”

“Marilyn? Has anyone ever gotten hurt on your trampoline?”

“Not badly.”

E
LIZABETH
, miserable on the couch, wondered if this was what it was going to be like when Rosie started driving. Would Elizabeth sit on the couch every night imagining her daughter dead? Maybe, she considered, she could practice living with the uncertainty. So she breathed quietly, listening. A loud motor: someone in the neighborhood was mowing the lawn; and after a minute Elizabeth’s chin was nodding up and down, as if off in the distance she heard, “Boing, boing boing.”

Elizabeth got her purse, fished out her keys, and went to the car. “This is crazy,” she said but turned on the ignition and put the car in gear. Ten minutes later she screeched up outside Hallie’s house and heard the springs and creaks of the trampoline as soon as she opened her car door. She went through the gate and followed the brick path around to the backyard, where her daughter was jumping five feet up in the air with each bounce, up against the cloudy blue sky, the lattice gate covered with ivy behind her. Elizabeth had not seen this much pure joy on Rosie’s face since she was a little girl swinging in the park, and she knew her child was safe here. She saw that all these years she could have been jumping with her, risking life and limb for those ecstatic moments. Pain washed over her out of the blue. And then Rosie flipped forward, too high, misjudging, landing on her feet two inches from the edge of the canvas and onto the springs. Hallie screamed, with laughter in her voice, but right away Rosie regained her balance:
boing boing boing. And then Rosie saw Elizabeth, and her face grew dark and puzzled.