Imperfect Birds (14 page)

Then the movie cuts to the glade where the family is waking up, and Jof, the dad, is having one of his visions that makes his wife think he is nuts, he’s seeing the dance on the hillside at dawn, Death leading the way, and the Fool at the end. And then it’s all over; thank you, Jesus. Rosie and Elizabeth sat there together in the dark for a very long time. It was the most terrifying, terrible movie Rosie had ever seen, but people were going, “Oh my God, so great, so great,” and blah blah, and Rosie felt like she should never smoke dope again, in case she got trapped in memories of the people with boils and thirst and plague, and Death’s face.

“Talk to me, Mommy,” Rosie said like a little child.

“Let’s go get cocoa at the Roastery,” her mother said, and they got up in the dark. Rosie wanted to take her hand but couldn’t risk any of her friends’ seeing her outside the theater. There was no one else in the Roastery but an anorexic girl Rosie knew from school, who was getting coffee to go, and a drifter you saw around town sometimes who always wore a floppy hat, so she and her mother had nicknamed him Gilligan. He was someone the kids could shoulder-tap if they needed someone to buy for them. He jutted out his jaw in greeting.

They went to the counter and ordered bowls of lentil soup. Rosie was basically a vegetarian now, except for bacon and occasional beef jerky. They sat at a table by the window and stirred their soup while it cooled.

“That girl looks like a skeleton,” Elizabeth said. “Like someone from the movie.”

“She is. She weighs in the eighties now. Also, she throws up. She’s so great at it, she can throw up silently into a Coke can.”

Elizabeth drew back. “Jesus. Well, everyone is good at something, right?”

“Why did you make me see that movie? It totally freaked me out.”

“Oh, baby, I’m sorry. It’s considered one of the great movies of all time.”

“Yeah, but maybe a little bit of a downer?”

“It isn’t to me. I mean, granted, it’s not
Yellow Submarine
.” Rosie smiled into her soup, and blew on a spoonful. “Greatness and truth are exhilarating,” Elizabeth added.

“Yeah, but the truth in it is like, ‘It’s all decay, end of the world, shoot me now, dude.’ ”

“Yeah, that was an awful time. It felt like the end of the world to them. I know what that feels like.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, like when your dad died.”

Rosie stirred her soup. After a minute she nodded. Then she turned her head around at the sound of the door opening. In came shaggy sun-streaked hair and tan muscles. She didn’t recognize him for a second, because he wasn’t wearing his wire-rimmed glasses, but it was Fenn. She looked back at her soup. Would he remember her? And then, impossibly, he came to their table, and said her name. Rosie said hey and looked up, but now he was smiling at Elizabeth.

“I saw you guys at the movie,” he said. “Pretty great, yeah?” He smelled so male, like sea salt and leather seats, like gunpowder must smell, like the astronauts said moondust did.

Rosie shook her head with amazement. “Yes,” she agreed. “It had . . .” she struggled for the right word. “Truth, and greatness,” she said finally. She and her mother exchanged a blank look.

“Hey, how’s that soup?” he asked.

“Delicious,” said Rosie, and then added boldly, “Want a taste?” He raised his eyebrows with pleased surprise and she handed him her spoon. He reached into her bowl, God, he smelled so delicious, and raised a spoonful to his lips.

“Oh, that is good,” he said, and then called out to the girl behind the counter. “Hey, I’d like a large soup to go, and extra bread.” He turned back to them.

“How many times have you seen it?” he asked Elizabeth.

“Four, maybe? I first saw it with my father when I was Rosie’s age. How about you?”

“Two or three.”

“Can you join us for soup?” Elizabeth asked, and Rosie wanted to die. She wanted him to stay, but he said he had to be someplace.

“I just popped my head in the door to say hey, ’cause you were one row in front of me. Then that soup smelled so good. I was surprised to see you there, Rosie.”

“Why?” She looked up at him, tilting her head with shy petulance, not knowing whether he had insulted her or not.

“You were the youngest person by far. I couldn’t have seen it at sixteen.”

“Seventeen.”

“Sorry. Still, I was afraid of death at seventeen. I didn’t like it—but the fact of death does not have to be the fear of death. I mean, that’s the hope in the movie.”

“Exactly,” Rosie said.

He turned back to Elizabeth. “I’m Fenn.”

“Elizabeth. I like what you just said. If your time is up, there’s no loophole—no amount of cleverness, prestige, no piety. And this is what we live with. Death in the movie is like the world’s greatest teacher, or grandparent—he’s very matter-of-fact. No bullshit, kind of tickled by everyone’s efforts to avoid him, but also somehow decent. Tired, but tireless. He has his job. He’s there, and you come.”

Fenn looked stunned. “Wow,” he said. “Nice to meet you.” He smiled and shook his head. “Are you a teacher or something?”

Rosie swelled with pride. Way to go, Mom. You knocked it out of the ballpark. Then Fenn bowed good-bye. Rosie watched him go, mournful with interest. Come back! His jeans hung off his hip bones.

Elizabeth watched her watch him go. Rosie was not breathing.

“Why are you staring at me, Mom?” You got so sick of having people stare at you all the time. She crossed her arms against her chest.

“I just love you, Rosie. And you’re so pretty.” Rosie hated grown-ups’ eyes on her. This was why she had so many pictures of eyes on her walls, rock star eyes, animal eyes, the eyes of God or angels, because you got to choose what was looking at you, for once in your life, instead of being stared at by perverty men or your mother. Rosie scowled. Her mother was looking at her like a fawn. But Fenn had been impressed by what she’d said. Like, maybe it would be cool to have a mother more like Jody’s mom, Sarah, so self-assured, who could keep a good job and defend her kid against attackers. But this was kind of amazing, too, her mother talking like one of your really great teachers.

“Tell me more about the movie, Mama. I have like fifteen minutes.”

“Well, I’m honored, Your Majesty. It’s very dark, obviously, but half of life is night. And it is only because he is being pursued by Death that the knight finds and saves the little family, and it reconnects him with innocence, and what is worth fighting or living for: goodness. Once again, after having been nearly destroyed in the Crusade, he starts to experience the triumph of being alive. And besides, Rosie, what are we left with at the end? What does Jof see, after his vision of the
Totentanz
, the dance of death? The baby, the dawn, the birds.”

She’d forgotten how different Rosie could be in public, although Rae had been telling her this, how the armor came off and with it the dark energy, the indirect gazes and blankness. Tonight they walked out of the café shoulder to shoulder, like girlfriends. When Rosie was a block away, she turned and waved good-bye to her mother like a child.

The good news was that James was home from the city by the time Elizabeth got back from the movie. The bad news was that he was already at work on a new piece someone at the studio had suggested, and couldn’t listen to her story about Rosie and the movie right away. “No, no, don’t write,” she protested, caressing his head from behind as he sat at his desk. “I have so much to tell you.” He grabbed her arms and kissed both hands.

“I missed you!” he said. “But give me half an hour. I have to get these notes down before I forget.” He never used to say this when he was working on his novel—he’d always been glad for interruptions then. She missed that time. No one could take from him what he had then, because it was so meager, and no one wanted it, the hard work for so little pay, the domestic peace and pleasures he’d mustered. But now there were several people in his life who could destroy his sense of self with the merest criticism or indifference. “Half an hour, darling,” he said, and kissed her good-bye.

James was right: the new job was the biggest thing that had ever happened for him. She wasn’t even employable. So she cuddled with Rascal on the bed. A siren blew and in a split second her heart tripped over its own feet and her head filled with a slide show of Rosie in danger, an ambulance, or a stranger’s van, the windows steamed up, an evil ugly man inside. She couldn’t breathe, and then scenes from the movie dropped into the frenzied hole of a panic attack, and she tried to straighten it all out, to quiet and comfort herself, but she felt anxious and strange.

She burst back into James’s office. He looked up from his computer. “I’m sorry to interrupt,” she said. “But I’m having an episode. And I’m so lonely.” He got up and said it was really okay, and came to stand beside her, and when she told him about the bad van, he made the simple sounds of comfort, no real human words, gentle moans, like during sex, or as to a child who has banged her knee, with lots of ellipses in between. It was like music, his holding her, and the soft moans; certain chords got struck again, and she held on for dear life, and the song she hadn’t heard in so long resounded, and standing together hanging their heads by his office window, they could hear the same tune again.

L
ank sat beside James on the cushions of the Fergusons’ old couch.

Their shoulders touched. James’s eyes moved from person to person, door to door, through the bay window into their front yard, straining toward every creak and house noise like a bodyguard. Moonlight caught the bare skin of Lank’s soft crown. His dark eyes were hooded and his lips pursed, like a man weighing his options. Elizabeth and Rae had pulled up chairs. Rae alone had been crying.

A yearbook from Lank’s school sat on the coffee table, opened to the pages of the Journalism Club, of which he was the advisor, where in a photo nine young people looked up from a layout table where they were composing the weekly high school newspaper.

The boy in the photo with the Giants baseball cap, Jack Herman, had died early this morning in a car crash. He had graduated last year and finished two semesters at Cal. Amelia, the Goth girl, had suffered a spinal cord injury. They had left a party in the Valley after police broke it up. Melanie Hertz, who was now in jail, had brought a baggie of Ecstasy to the party. The parents of the kid having the party had paid for a keg, to keep him off the road. The cops allowed the kids to drive home unless they were clearly drunk, in which case parents were called. Jack and Amelia had gone over the back fence, laughing, urging others to join them, but no one had. They had crashed into a tree as they came around White’s Hill, a mile from town.

“There’s one almost every year,” Lank said. “So stupid. He had everything: great parents, a marvelous mind, Amelia. He was the funniest kid I ever taught. Everyone liked him. His father had season tickets to the Niners. And yet partying with friends in the countryside, under the moon, smoking weed that costs what teachers make in a week, something beckoned him, promised more, a little more fun, a little more power, and he followed.”

James shook his head, sighed, continued his vigilant scan of the room. Elizabeth poured herself another cup of tea from the pot James had brewed, and stared into it as if to read her future.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Thinking,” she replied. “In the old days, this would have been the perfect excuse for us all to get sloshed. I wish Rosie would check in soon.”

The phone rang just then, startling them into small laughs. Elizabeth got up to answer it.

“Hello?” she said softly. “Hi, darling.” She could tell Rosie knew about Jack and Amelia. “Oh, baby. Where are you?” She heard Rosie breathe, sniffle, sigh.

“Out at Jody’s aunt’s house.”

“Are you?” Elizabeth bit her tongue, silent for a moment, pissed off but wanting to appear sensitive. “You didn’t ask if you could go to the beach tonight.”

“Mama, cut me some slack. A kid died. Someone a lot of us knew.”

“He was one of Lank’s students. He and Rae are here. Did you know him?”

“Not well. But I knew her—she’s at the same fashion design institute where Alice wants to go. She’ll never walk again, Mama.” Silence. “Some kids knew them both. We’re all sitting around. Vivian made us grilled cheese sandwiches. We’re safe and sound here and need to be together. Do you understand?”

“Of course I do, darling. But you still need to be home by curfew.”

“No, no, not tonight, Mom. Let me come home later. Or stay here overnight—Jody and Alice are . . .”

Elizabeth almost caved in, hating to make her daughter unhappy, hating to defy her and risk her wrath. But if she said yes, then she would live in fear of Rosie’s being out all night with other traumatized teenagers. “No,” she made herself say. “I want you home by one. I need you to be in your own bed.”