Imperfect Birds (16 page)

Rosie couldn’t focus right away. “God!” she snapped. “Get away!”

“Were you? I’ll go buy a Breathalyzer if you won’t tell me the truth.”

She had been urged to buy one, along with some home urine tests, by a counselor who addressed the junior class parents. And she had certainly meant to buy both, and definitely would now, later today. Rosie sat up.

“After we left Jody’s aunt’s last night, we stopped by the Roastery, with a girl Alice knew, a girl who went out with Jack freshman year. And the girl had a half-pint of tequila. So we all sat outside for a while, and we all had a couple of sips—that was all there was! A half-pint, for four of us. I had like, two big sips. That’s all.”

“It shouldn’t smell this strong if you only had two sips.”

Rosie threw her hands up, exasperated, disgusted. “Fine, don’t believe me. Call Vivian.”

Elizabeth was glaring at her, huffing.

“Mama, maybe you’re just extremely sensitive to it, because you don’t drink anymore. Remember how you thought Rae had been drinking that time, and it was just polymers from her wrinkle lotion?”

Elizabeth looked away. Then she sank to the bed. “Could you please do only a little bit of everything, and not get in trouble with it, and live to be eighteen, and not scare me to death? Very often? Please please please?”

“I don’t do much of anything, Mommy. Come here.” Rosie patted the space next to her on the bed. Elizabeth stretched out beside her. Rascal came to stand on her chest, treading as if she were his mother and he a kitten.

“Love can be so painful,” Elizabeth said, grimacing each time he flexed. Rosie watched her out of the corner of her eye. Then she slid a blanket between her mother’s chest and the cat’s claws. Rascal continued treading, eyes closed, drooling. “Are you teaching tennis today, darling?”

“Yeah. I told you, at two. And then church at four, to help set up.”

“I’ll see you there. Rae thinks a lot more people may come for the salt ceremony, because of the accident. People need to cry together. She and I are going to cook all afternoon.”

E
lizabeth wandered around the house, exhausted in part from having had to get up when Rosie had finally gotten home, and partly because of her antidepressants. Some days they left her feeling logy and too mellow. Yet at the same time, her stomach was often filled with butterflies. She wanted to experiment with taking just half a dose every day. She should tell James or Rae that she was having this thought. Or even her psychiatrist, come to think of it. But they really didn’t have the money. An hour with the shrink cost what James made at his radio job every week. So she went to an AA meeting at noon instead.

A young businessman in his mid-thirties was the speaker, with a wild story of alcohol and coke, involving violence, crazed spending, jail for public displays, and two overdoses. It was hard to believe—he looked so Ivy League. When he was finished with his story, he chose service as his topic for discussion, and when no one raised a hand, he volunteered that every morning when he took his psychiatric medication, he knew he’d done his community service for the day.

Elizabeth went up afterward and thanked him profusely for saying that.

R
obert was late for their lesson, but Rosie had tucked a copy of
Waiting for Godot
into her racket cover and stretched out to read in the grass beside the tennis courts. She pretended to focus as she turned the pages, chewing on the ragged nail of her baby finger. But she couldn’t stop thinking about Amelia, now imprisoned in a frozen body. She had called Robert to see if he wanted to cancel his lesson, and he had all but begged her to meet him at the courts, saying he had never needed a work-out so badly. Her heart wheeled around inside like it was on a tricycle.

Her feelings puzzled her. There was definitely something between them. Alice, who was the best at understanding guys, said that if you thought there was something going on between you and a guy, there was. It wasn’t like Jody and Claude; more like when Stuart Little falls in love with the beautiful two-inch Harriet Ames, and buys a souvenir birch-bark canoe in which to take her rowing at twilight: love in an old-fashioned way. She would try to love Robert from afar. He kind of seemed to love her, for her mind—the only A student in her physics class—and for helping him to get so good at tennis; and the looks on his face when they talked about stuff like
The Seventh Seal
and literature made him seem entranced. She thought about him more and more these days, in a deeper way than when you have a crush.

She yelped when he sat down beside her, and felt herself turn red. Raising one hand to her chest, she said, “You startled me!” She gave him a look of mock aggravation, then crossed her arms.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sitting down. “I thought you saw me walking here. You were lost in your book.”

“It’s okay.” She was still lying down, using the log as a headrest and pillow. He sat with his back against it. Her long brown legs stretched out before them. She sat up, and they both swiveled so that they faced each other, and he asked her if she knew anything more about Jack and Amelia, and she told him there had been Ecstasy at the party, that Melanie Hertz was in jail.

He shook his head. “Melanie Hertz is a wonderful kid. She’s a honeybee. There’s a funeral at St. Patrick’s on Sunday,” he said. “Are you going?”

“I didn’t really know him,” she said. “We’re doing a grief ceremony at Sixth Day Prez this afternoon, if you or anyone wants to come. At five.”

After a while he said, “Can we just sit here by the creek?” She nodded. Neither spoke. Time fluttered in the glade where they sat. There was still some water in the creek, making a soothing, clean burbling murmur.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked.

She didn’t answer right away. His eyes were as big and almond-shaped as Rae’s. She liked how serious he was. She dipped her head shyly and said, “Jack.”

The energy, sorrowful and close, was now stretched taut between them like a fishing line. He looked so sad that she almost reached out to touch him, like you would anyone who looked in such distress.

“Tell me about the creek,” he said.

“What?” She had no idea what he meant. “I don’t know.”

Neither of them spoke for a moment. “I guess,” she said, “a creek is like the rush of my thoughts.” Oh no, it sounded like the first line of a little kid’s poem. “But because the brook keeps moving forward—unlike my snaggy, plugged-up thoughts—it smooths me out.”

“It washes out the roar of rushing, tumbling thoughts,” he said.

“Exactly.”

He fished a wadded-up handkerchief out of his pocket and handed it to her. She wiped at her eyes, and held the handkerchief to her nose to inhale all his smells, and the sweet, sticky child smells, too.

“Let’s get up and hit for half an hour,” he said, and she didn’t want to, she wanted to sit with him by the creek, but he gave her shoulders a squeeze, stood, and handed her a twenty-dollar bill.

E
lizabeth and Rae made rice, black beans, corn bread, and salad with lettuce from Elizabeth’s garden, for a large crowd. People had heard that there was a commemorative ceremony and somehow thought it was in honor of Jack and Amelia, and that was to some extent what it had become, since that was the community’s most immediate shared sorrow. Rae had brought ten avocados, but they wouldn’t cut them up to add to the salad until the last minute. She and Elizabeth chopped tomatoes and onions and cilantro for the salsa while they talked about the same old things they always talked about, politics, periods, sex, books they were reading, books that they were reminded of by mention of these books. They washed lettuce and talked about Jack, Amelia, their bodies, Rosie, Lank, and James.

“Jack is this year’s sacrificial lamb,” Elizabeth said. “Half of the kids are drinking and using, driving badly, way too fast, while lighting up or fiddling with the radio. And almost every year, the gods seem to come and collect. Or the devil does. I don’t know how these things work. But it feels like a bored evil is hanging around town, waiting for one false move.”

“My understanding is not that there’s a devil outside, prowling Pali Park or the Parkade. But that there’s something inside that’s always bored, that beckons us, knowing what it is we each want most desperately. And adolescents have fewer defenses.”

“Do you think that we’re wired this way? With the devil inside?”

“Yeah, in the same way we’re wired for God. But not to the same extent. I think it’s tiny, and insidious. Like hairline cracks that let in the water that shatters the rock.”

R
everend Anthony and Rosie had filled the sanctuary with candles, flowers, and origami cranes from the origami crane ministry, and every chair the church owned, which was sixty. Anthony asked the fifty or so younger people to please sit on the floor or stand, and he began with a prayer that the fire marshal not show. Even the people who were crying laughed.

Rosie couldn’t believe how good her own mother looked. Maybe it was the light, or the solemn occasion. Other girls from her class were there with their mothers, and the mothers seemed sort of frumpy and stressed, even bottle blondes and brunettes. Elizabeth’s hair did not seem as gray and mussed as usual, but frosted, casual, confident. Her mother was actually a fine- looking woman, as Jody’s soldier, Claude, had said after meeting her. She was wearing black linen pants, a dove-gray blouse, a bamboo-patterned Japanese scarf, and shoes that did not for once make you want to die or join the government witness protection program.

She smelled delicious—that was her best quality—of soap and baking. Rosie felt proud standing beside her, and wished desperately to be a better child. No matter what happened from now on, she was going to stop lying so much.

Anthony wore the clerical dashiki of wine red and green and gold that he wore when he presided over unusually joyful or tragic gatherings. Rae was at the altar holding a small bowl of salt. She winked at Rosie. She always looked so great, in comfortable flowing clothes, cool accessories, an elegantly messy bun.