Imperfect Birds (19 page)

They managed to sleep for a few hours, then lay in the dark, resting their eyes. The dawn was light gold above the tree line. By the time they went to pick Rosie up at the station, the golden border was gone.

R
osie sat hunched over a table in a small room behind the front desk, and Elizabeth watched her for a moment through the window in the door. Her long arms were crossed, eyes opaque with disbelief. “Look at her,” James whispered. Rosie looked up at them, and then slowly down at her watch with a hint of a smirk—she was not going to show anyone much of anything in this public place. “As if we all work for an airline, and her flight has been delayed,” he said. A police officer led them in.

“Rosie,” Elizabeth called, but Rosie didn’t seem to hear.

“Rosie!” James said sharply, and she looked up slowly.

“I hear you,” she said. “The whole town can hear you. Can we just go, please?”

“Listen, you don’t get it, do you, baby?” he asked. “You’re in a fuck of a lot of trouble.” Rosie looked away with contemptuous amusement, as if he were delusional. He seethed. Elizabeth stepped between the two of them.

“We are not bringing charges this time,” the officer told James and Elizabeth. He turned to Rosie: “But next time we catch you with dope or alcohol, I will throw you in juvie so fast you won’t know what hit you. We’ll be watching for you.” He shot James a knowing glance.

Rosie considered his words, as if he were a waiter at her table reciting the specials of the day. “Okay,” she said slowly, as if he had talked her into the lasagna.

The officer advanced upon her. “Listen, miss,” he said quietly. “I will be god
damned
if some snotty-nosed stoner high school kids are going to burn down our beautiful hills. I see you so much as smoking a cigarette in an open space again . . .”

Elizabeth wanted simultaneously to fling herself at his legs and pull him off her daughter, and to choke Rosie with her bare hands. In her corner Rosie seemed to have decided that the service at this joint sucked. She got to her feet and walked out the door, head held high.

I
n the car, she let herself fall apart, crying, spewing out rage and accusation: How on
earth
could they betray her like this, leave her there for hours in that piss hole; what the hell good did they think that would do? Did Elizabeth
ever
think about anyone but herself? Did James even have a clue what it was like to be a real parent? Did it matter to them at all that they had turned her into someone who
had
to lie, just to have the semblance of a life, and not be treated like a baby? It was stupid bad
luck
, for God’s sake, that the cop had grabbed her and not the other kids. She hadn’t even done anything wrong.

Horrible James didn’t say anything, and he looked like he might start humming. He had learned this at his meetings—Rosie realized that she was now the gorilla in the cage he had to stay away from. Her mother cried daintily, like a little old lady. They made her sick. In her core she felt a deep fury and a rage for freedom.

A cold calm descended, all at once, like there was hard glass inside her. She knew she was scary, and that this immobilized them. Rosie smiled.

By the time they got home, the rift was so big that it scared even her. Where could they go from here? No way would they let her out today. “Go to your room,” said James, reading her mind. “You’re grounded forever.”

She lay in the dark on her bed, listening to music. Nothing could capture the feelings inside except Axl Rose and Bob Dylan. She played them as loud as she could without risking a warning—her parents were turning into old neighbors who hassled the young—or a visit. Worst of all would have been a real conversation.

She began to open drawers, her hamper, and handbags, and raged as she discovered they’d taken almost everything; they’d raped and pillaged the room. She sat on the floor and fumed, breathing hard like she’d been running. Everywhere she looked, her stuff had been taken. She whipped open her tennis racket case to find the rum missing. Then she looked in the well of a marble-based pen-and-pencil set, a trophy for winning the state doubles tournament in San Jose, and found a plastic bag that earrings had come in—thank God they had not found her stash of Ecstasy. She and Alice had gotten it at a rave in Oakland, a while ago, before summer began. The memory lifted her spirits. An older woman—maybe in her thirties—had brought her little boy, in his one-piece sleeper, although he must have been at least seven already; it was decorated with rave glow spots, white plastic cut-outs that the black light would catch, the M&M’s logo on each one. Maybe the mother thought he would blend in, like a prop or the gigantic peanut M&M’s decorations. Rosie had played with the boy for a while in a corner, even though she was stoned out of her mind, had taken two tabs at once because she had been taking it too much and had a little tolerance going. That was why she had quit E.

She dozed. When she woke up, she found that her mother had left a tray of kindergarten food on her bedside table—peanut butter and jelly on wheatberry bread, cranberry juice and carrot sticks, Oreos and an apple. She didn’t want to be in this abyss. The first time she saw her mother come in, as the sun sank beneath her windowsill, she turned to the wall, and said, “I have nothing to say to you.”

The second time her mother came by, Rosie was blubbering like a baby, partly out of exhaustion and fear, but also so her mother would comfort her, hold her quietly, promise it would all be okay. She wanted her mother to save them both, so she could get on with what she had been doing, with her wonderful grown-up life—Jody and Alice and the guys they hung with, lying on the sand at the beach, lying on the golden grass in the hills. What, was there a law now, you couldn’t smoke outside?

They were all so careful, the kids she knew. They would never start a fire. She missed Robert and Rae and the kids at the church, the little ones, her bucket kids, whom she pulled around on the lawn in the big plastic tub, singing their funny songs and screaming every time they hit a bump.

She was starving to death by dinnertime, but when Elizabeth came in to get her, she claimed not to be hungry. This usually freaked her mother out, but tonight she did not try to change Rosie’s mind. Rosie heard her footsteps recede down the hall.

“Wait a sec, what’s for dinner?” she called after her, but James answered.

“Bread and water.”

R
obert and she had a lesson tomorrow—they had to let her out by then, or she would lose all respect for them both. Jailers!

But the next day at one, Elizabeth drove her to the courts, waved in the friendliest way to Robert, as if from a float, and said she’d pick Rosie up an hour and fifteen minutes later. The fifteen minutes was to prove how serene Elizabeth was.

Elizabeth got a cup of coffee at the KerryDas Café while waiting, and took it to the steps of the Parkade. Townspeople went about their business in every direction you looked, walking in and out of stores before her, getting gas at the station to her left, lining up with little kids for the last big matinee of the summer, heading to their cars in the parking lagoon behind her. Some of the town’s delinquents and no-hopers and high school kids milled around the Parkade, Rosie’s peers, younger or a few years older. Among them were two who had had nervous breakdowns, one out of nowhere her first month in college, one after massive amphetamine use at Santa Cruz. They milled in groups at the bottom of the stairs, in the bus kiosk, in the steps in front of the theater, making themselves villages of commerce and knowledge and sulk. Otherwise, they would feel small and ridiculous. Please God, even though I don’t believe, please, if you are there, don’t let Rosie end up here next year, Elizabeth prayed.

She studied the amulets hanging from their necks, the earrings, the wife-beaters, the strange caps that kept them warm and signified how different they were. How did the younger kids get such extensive tattoos, snakes slithering up their necks, dragons fanning out across their chests? It was illegal in California, even with parental authority; they must be the prison tattoos you could make with pens and heated wire guitar strings. Don’t let my scrawny muscles confuse you—see how dangerous I am, with my piercings and jail tats.

The coffee was warm and milky, and woke her up. The mountain behind the town shone with woolly green expansiveness like Oz. A man walked up alongside her on the steps and said hello, and it took her a moment to recognize Fenn. He greeted her as if they were friends. God, he was sweet. The young blonde woman he was with had African-pierced ears, with plugs that stretched her lobes to the size of dimes, and as the three of them made small talk, Elizabeth tried not to stare.

Elizabeth tugged at her own earlobe. “Did that hurt?” she asked. The girl shook her head.

“Not at all.”

The earrings brought to mind watch batteries, or hearing aids.

“Are you interested?” Fenn asked, smiling. Elizabeth shook her head hurriedly, no no no. “ ’Cause we can plug you into our connection.”

Elizabeth looked shyly into her lap. “I don’t really understand the concept of most piercings, I’m afraid, or tattoos.”

When she raised her head to meet his eyes, he said, “It’s about finding openings.”

After Fenn left, she said to an imagined listener: I don’t believe in you, but please don’t let Rosie get those earrings; or any neck tattoos; or AIDS. Also, help her not fry her mind. Oh, one more tiny thing: Could you please help keep her alive, and not have a spinal cord injury, like Amelia the Goth girl? Thank you: that would be great.

B
y dinnertime, James had arranged on the table everything they’d found in Rosie’s room, like a holiday centerpiece, including a bottle Jody and Claude had asked her to hold for them, that she had maybe had a few hits from, and the Percocet she said she’d stolen from James. Why, why, her mother kept asking, and Rosie wanted to shout at her what Rae always said. That “Why?” was not a useful question.