Imperfect Birds (24 page)

T
he next night, Elizabeth asked James to take a walk with her after dinner. They went out in T-shirts and rolled-up jeans. A glowing moon, still more than three-quarters of its disc illuminated, was ringed in a fuzzy corona. They held hands, walking under the branches of their neighbor’s persimmon tree.

“Rosie’s in such a good place tonight,” said Elizabeth. She was working up to the half-sentence blurt that there was something she needed to tell him, and she knew by now that she did. After leaving Lank yesterday and heading home for dinner, she had tried to convince herself that she was keeping the secret so as not to endanger her relationship with Rosie. It was draped in virtue: I’m doing it for others. But she admitted the truth to herself as she’d drifted to sleep in James’s arms. Keeping the secret was a kind of protection from her daughter’s wrath.

She took James’s hand under the moonlight and said again, “She’s in a good place.”

James was silent for a while. “Tick, tock, tick, tock.” This pissed her off, and she reconsidered telling him, but the imps inside were pushing out and through. He had noticed her preoccupation at dinner. “You seem far away,” he’d said, but she had shrugged it off. She hated to admit that it gave her the power of double-dealing, playing Rosie off James. Now, walking around with him, she tried to say the first words. “James?” she managed. So far so good. She almost said, “I’ve been keeping something from you,” but now he seemed distant, and at the same time, it was so lovely to be alone, holding hands, and she knew what he would say: “How could you!”—the mantra of the betrayed. Then, “We’re supposed to live in trust, Elizabeth, and you’ve dumped all over that.”

Then he began to talk. “Even though I get so angry with Rosie, I know things could be a whole lot worse—look at what other parents are going through. Some of these kids are total lushes already. I don’t actually think Rosie is. We need broader-spectrum tests than the ones you got—her eyes are clear most of the time, and she doesn’t smell boozy.” They both sighed loudly at the same time, and this made them laugh. “Hey, want to walk to the Parkade?” he asked. “At least we can see how much worse her scary little friends are doing. That’ll cheer us up.” Elizabeth poked him, and he laughed enthusiastically at his own awfulness.

They walked along for another five minutes, and came up the steps from the movie theater. At nine p.m., the Parkade was crawling with teenagers, some huddled in groups, plopped on various stairs, furtively peering out from the bus kiosk. There was a random milling quality, and yet a sense of cohesion and sanctuary. “I want to write a piece about this place,” James whispered. “Don’t tell Rosie.”

They knew many of the players tonight. Some of them had been friends of Rosie’s since kindergarten, in the school district she was in before they moved to Landsdale. Alexander, a friend of hers from kindergarten who’d moved to town a few years ago, stood leaning against a tree near the liquor store, a beautiful blond hippie boy now, the former Eagle Scout who was doing smack. The senior class lushes who had overdosed on alcohol and ended up in the emergency room.

Antonio Brooks, who was leaning against a car near the kiosk, and who had accepted a full basketball scholarship to Marquette, was said to be dealing hash oil. You baked it into brownies, or somehow smoked it using the tube of a Bic pen. It was hopeless: you could close every smoke shop in the county and the kids would still find a way to get high.

“What would the angle be, James?”

“Let’s sit here on the curb.” They lowered themselves, groaning. “I would go into the medieval-modern aspects of their lives, how they try to come off as nomads, from olden times, even though they’re rich kids with homes to go to, even when they’re wrapped in blankets for a few days. Maybe they stay out nights, and sleep in cars, but their homes are up the street. Some of them go too far, like Alexander, and become primitive, and dirty. The parents keep bailing them out. Setting new and lower standards.”

“How do you know all this?”

“The Al-Anon mothers tell me. The ones who are trying not to let their kids live at home when they’re using.”

“How on earth could you turn your child away, if he or she were suffering?”

“What if trying to save them was helping the kids stay sick? What if your help is not helpful?”

“Oh, stop, James. That’s dereliction.”

“Some of the older ones really are street people,” James said, ignoring her, pointing to an older boy who was obviously on a long-term brute course, a preppy caveman in a button-down shirt, with dread-locks and a slack mouth. “I know they are lost cases, and I feel for them and their families. But they buy beer for the kids—for
Rosie
.”

This was true. She recognized Fenn coming up the Roastery steps, stopping to talk to the young street guy with the floppy hat whom she and Rosie called Gilligan. “That’s a sweet guy—Fenn. We say hi to each other,” she said. He looked his usual sun-streaked self, shaggy but composed, in a button-down shirt, dark glasses tonight instead of the wire rims. He fished a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, handed it to Gilligan, then reached into his back pocket and took some cash out of his wallet.

“Oh my God, is this a drug deal?” James asked. But Fenn gave Gilligan a bill, gripped his shoulder like a politician, smiling, and took off down the steps.

“You’ve gone crazy, James. He’s helping out a street person.”

James continued to glare in Fenn’s general direction. Without answering, he pulled out his notebook and scribbled into it. She read what he had written: “Clusters of arrogant young people filled with self-loathing, sharing beliefs in a circular cage of parked cars, holding beliefs that make them feel safe, connected, guarded. Surfer Samaritan, or dealer?”

Elizabeth remembered herself at ten, still lonely and always worried, about how crazy her parents and the friends of theirs were scaring her half to death with their moist affection, their fights and crying, and the drunken end of their night dancing. She remembered how much time she’d spent alone in the backyard, setting up horse jumps with broom handles, being the jumper, being the horse. Blink, and she was twelve again, and she had huge breasts and boys ogled her, and men did, too, and shouted things to her from cars and construction sites; blink again and she would sleep with a teacher in high school, who would give her all the great books in the American canon, and with whom she would start drinking, and who she would feel had finally thrown on the lights for her.

After a while they got up and walked home, without Elizabeth’s telling him the secret.

J
ames started a draft for his Parkade piece that night. Rosie was on her bed with Rascal, reading Robertson Davies. She came in later to say good night to Elizabeth. Rosie smelled clean and delicious, and lay down beside her mother, burrowing. She had brought Rascal with her, and flicked lightly at his ears to pester him, and when he batted at them, Rosie and Elizabeth laughed; it was silvery and warm, heaven. “You didn’t tell James, did you, Mama?” Elizabeth shook her head.

“Thanks. That’s great.” Rosie sighed. “Hey, let’s get James a dog for Christmas.”

“I’ll get you a drug-sniffing dog, is what I’ll get you,” Elizabeth said in a menacing voice. Having a secret gave you a hit of power, a kind of self-esteem, and love was unleashed in her; love that had been dormant during the recent bad weeks flowed. It was like a magical opening: she and Rosie were learning to love and trust each other in a new way. Maybe it was an illusion, she thought, but hell, she would take it.

E
lizabeth was asleep when James finally came to bed, and when she woke up in the morning, he was already back at work. He’d left her a first draft on the kitchen table. It wasn’t good yet—there were too many details, and no ending in place. She did not like it when he needed her to read new material before he’d nailed it; so when she finished reading the draft, she only said it was going to be great.

“You hate it,” he said, which he always said.

“I love the material,” she responded, “but it’s just not there yet.” She liked the stuff about the wealthy kids dressed alike in rags, how afraid they were underneath it all that they might lose their individuality. She liked where he’d said that even with their piercings and tattoos, with all that was so alive in their souls—their wildness, spontaneity, silliness, spirit—they were consumed with thoughts of death, their own, and that their parents lived in a kind of death, gray and hassled, multitasking, microwaving organic food, plopped in front of the TV, because these things were all they had energy for. So yeah, they loved coke and speed and Ecstasy, driving too fast, dangerous sex with people who had had dangerous sex with multiple partners. But what, she asked James, was the
story
?

She had been too brusque, had hurt his feelings. He went into his office and slammed the door. She sat down at the kitchen table and stared miserably into a cup of black coffee: This was not about his work. It was about the distance between them now because of the secret. Having it had been like nectar initially, even last night, lying with Rosie in bed. Then it was like nectar that has gone off. Now she held on to her stomach because the secret was indigestible, sitting there in her solar plexus, where indigestible emotions lodged.

She went into his office to apologize, and started to try to tell him the secret, but he had already moved from having his feelings hurt to gratitude for her great job editing him, and it seemed a shame to muck with his love and reliance on her. “You saved me from looking like a jerk,” he said, and kissed the back of her hand.

“Oh, I thought you were mad at me for being so abrupt with my suggestions.”

“I’m sorry I was such a baby. You nailed the problem—too many details and ideas. Not enough structure or story. It’s like Gertrude Stein said, that she could always write good sentences, but she never quite understood paragraphs. That’s me, in this piece.”

Deeply relieved, she left him to his rewrite, her secret still untold.

R
osie woke up the next day and wondered what it might be like to take acid or Ecstasy with Robert. They could candy-flip—take a little of both—although maybe not their first time together. Maybe he’d go to a rave with her in Oakland. She doubted he had ever done E. The fantasy enthralled her; time turned soft and druggy.

She kept trying to reach him at the office the next day, but he never picked up. She left a chipper message on his machine, and waited for him to call back.

Alice called twice, Jody once, speeding on Alice’s Adderall, saying she was going to run away from home to be with Claude in San Diego, she knew a girl there from rehab she could stay with, but Rosie thought it was just the speed talking. A couple of hours later, Rae called to discuss the schedule for next week, after which, with school starting, the summer program at Sixth Day Prez would be over. Alice called to say Jody had phoned her from the Greyhound bus station in Salinas—she really had run away from home to be with Claude. They both cried out in worry and loss and amazement, and Rosie’s stomach wrenched with jealousy, that Jody loved someone this much that she would throw away everything to see him again—God, she was going to be in massive trouble when she returned. Rosie couldn’t stop thinking about Robert, how close she felt when they sat on the grass side by side, how she could feel the tuning fork between them.