Imperfect Birds (34 page)

R
osie arrived home that night before dinnertime, clear-eyed and friendly, as if nothing had happened at breakfast. Elizabeth was caramelizing onions to pour over wild rice, and when Rosie came to watch, they ran through the litany—how was school, fine; where’ve you been, studying at Alice’s house; are you and Fenn going to a meeting tonight, probably; how many clean days do you have now, eighteen.

“Wow!” Elizabeth exclaimed. “Fantastic.” Rosie shuffled, at once pleased with herself and cool. Then Elizabeth smelled something alien and awful on Rosie’s breath, like sauerkraut. She said, “Pew!” and stepped back. “What have you been drinking?”

Rosie burst out laughing, relieved. “Rejuvelac! At Alice’s. Do you even know what that is? It’s this nasty fermented shit that Alice and her mother swear by—for digestion and energy. I’m going to go brush my teeth.”

“Is it alcoholic, though?” Elizabeth tried to appear unperturbed.

“Of course not. It’s just a nasty hippie raw-food fluid.”

Elizabeth smiled and stirred the onions. They smelled of butter and burnt sugar, but the smell of Rosie’s breath lingered in her nostrils after Rosie left the room. It was the smell of rot. The word “ergot” came into her head, and later, at the dinner table, she asked James about it.

“What was it again?”

“Some sort of grain fungus,” he told her. “I associate it with the Middle Ages, for some reason, or the Salem witch trials. It grew on rye that had gotten damp, and hungry humans consumed it, despite the taste, and everyone went crazy, and then died.”

Rosie studied him, impressed. “You’re like a zoo key, James.”

He doffed an invisible hat, and everyone laughed and devoured dinner. But peace did not last the night. Before bed, Elizabeth went into Rosie’s room with a plastic cup and asked her to go with her to the bathroom.

Rosie protested the timing, but got up, releasing sighs and clicks of annoyance, and pushed past Elizabeth in the doorway. She headed down the hall to her parents’ bathroom.

Elizabeth stopped. “Let’s use yours tonight, mix things up.”

Rosie stopped but did not look back at her. “I’m already practically there.”

Elizabeth felt a flicker of alarm but let it go. “What
ev
,” she said, mimicking Alice to lighten the mood, but Rosie pressed on, and almost had the door closed before Elizabeth stuck her foot in.

Rosie whirled around. “What the hell? I’m not going to pee into a cup with you here, sitting on the side of the tub like a cop.” When she feinted left, as if about to leave, Elizabeth stepped in front of her and took her by the wrists. The air sparked. Silence, as before a storm, or after a slammed door.

“Now,” said Elizabeth, staring her down but afraid. Rosie flung the cup into the tub. Elizabeth retrieved it, handed it back. Her daughter’s eyes were filled with anger and fear and tears of betrayal. Then she sneered with derision. She put the cup beside the toilet, wriggled out of her cut-offs, glared at her mother.

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” she said, and the ugliness of the tone sent a chill through Elizabeth. Rosie pulled down her thong as she lowered herself to the toilet seat. Elizabeth saw a flash of dark hair and saw Rosie reach for the cup, but there was only silence. “I can’t go,” she said, scornfully. “I peed about five minutes ago.” She started to stand.

“Uh-uh,” said Elizabeth. After what seemed like a long time, Rosie sat back down. Then she hung her head and looked over, solicitous.

“Mommy,” she said. “Please just let me pee in peace.” They looked at each other a moment, and Elizabeth tried to channel Anthony. She felt she should not leave, but after a moment she did, and waited outside the door like a butler.

When Rosie came out a few minutes later, she handed her a scant cup of urine. The green test strip on the outside of the plastic cup tested ninety-eight degrees. It was fresh and warm, and Elizabeth sat down on the toilet, tipped the cup so it covered the base of the stick, and waited five minutes. The five tiny windows each showed a single pink line, which meant negative. But Rosie definitely had been trying to hide something: Elizabeth squinted at the faint pink lines again, mulling it over. She felt efficient and suspicious at first, like a crime scene detective, then confused, deep in her animal being.

R
osie asked if she could spend Friday night at Fenn’s.

“Of course not,” said James.

“You force us to sneak around like common criminals.”

“Oh, Rosie,” he said. “That’s the nature of teenage love. Deal with it. You’ve got it good. As long as you keep producing clean urine, we’ll let you use the car, and we’ll keep the midnight weekend curfew in place.”

“You’re so harshing me,” Rosie bellowed, bursting into tears. “What’s my reward for trying so hard to do well these days?” She smashed her fist against the wall. Elizabeth trembled.

“What a jerk,” James said, utterly without sympathy. “Let’s go bathe in the moonlight while she stews in her own juices. That would make Anthony happy.”

Rosie didn’t speak to them again that day, but she was friendly by dinner the next night. She worked on her homework until late. She spent Friday evening with Fenn and was home by curfew, then spent the day and evening with him on Saturday and got home only five minutes late. Elizabeth heard her get up twice in the night, once to pee, once to bang around in the kitchen. On Sunday both of them slept in. James brought Elizabeth café au lait in bed, along with
The New York Times
, and crawled in beside her to read. “Thank you, love,” she said.

“I have ulterior motives,” he said. “I need you to read my piece later.”

She raised the cracked blue bowl of hot pearly-white coffee to her lips, drinking deeply.

E
arly that afternoon, Elizabeth went out to read on the front steps, under a bright cheerful flag of blue sky. She could see from where she sat that there were no footsteps in the dirt outside Rosie’s window, no flowers crushed in the dark, and she wondered as she often did how Jody was doing. She was glad that Jody had left town, even as she hoped that she was okay. She reached for the pencil tucked behind her ear and began James’s story, “The Wild Lagoon,” looking for things she and Lank had said that wonderful afternoon. The best thing of all was pure James: “Like Arthur Murray dance steps in the muck at low tide, you see a squirt from a clam when you put down your left foot, and when you lower your right, a crab raises itself and brandishes its pincer at you, menacing, absurd, and magnificent.” She corrected typos, made a few penciled suggestions. She was proud of this story.

Before going back inside, she peered in the closed window at her long-sleeping daughter, her ropy curls fanned out over Raggedy Ann pillowcases. She still had the broad shoulders of an athlete, but her waist was as small as a child’s, dipping down like a valley between the hills of her breasts and her flanks. She was definitely thinner than usual, but this could be from falling in love, and with a vegetarian smoker, who had gotten her hooked on cigarettes, too.

But when Rosie stirred, and the sheet at her neck fell down, her clavicle showed, white and skeletal. Elizabeth could only stare. She wanted to pound the glass, hard, with her fists against the window, crying out Rosie’s name, and then force- feed her milk shakes. She prayed to the speck of something she’d seen at the sweat lodge that wasn’t her, and then in desperation to Mount Tam, as the Miwok had, “Do something. Help, please.” But she was faking belief. She felt nothing. She tapped the glass, and her groggy daughter opened her eyes, saw her mother, turned to look at the clock, looked back, small smile, and they waved small barely perceptible waves, like spies.

R
osie lay in bed awhile and felt like she was dying. She and Fenn had taken ketamine the night before, and then a few sips of cough syrup to come down. She lay as still as she could, like when she was little, after her father had died, when she used to lie in bed and pretend she was dying, wearing a white Victorian nightie. She and Fenn knew all the drugs that either didn’t show up in over-the-counter drug tests, or were easily masked, the way the bleach in the eardrops bottle kept masking the THC in her system. There were other great products out there that totally flushed toxins out of your urine, but only for five hours, and she hadn’t quite figured out her mother’s test schedule. Definitely one weekend morning, but then maybe once midweek, although her mom hated to send her off to school in a bad state. “Keeps a girl on her toes,” she had said to Fenn.

Her parents would be very down on ketamine, Special K, because all the literature said it was a horse tranquilizer, but it was really a perfectly safe drug. It was lovely, or at least the stuff Fenn’s connection in San Francisco gave them was fine. Fenn’s guy had a nurse he bought from, so it was the good stuff, pharmaceutically pure. It was both deeply relaxing and beautifully hallucinatory, like good mushrooms, like a waking dream. Also, twice they took LSD in the low golden hills, sitting in hippie Buddhist poses, lying together gazing into each other’s eyes, feeding each other sections of orange; the afternoon in bed, naked but not having sex, warm and close as she’d ever been with another human being; and then at sunset, on the steps where it had all begun for them, under the crescent of moon.

Rosie was genuinely glad to see that her mother was in less pain since she had started testing negative for everything. She loved her mother and hated that she suffered so. Everyone was more relaxed. Dinners were calmer now, always based on food from Elizabeth’s field trips with Rae to the farmers’ market. Then she often got to go to a meeting with Fenn, or she would pretend to, and would stay up a little later doing homework. She and James and Elizabeth talked about regular old things at the dinner table. James asked her stuff that he needed for his stories, and this made him grateful, and she loved doing this for him. Like the other night he had demanded to know in his agitated, joking James way how it could be true that a feather and a coin dropped from the Transamerica pyramid would land at the same time. She felt like he was treating her like they were equals.

“Here’s my best shot and simplest answer,” she began, and tried to explain that gravity acts the same on everything no matter what its mass.

“Theoretically,” James qualified. Rosie shook her head: Sorry, Charlie.

James put down his fork and reached for his notebook. You’re not going to like this, she warned him, but as far as she knew, it was something that was just accepted, based on lots of experiments and observations. The reason a feather and a penny fell at different rates was wind resistance. The feather was not allowed to accelerate to its full potential of approximately ten meters per second per second, which was the acceleration of
any
falling mass in a vacuum—that is, a place where there was no air resistance. “Slow down,” James cried out, and her mother smiled. Rosie had to repeat it. When he finally caught up, she continued. The lighter an object was, and the wider its mass was distributed, the more it was affected by air resistance.