Imperfect Birds (35 page)

James stared at her with amazement when she paused.

“I’m sorry my explanation is so shallow, but I guess I don’t really get it, either,” she added, which made them all laugh.

“It was the opposite of shallow,” her mother said.

Rosie was on a roll. “It does all seem very counterintuitive, though, right?” Her parents both nodded, and James even had to write that phrase down, too. It was sort of pathetic. Her parents’ memories were going, tearing like fishing nets. She wanted them to feel better about themselves, so they could leave her alone. “It’s frustrating,” she added compassionately, “how much must just be accepted for the explanation to make sense.”

A
ll day Sunday she felt so poorly that she didn’t even want to get together with Fenn; they talked on the phone twice. He didn’t feel great, either, but he was still going out to Stinson to surf. “Want to go with?” he asked, and she almost said yes; just to watch him from the shore was heaven. Yet she sensed that he was only being nice by inviting her, and in the end she said no, she needed to catch up on homework.

Elizabeth babied her with trays of healthy food, but Rosie’s mind felt whipped, jangly. Though she wished she could make her mother happy, she wanted to be happy, too, happy and free—was that so crazy a desire? She wanted to be with Fenn every minute she could, wanted to be out in the world, mostly wanted to be done with high school. She took a nap with Rascal and then such a long shower that she used up all the hot water and made James be pissy and have an episode.

She felt like she was always trying to keep six plates spinning in the air, trying to keep her stories straight, trying to keep everyone happy. No wonder she was tired all the time. Monday morning she felt somewhat better. Then her mother had to go and give her a piss test.

“I took one a few days ago,” she said, “and it’s a Monday. We never do this on Mondays, so I can start the week out on a positive note.” But her mother held firm, and marched her into Rosie’s own bathroom, as if to trip her up.

Thank God she had finally remembered to put a cosmetic bottle with bleach in it among her makeup and lotions. She closed the door wearily and went to the toilet. You sort of had to laugh about the whole thing—how dogged and determined her mother was, like a little child trying to make letters. She peed into the cup, reached for the Clinique toner bottle, and poured a few drops into the urine.

“You almost done in there?”

Rosie yawned and wiped herself, put the bottle back, washed her hands.

“Here you go, Mama,” she said, handing her the plastic cup. She watched Elizabeth check the temperature strip, and was heading back to her bedroom to get ready for school when something stopped her in her tracks: her mother was sniffing loudly, like a cartoon character, only not funny.

Rosie turned around to find her mother’s nose deep in the plastic cup.

Elizabeth looked up, wild-eyed, terrified. “Do I smell
bleach
?” she asked, and smelled it again. “Rosie! Is there bleach in this pee?”

R
osie faced her mother, eyes narrowed with disdain even as she felt the ground beneath her turn to sand. Her heart pounded the way it did after the cheapest cocaine, going so fast that she felt like she might be having a stroke, and yet still she sneered with disbelief at such bald-faced foolishness, at her stupid, stupid mother who stood there in the bathroom holding out the cup of pee like it was plutonium. Rosie’s mind churned and she desperately tried to figure out the angles. If she went ballistic, she could beat her mother down, deflate the story into something more manageable, and continue her life as it had been. And then there was a second person inside her, composing excuses and words of contrition. She wondered if she should try to calm this crazy idiot by throwing her mother the bone about having smoked one hit with Alice. That would get her to do what Rosie wanted: dial back the drama, love Rosie again, be grateful for her honesty, and relieved—it could be
so
much worse than Elizabeth imagined. But a third person inside Rosie calmly pointed out that it really was so much worse than Elizabeth imagined, way worse, all the raves and Ecstasy, all the unsafe sex she’d had before Fenn, the times she’d gone down on some guy, all that fucking oral, because he was holding cocaine. It was so disgusting, so shattering to recall, that it stopped her in her mental tracks—maybe she had been out of control for a while—and right when she looked up, her mother got this crazy look on her face where frozen disbelief met rage and weirdness the way it had that day on the trampoline three years ago, and that pierced Rosie, knowing what her mother looked like when she went crazy. All in a swirl like when drugs were coming on too hard, she needed to calm her mother down, needed to sneak out of this mess with her freedom intact; she needed her mother to be strong, she needed a mommy.

Then her mother started to shake, Rosie could see this from six feet away in the carpeted hall, and the first voice inside her came back and she saw that she could win now by going cold, and derisive, although lying might do real damage to her mother, who was tilting her head and looking at Rosie as if she were a speck on the horizon, way far away, and she heard herself saying out loud that she had lied, she had had a hit with Alice at school on Friday—one hit after all these weeks—but then she felt like you do when you see an outlying breaker on the ocean coming right at you and you’re thrilled because you think you can catch it and ride it all the way into the shore. It’s getting bigger too quickly as it approaches, but you’ll still be able to ride it, even though it rises above you, now such a gigantic wave, with so much more water than you could have possibly seen, that it’s going to wipe you out, it’s going to hurt.

And she glanced at her mother, who was looking into the small cup of pee as if now she were about to raise it to her lips, and the wave came crashing down.

T
ruth poured forth as Rosie wept from a makeshift mourner’s bench on the rim of the bathtub, where she cried over her sins, or at least the sins of the last month. All the grisly details spilled out, the secrets, the lies, the truth, that she had smoked dope a number of times during the last few weeks; that every time she had had a pee test during the last few weeks, she had added some drops of bleach to mask the THC. She’d taken acid, too, once, and ’shrooms, too, with Fenn. Also, she and Alice had sniffed her boyfriend Evan’s plastic cement, on his dare. She buried her face in her hands and wondered out loud what was wrong with her.

James, running from the living room, confronted a locked bathroom door. Muffled sounds of Rosie choking for breath followed, interrupted by a tinkle of water. When Elizabeth unlocked the door, he stepped in, taking in the scene as if at a car accident: Elizabeth slumped against the wall, her face pure white, her neck flushed red, her chest heaving. A cup of pee with a stick in it sat by the sink. Rosie clawed her fingers through her hair, trying to pull it out. She insisted that she loved the meetings, the kids there, the whole scene, and was finally done, really fucking done with getting high. She hated herself for what she had put them through, but it took what it took, right?

She repeated this until James robotically told her to shut her up. “Why are you letting her talk, darling?” he asked Elizabeth. She looked at him as if she hadn’t noticed that he was there, then bobbed her head around like a wooden toy bird, pecking. Rosie got to her feet, sizing up the situation: James sniffing at the bottle of eardrops that Elizabeth held to his nose, as if it were wine; the cup of pee with two Advent windows turning blue.

“You can test me every day, and I’ll go to outpatient rehab—I’ll even help pay,” Rosie cried at the door. “Believe me, I’m done.”

“Honey, that’s wonderful,” said Elizabeth, and Rosie seemed to think she meant it. Her face was watchful yet safe, like a gopher that has nearly made it to his hole. She slunk away. The unbleached urine was positive for THC and methamphetamines.

“Jesus,” said James. “The hits just keep on coming.” He stroked the stubble on his chin. “What bothers me is that she admitted to mushrooms and acid, yet those didn’t show up.”

“This panel doesn’t test for those,” Elizabeth explained. “How can I be so stunned and numb at the same time?” He shrugged. She dug her nails into her brow, making indentations in the skin, then into the back of one hand, making red half-moons.

“Stop that,” he said. “What do you want to do?”

“Maybe outpatient treatment. We can afford it, it’s not very expensive. But it didn’t work for Jody, they eventually needed to send her away. There’s Allison Reid’s Adolescent Recovery, which costs a fortune. But one of Allison’s big success stories OD’ed her first semester in college. We cash in your SEP-IRA, pray for our own early deaths. I’ll call Jody’s mother later, see what she knows—she won’t know about low-cost programs, because they have money. Alexander’s family went through the county program and thought it was great—he graduated early, and got a scholarship to Santa Cruz, but of course, now he’s smoking heroin.”

“So there’s that.” He reached out and touched each fingernail of her right hand.

She limped toward their bedroom but stopped at Rosie’s door to listen to the silence. When she opened the door and saw Rosie sitting on her bed incuriously glancing at a textbook as if it were any other school morning, Elizabeth felt a twig snap inside. She slammed Rosie’s door so hard she thought it might come off its hinges. She bellowed, opened the door, and slammed it full-force again and then again and again. But still it did not break or splinter. She felt sick and dizzy from the seesaw of trusting Rosie and then being betrayed; from caving, saying yes, when she was more afraid of defying Rosie than of Rosie’s safety; felt exhausted from trying to find enough resolve within to say no and then being pilloried by Rosie, from the overwhelming fear of saying either yes
or
no. She opened the door and slammed it closed again, sick of being afraid, of holding her breath, sick of feeling numb, and then feeling the rage. She opened the door and slammed it.

James came into the hall but did not stop her. When she was done, she collapsed on the carpet in the hallway. She heaved for breath. Still James did not come to comfort her, because there was no comfort, and Rosie had been right—it took what it took.