Imperfect Birds (45 page)

Elizabeth spent some time in the garden, where she usually found solace, but not today, not with Rosie gone. Today it was dry like someone who had cried too much. She moved through her plants slowly: since Rosie had left, four weeks ago, she and James had both slowed down. Maybe they now got to act their age, instead of trying to act more energetic around Rosie so she would not think they were decrepit.

They both had much to do before leaving. They had to pack for the snow—it was only twelve degrees in Davis. James had a story to record, and an appointment with the dean at the College of Marin, where he would begin teaching English comp half-time after the first of the year. It was a real break: they needed the money, and it might be great material for his radio pieces. He was only medium bitter about having to take a real job. Elizabeth had to drive Ichabod up to Lank’s house for the weekend, and arrange for a neighbor to feed Rascal. She was to have one last talk with Bob on Thursday afternoon. That night she and James were going to a rally at the Parkade that Rae had helped organize with the people of Sixth Day Prez, to consecrate this piece of land on which so many of the town’s children had gotten so lost. It had been planned since Jack Herman’s death. And she had a date for tea with Jody and Alice on Friday morning.

She reached Bob at his office at four.

“How are you?” he asked gently.

She thought about this for a moment. “I’m okay in a number of ways. Scared, worried, excited, desperate, flat. If that makes any sense at all.”

“It makes perfect sense,” he said. He walked her through a few details of the weekend: “We’ll all meet upstairs. There will be a fire, and snacks. We will catch you up on your children and the program, and prepare you to see them. They are not the children you left with us a month ago. Then they’ll do a demonstration of what they have been learning. And then you get them to yourselves for an hour. Each family will stake out an area of the room. There will be lots of crying and laughing and blame, the kids will be angry and ecstatic, and they will binge on the snacks and get stomachaches. There will be anger and there will be extraordinary healing. There’s no way around it being one of the toughest things you’ll ever do. This is parenthood on steroids.”

“What are the kids doing right now?”

“Finishing up their truth letters to you parents. Have you written yours to Rosie?”

R
osie sat on a log beside the rare afternoon campfire, bent over her journal, gripping her pencil; there was so much to say, but they could use only the front and back of one sheet of binder paper. She looked around at the boughs of the nearest trees, heavy with snow. Boy, were her mother and James in for a bad surprise—it was not cute Tahoe cold here, but cold cold, Outer Mongolia cold. She turned back to her paper and began.

Dear Mama and James, I am still sick with anger that you sent me here. You stole something from me that I can never get back, my senior year in high school. I worked so hard and so long for this year, and there were other ways you could have reined me in when you got so freaked out by my behavior, which believe me was very typical of all the kids I know. At the same time, I know you honestly believed that sending me here was the only way you could save me. So I am trying to look forward. James, I want to say you made things really horrible for me this year, you were always on my case and riding my ass. I love you a lot, mostly, and overall you have been a great blessing to this family, but you spend way too much time on your work, to the neglect of my mother and myself. When you look back over your life, I think your memories of us will matter much more than your success as a writer. And mama, it really hurts me that you did not make more of your life. I know you are shy and have had mental trials, but just being a mother and wife is not enough. This has not set a good example. I think your work with Rae as activists is very important and that you should stop using your fake fragile condition as an excuse to lie on the couch and read, or putter around in the garden. I love you so much, you could never in a million years imagine loving someone as much as I love you.

T
hat night, dozens of people came to be a part of Rae’s candlelight procession in the Parkade, mostly from Sixth Day Prez—old folks in their Sherpa caps, the youth group, parents, even the parents of one kid who had died. Lank and James had built a primitive wooden stage with a row of steps for the candle ceremony. It was cold and windy. People pressed in close to the stage, and some of the teenagers who had been huddling under the bus kiosk wandered over to listen. Everyone received a candle inside a paper cup. Rae’s co-organizer opened the event by saying simply, “Tonight we bring fresh air, light, and hope to the Parkade.” A guitarist played “Lost Children Street” by Malvina Reynolds. The newly formed church choir sang “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around,” and then “Blowin’ in the Wind,” completely off-key until the crowd joined in and straightened things out.

Parents and relatives and friends who wanted to light a candle for a specific young person gathered to the right of the stage. Rae gave them red plastic party cups with candles inside. From where Elizabeth stood, they looked like a bread line, or people waiting for soup. It was a modest ceremony. The red plastic cups were supposed to guard the votives inside, but the wind was strong and the flames fizzled out, and had to be lit over and over. One person got his candle lit, walked to the center of the stage, said a girl’s name loudly, and placed the candle on one of the steps. Then he went to rejoin the line at the end, while people near the front of the line tried to light their candles. People from the crowd came over to whisper names to the people with red plastic cups, as if making requests, and more and more names were lifted up. The person at the front of the line would step forth like a bridesmaid after the person ahead placed a candle on the step. James took someone’s red party cup and went to the step to lift up Rosie’s name. Elizabeth had had a vision of the heat and light of flames moving the message of the rally into the world, a baby conflagration to stir the cold and unseeing parts of oneself, the cold and unseeing parts of the world, but the candlelit step looked like a beggar man’s war memorial.

Rae also lit a candle for Rosie, and made a very short speech when all the parents were done. “Tonight, we lit something inside ourselves to be spread, lit a tiny flame to consecrate toxic ground, to consecrate our caring, our attention to this matter, our wish that there would be help for the parents of the dead. My belief is that their children did not die in vain and their children did not die alone. Tonight was about our huge desire to help, a few of us poor schlubs trying to light a little flame that almost no one was here to see, in red plastic cups.” She laughed at how impoverished an image this was, and continued, looking right at Elizabeth: “Each candle is so temporary, but it says that there is light and there are people who can help: it says the time is now.”

A
lice and Jody came at nine on Friday morning. Before answering the door, Elizabeth stopped at the mirror in the hall, saw a tired, graying woman with curved and questioning shoulders. She straightened them up, sucked in her stomach, ran her fingers through her hair, practiced an upbeat smile, and checked once again in the mirror to see if she looked any more like her old self. She thought that she did, that it was pretty convincing.

She made them both cocoa with white chocolate shavings, and said that James would be out to say hello as soon as he finished something he was working on. The girls sat on the rug in the living room and played with Ichabod like huge young children. For Rosie they had brought a picture of themselves dressed to the nines in vintage clothes for a party; a lavender, rose, and light blue cap that Alice had crocheted; and a bronze butterfly recovery medallion that Jody’s sponsor had given her. Jody looked dykier than before, with spiky maroon hair, and heavier, yet still with those long fingers and bony wrists. Alice was almost gamine now, with a short stylish pixie cut, fitted black capri pants, a silk scarf, a heart locket from a new boyfriend. But they were so much the same, their fingers always busy, constantly tracing on their palms and pulling on their ears, rubbing their knuckles, inspecting their cuticles. They had something terrible to tell Elizabeth—or at least Rosie would think it was terrible—which was that Fenn was going out
seriously
with two different girls, and Elizabeth cried out, “Thank you, Jesus,” so loudly that James came running from his office.

“Are you going to tell her?” Alice asked.

Elizabeth didn’t know. Her skin itched, her brain itched. She shrugged. “I don’t want to be cruel, but I want Rosie to know that Fenn isn’t back at home waiting for her like in the movies.”

“You will intuitively know what to do,” said Jody, and Elizabeth smiled, because it was something you heard at every AA and NA meeting, the Ninth Step promises. Then she shook her finger menacingly at Jody.

“You and your little NA friends better be right, or your ass is grass.” It was painful and sweet to be with the girls, Alice so stylin’ now, as Rosie would have said, so confident after having gotten early acceptance to three design schools, and Jody fingering the strand of plastic key tags that hung from her belt loops like a rosary, both of them peering at Elizabeth with concerned affection. “I’m so proud of you both,” she said, and she was—Alice was going to be a star, Jody was going to work at the KerryDas Café every morning, before heading to her daily meeting—but guilt squeezed her heart like fingers. Had she done the right thing, sending Rosie away? And would it even work?

Alice broke off a corner of a chocolate chip cookie and nibbled at it thoughtfully. “I want to tell you one more terrible thing.” James and Elizabeth turned toward her. “I gave Rosie a lot of Adderall over the last year—I mean, I just shared my stash with her. You know, I take it for ADD.” Elizabeth felt something verging on hate. Then Alice dipped her head. “I actually take it ’cause I love speed, and I’m so sorry that it makes me sick.” She looked up tearfully and smacked herself hard on the head a few times. Elizabeth grabbed her wrist to make her stop, and held on as they collected themselves, Alice’s fingers clenching with the desire to keep hitting herself.

“You’re not Rosie’s problem,” Elizabeth said. “Rosie is Rosie’s problem.”

“Jesus, Alice,” James exclaimed. “Didn’t you ever hear that speed kills?”

Alice rolled her eyes angrily, and muttered about what a jerk she used to be.

“Stop, James,” said Elizabeth. “You girls are totally amazing. You’re Rosie’s two best friends, and you get to start writing to her pretty soon.” Then she narrowed her eyes at Alice. “It goes without saying that if you ever give Rosie drugs again, I will so rat you out. I will call every college that has taken you, and say you are a pusher—and I will hurt Ichabod,” she said, and both girls screamed in protest. “I mean it,” she said. “This is not an idle threat.”

At the door, Jody took Elizabeth by the hands. “You did the right thing,” she told the older woman sternly. “You made the same messy decision my parents did, when I made such a mess of my life. They know now that they did the right thing, and I do, too, for sure. And Rosie will be too, someday.” A shard of Elizabeth believed her. Most of her was filled with worry, fear, and self-loathing. They all hugged, and the girls did the secret gang handshake with James, the roe-sham-beau and gibberish sign language. Elizabeth watched them walk away, Alice so fine and thin, Jody with a few inches of fleshy back showing, a sparrow in flight tattooed above her leather belt, orange, dark blue, rose, outlined in black.