Waking Rose: A Fairy Tale Retold (10 page)

“I got permission and directions from my cousin Jerry, who’s actually a third cousin,” she said. “He owns the barn and house, but doesn’t use them except to store farming equipment. He just plows the fields every other season. He said we can go through the barn and take anything we want—except the combine or the tractor.”

Paul snorted his milk and recovered. “Sorry. That was funny. Okay. And we’re looking for your dad’s stuff.”

“Mom said it was all in file boxes in the hayloft,” Rose said, giggling at him. “I’m hoping that if it’s not much, I can just bring it back with me and go through it here. Otherwise, it might take a while.”

Paul nodded, wiping his face with a napkin. “That’s no problem. I don’t have too much homework to do today anyhow. I just have to find a nurse I can interview for my Anatomy class.”

“My mom’s a nurse,” Rose said. “She works in the emergency room in our local hospital in New Jersey.”

“Really? Hey, do you think she’d mind if I did a short interview with her?”

“Not at all. I can give you her number.” Rose tore out a page from her research notebook and scribbled her home number on it and passed it to Paul. “She’d be happy to do an interview.”

“Awesome! This helps me out a lot.”

After finishing breakfast, they walked out to Paul’s little green Honda with tattered seats and a dent in the rear bumper. At least Paul kept his car fairly clean. Rose admired cars with character.

As they drove they talked about tons of different topics—everything from Paul’s youth group at home to his experiences in Army boot camp, from martial arts to juggling, from careers to the possibility of running away and joining the circus, from summer movies to good books—until they found the unmarked driveway that led to the Brier’s old homestead.

“Wow, this place is in the middle of nowhere,” Paul said as they approached the ramshackle house and barn. They were in fields bordered by forests.

“Mom said the property backs up on the State Forest,” Rose said. “It’s pretty deserted.”

As they came up to the house, Rose sighed. “It’s so sad to see old houses like this, all shut up and neglected. Someone should be living here.”

“Yeah,” Paul nodded, looking at the two buildings. The house had peeling paint and the windows were boarded up. The doors of the old barn were swinging in the autumn winds. Paul pushed them apart for her, and Rose stepped into the dim light.

Inside was a jumble of dusty machinery and decaying straw. Rose picked her way down a narrow aisle between stalls. The middle of the barn was cleared out. There was a coil of old rope hanging from a nail in a supporting beam along one side. An old wooden ladder leaned against the beam next to the rope.

“Mom said the boxes were in the hayloft,” Rose said, looking up. Above the stalls, she could see a platform where some bales of hay were stacked.

“Wonder if that ladder’s any good?” Paul mused, taking it up in both hands and testing it. “Seems pretty solid.”  He leaned it against the platform. “Mind if I go up first?”

“Not at all,” Rose said. He scaled the ladder nimbly, and stepped easily onto the board floor of the loft.

“Whoa! Watch the edge! These boards don’t seem sturdy,” he said, testing them gingerly. He walked forward. “It’s a bit more solid here, but I’m staying on the beams, just to be sure.”

“Can I come up?” Rose asked, anxious to see what was up there.

“Sure. It’s a maze up here.  I don’t see any boxes.”

Rose cautiously climbed the ladder and got onto the hayloft. As Paul had said, the boards near the edges were creaking and loose. But the rest of the floor seemed firmer, though there were sudden gaps and missing boards. She walked carefully.

The platform was haphazardly stacked with hay bales, and Rose sneezed when she touched them. She picked her way among them, following Paul. At last they found, beneath the eaves of the barn, some shallow closets, doorless, where there were stacks of brown file boxes. They were covered with thick dust, but seemed to be dry and otherwise in good shape.

“These must be it!” Rose exclaimed, but her heart was sinking. There were at least twenty boxes. There was no way she could take them all home to look through.

“Which ones do you need?”

“The ones that have his notes from work,” Rose said. “Bother. I guess we’ll have to start going through them.”

“Like hunting for treasure!” Paul exclaimed, his eyes lighting up.

Rose was grateful for his spirit. She pulled the closest box towards her, and lifted the dusty lid. Its contents were covered with more dust and she carefully blew off the mixture of straw, dirt, and dust that had accumulated over twenty years. Paul did the same, and began looking through another box.

They quickly found that some of the boxes had financial records—old bank statements, credit card bills, cancelled checks—from when her dad was in college and even before. Others held high school memorabilia, and college papers. After pawing through some of these, Rose decided that she didn’t want to try to take any of the full boxes home with her. There was simply too much dust and dirt on them, and she doubted Kateri would want them in their dorm room.

Sighing, she set the battered top back on the box she had been looking through, and reached for another one.

After an hour and a half of looking, Paul found a box that had materials from the newspaper her dad had worked at. He and Rose looked through the back issues of the paper, and Paul commented on the intensely liberal bias of the paper. He turned a page and said, “But here’s an article defending the town Nativity Scene. And it’s by Daniel Brier—that must be your dad.”  He grinned and handed it over to Rose.

Rose read it, a smile on her face. It sounded like it had been written by Dad—actually, it sounded like it had been written by her. She read the whole thing twice just to savor it, and then realized Paul had been observing her.

“You must miss him,” he said quietly.

“Every minute,” she said, and put the paper aside in a separate pile. She would take it home with her.

They browsed through other copies of the paper, and then finally Rose said with a sigh, “I’m sorry, Paul. I just don’t think I can find anything here. I guess this was a wasted trip after all. It would be easier to do research in the library.”

“Well, this was interesting, wasn’t it? Finding out more about your dad?”

“Yes,” Rose admitted. “I’m glad I came.”

“How much you want to bet that if you come back another time, you’ll actually find the notes?” Paul said.

“I’m not sure,” she said reflectively. “How much would you bet?”

“Two hamburgers,” Paul said. “Or more.”

She glanced at him. “You must be hungry.”

“Starving.”

“Okay. Let’s go then. Paul, thanks so much for driving me out here.”

“Hey, it’s been a real adventure. You’ll come out here again sometime, won’t you? Let me know if you need to borrow my car again. I think that people getting in touch with their past is important.”

“I really appreciate it.” She slipped a few of the papers into her notebook to keep for sentimental reasons. Paul was separating the boxes they had already looked through from the untouched ones. “So we know where we left off,” he said.

As they came down the ladder, Paul pointed. “There’s a ladder on the wall. We could have used that one.” Rose looked and saw rungs of a ladder hammered into the wall running up to the loft.

“It’s further away from where we needed to go, though,” she said. “We’d have to crawl through all that hay to get over here.”

“Hey, Rose, you know the fifties dance next month?” Paul asked.

“Yeah, I heard about it,” she said, swallowing slightly and turning back around.

“There’s a dance contest. I’d like to enter. Would you want to be my partner?”

Okay, so this was a
real
date, even by non-Mercy College standards. The world seemed to swirl slightly, then she recovered, blushing. “Sure. That sounds like fun, Paul.”

“Great!” he exclaimed, opening the barn door for her. “I’ll sign us up.”

As they got into the car, she wondered to herself at how easy it was to begin a relationship with someone, particularly in college. It was almost as easy as Fish had predicted it would be... The thought made her redden again, but for a different reason. Was Fish right, after all? Would she really forget him so soon?

H
IS

There were twenty-one days until his errand. He entered the appointment with the stylus of his electronic planner and counted the days again, not touching the small gray screen. Was there any way he could get out of it?

Scared, Denniston? Oh, I can see you’re scared now. Scared and you don’t know where to run.

“Damnation,” Fish said to the Palm Pilot, then closed the black leather flap of the case and slid it back into his briefcase. He should be studying. No point in taking all these extra classes if he wasn’t studying for them.

Getting himself a cup of tea with sugar, he sat down at his desk and turned the pages of his anthology to “The Eve of St. Agnes,” the long poem by John Keats. He read through it to himself.

St. Agnes’s Eve. Ah! Bitter cold it was!

The owl, for all his feathers, was a-cold.

Here was something to distract him.  A romantic view of the Middle Ages, wonderfully executed, with lush imagery and vibrant language. Seeing as he had first read it while sitting in a prison cell in juvenile detention, the verse had seemed particularly powerful to him, a colorful contrast to the dreariness, banality, and senseless violence that had surrounded him then.  Escapism? Or something more real than reality?

But according to the commentaries he had picked up from the library, the whole poem was actually the erotic fantasy of a severely repressed man, telling the story of a lying male predator who tricks his victim by twisting and exploiting her religious beliefs.  It was depressing.

  Fish had to admit that there was something a bit untoward about the situation: the hero creeping into his love’s bedroom on St. Agnes Eve to present himself as the husband she is hoping to dream of, according to a pious custom.  But the professors writing about the poem were so crass he was disgusted.

You’d think no one really believes in love any longer
, he reflected to himself, thumbing the angry pages of one recently-published commentary.
Everyone seems as cynical as those teenaged criminals I used to know in JD.

Maybe I’ll just stick to doing an analysis of the medieval imagery since the meaning of the poem is so controversial,
he decided. He had always taken pleasure in literature. And being able to concentrate on it now was a welcome change from the larger issues in his life. He couldn’t escape the effects of prison cells and captivity, even here.

Hers

A week later, the phone awoke Rose.

“Hi, Rose. Am I calling too early?”

“Blanche!” Rose exclaimed, sitting up in bed. “How are you?”

“Oh, pretty deliriously happy. How are you?”

“Just tired,” Rose stifled a yawn. “I was at play practice until late last night. Then I met up with Alex, Leroy, and Paul and we watched a movie until three.”

“What did you watch?”

“Some superhero movie that they all watched when they were kids. It was a Japanese film. There was a dinosaur and a giant pigeon smashing Tokyo.”

“Sounds mentally invigorating.”

“It was. These guys are so weird, but I like them.”

“How are your classes?” Blanche asked in her older sister voice.

“Great. Super. It’s so nice to study things that are actually interesting. I’ve been working hard on my bioethics paper. Paul is in that class with me. He actually drove me out to the barn to find some of dad’s notes for my topic, but we haven’t found any yet.”

“Now that’s the second time you’ve mentioned Paul on this phone call.”

“He’s really, really cool, Blanche,” Rose sighed. “I’ve never met anyone like him. You’d think someone smart like him would be more jaded or unhappy, but he’s just like a little kid. Except he’s tall. We have a lot of fun together. He asked me to go to the fifties dance with him.”

“Do you like him?”

“I guess I sort of do. Well, you can’t
not
like a person like Paul. It’s almost impossible. You might think he’s shallow, but I know enough about goodness to know that he’s not.”

“How’s Kateri doing?”

“Barely being a student. She’s so busy! I never see her.”

“She’s a Kovach,” Blanche sighed. “Activism is in her blood.”

 “So—let me see—Blanche, I can’t remember why I called you,” Rose scratched her head.

“I called
you
,” her sister reminded her. “You must have been thinking about calling me.”

“I was. Fish might be coming up here in a week.”

“Oh, really? Why?”

Rose confessed, “I invited him. Since you guys can’t come up for the medieval festival on family weekend.”

“So you invited him as substitute family?”

“Well, yes, sort of. Maybe I shouldn’t have. But—I sort of need to see him and Paul at the same time. To decide. You know?”

“I think I know,” Blanche said with a sigh.

“Are you disappointed in me? I know you want me to get over him,” Rose said.

“I know your heart, Rose. You’re very loyal. It will take time.”

“So, anyhow, why did you call me?” Rose tried valiantly to change the subject.

“Just to ask you how you would like being an aunt.”

“An aunt???? Ahhh! Congratulations!” Rose whooped, rolling over in bed and leaping onto the floor. “When is the baby coming?”

Her sister laughed, a bit nervous. “My gosh, this is so strange, Rose, to be telling you this. We weren’t sure for a long time, but the baby’s coming in April. I think. Well, Mom thinks.”

“Is Mom totally excited?”

“Of course. She’s just beside herself. I told her I want to have the baby at home, if I can, and I want her to be there.”