Wild Roses (15 page)

Every year for the past three, my mother and
Dino hosted a Thanksgiving party for certain members of the Seattle Symphony
board of trustees, high-end givers, major players in the music arena, and Dino's
associates-- his manager and agents and anyone from his recording companies and
publishers who wanted to travel in for the occasion. I believe that he chose
Thanksgiving in the hopes that most people would be with their own
families--he'd be able to extend an invitation and get social credit for that,
without having to have total follow-through. A good plan, really, but it never
ended up that way. A gazillion people answered the formal invitations, mailing
back tiny envelopes of RSVE

Mom had the event catered, thank God. She can
get flustered when the phone rings and she's making a grilled cheese sandwich.
This year it seemed like there were more people than ever in our kitchen, more
trays of food, more

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waiters carrying hors d'oeuvres and canapes.
The house looked beautiful and different than our regular house with the cereal
box left out on the counter. You wouldn't believe how good it looked. We're not
talking decorations of turkeys with accordion-paper stomachs like we used to
have when Mom and Dad were married and had Nannie and Aunt Nancy and Uncle Greg
over. No, we're talking cinnamon-smelling candles in hurricane glass on every
surface, and evergreen boughs, and cranberry-colored vases of white roses. Linen
napkins, and china with boughs of fruit around the edges. We're talking a turkey
the size of a brown bear, and the dining room draped with gauzy curtains and
burgundy ribbons. There was enough food to feed a small town, all of it steaming
and glossy and colorful. Mom wore velvet and I wore my beaded vintage dress, and
Dino's dark suit and restrained curls made him look like the man on the Paris
Diaries cover, whose sex life was the talk of the town when he was
younger.

I was glad my dad couldn't see us now. This was
the good news, the everything-is-working-out-
beautifully that you want to
hide from the other parent. Their worst nightmare of their former spouse having
a better life after all, as they passed the yams back at home. We all smelled
soapy and perfumed, and the doorbell kept ringing and ringing, and the house got
so stuffed, people went outside to cool off. You wondered if all of these people
didn't have family to be with, or if the chance to be with a world-famous
composer and violinist was enough to make them ditch their own
grannies.

Andrew Wilkowski, Dino's new agent, had
apparently

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solved this conflict by bringing the whole gang
along. He had brought his quiet wife, thin as a file folder, and his twin
seven-year-old boys, who wore ties and ran around like crazed, midget
businessmen, popping olives and caviar. I don't know why they liked the
stuff--fish eggs as a delicacy was always a hard one to understand--but I swear
they ate half of the mountain of it, in spite of the fact that their mother told
them repeatedly to stop. I caught her grasping each of their arms fiercely and
hissing in their ears, showing her less passive side. Andrew Wilkowski also
brought his aging parents, who looked at the thin wife and caviar-sucking
children as if they were characters in a horror flick. Meanwhile, Andrew himself
was glued to Dino, filling his plate and wineglass and doing the most shameless
ass kissing I'd seen since Katie Simpson brought our sixth-grade teacher a dozen
roses and a box of chocolates on her birthday.

I played good daughter at the party, and tried
not to miss the old days of Dad's overcooked turkey and Mom's pies and watching
the Macy's parade on television. I talked to lots of old people with white hair
who probably each had a gazillion dollars, ate way too many little chocolate
tarts, and tried to figure out if there was something going on in the romance
department between these two waiters. I saw that Dino had broken free from
Andrew, and for a moment I was sincerely happy for him that he managed to cut
loose from the weasely brownnoser.

But then I noticed that Dino was striding with
a sense of purpose to the dining room windows. He peeled back

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the curtains, cupped his hand to the glass, and
looked out. There was something about the way he walked--too much purpose,
obsession, fury--that I recognized from that night I saw him on the lawn when he
cut the cable. Oh, God. Not now. No.

I immediately scanned the room and looked for
Mom. Instead of chatting amiably with the orchestra creative director or with
one of the donors, I saw that Andrew Wilkowski had taken her elbow and was
heading out of the room, as if to talk to her in private. Great. Terrific.
Something was definitely wrong.

Dino apparently had not found what he was
looking for. He moved toward the hallway and the front door. I thought Td better
follow him, though what the hell I'd do if he freaked out while I was with him I
hadn't quite figured out yet. Dino opened the door and I stepped out after him.
I did not want to step out after him. I wanted to go someplace else, where I was
completely alone and where no one could find me. I wanted to tuck my quilt
around my head, disappear. I did not want right here and right now.

Outside, the night was amazingly quiet, with
the noise of the party behind us, inside the house. It was November cold, and
the air was dewy and full of rain not yet fallen. Thick, wet clouds filled the
sky. A couple of people were standing and talking by the long line of parked
cars. I heard a trunk slam, and a man and a woman with instrument cases walked
back up the street to our house. Dino looked up and down the street,
and

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headed toward the box hedge at the perimeter of
the yard.

"Dino?" I said.

"William," he called. "Wil-yum." A bit of hope.
"Did we lose the dog?" I asked. "No, not the dog. William Tiero, the leach. I
know you're here."

Shit, I thought. Oh, shit! I wanted to call for
Mom, to find her, but I didn't think I should leave him. I didn't know what to
do. I just had no idea.

Dino crouched over, looked under the hedge. I
was glad that the people with the instrument cases had gone inside. I decided to
be calm. If I used a really calm voice, then he'd be calm, and I could go and
find Mom.

"You're getting your pants all wet," I said.
"Let's go in."

"I knew he couldn't stay away."

"William Tiero is not here, Dino," I said. My
voice sounded high, like it might break. I was fighting a weird sense of
unreality. I didn't even feel like me, talking calmly to this man I lived with,
who was looking in the hedge for someone who wasn't there. I felt like I had
gone into someplace past fear. Someplace way farther than that, where you cut
off from what's happening in order to function. I was watching this poor girl
with this crouched-over man who was losing it. I looked down and saw my own
hands, and they seemed familiar but not.

"You don't know what you're talking about. That
prick will never let me out of his life."

"No one's in the hedge, Dino," I
said.

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"You're right."

Dino came out of the hedge, hair messed, bits
of leaves on the arms of his jacket. I don't know how to describe his eyes
except to say that they were not unfocused or bleary like someone who's been
drinking. In fact, they were the opposite--hyper focused. He stood still,
listening. It was as if his senses were broken open--his hearing more acute, his
gaze taking in things no one else could see.

"Why don't we go inside now," I
said.

"He's not in the hedge. I'll check the back.
You check the cars," he said.

"Please, Dino." I wasn't doing well with calm.
My voice was pleading and anxious. I was climbing the slope of panic right
alongside of him. Where was my mother? Where was someone who knew what to
do?

"Check the cars before he drives off. He called
and hung up just now. He can't stand it, that this is happening without
him."

"William Tiero isn't here, Dino." Okay, the
calm was gone completely. 7 don't want to do this! I can't! I felt like
crying.

"Of course he's here. I know he's here." He
pulled his cell phone from his jacket pocket, showed me the display. It was true
that someone had called. The ID read unidentified caller. The letters glowed in
the gathering darkness. The two people who were talking by the car were carrying
large instruments into the house now, also. A bass and a cello, by the looks of
it.

"Is everything all right?" one man
asked.

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I wanted to cry out. Help me, I wanted to say,
but I didn't. "Fine," I said. "The dog is missing."

"Pets," the man said. He hauled his instrument
through the door, a loud gust of party sounds escaping as he went
through.

"Dino," I said. "Unidentified caller. That
could be anyone. William Tiero is not out here in the bushes. Or anywhere."
Please, I begged him with my voice. But you can't reason with insanity, or plead
with it. It's the frightening tyrant, the boss, the kidnapper.

"He did this last year. I smelled his cologne.
I saw him looking in the window. I'm going to catch the dirty little bastard.
I'm going to check the back."

I changed my tactics. "Let me check the back.
I'll make sure I find the dirty little bastard," I said. "You go
inside."

"He couldn't let me free. Obsessed." "Come
on."

"He'd rather have me dead than free of
him."

I took Dino's arm. His unreason made him seem
capable of anything, and I didn't even want to touch him. But I did--I pointed
him toward the house. I tried to keep from letting the tears come, from letting
out my own desperation. I looked around for Mom. Inside, people were gathering
in the living room. The quartet of musicians had set up an impromptu concert,
began to tune for the crowd. I wondered if they were expecting Dino to join
them. Some woman was ushering everyone out of the dining room for the
concert--they were squeezing out of the

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doorway and packing into the living room. Dino
stalked into the dining room, empty of people now. He looked back out through
the drapes again.

"I see movement," he said. "Turn off the lights
so that I can see."

"Dino, no. He's not there." I felt the tears
working away at my throat. Where the hell was Mom? "Turn out the
lights!"

His voice was loud, and I flinched. I knew that
my job right then was to hide the mess, make sure none of these people noticed
anything. To keep the secret. So I went to the switch and turned off the lights
to keep him quiet. Thankfully, everyone was either jammed in the other room or
overflowing out into the hall, happy to be in an important house of an important
man, spilling drinks and talking and eating tiny, fancy desserts on glass
plates.

Only the candles flickered in the room. I could
see their flames reflected in the glass that Dino was peering through. "Shh," he
said, even though I wasn't saying anything. "Come here."

I went. I hated standing beside him. His breath
was fogging up the glass. His coat was hanging dangerously over the candles on
the table under the window.

"Be careful, Dino," I said. I watched his
sleeve dangle by the flame. "Jesus."

"Holy shit, look!" Dino said.

I looked outside, where he was pointing. "Oh,
God," I breathed.

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He was right.

He was right, there was a figure outside, a
dark figure in a big coat.

I jumped my ship of sanity, got into Dino's
boat, because he was right. And if Dino was right about this, maybe William
Tiero really did have evil plans for us. Maybe Dino really was in danger. The
quartet began playing in the other room. All four instruments, a sudden,
thunderous sound of frantic motion.

"Get the gun," Dino hissed.

"Don't be crazy," I said, which is a rather
stupid thing to say to a crazy person, but my own thoughts were out of control.
My heart was thumping like mad, my hands shaking. A man in the bushes . . . "We
don't have a gun."

"I said, get the gun!"

Right then, the figure came close to the glass,
toward us. I let out a little scream at the same moment that I realized it was
my mother standing before us, Andrew Wilkowski's navy wool coat draped over her
shoulders. It was also at that same moment that Dino's elbow knocked over the
glass hurricane candle and the flame began to lick up the fabric of the
curtain.

Here is what I saw in my mind. The flame,
gathering speed up the curtain, bursting into a ball of fire. Catching onto the
other draperies, moving with the fury of some mythological god to the adjoining
room full of people. I heard screams in my mind, the panic of sequined and
silked guests, someone tripping on a velvety hem. Smoke suddenly everywhere, one
doorway, glass breaking.

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Flames spinning up the stairwell, surprising a
couple who were upstairs, looking for their coats. Fire trucks with twirling,
dizzying lights on the dark street, and charred remnants of furniture and
bodies, people crying on the front lawn, the house consumed and then
disappearing under gusts of water from the hoses.