Wild Roses (9 page)

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between cloudbursts. It was more work than it
seemed, looking through a telescope, as the Earth was continually moving and you
had to move along with it. You don't realize how fast this actually happens, and
it's kind of both creepy and wonderful when you stop to think about it. And it
makes you realize there is absolutely no way to avoid change. You can sit there
and cross your arms and refuse it, but underneath you, things are still spinning
away.

Anyway, the telescope always made me feel
better. I could go to a different place and didn't need chemicals or airfare to
do it. I started hunting around for Mars when I heard tires on gravel. Bike
tires. Oh, my God, bike tires. It was inky black out there, so all I could see
was the white of his T-shirt underneath his black coat until he got closer. Ian
Waters put his feet on the ground, balanced his bike with his hands. God, there
he was, all of a sudden. Ian Waters.

"Hi," he said. His breath came out in a puff.
That's how cold it was getting.

"Hi," I said. "What are you doing here?" I
tried to breathe. My heart was doing this charming maraca number.

"Performance tape." He pulled a cassette from
his pocket, lifted it up. "Mr. Cavalli wanted to hear one of my concerts. Can
you see anything tonight?"

"Mars." I was trying to ignore the fact that
his presence was charging up the night like an approaching lightning storm. I
swear, my insides felt this surge of energy, a hyperawareness. I could smell his
shampoo. I tried to breathe deeply. I mean, this was stupid. This was no big
deal. I forced myself to sound casual. "Want to

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look? You've got to be quick, before a cloud
comes."

Ian set his bike down on the grass, climbed
over it. His coat was apparently a conductor of electricity, because when his
sleeve touched my arm as he bent over beside me, I felt a jolt of current. I
shivered.

"Cold?" he said, as he looked into the
telescope where I had pointed it.

"I'm okay." Which was a lie. Some cruel person
had invaded my body and was squeezing my lungs. I could barely breathe, so I'm
not quite sure why I was suddenly worrying about my guacamole breath.

"No way," he said. "Is that it?
Mars?"

"Big white ball? Yeah." Casual. No big
deal.

"That's amazing. That's Mars? That's an actual
planet? Man, that's hard to believe." He stood straight again. His eyes were
shiny and happy. "We're looking at a planet."

"I know it. That's how I feel about it
too."

"I've never seen inside a telescope
before."

"Never?"

"No. You know, this is my usual method." He
leaned his head back, looked up. "Wow. This isn't bad either."

He was right. I looked up with him and saw that
the sky was showing off. The clouds had moved aside for a moment, and the
blackness was deep, deep. The stars were both simple and magical, thousands of
pinpoints of light. It was one of those moments you wonder how we could ever
forget what was up there. There is that majesty, you are overcome by the wonder,
and then the next day you're worrying about your math homework.

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We just stared up there for a while, and then
Ian sat down on the grass, on the tails of his coat. It occurred to me briefly
to worry that Dino might see us, and about the trouble I'd be in then. I sat
down on the grass beside Ian. Right there next to him, and I started imagining
his arms around me. Eight months, I reminded myself. Eight months and he'd be
gone and not looking back. I remembered how much it had hurt when I broke up
with that asshole Adam Peterson, even when that had been my choice and he was a
creep. I remembered my father's arm through the glass of his car when his heart
was destroyed. I leaned down on my elbows. "This is the best way to see the
stars this time of year, anyway" I said. "The telescope gets impossible. Shaky
images. The atmosphere is more . . ."I looked for the word. Moved my hand in the
air.

"Unstable?" he guessed.

"Turbulent."

I was sitting very close to him and he looked
over at me, laid down on his side and propped on one elbow. He looked at me and
I looked back, and he held my eyes for a while. I looked deeply inside of him,
and he saw me, too. Something passed between us right then. Some force, some
connection, and, God, I wanted it so badly, him seeing me that way, me seeing
him. I wanted more and more and more of it. I granted myself a concession.
Friends. That's what I would do. I'd be Ian Waters's friend, and I could still
have some piece of this without getting my heart broken. I could do that. I was
in charge of my feelings; they weren't in charge of me.

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Ian looked away from me, back toward the sky.
"Wow," he said. He shook his head. Stood up. "Whew." "Are you all right?" "I've
got to go." "Okay."

He went to his bike, set it upright again. "You
know, I'm jealous. You here, doing what you love." "You do what you love," I
said. "I don't love the violin," he said. "You're kidding." "Sometimes I hate
it." "You do?"

"It runs my whole life. Then I try to remember
that I'm lucky to have a talent for it."

"Talent?" I said. "You've got more than a
talent."

"Mr. Cavalli thinks my playing lacks
passion."

"Well, he's got too much of it. Way too
much."

"That's what it takes to be great, he
says."

"Then maybe it isn't such a good deal to be
that great," I said. Passion--you had Dino on one side with way too much, and
the Powelsons on the other with absolutely none. The cable truck had come and
gone, and now their house glowed blue again from television light. There had to
be a happy medium somewhere.

I was standing next to Ian and his bike. He
picked up one of my cold hands. He rubbed it between his own to warm it. He let
it go again. Friends could do that. Friends could wish that he didn't let
go.

"Bye," he said. He smiled, pushed off hard on
the pedals

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and set off down the road. I watched the back
of him disappear.

I heard one of our upstairs windows slam shut.
Angrily. Dino had been watching us, I realized. And then I realized something
else--Ian had ridden off with the performance tape still in his pocket. Maybe
the reason Ian came over had nothing to do with the tape after all.

"Ian Waters." I said his name into the
darkness.

I rubbed my arms against the cold. The feeling
I had gotten when our eyes met--I tried to shake it. Anyway, it was no big deal.
Really. Because I had it all under control.

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CHAPTER FIVE

People don't crack up in a linear, orderly
fashion. A person on the brink can do something really wacky--believing he can
be heard through his cable, for example--but then return to his regular old self
for days afterward. It's a great way for you to convince yourself that things
are okay enough. Then something happens again. And again. Until the creepy
things are coming closer and closer together, and regular is farther and farther
apart. It's an elevator ride--down, up. Down two floors again, and up seven. Up
again to the highest floor, where the cable will snap and the car will drop in
fast, mind-blowing destruction.

Dino was okay for most of the week after he cut
our cable. Then on Friday night, Dino, Mom, and I decided to go out to dinner
before I went over to Sophie Birnbaum's. During football season my friends and I
sometimes go

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over to Sophie's in an informal ban of the
display of caveman hormones going on at our school stadium. We play marathon
Monopoly with our own system of money using M&M's, our reward for having to
put up with cheerleaders flashing their asses at us during the afternoon
assembly, and for being forced to clap for the football players with their
D-plus grade averages.

We had dinner, and Dino was driving back. Mom
and I were discussing whether I needed a ride home after Sophie's or not, when
Dino spoke.

"I've ruined him, I'll guess," Dino said.
"That's why he's stalking me."

Just like that, out of nowhere. The air in the
car went cold.

"No one is stalking you," Mom said. "Quit
that." "He's jealous that I'm succeeding without him." "Who?" I asked. "You know
who," Dino said.

Mom caught my eyes in the rearview mirror. Her
eyes said, I know. I heard the same thing you did. They said, Please, Cassie.
Keep your mouth shut.

"He's probably driving one of those outhouse
trucks. What are they called. Porthole potties." Dino chuckled to himself.
Porta-Potti, he meant, and it might have been funny. I might have laughed,
imagining the poor sailor who would look out of a porthole potty. I might have
cracked up at Dino being so hilarious about some guy stalking him, because of
course it was a joke. But I didn't laugh. I was scared.

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Insanity, see--it's hilarious until it's deadly
serious.

Mom was scrambling eggs the next morning and
talking on the phone. She wasn't paying attention to them the way she should
have. They were getting brown on the bottom.

"I've got to go, Alice." Alice was Alice
Easton. Mom's good friend and a clarinet player in their orchestra. They often
carpooled together. Alice was the warm kind of person who baked a lot. We were
always getting things from her like banana bread and cookies and muffins. Good
kind of friend to have. "I'll try. Okay. Bye," Mom said, and hung up. One of
those kind of hang-ups that happen because you are suddenly in the
room.

"I thought you were going to make him take his
medicine," I said. Here was my message: Fix this, I was saying.

"I never said that. I said I was going to talk
to the doctor. Which I've done. No one can make him, Cassie. The doctor says
we'll just have to wait and see what happens."

"Terrific. What's next? The CIA is going to
talk to him through the television? Who does he think is stalking
him?"

"William Tiero. Look, it's pointless to try to
make sense of this."

"William Tiero? Why William Tiero?"

"I don't know, Cassie. They've had a long
history together. One of those love-hate things. Epic drama of good intentions
and bad blood. I don't want to talk about this now, okay? I'm exhausted. Just
... I can handle him. Try not to worry."

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"I don't really see how that's
possible."

"Let me worry. The good thing is . . . well,
he's writing," she said. "He'll finish his writing, and things will get better.
I promise."

When you think of Hemingway and William Styron
and Virginia Woolf and Robert Lowell and Mozart, think too of the people around
them. The brothers and friends and wives and nieces and daughters. Think of all
of the people who had to be normal in crazy conditions. Who had to pay bills and
figure out what to have for dinner. Who worried, and tried to understand, and
called doctors, and placated in their attempt to define and control what wasn't
even of this world. Who acted as the stabilizing force, the pull of the moon on
a wobbly earth, calming its own natural impulse to spin out of control. And
think of those who couldn't hold on to their own sanity while being pulled down
by others. Liszt, who went mad himself dealing with his crazy family, including
his daughter with three kids out of wedlock with Wagner; and poor Robert Frost,
with his nervous breakdown after trying to pay for all of his family members in
insane asylums. And Theo van Gogh, devoted caretaker, who died six months after
his mad brother. Sometimes, the job would have been too much.

I decided to get out of there. It wasn't just
the night sky that was tumultuous, filled with smashing air currents and forces
of nature at their most raw and untamed. My house felt that way too. Depression
is a force, paranoia is

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a force, huge moving masses that affect
everything in their way, same as continents colliding. And just like looking
through a telescope when the weather gets cold, the instability in the air makes
the images blurred and confused. I wanted to be in a place where I could count
on things being calm and making sense.

I walked to Dad's. I had to pass Ian Waters's
house, the small cottage near town that now had a new coat of paint and some
flowers out front since he'd moved in. I felt a little surge of glee seeing his
tennis shoes on the front porch. I admit, I walked past kind of slowly, hoping
he'd see me and come out, but the house looked quiet. It was probably a good
thing. All week I'd been working hard to keep the thoughts of my new friend
where they should be. I tried not to keep meeting his eyes in my mind. Eight
months, I reminded myself, and he'd be off with his violin. I'd be lucky if he
had time for a letter after he went to Curtis.

When I got to Dad's, I just hung out with him
and helped him change the oil in his car. Afterward we drove over and picked up
Nannie from Providence Point, and Dad made us all dinner. I didn't want to talk
to him about what was happening at home--God knows how he'd take that and run
with it. I just wanted to be with him. He made this great buttery pasta that
probably had a gazillion calories, and then we played Crazy Eights and Nannie
cheated. She beamed with victory and rode home with the most smug look you ever
saw. It reminded me exactly of Zach Rogers earlier that day when we got back our
math