Darling Rose Gold, page 11
Point taken.
I march down the sidewalk, trying to look braver than I feel. Curtains are pulled aside as I walk. The faces staring out at me are haggard, and their eyes burn into the back of my head after I pass. None of them has come to our house or otherwise acknowledged me. A crone pushing a cart crosses the street when she sees me coming.
When I pass each house, I bend to pick up the newspapers, then toss them in the oversized trash bins. I don’t mind doing my part to save the neighbors from reading this filth. The news is all lies and sensationalism. We won’t encourage them with our money or eyeballs. I made sure Rose Gold didn’t have a newspaper subscription the day I moved in with her.
Deadwick is old now—just a handful of kids here to replace the diseased and dying. No hope, no verve, no ambition in this town. Just row after row of deteriorating houses with owners to match. One by one, we’ll all fall down.
A window opens. A bag of trash flies out of it, exploding on the lawn ten feet in front of me. I cast a scathing look toward the window, though I can’t see who threw the bag. I keep walking.
I’m determined to stay positive today, so I try to focus on what I once loved about this town. Deadwick’s population has hovered steady at four thousand since the nineteen seventies. Newcomers were noticed and typically welcomed twenty years ago. While the rest of the country worried about unmarked white vans, Deadwick’s parents didn’t have to fret over the safety of their children. Most adults knew the name of every kid who sailed by on his or her bike, and who that kid belonged to in case tattling became necessary.
I made a splash when I moved into the town house—I’d grown up on the old side of Deadwick, so I was a newish face on the newer side. My neighbors were just happy I’d replaced the Gantzers, who had kept to themselves in a community that emphasized togetherness. The Gantzers had never participated in the town Easter egg hunt or made dinners for grief-stricken families. Plus, their cat, Dante, had antagonized the neighborhood dogs. I made mental notes of what was expected of me as I rubbed my pregnant belly. I have always been a good neighbor.
My community participation paid off when my own time of need came. I’m not sure how I would’ve gotten through Rose Gold’s childhood without my neighbors stopping by to drop off casseroles and cheer me up. There was always someone to rub my back, to sigh sympathetically, to bounce an idea off of when the doctors wouldn’t listen.
By now I’m standing at the entrance to Walsh’s. I lift my head, straighten my shoulders, and plod through the doors, ignoring the growing knot in my stomach. I guide a shopping cart down the first aisle, gathering the items on my list. No one pays me any attention. I don’t recognize most of their faces, thank God. The coil in my stomach loosens a little.
I approach the deli counter. Ancient Bob McIntyre is working the slicer. Bob is harmless. I will start with him.
“Hiya, Bob,” I say to his back. Hiya? A bit much, even by my standards.
Bob turns, a grin on his face, until he sees me. A crease forms between his skimpy eyebrows. “I heard you were out of prison,” he says.
“You heard right,” I say. “I’m planning a Thanksgiving dinner for my family.”
“You’re living with Rose Gold now?” he asks, arms crossed.
“Sure am. How’s your family been? How’s Grace?”
“She’s fine,” Bob says. “What can I get for you?”
“A pound of honey ham. For sandwiches,” I add. “I’ve already got my turkey.” I pat the twenty-one-pound Butterball strapped into the child’s seat in front of me. I’ll plump my daughter up one way or another.
“I see a turkey, all right,” Bob says under his breath. He pulls the ham from the display window and turns back to the slicer.
I almost laugh. If this is the worst insult Deadwick’s residents can lob at me, I’ll be fine.
“What puzzle are you working on these days?” I say to Bob’s back. Bob is a puzzle fanatic.
Reluctantly he answers, “A thousand-piece of the solar system.”
I resist a pun about his abilities being out of this world. Bob is not in the mood to pal around. He hands me the bag of sliced ham.
“Well, it’s good to be home,” I say.
Bob snorts. “Have a nice day.”
I wave goodbye and keep walking. Not a horrible start. Baby steps.
I force myself to take my time in the store. I catch a few dirty looks and hear a lot of whispering out of earshot, but I keep packing produce into bags, pretending I don’t notice any of it. I have as much of a right to be here as they do.
I’m searching for the stuffing when I find a store employee crouched down, restocking shelves. I tap him on the shoulder. “Excuse me,” I say, then stop short when I realize who it is. “Josh Burrows.” I cross my arms.
He glances up, rodent eyes searching my face, trying to place me.
Josh Burrows: the little boy, now young man, for whom I wished a low SAT score, early male-pattern baldness, and a lifetime spent with exclusively feline company. I have resisted the urge all these years to look him up, to find out what sort of psychopath he’s grown into.
“Can I help you?” he asks, feigning politeness, pretending he doesn’t remember me.
“Do you remember my daughter?” I say.
He scratches his pockmarked face. “I’m sorry. I don’t. Did we go to school together?”
“She left school because of you.” I keep my voice low so he has to lean in to hear me.
Josh Burrows squints, confused. I should have known he’d grow up to be a dunce.
I sigh in frustration. “Just tell me where the stuffing is.”
“Aisle nine,” he says with a smile, glad to have an answer. “You have a nice day.”
I roll my eyes and push the cart toward aisle nine.
That March afternoon when Rose Gold was in first grade, I’d allowed myself a rare couple of hours to relax. I think I had almost finished a crossword when I received a call from the school administrative office asking me to please come by, because Rose Gold was “okay but unwell.” They’d adopted this phrase over the course of two years, having phoned me dozens of times. Unwell is not okay, I wanted to snarl.
I raced over to the school, where I found Rose Gold gasping for breath with tears streaming down her face. Her wig was in her hands, covered with dirt. She strangled the dirty golden locks with her fists, shaved scalp exposed. “It hurts, Mommy,” she cried, clutching the wig to her chest. I noticed someone had put Band-Aids over scratches on her knees. The scratches hadn’t been there that morning.
“What hurts, baby?” I said, tugging her toward me. The question was redundant, a stall tactic. The reality was everything hurt: her chest, her lungs, her stomach, her head. If the pain lessened in one area, a different region gobbled it up, intensified the flame. The pain never disappeared, just shifted in levels of manageability. The tide was always high with my daughter. She exhausted me.
Rose Gold shook her head, refusing to answer. The school staff asked me to sit down for a meeting, but I ignored them. I carried Rose Gold to our beat-up old van, cradling her like I had when she was an infant. I buckled her into the backseat and put the key in the ignition. On the drive home, I watched the rearview mirror, my eyes focused backward more often than not. My little girl stared out the window, silent.
I pulled into the garage and turned off the ignition, letting my head rest against the seat for a minute. Closing my eyes, I imagined finishing the crossword, taking my daughter to the park, cheering her on as she descended a slide headfirst.
“Darling, why is your wig dirty?” I asked with a sinking feeling, already knowing the answer.
Behind me, Rose Gold began to whisper. “At recess Josh Burrows said my hair is fake, and he pulled off my wig to prove it. And then he and the other boys kept throwing it but I couldn’t catch it and it fell in the dirt and I tried to get it but Josh pushed me and I fell in the dirt too. Then they all shoved dirt in my mouth. To match my teeth, they said.” A solitary tear slid down her cheek. “Mommy, what are cooties?”
Josh Burrows and his cronies had been bullying Rose Gold for months, spilling ketchup on her clothes, leaving dead bugs in her backpack, and calling her cruel nicknames the rest of the students picked up on. This was the first time they had physically hurt her. I wished those boys a thousand fiery deaths that day and have every day since. It mattered not one whit to me that Josh was seven years old.
I had tried to teach my daughter how to defend herself, but she was an easy target with all her ailments. I was a bit clueless in this department—I had been popular in school, getting straight A’s and learning the art of self-deprecation at a young age. Rose Gold was too sensitive to laugh anything off.
I relaxed my fists into hands. “Your hair is beautiful, sweetheart. And you don’t have cooties. Josh Burrows is the one with cooties.” (Undoubtedly the wrong lesson to teach in that moment, but I am, after all, human.)
Growing up, my father had preached resourcefulness above all else. No use listening to someone’s problems if you couldn’t fix them. I could fix my daughter. I ached to help. “Do you want to stay home with Mommy from now on? What if Mommy was your new teacher?”
Rose Gold hesitated. She had mentioned last week that she loved her teacher, and there was a girl in class she talked about a lot. Maybe the two of them were friends for the time being, but how long until that girl turned on her too?
This transition would make both our lives easier. I could squeeze in classroom lessons during those interminable waiting room visits. I could make the doctor’s office an opportunity for fun, rather than something she dreaded. As long as those checks kept coming every month, we would make this work.
Rose Gold took off her glasses with the clear frames and cleaned them on her Tweety Bird T-shirt. This gesture always made me smile—such a wise old action for a child. I’d grown to love those glasses. Her eyes looked beady without them, as if they might scamper off her face without the frames to hold them in place.
“What do you think?” I asked again.
She put the glasses back on and watched me. “Can we still have recess?”
My heart swelled, imagining her participation in recess these past two years. I pictured her standing off to the side of red rover and tag, more out of breath than her classmates, who were running around.
I jutted out my chin, toughened the shell. “Of course we can, sweetheart. We’ll have two recesses a day. How about that?”
Rose Gold nodded and took off her seat belt. I hoped Josh Burrows and his goons were already fading from her memory. Supermom had saved the day again.
* * *
• • •
Back in the grocery store, I grab the last couple items on my list and head for the checkout. One lane is open. Four people wait in line while the teenage cashier slowly scans canned goods. I join the back of the line.
A very tall man, thin as a flagpole, stands in front of me. Only one person I know of in Deadwick is almost six feet five inches. The man turns as if he can hear my thoughts. I come face to face with Tom Behan.
He’s almost as startled to see me as I am to see him mustache-less.
“You shaved your mustache,” I blurt.
Tom hovers over me, adjusting his glasses. “I heard they let you out,” he says.
“I seem to be the talk of the town,” I say, chilled by his tone. “It’s strange not to see you in scrubs.”
Tom and I went through the CNA program together at Gallatin. He had been my closest friend. We’d stay up late at his apartment, goofing off when we were supposed to be quizzing each other on infection control. He’d gone on to get his nursing license, and we sometimes worked overlapping shifts at the local hospital. I think Tom had a crush on me back then, although I always thought of him as a brother. Now he has a wife and two kids.
“Let’s cut the horseshit.” He jabs a finger at me. “You may have tricked your daughter into forgiving you, but the rest of us have long memories.”
“That was all a big misunderstanding,” I say. “I made a few missteps, but I served my time. Rose Gold and I are closer than ever.” Not strictly true, but Tom Behan doesn’t need to know that.
Through gritted teeth, Tom says, “I vouched for you. I helped you research her symptoms and suggested treatments and let you cry on my shoulder.” Tom gets this haunted expression and lowers his voice. “Do you know the damage we wreaked on her poor body? On a perfectly healthy body? We took an oath—”
“She could barely walk. I wouldn’t call that perfectly healthy.” I look Tom Behan straight in the eye, suddenly desperate to win my old friend over, and try a softer tone. “I thought we could put the past behind us.”
Tom stares at me. The cashier has gotten through one customer in all this time. Another cart joins the line behind me.
“Well, well, well.”
I turn to see Sean Walsh, a lumberjack of a man I barely know, but who had an awful lot to say about me to the press five years ago. Tom nods at Sean.
“Patty here thinks we should all put the past behind us,” Tom says, loud enough for everyone in earshot to hear. I cringe.
“The past behind us, huh?” Sean says, scratching his beard. He leaves his cart and takes a few steps forward.
“Yes,” I say, because he’s waiting for my response. Sean takes another step closer. I wish he’d back off. Everyone in line in front of us is pretending to examine the register kiosks while they rubberneck.
“We’ve known each other since we were seventeen,” Tom says to me. “Maybe that’s the past we should put behind us.”
Sean takes a sip from a travel coffee mug. “I think the whole town would like to forget you were ever a part of it.”
His drink could use more than a few drops from the small brown bottle with the white cap in my purse.
“Tom, be reasonable,” I say under my breath.
Tom takes a step toward me. “Reasonable?” he chokes. “This coming from the woman who starved her little girl?” He raises his eyebrows at Sean. Tom is putting on a show, but I recognize the pain in his voice. I know how upset he is. If it were just the two of us, I’d give him a bear hug, like I did the day he failed his first certification exam. I was the one who convinced him to try again. If I hugged him right now, in front of Sean Walsh and the rest of the customers, he might slap me.
“Don’t talk to us about reasonable,” Sean says, taking another step forward. He’s close enough to reach out and touch. “The reasonable thing for you to do right now is walk out of this store before I remove you myself.”
Someone, a few feet away, starts to clap. Heat rushes to my cheeks. “But—” I gesture to my cart full of food.
“My brother doesn’t need your business,” Sean says, pointing to the door. Bill Walsh owns the grocery store. “Buy your food elsewhere.”
Tom and Sean form a semicircle around me. The only way out is toward the store exit. Outside, the bare branches lean forward with the wind, reaching for me.
I imagine a tree for every citizen of Deadwick. The long arms of timber lift the people up higher, higher, higher still. Then, when every Tom and Sean and even the little Timmys are fifty feet in the air, the trees release their catches, all at once, in harmony. I am their conductor. The bodies crash to the ground, the opposite of rose petals. They land on the tops of their heads and the backs of their necks and the flats on their spines. Their bodies are my carpet, painted red. I wipe my shoes on their faces.
I stand my ground for a second, chin out, fists clenched. I try to meet Tom’s eyes, to plead for mercy, but he won’t look at me anymore. His facial expression suggests he just stepped in a pile of dog doo.
They’ve left me no choice. I shuffle toward the door, head down, leaving my full shopping cart where it is. I think of the empty fridge at home, of Tom Behan’s misty eyes.
I walk out the door.
Behind me, the crowd erupts in applause.
10
Rose Gold
November 2014
I had been on the road for four hours, driving east along I-74 and then north on I-69. Today was the big day: I was going to meet Dad’s family and stay the night in Indiana. Over the past four months, he and I had texted a lot and talked on the phone several times. All I had to do was listen during these conversations; Dad was chatty enough for both of us. I pointed this out once, and he conceded that with age, he’d started to talk to strangers everywhere, whether he was in a checkout line or stopped at a tollbooth.
I’d friended him, Kim, and the two older kids on social media. I had hoped the family would grow to love me before they’d even met me in person. Dad and Kim weren’t as active online, but the kids were, especially thirteen-year-old Sophie. I liked every single status update she posted; there were a lot, and they were random.
My second toes are longer than my firsts. As a kid, someone told me that means I’m a genius. Even then, I knew it just meant I have hideous feet.
I’m calling it now: I suspect cancer will be my eventual demise. All four of my grandparents died from breast, throat, skin, and/or prostate cancers. The only mystery is which of these I will succumb to, the last being unlikely.
I suspected people would call Sophie a “character.”
Last summer was a long one, but now, in November, the weather was cooling down. My mother had been in prison for two years. The closer I got to Dad, the angrier I got at her. He was such a loving, kind man, and she’d kept him from me. All this time I’d thought she cared most about me. Even when I testified against her, I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing—I only went through with it because Mrs. Stone and the police said I should. I’d doubted myself the whole way through. But the reporters were right: she was a monster; she was poisonous. My mother was a selfish woman. She loved herself more than anyone else.
