Darling Rose Gold, page 3
I reach for the buckle to his car seat, then remember my place. I turn to Rose Gold. “May I?”
She nods. Her eyes match her son’s, dashing back and forth between his body and my face. I unbuckle the seat belt and lift him out of his chair.
I cradle him in my arms, drop my nose to his head, and inhale. Nothing beats that new-baby smell. For a second, it’s Rose Gold in my arms again. We’re back in the town house, and for a few minutes, she’s not crying or wheezing or coughing.
“He looks like you,” I say, glancing at my daughter.
She nods a second time, staring at the baby with such intensity, I know she’s not listening to me. I’d recognize that lovesick gaze anywhere: she is head over heels for her son.
I focus on Adam, who watches me with curious hazel eyes. He sticks his tongue out again, then puts a few fingers in his mouth. All infants resemble tiny, wrinkled grandpas, but on Adam, the arrangement works. He’s a cute baby. Lord knows the Wattses aren’t lookers, so it won’t be long before the ugly stick comes after him. For now, he is precious and adorable and everything I’ve hoped for in a grandson. I sigh.
“It feels like just yesterday you were visiting me here with that growing belly,” I say, handing him to Rose Gold. “Oh, darling, he’s perfect.”
She nods and nestles him back into his car seat. “I think so too. He almost slept through the night once.” She tucks a blanket around his body and under his chin—our miniature mummy. He smiles up at us, dimples forming in his chubby cheeks. We both beam back, awed.
Rose Gold turns to me. “Should we go?”
I nod. We both reach for the driver’s door. I realize my mistake and shuffle to the passenger’s side. I bought this van when Rose Gold was a toddler. I have never sat in the passenger seat.
Inside, Rose Gold removes her sweatshirt, revealing a ratty white T-shirt underneath. She appears already to have lost some weight. I debate saying as much, knowing most mothers would be overjoyed to hear such a thing—I’ve been trying to lose my baby weight for twenty-three years—but stop myself. Comments on weight loss have never been a compliment in Rose Gold’s book.
She is small behind the wheel. A vehicle of this size is meant for a meaty driver, someone like me. Still, she handles the van with ease, pulling out of the parking spot and pointing it back down the long road. She grips the wheel, hands at ten and two, knuckles turning white. I wonder when she got her driver’s license. I never gave her permission. I imagine wrenching the steering wheel away from my daughter, sending the van careening off the road.
We all have little musings like this: what if I screamed in the middle of the meeting? What if I grabbed his face and kissed him? What if I put the knife into his back instead of the utensil drawer? Of course we don’t act on them. That’s what separates the sane from the not: knowing madness is an option but declining to choose it.
I notice the silence has carried on a beat too long. “Thank you for coming to get me.”
Rose Gold nods. “How does it feel to be out?”
I dwell on the question. “Scary. Unsettling. For the most part, fantastic.”
“I bet.” She chews her lip. “So now what? Do you have to do community service or go to therapy or anything?”
Yeah, like I’m going to serve the community that threw me in prison. Throughout Rose Gold’s childhood, I was an exemplary neighbor, cleaning trash off our highways and playing bingo with our elderly. If I want therapy, it has to be on my own dime. I don’t have that kind of money in the first place, and if I did, I certainly wouldn’t use it to have some quack list all my deficiencies. One of my fellow inmates—a former shrink—gave me some free advice.
She suggested I make a list of goals for my return to society, said keeping busy would leave me less time for getting into trouble. I didn’t bother telling her how busy I was during the months leading up to my arrest.
I came up with the following list:
Find somewhere to live. My town house went into foreclosure after I went to prison.
Find a job. I can’t work in a hospital anymore, but I have a promising lead with an old friend from prison. When Wanda got out, she started a nonprofit that helps female former convicts get back on their feet. Ex-prisoners run the company, Free 2.0. (What about the women who’ve been in and out of prison a dozen times? I asked. Would she call it Free 13.0 for them? “Patty,” Wanda had drawled, “your mind is both your biggest asset and your biggest drawback.” People tend to describe my personality via backhanded compliments.) Last time she wrote, she mentioned something about manning a hotline remotely.
Fix things with Rose Gold. When my daughter began visiting me a year ago, she was angry and wanted answers. Step by step, I’ve been winning her back. Soon things will return to how they used to be.
Convince my friends and neighbors I’m innocent.
Denial is as good a strategy as any. The word suggests obliviousness, a refusal to see the truth. But there’s a mighty big difference between someone who won’t see the truth and someone who won’t tell it. People are much more inclined to forgive you if you act like you didn’t know any better. Let them call me oblivious. Let them think I don’t know right from wrong. Beats the alternative.
I glance at Rose Gold. I have one shot to get this right.
“First, I need a place to stay,” I say, feigning nonchalance.
She doesn’t react, keeps checking on Adam in the rearview mirror.
I was hoping she’d offer so I didn’t have to ask. Maybe I’ve overestimated her renewed loyalty to me. I look out the window. We’re on the highway now, nothing but cornfields for miles in any direction. They built this prison where Jesus left his sandals. I keep my voice casual.
“I thought maybe I could stay with you for a little bit? Just until I’m back on my feet,” I add. “I know you said your apartment is tiny.”
Rose Gold stares at me so long, I get nervous we’re going to drift off the road. After a minute, she says, “I don’t live in that apartment anymore.”
I turn to her, questioning.
“I bought a house,” she says with pride. “It’s no mansion, but I have three small bedrooms, a bathroom, and a yard.”
Bingo. “Well, if you have a spare bedroom, I’d love to spend more time with you. I could take care of the mortgage payments once I have a job.” I almost offer to watch Adam while she’s at work, but decide to take this slowly. The thrashing in my chest annoys me. I put a roof over my daughter’s head for eighteen years. Why shouldn’t she put one over mine for a while?
“We’ve come a long way since I started visiting you in prison,” Rose Gold says slowly. “I shouldn’t have fallen for the media’s story. I wish I had stood up to the prosecutor.”
The tide is turning in my favor, so I stay quiet, let her think she’s making the decision. Maybe I’m finally going to get my apology.
She turns to me. “But you shouldn’t have sheltered me from the world my entire life. I’m not a little girl anymore.”
I ignore the slight and nod. I have to pick my battles. She will learn soon enough that the urge to keep your child safe never goes away, no matter how old she is.
“I don’t want things between us getting screwed up now that we’re finally on good terms. If we try this, if you live with me, it’s my house, my rules,” she says with a shaky voice. A gentle breeze could decimate her conviction. “I want us to be completely honest with each other.”
I nod some more, working to contain my excitement.
She chews her thumbnail for a few seconds.
“Okay, let’s give it a try. You can have one of the spare bedrooms.” Rose Gold smiles at me. I know it’s a real smile because she forgets to cover her teeth.
I can’t help myself—I clap with glee and squeeze her shoulder. How have we progressed from arguing across a table in a prison complex to becoming roommates again? But then how could I have doubted my daughter? Of course my flesh and blood will take me in. Think of all the sacrifices I’ve made on her behalf. Think of all she owes me.
“Are you sure? I don’t want to overstep.”
She takes a deep breath, eyes never leaving the rearview mirror. “If it doesn’t work out, you can always find a place of your own. But I don’t want you spending your first night at a motel or something. That’s almost as bad as jail.”
“Oh, honey, I’d love to stay with you. And I’m happy to take care of Adam if you ever need help.” The offer slips out before I can stop it.
“Let’s see how it goes.” She doesn’t sound overjoyed, but gives me a quick smile before her eyes flick back to the rearview mirror. What is she looking for? She has become hard to read, my daughter.
We don’t talk for a while, just sit next to each other in either companionable or self-conscious silence—I spend most of the ride trying to decide which it is. When I can’t take the quiet anymore, I turn on the radio. Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” is playing, which cheers me up immediately. I love eighties music. I tap along to the beat on my armrest.
Rose Gold pulls the van off the highway at the exit for Deadwick, and my shoulders sag. Deadwick is, in a word, brown. Everything is always dying here, whether it’s from too much snow or not enough rain. And I don’t expect the pea-brained residents will throw a parade when they find out I’m back.
I hope her place is in the newer part, with the town houses and apartment complex. You couldn’t call the homes there nice or big, but they’re farther away from old memories, at least.
We stop at a red light next to Casey’s, the town gas station. I note with surprise that gas is less than three dollars a gallon. When the light turns green, we take a right, heading north; the older section, then. Just my luck.
Rose Gold slows the van to a crawl as we travel down Main Street. I focus straight ahead so I don’t have the chance to recognize any of the long gray faces or beady black eyes on the sidewalk. My neighbors—people I thought were my closest friends—slandered my good name to the press throughout my trial: NEIGHBORS DESCRIBE POISONOUS PATTY WATTS AS “PREDATOR,” “MONSTER.”
I haven’t seen or heard from any of them since.
We’ve been in the car for over an hour, and I can’t keep my mouth shut any longer. As casually as possible, I ask, “Any word from Phil?”
Rose Gold glares. “I told you we broke up.”
“I wasn’t sure whether that was final. I thought he might have the decency to see his child into the world.”
Rose Gold cracks her knuckles at the wheel, tension growing. “You’re not going to start up about deadbeat dads again, are you?”
“Of course not.” I file away the speech I have been preparing, bulleted in six key points, since Rose Gold’s last visit.
My daughter should never have been left to fend for herself. A few years without me, and she winds up pregnant and abandoned. Our neighbors can grouse all they want about my controlling ways, my dubious mothering. But they don’t understand how much she needs me, how lucky she is to have me here to run her life for her. I’ll right this sinking ship in no time.
“Maybe all Wattses are doomed to awful fathers.” Rose Gold sneers. “You always said I was better off without Grant anyway.”
She is. I told her that her father overdosed before she was born, a misfortune both timely and fortunate in my book. True, she’d never met him, but at least she could imagine her father was a good guy. He wasn’t.
“Well, you’re not alone anymore. You have me now.” I beam. Fifty-eight years of cheeriness—I deserve a medal.
Rose Gold keeps watching the rearview mirror. She cradles the steering wheel with her knees and wipes her palms on her pants, leaving sweat marks behind. Is she nervous because of me?
She flicks on her turn signal, and I realize how familiar the route is. The right off the highway, the long straight stretch, another right, two lefts. Unease grabs hold of my stomach. I am ten years old again, sitting in the backseat after swim practice, dreading going home.
“Mom?” Rose Gold prods. “Did you hear me? What do you want for dinner tonight?”
I push the memory away. “Why don’t I make us something, darling?” My daughter flinches ever so slightly. “It’s the least I can do with you taking me in and all.”
Rose Gold makes another right turn, and now we’re one street away. Maybe she’s made a mistake. She slows the van as we approach the stop sign at the intersection of Evergreen and Apple. I clutch the armrests. Beads of sweat form along my hairline. I haven’t made a left turn onto Apple Street in decades. There are two houses in that direction, and one of them is abandoned.
The van stalls at the stop sign; it doesn’t want to go any farther either. Is Rose Gold making me wait or am I imagining things? The van and everyone inside it—even Adam—are still.
Rose Gold reaches for the blinker and turns the steering wheel left. We can’t be turning left; Mr. and Mrs. Peabody live in the house now.
The van creeps down Apple Street, tree-lined but leafless at this time of year. A pothole lurks in the middle of the road; it wasn’t there when I was a kid. Neither was the guardrail at the street’s dead end—I wonder offhand when it was installed. I try to make sense of the situation. Maybe somebody renovated the Thompsons’ old house. But their place is already coming into view, and it’s still as run-down as it was when I was a kid.
By now we’ve reached the end of the subdivision and stopped in front of 201 Apple Street, a half-acre lot with a small one-story ranch house. The brown brick building is still unexceptional, dull but well cared for over the decades. A tall wooden fence surrounds the back half of the property. “To keep the riffraff out,” Dad explained while hammering the fence posts into the ground.
I gape at Rose Gold, unable to verbalize the question. She pulls into the driveway and presses the garage-door opener clipped to the sun visor. The door to the detached two-car garage starts to open.
“Surprise,” she says in a singsong voice. “I bought the house you grew up in.”
I’m too dumbstruck to formulate sentences. “The Peabodys?”
“Gerald died last year, and then Mabel moved into a nursing home. But we made an agreement they’d sell it to me once they were ready to move on. I got such a good deal. Way better than anything else I could have bought around here.” Rose Gold is proud of herself, like the day she learned to tie her shoes. She pulls the van into the garage, empty without my dad’s yard tools and all the cases of Budweiser.
I feel sick.
“I was going to wait a few weeks to show it to you, so I could decorate more. But maybe now you can help with that”—she lowers her voice and squeezes my shoulder the way I had squeezed hers—“since we’re reconciling and everything.”
My mind is fuzzy, like a room with carpeted walls. I keep reaching for clues, but instead am consumed by one thought: I can’t go in there.
Rose Gold pulls the key out of the ignition and opens her door. “I knew you’d be surprised.” She simpers, then gets out of the car.
“You know what happened here,” I say, still in shock. “Why on earth would you buy this house?”
Rose Gold’s eyes widen. “I thought we’d keep it in the family,” she says earnestly. “Four generations of Wattses—think of the history!”
She opens the backseat door and makes baby noises at Adam. He kicks his feet. She takes him out of his car seat.
“I missed you,” she coos, hugging Adam tight to her body. He nestles into her, yawning.
I am still belted in, hand frozen on the buckle.
Rose Gold carries the baby toward the garage’s side door, then turns back when she realizes I’m not following her. “Come on, Mom.” Why does she say it that way, sarcastically, as though I’m not her actual mother? “Come see what I’ve done so far.”
I should have stayed at a motel. I could have stayed in prison. The hair on my arms stands straight up. My mouth is dusty. I press the buckle, and the seat belt strap retracts. My fingers reach for the door handle. The soles of my feet find the running board.
“You coming?” Rose Gold watches me, cradling Adam in her arms.
I nod and muster a grin, the ever-agreeable Patty. Slamming the van door behind me, I drift out of the garage and toward the house.
4
Rose Gold
January 2013
The reporter tapped away on his phone while waiting in line for our coffees. Vinny King had slicked-back hair, wore a small silver cross on a chain around his neck, and looked like he’d slept in his baggy clothes. I wondered if he’d woken up late.
It had taken us two months to find a date to meet in Chicago. On the drive up, I was sure Vinny would cancel on me last minute. When I got to the café, I was still convinced the interview wouldn’t happen. Yet here we were, on a freezing but sunny January afternoon.
Vinny had suggested a coffee shop in Bucktown. I had to google where Bucktown was, but I found my way. I watched stressed customers order their drinks to go. Others sat at old wooden tables and pecked away at their keyboards. I’d drunk coffee once and hated it, but Vinny didn’t need to know that. Coffee was a rite of adulthood—only a kid wouldn’t drink it. So when Vinny offered, I asked for a Nutella latte. Maybe the chocolate would disguise the coffee flavor.
I had decided this interview would go well because of two good omens on my way into the shop: a baby with its hand in its mouth, then three blue cars parked in a row.
I had started paying attention to good and bad signs when I was seven—first because Mom did, and later because I wanted a way to predict what was going to happen to me. While waiting in a doctor’s office lobby, I’d get that familiar nervous thumping in my chest. But instead of sitting there thinking how scared I was, I’d record everything I observed in a small pink notebook.
