Darling Rose Gold, page 8
I listen at the door for another minute, but Rose Gold doesn’t speak again. The bedroom floor stops creaking, so I tiptoe back down the hall and into the living room. I settle into my recliner, thinking. When I got out of prison, I extended an olive branch to Rose Gold, ready to start fresh. This is her response? Not only does she refuse to take responsibility for her actions, but she thinks she’s going to teach me a lesson. A weaker woman might run off, tail tucked between her legs. But I’m not going to desert my daughter when she needs me most. Underneath all that anger and scheming is a woman in need of her mother. Let her think she has the upper hand for now. She’s not the only Watts capable of forming a plan.
Like I said, now I know her weak spot: Adam.
I wait for my daughter to reemerge.
Half an hour later the master bedroom door unlocks. Rose Gold walks to the kitchen, places a bottle of milk in the freezer, and pulls two others out of the fridge. She washes her pumping supplies in the sink, then puts them in a backpack.
“I’m sorry,” she whispers, joining me in the living room. She wears khakis and a royal blue shirt with a small Gadget World logo embroidered on the chest, plus her pump bag. She sets down a baby carrier with Adam bundled inside. “I overreacted.”
“Being a new mom is hard,” I say, forcing sincerity into my voice.
Rose Gold doesn’t say anything.
“I’m here for you, darling.”
I scan her up and down, searching for clues. Even in long sleeves and pants, I can tell she’s lost weight. When we were in the yard, she looked gaunt in that bath towel. I think back to her weekly visits during my last year in prison. She’d seemed a normal size until her bump started to show, and she only got bigger from there. Of course some mothers lose pregnancy weight fast while nursing, but I didn’t expect Rose Gold’s new body to resemble the old one. She hasn’t been this thin since she was sixteen.
The teenager I raised was all elbows and knees, a hunched skeleton. She stopped growing at five feet and was excruciatingly self-conscious about her body. Back then I tried to reassure her that thinness was in vogue. I told her that millions of girls would die for her shape, but her body always embarrassed her. It didn’t help her chest was roadkill flat. She was stuck in a kid’s frame.
That was before her food allergies went away. Before her feeding tube was removed. She had a reason to be skeletal back then: she was sick. Now she is healthy. At least that’s what she’s told me.
The doorbell chimes. I stand at once, but Rose Gold rushes past me. She opens the door a tiny bit. Mary Stone’s warm voice floods the house.
“How are you doing, sweetie? Are you getting any sleep?” I miss this concern, the genuine care I know is etched on Mary’s face. She used to reserve that kindness for me. When she knew I was having a tough day with Rose Gold, she’d bring over a plate of brownies or a pitcher of iced tea. We’d sit and talk for hours.
“I’m okay,” Rose Gold murmurs.
I pick up the baby carrier and walk to the door. “Little Adam is a spirited one,” I say, forcing the door open wider.
Mary Stone hasn’t changed a bit in five years: sensible-mom haircut, dull but trustworthy face, wearing too much pink. God bless her.
Mary’s eyes bug out, and her jaw drops at the sight of me. She’s such a cliché sometimes.
“Hello, Mary,” I say warmly. “It’s been far too long.”
I lean forward to give her a hug, but she shrinks away from me.
She stares at Rose Gold, fingering the rhinestone butterfly brooch pinned to her blouse. “Whose idea was this?”
Rose Gold doesn’t meet Mary’s eyes. “Mine. Mom had nowhere else to go.”
Mary’s eyes narrow. “I know somewhere she can go.”
This is, without question, the most aggressive statement the lamb-hearted Mary Stone has ever made. Apparently distance does not always make the heart grow fonder.
“I’ve missed you so much, Mary,” I gush. “I thought about you all the time while I was away.”
Mary grips the doorframe, face purple and knuckles white. How hard would you have to slam a door to cleave a finger from a hand? She snatches the carrier from me and peers inside, as though I might have gobbled Adam whole for breakfast. I need a pointy black hat.
Mary turns to Rose Gold. “Why don’t you come by my house after work? We can catch up.”
Rose Gold shrugs her shoulders to her ears, eyes cast toward the floor. This submissive version of my daughter almost makes me miss the maniac screaming at me in the backyard half an hour ago.
“I’d love to join you,” I butt in. “You and I have a lot of catching up to do as well.”
“You are not welcome in my home,” Mary says. “Ever again.”
She grips the baby carrier and rushes down the driveway to her car. I guess it’s safe to assume I’m no longer the Mister Rogers of the neighborhood.
I step outside the house into a morning cloudy and full of fog. Mary buckles Adam into the backseat of her car. A movement across the street catches my eye. Standing at the darkened window of the abandoned house, watching me, are three shadowy figures. They don’t move when they realize I see them. One of them crosses their arms. I cross mine back, though the hair on my forearms is on end. I glance at the driveway. Mary is gone. When I squint at the abandoned house, the shadows are too. I shake my head and go inside, locking the door behind me.
My daughter studies me, waiting.
“Reporters did a number on this town.” I shrug.
“People might forgive you if you were a little less chipper,” Rose Gold points out.
“Honey, when you spend five years in prison for a crime you didn’t commit, you’ve got to make up for lost time when you get out,” I say. “I’m not going to pretend to be something I’m not.”
Rose Gold’s jaw stiffens for a second. Then she conjures up a smile. Maybe she fools Mary Stone with this act, but she can’t hide her anger from her own mother.
“I have to get to work,” she says. “I’ll be home around six.”
Rose Gold slams the door behind her and walks toward the detached garage. From the living room window, I watch the garage door open. She begins to back the van down the driveway, but then sits there for a moment, staring at me as I stare at her. Her lip curls in contempt, an expression I’d seen on her once before.
August 22, 2012: the day she took the witness stand.
* * *
• • •
The courtroom sweltered on that Wednesday. The gallery was crowded. Most of Deadwick’s residents had shown up to stick their noses in our business. Plenty of reporters had come as well; they couldn’t resist weaving a few more scandalous lies into their stories. My lawyer—an incompetent public defender who would have been more at home behind the counter of a medical marijuana dispensary—fanned himself and fidgeted in his baggy suit. The day I met him, I knew I was doomed.
The prosecutor had just finished questioning one of Rose Gold’s former pediatricians. This imbecile of a doctor claimed I’d acted “fishy” during office visits. Funny, he’d never said a word about my behavior ten years ago. He never reported this supposed fishiness to any superiors or state CPS agencies. If you asked me, all the prosecutor had established was that this key witness was a key moron, another seeker of the limelight armed with tall tales. The doctor returned to his seat.
The prosecutor, chin raised and shoulders back, looked the part of the justice-seeking hero. He glanced at the notes on his table before turning to face the judge. “Your Honor, at this time I’d like to call Rose Gold Watts to the stand.”
My stomach churned. My lawyer had said Rose Gold would testify against me, but I’d hoped she would back out before this day came. I turned to peek at my daughter, in her usual spot in the gallery, sandwiched between Alex and Mary Stone. Rose Gold had been living at the Stones’ town house for six months, since the day I was arrested. I wasn’t allowed to contact her.
Alex squeezed her arm around Rose Gold’s shoulders. The little con artist—Alex might have fooled the reporters with her concerned-best-friend shtick, but I knew all she wanted was fifteen minutes of fame. She hadn’t given two hoots about Rose Gold until my trial.
Rose Gold stood, bony shoulders propping up the sleeves of her cardigan. Eyes wide, she swayed a little, as though she might faint. Her skin was even paler than usual. She looked much younger than eighteen.
My daughter was terrified.
Sit back down, I wanted to tell her. Let’s call this whole thing off. I’ll drive you home and tuck you into bed, and we’ll make up stories about princesses and magic spells in faraway lands.
Rose Gold took a shaky step forward, one after another, until she was close enough for me to reach out and touch. I had to stop her. I couldn’t let her put herself through any more of this agony.
“You don’t have to do this,” I whispered.
Rose Gold turned to me. Her eyes were sad, begging me to take her home.
“Ms. Watts,” Judge Sullivan—who resembled a walrus—barked, “if you try to communicate with the witness again, I’ll hold you in contempt of court.”
At the sound of the judge’s voice, Rose Gold turned away and continued shuffling toward the stand. Was everyone in the courtroom blind? Could none of them see how much my little girl hated being there? They must have realized she was being forced to testify against her will.
Rose Gold sat in the witness box. She raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth. The prosecutor asked her to state her name for the jury.
“Rose Gold Watts,” she mumbled. The jurors leaned forward, straining their necks to hear.
“A little louder, please,” the prosecutor said.
She cleared her throat. “Rose Gold Watts,” she repeated.
“What is your relationship to the defendant?” the prosecutor asked.
“She’s my mom,” Rose Gold said, eyes cast down, hands gripping the arms of her chair.
“And it was just you and your mom living at 1522 Claremont, correct?”
Rose Gold nodded.
“Can you give us a verbal affirmation, please?”
“Yes,” Rose Gold said.
“No dad? No brothers, no sisters?”
I gripped the arms of my own chair. This simpleton was going to make my daughter relive every rotten moment of her childhood—every absent family member, every infection, every missed school field trip. I had tried to shield her from her disadvantages. In our house, we focused on positives. These buffoons were trying to drown her in her own sorrows.
“Can you describe your schooling from preschool up through now?” the prosecutor asked.
Rose Gold launched into a nervous explanation of her transition from elementary school to homeschooling. She lifted a trembling hand to smooth a flyaway on her head. I wondered if she was on her period. The time of month was right. I still hadn’t taught her how to use a tampon. There were so many things I had yet to teach her. She wasn’t ready to face the world alone.
The prosecutor moved on. “I want to ask you a few questions about your diet.”
Rose Gold had never fixed a sandwich or folded laundry. I cleaned her room and made her bed and drove her everywhere she needed to go. I had tried to encourage her independence once in a while, offering to leave her at the library for a few hours or sit in the waiting rooms during her doctors’ appointments, but she always wanted me there. “Stay,” she’d beg, and grab my hand. So I did. Maybe I should have pushed her harder. She was eighteen years old with no driver’s license or friends. She was not equipped to handle the meanness of this world. She was up there, shaking like a leaf, because of me. I should have been firmer, should have said no, should have spoiled her less. But all those years, I had needed her as much as she needed me.
“Were you allowed to have friends?” the prosecutor asked.
I had been deserted time and again throughout my life. I wasn’t good enough for my family, wasn’t good enough for Rose Gold’s father. Then suddenly I had this little angel who was dependent on me, who loved me more the longer we were together. I had someone to zip the back of my dress all the way to the top, to laugh no matter how cheesy my jokes were. She never got sick of my stories, never asked me to leave her alone. Some evenings, after we’d finished school for the day, I’d head to my bedroom or the kitchen to give her some privacy. She always came looking for me.
Rose Gold seemed far away, dreamy.
The prosecutor repeated his question. “Miss Watts, were you allowed to have friends?”
“No,” she answered, not making eye contact with anyone, but especially not me. “My neighbor Alex Stone was the only person my age I was allowed to talk to—almost always under my mother’s supervision.”
“What was her reason for keeping you away from the other kids?” the prosecutor asked.
Rose Gold tucked her hands under her legs, arms stiff. She shivered, obviously freezing. Mary hadn’t bothered to pack her an extra sweater. Some stand-in mother she was.
“She said she was worried my immune system wouldn’t be able to fight off their germs. Because of my chromosomal defect.”
“Which we now know you do not have,” the prosecutor pointed out. The two of them must have rehearsed this little scene.
“Right,” Rose Gold said reluctantly. “That was an excuse. She wanted us to be together all the time.”
“Why do you think that is?”
Rose Gold mumbled, just loud enough for everyone to hear, “She said she wanted to give me the childhood she never got.”
My face burned to the tips of my ears. My stomach flipped.
“What kind of childhood did she have?”
Rose Gold watched the prosecutor with wide eyes, searching for the same approval she’d always sought from me. “She wouldn’t say much, but I know neither of her parents was very nice to her. Actually, her dad was abusive. I guess that’s where she gets it from.”
I wiped my clammy hands on my pants. The jurors watched me with curiosity; one even wore an expression of pity. I stared down at the table, pretending to examine the wood grain.
In Dad’s defense, he had PTSD during an era when there was no such thing as PTSD, let alone a treatment plan. If I had to guess, I’d say the Battle of the Bulge was tolerable next to his battle with the bottle. He never laid a finger on my mother, but he applied all ten of them and then some to David and me. The country was ready to boil over in the sixties, and my house was no exception.
Dad ran his house with military precision, all “Yes, sirs” and never at ease. My mother, with her gelatinous spine, was his second in command. She never hit us herself, but I came to dread the threat “Wait till your father gets home” almost as much as the inevitable pounding that would follow. To this day, I can’t look at a belt, let alone wear one. They make the scars on my back itch.
Rose Gold studied the prosecutor, brows furrowed, debating something. In my head, I pleaded with her not to say whatever was supposed to come next in their script.
She sat back in her chair, decision made. Quietly she said to her lap, “One time I found her in the kitchen, crying that her parents never loved her.”
A lump formed in my throat. I have tried to be a cheerful person all my life, but the morning Rose Gold was referring to, I didn’t have it in me. When my ten-year-old daughter found me crying over the sink, I confided in her. I slid to the tile floor, slumped against the cabinets, and sobbed that my parents hadn’t loved me. Graduations, parent-teacher conferences, school talent shows: my dad never came to any of them. Not like you’re going to win, he’d say, while my mother sat next to him, acquiescing with her silence.
On the kitchen floor, Rose Gold had nuzzled her face into my shoulder. I love you more than all the people in the whole wide world combined, she’d said. Her love helped me pick myself up, allowed me to get breakfast on the table and finish the dishes.
I know I’ve made some awful mistakes, but I would never expose the thing she hated most about herself to everyone she knew.
In the courtroom, the prosecutor drove his point home. “Is it fair to say Patty Watts created a toxic environment for a child to grow up in?”
Rose Gold nodded. “She wouldn’t leave me alone.”
For the second time in as many minutes, I felt like I’d been slapped. Wouldn’t leave her alone? I couldn’t go to the bathroom without Rose Gold following me. She needed my opinion on everything: her outfits, her hairdos, her Barbie dolls’ names. Less than a year ago, she had asked to sleep in my bed, and now she had the nerve to act like I was the one suffocating her? If there was an unhealthy codependence between us, it went both ways. Sure, outsiders would find our relationship odd—since when had we cared about outsiders? I’d trusted her. She was my person.
Rose Gold went on. “My mom talked over me to my doctors.” You asked me to do the talking—you were shy and nervous around strangers.
“My mom picked out my outfits every day until I was seventeen.” You didn’t trust yourself to match your clothes.
“My mom chewed up the foods she thought I could tolerate before I was allowed to eat them.” You said you might not get sick if the food was ground up first.
Through my mind flicked memory after memory. Weren’t we laughing in most of them? Wasn’t she begging me for more hugs, more stories, more approval? More, more, more. Did I ever say no? Did I ever once bad-mouth her to a neighbor or a teacher or a doctor? Did I ever leave her on a Friday night to go on a date or see a friend? Did I ever ask for space from her, ever say I wanted the bed to myself, that I wanted to sleep in, that I wanted to take a bubble bath without waiting for her call for more apple juice?
Rose Gold’s chin quivered. “I knew she was controlling, but I didn’t know the medicine she gave me was making me throw up over and over and over again, until my teeth started to rot. She starved and poisoned me”—her voice shook—“and she ruined my entire childhood.” She played with the cuff of her sweater, sliding the fabric between her index and middle fingers, a method of self-soothing she’d used since childhood. She used to stroke the edges of her blankie that way as a toddler. When I remembered how small and naive she still was, my anger began to subside.
