Searching for Rose

by Dana Becker

“Okay, hon,” Carmen said. “Just keep it in mind, okay?”

  * * *

  For the next few hours April waited in the bakery, sitting at the table next to the door, staring out into the marketplace. Carmen made her a sandwich, which the girl at first ignored and then, in four rapid bites, devoured. At noon, when the bakery got crowded, a young woman about April’s age approached her table and, seeing that she’d finished her meal, asked if April was about to leave. With teeth clenched in rage, April said loudly, “How about you keep walking.” Carmen overheard this, sighed, dropped a croissant on a plate, walked briskly over to April’s table, and slid the croissant in front of her.

  “You will not talk to my customers like that,” she said. “I’m running a business here.”

  April glared at her.

  “Do you understand? Answer me.”

  “Yeah,” April said. “I got it.”

  Even as Carmen handled long lines of customers, she’d turn an eye toward April. For hours, the girl sat in the same spot, almost motionless, just staring. Occasionally, she would stand up, look intently out the window, as though recognizing someone, and begin to walk toward the door, only to discover that it wasn’t the person she thought, and then retreat back to her seat.

  Joseph Young had watched all of this from afar. Whenever possible, he’d drift over toward the bakery, to see what was happening with the girl whose sister was missing. He considered going up to her and saying something. But what? And anyway, she seemed agitated, and not in the mood for company. Joseph decided to let her be—for now. But he was keeping an eye on her.

  By the end of the day, April was still sitting there. As Carmen began to mop the floor, April suddenly jumped up.

  “I gotta go,” she said and made for the door.

  “Wait!” Carmen called out. “What if your friend calls me back?”

  “She’s not my friend,” April said over her shoulder.

  And then she was gone, swallowed up in the crowded market. On her way out, she’d walked right past Joseph, who had drifted back toward the door of the bakery—possibly for the twentieth time that day—to keep watch over April. In her haste, she had bumped into him, and the contact had jolted him far more than he expected. The aroma of her perfume had reached him quickly and lingered powerfully for a moment before thinning out into the ether. Its fragrance was unmistakable. As Joseph watched April disappear, he named it aloud, letting the word pass over his lips like a gently felt secret.

  Roses, he whispered.

  * * *

  Joseph had been so antsy to see April that he barely slept. But April did not show up at all the next morning, or during lunch. By 3:00 P.M. Joseph was losing hope. By 5:00 P.M., he was fairly certain he’d never see her again.

  Carmen, too, was preoccupied with thoughts of this troubled young stranger. On her postwork walk home, Carmen kept her eyes wide open, looking for April’s missing sister—but she was also looking for April herself. The search went on for two days. During this time, Carmen called and re-called the number April had dialed, but never got a response. Had it all been a dream? Maybe April and her missing sister were just figments of her imagination?

  But then, on Monday morning, shortly after opening time, as Carmen set out a display of fresh rosemary rolls—and Joseph was fielding the breakfast crowd over at the Amish diner—April was suddenly back, standing at the bakery counter, helping herself to samples, gobbling up little bits of bread as though she hadn’t eaten anything in days.

  “Hey there,” Carmen said, trying to act casual. She slid a plate with a cranberry-walnut roll on it to April. “It’s hot out of the oven. Want some butter?”

  April nodded.

  “Any luck with your sister?” Carmen said as she buttered the roll.

  “Her name is Rose,” April said. “And no.”

  “Have you considered calling the cops?”

  “Not doing it,” April said, with a mouth full of bread.

  “Listen,” Carmen whispered, leaning over the counter, “the cops are going to find out that there’s a missing person. And if they find out you knew and didn’t report it, they’re going to suspect you.”

  Carmen had no idea what she was talking about. Everything she knew about police procedure came from TV and movies. But it didn’t stop her from speaking confidently. She figured the kid needed a push.

  “You listen to me. You’re gonna have to deal with cops, one way or the other,” Carmen found herself saying, mimicking the shows she watched. “The question is: you gonna be the worried sister or a suspect? Your choice.”

  April nodded slowly.

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Good,” Carmen said, switching back into her real voice. “Now . . . how are you doing?”

  “Me?” April said, and made a sound that was either a laugh or a whimper—Carmen couldn’t tell. “I’m a complete and total mess.”

  April told Carmen a story that made her head spin. April was doing a court-ordered Narcotics Anonymous program; if she missed any NA meetings without a good excuse, it was over for her. She would be immediately arrested and forced to serve six to twelve months in prison. The judge who’d ordered it had literally pointed at April and said, “Don’t mess up this time, or you’re going to find yourself in a tiny prison cell. I promise you that.”

  The words had chilled April to the bone. She’d had a lot of run-ins with the law, from drug possession charges to small-theft charges. So far, she’d managed to avoid jail time. But her luck was running out and she lived in deep fear of prison.

  “I can’t go there,” she told Carmen. “I know what goes on in there. I got friends who’ve told me. And I’m claustrophobic. I can’t be in a locked room. I can’t do it. I’ll go insane.”

  But, at this point, April was in the system. And being in the system meant there was a force as strong as gravity pulling her toward prison. She hadn’t missed any meetings yet, or the community service that she had to do, but she’d been very close a few times. She’d passed the first urine test. But it had been a huge battle for her. She didn’t think she’d be able to keep up for six months.

  “And it’s not just ’cause I’m messed up,” April told Carmen. “I mean, okay, I am messed up, right? But it’s more than just that.”

  Last week, for example, April had had a chance to get a job—making sandwiches at a Subway—but the manager had wanted her to start on a night when she had to do community service work and he wasn’t willing to be flexible. So she lost that chance. And another prospective employer, in another shop, almost physically kicked her out when she said that she’d have to work around her NA meetings and community service work. A temp agency laughed in her face when she arrived underdressed and without a resume. April was broke and becoming desperate.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong,” April said.

  Everything, Carmen thought to herself. You are doing everything wrong.

  And then, of course, there were her problems with men. April had a type: beautiful boys, who were incompetent criminals. And who were just generally incompetent. “This kid didn’t even know how to tie his shoes,” April told Carmen of her last boyfriend.

  Carmen snorted.

  “I’m serious, though,” April said. “He literally didn’t know how to do it right. I taught him Bunny Ears. Like I’m his momma. He got mad at me when I did it but then he totally used it.”

  He also didn’t know how to put on his sweatshirt. He would struggle inside of it, like a chick trying to hatch from an egg. April used to watch the process with amusement. It had endeared him to her. She was charmed to see this tough guy vulnerable for a moment. But, later in their relationship, when things had gotten bad, she was far less amused.

  He’d developed a pill addiction that ravaged his body, his mind, his life, and, eventually, April’s life, too. Her first major court case came from her involvement with him: she was caught helping him break into a house—the house of his best friend’s mother, no less—to
steal some jewelry and electronics to sell to support the habit. April had figured that, if she helped him, he was less likely to get caught. Instead, she was the one who got caught.

  Carmen listened quietly to everything April was telling her. Suddenly, without thinking, she said, “How would you like a job here at the bakery?”

  Even as the words were coming out of her mouth, she found herself thinking: What am I saying? Someone tells me ‘I’m an addict and a felon’ and my response is ‘Hey, come work for me’? Carmen was beginning to doubt her sanity.

  But she’d made the offer, and April’s response, she had to admit, was rather winning. April ran around the counter and threw her arms around Carmen’s neck.

  “You don’t know how much this means,” she said, as she hugged Carmen. “I’m gonna work really hard. Not gonna let you down.”

  Carmen really wanted to believe it.

  * * *

  April was late to work the next morning. And, the next day, she arrived even later. After a week, it was official: April was incapable of arriving on time. Each morning, she had an excuse. Of course, Joseph, watching from afar, didn’t mind. He was just thrilled that April was suddenly working only a hundred feet away from him. It seemed like a gift.

  Carmen didn’t mind April’s constant lateness either—she was just worried about what it meant: what other problems April might bring to the bakery.

  The ongoing situation with Rose’s disappearance made Carmen very nervous. What kind of mess was that? At the end of the workweek, April had finally called the cops to report the disappearance. Carmen had made it a condition of her working at the bakery—but she still didn’t know the exact reason April had been so uptight about the police to begin with. Was April concerned about her own legal problems or was there something more? Carmen wanted to know the answer, but she also really, really did not want to know. She didn’t want to hear something that would pull her deeper into whatever kind of mess this was.

  Carmen watched, nervously, as April made the rounds in Reading Terminal Market, chatting with the market’s shopkeepers about her missing sister, asking them to help keep a lookout, and giving them an official “Missing” poster. Carmen wanted to help with the search, too. But every time she saw April, wearing a Metropolitan Bakery apron—which April had done intentionally so she would be taken more seriously for these little meetings—Carmen winced. All around the market, April’s troubles, whatever they were, were becoming synonymous with the bakery and, by extension, with Carmen herself. Carmen knew these shopkeepers well, and she knew that they would want no part of whatever kind of trouble was behind Rose’s disappearance. She knew that they, like Carmen herself, worried that this mess would eventually intrude on their businesses.

  * * *

  One afternoon—the day before the police had come to take April’s statement—Carmen noticed April standing by the door, watching something outside the bakery.

  “Come here,” April said, motioning to Carmen. “Check this out.”

  Carmen and April watched a young, tall Amish man posting Rose’s “Missing” posters on a wall across the way, next to the Amish diner. They watched as he posted another one on the door to the market itself. And on a pillar in the middle of the market. And, then, on another door. The Amish man, in fact, had an entire stack of “Missing” signs under his arm, and he was posting as many as he could, on any surface he could find.

  Carmen sighed.

  “April . . .”

  “I had nothing to do with this!” April said. “I didn’t even talk to the Amish diner people about Rose. I have no idea where he got the signs.”

  Carmen gave April a skeptical look.

  “I’m serious,” said April. “I didn’t say a word to them. I’m kind of afraid of them.”

  Carmen and April watched for a few more moments as the man continued to cover the market with pictures of Rose.

  “I mean, I didn’t say anything to them before,” April said, breaking the silence. “But I guess now . . . I will? I mean, that guy’s weirdly cute, don’t you think?”

  Carmen rolled her eyes and drifted over to the bakery counter. “Back to work, kiddo,” she shouted from behind a pile of bread loaves.

  Chapter Two

  The hand-painted NICK’S REPAIR sign was so faded that nobody driving by on Route 23 would notice it hanging there. But it didn’t much matter. Nick’s Repair already had all the customers it needed, and they knew exactly where to find it.

  Even though April was ninety-five percent certain that the shop was connected to Rose’s disappearance, she wasn’t sure what, exactly, she was looking for when she’d set out on an almost two-hour bus ride from Philly that took her to a random stop just west of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. For most of the morning, she’d just stood outside of Nick’s, across the two-lane highway, behind a bush, and watched.

  She didn’t see too many trucks go in. Those that entered, didn’t stay long. Nobody, from what she could tell, was actually going to the shop to have their truck repaired—this fit what she already knew about the place: that it was a truck repair shop in name only.

  Rose, too, had known this. And this bit of information was the reason for her sudden disappearance— at least, April suspected as much. For almost three years, Rose had dated the co-owner of this shop, a man named Ricky Devereux. Ricky was the kind of guy who liked to tell people that he was an “independent businessman,” without specifying what kind of business. And he always made a point of handing out a business card, whether or not the occasion warranted it. It had been a running joke between Rose and April. Especially when April discovered that the card read “Richard J. Devereux” on it.

  “Richard? Ha!” April had said when she’d seen the card. “That guy’s a ‘Ricky’ all the way.”

  Any time she’d wanted to make her sister giggle, April would adopt an over-the-top posh English accent, curtsey, and say, “Charmed to make your acquaintance, Sir Richard.”

  But it wasn’t long before Rose and Ricky became more serious as a couple and April had to tone down her mockery. Despite the chaos of her own love life, or perhaps because of it, April had a difficult time watching Rose grow closer to a man she considered a lowlife, who offered her beloved sister only heartache, and possibly also serious trouble. April’s efforts to advise Rose—sometimes tactfully, usually not—to break up with Ricky, had become a constant source of tension between the inseparable sisters.

  Once, when Rose had asked her, “What’s so bad about him?” April had lost her temper and begun shouting.

  “Um, lemme see . . . well, first of all, he’s a lying-piece-of-trash-grease-monkey-thug. And that’s just one thing. Want me to name others?”

  After these outbursts, the sisters would stop talking for a bit, usually for about a week, but sometimes for as long as a month. This was the reason April hadn’t, at first, realized that Rose was missing—they’d recently had another fight over Ricky.

  Still, the sisters’ bond was unshakable. They not only reconciled after fights, they continued to confide in each other completely. Rose never concealed the things she’d learned about Ricky, and they weren’t pretty. He was involved in a racket which, from what Rose could tell, had grown from a small indiscretion here and there into a full-fledged criminal operation that had turned a once-legitimate truck repair business—founded twenty years earlier by Ricky’s father, Nick—into a front.

  Having grown up in the shop, Ricky had made deep connections among the teamsters whose trucks he repaired. Occasionally he’d hook them up with some pills. Aderall for alertness. But also prescription painkillers like Vicodin and OxyContin. He’d done this mostly as favors, as a friend who knew how tough it was out there on the road. The truckers trusted him completely, and vice versa.

  But when Ricky’s brother-in-law, Dylan, joined the shop, and eventually became a co-owner after Nick died, things changed. Dylan was a shrewd businessman and he also happened to have absolutely no scruples. He realized that their teamst
er clientele was not only an excellent market for pills but that the truckers could serve as a reliable delivery service for what he imagined could be, and eventually became, a major cross-country smuggling operation. Instead of fixing trucks and handing out pills as small favors to their best clients, Nick’s Repair became primarily a drug operation that fixed trucks as favors, and as a front.

  Rose had learned about all of this from Ricky, who’d begun to have much more money to throw around and had also become increasingly anxious about getting caught. He’d needed someone to confide in and that person was Rose. April had long feared that this knowledge would lead to major trouble for her sister (and even for her—she’d stopped talking to Rose about Ricky’s work over the phone, for fear that someone, Dylan or the police, might be listening in).

  Rose had become increasingly agitated and suspicious. April could tell that something terrible had happened—something that Rose refused to tell her. Rose gave hints that cops, maybe even the feds, were tracing Dylan and Ricky, and that she might have to testify against them or risk a serious penalty herself. She wouldn’t elaborate. Not because she didn’t trust April but because she didn’t want to implicate her. She was trying to be a good sister. And then, suddenly, she disappeared.

  That was what brought April out to Nick’s Repair that day, to watch, to try to gather whatever information she could. But as it became more and more clear that April wasn’t going to learn anything new by hiding in a bush and staking out the shop, she faced a decision: go inside or leave.

  But just as she began to call a car to take her back to the bus station, she changed her mind. She needed to be brave if she was going to find Rose. If these guys knew something about where her sister was—where she’d been for weeks now—it meant they were the ones to talk to, even if they were dangerous. What choice did she have? For all she knew, Rose was right here, somewhere in that shop.

  The thought of her sister being so close by . . . just the thought of it clutched at April’s heart. She hadn’t quite felt their separation physically until then, hadn’t quite admitted, even to herself, how much she missed her sister.