Rosebush

by Michele Jaffe

  “Yeah, me either,” she said, lying back down.

  “Plus Langley would—”

  “Oh, totally.”

  It was just an experiment. No one would know. Just fun.

  That night, our last night there, we decided to try out what she called the Seventeen Headed Hydra, her parents’ massive steam shower. It was amazing, the entire back wall lined with heated fog-proof mirrors. Kate was in the middle of styling a bubble mustache and beard for me, with strict orders that I keep my eyes closed, when all of a sudden she froze.

  I opened my eyes to see why and was looking at her mother in the mirror. We weren’t even doing anything, but we were both naked and I could imagine how it looked. How my mother would have reacted. How anyone would. My heart started to pound. For a moment the pulsing sound of the sixteen showerheads echoed through the room like a torrential downpour. Then Mrs. Valenti said, “Don’t forget to mop up any water that gets on the marble; I don’t want someone to slip and crack their head open.”

  We never discussed it. Summer ended and I started going out with David and Kate and I were never that close again. She tried to bring it up once, but I pretended like I didn’t know what she meant.

  But sometimes when I was at David’s house, in his room, I looked over at Kate’s window and remembered what it had been like to kiss her.

  I wondered if I should tell her now. I looked at her but found that she was staring at my hand.

  “Your ring,” she said, pointing to the matching one on her left hand. “Where did you get it?”

  “You gave it to me.” Her eyes seemed to have gotten even glassier. Was she on something?

  “I know, but—” She frowned. “Anyway, I forgot, I got you a present.” She rifled through her Louis Vuitton tote and emerged with a long light-blue cotton scarf with golden threads woven into it. “I thought you could maybe wrap it around your head if you have to keep that bandage on. It would be sort of bohemian and chic.”

  “Thank you.” I ran my fingers over the soft material, enjoying the fact that I could feel again, until I hit something hard and plastic. “Kate. It still has the security tag on it.”

  “Oh. They must have forgotten to take it off at the store.” She looked scared. “I bought it. I did. I have the receipt in here somewhere.”

  She started pawing through her purse at first calmly, then more frantically, until it slid from her lap to the ground. The contents spilled out: a prescription bottle, denture adhesive, a bottle of Obsession with a tester sticker on it, a pair of bright-green reading glasses with the price tag still attached.

  “Kate, what have you been doing?”

  Her face was stricken. “I’m sorry. Oh God. I know I shouldn’t have. It’s just—I’ve just—I feel so guilty. What happened to you. All of this?” She waved her arm around the room. “In all honesty, I did it. This is all my fault.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I should have stopped.”

  I couldn’t believe she was actually saying what it sounded like. I felt goose bumps rise on my arms. “What?”

  “Stopped you, I mean,” she said quickly. “At the party. From going away. I should have known something was wrong with you, that you weren’t yourself.”

  “Why?”

  “You—I mean you were staggering. You needed a friend. And I wasn’t there for you. I should have been. I should have known better. And I didn’t.”

  “Kate. I don’t know what happened that night, but I do know you, and I’m sure you would have been there if I’d asked.”

  She looked at me with an expression of complete horror, her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide.

  A chill swept over me. “Kate, what’s wrong?”

  There were pink blotches on her face. “I—I have to go,” she said, grabbed her bag, and ran out of the room.

  Naturally, Pete chose that moment to come and bother me. “Wow, you weren’t kidding. People really adore you,” he said.

  “I’m not in the mood.” I tried to forget the scared look on Kate’s face.

  “What just happened?”

  “I have no idea.” I looked at him. Today he was wearing a cowboy-cut shirt with pearl buttons and what looked like dancing chili peppers on it. “Where do you get your clothes?”

  “Dazzling, right?”

  “Does that mean makes one’s eyes sting like poison?”

  His face assumed its Serious expression, lips pursed, brow furrowed, which made him look unbelievably cute. “I do believe that’s the etymology.”

  I couldn’t help it. I laughed. “I am so tired of being cooped up in this place.”

  “Want to get away from it all?”

  “Are you serious?”

  He pointed at the wheelchair. “We’ve got wheels, baby.”

  Chapter 22

  “Did you have any special destination in mind?” Pete bent near my ear to ask as he wheeled me over the threshold. The feel of his breath on the nape of my neck made my arms tingle.

  Or maybe it was just because it was thrilling to be somewhere besides room 403. “I don’t know. The cafeteria maybe?”

  “You want to get sicker?”

  “I hear the hot chocolate is really good.”

  “Someone who hates you deeply told you that,” he said in a voice like he was very sorry to tell me the bad news, but.

  “It was my little sister.”

  I could almost feel him shaking his head in mock resignation behind me. “Most murders are committed by family members.”

  “That’s not true,” I protested. I tried to turn around, but his hand on top of my head kept me facing forward. His grip was strong but gentle. “Is it?”

  “Maybe, but you can’t deny family members have the best cause.” His fingers stayed in my hair for a moment and they felt wonderful. He smoothed it, adding, “Although Annie seems pretty cool.”

  His thumb brushed my neck as he pulled his hand back, re-igniting the tingling in my arms I’d felt before and spreading it into my belly. Stop that, I told my mind, and made myself focus on the parts of the hospital we were passing through instead. The ICU was a warren of glassed-in rooms and nursing stations with a few areas with overstuffed but uncomfortable-looking couches and chairs scattered around. The walls were painted bright yellow, presumably for cheeriness, but I didn’t think it was working. In the sitting area near my room a little girl with her hair in cornrows was sprawled on the floor coloring at the feet of an older woman who was thumbing through a Bible. Across from them a dark-haired husky-looking man in a leather jacket was drinking Gatorade and reading the New York Post.

  Sickness made weird bedfellows.

  “Do you have any siblings?” I asked Pete.

  “A few assorted,” he said lightly.

  “What does that mean?”

  “Some steps, some halves, one real. My parents enjoy marrying.”

  “But you live with your dad.”

  “Right now I do.” We got into the elevator and Pete pushed a button marked M. “Live is sort of a strong word. I reside with my father. Live implies being able to breathe, which is not exactly what goes on in the stifling atmosphere of Dr. Malik’s home.”

  In the polished interior brass of the doors I could see his reflection, slightly distorted, but clear enough to know that the expression on his face wasn’t as blithe as his voice. He leaned against the back of the elevator, one shoulder higher than the other, staring down at me but not, I could tell, seeing me. There was a hollowness in his eyes, a sharpness in the dip of his shoulder that I recognized. Pete was lonely.

  He glanced up, caught me looking at him, and smiled. Even in the imperfect mirror of the brass doors, his smile was movie-star white and dazzling. I just had time to smile back when the doors slid open.

  M turned out to be the mezzanine, a sort of balcony that overlooked the main floor of the hospital. Here the walls were a bluish white punctuated by cheap prints of beach scenes and European capitals. But even as I took all that in, I was uncom
fortably aware of Pete’s presence behind me. When his fingertips grazed my shoulder, I shivered.

  “Sorry,” he said abruptly, for once not joking.

  “No problem, you can do that anytime,” I said. It was not what I’d meant to say at all, and I blushed furiously. “I mean, it’s nothing. No harm, no foul. No—” I was making it worse. I needed to change the subject. I tugged at the threads of our earlier conversation. “So you two don’t get along? You and your dad? Why don’t you live with your mother?”

  I expected him to make fun of me for being so tongue tied, but he seemed almost relieved. “Many reasons, but one good one is that she lives in Boise, Idaho.” The tension between us evaporated.

  “Couldn’t you get an apartment around here? I mean, there must be other places you could stay than with your dad.”

  “You ask a lot of questions for a sick maiden.”

  “It’s only my body that’s sick, not my brain.”

  “That’s not what I hear.” He snickered.

  I decided to retaliate. “Where do you go to school—oh wait, you said you were a deadbeat college dropout.”

  “Not yet. I haven’t even started yet. That’s just my father’s prophecy. I got accepted to Columbia and if he’s wrong, I’ll go there in September. But he’s rarely wrong.”

  “Why does he think you’re a deadbeat?”

  “Shhh,” he said, pushing me down the linoleum corridor.

  “What? What is it?”

  “Listen.”

  “To what?”

  “The harmony of the spheres.”

  “I think that’s the climate-control system.”

  “I thought you said you had poetry in your DNA.”

  We went through a set of mahogany French doors and were in a wood-paneled corridor with thick green carpeting.

  “What are you going to study at Columbia?”

  “Has anyone ever told you that you should be a prosecutor? You’re relentless.”

  “So?”

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “No.”

  “At least you’re honest. Okay, I’m going to study—”

  A distinguished-looking man with olive skin a shade darker than Peter’s, dark hair graying at the temples, and horn-rimmed glasses wearing a lab coat over an expensive-looking chalk-stripe suit walked by, did a double take, and came back to us. “Hello, Peter. What are you doing on this floor?” He spoke with a faint British accent.

  Everything that had been loose about Pete now seemed to tighten. “Just taking our patient for some air, sir.”

  “Around the executive offices of the hospital?”

  “She likes the plush carpeting.”

  Something in the man’s jaw tightened for a moment, as though he suspected a joke and didn’t like them, but he got it under control quickly. Then he bent slightly at the waist and held a hand toward me. “Hello, miss. What is your name?”

  Pete did the introductions. “Jane Freeman, this is Dr. Sanjay Malik, the director of the hospital.”

  The distinguished man stood up, nodding to himself. “You’re Rosalind’s daughter. It’s good to see you looking so fit. We’ve been proud to have you here. Your mother is a dynamo.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  He patted Pete on the shoulder. “Carry on, Peter.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  I waited until we’d gone a bit down the corridor to ask, “That’s your dad? He’s the director of the hospital?”

  “Yep.” The shortest response on record from Pete ever.

  “I don’t get it. Why is he making you do, you know, this?”

  “Long story.” Second-shortest response. He really didn’t want to talk about it. Which made me want to know more.

  “Tell me. You know I’ll just keep asking until you do.”

  He let out a sigh, a long one that felt real, not pretend. “It’s a tedious story of a boy, a girl, a dog with a prosthetic leg, and justice gone wrong.”

  Now it was my turn to sigh. “No, it’s not.”

  “You’re right. He’s just a tyrant and doesn’t have anywhere else to stash me this summer.” We’d come out of the executive offices and were back in the linoleum-corridor-with-bluish-white-walls mezzanine of the hospital with a railing overlooking the main floor. “Now on your left—”

  “Shhh.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “No, I’m serious. That’s a friend of mine and my boyfriend down there.”

  Beneath us, on the ground floor, I could see Kate talking to David. She looked angry and was using her hands a lot.

  “Honestly, Kate…and chill.”

  “Don’t even…nothing to say…why…just stay away…alone.”

  David said, “You know what. I’ll let her tell me that herself,” and started heading toward the elevators.

  “Wait,” Kate said. “I’m not—”

  “Go go go,” I told Pete. “Fast. If you’ve got any shortcuts back to my room, use them!”

  “Do you know what that was about?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “But it was weird, right?”

  He nodded, his impossibly blue eyes open wide, his expression solemn. “Oh yeah.”

  Kate and David had been friends before he and I started going out, from growing up next door to each other. But recently things had been strained. And at Langley’s last riding event the week before, Kate had been really weird about him.

  “I think I have to bag dinner tonight,” I had said as we watched Langley ride. We were both leaning back with our elbows propped on the stands behind us and our toes on the seats in front of us, my black flats resting next to the toes of her new brown motorcycle boots. I felt the cool metal against my forearms where the navy-blue leather jacket I was wearing with jeans had ridden up. “How mad do you think Langley will be?” Her grandparents always took us to dinner after a competition.

  “On a scale of angry to très très angry, I’d go for très,” she said, punctuating each très with a tap of her boot. She was wearing them with leggings, a loose cotton button-down shirt, and an old tweed blazer of her father’s with the sleeves rolled up.

  “It’s just that I really need to talk to David.”

  “Canceling on the girls for a guy is bad form. All for one and one for all.”

  “I know, but I don’t have a choice. It’s his only free night and the longer I put off telling him about the Getty internship, the more it’s going to suck.”

  Kate appeared to be fascinated by the riding. “You mean the more you’re going to have to suck to make up for it.”

  “Shut up!”

  She raised her eyebrows but still didn’t look at me. “Joking. But I’m sure he’ll find a way to console himself.”

  There was something in her tone that was off. “What do you mean?”

  Now she looked at me. Her gaze was appraising. “Nothing. Just that he may surprise you.”

  “Surprise me?”

  “Don’t you ever get tired of worrying about what David thinks and what David feels and what’s okay with David?”

  I sat forward, pulling the sleeves of my jacket over my wrists. I was suddenly chilly. “That’s what relationships are about. Caring about the other person.”

  “Then I’m sure you’ll be fine. Because if David cares about you, he must think about your needs as much as you think about his and he’ll understand and be happy for you.”

  She was right. He did love me. He’d be happy for me. He would.

  There was a snort from behind us. Turning around, I saw Nicky sitting there. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m waiting for my brother’s event to start and I just couldn’t help overhearing. Very quaint.” She put on a falsetto voice to mimic, “If he loves you, he’ll understand.” She rolled her eyes. “You must read a lot of bad novels.”

  “Just because you’re bitter doesn’t mean you have to make everyone else bitter too,” Kate told her, sitting up.

  “Does bitter mean ‘living in the real world’ no
w? I hadn’t realized.” Nicky stood up so she was towering above us. In her knit dress with skulls all over it, and green snakeskin cowboy boots, she looked pretty fierce, and fiercer when she put her hands on her hips and aimed her eyes directly at me. “Maybe you should try thinking for yourself once in awhile,” she said. Then she leaned forward, tapped me on the nose and added, “Beware the counsel of false prophets--or their daughters.”

  Nicky walked away, leaving Kate and I to stare at each other.

  “That was a little visit from the land of the very strange,” Kate said finally, wide eyed.

  “Uh-huh,” I answered with the same expression. “I feel sort of bad. I mean, she’s really nice.”

  Kate corralled her hair so it lay all on one shoulder and studied the ends. “Not to you.”

  Kate was right, but there was still a part of me that admired Nicky, admired the way she wasn’t afraid to say things even if they weren’t what people wanted to hear. Like she didn’t worry about being nice to people she didn’t care about.

  Langley joined us then. In her beige riding breeches, black tailored jacket, and black riding cap with the blonde braids peeking out the bottom, she looked like something out of a Ralph Lauren catalog.

  “It’s a good thing you talked through my whole routine because otherwise I’d be mortified about how badly I’d done.”

  “Sorry,” Kate said.

  “Not your fault. I just had an off day.”

  “We meant about talking,” I put in.

  “No, honestly, it was a bust. Although Popo did give me this.” She held up her right arm to show off a charm bracelet she’d been admiring the week before at Neiman Marcus. Then she turned to where her grandfather was sitting in his wheelchair with the nurse standing behind him and blew him a kiss. He gave a little wave.

  “You two are so adorable,” I said.

  “I know. I can’t imagine life without him. He’s more than a grandfather to me. But back to the two of you, little baddies. Your punishment is that you have to tell me what you were talking so seriously about.”

  “Dinner tonight,” Kate said.

  I gave her a pleading look. I was nervous enough about telling Langley without her making it harder.