Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel

by Jannifer Chiaverini

  Sick with dread, she sank lower into the seat—and bolted upright with a gasp when Lars suddenly rapped on her window. “I’ve taken two rooms at the Radcliffe Hotel,” he said, opening the back door and picking up Lupita. With his free hand, he gently shook Marta and Ana awake. “We’ll get you and the children upstairs first and I’ll come back for your things.”

  Rosa nodded and climbed out of the car, resting Miguel’s head upon her shoulder and wrapping her shawl around them both. The air was cool and misty and smelled of rain and sodden garbage and the ocean. Lars led them to a discreet entrance off the alley and inside a two-story brick building, up a narrow staircase, and along a dimly lit hallway. About halfway down, he stopped in front of a door, shifted Lupita to his other shoulder, and fumbled to fit the key in the lock. When the door stuck, Marta came forward to help Lars shove it open, but she recoiled from the smell of mothballs and old cigarettes that wafted from the room.

  “Let’s see what we have here,” Lars said, leading them inside and groping for the light switch. Blinking as her eyes adjusted to the glare, Rosa took stock of the room and noted two beds, a wooden chair, a single window on the far wall, and a bureau stained with bull’s-eye rings from old coffee cups. A narrow door to her right led to a bathroom with a toilet, a sink beneath a chipped mirror, and a clawfoot tub. That, at least, was a welcome sight.

  Rosa drew the white eyelet curtains and set Miguel down on one of the beds. Without waking, he promptly rolled over onto his tummy, fists tucked into his chest, right cheek resting on the candlewick bedspread, rump in the air. Lars lay Lupita down beside him, but as he removed her shoes, she woke and sat up. “Where are we?” she said, the words fading into an enormous yawn.

  “Someplace warm and dry and out of the rain,” said Rosa, mustering up what she hoped would pass for brisk good cheer.

  “When are we going home?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “I’ll be right back,” said Lars, pocketing the key. “Lock the door and don’t open it for anyone.”

  A small, wild laugh escaped Rosa as she nodded and locked the door behind him. If pursuers really did follow so closely behind them, they were already doomed.

  She knew that if she sat down she would not get up again until morning, so she stayed in motion. Exhausted and drained, her head and rib cage throbbing, she draped her damp shawl over the bathtub to dry, helped Ana out of her shoes, and murmured responses to Marta, who had assigned herself the task of determining their sleeping arrangements.

  When Lars returned from the car with the feed sacks full of clothing, Rosa sent Marta and Ana into the bathroom to wash their hands and faces and brush their teeth. A bath would have to wait until morning, she decided as she and Lupita took their turns at the sink. Miguel was down for the night and she had no intention of waking him. She had the girls change into their pajamas while Lars went back to the car for the rest of their belongings, and by the time he returned, she had tucked Marta and Ana in one bed and Lupita and Miguel in the other. Lars helped her shove the baskets and bags against the wall to leave a clear aisle from the beds to the bathroom, and then he took off his sodden hat, dug the room key from his pocket, and gave it to Rosa.

  “I’ll be right across the hall should you need me,” he said, his hand on the doorknob. “I’ll come back first thing in the morning. Don’t open the door for anyone but me. I don’t care who it is—innkeeper, chief of police, your husband, the devil himself.”

  Rosa promised she would not, and thus satisfied, Lars departed. Rosa had almost closed the door behind him when she suddenly pulled it open again. “Lars—”

  He paused in the doorway of the room across the hall. “What is it?”

  “I never thanked you. For coming after us, for seeing us safely out of the canyon, for bringing us here and finding us a room for the night—thank you. I’m ashamed I didn’t say it sooner.”

  A brief smile flickered in the corners of his mouth. “It’s all right. You’re welcome.” He stood watching her for a moment. “You know very well I’m not closing my door until you close yours and I hear that bolt slide into place, so you might as well go on and do it.”

  “Of course.” She managed a smile. “Good night.”

  “Good night, Rosa.”

  She closed the door and locked it, and then, draining the last reserves of her strength, she changed into her nightgown and slipped into bed beside Lupita and Miguel. As she drew the covers over them, Lupita snuggled up to her little brother, thumb in her mouth. Rosa gently removed it, closed her eyes, and sank into sleep.

  • • •

  Rosa was sixteen the first time she woke to a soft rapping sound and discovered Lars standing outside her bedroom window, beckoning her to join him in the soft and misty night. Quietly she tiptoed past the rooms where her parents and brother slept and eased the front door open without a sound. Heart pounding from the fear of discovery, she let Lars take her by the hand and lead her away from the house, but they went only as far as the orange trees in the corner of the yard, where darkness offered scant concealment should her mother wake and peer out the window. Lars murmured her name as he tangled his fingers in her hair and kissed her, his lips warm and soft and insistent upon hers. Her head was spinning when she finally broke from him, and pushed him away, and breathlessly told him that she couldn’t sneak out of the house in the middle of the night ever again. It was too dangerous. Her parents or a neighbor would spot them and it would all be over.

  “If we don’t meet like this, when will we ever see each other?” Lars asked, drawing her back to him. The arrival of summer recess had once meant that they would see each other rarely and only in passing until the new school year began, but not anymore. Lars had graduated the week before, and Rosa’s heart sank whenever she thought of returning to school in September without him. Autumn would find her studying at her desk at the back of the classroom with the oldest students, while Lars would be hard at work on his father’s ranch. He could not ride over to see her on a Sunday afternoon the way other young men visited their sweethearts, or have dinner with her family, or ask their permission to take her dancing at the Grand Union Hotel on a balmy Friday evening. It was unfair, and it was wrong, but as long as her mother’s heart remained relentlessly hardened against the Jorgensens, Rosa and Lars would have to meet secretly under the cover of darkness or not at all.

  The next time Lars came for her, she quickly dressed, slipped soundlessly out the front door, and ran to the warmth of his embrace. Hand in hand, they stole away to a grove of live oaks out of sight of the house, and there they talked and kissed and held each other for hours until Rosa’s apprehensions overcame her happiness. At any moment her mother, a restless sleeper, might wake, go to the kitchen for a drink of water, and check in on her children only to discover Rosa missing. “I have to go home,” she murmured, her lips brushing his. Lars walked her back to her front door, where they parted with a long, wistful embrace.

  “I love you, Rosa,” he told her as she turned to go, still holding her hand. “I always will.”

  “I love you too,” Rosa said, her voice breaking. She squeezed his hand tightly before going back inside.

  As she crept silently to her bedroom, slipped into her nightgown, and climbed back into bed, she smelled Lars’s scent upon her skin and wondered how she could be so blissful and yet so miserable at the same time, and how long she could endure it.

  At least once a week Lars would knock softly upon her window in the middle of the night. After listening for a long, breathless moment to be sure he had woken no one else, Rosa would steal outside to meet him amid the orange trees. Sometimes they hastened away on foot to the live oak grove where he had tied up his horse; other nights Rosa climbed up behind him and clung to his waist as they galloped off to explore the valley by moonlight—the golden mesa, the scrub-covered foothills of the Santa Monica Mountains, the pebbled banks of the Salto Creek. They would talk and laugh, or dream aloud about a future they would spend togeth
er, or lie side by side holding hands and watching the stars until the ocean mists rolled in over the mountains and drew a soft veil over them one by one. Sometimes they lost themselves in caresses and kisses, and lost track of time too, until the brightening of the eastern sky sent them racing back to Rosa’s house only moments before daybreak woke her family. Afterward Rosa would drift through the day half asleep, daydreaming of the previous night and of the next time Lars would come for her. Sometimes she nodded off at her desk in the middle of class, but her grades never faltered and everyone from her parents to her teachers would shake their heads and declare that she worked too hard. Guiltily Rosa would assure them that she really did not, but what they perceived as her modesty and diligence only made her rise in their esteem.

  Sometimes Rosa would wake in the middle of the night longing for Lars, but when he did not appear at her window she would sink back into sleep, disappointed and lonely. Less frequently, but often enough to distress her, Lars would come to her with the smell of alcohol on his breath, talking louder than usual and more prone to boasting and silly jokes. Once, when she chided him for his drinking, he groaned and said, “Not you too. You sound like my mother.”

  Stung, Rosa retorted, “Maybe you should listen to her.”

  Lars laughed. “The way you listen to your mother?”

  Rosa sat up, straightened her skirt, and picked leaves from her hair. “It’s not the same. Do you really want me to obey my mother and never see you again?”

  Of course he didn’t, and although his words were slurred, his apology was sincere enough to mollify her, but she soon learned that although he was sorry for teasing her, he had no intention of mending his ways. A few weeks later, he showed up at her window long after she had stopped hoping for him. Dawn was less than an hour away, and as she blinked sleep from her eyes she whispered through the window that she could not come out to him. It was nearly morning and the risk of waking her family was too great.

  “Come back tomorrow,” she implored, because she had not seen him for days and she missed him. “Come earlier, at midnight.”

  “I can’t come tomorrow,” he said, too loudly. “I’m here now. Come out and kiss me.”

  Alarm made her anger flare. “I told you, I can’t,” she whispered. “You should have come earlier.”

  “I couldn’t come earlier. I was out with the boys.”

  And the boys had been drinking. She saw that now. Folding her arms over her chest and shivering from the chill, she said sharply, “You made your choice. Come back tomorrow, if you’re sober.”

  He threw his head back and groaned. “Don’t be a stick in the mud. You and John Barclay are a perfect pair. Both of you toe teetlers—” He shook his head roughly. “Both of you teetotalers, dull as dishwater and no fun at all.”

  Through the wall, she heard bedsprings creak as her father turned over in his sleep, and she gestured frantically for Lars to be quiet. “If I’m as dull as you say, you shouldn’t mind going home,” she snapped. “Get drunk with your friends if that’s what you call fun, but don’t bother coming around here afterward.”

  He blinked at her, bleary-eyed and astonished. “Fine.” He stumbled off, but when he was a few yards away, he turned around, snatched off his hat, and gave her a sweeping bow. “If you insist. I guess this is good-bye.”

  Rosa blinked back angry tears and watched him jam his hat back on his head and stagger off toward the oak grove. When the ocean mists closed around him and she could no longer make out his dark shadow through the gray, she sank back into bed, pulled the quilt over her head, and shook with silent sobs. He had never been so mean to her, and she had never seen him falling-down drunk before. The man he became when he drank frightened her, and not only because he grew careless and took stupid risks that could expose their precious, long-held secret. She had never wished Lars to be anyone but who he was, but at that moment she wished he would follow his friend John’s example and forswear alcohol. It could not be that difficult.

  • • •

  She had seen John at church, sitting in a pew near the front with his parents and elder sister, and if any trace of the childhood bully remained in him, he kept it well hidden. His father was fifteen years older than his mother and was in poor health, so at only twenty years old, John ran the family rye farm almost single-handedly, providing for his family faithfully and without complaint. Despite his greater responsibilities, John didn’t need to blow off steam with a bottle of gin several nights a week. Why did Lars?

  Lars did not come to her window the following night, and she was still angry enough not to miss him. Nor did she mind when he stayed away the next night, and the next. She imagined him nursing his aching head and bruised pride, and she planned what she would say to him when he finally returned. A week passed, and then another, and after a third, all thoughts of reprimanding him faded. Perhaps when he had said good-bye, he had meant forever. She could not bear to believe it, but every night he stayed away affirmed the same devastating conclusion.

  She was seventeen, and she had loved Lars nearly half her life, and her heart was broken.

  As the days passed, she tried to tell herself that it was all for the best. Her parents never would have accepted a marriage between them, and she could not bear the thought of marrying him without their blessing. Lars became someone she couldn’t recognize and didn’t like very much when he drank, and if he could not quit drinking for her sake, it was for the best that she had discovered that before she married him. And that was if the church would have permitted a mixed marriage. Lars had been baptized Protestant, but he was irreverent at best, irreligious at his worst, and he was adamantly opposed to converting just so she could marry within the faith. When she looked at the cold, plain facts, she had no choice but to admit that their love was not only forbidden but impossible, doomed from the beginning. She should be glad that he had abandoned her—and if she could not manage that, she ought at least to be relieved.

  But she loved him, and she missed him, and she felt as if her heart had shattered, littering the empty places inside her with cold shards that stabbed her whenever she took a breath.

  After a month and a day, she woke, disoriented, to the sound of rapping on her windowpane. Heart pounding, she flung open the window and clutched the sill, wordless and breathless, waiting for Lars to speak. He looked unhappy and ashamed and thoroughly sober. “Rosa, I’m sorry,” he said quietly. His eyes and voice were clear again. “Before you tell me to go away, I wanted you to know that.”

  She shook her head. She had no intention of sending him away until he answered the question that had haunted her for weeks. “How did you do it?” she whispered. “How could you stop loving me so suddenly?”

  “Rosa, I never stopped loving you.”

  “Then why have you stayed away so long? I told you to come back when you were sober.” Suddenly Rosa had a terrible thought. “Do you mean you’ve been drinking every day since—”

  “No. Not a drop since that night.” His voice was firm, but his eyes were soft and pleading as he held out his hand to her, as if he thought she might take it and climb out the window and into his arms. “Rosa, I made a mistake.”

  “It wasn’t a mistake. It was a choice.”

  “You’re right, but maybe everyone should be allowed one bad choice in life that the person they love will just forgive, without question, and give them a second chance. Maybe this can be mine.”

  She watched him, mulling over his words and struggling to settle her warring emotions. She was happy to see him, happy and relieved, but he had stayed away too long and the time apart had granted her both torment and insight. When hope faded into uncertainty in his eyes and his outstretched hand fell heavily by his side, compassion won out. She tore herself away from the window, threw on the dress she had worn the day before, and flew from the house as swiftly as silence allowed. When she caught up to him, he was trudging back to the oak grove, disconsolate.

  “Lars,” she called softly to him, bu
t it was the sound of her quick footfalls on the dry earth that he heard, and when he turned, fierce joy lit up his sun-browned face. He ran back to meet her, and when he embraced her and murmured in her ear and kissed her, she felt as if everything that had been thrown into upheaval had fallen into place again, had been made whole and right.

  He seized her hand and led her off at a run across the open field to the oak grove, where they quickly mounted his horse and galloped off. As they sped away, she clutched his waist, pressed her face to his back, and closed her eyes, not caring where they went, her dress pulled up past her knees and the wind in her hair. She and Lars were together again as they were meant to be, and that was all that mattered.

  Even so, when Lars pulled the horse to a halt in front of the cabin her mother and grandparents and great-grandparents had once called home, she hesitated, gripping the saddle with both hands while he dismounted. Her gaze traveled from the shabby front porch to the bowing roof to the cracked and grimy windowpanes to the weeds growing through the boards of the front steps. She recognized the cabin from photographs in her mother’s album, but in those days it had been a much-loved and well-tended home, not an abandoned relic from a bygone age.

  She wished he had taken her almost anyplace else, but when he reached up to help her down from the mare’s back, she swung her leg over the side and slid to the ground, and when he took her hand she let him lead her to the cabin. The wooden boards felt as if they would give way underfoot as they climbed the stairs and crossed the porch, and the hinges creaked a complaint when Lars pushed upon the door. They entered a front room that filled the whole length and half the width of the cabin, with a kitchen on the right and a fireplace, a dilapidated chair, and a broken footstool on the left. She spotted two open doorways on the opposite wall, but it was too dark to see what lay beyond them. The air was hushed and stale, and she would have believed it had been undisturbed for centuries if not for the man’s boot prints leading from where she and Lars stood to the room on the left. Lars gave her an encouraging smile as he led her in the same direction, and when he did she realized that he must have left the prints himself, perhaps only days before.