They entered a small room with a single window, a bureau, and a bed covered with a fresh, bright quilt that Lars must have brought over from the Jorgensen farmhouse. As they lay down upon it together and he took her in his arms, she wasn’t sure whether to feel amused or indignant that he had been so certain she would forgive him, that she would come with him to this place. But there she was, lying in his arms again, his lips familiar and warm upon hers. She thought she felt the ghosts of her grandparents and great-grandparents watching over them in stern disapproval, but Lars’s kisses soon warmed her until the ice of her worries melted and flowed off her summer skin, evaporating into the night air.
Later, as they held each other quietly, reluctant to part and all too aware that they must, Lars said, “Let me meet your parents. If they knew me, they wouldn’t hate me.”
“My father might not,” Rosa acknowledged, “but my mother could never see you for who you really are. You’re a Jorgensen, and that’s reason enough to hate you.”
“I’ll change my name,” he said. “Maybe she’ll never know.”
She laughed and slapped him lightly on the chest. “She’ll know.”
“She probably would,” he said ruefully, and hesitated before continuing. “Rosa, we’ve talked about spending our lives together, but you won’t even ask your parents if you can come to the ranch for the apricot harvest. Years ago you promised me you’d come someday, as soon as your mother realized I wasn’t the devil and you could tell her about us. How is that ever going to happen if you won’t even let me meet her?”
Rosa laced her fingers together, rested her clasped hands over her heart, and gazed up at a crack in the ceiling, jagged and splintered like a lightning bolt. “I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll tell you how. It won’t happen at all.”
Rosa knew he was right. “I don’t know how to tell them about you without admitting I’ve been seeing you against their wishes.” That, she knew, would make everything infinitely worse.
Silence fell over them, and as the minutes slipped past, the room grew lighter. Now the decades of accumulated dust on the limp eyelet lace curtains was readily visible, as was a steamer trunk in the shadows of the corner, and a sharp, diagonal crack dividing the cloudy mirror above the bureau. Rosa knew she should have been on her way home long ago, but just as she shifted to sit up, Lars’s hand closed around hers.
“Rosa,” he said, “when you turn eighteen and your parents have no power to prevent it, will you marry me, or do you mean for us to keep going on like this in secret forever?”
Her heart pounded, but she managed a weak laugh. “Was that a proposal?”
“Yes, I guess it was.”
She slipped her hand free from his, sat up, and finger-combed her hair. “It wasn’t very romantic.”
“The wedding can be romantic, and the honeymoon, and every day leading up to them and every day after, but right now I’m asking you a serious question and I want a serious answer.” A single furrow appeared between his brows as he studied her. “Do you have any intention of marrying me, ever?”
“Of course,” she said hotly. “Do you think I would sneak out of my house with you and—and lie in this bed with you if I didn’t think we were going to be husband and wife someday?”
“Then either I’m going to have to meet your parents and win their blessing or we’re going to have to marry without their approval,” he said. “It can only be one way or the other. Which way is it going to be?”
Rosa desperately wanted to marry Lars in the church where she had been baptized with her family proudly gathered around them, but when she imagined introducing Lars to her parents, all she could envision was her mother’s anger and her father’s bewilderment, tears and shouting, accusations of betrayal and banishment from the only home she had ever known. “I don’t know,” said Rosa, her voice breaking. “I don’t know what to do. I promise I will marry you someday, Lars. I want to with all my heart. I just don’t know when and I don’t know how. Don’t you see how impossible this is for me?”
“I do, I do. Please don’t cry.” He put his arms around her. “I didn’t mean to make you cry. Your promise is all I need. It’s enough. We can figure out the rest later.”
He embraced her gently, but although she held back her tears, she was not comforted. She wanted nothing more than to marry Lars and live with him happily for the rest of her life, but she could not see how to do that without losing her family. When she was younger, she had chosen her parents, and a few years later she could not have chosen between them, and now she had chosen Lars—but the severing of ties with her mother was a sacrifice she would delay as long as she could, as long as Lars was willing to wait for her.
Rosa woke to a soft rapping sound and light streaming through the gauzy curtains, and for a moment she was sixteen again, in the bedroom of her childhood home, warm and safe beneath a quilt her mother had made. Disoriented, she sat up and found herself in an unfamiliar bed with her two youngest children, and in a flood of awareness she remembered all that had happened the day before. The rapping came again, louder, and in the other bed Marta mumbled something, rolled over, and flung an arm around Ana. Rosa carefully climbed out from beneath the covers, but when she stood, the pain in her side stabbed so sharply that it left her breathless. Bracing herself against the edge of the bed, she waited for her head to stop spinning before she forced herself upright and went to answer the door. Her hand was on the bolt before she remembered the danger. “Yes?” she called through the door, low enough not to disturb the children.
“It’s me,” said Lars.
Quickly Rosa drew back the bolt and beckoned him inside. He carried a pink-and-white striped bakery box, which he set on the coffee-stained bureau. “I forgot milk,” he said apologetically. He glanced at her and then looked away, as if he was embarrassed to be caught watching her in her nightgown. He had seen her in far less, but the last time had been more than five years before.
“That’s all right,” Rosa quickly said, smoothing over the awkwardness. “This will hold the children over until we can get them a proper meal.” She lifted the lid, smelled sugar and pastry, and smiled. “Donuts. I never get them donuts.”
“I could go out and find something else—”
“No, no, I only meant that this will be quite a treat. They deserve something special after all they’ve been through.”
Lars grimaced, took off his hat, and sat down on the wooden chair, watching the children as they slept. He had showered but had not shaved, and he was clad in the same denim trousers, blue-checkered cotton shirt, and coat he had worn the previous day. He had brought nothing but the clothes on his back, Rosa realized, dismayed. Of course he had not packed for travel. He had raced to the adobe expecting to find her murdered, perhaps the children as well. He had not planned on an overnight stay—and the Jorgensens had surely expected him to return before nightfall. They were probably sick with worry, wondering what had become of him.
“You should call your mother and brother and let them know you’re fine,” Rosa said.
“I should do no such thing. No one can know where we are until I’m sure you and the children are safe, and I’m a long way from sure.”
“Not even your own family?”
“They can’t let slip what they don’t know.”
Rosa supposed he made a fair point, and he would be seeing them again soon enough. A day or two of worry wouldn’t matter in the long run.
The children stirred in bed, roused by their hushed conversation and the smell of donuts. Only Miguel seemed startled to see Lars there, and he reached for Rosa and buried his face in the collar of her nightgown when she picked him up. “Hungry?” she asked the girls, and passed the box of donuts. Delighted, they each took one, thrilled with the novelty of the treat and of eating in bed. Even Miguel overcame his shyness and took a few bites, but he refused to go to Lars when he offered to watch the children while Rosa bathed and dressed. Miguel climbed into bed beside Marta
instead, and after Rosa warned the children not to bounce around with full tummies and make themselves sick, she took her things into the small washroom and drew a bath.
She avoided looking at herself in the mirror while she undressed, but as the chill of the tile floor crept into her bare toes, a morbid curiosity eventually compelled her to examine herself unflinchingly. She was a horror, she concluded, studying the mottled pattern of bruises and cuts on her face, shoulders, and side. It was a wonder the children didn’t recoil from her.
She never should have let them become accustomed to seeing her in such a state.
She eased herself into the tub, sinking into the blissfully warm water. A bar of hard amber soap sat in a ceramic dish on a tile shelf above the faucet, so Rosa scrubbed herself clean of blood and dirt, treating her injuries as gingerly as she could. Stomach growling, she finished her bath, drained the tub, and refilled it as she dried off and dressed. Just as she was about to summon the girls, Ana knocked on the door and burst in without waiting for a response. Blinking back tears, Rosa stroked her head while Ana voided her bowels in an explosion of diarrhea. She was so thin that Rosa could count her vertebrae through her nightgown like pearls on a necklace. Frustrated and frightened, Ana sobbed all the while, and although Rosa soothed her and told her everything would be all right, she didn’t know whether she spoke the truth.
A knock sounded on the door. “Mamá,” called Marta. “Miguel has to go and he has to go now.”
Hastily Rosa yanked open the door and, with Marta’s help, managed to get Miguel’s trousers off and set him on the toilet just in time. “He didn’t throw up,” Marta told her. “Not yet anyway.”
Rosa nodded, but that didn’t offer her much hope. She had nursed Miguel longer than any of her children, eighteen months, certain that he would be her last baby and longing to extend that precious time. For his first year, Miguel had thrived. He had smiled and crawled and talked and walked exactly when he should have, exactly like any other healthy child. But a few months before his second birthday, he had begun to steadily decline. She weighed and measured all her children vigilantly, and the numbers recorded in her notebook broke her heart: Miguel had lost weight since she had weaned him, and he had not grown in height at all in eight months. Once, he had run and played and found his way into all manner of mischief, but now all he wanted was for Rosa to hold him. And Rosa did, willingly, because she had already lost four children, four children she would never hold again, four children she would love and remember every day for the rest of her life.
She bathed Ana first and then Miguel, and as she carried him back to the bed to dry him off and dress him, she found Lars pacing by the window, stricken. “I shouldn’t have brought sweets,” he said. “I should have brought something simple, something plain, like biscuits or toast.”
“Don’t blame yourself,” said Rosa, helping Miguel into a clean pair of trousers. “Biscuits and toast likely would have done the same. The only things Miguel and Ana manage to keep in their tummies are rice and tortillas and oranges, but they can’t live on that.”
Miguel suddenly perked up. “Tortilla, Mamá?”
“Are you hungry, sweetheart?” she asked, puzzled. He nodded. “Okay. Put your shirt on like a big boy and I’ll see what we have.” She stepped around Lars and knelt by the basket, hoping the rain had not ruined the food she had packed the day before. Luck was with her. At the bottom of the basket she found four corn tortillas wrapped in wax paper, still dry, but cold. She gave one to her son and watched with misgivings as he devoured it, expecting it to come right back up again. Instead Miguel beamed at her and asked for another, but Rosa told him he would have to wait rather than risk upsetting his tummy again.
“You didn’t ask for my opinion,” said Lars, “but if it were up to me, I’d take all of you to the hospital straightaway and not leave until you’re patched up and someone can give us good answers about what’s plaguing Ana and Miguel.”
“As soon as the children are dressed and ready, we’ll go.” With John miles away and unable to interfere, with his arguments that they couldn’t afford a doctor disproven by the small fortune she had discovered in the valises, nothing would prevent her from seeking a cure for her children’s strange and sinister affliction, not while there was breath left in her body.
Within an hour they were on their way. Lars thought it would be too far for the children to walk, so they left the hotel through the same discreet alleyway entrance they had used the previous night, climbed into the car, and drove west down Fifth Street and turned north on F Street. On the way, they passed Plaza Park and a stately white building with Greek columns Lars said was the Carnegie Library. “Can we stop?” Ana begged, rising out of her seat.
“Ana, sit down,” Rosa admonished.
“Can we? Please?” Ana said, promptly sitting down again. “They must have hundreds of books in such a big place.”
“Maybe thousands,” remarked Lars.
Rosa glanced at him, and when he nodded, she said, “All right. After we see the doctor.”
Ana beamed as if she couldn’t believe her good fortune. The only library she had ever visited was the small bookcase in the Arboles Valley School, although she had seen photographs of other, grand and glorious libraries in far-off cities like San Francisco and New York.
“Can we play in the park too?” piped up Lupita.
“We’ll see,” said Rosa. The day had turned bright and sunny, with no trace remaining of the previous day’s rainstorm, but Rosa could not shake the sensation that they were being hunted. She didn’t want to frighten the children, but she would feel safer within the marble walls of the library than out in the open at a park.
Downtown Oxnard seemed busy and bustling to Rosa for a Sunday morning, but she rarely left the Arboles Valley, and for all she knew, there were fewer cars on the street and people strolling on the sidewalks than other days of the week. As a young woman she had traveled to Los Angeles to visit her aunt, a teacher, several times a year, but marriage had brought an end to her travels, since she could not take the children with her and she was reluctant to leave them at home alone with John, with his tempers and demands. Her last trip to Oxnard had been shortly after Maria died, to seek the aid of a curandera before she lost another precious child. The healer, an elderly woman who wore her white hair in a single long braid down her back, told her that the children’s souls were frightened and lost, and unless Rosa found a way to bring balance and harmony to their spirits, their bodies would continue to suffer. She had encouraged Rosa to pray continuously and to nourish the children with the traditional foods of their ancestors. Rosa did, and it seemed that her remedies benefited the children to some extent, but their symptoms persisted. The curandera had urged Rosa to bring them back to see her in two months, but John, who referred to the old woman as a witch doctor and her treatments as a lot of hocus-pocus, forbade Rosa to see her again.
Before long they arrived at St. John’s Hospital, a white, two-story building on the corner of F Street and Doris Avenue that looked to be about four times the size of the library. The children fell silent as they approached the imposing structure, and after Lars parked on the street nearby, Rosa had to coax them from the car with promises of visits to the library and the park and perhaps even the soda fountain Marta had spotted near the hotel afterward, if they were good.
Inside, Rosa asked the children to sit and wait while she spoke to the nurse at the admissions desk. The nurse, a plump, white-clad nun perhaps a dozen years older than herself, took one look at Rosa’s face, shot Lars a cold and stony glare, and ushered her off to an examination room. “But my children—” Rosa protested, glancing back at them over her shoulder as the nurse briskly led her away.
“I’ll see to them,” Lars called after her, leaning over the desk to beckon another nurse who had just arrived.
The first nurse closed the door behind them firmly and instructed Rosa to sit on the examination table. After taking Rosa’s temperature and inspe
cting the cuts and bruises on her face, she asked, “How did you come by these injuries? Take a bad fall, did you?”
“No.” Rosa hardly knew what to say. Could there be any mistaking what had happened to her? Was the nun giving her the freedom to lie if she were too ashamed to tell the truth? “That is to say, I—I did fall, after my husband hit me.”
“I see.”
“I realize I look a fright, but I’m really more concerned about my children. May they see the doctor first?”
The nurse’s mouth tightened. “Did your husband hit them too?”
“No—no, I mean, he spanks them when they misbehave, but he—he doesn’t hit them the way he hits me. That’s not why I brought them here today. Please, could the doctor see them first?”
The older woman’s features softened. “We have several doctors, my dear. One of my sisters has already escorted your children to the pediatrics ward.” She opened the door again. “Dr. Hayd will be in to see you shortly.”
Alone, Rosa watched the door and wondered if she had made a terrible mistake in coming there. She should be with Ana and Miguel during their examination to answer the other doctor’s questions and comfort them if they became frightened. Just as she was about to climb down from the table and go in search of the children’s ward, the door opened and a tall, gray-haired man with round glasses entered. “Good morning,” he greeted her, inspecting the notes on his clipboard. “Sister tells me you said you had a tiff with your husband. Is that so?”
Rosa clasped her hands together in her lap and studied them—the fingers slender, the nails uneven, the skin rough and dry from years of washing clothes and dishes and children. “My husband hit me, yes.”
Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel Page 7