The Care and Handling of Roses with Thorns

by Margaret Dilloway

  Outside, the army chanted for her. “Tomoe, Tomoe!” The drums and horns sounded and the men stomped their feet on the ground, banging swords against metal. Tomoe felt the vibrations in her eardrums, in her heart.

  Yamabuki took a step back and bowed deeply. Tomoe bowed in return. Both filled with unspoken words that would always remain so.

  Chapter 1

  People in my family are pathologically incapable of asking anyone for help. It’s probably the only tradition we have. Call it pride or stubbornness or fear of rejection, even—each of us is our own island. No matter what anybody’s going through, we pretend everything’s fine, just fine, thanks for asking, and we soldier on.

  Take my mother. My mother never asked me or my sister for anything. Not for help with the dishes or cooking. Not for a Christmas or birthday present. Not even for a simple hug.

  But I always believed that my mother had deeper needs. Wants she would not out loud, even when she could still communicate. Maybe even desires I was afraid to ask her about, in case I couldn’t help her.

  Except for today. Today she broke through her cocoon and, finally, now of all times, asked.

  I’ll do anything I can to help her. I wish she’d always known that.

  I put my hands on top of each other, palms down, and rock the soles of my feet back and forth into the smooth concrete pool deck. Goggles and earplugs and nose plugs and swim cap and plain black Speedo racerback swimsuit all in place.

  You wouldn’t know it, but there was once a day when I could have handily beat every single person standing on the pool deck next to me. That sleek woman to my right. The barrel-chested old man in the unfortunate Speedo to my left. Even the twenty-year-old man already kicking through the water. In fact, there’s still a plaque in the La Jolla High gym that bears my name. Rachel Snow, 100-Meter Freestyle record. Still unbroken, says a handwritten note below it. That was who I used to be. Unbroken.

  The noon sun covers me in a prickly blanket. It’s October, and still oven-warm here in San Diego. Only a few people are in the public pool in the middle of the weekday, parents splashing in the shallow end with their toddlers. Later, it’ll be filled with water polo teams and after-school swim clubs.

  Usually swimming clears my head, but not today. My brain turns over and over what happened this morning, when I visited my mother in the nursing home. I shake my shoulders loose, take a deep breath in. One, two, three. I release it, take another, stare at the shimmering blue-white water. Yes, there it is. That particular ache I get whenever I think about Mom.

  We had a good visit today. Not because my mother knew who I was, but because we had a nice time together. Being quiet. Looking at foam on the waves and cloud formations in the sky. This was a beautiful facility, situated as it is right by the Pacific, and its expense matches its views—and my father can afford it without a single sacrifice.

  My mother and I ate ginger and lemon crème cookies, dipping them into our decaf black tea. She ate a whole sleeve. Probably not on her approved diet list, but really, if I were in my mom’s situation, I’d be eating a daily pound of See’s. You might as well enjoy the time you have left. The truth is, she’s never going to get better.

  After we finished our snack, Mom continued staring out the window. I sat in another slipcovered armchair next to hers.

  Mom’s coarse black hair, white at the roots, was standing up, and I reached over to smooth it down. “Hikari Sato.” My voice was so loud I hurt my own ears. Most of the time, people ask me to repeat myself. Mom didn’t turn at the sound of her name. I wondered what she was thinking about. If she remembered her husband, my father.

  I haven’t seen or talked to him since I was sixteen. I’d become a problem child, breaking the rules, acting the wrong way, and my father had abruptly told me to get out, forbade my mother from seeing me. I’ve heard, since then, of other parents doing the same for various reasons—often because they disapprove of their child’s partner or lifestyle or sexual orientation. Some people have an unshakable internal morality. As far as he’s concerned, he has only one daughter now, Drew. I’m not sure I’ll ever talk to him again. If you can say anything about Killian Snow, it’s that he will never give up.

  “Hey.” Mom took my hand in her paper-dry one. “Look out there.” She pointed to the parking lot below, where a man shimmied out of his wetsuit, his surfboard leaning against the open trunk of his sedan, having finished some morning surfing. His broad shoulders glistened with salt water. “Check out that surfer. He’s changing. I can see everything. Back and front.” She giggled, a throaty, mischievous sound, then leaned over and rapped on the window. “Woo!” she shouted like a teenager, and he looked up, searching for the source. “That cold water didn’t hurt him any.”

  “Mom!” I giggled, too, my laugh echoing hers perfectly. A flush rose up my neck. The man waved, believing it was me yelling, not the tiny innocent-looking Japanese woman sitting next to me. Oh well. I leaned back out of sight and checked the time. “I have to go, okay?” I stand, kiss the top of her head. “I’ll see you next week.”

  “Wait.” Mom grabbed my upper arm, hyperalert. Wrinkles suddenly cracked across her face like riverbeds on a relief map, cutting across the high mountains of her cheekbones. “Wait, wait.” She yanked with sudden Hulk-like strength on my arm, and I sat right back down.

  Mom wanted something.

  I gently pried her hand off my arm, no small feat. “What is it, Mom? What do you need?” I thought perhaps she’d ask me for a box of her favorite cookies, Mallomars, or maybe even tell me to bring my twenty-year-old daughter, Quincy, and my fourteen-year-old son, Chase, around next time.

  Her mouth opened, forming words I couldn’t catch, her voice raspy and low. Like she couldn’t quite expel the syllables hard enough.

  “Say it again.” I leaned closer, trying to make out her meaning.

  Mom cupped my chin with her hand. “Rachel.” Her eyes met mine, purposefully now, not with the usual randomness, as if my eyes were another piece of furniture in the room. “Rachel, Rachel.”

  Mom was back. If only for a moment.

  “Mom?” I leaned forward, my mouth going dry. “What is it you need? Tell me. I’ll help you.” Tell me. Make up for all the other times you didn’t ask. Or when I couldn’t help.

  Mom took a gigantic gulp of air, as if she’d been diving hundreds of feet under water. “Hon, hon,” she whispered in Japanese.

  I didn’t speak the language. “Hon?” I whispered back, though I wasn’t sure why we were whispering. We were all alone in the calm, white room. The plastic vertical blinds rattled in the breeze. Mom blinked and screwed up her face like she’s tasted something sour. “Sewing room,” she said finally, with tremendous effort, in English. “Drew knows. Drew will help.”

  My little sister. Not that she’s been little for a long time. Younger, I corrected myself. I will always be younger than you, Drew liked to say. “What does hon mean, Mom?”

  Mom took her hand out of mine and stared back out the window, at the ocean waves pounding. Another car pulled into the surfer’s vacated spot. I bent into her face, searched her gaze for a sign she knew me. But it was like looking at the blank dark screen of a laptop. Only my own reflection.

  Now I hesitate on the pool deck, straighten, crack my shoulder and stretch it out, considering my mother’s request. Small pins of pain shoot up across my back, to my spine. Hon. I had looked up the word. Hon means “book.”

  My mother wants me to get a book.

  From her sewing room? Or what used to be her sewing room? And Drew, of all people, knows? As far as I know, my sister’s never set foot in that room. That was Mom’s sacred space. I’m going to have to call my little sister. Which means bumping up our phone calls from birthday-and-holiday-only to an out-of-the-ordinary one.

  I imagine Drew’s voice, smooth as melted sugar, coating over her real emotions. It used to be so e
asy, second nature, to tell what my sister was thinking. Now there’s a thick invisible wall between us, and it’s like we’re little girls again, our beds on each side of the wall, tapping and hoping the other will hear, after the other one’s already deep asleep.

  Drew coming home from the hospital is one of my very first memories. I was four when Drew was born. I wasn’t too excited about having a baby in the house. I didn’t even like baby dolls.

  Mom told me to sit quietly on the couch. She put Drew in my lap. “Hold her while I get her bottle ready,” she instructed me. “Do not move.” Drew lay perfectly still, wrapped up like a sausage in her blanket. I thought Mom had tricked me, brought me a heavy doll. I stared at her. She slept, immobile. Boring. She smelled like sour milk. Her head was pointy, her face wrinkled and homely.

  I poked her in the cheek with my finger, dimpling the soft skin like dough. I poked her again, a little harder. “Wake up.”

  Drew opened her eyes and stared right at me. Her eyes were the deepest gray-brown then, like polished obsidian mixed with dark chocolate. Her stubborn little arm busted free and her tiny hand clutched my finger.

  My heart stuttered. “Hello,” I whispered, and I swore to God she smiled, though everyone said newborns couldn’t. I kissed the spots where I’d poked her. That night, I slept in her room, on the floor next to her crib, until Mom caught me and made me go back to my own bed.

  It was my sister who taught me how to love.

  “Feel like a race, Rachel?” the sleek woman to my right says. Shelley, another mother who swims laps here regularly. She pulls her dark goggles down over her tanned face and white swim cap and stretches her wide, muscular shoulders. “It’ll be good for both of us.”

  My own shoulder gives a twinge of anticipatory pain. “That’s okay. You go on with your bad self.”

  She sticks out her lips. “You’re no fun.”

  “I know, I know.” I wave her off and she dives in. Wet blanket. Hey, somebody’s got to be the sensible one, even if it’s not much fun sometimes. I bend over again, grabbing for the water, diving in without a splash. Perfect, even when nobody cares.

  Water has its own time. Inside, under the water, you can’t hear anything but muffled sounds from the people on shore. Bubbles and sloshing from whoever or whatever’s in there with you. Nothing to look at but the black lines painted on the bottom of the pool.

  Usually I don’t think of anything at all while I swim, which is why I love it so much. Even with my bum shoulder, which still flares up like a barometer on thunderous days.

  But today. Today I do my usual crawl, two strokes and then a breath, two strokes and then a breath, my big feet like turtle fins propelling me along. I look down at the white lines and instead I see the familiar faces of my mother, my sister, and my daughter. The three women closest to me.

  It strikes me that even though I could sketch all these faces in my sleep—even though one gave birth to me, one inhabited the same womb I did, and I literally grew the other one inside of me—all of them are really strangers now. Unknown to me, really. And I’m unknown to them. Because isn’t that what happens when we grow up? We leave each other.

  I close my eyes and swim faster.

  Drew decides to drown this afternoon’s humiliation in a diet Pepsi. What she really needs is a kick-in-the-sternum Jack and Coke. Jack, like the musician she met today. She almost giggles at the reference. “I’m losing it,” she whispers to the photo of the English sheepdog drooling over a Milk-Bone.

  She opens the mini fridge under the desk, hoping that she missed a little whiskey or vodka bottle amid the old bagged salads and half-eaten Dannons. It’s turned up too high, filming ice over everything. She pushes a spot clean on the desk, amid papers and tufts of dog hair in blacks and tans and whites. She cracks the can open slowly, and pours it into a child’s plastic take-out cup, pleased to see that the soda comes out the consistency of a Slurpee. Perfect. This, at least, is the bright spot in her day. She sits back in the ergonomic chair her employer, Liza, bought. An awfully expensive chair, considering this office is essentially a storage closet.

  This is Dogwarts Dog Grooming, located in a little strip mall off of Beverly Boulevard. Not the Beverly Hills part of Beverly Boulevard, but further east, next to an all-night burrito joint and a legalized marijuana shop, the parking lot always crowded with red-eyed, sleepy people. The interior looks like a preschooler’s approximation of an English castle, with fake stone walls and a built-in turret on which a fake sleeping dog sleeps, his nylon-furred, black-and-white sides moving up and down eternally. Dogwarts is closed today, because Drew had another job and Liza is off on what she called a “cleansing cruise” for the next three weeks, where she’ll get her aura purified and lots of hot stone massages, or something of that nature.

  Drew’s not a hundred percent sure. She only knows that Liza, a never-married woman in her late fifties, has called Drew three times during her vacation and requested wire transfers of thousands of dollars. It’s making Drew nervous, this hemorrhaging when there’s so little coming in; but tomorrow she’s got two groomings, an overgrown Labradoodle and a Newfoundland, so that will eat up at least half the day. The viola gig came at just the right time.

  The viola gig. Drew takes a big pull of the soda, getting a chunk of ice. Today was the final recording session of Drew’s backup strings for an alternative rock band, Time in Purgatory, working along with ten other classically trained instrumentalists.

  Everyone else had already left the studio, except for Drew and the lead singer. Drew fiddled with the locks on her viola case, feeling, she thought, a warmth between them.

  This band’s about to take off, U2-style. Radio stations are already playing tracks off the second album, and everybody’s talking about the release of this one. She’s still humming the song they recorded today. It’ll be one of those songs they play ten times a day until you’re properly sick of it, like it’s some radio conspiracy to make people hate songs they once loved. But right now, it’s still new.

  A musicians’ agency books Drew for these gigs. She’s played viola for chocolate and lotion commercials, for Italian restaurant radio ads (she’s always playing that cheesily romantic “Bella Notte” song from Lady and the Tramp), for educational baby DVDs. (Drew still can’t believe anybody lets babies watch television—her sister, Rachel, would have rather poked her own eyes out than let her precious babies be stunted by television. Okay, exaggeration. But not by much.)

  These gigs aren’t bad work by any means. Not that steady, but Drew’s got it better than most musicians. The occasional gig supplements her dog-grooming job. And who knows—one could turn into something one day.

  Maybe even a relationship.

  Drew sinks down into her comfortable chair and takes a pull so strong on her soda that she gets brain freeze. Relationship. Yeah, right. She’d rather forget.

  How Drew had smiled at the lead singer, Jack, as he packed up reams of sheet music into an accordion folder, carefully sorting by instrumental part. It reminded her, with a twinge in her stomach (regret? annoyance? she couldn’t identify the feeling; they felt interchangeable sometimes, in her untrustworthy gut) of the old days, when Drew used to arrange music for the rock band she was in, Out Stealing Horses.

  Drew quit grad school at twenty-five to be in that band, quit for her boyfriend, Jonah, because she didn’t want him traveling, having fun, without her. They didn’t want a viola player, so she banged the tambourine, standing in the background, stage left of the drummer, hundreds of cables swirled around her ankles like chains. Her most important role was that of the music arranger, as Drew was the only one with a music degree and the only one who could do notation.

  For seven years, off and on, with Drew always working some job that could easily be left if need be, they’d traveled from one club to another, to every dive on the West Coast until they were signed by a minor label; then to every cou
nty fair and second-rate musical festival in the country. The crowds grew at each venue. Drew wrote some music, hoped she’d prove her worth and get a larger role. Once she wrote an entire song, “Out of Bounds,” with a beautiful viola part that backed up and supported the other instruments, like the frame of a house. That’s not the kind of music we play, Yoko, the bassist said. The guitar’s the frame, not you. Jonah told her it wasn’t quite right for them. She told herself it didn’t matter, that she was only sticking around because of Jonah, The One. She wouldn’t have put up with that for anyone else.

  That’s what you get for putting all your eggs in one basket. Her literal ovarian eggs—nearly all of them wasted on Jonah. They’d broken up almost two years ago now.

  Drew was lucky to be doing anything even semi-professional with music. Most of the other music majors in her year went into other fields after graduation, their student loans and then mortgages and weddings and babies absorbing their freshly hatched ambitions. Drew would see her old friends and they’d tell her, You’re so lucky to be doing what you love, I just became a corporate cubicle slave. And Drew would feel a glimmer of gratitude and pride.

  Finally, Jonah’s band signed with a big label and embarked on a European tour, and Drew was unceremoniously released from both the band and the relationship. “It wouldn’t have worked out long term anyway,” Drew told Jonah, wanting to be the one to say it first. Jonah, staring at Drew with his large Siamese cat eyes, had at least been kind enough to give her that courtesy. “If we had kids, both of us can’t be traveling the world, and I hate being left behind.” This was absolutely true. At least this all had ended before Drew hit her mid-thirties, and really lost all of the best years of her life.

  And so Drew returned to Los Angeles, to her viola and her side jobs. Then, at some point, her side job became the viola instead, and the side job became the main job, the transition taking place so fluidly that Drew didn’t notice it had happened until Rachel had asked her about it last Christmas. “Are you spending most of your time at the grooming salon these days?” Rachel asked, encased in the bubble of her perfect family. “Not too many music jobs in this economy, I suppose.” Rachel couldn’t see how much this question hurt Drew. Or possibly she did. Drew could no longer tell.