Wild Roses

by Deb Caletti

  “No one knows all those words. It’s a fucking long song.”

  “Three French men? Wee wee, monsieur. Jacques, Pierre, and Luc,” Bunny said.

  “It’s the stupidest and most boring song in history. I was only trying to jazz it up.”

  “I don’t know if there’s anything we can do,” I said. “About Ian.” I was trying to get them back on track. Something about this reminded me of the time I dropped our old thermometer and mercury bounced crazily all over the bathroom floor.

  “Why don’t you sit down here in the back for a minute and we’ll make a plan,” Chuck said. “Crouching over in the window like that’s gonna strain your lattisimus dorsi.”

  “Hey, he’s my favorite Star Wars character,” I said. “I even had the action figure.” I got in the back, shoved over Donna Summer. “Groovy music. Boogie down.” I waved the CD around between them.

  “Record club. I forgot to send in my coupon.”

  “Same with this?” I held up the book.

  “Literary Guild,” Bunny said.

  “If you don’t mind, I’m leaving the window open,” Chuck said. “Nothing worse than the smell of french fry grease when you’re not hungry.”

  “How about we take Ian on a trip?” Bunny said.

  “A trip? What kind of trip?” I asked.

  “It doesn’t even matter. We just stick him in the car and go. Make him relax. The kid’s gonna break.”

  “He’s flying out for his audition in two weeks,” I said. “We can’t really take him on a trip.”

  “Okay, for the day then,” Bunny said. He was folding up the foil wrap from his hamburger into a decisive triangle.

  “A day of rest and rejuvenation,” Chuck said. “One day off of practice is not gonna kill him. He keeps up like this …”

  “We’ll put him in the car. Pick you up,” Bunny said. Something about the three of us plotting there in the parked car made me think of a bad movie with gangsters. “Tomorrow. Do you have school?”

  “I’m suddenly feeling a sore throat coming on,” I said. “Eck, eck,” I coughed.

  “We don’t want you getting into trouble,” Chuck said.

  “I haven’t missed a day yet this year,” I said. I was getting excited. Common sense hadn’t quite caught up yet. It was just one of those times where you’re so happy to have an idea that you don’t quite stop to figure out if it’s a good one.

  “Mental health day,” Chuck said. “I saw it on my calendar.”

  “Where will we take him?” I asked.

  “Just get in the car and go,” Bunny said.

  “We’ll figure something out,” Chuck said.

  We decided on ten o’clock. I hopped out of the car, feeling like I’d done a good thing. I actually thought I was helping. That night I stayed in my room, afraid that my face would give away my secret. I didn’t sleep well, but only because I was excited and hopeful. Let’s just make it clear that my lack of sleep had nothing to do with premonition of disaster.

  Every person above the age of seven knows how to do it—you sag your face down so that your eyes look lifeless, and then slump in a chair like a sweatshirt tossed there by someone with bad aim. You’ve got to hang over the chair a bit, your head on your arm, too heavy to hold up.

  “I feel like crap,” I said to Mom. I lowered my eyes, held my hand to my throat. “Hurts.”

  “I thought we were doing too well this year with no one getting sick,” she said. She was hurrying around to catch her carpool, shoving random things in a brown bag for lunch. Someone needed to go to the store. You opened the fridge door, and you could see your own reflection. “Do you need to stay home?”

  “I’ve got a test,” I said. “I can’t.” Utter brilliance. Applause, bow.

  “If you’re sick, you’re sick,” she said. “You know how I feel about that.”

  “I know,” I said. Yep, I knew.

  She put her hand on my forehead, cold from the fridge. “You are warm,” she said. And in case this gives the impression that Mom wasn’t too smart, I’d better correct that right here. She was hugely smart, read all the time and knew something about everything. But she was someone who tended to get absentminded when she had a lot on her mind. The week before she’d walked into my math class while it was in session because she was a week early for conferences, and a couple of days before that, she left the water running in the bathroom while hand washing a sweater. I found water spilling over the counter and soaking the rug.

  “I’ll call the school,” she said. “Back to bed.” Which would have been the three most fantastic words in the human language if I didn’t have better things to do. You may be wondering if I felt the least bit bad about deceiving my mother right then. Or at least maybe I’m wondering it, looking back. And the answer is no, I didn’t feel one bit bad. Or at least the parts of me that might have felt bad were silenced by the importance of what I was doing. Sometimes rightness was bigger than lies. And if Mom did get mad over what I did for love, well, hey—what I was doing seemed pretty mild compared to throwing away a home and a man and a family and a shared toaster and vacation photos and a sock drawer with intermingled socks, for the possibility (impossibility) of forever, tortured romance with the Prozac poster boy, People magazine’s Most Fucked-Up Man Alive.

  I went back to bed for a while, and lay there with my eyes wide open and my heart racing, like a kid on Christmas Eve. Mom came up and kissed me on the cheek and reminded me to stay quiet for Dino, as he’d be home working. No problem, I said. I’d be so quiet, it’d be like I wasn’t even there.

  I watched out my window for the Datsun, and grabbed my coat and went outside when I saw it come up the street. I opened the back door and climbed in beside Ian. There was a handkerchief lying beside him, as if they had tried to blindfold him or something. It really was like a bad gangster movie. There was even a violin case on the seat.

  “So you’re in on this, too, huh?” he said.

  “Mission accomplished!” Bunny said.

  “Partners in crime,” I said. “We were worried about you,” I said to Ian.

  “As long as I’m back before practice,” Ian said. “You guys know I’ve got to get ready.” I checked Ian’s face for signs that he was pissed off, and saw only the tight, tired face I’d gotten used to.

  “Oh, we know you’ve got to get ready. Yes, sir,” Bunny said.

  “I mean it, Bun. Two-thirty max.”

  “Full tank of gas and a road atlas. We’ll make it to Malibu by sundown.”

  “Not funny,” Ian said.

  “Where we headed?” I said.

  “It’s a surprise,” Chuck said. “You got enough room, or should I move up my seat?”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  And it was. Just being there in the backseat with Ian in his long coat that smelled of coffee and cinnamon, knees touching. Riding down my street with that delicious feeling of everyone else being in their normal routine, poor suckers, while you were having a new day. It was cold but bright out, a nice show of sun that added a couple of notches to the cheer level. I picked up Ian’s hand. It was dry and chapped from the cold, as if the last weeks were slowly sucking the moisture from him.

  We drove through town, past the Chinese restaurant with its plastic-covered menus, and the real estate office with its pictures of Seabeck homes in the windows. We didn’t have many tourists this time of year, so the Gift Gallery, selling wind chimes with ferryboats and tacky sweatshirts with plastic whale decals, was quiet, as was the hemp clothing store (run by the perpetually stoned Mrs. Ramadon), and the bookstore/coffeehouse, which had the best coffee cake of anywhere in the universe. We headed down to the ferry docks, past Ian’s house, and Bunny bought a ticket from Evan Malloney’s dad in the ticket booth. I wondered if Evan Malloney’s dad knew what we all knew about Evan Malloney—that he was already a drunk. The kind that made people so uneasy they steered clear of them. Like anyone whose future you could see (the terminally ill, ninety-year-olds, girls who sl
ept around) it was too much reality to want to look at.

  “If we’re getting on the ferry, we’ve got to watch the sailing times,” Ian said.

  “Would you relax, for Christ’s sake?” Bunny said. “That is the whole point of this journey. I’m going to make you do some relaxation exercises.”

  “Oh, God. Anything but that,” Ian said. “I’m relaxed, okay?” He shook his hands and turned his neck in a circle, the way Mom did whenever she was getting a headache. “Mellowness has come.” This was the Ian I loved.

  We parked in the loading lane behind a camper. Its license plate read CAPTAIN ED. He had a bumper sticker that said HOME OF THE BIG REDWOODS.

  “Just do it. Picture yourself somewhere you want to be,” Bunny said. “A beach. A mountain cabin.”

  “Very original ideas, Bun,” Ian said.

  “What you want me to say, a Taco Time? A Jiffy Lube?”

  “I’m in a boat on a lake,” Chuck said.

  His head was resting back against the seat. I could see in the window reflection that his eyes were closed.

  “Cassie, you too. Close your eyes.”

  I closed my eyes. Snored loudly. Ian cracked up.

  “Find your place of inner peace,” Bunny said.

  “It’s sunny on the boat,” Chuck said. “There aren’t even any waves. I just had a big roast beef sandwich. I’m thinking I should have remembered sun lotion. Damn, I wish I had a beer.”

  “Would you shut the hell up, Chuck, I’m trying to relax these people.”

  “Okay, go ahead. Move along, Bun. I’ve got my quiet place.” Ian poked my leg. He mouthed bowling alley.

  “School cafeteria,” I whispered.

  “Airport runway,” he whispered back.

  “I hear a splash,” Chuck said. “I look up. Some asshole in another boat just tossed in an empty can of Mr. Pibb. Man, that pisses me off. I hate litterers.”

  “Now, start at your toes. You feel them getting heavy. They are totally relaxed. Your foot is relaxed.”

  I held up one shoe, swirled it around. Ian put a finger through the lace and dangled my foot from it.

  “Now your calf is relaxed. Now your shin. Your lower legs have never felt so relaxed.” Something about this wasn’t right. Maybe I didn’t know about these things, but it seemed pretty damn impossible to relax a bone.

  “Not the shin,” Chuck said, reading my mind. “You don’t relax the shin.”

  “Okay, the leg. The leg. Your leg is relaxed, all right? Go back to the lake, Chuck, Jesus, and let me do my work.” He reached for the pack of gum on the dashboard, pulled the little red plastic thread and picked out a stick. He popped it into his mouth, and crinkled up the foil into a little ball and tossed it at Chuck.

  “It’s like telling you to relax your collarbone,” Chuck said. His eyes were still closed. He didn’t even notice the foil ball tap his massive arm.

  “Meanwhile, back at the legs,” I said. I was peeking. Ian was peeking too. It reminded me of the times when my parents were still married and Dad made us go to church. Everyone else would just be praying away while Mom and I were peeking at everyone.

  “Legs like Jell-O,” Bunny said.

  “Lime. Yum, my favorite,” Chuck said.

  Bunny ignored him. “And then your thighs. Warm and heavy and relaxed. They’ve never been so relaxed. The warmth spreads to your buttocks. …”

  This was getting a little embarrassing. In one of my heights of emotional maturity, I started to laugh. It made me think of Aaron Mills, during this science lesson. Mr. Robelard had told the class that the cut of a rock was called a cleavage. After a few snickers, he paused and then sternly told everyone that they had better just get all of their laughs out right then. The class was dead silent, except for Aaron, who just sat in his seat busting up, holding his stomach, he was laughing so hard.

  Right then after the warm buttocks, car engines began to spring to life around us, thank God. The ferry was loading, and so I’d never get to find out how Bunny was going to handle what we were going to relax next.

  Chuck shook himself as if he had really fallen asleep and was awakening back into the world. “Whew,” he said. “Wow. Rejuvenation.” He seemed to really mean it. Bunny started the car, followed Captain Ed onto the ferry, squeezing tight behind him. I was hoping we’d be able to see what Captain Ed looked like, but no one got out and the windows were tinted, and Bunny was already zipping up his coat and readying to leave our car.

  I could see the couple in the BMW next to us staring at Chuck and Bunny as if they’d better lie low and pretend to be really nice people until Chuck and Bunny got on the ferry, in spite of the fact that Chuck’s big butt bumped their side mirror as he tried to squeeze around the Datsun to the ferry door. Already, the noise of the boat filled your ears to the point of bursting, a thunderous roar that appeared to make the brain cells expand to the outer edges of their living quarters. Chuck shouted something that no one could hear, and then pretended to do sign language, moving his fingers in a way that was hugely unpolitically correct and a nice lawsuit for the attorney for the Deaf People Of America who was probably sitting in the BMW whose mirror Chuck had just knocked askew with his ass.

  We walked sideways until we got to the ferry door, which Bunny opened with no problem at all in spite of the fact that those doors usually weighed a thousand pounds. We were suctioned into the quiet of the ferry stairwell.

  “You going to be warm enough?” Ian said.

  “No problem.” I was wearing my wool peacoat from the army-navy surplus store, and you could be in an arctic blizzard in that thing and feel toasty.

  The ferry crossing from Seabeck to Seattle is short, thirty minutes tops. Just long enough to have all of the ferry fun without the ferry boredom. Chuck and Bunny sat in the restaurant and ate cheese dogs while Ian and I made a tour of the decks and stood outside in the blasting wind. We stepped out to the farthermost edge of the deck, just watching the water rush at us from below. The land looked as if it was being brought to us, per our instructions. We went inside again to get warm, and bumped into Chuck and Bunny heading our way.

  “You got to be outside when the ferry docks,” Chuck said. “No matter how cold it is.”

  “It’s like, you’ve got to take your shoes off at the beach, no matter what. Same kind of law,” Bunny said.

  “Your guys’ hair looks hilarious,” Chuck said.

  I socked his arm. We walked out with them, though, because they were right about the “laws.” I’d add a few to theirs—you had to roll the window down a little bit in the car wash, just to freak out your passenger, and you had to yell wherever your voice would echo. Ian took my hand and put both of ours in his coat pocket. We ducked our heads against the rush of wind that attacked us as we opened the door, walked like Polar explorers to the edge of the deck once more.

  Ian put his arms around me from behind, and set his chin by my neck. I let myself forget my drippy nose and the wind that was blasting my face. I just let this good feeling, love, the amazing beauty around us, overtake me. A red carpet of feeling began at my toes and unrolled and filled my heart. I’d been so scared to hand myself over to someone like this, but I’d gone ahead and done it. Love, this letting go, had snuck past the guards and the attack dogs, and now here I was. I was certain that the experience would be akin to putting on nylons (which, if you have any sense, you don’t ever do), in the way that when you first stick your foot in, they are going along fine, lying pretty straight, but by the time they’re pulled up, they’re twisting around hopelessly in some form of leg strangulation. But love hadn’t turned out like that. Standing there in the icy wind with Ian wasn’t one bit that way. Here was the feeling: delicious and exhilarating. Full to the tiniest pieces.

  Bunny was a hypocrite to talk about our hair. You should have seen his. I pointed and laughed, another law. You must always point and laugh when someone you really like’s hair looks particularly funny, or when they’ve spilled food in an embarrassing locat
ion on their clothes. “Hey, Bozo the Clown,” I said.

  “Hey, chick Einstein,” he said back at me. Okay, so, my hair was like something you pulled out of a clogged drain.

  “Is this amazing or what?” Chuck spread his arm out over the waters of the sound like a game show host displaying the washer-dryer combo.

  “Group hug,” Bunny said, although I suspect he was just freezing and wanted warmth. He came over to us, wrapped his bear-size paws around Ian and me. Chuck came around the other side and did the same. It was nice and warm in there. My nose was smushed up against Ian’s chest, and his breath was warm in my hair. I still had a view of the city fast approaching. It was a display of building blocks set up by a genius child, or maybe by his parent after he’d gone to bed. They seemed like they had just been plunked down, rectangles and triangles and squares. It was bright and shiny, the sun hitting glass. We were being delivered to the door, like Dorothy and gang at the gates of the Emerald City.

  “Tell me how life gets any better than this,” Bunny said. “What could you do to improve this moment?”

  And he was right. In spite of the fact that I was squeezed and frozen and had to use the bathroom, he was 100 percent right. I couldn’t believe it. I loved my mother and I loved my father, but there in that circle I felt something I hadn’t for a long time. It was that something I’d been missing, that I’d been longing for without even realizing it. It was a sense of family. That’s what it was. My throat closed up, got so tight I felt like I might cry You just get to missing that so much, that feeling of everything in its right place. You just feel that loss so deeply that you don’t ever give it a name. A hot tear rolled down my cheek. I couldn’t believe I was crying, but I just let the tears come. There was so much unexpected emotion that it needed somewhere to go. So much love and pain and absence and cut, living roots. And here, unexpectedly, something to fill that space. You just never knew where you might find your kindred ones. Usually you just walk and walk among people who are not of your tribe, and then suddenly, there you are, in a place that feels familiar and known.

  I took my arms out from the middle and reached around this wide group. I hugged back, patted a tattoo.