Wild Roses

by Deb Caletti

  I stayed with Dad long enough to get annoyed when he used up all the hot water when he took a shower and watched way too much of the History Channel at volumes loud enough to make you duck when the allied forces stormed in with guns firing. After the third day when he made my bed for me, I was actually longing for my old routine at Mom’s. I missed my routine, even though I did not miss my mother’s husband, the psycho liar, the evil stepfather, the Anti-Mr. Brady—Mike Brady with hair grown out and psychological issues and a cigarette. Which brings to mind another inane and mostly irrelevant side note, and that is that The Brady Bunch has got to beat out Lord of the Rings in terms of the best in sci-fi fantasy. I mean, the kids call their steps Mom and Dad, which we know you’d never do, unless you harbored a death wish or an all-out hatred for your own mother or father. They also never mention their missing parents. What about Carol Brady’s first husband? Was he a drunk, a wife beater, or merely dead? And what about Greg, Peter, and Bobby’s mother? Adulteress that ran off with Mr. Partridge Family? Decided she was a lesbian and started a new life? Career woman in another state? Also merely dead? And did no one long for their mom or dad? No photos by the bedside, visits to the cemetery, longings to be remembered at Christmas? For God’s sake, no one has an attorney. No one even goes to a therapist!

  Anyway. Things right then were fairly peaceful but irritating at Dad’s. Add to the equation the fifty times a day that Dad said, “I think it’s sad what your mother has done to her life,” (meaning: what she’d done to his) or “Divorce is such a crime” (meaning: he had nothing to do with it) or “What did she expect?” (meaning: she got what she deserved). I hated the thought of being back with Dino, but I missed Mom and my room and my stuff. I missed the smell of my own pillow.

  I talked to Mom on the phone, and she seemed really tired but okay. Okay enough that when she said she thought things were calm enough for me to come back, I went, in spite of Dad’s protests. The concert was only a few short weeks away. And Dino had accepted the whole “Ian thing,” according to her. It seemed amazing, miraculous and completely doubtful, but I went home anyway. There was a piece of me, too, that felt I could miss Ian better at home. I could miss him more thoroughly, being surrounded by places we had been together. I was beginning to feel that my missing him was all I had of him, and so I wanted it.

  I went home the day before Ian had been scheduled to fly out to Philadelphia for his audition at Curtis. I called him again when I got home. His mother answered, and I hung up. I hurt without him. My heart felt like a cave, dug out, dark. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t call me, why we couldn’t just talk. My fear was that he’d never forgive me, and I pictured him with his cast, hating me with the intensity I felt I deserved. I missed the feeling on the ferry, before it all turned bad that day. I missed the feeling of being where you belonged.

  I avoided Dino as much as I could. He avoided me, or else was avoiding everything that wasn’t music. He didn’t eat, didn’t appear to sleep, only built up the cigarette butts in coffee cups and saucers. He only said one thing to me all of that first day. Turn the handle of the door when you shut it, he had said. It makes less noise. I avoided Mom, too, but for a different reason. I was carrying around this knowledge of Dino that Dad had given me, and it kept bumping between us. I was afraid that if I looked too long at Mom she might see it there in my eyes, or feel it between us in the room. I just lugged this secret around, and how she couldn’t see it there, I don’t know. It was huge and ugly and powerful. And I kept it close to me, my weapon. This stockpiled bomb that somewhere inside I was sure I would use when the enemy most threatened.

  The days were hollow and vast as the sky that I saw through my telescope on those nights, though empty of any of the life that was also out there, stars dying and being born before your eyes, the life cycle taken to its outer edges of time and place. I had all of the vastness, none of the fire. Zebe and Sophie and Brian and Nat were all in rehearsal period for Anything Goes, which made things even lonelier. In English class, I sat for an hour as Aaron Urling read his poems aloud. Eleven haiku poems on Darth Vader. Father and Son. Bonded by Blood. Eternal Destruction. He had two light sabers in his belt as he read. My visual aids, he told the teacher. He snickered to his friends. He thought he was a real crack-up. In science we took a walk in the forest on school grounds to measure distances from trees, and Mr. Robelard called us back in with an elk call. I’m not kidding. It sounded like he was giving birth.

  A week and a half until the concert. A week. No Ian. I didn’t blame him for hating me.

  Your own small universe moves on in surreal ways when you feel a crisis building, building. And when your sanctuary is gone. Walking home, I got stuck having a conversation with Courtney about split ends. Our neighbor, Mr. Frederici, left an angry message that Dog William, in an apparent act of outburst over the withdrawal of the object of his love, had gotten into the Frederici garbage can and spread litter all over his yard. The catsup bottle fell out of the fridge when I was getting some milk and spilled out in a blobby smear of goriness. Life just keeps ticking along.

  I invited Siang over. I should have been trying harder than ever to keep her away. Dino’s intensity was focused on his music, same as a kid focusing reflected sunrays from a mirror onto paper, hoping it will burst into flames. But it was comforting having Siang around. It reminded me of the simple days when Dino was merely a jerk and Siang would come over and steal his orange peels for her mini-tabletop shrine.

  “My father said he’s had to give up lattes for, like, six months to afford the concert tickets,” Siang said. I had made brownies, hoping to drown my sorrows in three zillion fat calories, and we were taking chunks and eating them out of the pan. I had the feeling that Siang never did these kinds of things. First, she was thin as a sheet of foil, and second, she was going at them like she’d been lost at sea on a rubber dinghy for months.

  “Slow down,” I said to her. “If you choke, I’m not so hot at Heimlich. I was absent that day in health. I might dislodge something you need, you know, like a larynx. What concert?”

  “Cassie! The world premiere of Mr. Cavalli’s new work!”

  “It was a joke. Six months with no lattes? That is so sad. That’s like some fairy tale where some woman cuts her hair to buy bread. You should have told me. Maybe I could have helped.”

  “Those tickets have been sold out for almost a year,” Siang said.

  “I’m sure we could have done something.”

  “Wow. Do you know how many people would die to be in your place? Or even mine, sitting in here in his kitchen, eating off his plate?”

  “You’re bypassing the plate, far as I can tell,” I said.

  “You probably didn’t see the article in Newsweek. Or the New York Times? FAMED COMPOSER CHOOSES SMALLER VENUE TO UNVEIL NEW WORK?”

  “Smaller venue? That’s kind of insulting.”

  “The New York Times. Jeez, Cassie.”

  “As long as you’re happy, Siang.”

  “Is he ready? There are rumors.”

  “What kind of rumors?” That he’s losing it? That he thinks William Tiero is hiding under the table? That his stepdaughter ruined the career of his protégé and now he’s cracked? That the only thing he seems to have ingested in a week is a box of truffles sent by his manager and twelve thousand pounds of nicotine?

  “Just that the third piece isn’t done.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be done.” I wasn’t sure at all, but, Jesus, Siang seemed so worried, and now so happy with my words. She smiled, brownie in her teeth. “Go like this,” I said to her, putting the edge of my fingernail to my tooth. Personally, I hate it when people don’t tell you those things.

  Siang removed the offending brownie. “I knew he’d be ready. He’s a professional. An artist of the highest order.”

  Maybe we consider a piece of work to be genius in part because it goes places we cannot go. Maybe it is not so much that the geniuses are nuts, but that there is something in the nuts
that is genius. That ability to get to not just the seed of emotion, but to the place that exists even before the seed is there. Maybe they live amid the raw materials of feeling before feeling becomes organized; maybe they work with the base elements, like the cosmos in formation. There seems, anyway, an ability to get to truth, the purest emotion, if you can see through the barbed wire of chaos that surrounds it. Maybe that’s what we respond to in those works of genius—our own inability to be that emotionally unbound. An envy for the letting go of the tether and seeing what is beyond the frontier, the barrier of self-protection. Maybe the genius is only a letting go, in a way that most of us would be too frightened to. But maybe, too, the genius is just some wacky consolation prize for the pain of living out of this world.

  I don’t know. But I do know that the most honest, the deepest and purest forms of thought and creation appear to make their owners pay a price. The scientists with the world-changing ideas, the painters that change our vision, the musicians with the soul-altering music—they seem to blow a circuit in the process, or a circuit was blown beforehand that allowed the creation to happen. And sometimes, just before the final break, there is a huge outpouring of creativity. It’s hard to know whether the outpouring of creativity causes the break or if the break that is coming causes the outpouring. Before her suicide, Sylvia Plath was writing a poem a day, working at four A.M. while her children slept, and Emily Dickinson cranked out her own poetry during her affair with a married clergyman, then collapsed in a nervous breakdown. And Vincent van Gogh. He had moved to Auvers, France, for peace and tranquility, and painted the flowers of Daubigny’s garden, including his Wild Roses. He painted seventy canvasses in seventy-five days, and then shot himself in the chest.

  I overheard my mother and Dino talking when I got home from school. It wouldn’t have been hard to do. Courtney and her media-monster brothers could have overheard them talking, and it would have been better than anything on television.

  “For God’s sake, Dino, I’m going to call the doctor,” my mother said.

  “What does the doctor have to do with this? It has nothing to do with the doctor. This is between Tiero and me.”

  “You’re worrying for nothing, okay? He won’t be there.”

  “I know he will. He has never been able to stay away. He’s like a fly on shit. I can feel him nearby. I’ve always known. He’s always come.”

  “Dino, really. Stop it. If he’s come before, it’s only because he loves you.”

  “Love? You call that love? He tried to destroy me.”

  “Maybe he wanted to help you. Like I want to help you.”

  Dino had been right. When you turned the door handle, it did make less noise. I had crept up the stairs with my backpack and a box of crackers. I could still hear them. The conversation was giving me the creeps. I almost wanted to look for William Tiero under the bed.

  “Maybe you want to destroy me, too.”

  “Dino, no. Don’t do this. I’m phoning the doctor.”

  “And you run to the doctor whenever I get too close to the truth. Just like he did.”

  Shit. Weren’t these the kind of people who committed horrible crimes? Was my mother in danger? If anything, she was certainly kidding herself in thinking she could manage him. He was not manageable. This had gone way beyond a manageable situation.

  “I think you’ll feel better if you talk to the doctor a little.”

  “I’ll feel better when Tiero lives his own life and stays the hell out of mine.”

  “Look, why don’t we just have Andrew call him? We can tell him it’s too upsetting for you to have him there.”

  “Andrew Wilkowski knows where Tiero is? They’ve talked on the phone?”

  “No, they haven’t talked on the phone. But it would be a simple thing to find him. Give you some reassurance that he’ll stay away.”

  “He will never stay away. He can’t. He vowed not to.”

  “It was a long time ago,” my mother said. “He’s done his job.”

  “His job will be finished when I die,” Dino said.

  “Dino, I think he would stay away if you just asked him to. If he understood how much his presence would upset you. He thinks you’re just fighting about money.”

  “And you know what he thinks, don’t you? You’re two of a kind.”

  “No, Dino. No, please. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.” She sounded close to tears.

  “You want to destroy me.”

  “I want you to be well. And that smoking isn’t helping anything.”

  I heard the sound of inhaling, that black smoke curling up inside of him, same as his poisonous thoughts. “If you call him, I will cut you out of my life forever.”

  Brief Fantasy Number Twenty-Five Thousand Two Hundred and Nine—handing her the phone with William Tiero’s number already dialed. I didn’t know how much more of this I could take, either. As soon as Dino was gone to rehearsals that night, my mom was on the phone. Dino’s doctor. They reached some agreement, something about the doctor coming over. I thought about my mother’s marriage to Dino Cavalli. They had run off to San Francisco together and had a judge do the honors at the courthouse. I thought about what my mother’s dreams had been that day. Whatever she had imagined their future to be, I was sure it wasn’t this.

  Mom asked if I wanted to go for tacos. I was glad she was eating—she looked like hell lately, stress-thin. We left and picked up some food, and ate it in the car driving home. I love to eat in the car. There’s something so satisfyingly efficient about the whole endeavor, taking care of two needs at the same time, and it’s such a challenge of planning, too. Where to put your Mexi-Fries (yeah, right—like we all don’t know they’re Tater Tots) and your hot sauce; how to balance your drink while keeping the insides of your taco from spilling out of their shell.

  Mom negotiated an intersection while taking a sideways bite of her dinner. “I’m sure this goes without saying, but you know I’m expecting you to be at the performance on Friday,” she said.

  “What performance?” I said.

  “Cassie!”

  “Just kidding.” Boy, that joke got a good reaction.

  “You’ll have to wear a dress.”

  “Cruel and unusual punishment,” I said.

  “The long one from the Thanksgiving party, how about. You won’t even have to do pantyhose.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “There’ll be reporters and critics,” she said.

  “They won’t even notice me, I’ll behave so nicely.” I knew why she wanted me there, but I didn’t understand why Dino would. I said so.

  “Of course he wants you there,” she said. “We’re family.” I could hear the lie in her voice. “He really has taken the whole Ian thing well, after the initial blowup.”

  “He’s been pretty quiet about that,” I said. “But I heard you guys talking today.”

  “I know, but try not to worry. In two days this performance will be over, and he promised he’d get back on his medication. Dr. Milton is coming over tomorrow, just to help him through.”

  “You’re not a lion tamer, Mom.”

  “But Dr. Milton is.”

  “It just seems like there’s more than we can handle here. It’s just … too much. You’ve been eating Tums and Maalox like candy.”

  “I’m walking around in someone else’s life,” she agreed.

  Right then I thought about the secret weapon I held, this information that Dino’s early life was a concoction, a lie. Everything that she’d already seen hadn’t been enough to make Mom leave, so why would this? But maybe it would be enough to tip the scale. I opened my mouth to speak, then changed my mind.

  “All this is almost over,” my Mom said.

  She didn’t know, neither of us knew, how right she was.

  I’d set up my telescope over the past few nights, hoping and hoping that Ian would come as he had before. But he hadn’t come. Still, it was better than being in the house, so after dinner that ni
ght I set up again. That night was clear and the sky was still in the hold of the midwinter turbulent atmosphere, the shakiness of the air blurring the images in the telescope, but making the stars twinkle. I gave up and just looked without an instrument, admired Sirius, the most scorching-hot star and the brightest thing in the sky next to a planet. It sparkled blue-white, dominated everything around it. I found Canis Major, the Big Dog, and Canis Minor, the Little Dog, though they looked more like spilled sugar than animals.

  I was missing Ian something fierce right then, and I remembered our first touch, right there on that lawn. I packed up, put the telescope into the shed. I was heading up the steps to the front door when I heard his voice.

  “Cassie?”

  His dark figure came toward me, becoming clearer as he stepped forward, his face nearly white from the light of the sky. It was a dream, I was sure. This figure, approaching me slowly, appearing out of the darkness.

  “Cassie?”

  Tan?”

  “It’s me.” One sleeve of his coat hung limp by his side, and the lump of his cast was buttoned inside his coat. I couldn’t believe it was him. I just couldn’t believe it.

  “You came.”

  “I’ve been trying and trying to call you.”

  “You have?”

  “I swear, every time I do, Dino answers. I didn’t want to make more problems for you, so I keep making up reasons why I’m phoning him,” Ian said. “It’s getting stupid. Where have you been, Cassie? What’s going on? You haven’t called or anything. I figured maybe you were under lock and key or something. Couldn’t climb out your window like Rapunzel because your hair is too short. I came over one day and hid behind the neighbor’s car, because Dino and your Mom were there in the driveway.”

  “I’m sorry …”

  “I wanted to come over so bad, but I didn’t want to risk getting you into more trouble. I figured it’d be safe now—Dino’s got to be at the concert hall every night this week, right?”