The Rose Thieves

by Heidi Jon Schmidt

  The last night, the moon never rose, but a cruise ship came by so fully lit it looked like a new borough. She stood at the window, watching it, feeling ready to put her hand through the glass, ready to do anything that would break the reserve between them. When he came to stand behind her, anger, fear, and desire kept her still—she wanted both to move toward him and away.

  Asleep, he pulled her toward him, trapped one of her legs between his, held her head against his chest. The wind slammed a door somewhere over and over, and Michael spoke in his sleep every time Kate moved or even breathed deeply, saying, “What? What?” as if she were keeping something from him. Awake, he never answered her questions. She thought of oil spreading out over water, wishing something in her could cover him that completely and flexibly. “What?” he said, and she stayed still, staring at the ceiling, wanting to sit up and give him a long, full answer, to talk and talk, telling him what. But she was afraid to wake him, and she wasn’t sure she knew.

  * * *

  Falling asleep, Kate had the sense that the snow weighed everything in Chiverton down, solid and safe. The sheets were cool against her skin, and she stretched across the whole bed, glad of the solitude, the perfect, snowy quiet. Don arrived downstairs—even his obnoxious laugh was comforting. He called to Terri from the bathroom, pissing torrents. Beer and bangers for this wedding, Kate thought as she fell asleep. She woke again when he was leaving, just before dawn, but before she knew for sure she was awake, she was lost. Don slammed the front door, and her window burst with shooting, blaring light. A ball of fire was outside, moving in.

  Terror is the sudden absence of explanation. This had not the properties of a fire or an explosion or even a vision; it assaulted her senses and ignored her mind. Kate was out of the room and down the stairs in seconds, finding Terri and Don in the hall.

  “It’s a fire,” she said. “I don’t have anything on.”

  “God, she doesn’t,” Don said. Out of hysteria, a reassuring embarrassment emerged.

  “It’s the electrical cables,” Terri said. “I called the fire department.” She took off her robe and wrapped Kate in it, so that she was the one undressed, wearing only black panties with pink elephants on them, and matching bra. She pulled Kate upstairs, rewrapped her in one of her bedsheets, and took the robe back. Flashes of electricity spilled through the doorway, lighting their faces weirdly, and static ripped at the air so they had to shout to be heard.

  “It’s the weight of the snow,” Don said. “Those wires were all frayed. This is an old building.” He was holding Terri, who shuddered with each new flash. Kate stood against the doorframe, holding the sheet tighter. How could she have gone to bed naked, unguarded, last night?

  * * *

  Carson came in at lunchtime and seemed not to notice anything, although Kate was wearing Michael’s black corduroys and sweater and had left her hair hanging in tufts over her eyes.

  “I’ve done it,” he said. “I’ve discovered a cure for baldness, and I’m going to win the Nobel Prize.” He sat at the counter and twirled around on the stool.

  “What about cancer?” Kate wanted to smile, but the fire had made her angry and competent. Already she had fed huge breakfasts to the snowplow operators. She seemed to be gliding; each egg broke cleanly, and masses of them stared up at her from the grill.

  “First things first,” Carson said, handing her the twist tie from a bread bag. “I like the new-wave look usually,” he said. “It’s kinda sexy, those girls with all the hair on one side chopped off? But this is a little hairy for a cook.”

  She wanted sympathy but didn’t know what to say to get it.

  “A fire, huh?” Carson said. “Is the place livable?”

  “It’s fine,” she said, wishing she could hold out a charred hand as evidence of suffering. “It was like an apocalypse.”

  He laughed. “Maybe a minor apocalypse. I hope nothing really terrible ever happens to you.”

  She turned her back, threw a lump of margarine on the grill, winced when it sizzled. “What’s your order, Carson?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to be so offhand.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, shivering, glad to be wearing black. Sympathy had turned out to be the wrong response—now she wanted to cry.

  “What’s the entrée today?” Carson asked.

  “Peanut butter and jelly,” she said, seeing he wouldn’t dare to cross her now. “White or wheat?”

  “I hate peanut butter and jelly.”

  “Plain peanut butter it is, then.” Meek, he wouldn’t argue, and Kate softened. “So how’s Annie?”

  “She’s okay, but I’m in guilt mode.” Carson always argued that tides of lust and guilt alternated, and that all change resulted from this flow.

  “Why?” Kate asked, putting turkey and lettuce on an onion roll, his favorite.

  “I’m not in love, I guess. I don’t know.” He smiled a hopeless little smile at her, and she returned it, touching his shoulder. This seemed to frighten him, but then the sandwich sat quite solidly between them.

  “You’ll feel better when you get some sleep,” he told her.

  * * *

  Sleep was not a possibility. Kate wore a flannel nightgown and socks and long underwear to bed, then got up and put on a sweater. She lay on her back, ready to jump at any noise; she could close her eyes, but her muscles stayed wary. Every electrical outlet was suspect now.

  “Carson,” she whispered into the phone, “can you come over here and talk to me? I know this building is going to burn down tonight.”

  “Jesus, Katie,” he said. She had known he would be in bed, or almost in bed, with Annie. She could picture him lifting his hand out of her hair to answer the phone. “That building is brick, it can’t burn down,” he said.

  Don and Terri left, slamming the door. The refrigerator was making a new sound, a more metallic sound. Its cord was frayed at the plug, and Kate imagined a flame running along the insulation and blowing up the motor. She remembered seeing a phone melted on a hot plate in college and wanted to drop the receiver.

  “Don said the wiring’s shot all over the building.”

  “Annie’s here,” Carson said. “This is sort of an awkward moment.”

  “I’ve got a bottle of scotch,” Kate said. “You two can drink it all. You can bathe Annie in it if you want.”

  “Katie…” he said.

  “I know we’re not close enough for me to ask, Carson,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  They arrived with a plastic bag of triangular pills and sat at the bottom of the bed, leaning against the footboard, stretching their legs up so their feet nearly reached Kate’s shoulders. Annie’s fuzzy leg warmers and Carson’s argyle socks with his checked trousers were comforting in themselves.

  “The place smells of electricity,” Kate told them.

  “It’s boiled cabbage,” Carson said.

  “For heaven’s sake, Carson, it smells of pine needles,” Annie said. “It’s Christmassy. Did you get the wreath at The Posey Place? Maybe I made it.” The wreath was flammable, and Kate hated the sight of it now.

  Carson went to get a glass of water. “These will make you so sleepy you won’t care if the building burns down,” he said, holding out two pills. “Take one now and you’ll be fine in twenty minutes.”

  Kate shook her head, wept pitifully into the quilt. She had to remain alert.

  “Katie,” he said, sitting down again, examining the pill as if he might decide to take it himself, “I know how you feel. It’s a syndrome, a physiological thing. Some insects act like this for weeks at a time. They don’t eat or sleep, they just watch.” He made an intense, bug-eyed face as an example, then looked despairingly at Annie.

  She was pretty, like a cat curled at the end of the bed, and sympathetic, saying she knew just how Kate felt, that she once fell two floors in an elevator and now always took the stairs. Kate cried at her kindness, sobbing into Carson’s ankles. Looking up, she saw he was af
raid Annie might misconstrue this, and she took a breath and sat back against her pillow.

  Carson gave her relaxation exercises: she should tense all her muscles and then go limp. She couldn’t do it.

  “Listen,” he said, “at least you’re not like that diplomat who suffocated under a pile of newspapers with his name in them.”

  “Carson,” Annie said, “that’s hardly reassuring.”

  “At least you didn’t fall into a vegetable slicer and come out in lots of little cans.”

  “Carson has an odd sense of what might help,” Annie said.

  “Katie knows what I mean,” he told her, hurt. “Katie’s my dearest friend.”

  “Excuse me,” Annie said. “I forgot Katie was your dearest friend.”

  Everyone was relieved when the phone rang. Carson jumped for it. “Carson’s sporting goods, we love it when you play with our balls,” he said. “Katie? Katie who?” He meant to tease her, but Kate couldn’t play. She wanted safety and quiet, and she was afraid to touch the phone. Even when she realized it was Michael, she reached for it only because she knew Carson annoyed him, but Carson kept talking, asking about New York and music and whatever else came into his mind.

  “Carson, let Kate have the phone and we’ll go home and give her some privacy,” Annie said.

  “No, it’s okay. I don’t need privacy, really.”

  Annie settled glumly back. Carson sipped from her scotch, talking to Michael.

  “Listen, let me ask you something,” he said into the phone. “Suppose you were driving and you ran over a little animal. A rabbit. And this rabbit was dragging itself along just trying to find a place to die. Would you get out and kill it, or drive on?”

  “God, Carson, give me the phone,” Kate said.

  “I don’t know,” Carson said to Michael. “You don’t seem to me like the kind of guy who would bother to stop. You seem like you’d just let it suffer … Think of it all kind of soft and bedraggled…”

  “Carson, you’ve got it all wrong. Give me the phone,” Kate said. He did.

  “What’s going on there?” Michael asked.

  “Nothing. I had a fire.” She felt his hesitation. He was afraid she might need him. “It’s okay,” she said. “Nothing burned.”

  “So it’s the middle of the night and Carson’s there and he starts giving me a lecture on animal rights? I was just starting to write you a letter.”

  Carson was yelling, “The kind of guy who would drive away and tell himself he wasn’t to blame!”

  “What were you going to write in the letter?” Kate asked, though it was easy enough to guess: there’d be something pleading, something sad, and something angry, in sentences so disjointed Kate could read them differently each time.

  “That’s my bed you’re in, you know,” Michael said. “I bought it, if you remember.”

  “Well, you should come back here and sleep in it, then,” Kate said, but without conviction. She had been careless with love, with everything, and in her minute of horror last night she had glimpsed a terrified death, alone.

  When Michael didn’t answer, she handed the receiver to Carson. “Hang up,” she said.

  He did. “That’s my Katie,” he said. “He’s not good enough for you. I told Annie about him—I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “’Course not, Carson,” Kate said, though this meant Annie would see just an ordinary woe: Man Loses Interest, Can’t Quite Leave.

  * * *

  “Yes, I’ll sleep. I promise,” Kate said. She turned out the light. Slipping into sleep would be a foolish loss of vigilance, but if she couldn’t release Carson and Annie completely, she could at least let them get some rest. They lay together on the floor, under Kate’s checked blanket. In bed, in the absolute dark, Kate kept rigid, listening with every nerve.

  “You’re afraid of being afraid, really,” Carson said. “Just do the exercises one more time.”

  They spoke in unison: tense your feet; now relax them completely; now your legs; now your legs are completely relaxed. Kate smiled to think they really expected her to do these things. Still, as her eyes adjusted to the dark, the familiar shapes in the room comforted her. Dishes stood in the kitchen drainer; Michael’s philodendron was drooping and she wondered what it needed—less water? more light? When Carson and Annie were quiet, falling asleep, she was relieved to concentrate only on the sounds, the possible dangers. The refrigerator went on, a car turned into the gravel driveway across the street. Then she heard something else, a kind of bubbling. She turned carefully toward it. Carson was kissing Annie.

  “She’s asleep, Carson,” Annie whispered. “We can go.”

  “We can’t,” he said. “When she wakes up, she’ll be terrified.”

  Silence of exasperation. Then: “Quit it, Carson.”

  “She’s asleep,” Carson said. “You said it yourself.”

  “No,” Annie said, but she was laughing, and Carson prevailed. He moved to kiss her, to pull himself over her. The white checks of the blanket caught the light in varying patterns as the two moved beneath it, first slow and random, then in Carson’s rhythm. It was like kinetic sculpture, Kate thought, dull but mesmerizing. Waking here with Michael, she used to find him watching her as if on the verge of discovery, deciphering the curves of her face. Bold, she would turn her open eyes to his, wanting him to know her. She couldn’t imagine such yielding now. Watching the blanket rise and fall, she saw only that Annie was being held safe, away from harm.

  “You’re dreadful, Carson,” Annie said then, sweet and sleepy.

  “She’s out like a light,” Carson whispered. “Kate?”

  She didn’t answer, obliging.

  “See?” he said.

  “So, let’s go home.”

  “She’d never forgive me,” he told her.

  “So what?” Annie said, aloud. “We’ve been here all night, Carson. This is Vermont. There are no lions or tigers or bears here.”

  “I’m awake,” Kate said.

  “And I’m leaving,” Annie said.

  “Annie, Annie!” Carson called her as she dressed, called down the hall after her, opened the window to call after her car.

  “Go,” Kate said. “Go ahead.”

  “You’re sure?” He looked hopefully at her, but she shook her head no. “It’s okay,” he said, still watching out the window. “She’ll understand.”

  Kate threw him his underwear, and he dressed awkwardly, coming back to sit on the bed. She sat up and hugged him, held him as tight as she could, her face buried in his neck, but his arms stayed at his sides. When she looked up, he was smiling his resigned smile, the one she always returned.

  “What do you want for Christmas, Carson?” she said.

  “You know I hate presents,” he said. He squirmed, and she had to let go.

  “Just tell me what you want.”

  “Nothing,” he said, “and especially nothing over five dollars, because I can’t spend more than five dollars on you.”

  “Carson, what do you want for Christmas? What?”

  Carson always said that the only things he wanted besides a Nobel Prize were a little daughter to bounce on his knee, someone who would still love him when he was completely bald, and the knowledge that no woman could resist him. She wanted to give him these things at the very least.

  “Please don’t give me a Christmas present, Katie,” he said. “I’m already in guilt mode. I just want to go to sleep.”

  “I can move over.”

  “The floor’s fine,” he said. “It’s good for my back.”

  * * *

  Leaving for work, Don slammed the door again. When no explosion followed, Kate took an even breath, but then the streetlight outside the window dimmed to lavender and flashed out, and every nerve flashed with it. It would take a while to get used to the knowledge that she was not safe, not even here. She’d been making a mental list of Christmas presents for Carson: Delson’s had kaleidoscopes in the window—pairs of them, one that broke t
he world into thousands of bursting patterns and one full of its own fragments and designs. Watching him sleep, seeing the thinning spiral at the back of his head, she wished him a house with zinnias in the garden and a daughter in a party dress; also the power to dispel these things, to have a garden full of women follow him like the sun.

  She punched Michael’s number on the phone and listened to the empty ring in the distance, unsurprised.

  “Who are you calling?” Carson was sitting up, confused. “Michael?”

  “No answer,” she said.

  “Bastardo.”

  She nodded, smiling. “Do you want to call Annie?”

  “No. I’ll go by the flower shop later. It’ll be okay. So what did you think?”

  “Of Annie? Well, I didn’t really catch her at the right moment. She’s very pretty.”

  “I know,” Carson said. “She’s grouchy.”

  “It was an awkward situation,” Kate said.

  “No, she’s just a grouch. But what a Twinkie, huh? But not really Ms. Right. Just Ms. Okay-for-the-Time-Being, I think. You’re right.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “I always know what you’re thinking, Katie.”

  “I’m thinking of switching to a full menu,” she said. “Maybe I should stop feeding Chiverton according to my whims.”

  “Katie, if it weren’t for your whims, I wouldn’t know what to eat at all,” he said. “Let’s hold hands when we go downstairs—keep Terri on her toes.”

  He wanted to make amends, to smooth everything between them. The sun was up, spilling through the curtains, mocking her last night’s fears. If Michael wasn’t thinking of her now, Kate knew, he would be later, with guilt, even with longing. So she thought of him, an exhausted little blessing. The first time she met Carson, he’d come bopping into Buddy’s, spun around on his stool, and asked her advice about a woman, someone named Jolene or JoAnne. Kate had told him to be patient, that love without difficulty could hardly be called love at all. When she told him about Michael, Carson had said she should leave him—why put up with such things?