Imperfect Birds (29 page)

E
lizabeth woke Rosie for school, and Rosie was tense, not knowing where they stood.

“That’s so scary when you do that, Mama,” she pleaded. “When you flip out.”

“I won’t have you speak to me like you did last night, Rosie. I’m not going crazy. I don’t believe you when you say you and Robert had nothing going on. You were lying to us all summer, repeatedly. But I am trying to avoid having to pay for you to see a shrink or go to rehab. But you need to talk to
someone
. Your counselor. Or Reverend Anthony.”

Rosie considered this. “How about Rae, instead? She’s my safest person.”

Elizabeth talked this over at breakfast with James, and they both agreed to Rae.

A
few days later, after school, Rosie went to see Rae at church. Rae’s office was no bigger than a walk-in closet, which is what it had been before she’d brought in a narrow desk, a white rattan bookcase, and a worn easy chair. There was a framed photo of Lank, and a framed shadowy book cover, from
The Luminous Darkness
by Howard Thurman. Rae looked soft and pink in the low light of the lamp, the pupils of her large eyes full. Rosie held her knees to her chest, her head hunched over, her long limbs tucked beneath her.

“Everything is going so badly! Mama and I fight all the time. And I hate school.”

Rae was silent for a moment. Then she said her churchiest thing: “How can I serve you?”

Rosie let her hair fall over her face, tried to hide behind it like it was a duck blind.

“You know Jody’s gone, right? Maybe forever.”

“Yes, your mother told me. Is she safe? Do you know where she is?”

“Not really. Somewhere near Claude’s base. And Alice has a boyfriend. My two dearest friends! School’s screwed up, too, and I hate all the dweeby little boys.”

“And tell me what else is going on. Are you getting stoned a lot? Drinking?”

“No!” Rosie said vehemently. “I mean, God! Did my mother put you up to this?”

“Look, I was sitting here innocently reading Mary Oliver when you called.”

“Well, of course I was smoking a little dope, like everyone, until a while ago. And I’ve been trying not to smoke since then.”

“Trying not to? Or not smoking, since then?”

“Jesus, give me some slack.”

Rae sneered in the nicest possible way. Rosie growled.

The smell of lemons wafted in from somewhere, or oranges, or grapefruit. “It seems like there’s something else, way deep down, that’s troubling you.”

Time was stopped and fluid at the same time, like resin, and Rae’s face was a blur of chestnut hair and big eyes and a child’s cheeks.

“I would never trust you again if you told my mother.”

Rae considered this for quite some time. “All right,” she said finally.

Rosie studied her. “I sort of, I don’t know. Fell in love with a married man.”

Rae’s mouth opened. “Wow.”

“I am so totally fucked! I feel like I’m in a whirlpool, going down.”

Rae nodded in sarcastic agreement—like, Yeah, no shit.

Rosie looked at her. “Thanks a lot.”

“What do you want me to say? You
are
fucked. Not morally. But I’ve been there, honey bear. It’s the worst I’ve ever felt in my life. Worse than when my folks died.”

“Well, we’re not sleeping together yet.”

“Seriously? Thank God. I mean, that would make it so much worse.”

“It would?” Rosie asked. Rae nodded, visibly relieved.

“Then why do I think about it all the time? And why do I want it so badly?”

“Because you’re a little lonely. But sex with him is the fail-safe line, Ro. Who is he?” Rosie looked away. “Is he a teacher?”

“God, no! And I thought we loved each other. But now I don’t know. He has a family.” Rosie expected Rae to roll her eyes, but she only tilted her head slightly, as if Rosie were a painting or a view. “Nothing’s turning out right. Senior year was supposed to be so great. It’s all broken and fucked up. My best friend has run away, and my other best friend is in love, and I’m so lonely and stressed. I’m
already
behind in school. Plus I’m going to have to see this guy every single day—”

“So he is a teacher, right, darling?” Rosie shook her head, pleading. “It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that you haven’t started sleeping together. That is so huge, hon. Once you go there, I can promise you’ll eventually come to know what hell truly means.”

Rosie pulled back to look Rae in the eyes. “Swear you’re not going to tell my mom?”

R
ae called Elizabeth two minutes after Rosie took off.

“She’s madly in love with a teacher, who she thought was in love with her, although she says they haven’t slept together, and she says it’s over.”

“Oh, shit. It’s Robert Tobias. That jerk! What an asshole. What do I do?”

“I guess we hope, if she’s telling the truth, that she really is done.”

“You mean, you think she may be lying? She may be—she lies about everything.”

“Or that it’s mostly in her mind. That he gave her mixed messages, and she ran with it.”

“Yeah, but Rosie didn’t make this up out of thin air. I don’t want her to drop out of inorganic chemistry. She needs it on her transcript if she’s going to get a scholarship to a good college.”

“Elizabeth! What she needs is tough love. Allegiance, and a chance to start over. She doesn’t necessarily need to go to some Ivy League school.”

“She’ll still need to get a scholarship—and that means she needs one last great semester.”

“You say those are the things she needs, hon—but those are all things you need for her. And your parents probably said those exact things to you. They were a lie then, and they are now, too. I mean, I don’t even know what inorganic chemistry
means
. Do you? What is it, dead compounds with their little feet sticking up in the air?” Elizabeth managed a laugh. “Wait, that would be AP inanimate chemistry.”

She felt less sure of everything when she hung up. It was a nightmare. All she could think to do were the most ordinary of things: plant the flowering pear that was still in its pot from the nursery, labor over a vegetable stew, clean out the bottom drawer in the kitchen where the whole world ended up.

When she went in to say good night later that evening, Rosie was in bed, wearing a lacy white camisole, almost Victorian really, her thick hair spread out on the pillow like a peacock’s tail. Elizabeth sat on the bed with her for a few minutes. “I’m so tired tonight. Are you?”

“Exhausted,” said Rosie. She rolled over to face her mother, and let Elizabeth massage her neck and shoulders. Her mother smelled like an old lady in a thoughtful mood.

“How are things going in chemistry, darling?”

“Fine,” Rosie answered, “same old same old,” although they weren’t. Chemistry was much harder for her than physics had been, and more competitive because all of them were preparing for the AP test in May. It was so painful to have to see Robert pretend that she was any old student; she’d been used to being his physics star. He was kind and funny with all of the students, they were the cream of the crop, and he loved their debates, even when they were just trying to show how smart they were, but there was no way anyone would know by watching him with her that they had had something special between them. Now it was just him asking for her take on acid-base reactions or how to determine what pH you’d end up with when you used different combinations of chemicals, or what ev, like she was some random nerdy nerd. Instead of how they used to talk about love, and rivers.

She thought about Robert all the time now, even more than she used to, all day every day, and waited for him to approach her with an explanation for why he had cut her off.
I love you,
he would say,
but my wife was catching on
. Or,
One of my children is sick; and I have to play it cool for now
. But as the days passed and he didn’t come forth, she began to give up. He made her sick. The only thing, she thought, was that she had the goods on him, if he even thought about giving her less than an A.

J
ody didn’t call the next week, and Alice got grounded for taking a twenty out of her mother’s wallet—her mother was suddenly worse than Rosie’s, after hardly ever having been home before. Now she kept tabs on the amount of cash she carried, like the Treasury Department. Elizabeth wasn’t that bad yet. One Monday somebody told Rosie that Fenn and his roommates were having a party that coming Friday, and Rosie went into overdrive: she was easygoing and hardworking all week, and did not have one fight with her parents. Thursday night she passed a drug test, thanks to a few drops of bleach from the bottle of eardrops. Her mother gave her the high five—such a cornball—and Friday morning Rosie asked if she could go to a party at her chemistry lab partner’s house, if she was home by midnight. In her most persuasive voice, thick and creamy with lots of eye contact, she said the lab partner’s parents would be home—she could have them call Elizabeth once Rosie arrived, since she didn’t have the number on her. Elizabeth allowed that they didn’t need to go
that
far. James said they did. Her parents argued while Rosie put on her makeup. Her mother said, “Don’t make me be the lone vigilante mom tonight,” and James backed down.

Rosie was going to walk to Fenn’s, as her parents had gone to a meeting and movie. “Wild times, huh?” James had said. Rosie put on her sexiest tank top and more makeup, and set out down the trail to the main street in town. It was a mile away. There was not much light on the trail, only a crescent moon and distant streetlights, and this made her very afraid, which made her hate herself. What a loser, to be almost eighteen, and still scared that creatures might pop out at her in the dark.

She walked as fast as she could past the bushes that lined the trail, and told the story of her walk to herself in her head, as if she were telling Alice, and she made it funny because this made her less afraid. There was rustling in the bushes, she said into her imaginary phone, a rusty kind of rustling, which could have meant a mountain lion, or a bum. Her heart pounded like bongo drums. What if a raccoon with rabies jumped out and clawed me, or possums, which were so disgusting, with those penisy hairless white tails.