The Rose Thieves (7 page)

“Zipper?”

Kate unzipped. In Turkey they wouldn't violate the sanctity of love with words. The couch was too short, so Amir got stranded atop her as he tried to reach into her jeans, then bumped his head on Elayne's doily-covered end table. Wasn't this the way of all life? The sight of him, mute, helpless, full of want, filled Kate's heart to overflowing.

“I love you,” she said, and held him so tightly he couldn't move at all.

Over the insects she heard a car approach.

“Amir, a car,” she said.

“I too,” he said, laughing uncomfortably before the translation formed. “A car!” he said, and leapt to his feet, swearing in Turkish.

They were zipped and sitting by the time Pop knocked. As Amir went to the door, he turned up the TV.

“Your mother sent me,” Pop apologized. Hardly a threat, but when he held his hand out to Amir, Amir flinched. Pop looked at his own hand and withdrew it.

“I'm pleased to meet you,” he said. “Come on, Kate.”

“American television,” Amir explained.

*   *   *

“Don't they shake hands over there?” Pop asked when they got home. “I think he thought I was going to hit him.” Moths were collecting at the yellow porch light over his head.

“I don't know,” Kate said, “we never shook hands.”

“I suppose I should speak to you, Kate,” Pop said, “but I don't know what to say.” She listened to the aimless sound of the brook behind him, waiting for him to go on, but that was all.

“We were only watching TV,” she said.

“I'd never doubt you, Kate,” Pop said. “You know that.”

“Yes,” she said. “I do.” He pushed the door open for her, turned the light off, and sat back on the swing.

A page turned. Ma was reading, and the light from her half-closed door fell the length of the hall. Kate walked through it to the bathroom. Shame and self-pity flashed over her, in alternate waves, and she rinsed her face over and over until she could see it in the mirror rosy and courageous again. When she stood up, dripping, Ma was behind her.

“You don't come in to say good night, now,” she said.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“Katie Vanderwald,” Ma said, full of scorn. “Katie the Proud lies again. And just like her grandmother, so cool.”

“Please,”
Kate said, so disdainful she startled even herself. Some new authority had blazed up in her in the last few hours, maybe the last few minutes. She turned to shine it straight in Ma's eyes.

Ma smacked her, a blind strike that knocked her against the shower, which gave a resounding, metallic thunder-roll but cushioned the blow.

“My God, Ma!” Kate said. Ma didn't even believe in spanking!

“Don't look at me like that,” Ma said. “That didn't hurt you. Get downstairs and do the dishes, you … you…” Kate started down. “Slut,” her mother finished under her breath at the top of the stairs.

There were no dishes, of course. Ma always did them. Children were not household slaves, she said—they should be out soaking up sun and fresh air, dreaming and storing their strength for later on. Laugh, don't do the dishes! Kate sat at the piano in the dark, pretending to organize her music, until Audie came down and folded her in her protective arms.

Ma was two steps behind her. “Don't you make an ogre out of me!” she cried, swooping at them, batlike, slapping the tops of their bent heads, until Pop came in from the porch, rubbing his eyes.

“My God, are you hitting them?” he asked, and she told him not to dare be reasonable with her and sent them to bed, saying not to wake Chucky and for God's sake not to turn this into a scene.

So up they all went, except Pop, who stayed on the porch until time for the early train.

*   *   *

“No, like this,” Mrs. Schnippers said. Her hands were bunches of carrots, but she played softly, sharply. “Might as well go back to the beginning, we're not that far in.”

Kate went back. In half an hour she had played half a page, with a mistake in every measure, every time. The notes sat before her as useless as an assortment of old screws. Timid, painstaking, she began again.

“Molto vivace, remember?” Mrs. Schnippers prompted, very, very gently. “That's good, that's on the right track.”

It wasn't good. Just because she couldn't play the piano didn't mean Kate couldn't hear her own noise. “I'm sorry,” she said, “I can't.” Pure will kept her from slamming her full arm down on the keys. The damned notes kept her from the music as surely as her body kept her out of the sky! She labored at the piano for grim hours every day, always too slow or too fast, too weak or too loud. She put her head against her music now and willed herself not to cry.

“It's my fault,” Mrs. Schnippers said. “I should have let you play it through.”

“No, something's wrong.”

Mrs. Schnippers' laugh forgave all. “Yes, something is wrong,” she said. “You don't know how to play the piano yet. You will, though. Have you been practicing?”

“All the time,” Kate said.

Music ought to be like diving: you should make a wide arc over it, let it swallow you, and emerge triumphant, clean. It was so long since Ma had taught her to dive that she didn't remember the lessons, only the skill.

And she had lost Ma absolutely—Ma seemed to despise her now. The month at home had been hot and silent, with only one visit from Pop. Ma and Kate talked about what needed to be done in the house and why Kate had done it wrong. When the toaster went up in flames, Kate was making toast for her gluttonous self, in midafternoon. When Chucky got stung by a wasp, it was during Kate's turn to watch him. What was the matter with her? Next Ma would come home and find he'd been squashed in the road.

“She's nuts, that's all,” Audie reminded her. In the afternoons they sat on the flat stones in the brook, watching the water striders skim by. Audie looked so lucky, her head a neat blond cap bent over her pink toes, the bottle of polish balanced within reach on the bank. She was having the pearls restrung as a surprise for Ma. Chucky was the favorite now, having slept through the wars, and Ma was teaching him to use a rod and reel. He sat with his line, miming patience, or ran back to the island and made fish out of leaves.

Kate was alone with her new knowledge: nothing can be made right. Doubts came thick as fleas; she pinched one, only to be stung by another, with never a chance to look up. Amir had gone back to Ankara without even a phone call goodbye. Kate lay on the grassy bank and watched the clouds make their rapid transformations overhead. Like all her ideas, dreams, and plans, they floated free, far above the confusion below.

Then, last night, Ma had apologized.

“Kate,” she said, on her way upstairs, “you forgot to feed the sheep again.”

“I did, right before dinner.”

“I can hear them bleating,” Ma said. “Is that what it's come to? You don't even care if they starve?”

Kate shut the piano and went up to the shed. One fat ewe rested her head on the fence rail, then lifted it to babble. Kate knelt and hugged her between the rails. She and Audie had bottle-fed the lambs when the mothers balked, and one touch calmed them now.

“What's the matter, dopey? Are you trying to bay at the moon?” Probably it had eaten a poisonous plant, as sheep in their stupid hunger were wont to do.

“Are you sick?” she asked it. “Are you sad?”

“Kate?” Ma had followed her out. Kate's heart, opened to the ewe, clenched again.

“I'm sorry,” Ma said stiffly. Why now? But why anything? The world had lost its order; all its peaceful symmetries were gone. It was too dark to see Ma's face, but the sky above her was full of stars.

“I'm sorry too,” Kate lied.

“Thank you,” Ma said. She turned and went in. Kate watched her pass through the kitchen, the living room, up by the stairwell window, saw the hall light go off and the bedroom light go on. When she took a breath, it felt like her first, and when the ewe in its wretched softness gave another bleat, she cried.

*   *   *

“Maybe you're working
too
hard,” Mrs. Schnippers said. “Be
patient
and
listen.
You'll be surprised.” Her orange hair bristled as if she had often been surprised.

Desperate for wisdom, Kate could only hear the words. Listen, she wondered as Mrs. Schnippers went on, how listen? The tomato sauce Mrs. Schnippers was canning could be heard a-bubble on the stove.

Summertime and the livin' is easy,

Fish are jumpin', and the cotton is high.

Oh your daddy's rich, and your ma is good lookin',

So hush, little baby, don' yo' cry.

Kate was home from her lesson, before Ma. Her voice sounded low and thrilling when she was alone and sang just as she felt. Fortified, she turned a stern eye on the counterful of vegetables. Green and yellow squash, tomatoes, corn—the produce of a garden gone mad would have to organize itself into a casserole. The peaches were so ripe now, they glowed like lanterns on the tree.

Audie came in with a pail of beans.

“Minestrone,” she said. “You chop.”

The knives were never sharp enough. The tomatoes squished out of her grasp and spurted their seeds on her sleeve. Finally Kate ripped them open with her fingers, admiring their rich red.

“Look,” Chucky said, through the screen door. He was carrying a real fish, albeit a small one, cupped between his hands.

“Did you take the hook out yourself?” Audie asked.

“I used the butterfly net,” he admitted.

“Ah, well, it's a fish, isn't it?” Kate said, opening the door for him. It swam in the mixing bowl until Ma got home.

“Do you mean to say that after you children were nearly raised in that brook, not one of you knows how to clean a fish?” She shook her head and beheaded the fish, gutted and fried it, and gave everyone a bite.

Then she turned to Kate and with some effort asked if she'd had a good day.

“Nothing special,” Kate said, stubborn. Now she didn't spend all day phrasing and rephrasing the march of events for Ma, they didn't seem to be events at all.

“How was the lesson?” Ma seemed determined to reconcile. Forgive her, Kate thought, rise above this. But how forgive a mother?

“I can't play the piano,” she said finally, as an excuse, “so I'm in a slough of despair.”

“Slough of
despond,
” Ma said.

“Depths of despond,” Kate told her.

“Depths of despair, slough of despond,” Ma said. “Trust me, this is one thing I understand. And
don't
be absurd. Of course you can play the piano. With
your
strength of spirit? Hah!” She waved a hand. “Believe me, if you want to, you'll play the piano. Katie Vanderwald,” she said, as if announcing a visiting queen, “you have a history of getting what you want, after all.” She raised an eyebrow, and the old accusation became praise.

“If you say so,” Kate said. “You seem to be objective.”

Then she decided to believe her. When the world spins as it does, what is there to do but grab hold? To Audie, smiling at Ma's words now with the familiar shy pride, Kate would always be venerable.

So she would have to do well. After dinner Chuck and Audie raced out to turn cartwheels over the lawn, as they had all three used to do. Then Kate went back to the piano. She played the first page with her whole heart and a thousand errors, then flat and lifeless with every note exact. Then the first three measures, ten times over. Outside, Ma laughed with the children, whose cries had got the sheep bleating and startled a goose out of the brook. Haydn gave order to everything if only you played him right. Kate began again.

Packing Up

Kate wakes up in full darkness, at the first snap of a flame. It can't be a fire—the house is built of the same stone as the crumbling walls that stretch into the hills around it; it leaks, ivy creeps in through the chinks to grow up the window frames, but it is hardly likely to burn. Kate can never sleep in a strange place, for fear of fire. She has kept away so staunchly, studying over vacations, taking distant summer jobs, that home seems unfamiliar, full of perils now.
Sleep,
she says to herself, nearly aloud. She has to be sharp with herself, or she'll be all sloth and fear. Listen. She hears nothing but the slow pulse of tree frogs over the marsh. Dread will not yield, though, and she holds her breath, dares not move lest she miss another sound.

There have been fires: chimney fires, a lightning strike, coals burst free from the hearth. But after the first fright, the frantic phone calls and firemen swarming, all ends in laughter, gin on the porch. Nothing ever really burns.

Even the divorces have been false alarms. Pop, woken from his customary daydream, would be shocked: was something wrong? Ma was always magnificent in rage; she'd take Grace, sweep Chucky from his playpen, buckle them into the Jeep, and escape. A few lost, surreal days at home, Kate and Audie tending to Pop, until the phone rang. Then the tears and apologies, and Pop, restored, full of faith, would see infinite promise in … soybeans, or winter wheat. Someday, he said, the market would change their lives. Calling from his office, one eye on the board, he would spin out his plans: a few months of good fortune, and they would sail for the Maldives, buy their own island, live in the trees. Kate and Audie would be set studying Swahili while Ma learned to pound her own flour. Only the market was unwilling. Suddenly they'd be broke again, the dream exploded, the house remortgaged, and Ma, betrayed, off again on the road.

Now the bank is repossessing the house. They—Ma and Pop and the younger children—have known it all spring, though they didn't tell Kate till today. After twenty years safe in the path of disaster, it must have been hard to believe one had come. They continued their perpetual rhythms: feeding the sheep, planting the garden, meeting Pop's train from New York, waiting for the usual reprieve. Now the peas are blooming, the spirea blooms in cascades, and in four days they will have to leave.