Wild Roses (7 page)

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with anyone you actually would want to spend
all day, every day, with. No, I got Zach. Zach was weird. Entertaining, okay,
but weird. He made me believe in alien life forms who come to live among us to
steal our souls and our Hostess Cupcake recipes.

"A dinosaur isn't a reptile, it's an
amphibian," Courtney said.

Zach ignored her, which was a good thing, since
she was wrong, anyway. Courtney and I walked to school together often, but she
usually pretended she didn't know me when she got there. She was one of the
Popular Group, which meant two things: one, she could outfit a small town in
Lithuania with the amount of clothes she had (picture innocent Lithuanian
children in glittery hot babe T-shirts) and two, she was destined to marry some
jock, have a zillion kids, and thereby assure herself a spot in front of a
television forever. Queen of the American Dream. She didn't often walk home with
me, as she was usually doing some after-school activity--the Sexy Dancing in
Front of Male Sports Team club or the I Could Play a Sport Myself but Then I'd
Have to Get Sweaty club. Her mother should have named her MasterCard, Zebe said
once. Courtney and her two brothers bugged the hell out of Dino. "They have the
glazed eyes of too much technology," he said once. "You look in their eyes and
see Gillian Island re-runs playing." Gilligan, he meant. Even though our houses
were pretty far apart, you could often hear their TV blasting or the repetitive
pounding of video game music. I still walked with her because, okay, I admit it,
she

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was nice away from her friends, and because I
was weak when it came to compromising my principles.

"I didn't even get to the best part yet," he
said. "So the lamp I had shining on him? I stuck it down with duct tape. When
this mother got out he climbed up the lamp, and when I found him, there was the
snake, stuck on the duct tape, back of his head pinned like this." Zach threw
back his head, did a really good stunned cobra impersonation.

"Hey, that was great," I said. "You could take
that on the road."

"Eyuw," Courtney said. She shivered. I'm not
kidding. Those kind of girls always shiver.

"I didn't even try to take it off. I was afraid
I might skin him."

"Hey--perfect ad for the strength of duct
tape," I said. "Oh, my God," Courtney said.

"Had to take him to the vet. Luckily he was
still alive," Zach said.

I pictured Zach putting his ear to the little
chest to check for a heartbeat, a grateful tear coming to his eye. "How does a
vet de-duct tape a snake?" I asked.

"Very carefully," he said. "Anyway, there's six
encyclopedias on there now, to see if he can beat his record. He's my
Bench-Press Baby."

"Well, here's our street."

I was right earlier, because Zach stopped and
looked around. "Where the fuck am I?" he said. Then he shrugged his shoulders.
"Cool."

Zach wandered off the direction we came, and I
left

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Courtney to an evening of video fulfillment. At
home I let Dog William in, went back out front to get the mail. Up the road came
Dino's car. He parked in the driveway and got out. He had his suit on but wasn't
wearing any shoes. No socks, shoes, nothing. It was October. Way too cold for
simple, barefooted pleasure.

"Dino?" I said. "Hey, did you forget something?
Or is this a new bohemian phase?"

Now, Dino was usually a pretty distracted guy.
But this struck me as a bit beyond his usual absentmindedness. We're talking
shoes. Not exactly something that tends to slip your mind.

This, my friends, is how quickly life can
change.

A little kernel of unease planted itself inside
my gut. "It doesn't matter," Dino said.

He slammed the car door and went inside.
Something more was going on here; something was not right. I could feel this
wrongness coming off him, just like you feel someone's anger or joy. I followed
him, saw him discard his tie on the floor. He paced into the kitchen, and a
moment later paced back out again. I was getting a seriously eerie feeling. An
uneasiness that didn't have a name. It was his agitation. And he had this weird
look in his eyes, like he was watching something I couldn't see.

"He always knows where I am, doesn't he?" Dino
said. "He can see me wherever I am, that bastard."

Okay, shit. Something freaky was definitely
going on. My body tensed in high alert. I wanted Mom home. Creepiness was doing
this dance inside my skin.

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Dino strode into his office, shut the door with
a click. The house was quiet except for Dog William huh, huh, huhing beside me.
I was glad for his presence--at least I wasn't completely alone. I had one of
those inexplicable moments where I looked at Dog William and he looked at me,
and I decided that dogs really had superior knowledge to humans, held the
secrets to the universe, only they couldn't speak. It's an idea you quickly
discard after you see them chew underwear, but right then I felt better thinking
one of us understood what the hell was going on.

And then suddenly the silence was shattered.
Sorry for the cliche, but that's what happened. Shattered, with the sudden
frenzy of the violin, the sound of someone sawing open a tree and finding all of
life and death pouring out.

"Wow," I said aloud. "Jesus."

He didn't tune first. That was what I realized.
Not tuning was like a surgeon not snapping on his gloves. Like, well, going out
without first putting on your shoes.

It was the first time he'd played in months and
months. But this wasn't just playing. This was unzipping your skin and spilling
out your soul. I had a selfish thought then. Actually, it was kind of a prayer
to anyone who might be listening and interested. Please, I begged. Don't let
Dino be crazy when Ian Waters comes.

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Chapter Four

Here's the thing about dealing with people who
are beginning the process of losing it. Your most overwhelming urge is to make
sense of something that doesn't make sense. You try to make it fit, even if it
doesn't really. You look at their crazy world from your sane world, and try to
make your logical rules apply. As I stood in the hall with Dog William, I
decided that there was a plausible story for Dino's behavior. Something
rational. I was having trouble coming up with a story, but hey, there was one
somewhere because there had to be. Maybe he got a letter from an old friend he
wasn't so happy to hear from. And Italy--Italy was hot, right? How many times
had I heard that1. So you know, maybe he was homesick for his shoeless days in
Italy. And what about Einstein? A genius, yeah, but he couldn't match his socks,
so he gave up wearing them.

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Maybe this was something like Einstein. A
shoeless, paranoidish genius thing. Of course, the deep inside piece of you that
knows everything was saying this had nothing to do with Italy or Einstein or an
old friend. That inside piece of you knows that your life is veering in a
direction you have no desire to go. Basically, downhill.

That night I heard yelling. Dino just really
going at it downstairs in his office. I'd heard him yell before, usually at his
managers, but I couldn't imagine who he'd be yelling at now. Mom had gone to bed
already, and the house had been silent. A moment later I heard Mom come out from
their bedroom, her hurried steps down the stairs. The front door opened, slammed
shut. I slipped out of bed, peeked out my front shades. Dino was on the front
lawn in his bathrobe, his skin looking white in the moonlight. He stalked around
a bit as if trying to decide what to do, then went behind the hydrangea bushes
in the direction of the shed. I lost sight of him, then waited a while to see if
he would reappear. Nothing. Finally I got back in bed, stayed on high alert. The
house was quiet. I tried to go back to sleep, but when I finally started to doze
I heard their voices downstairs. I couldn't make out their actual words, and
though a part of me wanted to hear, a bigger part didn't. The uneasiness I felt
that afternoon was appearing again, adding a new piece, and I wanted it away.
But I could tell that my mother's voice was calm, a little pleading, and that
Dino's was insistent.

The next morning I went down to get breakfast.
I was exhausted from the night, feeling like shit and wondering

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how to define all the oddities of the day
before. Mom sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. She looked tired too. She
looked more than tired. She looked like someone had crumpled her up into a ball,
thrown her in the trash, removed her, and tried to smooth her out again. I
confess I had a Child of Divorce Reunion Fantasy Number One Thousand, where I
for a moment imagined my father finding out that Dino really was a killer woman
and that my parents would have to get back together. I saw them running through
a meadow, hand in hand. Okay, maybe not a meadow. But I saw me having only one
Christmas and one phone number and only my own father's shaved bristles in the
bathroom sink. Having both of my own sane, well-rested parents in the kitchen in
the morning. I didn't have these moments often, but the only time Mom ever
seemed even mildly tired with Dad was when he had a bad bout of marathon
snoring. Why she had brought Dino into our lives I'd never understand. I'd give
her some excuse, but three years was a little long for temporary
insanity.

"Well, that was fun," I said.

"You heard," she said. Mom pushed her bangs
from her forehead, rubbed her temples. The gesture made me pissed off at Dino,
at what he caused.

"I heard yelling. I didn't hear actual words.
What was going on?"

"Dino was trying to write last night, and he
swore he could hear the Powelson's television. It was bugging him. His ears--you
know he can hear a leaf drop off a tree."

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"I heard the door slam. I saw him
outside."

"He went over there. To their house. He cut
their cable wire with a pair of hedge clippers."

I almost laughed. I did. I mean, think of
it--Dino creeping down the street in his bathrobe, aiming toward the glow of
light in Courtney and gang's living room window. I could just picture him
hunting around in the junipers for the cable, his gleeful discovery of the thick
wire, the satisfactory snap. Then, the sudden extinguishing of the light to a
pinpoint. The whole Powelson house with its television IV yanked. "It's almost
kind of funny," I said.

"It's not funny, Cassie. Okay, it's a little
funny. Oh, shit." She chuckled to herself. She shook her head, held her coffee
mug in both hands.

I wanted to crack up, but the joke felt like a
sick one, slightly morbid. If it had just been this, another Dino tantrum, I
could have laughed. But there was also his shoeless display of weirdness
yesterday This wire cutting--it was more than excessive frustration. I knew
that. "Something strange happened yesterday," I said.

"Oh?"

I told Mom about Dino. The shoes. His paranoia
that someone always knew where he was. The way he played that violin. She just
looked at me for a while. "He's off his medicine," she said finally.

"What do you mean, 'He's off his
medicine'?"

"He's trying to write. He says it makes him too
foggy That he can't create when he takes it."

"I didn't even know he had
medicine."

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"For his depression."

Mom had first explained to me about Dino's
depression early on in their marriage. No one I knew before had ever tromped off
to see a psychiatrist every week. This seemed more than a tad over-dramatic, and
I said so to Mom. She went into this big discussion about what clinical
depression was, as if I'd never heard those ads on the radio ("Do you have any
of these symptoms? Change in eating or sleeping habits? Loss of interest in
things that used to give you pleasure? Being critical and nasty to the people
you live with?"). It apparently was not

I'm-having-a bad-day but I'm-having-a-bad-life,
with complications ranging from not being able to get out of bed to feeling like
the world was out to get him. All things you want in a second
husband.

Obviously, this depression also made him
incapable of seeing that he was luckier than 99 percent of the world's
population. Okay, I know it sounds unsympathetic, and I know most of the time
it's a chemical thing that happens to good people and can't be helped. But in
Dino's case, so much of it sounded like a spoiled child who needed to be sent to
his room. Really, did people who lived in third world countries with no running
water or indoor toilets and that had to sew thousands of faux leather jackets in
zillion-degree heat in order to eat get depressed and stay in bed? Could they
not function without their psychiatrist connected to them like those sicko
parents who put their kids on a leash? Call me cold, but his depression seemed
like a luxury. I mean, I

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was depressed myself at having to live with the
guy.

"Can't you make him take his medicine?" I
said.

"Oh, sure," she said. She was right. It was a
stupid thing to say. No one could make Dino do anything he didn't want
to.