I thought maybe . . .’ Rose didn’t want to say what she had thought. She’d just assumed that he would give up this fancy academic jet-setting and find something nearby, something where she wouldn’t have to go anywhere. Where she wouldn’t have to change at all. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again.
‘Oh, Rose, I’m sorry, too. Let’s not talk about it any more. Let’s just enjoy being together for a bit.’
He came over to her and put his arms around her and kissed her, and that did only a little to soothe the ache inside where her heart had been bruised. So that was it. He wouldn’t stay, and she wouldn’t – couldn’t – go. It was ridiculous to even think about it.
His hands were in her hair, slowly pulling the pins out and letting it fall down her back the way he liked it, stroking the tresses the way she liked it, the gentle pull against her scalp so soothing. She wasn’t paying attention. Bean and Cordy were sitting on her shoulders, whispering in her ears like a cartoon devil and angel. Or two devils, really. ‘You could go if you wanted to, Rosie,’ our youngest sister said. ‘Just pick up and go. It’s not so hard. I do it all the time.’
‘What are you afraid of?’ Bean mocked. ‘Don’t want to leave your glamorous life behind?’
Okay, so it wasn’t a glamorous life. But it was important. She was important. We needed her. Didn’t we?
Bean and Cordy didn’t answer. Bean was adjusting her horns, and Cordy was chasing her own forked tail. You need me, Rose thought fiercely. They turned away.
‘Hush,’ Jonathan said, as though he could hear the busy spinning of Rose’s thoughts, and he kissed her, and we fell off her shoulders as though we’d been physically brushed aside.
ACT II
Setting : Interior, the Golden Dragon, a small Chinese restaurant a few towns over, famed more for its convenience than its cuisine. Also the site of an infamous embarrassment for Bean, aged eight, in which she devoured a sweet and sour pork entrée all by herself and then regurgitated the entire thing tidily into the mouth of a fake dragon hidden behind a plant, certain it would never be found there. Characters : Rose, Jonathan, our father, our mother.
They sat around the table, the four of them, sharing dishes and companionable chatter. Tea steamed in tiny cups, and Rose was fumbling with her chopsticks, envying Jonathan’s easy grace with the infernal things.
‘We have something to tell you,’ our father said, clearing his throat.
Rose looked up quickly, warily. This was the sort of announcement that had preceded the game-changing births of both Bean and Cordy. Whatever the news was, it wasn’t bound to be good.
Our father cleared his throat again, but it was our mother who spoke, leaping in, tearing off the conversational Band-Aid. ‘I have breast cancer,’ she said.
The ice in Rose’s throat grew solid, and she grabbed for her still-scalding cup of tea, taking a long swallow, letting the liquid burn away the freeze inside her, leaving a bubble on her tongue she would feel every time she spoke for the next few days. There was silence. The few other diners in the restaurant kept eating, oblivious.
‘Mom,’ Rose finally said. ‘Are you sure?’
Our mother nodded. ‘It’s early, you see. But I found a lump – what was it, a month ago?’ She looked at our father for confirmation, the quiet ease of cooperative conversation they had developed years ago. He nodded.
‘A month ago?’ Rose’s voice cracked. She set down her teacup, hand shaking. ‘Why didn’t you call me? I could have . . .’ She trailed off, unsure of what she could have done. But she could have done something. She could have taken care of this. She took care of everything. How had she missed this? A month, they’d been going to doctors and having quiet conversations between themselves, and she hadn’t seen it at all?
‘We’ve been to the oncologist, and it’s malignant. It doesn’t look like it’s spread, but it’s quite large. So they’re going to do a round of chemotherapy before surgery. Shrink it down a bit. And then . . .’ Our mother’s voice caught and trembled for a moment, as though the meaning behind the clinical words had only just become clear to her, and she swallowed and took a breath. ‘And then a mastectomy. You know, just get the whole problem dealt with.’ She said this as though it were something she had woken up and decided to do on a relative lark. Like going on a cruise, say, or taking up tennis.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Jonathan said. He reached across the table and put his hand over our mother’s, squeezed. He was so elegant in his sympathy. ‘What can we do?’
Rose stared wildly around the restaurant, at the gilt and red and paper placemats. This is what she would remember, she knew, not the fear in our mother’s eyes, or the pounding of her own heart, but how desperately tacky this place was, how cheap it looked, how the chopsticks had not broken properly when she had separated them but splintered along the centre. This is what she would remember.
But when the shock passed, it had become something, forgive her for saying it, something of a relief. Thank God, a purpose. An excuse to be needed. A reason to turn Jonathan’s abandonment into something important. So the next day she broke her lease, packed up her things, and moved back home, uninvited.
It wasn’t until she had been home for a while, had straightened out the little messes around the house and helped our mother through the first rounds of chemotherapy that the shame of her situation had hit her. How humiliating to be living at home again. If she told people that she had moved back to help care for our mother, of course they would nod and sigh sympathetically. But still, where was she? Living with our parents? At her age? She felt like a swimmer who had been earnestly beating back the waves only to find herself exhausted and just as far from shore as when she had begun. She was lonely and tired.
Embarrassed even by the thought of herself in this rudderless life, she flushed and stood impatiently from the window seat, where she’d been staring in irritation at our mother’s wildflower garden. The garden had, in the way of wildflower gardens, grown out of control. Our mother loved it – the way it drew butterflies and fat bees, the dizzy way the purples and yellows blurred together as the stems tangled – but Rose preferred her gardens to be more obedient.
She turned to look back into the living room, one dim light behind our father’s favourite sun-paled orange wing-back chair spreading shadows over the opened books that covered every surface despite her attempts to keep them orderly. Our family’s vices – disorder and literature – captured in evening tableau. We were never organized readers who would see a book through to its end in any sort of logical order. We weave in and out of words like tourists on a hop-on, hop-off bus tour. Put a book down in the kitchen to go to the bathroom and you might return to find it gone, replaced by another of equal interest. We are indiscriminate. Our father, of course, limits his reading to things by, of, and about our boy Bill, but our mother brought diversity to our readings and therefore our education. It was never really a problem for any of us to read a children’s biography of Amelia Earhart followed by a self-help book on alcoholism (from which no one in the family suffered), followed by Act III of All’s Well That Ends Well, followed by a collection of Neruda sonnets. Cordy claims this is the source of her inability to focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time, but we do not believe her. It is just our way.
And it wasn’t that Rose regretted being home, exactly. Our parents’ house and Barnwell in general were far more pleasant than the anonymous apartment she’d rented in Columbus – thin carpet over concrete floors, neighbours moving in and out so quickly she’d stopped bothering to learn their names – but after she filled our parents’ pill cases and straightened the living room, after she had finally hired a lawn service and balanced the cheque book, after she went with our parents to our mother’s chemo treatments, sitting in the waiting room because they didn’t need her there, not really, they would have been fine just the two of them, her life was almost as empty as it had been before.
The tiny clock on the mantelpiece chimed ten, and Rose sighed in relief.