Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (11 page)

Rosa’s heart sank. She had hoped they could begin the next morning. With hopes of a cure within reach, how could she wait a week? How would she prepare rice and tortillas in the small rented room at the Radcliffe Hotel? How long would they need to remain in Oxnard while Ana and Miguel underwent treatment? What about school for Marta and Lupita? What about John, and the police, and the bootleggers, and anyone else who might be seeking them?

As they thanked Dr. Russell and left the children’s ward, Rosa’s mind worked furiously. “There must be something more we can do,” she said to Lars, falling behind the girls as they led the way downstairs. “I can’t bear to delay a week if there’s a treatment that could help them now.” Miguel was so light in her arms. Sometimes she felt that if she did not cling fiercely to him, he would drift free of her embrace, float away, and disappear.

Lars looked as if he were about to reply, but when they reached the lobby, he suddenly stopped short. “Girls,” he called
in an urgent undertone, and when they turned to look at him, he beckoned them to hurry back. Quickly he steered them down an adjacent corridor and around a corner. “Wait here.” He ducked back the way they had come and returned a moment later. “We have to find another way out.”

“Why?” Rosa imagined John pacing in front of the nurses’ station. “Who’s out there?”

“My brother, his wife, and Elizabeth.” Quickly Lars looked up and down the branching corridor and led them off down the right-hand passage. “This must be where they brought Henry after he was shot.”

“How did Elizabeth look?” Rosa asked, hastening after him, placing a hand on Lupita’s shoulder to urge her forward more quickly.

“Upset, dazed—I only caught a glimpse of her, not enough for me to guess how Henry might be doing.” Lars glanced down a hallway branching off to the left, and after a moment’s hesitation, he led them down it. “Mary Katherine had her arm around her. She might have been crying. Oscar was speaking with a doctor.”

Rosa held Miguel more tightly and quickened her pace. At the end of the corridor, she spotted a door with a small window through which bright sunlight streamed. Lars and the children saw it too, and as they raced toward it they narrowly avoided running into a man in a wheelchair emerging unexpectedly from a doorway. The nurse attending him shouted warnings after them, but they took no heed, and moments later, Lars shoved open the door and closed it behind them, silencing the scolding voice.

“Why,” asked Lupita, catching her breath, “are we running from Mrs. Nelson? I like her.”

“I should have thought of this,” Lars berated himself as they hurried around the back of the hospital to the street corner, where they followed the sidewalk to the front parking lot. “I knew they’d taken Henry to the hospital, and of course St. John’s was the best choice for them just as it was for us.”

“It’s all right,” Rosa said. They reached Lars’s car, climbed in, and drove off as soon as everyone was seated. “They didn’t see us.”

“They didn’t this time,” said Lars. “Next week we might not be so lucky. It’s a miracle Henry survived that gunshot wound at all, and thank God he did, but we have to assume he won’t be well enough to be discharged before we return to start the children’s treatment. It won’t be easy to sneak in and out of the hospital unnoticed.”

You don’t have to
, Rosa almost said as he turned the car south onto F Street. Rosa must; she was their mother. Lars could—and should—return home to his family. He had seen Rosa and the children safely from the Salto Canyon to Oxnard, but she could not impose upon his kindness much longer.

When they turned east on Fifth Street, Rosa spotted a Chinese restaurant and asked Lars to stop. She had never eaten Chinese food before, but she knew they served plain white rice with their meals and that was good enough for her. While she puzzled over the menu, Lars stepped up to the counter and ordered two chicken dishes and one beef as if they were old favorites, but when or how he might have acquired a taste for it, she had no idea. There was so much about the man he had become that she did not know.

After a brief wait, the order came served in white cartons with wire handles. Rosa was glad to discover that the rice had been packaged separately. She intended to follow the doctor’s
instructions to the letter, and she didn’t want a single drop of sauce to contaminate Ana and Miguel’s food.

Returning to the car, they drove to Plaza Park and ate their lunches on the grass in the shade of a fig tree. Rosa expected Ana, and perhaps Miguel also, to protest when she served them only plain white rice while the other children sampled the new and exotic flavors of the dishes Lars had selected, but the visit to the hospital had left them quiet and subdued. They knew Rosa had lost other children—Pedro, the brother they remembered, and three other siblings they had never met. Miguel was too young to understand, but gentle, introspective Ana had always been remarkably perceptive for her age. The visit to the hospital had surely reminded her anew that she and Miguel might share their lost siblings’ fate.

When they finished eating, Lupita bounded to her feet and begged to be allowed to play. Marta joined her, but Ana gazed at the white-columned library with such longing that Rosa wished she could take her inside.

“You two go along,” said Lars, settling back against the fig tree. “I’ll watch Marta and Lupita, and I’ll play with Miguel, if he’ll come to me.”

Rosa hesitated, reluctant to let any of the children out of her sight. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea. What if Oscar and Mary Katherine drive past on their way home? What if someone else from the Arboles Valley comes by?”

She was more afraid of gangsters and police than of Lars’s family or their neighbors, but she could tell from his expression that Lars understood. “If we’re going to be out in public, we’re probably safer splitting up,” he reasoned. “Anyone looking for us would be searching for a woman with four children, and it’s unlikely they’d look for you in a library.”

Ana’s crestfallen face immediately broke into a smile, and Rosa didn’t have the heart to disappoint her. “Miguel, would you like to stay and play?” she asked. When he nodded, she tried to hand him to Lars, but at the last moment Miguel clung to her and turned his face away when Lars reached for him. “Okay. Do you want to go to the library with Mamá instead?” He nodded, so Rosa threw Lars an apologetic look and brought Miguel along as she and Ana walked hand in hand to the library. As they entered the front door and walked among the rows of bookcases, Rosa admired the elegant classical architecture and the well-maintained collections, but her gaze returned time and time again to her daughter’s face, which she had not seen so lit up with happiness and wonder since her first day at the Arboles Valley School.

They couldn’t borrow any books, but Ana was happy to browse the shelves, read aloud the titles on the books’ spines, and open those that sounded most promising. Before long she chose a book, found a seat near a sunny window, and began to read, quickly and thoroughly captivated, while Miguel dropped off to sleep in Rosa’s arms. An hour passed swiftly to Ana, lost in her book, and Rosa, content to watch her daughter’s small and precious form bent over it. She hated to pull Ana away, but in the quiet of the library she had mulled over the hospital visit and had pondered her next steps. Now she realized with unmistakable certainty what she must do next. “Ana,” she said softly, rising from her chair and shifting Miguel to her shoulder, “it’s time to go.”

Ana sighed wistfully as if she had known that the brief, delightful respite had been too bright and perfect to last. She returned the book to the shelf and slipped her hand into Rosa’s, and as they left the library, she eagerly narrated the chapters she
had read, describing the characters and settings so vividly that Rosa almost felt as if she had read the book herself.

At Plaza Park, they found Marta and Lupita laughing and squealing with delight as Lars chased them in a wild game of tag, darting just out of reach of his fingertips, shrieking when he bellowed like a bear and jumped out at them from behind a tree or a bench. Rosa marveled with astonishment bordering on alarm that Lars would so recklessly draw attention to themselves—and even more so, that he would throw himself so entirely into their play—but as she watched, her worries soon gave way to amusement. The girls’ shouts woke Miguel, who rubbed his eyes sleepily and stared in utter bewilderment at Lars, who just then tripped and sprawled out upon the grass. The girls took the opportunity to tackle him, and as he watched, Miguel smiled bigger and bigger until he laughed aloud.

Lars looked up at the sweet, pure, happy sound, and his eyes met Rosa’s, and in that instant she glimpsed him as he had been more than twenty years ago when she had fallen in love with him—so handsome, so confident, carefree and daring, so terrifying and exhilarating all at once that she could not have helped being drawn to him. She had loved him so completely, and yet it had all gone so terribly wrong.

His smile faltered, and she knew he read the memory of heartache in her eyes. Suddenly she felt exposed and vulnerable, as if everyone in the park were watching her and knew who she was. “Let’s go,” she urged Lars, picking up Miguel and motioning to the girls to head for the car. She wanted desperately to be behind the locked door of their hotel room, safe and unobserved.

The girls made a few token protests, reluctant to spend such a beautiful day closed up in a small hotel room, but beneath that, Rosa sensed an undercurrent of fatigue and a longing for
quiet and calm. Back at the Radcliffe Hotel, they slipped inside through the alley door, and to Rosa’s relief, Lars remained with them instead of going across the hall to his own room. His presence offered her a feeling of safety and security that even the locked door did not provide. Marta brought out her backgammon set, sat cross-legged on one of the beds, and invited Ana to play, while Miguel found his wooden train and began pushing it around the floor. Lupita looked at the pile of baskets and bags along the wall, and, watching her daughter’s face and awaiting the inevitable, Rosa knew the exact moment Lupita remembered losing her doll to the floodwaters. Her eyes filled with tears, but without a word of complaint, she sat down on the floor between the two beds and tugged disconsolately at the buckle of her shoe.

Lars rose, put on his hat, and spoke quietly in Rosa’s ear. “I’ll go out and find her a new doll. There must be a shop open somewhere, even on a Sunday.”

“Thank you. But wait,” said Rosa, grasping his sleeve as he turned to go. “Just a moment.” She opened one of the valises, counted out a few bills, and turned to find Lars staring at the valise in disbelief.

“How much do you have there?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t had a chance to count it.”

“It must be thousands.”

Rosa hoped so. She had no idea how long she would have to rely upon it as her only source of income. “Here,” she said, placing the bills in his hand. “This should be enough.”

Lars tucked the bills into his wallet. “More than enough. Is there anything else you want while I’m out?”

“Ice cream,” Marta spoke up, moving a piece on the backgammon board.

“Yes, please,” chimed in Lupita. “Ice cream, ice cream. We were good at the hospital, and you promised.”

“Ana and Miguel can’t have ice cream,” said Rosa. “The doctor said so. It’s not fair to get a treat that only some of us can enjoy.”

“I don’t really want any,” said Marta quickly.

“I do,” said Lupita. “Please?”

“It’s okay, Mamá,” said Ana quietly. “I’m not hungry anyway.”

“I’m happy with oranges.” Marta frowned at Lupita, but Lupita was looking up at Rosa beseechingly, oblivious to her elder sister’s disapproval.

Rosa sighed, torn. “All right. If Mr. Jorgensen doesn’t mind stopping for it, you can have a cone.” To Lars she added, “Do you mind?”

“Of course not. Want anything for yourself?”

“Yes. A train schedule. We passed the station on our way into town last night, but I’m not sure how far away it is.”

“It’s only a few blocks down Fifth Street.” His brow furrowed, and she knew he wanted to ask why she needed a train schedule, but he refrained. “I’ll be back soon. Lock the door behind me—”

“And don’t open it to anyone.” She offered him a quick smile. “I know.”

He smiled back, but with a faint grimace of concern. He suspected she was planning something, something he would not like. He was right.

As soon as he left, Rosa took inventory of the children’s belongings, grateful that sensible Marta had packed so well. The children had plenty of clothes to suit them until Rosa could buy more, and she had even remembered socks and toothbrushes.
Thus assured, Rosa set herself to counting the money she had taken from the hayloft. Intrigued, Lupita came over to help her while the other children looked on. If the bills had not been bundled into stacks the task might have taken Rosa all afternoon, but as it was, she finished counting and had repacked the cash in the valises by the time Lars returned an hour later.

Lupita brightened at the sight of the new doll and the ice cream cone, and she flung her arms around Lars’s legs, speechless with gratitude. Gifts in hand, she climbed upon the other bed and happily cuddled her doll and licked her vanilla ice cream. Miguel tried in vain to climb up beside her, and Marta and Ana studiously ignored her, their gazes fixed on the backgammon board.

Lars eyed the neatly rearranged baggage, took a folded piece of paper from his inside coat pocket, and handed it to Rosa. “Mind telling me why you need a train schedule?”

Steeling herself, Rosa nodded. “Let’s step outside.” She asked Marta to keep an eye on everyone for a moment and led Lars into the hallway, leaving the door slightly ajar. She took a deep breath as Lars bent closer expectantly, his arms folded over his chest. “I can’t wait until next week to start the children’s treatment,” she told him. “Ana and Miguel need help now. And what if after consulting with the other doctor, Dr. Russell realizes that he can’t offer the same procedure for some reason? We’ll have wasted seven days, and the children will be no closer to a cure.”