Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (20 page)

John met her in the kitchen as she was tying on her apron. “Where were you?”

“Out for a walk.”

“You were gone a while. Long walk for such little girls.”

“We didn’t go far. We stopped to play on the mesa.” Rosa suddenly remembered that she had once told him that the mesa was her mother’s favorite place in the Arboles Valley, and she hurried on before he had too much time to ponder the implications.

“Did you meet your mother there?”

“Would that be so wrong?” she asked. “The girls ought to know their grandmother. You forbade me to invite her here, but you never said I couldn’t see her elsewhere.”

“Well, I’m saying it now. I don’t want you seeing her anymore.”

“She’s my mother,” Rosa protested.

“She disowned you!”

“My father did. She didn’t.” A vivid image sprang into her mind’s eye, John unpacking the quilt-draped basket of delicacies her mother had prepared so lovingly and telling her that
her mother never wanted to see her again. He had lied to her, and she still did not understand why. “She never disowned me and she never will. But even if she had, she obviously wants the girls and me in her life now. Why are you dead set against it? What has she ever done to offend you? You were the one she preferred. You were the one she wanted me to marry. She never hated you the way she hated Lars—”

John slapped her across the face, sending her reeling back against the kitchen table. “I told you never to mention his name,” he thundered, clenching his fist so close to her eyes that she could make out the black hairs against his tanned skin on the back of his hand. “Is that why you married me? Because you couldn’t marry him?”

“You were my friend, and you loved me, and I thought we could be happy—”

He seized her by the shoulders again and shook her until her head swam. “Answer the goddamned question!”

“Yes,” she choked out. She shouldn’t have married him. Better to bear a child out of wedlock than to endure a lifetime of misery and deception. But it was a lesson learned too late.

He stared at her for a long moment, red-faced from rage, breathing heavily. “You are a filthy whore,” he said flatly, releasing her. “I’ve raised that girl as my own daughter, and this is how you repay me, by going behind my back, plotting against me.”

“I took the girls to see my mother,” Rosa said, incredulous, clutching the back of a chair for support. “How does that hurt you?”

He shook his head slowly, a warning. “Don’t make me hit you again.”

“If that’s what you want to do,” she snapped, “is there anything I could say that would prevent it?”

This time, his closed fist knocked her sprawling to the floor. As she lay there, stunned, he came upon her so swiftly that she instinctively rolled onto her side and curled protectively around the child in her womb. But the kick she was expecting did not come. “Don’t try to see her again,” John said without emotion, and walked away. She heard his boots striking the floor as he crossed the front room, the door open and shut. Only when she heard the tractor start up and knew he would not soon return could she take a deep, shuddering breath, drag herself into a chair, and rest her throbbing head in her arms on the table.

Week after week, Rosa’s distress escalated as she imagined her mother sitting alone on the old quilt she spread on the grass of the mesa, waiting and waiting without fail, hoping Rosa and the children would come. Rosa wanted desperately to send her an explanation through mutual acquaintances when they came to the Barclay farm to pick up their mail or post letters, but John was always hovering nearby, rendering it impossible for her to exchange more than a few pleasantries.

As spring blossomed into a glorious, warm summer, the rye grew tall in the fields surrounding the adobe and fruit ripened on trees throughout the valley. Neighboring farmers cheerfully predicted a harvest more plentiful than in decades, but the promise of abundance did not touch Rosa, who felt herself fracturing under the strain of Ana and Maria’s illness, John’s coldness, and her interminable isolation. She had not fully understood how much her weekly visits with her mother had sustained her until they were gone.

In late July, Rosa was hanging wash on the clothesline when a dark, unfamiliar automobile slowly crawled up the gravel drive from the main road and parked between the house and the barn. Pinning one last sheet to the line before going to see
who the visitors were, Rosa glanced over her shoulder and spotted two grim-faced men emerging from the car. Her heart plummeted when she recognized the sheriff and the young, red-haired priest who had replaced her old confessor. “I’m afraid we have some bad news, Mrs. Barclay,” the sheriff greeted her solemnly. “May we come in? Is your husband home?”

Her mouth dry, she nodded and led them into the front room, where they waited while she went to ring the triangle to summon John. They waited for her to be seated and for John to come in from the fields before they told her that earlier that day, her mother’s body had been found at the bottom of the Salto Canyon.

“We found no signs of foul play,” the sheriff said. To Rosa it seemed that his voice came from very far away. Her ears rang and her vision seemed dimly unfocused. Her mother, dead? It was impossible. Impossible. “From the condition of her remains, we believe she fell from the top of the canyon. Do you have any idea why she might have been out that way alone?”

Everyone waited for Rosa to speak, but when she said nothing, John cleared his throat and said, “My mother-in-law walked on the mesa often. She enjoyed taking in the view of the canyon.”

The sheriff nodded. “Then we have no reason to suspect her death was anything but a tragic accident.”

“Of course it was an accident,” said the red-haired priest firmly. He moved to the sofa beside Rosa, and in a gentler tone, added, “Your father and brother are making arrangements for the funeral mass on Thursday. I understand that you’ve been estranged, but I thought you’d want to know.”

“Thank you, Father,” Rosa murmured. Tears filled her eyes, blurring the men’s faces. She understood then why the priest
had emphasized that her mother’s death was surely an accident. Isabel had been a faithful, devout Catholic all her life, but if she had committed suicide, she could not be buried in sacred ground.

The sheriff, the priest, and John quietly discussed the investigation while Rosa stared into space, insensible. She roused herself enough to bid the visitors good-bye when they left, and to thank the priest for his promised prayers. When she and John were alone, he held her for a moment and told her he was sorry for her loss, and then he returned outside and resumed his work. Momentarily alone, Rosa could almost believe that the sheriff and the priest had never been there, that the terrible event they had come to tell her about had never happened. Life not only went on, it had barely paused to mark her mother’s passing.

Marta and Ana clung to Rosa and wept when she told them that their
abuela
had gone to heaven. Maria was too young to understand, but she knew that her mother and sisters were sad and so she was too. Rosa assumed she would have to beg John to let her attend her mother’s Mass of Christian Burial, but he decided that the entire family must go. “If we don’t, people will talk,” he told her the night before the service.

“People will talk anyway.” She saw it in their eyes as they came to the farm to pick up their mail, heard it in the undertone that ran beneath their solemn, gentle words of condolence. She realized she was probably the only person in the Arboles Valley who believed her mother’s death was an accident, but she had grown accustomed to being alone in all the different ways a woman could be alone, and their doubt did not weaken her certainty.

The funeral mass was solemn and poignant. Rosa could not bear to look upon her mother lying in repose in her coffin, so she
fixed her gaze on the back of her father’s head, grayer than she remembered and bowed in grief. Rosa, John, and the children had seated themselves near the back of the church rather than in the front pew where the closest family belonged, and after Mass when the mourners gathered at the grave site, they made sure to be among the last to arrive so her father would not notice them. Rosa and John had agreed that they would quickly slip away as soon as the final prayers were spoken, but in the press of the crowd leaving the churchyard, Rosa suddenly found herself face-to-face with Carlos.

“Rosa,” Carlos murmured, hesitating before he embraced her. He nodded to John, and a flicker of a smile appeared on his face as his gaze lingered upon his nieces and nephew, whom he had never met. Before Rosa could speak, their father came upon them. Distracted by sorrow, he did not immediately recognize her, but when he did, his eyes widened and he stared in wonder at his four grandchildren.

“Papá,” Rosa greeted him tremulously, pained to see him muddled by grief and loss, aged beyond his years. “This is Pedro,” she said, nodding to the baby in her arms. “John’s holding Maria, and here we have Ana and Marta, my eldest.”

He gazed at each of his grandchildren as she named them, his watery, red-rimmed eyes filling with tears. Then he patted Marta on the head, cupped Ana’s cheek with his hand, and reached forward to offer Pedro a finger to grasp. Suddenly his arms were around Rosa, and he bent to rest his head upon hers. Motionless from astonishment, she felt his tears falling upon her hair as he held her, swaying slightly as he shifted his weight from foot to foot. She drew in a breath, and as her lungs filled with her father’s familiar smell of wool and tobacco and cedar, she felt the strange sensation of the weight of years of unhappiness
falling aside. “Papá,” she said, resting her cheek upon his shoulder and closing her eyes. “I’ve missed you so.”

Just as suddenly as he had embraced her, he let her go. “You broke her heart,” he choked out. “You broke her heart and now she’s gone.”

“Papá—”

“Don’t. Don’t speak to me.” He shook his head and pushed past her. Carlos went after him, throwing her an impassioned look over his shoulder, a warning not to follow. Shocked into silence, Rosa stared after them as they disappeared into the crowd of mourners, her father’s words of rebuke and condemnation ringing in her ears.

John saw her swaying and managed to steady her before she collapsed. He handed Pedro to Marta and helped her to the car. “He blames me,” she murmured. “He thinks she took her own life, and he blames me.”

“It was an accident,” John said, “but let’s face facts—she wouldn’t have been on the mesa that day if not for you.”

Rosa felt as if a cold wind had swept her last hopes away. Her teeth chattered violently and she clutched her arms to her chest, shivering. She thought she might never be warm again.

She had no safe refuge anymore. Her mother was dead and her father had rejected her.

She wept for her mother—and for herself. She could not leave John now.

More than five years had passed since that desperate hour, but Rosa had finally left him.

The train sped north, carrying Rosa and her children and Lars away from John, away from the adobe, and for Rosa and the children at least, away from the only lives they had ever
known. Her gaze went to the luggage racks above their seats where the two precious quilts Elizabeth had rescued—one a cherished family heirloom, the other the last gift from her beloved mother—sat neatly folded among their few belongings.

Somewhere, in some faraway town Rosa had never seen, in a home she could as yet only vaguely imagine, she would spread the quilts upon warm, snug beds and her children would sleep peacefully beneath them, safe and sound at last. Rosa would have her brave and loyal friend Elizabeth to thank for whatever happiness they found there.

With each passing mile, as city blocks and streetcars gave way to rolling hills and farmers’ fields, Rosa felt John’s stranglehold upon her imagination loosening. He was in prison and likely to remain there for a very long time. The police believed that she and the children were dead; perhaps John believed it too, if jealous suspicion had not prompted him to conflate Lars’s disappearance and her own.

If there were any justice in the world, John would be convicted of her mother’s murder as well as Henry Nelson’s shooting, but it was not to be.

When a sudden surge of anger swept through her, Rosa turned her face to the window so the girls, enjoying a game of backgammon with Lars while Miguel dozed on her lap, would not notice. John had pressured her to blame herself for her mother’s death, when he knew Isabel had perished at his own hands. Rosa felt a spiky, cold shiver down her spine when she remembered the aftermath of her mother’s accident. Nothing in John’s manner, not his words or his deeds or even the slightest, betraying flicker of emotion in his expression had implicated him. She was shocked and bewildered enough to think that he
had taken her mother’s life; that he showed not a wisp of regret or remorse terrified her.

She recalled a day not long after her mother’s death when John had come home from an errand pale, clammy, and trembling. Alarmed, she had questioned him, but he rebuffed her until she threatened to summon the doctor. He wasn’t having a heart attack, he had insisted roughly, he had just taken a fright. On his way home he had crossed the mesa, and for a moment he had thought he had seen Isabel walking along the edge of the Salto Canyon. “She stopped in her tracks and stared right at me,” he had said, shaking as he paced the length of the front room, clenching and unclenching his fists.

“It must have been someone else,” Rosa had replied, refusing to believe even for a moment that her mother’s unquiet spirit haunted the mesa. “Or perhaps it was a tree blowing in the wind. The sunlight streaming through the mists can play tricks on the eyes.”

“That was no tree,” John had retorted. “Trees bend or break, but they don’t walk. Someone was out there.”

“Whoever it was, it wasn’t my mother,” Rosa had said sharply, and John set his jaw and never spoke of it again. Now Rosa looked back on the bizarre exchange with new insight: Her mother’s ghost had been a figment conjured up by his own guilty conscience. To Rosa, his fearful avoidance of the mesa thereafter was as good as a confession.