Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (5 page)

One spring day when Rosa was eight years old, two older boys followed her and Carlos home from school, taunting them with gibberish in a cruel imitation of Spanish. When she told the bullies to leave them alone, they laughed and knocked her books out of her arms. Suddenly Lars was there, seizing each bully by the scruff of the neck and pulling them roughly away. “Pick ’em up,” he ordered, indicating the scattered books with a jerk of his head and shoving the bullies toward them.

Red-faced, the other boys scrambled to do as they were told.

“Now clean ’em up and give ’em back,” Lars commanded.

The boys wiped off the dirt with their shirtsleeves and returned them to Rosa.

“Now tell her you’re sorry.”

As the humiliated bullies stammered out apologies and promises to leave her alone, Rosa clutched her books to her chest, seized Carlos’s hand, and ran home without a word of thanks to their rescuer.

The next day at school, she ignored Lars as determinedly as ever, but at lunchtime, instead of joining his own crowd, he strolled over to the oak tree where she and her friends always sat, settled down on the grass beside her, and greeted all the girls with a smile. Inevitably they smiled back, but Rosa could only stare at him as he opened a paper sack and offered it to her. “No thank you,” she said, turning away in disdain. “I don’t want your candy.”

“It’s not candy,” he replied, holding the bag so she could see the dried apricots within. “It’s better than candy.”

She hesitated, a refusal on her lips, but the sweet, enticing fragrance and soft orange color of the fruit proved irresistible. Lars’s grin widened as she reached into the bag and took out a single apricot. Everyone said that the Jorgensens grew the juiciest, most delicious apricots in Southern California, and even dried, they retained every bit of their succulent sweetness, the very flavor of summer. One bite told Rosa that the praise was well deserved. “It is better than candy,” she admitted, with a shy, delighted laugh.

“Have another,” said Lars, pleased. “They’re best fresh, right from the tree and warm from the sun. If your family comes out for the harvest, I’ll prove it to you. My father always lets me pick some of the best apricots for my friends.”

Rosa froze, her hand still reaching for the bag. Working the Jorgensen apricot harvest was a summertime tradition for families throughout the Arboles Valley, a festive, happy season of visiting with neighbors and picnicking in the orchard at noon, or so Rosa’s friends had told her. Her parents had never joined in the harvest—nor would they want Rosa to accept gifts of apricots from Lars.

“Go on, help yourself,” prompted Lars as she hesitated, holding out the bag. “There’s plenty.”

“I—I don’t want any more.” Her cheeks burned as she imagined her mother’s reaction if she could see Rosa sitting beside Lars in the schoolyard, not only sitting beside him but speaking with him and enjoying apricots that had grown on the land that had once belonged to their own family.

Lars waited for her to explain, but when she turned away from him, he shrugged and offered the bag to the other girls.
Eagerly they passed it around the circle, sampling the fruit, thanking him, and exclaiming that they had never tasted sweeter, yummier apricots. For the first time, Rosa imagined her friends enjoying themselves at the Jorgensens’ apricot harvest without her and resented missing out on all the fun.

She wished she had not refused to take another of Lars’s dried apricots when he had first offered her the bag, because when it came back to her after being passed around the circle of friends, it was empty. Lars must have seen her disappointment, because he said, “I’ll bring more tomorrow.”

Don’t bother
, she almost retorted, but something made her hold back the words. Instead she nodded, and the next day he brought her a small bag of dried apricots all her own.

For the rest of the school year, Lars brought Rosa apricots at least once a week, and he would sit with her and her friends at lunchtime and entertain them with stories of his escapades on the ranch. On rainy days when the teacher held recess inside, Rosa and Lars would read together or play checkers, but their burgeoning friendship began and ended at the schoolyard. If they happened to see each other anywhere else, they would exchange a surreptitious glance of acknowledgment and then pretend not to know each other. If they were on an errand with their parents, which they usually were, they wouldn’t risk even the glance.

As the years went by, Rosa’s friendship with Lars blossomed, but in secret, like the delicate roses that climbed the trellis in the shade of her parents’ house.

When Rosa was fourteen, the Arboles Valley School celebrated Valentine’s Day with a party and gift exchange. Rosa had written Lars a clever poem, which she knew would make him laugh, and she had drawn a simple landscape of an apricot
orchard to remind him of her promise to come to the Jorgensen ranch at harvest time someday.

When Rosa had returned after distributing her valentines to her classmates, she found a pink carnation on her desk, pink and white ribbons tied around the long stem, a small white card tucked beneath it. “For my Spanish Rose,” Lars had written inside in his familiar, orderly script, and he had signed it, “L. J.” Glowing with warmth and happiness, she slipped the card into her valentine bag and suppressed a laugh. Lars knew all there was to know about apricots but he didn’t know one flower from another. She didn’t care. The pink carnation from the Arboles Grocery was as lovely to her as the most tenderly cultivated rose, because it was from Lars.

She walked home from school dreamily, smiling to herself and often raising the carnation to her face to inhale its delicate fragrance. She had watched Lars from the other side of the classroom as he had read her poem, and she had seen him throw back his head and laugh, just as she had hoped he would. The other boys demanded to know what was so funny, and one of the eldest—dark-haired John Barclay, who had taunted her and knocked her books from her arms years before—had dared to take it from Lars’s hand, but Lars snatched it back again before John could read a single word. Then Lars’s eyes met hers, and he smiled, and suddenly she knew that he would never have any valentine sweetheart but her. Warmth flooded her heart and spilled over until it filled every part of her from her eyes to her fingertips, and although she had never kissed Lars and was a little afraid to, she longed to kiss him then.

As soon as she arrived home from school, Rosa hid the flower in her bedroom, but Carlos, not meaning any harm, told their mother about it. With half-truths and red-faced silences,
Rosa evaded her mother’s questions about who had given her the carnation, guilt and disappointment stinging her with equal sharpness. She ought to be able to share her joy with her mother, her joy
and
her uncertainties, but her mother hated Lars—or rather, not Lars but the idea of Lars, and for that reason alone Rosa was forced to lie and to pretend that the happiest day of her life had been as ordinary and undistinguished as any other.

In the darkness of the cave, Rosa shivered and held her children close. Now the sweetness of first love was only a distant memory, and the man her childhood sweetheart had become had not called her his Spanish Rose in many years. He might, at that moment, be dead at her husband’s hands.

Whimpering, Miguel eventually dropped off to sleep, and Ana and Lupita soon drifted off too, leaning against each other. Marta inched closer to Rosa and rested her head on her shoulder. “What are we going to do, Mamá?”

It was a question that Rosa had asked herself over and over as dusk stole over the canyon. “We’ll sleep here tonight.”

“And tomorrow?”

“We’ll load up the wagon and leave the valley.” It was the only choice.

Twilight descended, and as the cave grew colder and slipped into darkness, a gray, misty light lingered near the mouth of the cave. Despite the cold, Rosa was thankful for the cover of night. John would never brave the canyon after sunset, not with its steep paths and mountain lions. She shivered and wished again for dry wood. She wondered where John was now. Had he found Lars? Killed him? Had he returned to the adobe and ransacked it in a rage when he discovered she had taken the children away? Had he gone after Carlos, demanding
to know where they were? What about Elizabeth? She knew where they had fled. What if John forced the truth from her?

Suddenly Marta stiffened. “What was that?”

Rosa heard nothing but the fall of the rain and the younger children’s gentle breathing. “What was what?”

Marta sat up straight, staring into the darkness outside the cave. “I heard something. A scraping sound. Rocks falling. Not big rocks. Little rocks, like the ones on the path.”

Rosa held perfectly still, every sense alert. She waited, and listened, and heard nothing. “I think it’s your imagination,
mija
.” The words had barely left her mouth when she heard the distant sound of a boot grinding gravel underfoot. A heartbeat later, a thin shaft of light illuminated the mouth of the cave.

Marta clutched her arm. “He’s out there.”

Rosa’s heart was in her throat. “Stay here.” Without a sound, she climbed out from beneath the quilts.

Marta seized her skirt “Mamá—”

Rosa hushed her with a quick gesture. Marta reluctantly released her and scooted deeper into the cave, closer to her sleeping brother and sisters, until she disappeared into the darkness. Rosa crept across the cold, pebble-strewn ground to the wall of the cave where she had left their belongings. She heard the scrape of leather on rock again just as she stumbled into her sewing basket. Swiftly kneeling, she groped blindly through the folded fabrics and spools of thread until her hand closed around her scissors. Grasping the finger loops like the hilt of a knife, she stole toward the cave entrance, heart thudding, eyes fixed on the dim, bobbing light that could only have been cast by a kerosene lantern carried by someone striding purposefully toward them. She heard more footfalls, and suddenly she glimpsed a dark figure through the rain, a grotesque silhouette against the
sheets of water tumbling over the mouth of the cave, looming larger as he approached, and just as she raised her hand to strike him down, a man stepped through the falling water into the cave and raised the lantern, blinding her. Shielding her eyes with her free hand, she stumbled backward and nearly fell—and in that moment she knew from his height and light hair and thin build that the man was not John, not John at all but Lars.

“Rosa, thank God,” he said when he saw her, the tense lines of his thin, weathered face easing. With a sob, she dropped the scissors and ran to him.

L
ars barely had time to set down the lantern before Rosa threw herself into his embrace. “Thank God you’re alive,” she murmured, burying her face in the warm, damp wool of his sweater. After the barest hesitation he wrapped his arms around her as if he were afraid she would vanish like a mirage within his embrace, but a moment later his arms tightened and he held her as if no power on earth could take her from him ever again.

“Thank God
you’re
alive,” he replied, his breath warm against her ear. “I thought this time maybe he’d killed you. The children—”

“They’re here. They’re safe.” They were safe now. They were safe
for
now. “John went after you—”

“I wasn’t home,” Lars said grimly. He pressed his cheek against her forehead, and she thought she felt the faint touch of his lips upon her hair. “I’d taken a wagonload of apricots over the grade to Camarillo. I got back to the ranch to find all hell breaking loose.” He cleared his throat, released her, and glanced back into the darkness of the cave as if he had just remembered
the children and was reluctant to say more within their hearing. Rosa followed his gaze over her shoulder. Just within the fading edge of the lantern’s light, Marta and Ana sat huddled beneath the quilts, studying Lars solemnly but without fear.

“Hi, Mr. Jorgensen,” said Ana in a small voice.

“Hello, Ana. Hi, Marta,” said Lars gently. They smiled wanly, and as Rosa smiled back she felt Lars’s hand on her chin. “Good God in heaven, Rosa,” he said as he turned her face toward his. “What did he do to you?”

“Nothing he hasn’t done before.”

“You need to see a doctor.” He stepped back to examine her, his hands still on her shoulders. “Why are you holding your side?”

She pulled away. “I’m all right.”

“Rosa—”

She flashed him a look of warning, silently begging him not to make a fuss in front of the girls. They must not think of her as broken down, beaten, even if she were. Especially if she were.

“He’ll never lay a hand on you again,” said Lars. His voice was calm, but his mouth tightened and his eyes smoldered with silent fury. “You can’t go back to him, not after this.”

“I’ve already decided that I won’t,” said Rosa, shame and fatigue giving a sharp edge to her voice. “Is he searching for me? Is he coming after us?”

“That’s the least of our concerns at the moment,” said Lars, his gaze falling upon the girls again. “We can’t stay here, not in this storm. The creek’s rising past its banks. If we don’t make the climb out now, we could be trapped here for days. My car’s on the mesa. We can make it to Oxnard before midnight. I know a place we can stay for a while. They won’t ask questions.”