Wild Roses (27 page)

"Smaller venue? That's kind of
insulting."

"The New York Times. Jeez, Cassie."

"As long as you're happy, Siang."

"Is he ready? There are rumors."

"What kind of rumors?" That he's losing it?
That he thinks William Tiero is hiding under the table? That his stepdaughter
ruined the career of his protege and now he's cracked? That the only thing he
seems to have ingested in a week is a box of truffles sent by his manager and
twelve thousand pounds of nicotine?

"Just that the third piece isn't
done."

"I'm sure it'll be done." I wasn't sure at all,
but, Jesus,

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Siang seemed so worried, and now so happy with
my words. She smiled, brownie in her teeth. "Go like this," I said to her,
putting the edge of my fingernail to my tooth. Personally, I hate it when people
don't tell you those things.

Siang removed the offending brownie. "I knew
he'd be ready. He's a professional. An artist of the highest order."

Maybe we consider a piece of work to be genius
in part because it goes places we cannot go. Maybe it is not so much that the
geniuses are nuts, but that there is something in the nuts that is genius. That
ability to get to not just the seed of emotion, but to the place that exists
even before the seed is there. Maybe they live amid the raw materials of feeling
before feeling becomes organized; maybe they work with the base elements, like
the cosmos in formation. There seems, anyway, an ability to get to truth, the
purest emotion, if you can see through the barbed wire of chaos that surrounds
it. Maybe that's what we respond to in those works of genius--our own inability
to be that emotionally unbound. An envy for the letting go of the tether and
seeing what is beyond the frontier, the barrier of self-protection. Maybe the
genius is only a letting go, in a way that most of us would be too frightened
to. But maybe, too, the genius is just some wacky consolation prize for the pain
of living out of this world.

I don't know. But I do know that the most
honest, the deepest and purest forms of thought and creation appear to make
their owners pay a price. The scientists with the

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world-changing ideas, the painters that change
our vision, the musicians with the soul-altering music--they seem to blow a
circuit in the process, or a circuit was blown beforehand that allowed the
creation to happen. And sometimes, just before the final break, there is a
huge

outpouring of creativity. It's hard to know
whether the outpouring of creativity causes the break or if the break that is
coming causes the outpouring. Before her suicide, Sylvia Plath was writing a
poem a day, working at four a.m. while her children slept, and Emily Dickinson
cranked out her own poetry during her affair with a married clergyman, then
collapsed in a nervous breakdown. And Vincent van Gogh. He had moved to Auvers,
France, for peace and tranquility, and painted the flowers of Daubigny's garden,
including his Wild Roses. He painted seventy canvasses in seventy-five days, and
then shot himself in the chest.

I overheard my mother and Dino talking when I
got home from school. It wouldn't have been hard to do. Courtney and her
media-monster brothers could have overheard them talking, and it would have been
better than anything on television.

"For God's sake, Dino, I'm going to call the
doctor," my mother said.

"What does the doctor have to do with this? It
has nothing to do with the doctor. This is between Tiero and me."

"You're worrying for nothing, okay? He won't be
there."

"I know he will. He has never been able to stay
away.

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He's like a fly on shit. I can feel him nearby.
I've always known. He's always come."

"Dino, really. Stop it. If he's come before,
it's only because he loves you."

"Love? You call that love? He tried to destroy
me."

"Maybe he wanted to help you. Like I want to
help you."

Dino had been right. When you turned the door
handle, it did make less noise. I had crept up the stairs with my backpack and a
box of crackers. I could still hear them. The conversation was giving me the
creeps. I almost wanted to look for William Tiero under the bed.

"Maybe you want to destroy me, too."

"Dino, no. Don't do this. I'm phoning the
doctor."

"And you run to the doctor whenever I get too
close to the truth. Just like he did."

Shit. Weren't these the kind of people who
committed horrible crimes? Was my mother in danger? If anything, she was
certainly kidding herself in thinking she could manage him. He was not
manageable. This had gone way beyond a manageable situation.

"I think you'll feel better if you talk to the
doctor a little."

"I'll feel better when Tiero lives his own life
and stays the hell out of mine."

"Look, why don't we just have Andrew call him?
We can tell him it's too upsetting for you to have him there."

"Andrew Wilkowski knows where Tiero is? They've
talked on the phone?"

"No, they haven't talked on the phone. But it
would be

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a simple thing to find him. Give you some
reassurance that he'll stay away."

"He will never stay away. He can't. He vowed
not to."

"It was a long time ago," my mother said. "He's
done his job."

"His job will be finished when I die," Dino
said.

"Dino, I think he would stay away if you just
asked him to. If he understood how much his presence would upset you. He thinks
you're just fighting about money."

"And you know what he thinks, don't you? You're
two of a kind."

"No, Dino. No, please. I don't know how much
more of this I can take." She sounded close to tears. "You want to destroy
me."

"I want you to be well. And that smoking isn't
helping anything."

I heard the sound of inhaling, that black smoke
curling up inside of him, same as his poisonous thoughts. "If you call him, I
will cut you out of my life forever."

Brief Fantasy Number Twenty-Five Thousand Two
Hundred and Nine--handing her the phone with William Tieros number already
dialed. I didn't know how much more of this I could take, either. As soon as
Dino was gone to rehearsals that night, my mom was on the phone. Dino's doctor.
They reached some agreement, something about the doctor coming over. I thought
about my mother's marriage to Dino Cavalli. They had run off to San Francisco
together and had a judge do the honors at the courthouse. I thought about what
my mother's dreams

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had been that day. Whatever she had imagined
their future to be, I was sure it wasn't this.

Mom asked if I wanted to go for tacos. I was
glad she was eating--she looked like hell lately, stress-thin. We left and
picked up some food, and ate it in the car driving home. I love to eat in the
car. There's something so satisfyingly efficient about the whole endeavor,
taking care of two needs at the same time, and it's such a challenge of
planning, too. Where to put your Mexi-Fries (yeah, right--like we all don't know
they're Tater Tots) and your hot sauce; how to balance your drink while keeping
the insides of your taco from spilling out of their shell.

Mom negotiated an intersection while taking a
sideways bite of her dinner. "I'm sure this goes without saying, but you know
I'm expecting you to be at the performance on Friday," she said.

"What performance?" I said.

"Cassie!"

"Just kidding." Boy, that joke got a good
reaction. "You'll have to wear a dress." "Cruel and unusual punishment," I said.
"The long one from the Thanksgiving party, how about. You won't even have to do
pantyhose." "Okay," I said.

"There'll be reporters and critics," she
said.

"They won't even notice me, I'll behave so
nicely." I knew why she wanted me there, but I didn't understand why Dino would.
I said so.

"Of course he wants you there," she said.
"We're family."

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I could hear the lie in her voice. "He really
has taken the whole Ian thing well, after the initial blowup."

"He's been pretty quiet about that," I said.
"But I heard you guys talking today."

"I know, but try not to worry. In two days this
performance will be over, and he promised he'd get back on his medication. Dr.
Milton is coming over tomorrow, just to help him through."

"You're not a lion tamer, Mom."

"But Dr. Milton is."

"It just seems like there's more than we can
handle here. It's just . . . too much. You've been eating Turns and Maalox like
candy."

"I'm walking around in someone else's life,"
she agreed.

Right then I thought about the secret weapon I
held, this information that Dino's early life was a concoction, a lie.
Everything that she'd already seen hadn't been enough to make Mom leave, so why
would this? But maybe it would be enough to tip the scale. I opened my mouth to
speak, then changed my mind.

"All this is almost over," my Mom
said.

She didn't know, neither of us knew, how right
she was.

I'd set up my telescope over the past few
nights, hoping and hoping that Ian would come as he had before. But he hadn't
come. Still, it was better than being in the house, so after dinner that night I
set up again. That night was

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clear and the sky was still in the hold of the
midwinter turbulent atmosphere, the shakiness of the air blurring the images in
the telescope, but making the stars twinkle. I gave up and just looked without
an instrument, admired Sirius, the most scorching-hot star and the brightest
thing in the sky next to a planet. It sparkled blue-white, dominated everything
around it. I found Canis Major, the Big Dog, and Canis Minor, the Little Dog,
though they looked more like spilled sugar than animals.

I was missing Ian something fierce right then,
and I remembered our first touch, right there on that lawn. I packed up, put the
telescope into the shed. I was heading up the steps to the front door when I
heard his voice.

"Cassie?"

His dark figure came toward me, becoming
clearer as he stepped forward, his face nearly white from the light of the sky.
It was a dream, I was sure. This figure, approaching me slowly, appearing out of
the darkness.

"Cassie?"

"Ian?"

"It's me." One sleeve of his coat hung limp by
his side, and the lump of his cast was buttoned inside his coat. I couldn't
believe it was him. I just couldn't believe it.

"You came."

"I've been trying and trying to call you." "You
have?"

"I swear, every time I do, Dino answers. I
didn't want to make more problems for you, so I keep making up reasons why I'm
phoning him," Ian said. "It's getting stupid.

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Where have you been, Cassie? What's going on?
You haven't called or anything. I figured maybe you were under lock and key or
something. Couldn't climb out your window like Rapunzel because your hair is too
short. I came over one day and hid behind the neighbor's car, because Dino and
your Mom were there in the driveway." "I'm sorry ..."

"I wanted to come over so bad, but I didn't
want to risk getting you into more trouble. I figured it'd be safe now--Dino's
got to be at the concert hall every night this week, right?"

"They rehearse in the day."

"Oh, shit--should I go?"

"No! No, Ian. I have been trying to call you.
Over and over. Your Mom told me not to call anymore. I didn't think you wanted
to see me. . . ."

"You're kidding," Ian said. "Man, I had no
idea. She . . . she's really upset. God, I worried maybe this wasn't worth it
anymore to you. You had enough of all the crap . . ."

"No! I thought you . . . after your wrist, and
what your mom said. . . . How could you ever even want to talk to me
again?"

"I was really worried," he said.

I went to him, put my arms around him, the
bulky cast between us. He felt so good. His mouth felt so good. All the pieces
came together and made sense again. It wasn't happiness so much I felt, though
that, too. There was just this profound relief. His cold mouth, warm breath
filling me up again--just such relief.

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"Whatever happens," he said. "Whatever, you've
got to promise me you won't go away from me anymore."

I put my head against his shoulder. The worry
and relief poured out together, lodged somewhere in my throat. My eyes welled
up. "I am so sorry, Ian. I am just so, so sorry about your arm." I started to
cry. He put his good arm around me.

"Hey," he said.

"I was selfish," I said. "You were working so
hard. Please, if you could ever forgive me ..."

"There's nothing to forgive," he said. "Look,
fate decided things for itself. Cassie, look at me." He tilted my chin up from
his coat. Kissed each of my eyes. "Look," he said.