Rosethorn (29 page)

The girl who had written of love and betrayal had been the same age as Sera was now, giving them a peculiar affinity. Sometimes, when disturbing dreams of her parents stayed with her past the waking, it would seem to Sera that she and her mother had become one. What had happened to her mother, happened to her. What her mother had felt, she felt.

Andrew understood none of this. He had been loved from the moment he was born. He had been wanted. And he had never known the uncertainty and feeling of halfness that had dogged Sera all her life.

“So it’s my fault that I have a family? That my parents are alive?” He had asked incredulously during one of their fights.

She did not ask Andrew to come with her to San Rafael, to a house on 5 Piper Lane which had been listed in the phone book under the name Bill and Debbie Wood. It was Allison who came with her, Allison who didn’t ask why, but said, “Of course” when Sera had asked. It was Allison who stood next to her and watched the house until a plump, older woman came out with a fluffy white dog for a walk in the middle of the morning. She stood with Sera as they watched the back of the figure retreating down the street.

“She looked so...ordinary,” Sera would say later with some surprise.

"What did you think she'd look like?"  Allison asked.

"I don't know, the devil incarnate with a big, blazing sign flashing 'bigot' or 'murderer.'"

"Murderer?!"  Allison exclaimed.

"I hold her responsible," Sera had said darkly. "She's as guilty as He is.” Allison did not have to ask who "He" was.

"I look nothing like her
,” Sera had said coldly.

"No," Allison agreed. "She doesn't look like she could be your grandmother."

"That's because she isn't."

"Do you want to talk to her? Maybe it'll make you feel better.” Allison suggested.

Sera shook her head violently. What could she say to someone who had disowned her before she was even born, who had kept her parents apart? What do you say to someone who didn't care if she existed or not?

Andrew did not know Sera had gone to San Rafael to see for herself "those people," as she referred to them. Nor did he know she spent long hours in the main county library looking at microfiche newspaper articles from 1987 or researching the thousands of web hits on the name “Alex Wood.” It consumed her, this need to know. With the diary came not only illumination, but purpose.

Her grandmother had buried her face in her hands when Sera had gently asked once more about her mother’s fate. Even after all this time, her grandmother was still too heartbroken to say anything other than “She’s gone, Serafina.”

Gone, but still remembered, for her mother’s picture was on an altar next to that of the grandfather Sera never met and the wooden carving of Christ on the crucifix. Her grandmother would softly touch both frames as she said her prayers before going to bed, never failing to light votive candles that flickered all night for the dead. It seemed to Sera that she prayed for her mother’s soul, that there would be forgiveness and peace for what she had done in the end.

The county recorder's office turned up nothing, so Sera had scrolled through local newspaper articles, then through papers further out, within 50 miles, looking for anything. She was skimming the Chronicle's archives when she spied a small paragraph from December of 1987 regarding the badly decomposed body of an unidentified woman that had washed up in the Marina. The article quoted a police officer saying it might have been in the water for as long as eight weeks.

Sera counted back from the date of the article to the last entry in her mother's diary, which was exactly eight weeks, and remembered the numerous references to the water.

She carefully looked through a year's worth of articles in the Chronicle, but there was no mention of the body ever being identified. She had copied those six lines of print and made a round of fruitless calls, unable to penetrate the bureaucratic maze of city government. The receptionist at the medical examiner's office said unclaimed Jane Does were usually sent to Colma to be buried in unmarked graves.

It was then that she started having nightly dreams of her mother sinking into the depths of the sea, a soundless plea from her pale lips, a ghost-like hand reaching out to Sera. “Save me,” she seemed to say as she succumbed to her watery grave. Not with all of Sera’s strength to swim against the strong currents could she ever reach her mother in time.

More than ever, Sera felt that her mother had left the diary for Sera to find, so that her death would not be in vain.   

Andrew would have said she was obsessed or morbid, yet again. She did not want to hear that tone of voice or see that look on his face. She did not want to peer into the abyss that had come between them, so he did not know that she had taken to haunting cemeteries. Grave angels had become a secondary interest now, as she spent painstaking hours searching for unmarked graves.

"What use is it doing all this?"  She could hear him asking. "What does it matter now?" 

Indeed, what did it matter to walk the rows of endless graves looking for someone who will never come back to her? Musty earth and lichen-covered headstones sinking into neglect, miles of microfiche, even the book of secrets she had uncovered couldn't make up for all she had lost. But she couldn't, as Andrew would want her to, put it away either.

She had not shown him what the diary had contained, protective of her mother’s last words, only given him the harsh fact that her mother killed herself because her father had abandoned them. Andrew had taken it as an accusation against him and said that she now treated him as if she were waiting for him to follow in her father’s footsteps.

He did not comprehend that to do nothing would be worse than an unmarked grave rotting and weeding in obscurity. She would be abandoning her mother just as her father had done.

Did the others mourn someone as she did, she wondered while she waited outside the cemetery gates that Sunday morning. Her curiosity was beginning to wane. Except for her grandmother’s car, the parking lot was still deserted. It was now 10:10. Sera started to feel foolish.

A van drove up and a surly-looking boy in a black trench coat with long black hair and sickly pale skin got out. He slammed the door and stood on the other end of the gates, without looking at or saying anything to Sera. The van sped off. Sera turned to the Goth boy and tried to catch his eye. He kept looking intently at the rhododendron bushes, ignoring her sighs. They waited, the Goth boy looking anywhere but at her, and Sera feeling more and more ridiculous with each long drawn-out, passing minute.

They both turned their heads eagerly when two cars pulled up at the same time, a rusty blue bug and a brown sedan. A tall, bearded man and a white-haired woman got out of the bug. Two women in gypsy skirts and flashing silver jewelry got out of the sedan. All four seemed to know each other and spoke briefly before moving towards the gates.

"Sera?"  The tall man said with a friendly smile as he approached. "And Jared?"  He asked the Goth boy. The Goth boy grunted and nodded his head. "I'm John, this is Frances," indicating the older lady by his side, "and these are Sky and Summer," to the two women in gypsy skirts, who smiled shyly. Frances had an uncertain look on her face, as if she was too preoccupied to smile. Her forehead frowned at them instead.

"Well," John said as he rubbed his hands together, "Shall we?"  John led them to the base of a small hill beyond the gates, where he stopped to address them.

"I'd like to welcome Sera and Jared to our group. I hope you find what you're seeking.” John stared at both them without speaking, as he let the cryptic remark settle. He then started walking and the group slowly followed him. He held his hands behind his back as he meandered up the path and began speaking in a monotone:

"Cypress Lawn was founded in 1892. This and other cemeteries in Colma flourished when the City of San Francisco outlawed all cemeteries within the city in the early 20th century. The wealthy were able to move their ancestors to Colma. Poorer families who couldn't relocate the remains of their ancestors left them were they lay to this day, below the Richmond district of San Francisco. The earliest birth year is 1797, and earliest death year is 1858. Some people of note interred here are William Randolph Hearst, James Flood, Lily Hitchcock Coit, Rudolph Spreckels, Lefty O'Doul, Charles de Young, and other San Francisco luminaries. We'll visit their final resting places later.”

They paused by a large stone angel with folded wings in front of a mausoleum. The mausoleum was guarded with rusty iron gates that shielded a stained glass window of a haloed saint.

"As you can see," John said as he made a sweeping motion to the acres of green that unfolded beyond him, "the founders of Cypress Lawn followed the movement at that time for park-like cemeteries, allowing for a serene and beautiful, planned environment suitable for long walks like the one we're going to do today."

They continued strolling down the wide avenues towards the rows of massive crypts on the hill. John, after his initial lecture, did not speak again and the group walked in brooding silence. The gypsy women would whisper to each other as they pointed out certain headstones. Frances walked beside John and copied his introspective gait, even clasping her hands behind her back, as he did. Jared walked a little outside the group.

They passed some families laying flowers in the newer section of the cemetery, but for the most part, they were the only ones in the older section, which was composed of weather worn stone, carved angels that had turned black and porous in the salty Pacific air, and weeds that pushed through cracked cement slabs. More than one dusty and neglected mausoleum had its rusty lock pried open, with empty beer bottles desecrating the altar inside.

Sera paused at one such dim vault, saddened by the broken stained glass and cobwebbed vase of plastic flowers, once white but now dun-colored. The floor was covered in a thick layer of undisturbed dust. No one had visited lately. Two of the six crypts, three stacked on each side, were empty.

"When all that knew of you have died, who would be left to mourn you?"  John's deep voice boomed beside her. Sera jumped back from the gates.

John turned to the rest of the group. "I'm already paid through the Neptune Society. I've arranged to be cremated once my time comes so I'll be no trouble to any of my kin.”

Like a priest dispensing holy sacraments, he turned his palms up while standing at the foot of the avenue of stone monuments, "We'll stop here for a few moments before moving on. Feel free to meditate. Reflect.” The gypsy women and Frances dispersed without comment. The Goth boy disappeared behind a tall crypt.

After an awkward silence and a bob of her head towards John, Sera headed across to a large oak tree shading unusually tiny tombstones. Almost all were topped with seated marble lambs. Some had forlorn toys next to them still, a stuffed bear whose matted fur was dark with dirt, a wooden car with chipped red paint. They were graves of children who had not lived to reach their first birthday.

Sera wanted to take out her camera and snap pictures, but felt uncertain, then ashamed as she imagined the grieving parents who had left these precious mementos behind to guard their dead children. She lingered here, running her hand over the inscriptions, wondering if those who mourned them were still alive or if they too now lay below ground.

Sera turned to a field of headstones beyond the oak tree where she spied some marble sculptures. One towered above all others, its outspread wings shading protectively the grave below. Unlike other grave angels, its face was not downcast, but angry, as if it was readying itself for battle. One hand pointed up and the other was stretched forward in a fist.

Sera crouched by the base and shot the warrior angel from an angle, with the sun's rays hitting the tips of his carved crown, turning golden the locks of his alabaster hair. He looked like he was on fire. After snapping 10 frames, Sera caught the headstone's inscription and laughed out loud. It bore the name of Charles and Mary Slaughter. Chuckling, she took a picture of the headstone as well.

"Found something amusing?"  John inquired as he came to stand next to her. Sera pointed to the headstone. John laughed too, but his laughter seemed forced, polite. Sera recomposed her face to look more respectful.

"So how are you finding our little group?"  He asked, his hands clasped behind his back. Sera opened her mouth to reply, but he had turned to look at Jared, who was walking between the rows of mausoleums lining the avenue. "I don't know if he quite fits.”

John turned back to look at her. "He's emitting very troubling vibrations."

"Vibrations?"  Sera repeated uncertainly.

"Yes, I bet if took a picture of his aura, it would be all black. I'm almost positive he's not right for us.”

"Really?" 

"He's not receptive to the universe."

"Oh?" 

"Not like you for instance. I can tell you're receptive. I'm a highly sensitive person and I can always sense other sensitive people."

Sera realized that she couldn't see any of the others wandering about. Even the Goth boy had disappeared among the mausoleums.

"Have you measured your sensitivity scale? Because I'm reading very powerful vibrations from you. When two sensitive people connect, they vibrate towards each other."

"I, I, don't think I'm vi-vi-vibrating.” Sera bit her lip in deference to John's solemnity.