Rosethorn (6 page)

A haunting chord by a single guitar joined by another and then James Hetfield's voice, its rough edges tamed into something almost soft, at first quiet then roaring in a metal ballad.

Andrew sat across from her, watching her reaction as she had watched him the night before. As if he was listening with her, his mouth formed the words in silent accompaniment.

The intensity of the hunger leaping out of his eyes didn’t frighten her or make her want to turn away from him, and she did not question her own yearning rising to meet his.

"I've never heard that before," she said shyly, afterwards, feeling that she had shared something intimate with him. "Look," she held up her arm. "Goosebumps."

He nodded, pleased. "Nothing Else Matters. It calms me down when I'm pissed off." He tapped her disc player with one long finger. "It has Enter Sandman, One, Wherever I May Roam, Master of Puppets, The Memory Remains, Sad But True. All the good ones."

"Your favorite band?"

He nodded. "It's the only music that gets me, you know?"

"Yeah," she agreed, "that's the way Stevie is for me. Like whatever I'm feeling, she has a song that has the perfect melody or words that capture exactly what's inside me." She looked sideways at him.

"Surprising," she remarked quietly, not sure if she meant it for the song or for him or the afternoon. She held up her disc player. "I owe you." Troubled that he had her at a disadvantage, she asked, “Are you hungry?"

"What?"

"'Cause I thought I heard your stomach rumbling." 

“I’m starving. But there’s nothing around here." Andrew craned his head, trying to look through the trees above them. “I think we’re past all the houses, too. We must be near the golf course. I can’t smell the horses anymore.”

“I’ve got something to tide us over until we go back to civilization," she said as she scouring through her backpack. “Ever had
lumpia
?”

“Loompeeyaa?" Andrew emphasized each syllable. He shook his head.

“Say it really fast-
lumpia
." Sera took out her tin foil package and unwrapped six, puckered
lumpia
and offered them to Andrew.

“Oh, egg rolls? I’ve had them before." Andrew reached to take one eagerly.

“They’re better than egg rolls. Much tastier." Sera watched Andrew’s face as he bit it and chewed.

“Thssss gowddd
!” Andrew said in between mouthfuls.

Sera laughed. “They’re better right out of the fryer and with some sauce. My grandma and I made them last night."

Andrew devoured three in rapid succession, barely chewing before swallowing. Rummaging in her bag some more, Sera found her still-cold can of juice.

“Something to wash it down with."

“What’s that?”

“Calamansi juice." Sera showed him the can, which had a picture of the round green calamansi fruit on the outside.

“It looks like a lime.”

“It tastes more like lemonade, but sweet." They laughed.

Andrew took a long sip. “Ahhh, that hit the spot." He reached for a fourth roll, but snatched his hand back. “Sorry. You haven’t eaten any.”

“That’s okay. All I need is two. Take that one." They munched in silence, watching purple dragonflies dance above a patch of wildflowers further up the creek.

Andrew took another sip of the juice and looked at the can. Pointing to the brand name, “Philippines,” he said, “Is that where your grandma’s from?”

“Um-hm. She and my grandfather moved here in the seventies.

Andrew opened his mouth to ask her a question, but thought better of it and closed his mouth.

“My mother died a long time ago," Sera started, as if all along she meant to tell him, "I think right after I was born. I don’t really know."

The most current picture she had of her mother showed her to be little older than Sera, holding her as a tiny infant. There were no pictures of her and her mother past that stage. In that photo, which her grandmother had placed in the altar next to her grandfather’s, her mother had looked tired yet happy, smiling down on her sleeping newborn daughter.

“My grandma doesn’t like to talk about it. I remember her crying when I was little, whenever I asked where my mother was."

Her grandmother would just bury her head and say brokenly, “She’s gone, Serafina,” and Sera would be afraid to probe any further.

What was she like? What happened to her? were questions that shadowed Sera’s childhood, ever present but unspoken. Sera remembered the few times she and her grandmother had knelt in an empty church praying for her mother’s salvation. Sera’s childish fingers could not hang onto the rosary beads she had been given, but she prayed anyway, frightened by
the urgency in her grandmother’s voice.

Her mother had done something so terrible that she needed hours of rosaries and entreaties on her soul’s behalf.

Sometimes when she was almost falling asleep, half-dreaming, half-awake, a memory would come to her of a woman with long hair smelling of warm milk cradling her, her face full of light. But it couldn’t have been a memory for her mother had died when she was a baby. Perhaps the smell was something she did remember, even from so many years ago, but she may have just transposed the face she knew from the tattered pictures she hoarded in her room, along with some of her mother’s things, a lace shawl, some books, records and tapes, and her clothes. This was, in addition to years of secrecy, all that was left of her mother.

“And your dad? Is he dead too?”

“I don’t know. He could be. I don’t know his name or what he even looks like. I have no pictures of him. I think he's white."

Over the years, she had come to realize on her own without her grandmother telling her that he was
not dead, just not around.

She had no memories of her father so she had played pretend games of searching older men’s faces, almost subconsciously done now like a reflex she had learned, and seeing if any of them sparked something in her or if they had a nose or face shape similar to hers, the only features she did not inherit from her mother. If they did, she would stare at them until they turned her way and then she would look into their eyes, seeking recognition.

When she started taking Mr. Leach’s English class last fall, she began to picture her father with his bearded and bespectacled face, along with his deliberate way of talking and kind manner. She created a history in which she inherited her love of books and writing from an intellectual man like Mr. Leach, just as she inherited her face from her mother.

When she was little and the envy of other children’s parents grew to be too much, Sera would retreat into her fantasies whose superficial details varied wildly, but at their core was the same secret wish: that her parents were really alive and would someday come for her. Her mother was not dead, but lost in a fog of amnesia. Her father was rich and powerful and was searching the world for his missing wife and daughter.

“Kevin Wilson used to call me a mutt," she told Andrew in a mocking voice that did not hide the residue of childhood pain. She didn’t look quite white, with her mixture of pale skin and dark, slanted eyes. Looking a bit exotic in their high school, where the jocks chewed tobacco and the popular girls wore cute cowboy hats on their blonde heads, had always made her feel set apart. "Like I was a stray dog."

Andrew snorted. "Kevin Wilson's an inbred slimeball - his parents are first cousins."

Sera laughed. "Like the Hapsburgs?"

"Who's that?"

"A royal family that married each other because they wanted their blood pure. The children ended up crazy, ugly, and slobbering idiots."

"That's him. He told me about his parents when we were in detention together. He doesn't have a fucking clue."

"But still, at least he knows who he is. It’s like being lost, in a way, not knowing that much about where you’re from. There’s a part of me that will always be a mystery, no matter how long I live. I want to ask my grandma so many things, but I don’t want to hurt her. All we have is each other."

Sera shook her head, incredulous of all that she had just told him. The quiet anxiety in his face touched her. Never in her strangest imaginings would she have thought that she would someday spend an afternoon with Andrew LaSalle sitting by the banks of the creek as she gave up the truth of herself to him.

Shaking off the melancholy that had suddenly visited her, she turned away to rummage through her backpack once more. Hunching over to hide her bag, she looked over her shoulder at Andrew.

“I’ve got dessert. Don’t look!”  She scolded as he tried to see what she was doing. “It’s a surprise!”  Taking a minute to prepare it, she looked at him once more, “Now close your eyes."

Looking at her suspiciously, he asked, “You’re not gonna feed me something gross are you?”

Sera pursed her lips. “Do you wanna taste it or not?”

Andrew closed his eyes, a doubtful look on his face.

“Trust me. You’ve never had anything like this. Now open your mouth."

Andrew opened his mouth a little and Sera smiled as she put a soft, dripping sliver of cold mango on his tongue. With a wet finger, she wiped away yellow juice running from the side of his mouth as he chewed.

“It’s cold." Andrew’s eyes were still closed as he swallowed. Sera watched his Adam’s apple bob. “And really sweet. What is it?" He opened his eyes.

“Mango.”

“But I’ve had mango. It doesn’t taste like that.”

“I know,” Sera said with a satisfied smile, “These were grown in the Philippines. They don’t taste like the mangoes you get at the store. I could eat these every day and never get tired of ‘em.”

Andrew opened his mouth again for more, looking at her. Sera put another soft slice on his tongue, pausing before taking her fingers away. “I put these in the freezer this morning before I left. They’re almost completely thawed out."

She fed him a little at a time until both sides of her mango were gone. On the last slice, he closed his mouth on her fingers, his eyes on her. His mouth felt warm and moist-Sera’s skin electrified at the touch of his lips. She withdrew her fingers slowly, unable to look away from his mouth.

She took the pit, unpeeled the skin circling it, and ate the thick, yellow flesh around it as he watched her. Wiping the juice from her chin, Sera licked her lips and sighed.

Without looking at him, Sera could feel Andrew brooding and watching her.

Something was about to happen, is happening.

She was bothered by his lips, his cheeks, his nose. Bothered by the veins on his arms, by the way his skin might feel. Bothered by his large hands and bothered beyond limit by his eyes.

She shook her head, forcing herself to awaken from a lush and treacherous dream, and went to the edge of the water to rinse her sticky hands.

A minute passed before he followed her and put his hands in the cold water next to hers. Sera stood up, wet feet on two flat stones and started putting water on her legs to rinse off the dead leaves and dirt plastered on her calves.

Andrew picked off some leaves from the back of her thighs, his fingertips brushing her skin lightly.

She stood on the balls of her feet, legs apart, and stretched up towards the trees above them. The eucalyptus and birch trees made a green canopy of leaves through which the sun carved lacy patterns of gold. She looked down at him, crouched by her feet, looking up at her.

“Hey, I’m taller than you."

He smiled and unfolded his long body. He loomed over her, shoulders partially blocking the trees above them, smelling sweetly of mango, and with eyes that deep and endless blue.

“No, you’re not." He was so close Sera felt sure he could hear the blood rush to her face.

He gently pulled a long lock of her hair and wound it around his finger. “You got it to come off,” he said softly.

Sera nodded slowly, finding it hard to speak or look away. When she finally did open her mouth, it was with a great effort to say, “We should head back.”

His shoes crunched noisily on the pebbles as he backed away, breaking the quiet between them, and a shadow briefly passed in his face. He picked up his bike and got on it, waiting for her as she reached for her backpack. Sera put on her socks and shoes.

“I think we can get to the road from over there." She pointed to a gently sloping bank further up. She put on her backpack and trudged through the wildflowers and ivy, up the bank.

Andrew walked his bike up behind her. When they walked past the trees, they came to the edge of the dairy fields beyond Wild Horse Valley. They headed for Venetia Boulevard, a strange silence between them.

Andrew stopped and turned to her. “Hop on,” a hand on his bike seat. “C’mon. I’ll get you home,” he said when she hesitated. Straddling his bike, Andrew faced forward. Sera placed a boot on the spoke of the back wheel and climbed on, resting her right boot on the other end of the spoke.

“Hang on."

Andrew started pedaling fast and Sera almost fell off. She could not see where they were going, just his back going up and down in front of her as he rode them down Venetia Boulevard.