The Rose Thieves (9 page)

“These old tools were here when we bought the house,” says Pop from the hall closet. “Look, Grace, this works with a spring action, do you see?” He brings out an enigmatic contraption and takes it apart. Grace tries to look interested, though she's reaching deep to the back of a shelf to pull out a nest of rags.

“An apple corer. We found it in the henhouse with the old sharpening wheels,” he says. “You weren't even around then, Baby Sister, and Audie was just about to be born.”

Audie telegraphs a warning to Kate. If he sinks into nostalgia now, there'll be no retrieving him. Before they can change the subject, though, he has opened the cupboard of Christmas ornaments. He turns from it as if from a rebuke and sits down.

“You know,” he says, “there was enough land here that you could each have had a little parcel. We could have built two houses up by the waterfall and one over on the hill. It wouldn't have to be elegant, we'd be together. I'd visit my grandchildren…”

Audie and Grace leave their work to comfort him, repeating the gentle phrases “Don't worry … we love you,” like a rosary, one on each side of his chair. Kate opens the book in her hand and vows to live by whatever sentence she finds, but it's an investment adviser. She has just fitted a tiny leather volume of Shakespeare into an empty space, and she plucks it up again, closing her eyes to choose a page.

“Forbear, and eat no more!” Orlando cries.

“Okay,” says Pop, breaking, renewed, from the daughterly embrace, “okay.” He is blithe by nature, trained to see the windfall just ahead; sorrow unnerves him.

“Let's go jump in the brook,” he says. “Come on, it's too hot for this.” He yanks Grace's braid and chases her, squealing, down through the field. Kate and Audie watch from the windows as he lifts her, as if to heave her in, then tenderly sets her down on her feet in water only a few inches deep.

“How are we going to get this done?” Audie says, hand, as ever, on hip. “Steve needs me at home.”

She loves him as Kate imagines their parents loved, at nineteen: inextricably. Audie loves the shopping malls now and holds forth on triple-A baseball with a small, bustling pride. She cooks and cleans and clips coupons while his jeans billow from their fire-escape clothesline like flags. Kate understands it, fearfully well. It's an undertow—“I love you” is the last choking cry. Her lover at school appears in her dreams as a raven, a shape torn out of darkness, swooping down to fix her in his golden eye. Once, she had come upon him in the library, his whole body tensed over a sentence. She had wanted to rip Nietzsche out of his hands: “Study me!”

“You should go home,” she tells Audie, who is rummaging in the closet again and emerges with a khaki uniform and a pair of scuffed saddle shoes. She examines these items suspiciously, as if her parents might still be inside.

“If we leave it to them, it'll never get done,” she says to Kate, with a smile of regretful wisdom. It's just the two of them again, as it always used to be: ministers under a mad monarchy, meek and still and secretly in charge.

*   *   *

Audie finds a can of shrimp, and they add it to macaroni salad for supper. She steps instinctively over the buckled floor, cooking and packing at once, while Kate considers how to keep things from breaking, wrapping a few glasses in a quarter of an hour. At the porch table they eat in silence. Grace has braided her wet hair, and it makes a mark on her sundress that grows wider as they sit.

Audie's face is smudged, and a long scratch runs up her left arm. She eats in a moment and stands up to clear away.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Pop says. “Take it easy there, Audiekins, I just got started.”

“I thought…”

“Don't think,” he says, smiling, his eternal spring of jollity welling again. “Cool it. Enjoy the breeze.” When she sits, he claps a hand to her head until she relaxes.

“We've got a perfect summer evening here,” he says, and Kate follows his gaze over the brook to the hillside, where he's been clearing the road up to the falls. It's taken twenty years to cut just through the blackberries and birches to the old field, where the road ends in a tangle of thistle and brambly rose. Kate has always brought anyone who mattered here, walking them up the road and through the layers of forest to see the water fall free over the ledge. Once a buck came crashing through a thicket not three feet in front of her: snorting, tossing its antlers, nothing like the does who stole down in the evenings to drink, it galloped once around the clearing before her and plunged back into the brush. Kate catches her breath again, fixing the memory. She will want to describe this place someday, trying to explain herself.

Audie is poised at the edge of her chair, awaiting Pop's permission to stand, but Grace gives her a wary glance: he told them to relax.

“Do you want a drink?” she asks him, running inside and returning in a moment to the porch window, passing him a gin and tonic in a jelly glass, the lime pierced, as he has taught her, on the rim.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “The crystal is all packed.”

Absorbed in the hillside, he gives a weak, fond smile, but the first sip revives him.

“You girls want to go to a movie tonight?”

“You're joking.” The minute Audie says it, she covers her mouth at contradicting him. But they never go to the movies. The theater is an hour away.

“Certainly not. Grace, run get the paper and we'll see what's on.”

“We'll probably all feel better if we make some progress tonight,” Audie says carefully.

“We'll
definitely
all feel better if we take a little break,” says Pop. Grace returns to the window without the paper.

“I wrapped the crystal in it,” Kate tells him.

“Then we shall blaze off into the great unknown, eh, Baby Sister?” Pop starts singing: “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag…”

“We
can't,
” says Audie.

Pop's smile is full of love, and utterly obtuse.

“Don't say ‘can't,' honey,” he says. “Anything might happen. Where would you like to live next? The Spice Islands?” He leans back and laces his fingers behind his head, preparing to ruminate. “I know things have been shaky, but I think … most people disagree, but
I
think there's going to be a turn-around, and if the past few days are any indication…”

The sibylline market.

“Rice terraces!” he says. “Shimmering in the equatorial sun…” He holds a hand out toward this consoling vision, watching Audie to see if she will follow him there. “Sandalwood forests … what do you suppose that movie will be, Baby Sister,
South Pacific?
”

“Well,” says the patient Audie, “it does sound wonderful, but I guess I'll just stay here and do a few little things.” Pop, on his way in for his sweater, is still humming and doesn't hear.

“We
have
to go with him,” Grace says. “He's just cheering up.” She climbs delicately over the windowsill and goes down the stone steps to sit, prim, in the passenger seat of the Jeep, facing the brook, away from them.

Suddenly they hear a car, coming too fast, kicking up stones on the dirt road. This sound is so rare, it is ominous. When they were children, Kate and Audie would dive together to the ground behind the stone wall, lest they be seen. Instinct still tells Kate to duck. Ma pulls the Buick up into the driveway beside the Jeep.

“Where's your father?”

He comes to the door. Kate and Audie are trapped on the porch between them. Just from the tilt of Grace's head, Kate guesses that she has determined to be valiant again.

“Hi, Ma,” she says from the Jeep window, in a voice so wary of offending it is absolutely flat. “You came back.”

Ma seems neither to hear nor see her, coming up the steps still in her baggy gardening clothes. She's in the eye of a black rage, single-minded, silent, and cold.

“I need my things,” she says, but Pop keeps his arm across the door.

“Lila,” he says. It's an appeal, kind and sorrowful.

“What?”
She sounds utterly disgusted, but she's listening. Kate hardly dares to blink. He could say anything now.

“Be reasonable, Lila,” he says.

“Oh, yes, I forgot.” Ma swells with bitter scorn. “I'm not
reasonable.
I will
not
pull myself together. You take everything…” She gestures toward the garden, where she used to kneel in the dirt for whole summer mornings, dreamily weeding. The full, loose peony blossoms weigh heavy on their stems.

“… everyone,” she says, widening the sweep of her arm to include Audie and Katie and Grace. “Just let me go. Let me pass, Gil.”

He stands aside, follows her in. The storm door slams behind him.

“Remember when she threw the iron out the window at him?” Audie asks. Realizing they're alone again, she and Kate start to laugh. They can hear the argument continuing inside, in cadences so familiar it is almost comforting.

“Remember when he gave her a ride to the lawyer?” Audie says. They had once driven off to seek a divorce together, but Ma kicked Pop so furiously he went off the road into a telephone pole. By the time his arm was set, a bottomless tenderness had opened between them—it lasted for most of a year.

“That was the summer we got the sheep,” says Audie. For her this is no dream of the country; it's home. Kate remembers her as a child in her fawn-colored jacket, pockets ripped loose, swinging by her knees from a low branch so her long hair brushed the ground.

Inside, Pop is recalling the old days too, his weekends at home with them, the children racing over the evening lawn. They can hear him so clearly he must be calling his stories up the stairs to Ma.

She returns crying, her arms full of clothes. Pop is behind her, picking up dropped socks. He touches her shoulder.

“Don't!”
She flinches, dropping more things, stoops to collect them, drops even more, but when Kate goes to help her, she recoils and sweeps everything together with one majestic arm.

“You'd better get to work, girls,” she says, mocking them, as she carries her bundle down the steps to the car. By helping him, by sitting here on the porch with him, they have betrayed her. It is becoming difficult to trace the great web of betrayal, except to see that loyal Grace, who is still waiting for Pop in the Jeep, is caught at its center now.

“And don't tell me, Grace,” Ma says, “that we should all work together. This was your father's idea, and it's his job.”

“Which he can't do without
his
car,” Grace blurts.

Kate expects to hear her scolded for back talk, but Ma is so unhappy she cannot rise to authority.

“
I
paid for this car,” she says. “You're not coming, I gather.”

Grace looks quickly up to the porch at Pop, who doesn't move. “You're not
staying,
” she replies. It's an entreaty, but Ma turns away.

“I won't forget this, Grace,” she says, monumentally cold. She throws her things into the back of the Buick, gets in, and slams it into reverse.

The sound, as the two cars smack together, is not particularly loud among the day's other noises, and Kate can see Ma means to ignore it, but the Jeep rocks on its high wheels and lurches forward onto the lawn. From here it is a long, straight slope to the brook. The Jeep rolls slowly, stately, as in a dream, with Grace still inside.

“Step on the brake!” Kate yells, but of course Grace has never even tried to drive a car. She sits perfectly still, looking ahead of her toward the brook and the woods beyond. The bank is high, the Jeep unsteady…”

“Gracie, jump out!” Kate calls. Nothing happens, and no one else seems alarmed. They watch transfixed as the silent wheels press down the lawn, gathering speed, clipping off fat white peony blossoms as they go. Pop is looking at Ma as if this were another of their everyday spectacles, as if what happens will occur on her face. They think they are charmed, Kate thinks, safe in their Arcadian valley, apart from the world and time.

Perhaps they are right. The Jeep passes between the twin maples neatly as if someone were steering, and though it rocks as it goes over the bank, it does not tip. It turns with the current, seeming to begin a long journey, and floats a few feet before it becomes mired. Grace opens the door, takes off her shoes, and, holding up the hem of her dress, steps into the water, stopping to rinse the mud off her feet before she comes up the lawn.

“That's my Gracie, always cool,” Ma says, still mocking, but there is something—in her face, in her tone—a hint of amusement, of pride. She shakes her head; she almost smiles.

Pop leans back against one of the porch pillars, smiling for real.

“You see,” Kate whispers to Audie, “we'll never be rid of each other.” Life will go on with the same rages and sorrows, plans and disappointments, the same freedom among the leaves. And this is as it should be. Kate feels, finally, as if she has never been away, as if college were just another of those grand dreams from which you awake yourself still at home.

As soon as she sees Grace safe, though, Ma gets back into the Buick. Slowly now, with not a flourish, not a word, she backs around and drives away. For a moment Kate doesn't understand; then she sees—from Pop's and Audie's faces—that this is it at last, the real, quiet thing. When they can no longer hear the car, Pop drinks down his gin and goes inside.

“It's just that it isn't fair,” Grace says, coming up the porch steps, shoes in hand.

“We know, honey,” says Audie fondly. Even she seems suddenly uncertain, unprepared.

“This is rueful,” Kate thinks. “Now I am full of rue.” It is the hour of her old lonely ritual: she would escape them, after dinner, to walk around the upper field, looking down over the yellow-lit house in the valley with its spruce bulwark against an incandescent sky. She could feel infinitely tender toward the house and its dwellers, from her distant rise. For all her pursuit of the world beyond, her studies, this land, these people are all she really knows.