Rosebush (23 page)

Chapter 20

I didn’t dream that
night. When I woke up at ten in the morning, I felt better, more alert than I had in a long time. The Robert Frost dog was nestled beneath my chin.

Dr. Connolly had visited me the previous evening and declared my progress “nearly miraculous,” and I hadn’t had any more hallucinations. I dared to imagine I might really be on the mend.

When Loretta brought in my breakfast, I saw a box next to my bed. “Delivered this morning early,” she said. I reached out and pulled it onto my lap, delighted by the simple act of using my arms. It wasn’t wrapped, and when I opened it, there was a porcelain doll inside.

A doll with dark hair dressed like a fairy. Like I had been the night of the party. It was holding a rose in one hand. I lifted out the note:

As I picked up the doll, her head rolled off onto the floor and cracked open.

My mother’s perfectly lined lips were tight. “Jane, don’t be absurd. Someone went to all the trouble of making a doll that looks like you. It was a lovely gesture, not a menacing one. There’s no need to call in a security team.”

“Really? A doll whose head falls off and breaks the minute I touch it? That’s not lovely, that’s voodoo.”

Her blonde bob hardly moved as my mother shook her head. “I’m worried about this growing paranoia,” she said to Joe, as though I wasn’t there. “Maybe we should talk to Dr. Tan again.”

“I can call him if you want,” Joe offered.

My hands were clenched. “Yes, let’s bring in someone to tell you what you want to hear rather than what I’m saying.” I felt tears starting to prick my eyes. I was tired, so tired of being doubted, of not remembering. Of doubting myself. “Why can’t you listen to me?” I demanded. “Why can’t you believe in me? I mean, believe me.”

My mother ignored my revision. “Of course I believe in you, Jane.” She came over to stand next to me. “I know you can do anything you want. You’re my brilliant, beautiful girl.”

For a moment, a split second, I felt as though my mom—the one who put on Band-Aids and promised everything would be all right—was there again with me. I looked up and I saw her the same way I did the first day of kindergarten, the way I did when Amerigo the turtle died and we buried him, her face a map of love and concern and care. The mom who used to let me curl up and rock with her on the old hammock under the tree in the backyard while she read, until she dozed off and her glasses would slide down between us. We still had the hammock, but it wasn’t out anymore. No one had time for it.

Gazing at her now, I whispered, “I’m scared, Mom. Everything is wrong. I’m scared of what I can’t remember and I’m scared of what I will remember. Everyone seems discombobulated.”

And like the mom of my memories, she said, “I know, darling.” She put her hand on mine and squeezed. It was a wonderful feeling. “I know it’s hard.” We stayed like that for a minute and I felt a sense of calm, of lightness growing inside of me that had been eluding me. I didn’t have to do this alone. She was here with me. For me. We’d face this, whatever it was, together.

She said, “And that’s why we should get Dr. Tan up here to help you. So you can distinguish what is real and what isn’t. And then you’ll be good as new.”

She pulled her hand away to move toward the phone and I felt like a weight had dropped onto my chest. My eyes went to my empty hand.

I don’t need Dr. Tan, I need you,
I wanted to say.

I said instead, “You don’t have to call him. I’m fine.”

“You will be.” She dialed his extension on my room phone and from the tone of her voice I could tell she’d gotten his voice mail. “Dr. Tan, this is Rosalind Freeman. I was hoping you could come and have another chat with my daughter. She’s a bit agitated this morning and I think a talk with you would cheer her right up.” She smiled at me as she spoke.

Yes, that was what I needed. To be cheered up. Because being sad, feeling things, was some kind of sin.

She hung up with what sounded like a sigh of relief. “There, now we have the experts working on it.”

She’d just cradled the phone when Annie came barreling into the room. “Jane, look.” She rushed toward my bed, waving the porcelain doll aloft like a trophy. “Loretta and I fixed her.” The doll now had a small bandage wrapped around her head, holding the two sides together, and a crack across her skull. “She’s even more like you now.”

“Great,” I said. “That doesn’t enhance her creepiness at all.”

“Jane,” my mother said warningly. She turned to Annie. “That’s adorable, darling.”

“Her name is Robert,” Annie announced, her face wreathed in proud smiles.

“Robert?” I asked. “She doesn’t really look like a Robert to me. Are you sure?”

“Yes, she told me. And she says she comes in peace.”

I laughed unexpectedly, suddenly realizing how much I’d missed having Annie around the day before.

“How was your time with Dora yesterday?” I asked her.

“It was fun. We played family vacation. Dora plays it different than I do.”

“How do you play?”

“My way the family gets in a station wagon and goes to see the world’s biggest ball of yarn and the dad reads out loud and the mother yells at the people on the radio even though they can’t hear her and the sisters sit in the back and the big sister listens to music and the little sister tries to find license plates from every state on the cars they pass. And sometimes the big sister helps her.”

Annie was describing the last family vacation we’d had before my father died, right down to the cursing at the political talk shows on the radio.

“And how does Dora play?”

“In Dora’s they go to Casa del Campo, which is made of Kleenex boxes—but only the silver and gold ones. There’s only Dora and Mother and Ollie, and Mother spends all day at the pool meeting people and Ollie is in charge of making sure Dora eats lunch and has things to do. And at night Dora offers her mother’s guests cocktails. And sometimes Mother and Ollie fight about why Mother never spends any time with Dora.”

“That
is
different. Where’s Dora’s father?”

“He died a long time ago. But it’s okay because her brother is the Man of the House and takes really good care of her and they play great games. But when he fights with their mother, he gets sent home, where he hangs out with his nice girlfriend Angel Face.”

“Oh.” I’d had no idea that Ollie’s father was dead or that like me, he had a single mom. Although his mom didn’t sound exactly like mine. For that matter, the Ollie that played nicely with his sister and was the Man of the House didn’t sound like the Ollie I knew at all. I wondered how much of this story was real and how much was make-believe.

Annie nodded. “But he and Angel Face are keeping it a secret because she says it’s more exciting that way and why would they want the whole school knowing their business.”

That, I guessed, was made up because Ollie was definitely not dating someone at our school.

I decided to change the subject. “What’s it like at their house?”

“Mostly we just played by ourselves or with Rasheena—she’s the nanny. But then at dinnertime Dora’s mother came down from her nap. She is very worn out. She told us all about Charles Dickens, about how he was her favorite writer and that’s why she named Oliver and Dora what she did because they were characters in a book by him. I pretended I didn’t know about Charles Dickens even though of course I do because I’m not a baby.”

Charles Dickens had been one of the authors Annie always wanted our father to read to her at story time, and in the year before he died, he’d finally acquiesced, telling her it was because she wasn’t a baby anymore. Since then she’d read his entire set on her own.

“Sounds like quite a day.”

“It was.” She leaned in to whisper. “We did something naughty.”

“What was it?”

Her cheeks got red and her eyes were huge behind the lenses of her glasses. “You have to promise not to tell.”

“I promise.”

“We snuck into Ollie’s room.”

I worked to match her solemn tone. “What was it like?”

“He has a picture of you on his dresser.”

“Of me?”

“You with Kate and Langley and David.”

“That makes sense. We’re his friends.”

“And he has girls’ underwear. A whole drawer of it. All from that fancy store that Langley was talking about last time she came over. The one with the pink tags.”

The weirdness of the revelation that Ollie collected Agent Provocateur underwear was overshadowed by the fact that somehow Annie could hear what went on in my bedroom. “Were you spying on us?”

“No. You didn’t have the door closed. All the way.”

I would have to remember that when I got home.

“And he had all these toys that you can use to listen to other people’s conversations. Dora says it’s because their family is in surveillance. They’re really cool. One of them looks like a cigarette pack and one of them is a Diet Coke can and there’s a plant and a stick of gum. There’s one that looks just like the telescope in Joe’s office.”

It would not have surprised me at all if Joe had our entire house wired for security. And what she was telling me about Ollie and his surveillance toys didn’t surprise me either.

Once in the early days of my dating David, Ollie had offered me a ride home in his car. I said yes because having my boyfriend’s best friend like me seemed like a good idea. Even then Ollie made me a little uncomfortable, but I was determined to make a good impression. So when he said, “Want to hear something cool?” I was enthusiastic.

“It’s a little out there,” he added.

“That’s good, I like out there.”

He flipped through a few tracks on his iPod, hit play.

“Gimme a venti skim misto with light foam,” a Brooklyn accent said. Behind it I made out a woman’s voice saying, “No, the poodle gets the blow out, the Lab just needs ribbons,” and someone playing the bongos.

“What is that?”

“The sound environment,” he said. “Starbucks. Try this one.”

“…so when someone thought to posit the possibility of the square root of negative one, it changed the face of…” said the voice of Dr. Reed, our calculus teacher.

“You recorded that at school.”

“Everywhere.” He smiled a little oddly. “Listen to this one.”

“…hotter than you said and he
so
has a crush on you.” It was Kate’s voice.

“No way. We’re just friends. And he thinks I live on autofocus.” That was me.

“Whatever that means,” I heard Langley’s voice say.

I couldn’t keep the shock out of my own voice. “That was last weekend. You taped us? In New York? How?”

Ollie hit stop quickly. “Technology. I tape everyone. I call them portraits. One day I’m going to put them together into a symphony.”

I forgot about trying to make him like me. “That’s spying.”

“No, it’s art. Louis Armstrong did it all the time. He was famous for it. Bellhops, people in his house, everyone.”

“It’s sick.”

“That’s a heavy word.”

“If people knew you did this—” I started.

“They wouldn’t care. People like to hear themselves. Plus I know you won’t tell anyone; it would ruin the naturalness. I mean, listen.”

He hit play again and I heard Langley saying, “Anyway, we’re right and you’re wrong. Did you tell him about your date with David?”

Me: It didn’t come up.

Kate: Right. That seems probable since it’s the only thing you’ve been talking about all week.

Me: Ha. Maybe Scott and I just have more important things to—

Ollie stopped the recording. “Incidentally, be careful with that Scott guy. He dated a friend of mine and she said he was weird. He had these little trophies he’d collected from one of his girlfriends and was generally a little creepy.”

Takes one to know one,
I thought.

He smiled at me and pointed to the tape. “Great stuff, right?”

“Yeah—great,” I agreed. I had the uneasy feeling that I had just entered into a dangerous bargain.

“I knew you’d understand if you just thought about it,” he said, patting me on the shoulder. His touch made me want to recoil. “I mean, really it’s no different than you taking a picture of someone.”

I couldn’t believe he was comparing my work to his perverse hobby. I said stiffly, “People pose for my pictures.”

“If you think people aren’t posing when they’re in public, you’re more naive than I imagined, Jane Freeman.”