Wild Roses (23 page)

"It's like telling you to relax your
collarbone," Chuck said. His eyes were still closed. He didn't even notice the
foil ball tap his massive arm.

"Meanwhile, back at the legs," I said. I was
peeking. Ian was peeking too. It reminded me of the times when my parents were
still married and Dad made us go to church. Everyone else would just be praying
away while Mom and I were peeking at everyone.

"Legs like Jell-O," Bunny said.

"Lime. Yum, my favorite," Chuck
said.

Bunny ignored him. "And then your thighs. Warm
and heavy and relaxed. They've never been so relaxed. The warmth spreads to your
buttocks. ..."

This was getting a little embarrassing. In one
of my heights of emotional maturity, I started to laugh. It made me think of
Aaron Mills, during this science lesson. Mr. Robelard had told the class that
the cut of a rock was

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called a cleavage. After a few snickers, he
paused and then sternly told everyone that they had better just get all of their
laughs out right then. The class was dead silent, except for Aaron, who just sat
in his seat busting up, holding his stomach, he was laughing so hard.

Right then after the warm buttocks, car engines
began to spring to life around us, thank God. The ferry was loading, and so I'd
never get to find out how Bunny was going to handle what we were going to relax
next.

Chuck shook himself as if he had really fallen
asleep and was awakening back into the world. "Whew," he said. "Wow.
Rejuvenation." He seemed to really mean it. Bunny started the car, followed
Captain Ed onto the ferry, squeezing tight behind him. I was hoping we'd be able
to see what Captain Ed looked like, but no one got out and the windows were
tinted, and Bunny was already zipping up his coat and readying to leave our
car.

I could see the couple in the BMW next to us
staring at Chuck and Bunny as if they'd better lie low and pretend to be really
nice people until Chuck and Bunny got on the ferry, in spite of the fact that
Chuck's big butt bumped their side mirror as he tried to squeeze around the
Datsun to the ferry door. Already, the noise of the boat filled your ears to the
point of bursting, a thunderous roar that appeared to make the brain cells
expand to the outer edges of their living quarters. Chuck shouted something that
no one could hear, and then pretended to do sign language, moving his fingers in
a way that was hugely unpolitically correct and a nice lawsuit for the attorney
for the

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Deaf People Of America who was probably sitting
in the BMW whose mirror Chuck had just knocked askew with his ass.

We walked sideways until we got to the ferry
door, which Bunny opened with no problem at all in spite of the fact that those
doors usually weighed a thousand pounds. We were suctioned into the quiet of the
ferry stairwell.

"You going to be warm enough?" Ian
said.

"No problem." I was wearing my wool peacoat
from the army-navy surplus store, and you could be in an arctic blizzard in that
thing and feel toasty.

The ferry crossing from Seabeck to Seattle is
short, thirty minutes tops. Just long enough to have all of the ferry fun
without the ferry boredom. Chuck and Bunny sat in the restaurant and ate cheese
dogs while Ian and I made a tour of the decks and stood outside in the blasting
wind. We stepped out to the farthermost edge of the deck, just watching the
water rush at us from below. The land looked as if it was being brought to us,
per our instructions. We went inside again to get warm, and bumped into Chuck
and Bunny heading our way.

"You got to be outside when the ferry docks,"
Chuck said. "No matter how cold it is."

"It's like, you've got to take your shoes off
at the beach, no matter what. Same kind of law," Bunny said.

"Your guys' hair looks hilarious," Chuck
said.

I socked his arm. We walked out with them,
though, because they were right about the "laws." I'd add a few to theirs--you
had to roll the window down a little bit in the

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car wash, just to freak out your passenger, and
you had to yell wherever your voice would echo. Ian took my hand and put both of
ours in his coat pocket. We ducked our heads against the rush of wind that
attacked us as we opened the door, walked like Polar explorers to the edge of
the deck once more.

Ian put his arms around me from behind, and set
his chin by my neck. I let myself forget my drippy nose and the wind that was
blasting my face. I just let this good feeling, love, the amazing beauty around
us, overtake me. A red carpet of feeling began at my toes and unrolled and
filled my heart. I'd been so scared to hand myself over to someone like this,
but I'd gone ahead and done it. Love, this letting go, had snuck past the guards
and the attack dogs, and now here I was. I was certain that the experience would
be akin to putting on nylons (which, if you have any sense, you don't ever do),
in the way that when you first stick your foot in, they are going along fine,
lying pretty straight, but by the time they're pulled up, they're twisting
around hopelessly in some form of leg strangulation. But love hadn't turned out
like that. Standing there in the icy wind with Ian wasn't one bit that way. Here
was the feeling: delicious and exhilarating. Full to the tiniest
pieces.

Bunny was a hypocrite to talk about our hair.
You should have seen his. I pointed and laughed, another law. You must always
point and laugh when someone you really like's hair looks particularly funny, or
when they've spilled food in an embarrassing location on their clothes. "Hey,
Bozo the Clown," I said.

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"Hey, chick Einstein," he said back at me.
Okay, so, my hair was like something you pulled out of a clogged
drain.

"Is this amazing or what?" Chuck spread his arm
out over the waters of the sound like a game show host displaying the
washer-dryer combo.

"Group hug," Bunny said, although I suspect he
was just freezing and wanted warmth. He came over to us, wrapped his bear-size
paws around Ian and me. Chuck came around the other side and did the same. It
was nice and warm in there. My nose was smushed up against Ian's chest, and his
breath was warm in my hair. I still had a view of the city fast approaching. It
was a display of building blocks set up by a genius child, or maybe by his
parent after he'd gone to bed. They seemed like they had just been plunked down,
rectangles and triangles and squares. It was bright and shiny, the sun hitting
glass. We were being delivered to the door, like Dorothy and gang at the gates
of the Emerald City.

"Tell me how life gets any better than this,"
Bunny said. "What could you do to improve this moment?"

And he was right. In spite of the fact that I
was squeezed and frozen and had to use the bathroom, he was 100 percent right. I
couldn't believe it. I loved my mother and I loved my father, but there in that
circle I felt something I hadn't for a long time. It was that something I'd been
missing, that I'd been longing for without even realizing it. It was a sense of
family. That's what it was. My throat closed up, got so tight I felt like I
might cry. You

206

just get to missing that so much, that feeling
of everything in its right place. You just feel that loss so deeply that you
don't ever give it a name. A hot tear rolled down my cheek. I couldn't believe I
was crying, but I just let the tears come. There was so much unexpected emotion
that it needed somewhere to go. So much love and pain and absence and cut,
living roots. And here, unexpectedly, something to fill that space. You just
never knew where you might find your kindred ones. Usually you just walk and
walk among people who are not of your tribe, and then suddenly, there you are,
in a place that feels familiar and known.

I took my arms out from the middle and reached
around this wide group. I hugged back, patted a tattoo.

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CHAPTER ELEVEN

Ian stuck a ferry schedule from one of the
racks into his pocket on the way back to the car. Everyone squeezed in their
vehicles and the guys in the orange vests unhooked the chains so that the cars
could ba-bamp, ba-bamp off of the ferry. Captain Ed headed off in the direction
opposite us. Ian's mind was obviously still on his lessons, and as we drove
through the city and headed onto the freeways toward the mountain passes, I
could see him looking at the time, watching for the point we'd have to turn back
around before he'd be late.

"It's still early," I said.

"If I miss, Dino'll kill me, is
all."

"Aren't you ready enough? You've been
practicing nonstop for weeks. How much better can your pieces get?"

208

"Ix-nay on the violin-talk-say" Bunny said. And
I thought I was the only one who could never get the hang of pig
Latin.

"Dino says I'm uneven. I go from brilliant to
shit, in his words. My partita is weak." Bach's Partita No. 3 in E Major. One of
his hardest audition pieces, far as I could understand. He explained to me that
his performance was supposed to demonstrate that he could handle different
styles from different time periods, multi-movement pieces, and technically
difficult ones. The Bach was in the last category.

"Dino will kill you in the process," I
said.

"He's halfway there, if you ask me," Chuck
said. "Anyone else hungry? I got Corn Nuts."

"This is a day off from violins," I said. "What
have you got, barbeque or ranch?"

"Both," Chuck said.

"Yum," I said. I popped my hand over the seat
when the foil bag appeared, and Chuck shook some into my palm.

"There can't be days off until after the
audition." Ian watched the speeding scenery. We had driven over one of Lake
Washington's floating bridges, long concrete air mattresses that connected
Seattle to its suburbs. Then we had passed the wide expanse of Lake Sammamish,
which sat to our left, the second lake in five minutes. Mount Rainier was on our
right. It looked as if it had been plunked down in the middle of civilization,
and not the other way around. That's how we talk about it too. On sunny
days

209

when it's visible we say, "The mountain is
out," as if a crew of burly guys haul it out only on occasion.

The speed limit had started to increase, and so
did the amount of trucks, most of which were piled high with loads of huge,
bound tree trunks. We passed the point where humans had sprawled, which meant
you started to see only towns with one gas station and a cemetery, bringing to
mind the obvious question of where the latter got its customers. Maybe you'd see
one or two houses every zillion miles, and you wonder what they do when they run
out of milk, and what they do for fun. Watch the rust grow on the broken
tractor? Stir up some excitement with another UFO report?

"So when do you get a day off?" Bunny asked.
"When you're the best in your class? When you win more awards? When
you--"

"Quit it," Ian interrupted. "Why are you making
me wrong, here?"

"I'm not making you wrong," Bunny said. "I'm
making your mother wrong."

"I don't think that's fair," Ian said. "And you
know it's not." There was a bite to his voice. Dino's own words flashed in my
mind. Shut this child up about my mother! Was this the secret to genius violin
playing? Unresolved mother issues?

"I don't know it," Bunny said. "Everyone's got
their own journey. This is about her pride."

"What? What's going on?" I asked. "Is your
mother a frustrated musician?"

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"She doesn't even know?" Bunny said. "Shut up,
Bun."

"You don't share these details with your
girlfriend?" Bunny said.

"I said, shut up." "What's going
on?"

"I like the ranch better than the barbeque,"
Chuck said, crunching.

"What, are you ashamed?" Bunny said.

"What?" I said. I took Ian's hand.

"It's just, my family's situation."

"Your mother's situation," Bunny said. "She's
broke. Way beyond broke. Seventy thousand dollars in debt."

"God damn it, Bunny. Shit."

"She should at least know what this is all
about. Don't you know anything about communication?"

"The biggest stumbling block to a healthy
relationship. Next to sex," Chuck said.

"Why didn't you tell me?" I said.

"They lived in their car for a few weeks in
California before I heard about it," Bunny said.

"Enough, okay?" Ian said. "Enough." His face
was red. He had let go of my hand and was combing his fingers through his
hair.

"And child raising," Chuck said.
"Communication, number one. Sex, number two. Child raising, number
three."

"They were kicked out of their apartment. They
used the bathrooms in fast food places."

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Ian covered his eyes with one hand. "Shit,
Bunny," he said. I thought he might cry. I took his hand. The car got quiet. The
kind of quiet that hurt.

"I'm so sorry," I whispered. "You could have
told me." The words caught in my throat in the way a lie does. I thought about
Dino's craziness. All the things I never could say out loud. I thought about
saying it right then, but something stopped me. Being poor was one thing.
Creeping around in bushes because you think you're being followed and almost
setting the house on fire is another.