Wild Roses (26 page)

"I'm worried about Mom," I said to Dad when he
came into my room to say goodnight.

"She's strong, Cassie. I think she can handle
things," he said.

"I know. But sometimes she doesn't ... I don't
know. See."

"She is one of the most logical people I know,"
he said. "Even if she isn't showing it at the moment."

He was right about that. "She's logical, but
then suddenly she gets carried away with a burst of passionate feeling," I said.
I was thinking about her own cello playing, her methodical practicing, her sane
musicianship. But then I would see her listening to Dino play, the way she
closed her eyes and let him bring her to where she couldn't go herself. Like me,
I realized. Great, like Ian and me.

231

"It'd be good if you could have passion without
it having you," my father said. He was lost for a moment in his own thoughts.
Memories, I'm sure, that he didn't want to share with me. And then one memory he
did want to share. "Remember when Mom cut the bushes into the shapes of
animals?"

"Tried to cut the bushes into the shapes of
animals."

"Talk about getting carried away. She just had
this sudden idea and whacked away at the poor plants. When I got home, they'd
been massacred."

"One really did look like a rabbit."

"You've got to be kidding. A Picasso
rabbit."

"And then this one time? She was teaching me to
drive," I said. "We were in Seattle. She was doing really well. Not freaking out
or anything. She sat there with her hands in her lap and only pushing her foot
to the floor mat when she thought I needed to brake. Then we got onto the
freeway. I'm trying to merge, right? And this big truck is coming."

"Oh, God," Dad laughed.

"She suddenly screams, 'Oh, shit, FLOOR IT!'
Always good advice for the beginning driver."

"I think that's in the traffic-safety manual,"
he said. "I practically wet my pants."

"Holy shoot!" Dad laughed. He shook his head,
but it was a loving shake, not a critical one. It was strange to be talking like
that about her, the two of us, but good, too. Nice. You got so used to keeping
both parties separate, Mom here, Dad there, trying to be sensitive to
everyone's

232

feelings, that it sometimes got exhausting. No,
it always got exhausting. Trying to keep track of the separate piles of emotions
and what was to be kept where. Don't talk to Dad about this part of your life;
don't mention to Mom about that. Dad will be hurt if he knew we had a good time.
Mom will be hurt to know I tried something new when she wasn't there. Dad will
be hurt at Mom's new car/vacation/home/baby/
clothes/guinea pig. Mom will be
hurt at the things Dad's family said about her. Even if they told you a thousand
times that there was nothing you needed to hide, that they were both okay about
sharing all parts of your life (chapter three in the bestselling Divorced
Parenting for Dummies), you could still see those brief flashes of feeling pass
over their faces. A jealous look, a hurt one. And even if they were sometimes
okay at hiding the snide comments, you could still see the feeling there, raw
and exposed.

It was good right then, talking with Dad. Just
having everything in one pile and it all being okay. Not having to walk the
loyalty tightrope. Just for us all being able to love each other in the
complicated ways of a family. For one moment we had that thing that I will go
out on a limb and say that every divorced kid wants, this sense of family that
is still family even if apart.

The possibility of it was sweet, but then it
was gone. The human condition again.

"I worry about her too," my father
said.

"I know you do."

"The thing I wouldn't tell you?"

"Yeah?"

233

"She doesn't even know the whole
story."

"What?"

"About Dino."

I scooted up in bed. Again, I didn't want to
know. A sick warning urge was creeping up my insides, but racing along with it
was this adrenaline-fueled desire to hear what he was about to say Maybe it was
the same kind of desire little kids felt with the box of matches in their
hands.

"What? Just tell me."

"I know now for sure. He's not who he says he
is." "Who is he then?"

"I don't know the whole story, but I know this.
There was no Dino Cavalli born in or around Sabbotino Grappa, then or
ever."

"No way. What about all of those people?
They've all told their stories. You've read them."

"I don't know. Group hysteria. The desire to be
part of the greatness. Reporters coming to this small town and livening things
up. Maybe they've come to believe it themselves. Maybe the attention has just
become too much fun to give up."

"No. The fig trees, his beautiful mother, the
tossing him bread as he played ..."

"Fiction. All fiction. Good fiction, a great
story. But a lie."

"I can't believe it."

"Believe it. Cassie, there was no Cavalli
family in Sabbotino Grappa."

234

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I made him prove it to me, the things he said
about Dino. I wanted to believe in Honoria Maretta, and the Bissola sisters, in
lemon trees, and a small boy who made a tiny village happy with his
playing.

And apparently the few people of Sabbotino
Grappa wanted to believe it too. Whether it happened or not, they were pleased
to go along. Same with Edward Reynolds, who must have found out the truth
somewhere along the writing of his book. Because there was no Cavalli family in
Sabbotino Grappa and there never had been. I didn't know yet what that
information meant to me, or what I would do with it, but I did know one thing:
my mother wasn't the only one who had fallen in love with an image.

I stayed with Dad long enough to get annoyed
when he used up all the hot water when he took a shower and

235

watched way too much of the History Channel at
volumes loud enough to make you duck when the allied forces stormed in with guns
firing. After the third day when he made my bed for me, I was actually longing
for my old routine at Mom's. I missed my routine, even though I did not miss my
mother's husband, the psycho liar, the evil stepfather, the Anti-Mr. Brady--Mike
Brady with hair grown out and psychological issues and a cigarette. Which brings
to mind another inane and mostly irrelevant side note, and that is that The
Brady Bunch has got to beat out Lord of the Rings in terms of the best in sci-fi
fantasy. I mean, the kids call their steps Mom and Dad, which we know you'd
never do, unless you harbored a death wish or an all-out hatred for your own
mother or father. They also never mention their missing parents. What about
Carol Brady's first husband? Was he a drunk, a wife beater, or merely dead? And
what about Greg, Peter, and Bobby's mother? Adulteress that ran off with Mr.
Partridge Family? Decided she was a lesbian and started a new life? Career woman
in another state? Also merely dead? And did no one long for their mom or dad? No
photos by the bedside, visits to the cemetery, longings to be remembered at
Christmas? For God's sake, no one has an attorney. No one even goes to a
therapist!

Anyway. Things right then were fairly peaceful
but irritating at Dad's. Add to the equation the fifty times a day that Dad
said, "I think it's sad what your mother has done to her life," (meaning: what
she'd done to his) or "Divorce is such a crime" (meaning: he had nothing to do
with it)

236

or "What did she expect?" (meaning: she got
what she deserved). I hated the thought of being back with Dino, but I missed
Mom and my room and my stuff. I missed the smell of my own pillow.

I talked to Mom on the phone, and she seemed
really tired but okay Okay enough that when she said she thought things were
calm enough for me to come back, I went, in spite of Dad's protests. The concert
was only a few short weeks away. And Dino had accepted the whole "Ian thing,"
according to her. It seemed amazing, miraculous and completely doubtful, but I
went home anyway There was a piece of me, too, that felt I could miss Ian better
at home. I could miss him more thoroughly, being surrounded by places we had
been together. I was beginning to feel that my missing him was all I had of him,
and so I wanted it.

I went home the day before Ian had been
scheduled to fly out to Philadelphia for his audition at Curtis. I called him
again when I got home. His mother answered, and I hung up. I hurt without him.
My heart felt like a cave, dug out, dark. I couldn't understand why he wouldn't
call me, why we couldn't just talk. My fear was that he'd never forgive me, and
I pictured him with his cast, hating me with the intensity I felt I deserved. I
missed the feeling on the ferry, before it all turned bad that day I missed the
feeling of being where you belonged.

I avoided Dino as much as I could. He avoided
me, or else was avoiding everything that wasn't music. He didn't eat, didn't
appear to sleep, only built up the cigarette butts in coffee cups and saucers.
He only said one thing to me

237

all of that first day. Turn the handle of the
door when you shut it, he had said. It makes less noise. I avoided Mom, too, but
for a different reason. I was carrying around this knowledge of Dino that Dad
had given me, and it kept bumping between us. I was afraid that if I looked too
long at Mom she might see it there in my eyes, or feel it between us in the
room. I just lugged this secret around, and how she couldn't see it there, I
don't know. It was huge and ugly and powerful. And I kept it close to me, my
weapon. This stockpiled bomb that somewhere inside I was sure I would use when
the enemy most threatened.

The days were hollow and vast as the sky that I
saw through my telescope on those nights, though empty of any of the life that
was also out there, stars dying and being born before your eyes, the life cycle
taken to its outer edges of time and place. I had all of the vastness, none of
the fire. Zebe and Sophie and Brian and Nat were all in rehearsal period for
Anything Goes, which made things even lonelier. In English class, I sat for an
hour as Aaron Urling read his poems aloud. Eleven haiku poems on Darth Vader.
Father and Son. Bonded by Blood. Eternal Destruction. He had two light sabers in
his belt as he read. My visual aids, he told the teacher. He snickered to his
friends. He thought he was a real crack-up. In science we took a walk in the
forest on school grounds to measure distances from trees, and Mr. Robelard
called us back in with an elk call. I'm not kidding. It sounded like he was
giving birth.

A week and a half until the concert. A week. No
Ian. I didn't blame him for hating me.

238

Your own small universe moves on in surreal
ways when you feel a crisis building, building. And when your sanctuary is gone.
Walking home, I got stuck having a conversation with Courtney about split ends.
Our neighbor, Mr. Frederici, left an angry message that Dog William, in an
apparent act of outburst over the withdrawal of the object of his love, had
gotten into the Frederici garbage can and spread litter all over his yard. The
catsup bottle fell out of the fridge when I was getting some milk and spilled
out in a blobby smear of goriness. Life just keeps ticking along.

I invited Siang over. I should have been trying
harder than ever to keep her away. Dino's intensity was focused on his music,
same as a kid focusing reflected sunrays from a mirror onto paper, hoping it
will burst into flames. But it was comforting having Siang around. It reminded
me of the simple days when Dino was merely a jerk and Siang would come over and
steal his orange peels for her mini-tabletop shrine.

"My father said he's had to give up lattes for,
like, six months to afford the concert tickets," Siang said. I had made
brownies, hoping to drown my sorrows in three zillion fat calories, and we were
taking chunks and eating them out of the pan. I had the feeling that Siang never
did these kinds of things. First, she was thin as a sheet of foil, and second,
she was going at them like she'd been lost at sea on a rubber dinghy for
months.

"Slow down," I said to her. "If you choke, I'm
not so hot at Heimlich. I was absent that day in health. I might

239

dislodge something you need, you know, like a
larynx. What concert?"

"Cassie! The world premiere of Mr. Cavalli's
new work!"

"It was a joke. Six months with no lattes? That
is so sad. That's like some fairy tale where some woman cuts her hair to buy
bread. You should have told me. Maybe I could have helped."

"Those tickets have been sold out for almost a
year," Siang said.

"I'm sure we could have done
something."

"Wow. Do you know how many people would die to
be in your place? Or even mine, sitting in here in his kitchen, eating off his
plate?"

"You're bypassing the plate, far as I can
tell," I said.

"You probably didn't see the article in
Newsweek. Or the New York Timesl famed composer chooses smaller venue to unveil
new work?"