Chapter 80 Rosemary
Rosemary
Rosemary McDonnell had never fallen before, not once, despite having been an age where falls are common for some time.
Claire had fallen at their weekly bridge game, and Shelley had fallen at the largest fundraiser of the year.
She’d even had to be rushed out by paramedics—hit her head or something, it was all very dramatic and, frankly, typical for Shelley—but not Rosemary. She considered every step she took.
Until now.
“Let me see that.”
Lorraine gave her a quizzical look but passed her Callum’s jacket. The feel of it in her hands took her back in time.
She got out of her chair while Maureen and Lorriane fought on and on. She slipped her feet into her good-traction shoes and pressed against the door.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Rosemary turned to look at her oldest daughter—the one most like her, perhaps. They would have to pin her down to halt her steps now. “I’m going after her.”
When Rosemary was a younger woman, she played tennis against the other girls at the club dressed in pressed white skirts—perfectly pleated without a wrinkle or spot.
With each win, she earned a nod of approval from her mother and, if she was lucky, a passing grunt of acknowledgment from her father.
Rosemary barely broke a sweat as she played every morning, and she’d glance at the balcony dripping in bloodred bougainvillea where the mothers were drinking mimosas, hoping hers would nod.
One night Rosemary was walking home from a show with a bachelor from the club—who was perfectly reasonable, if entirely bland—when she felt like she was struck by lightning.
Callum stumbled out of a pack of men with shirts and jackets made loose with whatever activities young men do that young women didn’t speak of, and their eyes met.
She felt something hot and urgent rip through her—like a tether in the center of her had been excavated and tied to the center of him. Callum walked right up to Rosemary, and she pulled her hand from the man who had paid for the fur coat she was wearing to place it in Callum’s instead.
But it was neither love nor lust that made her run away with him.
It wasn’t even the way Callum spun magic out of words, or the way the wild sea and sky of Scotland poured out of him in his passions.
In truth, Rosemary married Callum McDonnell because of the look on her mother’s face and the sharp glint of her father’s attention when their daughter invited an untamed poet for dinner.
She married him because her parents noticed.
Now, squinting at the slippery trail that led to the cliffside, Rosemary felt a seething anger toward her younger self.
“Stupid girl, Rose,” she hissed under her breath, picking her way carefully up the path toward her granddaughter. “Look what you’ve done.”
Delilah’s silhouette was the spitting image of the girl Rosemary used to be—dark against the twilight sky and the silver streak of the Scottish sea.
She couldn’t count the number of times in her young life she’d sat just there, tennis ankles dangling over the crescent strip of land, watching it be swallowed at high tide.
Oh, she thought with a devastating suddenness, it never stops.
“Delilah!” she called. “You’ll catch your death!”
For a moment, Delilah only stared blankly.
Something was broken, and it was Rosemary’s job to fix it.
“Grandma? What are you doing out here? You’ll slip!”
She came alive again and jogged toward Rosemary without any idea of how young she really was. The wineglass she’d taken was sloshing as she moved, spilling through her fingers despite her attempt to cover it with her hand.
“Oh, hush.” Rosemary waved her concern away. “You’re wasting good wine. We’ll need it to stay warm.”
“We should go in. It’s too dark.”
Even in the last of the light, Rosemary could see the mascara-streaked skin under Delilah’s eyes, so pale against her freckles.
When she was just a child, all innocence and ideas and magic, Rosemary would watch Delilah sleep sometimes.
Her eyes would dart through the land of her dreams as that delicate skin moved with her adventures—the same freckles, like they’d been blown out of the palm of a passing god, landing carelessly on a little girl who would carry the marks her whole life.
When Rosemary was a little girl, her mother had kept a long tape measure in her nightstand, and every day, after she brushed her teeth and before breakfast, her mother would wrap it around her and mark down the numbers in a small notebook.
Mother adjusted meals. She made her clothes that fit and flattered her figure.
She cared so deeply about Rosemary’s body, about her rightness, and she spent a great amount of time dedicated to the pursuit.
It wasn’t an easy job. Rosemary was born with a certain unruliness about her.
Her body insisted on getting bigger whenever she wasn’t in strict control.
Her mind seemed to wander. She wanted so badly to be a good daughter, but she had bad thoughts of disobeying constantly. She was, it seemed, at her core, wrong.
Of course her mother loved her. It wasn’t Mother’s fault that Rosemary was too soft, and her critiques could cut Rosemary to the bone.
She spent a lifetime trying to make Rosemary acceptable to a good man so she could focus on bringing up a family, and that was a safe, neat life.
Her mother only wanted Rosemary to be safe.
But she couldn’t keep her daughter safe from the cottage by the sea and her own reckless heart.
Callum was loud and alive—a riot of color, sound, and bloodrush.
Under the neons of Hollywood Boulevard or the flickering firelight of a cottage pounded with Scottish rain, Rosemary had never seen someone so beautiful.
She marveled at his poetry—how he could reach into the air, pluck a feeling or fear from the sky, and translate it into words that gave voice to the great task of being alive.
Callum spoke the language of the heart in a way that Rosemary never could, but when he translated it for her, it was a sacred intimacy.
Like he was a prophet with precisely one disciple.
Yes, in the early days of their marriage in the cottage by the sea, Rosemary McDonnell was in love.
But her mother still needed her, and they had to return home.
Against the cold, white marble, Callum looked less like a person and more like a blemish.
His laughter rattled. His muddy boots left imprints in the foyer.
His filthy jacket lay draped across the back of a chair—a streak of gore in the pristine gallery of her mother’s perfection.
Under Mother’s gaze, Callum’s touch made Rosemary flinch.
In the California mornings, Rosemary would wake with Callum’s arm draped across her. She would roll away to slip on her robe, her slippers, and report to her mother’s room.
That was how she found out she was pregnant for the first time.
Rosemary’s hips and waist measurements had grown by a full inch.
Mother placed a hand on either shoulder.
For a moment, Rosemary believed her mother might kiss her, might hold her close.
But her mother was not a woman who indulged in the guilty pleasures of womanhood—the giddiness and the gaudiness of things.
She was practical and efficient, and so was her love.
What she whispered into Rosemary’s ear was kind, really. She was right, after all. Rosemary had thrown away everything on a whim, and now there was certainly no going back.
It was the first time she regretted marrying Callum McDonnell.
The day they were told their second child would be a second daughter, Callum did not come to bed.
In the early hours, as she picked up the wooden horses and doll clothes, she found him snoring at his desk.
The empty bottle of whisky and the tipped glass stained the pages of his notebook amber and confirmed what she already knew.
Callum’s handwriting tumbled across the paper.
She could feel the roiling heat of him left burning in ink.
She almost recoiled as it sparked against her hand.
Had Rosemary been able to understand, she might not have decided she no longer loved Callum McDonnell that day.
She might have remembered the man who had once said she was the only thing with a tide he would follow, damn the moon and its light, as he kissed her on the cliffside of a dark and raging sea.
But Callum spoke the language of the riotous, windswept heart.
If he didn’t translate, Rosemary couldn’t hear him clearly.
By the time she decided she no longer loved him, she hadn’t heard him clearly in years.
Callum had never helped in Rosemary’s considerable effort to teach their first daughter the way that girls must behave by the time Maureen arrived.
He resented Rosemary for every cookie snatched off a plate, every stubborn hair pinned, every denied request to play in the dirt.
Let her be, he would beg, insisting that Lorraine didn’t need any changing.
But Callum didn’t know what it was like to be a woman in the world.
Callum had no idea at all.
If Lorraine was a molehill, Maureen was born a mountain. Messy, loud, and hot—all pink cheeks and full-chested wailing. Lorraine’s soft brown eyes would widen like a doe’s while Maureen threw food off her high chair or tore bows from her hair.
Rosemary hadn’t loved him for some time by the time Callum came to her with his tail between his legs and uttered the word divorce.
Still, she raged against it. Why should he get to call her a failure?
She’d done everything right! She’d pushed him into getting a respectable job, she’d given birth to his children and raised them.
She’d even turned a blind eye on Callum’s affairs.
And Rosemary had had her chance with someone, too!
Someone who made her wish she’d met him first. But it was Callum who had found her, and Rosemary did the right thing.
They screamed in the bedroom of the cottage, which was leaking and musty no matter the season.
When they finally stood panting, staring hatefully at each other across the mattress where they’d spent their first night as lovers, she heard the quiet sob of her eldest daughter beyond the door.
Lorraine sat on the kitchen chair with her knees pulled up to her chest and her doe eyes shiny.
Maureen stood in front of her with her arms spread like a guardian, glaring at Rosemary with Callum’s eyes.
Rosemary was yelling before she could think. “I told you not to track mud into the kitchen! Look what you’ve done!”
Lorraine made a yelping sound like a dog and buried her head into her knees. Maureen snarled her lip and narrowed her eyes—burning blue coals set too deep in the cherub face she should have already outgrown.
“It’s okay, girls,” Callum drawled softly, as though he hadn’t spit venom moments before. “Your da will clean it up. Go play!”
He stepped between Rosemary and her children, and she felt a hatred twitch from elbow to fingertip.
Maureen ran from her place in front of her older sister and flung her arms around her father’s legs, burying her head into the soft layers of fabric he patched and never replaced.
Callum bent down and kissed the top of Maureen’s auburn head, which was already losing its penny undertone, closer each day to a muted brown.
“Go on, you,” he said. Maureen walked to the door and put a hand on the knob.
“Lolo,” she called, and cleared her throat as her small voice gave. “Come on.”
Lorraine watched her mother, trembling, thin, and unmoving.
Callum hissed, “Do you see, Rosemary? Do you see what you’ve done?”
She loathed him. “Go and play hero, Callum.”
He ran a hand through his sandy hair and took the smallest step back from her. “Who are you?”
Rosemary’s voice was steel. “I am their mother.”
Callum took Maureen outside, and Rosemary was left with Lorraine. She slid from the chair, went to the cupboard where they kept the broom and dustbin, and whispered, “I’m sorry, Mama.” Then she began to cry.
Many, many years later, young Delilah came into the cottage from the cold, covered in blood and mud without a single tear.
“Reckless girl!” Lorraine barked, pushing Delilah into the kitchen chair rather more forcefully than she needed. “Look what you’ve done!”
Lorraine pressed a hot cloth to the stained knees, chastising, and Rosemary witnessed her only granddaughter refuse her gathering tears.
Maureen stepped between them just so. “Don’t blame Delilah for gravity.”
“Would you like to replace her ruined clothes, Maureen?”
“It’s just a T-shirt, Lorraine.”
“I’ll never get the blood out.”
“I’m sorry, Mama,” Delilah whispered.
“Sorry can’t erase a stain, can it?” Lorraine spat back.
Maureen held a Popsicle out to Delilah, but Lorraine snatched it away and scowled.
“Delilah, this isn’t sugar-free. You know that.”
As her granddaughter’s tears finally spilled hot and fast, Rosemary felt something hit her chest like a battering ram. And suddenly she heard Callum’s voice again, crackling through time like acid down her spine.
Do you see, Rosemary? Do you see what you’ve done?
But soon after they returned home, and things had returned to normal, Rosemary had forgotten (perhaps, she thought now, intentionally) that Delilah might have been inheriting something she had never intended to pass down.
Now, at eighty-something years old, Rosemary could see the thinness that had begun to declare the presence of time in Delilah’s eyelids—crinkling to eclipse the freckle-stars in worry—and she had the most peculiar feeling.
Desperate and panicked, like something was happening.
Someone was taking something, but she wasn’t sure who or what.
“Damn the light, Delilah,” Rosemary said, cupping her granddaughter’s face. “We need to talk.”
As she walked arm in arm with Delilah back toward the place where the land met the sea like the past met the future in a sudden and violent rift, Rosemary closed her eyes, only for a moment. She could feel her mother’s hot breath on her ear.
Stupid, reckless girl. Look what you’ve done.