Chapter Ten #2
“Oh,” her mother said, her eyes shining again the way they had the morning Rose left for school.
Rose sat up a little straighter. “Well, her father picked that. Our first house was down the end of a dirt road in the woods, and there was a patch of wild roses in the backyard that started snaking up the downspouts. I was just a few months pregnant at the time, and miserable, but he was ecstatic—just ecstatic—that I couldn’t stop puking because we’d had so many losses.
He was just so grateful this one had stuck.
” It landed with a pang. How was it Rose had never heard this story?
Had her parents tried so hard not to burden her that they’d neglected to share the sadness surrounding her origin?
“So I was hormonal and I wanted everything to be perfect for this baby, and I told him to pull the roses down. They looked like weeds, and I remember thinking something was wrong with me for not being able to see the beauty in them. But he wouldn’t do it.
He said those wild roses were scrappy and sticky, just like the child in me.
Just like you.” Her mom glanced at her, and Rose tensed, unsure what to do or say. “He was quite the romantic, really.”
They were all quiet for a long minute. Then Landon put his fork down, placed his hands in his lap and said, “I really am so sorry.”
But her mother didn’t hear him. She was already somewhere else. Rose hoped that behind those cloudy eyes, her mother was dancing with her father in the living room, tilting and twirling, boots scuffing the tiles.
Her mother didn’t notice when she and Landon retreated to her bedroom.
She’d kept the room the same: purple walls, an imperfect quilt Rose had sewed herself when she was in middle school, movie and boy-band posters tacked to the walls.
It surprised Rose more than it comforted her.
Why hadn’t she stripped away the personal markers and turned it into a sterile guest room, or sewing room, or sitting room?
Was it laziness, did she understand Rose even less than she thought, or was it something else—something she was holding in the same way she had the story of Rose’s name?
“I can see it,” Landon said. His large body looked so out of place in her shoebox of a bedroom, somehow filling out her old twin bed more than it did in beds of the same size back at school.
“See what?”
“Little Rose in this room, curled up with a stack of books on this quilt. These squares are a little wonky, you know.”
“I feel like I don’t even know the girl who lived here.” Rose knew it wasn’t just the grief talking. She’d set out to change, and she had.
“Of course you do,” Landon said, opening his arms to her.
She sank into him and indulged in the feeling of being physically tethered in the midst of a hurricane.
“She’s the reason you’re here. Though she had questionable taste in music.
” He nodded his head at the NSYNC poster mounted in a thin black frame.
“Hey,” Rose mumbled into his shirt, “if you come for Justin Timberlake, you come for me.”
“See?” Landon said, smug in the knowledge he’d just proved his point.
Rose would not concede, but she could not deny that being in her childhood home—being with her mom—stirred up memories and emotions that made her feel terrible for her young self, sad that she could not protect her.
Landon’s presence magnified those feelings twofold.
Rose did not want to be like her mother and pretend like dinner had never happened.
Or worse, forgive and explain and excuse it.
“I’m so sorry about my mom,” she said. “She’s gotten worse, with time. ”
“You mean the drinking?” Landon asked.
It seemed he had no problem naming the big, terrible thing either. “She thinks she’s getting away with it. I mean, she really thinks that I don’t notice. But I notice. I would have to have my eyes closed not to see it. You wouldn’t even believe me if I told you what she was like before.”
“Try me,” Landon said, tone light and eyes heavy.
Rose gripped Landon’s arm, giving it a light squeeze, and he squeezed back with equal force.
He never asked her to be perfect. He just invited her to try.
“My mom was the kind of person who lived life like it was a gift. I swear I knew that even as a child, because I remember my friends couldn’t wait for Christmas to roll around every year, and I was the only one who could.
Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t crazy—Christmas was obviously exciting—but my mom was so sparkly, and my parents were so shiny around each other, that that shine rubbed off on me every day of the year.
She wrote me love notes and left them in my lunchbox and showed up with a video camera to every single one of my dance recitals and rocked me to sleep until I was way too old for it.
It felt like she wanted to soak up as much life as possible with the people she loved.
“When someone shines that brightly, you notice when they fade. She started leaning into the alcohol when my dad was diagnosed. I don’t think she knew how to keep moving forward without him.
But it killed me. I mean, Alzheimer’s is a bastard of a disease.
It’s slow and cruel and takes the pieces of you that that person was keeping safe—pieces you might not even know how to ask about on days they’re still lucid.
But I wasn’t just losing him. I was losing her, too.
The farther away he got, the farther away she got. ”
Landon’s heavy breaths rocked Rose in a way she found soothing, if also connected to childhood. “That’s awful.”
“It was awful,” Rose said. “To lose two parents at the same time.” Young Rose came to her then: an image of her adolescent self at the dinner table, eating whatever she could scrounge while her mother drank from a mug in the living room and her father lay in bed miles away in a facility that provided him just below a reasonable standard of care and quietly drained her college fund. “Can I tell you something awful?”
“You could say or do almost anything today, and I would argue your right to do it. You’ve got the dead dad card to play.”
If it had been anyone else who’d said it, Rose would have shut down immediately, a sea anemone retracting into itself. But as long as she’d known him, Landon’s propensity to put his foot in his mouth had only ever endeared her. It was like they were in a secret club together. Just the two of them.
“I used to wish my parents died in a car crash.”
Landon tensed up and quickly recovered. “Wow,” he said, “good thing you don’t even know that old version of yourself. If she was around, I’d have to start sleeping with one eye open.”
“Hah, hah.” She snuggled into him and fixed her gaze outward, on the calendar with the red X’s stuck back in August, marking each day she’d patiently waited until she could leave this place and make something of herself.
“First of all, I’ll have you know that being an orphan is very glamorous.
At least, I used to think so—though I was really susceptible to subliminal messaging. ”
“I don’t know if I would consider Oliver Twist romantic.”
“Dead dad card.”
“Very glamorous,” Landon amended. “I must have had that one confused with another Dickens.”
Rose chuckled. “It wasn’t really about living a glamorously orphaned life.
There was just something about the speed of a car crash that really appealed to me.
With my dad, I had a long time to come to terms with his death, but at the end of the day it still wrecked me.
Five years to find a way to cope, and I was still a puddle.
And my mom is on this interminable off-ramp that will let out God knows when and where.
But a car crash: poof. Gone. Here one minute, gone the next. ”
“I see.” And his tone suggested he did. It was as addictive a feeling as being onstage the first time had been, finally, finally sharing these ugly parts of herself with someone else—the raw, buried, unspoken feelings.
Now that she’d started, she wasn’t sure she could stop.
She wanted more. As much as Landon would give.
“Can I tell you something worse?”
“Tell me a thousand worse things.” She was momentarily sidetracked by how sexy the words were, even though he clearly hadn’t meant them to be. Maybe especially because he hadn’t meant them to be.