Her Name Is Rose (28 page)

“Breast cancer is really treatable these days, you know. My aunt Fran had it and came through fine. Healthy as a horse now.”

“I don't want to talk about it.”

“Sure. No problem.” He shrugs his shoulders, smiles, pushes back the wooly hat. “But you know—”

“Conor!”

“Right. Got it.” He folds his arms. “The girl knows her own mind,” he says to Cicero when the cat finishes the milk and jumps down to rub himself against Conor's legs.

Rose says nothing. It's like there's a still, airless place inside her and she's retreated. She tries Iris's phone but it goes directly to voice mail. She doesn't leave a message.

Cicero makes his way to the door and Rose follows and lets him out. Conor rises and reaches in his pocket for his keys. “I think maybe I should get going.”

She turns and looks at him. Her eyes are tearful.

“All right,” he says, “you've persuaded me, I'll stay.”

*   *   *

In the late afternoon light in the Ashwood garden, bathed in a half dozen hues of green, sploshes of color punctuate here and there. Red poppies. Spires of blue. White daisies with bright yellow centers. At the bottom of the garden a bush with long blooms of purple is covered in butterflies. Clouds come slowly from the west, drawing across the sky like a silver wave rolling in.

Rose is awfully worried about her mother, but Conor succeeds in distracting her. He asks her if she will play her fiddle.

“You mean my violin,” she says.

“No. I mean your fiddle. The master class was a great success and all, but you're back in Ireland now, girl. We plays da fiddle here, you know.”

After a brief pause, she laughs and says, “My dad would have liked you.”

He beams, knows it's the best thing she could have said. “I know you didn't want me to say anything but I'm telling you now for nothing—you played brilliantly! You really nailed it.”

Rose picks up her fiddle, her bow, and starts tuning.

“You know, Kiwi Surfer Dude isn't a surfer?”

“Yes, he is.”

“Nope. He's not.”

“Really? What's with the poster, then?”

“Just for show.” Conor picks up his fiddle.

“How do you know?”

“A surfer knows a surfer,” he says, and breaks into the fiddle with a quick flourish of his bow. “And a fiddler knows a fiddler.”

They begin with the “Currach” from “Inishlacken,” a concerto for fiddle and violin by the contemporary Irish composer Bill Whelan. Rose has been learning it in her spare time. A challenging piece blending the traditional and the classical. She has only seen and heard it on YouTube when the Irish National Chamber Orchestra played it in Beijing. Conor has played it before with his mother.

“Really? Did she go to China?” Rose asks.

“Yeah.”

“I want to go!”

“Just play!”

He gets me, she thinks. He really gets me. Fact is, she likes playing with someone else, she likes being in a group surrounded by bodies pulsing and being in the music, together, one breathing, magical sound. While she plays she thinks of Andreas.
You're in the music and the music's in you.

“Brilliant,” he says. “You know what? My mother will really like you.” Conor pushes back his wooly hat and adds, “You'll be perfect for the festival this weekend.”

“Festival? What?”

“In Doonbeg. You know? The jazz. I've sort of invited myself and they accepted. Play with me?”

Rose is caught by surprise. “I don't know. I don't know. I'm not good enough for
that
piece.” Before Conor can reply she hears voices, she lays down her violin and runs to the sliding glass door. Her mother and Tess are walking up the path but neither sees her standing there. She pulls open the door.

“Mum?”

Iris drops her rattan handbag and runs to Rose, who meets her halfway. The hug they share is deep, silent, and all-encompassing, long and powerful and beyond words. Inside it, they rock side to side. Rose cries.

“No. No. No. Don't cry, honey. It's all right. Everything is all right.”

“Tell me. I want to know everything. What did they say?”

“The doctor said your mother has very busy breast tissue!” Tess says.

“What—”

“Seriously.” Tess laughs. “It took a good few go-arounds with the ultrasound, didn't it, pet?”

Iris smiles. “The doctor was very funny. Afterward she said, ‘You're fine, but you have a lot going on in there.'”

“You should have told me,” Rose says, halting between tears.

“I should have.”

Relieved, Rose feels like collapsing on the lawn. As they walk toward the house her mother takes her hand. Tess is ahead of them, Cicero behind.

“I'm sorry I worried you,” Iris says, taking Rose's hand to her face and speaking softly.

“I could have handled it, Mum,” Rose says. “Dad told me to take care of you.”

“I know.”

“How can I take care of you if you don't tell me what's going on?”

“I know.”

Rose stops. “And no more secrets.”

Tess goes through the door first. And it startles Iris when she hears her speaking to someone inside. “Hello,
Conor,
” Tess says in a I-didn't-know-
you
-were-here voice.

Rose drops her mother's hand and rushes into the kitchen, landing beside Conor just before her mother enters. Head tilted down but a smile breaking on her face, she says, “Mum,
this
is Conor.” She pauses for a moment. “Conor,
this
is Mum!”

Rose watches her mother's eyes dart to Tess, then back to Rose and over to Conor, then onto the stringed instruments lying side by side in their open cases. They are waiting for her to say something. Even Cicero has jumped back up onto the counter and looks around expectantly. Something registers on Iris's face and she walks to the young man she's seen before and says, “Nice to see you again, Conor.” He has cut his hair. Now it is short and curly. The ponytail is gone but the wooly hat is still there. She turns and plucks the cat off the counter.

“You, too, Mrs. Bowen,” Conor says. He reaches to shake her hand but can't because she is holding the cat.

“So…” Iris says, “this is your new friend?”

Rose shoots her mother a warning look. The four of them are standing around the counter and for a second Iris looks like she's the stranger in her own house. Then Tess says, “I think I'd better get going. The boys are hoping I'll take them to Doonbeg this evening, to set up.”

“For the festival?” asks Conor.

“Yes,” Tess says, raising an eyebrow the way only Tess can.

“Yeah? Cool. Rosie and I are going, too. In fact, tomorrow night we might—”

“I haven't decided yet,” Rose interrupts him, sharply, and for a moment no one says anything. “I haven't said yes.”

Iris shakes her head. “I feel as if I've been gone a month!”

“That's what happens when you're missing in action, Mum,” Rose says, a bit too sharply, and it makes Conor look at her in surprise.

Tess winks at Rose. “You're all right now, pet,” she says to Iris as she leaves. “See you later.”

“I'm off then, too,” says Conor, looking inquiringly at Rose, but she avoids his gaze. “I can be back later if you want to go to the pub session tonight. Or you, Mrs. Bowen? We could go together.” Iris looks at Rose, but she's not saying anything. Conor shrugs. “I'm glad you're all right, Mrs. Bowen.” He closes his fiddle case and crosses in front of Rose to the door. “Maybe I'll see you later,” he says and he hesitates a moment as if for a kiss.

Rose feels Iris's eyes on her as she lets Conor pass. She bites her lower lip, she pushes her hair behind her ears. She glances at her mother, and then outside. Conor is on the garden patio, then he's on the path heading to his van, when finally she calls, “Wait!” and goes after him.

Standing beside the stone cabin, where a climbing clematis is hanging loosely, she says in a low voice, “I haven't decided about playing. You can't just expect—”

“I was going to suggest another piece if you thought the Whelan piece too tricky. What about ‘Over the Rainbow'? If Grappelli and Frankie Gavin can, on violin and fiddle, so can we. Right?”

Conor reaches out to her, but she shoulders him away.

“Sorry. I don't understand what the big deal is.”

Rose turns around. There's so much he doesn't understand, she thinks.

“That's all right, though,” he says. “You think about it and let me know.” He kisses her lightly on the back of her head and says, “Okay, Rose, I had a good time the last couple of days.” He waits for a response. “Rose?”

She forces herself to turn and face him. Except for her father's, Conor Flynn has the kindest eyes she's ever seen.

“See you later?” he says.

“Not tonight.”

They stand a moment longer in Iris's garden. A strong wind picks up and a petal from a blue clematis floats and lands on his shoulder, then slips off. Rose is motionless. For a second her breath stops. She gives Conor one long look, which leaves him looking confused. Then she turns and heads back to her mother's kitchen.

What Rose hasn't told Conor is that the piece he wants her to play was one of her father's favorites. She hasn't told him of the strange synchronicity and how the moment he'd said it, her heart split. She doesn't know if she can do it. Luke Bowen had collected nearly every single recording ever made of “Over the Rainbow,” from instrumentalists like Stéphane Grappelli, Nestor Torres, Jeff Beck, and Keith Jarrett, to singers Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Plácido Domingo, Eric Clapton, Eva Cassidy, Willie Nelson, Sarah Vaughan (and, of course, Judy Garland), and his favorite, Israel Kamakawiwo'ole.

As she comes back into the kitchen she hasn't decided if now is the time to tell her mother more about Conor. There is so much to tell now that Iris is back from her crazy trip to Boston. And what the hell? Like, what was her mother thinking? And why Boston?

Then it hits her—her mother is all right! Nothing else matters. Her mum doesn't have cancer. “Mum!” she says when she sees Iris still standing there in the kitchen like a solid piece in the center of a puzzle. That's all Rose can manage. “Mum!” She hugs her mother and cries, gulps for air, and Iris rocks her gently back and forth on her shoulder, smoothing her hair.

“I'm glad you're home, Mum. I have so much to tell you,” Rose says. She stands back and sleeves her tears.

Her mother has a look that Rose can't quite interpret. It's happy and sad at the same time.

Iris waits a moment, then she says, “Me, too, honey. Me, too.”

 

Seventeen

Rowan drove westward from Dublin under an iron-gray sky. It was a Friday in the middle of June. The countryside was oddly lit, as if all the forty shades of green Johnny Cash sang about were rolled into one long expanse of vegetation. Asparagus green, Hooker's green, lime green, Dartmouth green. He tried to pick the colors, like crayons from a box, and remembered Burdy withdrawing his hand from his overcoat pocket one Christmas and presenting a pack of Crayolas. “And it's okay to draw
outside
the lines,” Burdy whispered.

County Laois brought a sudden release of rain. The weighty sky darkened swiftly and the wipers slashed back and forth in a blind flash. And then, just as suddenly, in the afterrain, sparkling sunlight glimmered on the road. That's how it must be in this country, Rowan thought, light and dark in dramatic play between sunshine and shadow. He drove on, past the city of Limerick and over the Shannon into the west of Ireland. Swans clustered under the bridge. The radio didn't hold stations and so he drove in silence and fell in and out of memory. And hope. And doubt.

Passing a craggy field he heard Burdy's voice in his head, “When you hit a wild shot you know it right away. You swing through and connect with the ball but it flies off, and you know. You know the shot is hooked or sliced and the ball disappears into the rough. You know that you'll never find it. You know it's lost.
But you still look.
You still drag your bag up there into the long grass and you start hacking around with your club at the place you last lost sight of the ball. That's it. That's what you do.”

Before Rowan had left Dublin he'd met briefly again with Sonia McGowan and signed the official Register for Adoption Contact. He'd filled in the form, giving his address. He'd ticked the box:
Natural Father
, and farther down:
Willing to Meet
.

“I hope at least you know you've done all you can—to open the door from your side—by stating your preference for contact. Your birth daughter will have the information … if she ever comes looking for it.”

Rowan took her offered hand and shook it, warmly, and thanked her. “I just want to do the right thing.”

She seemed more at ease with herself. Lighter somehow, her dark eyes restful, he thought. “I'm so sorry, Mr. Blake, this has all come as quite a shock to you.”

“If she ever comes looking for me, please tell her she has nothing to fear. I will be glad of whatever level of contact she requests.”

“And if she never requests it? How will you feel?”

“It's still hard to lose something, or someone, you never had.”

*   *   *

Rowan arrived in the town of Ennis, half an hour after crossing the Shannon, and booked into a hotel. The hotel's owner, a man named Allen, bright blue eyes and an easy smile, greeted him, and after remarking on the hotel's garden, Rowan was enthusiastically shown into a room that overlooked it, and beyond which, across the street, stood the town's cathedral.

Tracking down Iris and Luke Bowen on the Internet had been easy, although the manner in which he'd discovered them was still troubling him. Any person with even the skimpiest of profiles could be traced these days. He'd found out that all Irish birth records (adoptions included) were open to the public, and with just a few facts (a name and a date of birth) and a little detective work, he'd been able to apply for Rose's birth certificate, which arrived at the Merrion Hotel through the Irish postal system two days later. If it wasn't in his own interests, he'd have objected. It was too easy. Her adoptive parents were named on Rose's birth certificate. Iris and Luke. (Not as adoptive parents.) Rowan searched for a “Luke Bowen,” and from a link to the
Irish Times
archives learned that Luke Bowen, solicitor, beloved father of Rose and husband of Iris, had died after a short illness two years previously. Sad. Uncomfortable and all as it was, Rowan forced himself to take it in:
beloved father
. Poor Rose.