Her Name Is Rose (9 page)

Iris
would
understand, wouldn't she? Yes. But. But she'd be heartbroken for her. So how could Rose tell her?

If Rose could have asked God for a mother, she would have asked for Iris. Good old Iris. Strong, yet able to bend like a flower in the wind. She'd have asked for a proud mother, a brave one, an understanding one, a fierce one who could be pigheaded, impulsive, determined, yet delicate, too, who wanted the best for her daughter in everything and would move whatever she had to just to make that happen, a mother who always had just the right amount of humor.

Stars pixelate in the night sky and remind Rose of the day before she left Ashwood for London at the end of August the previous year. She and her mother had lain out on beach chairs in the garden past midnight. They'd watched a meteor shower and counted twenty-four shooting stars. They'd held hands and agreed they'd come through an entire year and second summer without Luke. Somehow they had managed it. It was a miracle in a way and Rose had pressed her head against Iris's apple-scented hair.

There are times she wonders about her birth parents (she'd be lying if she said she hadn't thought about them, ever), but only in a matter-of-fact kind of way because Rose knows she's lucky to have been adopted. She knows how much she was wanted and that in a way, she was
chosen.
That has always made her feel special. Life as Rose knows it—has only
ever
known it—has been as the treasured child of Iris and Luke Bowen, the mother and father who raised her, nurtured her, encouraged her, took care of her—like that time with the chicken pox when all she wanted to do was scratch her face to pieces and her mother kept bathing her in calendula oil. Or, when she fell from her bike, broke her collarbone and her mother had to do everything for her. Everything. Or the time she failed French in her Junior Certificate exam and was gutted. Then, her mother's cups of tea and homemade scones were like some magic recipe to which only Iris knew the secret.

That's what she needs right now, as she sits on the park bench in the fettered dark—magic. But there is nothing and no one. She's on her own. A boisterous group arrives at the top of the hill and looks at the lights of the city. They don't speak English. They are laughing and pushing and hanging off each other. Rose doesn't understand them. But one of them has an iPod playing through headphones and something about the thin music escaping jolts her like a bolt of electricity.

Oh my God.

Oh my God, what have I done?

She jumps up, pushes past the group, and races down the hill and out through the gates. She tears down the High Street, past the pet shop, the greengrocers, the Primrose Hill Bookshop, past the now-closed pubs and chic restaurants and cafes, the street empty except for black plastic bags of rubbish and stacks of folded cardboard. Across the railway bridge she races down into Chalk Farm tube station. On the platform the tunnel wind blows her hair. The lights glare into her eyes and she feels disgusting, she feels like some insect wanting to run for cover. She walks quickly toward the red light so she can step into the first car as soon as the train comes and when it does, she pushes in through disembarking passengers when the doors open.

Next stop is Belsize. Did she get on the right line? Feck. Her anxiety is such that she gets out at Belsize to check. She jumps back in just as the doors are about to close. Hampstead, Golders Green. How long will it be to the end of the line? Brent Cross, Hendon, Colindale. Places she's never been, never even heard of, doesn't want to know.
Burnt Oak.
That's what she feels like, she thinks. Burnt Oak.
What have I done? What have I done?

Dadda?

Finally, Edgware. The tube doors open and Rose is first out. She's frantic. Takes the stairs two at a time. Her heart is hammering.

I was stupid. I was stupid. I was stupid.

At the top step she looks quickly around like a frightened mother looking for a lost child. At the turnstiles other passengers come and go. She is wild with alarm, yet with hope, too, that somehow the violin will be here.

She flings her Oyster Card onto the Reader. Her eyes sweep across the ticket windows. Will someone recognize the look on her face and know that she's not running from heartbreak but toward something? Will someone help her? Know this must be the girl looking for the violin that was brought in an hour earlier by some decent passenger? This girl with the flushed face and tossed hair must be her. It's crazy ridiculous but it flashes through her mind just the same—
It'll be there. It'll be there. It'll be there.

But the ticket windows are shut.

No porter stands by any turnstile.

And there is no sign of a violin case as she peers in through the black windows of the office.

Exiting passengers flow past her. She keeps staring in. It's not there, but she doesn't stop looking, she doesn't stop hoping. Then, at last, like a slow breath exhaling, Rose slides down the cold tiled wall to the dirty floor. People pass but they do not look. She's just another drunken nightclubbing girl of London at one o'clock in the morning.

*   *   *

It is the second-hardest thing Rose Bowen has had to do, to get herself back to Camden, but somehow she does. It takes a long time. A long time to reconcile what she has done with what she had hoped this day would bring—achievement, recognition, a sense of belonging. Her so-called
sterile
Bach wasn't part of her plan or her tender hope to shine as a rising star for whom the academy might sit up and take notice, of whom her father would be proud. Rejection is all she feels. She can't escape it. Yet, somehow, she finally gathers herself, presses her Oyster Card again on the Reader, and makes her way down, down into the Northern Line.

She rides back in the spotlight of the nighttime Tube in a trance, not sitting but standing, swaying in a slow oscillation through the dark and light of Colindale, Brent Cross, Hampstead, Belsize, Chalk Farm, Camden … until she makes it back to her flat. There is a note from Isobel.

Hey Rosie, Hope the master class was brill! Hope you nailed it. Sorry I missed you. Aaron and I are off to Dublin. Back in a week. xxxoo Izzy

She sits on her small balcony with the bottle of champagne she'd brought the day before and drinks quickly. The bubbles spill down her chin. She has not eaten. Too late to ring her mother and confess all. Below, across the canal under a streetlight, a guy with a guitar sings reggae. The music swells every memory of the day into one tidal wave of emotion. She finally breaks. The guy with the guitar pauses his playing and looks for the sound of a woman crying. When he cannot locate it he plays Bob Marley's song “No Woman No Cry.”

Rose will find out if it is the end of the world when she contacts the Underground's lost property office in the morning. But now, dizzy from drinking too fast, she steps back into her room, closes the curtains, and falls to her bed and sleeps.

In her early-morning dreams there are people in a crowd. They are waiting for someone. A man comes toward her but she can't make out whom it is. First it seems like it's the man she sometimes sees on her way to college. Then it's the violin maker. Then it's Roger. Then Bob Marley. There's guitar music and violins tuning. The man whom everybody is waiting for becomes solid. He approaches through a blue haze and when she recognizes who he is, she runs. She runs straight at him and flings her arms around him. The man hugs her tiny child frame. Her head turns in against his chest and she cries. “Dadda, come back to me. Come back to me. Please.
Please
.”

 

Six

Iris had never been across the Atlantic. When she arrived into Boston's Logan Airport at four on Thursday afternoon after an eight-hour flight from Shannon, she was travel weary, in a bit of a daze. So she followed the crowd through to the arrivals area where people in summer clothes looked like they knew where they were going. They seemed happy to be there. Happy to be on holiday. Happy to be home. Happy to have arrived safely. With a little trip of her heart, Iris believed that happiness belonged only to these people. Not to her. She slumped and let go of her suitcase. Gone was the confidence she'd felt walking away from the Adoption Board—a woman with a mission, doing nothing but charging forward until she would arrive in Boston and find Hilary Barrett. No distractions in between. She'd let no one know. Not Tess. Not the postman. Not the Breast Clinic. Not Rose. Especially not Rose. She expected to be back in four or five days. (She'd left enough food for Cicero in one of those plastic funnel self-feeders but, she was suddenly remembering, had neglected to reschedule her appointment with the Breast Clinic.)

In the center of the concourse the crowd she'd been following dispersed in a dozen directions. Iris stood by her suitcase and looked around. She hadn't thought this through. Now what? Now what the hell? What the bloody hell! There, under the bold bright information kiosk, stood a young redhead. As Iris approached the counter she saw the girl was wearing a green
HI
!
I
'
M
KERRY
nametag. She had the kind of face you see on old postcards of Ireland, the ones with donkeys in Technicolor and freckled, curly-haired children. Iris angled her suitcase against the kiosk.

The girl looked up from her work.

“Can you find me some place to stay?” Iris blurted. “I mean,
please,
can you help me?” She was hot and gathered up her hair to let the air-conditioned air cool the back of her neck. “I'm afraid I haven't booked a place. It was last-minute.”

“First time to Boston?”

“Yes.”

“I'll be happy to help.” Kerry smiled. Iris noticed her teeth were straight and perfect and white. Her red hair was more auburn than Iris's. “In the city?”

“I'd like to stay near St. Botolph Street. Is that in the city?” Iris didn't know what size city Boston was or, foolishly, she was now realizing, how expensive. She'd already spent a fortune on the last-minute flight.

“Sure thing. St. Botolph Street? Ummm.” Kerry's eyes squinted into the distance. After a moment she said, “Oh, right!
I
know where that is. I pass it all the time.” She said it with such obvious satisfaction that it made Iris smile. “I can look for a hotel around Copley Square. The Copley Plaza maybe?” Kerry leaned slightly forward and asked, “Single?”

“Single,” Iris said quietly and made her best silly middle-aged-lady face. “I don't know what I was thinking, not booking accommodation. It really was a last-minute decision.”

The girl smiled and looked down. Her fingers padded a keyboard behind the counter while she scanned the PC's screen. “Um … sorry. Copley's booked. It's the weekend.” She paused. “Like, how nice a place do you want? There are lots of great places. But, some of them are—”

“A small hotel, I think.” Iris placed her hands on the counter.

“No problem.”

“Like a B-and-B, maybe? But near St. Botolph Street,” Iris quickly added.

“A B-and-B? We don't really have B…” Kerry thought a moment, looked at her watch, then back to Iris. “Just a sec.” She picked up the phone.

Iris's eyes rose from her hands to Kerry's young face. She wanted to say more. She wanted to confide in her the way one does sometimes with strangers. In fact, right then she wanted to confide to anybody who might listen. And for a few seconds she imagined walking right out into the middle of the concourse, walking into the flux of the arriving and departing, the helloing and good-byeing, and saying: “Hey. Listen. I need your help. I have to find my daughter's mother.” But of course she didn't, and the flow of people continued, each face carrying its own story, like worlds within worlds.

She'd kept to herself the whole flight from Shannon, flicking through her gardening magazines, and back and forth between films she didn't really care to watch, eating and not eating, drinking a gin and tonic after takeoff and then two small bottles of pinot grigio somewhere over the mid-Atlantic when she realized she wasn't going to be able to nap. She'd been eight hours in a silent cocoon with the name “Hilary Barrett” and the words “architectural distortion” flying around in her head. Everything was up in the air, literally—her appointment at the Breast Clinic; her promise to Luke; and just what she was going to say to Hilary Barrett when she found her. It had all been colliding silently in seat 16D for eight hours. And now, now she was desperate to talk to someone. Just that. Talk. She turned from the counter to watch the crowds negotiating the concourse, a nonstop rush of families, friends, and other strangers moving purposefully across the polished floor, and then she looked through its wide windows beyond where cottonball clouds floated above the city on the horizon.

Kerry returned and scribbled something down on a little “Welcome to Boston” pad. Her short nails were painted purple. She produced a map from below the counter and as she leaned forward, she tossed her hair back over her shoulder. “Here. Here's a nice place,” she said quietly, looking around her and ringing the location with a pen. “She has a vacancy. A Mrs. Hale.”