Rosethorn (2 page)

"The part about getting a visa, selling the house, saying goodbye to friends, picking which things to take and which to give away--no, that part wasn't simple. Yet at the center of that storm was a certainty that I loved him more than I loved myself, and from that everything else will follow. But that's my story. Now tell me yours."

"Not much to tell. He asked me to choose and so I must choose." Sera mouthed an apologetic Merci to the shopkeeper and walked out the store. She started walking down the street market on Rue Cler with her empty basket, seeing desert and souqs in place of the covered stalls of fruit and vegetables and busy Parisians.

"Why am I not jumping at the chance?"

Elise made a clucking sound.

"Oh, you young people--you make everything so complicated."

"I dreamt about my mother again last night. Three times in the past two weeks,” Sera confessed. “The one where she’s drowning and there’s nothing I can do to save her. She was saying something to me, a variation of the same thing. She wanted just one hour of my life, to live again. I woke up crying."

"Something deeper than indecision is afoot."

"I always feel this way this time of year, I guess. I've been wondering about my life, if my mother would be proud of me. If I'm worthy."

Sera caught her reflection on the dark windowpane of a patisserie. In her fitted trench coat, her black hair pulled back in a loose chignon, and her scarf tied artfully about her neck, she appeared very much a Parisian. She belonged here.

Remembering the awkward and unsophisticated young girl she used to be, who dressed in flannel shirts and thunderous combat boots, the image reflected before her now seemed as exotic as some of the veiled women she had seen in Morocco.

She heard Elise sigh on the other end. She could picture her friend in her Umbrian kitchen, leaning against the marble counter, her hands dusty with semolina flour. Something delicious would be baking in the oven or simmering on the stovetop.

"One hour of your life,” Elise murmured thoughtfully. “Intriguing. What does that remind me of? I know - that poem by Whitman. How does it go?" She fell silent.

"Ah, yes
!” she then exclaimed. Pausing for effect, she then recited, “
'To feed the remainder of life with one hour of fulness and freedom! With one brief hour of madness and joy
.'  Rather begs the question, doesn't it?"

"What question?"

"If you could have one hour of your past returned to you, to last you the rest of your life, which hour would it be?"

Even before Elise finished posing her question, memories had come to Sera like waves crashing on the sand, erasing all traces of what had been there before.

Light filtering through the trees outside a stained glass window.

Shadows against the walls of an old house full of secrets.

The smell of sun on warm skin, promising golden summers to come.

And eyes as blue as a distant, imagined sea.

Without meaning to, Sera whispered, “Rosethorn.”

*****

"I have to go home,” Sera announced as she laid the empty basket by the door. Chase looked up from his Le Figaro. "I'll go home and then I'll come live here with you."

"Really?" Throwing aside the paper, Chase rushed over and picked her up by the waist, his face beaming.

"Yes, I will live with you. But before I do, I need to go home."

"Of course, go home to New York, pack, settle everything, then move here as soon as possible."

"I need to go back to California,” she clarified. “Back to where I was born, where I grew up. Have I ever told you where I grew up?" Chase shook his head.

Sera looked around Chase’s tastefully decorated apartment, complete with a picture window of the Eiffel Tower in the distance.

"I didn’t think so. Well, on a hot summer day with a little bit of breeze, you can smell the lovely perfume of manure for miles around. For fun, kids would cruise up and down Old Town revving their souped up engines or smoke weed in the boonies by the marsh hoping the cops won't find them."

Sera could see the questions forming in Chase’s transparent face, but she did not pause to let him ask them. She was already looking back towards a place as far away as one could get from elegant Parisian cafes or exotic Moroccan bazaars.

“I’ll go home one more time and then we can start our life together here."

Chapter 2

The Moroccan sand from her travels did not have time to drift to the bottom of her suitcase yet nor the reality that she was moving to Paris settle upon her when Sera made the journey home.

After a long flight across an ocean and a continent, she should have been tired. Instead she felt her excitement building.

Her grandmother had been surprised, but delighted, when Sera called her from Paris. She asked no uncomfortable questions why, even though in the many years since Sera had first left for college, she had come home infrequently. Dependably, her grandmother had immediately launched into the subject of feeding her. Sera made vague, unconvincing protests not to go into any trouble since her trip home was only for a few days, which her grandmother ignored, listing all the dishes she was going to cook.

With an unexpected eagerness which had been absent in prior trips home, Sera had driven her rental car through town in a slow, roundabout way. She tried to picture bringing Chase to meet her grandmother and what he would think of Venetia, with its golden hills and rural feel. She wondered if he would be charmed, as she always was, by the old Presbyterian Church on the main road with its proud tower and dark barnyard red clapboard, a remnant from over a hundred years ago.

Born and raised in New York, Chase had always lived in big cities. She could not imagine he'd be interested in all her favorite places--the creek, the hills with summits of sweeping views, horse trails that meandered deep in the valley.

Sera had driven through Old Town, noting that the dilapidated old movie theater was now permanently closed, the new stores and restaurants that had appeared.

She detoured through side streets, remembering long walks she used to take, over wooden, rickety bridges that crossed the creek. She even stopped for a moment across the park that surrounded the cemetery on top of a hillock. Not much had changed, she saw, as two black-clad teenagers, perhaps 16 years old, walked up the wooden steps to the seclusion of the cemetery, entwined and unaware of anything but each other.

A typical Filipino welcome awaited Sera when she finally arrived. Presiding over bubbling pots in her tiny kitchen, her grandmother shushed all of Sera’s protests and plied her with comfort foods. The simple vinegary chicken
adobo
, flavored with ginger and bay leaves,
pancit canton
noodles sautéed with vegetables and topped with lemon wedges and green onions, a spicy dish of taro leaves cooked in coconut cream, and a steaming pot of Sera’s favorite,
kare-kare
, green beans and beef shanks swimming in a salty peanut stew, the meat so tender it was barely hanging on the bone.

With one whiff, Sera had come home.

The next morning she patiently attended Sunday mass and the church pancake breakfast afterwards, which her grandmother was helping to host. She endured the inevitable rounds where she was re-introduced to the entire parish, it seemed, as the prodigal granddaughter returned. After politely eating two griddle cakes and sipping weak coffee, Sera had excused herself, escaping to her rental car.

She still had not told her grandmother the real reason why she had made this surprise visit home, waiting for, or perhaps avoiding, the right moment.

However, there was one errand she did not want to put off. After all these years away, she could no longer wait another minute.

Not bothering to change from her church clothes, Sera drove directly to the valley, more than curious to see what had replaced the house she remembered. It would be demolished by now, she knew, the empty house that Ms. Haviland had held onto so fiercely as a monument to the past. Years ago such a story of an old woman grasping close the last vestige of her lost love had stirred her, made more than an impact on her and, like other tragedies not her own, had made its home in her.

As she passed the idle construction machines and the fallow pastures of what used to be Ms. Haviland's old farm, she felt the peculiar sense of driving not to a place but back to a time.

She could almost see her l6-year-old self madly riding down the narrow dirt road through the grove of bay trees. She remembered feeling so full back then, full of endless blue sky and eternal summer and the fragrant air of rose and youth, full of dreams and schemes and the world bursting out of her skin, she was so full.

The grove of bay trees ended and it was only when she saw the wrought iron gates in front of her that she knew it had not been demolished. At least not yet.

She stopped the car at the edge of the grove, where the grass was high, and got out of the car. It had become hotter since she left church and the black jersey knit dress which clung to her was too warm and formal, her heels inappropriate for walking on dirt roads. Tire tracks led up to the gate, beyond which she could hear loud, staccato hammering.

The crickets were abuzz as if it were summer, suddenly alive in the warm spring day.

Heart hushed, she approached the gate on foot and gasped.

Chapter 3

About 11 years ago...

Standing from the corner of Miss Haviland's old farmhouse, Sera watched as the new boy, a scarecrow with too-large hands and feet, mowed the vast back lawn. Reluctantly she walked towards him, but stopped 50 feet away and waited with her arms crossed until he saw her, almost tripping over the mower in surprise.

"Christ! How long have you been standing there
?” He shouted over the noisy motor.

"Miss Haviland told me to tell you there's fresh lemonade out in the porch if you want some
,” she said in a low voice, then abruptly turned around to go back to the garden.

"What?" She heard him fumbling with the mower's power switch. She kept walking.

He followed a few minutes later, and although she kept steadily pruning the rose bushes, she saw from the corner of her eye, his eagerness in drinking a glass from the ice cold pitcher of homemade lemonade Miss Haviland had set out on the porch. She had to turn her head to keep from laughing when he started to gag and cough, face turning purple, for Miss Haviland did not believe in sugar.

“Are you alright, Andrew?" Ms. Haviland had come out and started vigorously patting his back.

“Went...down,” he coughed out, “the wrong way." As he doubled over, he caught Sera watching him. She quickly looked away and busied herself with the pruning shears, the very picture of absorption.

Next Saturday, when she found the stiff body of a dead rat in the pail where she kept her pruning shears, Sera forced herself not to scream. Shocked,
but still able to detect clumsy feet nearby, its owner waiting for girlish shrieks, she said nothing and left the rat inside the pail. She spent the morning with her ear cocked, waiting for sounds of Andrew taking a break from painting the fence. When she saw that he had gone in the house, she quickly took the pail, ran to where the paint can was and dumped the carcass in it, so that it floated grotesquely, half-gray, half-white.

She was serene for the rest of the morning, until about to go home she discovered that her bike's back tire was deflated. Miss Haviland had already left for an errand and the house was locked. She could hear Andrew whistling smugly on the other side of the house.

Walking her useless bike out of the valley, she amused herself by mentally compiling a list she tentatively titled "101 Ways to Humiliate a Cretin." She was on number 35, an elaborate plan involving hot pepper and underwear during school assembly, when a car drove up and stopped next to her. The cretin was hanging out the window, a fake smile plastered on his face. His older brother was at the wheel.

"Need a ride?" The cretin asked with a smirk.

"No, thank you,” she replied with what she hoped was a cold and proud look, and kept on walking, head held unnaturally high. She heard laughter as the car drove off and plunged into number 36 with a vengeance: super-strength laxatives and a hidden microphone in the boys' bathroom connected to the school PA system.

Applying her creativity with diligence, Sera had reached number 70 by the following Saturday, with numbers 51 through 65 inspired in one afternoon after spying the cretin and his friends at the lunch tables laughing at her.

"I heard he has to take ritalin." Allison said as they ate their lunch at The Hay, their place between two old oak trees behind the art building, strewn with remnants of old hay bales.

"Well, he's obviously not taking enough of it."

"Hey! I got one," Allison exclaimed. "I can get Paul and his friends to dress up in ski masks, knock him unconscious, take off all his clothes and tie him to the flagpole, then write on his chest with permanent marker--'I Love Mrs. Grunty.'"  Mrs. Grunty was the P.E. teacher and owner of three spectacular hairy warts. She was built like a linebacker and although she had long hair, which she wore in a perpetual ponytail, her gender was still suspect, as was the title of “Mrs." No one believed that there had ever been a Mr. Grunty.