Wild Roses (14 page)

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hell I had actually just done. The optimistic
energy I'd been infused with after the concert had evaporated instantly,
reminding me of my other failed surges of Yes! like the time I decided to
redecorate my room with some leftover paint we had in the garage and got as far
as the door frame before I realized I was tired, far from finished, making a
mess, and running out of orange.

Now I just stood by Ian's door, looking at this
mosquito with its dangly legs all caught up in this spider's web by their porch
light, and thinking a panicky Shit! Oh, shit! I heard footsteps and a dog
barking, Rocket, no doubt, and I had the urge to jump into the huge juniper
plant, the same way as when we used to play Ding Dong Ditch when we were
kids.

The door opened. Ian's mom stood in the
doorway, with Rocket peering around her legs like a shy toddler, and I wished I
had something to hand her--one of those peanut butter cookies I was going to
stick in my pocket back at the cookie table, a pamphlet about a politician, or a
trick-or-treat bag (weeks late, but still).

"Mrs. Waters?"

"Yes?"

She had Ian's eyes, but they looked different
on her, wrinkled at the edges, like they knew things that had made her tired.
She was wearing a T-shirt with some metal rock group on it, which surprised me.
Golden wings spread out with a skull between them, and pictures of scary-looking
guys. She was holding a towel, drying her hands, and I could smell something
warm and buttery cooking inside.

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She opened the screen door and held it open
with her foot. Her hair was pulled back, and her forehead was broad and sturdy.
Ian's mother. The one who taught him how to be in the world and who told him to
clean his room and to get in the car because they were late. "Can I help
you?"

"I'm . . ." Okay, real functioning words were
required, and if it says anything about my character, the first ones that sprang
to mind were a lie. A bad one, too. The name that first popped into my
consciousness was not my own but Harriet Chin. "Cassie Morgan. A friend of
Ian's." I put my hand out for Rocket to sniff. She put her black nose against my
palm and licked my fingers.

"Oh!" Ian's mom said.

"Ian studies with my stepfather, Dino Cavalli."
What a shameless name-dropper I was.

"Cassie. Come in! I'm Janet. Ian's mom. Ian's
not here, but please. I know this sounds very fifties housewife, but I was just
making cookies. I had this incredible craving for fat and sugar."

I liked her already. Her toenail polish was
chipped. And anyone who has a craving for fat and sugar and gives in to it is
okay by me. "No, thanks. I better get home. I just stopped by to say hi because
I hadn't seen him in a while. I'm always gone when he's around lately." I peered
around her, into the house. Ian's home. It was very sparsely furnished; well,
pretty empty, actually. Tres minimalist.

"Well, I'll tell him you came by. Are you sure
about coming in? I gorged on dough, and now there are warm

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cookies. I'm going to make myself sick if
someone doesn't stop me. Hormonal chocolate frenzy" "What is it with
that?"

"I have no idea, but I'm worse than the lions
with the zebra carcass on Animal Planet."

"Well, good luck. I wish you cold milk and the
ability to fit in your jeans tomorrow."

"Amen. I'll tell Ian you came by."

I crossed back over the street, got in the car
that had already grown cold. Okay, so his mother was cool, too. I turned the
key, just watched the dashboard lights glow for a minute. I looked over at Ian's
house, at the yellow light in the windows, at the lawn growing frosty-tipped in
the cold night, sparkly -by streetlamp. Small house, with a porch that needed
painting, same as his mom's toenails, and what I guessed was one of Rocket's
tennis balls in the driveway gutter. This didn't have to be as large as I was
making it out to be, or as scary. This was a houseful of normal, faulty people
leading normal, faulty lives, and Ian was one of them. I liked the people in his
world. And he did not, I realized, hold the secrets of the universe or the power
to destroy. He was just himself, with a spirit and a talent who also lied to the
dental hygienist about flossing every day, just like the rest of us.

I sat there, and my heart opened up, just a
little. Go where you fear, Chuck and Bunny said. Participate. I could hear my
heart make room. Maybe, is what it said.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

It is one of those Murphy's Law things that if
you have a group project at school, the more important it is to your grade, the
more likely you are to get stuck with partners whose safest contribution is to
color the map. Even that makes you nervous. The project in question was a report
on the economic system of a Pacific Rim country.

Partner number one, Jason Menyard, studied the
list of choices. "Let's do Honduras," he said. "My parents went there on
vacation."

"Honolulu. They went to Honolulu, you idiot."
Partner number two, Nicole Hower. Nickname, Whore, because if you said her last
name fast, this is what it sounded like for one, and for two, because her
clothes gave the impression that she wanted to share her boobs with mankind,
some goodwill mission like those people

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who go to third world countries to spread
knowledge of how to keep their drinking water clean and improve their
educational systems. Jason's eyes were already so glued to her exposed chest you
would have thought a good movie was playing there. Pass the popcorn.

"How do you know?" Jason said to Nicole's
boobs.

"Your parents brought mine back a present.
Macadamia nuts. You don't even know where your own parents went. God," she
said.

"Show some respect," Jason said.
"'R-E-S-P-E-C-T,'" he sang. "That is what you mean to me. Ooh, just a little
bit.'" Jason snapped his fingers.

"Hey, he actually does a good Urethra
Franklin," Nicole said to me.

Right about this time I was working on dual
theories: that Nicole's parents were first cousins, and that Jason's brain and a
jockstrap had much in common. Basically made of holes and not holding anything
too important. I was also coming to the quick realization that I'd have to go to
the library after school that day, since I'd basically be doing all the work
here. This meant I'd miss the chance to see Ian before his lesson. I'd been
holding on to that little open feeling, preparing myself to take a step in his
direction whether Dino liked it or not, and I was going to do it that day. I,
for one, would let Ian decide what was good for him. This glitch in the plan
filled me with the low-level annoyance that is actually rageful, crazed fury
held in a straitjacket.

At the library I grabbed everything I could
on

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Honduras and bolted out of there. Finally, I
headed home. I breathed a grateful sigh of relief when I saw Rocket on the front
lawn entertaining a gloriously happy Dog William. Call me a pessimist, but I
started having the creeping fear that now that I had finally gotten the courage
to make a move, Ian would not be there that day, so I was glad to see that I was
wrong. I dropped fifty pounds' worth of Honduras books on the table and looked
in the fridge for something to quench my weight-lifting thirst. I could hear the
rumblings of Dino's voice in his office, intense, making a point.

I closed the fridge door, stepped back into the
hall to eavesdrop. I would have put my ear to the door, just like they do in the
movies, had it been necessary, but it wasn't. In fact, Dino's voice got louder
and louder over Ian's playing.

"Bam, bam, bam. You need to hit it." I could
hear something being smacked against a table, a book maybe. Ian continued to
play. "Again," Dino barked.

Ian stopped, started again. I don't know what
he was playing, something frenzied and fast.

"Bam, bam, bam," Dino said again. The book
cracked against the table three more times. The sound made me flinch. "Don't you
hear me?"

"I'm sorry," Ian said.

"Don't stop. Pick it up and do it again. It is
forceful. Fast. One-two-three. Not one. Two. Three. You have no
command."

"I'm sorry," Ian said again.

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"What is sorry? Sorry has nothing to do with
anything. I don't give a fuck about sorry. I give a fuck about you doing it
right. What is the matter with you?"

"I don't know," Ian said.

Something crawled up along my backbone. Shame.
I'm not sure why--shame at Dino's behavior, shame for Ian. I felt
sick.

"I thought you were supposed to be such a
talent."

"I'm sorry," Ian said again.

"Do it again. Show me that what everyone says
about you is true, because it is not what I see."

I held my breath. Prayed that my feet would
stay where they were and not burst in to interrupt this cruelty. The prayers
were unnecessary, though, if I were telling the truth. I knew I couldn't go in
there. It was nowhere I belonged, and something I didn't understand.

"Maybe it's not true," Ian said. "Maybe I
wasn't born with some gift."

"Nobody is born with that gift. It's not about
gift. It's about need. A deep, ugly seed of need," Dino said. "What is your
need, Ian? In what need does greatness lie?"

"I don't have a need. I play because I choose
to."

Dino laughed. Mocking. "What
bullshit."

"And when I choose not to, I'll
stop."

"You know that's a lie. Choice has nothing to
do with it. There is no choice."

"Maybe not for you."

"Need. Ugly need. You're no
different."

"How do you know?"

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"You have no choice. You must save your mama,
Ian. You must save her from despair. That is your need. You are the savior."
What the hell was he talking about?

"You don't know anything about it," Ian said.
His voice was angry, full of tears.

"I know all about it. Play to save your mama,
boy."

"No."

"Play! Bam, bam, bam. Play it."
Silence.

"You think I'm hateful, don't you? You think
I'm a bastard. But you also think I'm right. I know you." "You don't know
anything about me." "I know you. Play, God damn it. The need will speak." More
silence. "Stupid boy."

And then, the beginning notes of the song. So
tender, you pictured them floating in midair and then breaking in two. The music
rose, gathered intensity. I recognized the part they had been practicing. It
came, forceful. Building. Bam, bam, bam. I heard it; I knew nothing about this
shit, but I heard it. One, two, three--driving into me, hard, so
hard.

He stopped then, and the silence was abrupt.
The kind of sudden, sharp silence that comes after a slap. And then Dino began
to applaud. "Bravo!" he said. "Bravo, boy!"

I stood there, stunned. My heart hurt. My soul
and insides felt wrung out, perched on the desire to sob. Oh, how I hated Dino
right then. The office door opened and

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Ian ran from it. His coat was over his arm, and
he shoved past me. He slammed out the front door, hard enough to rattle the
windows.

Dino came out from the office. He looked at the
shut door, shook his head.

"Bastard isn't the half of it," I said to
him.

"You're a child," he said to me. "Silly
child."

Erik Satie, contemporary composer, wouldn't
wash with soap, and became so suspiciously obsessed with umbrellas (yep, I said
umbrellas) that he had more than two hundred of them when he died. Tchaikovsky,
of Nutcracker fame, killed himself with arsenic, and Schumann spent the last
years of his life in an asylum. Beethoven was a Peeping Tom. When he was
arrested, it is said that he yelled, "You can't arrest me, for I am the immortal
Beethoven!" Police later found that he had spread feces over a wall of his
house. Crappy taste in decorating, if you ask me.

And since what happened next happened on
Thanksgiving, let me tell you a few food-related wacky-genius stories. Poet
Elizabeth Barrett Browning was an anorexic, due to her brother's death and her
father's inability to let his children leave the nest (he disinherited any of
them who dared to marry). Lord Byron was a bulimic, dieting and exercising down
to the skeletal, and believed that if you ate a cow, you'd endanger the appetite
of all cows. Charlotte Bronte basically threw up to death while she was pregnant
because she was too whacked out to

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handle it. Vincent van Gogh ate his own paints.
Yum.

Let's also not forget that more people commit
violent crimes on Thanksgiving than on any other day of the year. This is not
just by people forced to eat Brussels sprouts, which would make the statistic
understandable. Thanksgiving can be torture, and I don't just mean the times
when some well-intentioned person suggests, "Let's all say something we're
thankful for," and you want to drop through a hole in the floor. I mean that for
some people life is already stressful enough without multiplying human
relationships by five or ten or by however many napkin rings you happen to
have.