Rooted (The Pagano Family Book 3)

by Fanetti, Susan

  He drained his bourbon again, staring out at the balcony, watching birds perching on the building across the street, his thoughts dark. He set his empty glass on the bar next to the empty bottle, walked into the bedroom and opened a drawer, pulling out a large, worn, handmade leather journal. A gift from Maggie when his MFA had been conferred, more than twenty years ago. He plopped down into the wingchair over which Carmen always tossed her clothes, and he opened the leather tie. The journal was refillable; he had banker’s boxes at home in Maine full of the previous contents. This was where he wrote his poetry. He probably wrote fifty poems for every one he published—hundreds of poems, thousands of attempts—and every draft, from the first wobbly words to the polished piece, had been written in this book since he’d had it. He’d never written a poem in any way but longhand. Ink on paper, the heel of his hand sanding the words as it passed over them, pushing them into being.

  Being a poet, perhaps more than any other career in the known world, was a calling, an act of love, not a career choice at all, despite the burden of student loans he and Maggie had struggled for a decade to pay. Any other artist—painter, musician, novelist, sculptor, weaver, anything—had at least a glimmer of hope that their labors might someday feed them. People bought paintings in galleries, in restaurants, at flea markets, at art shows. Musicians might get recording contracts or work as studio talent, or play gigs in seedy bars. Fiction writers, biographers—memoirists—might see their work displayed on a prominent table at a bookstore, might be interviewed on a morning talk show. Might earn a living from their work.

  Nobody paid for poetry. As was the way of this work, most of his published poems had been published in poetry journals—the ‘little magazines’ of the literary world. For them, he was paid in ‘copies,’ usually two. The small presses who published chapbooks of poetry printed runs of a few hundred, a few thousand at the most, and they languished on shelves of tiny bookstores. Even the anthologies published by bigger houses offered little compensation to the poets on their pages.

  And the odds of getting an academic job, especially with an MFA in poetry, were somewhere around the odds of being struck by lightning while eating a banana split and dancing the Macarena. In Death Valley.

  No. A poet became a poet, studied the art and craft of poetry, locked his life onto its tracks, because he had no other choice. Words demanded their due.

  Theo had been lucky. He’d gotten the elusive academic job. But that had turned out to be very little about the writing of poetry or the teaching of the art. More than anything else, he taught lower-division literature courses to theaters of a hundred or more disaffected post-teens. When he was lucky, for three hours a week, he also taught a poetry writing seminar to the half of the class who hadn’t registered thinking that writing poetry would be an easy class.

  It was not an easy class. It was not an easy calling. It was a thing that could only be done for love of it. The need of it.

  Without his words, he was nothing.

  He pulled the pen from the portfolio and turned to the first blank page. Left-handed, he wrote only on the left side of the pages, what to most would be the underside of a sheet of paper. On the top, as was his custom, he wrote the date and his location.

  And then he wrote the lines, the images, that had driven him into this room, to sit in this chair and open this book.

  Sunday, July 17, 2016—Paris, Rue Girard

  Black,

  Red and gold.

  A sun burnt Raven, a crow.

  Blackbird. Black bird.

  Flutter, flee, fly

  Out. Away.

  Black silk wraps around my fist, my throat.

  I am entangled, bound.

  Theo lifted the point of the pen from the page and read what he’d written. Not much. Rough and ungainly. The stunted product of a blocked writer. But they were the words that had wanted out, that had escaped around the edges of the block, and he always trusted that impulse. Maybe he’d find the seed of this next memoir of his marriage in the words that wanted out.

  He read them again. That wasn’t Maggie.

  That was Carmen.

  And then he understood why he was blocked. He couldn’t write a memoir of the beginning of his love of Maggie because he was immersed in the beginning of his love of Carmen. A love even his subconscious saw was doomed.

  Well, shit.

  There were no more words. The air around him, inside him, was still and silent. He closed the book, tied it shut, shoved it back in the drawer and went out to buy bourbon.

  ~oOo~

  He woke up on the sofa in the library. His head was thick and heavy, clanging like a broken bell. Struggling to his feet, he went out into the main room and heard noise in the kitchen.

  Eli was making food. A roast, maybe. Some meat thing. There was a heap of chopped onions on a cutting board, and several golden potatoes were clustered on the counter. He was alone, a white canvas apron over his t-shirt and jeans.

  Theo rubbed his hands over his face and squinted at the clock on the wall. After six. “Where’re the girls?”

  “They’ll be over later. I’m making dinner.”

  The lights in here were fucking bright. Theo went to the counter and grabbed the bottle of aspirin, tapping two—no, three—into his hand and swallowing them down with water from the tap. He didn’t bother with a glass.

  Eli stood stock still, a large knife in his hand, and looked him over. “Dad, you okay?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “You were gonna spend the day writing, and I come back to find you passed out on the couch next to half a bottle of booze.” He paused. “Was that new? There’s an empty on the bar, too.”

  Maybe it was the way his heartbeat was banging around on his brain, but that pissed him off. “You’re keeping track? Who’s the parent here?”

  For a couple of beats, Eli just stared. When he spoke, his voice was cold. “You. Do what you want. But you’re drinking a lot. More than you have since…since after Mom. I’m just asking if you’re okay.”

  Theo had believed he’d kept the drinking back then to himself—and under control. The thought that Eli, who’d been twenty at the time, had known and made note…and what about Jordan, who’d been only fifteen? Instead of feeling guilty, though, he was just angry. “I’m fine. I’m going for a shower.” With that, knowing he was being irrational and not giving a shit, he turned and left his eldest son to his cooking and his judgments.

  ~oOo~

  Theo woke that night and found Carmen sitting up next to him, motionless, staring at the moonlit curtains billowing from the open windows. The night had a chill that had raised prickles on his flesh as he’d slept. She sat bare, with the covers pooled at her waist.

  “Carm? Again?” Lately, she’d been dreaming badly most nights.

  She flinched at his voice and looked over her shoulder. “Did I wake you?” Not an answer to his question, but she never answered questions about her dreams. Or maybe it was ‘dream’ in the singular, the same one. He didn’t know. In that as in most things, she was closed to him.

  “I don’t think so. I think the cold did.” He rose up on an elbow and took her arm in his hand, pulling her to lie with him again. “You’re freezing.” He tugged the covers over their shoulders and snugged her against his chest. She let him, tucking her head under his chin, tracing her fingers through the hair on his chest.

  She took hold of his pendants. She did that often; he didn’t know what to make of it. She’d called them ‘poignant’—it was a word she’d used often enough with him that he’d noticed, and in his constant quest to discover anything he could about her, he’d tried to make it meaningful. She thought his history poignant. She thought his writing poignant. She thought his pendants poignant. Poignant—moving, emotional, heartbreaking. Powerful. A compliment, maybe. He thought she meant it as such. Yet there was more meaning in her use of that word, but he either couldn’t find it or instinctively shied from it.

  He pressed his lips
to her temple, smelling the faint linger of her perfume. She always wore it now. She’d told him that she didn’t habitually wear scent, so, desperate for signs of connection, he took her new habit of dabbing perfume on the spots behind her ears as a sign for him, a sign that he wasn’t making a total fucking fool of himself and sending his heart to the gallows while he did.

  He knew the scent now; he’d seen the pretty little pink bottle, adorned with a rosette. Such a delicate, feminine bottle. So full of liquid need.

  “Theo.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Are you okay?”

  No. He wasn’t. And he supposed it showed. After his shower, he’d felt a lot better, and he thought the night had been normal, even though he and Eli had been tense with each other. He’d had only three glasses of bourbon—and they had brought him fully back, not sunk him under. Hair of the dog and all that. Now Rosa and Eli were, as usual, staying in Carmen’s friend’s flat, and he and Carmen were here alone.

  She’d never asked before if he was okay, which meant either that he was showing something or Eli had said something. In either case, denial was his strategy. “Yeah. I’m good. Right now, I’m great.” To print that point in boldface, he squeezed his arms around her. “I should be asking you that question, sitting up in the chill in the middle of the night.”

  “I’m okay, too. Like you.”

  He smiled into her hair. She was wily. She was telling him that she wasn’t okay while at the same time forcing him to expose himself if he called her on it. “Well, that’s good, then, right?”

  “Are you sure you want to come with me next weekend? I’m going to be working a lot of it.” She was touring lavender farms in Provence. But he wanted next weekend. She and Rosa were heading to Germany a week from Wednesday, and then there’d be barely three weeks left before they returned to the States. He knew—he didn’t know how, but he knew—that if he was going to get to her, get through her spiked armor, it would happen while they were staying in Avignon. Quaint, ancient, lovely, romantic Avignon.

  “I’m sure. While you’re taking time to smell the flowers, I’ll set up my Mac at a table in a café and write. Working weekend for both of us.” Actually, based on the current status of his writing health, he’d likely spend that time doing crosswords online, but she didn’t need to know that. Until he found himself writing All work and no play makes Theo a dull boy over and over and over for hundreds of pages, he and his writer’s block would hang out alone.

  She laughed again. “You know, I feel like I’m leaving a child home alone for the first time. It’s stupid. Rosa lives on her own most of the time anyway. But it feels strange to be leaving her alone in Paris while we trot off to the south of France.”

  “Not alone. Eli’ll be with her.”

  Shifting in his arms, Carmen looked up at his face. Her dark eyes reflected the pearly, pale light from the windows. “Does that bother you at all, how close they’ve gotten?”

  “Why would it?” Theo felt a small push of adrenaline. They were getting close to questions he had about the two of them.

  “I don’t know. What happens when Paris is in the past?”

  “Paris is eternal, Carmen.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You know what I mean.”

  He did. And he thought she knew what he’d meant, too. They were talking about more than Rosa and Eli. “I think you fight for what you want. When you want something enough, whatever’s in the way is immaterial. Clear it from your path. Nuisance, nothing more.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I do. You don’t?”

  “No. Life gets in the way. That’s what it does. Man plans, and God laughs.”

  “Christ. That’s fatalistic as hell.”

  “Your wife died. What—is that because you didn’t fight hard enough, or because she didn’t? Or maybe you didn’t want her enough?”

  He sat up, stunned and hurt. “Carmen, shit. That’s fucking low.”

  She sat up, too. “No—tell me. In your rosy worldview, how do you factor the untimely death of someone you love? A wife? A mother?”

  Tossing the covers back, he stood. He couldn’t be in the bed with her right now. “Carmen, shut up.”

  Now she stood, too, facing him across the wide bed. “No. Explain to me how it makes sense.”

  His throat was tight and his heart thumped, but he had an answer. He’d been grappling with the answer a lot lately. “You can’t fight your end.” His voice shook, and he took a breath and tried to calm down. “You fight for the life you want. But you can’t fight your end. For the living, a loved one’s end becomes a thing to clear from your path. Or you let it stop you cold, and then you’re not fighting anything but yourself.”

  “Fuck you.”

  Until that moment, Theo had not realized that they weren’t even talking about Maggie. Not really. Redirected, he scrambled through his bewildered brain for some crumb of information she might have let fall about herself, her past, her family…

  “Your mother.” She reacted as though he’d spanned the bed and slapped her. “Carmen…”

  “No. Fuck you.” She turned and went for her clothes.

  Oh, no. She wasn’t leaving. Not when he’d finally found a crack. He didn’t know what it was about her mother’s death that had made her this suddenly vulnerable, but it was a crack, and he wanted, at least, to mark its place.

  He made it around the bed in a blink and yanked her jeans from her hands as she was trying to step into them. His force overbalanced her as she stood on one leg, and she fell toward him. He caught her, and she punched him. In the face.

  Theo tried to think when he’d last been punched, or had thrown a punch. Twenty years, easy. When he’d been punched by a woman? Never. He shook it off and pushed her against the wall. She tried to knock his hands from her, but he was stronger than she was.

  “Carmen, stop. Stop. Stop. What the fuck?!” She settled, just a little, her arms going still, but her eyes were so vivid with anger or stress or panic or who knew what that they practically illuminated the dim room. “I’m not trying to make you say something you don’t want to. I’m not trying to make you think something you don’t want to. I’m not trying to say anything about you or your life. I’m not digging. What I said—set it aside. I was talking about myself.”

  “My life is different.”

  The assertion was so plain, so pleading despite her sharp tone, it made him ache. In these last, brief minutes, Carmen had rewritten how he knew her. “Okay. No argument from me.”

  She began to relax under his hands. “What I said to you was fucked up.”

  “Yeah, it really was.” She’d blindsided the hell out of him.

  “Are you angry?” Her eyes changed.

  Despite her new vulnerability, which was closing up as he watched, he had an easy answer. His jaw was sore, his chest thumped with adrenaline, his belly was full of bile, and his head was full of the poison of his doubt. “Yeah.”

  She reached back and snatched a handful of his hair, closing her fist. “Good. Fuck me angry.” She yanked his head down to hers and kissed him.

  He fucked her angry.

  Twice.

  ~ 9 ~

  Carmen sat with a huff, dropping her backpack on the seat next to her. Across the table, Theo, already seated, grinned at her, and she glared. “What’s funny?”

  “You. You do understand that shouting at the rail agents doesn’t actually make them more helpful, right?”

  “I fucking hate this station. It’s insane and confusing, and that guy was rude, anyway.”

  “He might argue that you were rude first.”

  Knowing that she wasn’t going to win that debate, she changed tacks. “Why are you so bloody calm, anyway? We almost missed the train. I fucking hate running through stations and airports.”

  He was still grinning at her in that condescending way—which matched his condescending tone. “You’ll notice that I didn’t run, and yet I caught up with you while you were shout
ing. Carmen, trains leave this station for Avignon every single hour. If we’d missed, we’d just have caught the next one.”

  Oh, she hated reason at moments like these. “So, you’re grinning at me because you think my rage is cute. Asshole.” Damn those fucking dimples.

  “I’ve decided to think of it as cute, yes. Do you always get this bent when you travel?”

  “I’m not a fan of mass transportation. There are a lot of people, and I don’t like people much. And I really don’t like being dependent on other people’s schedules.”

  “We could have driven.”