Wild Roses

by Deb Caletti

  I turned off the coffeepot and went upstairs. I found Dad on his bed, propped up not too differently than his mother the night before, with his glasses on and one toe trying to get a glimpse of the outside world from a hole in his sock. Those notes I had seen the night before were scattered all around him. Maybe it wasn’t disinterest that had let the toast grow cold—maybe he was just excited to get back to his project.

  “Knock, knock,” I said.

  “Oh, jeez.” Dad startled, gathered up his papers. I’m surprised he didn’t shove them under the pillow, stuff them in his mouth, and swallow them like they do in the spy movies.

  “What time is it? You’re early.”

  “Nope, right on time,” I said.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “So what’re you doing?”

  “Work.”

  “One, you look too guilty for work. Two, there’s one of Dino’s books open in front of you. Unless you got a new job I don’t know about, that’s not work. What’s going on?”

  My father sighed. He looked out the window, as if hoping the answer to my question would form in the clouds. I see a giraffe! I see a pirate ship! I see that I’m nosing around on my ex-wife’s new husband to try to catch him doing something horrible!

  I moved closer to the bed to see.

  “No!” he said. He actually put one arm over his notes, same as those kids who make sure you don’t cheat off them.

  “Dad, God.”

  “All right,” he said. “Okay! I just had a little feeling about something and I wanted to check it out.”

  “What kind of little feeling?”

  “About Dino Cavalli.”

  “No shit,” I said.

  “Cassie, watch your mouth. Is that necessary? I was just thumbing through this book recently and something caught my eye that didn’t add up.”

  “You mean you were hunting through it line by line for something that didn’t add up,” I said.

  He ignored me, which meant I was right. “I found something. I mean, I think I found something, and I was just checking it out.”

  “What did you find?”

  “I don’t know if I want to say.”

  “What? He’s actually a woman,” I guessed. “A killer. A killer woman.”

  “A liar,” my father said.

  I sighed. “You should get a girlfriend, Dad. I mean it. It’s been three years, and you haven’t had a date.”

  “I’ve had dates. This isn’t about dates. This is important. Your mother’s life. Your life. If he’s lied about one thing, he’s lied about others, mark my words.”

  “Marissa what’s her name. She seemed nice. A little Career Barbie but …”

  “All right, listen to this,” Dad said. He adjusted his glasses and began to read. “‘My mother would make a simple lunch, gougere, some bread, and then I would practice.’”7

  “Goo-zhair. Is that edible? I think our neighbor’s cat had one of those caught in his throat once,” I said.

  “It’s a lie.”

  “There’s no such food?”

  “No, it’s a real food, but it’s a recipe from 1969. He’s claiming he ate it when he was eight or nine, and the man is older than I am. The recipe first appeared in a Moldavi wine recipe book, and the wine itself used in the recipe wasn’t even made until 1968.”

  “God, Dad.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “No! I’m talking about you! What are you doing? So maybe the food wasn’t around. Maybe he made a mistake. Maybe they got his age wrong. Maybe a thousand things. What does this prove? You’ve already got plenty of reason not to like him. Shit, in my opinion, Mom has plenty of reasons not to like him, and she still does.”

  Dad got up, gathered his papers. He looked pissed at me. “It just may prove what I’ve always known. He’s a fraud. You just wait.”

  It’s tough to lip-synch violin playing, but I didn’t say this. I turned and left the room, as I didn’t want to fight with Dad. Anything I said would sound like a defense of Dino, and the Civil War began on less.

  “That snake was fucking strong, man,” Zach Rogers said. “A reptile’s muscles you can’t exactly see, you know, through that skin and everything, but I had two encyclopedias on the lid. Two, and he still pushed open the lid and got out. Here’s the psychic-phenomenon-ESPN-shit part. One encyclopedia? It fell open to a page on dinosaurs. Tyrannosaurus rex. Biggest badass dude of reptiles in history. Now, that’s almost creepy. What are the odds?”

  I was walking home from school with Courtney Powelson, my neighbor, and Zach, though I don’t even think he lived near us. He was just sort of migrating along with us, and I had the feeling he was soon going to look up and wonder where the hell he was. He either had a thing for Courtney or he was so used to seeing me that he forgot we were separate individuals. I had every class period with him, even lunch. It was one of those annoying twists of fate in a supposedly random universe. I’ve noticed that this kind of scheduling cruelty never happens with anyone you actually would want to spend all day, every day, with. No, I got Zach. Zach was weird. Entertaining, okay, but weird. He made me believe in alien life forms who come to live among us to steal our souls and our Hostess Cupcake recipes.

  “A dinosaur isn’t a reptile, it’s an amphibian,” Courtney said.

  Zach ignored her, which was a good thing, since she was wrong, anyway. Courtney and I walked to school together often, but she usually pretended she didn’t know me when she got there. She was one of the Popular Group, which meant two things: one, she could outfit a small town in Lithuania with the amount of clothes she had (picture innocent Lithuanian children in glittery HOT BABET-shirts) and two, she was destined to marry some jock, have a zillion kids, and thereby assure herself a spot in front of a television forever. Queen of the American Dream. She didn’t often walk home with me, as she was usually doing some after-school activity—the Sexy Dancing in Front of Male Sports Team club or the I Could Play a Sport Myself but Then I’d Have to Get Sweaty club. Her mother should have named her MasterCard, Zebe said once. Courtney and her two brothers bugged the hell out of Dino. “They have the glazed eyes of too much technology,” he said once. “You look in their eyes and see Gillian Island re-runs playing.” Gilligan, he meant. Even though our houses were pretty far apart, you could often hear their TV blasting or the repetitive pounding of video game music. I still walked with her because, okay, I admit it, she was nice away from her friends, and because I was weak when it came to compromising my principles.

  “I didn’t even get to the best part yet,” he said. “So the lamp I had shining on him? I stuck it down with duct tape. When this mother got out he climbed up the lamp, and when I found him, there was the snake, stuck on the duct tape, back of his head pinned like this.” Zach threw back his head, did a really good stunned cobra impersonation.

  “Hey, that was great,” I said. “You could take that on the road.”

  “Eyuw,” Courtney said. She shivered. I’m not kidding. Those kind of girls always shiver.

  “I didn’t even try to take it off. I was afraid I might skin him.”

  “Hey—perfect ad for the strength of duct tape,” I said.

  “Oh, my God,” Courtney said.

  “Had to take him to the vet. Luckily he was still alive,” Zach said.

  I pictured Zach putting his ear to the little chest to check for a heartbeat, a grateful tear coming to his eye. “How does a vet de-duct tape a snake?” I asked.

  “Very carefully,” he said. “Anyway, there’s six encyclopedias on there now, to see if he can beat his record. He’s my Bench-Press Baby.”

  “Well, here’s our street.”

  I was right earlier, because Zach stopped and looked around. “Where the fuck am I?” he said. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “Cool.”

  Zach wandered off the direction we came, and I left Courtney to an evening of video fulfillment. At home I let Dog William in, went back out front to get the mail. Up the road came Dino’s car. He parked
in the driveway and got out. He had his suit on but wasn’t wearing any shoes. No socks, shoes, nothing. It was October. Way too cold for simple, barefooted pleasure.

  “Dino?” I said. “Hey, did you forget something? Or is this a new bohemian phase?”

  Now, Dino was usually a pretty distracted guy. But this struck me as a bit beyond his usual absentmindedness. We’re talking shoes. Not exactly something that tends to slip your mind.

  This, my friends, is how quickly life can change.

  A little kernel of unease planted itself inside my gut. “It doesn’t matter,” Dino said.

  He slammed the car door and went inside. Something more was going on here; something was not right. I could feel this wrongness coming off him, just like you feel someone’s anger or joy. I followed him, saw him discard his tie on the floor. He paced into the kitchen, and a moment later paced back out again. I was getting a seriously eerie feeling. An uneasiness that didn’t have a name. It was his agitation. And he had this weird look in his eyes, like he was watching something I couldn’t see.

  “He always knows where I am, doesn’t he?” Dino said. “He can see me wherever I am, that bastard.”

  Okay, shit. Something freaky was definitely going on. My body tensed in high alert. I wanted Mom home. Creepiness was doing this dance inside my skin.

  Dino strode into his office, shut the door with a click. The house was quiet except for Dog William huh, huh, huhing beside me. I was glad for his presence—at least I wasn’t completely alone. I had one of those inexplicable moments where I looked at Dog William and he looked at me, and I decided that dogs really had superior knowledge to humans, held the secrets to the universe, only they couldn’t speak. It’s an idea you quickly discard after you see them chew underwear, but right then I felt better thinking one of us understood what the hell was going on.

  And then suddenly the silence was shattered. Sorry for the cliché, but that’s what happened. Shattered, with the sudden frenzy of the violin, the sound of someone sawing open a tree and finding all of life and death pouring out.

  “Wow,” I said aloud. “Jesus.”

  He didn’t tune first. That was what I realized. Not tuning was like a surgeon not snapping on his gloves. Like, well, going out without first putting on your shoes.

  It was the first time he’d played in months and months. But this wasn’t just playing. This was unzipping your skin and spilling out your soul. I had a selfish thought then. Actually, it was kind of a prayer to anyone who might be listening and interested. Please, I begged. Don’t let Dino be crazy when Ian Waters comes.

  Here’s the thing about dealing with people who are beginning the process of losing it. Your most overwhelming urge is to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense. You try to make it fit, even if it doesn’t really. You look at their crazy world from your sane world, and try to make your logical rules apply. As I stood in the hall with Dog William, I decided that there was a plausible story for Dino’s behavior. Something rational. I was having trouble coming up with a story, but hey, there was one somewhere because there had to be. Maybe he got a letter from an old friend he wasn’t so happy to hear from. And Italy—Italy was hot, right? How many times had I heard that? So you know, maybe he was homesick for his shoeless days in Italy. And what about Einstein? A genius, yeah, but he couldn’t match his socks, so he gave up wearing them. Maybe this was something like Einstein. A shoeless, paranoid-ish genius thing. Of course, the deep inside piece of you that knows everything was saying this had nothing to do with Italy or Einstein or an old friend. That inside piece of you knows that your life is veering in a direction you have no desire to go. Basically, downhill.

  That night I heard yelling. Dino just really going at it downstairs in his office. I’d heard him yell before, usually at his managers, but I couldn’t imagine who he’d be yelling at now. Mom had gone to bed already, and the house had been silent. A moment later I heard Mom come out from their bedroom, her hurried steps down the stairs. The front door opened, slammed shut. I slipped out of bed, peeked out my front shades. Dino was on the front lawn in his bathrobe, his skin looking white in the moonlight. He stalked around a bit as if trying to decide what to do, then went behind the hydrangea bushes in the direction of the shed. I lost sight of him, then waited a while to see if he would reappear. Nothing. Finally I got back in bed, stayed on high alert. The house was quiet. I tried to go back to sleep, but when I finally started to doze I heard their voices downstairs. I couldn’t make out their actual words, and though a part of me wanted to hear, a bigger part didn’t. The uneasiness I felt that afternoon was appearing again, adding a new piece, and I wanted it away. But I could tell that my mother’s voice was calm, a little pleading, and that Dino’s was insistent.

  The next morning I went down to get breakfast. I was exhausted from the night, feeling like shit and wondering how to define all the oddities of the day before. Mom sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. She looked tired too. She looked more than tired. She looked like someone had crumpled her up into a ball, thrown her in the trash, removed her, and tried to smooth her out again. I confess I had a Child of Divorce Reunion Fantasy Number One Thousand, where I for a moment imagined my father finding out that Dino really was a killer woman and that my parents would have to get back together. I saw them running through a meadow, hand in hand. Okay, maybe not a meadow. But I saw me having only one Christmas and one phone number and only my own father’s shaved bristles in the bathroom sink. Having both of my own sane, well-rested parents in the kitchen in the morning. I didn’t have these moments often, but the only time Mom ever seemed even mildly tired with Dad was when he had a bad bout of marathon snoring. Why she had brought Dino into our lives I’d never understand. I’d give her some excuse, but three years was a little long for temporary insanity.

  “Well, that was fun,” I said.

  “You heard,” she said. Mom pushed her bangs from her forehead, rubbed her temples. The gesture made me pissed off at Dino, at what he caused.

  “I heard yelling. I didn’t hear actual words. What was going on?”

  “Dino was trying to write last night, and he swore he could hear the Powelson’s television. It was bugging him. His ears—you know he can hear a leaf drop off a tree.”

  “I heard the door slam. I saw him outside.”

  “He went over there. To their house. He cut their cable wire with a pair of hedge clippers.”

  I almost laughed. I did. I mean, think of it—Dino creeping down the street in his bathrobe, aiming toward the glow of light in Courtney and gang’s living room window. I could just picture him hunting around in the junipers for the cable, his gleeful discovery of the thick wire, the satisfactory snap. Then, the sudden extinguishing of the light to a pinpoint. The whole Powelson house with its television IV yanked. “It’s almost kind of funny,” I said.

  “It’s not funny, Cassie. Okay, it’s a little funny. Oh, shit.” She chuckled to herself. She shook her head, held her coffee mug in both hands.

  I wanted to crack up, but the joke felt like a sick one, slightly morbid. If it had just been this, another Dino tantrum, I could have laughed. But there was also his shoeless display of weirdness yesterday. This wire cutting—it was more than excessive frustration. I knew that. “Something strange happened yesterday,” I said.

  “Oh?”

  I told Mom about Dino. The shoes. His paranoia that someone always knew where he was. The way he played that violin. She just looked at me for a while. “He’s off his medicine,” she said finally.

  “What do you mean, ‘He’s off his medicine’?”

  “He’s trying to write. He says it makes him too foggy. That he can’t create when he takes it.”

  “I didn’t even know he had medicine.”

  “For his depression.”

  Mom had first explained to me about Dino’s depression early on in their marriage. No one I knew before had ever tromped off to see a psychiatrist every week. This seemed more than a tad ov
er-dramatic, and I said so to Mom. She went into this big discussion about what clinical depression was, as if I’d never heard those ads on the radio (“Do you have any of these symptoms? Change in eating or sleeping habits? Loss of interest in things that used to give you pleasure? Being critical and nasty to the people you live with?”). It apparently was not I’m-having-a bad-day but I’m-having-a-bad-life, with complications ranging from not being able to get out of bed to feeling like the world was out to get him. All things you want in a second husband.

  Obviously, this depression also made him incapable of seeing that he was luckier than 99 percent of the world’s population. Okay, I know it sounds unsympathetic, and I know most of the time it’s a chemical thing that happens to good people and can’t be helped. But in Dino’s case, so much of it sounded like a spoiled child who needed to be sent to his room. Really, did people who lived in third world countries with no running water or indoor toilets and that had to sew thousands of faux leather jackets in zillion-degree heat in order to eat get depressed and stay in bed? Could they not function without their psychiatrist connected to them like those sicko parents who put their kids on a leash? Call me cold, but his depression seemed like a luxury. I mean, I was depressed myself at having to live with the guy.