Rose Read online

  "How is his health?" Mammy asked.

  "Aside from his problem with his legs, he is a healthy young man. He doesn't get out long enough to catch anything," she added as if that was something to regret. "I have to have the barber come here when he will permit it and then he won't let the man do much more than snip an inch or so here and there and you should see what it's like to get him to go to the dentist or to his doctor. The only thing that gets him excited is shopping at one of those electronic stores and he doesn't do that very much anymore either. because he's able to do it all over the computer. Sometimes. I think he is turning into a computer."

  She sighed again.

  "Please." she said. "follow me.''

  She led us up the stairs to show us what would be our rooms.

  The room she said would be Mommy's had a queen-sized cherry four-poster bed, a sitting area with a fireplace and a television set in a matching wood cabinet. The room had its own bathroom. There were two large windows facing south with pretty flowerpatterned curtains. The floor was a rich maple wood with an area rug. The room looked warm,

  comfortable, and very inviting. Charlotte pointed out all the closet space.

  When Mommy said she had hardly enough to fill half of it. Charlotte replied. "Well, you will be buying more clothes. Monica. I want you to be very stylish and in fashion. My hope is you and I will become good friends and go to many social affairs together. You'll be the sister I've lost," she said. "I'm looking forward to that." she added with such sincerity. Mommy had to look at me with surprise. I didn't know what to say or do to react.

  "Let's look at Rose's room." Charlotte quickly continued.

  The room she declared would be mine was right across from Mommy's and just as large, also with its own bathroom and small sitting area with a television set on a stand. There was a queen-sized light oak bed with what looked like handmade quilts. Above it was a ceiling fan, and there were two large windows with curtains that matched the quilts. The area rug was somewhat larger. This, too, looked very warm and comfortable.

  "You can have your own phone, of course," Charlotte told me. "I'll have it set up with your private number."

  What could I say? The room was easily twice, if not three times, the size of my present room, and I didn't have my own bathroom like I would here.

  "This was my sister's room," she added. She turned to me to see my reaction.

  I felt a quickened heartbeat and looked at the room again.

  "Of course, all of her things are gone. I gave most of it away and stored some of her personal things in the attic.

  "There are two more guest bedrooms and the master bedroom up here and a guest bedroom downstairs," she said. "As you can see, plenty of room, too much for just little old me and poor crippled Evan now."

  Mommy looked at me again and then turned to her.

  "What is it you expect from us exactly. Charlotte? You have a maid who cooks your meals and cleans your home. You have a chauffeur. You have all you need to look after you and the house. I understand why you want a companion for Evan, but what would I do?"

  Charlotte nodded and sat on the chair to the right of the bed. Her face softened, her eyes warming.

  "That's all true, Monica, but when I leave here. I can't help feeling I'm deserting him. This is such a big house. It can feel so empty sometimes, so cold. With you and Rose here, too, there will be so much added warmth. I am hoping it will eventually bring Evan out and what my poor dead sister wanted so much for him will finally take place. Does that help you understand? Doesn't it make sense?"

  Nodding slowly, Mommy looked around the room and at me, her mind obviously reeling with indecision, confusion.

  "I am simply trying to get some good from all this tragedy and unhappiness," Charlotte said, seeing the same thing in Mommy's face. 'Why should y'all continue to suffer? Why should Evan? Why should I when I have all this at my fingertips, more than I need?"

  Mommy's head seemed to nod on its own and keep nodding. "Let us talk about it. Charlotte," she offered.

  "Oh, yes, dear:' she replied with excitement. "Stay here. I'll see about lunch for all of us. Maybe Rose can entice poor Evan to come out and eat with people instead of a computer monitor," she said, rising quickly. "Feel free to look all around while I make the arrangements," she said and left us.

  "I'm absolutely overwhelmed," Mammy said, reaching out to steady herself on the bedpost. "My head is spinning. Look at this place. It's like a five-star hotel. These rooms are so large and beautiful and the grounds... and you would attend a better school and she wants to buy me clothes..."

  She paused and looked at me. "What do you think. Rose?"

  "I'm just as overwhelmed. Mommy. I don't know what to say. I don't want you getting sick with worry about our financial situation, a financial situation Daddy left us. I can also see how Charlotte is right and how she seems to need us. In a very twisted and strange way, this good thing is Daddy's doing, too."

  Mammy nodded.

  "Yes. I'll do it if you will," she said quickly. "I'm not so proud as to cause us to miss a chance to escape our misery and put so much of a burden on you."

  I looked around at what would instantly become my new world, my new life. I couldn't stop my heart from pounding in anticipation, but what was it anticipating? Good things or bad?

  "Let's look at all the rest ofit." Mommy said suddenly, so filled with such excitement and joy, she shed the lines of worry and sorrow instantly.

  Already she was looking younger, happier.

  Charlotte Alden Curtis was right. She was either an angel of mercy. Or an angel of temptation leading us to a deeper fall into unhappiness.

  Mommy and I wandered through the house looking at the pictures of the Curtis and Alden families. We both lingered over pictures of Angelica. There were very few pictures of Evan, and in these he was always looking away or down and never smiling. I picked up the one on the grand piano and looked more closely at his face. It was only natural I suppose for me to look for resemblances to Daddy and to myself. I thought he definitely had Daddy's nose and jaw as well as his hair. In the pictures where I could have some view of his eyes, I thought they were his mother's eyes, and he did have his mother's slightly cleft chin.

  Charlotte had her maid set up a small buffet lunch for us on the patio that was on the west side of the house and therefore soaked in warm sun. Soft blue umbrellas shaded the rolls, meats, and salads that were placed on the tables.

  "Why don't you go to Evan," Charlotte asked me. "introduce yourself, and see if you can get him to join us for lunch?"

  "I can't just go to his room," I said.

  "Of course you can. dear. I want y'all to feel this house is your house immediately. Go on," she urged. "He won't bite. The worst thing he'll do is what he does often to me. He'll ignore you, pretend you're not there."

  I looked at Mommy. She smiled some encouragement and I shrugged and started toward Evan's room. What a strange feeling came from realizing I was about to meet my brother for the first time. We shared the same father. We had similarities in our looks. Did that mean we might think alike, feel things the same way?

  And what did he think of our father now? Did he hate him for what he had done to his mother, for helping to create him and then deserting him? Would his anger toward our father spread to me? Would he resent me and hate me no matter what I said or did?

  I was actually trembling a bit when I approached the door to his room and 'mocked. I heard nothing, and thought perhaps I had knocked too softly, so I did it again much sharper, harder. Still, he didn't say come in or ask who it was. My third set of knocks actually opened the door. It wasn't closed tightly at all. It swung in and I looked at his room.

  I hadn't been in many boys' rooms, but this certainly didn't look like any I would imagine. The walls were bare. There weren't any posters of sports heroes or movie and television stars or rock singers. The room itself resembled a cold, aseptic hospital room. There was a special bed made up with stark white s
heets and pillow cases bounded by railings. Around the room were all sorts of therapeutic equipment.

  At first I didn't think Evan was in the room, but when the door finished opening. I saw him staring at a computer monitor. He was also wearing headphones, which explained why he didn't hear my knocking. I saw that there was a microphone attached to the headphones and he was talking softly to someone. I thought I shouldn't interrupt him, but something told him I was in the doorway. Perhaps it was the shadow that came from the light behind me or maybe I was reflected in the glare of his computer screen. Whatever it was, he turned suddenly and looked at me, practically stabbing me with his furious eyes,

  "I'm sorry," I began. "I knocked and then knocked again and your door just opened."

  He said something into the microphone and slowly took off the headphones, placing it all in his lap.

  "She tells me you're my sister," he said. His voice was deeper than I had expected and not unlike Daddy's. "My half-sister," he added.

  "It seems to be so," I replied.

  "She's trying to make it sound like half is better than none," he said. "That's not always true. Half a glass of cyanide isn't better than none; half a headache isn't better than none."

  "I'm hardly poison and I don't think I give people headaches," I retorted. "Look. this is just as much a surprise for me and my mother as it is for you, believe me. More so," I added after a beat. "because, according to Charlotte, you've known about us for some time."

  He stared, his eyes so unlike Daddy's. They were definitely his mother's eves entirely-- a deep blue, sapphire, but so penetrating, searching, and unmoving.

  "I don't see why you and I have to suffer because of what others have done," I suggested.

  His eves brightened and softened.

  "Oh, and how do I stop suffering?" he asked with a bit of an impish smile. "'The best doctors haven't come up with an answer. Can you?"

  "I'm not talking about that."

  "What?" He was wheeling toward me. "What's that?"

  "Your unfortunate condition." I said, nodding at him in the chair.

  "Unfortunate condition, Yes, that's a good way to put it. Thank you. I used to call myself crippled."'

  "'If you accept misery, you will be miserable,' Daddy used to say."

  "Daddy? Daddy," he muttered. "You'll have to tell me about Daddy," he added, spitting the word like some profanity.

  "I will," I said defiantly. "I'll tell you lots of things if you let me, but first you have to want me to. I'm not coming here begging you to be friends. I'd like to be friends, but if you don't want me to be your friend..."

  "It's up to me. I know. She's always saying things are up to me-- as if I really had any control of anything," he complained.

  "You do when it comes to our relationship." He stared and then smiled.

  "What's your real name?"

  "That's my name."

  "Rose? That's on your birth certificate?" "Yes."

  "What were they going to call the next child. Daffodil?"

  "Very funny," I said. "Look. I'm hungry. There's a nice lunch out there. Do you want to have some lunch with me and talk sensibly, or do you want to shut yourself up in here and try to make us feel terrible. too?"

  "That's a tough one," he said. He looked back at his computer. "I may have to go on a search engine to find the answer."

  "Yes, well when you do, come on out and join me," I said and started to turn away.

  "Okay," he said.

  "Okay?"

  "Okay, I'm coming, Lead the way. Rose."

  "I'm glad my name amuses you," I said and we started down the hallway, him wheeling himself alongside me. "I can push you, if you like." I said.

  "Thanks, but this is all the exercise I'm getting today. My therapist isn't coming today."

  "What were you doing on the computer? Who were you talking to?"

  "I was in a chat room with other shut-ins. I created the club. It's called Invalids Anonymous. We compare notes and depress each other."

  "Doesn't sound like fun."

  "We just got started. We'll find a way to have fun yet."

  We reached the patio doors. Charlotte looked up. She and Mommy were seated at a table, talking and eating. "Well, isn't this nice," she said.

  "Yes," Evan said. -'one big happy family."

  He looked up at me with a half smile on his face, waiting for my reaction. In that split second. I saw the pain and the loneliness as well as the impishness in his eyes. He wasn't just crippled with a bone deformity. He was all twisted emotionally, full of anger and self-pity.

  And yet I thought he was actually a very goodlooking boy. He had the best of Daddy's features and his mother's. If some sparks of joy could light some happiness in those eyes, he would be very attractive, I concluded.

  He seemed to be challenging me with his recalcitrant stare, daring me to do something that would help him, daring me to really be his sister, to be sincere and care about him. He looked like he expected me to flee, to turn away in disgust, but I didn't.

  I smiled at him.

  "This is my mother, Monica," I said. "She and my father named me Rose."

  His eyes softened and filled with some humor. "Hello, Evan," Mommy said.

  He said hello politely.

  "Can I get you a plate of food. Evan?" Charlotte asked him.

  "No," he said sharply. He looked up at me. "I'd rather have Rose do it. By any other name, she'd smell as sweet."

  Okay I thought. I'll play, too.

  "Too bad you don't."' I threw down at him.

  He seemed to wince, and then he laughed. The sound of it must have been alien to Charlotte. She dropped her mouth in amazement, and then looked at Mommy as I pushed Evan toward the food.

  "I do believe this was meant to be." she said.

  I would soon learn that what she meant by this and what we would interpret it to mean were two entirely different things.

  5 Evan

  After lunch. Evan allowed me to push him down the paths that wove through the gardens, ponds, and grounds around and behind the grand house. He said he wanted to show me his favorite places. but I sensed he wanted to get away from his aunt and Mommy to talk to me. I soon learned that Charlotte wasn't exaggerating when she characterized Evan as an introverted fifteen-year-old boy who had chained himself to his computer and who had minimal contact with the physical world around him. He reminded me of the allegory of Plato's Cave, one of the dialogues in Plato's The Republic, which my English teacher, Mr. Madeo, had made me read as an extra assignment just a few weeks ago.

  In the allegory, people were living in an underground cave and chained so they could only look at the wall ahead of them. Above and behind them a fire burned so that everything that moved between the fire and them was thrown on the wall in the form of shadows. All they knew as real were the shadows and the echoes of sounds they heard and thought came from those shadows,

  As Evan talked and described some of the things he did on his computer, the people he met and had gotten to know only over the Internet. I thought to myself that he was living in a cave-- an electronic one, but still, a cave. His only friends were people he heard over his earphones and saw on his computer monitor. He traveled through the monitor and knew about exotic lands and people, but he had never really left the grounds of this estate. The only flowers he smelled or touched were the ones he could experience from his wheelchair trips down these paths. His world was populated solely by nurses, doctors, and other medical people, as well as a few servants and his tutor. Mrs. Skulnik, a fifty-eight-year-old retired math teacher who he said had a face like an old sock, so full of wrinkles it would take a tear two months to travel down to her chin.

  "And she smells," he said. "like sour milk. I've told my aunt that I don't want her, but she says it's difficult to find someone else. I know she's not even trying.

  "Maybe I don't need a tutor anyway," he suddenly thought aloud and looked up at me. "Maybe now that you're moving in, you can be my tutor and I'll j
ust take the high school equivalency exam." "It's not definite that we're moving in. Evan." "I meant, if you do."

  "I don't know if I can do that, Evan. I don't

  know if it's even legal," I said. "Doesn't the tutor have to be a licensed teacher?" "Right." he snapped, looking down quickly. "It was a stupid idea. Forget it."

  "I didn't say it was stupid. Evan."

  He stopped talking. I could see how quickly he could be discouraged. Fooling around with him at lunch, meeting his challenges and quips with my own, had, strangely enough, gotten him to relax enough with me so that he was willing to talk with me and be with me privately. From the way his eves traveled over my face, searching for sincerity. I could feel how difficult it was for him to place his trust in anyone. No wonder it was easier and far more comfortable for him to deal with people through a computer. There was so much less danger of being disappointed. If someone displeased you, you simply clicked the mouse and sent them into electronic oblivion.

  "You wouldn't have the time for me, anyway," he finally said. "Once you started school here, you'd make lots of friends and wouldn't want to be tied down to some invalid, even the president of Invalids Anonymous."

  "That's not true," I protested.

  "Right. You just wouldn't be able to wait every day to rush home to help me with schoolwork. The truth is, you're probably the most popular girl in your school."

  "The truth is. Evan. I don't have all that many friends at the school I'm at now," I revealed,

  He looked up at me. "Sure."

  I stopped pushing his chair and walked around to the front so he would have to face me.

  "For your information. Evan. I can count on the fingers of one hand the girls I care to talk to at school. Mommy. Daddy. and I have moved so many times. I never had a chance to make meaningful relationships. I can't even remember most of the other kids I knew, Their faces are like one big blur to me.. It just so happens, our present address is the longest I can remember occupying, and it's not even a full two years!"

  His self-pity dissolved as that look of interest and some trust seeped into his eyes again, warming them.