Rosewood

Hidden out of sight, I peeked between the slats of the closet doors to find flashes of an unwinnable fight. It seemed to last for an eternity while I anguished.

Suddenly I heard a heavy load tumbling down a flight of stairs.

Shattering glass as a body crashed through the sliding glass doors at the bottom.

Footsteps leading towards the slamming of the front door.

And the rage smoldered away, leaving only a boy fractured in the yard and tire smoke forlornly curling off the driveway.

In his darkened bedroom a puddle of orange lamplight spread across the bed where he lay, imitating peace. While his mind swam in dreams, I sewed until he was skin and bruises sutured into a tapestry of agony. My hands did not waver but my tears did not stop.

Finally I finished the stitches—a curved needle joined a pile of crimson-slicked glass shards on the nightstand beside us—and slumped against the bedframe.

After a few more moments, I watched Elwin’s breath catch as if in a quiet sob, and his lashes blink open.

He struggled to sit up, eyes already melting into sorrow. “I’m so sorry you had to be there.”

Such horror I could hardly speak.

“Say something. Are you okay, Marí?”

The nonsensical question jarred words from me. “You did this to yourself. Look at yourself.”

His hands trembled over his face, chest, arms, traversing a new war-torn landscape.

“Why are you letting him hurt you? Why are you still here?”

“Where else?”

“Anywhere else,” I whispered. “You're sixteen. It's not your fault that your father can’t take care of himself, why should you have to—”

“…I love him.” Elwin shifted uncomfortably, leaving red handprints on white bedsheets.

I was my cousin’s twin in suffering—my heart bled from what he was subjecting himself to. “This is love?”

“It’s not like this all of the time. I swear, it’s not most of the time.”

“This is love?” I repeated, louder, gesturing to his body.

He only stared at me, and for a moment I thought that I had finally made him understand.

But then, “Marí...he’s my father.” He slipped his shirt over his head, heaved himself out of bed, and grabbed his guitar case housing a rustic rosewood instrument. I remembered his distress when his father had wrecked the first one while he guided me to the door, grimacing with each step. “He’s my blood.”

By way of response I grabbed his arm and forced him to face his own reflection in the mirror hanging upon the wall. This is your blood. This is your blood that was drawn by his hand. 

He dodged himself. “He’ll be coming back. We should go.”

I carefully articulated my next question as I followed through the living room. Finally I asked, “If he were anyone else, would you allow him to treat you this badly?”

“He’s not anyone else. He deserves my forgiveness because he’s—”

I raised my voice over him as we emerged from the house. “—And he knows he can abuse you because you think that.”

Elwin stopped and faced me, spotlit under the flickering porch light. “I know you mean well,” he said, an incongruous smile touching his lips, “and I love you for it.”

I folded my arms. “You seem to use those words too freely.”

“…You're my family.”

“And I act like it.”

He bent and touched his lips to my forehead sweetly and fraternally, a mute thanks for my dedication.

As I watched Elwin walk into the night, I realized I could never make him understand. All I could do was show him real love.

***

The first thing I noticed was the desperate clutter and grit of the house. Then the roses, pastel pink and white as if painted by some seraphic artist. I found them scattered across the kitchen counters and table, heaped in the half-full sink, stranded on the coffee table.

I followed my mother’s distant voice upstairs to the bathroom. Ducking inside, I found a sink overflowing with shimmering alcohol and, to my shock, my mother in a flame of emotion.

“You’re lucky she hasn't been taken from you.”

A humorless smile tugged on Aunt Belle’s lips, but no emotion showed beneath the mask of makeup. “I know.” Her voice was aloof and sophisticated like laughter from afar.

Neither my aunt nor she noticed me, so I crept back and sank into a crouch by the door. As the orange light of dusk poured through the windows and painted the bathroom, the women cast their shadows upon the wall like drawings on a paper screen. I watched my mother's slender phantom pace across the room, throwing her arms in graceful animation and each rapid word ringing with passion, like an actress from an old movie. For all my aunt listened she might as well have been.

“She’s nine and she can't read. She can't bathe on her own. She lays in bed and plays video games and barely goes to school.”

My cousin’s condition struck me and twisted my heart into sorrow. When I had heard my mother speaking over the phone to my aunt, her tone had pinballed from desperate to furious to deeply sad. I had also caught bits of conversation with my other aunts and uncles, enough to stitch together an idea of their situation. Now that they had moved to our town I had a full view.

Aunt Belle unspooled a long, tired sigh in response to this indictment. “I know.”

“You know. You know and what? What are you going to do about it? Buy more makeup? Drink it all away?”

Belle waved a hand to convey her ineptitude. “That would be hard, considering you just stole everything I had of each.” I risked a glance around the doorframe—her aristocratic features were not less beautiful, but suddenly, she was hideous. I noticed around the sink was a graveyard of wine bottles and empty eyeshadow pallets and perfume bottles. As if without these occupations my aunt would be forced to spend the money on Tiffany.

“Do you understand what you’ve done to her? That you’ve stunted this girl?” My mother’s words sharpened along the edges as if trying to draw some emotion.

My sorrow flamed into anger at the injustice.

“How can you not care about your daughter?”

“I care,” Belle muttered.

“No, Belle. If you cared you wouldn’t have let this happen in the first place!”

Belle stood up. “I care about my daughter. How dare you say that to me.”

I snorted. I had thought that she had a complete indifference towards Tiffany, judging by her actions. I wondered if there was a truer way to gauge one’s love for another.

I pitied both my cousins with every part of my soul, forsaken as they were if love was an action.

But then I wondered how love could be anything different.

“Who’re you?”

I whipped around, spooked, and found a child with an old GameBoy dangling from her hand. Eyes racooned in shadows, Tiffany peered out from a melancholic, sleepless haze, not quite seeming to see me. She looked like she hadn’t bathed in days.

“I’m Marí.”

My mother’s shadow slammed over me. "What are you doing here?"

I jumped to my feet. Her sharp gaze punctured each excuse I had prepared. "Well, I—I just heard you say you were going to be here, so I thought I would just—see if you needed help babysitting the kid…?" It was the truth but in my panic under her stare it sounded like a lie.

Accepting this, she nodded towards the girl haunting the hallway behind me. Go ahead, then.

Walking to her bedroom I asked about the hundreds of dollars worth of roses adorning the house. “Because mama likes them,” Tiffany told me.

She crawled into bed and resumed her GameBoy while I wandered the disarray of her room. Cracked picture frames displaying Tiffany and her mother and father on lavish vacations. A pile of untouched homework. Half-shredded sheet music smudged with lipstick. Mauled baseball cards. A sleek ivory box filled with broken typewriter keys.

“What’s this?” I lifted the letter T and examined it.

“It was daddy’s,” she muttered from her bed. My imagination sparked with dramatic scenes of Belle rampaging through the house to destroy everything he had touched, which was not unrealistic.

“Why don’t you put that game down?”

No response. The room was dim but light infiltrated the blinds and drew fine lines across her, highlighting the ridges and red scratch marks along her skin. The resemblance was dizzying, like peering through time to see my younger self crumpled in an unwashed bed and retreating into a pixelated world.

“You have to listen to me. I’m older than you and I was put in charge by my mom.”

“But you're not her kid,” she emphasized.

“I know I don’t look like her, but…you will understand one day. In the meantime…that’s a beautiful guitar. Rosewood…your father’s? Let’s see. My friend has one just like it.” I began to pluck a contemplative, sorrowful tune. 

Each note touched her and slowly coaxed her attention away from the game until she sat up. Watching a kaleidoscope of emotions shift across her face, I wondered if maybe she was remembering the man who had traded her for prison bars.

“Can you sing, Marí?” she whispered at the end of the song.

“No, my voice is terrible. Can you?”

She brightened and retrieved a slip of paper from where it was tucked behind her pillow. I spotted song lyrics jotted down in a man’s handwriting.

“Can you read?” I asked.

She shook her head, striking a miserably deep chord in my soul. “I know the notes, though.”

She is not unintelligent, clearly, I thought as she began a lullaby. I followed her notes in clumsy harmony.

“I was like you once,” I told her at the end.

Youthful confusion scrunched her face.

Tiffany only needed someone to help her up, just like I did once. My mother was that person.

I would be hers.

“Would you like to read what your father wrote here?” I showed her the paper again.

After an agonizing moment, she nodded.

***

We sat down in the balcony chairs with bowls of caldo gallego. I felt her eyes searching through my soul as we ate and dusk pulled long shadows across the grass, grasping at the palm trees as if not ready to depart.

We scalded our mouths with dark green broth in silence before she said, “Look at me, Marí.”

Instead my gaze wandered across peach-colored clouds billowing through the sky above the ocean.

“Now.”

I glanced up. Amber sunlight gently touched her face.

She listed her head, studying me through the steam twisting off her soup. The subtle gesture forced my words out instantly: “I’m sorry.”

Her eyebrows twitched upwards and she opened her mouth to respond, but I hurried forward. “I mean, you didn't have to raise me, I’m not your blood.”

Her eyes widened in concern as if to ask where this was coming from and I responded, “I don’t…know why, I just…I am sorry. I’m a dumb teenager.”

Beautiful soprano laughter spilled out of her.

I pushed the bowl of caldo gallego away and whimpered a tangle of two languages coupled with hand gestures to illustrate my devastation, something about her being the most important to me. She listened and watched closely, her face mirroring my emotions as I whirled on.

Finally she smiled, stood, left for the kitchen, and returned with a small chocolate cake and a new guitar. “I love you, my daughter.”