The Rose Variations by Marisha Chamberlain

Author:Marisha Chamberlain
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Soho Press
Published: 2000-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

PART TWO

“Now you are tangled up in others and have forgotten what you once knew. . . .”

—Kabir, “The Radiance,”

version by Robert Bly

Chapter SEVENTEEN

On a bright Sunday afternoon in late March, the week before Easter, Rose lay in her kimono, lolling in bed on her sun porch, when a knock came at the door. It was not a knock she knew, not Alan’s boom-boom, nor Frances’s rhythmic rat-a-tat, nor little Max’s soft thud when Frances held him up to do the honors. The Gilpins—Alan, Frances, and their son, Max—lived upstairs, and their descending footfall usually warned her before any knock came.

“Just a sec,” Rose called and tightened her sash.

Downstairs, the front door lock had been changed the week before by Alan. He was president of the condo association and security-minded: outside locks should be changed every two years. It was, however, a little schizophrenic, to use his phrase, that he hadn’t yet managed to deliver new keys, so the front door stood unbolted all day. Anyone could be knocking. Though the tangled streets of the neighborhood around the college tended to discourage outsiders—so easy to get lost there—it was still a city neighborhood, and the only thing between Rose and the street was her door with its peephole. She peeped out and didn’t see anyone. The knock came again, down low.

She opened the door to a strange little creature, a girl of five or six. There was something of the wild animal about her, like a squirrel or raccoon. Her snarled brown hair was held back by a worn velvet headband, and she twisted her hands—paws, really: her fingernails seemed both sharp and bitten—and gazed at Rose through widely spaced eyes of a peculiarly intense shade of blue. In her patched-together jacket, which seemed to be missing buttons entirely, Rose recognized something, and looked into the blue eyes as into a mirror, feeling absurdly that she was looking at herself. Yet a real little girl stood before her.

“Aunt Rose?” the girl said, in a tiny, tremulous voice.

“Marguerite?” breathed Rose, and knelt. “You’re Marguerite, aren’t you?”

The girl nodded curtly.

“Well, come in,” said Rose. She hadn’t seen her niece since Natalie and Guy had struck off for Mexico a month after her Composer’s Guild con-cert, on a winter vacation that had stretched into years, six years. For all Rose knew, they’d settled there.

The little girl took a step inside and looked around, and then peered up at Rose through her lashes. It was pure Natalie, that look, exact to the tilt of the chin—dauntingly innocent and at the same time obscurely scheming.

“Where’s Natalie?” asked Rose, craning into the hall. The little girl stood at the threshold of the sun porch, leaning on her toes toward the unmade bed.

“Where’s your mama?” Rose asked again.

The girl wriggled out of the knapsack on her shoulders and let it drop to the floor.

“Guy’s sposed to get me,” she said.

However, out the windows, all the parked cars were familiar. Guy’s truck, if he still had the truck, was nowhere in evidence.

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