The Sweetness of Forgetting (97)

Rose

It was July of 1980, and Rose sat, eyes closed, in the living room of the home Ted had built for her. It was hot outside, so hot that even the salty sea breeze wafting in through the windows wasn’t enough to cool her off. On days like this, she longed for Paris, for the way that even in the heat, the city seemed to sparkle. Nothing sparkled here but the water, and that just seemed to Rose a cruel temptation. It taunted her, reminding her that if she only got into a boat and headed east, eventually she would be home, on the distant shores of the country of her birth.

But she could never go back. She knew that.

She could hear raised voices in the front room. She wanted to get up and tell them to stop fighting, but she could not. It was not her place. Josephine was thirty-seven now, old enough not to be told what to do by her mother. Rose had already failed in protecting her daughter, in instilling in her the things a good mother should. If she had it all to do again, the choices she would make would be different. She hadn’t realized when she was younger that fate could be decided in a moment, that the smallest decisions could shape your life. Now she knew, and it was too late, too late to change a thing.

Ted came into the room then. Rose heard his heavy, confident footsteps and smelled the faint, sweet odor of the cigars he liked to smoke on the front porch while listening to Red Sox games on the radio.

“Jo is at it again,” he said. She opened her eyes to see him staring down at her in concern. “Don’t you hear her?”

“Yes,” Rose said simply.

Ted scratched the back of his head and sighed. “I don’t understand. She loves to fight with them.”

“I did not teach her properly how to love,” Rose said softly. “It is my fault.” That was why Josephine pushed the men who loved her away, Rose knew. Because Rose had kept her at arm’s length. Because Rose had been terrified of relying on the one person she loved the most. Because Rose knew that the people you loved could be taken away one day with no warning. Those were not the lessons she had meant to impart to Josephine. But she had.

“My dear, it’s not your fault,” Ted said. He sat down beside her on the couch and pulled her to him. She breathed in deeply and let him hold her. She loved him. Not in the way she had loved Jacob, or her family in France, for she had loved them all with an open heart. When one’s heart closed, it was impossible to feel the same. But she loved him in the best way she knew how, and she knew she was loved deeply in return. She knew he longed to reach across the invisible divide that separated them. She wished she could tell him how, but she herself did not know.

“Of course it is my fault,” Rose said after a moment. They were quiet for a moment as Josephine screamed at her boyfriend that he would only leave her one day anyhow, so why should she bother giving him another chance? “Listen to her,” Rose said after a moment. “The words she is speaking could have come from my mouth.”

“Nonsense. You never pushed me away like that,” Ted said. “That is not the example you set for her.”

“No,” Rose said simply. But what she wanted to say was that she had never pushed him away because she had never let him in to begin with. She was a castle surrounded by many defenses. Ted had only made it to the grassy knoll beyond the first moat; there were many more walls to be scaled and many more battles to be fought in order to reach her heart. But Ted didn’t know that. It was better that way.

They both watched through the window as Hope came toward the house from the backyard, where she’d been playing in the sand at the edge of the dunes. Rose had been keeping an eye on her—she was just five—and hoping that she’d stay out of earshot long enough for her mother to finish arguing with the latest man she’d brought into Hope’s life.

“I’ll go keep her occupied,” Ted said, starting to rise.

“No,” Rose said. “I will go.” She kissed Ted on the cheek and headed toward the door. Hope turned and her eyes lit up when her grandmother walked out onto the back porch. For a moment, Rose was too choked up to speak. Hope looked so much like Danielle had looked all those years ago, and sometimes, it was hard for Rose to look at her without seeing the past, without seeing the baby sister whose fate she could not bring herself to fully imagine.

“Mamie!” Hope called out excitedly. Her brown curls, so similar to the flowing curls Rose herself had sported in her youth, danced in the sea breeze, and her extraordinary green eyes, the color of the sea flecked with gold, shone with excitement. “I caught a crab, Mamie! A big one! It had pinchers and everything!”

“A crab?” Rose smiled down at her granddaughter. “Oh my! Whatever did you do with it?”

Hope grinned and blinked up at her grandmother. “Mamie, I let him go! Just like you told me!”

“Did I tell you that?”

Hope nodded just once, confidently. “You told me not to hurt anyone or anything if I could help it. And the crab’s an anyone.”

Rose smiled. She bent to give Hope a hug. “You did the right thing, my dear,” she said. Inside, she could hear the voices of Josephine and her boyfriend rising as they yelled at each other. She cleared her throat, hoping that it would block the sound. “Let’s stay out here for a little while,” she said to her granddaughter. “How about I tell you a story?”

Hope grinned and hopped up and down for a minute. “I love your stories, Mamie! Can you tell me the one about the prince teaching the princess to be brave?”