Darling Rose Gold(25)

Rose Gold sat in the witness box. She raised her right hand and swore to tell the truth. The prosecutor asked her to state her name for the jury.

“Rose Gold Watts,” she mumbled. The jurors leaned forward, straining their necks to hear.

“A little louder, please,” the prosecutor said.

She cleared her throat. “Rose Gold Watts,” she repeated.

“What is your relationship to the defendant?” the prosecutor asked.

“She’s my mom,” Rose Gold said, eyes cast down, hands gripping the arms of her chair.

“And it was just you and your mom living at 1522 Claremont, correct?”

Rose Gold nodded.

“Can you give us a verbal affirmation, please?”

“Yes,” Rose Gold said.

“No dad? No brothers, no sisters?”

I gripped the arms of my own chair. This simpleton was going to make my daughter relive every rotten moment of her childhood—every absent family member, every infection, every missed school field trip. I had tried to shield her from her disadvantages. In our house, we focused on positives. These buffoons were trying to drown her in her own sorrows.

“Can you describe your schooling from preschool up through now?” the prosecutor asked.

Rose Gold launched into a nervous explanation of her transition from elementary school to homeschooling. She lifted a trembling hand to smooth a flyaway on her head. I wondered if she was on her period. The time of month was right. I still hadn’t taught her how to use a tampon. There were so many things I had yet to teach her. She wasn’t ready to face the world alone.

The prosecutor moved on. “I want to ask you a few questions about your diet.”

Rose Gold had never fixed a sandwich or folded laundry. I cleaned her room and made her bed and drove her everywhere she needed to go. I had tried to encourage her independence once in a while, offering to leave her at the library for a few hours or sit in the waiting rooms during her doctors’ appointments, but she always wanted me there. “Stay,” she’d beg, and grab my hand. So I did. Maybe I should have pushed her harder. She was eighteen years old with no driver’s license or friends. She was not equipped to handle the meanness of this world. She was up there, shaking like a leaf, because of me. I should have been firmer, should have said no, should have spoiled her less. But all those years, I had needed her as much as she needed me.

“Were you allowed to have friends?” the prosecutor asked.

I had been deserted time and again throughout my life. I wasn’t good enough for my family, wasn’t good enough for Rose Gold’s father. Then suddenly I had this little angel who was dependent on me, who loved me more the longer we were together. I had someone to zip the back of my dress all the way to the top, to laugh no matter how cheesy my jokes were. She never got sick of my stories, never asked me to leave her alone. Some evenings, after we’d finished school for the day, I’d head to my bedroom or the kitchen to give her some privacy. She always came looking for me.

Rose Gold seemed far away, dreamy.

The prosecutor repeated his question. “Miss Watts, were you allowed to have friends?”

“No,” she answered, not making eye contact with anyone, but especially not me. “My neighbor Alex Stone was the only person my age I was allowed to talk to—almost always under my mother’s supervision.”

“What was her reason for keeping you away from the other kids?” the prosecutor asked.

Rose Gold tucked her hands under her legs, arms stiff. She shivered, obviously freezing. Mary hadn’t bothered to pack her an extra sweater. Some stand-in mother she was.

“She said she was worried my immune system wouldn’t be able to fight off their germs. Because of my chromosomal defect.”

“Which we now know you do not have,” the prosecutor pointed out. The two of them must have rehearsed this little scene.

“Right,” Rose Gold said reluctantly. “That was an excuse. She wanted us to be together all the time.”

“Why do you think that is?”

Rose Gold mumbled, just loud enough for everyone to hear, “She said she wanted to give me the childhood she never got.”

My face burned to the tips of my ears. My stomach flipped.

“What kind of childhood did she have?”

Rose Gold watched the prosecutor with wide eyes, searching for the same approval she’d always sought from me. “She wouldn’t say much, but I know neither of her parents was very nice to her. Actually, her dad was abusive. I guess that’s where she gets it from.”

I wiped my clammy hands on my pants. The jurors watched me with curiosity; one even wore an expression of pity. I stared down at the table, pretending to examine the wood grain.

In Dad’s defense, he had PTSD during an era when there was no such thing as PTSD, let alone a treatment plan. If I had to guess, I’d say the Battle of the Bulge was tolerable next to his battle with the bottle. He never laid a finger on my mother, but he applied all ten of them and then some to David and me. The country was ready to boil over in the sixties, and my house was no exception.

Dad ran his house with military precision, all “Yes, sirs” and never at ease. My mother, with her gelatinous spine, was his second in command. She never hit us herself, but I came to dread the threat “Wait till your father gets home” almost as much as the inevitable pounding that would follow. To this day, I can’t look at a belt, let alone wear one. They make the scars on my back itch.