“Safe.”
“It’s not a turnip.” I turn back to the window. “It’s an amaryllis bulb.”
“A what?”
“An amaryllis. A flower bulb.”
“But why do you have it?”
I don’t want to explain why I have it. And I don’t feel like telling her the dirty little turnip is not what it looks like. It is more. It is something beautiful, hidden but there. Helen Calvert, who lives far across the sea, wrote words like those about the amaryllis bulb when she gave it to me. I’ve held on to them and the bulb because I’ve needed to believe they are true.
“Because it’s mine,” I say. “And so were those letters I had in my bag.”
“They weren’t addressed to you. Mrs. Calvert said they were hers and Mr. Calvert’s.”
“Not all of them were. Some of them were mine. And they had given the others to me. Those letters were mine.”
Mrs. Grissom is quiet for many long moments.
“Care to tell me how you got into this mess?” she finally says,as though it doesn’t matter who the rightful owner of those letters is. We aren’t going back for them.
“No.” I reach again to touch the little key hiding behind the pendant. I don’t care to tell her. I won’t.
“Things would go easier if you told me the truth about...” She glances at the slight bump at my waist. “You know. How this happened.”
“Would it change where you’re taking me?”
“Well, no.”
“It happened the usual way, Mrs. Grissom.”
The county worker sighs, shakes her head, and turns her attention fully back to the road.
I remove the tissue-thin paper of instructions on how to care for an amaryllis from within the baking soda tin—which Celine obviously missed when she went through my bag—and place the only letter from Helen left to me inside the cigar box where all the others had been. I return the bag to its place on the back seat.
We drive into Santa Rosa, then through it, and then we pass over to rolling hillsides on its other side, blanketed with vineyards and scattered sycamore and bushy acacia trees.
“Is it a nice place? Where you’re taking me?” I ask as we turn onto a road I have never been down before.
Mrs. Grissom purses her lips before answering. “It’s a respected place for people who need help, Rosanne. You need help and that’s what’s important. I suppose in its own way it’s nice.”
It will be something like a boardinghouse, I imagine, run by tsking older women who will look down on me in disapproval. I’ll be rooming with other fallen girls who have gotten themselves in trouble, and we will surely be reminded daily of our failure to make good choices. Why aren’t there places like that for fallen men, I wonder, where they are tsked and told every day that their recklessness has led to disaster?
Mrs. Grissom slows and turns onto a sloping driveway. I see ahigh fence surrounding a multistory brick building with white trim and flanked by lawns just starting to come back to life after the winter. It looks like a school or college. On either side of the gated entry are two oak trees with limbs that reach well over the top of the fence. A sign etched in stone on the outside of the gate readssonoma state home for the infirm. Below that in smaller letters are the words:caring for the mentally encumbered, the epileptic, the physically disabled, and the psychopathic delinquent.
A cold burst of alarm surges in my chest. “Is this where we’re going?”
“It is.” Mrs. Grissom doesn’t look my way as she stops in front of the closed gate. An attendant emerges from a small gatehouse.
“This can’t be right, Mrs. Grissom. Didn’t you see the sign? This is some kind of hospital for... for sick people.”
The smiling attendant comes around to the driver’s side and Mrs. Grissom rolls down her window.
“Eunice Grissom with County Human Services. This is Rosanne Maras.”
“Mrs. Grissom!” I shout. “This isn’t the right place. I’m not sick. I’m not... infirm.”
Mrs. Grissom tightens her grip on the steering wheel and says nothing.
