Her Name Is Rose Read Online Free PDF Page A

out, inadequate. An amateur. A craftsperson at best. Not an artist. She makes no sound in the hallway although tears shine in her eyes.
    A door opens and closes somewhere down the hall. What is she going to do now? Hang out here until Roger returns?
    What the hell?
    And who is Victoria?
    In the ladies’, she sees her red face in the mirror. She stares while trying to control her breathing. She’s gulping for air.
    Finally, she takes out her makeup bag. The birthmark is flushed with feeling. She looks closely at it, as if in seeing it, it somehow pulls her back into herself and she begins to calm down.
    â€œIt’s shaped like a rose,” her father said.
    â€œA tiny tea rose,” her mother said.
    When she was old enough to understand such things, they had told her: “That’s why you were named Rose.”
    She’d thought about that for a moment and then asked: “What if it looked like an elephant? What would I have been called then?”
    â€œEllie, of course!”
    They went on like this, making a game of it. The story of the rose always preceded the story of how she arrived in Ashwood on August 23, 1990, when she was eight weeks old. She wasn’t an orphan, but “placed” for adoption following her birth in the month of June. Both stories always worked to make Rose claim her identity. Her father was right, the edges of the birthmark on her right cheek do look like the curved petals of a rose tattoo. But that’s not why they named her Rose. She knows that. But the story always comforts her. She’s grown used to it, just as she’d grown up with the idea of being adopted. Just another way of being in the world. Most of the time she doesn’t even notice. It doesn’t really matter, most of the time.
    When she was sixteen her parents decided to give her the letter from her birth mother. She had cried when she read it. Rose keeps the letter tucked inside a music book that is on the shelf in her bedroom back in Ashwood. Her birth mother hadn’t written much. It was a short, handwritten letter. She wanted Rose to know she was very much loved and it was because of that love she’d been “placed” with a wonderful couple who would give her all the things she couldn’t—a house and home and, most important, two parents who really loved each other. Always remember you are doubly loved. By me, forever, and by your parents.
    She touches her cheek and thinks of her father. What would he do now? She knows her mother would be raging mad at Roger. In fact, now that she thinks about it, she’s sorry she didn’t tell her mother the master class was this week, because if she had, her mother would be on her way to the academy, bursting in without stopping for George, marching right up the stairs to the office of Mr. Roger Ballantyne and waiting for him to come back, to ask him what the hell was he doing walking out on her daughter at a critical moment when she was trying so hard to be perfect. She would be a storm coming at him. And for a moment Rose lightens up just thinking about her impassioned mother.
    But her father, now what would he do?
    Leaving the makeup bag on the edge of the sink, Rose takes out her ensemble for the concert, strips off, and steps quickly into her sleeveless black dress and ballet flats. She returns to her makeup and underlines and overlines her eyes in black. Sultry.
    Feck ’em. Get your Irish up! her father would have said.
    Yes. Feck them.
    She picks up where she left off with the Siciliana . The acoustics in the ladies’ room are amplifying. Her Siciliana is a long, anguished sigh. She leans into the phrases like Roger taught her, goddamn him, giving them room to breathe without letting them fade like petals withering on a stem. The heartbeat in her chest is a metronome, silent to the outside world, but keeping time with the music.
    *   *   *
    An hour later, she gets her Irish up and goes to