For her sixth birthday, Rose received a bicycle. A late-spring snowstorm had forced her party inside, and so the bicycle, which was meant to be presented to her under the mild May sun, was instead placed with a bow on the cement-floored confines of the family garage.
It was a beautiful thing. A light brown frame with a dance of pale pink daisies across its crossbar and pale cream banana seat. Pink and white streamers trailed from its plastic grips. An aftermarket basket had been attached to its handlebars, daisies on this as well, naturally.
“For your Barbies,” said Rose’s mother.
It was she who had spent the early morning crouched in the garage in her robe, weaving streamers through the bicycle’s spokes.
Rose’s father had picked up the bicycle with a box of training wheels the evening before. These extra wheels had not yet been affixed to the bike, as had been the plan. This was due to the fact that Rose’s mother had spent the prior evening spinning her own wheels about the changes to little Rosie’s party required by the next day’s forecast—which led to Rose’s father spending the evening reassuring her that it would all be fine.
Rose stood shivering in her cotton party dress in the garage.
“Thanks, Mommy. Thanks, Daddy.”
* * *
The weather remained chill that year all the way through the middle of June. At Field Day, in the last week of school, Rose’s classmates all clutched at their sweatshirts and pulled their ankle socks against the cold wind before running races against one another. School might have been ending, but it didn’t feel like summer yet.
The bicycle was moved to the side to make way for Rose’s father’s car. The training wheels remained in their box, set out of the way on a high shelf in the pantry by Rose’s mother.
The bicycle wasn’t forgotten, but just as one doesn’t think about sleds and snow shovels at the beach, nothing about the season sparked feelings of “bicycle-ness.”
And six-year-old Rose … though very pleased with the bicycle when she had seen it, had not thought about it again since she had returned from the cold garage to the warm, squealing girls of her party. She had gotten plenty of lovely, indoor toys that day: toys she already knew how to play with.
In fact, the only person who thought of Rosie’s bicycle at all was her father, for whom its location in the garage was creating an obstacle to exiting his vehicle. As he would contort his body around it, squeezing past the driver’s-side door, he would think about how much the bike had cost him and how his wife had insisted that Rosie must have it.
But, kids, he’d say to himself with a sigh. What are you going to do? And head inside.
* * *
Summer arrived overnight two weeks after school had ended. The coldish spring was burned away by a hot July sun, arrived early, too impatient to wait for the end of June. All around the neighborhood, mothers dragged sprinklers onto their front lawns, told the kids to entertain themselves, and returned to the cooler dim of their homes.
Rosie spent her days shuttling between her neighbors’ houses. Jennifer had the best dollhouse. Brittney’s mom bought name-brand Popsicles. Kara’s parents let her watch MTV.
For these trips Rose used her own two feet, shod in a pair of aqua jelly sandals. And though the shoes left her with delicate, oddly placed blisters, she still never thought about the bicycle she had been given for her birthday or that she could travel much more comfortably upon it. She didn’t know how to use it, and no one had yet undertaken to teach her.
Besides, the jellies made her feel like a princess.
* * *
It wasn’t until a hot Saturday after the Fourth of July that Rose’s father finally hauled the bicycle out of the garage. He had spent the morning weeding and drinking beer. Rose, who had at first insisted upon her fitness to help him with the task (the weeding, not the drinking), had quickly given up and instead lolled on the grass, complaining of boredom.
“Go find your mother,” suggested her father, who thought that if he was to be made to work on his day off, at the very least he could be spared the whining.
“She’s not here,” whined Rose.
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
Rose’s mother was in fact out doing chores, something she’d informed both Rose and her father of before leaving. But both had not thought the information worth remembering, and so it was to both of them as if Rose’s mother had disappeared from their living room without so much as a by-your-leave.
“Well,” he said, turning from the flower bed, “whatcha want to do?”
“I dunno.”
“TV?”
“Nothing’s on.”
“Go see Jenny?”
“On vacation.”
Rose’s father studied his daughter. Suddenly, his mind was full of the bicycle he’d had to move out of the way to get to the gardening tools that morning. He took a swig of beer.
“Come on, let’s go.”
* * *
Rose was not so sure about this.
She straddled the crossbar and looked up at her dad. Unable to find the box of training wheels after ten minutes of searching, he had decided that Rose didn’t really need them anyway.
“Why bother putting them on when you’re just going to ask me to take them off in a week?”
He had tried to cajole Rose into mounting the bike without them. And when that didn’t work he had bullied her. Insisted he thought she was a “big girl.” Maybe he was wrong.
Rose knew when she was being accused of being a baby. She had socked Pete Koernig last week when he had suggested that she still wet the bed.
Rose had gotten onto the bike. But now, perched on the edge of the seat, her toes skimming the ground, she thought maybe she was a bit of a baby. Maybe it was better to be a baby. Safer.
“We’ll take it slow, okay, honey? You just keep your feet moving.”
Rose’s father gripped the back of her seat and her handlebar. With a sharp inhale, Rosie pulled her feet up, located the pedals, and pushed.
Pushed.
Pushed.
They were moving. Rose laughed. So did her father.
“See! You don’t need those silly wheels!”
He led her in a steady, straight line past the neighbors’ houses.
“We’re going to turn now.”
Gently, he pulled an angle into the handlebars. Rose’s breath caught—sure gravity would kick in now—but instead they just executed a wide loop, before straightening out.
Rose’s confidence grew as they looped around and around in front of their house.
Her father, sensing this, began to loosen his hold on the bike. First they did a circuit with his hand barely gripping the seat. Then they executed another, this time his fingertips only lightly guiding the bars. Pretty soon, she was doing it all by herself, though he kept pace with the bicycle.
“Don’t let go, Daddy.”
But he already had. Rose’s hair was streaming in her self-made wind, her tongue between her lips in concentration.
Rose’s father held back and watched her go. Still unaware that she was doing it on her own.
She was about to make the turn when he shouted, “That’s my big girl, Rosie!”
Rose, surprised by the distance of her father’s voice, turned toward it and let go of the handlebars. The wheel jerked to the side, suddenly perpendicular to the bike, forcing the whole contraption into a complete and sudden stop.
From where he stood, Rose’s father watched as her small body pitched up and over the handlebars. A little rag doll landing headfirst, crunch, on the asphalt.
* * *
She was not scared. At least, not at first. And she wasn’t in pain. She was simply on the ground, whereas a moment before she had been in the air. And before that? Where had she been before that? Rose couldn’t remember.
Somewhere, beyond the expanse of pebbles and tar of the road, she sensed movement. Feet running toward her.
And then there was the hot, bare sky and her father.
Rose anchored on his face. Her father’s unshaven face. It was stricken. Terrified. He was shouting something, looking at her, but she couldn’t tell what it was he was saying.
It was then that she became scared.
Her father’s fear infected her. It welled up through her tiny body, invading her chest, her limbs, her neck. Fear poured out of her, bubbling over, spilling out of her ears, running out of her eyes.
Rose drowned in her father’s terror, sinking further and further away from him until she couldn’t see him at all.
* * *
“It’s about time you got here.”
The beach smelled of caramel. And so did the little boy.
Rose was confused. “Where is here?”
“I dunno. Here. Here is here … I guess. Here is where I’ve been waiting for you.”
Rose sat up, the pink sand shifting under her bottom.
“Here,” wherever it was, was beautiful. A short expanse of beach emptied out into a gulf of clear, warm water. In the shallows, Rose could see the flashing of piscine bodies as schools of fish shifted and flocked in the current. A gentle kiss of a breeze carried the scent of salt and lilac across the water. Mounds of sea grass clutched at the sand, before yielding to a sun-speckled forest.
They were in a tent of some kind. White sheet walls, sloping up to big top peaks. Like the blanket forts she made for herself on rainy days … but so much bigger. Grander. Like the circus, almost, but lighter, prettier. A pavilion.
“Want a snack?”
The boy offered her a seashell. A small cowrie. Like the ones on the necklace she had brought home after her trip to Hawaii with Mom and Dad.
Something about that thought bothered her. What was it? Rose pulled her legs in and shook her head.
The boy shrugged and popped the shell into his mouth. Cracked it with his teeth.
“Are you crazy? Don’t do that.”
“Why not? They taste like candy.”
He offered Rose another, this time the slightly larger fan of a bivalve shell. His teeth crunched down again.
Rose took it. She let her tongue flick across its surface, bracing herself for its saline grit.
Instead a sweet warmth rolled over her. The warmth of Sunday breakfast. Butter and maple and flannel pajamas.
“It’s good, right?”
The boy turned onto his belly, digging into the sand for more seashells.
At age six, Rose didn’t really make a habit of looking at boys. To her, they all seemed to be loud, dirty things with a proclivity toward hitting—not worth as much study as, say, the Toys “R” Us circular or the back of the Cap’n Crunch box.
But this boy was different, as much as this place was different, and Rose took a moment to really look at him.
He wore a black vest over a white shirt and a loose pair of pants that ended below his knees. He looked a bit like a pirate, Rose decided, or more likely a stowaway on a pirate’s ship. A plucky cabin boy like in that Swiss Family movie.
He had brown eyes. Rose had never noticed the color of anyone’s eyes before save her mother’s and her own. Rose decided that she liked his brown eyes. They were the color of chocolate.
His hair was curly and too long, as he kept having to brush it out of his face. It was that color that is neither blond nor brown but somewhere in between.
His smile started on one side and crept its crooked way across his teeth, before activating the dimple on the other side of his face.
He was a big kid. About the size of the second graders at her school. The size of kids who can read chapter books and tie their own shoes.
And as Rose had already noticed, he smelled of caramel.
“I’m Hugo. What’s your name?”