Uncle Lestan said, “I’ll be with you, Rose, as long as you need me.”
She woke in the night crying for her mother. He held her in his arms. He felt so strong, so powerful. They stood on the edge of the patio, looking up at the cloudy sky. He told her that she was sweet and good and beautiful, and he wanted her to be happy.
“When you grow up, Rose, you can be anything you want,” Uncle Lestan said. “Remember that. This is a magnificent world. And we are blessed with the gift of life in it.” He sang to her in a low voice. He told her this was “Serenade” from an operetta called The Student Prince. The song made her cry, it was so beautiful.
“Remember always,” he said, “that nothing is as precious to us as the magnificent gift of life. Let the moon and the stars always remind you of this—that though we are tiny creatures in this universe, we are filled with life.”
Rose felt she knew what magnificent was as she looked out over the shining waters below, and then up once more at those stars twinkling beyond the mist. Uncle Lestan’s left fingers touched the flowering vines that covered the railing, and he tore off a small handful of petals for Rose, and said that she was as soft and precious as these petals, a “precious living thing.”
When Rose thought back on it, she remembered seeing him several times before the night the island sank into the sea. He’d been roaming around on that island. He was a tall man with beautiful blond hair, just the most beautiful hair. It was long and full and he wore it back, tied at the back of his neck with a little black string. He always wore a velvet coat, just like Rose’s best velvet dress which had been in her suitcase. He had walked around the island looking at things. He wore shiny black boots, very smooth without buckles. Not cowboy boots. And whenever he happened to pass Rose, he smiled at her and he winked.
Rose hated Athens, Texas. But he took her there, though she could not clearly remember the trip. Just waking up in the Dallas airport with a nice lady to take care of her, and a porter collecting their bags. Uncle Lestan showed up the next night.
The old woman and the old man didn’t want her. They sat in a lawyer’s office on “the town square” at night, and the old man said that they didn’t have to make this appointment after dark, that he didn’t like to drive at night when he didn’t have to, that this was “disruptive” and he and his wife could have explained all this on the telephone. The old woman just shook her head as the old man explained: “We didn’t have anything to do with Morningstar, you see, what with the musicians and the drugs. We don’t know this child.”
The lawyers talked on and on, but Uncle Lestan became angry. “Look, I want to adopt her,” he said. “Make it happen!”
That was the first time Rose had ever heard someone say, “Make it happen.” And it was the first and last time she ever saw Uncle Lestan angry. He’d dropped his angry voice to a whisper but he’d made everybody in the room jump, especially Rose, and when he saw this, he took Rose in his arms and carried her outside the building, for a walk around the little town.
“I’ll always take care of you, Rose,” he said. “You’re my responsibility now and I’m glad of it. I want you to have everything, Rose, and I’ll see to it that you do. I don’t know what’s wrong with those people that they don’t love you. I love you.”
Rose went to live in Florida with Aunt Julie and Aunt Marge in a beautiful house blocks from the sea. The sand on the beach was as white and fine as sugar. Rose had her own room with flowered wallpaper and a canopy bed, and dolls and books that Uncle Lestan sent to her. Uncle Lestan wrote her letters in the most beautiful handwriting and black ink on pink paper.
Aunt Marge drove Rose to a private school called the Country Lane Academy. The school was a wonderland of games to play and projects to do, and computers on which to write words, and bright-faced eager teachers. There were only fifty students in the whole school and Rose was reading Dr. Seuss in no time. On Tuesdays, the whole school spoke Spanish and only Spanish. And they went on trips to museums and zoos and Rose loved all this.
At home Aunt Marge and Aunt Julie helped Rose with her homework, and they baked cakes and cookies, and when the weather was cool, they cooked barbecue outdoors and drank lemonade mixed with iced tea with lots of sugar. Rose loved swimming in the gulf. For her sixth birthday, Aunt Marge and Aunt Julie gave a party and invited the whole school to come, even the older kids, and it was the best picnic ever.
By the time Rose was ten, she understood that Aunt Julie and Aunt Marge were paid to take care of her. Uncle Lestan was her legal guardian. But she never doubted that her aunts loved her, and she loved them. They were retired schoolteachers, Aunt Julie and Aunt Marge, and they talked all the time about how good Uncle Lestan was to all of them. And they were all happy together when Uncle Lestan came to visit.
It was always late in the evening when he arrived, and he brought presents for everyone—books, clothes, laptop computers, and wonderful gadgets. Sometimes he came in a big black car. Other times he just appeared, and Rose laughed to herself when she saw how mussed his hair was, because she knew he’d been flying, flying like that first time, when the little island had sunk into the sea and he had carried her up into the Heavens.
But Rose never told anyone about that, and as she got older she came to think that it just couldn’t have happened.
She’d gone from the Country Lane Academy to the Willmont School some fifty miles farther away, and there she was really getting into the most fascinating subjects. She loved literature and history best of all, and after that music, and art appreciation and French. But she did all right in science and math because she felt she had to. Everybody would be so disappointed if she did not do well. But what she really wanted was to read all the time, and her happiest times at school were in the library.
When Uncle Lestan called, she told him all about it, and they talked of books he loved and that she loved, and he reminded her: “Rose, when you grow up, remember, you can be anything you want. You can be a writer, a poet, a singer, a dancer, a teacher, anything.”
When Rose turned thirteen, she and her aunts went on a tour of Europe. Uncle Lestan wasn’t with them but he had paid for everything. This was the greatest time of Rose’s life. They spent three whole months traveling together, and went to all the great cities of the world in what Uncle Lestan called “the Grand Tour.” And they visited Russia too, spending five days in Saint Petersburg and five days in Moscow.