blinked through her tears. The room was filled with flowers. "He's sent you lilies," said Louis. He had a soft deep voice. "He's sent you roses, too, all colors of roses. Your flower, Rose."
When Rose started to apologize for what she'd done, Louis wouldn't hear of it. He told her the people who'd taken her were "evil." The judge had gotten kickbacks from the Christian home to send perfectly decent teenagers there for incarceration. The school bilked the parents of the children and the state for exorbitant payments. He said that the judge would soon be in jail. As for the home, it was gone, burned down, shut up, and lawyers would see that it never opened again.
"It was wrong what they did to you," he whispered.
In his soft unhurried voice, he said there would be many lawsuits against the home. And the remains of two bodies had been found buried on the grounds. He wanted Rose to know these people would be punished.
Rose was amazed. She wanted to explain about the car, that she had never meant to hurt anybody.
"I know," he said. "It was a little thing. It was nothing. Your uncle is not angry with you. He would never be angry with you over such a thing. Sleep now."
By the time Uncle Lestan came Rose was home with Aunt Marge in a Miami Beach apartment. She had lost weight and felt frail and jumped at the slightest noise. But she was much better. Uncle Lestan took her into his arms, and they went out to walk along the beach together.
"I want you to go to New York," said Uncle Lestan. "New York is the capital of the world. And I want you to go to school there. Aunt Marge is going to take you. Aunt Julie will stay behind. Florida is her home and she can't adjust to the big city. But Aunt Marge will take care of you, and you're to have other companions now, good, decent security guards who'll keep you both safe. I want you to have the finest education." He went on, "Remember, Rose, whatever you've suffered, no matter how bad it's been, you can use that, use that to be a stronger person."
For hours they talked, not about the horrid Christian home but about other things, Rose's love of books, her dreams of writing poetry and stories someday, and her enthusiasm about New York, and how she so wanted to go to a great university like Harvard or Stanford or who knows where?
Those were wonderful hours. They'd stopped at a cafe on South Beach, and Uncle Lestan sat there quietly, leaning on his elbows, beaming at her as she poured out all her thoughts and dreams and questions.
The new apartment in New York was on the Upper East Side, about two blocks from the park in a venerable old building with spacious rooms and high ceilings. Aunt Marge and Rose were both overjoyed to be there.
Rose went to a marvelous day school which had a curriculum far superior to that of the Willmont School. With the help of several tutors, mostly college students, Rose soon caught up and was deep into her school work preparing to go to college.
Though Rose missed the beautiful beach in Florida and the lovely warm sweet rural nights, she was ecstatic to be in New York, loved her schoolmates, and was secretly happy that Aunt Marge was with her and not Aunt Julie, as Aunt Marge had always been the adventurous one, the mischievous one, and they had more fun together.
Their household soon included a permanent housekeeper and cook, and the security-guard drivers who took them everywhere.
There were times when Rose wanted to strike out on her own, meet kids on her own, take the subway, be independent.
But Uncle Lestan was adamant. Rose's drivers went where Rose went. Embarrassed as Rose was by the big stretch Lincoln limousine that dropped her off at school, she came to depend on this. And these drivers were all past masters of double parking anywhere in Midtown while Rose shopped, and thought nothing of carrying twenty and thirty bundles and even braving the checkout lines for Rose, or running errands for her. They were young mostly, cheerful guys, and kind of like guardian angels.
Aunt Marge was frank about enjoying all this completely.
It was a new way of life, and it had its charms, but the real lure of course was New York itself. She and Aunt Marge had subscription tickets to the symphony, the New York City Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera. They attended the latest musicals on Broadway, and plenty of off-Broadway plays. They shopped at Bergdorf Goodman and Saks; they roamed the Metropolitan Museum for hours on Saturdays and often spent weekends visiting the galleries in the Village and SoHo. This was life!
Over the phone, Rose talked endlessly to Uncle Lestan about this or that play she'd seen, or concert, or what was happening with Shakespeare in the Park, and how they wanted to go to Boston this weekend, just to see it, and perhaps visit Harvard.
The summer before Rose's senior year, she and Aunt Marge met Uncle Lestan in London for a marvelous week of visiting the most wonderful sites after hours and with private guides. Then Aunt Marge and Rose went on to Rome, and to Florence and to a whole string of other cities before returning to New York just in time for school to start.
It was sometime just before her eighteenth birthday that Rose turned to the internet to research the ghastly Amazing Grace Home for Girls where she'd been imprisoned. She had never told anyone she knew about what actually happened to her there.
The news reports confirmed everything Louis had told her long ago. The judge who'd sent Rose there had gone to prison. And two lawyers had gone with him.
On Rose's last night there, apparently, a boiler had exploded, setting fire to the entire establishment. Two other explosions had destroyed outbuildings and stables. Rose had never known there were stables. Local firefighters and police had converged on the school to find girls wandering the grounds dazed and incoherent from the shock of the blast, and many had had visible welts and bruises from being beaten. One or two had shaved heads; and two had been taken to local emergency rooms due to malnutrition and dehydration. Some girls had the words SLUT and ADDICT written on them with felt-tip pen. Newspaper stories reflected contempt and outrage. They railed against the school as a racket, part of the unregulated religious Troubled Teen Industry in which parents were bilked out of thousands of dollars to pay for "reformation" of teen girls they feared were in danger of becoming druggies or dropouts or suicides.
Everybody connected with the place had been indicted for something, it seemed; but charges eventually were dropped. There was no law requiring regulation of religious schools in Florida, and the owners and "faculty" of the place dropped out of the record.
But it was easy to trace Dr. Hays and Mrs. Hays. They had both died within months in a fiery home invasion. One of the other more notorious teachers had drowned off Miami Beach. And yet another had been killed in a car wreck.
Rose hated to admit it but this gave her a great deal of satisfaction. At the same time, something about it bothered Rose. A terrible feeling crept over her. Had someone punished these people for what they'd done, done to Rose and to others? But that was absurd. Who would do such a thing? Who could do such a thing? She put it out of her mind, and it was dreadful, she told herself, to be glad these people were dead. Rose did a little more reading on the Troubled Teen Industry and other scandals besetting these unregulated Christian schools and homes, but then she couldn't endure another moment of thinking of it all. It made her too angry, and when she became angry, she became ashamed, ashamed that she'd ever--. There was no end to it. She closed the book on that brief and horrid chapter of her life. The present beckoned.
Uncle Lestan wanted Rose to follow her own star when it came to college. He assured her nothing was off-limits.
She and Marge flew to California to visit Stanford and the University of California at Berkeley.
Stanford, near beautiful Palo Alto, California, was Rose's final choice, and Rose and Marge moved the July before school started.
Uncle Lestan met Rose in San Francisco for a brief holiday in August. Rose fell in love with the city, and had half a mind to live there and commute. Uncle Lestan had another suggestion. Why not live near campus as planned, and have an apartment in San Francisco? It was soon arranged, and Rose and Marge moved into a spacious modern condo wa