Rose and Daffodil sat in silence as the bus moved onward into the night, not looking at each other. Rose was still steaming, furious that Daffodil had almost gotten them arrested. She knew that she shouldn’t have agreed to Daffodil’s plan, but it didn’t stop her from blaming her friend for getting them into this mess. It would be a long time before they dared to show their faces in Reno again, and she had rather liked the city.
Finally, as the lights of Reno disappeared into the distance, Rose turned to Daffodil. "Would you care to explain what that was all about? You knew that back alley poker was illegal, and yet you engaged in it anyway, dragged me into it, and almost got us both arrested. What were you thinking?"
Daffodil glanced at Rose, then looked out the window again, ignoring her.
"Answer me, Daffodil!"
"Why should I? I’ve never answered to anyone for what I’ve done, and I’m not starting with you."
"Oh, I think you will."
"And why is that?"
"Because I have the outer seat, and I’m not letting you up until you give me some answers."
"I can sit here as long as you can, Rose."
"Besides, you owe me some answers, after all the trouble you’ve gotten us into. You’ve been bitching constantly since we hitched that ride to Reno. What is your problem?"
"I don’t have a problem. Unlike you, Rose, I am perfectly capable of resolving issues on my own without running away from my problems."
"Of course. You don’t run away from your problems. You stab them in the back when they aren’t looking."
"Fuck you!"
"Same to you."
They sat in angry silence for a few more minutes, until Daffodil spoke again.
"You’re a fine one to lecture me about not talking about things, Rose. You never have told me all the details of why you left Masline after the earthquake."
"And I won’t, either. Not until I feel like it."
"And when will that be?"
"Never, the way you’re going."
"Oh, so I’m to blame, am I?"
Rose gave Daffodil a withering look. "Obviously."
Daffodil stiffened. "Look, I know I shouldn’t have gotten us into that poker game, okay? But we got away with it, no one was hurt, and we have enough money to relax for a while now. Why don’t you just chill out? If you didn’t want to participate in that poker game, you should have said so."
"And would you have listened?"
"I can’t force you to do anything, Rose. I pity the person who would try."
Rose gave Daffodil a startled look, glad that she had never revealed most of the things that had happened in the last year. She had certainly been forced—or conned—into doing a lot of things that she hadn’t wanted to do.
And then she realized that Daffodil was right. It would be very difficult to force her to do anything now. On the night of the earthquake, she had found her inner strength, and had been changed by it. No longer could she sit in misery, wishing that things were different. If she didn’t like the way things were, she would do what she could to change them, and if she couldn’t change them, push them out of her life.
"Thank you," she whispered.
"What?" Daffodil gave her an odd look.
"Thank you, for pointing out what I should have recognized already. My life is my own, and no one can control it but me."
"Okay. That’s very profound. Where did this come from?"
"Oh…it was your words about no one being able to force me to do anything."
"Oh. Well, I guess I did the right thing this time."
"You usually do the right thing. You’ve just been bitchy and itching for a fight for the last few days."
Daffodil rolled her eyes and sighed, turning to look out the window. Rose grimaced and sat back, wishing that she hadn’t brought it up again.
A few minutes later, though, Daffodil turned from the window and looked at Rose. "Rose?"
"Yeah?"
"You wanted to know why I didn’t want to go to Reno?"
Rose sat up straighter. "Are you going to tell me?"
Daffodil was silent for a moment, then nodded. "Reno is to me what Masline is to you."
Rose stared at her. "Why didn’t you just say so?"
"You have your secrets, and I have mine. There are things that I would rather not bring up. Besides, you seemed so eager to go there, I didn’t want to burst your bubble by saying I didn’t want to go. You spend far too much time being sad."
"I do?"
"Yes, though I must say that you’re honest about what you’re feeling. You don’t hide it under a mask of bravado."
"And you do?"
"Sometimes. When I think about it."
Rose looked at her for a moment, nodding in understanding. "Do you want to tell me why you don’t like Reno? I’ll understand if you don’t."
Daffodil thought for a moment, then took a deep breath. "I’ll tell you."
"Okay." Rose looked at her, wondering what could be so terrible that a person would want to leave a place and never return. She knew why she had left Masline, but what could Daffodil have encountered in Reno that was so terrible?
Daffodil turned to Rose, trying to think of how to proceed. "I never told you this, but I am half of a set of twins. Identical twins."
"You have an identical twin? Where’s your sister?"
Daffodil paused, thinking of what to say next. "We’re very different in personality, as identical twins often are, but we still used to be very close. We both liked Reno, and since we were shared a small apartment in Sacramento for a while, it wasn’t too terribly far to drive to get there, close enough that we could go there on long weekends."
Rose nodded. "What’s her name?"
"Willow. Mom really likes plants and such, especially when we were born. At any rate, Willow and I liked Reno. I was most fond of the river, being a self-proclaimed child of nature, but the casinos weren’t bad, either, and we liked seeing some of the acts that came there to perform. Willow, though, really liked the casinos, not so much for the gambling, but because they were such lively places. We weren’t averse to creating a little of our own excitement, too, so we held the occasional independent poker game in our hotel room. We won some, lost some—it rarely caused any trouble, until the last time."
"What happened?"
"We won, and the losers were pretty upset about it. They’d bet a lot of money, and weren’t happy that they’d lost it. That happens when a person gambles, but they didn’t see it that way. They were sure we had cheated."
"Sounds familiar," Rose commented dryly.
"Let me finish, okay?" Daffodil took a deep breath, then went on. "They walked out in a huff, saying that they were going to complain to the manager about our little gambling operation. We knew that we’d be in trouble, so we quickly packed our bags and left." She turned to look out the window. "They didn’t go to the manager, though. They knew that such a threat would make us leave quickly, and they were waiting for us in the parking lot.
"We got to the car and got in, but they followed us. They couldn’t have done anything at the hotel—at least, not without attracting attention—so they tried to follow us to a place where no one would see. We kept on going, trying to avoid them, but they kept trying to herd us away from the main road. Finally, they cut us off and put on the brakes, trying to cause a collision—with that, they could have collected the insurance money as well as the money they had lost to us. I swerved around them—I was driving—and right into the path of a pickup truck. It hit us, shoving us into the car that was trying to cut us off.
"The driver of the pickup truck and I were uninjured, though my car was totaled. The two men who had been pursuing us drove away, and I haven’t heard anything of them since—they weren’t the ones we encountered tonight. But Willow took the main force of the collision when we were pushed into the other car. She fractured her spine and is paralyzed from the waist down—and she blamed me for what had happened. We haven’t spoken since the accident, which was three years ago, not even when she was in the hospital. Identical twins are special, but we haven’t even seen each other since she got out of the hospital."
"Oh, Daffodil. How awful." Rose looked at her sympathetically.
Daffodil was blinking her eyes rapidly, trying to hold back tears. Rose hugged her, rocking her for a moment.
Daffodil finally pulled away, wiping her eyes quickly and looking back out the window. "Thanks, Rose."
Rose was silent for a moment. Then, gathering her courage, she said, "What I don’t understand is why you wanted to play another game of illegal poker, after all that happened the last time."
Daffodil shrugged. "I wasn’t thinking too clearly about it, but I had this feeling that if I could do it again and get away with it, it would negate some of what happened before. I guess I was trying to prove something to myself. After all, I survived the accident with no injuries, while Willow will never walk again. It was kind of like an act of defiance, like no one could tell me what to do, no matter what the consequences."
Rose looked at her. "At least this time no one was hurt. But Daffodil, please don’t get into any more illegal poker games. It’s just too dangerous. You’re one of the best friends I’ve ever had, and I would hate to see you get killed or imprisoned because you feel a need to prove yourself and negate the past. If I were your sister, I’d forgive you and get on with life."
"You aren’t Willow. You don’t hold grudges like she does." Daffodil looked out the window again.
Rose wasn’t so sure about that. She hadn’t seen her mother in months, and wasn’t sure she ever wanted to see her after the way she had tried to marry her off to Cal Hockley. And she didn’t think she could ever forgive Cal for abusing her or for killing Jack, no matter what he did to try to make up for the past.
She didn’t tell Daffodil these things, though. There were some secrets she couldn’t share.