wasn’t going to make matters any better. A conversation to clear everything up. As if there were still anything to be cleared up.
She walked to the Union Square subway station at Fourteenth Street, hesitated at the stairs, and then continued to the next entrance, at a traffic island on Astor Place. Here again she couldn’t bring herself to go down to the platform, and instead went on to Broadway-Lafayette, where she’d have changed trains anyway.
On the way, however, she decided it was ridiculous to put off the meeting any longer. After walking through the cold, it occurred to her that she didn’t have to watch every dollar anymore, and she took a taxi over the Brooklyn Bridge in the direction of Crown Heights.
She got out of the cab outside the building where she had grown up, searching her mind for any sense of coming home, or at least of familiarity. Nothing. She had felt a void like this before, when she’d arrived in Sicily last October. Now she wondered where her home really was. Her hand went into her bag and touched Aesop’s Fables.
Slush spurted up from the tires of the taxi as it drove away. Rosa stood on the sidewalk staring at the eight steps up to the front door. The building had only three floors above ground level, and there was a faded burn mark below the flat roof, left by the riots during the 1977 blackout. In all the decades since, the owner hadn’t thought it necessary to invest a few dollars in painting the facade.
The curtains of her mother’s apartment were open, all the windowpanes clean and shiny. A bunch of fresh flowers stood at one window. Gemma must have chosen the place because it got the most sunlight. The Petersons’ station wagon was parked right outside the door to the basement apartment, as always. If Mr. Piccirilli hadn’t drunk himself to death on cheap bourbon yet, there’d be the usual trouble.
And if she went on staring at the building like this, she was going to burst into tears of sentimental nostalgia.
It was only a few steps to the front door and the apartment buzzers beside it. She hadn’t taken a key with her when she left for Italy. Now it felt as if she’d been away not four months but forty years. That, more than anything else, made her realize how definitively she had broken with everything here.
The idea of climbing those steps made her feel terrible. Her mother probably wouldn’t be home anyway. She must still have that job at Bristen’s Eatery, and the second job at the Laundromat. At night she sometimes cooked glass noodles in a Chinese restaurant two blocks away, and then took the next day off. So she might be home after all. Which only made it worse that Rosa was standing there on the sidewalk as if frozen to it, easily visible.
What would she have chosen if her mother had advised her to keep the baby? Would she have brought Nathaniel into the world? And then what? She’d still be living here, hearing Mr. Piccirilli’s snores through the floorboards at night, feeding a howling infant, trying to get by somehow or other.
She had to get away from here. Right away.
Hadn’t Gemma been right to say Rosa would be doing herself no favors by having a baby at seventeen? Didn’t she have enough trouble with herself already? But they didn’t have to talk about that. She only wanted to find out something about her father and TABULA.
It was pathetic, just standing here doing nothing. Not going in, but not going away, either. Indecision of that kind had killed Nathaniel.
The lace curtain beside the bunch of flowers moved. A draft of air?
Why didn’t the snowplow come along and run her down? That would make it all so much simpler.
Her hand, she noticed almost to her own surprise, was still clutching Aesop’s Fables inside her bag. She let go of the little book and took out her cell phone instead. She tapped in the number and stopped with her finger hovering above the CALL key. The curtain moved again. Yes, just the wind. The windows had hardly any insulation. Rosa took a deep breath and pressed CALL. Was tempted to hang up.
She saw a silhouette behind the lace, someone going from the bedroom into the kitchen.
“Hello?” Her mother sounded tired. So she had indeed been working the night shift. “Hel-lo?” More awake now, and annoyed.
Rosa’s eyes were burning. She heard Gemma breathing.