Rosa’s dad, Peter, was a politics reporter for the Chicago Tribune. They lived with her mother in a partly rehabbed two-flat surrounded by run-down rentals, used car lots, and liquor stores. The area was segregated, but a number of liberal white families, like hers, had moved into it in the late sixties, even given all the turbulence. Even partly because of it. Her parents had participated in freedom marches and seen violence up close. Her dad had had his nose broken. Someone had hit her mother in the head with a D-cell battery. On her dad’s desk at the Tribune she remembered a photo of him between the writer Alex Haley and the actor and activist Ossie Davis, smiling broadly.
Occasionally in their neighborhood someone would overturn a car and set it on fire, which secretly thrilled Rosa—she could often see the glow from her upstairs bedroom window. Her dad took great pains to explain to her that this was a symptom of an illness. Like the chicken pox or a rash? she asked. That’s right, her dad said, a warning on the surface about what was going on inside. There was so much anger that maybe it couldn’t be contained. Better a car than a passerby, he said. Better things than a person.
She doesn’t think it happened that way. Her dad wouldn’t have allowed her to get so close to the dead woman. She would have heard about the nose and ears most likely from someone at school, or maybe her dad talking to one of the local politicos on the phone. Or possibly she’d imagined it. She’d even looked in the Tribune archives to find the story, but couldn’t find any mention of mutilation. She wondered if this was like her memory of her dad one day cutting the TV power cord with a pair of gleaming shears while she was watching it, or the time she was forced to leave for summer camp while her Labrador, Ali, was dying on the living room floor—memories she suspected she made up to confirm what she already believed about her dad. Some lack in him. What had she believed? That he was high-principled but cruel. A gifted journalist who abused his talent. A secret racist who helped black people so that he could feel better about bitter feelings he harbored against them. He was guileless to a fault. He’d eventually driven off Rosa’s mother with his various lost causes and under-the-table funding of his younger brother, Bill, who was constantly strung out on back pain medicine and running from creditors. Much of what she’d accepted about her dad when she was younger she was unsure about now, which had both helped and hurt their relationship, she suspected. She can see her dad’s hands, their neatly trimmed, milky nails, the lump on the outside of his left hand where a benign tumor made the bone brittle and caused him to break the hand half a dozen times. How could the tumor be benign, she wondered, if it ate away the bone? On a recent visit to Chicago, she’d asked him if he’d had his checkup, his scheduled colonoscopy and PSA blood work. He said to be honest, he couldn’t remember when he’d last seen a doctor. He smiled a little boy’s smile that pretended not to know. On the table in front of her, his left hand seemed frail, the lump more pronounced. She loved his guileless eyes, the way they took in everything and denied it all.
It would have happened this way: Her dad takes her hand, leads her away from the vacant lot and the dead woman. Rosa never sees what she thinks she did—holes where the woman’s nose and ears should be. Voids. The woman’s skirt hiked up, the greenish glass of the Coke bottle stuck between her legs. When Rosa begins pointing near the fence, her dad makes light of what they see there, someone asleep in the weeds. Siesta time, he’d say, then make a snoring sound and pull Rosa away. The woman’s body sprawled languidly on the ground as if she were in her own bed and not a vacant lot. Her compact mirror open beside her, a quick powder touch-up when she wakes. Lazy bones, Rosa’s dad would say. Get up and get on your way. Don’t stray from the path. Don’t tarry.
He would have protected her.
9
HOLLIS OFTEN CONFUSES what’s already happened with what’s to come. He knows this. Still, they feel the same.