Chapter 9: What Rosa Knew
Three weeks later, Elena came home.
Not to the apartment in Dorchester — that lease was already ended, the drawings carefully taken down from the wall and rolled into a tube that Cora carried herself.
She came home to a house in Cambridge, ten minutes from the gray headstone that Dante had already arranged to have removed and replaced with a garden bed of white flowers, because Elena had asked him to and he had done it the same afternoon she asked.
The house was not large.
Elena had refused large.
It had a real kitchen and a backyard and four bedrooms and a room with good north light that Dante had left empty so Elena could decide what to do with it.
She decided within twenty minutes.
She stood in the doorway and said, "This is the studio," and that was that.
The girls ran through every room twice and then convened in the backyard to assess the tree situation.
Rosa declared the oak in the back corner climbable.
Mia was unconvinced.
Cora was already climbing it.
Dante watched from the kitchen window.
"She's going to fall," Elena said beside him.
"She's not going to fall.
She moves like she's done it before."
"She has.
There was a tree in the park on Dorchester Ave." Elena paused.
"I used to watch her from the bench and try not to look terrified."
"Did it work?"
"No." A small smile.
"But I got better at hiding it."
The transplant evaluation had come back two weeks earlier.
Dante was not a match.
Nico was not a match.
The third person tested — a man named Garrett who had worked for Dante for nine years and volunteered without being asked — was a match.
Close enough, the nephrologist said, that the surgical team was optimistic.
The surgery was scheduled for six weeks out.
Elena had cried when Garrett came to the clinic to sign the consent forms.
She had tried not to.
Garrett had looked at the ceiling and pretended not to notice, which was the kindest thing he could have done.
"I don't know how to thank him," Elena had said afterward.
"He doesn't want to be thanked," Dante had said.
"He wants you to be well."
Now, in the kitchen, Elena poured two cups of coffee and handed one to Dante without asking how he took it.
She remembered.
He noticed that she remembered.
"I told them last night," Elena said.
He looked at her.
"About you.
Who you are to them." She wrapped both hands around her cup.
"I wasn't sure how to start so I just — started.
I said, you know how you've been asking about your father?
And Rosa said, we haven't been asking, we've been waiting for you to tell us.
And I thought, of course she did."
"How did they take it?"
"Mia cried.
Happy crying, I think, but I'm not completely sure — with Mia it can go either way.
Cora asked three very specific questions about whether you liked horses.
Rosa didn't say anything for a while." Elena looked out at the backyard, where Rosa was now standing at the base of the oak tree watching Cora with her arms crossed.
"Then Rosa said, I know.
I figured it out from the photograph."
Dante set his coffee down.
"She's six."
"She's Rosa." Elena's voice was full of something that had no clean name — exhaustion and pride and love and the particular ache of watching a child be more capable than any child should have to be.
"She said she recognized the harbor in the photograph from a book about Boston.
She said the way you looked at the painting was the way people look at things they've lost.
She said she thought you seemed sad enough to be telling the truth."
"She told me she had two faces," Dante said.
"She has seventeen faces.
She just lets most people see two." Elena looked at him.
"She wants to know if you're going to live with us."
"What did you tell her?"
"I told her that was a conversation for later." Elena held his gaze.
"Is it a conversation for later?"
"It can be whatever conversation you want it to be."
"That's not an answer."
"No," he said.
"It's not." He picked up his coffee again.
"I want to be here.
I want to be here every morning and every evening and I want to watch Cora climb things that frighten me and I want to hear Mia's crying that might be happy and I want Rosa to tell me things she's figured out that she shouldn't be able to figure out yet." He paused.
"But I know that what I want is not the only thing that matters.
So I'm asking you."
Elena was quiet.
Outside, Cora reached the first major branch of the oak and sat down on it with the confidence of someone who had always known she would get there.
Rosa uncrossed her arms.
Mia, from somewhere out of sight, called up asking if it was safe.
"Yes," Cora called back.
"Come up."
Elena watched her daughters.
"Yes," she said.
Not to Cora.
To Dante.
He didn't say anything.
May you like
He didn't need to.
She leaned her shoulder against his, lightly, the way people do when they are beginning to remember how.
