Arcadia Burns Read Free Page B

and eight lace-up holes, the only winter-weight tights in the store, and a heavy-duty stapler at a shop around the corner.
    Now she had really arrived.
    The stapler felt good in her hand and contained a hundred steel staples that could be driven into practically anything by compressed air at intervals of a second. After the rape she’d made it a habit to have a stapler like that always ready. Why make do with pepper spray when you could buy one of these in any hardware store?
    Of course she had enough money now to hire bodyguards to protect her full-time, but the mere thought of it made her feel unlike herself. She hadn’t come to New York to ask for trouble; she’d come to talk to her mother. But the weight of the stapler in her hand made her feel safer.
    It was sixteen months since she’d been drugged at a party and then raped by a stranger or strangers. Afterward, they’d left Rosa unconscious in the street. To this day she knew nothing more about what had happened that night, and after endless sessions of counseling and therapy she had come to the conclusion that she didn’t really want to remember. She had given up searching for suppressed images and scraps of thoughts, emotions blocked out by her unconscious mind. Ifthere was one thing to be grateful for, it was the blackout that kept her from knowing the details, the memory of faces or voices. Not even physical pain remained. Only her fears. Her neuroses. Her bitten fingernails, her kleptomania, and for a long time the feeling that she couldn’t trust anyone—until she met Alessandro. Sometimes you had to see through another person’s eyes to understand yourself better.
    But the rape had left other traces behind. Nathaniel. The baby she’d aborted. She knew it would have been a son; she just sensed it. She had waited a long time, until the third month, before caving to pressure from her mother and the advice of all the doctors. The operation had been under total anesthesia—just routine, the doctor had said. Routine for the doctor, maybe.
    Slush sprayed up on the sidewalk. There was a white bicycle chained to a lamppost on the other side of the street, one of many ghost bikes in New York, placed around in memory of cyclists who had been run over. Rosa stood outside the hardware store, weak at the knees now, staring at her stapler as if it held the answers she’d been avoiding for months. Maybe it had been a bad idea to come back; she hadn’t put enough distance between herself and the rape yet. Confronting her mother 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