Chapter 78: Roz
Rosalind Achebe has worked in that house for twenty-eight years and she has one rule, which she told me on my second night in 2025.
You see everything and you carry none of it.
She is sixty-two. She has a sister in Lansing and a knee she will not have replaced because of what it would cost her in wages.
She irons in the small room off the kitchen, standing, with the radio on low, and she has never in my hearing repeated anything anybody said to her.
I went to her on the fourth of December, which was a Thursday, because Thursday is silver.
She had the jar of polish out and a tray of forks and a folded cloth, and she did not stop when I came in.
I sat on the step stool. It is aluminium and the rubber tread is worn through on the left. I have sat on it for a lot of the worst hours of my life.
“I want to ask you about the winter before last,” I said.
Her hands did not stop. That is the tell with Roz. When she is deciding, her hands keep going and her face goes still. I have watched her decide things for a year and a half and I have never once seen her hurry.
“Which part of it.”
“Mrs. Blackwood,” I said. “The first Mrs. Blackwood.”
“Ana.”
“Ana.”
She put a fork down on the cloth, took another, and began at the base of the tines, where the polish always goes gray.
“You were here,” she said. “You know as much as I do.”
“I was on nights. I saw one room.”
“You saw the room that mattered.”
I let that sit, because I did not know yet what it meant and because pushing Roz is like pushing a wall.
“She was in the nursery a lot, at the end,” I said. “On the daybed.”
“From the end of October,” Roz said. “Six weeks, near enough.”
“Every night?”
“Most. Not all.” She held the fork up to the window and turned it. “She said she slept better with the noise of him.”
“Did anybody think that was strange?”
“People thought it was sweet,” she said. “People will call a frightened woman sweet all day long.”
I wrote that down afterwards in the car, word for word, because I did not want to lose it.
“Was she ill?”
“She had a cough from about the middle of November.” Roz set the fork on the tray.
“She said it was the dry air. Everybody says it is the dry air. This is Chicago in November, it is always the dry air.”
“Did she see anyone about it?”
“She went to somebody on Michigan Avenue. Twice, I think.”
“Do you know what they said?”
“I know what she said they said.” Roz looked at me for the first time. “They said she was anxious.”
She said the word the way you set down something hot. The radio played something with a lot of strings in it. The kitchen clock is nineteen minutes fast and has been for as long as I have known it.
“Roz,” I said. “In September, on the stairs. After the foyer.”
Her hands stopped.
“You said to Mr. Victor, this wasn’t the first time.”
“I know what I said.”
“What did you mean?”
She picked up the cloth again and folded it in half, and then in half again, which she did not need to do.
“You’ve been going out to Berwyn,” she said.
I had not told her. I had told nobody but Marco and Deon and, in the vaguest possible terms, Dr. Moreno.
“How do you know that.”
“You come back with a red mark on your ear from those headphones,” she said, “and you smell like somebody else’s house.”
I did not have an answer to that.
“You’re listening to something,” Roz said. “That’s what all this is. You’ve got something from before and you’re listening to it.”
“Yes.”
“How far back.”
“August 2025.”
She was quiet for what I would guess was ten seconds. She did four forks in it.
“Then don’t ask me,” she said.
“Roz —”
“Don’t ask me, because if I tell you now you will hear what I told you.” She set the tray straight with two hands. “You’ll be listening for my words instead of what’s there. And then it is worth nothing, and you will have thrown it away yourself.”
That is, I think, the single most useful thing anybody said to me in two years, and it came from a woman polishing forks.
“Ask me when you know,” she said. “You’ll know.”
I stood up. My hands were shaking slightly and I put them in my cardigan.
At the door I turned around, because I could not help it.
“Is it the room,” I said.
Roz did not look up.
“Go to Berwyn,” she said.