He opened the door.
“I’m grateful to him, in any case, for giving me an excuse to meet you. It was a pleasure, Officer Haas. I wish you peace of mind. Goodbye.”
He stepped out of the room, leaving Park alone in the new world.
24
ROSE GARDEN HILLER, STAUNCHLY FEMINIST, LIKED HER OWN last name. So she kept it. But she thought hyphenated last names were stupid and was happy to give her daughter the name Haas.
She was born in 1982. Her parents were divorced but remained on friendly terms and shared the raising of their daughter, though she did live primarily with her mother in what was little more than a cabin in the Berkeley hills.
When forced by circumstances she could not thwart to fill out any official paperwork, Rose’s mother would describe her profession as Social Activist. She and her ex had set divorce terms that did not include alimony. She’d refused any offer of “patriarchal patronage.” She was, however, practical enough to have agreed to accept a stipend on Rose’s behalf. There was no hypocrisy. Every penny of the checks she received was allocated to Rose’s care. Any money left over at the end of the month went into Rose’s college fund. She fudged only very slightly in that she occasionally used a small amount of Rose’s money to help cover the utilities. Rationalizing to herself that water and power were both necessary to raising a healthy child, but always doing her best to eke the difference out of her own earnings so that she could pay back what she had taken out.
One of Rose’s earliest memories, perhaps her single earliest, she couldn’t be certain, was of riding on the back of her mother’s Schwinn, holding her arms out straight from her shoulders, airfoiling her hands in the breeze as they careened down the steep potholed streets into town. Days spent at co-op vegetable gardens, on picket lines, going door-to-door with petitions, at the campaign offices of independent candidates for local office, watching her mother holding young women’s hands at Planned Parenthood, and then sleeping in the same seat, as her mother pushed the bike back up the hills in the evening if no one from one of the causes had been able to put it in the back of her Volvo and drive them home.
Her father was a lawyer. Devoted to social change, but not so much that he was willing to work totally without recompense, he was a junior, eventually full, partner at a firm that specialized in environmental law. An early memory of days with her father involved, not coincidentally, standing unrestrained on the passenger seat with her face stuck above the windscreen of his 1973 Porsche 911 roadster as he drove them across the Golden Gate Bridge from his Marin home to his office in the city. Mornings spent in progressive pre-K, afternoons tagging along with him to inspect a stretch of wetlands where abuses were suspected, sitting on his office floor in a small corral of law books, being passed off to one of the women he dated monogamously for long periods of time before becoming distracted and gently showing them the way out of his life, women who almost invariably took her to the Exploratorium, then being bundled into the Porche for a sleepy ride back to the house for a spaghetti dinner and a bedtime song, Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here.”
Parker Haas had been a surprise. In truth, he had been more of a tectonic shift in everything she had ever thought she wanted and desired from life. What she thought she’d wanted was unfettered freedom. A long string of lovers who were strikingly beautiful to look at but emotionally uncomplicated. Men and women who were, she would freely admit, not unlike her father in those qualities. Whether she chose to finish her fine arts degree or not, she wanted to pursue her interest in digital video manipulations. What she called, when pressed by a particularly cute grad student who taught one of her studio classes, “culturally ironic metatations.” Said with utter seriousness and no pretense. She wanted children, or a child, but couldn’t fathom marriage. She welcomed the idea of a coparent, but only if that person could be as respectful of her time with the child as her parents had always been of each other’s.
When, during her sophomore year at Cal, her father died of a heart attack at forty-six, she found she wanted to stay close to her mother, who, it turned out, had been secretly and irreparably heartbroken the moment he had sat next to her on their bed three weeks after he had turned twenty-nine and told her that he thought their roots were too tangled and he needed new soil. The heartbreak was revealed at home after his memorial service, after the spilling of his ashes in the bay, when she collapsed in the middle of the kitchen floor and began wailing. A wail that continued intermittently for three days. Rose had had no idea of the depth of her mother’s love for her father. She bestowed her own love freely and with abandon. She loved her parents, her surviving grandparents, her two aunts, three uncles, and five cousins, she loved her many friends, she loved her lovers. But she loved all of them lightly. As if the wide disbursement of her love had diluted it somewhat. What she saw from her mother in those three days, and not infrequently over the rest of her mother’s life, was alien and terrifying. Passions in both her parents had been reserved for cases of social injustice, the idiocies of governments, wonder in nature, and certain works of art. She knew that emotion of that intensity focused on another person was binding. Contrary to the freedom she saw as her natural element. It shocked her. Yet, rather often, usually in the day or two after she had jettisoned an especially endearing lover, she sometimes caught herself reimagining that display of grief, substituting herself for her mother. Those imaginings were never very detailed, they took place not in her mother’s kitchen but in a blank nonspace, the fate of her lost love was never specified, nor was his or her identity. She literally could not imagine who it was she might suffer for so. If she had forced herself to go deeper into this fantasy, to construct a vague ideal, that person would not in the least have resembled Park.
She couldn’t remember the name of the boy she’d gone to The Game with. She couldn’t remember why she’d agreed to go to The Game at all. The annual meeting between Cal and Stanford was a local holiday and call to arms, but her interest in sports faded the moment she walked from the soccer field where she played a bruising, slide-tackling style of defense in occasional pickup games. She could remember the boy’s ridiculously handsome face. Vulnerable to beautiful things, it was that face that had blinded her to the fact that he was clearly a prick. As the day and the game had both ground along, his prickish nature had risen on the tide of beer he swilled. Hardly a teetotaler herself, Rose was nonetheless disgusted by anyone who couldn’t hold his own. Uninterested in the game, rapidly finding her date’s face less and less of interest, she began to people watch the crowd, and found as her eyes swept back and forth that the same young man in the Stanford section several rows away seemed to be just looking away from her every time her eyes fell upon him.
Her first thought regarding Park was out of place. Not just out of place in the stadium, not just out of place wearing a red sweatshirt in that blot of red fans in the middle of the blue and gold crowd, not just out of place sharing a high five with one of his schoolmates after the Cardinal sacked Cal’s quarterback, but out of place in his skin. Under his hair, behind his eyes, on top of his feet, out of place in all his physical dimensions. She couldn’t understand how anyone could be watching the game when there was such a unique spectacle to behold: a man entirely without ease. His discomfort was profound. She knew he would misinterpret her looks but couldn’t keep from staring at him whenever he looked away from her. She wished for a camera. Why hadn’t she brought a camera? She needed to shoot him, needed video evidence of his fabulous awkwardness. Someone started a wave, and it washed over them. She watched as he refused to lift his arms in the air, but did faintly shrug his shoulders and flap his hands. Later, in the jumble of bodies pouring out of Memorial Stadium down toward University Drive, she’d see him ahead, hanging at the end of a trail of fellow Stanford supporters. With little effort she’d steered her drunken date through campus, across Bancroft, and followed Park into a house party hosted by a Cardinal alum who’d washed up on Durant Avenue.