Page 49

49

On the Roof

Dodi

I peer over the low wall and there it is, the call of the void, that intrusive impulse gusting up the side of the building like a breeze. The unsummoned visual of my own body on the ground below winks in and out. Thrilling and terrible. It wouldn’t hurt one bit. Nothing hurts right now, although I know from experience all that means is that it will really hurt later. The longer the lag between injury and sensation, the worse the hurt. And yet, it’s better this way. I’m grateful to Jake for that. Mighty high-handed of a man to tell a grown woman how she gets to break her heart, but he’s seen how reckless I can be. I’ve always needed him to cut me off. This is no different than that night in Las Vegas.

My body on the ground below morphs into a man in business attire. A woman screams on a balcony between us, and the lights of Vegas twinkle and glare…

“This rooftop is Paper Pusher bait,” Laura says next to me with her elbows resting on the dangerously low parapet, and I return with a start to my apartment building’s rooftop dog park.

“It’s just an urban legend,” I say without thinking.

She shakes her head. “Did Jake not tell you I tidied up four of her victims? All came to me from the coroner’s office, and they’re not supposed to say anything…” There’s a flicker of mischief on her face. “But it’s what they don’t say, if that makes sense.”

“Her?” I ask.

“Didn’t you watch the documentary? It’s obviously a woman. Sometimes I wonder…You hear stories about falls in other cities, and I think to myself, ‘Is she on vacation?’?” Laura laughs. “One time I even called up a funeral home in another city to dig.”

She’s into this shit, too. I suppose she would be. Maybe Jake turned her onto it. Or maybe she got him started.

I stare at the parking lot asphalt below. The idea of the Paper Pusher on a working vacation is delicious. That fall victim in Las Vegas didn’t necessarily fall off that balcony. Why did I assume that? Perhaps that woman witnessed the fall as he fell from the roof—

“I’m going to call her Tinkerbell,” Cat announces, and I’m back on the rooftop of my apartment building again. She’s standing in front of me, eyes sparkling, cheeks flushed. She looks like a normal child for once.

“But the dog’s a boy,” I say weakly. “See?” I point to his back end, where it’s clear as day the thing was never neutered.

“Girls can have balls,” Cat says matter-of-factly, conflating actual balls and metaphoric ones. I flinch and look at Laura. She seems like the sort of soft, sweet older woman to care about language, but there’s no disapproving side-eye.

“Girls can have anything boys can have,” Laura agrees.

Cat peels off and Laura smiles after her like she wishes she could jot down this Cat one-liner.

Something in the way Laura looks at Cat makes my chest ache. I push myself off the wall. I have to get back to the apartment to submit that assignment.

“Thanks again,” I say to Laura without making eye contact. I’m using her, unfortunately. I know she wouldn’t be here if she knew Jake and I were over, so it’s unfair what I’m doing: accepting the help of an aspiring grandma who will not be getting the permanent position. She practically threw herself at me with an offer of free babysitting. Perfect timing since my neighbor has stopped answering my texts.

“It’s my pleasure,” Laura says warmly, and she really does exude pleasure. I’ve never seen anyone this happy to spend time with my odd, uncanny little girl.

It’s hard not to worry just a little that Laura doesn’t quite know what she’s in for. “She can be very…” I have a list of words I don’t mind Cat overhearing me use. Persistent. Tough. Independent. Outspoken. “Assertive.”

“You know, when I was a girl, our mothers made a point of bringing us up to be polite and gentle and nice ,” Laura says, skewering me and my mothering neatly and knocking the breath out of me with the shock of it. She manages to say it so sweetly, too, with a smile like a day in June. My heart scales over in an instant, and my eyes snap to Cat.

“But it’s such a relief to see you’re smarter than that,” Laura continues. “You and Jake aren’t going to have to worry about her, are you? She’ll be tough enough to handle the world herself.”

My eyes stay trained on Cat as my heart softens again and a fresh ache twists through it. I want to keep Laura, even if I can’t have Jake, and I wonder if I can, if this is a friendship worth the risk. I would be able to keep tabs on Jake, at least.

In seven years I’ve never made a genuine attempt at a friendship. But for Cat’s sake, I think I would try.

There’s a whole dance that we do. Mirroring, sharing, meeting for coffees, reading each other’s book recommendations, and slowly, slowly friendship takes root and sprouts and blossoms. But I’m shit at plants. I cut to the meat.

“Can we be friends?” I wouldn’t have said anything if I had known my voice would sound this strangled.

“We’re family .” She smiles fondly at Cat, who loops close before peeling off again. “Jake adored dogs when he was little. He’ll have to teach Cat how to train Princess to do tricks. They’ll have so much fun with that.”

My heart twists again, an uglier pain this time. Every other sentence has been “Cat and Jake” this, “you and Jake” that. It’s high time I set her straight. I summon all the flat matter-of-factness I can and push past the knot in my throat.

“Jake and I aren’t going to stay together.”

Her face slips. “But Jake says you haven’t even tried living together yet. Jake is very easy to live with.”

My eyes swim until Cat is just a red blur. Laura’s so sweet my teeth hurt. I’m not like that. I’ve always been an acquired taste. People like Laura don’t usually take to it. I give her a taste of it now. “We would end up killing each other if we stayed together.” It’s half true.

“At least you would be merciful about it. Oxycodone overdose in your own bed isn’t such a bad way to go.”

My skin prickles and my organs slide out of my body.

“Jake, on the other hand, he’s very creative with his murder weapons. I’m not sure how you’d make your home a weapon-free zone.”

I find my voice. “What?”

“Strangulation by Christmas lights was his most recent brainwave.” She shakes her head. That Jake!

I stare at her, dumbstruck. Does she know about Neil? Either Jake told her, or she googled me, or she listens to Murderers at Work —

And yet this woman, who stuffs cotton batting into corpses and spray-paints their cheeks or whatever it is she does, just told me I’m family. We would make the perfect little family.

Laura’s face changes suddenly and dramatically, and she steps back from the wall. I follow her line of sight to a silver-haired man standing five stories below in the parking lot, staring up at us, his body tense.

“Is that…?”

“Andrew.”

Jake’s uncle.

“What’s he doing here?” I ask.

Laura doesn’t answer. A strange alchemy is occurring. This sweet, warm woman is turning cold and withdrawn right before my eyes.

“He sees me,” she says. “I should go down.”

“Why?”

“If he comes up, he’ll cause a scene.” Her eyes dart to Cat, playing with Princess on the Astroturf.

“He can’t just come up. Someone has to let him in.”

She shakes her head, face pale.

This is all pretty new to me, but friendship for me must be like a breaker switch, because I feel myself moving, realigning to enclose Laura within my own invisible armor. I put my hand on her arm. “Stay. If he comes up, we’ll send him on his way.”

“I’m sure Jake’s told you about him,” she says, her voice dropping, like she’s about to say something dirty. “He’s…not very nice.”

She smiles at me again—a warm, fake smile—and I get a dreadful inkling of where Jake learned his fake smiles and why.

This is why I don’t teach my daughter to be polite and gentle and nice. Listen to enough murder podcasts and you’ll eventually learn about fight, flight, and freeze’s lesser-known baby sister, fawn.

“I’ll just go down and smooth things over,” she says.

“No,” I say. “Absolutely not.”

I lean over the wall to look again, and he’s gone.

The bulkhead door groans open next to us and Laura flinches, even though it would be impossible for Andrew to be joining us so soon. A woman stomps onto the roof in practical thermal galoshes and a puffy purple straightjacket of a coat.

“Cynthia?”

Cynthia blinks through her owllike glasses, misted up from her own breath forced upward by her scarf. She stares at me, expressionless, and I notice she’s holding…a paper airplane? I recognize the paper clip I shoved onto the nose.

The fucking creep. I didn’t invite myself to her house when she left a paper crane on my desk. This is my home . That’s my daughter over there.

Two dozen steps and I’m toe-to-toe with her, blocking her advance, before I’ve even thought of what to say.

“Dolores,” she intones. She looks past me at Laura and Cat, and scans the rooftop for anyone else. Just one other neighbor with a Chihuahua in a Christmas sweater. Her ice-pick eyes bore into mine. “I hadn’t realized you would be here too.”

“What do you mean?”

“Although perhaps I should have expected it,” she continues in her carefully enunciated monotone. “You remind me of myself in that way. You take initiative. You like to identify problems and fix them yourself. I knew that when I saw the list.”

That fucking list. “You don’t know anything about me,” I snap. “Who do you think you are?”

Her face is an impenetrable wall when she says, “I know who you are, Dolores. You’re an ethical person. Someone who isn’t afraid to do the right thing, even if the right thing is difficult. And the right thing is always difficult.”

Another person who knows all about me. There’s the same sensation of my stomach dropping out that I felt just a moment ago with Laura, but more than that, a familiar feeling up and down my spine. Little mallets tickling a xylophone tune from my bones.

“I think we understand each other. I knew that when you left this for me,” Cynthia continues, and I notice the paper airplane again. What did I do when I left this paper airplane on her keyboard? What message did I send?

With dead fingers I take it from her hands and unfold it. Inside I find the notes she made during our HR dressing-down. Jake’s name. My address.

Tinkle. Tinkle. Tinkle.

My stomach feels acidic.

“Why are you here?” I whisper.

Cynthia’s eyes are as cold and hard as pavement.

“Jacob Ripper’s exit interview.”

And then the door swings open again.