Page 44 of The New Couple in 5B

She’s hanging from the rafters, dead.

The room starts to spin and there’s a siren, my own screaming for Max. Rushing over, I try to understand how she got up there. How do I get her down?

My thoughts are a panicked jumble. The rope around her neck is tied off around a metal piling. There’s a ladder beside her. Did she climb up there and jump off? I try to loosen the knot, but it’s pulled taut.

“Oh, my God.” Shock makes Max go gray as he enters the room. “Holy shit. Rosie.”

I drop to my knees, wailing. Max tries to bring me to my feet, pulling me back toward the door. He’s already calling 911.There’s an emergency. A woman has killed herself.

No, I want to say.That’s not true. She didn’t. Someone did this.

I can’t take my eyes off her. If we’d gotten here sooner, could we have saved her? She died not knowing how much her father loved her. There’s a letter from him that she will never read. Max is still trying to get me away, and I pull back to her.

“We need to get herdown,” I yell. “Maybe we can save her.”

“No,” he says sternly. “She’s gone.”

I pull away from his grasp, and go back to her.

That’s when I see it.

The leather strap of a necklace around her ruined neck.

A pendant.

A silver hand with the evil eye stone in its palm.

fourteen

I can’t take my eyes from her, from the pendant, just like the one my husband was wearing, as Max drags me from the room.

“I have to try to get her down,” I manage again through sobs.

“She’s gone, Rosie, please,” he insists, voice strained with despair, managing to get me out the door. “It’s too late. It’s too late.”

I wrest myself away from him to go back, but he blocks me again.

That necklace, I want to say.It’s just like the one Chad was wearing this morning.

Instead, I just give in to the sobbing, sink to my knees onto the cold concrete. Max comes down to the floor with me.

The police get there quickly, the paramedics right behind, though Max is right, of course—there’s no saving Dana. Max and I sit on the floor against the far wall of the gallery, leaning against each other. My head on his shoulder, his hand on my leg. I am shaken to my core, the image of her hanging there burned into my psyche. I can’t stop seeing it. I cry quietly. It’s not the first time I’ve witnessed death, but apparently it never gets easier.

She joins a gallery of macabre images in my mind. When I was a child, a man had a heart attack in my father’s church. His face was the strangest gray color, his wife wailing. The girl on the subway tracks. Ivan, his last breath leaving him so quietly, another never drawn. The silence that seemed to fall. The bike messenger twisted on the sidewalk.

Now Dana.

Her face—pain, rage, fear, frozen there forever. I feel a helpless grief for a person I never really knew, and it’s a knot in my solar plexus.

I’ve left a message for Chad, but he hasn’t returned it.

I try again. No answer.

Where is he?

I jab out a desperate text:Please call me. It’s an emergency.

No response.