Sunday night, the last night of July, I braved the ladder at the topmost level of the fire escape and climbed up to the roof. I came empty-handed, alone, and not entirely sure what to make of all this. But I had to come.
The rooftop was smaller than I expected, the bottom sticky and smudged, like flypaper at my feet. The air and everything around me was dim, a murky warmth that was golden in some places but mostly gray, and the view was of a sweep of lights, outlines of rooftops stretching into the distance, uncountable. Then there was the constant hum, coming from boxy structures housed on roofs and buildings nearby, from all around us, above and below. I didn’t go close enough to the edge to look down—I couldn’t—but I knew the street was on one side and the private garden on another. A crack of darkness showed the thin vertical space between buildings, and I kept my distance.
Monet appeared from behind a chimney.
“You’re here,” she said. She seemed surprised, which made me feel small. Then she leaped over and took me by the hand to show me her private area and her own personal vista of the city, and a thumping started in my chest. She’d asked me to leave with her. I almost, in that moment, believed she knew a way out and was about to show me.
On the tar-covered expanse, Monet had set up a lawn chair, a crate on which to rest her feet, and a gold-velvet couch pillow borrowed from the parlor furniture downstairs. Scattered on a low wall were a toy-army pair of binoculars, old snack wrappers, and a few grimy green goblets from the dining room. She’d spent lots of time here. On the roof below the wall was a bowl with cat food in it: dry kibble.
There wasn’t another chair for me, so we stood in her den and peered out. No other human beings could be seen on rooftops in any direction, and for a moment it seemed we had come to a forgotten part of New York and had the city all to ourselves.
“Is this what you wanted to show me?” I finally asked. If we were planning our escape from up here, I wondered if it might involve a rescue from a helicopter, her long-lost spy of a mother at the controls, reaching our arms up into whipping wind. I wondered if it involved a story she had yet to tell me, one featuring a walk across a tightrope between buildings or scaling down the side of the garden wall with mountain gear, carefully creeping past Ms. Ballantine’s wide wall of windows. I was hopeful, and open to anything, but she didn’t offer a story yet.
“Yeah,” was all she said. “Everyone’s always asking where I go at night. Where else could I go? You know what happens after curfew.”
I did know—and I didn’t. There was a blank spot in my memory over how I got back that night. I was at the curb near the phone booth, and then I was on our side of the gate. Next I checked, the lock was secured, the chain intact, and all I knew was there was no way back through it.
“But what about my first night? Where’d you go then?”
“I tried to stay out,” she said. “But I couldn’t make it past the garden.”
A warm feeling came over me: She’d let me in on something. She’d told me a true secret.
“I just thought you should hear it from me before I go,” she said.
Before I go. Hadn’t she just admitted it was impossible to leave Catherine House?
She walked away from me and sat in her lawn chair. She had her seat aimed toward the dense blocks of Midtown, where the Empire State Building glowed white that night amid the other tall towers. A chimney top protruded behind her; she could tilt back in her chair and not fall, and the spires and less romantic things, like water tanks and bulbous knots of electrical wires from other surrounding rooftops, faded into the low light.
She seemed to be waiting for something—but what? Was it me?
Her eyes could have been any color in the night—it was too dim to tell. She had her ordinary hair showing, nothing different to disguise herself with tonight. My mother might have been on this very rooftop when she’d had her accident, and she never returned after. She never spoke of what happened, not even to me. That was when I knew. It was happening again.
“It’s almost midnight,” she said. “That’s when I have to do it. Don’t look at me like that. I know I’ll make it.” She was crossing to the far edge of the building. It was where we saw the blue light we all told ourselves was Catherine de Barra. She stepped toward it with such determination. It made my knees feel loose, my stomach shake.
“But—” I started.
She turned and cut me short. “Curfew is a lie,” she said.
I remembered the legend about Catherine. How the air had her. How the night took her. But how the hard ground never came. The pavement never met her. The night never let her body go, as if it wanted her entirely for itself. That was the story Monet had told me my first morning in the house.
I shook my head.
“I’ll make it,” she said. “Come.” It sounded like a promise. She leaned over to see what was down there, but I couldn’t meet her. There wasn’t a railing; there was only a narrow ledge. The air was too boundless and uncontained where she wanted to go.
She shielded her eyes with her hand and looked down. She still had it on. Surely she hadn’t taken it off since she found where I’d kept it hidden.
The opal there on her finger. The low light of the rooftop liked its deep darkness, but now I could see the colors swirling inside. Red and gold, blue and green, all tumbled around inside the black stone, moving faster than I’d ever seen before. The opal had come alive. The black was warm and flushed. It showed the universe above and around us, the galaxy of uncountable, unreachable stars. It wanted her to do it; it was telling her it was time.
She was smiling, but so sadly. Was that pity on her face? The dark was hiding so much of her expression.
“What’s the first thing you remember about this city?” she said. “Quick. Don’t think too hard. From the day you got here.”
I wanted to say her, bumping into her in the fork of a double-named road. But I picked something else and pretended it was what came to me first. “The train,” I said. “Going through the tunnels.”
“Grand Central?” she said. “I remember that, too.”
It wasn’t what I expected. I’d always imagined her coming here from far away—arriving on a plane that swooped down from the sky, pulling up to the house in a speeding taxi or, better, a glossy black SUV, bare legs sliding out from the back seat. There could have been mystical ways to arrive, too, foggy in origin, lacking in explanation, simply appearing like a dot of color in the night sky. But she’d arrived on a commuter train. Same as me.
“I hope I get to see you again, Sabina Tremper from nowhere interesting,” she said, softening the blow. “If you make it, if you wake up and you get yourself out, that’s where you’ll find me. Just after midnight by the clock. I’ll be looking for you.”
“What are you saying?” I started, but it was too late. I’d gotten scared, and she’d seen what I was made of. I’d ruined one more thing.
She backed up.
“Wait, what day?” I said. “Midnight when? Tomorrow? Next week?”
She didn’t answer so mundane a question. She circled, only once.
“Wait,” I said. “What if you don’t make it?”
I sensed her right behind me, her breath on the back of my neck for a tense second, her muscles coiled, ready. Then she ran to gain momentum, and all I can say is there wasn’t a way to stop her. It was almost like she flew.
It was midnight and the light in the air was blue and it was already happening, and I wasn’t a part of it. My hesitation had cost me. I’d held back too long.
I probably could have told the story a hundred different ways, depending on who was listening, but the truth was this:
She dangled in the beautiful black for a moment, and I swore her eyes were wide open, and I swore that this was a moment that lasted long enough for me to remember it always, to feel it in my own body, to know it in my bones. The part of the story I didn’t tell any of the other girls, and wouldn’t ever, happened when she lifted her hand.
My mother once did the very same thing, but her arm was raised for the sun, to try to flag down passing cars. Monet’s arm was curled, her hand in a fist, and I swore it was aimed at me. A pop of light came, blazing and burning a perfect circle in my retinas. I was dizzied and stumbled back, shielding my eyes, and I heard it drop somewhere close to me, somewhere so close, with a ping.
When I opened my eyes again, there was no girl in the sky anymore. There was no burst of brightness. She’d been a ball of legs and light and amazing stories and perfect secrets, but she wasn’t there anymore. She had disappeared from view.
The wind carried the smell of burning wood. A siren wailed somewhere across the city for someone else. I pulled myself to my feet. And I made myself start walking. And I did what I knew she wanted, because there wasn’t anything more I could do. I went to the edge, and I looked down to search for her in the street.
━━━━━
It was only in the hours after, once I was sure she was gone, that I went looking. I searched and searched to see what had dropped from the night, what I suspected she’d thrown to me, but there was nothing on the sticky tarred surface of the rooftop, nothing I could find in the darkness. I had to climb back down the ladder by myself. I had to sit alone in my hot room and wonder if it would forever be this stifling. I was facing the fact that I had missed my chance. I might not ever see Monet, might not ever see my mother again.
The night was empty, and I’d ruined it for myself. I’d ruined everything. When I saw that she’d successfully cleared the gate, when I saw her stand up, illuminated in the glow of the streetlamps, where I couldn’t reach, when I saw her grab her suitcase and drive off in that taxi, I knew it would take such a long time to get over this.
I’d never met a better liar, or a girl I admired more.
I hoped that she might turn the taxicab around and come back for us, help get the rest of us out, ram that gate and knock it over and set us all loose into the streets, where any terrible thing could happen but it would be our choice, our risk, our running feet. I hoped for it all night, but it never came.