THE WHOLE WAY HOME, Laurie is worried that he’s lost me. Because when we’re silent, there’s no way for him to tell whether I’m next to him or not. He keeps looking over his shoulder, as if that would somehow let him know whether I’ve fallen behind. After a few minutes of this, I tell him, “Just assume I’m here. I’ll let you know if I start to lag.”
Neither of us knows what to do. Neither of us knows what Millie is doing to Elizabeth, or if it was a mistake to leave her there.
When we get back to our building, Laurie holds the door open for me, confusing the doorman, who’d been preoccupied with his crossword puzzle. Laurie senses his error but doesn’t say a word. He only speaks to me when we’re safely alone in the elevator.
“Do you want to go to the roof?” he asks.
* * *
I’m not expecting this.
“Sean showed me the way,” he goes on. “I’m sure you’re up there all the time, right?”
I shake my head, but he doesn’t see it.
“If we’re at your place or my place, we’ll just be waiting for her, you know?”
I know. So I tell him, sure, we can go to the roof.
* * *
The door to the roof is heavy, but there isn’t an alarm.
Laurie can shove it open easily, but for me it always took a lot of effort.
I only went to the roof when I really needed to.
It’s a different kind of daytime on the roof—different from that on the street, different from what comes through a window. We are in the strange borderland between ground and sky—nine stories up, we hover over pedestrians, over cars, over smaller buildings. But there are still-taller buildings hovering over us.
These taller buildings stand quiet, windows closed, expressions glazed. We are in a pocket of city silence, the traffic reduced to a hum, the voices never lifting this high.
Laurie walks over to the railing, looks below. I hesitate. He starts talking, thinking I am there.
“One second,” I call out.
It feels like years since I’ve been up here, even though I know it hasn’t been years. I wish there was some personal marker of time, so we didn’t have to rely upon days and weeks and months and years. Because each of us has our own unit of measurement, our own relativity. Spaces between loves. Spaces between destinations. Spaces between deaths.
Or just one death. The quickness of time before. The eternity of time after.
“You there?” Laurie asks.
“Yeah,” I answer, pulling up by his side, not touching the railing.
He looks out at the park. “Do you come up here a lot? Sean says he hides away here sometimes. I figured it was possible you were up here too. I mean, he thinks he’s alone when he does it. But he’d never know, right?”
“I don’t really come up here,” I murmur.
“Why not? It’s beautiful. And it’s not like they’re going to catch you.”
“It’s not that,” I say.
“Afraid the door will swing shut and you’ll get trapped? Sean says there’s a way around that.”
“No. It’s just . . . I don’t really like it up here. I never have.”
This is a lie, and I know it. I think, Why can’t I tell him?
“We can go back down,” he offers.
I think about everything he’s gone through. Not just in the past two days with me and Elizabeth. But before.
“I came up here at a bad time,” I tell him. “A really bad time. So it’s hard to come back without remembering.”
He nods, but doesn’t ask anything further. He’s leaving it up to me.
I think he might know.
“It was right after my mother died,” I say. “I spent about a month in a fog, completely paralyzed. I couldn’t believe I was alone. Everything seemed impossible. I knew enough to eat, but that was about it. Dad emailed, offered to come out. But I told him no. I felt that would have been worse, especially because there was no way he was going to stay. I’d just be postponing the abandonment.
“So one night I came up here. I found the strength and pushed open that door.
“For the first time since she died, I felt certainty. It was a flash of certainty: I was going to die. And the reason I was going to die was that I was going to throw myself right over the edge. It was the only solution. It was like all the other options had fallen away and all the walls had closed in, and the only thing that was left in the narrowness was the one exit, the one escape.
“I walked down there.” I point to a spot on the railing, even though Laurie can’t see me pointing. “I didn’t even have to leave a note—I figured eventually my father would notice I was gone. But he’d never really know, would he? I could be anywhere.
“I got one foot on the wall. The certainty was there . . . and then the flash was over. Because I thought to myself that, yeah, there was one person I would have to write a note for, and that was my mother. I know it sounds crazy, but I felt that I still owed her that. And as soon as I thought about her, I thought about how sad she would be to see me do this. I imagined my body lying down there, broken on the pavement, and no one would even know I was bleeding. The idea of everyone stepping over me, for days or months or years . . . it was the saddest thing I’d ever thought, and I knew my mother would never, ever want me to do that. It’s not like I saw her or heard her speaking to me. I just knew.
“So I guess I learned there’s no such thing as a flash of certainty. It’s a flash, for sure, but it isn’t certainty, even if it feels like certainty. And I haven’t been up here since then because I guess it reminds me how close I came. How dark it was. You know?”
Laurie reaches his hand out to me. I move my arm, concentrate there, so he can touch it. So he can give me that comfort, in the way that human beings do.
“I never wanted to die,” he tells me. “But I was always aware that it was an option. I felt the other people wanting me to do it, so I worked against it. I never even considered it. That would be my big defiance—I wouldn’t go away. Even when I was in the hospital, even when it was pretty dire—I guess I had the opposite of your flash of certainty. The certainty I felt was this foundation, the thing that all of my other thoughts were built on. I would get through it. I would heal. I would get the hell out of that town. They ruined my body, but I wouldn’t let them touch my life. I was certain of that. And I still am. Except in the moments when I’m not. But those are the exceptions.”