“The roof,” Eli whispered, leaning in too close. His breath smelled muddy and acrid, as if he’d stopped brushing his teeth. I couldn’t help scrunching up my nose. “The roof,” he said again. “It’s safe up there.”
“It seems pretty safe down here.”
Eli closed his fist tighter around my sleeve and pulled me through the crowd. I followed him, my friend after all. Truthfully I was curious. He was going to tell me something about Charlie. We climbed up the winding, beer-sticky stairwell to the third story, then pulled ourselves through a window to scale the sloping eaves until we reached a flat expanse. Settling next to Eli, my brain slightly fuzzy with beer, I felt glad I’d come. The sky hung heavy with stars, but the air tasted light in my lungs. That thin, high-altitude air—like diet air, not so full of oxygen. I sipped it in, my head clearing ever so slightly.
Eli scrunched his brow as if he were squinting into the night through his sunglasses.
“Take those off,” I told him, tapping a lens again. “I don’t know how you can see anything.”
“I don’t want to see anything,” Eli said. “I can’t stand the glare.”
“What glare?”
“Shh,” Eli said. “Just be quiet. Just shut up now.”
I tried to laugh. He had to be joking. We sat there, silent, me waiting politely—as if I weren’t allowed to say Charlie’s name out loud even though Eli had used it to lure me up here. I swear that ten minutes passed, the two of us, just sitting. When my eyes had adjusted to the semidarkness, I tried but failed to decipher the garbled scrawl across his pants. The noise of the party pulsed through the roof, vibrating slightly. Arriving voices and slamming car doors traveled up to us from the parking lot.
“Eli.” I finally spoke. “You said you were going to tell me something about Charlie.”
He pitched forward, placing his forehead between his knees, and pressed his hands over his ears.
“Eli?” I said.
“Shh,” he said. “Shut up. Don’t say that name.”
“Which name? Yours or his?”
He lifted his head and snatched off his sunglasses. I heard my own intake of breath; he looked so upset, so wired. His eyes were disturbingly beautiful even in this partially lit night; it made a kind of sense that he’d wanted to hide them.
“Eli,” I said, my voice a whisper. “Are you all right?”
Another minute passed, maybe two. We stared into each other’s faces. I thought how lackluster my own dark-eyed face must look in comparison to his. Then he turned in a jerky, agitated movement and slapped me across the forehead with the back of his hand. I couldn’t tell if he’d done it on purpose or if it happened because he wasn’t in control of his movement. Either way, the blow stunned me into a weird sort of calm—as if he’d smacked me right out of my body and now I could stand to the side, just watching whatever happened next.
“Shut up,” he whispered fiercely.
I hadn’t said a word. Eli stood, his eyes filling with water. I brought my hand to my forehead, which stung sharply. I pictured a quick, hand-shaped welt that would indeed take shape by the time I had a chance to look in a mirror. Eli drew his hand back to his own forehead and smacked it twice, harder even than he’d smacked me. The Ray-Bans flew out of his hand, skittered across the roof, and fell down to the parking lot.
“Eli,” I said, regaining my voice, sharply aware of the distance between us and the ground. The trust required for me to come up here—in my own footing, in my companion—evaporated into the thin air. “Stop it,” I said. “Stop it.”
I could hear voices three stories below, halting. “Who’s up there,” a male voice yelled. I imagined him kneeling to pick up the expensive sunglasses that had clattered to his feet. Eli covered his face with his hands.
“Goddamn it,” Eli said. “Don’t you see what he’s turned you into? Don’t you see what he’s making me do?”
“Who?” I said, though I knew exactly. I slid back a little, the tar shingles rough beneath my blue-jeaned thighs. I tried to calculate the distance and slope to that open window below. Eli moved his hands frantically across his head, as if discovering the lack of hair for the first time. He balled his hands into fists, and I thought he would start pummeling himself again. But instead he threw his arms out wide, like bird wings. The sky around us darkened in an elegant bow. Eli did a strangely graceful little hop, then ran down to the eaves with his arms outstretched and catapulted into the air. I swear that for a moment he hovered. It happened just after his feet grazed the gutters—his body hung flat, arms outstretched like a raptor about to swoop down on prey. But then that silhouette evaporated, and in less time than he’d been still, he crashed through the air to the pavement.
I heard male and female screams below, but I stayed silent. My arms hugged my knees close to my chest. A warm Chinook wind blew my hair off my sharply stinging forehead. I crawled down to where he’d lifted off, and peered over. Down below, three people—two girls and a guy—stood over Eli’s body. He lay on his stomach, his arms splayed out, still like wings, though they would tell me later he’d managed to land on his feet before crumpling to the ground.
He’s dead, I thought. Eli’s dead. Then I remembered the kitten he’d rescued, how sure I’d been she couldn’t possibly survive.
One of the girls looked up at me. “Are you all right?” she yelled, as if I were a victim instead of an accomplice.
“Is he alive?” I said, my voice such a froggy croak I didn’t expect she would hear it.
But she called back. “Yeah. He’s alive.”
“Call an ambulance,” I yelled back, my voice so loud and sudden it set off a little pulse behind my eyelids.
The girl brought her hand to her eyes, as if to shade them. “We did,” she said. I crawled backward, over the roof, and climbed back through the window, heading dutifully if numbly to the place where he landed.
BY THE TIME I got to the parking lot, the whole street was engulfed in ambulance lights. Everyone knew that I was the girl who’d been up on the roof. I must have looked that traumatized, disheveled. Somebody, maybe the Delta who’d been standing below when Eli jumped, put a blanket around my shoulders.
I watched Eli rumble by on a stretcher, apparently conscious, his eyes opened and unfocused, staring blankly up at the sky. Without turning his head, he reached his hand out toward me. I grabbed it, relieved that his palm felt warm. The stretcher halted for a moment.
“Do you want to ride with him?” the EMT asked.
Remembering what he’d been like on the roof, I shook my head and let go of Eli’s hand. It fell to his side with a sad flop and I immediately regretted saying no. By this time, the university police had arrived, too. The officers approached me as Eli’s stretcher was loaded. I watched the ambulance pull away, already regretful. I should have gone with him. I should have been right there next to him, holding on to his hand.
“We saw the whole thing,” said the valiant frat boy before they could ask a single question. “He was standing alone at the edge of the building and then he just jumped.”
It hadn’t occurred to me until I heard this defense that someone might think I’d pushed him. One officer scribbled on a notepad while the other looked hard at me.
“Was he drunk?” he said. “Acting strange?”
I nodded. The officer’s pencil halted, expectantly, so I cleared my throat and said, “Yes, he was acting strange. Yes, he was drunk.” That last word gave me a second of hope. Maybe that was all it was.
The officer lifted his eyes and squinted at me in the dimly lit parking lot, then reached out as if to push the hair off my face. I stepped back.
“Did he hit you?” the officer asked.
“No,” I said, shaking the hair back in front of my face. “No, I’m fine.”
His features sharpened as he paused, deciding whether to press the issue. Then he said, “Do you know how we can get in touch with his family?”
My opportunistic heart jumped, just for a mom
ent, hovering like a raptor in the air. Then it landed splat on the pavement, worried and confused.
ON THE CAR RIDE over to Eli’s house, the officers were sensitive and solicitous. Why wouldn’t they be? Here I was, innocent, fragile, and quivering—the embodiment of everything they were assigned to protect. The redheaded officer sat in the back, giving me the front seat so I wouldn’t feel like a criminal. When we arrived, Eli’s house stood dark—his roommates were either asleep or back at Pub Club—but the front door was unlocked. I led the officers up to his room, expecting to find chaos. But when I pushed his door open, the spare order took me by surprise: the bed perfectly made, the floor swept, the walls empty. It looked almost like a military barracks. The one thing not tucked away in a drawer was Eli’s address book, the thin faux-leather kind that banks give away for free. As I picked it up, I caught my reflection in Eli’s mirrored bureau: a dark-haired girl who looked dazed and much younger than nineteen, with a troubling red mark across her forehead.
“Moss,” I said, handing Eli’s address book to the redheaded officer. “His parents are named Moss.”
“Are you sure you don’t want to call?” the officer said. “It might be better if a friend tells them.”
We walked downstairs to the kitchen phone. I dialed 1 and then the number written in neat, slanted handwriting next to the words Mom and Dad. I listened to it ring once, twice, three times, not sure if I would prefer a live human being or the answering machine.
“Hello,” said a male voice, too young to be Eli’s dad.
“Mr. Moss?” I said.
I heard an amused pause and could imagine Charlie’s face, wry and smiling. “Sort of,” he said. “Though probably not the one you’re looking for. Can I take a message for him?”
“It’s about Eli.” I tried to pitch my voice lower, so Charlie wouldn’t recognize it. Then I remembered all those weeks and months of silence. Why would he remember my voice after forgetting me so immediately, so resolutely? Something inside me hardened. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but Eli had an accident. He jumped off the roof of a fraternity house. He’ll be okay, but somebody needs to come out here. Right away.” The silence on the other end had stopped smiling. “I’m sorry,” I said again.
Charlie spoke with a faint pause after each word: “Why would he jump off a roof?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “He was acting strange. He was acting wrong. I think there’s something wrong.”
“Brett?”
Charlie’s voice suddenly steadied, as if his future self—the one who knew and loved me—had managed to reach backward in time to recognize my voice. “Is this Brett?”
My hand went numb. Maybe Charlie wanted to think this phone call was just a cruel joke, a sick way to get back at him for not loving me. Or maybe he thought I had pushed Eli off the roof. In that moment I felt almost as if I had.
“No,” I said, scrambling for another name. I didn’t want this to be about me and Charlie. Eli needed his family. I had to step back, invisible. In my dorm room, on the bedside table, lay Walter Jackson Bate’s fat biography of John Keats, dog-eared and underlined. “This is Fanny,” I said. “Fanny Brawne.”
Charlie didn’t say anything. What twentieth-century person is named Fanny? I wondered if he recognized this name from a class where he’d sat listening, not having read the text, or if he just computed the oddness. More likely he hadn’t even heard me. I pictured Charlie holding the receiver and realized that I couldn’t remember his face, not exactly, only its outline, and the color of his eyes: a dim reflection of Eli.
I gave him the name of the hospital where Eli had been taken, repeating the number that one of the officers recited. Then I said good-bye and hung up. The officers stood staring at me. One of them reached out to pat my shoulder, but to me the gesture didn’t feel comforting. This was the first time I would experience it, the particular sense of trauma, Eli’s madness still thrumming just below my skin.
But if Eli’s family was now marshaling to come for him, this could be my only chance to see him again without running into Charlie. “Hey,” I asked the officers. “Can you give me a ride to the hospital? So I can see how he’s doing?”
“Sure,” they said. “But they probably won’t let you see him. Only family, I’d guess, at this point.”
Which let me off the hook, an immediate combination of relief and disappointment. I remembered both ways Eli’s hand had felt—slapping across my forehead and sliding out of my grip.
Over the next days and weeks and months, when Eli left Colorado and never returned, I tried to write a poem about that moment when he leapt off the roof and out of my life. Although it never materialized properly, it started to form in my head before we even left his house, the first lines interrupted by a creaky and mournful meow. Peering from behind a beat up armchair was the scraggly gray kitten, now a cat, brushed and plump under Eli’s care. The officers gave me a moment to search for a cat carrier and supplies. I left the house with Tab and kept her with me for over a decade, till she died under the wheels of a car, just up the road from the Mosses’ summer home.
5
For a while I tried to email Eli, to update him on Tab and find out if he was ever coming back to school. But he never answered. After a month or so went by, I helped his roommates pack up his things to ship back to his parents’ winter house in New York.
“He’s in some swanky hospital outside Boston,” one of the roommates told me. “It’s called McLean.”
I knew about McLean from studying poets and listening to James Taylor. In my mind, it was like a boarding school with rolling green lawns and maybe even a swimming pool and tennis courts. I imagined Eli lying on a grassy hillside under a broad, blue sky, writing poetry in a spiral notebook. That image comforted me, even as the years unfolded without ever hearing from him. Eli went away. He had treatment. He was cured. Maybe when he got out he enrolled in a different college, went on to med school, got married. I pictured an understanding wife who he could be solicitous of the way he’d been with Wendy. My imagination restored him, created the life he should have had.
Which left my own life to unfold. I finished my BA and then waited tables in Randall for a couple years before entering the PhD program at Amherst. Where I met Ladd, who asked me to marry him and then—unwittingly—returned me to the Mosses.
IT HAPPENED LIKE THIS. Seven years after I saw Eli loaded into that ambulance, Ladd and I rode the Hy-Line ferry from Nantucket to Cape Cod. I hadn’t been wearing his engagement ring a full twenty-four hours, and it felt new and heavy and noticeable on my finger. Ladd and I sprawled out on the life vest container at the stern. I wore a bikini top and shorts—at twenty-six, still too young to take skin cancer or premature aging seriously. Through the haze of early July—sunlight and milling passengers—I thought I heard someone call my name. Not sure if I made out the words correctly, I decided I didn’t want to run into anyone, so I kept my eyes shut tight. Those days I felt happiest wrapped in a cocoon with just Ladd. Other people had become, by definition, intruders.
“Brett Mercier,” the voice said again, insistent and determined.
Whoever it was, he lacked the social finesse to know he was being avoided. I peered to one side. Ladd lay asleep next to me. He and I both had dark hair, but in this bright sunlight, on the water, his skin revealed its northern European roots as opposed to my southern by getting redder by the minute. Ladd had thick eyebrows and narrow eyes, making his face look stern, almost craggy. Unlike Charlie’s, it wasn’t a face that everyone in the world would consider handsome. But I did. I knew I should wake him and tell him to put on sunscreen, a hat, something. I sat up, squinting into the sun, my hand coming down to rest on Ladd’s bare leg.
It took several seconds to recognize Eli. In my mind, he had separated into two different people: the great friend who’d always had my back and the scary stranger who’d appeared one night, and then disappeared, taking the original one with him. Now there seemed to be a third one, barely
recognizable across these distant years and miles. Not that I wasn’t happy to see him; I just felt like it wasn’t him, not exactly. Eli stood in front of me, blinking under blinding sun on a quiet Atlantic ocean. The most striking similarity to his old self—that last self, anyway—was his hair, cut very short.
He looked dejected that I wasn’t more excited about this chance meeting. Involuntarily, I touched my forehead with the tips of my fingers. Eli was the only person in the world who’d ever hit me. For the first time in ages I found myself wondering again, if it had been an accident.
“Eli,” I finally said, to his goofy and increasingly awkward grin.
All his angles had gone soft. A potbelly balanced on top of long, skinny legs. Despite the heat, he wore khakis and a striped oxford shirt, sweat stains visible under his arms. Somehow I knew without asking that he had not gone to med school.
I reached out my hand and Eli took it, then turned my palm over and brought it to his lips. The gesture seemed so natural and sweet that I found myself smiling. Ladd’s eyelids fluttered open and he propped himself up on his elbows, squinting into the sun.
“Hey,” Eli said. “Ladd Williams?”
“Yeah,” Ladd said as Eli’s identity registered. “Hey, Eli.”
It had never occurred to me to ask if Ladd knew the Moss family. How many thousands of people spent summers on Cape Cod? I’d imagined visiting Eli at his summer house, but if I ever knew the name of the town I’d long since forgotten it. Eli pointed at Ladd. The pudgy finger seemed nothing at all to do with the lithe, charismatic boy I remembered.
“You know Brett?” Eli said to him. And then, picking up on the unmistakable currents between us: “Are you, like, with Brett?”
“Yeah,” Ladd said. “How do you know Brett?”
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