by Mary Kubica
Somewhere between the eighth and ninth floors, my feet slip on the edge of the step, on some sort of tactile paving, yellow, rubbery lumps that are meant to have the opposite effect, to prevent people from falling. But not me. Rather my body keeps going, the momentum of the run thrusting me forward at a blistering pace. But, thanks to the tactile paving, my feet slow down, two things which are mutually exclusive because I can’t stop and go at the same time. And so instead I trip, feet skidding beneath me. My body jerks, my hand latching on to the banister to keep me upright. Pain radiates down my arm, into my hands, seeping into the muscles of my rib cage, my neck, my back. But I keep going. He is right there, within reach. I can’t lose him this time.
I scurry up yet another flight of stairs. I keep running, up the steps. Though before I know it, we’ve reached the top floor. The highest floor in the entire building, the sixteenth floor. The end of the line, I think at first, but not quite. Because he’s still climbing. Because there’s still one more flight of stairs, different from all the rest. More industrial, more heavy-duty. Not meant for everyday pedestrian use. It’s more of an elaborate stepladder than stairs. But I scale it nonetheless, ten feet behind him. Beside it, a sign reads Roof Access.
There’s a hatch at the top, a single slab of aluminum with a hinged lid. He pushes through it and I follow, mounting the last few steps of the stepladder and breaking free onto the rooftop of the apartment building.
At the top, the hatch door closes all on its own behind me. The wind forces it shut, the sound of it slamming closed, startling me.
I reach for the handle to tug it open again, finding it suddenly locked.
I’m trapped on the building’s rooftop.
The city surrounds me. A panorama. With arms outstretched, I can’t help but spin, taking it all in. Enjoying the view, knowing fully well this may be the last thing my eyes ever see.
The buildings and skyscrapers rise up like dominos around me and I stand on my own domino, waiting for my turn to fall. The lake is bluer than I’ve ever seen, a luminous blue that makes the blue of the sky inferior. An underling. Sunlight reflects off the glass of the buildings so that the whole world is suddenly aglow.
I circulate the building, looking for him, for my father. Now that we’re here, he’s somehow disappeared. He’s hiding from me. I call to him, but he doesn’t reply. “Hello!” I scream. “I know you’re up here!”
The roof itself is filled with all sorts of miscellany. An industrial cooling system. Exhaust vents. Access panels to this and that. It makes it hard to see. I search among various parts of the cooling system, looking for him. They’re big, boxy things that make noise from time to time, like the whirring of a fan inside. I hold my breath. I refuse to breathe. Breathing makes noise and I don’t want to make noise. I only want to listen.
A hand strokes me again, whispering into my ear, Earth to Jessie.
I pull back, drawing sharply away from the strange caress.
To the west end of the building, there’s a fire escape, one that runs from ground level clear to the top, a thing so basic, so rudimentary, it terrifies me. It’s little more than a metallic swimming pool ladder, four treads that lift you from the rooftop to the other side of the building.
That’s where my father stands. On the fire escape. Now that the hatch is closed, the only way out of here, aside from a free fall, is the fire escape.
I go there, legs shaking. I call to him, voice more subdued now that I see him. Now that I’ve found him. Now that he’s in reach. He’s climbed over the roof wall, a three-foot thing, and onto the fire escape.
My hand reaches out for the ladder’s handrail and I grab a hold of it and pull myself up. My hands are dripping and slippery. I go up one tread. It gives on me and I fall back down to the ground. I start again. One step and then two, watching on in horror as my father begins his descent without me, jogging down the steps at a steady clip, unfazed by the great height.
“Stop, please,” I beg, hearing the anguish in my voice. “Please, don’t go.”
As I near the top, there’s a moment of calm that comes and goes so quickly I almost don’t notice it. For one split second the world is still. I’m at peace. The sun moves higher and higher into the sky, yellow-orange glaring at me through the buildings, making me peaceful and warm. My hands rise beside me as a bird goes soaring by. As if my hands are wings, I think in that moment what it would be like to fly.
And then it comes rushing back to me.
I’m hopelessly alone. Everything hurts. I can no longer think straight; I can no longer see straight; I can no longer speak. I don’t know who I am anymore. If I am anyone.
And I know in that moment for certain: I am no one.
I think what it would feel like to fall. The weightlessness of the plunge, of gravity taking over, of relinquishing control. Giving up, surrendering to the universe.
There’s a flicker of movement beneath me. A flash of brown, and I know that if I wait any longer, it will be too late. The decision will no longer be mine. I cry out one more time. And then I go, legs convulsing as I swing one leg over the edge of the building and onto the fire escape on the other side. I have to force myself to do it. It takes everything I have. All that’s on the other side is a measly shelf, an overhang, that hovers seventeen floors above land.
I make my way toward him, but he’s moving far too fast for me. And I’m scared, looking down where, beneath me, the earth tilts and sways. I’m overcome with vertigo. I feel nauseous; I feel like I could be sick. The steps of the fire escape are perforated to prevent snow and ice from forming, which does nothing for me now. I can see straight through them to the street beneath my feet. People like ants walk up and down the street, minding their own business, paying no attention to me. Cabs like matchbooks soar past.
The steps beneath me are corroded and weak. A handful are missing. In some spots, the fire escape pulls away from the building’s masonry, bolts no longer holding tight. I take the steps two at a time, though they clatter each time my feet hit, the entire fire escape bucking beneath me. I have to take long strides over the missing steps.
I make it down only half a flight of steps before my knees give.
As they do, I lurch forward, staggering. I fall down the second half flight of stairs. The railing at the end is corroded, as much of the fire escape is. It’s the red-orange of rust. As my body goes hurtling into it, the spindles give and I slip straight through, with nothing there to prevent my fall.
As I tumble off the side of the fire escape, my head swims.
I take one final look at the great distance to the ground, the distance I’ll soon fall.
All at once, I’m falling. My legs follow the rest of me, feet making a last-ditch effort to cling to something, trying in vain to tether themselves to the steel of the fire escape. I try to grab it with a hand, but it slips straight through time and again, as I soar along beside it, unable to grab hold.
My arms and legs kick. They do the doggy paddle as I soar downward. I flail and kick, my body splayed as air rushes from beneath me, wrapping my hair around my face. I can see nearly nothing. Not that there’s much to see anyway, other than the blue of the sky as I fall. There’s no air resistance. The air does nothing to slow me down. My hands make a meek attempt to protect my head, some sort of Pavlovian response, as I thrust my feet downward, knowing my only chance of survival hinges on landing feetfirst. It doesn’t work. I can’t get them down. Another fire escape landing soars past but I can’t get to it in time.
My insides scuttle to my center from the speed, from the velocity of the fall. A fall that feels like forever. Like I am forever falling. My face molded in fear.
I open my mouth to scream, but nothing comes out.
eden
October 3, 1997
Egg Harbor
It’s become an itch that I can’t reach. A hunger that no amount of foo
d can satiate. A drought that a thousand rainfalls can’t fix.
That unquenchable need to be a mother.
I think about it morning, noon and night.
At night I lie awake not sleeping, wondering how I will ever be a mother.
I don’t know that I have it in me to wait until Aaron’s and my divorce is complete.
There is adoption, of course, but as a single mother going through divorce proceedings and carrying an exorbitant amount of debt, I hardly think I’m a suitable candidate for adoption.
And so I must find another way.
I go to work early and I leave late, spending those extra few minutes staring at the babies through the nursery room glass. On my lunch break I eat quickly so that I have time to wander down to the labor and delivery unit and salivate over the newborns while the nursery room nurses tend to their every need, the bottles and clean diapers and the endless rocks in the rocking chairs.
I don’t want to feel the way I do.
I’m not a bad person, not by any means, and yet it’s an addiction to me. A disease. I’m unable to abstain from thinking about babies, from wanting a baby, from craving a baby as one does gambling or cocaine.
I’ve lost control of my own behavior. I don’t know what I’m capable of, what I might do, and that in itself terrifies me. Once I was very rule abiding; I always did as I was told.
But now my neurotransmitters are in disrepair and quite simply, I’m not the person I used to be. That Eden is gone, replaced with someone I scarcely recognize anymore, someone I don’t know.
October 7, 1997
Egg Harbor
Something happened today.
I had eaten my lunch—roast beef on rye from the hospital’s cafeteria—sitting all alone at one of the smaller round tables, nibbling quickly, quietly and staring out the window at the visitors and outpatients who came and went through the revolving front doors, realizing how utterly alone I felt as the other tables spilled over with groups of four, five, six, all involved in conversations that didn’t have a thing to do with me. Oh, how I felt so alone. When I was through eating, I set my tray beside the trash can and then went to visit the babies in the nursery.
A drug addict needing her fix.
As I stood there, peering through glass at the newborns sound asleep in their knitted blankets with their knitted hats, one little one in particular caught my eye, the name in the bassinet reading Jade Cutter. It was the name that caught my attention, not necessarily the baby herself, though she was perfect in every way, from the roundness of her head to the redness of her cheeks. But more so, it was the slip of pink paper in the bassinet that caught my eye, the one that listed her name, date and time of birth, pediatrician, and the names of her parents.
Joseph and Miranda Cutter.
Joe and Miranda.
They’d had their baby girl. They’d had their baby girl and they didn’t tell me.
She was swaddled in a pink cotton blanket, eyes closed, mouth parted as she breathed in her sleep. A single hand had forced its way from the blanket, but Jade seemed unmindful of this, unlike other infants—I’d come to learn from my time spent observing them in the nursery—whose limbs needed to be controlled so that they could sleep. There was dark hair, a mound of it, that sneaked out from the edges of the pink hat and, though they were shut tight, I had to imagine her eyes too were dark like Joe’s, though these, of course, were things that often changed over time.
And in that moment little Jade’s eyes parted and she gazed at me, it seemed, and I was stricken with a sudden, purposeful, persistent need to hold her in my arms.
I stepped into the nursery, greeting the ladies there by name. There were two of them, one older and one younger, both of whom I knew fairly well. How many months had I been stopping by, telling the tale of how I was working hard to earn my degree so I could be one of them, nursery room nurses who tended to newborn babies? How many times had they let me into the nursery, allowing me to watch as they changed diapers and swaddled with the expertise of someone who’d done it a million times? How many times had they let me stroke an infant’s cheek in his or her sleep, never once needing to remind me to wash my hands because I always remembered?
But not this time.
“You’ll need to stay in the hall, Eden,” the older of the two nurses said, a woman by the name of Kathy, and I felt a stabbing sensation in the chest as she pointed to the floor, to an imaginary line that dissected the nursery from the hallway tiles.
That’s the line where I was to remain behind.
“But, Kathy,” I attempted to argue, but she held up her hands and told me that there had been complaints that they’d been too lax of late, and hospital officials were cracking down on security protocols, and I wondered now if the babies were fitted with tiny security devices on their wee wrists or ankles to keep someone from walking out the front door with them. Someone like me.
“But it’s just me,” I reassured her, holding up my badge, reminding her that I work here.
Except that by that time, she’d turned her back to me and was attending to an infant who’d begun to fuss; she wouldn’t let me in, and I could feel my hands begin to shake in withdrawal. There was a tightness in my chest and my head suddenly hurt. For a minute or two, I couldn’t breathe. My heart was palpitating, strong, irregular beats that left me light-headed, though neither of the nurses seemed to notice; no one noticed but me.
And then Joe was there coming to my rescue, as he appeared at the nursery to come lay claim to his baby girl.
“Joe!” I said too loudly, thrilled to see him, knowing that he was my key to that baby. Joe would get Jade out of the nursery; Joe would let me hold and coddle baby Jade as I needed to do.
He said hello to me, and what a nice surprise to see me, and at this, I felt a smile spread widely across my lips. My heartbeat slowed; the tension in my head and neck began to ease.
“Miranda called you to tell you the news?” he asked, but I said no, that I was working, that I had just come to visit the babies in the nursery when I saw baby Jade.
“Congratulations!” I said, offering an awkward embrace. Joe was not a man I knew well, and what I did know came from Miranda’s own complaints about him. How he was a jerk, a lousy father. But I couldn’t let this deter me now.
“How is Miranda?” I asked, and Joe replied as expected: Miranda was tired, Miranda wanted nothing but to sleep and already I imagined her, sore over her infant’s need to eat.
Kathy glided the rolling bassinet out the nursery door to Joe’s waiting hands, and when I made an attempt to follow, to accompany Joe to Miranda’s room where I would sit on the corner armchair with Jade in my arms as I’d once done with Carter, he said to me, “Another time, Eden? My parents are here,” meaning that they already had company, that Joe’s mother and father were here to see baby Jade.
That I wasn’t welcome in the hospital room with Joe’s mother and father because as everyone knows, three’s a crowd.
“Just for a minute?” I pleaded, staring at Joe, who looked worse for wear in that moment, tired and jaded. I could see it in his eyes: four children was too much.
I could help him.
I could take a single one off his hands.
Just one child.
“Just to offer my congratulations to Miranda and then I’ll go?” I begged—and even I could hear the desperation in my voice—but Joe shook his head, and I felt like a child then, like a five-year-old child who’d just been told no.
Joe said that he’d pass my message along to Miranda and then he turned to go without me. He walked quickly on purpose, faster than my legs could go, and I felt the dismissal a thousandfold then. I was being brushed off, given the cold shoulder as if I carried a stigma on my sleeve.
The stigma of infertility, the stigma of miscarriage, the stigma of a woman whose husband was in the process of divorcing her.
I blinked and Joe was gone, disappeared down the hall and around the corner where I couldn’t see him anymore, and immediately the headache returned, the palpitations, the sweat. The hospital walls began closing in on me as in a room nearby a lady, deep in the throes of labor, screamed, and instead of feeling sympathy for her, I felt a surge of jealousy and spite.
Oh, how I wanted to be the one screaming in the throes of labor pain! How I wanted to feel a baby inside me, wedging itself headfirst to get out. How I wanted to feel that baby press between my legs, to feel it crown as doctors and nurses gathered around telling me to push. Push!
My feet crept toward her room with instinct, setting my hand on the doorknob and turning it, opening it just a sliver so that I could see in. There was far too much happening inside the room for anyone to hear the door squeak. I stood in the doorway, inching a foot back so no one would see. A Peeping Tom. The door wasn’t open and yet it was ajar, not quite closed tight, and through the crack I saw her laid out on her back, gasping from pain. I saw her gather handfuls of blanket in her hands and squeeze, pushing to get that baby out. I heard her scream, this throaty, guttural scream, crude and uninhibited as a nurse on either side told her to push. “Push!” Her husband stroked her sweaty hair, brushing it out of her eyes. Between her legs was a shock of black and there I stared, wondering just where exactly she ended and the baby began as she pushed again, holding her breath—as I, in turn, held mine, parting my legs ever so and pushing too—bearing down, and this time, as she pushed, a baby came spilling out of her insides, covered in mucous, and the room was filled with a sudden rapturous bliss.
The door slammed shut in my face.
Someone had seen me.
I ran away, out of labor and delivery.
I was due back at my desk in just a moment. Soon the other women in billing would wonder where I had gone, and why I wasn’t yet back from lunch. They would tell our manager. I would be given a scolding.