Just Under the Clouds

by Melissa Sarno

I sit at the edge of the roof. Adare will sit at the steps like she’s always done. Mom will wait at the park like she promised. And I’ll be here, with a racing heart, wondering what kind of mess I’ve made now.

  I look up at the sun, which I know will eventually leave the sky.

  I don’t know what made me think I had any of this figured out.

  I set my backpack down and let my head rest on it. The edges of my books poke up into my brain. I cross my arms over my chest and look up at the darkening sky. I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast, and no matter how many times I’ve had to practice being hungry, it never gets easier.

  I look below me, realizing I have no choice. I have to find my way down.

  I stand on the lowest branch, at the center of the tree, staring at the ground. I slip my backpack from my shoulders, take a deep breath, and let it go. It doesn’t float or waver. It just takes a straight shot to the withered grass.

  I decide I’ll climb down. I’ll hold on to the bark for as long as I can before I let go.

  I slide my jacket over my palms, my thumb and fingers jutting out to grip the tree. I hug the trunk, legs and arms wrapped around it, knowing that as soon as I slip, it’ll burn and bruise. I only hope that I land flat-footed instead of plain flat.

  I’m face to face with the tree. All the jagged lines of bark. Like the cords of a scarf all cabled together.

  I take one step at a time.

  I know I’ll take it slow until I have to be fast. That’s how climbing down a tree works. When the slip comes—and it always comes—you have to give in and fly.

  Just as I think it, I feel a small scrape where my fingers can’t grab and I lose everything. My legs go straight and I slide down the tree.

  I turn my face, feel the earth pulling at me, think, Get your feet flat, your hands ready, your hands. Your hands, Daddy always said, are the best way to fall.

  It’s fast, the falling. It’s one moment you’re high and the next you’re down. I feel my hands on the matted grass and my feet in a knot, but because I can feel anything at all, I know I’m not dead.

  I sit up and catch my breath. I took the tree most of the way down, so I’m scraped instead of broken.

  My jeans are sliced and my knee throbs a little. My left hand burns, and when I hold it in front of me, all I see are scratchy, thin lines of flesh and blood and dirt.

  My heart drums in my ears and my legs shake, my breath still trying to fill up my chest and let go.

  I stand up. There’s a moment when I think I’ll fall, but I stay steady. I’ve still got my bulking coat and hanging hair, and my shoes are still attached to my feet.

  Then I burst out laughing, the kind of laugh that hurts because of the way it comes up at you, sneaking through your chest and pushing out your throat until it explodes. I slid down a tree.

  My hand is searing, knife-slice pain, and I catch myself and stop laughing as I remember whose hand I’m supposed to hold.

  I run as best I can with a wobbly knee and my burning hot hand stuffed into my pocket with lint and old tissues.

  When I get to the school, looking for Adare at her place on the steps, nothing’s the way it should be. Most of the kids are gone and no one’s laughing or shouting or talking about who did what where when, and Adare’s not staring at the streetlamp or the sky, smiling and wondering and waiting.

  The steps are empty.

  My heart stings more than my hand, which I stuff deeper into my pocket, clawing at the fabric of my coat. My palm sweats and burns as my chest fills up with all that’s gone wrong.

  I try not to panic.

  Maybe she’s in the schoolyard or the office instead. I walk the edge of the building and turn its corner to the wide concrete space with the outline of a basketball court and hoops without nets. It’s fenced off and empty and I don’t see anybody lingering.

  I tell myself it’s not like middle school, where people stay for practice or drama club or extra help. She’s probably dangling her polka-dot leggings over a seat at the security desk or the principal’s office, where kids get sent if nobody’s showed up for them.

  I pull on the blue doors. There’s that drab, mismatching tile I remember. The woman at security has a big puff of silk hair. She grits her gold teeth and asks if she can help me, but she sounds like she doesn’t want to deal with me at all.

  “I was supposed to pick up my sister,” I say. “I’m late.”

  “Mmm,” she says like she doesn’t believe me. “Who’s your sister?”

  “Adare Quinn.”

  “Oh, Adare!” She breaks into a smile. “She your sister?”

  I nod.

  “Ain’t seen her, but I can check the office.”

  “Thanks.”

  She picks up a walkie-talkie. It scratches static as she garbles, “Main office,” and I think I hear her say Adare’s name.

  We wait with the shhh stream of the walkie-talkie and she says, “Adare’s a breath of sunshine, ain’t she?”

  I nod, because Adare is a breath of everything, with the way she holds on to it until she can’t anymore.

  “She’s a funny one, but her smile’ll break ya, won’t it?”

  “Yeah,” I say softly, like she would, wishing she’d stayed where she was supposed to or, more like, wishing I had.

  I look through the windowed door into the auditorium, with its rows of seats. It all feels smaller than it did when I was here.

  The walkie-talkie smacks a sound back at us and I look to the security guard to translate.

  “Nope.”

  Everything inside me falls like a dumb weight and I feel like I need some of Adare’s sunshine breath. This is not good at all.

  “You wanna make a call?”

  I shake my head real fast.

  “Got your own cell?”

  I shake my head again. We don’t have anyone or anywhere to call, never have. I stand in place, not really sure where to go. I think of how I tried to run away from the day and how, now, it feels like it’s running away from me.

  The security guard moves her round blue-suited body in her chair, shifts her whole behind, so it squeaks an echo through the empty school. “Somebody’s probably come and got her,” she tells me. “That’s what happens. Somebody got the memo wrong.”

  I wish she was right. I wish it more than anything. But this is no one’s fault but my own.

  “Thanks,” I tell her. I hold on to the strap of my backpack, push in the sweaty metal bar of the door, and I’m outside on the empty steps, feeling the world—my world—get so small, I’m not even sure I fit inside.

  I walk to the park without Adare, trying to think of what I’ll tell Mom.

  Adare wasn’t there.

  Which isn’t true. At all.

  I wasn’t there.

  I’ve got one hand trapped in my pocket and the other so empty, without Adare, it starts to hurt even more.

  Adare has kept all my secrets and I don’t even know hers. Where would she go without us? Maybe she’s at the park. I’d tell Mom everything if it meant Adare was there.

  I pick up my walk, thinking Adare will be at the base of the pin oak, spread out like she’s making snow angels in Brooklyn dirt. I find myself running, holding my hand out, so the wind rushes at its red tree burn.

  Adare will be there because she has to be.

  But when I get there, she isn’t.

  She’s not at the base of the tree and she’s not at the bench and she’s not at the little stone tables and when I look up into the canopy of trees she’s not there, nothing is, just branches and the gaps in between.

  Mom is there. She sits on the bench, one leg curled up in her lap, cradling it like a baby.

  I stand where I am until she sees me, until she makes her way to me, looking first at my ripped jeans and then
at my mangled hand. I say what I wish I didn’t have to say. “Adare is gone.”

  “So you were late. You were climbing.” Mom tries to get the facts, her hands on her hips, ponytail swinging as she paces. “She wasn’t in the office. She wasn’t in the schoolyard.”

  I shake my head, my heart leaping hurdles.

  “This is a big city, Cora.”

  “I know.”

  “Adare is a little girl.”

  “I know.”

  “When I tell you to meet Adare, it is not a joke. This is not a joke.”

  My face is hot. My hand burns. I want her to take it. I want Adare to appear. I want this all to be over. But I can tell it’s just begun.

  “What’s gotten into you?” she asks. “You’re keeping secrets. You’re walking away. From Adare. From me. This isn’t like you.”

  I wonder what is like me. To follow orders. To be where I’m supposed to be.

  “I trusted you.”

  I’m sorry, I want to say, but the words are caught.

  “Do you know what can happen to someone like Adare, alone in this city?”

  I shake my head. I don’t want to know.

  “The worst. The worst,” she whispers.

  I can tell that this time she has no next for us. Everything inside me shakes.

  “We’ll need to tell the police. How far could she have gone in just one hour?”

  I shake my head. I don’t know. I don’t seem to know anything. “Maybe she’s at Ennis House. Or Willa’s. Or Miss Li’s.”

  “Miss Li’s?”

  “The cat,” I say.

  “What cat?”

  “Adare’s charcoal cat.” But my words get messed up. “Sabina found him.”

  “Sabina?”

  “My friend.”

  Mom stops pacing. She takes in a breath and her eyes, big and brown, turn glassy as they fill up with tears. I have never seen Mom cry. Not ever. Not even when Daddy died. Not that I saw.

  “I’ll find her,” I say.

  She takes my arm. She holds it soft in hers. “You’ll stay right here with me.”

  The police station is dim and gray like school—the waxy floors and the fluorescent lights with their harsh glow. We sit on plastic chairs.

  Officer Torres has pin-straight hair. It’s a thick, willowy blond. When she talks, her teeth glow white, and she rolls each r like a guitar strum. She speaks softly to us, asks one question right after another about Adare. Address, date of birth, hair, eye color, height, weight, complexion, eyeglasses, braces, body piercings, tattoos. She asks, Where was she last seen? School. What was she wearing? Polka-dot leggings. A purple wool coat. Any belongings? A backpack as blue as the sky.

  Officer Torres has a phone that whispers static like the security guard’s walkie-talkie. She talks into it. She mentions something about dispatching.

  She asks for photos and phone numbers and Mom shakes her head. She asks for friends and parents of friends and all we can think of is Willa. She asks about custody issues. My husband is dead. She asks about grandparents. None. She asks if her bedroom has been secured, if she could be hiding in closets or crawl spaces, in piles of laundry, under beds or behind large appliances.

  “We haven’t…It’s not—” Mom hesitates.

  I say it simple. “We don’t have things like that.”

  She asks what else we have to know about Adare. She says, “Tell me anything. Everything.”

  I look to Mom, who runs the back of her hand across her eyes. She almost smiles. “Adare is sweet. She lost oxygen to her brain when she was a baby. So she doesn’t say much. She smiles a lot. She loves cats. She has this habit of holding her breath. She doesn’t like to wear shoes. She doesn’t always answer when you ask a question.”

  “She’s always looking up,” I say. Like me, I think. But she stays put. Until now.

  Officer Torres looks me over. I see her eyes wander to my torn jeans. She watches me stick my hand in my pocket. “There are no custody issues?” she asks again.

  “I told you, my husband is dead.”

  She nods. “And there’s no one who’s shown unusual attention or interest in your child?”

  Mom shakes her head as I say, “Willa,” real fast. Willa wanted us once.

  Mom turns to me, stern. “No.” Then she tells Officer Torres, “She doesn’t understand what you’re asking. Willa is a friend. My friend. And Adare wasn’t taken. She wandered off.”

  “She does this often, then? Wanders?”

  Mom’s voice is a sudden mouse-quiet. “No.”

  “She ran off once,” I say, and Mom looks at me, confused. “To follow a cat.”

  “Where?” Officer Torres asks, and I watch Mom look carefully at me for the answer.

  “To Miss Li’s,” I say. And I think of the canal and the tree, the screech owl in the hollowed-out trunk.

  “A bodega. In Gowanus,” Mom clarifies.

  “And you haven’t checked your home?”

  “We only just moved in.”

  “Last night,” I say. “But she has a good memory. For places.”

  “Okay. We’ll send someone there. And there’s no place else you think she could be, except school, the park, Willa’s, or this…Miss Li’s?”

  I think of the tree. I had told her it was our secret. Would she go there without me?

  “Maybe Ennis House,” Mom says. “A shelter. We lived there for a while.”

  “And Ennis House.” She scribbles in her notebook.

  My heart bangs fast, thinking of Old Lou on those steps.

  Officer Torres nods.

  “She’s not like other children,” Mom explains. “She doesn’t have attachment to places or things. She likes animals. People.”

  I say it quiet: “The cat. The tree.”

  “Yes, in the park,” Mom says. “Cora has a favorite climbing tree. That’s where she and Adare meet me.”

  I shake my head. “Not that tree. A different one. I—” I hesitate, thinking of our secret. Daddy’s and mine and Adare’s. Together. “We have a tree.”

  I sit in the back of Officer Torres’s car, looking out the window, smelling the musty leather of the seats. My hand’s bandaged and stained orange from the iodine and it throbs beneath the sticky white tape.

  I watch Officer Torres and Mom through the glass door of Miss Li’s. I see how Miss Li turns the volume of her little television down and the way they all stand and nod and shake their heads.

  I think of Old Lou creeping on the stairs at Ennis House, his elbows resting on his knees, his wild laugh when I handed him the acorn. What if Adare is there? With him? Adare will hold her breath at the bottom step and maybe she won’t set it free.

  I breathe more and more air out into the world, hoping it finds a way to her.

  Officer Torres climbs into the driver’s seat. Mom takes the other side. The doors slam and I don’t even have to ask if Miss Li saw her, from the way they’re quiet, their lips flat and straight.

  Officer Torres suggests we check the canal and I know I have to tell them where I was when I was supposed to be getting Adare, so I take a breath and tell the truth. “I was just there. Climbing. I didn’t see her.”

  Mom turns, looks at me through the faded glass that separates the back seat from the front. “Shouldn’t you have been in school?”

  I say nothing, just lift my shoulders into a shrug.

  “Well, there’s been a lot of time between now and then. Where exactly is it?” Office Torres asks.

  I tell her to take the Ninth Street Bridge. We drive slow, looking at every person who passes us. None of them is Adare.

  We drive over the bridge and leave the car on the street.

  Leading them along the narrow path, I feel like this is our last chance at finding her. My heart beat
s out a prayer.

  We pass the foundry. Mom and Officer Torres walk the high grass, their shoes sticking in the dirt and old leaves.

  “This is where you’ve been going?” Mom asks, her hand at her nose, trying not to breathe the stink of the canal.

  “Uh-huh.” Then I point at the tree.

  Their chins lift like they’re looking up at a building scraping the sky.

  When we reach the dock, it’s empty. No charcoal cat. No Adare. The fallen tree sits alone and I don’t see the screech owl inside.

  Mom folds her arms and shakes her head and I watch her wipe her eyes, real quick, like she doesn’t want anyone to see. Her ponytail has fallen to the side and it leaks wisps of hair she doesn’t try to fix.

  I look up at the red foundry, thinking how it wasn’t long ago I was trying to get down. My head skips visions like a jump-cut video. If I had got down the tree sooner. If I had gone to school. If my backpack had stayed zipped. Maybe everything would be different.

  Officer Torres walks the grass, kicking things with her feet, and my eyes have never worked harder to see someone than the way they’re working now.

  I look at everything. I walk the narrow path, looking at every rock, and then I see, in some overgrown grass, a heap of pink. My mind stops skipping. My heart stops pounding at my ears. I take in all the breath I can.

  Adare’s high-tops.

  “She’s here!” I call out.

  Even if I can’t see her, she has to be. I hear Officer Torres and the static beeps of her phone. Mom rushes to me. I slip to my knees and take the shoes into my hands before Officer Torres tells me, in the rolling hill of her voice, not to touch a thing.

  Mom and I use the fallen tree as a bench. Mom sits with forms she’s supposed to fill out, but her pen hovers over the pages like a ghost. We sit and wait and I feel the sky edging toward dark. I feel the way the air takes on the cold. Mom doesn’t let go of my bandaged hand. For the first time in years, I haven’t drawn anything on my palm except the memory of my fall. We hold on to nothing. But we don’t let go.