When she had emptied the book box, she stood up and dusted off her hands, smiling hesitantly. “Looks nice,” she said, nodding at the architect’s table now in the bay window, and immediately she regretted it, as it seemed to point out the fact that no one had asked her opinion. “I thought I’d make a little snack for the boys,” she said quickly to Adam.
He glanced at his watch. “A bit early. I usually give them something at four.”
“Oh. Well. Maybe Milagros needs a hand.” She ducked out of the room and went into the kitchen.
“Adam?” Milagros asked, her voice muffled because her head was deep in the cupboard under the sink. “If I see one cockroach, I quit! I tell you that right now!”
“It’s only me.” Sophie laughed self-consciously, noting that Milagros called Adam by his first name now. And joked with him. “I thought I’d make a snack for the boys, for later. Four o’clock, right?”
“Oh, Adam did that already.” Milagros pulled her head free and stood up. “This morning. I’m glad, because it’s too filthy here to prepare food. Disgusting. The people who lived here? Pigs.”
Sophie snapped open the lunch box and surveyed its contents: two sandwiches neatly wrapped in tinfoil, two apples, two bunches of grapes, some cashew nuts, and a can of sardines in tomato sauce—an abundant and healthy snack, prepared with foresight and care. “I’m not sure how well the sardines will go down,” she said with a chuckle.
“They love them! They play they are seals, drop the fish in the mouth by the tail. Then bark, clap the flippers…” Milagros shrugged. “Well, they are only young.”
“Wonderful! Omega-3 oil!” Sophie said brightly, snapping the lunch box closed, and she felt relief when Mila gave her a box of little-used kitchen items to carry up to the attic.
“The boys will show you the way. Boys!”
They led Sophie out of the apartment and up the stairs to an attic storage room reserved for their use, a small room with quite a large skylight set into the steep roof and, piled against one wall, boxes of Christmas decorations, a stepladder, skis, camping equipment, and other rarely needed things. “See, there’s a tippy window in the roof!” Hugo said with glee, pointing. Obligingly, Sophie craned her neck to study the skylight, an old-fashioned one divided into two panes and hinged in the middle, open a crack for ventilation. “This is our playhouse! Do you want to see our room? Come on!” She laughed and followed them back downstairs.
The real-estate man had described the apartment to her on the telephone, but she got her first view of it all looking left and right as the boys dragged her down the hall to their room at the back. She craned her neck to look into the master bedroom as they passed it. Among stacks of boxes stood all their old bedroom furniture, looking reproachful, mocking, or inviting—she didn’t have time to decide which before the eager boys yanked her on down the hall to their room.
“I picked the paint,” Matthew said proudly. It was apple green with white trim, fresh and luminous, and in this room, unlike the others, everything had been unpacked and tidied: toys on shelves, beds made up, clothes put away—even the curtains and pictures were hung. There was something else as well: a row of white pegs running the length of one wall, placed conveniently low, for hanging up clothes. Simple but brilliant. And it was thoughtful of Adam to do their room first.
“This bed’s mine. That one’s Hugo’s.”
“This one’s mine! That one’s Matthew’s!”
Moving day had made them almost ill with excitement, and they were entering the euphoric stage that precedes total collapse. Each began to jump on his own bed, shouting, “This one’s mine!”
“It’s a beautiful room,” Sophie said. “Shall I put your…?” But they weren’t listening, too busy seeing who could jump higher. “Careful, now,” she said, unheeded.
She wandered back up the hall. Adam and James were setting up the television and the video and the stereo, crawling around and peering into instruction manuals, black cables stretched everywhere, Adam complaining, “These damned ‘universal’ symbols—universally incomprehensible!” He took an angry swig of tea, achieving bevel-meter as he did so, had he but known it. Sophie watched him bat the coaster off his mug irritably, feeling like an au pair girl—with the family, but not of it. Looking around the room for a task, she saw another box of books to put away. “More architecture books!” she called to Adam, making sure she sounded cheerful. “Where do you want these?” But he was engrossed in the problem of cables, studying the back of the DVD player, and he didn’t hear her question.
James did. “The shelf in the corner,” he said shortly, his mind on the task at hand, but when he realized how abruptly he had spoken, he blushed. “I mean, I guess that’s as good a place as any. Near the desk and all.”
She fell to the job gratefully, like a shy guest happy to have a little mission at a party, spearing the olives with toothpicks for the hostess instead of just standing there trying to look as if she didn’t mind not speaking to anyone. One after another, she pulled Adam’s architecture books out of the box, the same books he’d packed when he was planning to leave her and unpacked when she’d left him instead, then repacked to come here. And now it was her turn to unpack them. This, she thought, was how books experienced the triumphs and the heartbreaks of their owners’ lives: as trips in and out of boxes.
“There, that’s done.” She stood and faced the two men. “Well! I guess I’ll be going, then.”
“I should go, too,” James said suddenly. “In fact, hey!” He checked his watch and started violently, poor actor that he was. “Oh, my gosh, I had no idea. I’ve got to run. Call me tomorrow if you need me.” And with a wave, he was gone.
The abruptness of his departure, and his too-obvious intention of leaving them alone together and deferring to Sophie the honor of being the last to go, left them standing awkwardly, not looking at each other, listening to his footsteps recede down the stairs. Then came the distant slam of the front door. Then nothing.
Adam cleared his throat. “Thanks for your help.”
“I didn’t do much.”
“Yes you did. You were a great help. Thanks.”
Silence.
“Boys, your mother’s going! Come and say good-bye!”
It was a relief when they ran in.
“Can we come, too, Mommy? We want to come, too! We can walk to your house because it’s so near!”
“We can go all alone even. I want to come with you and count how many steps it is!”
“Yeah!”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “And you know what? I have something to show you at home—a surprise.”
“Can we see it now? Can we?”
“Tomorrow. In fact, you’re spending the weekend with me, so you’ll have a long time to play with it.”
“Is it a toy?”
“I’m not saying.”
“We want to see it now!”
“All right, now, boys, all right,” Adam cut in. “That’s enough. Mummy has to go home now.” He made an apologetic face, and it struck her that it used to be she who intervened in order to protect him from the children’s overexuberance. “Come on, now, bath time.”
“No!”
“I’ll be right in. You get your clothes off. Go on, now.” They ran off, and he shrugged. “They’re just very excited,” he explained, rotating his shoulder.
“I realize that,” she said coolly.
“I think we’ve done the right thing, Sophie. Thanks. For finding this place, I mean. They’re so happy we’re neighbors, it’s all they talk about. They want keys to both apartments. Of course they’re too young for that, and there’s still a street to cross.…” He lifted his arm and winced. “Maybe when our businesses take off, we’ll be rich enough to pay for our own crossing guard between us.”
Milagros popped her head in. “Have you seen the boys?”
“I just sent them in to have a bath.”
“Well, they’re not there. Now, where…?” She disappeared ag
ain.
Sophie gestured to Adam’s shoulder. “Have you hurt yourself?”
“No, it’s nothing. Well, actually, yes. I did it playing squash, and it’s still a little sore. And I guess moving that thing didn’t help.” He nodded resentfully at the chesterfield.
She looked at it, too, for want of anything to say.
“I may have pulled something. I don’t suppose… You couldn’t take a look at it, could you? Or is that… not the kind of thing you do?”
“It’s exactly the kind of thing I do.” She considered for a moment. “All right. How about later, when the boys have gone to bed?”
“All right. Yes. Milagros is staying late tonight to finish the kitchen. That would be fine. But… you won’t be… busy?”
“No.”
He laughed suddenly. “I’ve never actually seen your apartment. Do you realize that?”
He had walked her to the door and opened it, and they stood looking out into the hall in an embarrassed way. “Come around eight, then,” she said. “And wear something loose, made of cot—”
There was a scream overhead. Not a movie scream. The electrifying true scream of a woman in terror. Tingling with shock, Sophie and Adam locked eyes. Milagros. Now Milagros was running down the attic stairs, shouting, “Up on the roof! Up on the roof!” Shouting “up” yet running down—it made no sense. Sophie stood frozen, unable to move, unable to think past that ghastly scream. Adam dashed into the hall and up the stairs, two at a time; Milagros rushed down past him, still shouting.
Sophie broke the grip of fear and raced after him, up the stairs to the attic, through the door, panting. The stepladder lying across the floor, fallen over; Hugo wailing, pointing up. The skylight, and Matthew’s pale face pressed to the lower pane—from the outside. Matthew was trapped out on the roof, hanging by the fabric of his shirt caught on the latch of the closed skylight, his face white against the glass, mouth open, eyes wide in terror. Hugo was whimpering, “The bird was hurt! He was trying to get it!” Sophie saw it in her mind in a series of freeze-frames: Matthew climbing the ladder, leaning out the top opening of the tippy window to reach a bird resting on the pane, leaning too far, pushing the ladder over with his foot, his weight swinging the window up to close and bringing him with it, his shirt catching as he slid out, him pivoting, staring facedown back through the skylight, his feet pointing to the edge of the roof and the ground three stories below, his shirt stretching.
Adam slammed the ladder back onto its feet, raced up it.
“No!” Sophie screamed. “If you open it, he’ll fall!”
“I have to break it! Cover your eyes!” And through the glass to his son, “Matthew, close your eyes!” With sharp raps of his elbow, Adam cracked the top pane until he made a jagged hole. Some glass fell in, other pieces he wrenched out with his hands, working feverishly to clear a hole big enough to lean out of. Glass showered to the floor with a tinkling crash and, among the shards, drops of blood. He worked fast, but—
What happened next would revisit Sophie in dreams. Matthew shrieked as his shirt ripped free of the latch and his head disappeared from sight. “No!” she screamed. Adam abandoned his task, snapped the catch open, batted the window up, and threw his upper body out the lower opening. Sophie listened with her whole being for the sound along the roof tiles that would mean Adam had not caught their son—the scraping sound of the boy sliding off the roof before he fell over the edge into the void. Nothing else matters, she thought, with penetrating clarity. Nothing in life matters but life itself.
And there it was, the scrabbling sound. Their son was slipping, slithering down the tiles off the roof. “Good God!” Adam shouted, leaning out farther. Matthew screamed, Sophie screamed, and through the open window came Milagros’s voice from down in the garden: “I’ll catch you, mi amor! I’ll catch you!”
Then the scrambling noise on the tiles stopped abruptly—and Sophie’s heart with it—to be replaced by something yet more hideous: the sound of death, silence. Matthew over the edge… Matthew plunging through the air…
“He’s stopped!” Adam shouted. “He’s got a foot on the gutter!” Spread-eagle on the roof, his fingers splayed and white-tipped in his effort to grip the flat tiles and brake his slide, Matthew lay looking back up with panicked eyes at his father, just out of reach. Adam eased his legs up and out and lay on his stomach along the roof, holding on by the tops of his feet flexed against the frame of the skylight, reaching. Reaching…
“Adam, no!” Sophie saw now that they were both going to fall.
“I’ve got him!” Adam cried. “I’ve got his arms! I’ve got you, son! You’re all right!” A moment’s silence, and then with a metallic groan the guttering broke away, and Matthew slipped farther, his legs now over the edge, his waist at the level of the missing guttering. “Sophie!” Adam’s voice sounded strained and far away. “Go down and try to bring him in the window directly below!”
“What? What?” Too panicked at first to understand.
“Pull him in through the window downstairs!”
Sophie turned and ran down the stairs, Hugo crashing after her, down, down, and into the room below—a run she would never remember. It was a sash window. Stuck! With frantic fingers she fumbled with the lock, couldn’t open it, whimpered with fear, did open it, threw the window up, and leaned out. Above her she could see Matthew’s shoes. “I can’t reach him!” she called up to Adam. “Lower him some more!”
“I’m stretched full out! Can you get higher?”
“I’ll try!” Sophie climbed onto the sill and stood up outside the window, clinging with her left hand to the frame inside, under the fixed top half of the pane. She swayed out over the void. “Help me!” she shouted back inside to Hugo. “Hold me!” He ran and wrapped both arms around his mother’s leg, leaning back to throw all his slight weight into the hopeless task of providing ballast for her. He lifted his feet off the floor to make himself heavier.
“I called the firemen!” Milagros yelled from below, her frightened face upturned and framed by her extended palms. “Hold on, Matthew! Hold on! Don’t worry! If you fall, I’ll catch you!”
Sophie tightened her grip on the frame inside and reached up. She could just touch the boy’s knees. “He’s still too high! Adam, he’s still too high!”
“All right, I’m going to lower him! Sophie, are you ready? We only have one shot at this! Are you ready?”
“Yes!”
“Here he comes!” Little by little, by loosening his grip, then tightening it again, Adam allowed the boy’s arms to slip through his grasp until he was holding him by the hands. “That’s all I can do! Do you have him? Sophie, do you have him?”
Sophie braced herself to receive Matthew’s weight. “Let go!” she called up.
“No!” Matthew screamed.
As the child’s and father’s fingers separated, Sophie gained a further couple of inches, just enough to clamp the boy’s legs above the knee to her chest with her right arm. Matthew grabbed her head with a scream as he came down, yanking her hair, and Sophie swayed out over the drop, unable to see, her fingers slippery with sweat on the window frame inside. She envisioned herself falling, ripped from the window, Matthew in her arms, pulling Hugo out after her: a vision that would recur in nightmares. But she groaned and held on, hauled herself back in against the building, the fingers of her left hand cramping. Matthew slid down her body until he could wrap his legs around her waist and his arms around her neck. Slowly, she bent her legs, clutching Matthew tight to her chest, then swiveled until she could sit straddling the window frame, her whimpering son on her lap. She shook Hugo off her leg and pushed Matthew into the room. He fell on the floor, crying. Safe.
“Move! Get out of the way!” Sophie ordered her sons. She clambered stiffly in the window and ran back upstairs on uncontrollable rubber legs. She slipped on the stairs, smacking her head against the wall, got up, ran on, burst into the attic, panicked eyes upturned to the skylight, afraid she would find—noth
ing. Afraid Adam had already fallen.
But no, she saw shoes. He was there, still holding on with his feet, only the soles of his shoes in sight. She skidded over broken glass to the ladder, dashed up it so fast it rocked on two legs, poked her head and shoulders out the opening, and locked her arms around his calves with all her strength. “It’s okay, Adam, I’ve got you!” she gasped. “I’ve got you. I’ve got you.” Eventually she was aware of the firemen’s siren, then big boots tramping up the stairs and deep voices next to her, then big men pulling her husband back inside, then someone putting a blanket around her shoulders.
* * *
Matthew recovered from the shock fairly quickly, his parents less so. Several days later, still feeling shaken and achy, Sophie got a call from Adam asking again for a shiatsu. His shoulder was worse from holding Matthew on the roof, and, he added sheepishly, the tops of his feet were sore from clinging to the frame of the skylight. “Let no drama be without its element of low slapstick,” he said ruefully.
“I’ll do what I can one-handed,” Sophie said. “My left went into spasm, and I still can’t open it all the way.” She gently flexed her heroic left hand, where shock and fear still resided. In self-defense her mind had rapidly shrouded its memories in translucent layers, but her body lacked the protective mechanism of forgetfulness and it would retain the horrific imprint forever. “Is eight o’clock tonight all right? What about the boys?”
“It’s fine. James is here. He’ll stay with them. Eight o’clock, then.”
The knock on her door came at ten past eight, which is eight o’clock straight up for parents. “A hundred and four steps, I make it,” Adam said when she let him in. “Between our houses, I mean.” He saw that she was dressed all in white—drawstring trousers, T-shirt, and socks, no shoes—looking modest and businesslike.
“It takes me a hundred and twenty-seven,” she said. “Not counting the stairs. Come in. This way.” He stepped in gingerly and glanced discreetly around. She led the way across the kitchen, saying, “They have shorter legs, so I calculate it’ll take them, oh, two hundred and three. When they can count that far. Look, this was their surprise.” She snapped on the light of her former treatment room to reveal the boys’ new bedroom. Like their room at Adam’s house, this one was neatly arranged and freshly painted, but it was much smaller, with bunk beds against one wall. “They needed a room of their own over here, so I packed up my work space and made this for them. At first I was so sure this room was too small for them that it was blocking my thinking. But it’s not, not if they spread up instead of out.” She pointed to the wall opposite the bunk beds, filled entirely from floor to ceiling with built-in cabinets, divided horizontally into two sets of closets and drawers by a shelflike platform running lengthwise.
Leaving Sophie Dean Page 29