Skylight Confessions

by Alice Hoffman

  “Good choice,” he said. “It’s peaceful.”

  His voice was childish and reedy and Diana hated herself for not liking him all these years.

  “Climb the tree,” she said. “But not too high.”

  Sam leapt from the grass, whooping with joy.

  “That might be dangerous,” Mr. Hansen advised. Sam was throwing himself onto the lowest branch, not a particularly strong branch from the looks of it. Not a particularly agile child, either.

  “I’m buying burial plots,” Diana said. “His mother’s dying. Let him enjoy himself.”

  “I suppose,” Mr. Hansen said.

  “In your line of work, you must value life enormously,” Diana said.

  “No more than anyone else,” Mr. Hansen said.

  They stopped at the ice-cream shop on the way home. Diana had a vanilla cone. Sam had a Jumbalina — it was even bigger than the sundae his mother sometimes allowed him. Six kinds of ice cream, butterscotch, hot fudge, and strawberry sauce. All that ice cream made Sam sick; he threw up in the washroom, then was ready to go. He used to think his grandmother was a witch. She was old and she didn’t seem to like him and she had spindly fingers with big knuckles. Whenever she spent the night in the guest room, he would check under her bed after she’d left, looking for bones and poison. Now he was so tired he let her hold his hand on the way to the car, even though he didn’t like to be touched by people who weren’t his mother. He supposed a witch’s touch was all right, it probably washed right off in the bathtub. Or maybe she was a good witch who could reverse time and make his mother well again.

  “Can you fix my mother?” he asked on the way home.

  “Unfortunately, I can’t,” Diana said.

  She was honest. Sam had to give her that. When they pulled into the drive, that man’s truck was there. There was a collie sitting in the passenger seat, sticking his head out the window and woofing.

  “Who owns that dog?” Sam asked. He knew a big man sat by his mother’s bedside every day but he didn’t know that man’s name or what he was doing there. He looked a lot like the man who used to wash the windows.

  “A friend of the family,” Diana said.

  Sam didn’t understand; he was a part of the family and he wasn’t friends with the man with the truck. They went inside. Jasmine was in the kitchen with Blanca, feeding the baby some cereal. When she saw Sam, Blanca let out a chortle.

  “Baby baby stick your head in gravy,” Sam said cheerfully.

  Blanca laughed so hard cereal came out her nose.

  “Is that a nice thing to say?” Jasmine asked.

  “She looks like a volcano,” Sam noted.

  “You look like a dirty boy, honey. Go upstairs and wash up for dinner.”

  Jasmine’s voice was usually strong and pretty; now it sounded shaky. Sam knew about these things, the underside of the world, the part you couldn’t see. Something was more wrong than usual. Out on the patio, Sam’s father was having a drink and looking at the pool. He looked smaller than usual. He didn’t turn around.

  “What are we having for dinner?” Sam asked. It was a test. He watched Jasmine carefully.

  “We’re having whatever you’d like,” Jasmine said, when ordinarily she just said chili or hamburgers or macaroni. She was too busy to give you many choices.

  Sam went through the hall and up the stairs. His mother’s door was open. He had started to feel his mother wasn’t there anymore. When he talked to her, sometimes she didn’t hear him. Sometimes she spoke to somebody who wasn’t in the room. She was like those people she’d told him about, flying above the rooftops. She weighed so little that now when Sam got into bed beside her he felt bigger, stronger. She was made up of bones, but of something more. Maybe it wasn’t all a made-up story when people talked about a spirit. Maybe something else was there.

  Sam’s mother liked to look right into his eyes, and Sam let her do it even though her breath wasn’t so good anymore and her eyes were milky. Every time she breathed out there was a little less of her. Every time she spoke there was less as well.

  “Tell me a secret,” she’d said to him last night. She was like a bird, hollow bones, little beak, shivery bald head.

  The sky had been dark and the lawn looked black. He had thought about the ferryboat ride on the day he found William the squirrel and the angels they’d made in the snow. He’d thought about her long red hair and the fact that even when he was horrible and out of sorts she loved him anyway.

  “Just one?” Sam had said.

  He’d felt her knees against him, knobby, like pieces of stone.

  “One.”

  Her eyes were big. You could fall into them. Mother, Mother, are you there?

  “I’m six years old,” Sam said.

  Arlyn had laughed a bit. Her laughter sounded like her. It was her. “I know that.”

  “But I’m going to stay that way,” Sam confided.

  “No, you won’t,” she told him. “You’ll be a big man. You’ll be so tall your head will hit the sky.”

  But that conversation had taken place last night, and last night was over. Now Sam stood in the hallway outside his mother’s room and listened to the man who was supposed to be a friend of the family crying. He had no idea grown-ups could sound like that. Sam knew what had happened; he stayed in the hall a moment longer in order to have one more instant of still having her just as she’d always been, safe inside his mind. Then he walked into her bedroom. There was still the smell of her, the shadow of her, the bare skull. The man had his head in his hands.

  “I’m sorry,” the man said, as though he’d been caught doing something bad. He had her pearls in his hands. They were big hands and the pearls looked like small black seeds. “She said to give them to you.”

  Sam looked at the person in the bed; it wasn’t his mother. It was just a shell, the way his squirrel had been on that other bad day. Sam took the pearls and brought them to his room. In the back of the closet was the box with everything that mattered. The photos, the pictures, the cards, the braid of her hair, his squirrel’s pelt and bones. He wrapped the pearls in a tissue, then put them in the box. He did it carefully. Sam was not like other boys, who would not have taken such good care of a necklace. He was different. He planned on keeping his word. The secret he’d told his mother was true: he was never going to grow up. He refused to go past this day when his mother left him. No one could force him because he’d already decided. He was never going to say good-bye.

  PART TWO

  A House Made of Stars

  IT WAS A WEDDING SHOWER, ALL IN GOOD FUN, held at a psychic tearoom on Twenty-third Street. Meredith Weiss knew she should have claimed to have a migraine or a previous appointment, but Ellen Dooley was her old college roommate, and privy to the tricks Meredith often used to avoid social contact. Clearly, there was no gracious way out. Meredith dragged herself downtown from the Upper West Side, where she was house-sitting a huge apartment for a family that was traveling in Italy. Meredith had gotten a temporary job at the gift shop in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Everyone who worked there was overqualified and undermotivated. Meredith herself had a degree in art history from Brown, not that she cared about art anymore. In high school she had been a champion swimmer; now she could barely bring herself to get out of bed in the morning. She couldn’t sleep, but she couldn’t quite wake up, either. She was twenty-eight, six years out of college and a million miles away from knowing what she might possibly do with her life.

  Her ex-roommate Ellen was the only one she knew at the party, so it was possible for Meredith to drift into the background as the psychic told good fortunes all around, with an especially brilliant future foreseen for the bride-to-be, including four children and a fabulous sex life. The psychic was an Irish woman with a lovely lilting voice; her cheerful predictions all but put Meredith to sleep. It was hot outside; heat waves rose from the asphalt into the still, gray air. Meredith collapsed into a chair that overlooked the street. At least the tearoom was
air-conditioned. The others were all talking about where they’d go to dinner later in the evening. No one included Meredith. It was clear she didn’t belong, despite the silk nightgown she’d given Ellen, which everyone declared was the best present of all. She’d picked lingerie she herself would never have worn, a flimsy, silly thing. Naturally the others all loved what she hated. It was always the same for Meredith: she was the outsider who never seemed to speak the commonly shared language.

  Meredith had brown hair and dark, ebony eyes; she was long and coltish, with a swimmer’s body, but out of the water she was awkward. Poor gasping fish. Although she had spent most of her childhood and adolescence in one pool or another in suburban Maryland, she had come to dread water. Sometimes she called in sick to work when there was a heavy rain, then went back to bed so she could hide under the covers. People who met her sometimes had the impression she was mute. Because she was a loner, she was a listener as well. She noticed things, strange odds and ends, facts no one else cared about: how many stairs led up to the museum, how many cracks there were in the ceiling of the borrowed bedroom where she was staying, how many museum employees she had caught smoking in the restroom. Useless bits and pieces. Now, for instance, while the other women had cake, some gooey blue and white concoction, Meredith looked out the window to see a tall man leaving his black sedan in the parking lot across the street.

  The man on the far side of Twenty-third Street left his keys with the attendant and ran his hand through his hair. He was wearing a gray jacket and he loped through traffic, followed by a red-haired woman. Meredith assumed they were husband and wife from the way the man made his way without bothering to see to the woman’s safety. A typical married pair. Meredith’s parents had been the same before they divorced; bickering whenever they spent more than a few hours together, living separate lives long before the papers were signed.

  Meredith hoped that this couple, now headed toward the psychic’s door, were the next clients. Then the party would at last come to a close and she could beg off dinner and grab a cab back to her borrowed apartment. At last, Ellen was gathering her gifts together. The dreadful nightgown, the jokey sex manuals, the satin sheets. The psychic approached the corner of the room where Meredith was in hiding. Exactly what Meredith dreaded most. Someone interested in her future.

  “How about your fortune?” The psychic’s name was Rita Morrisey and she had a knack for telling people what they wanted to hear. From a distance she had figured the best bets for this shy woman would be a boyfriend and a trip over water to a new horizon. Now the psychic wasn’t so sure.

  “No thanks,” Meredith demurred.

  The bell over the outer door jingled and the tall man came inside. He slammed the door, once again not bothering to wait for his wife. He was near forty, a worried, good-looking man. He situated himself in the waiting room and gazed around uncomfortably.

  “Poor fella,” Rita said.

  “Where’s his wife?”

  Rita Morrisey glared at Meredith. The psychic had a foxy face, quick and distrustful. “What wife?”

  “The red-haired woman who was following him in the street.”

  “Don’t screw around with me,” Rita said. “He’s a regular customer. He’s being haunted by his first wife.”

  Meredith peered into the waiting room. The tall man was alone; he’d grabbed a National Geographic and was leafing through it. “He doesn’t seem like someone who’d come here.”

  “Well, you never know, do you? For your information, he’s got all sorts of things going on at his house in Connecticut. Soot, voices, dishes. It’s classic. Those are the signs.”

  Meredith was confused. “Signs?”

  “Of a specter. Dishes breaking, voices in the middle of the night, soot on everyone’s clothes, shoes lined up in the hallway, cabinets open. I figure it’s the wife. Pissed-off creatures usually are at the root of such things. The betrayed, the lost, the confused. They linger.”

  The rest of the party was ready to go. They traipsed into the waiting room, obscuring Meredith’s view of the couch. Now Meredith was the one who was lagging behind. “Come on!” Ellen called. “We’re starving.”

  While Meredith hesitated the others went out the door; she could hear their laughter as they trooped down the flight of stairs that led to the street.

  “Walk by and forget him,” Rita Morrisey told Meredith. “A tormented soul is nothing to mess with.”

  “I don’t believe in specters,” Meredith said primly.

  “So much the better for you.”

  “I don’t believe in anything,” Meredith admitted.

  But the psychic was no longer listening. She peered into the waiting room. “Mr. Moody. Please come right in.”

  The tall man bumped against Meredith in the doorway as he came forward for his reading and she headed into the waiting room.

  “Sorry,” Meredith said.

  He paid no attention. Didn’t even nod.

  Meredith went on into the waiting room. The red-haired woman was there now, on the couch. She was young, in her midtwenties, wearing a white dress and soft leather shoes; her hair reached her waist and she had so many freckles they all ran together over her forehead and cheeks.

  “Hello,” Meredith said.

  The woman looked past Meredith.

  “Ready, you slowpoke?” Ellen had raced back in. She grabbed Meredith’s arm and led her out. They took the flight of stairs two at a time; out into the sweltering heat. “We’ve decided to walk to Union Square and have dinner. There’s a fabulous place Jessie says she can get us into. She knows the chef’s brother. Or cousin.”

  Meredith blinked in the white light of summer. Lies did not come easily to her.

  “I wish I could,” she said. Right.

  “But you can’t. You never can.”

  “I’m antisocial. You know that about me.”

  Ellen kissed Meredith on both cheeks. “I love the night-gown.”

  As soon as Ellen and her friends had gone off, Meredith crossed the street and went into a market. It was so hot and humid that her skin was already slick with sweat. This New York City heat made summer anywhere else seem like kid stuff. Still, for Meredith it was a relief to be somewhere made of concrete; no pools, no grass, just the melting asphalt and the blur of traffic. Meredith bought a guava juice, making certain to stay in front of the rotating fan beside the register as she paid, then uncapped the bottle. She glanced at the street; through the storefront she could see into the tearoom window. The red-haired woman was standing there. She opened the window. Soot fell down from the ledge.

  Meredith put her juice on the counter.

  The red-haired woman’s dress moved in the breeze like a cloud.

  “Don’t do it,” Meredith said.

  “Hey, lady, don’t tell me what to do,” the fellow behind the cash register said.

  Across the street the woman was now standing on the window ledge. She put her arms straight out and the white dress billowed around her.

  Meredith ran for the market door and pushed it open. Smack, that heat again. Bricks and stones. Soot and ashes. Meredith looked up in a panic; all she could hear was the crashing noise of Twenty-third Street, the buses, the trucks, the sirens. It took an instant to focus.

  There was no one on the ledge.

  It was hot, too hot to think straight; summer was always bad for Meredith. Swimming-pool season. She would have liked to crawl under the bed until fall, until the air was crisp, the leaves yellowing. A far better time of the year.

  She headed toward the subway stop on Eighth Avenue, but then she noticed the parking lot where she’d first seen the tall man. In the first row there was a black Mercedes with Connecticut plates. Meredith went over to the parking attendant’s kiosk. “I think I’m supposed to meet my husband here. Tall, wearing a gray suit.”

  “The Mercedes,” the attendant said. “He said he’d be at least an hour.”

  The attendant handed Meredith the key. The name and home addr
ess had been marked down in a scrawl she squinted to decipher. Moody. Madison, Ct.

  She quickly handed back the key. “My mistake. I think I was supposed to meet him somewhere else. This isn’t our car.”

  Meredith took off running, hailing a cab on Eighth Avenue. She threw herself inside, legs sticky against the vinyl seat. She usually didn’t splurge on taxis; she didn’t think she was worth it. Now she leaned forward and said, “Hurry up. Let’s go!”

  “Hey, relax,” the taxi driver told her. “You’ll get where you’re going.”

  But where exactly that might be and how she might get there, Meredith couldn’t say.

  YOU COULD HEAR WATER IN THE Moodys’ yard. it was the first thing anyone noticed when approaching the house, one pool running into another over the infinity edge. The first smell? Cut grass and chlorine. Summer. Country. Something you could sink into the way day sinks into dusk. First sight? The boxwood hedge, twelve feet tall, and then, like a mirage, the Glass Slipper. All that glass and steel. The trees reflected back to Meredith as though she were doubly lost in the woods.

  Atop the glass was the one flat place on the roof, a precipice that could be reached only from the attic. That was where Sam Moody was, arms akimbo. He could feel the breeze that carried the swallows. Sweat poured down his face and his back. He was sixteen years old and tall, just as his mother had predicted. He hit his head everywhere he went, but not here where there was only the sky.

  Sam had been to some pretty bad places in the past two years. Darkened doorways and basement apartments where he’d had to crouch. Underpasses, where the concrete was inches above his scalp. Dead-end streets, where he had to fold up on himself and walk small so no one noticed him and beat the crap out of him.

  Up on the roof he didn’t have to bend or bow; the world was endless, seamless. He took deep gulps of air.

  His stepmother was the first to spy him, when she came out to the front path for the Saturday newspaper. She shielded her eyes, squinting; she realized it was not an enormous stork, only him, Sam, the bane of her existence. Cynthia started yelling. He couldn’t quite make out the words, but frankly, he never listened to her. She was always ordering him around. Cynthia raced into the house and brought his father out. The big gun, the authority figure, the man in the moon. His poor, stupid father who threatened to call the police.