Skylight Confessions

  Amy had used her inheritance to buy a condo right down the street from her grandmother’s rent-controlled apartment, the one Sam had gotten them kicked out of when he fell asleep and started a fire one night. She paid all their bills, got Will a skateboard, bought herself a new wardrobe and went back to school. Since then Will’s mom had become a substitute teacher in a private school in Brooklyn. She taught biology and earth science. Will, on the other hand, was an artist, as his father had been.

  Death wasn’t all bad, Will saw that now. You lost things, you found things. His grandparents, for instance, continued to give even after their death; they’d provided for Will, even had a college savings account in his name. He had loved his grandparents and had spent summers with them out on Long Island; he’d had more time with his grandparents than most kids did because his mother was so young, seventeen when she had him, and his father, well, his father wasn’t reliable. Will knew this early on. That was probably why Will still was so careful with money. He was careful all the way around. He knew the way things could get away from you, right out of your hands.

  His parents sometimes lived together and sometimes didn’t and in the end his father sort of disappeared. But his dad always came back, at least for a while, and Will’s mom always let Sam crash with them, even when they’d pretty much broken up for good. She let Sam’s parrot stay as well, as long as there was newspaper spread out under the metal stand they brought out from the closet when such visits occurred. Will understood how kind his mother was; she hated that parrot, and he hated her right back. Get out, he would cry whenever Amy came near. You, he would croak accusingly.

  Whenever Will’s dad was there, he was vivid, like a splash of color. Sam painted the walls of the bathroom one day and let Will help until they were both human swirls of color, covered with oil-based paint that lasted for days and wouldn’t wash off. Sometimes when Will’s dad visited, his parents would end up fighting; his mother would cry and she’d say, Why can’t you just grow up?, and then Will would feel responsible. He’d feel bad for liking the time he spent with his father, who didn’t even make him wear shoes. Sometimes the concrete was hot and burned his feet. Sometimes there was ice and snow and he wished for a pair of boots. But Will never complained to his father. He was grateful for whatever he got. He grew up to be a steady, practical kid, dark-eyed with chestnut hair, tall and lanky and serious.

  “What about Dad’s family?” he’d asked his mother, and she’d answered, “The parrot is his family. He had a sister once, but I don’t know what happened to her. It’s mostly the parrot.” Then she added, “And us.”

  One night when Will and Amy were walking home from grocery shopping, a gray rainy night when the air smelled like sugar and ashes, Amy suddenly stopped and dropped her packages in the street. For a minute Will thought she was having a heart attack, but no. His mom was looking up. There was Will’s father on the roof.

  “Be careful who you fall in love with,” Will’s mother had told him then. Ashes, ashes, he’d thought to himself. There was no place to go but down. “Anything you fall into can’t be good. Remember that.”

  Will’s mother had short black hair and she wore jeans and T-shirts when she didn’t have to go to work. She had a tattoo of a rose on her shoulder that she wished she’d never gotten.

  “From the time of my idiocy,” she told Will. “And don’t you even think about getting one. You’re underage.”

  Will understood that his parents had used drugs, that they’d fallen in love without thinking about consequences. Will saw that his mother had pulled herself together, but his father never had, and so Will didn’t expect anything from Sam. Sometimes his mother would be ranting about how irresponsible his dad was, but Will took that as a given, the way some birds are blue and some are black. His father was himself, nothing less and nothing more.

  There had been a few bad incidents. Sam occasionally showed up at Will’s school, and that was always a disaster. Back in first grade, the police had been forced to eject Sam. Or at least that was their story. Will would have been able to talk his father down when he was high; he’d done it before. We’ll take two steps, we’ll make a run for it, we’ll hide in the subway, the stairwell, the basement, the coffee shop. Sam was paranoid. Will had learned that word when he was very young. He knew what was going on when Sam stood on the sidewalk in front of the school shouting that someone wanted to kill his son; that danger was everywhere. Will went to the window and watched them take his father away. When you yelled or screamed or shouted it only made things worse. He wished he could write out a list for his father: crouch down, keep your arms loose and to the sides so they don’t break like twigs, don’t struggle.

  They got Will’s dad down on the ground when he wouldn’t cooperate; one officer sat squarely on top of him, the other cuffed his hands behind his back. There was blood on the sidewalk, or maybe it was paint. Will’s father was a great artist, though he never got paid. Will hoped the officers wouldn’t hurt his father, that they’d understand who he was. Will’s dad had his own belief system. He believed in evil people, maps made of tears, cities of white powder, tents constructed with needles. He believed there was a heaven; it was right above the everyday realm, it had to be. This couldn’t be the real world. Not this terrible plane of existence. Not this world they were walking through.

  Will’s dad suffered, he ached, he hurt. He did bad things like steal; he was a slave to heroin. Will understood what drugs did to you; they took you apart bit by bit until only your heart was left. Still, no one else’s father cared enough to run up the school stairs shouting about evil kidnappers; no other dad was brave enough to be dragged away, shoved into a patrol car, handcuffed, arms bent into wings, looking back through the window of the car, desperate to protect the son he loved.

  And then Will’s father died. No warning, no reason. It was just a regular day and Will was in his room. He was doing homework, writing a paper on the great religions of the world, when he saw something go past the window. He had the craziest idea — that the sky was falling, the world was ending. Maybe the city was under attack. It had happened, and it could happen again. His father had told him he’d been so close to Ground Zero he’d been covered with ashes; he’d kept a jarful in his backpack to remind him how near the end might be. Maybe it was happening now. Tenth Avenue turned into a war zone. Maybe pieces of the sky were crashing onto trucks, buses, sidewalks, wounding anyone foolish enough to venture out.

  What would he do in the few minutes allowed him if this truly was the end of the world? Not homework. That was certain. Will went to his desk and he wrote, I love you, although to whom he was leaving this message he wasn’t sure. It just came to him. A message to the universe, to everything that had ever been and wasn’t anymore. Every day, every moment, every molecule.

  Someone was pounding on the front door and Will heard it open. Then he heard his mother sobbing. It didn’t even sound like her. The sound was like glass; too broken, too torn apart for the human throat. He stayed where he was, listening to himself breathe. Something bad was happening out there. Then there was a knock at his bedroom door. His room was small, fashioned out of two closets with the wall between them taken down; it had a window and a great loft bed. Will was sitting at the desk beneath the loft, looking at what he’d written. It didn’t even look like his own handwriting. All at once, he wondered if perhaps it wasn’t a message he had left, but one that had been delivered to him. His mother opened the door. Will was ten at the time, but anyone would have guessed he was older. He looked up at Amy. And then he knew it wasn’t the sky that had fallen.

  The next day, his mother went to see her doctor for some pills that would help her stop crying. Overnight, she looked her age, or maybe she just grew up the rest of the way, fast. She’d met Sam Moody at the bus station on Forty-second Street when she was fifteen. It seemed a second ago, sitting there with her back against the wall, wearing army boots, a green plaid skirt, a sweater she’d stolen from Lord & Taylor, thi
nking about getting a tattoo on her shoulder, thinking what it might be like to fall in love, crazy head over heels in love. That was when he sat down beside her, just like that, as though she’d called him to her. Sam smiled at her, and she wondered if this was how angels made themselves known to those on earth. They sat down beside you and changed your life. Sam said, Hey, you want to get high? Amy had taken his words to mean You are so beautiful I am undone by you. After his death, it was the other way around. She was undone by him completely. He’d been sleeping on the couch, half living with them, half disappearing. She counted on Sam’s unpredictable nature, a funny way to chart your life. But he had always come back. Until now. Maybe that was the reason Amy couldn’t stop crying; in losing Sam she’d lost herself, the girl she used to be, the fearless one who fell in love at Port Authority without the slightest bit of hesitation.

  When Amy went off to her doctor’s appointment, Will made himself lunch, but then he couldn’t eat. His stomach was all jumpy. He had weird thoughts ricocheting through his head. He kept expecting his father to knock on the door, and for everything to be the way it had been. He’d never told his mother, but he knew where his father had lived when he wasn’t with them. Sam had taken Will there once, and even Will could tell it was a dump. They had to go in through a basement door, then up some metal stairs. People were staying in rooms that had no doors. Will and Sam went up and up to the top floor. Sam had his parrot with him; it was a small parrot that fit inside his coat pocket. His family, his confidant. Sometimes Sam talked to the parrot, and people on the street backed away.

  Pick a door, any door, his father had said, once they’d climbed as high as they could go. But of course there were no doors, only open, filthy rooms. There was bedding and clothes on the floor and water leaking from the pipes. There was the smell of mold and of urine.

  Wherever you want to go, Dad.

  Well, you’re the first person who’s ever said that to me. His father had sat down on the floor, right there in the hall. Will had sat down across from Sam. He knew that no one else’s father would bring them to a place like this, but his father couldn’t be anyone but himself.

  You can get hurt here, Dad, Will had said. I don’t want that to happen to you.

  Now on the day after the accident, not long after Will had made the sandwich he couldn’t eat, a man Will didn’t know came to the door. There was a knock, and for an instant Will had the crazy hope his father had returned, even though he knew it couldn’t be. Will went to answer; a tall man in a gray suit was in the hall. The man was older; he seemed tired, as though he’d climbed a million steps. He looked familiar, but Will couldn’t place him.

  The man called Will by his father’s name.

  My father’s not here, Will said. Do you want to come in? My mother will be back soon.

  The man said something Will couldn’t make out, then turned to leave. Will had gone out after him, but the man was already down the stairs. Will wondered if their visitor had been a friend of his father’s; he seemed choked up and lost somehow. Will went back into the apartment and looked through the window. The old man wasn’t out there, but Will saw something green out of the corner of his eye.

  Even now, more than five years later, Will saw it sometimes. A flash of color and feathers. The parrot that got loose the day his father died. And he wasn’t the only one. People in Chelsea saw the parrot on rooftops along Twenty-third Street; there were those who swore they’d spied it in the hallway of their apartment building, sleeping in vestibules on snowy nights, sitting perfectly still on window ledges, or roosting on water towers.

  Parrots, Will knew, could live past a hundred, like Winston Churchill’s famous pet. For a long time Will left out traps on the roof of their building, tins of seed and grapes and carrots, all beneath a laundry basket set to fall upon the creature should it alight. He caught a rat, and two pigeons and a dove, and then he gave up. He stopped taking the subway to Brooklyn and Queens, where there were reports of wild parrots roosting. The one time he spotted a nest, the birds inside were red, nothing like his father’s parrot. All the same, he still looked at the sky. He did it all the time. Some of his friends called him the Stargazer, not that you could see stars in Chelsea; but it was true, he was always looking up. It was in his nature to be hopeful, but not to be a fool.

  His mother had told him it was an accident, and Will acted as though he believed her. He was that kind of son, and Amy was grateful to him. She thought Sam knew what a great kid they had. In spite of everything, they had brought something good into this world. Maybe that was their destiny, their combined task, a boy like Will.

  Now, it was Will’s birthday. He was about to turn sixteen, a year older than Amy was when she made her life-changing decision in the bus station. Will was much purer than she ever was. Much more centered. Almost six years without his father. Hardly a little boy. Every spring Amy and Will rented a car and went up to the cemetery in Connecticut where Sam was buried. He wanted to be turned into ashes, but he and Amy had never married and she had no legal rights to make a decision like that; Sam’s father saw to that, even though he never saw to anything else, least of all his son.

  When they had first visited Archangel Cemetery, Amy had suggested Will leave a stone; that’s what Jews did to remember their dead. That’s what they did when they visited his grandparents’ graves on Long Island. And so every year Sam left a stone for his father, and not just any stone. It was always one he’d spent weeks searching for, a perfect stone, one his dad would have appreciated. There was a white one that he’d found in New Hampshire, where they were vacationing with some guy his mother thought she might marry, but it didn’t work out. There was a green stone from Cape Cod, a black stone from Central Park, a bluish swirly thing he had uncovered under a pine tree while walking with his grandpa on Long Island, a chunk of granite from the sidewalk on Tenth Avenue. The last one he’d found was silver, shiny, discovered on the floor of the Museum of Natural History. Maybe it was something important that had rolled out of an exhibit, a moonrock, say, or a prehistoric piece of petrified wood, or maybe it was trash dragged in on the bottom of someone’s shoe. He thought his father would appreciate its mystery. He thought his father would love it best of all.

  “I wish Sam could see you now,” his mom said on the day of Will’s birthday. “So grown up.” All his buddies had come over and they were gathered around the table. Will had ordered six pizzas with everything. Will went over and hugged his mother and she started crying for no reason.

  “I’m an idiot,” Amy said, wiping at her eyes, laughing. All of the wildness she’d had as a kid had been drained out of her. Now when she thought of the person she’d been, the things she’d done — hitchhiking across the country, living in strangers’ apartments, all those drugs, pills she took to make her smaller or larger, anywhere but where she was — it was like remembering a long-lost sister, one she hardly knew. A crazy kid. That wild girl. Whoever she might have gone on being if she hadn’t gotten pregnant with Will.

  “You’re just overprotective,” Will said. He knew his mother was a good-hearted, well-meaning person. Maybe she wasn’t always right about things. She wasn’t an idiot, that much was obvious. It was just that sometimes there were certain things she didn’t want to know. About his father, for instance. Falling off the roof. That’s what she wanted to believe. That day when Sam had taken Will to the run-down building, the one with no doors and a staircase to nowhere, the one where he lived when he wasn’t with them, when all he could think about was drugs; they’d sat there knee to knee in the hallway, on the dirty floor. Sam had leaned very close to his son. For someone who wasn’t very clean, he smelled good. He smelled like fresh air and green grass.

  You can’t go with me, he’d said to Will. You know that, right? Nobody can.

  Maybe it was an instant, maybe it was well planned out, maybe it was his dream come true.

  I’ve got to get there by myself, Will’s father had told him that day in the hallway.
r />   Someone downstairs was drunk or stoned and screaming but Will and Sam had both ignored the ruckus. Will had nodded; he understood. Some people had choices and some people didn’t. He knew that then and he knew it now, as he led his group of friends down the stairs, all of them whooping, stomachs filled with pizza, happily on their way to Will’s birthday celebration. Another year most gratefully spent in this world.

  BLANCA HAD GONE TO THE HOUSE FOR THE FUNERAL luncheon, but Meredith had been driving then. Now Meredith had left, back to her own family, and navigating alone the next day was a trial. Blanca was lost in no time. She tried to follow the route she’d once known so well she could find her way in the dark, flying along on her bicycle. But everything seemed changed. Trees had been cut down, new houses built, roads had been extended to sweep through developments that had once been nothing more than meadows; everything seemed to be on the wrong side of the road.

  Blanca was to meet with her stepmother and half sister and her father’s attorney, David Hill. It was still hot and she had bought an outfit for the occasion in the Dress Shack in town, along with a pair of white flip-flops and some summer clothes. Her hair was loose and she wore her mother’s pearls, cool drops of salt and stone. James had phoned the inn twice, but both times Blanca had been out when he called. She felt isolated and abandoned; all the same, she hadn’t phoned back. She was in a bubble. All alone. She drove to her childhood home with the windows down so she could spy the street signs; still she was over an hour late. Blanca dreaded the meeting. It was one thing to avoid her father all these years, another thing altogether to go home and not have him there.