It was a long drop from the fourth floor to the ground below. The soundtrack of the neighbourhood – bus airbrakes exhaling at every stop, truck wheels walloping over potholes, police sirens bleating, car alarms wailing, a distant train horn – all faded to background noise. The air was still, the world holding its breath.
‘Mom, we have to go inside,’ Rémy said, pushing his mother gently in the back.
Annie kept singing, a Nina Simone song now, keeping Don Grigori at bay. The despair in her cracking voice made Rémy’s skin tingle. She was dropping notes.
How long had she been out here?
A fault line in the balcony zigzagged beneath his feet. There was an expression of such defeat and disappointment, sorrow and love in his mother’s eyes that he stepped back. He felt the balcony shift away from the railing.
‘Find it, baby,’ whispered his mother, so quietly Rémy almost missed it. ‘I love you.’
She hugged him. Rémy felt something cool and hard slither down the neck of his tucked T-shirt, coming to rest against the skin at his waist.
Stepping back into the room, Annie opened her mouth and sang a top C.
The balcony split in two. Rémy fell, slamming on to the balcony directly beneath, the hard landing punching the air from his lungs. He fought for his next few breaths. He couldn’t get air to fill his lungs. Pain pierced his shoulder, and he was covered in planks of softwood and pieces of rusty railing. He stared in disbelief up at what was left of the balcony above, the split wood like broken teeth. He could hear Don Grigori losing patience, shouting now.
‘Tell me where the journal is!’
‘Help her! She’s going to fall,’ sobbed Rémy, his ribs screaming in pain.
Don Grigori reached down with a slim, red-satin arm, lifted Annie up as easily as if she were a feather, and pulled her inside.
From beneath the broken balcony, Rémy heard his mom scream and Tia Rosa howl. A window exploded, raining shards of glass down on him.