Day Four

April 3

THE MAYOR GAVE A PRESS CONFERENCE TODAY AND RECOMMENDED MASK-WEARING for everyone, and as a result the news was full of a debate about masks, whether they help, whether they should be required, and especially whether there were enough to go around, and if not, shouldn’t we be saving the masks for the doctors and nurses. As we arrived in the evening, I saw that some of the tenants had followed the advice and improvised various ragtag masks—scarves, skiing gaiters, bandannas.

This evening, I arrived extra early. My plan was to be first on the roof so that I could make a checklist of all the tenants and match them with their names, apartment numbers, and descriptions in the bible. As they arrived, I could check them off—as a sort of roll call. I wanted to finally and completely get them all straight in my mind, especially the audience members who hadn’t said anything yet and were just sitting at the fringes of the gathering, doing their own thing. I’d also drawn a diagram of the building, showing each apartment, that I pasted onto a blank page in the bible.

The first to arrive, besides me, was Eurovision, and it went on from there.

Here’s the list:

Eurovision, 5C

Monsieur Ramboz, 6A

Vinegar, 2B

Hello Kitty, 5B

Merenguero’s Daughter, 3B

Tango, 6B. This mysterious woman has been sitting in a wicker chair at the far end of the rooftop, a well-put-together blonde of about forty, trim and poised, wearing glasses and a black silk mask. She’s been completely silent, but I could see she was keenly observing all of us. “She is Tango, who dances inside the lives of others,” according to Wilbur’s bible.

Whitney, 4D

Amnesia, 5E. “She is Amnesia, who carries the universal desire for oblivion.” Wilbur’s notes also say that her hobby is distressing secondhand clothes, but that she writes comic books and also was a writer for the famous computer game Amnesia. I was really curious about her, but she, too, shows no interest in our gathering and hangs out in the dark outer edges of the rooftop.

The Therapist, 6D

The Lady with the Rings, 2D

Blackbeard, 3E. “He is Blackbeard, come to open the purple testament of bleeding war” is what the bible says about this bearded bear, who sits by himself in a dark corner, reading a tattered paperback and drinking bourbon straight from a bottle.

La Reina, 4E. She intrigued me more than most of the silent tenants. She’s as tall as me, maybe even taller. Her movements are deliberate, poised, like her whole body is conscious of its location in space. Her brown curls spill down her shoulders. The bible gave her this aphorism: “You may her throne depose, but she is still queen of her griefs.”

Lala, 4A. This tenant is instantly recognizable: “She is Lala, with eyes like black infinities.” Lala’s a small, pretty woman of about forty-five, with dazzling white teeth, long wavy hair, and eyes like huge wobbly drops of black ink. Her hands and fingers are in almost constant motion, like two birds fluttering around her as she talks.

Prospero, 2E. A professor at NYU, “rapt in secret studies.” He doesn’t look much like an academic, dressed in a warm-up jacket and striped athletic pants, as if he’d just come from the gym. He sports one of those carefully curated quarter-inch beards, to match an aquiline nose and high cheekbones. He’s been listening to the group but so far has said nothing.

Wurly, 3A. He sits on a piano bench that he lugs up and down every night. I figure he must be the guy who plays the Wurlitzer with the sound turned low. Shaved glossy head, big beard, deep brown eyes, quiet way of speaking. He gives off the feeling of the sort of man you can trust. “He is Wurly, whose tears become notes.”

The Poet, 4B. “He is the Poet, who writes graffiti on the soul” is what the bible says. He’s a lanky man, about forty, restless face with a wise-ass look on it, a sort of mocking half smile at the world.

La Cocinera, 6C. “Sous-chef to fallen angels.” I can’t tell quite what this description means, but she’s another strikingly tall woman, long dark hair, who spends her time on the roof hunched over and messing with her phone.

Pardi and Pardner, 6E. Mother and daughter. “The Midnight Special shines its light on them” is the bible’s comment. I have seen the mother but no sign of the daughter. Perhaps she’s hiding away from Covid, like Vinegar’s pregnant daughter.

Darrow, 3D. Super tall, maybe six feet six, in a suit, white starched shirt, cuff links, and silk tie with the knot drawn tight. I figure with that getup, he must be in Zoom meetings all day, or maybe he’s just the kind of person who likes to dress up. Wilbur’s bible says, “His secrets become cicatrices.”

So that’s who was on the roof tonight, and it was quite a large group, although less than half had spoken up. I suppose I was among the silent observers.

We were beginning to fall into a rhythm on the roof. People would start gathering about fifteen minutes before seven; we’d mostly be in place by seven sharp to join in the evening cheer; and then an hour later, the bells of Old St. Pat’s would nudge the evening to a close.

A leaden sky had covered the city that day, filling the streets with a dreary twilight. In the morning I mopped the hallways, as I’m supposed to do every day, and it pissed me off that people who seem so connected on the rooftop just pass me by with only a nod. I do think some of them don’t like me, or maybe are a little suspicious. The building is hopeless—broken windows, cockroaches, and lousy, burn-your-lungs-up heat at random times of day, but with this coronavirus I can’t get people in to fix anything, or even order parts. My store of lightbulbs is running out, and I’m down to the last roll of duct tape. Without anything else useful to do, and still unable to reach my dad, I spent the afternoon going through the super’s accordion file of random manuscripts. It was a catalog of strange and pointless stuff, but sort of fascinating nonetheless. It gave me the suspicion he went through recycling and trash and pulled out things. I have to admit, when I was working for my dad, I sometimes did the same thing. I once found some cash in the recycling. No discarded money yet here at Fernsby. When I first got here, while inspecting one of the abandoned apartments upstairs—the tenant, I think, went to the Hamptons—I did find a hilarious letter balled up on the floor. I smoothed it out and added it to the accordion files—feeling a little guilty at having taken it, but, honestly, who’s ever going to know?

Tonight, our flickering rooftop candles could hardly beat back the darkness. And the wind! A sudden gust blew some wet leaves across the roof, dancing and flipping them over and over. It also snuffed out some candles. The sirens seemed almost continuous. As people relit their candles, I recorded the day’s brutal statistics. Today was another day where 911 calls exceeded 9/11. The system is overwhelmed. The number of cases in the world topped one million. The stories coming out of Italy are terrifying, with doctors triaging patients choking to death. Apparently, the Italians have decided to let people over eighty die because they’re running out of ventilators. They say we’re three weeks away from the same situation. Cuomo ordered the National Guard to seize ventilators and PPE from hospitals and clinics in low-Covid areas upstate to redistribute them to hospitals here in the city. And I read a horrific prediction from the CDC: that in the United States alone, as many as fifty thousand people might die before the pandemic is over. Just imagine: fifty thousand dead. New York State has already recorded a total 102,863 cases with almost three thousand deaths. It’s Friday, but at this point the days of the week are smearing into sameness. I’ve been calling my dad nonstop, with no results. I’m exhausted and sick with anger.

This evening there were more tenants on the roof, everyone fussing to keep the six-foot—or more—distance in a random collection of kitchen chairs, stools, milk crates, a bucket, even a beanbag. Not to mention Wurly’s piano bench. A lot of the chairs were just left up there, to be rained on, I guess. Eurovision, on the other hand, had gone in the opposite direction and replaced his lawn chair with an antique chair of carved mahogany with gilded accents and a plush velvet seat, covered with clear plastic like in a grandmother’s living room in Queens. He placed this quasi-throne in the center of the rooftop, forcing the rest of us to socially distance around the periphery. Vinegar parked her director’s chair nearest to him, but not too close. She was wearing as a mask a crude piece of cloth with shoestrings, which muffled her voice. Her eyes looked worried, and I wondered how things were going with Carlotta, the daughter.

After everyone had arrived and set themselves up, Vinegar looked us over. “I assume we’ve all had time to appreciate the new artwork?”

We all looked over at the communal mural. Someone had spray-painted a poop emoji next to the Heinz vinegar bottle.

“I think we can all guess who the anonymous da Vinci is,” said Vinegar, her eyebrow cocked.

“That’s disgusting,” said Eurovision. “It shouldn’t be too hard to cover.” He stood and took a step toward the box of art supplies.

“Now you leave it alone,” interrupted the Lady with the Rings. “Everyone’s got to be free to express themselves up here, or else what’s the point? Yes, even Miss Thing,” she added, with a pointed look at Vinegar. “What we should do is add to the mural, not censor it.”

At that moment, the distant cacophony of the seven o’clock cheering emerged from the city in all directions and grew rapidly, like an approaching train. We joined in.

After the noise died down, Eurovision remained standing. He cleared his throat and looked around and clasped his hands together, like someone who’d just emerged on a stage. I could tell from the little curl in his lips that a wicked idea was brewing.

“As I lay in bed last night,” he began in a public voice, “I was thinking about the stories that we’ve heard over the past few nights. And then I thought that maybe we should all be telling stories.”

He paused and looked around again, even to those sitting in the outer darkness. An uncomfortable silence fell. Nobody replied. No way is this idea going to fly, I thought.

“It seems to me,” he went on, “that the price of admission to our rooftop refuge will be to tell a story. Each. One. Of. Us.” He scanned the group with teacherly expectation.

“Who appointed you Den Mother?” said the Lady with the Rings.

This was seconded with an explosion of disapproving noises, shaking of heads, and the ostentatious insertion of earbuds.

“It’s just an idea, for heaven’s sake!” he said. “We’ve all got stories. Love, life, death, a reminiscence, a ghost story—anything!”

“I think,” said the Therapist firmly, “that storytelling is a beautiful idea. A very beautiful idea.”

Monsieur Ramboz cried out, “I do, too! A most excellent idea!”

“Thank you,” said Eurovision, as if this decided things. “And, to show that I’m a fair person, I’ll begin with my own story. A true story. It’s a sort of funny story—or maybe not so funny. About an adoption.”

He gave a dramatic pause to be sure enough of us were paying attention, took a deep breath, and began.

* * *

“So this couple I know, Nate and Jeremy, they were trying to adopt this baby. I say ‘trying’ because there was nothing easy about the process. They’d been burned before, a couple of years back—they’d had a toddler placed with them for six months, foster-to-adopt, you know? The two of them were totally gaga over that boy by the end of the first week. So was Jeremy’s mom, she lived only three subway stops away and had always wanted to be a grandma. In spite of all the warnings about ‘protect your heart,’ she was all in from day one.

“What the social workers hadn’t been clear about was that this couple’s chances of getting to keep this particular boy were minimal. The family situation was so complicated: the mom’s mother was making a claim, and the dad wasn’t entirely out of the picture, plus it wasn’t a ‘cultural match’ . . . And afterward, what pissed my friends off wasn’t so much that they’d had to give him back—that broke their hearts, but whatever, they’d signed up for this—it was that they got the sense the social workers had misled them just to get them to agree to a short-term placement.

“Anyway, once they’d had enough time to get over it, Jeremy persuaded Nate to sign up again. Jeremy’s mom was such a cheerleader, totally encouraging—in fact, bordering on a nag, but you know, with the best of intentions.

“Turned out, they weren’t as over it as they’d thought because they got flashbacks just looking at the website of the Bureau of Permanency Services—does it have to have such an Orwellian name, really?

“So they decided to try going private. They registered with an agency, filled in this super-detailed profile, and waited for a birth mom to pick their file from the heap. A whole year went by, not a peep. They realized they’d probably overestimated the gay-friendliness of the average unhappily pregnant New Yorker. Nate was trying to forget all about it, move on with his plans for his business, trips abroad, that kind of thing. But really, it’s a ticking bomb, once you’ve filled in an application like that, begging for a kid: Who could possibly put it out of their mind?

“Then one day they got the call. A teenager had pulled out their file and slapped it on the top of her heap because, as she said, she had a thing for the gays.

“It all went so well, right through the pregnancy. All of us were excited for them and ultra-supportive. Nate and Jeremy told these great stories about how well they were bonding with the girl, what fun meals out they had with her, how she said she felt so at home in their apartment. They covered all her expenses—maternity clothes, cabs to appointments, got her counseling and an attorney. Of course they wanted to stay in contact after and let her be part of their family, as much or as little as she wanted. Frankly, they felt so freakin’ grateful that she was going to give them her baby.

“Now they knew from the last time that everything could always fall through at the last minute, so when she didn’t call them or the agency, around her due date, they tried to stay calm. Even when two weeks had passed, they weren’t letting themselves lose their minds.

“Finally, they got the call. The social worker said that Mom—weird how they call her that, isn’t it, as if it’s their own mom they’re talking about—that Mom had given birth one afternoon after school, super-fast in the bathroom at home before the ambulance could arrive, and that both she and the baby girl were doing fine.

“Jeremy burst into tears when he heard it was a girl, even though he’d have been just as excited the other way—it just made it all so real.

“Next thing, the social worker startled them by saying the birth had actually happened last week, and Mom hadn’t called anyone—not the agency, not her attorney—because she’d thought maybe she’d like to try raising this kid herself after all.

“My friends just froze when they heard that. But of course they understood and sympathized. How would anybody, least of all a teenager, know in advance how they’d feel after something like giving birth?

“But the social worker was happy to report—well, happy for them, Nate and Jeremy—that Mom had now changed her mind after what she said was the shittiest week of her life. The agency was offering her ongoing support, of course, but no, she said she was sure at this point, she wanted Jeremy and Nate to take the baby, like right away. She’d already signed the surrender, that’s what they call the agreement to give up your parental rights.

“Apparently, when Jeremy’s mom heard, she screamed.

“Well, I’ll skip over the next forty-five days. That’s how long it takes for the birth mother’s consent to become irrevocable, in New York State; unless the mother signs the papers in front of a judge and with her attorney right there, she has a full month and a half to change her mind. Which seems only fair, because postpartum sounds like such a crazy time to be making any hard decisions.

“So by that point, Nate and Jeremy were blissed out but also totally strung out—not on drugs!—I mean, just exhausted from waking up every couple hours. Because even though they were meant to be taking turns, when a baby lets rip in an apartment, it’s not as if one of you can manage to stay asleep. By the six-week mark, little Sophie (they’d named her for Jeremy’s grandmother) had gained four pounds, she could follow you with her eyes, lift her head off the rug during tummy time, and she was producing these smiles that the baby book said were probably gas but, nah, they looked like real smiles to me. (We’d all met her at various brunches by now.)

“In the final week, Jeremy’s mom Facebooked me to say she was organizing a party for midnight on the forty-fifth day—like, to mark the exact moment that Sophie was definitely, absolutely, legally going to be theirs forever. I was a bit surprised Jeremy was letting her handle it, because he’s known for his party planning, but I figured he just had too much on his plate.

“So midnight on that Tuesday, about forty of us were standing in the street outside their building, with balloons, streamers, flowers, champagne, the works. Jeremy’s mom buzzed their apartment, which is on the third floor.

“No answer.

“‘Maybe they’re getting the baby up,’ somebody said. ‘Diaper and a cute outfit and all.’

“So we all stood around chatting and joking some more.

“But I could tell Jeremy’s mom was getting antsy. She kept pressing the buzzer.

“‘Could they be out?’ I asked.

“‘Who goes out with their new baby at midnight, especially when they’re having a party?’ That was a woman I barely knew, in a tone I thought was more scornful than was called for.

“A friend of Nate’s from the gym said he’d often push his daughter around the neighborhood in her stroller when she just couldn’t settle, and it was easy enough to lose track of the time.

“We stared up and down the block.

“I had my phone out, but Jeremy’s mom spotted me. ‘No! I’ll call him,’ she said.

“‘Jeremy?’ she said into the phone. ‘Damn, it’s gone to voicemail. Jeremy, this is Mom, pick up!’

“Nothing.

“Next, someone tried Nate’s phone, while someone else pushed the door buzzer a couple more times.

“No answer.

“It was as if the three of them had all been kidnapped by some psycho stalker. Maybe massacred!

“I tried to rein in my imagination.

“Was that a baby crying on a balcony above? At about third-floor level? I put back my head.

“‘Nate?’ I shouted. ‘Jeremy? Yoohoo!’

“A long pause.

“Then the faces loomed over the railing. Jeremy had the baby on his chest in one of those carriers. The two guys looked down at us in—well, at the time I thought horror, but now maybe I’d say rage.

“Jeremy’s mom put her hands in the air and shrieked, ‘Surprise!’

“It was only then that the rest of us realized what she’d—what we’d all—done.

“To their credit, Nate and Jeremy did let us all come up to the apartment. And once they’d told the story from their point of view—their blind panic when they’d heard the buzzer at the stroke of midnight, how they were convinced it was the birth mom come to take Sophie back, how they knew they couldn’t stop her legally or even ethically, but they just couldn’t bear to open the door, how their phones had kept manically playing ‘Staying Alive’ and the Minions ringtones over and over, how Sophie had wept but not as hard as Nate, how they’d run out on the balcony to get away from the buzzer and their phones, how it had actually occurred to Jeremy (he was embarrassed to admit this) that it might end with the three of them leaping, Thelma-and-Louise-style, over the railing . . . Well, after all that, and Jeremy’s mom’s endless apologies for her thoughtlessness, they did open the champagne. Sophie spat up right across the glass coffee table, and it was, shall we say, a party to remember.”

* * *

Eurovision stopped and looked around, beaming. It dawned on us that he was waiting for applause. So we clapped—it was a very good story, after all—and his whole face glowed with the pleasure of it.

“Thank you,” he said. “Thank you.”

I almost expected a bow. It was clear that having an audience was something he lived for, a lifeline that had been taken away by Covid. God, so much was being taken away by Covid.

“Now,” he said, “who’s next?”

“I’m not much of a storyteller,” said a tall man near the edge of the circle. “But I’ve got a story about a baby, too.” This was apartment 3D; the nattily dressed attorney Darrow, I assume after Clarence Darrow.

“Wonderful!” Eurovision clapped his hands together, so pleased with his idea.

I made sure my phone was adjusted and recording. Darrow began, his gentle southern accent drifting over the roof.

* * *

“I grew up on a cotton farm in Arkansas,” he said.

“We were poor but the kind of poor where you don’t know you’re poor because everyone else is just as down and out as you are.

“The week before my brother was born, a heavy snowfall covered the farmlands of eastern Arkansas, giving us a white Christmas, our first ever.

“The snow-swept fields and roads promised to make the season even more magical; on the negative side, my mother was expecting her fourth child. As a sheltered six-year-old, I knew nothing about human reproduction and such matters were never discussed. But I remember thinking that a fourth child was completely unnecessary. There was hardly enough to go around to begin with.

“In those days, pregnant women went to great lengths to conceal what was becoming more and more obvious, but soon even I realized that things were getting serious. My sister was a nosy brat and, being a girl, knew far more than me and my clueless little brother. As we counted the days to Christmas, she gravely informed us that our mother might give birth around the same time we were expecting Santa Claus. This caused some concern. I’d memorized the Sears & Roebuck Christmas catalog and was not interested in managing expectations.

“Sure enough, upon leaving church on Christmas Eve, we were startled when Mom groaned painfully in the front seat and grabbed Dad’s arm. Then she let go, and she seemed fine. Then she groaned again, though she tried her best to hide her discomfort.

“‘She’s in labor,’ my sister whispered to me in the back seat.

“‘What’s that?’ I asked. I’d been watching the skies for reindeer.

“She rolled her eyes and said, ‘You’re so stupid.’

“The cotton crop that fall had been another disappointment, and though we didn’t know it, our parents were planning to leave the farm and move on to another life. Times were tough. A lot of bills were past due. There wasn’t a spare dollar anywhere, but, somehow, they always managed to provide a wonderful Christmas.

“As soon as we got home, Dad cleverly informed us that a neighbor down the road had just spotted Santa. Enough said. We sprinted to our bedrooms, pulled on our pajamas, and turned out the lights. It was only eight o’clock.

“Within minutes, it seemed, Dad was back, turning on the lights and announcing that Santa had just left.

“Who cared if we had not actually had the chance to fall asleep? We raced to the den where the tree was glowing and surrounded by the toys we’d longed for.

“We had barely touched the spread that Santa had left behind when Dad announced that Mom was ready to go to the hospital and have a baby. She was lying on the sofa, trying gamely to enjoy the moment with us. Though she was obviously in distress, I wasn’t that concerned. I had a shiny new Daisy BB gun, a set of Lincoln Logs, and an electric train, and I was preoccupied. When I didn’t move fast enough, my father gave me a rather firm pat on the rear and told us there was no time to change clothes—just get in the car, pajamas and all.

“Dad gunned the engine, and the car began sliding. Mom barked at him; he barked back. Through the rear window I could see the little white farmhouse with its front window lined with sparkling Christmas lights that Dad had forgotten to turn off. Santa had just left. Our toys were inside. It seemed so unfair.

“My father was a reckless driver on a good day, but the thought of his wife giving birth in the front seat while his three children watched from the rear was more than he could handle. He was driving too fast on a frozen road, and after the car slid for the third or fourth time my mother snapped, ‘I’m not having this baby in a ditch.’

“The hospital was thirty minutes away, and my grandparents lived on a farm halfway in between. Back in those days, folks had telephones, but they tried not to use them, especially if long distance was involved. Visits to relatives and friends were never cleared with an advance call. No sir. You just showed up whenever you wanted. The surprise was part of the ritual.

“My grandparents were certainly surprised when we came sliding down their driveway at nine o’clock at night, the horn honking frantically. By the time they staggered to the front porch in their pajamas, my father had us out of the car and scrambling to meet them. The hand-off took only seconds.

“My grandparents, Mark and Mabel, were salt-of-the-earth farm folks who lived off the land and, much more importantly, lived by the Holy Scripture—every literal word of it, and only in the version according to King James. My grandmother made hot chocolate while my grandfather built a roaring fire, the only source of heat in their old farmhouse. Huddled under a quilt and warmed by the fire, we listened as he read the story of Baby Jesus from his worn and beloved Bible.

“When we awoke the next morning, we were told that our mother had given birth to a little boy shortly after midnight. Thus, he was indeed a Christmas baby. We really didn’t care. We were just relieved that she was okay, and we wanted to get home to check out the rest of our toys.

“The following morning, during breakfast, we heard a car horn. My grandmother looked out the kitchen window and exclaimed, ‘He’s here.’ We raced for the front door, across the porch, and down to the car where our mother sat, beaming, proudly holding her latest. She named him Mark.

“We loaded up and hurried home, where the Christmas lights were still on, where Santa’s gifts were still scattered throughout the den. We immediately picked up where we’d left off before being so terribly interrupted.

“With snow on the ground, our father had little to do but hang around the house and play with us. He knew he would never plant another cotton crop, and I’ve often wondered if this was a relief or a fear. But, of course, we were sheltered from such conversations. Six weeks later, we abruptly left the farm, never, mercifully, to return. He found a good job with a construction company, one that moved us every summer to another small southern town.

“The following season, we waited with great anticipation for the arrival of the Sears & Roebuck Christmas catalog. Within hours, we made our lists of wishes, lists that invariably began much too long and were slowly whittled down by our parents. When Santa made a surprise visit to my second-grade classroom, I told him, in all seriousness, that I wanted this and I wanted that, but what I really did not want was another brother for Christmas.”

* * *

As Darrow finished speaking, Eurovision leapt up and led the acclaim, clapping, nodding, and beaming. “Who said you couldn’t tell a story? Good, good!” He looked around, and I could see he was searching for another victim among the reluctant ones at the back of the audience, all of whom were suddenly pretending a great interest in their phones.

“Come on, folks! Who’s next?” His eye wandered across the nervous group before coming to rest on me. “I reckon our super has some interesting stories to tell about this place.”

I was shocked and temporarily paralyzed by panic. I shook my head. “I’ve only been here for a few weeks.”

He looked at me askance. “But in your previous building?”

“I worked at Red Lobster. Nothing happens at Red Lobster.”

Again that sideways look. “Well, we’ll get back to you, then. I think we’re all a little curious about you.”

“Curious? Why?” His penetrating look made me nervous, almost like he suspected me of something. I could see a certain level of distrust, or at least wariness, in the faces of the others. I worked so hard to be invisible, it was a shock to think they had opinions about me.

“Well,” said Eurovision. “You have to admit you’re not exactly what we’re all, uh, used to in a super.”

“Oh. Right. Because I’m not a man?”

“No, no, no. It’s just— Well, a little bit. Yes.”

I had to laugh at the look on his face. I was tempted to leave him squirming, but instead, to get the focus off of me, I said, “I’ll tell a story, I promise. Just give me time.” I wondered if there was something in Wilbur’s stash of stories I could pretend was my own. The last thing I was ever going to do was tell these strangers my own secrets.

“Fair enough.”

“No freeloaders!” Vinegar said. “Everyone who listens, tells.”

“I have a story,” said Amnesia. She was wearing an array of distressed clothing, with acid stains and paint and ragged knife cuts, like she’d just been hauled out of the rubble of a collapsed building. Back in Vermont, my girlfriend and I had played the Amnesia computer game. It’s about someone who wakes up in a desert and can’t remember anything about her previous existence and is pursued by ghouls and demons and curses. It had been pretty cool, at least until the theme hit a bit too close to home.

“Thank you,” said Vinegar decisively, settling back to listen.

* * *

“All my life,” Amnesia began, “I’ve had this dream about a woman. It’s not a nightmare, not exactly, but it’s unsettling because it’s always the exact same. I’m in a yard. It’s summer. In front of me is a huge dark house with white shutters, curtains drawn over every window except one. That’s where she is, the woman, standing darkly in the white frame and looking right at me. She has a scar on her cheek and a little gold cross at her neck, and I know that doesn’t sound scary, but the thing is, she never smiles. Like, most people, they see you, they smile, right? But she just stares at me with this hollow face, and that’s usually when I wake up.

“I told my mom about it once when I was a kid, and she got super intense about it. How old was the woman? How big was the scar? What was she wearing? What kind of house? What state was it in?—like we were trying to find someone who’d been kidnapped. I remember because she was digging her nails into my arm even though we were at the Waffle House and it was after church and everyone could see. And my dad said, ‘Let it go, Kath.’ Firm, like he would actually do something if she didn’t.

“You know how in relationships, one person takes up more space? That’s them. Like, if my mom’s the sun, my dad is Mercury or something—small and way too close to her to be anything but uncomfortable. Sanjay and I used to joke that the only reason they were together at all is because she got pregnant with me and then him, but now I think we just turned the truth into a joke so we could say it out loud. My parents don’t have any stories about how they met, or what their first dates were like, or anything. You ask them, and they just say, ‘Oh, we met at TCU,’ like the rest is inevitable, like a man who’d left everyone he knew in Tamil Nadu to study was of course going to end up married in Lubbock.

“Anyway, I never brought up the woman from the dream again. It made my mom too upset, and the truth is, I did that all on my own. I didn’t know why. You’ve seen those commercial moms who cry at ballet performances and put Band-Aids on skinned knees and such? My mom tried all that with me, but it was like she just couldn’t. She’d grit her teeth when she hugged me, or wince when I laughed, or leave the room if I started crying. She was different with Sanjay—she’d get all ‘soft cow eyes’ around him, hug him for no reason at all. She even said once to Mrs. Hewson, when she didn’t know I was in the next room, that she knew she wasn’t supposed to have favorites, but Sanjay was just easier for her, he didn’t need her as much. Mrs. Hewson laughed and said that’s just because she and I were too alike—people said this all the time, us with the pale hair and potato chins, Sanjay and my dad dark and birdy—but my mom said, ‘She and I are nothing alike,’ and Mrs. Hewson didn’t say a thing after that.

“Sanjay was seven the Easter Mom fell apart. I was twelve. We whispered about it for years afterward, like it was a favorite movie we weren’t supposed to have seen. How it was extra nuts because Mom was always her most perfect self at First Baptist, always smoothing something into place, and squaring the programs, and treating everyone like they were in her living room just because she was one of the Greeters. The night before, she’d laid out two yellow dresses and two navy suits so we looked like some terrible dollhouse family come to life: light/dark/light/dark, sitting in the second-to-last pew, where she could keep an eye on the door.

“We were miserable that morning. That part I remember, too—how she’d yelled at us the whole way in the car about embarrassing her in front of everyone even though we hadn’t gotten there yet, how she frowned in the rearview mirror and asked twice if I’d remembered to wear deodorant. Sometimes it felt like the only thing to do was hope for something bigger than you would come along, take her eyes off you. So when Pastor Mitchell boomed, ‘He is risen! He is risen!,’ the relief I felt was real. His voice filled us up, throat to waist, and for a minute it felt like the whole ceiling might crack into one of those goldeny heaven murals.

“That’s when Mom stood up. Fast, like maybe she, maybe she’d forgotten something, her fists balled by her sides. But then she started walking slowly in the wrong direction. One step and then another and then another, right down the center aisle. And no one knew what to do because this was Kathleen Blair Varghese, the one who was always putting everyone else in line, so what was she doing inching toward the podium like she’d been called to it? Even Pastor Mitchell looked confused, waiting until she’d stopped right in front of him to say, ‘You okay, Kathleen?’

“She said something. We couldn’t hear her. Then she said it again. ‘My mother is dead.’

“Little murmurs curled up from the pews and then my dad stood up, too, even though he usually tried to get through church without anyone noticing him. It wasn’t that people were mean on purpose, just they were always saying little things like, ‘Well, here in Lubbock, we celebrate Christmas with the Carol of Lights,’ like he wouldn’t know after fifteen years. Anyway, he walked quick and reached for my mom’s arm, and when she turned and looked at him, everyone gasped. She was panting like a dog. Her whole face was red and wet.

“‘She’s gone, Arvin,’ she said. ‘She’s gone and she’s never coming back.’

“‘Grandma Cindy?’ Sanjay whispered, eyes big because we spent every Saturday afternoon with Grandma Cindy, smoking candy cigarettes on the lawn while she smoked real ones.

“‘No,’ I said, because Mom and Dad were coming back down the aisle with all those eyes on them, and then on me, and then on Sanjay, and what was I supposed to say anyway? What did I know back then? Dad opened the door to the vestibule and gave us a look, and we slid out and followed them. And then we were all standing outside. Just like that, the four of us in the sun with the noise of sprinklers and the smell of water on hot cement.

“‘Is Grandma okay?’ Sanjay said. I looked at Dad and Dad looked at Mom and Mom’s mouth stretched into a dark hall before she slammed a hand over it.

“‘Is she?’ Sanjay said again, his voice kicking high, and my dad took out his phone. It rang a few times, and then Grandma Cindy was yelling through the convertible wind that she’d have to call back when she’d pulled over. Dad hung up. We all looked at Mom. Mom looked like an outline of herself.

“In the car on the way home, Dad held her hand whenever he wasn’t shifting, which was the second strangest thing we’d seen all day. She went to bed once we got there and stayed in it all night. Grandma Cindy came to see her, and afterward she and my dad talked in the driveway for three cigarettes, but we couldn’t hear them without opening a window. I thought maybe they were talking about having her sent to Sunrise Canyon because that’s what happened to Laura Gibson’s mom after she lost the baby, but the next morning when I got up, Mom was at breakfast same as always, making toaster waffles, and checking under our nails, and walking us to the bus five minutes early. The following Sunday at church, she slammed away the looks of concern so hard that everyone got a little disoriented, like maybe they’d just imagined the whole thing. I probably would have thought the same if Sanjay hadn’t seen it, too, if it hadn’t become the thing we whispered about as kids and then laughed about as adults because, honestly, what was more Kathleen than our mother interrupting Easter sermon to say Grandma Cindy was dead and everyone being too scared of her to ever bring it up again?

“We held Mom’s funeral at First Baptist last year. None of the rest of us had gone for years, what with Dad’s hip and Sanjay’s living in Austin and me being out here, but it didn’t matter—the ladies from her Wednesday prayer group who’d been taking turns driving her to chemo pulled everything together. All we had to do was walk in and collect the condolences. Pastor Mitchell’s replacement gave her eulogy, forgetting to mention how Mom organized the Sunday school picnic, and was the first candle lit in the living Christmas Tree, but when we sang ‘Abide with Me’—her favorite—I felt her approval all around us. Afterward, a few people came by the house with frozen dishes, and then it was just over, a whole life folded neat like a tablecloth, ready to be put away.

“But we couldn’t, right? We couldn’t. You live your whole life with someone that big, and it doesn’t matter if you’re the one she forgot to love, or didn’t know how to love, or loved too much, you still feel her everywhere. I didn’t miss her yet, not like I do now, but I could tell Dad and Sanjay did, so I poured us Jameson in the nice tumblers, and then we were sitting around the kitchen table, trading all the batshit stuff she ever did. Remember the time she ironed our sweatpants? Remember when she called the neighbor’s dog a walking bowel movement? Remember when she made the guy paint the whole porch again because that squirrel ran across the corner and she said the new paint wouldn’t dry the same color? Remember when she told all of First Baptist Grandma Cindy died? We were laughing the way you laugh about a thing when you’re trying to forgive it for scaring you.

“‘In the middle of the Easter sermon! And no one said a thing!’ Sanjay said.

“‘Nothing to see here, folks.’ I made usher hands. ‘Just a grown woman announcing the death of her mother who is . . . not dead!’

“‘Grandma Cindy’—Dad started, but we were laughing too hard to hear him; he waited until we calmed down to say—‘wasn’t her mother.’

“He said it like that, like he was telling us any other thing about Grandma Cindy. Grandma Cindy liked her younger men. Grandma Cindy and the damn lottery. Grandma Cindy only went to Costco on samples day.

“‘What?’ I said.

“‘Her birth mother lived in Oklahoma City,’ Dad said.

“Sanjay and I looked at each other. Sanjay said, ‘Dad, are you fucking with us right now?’

“Dad pointed at me with his chin. ‘You met her once, when you were just a few months old. Barbara. Barb. She said call her Barb. She drove all the way here and got lunch with us at La Quinta and then went home that night.’

“‘To Oklahoma City?’ I said, like that was the weird part.

“‘She was married and had more children by then. She was scared, I think, that they might find out, that the husband might find out. She showed us their pictures. The girls looked like your mother.’ Dad looked at me. ‘Like you.’

“You know how sometimes someone will tell you a thing, and all these little levers and dials just start clicking in you because you got back a part you didn’t even know was missing? My dad said ‘like you,’ and my whole body started vibrating. Sanjay looked sick.

“‘That was the woman that died?’ he said.

“My dad nodded. ‘She had it, too. The ovarian cancer.’

“‘But how did Mom—’

“‘I don’t know.’

“‘Had she been in touch with her?’

“‘No.’

“‘Then how did you guys know what day she—’

“‘We didn’t right away. We read it in the obituary later.’

“‘But you guys never talked about it?’

“‘What was there to talk about?’

“‘Was Barb . . . was she . . .’ I didn’t even know what I wanted to ask, really. ‘Nice?’

“You wouldn’t think it would hurt, that question, but somehow it did. My dad was quiet a long time before saying, ‘She was young.’

“Then he starts rattling off all these numbers. Barb was fifteen when she had my mom. Barb saw her for only two hours before Grandma Cindy came to the home to pick her up. Mom was twenty-three when she started looking for her. It took them a year to find her and another three months to negotiate where and how they’d meet. And I’m quiet, thinking about how Mom must have started looking for her own mom a few months before she got pregnant with me, and heard from her about the time I was born. Sanjay was straight angry though. He starts in on Dad about how he can’t believe they never told us, that he can’t believe this is the way we’re finding out, and then my dad starts yelling, too.

“‘It didn’t matter!’ Dad said. ‘This woman comes and eats one lunch and holds the baby and cries to your mother about all the time she lost and how she will be back soon, but she never comes back! She never calls and she never writes and she moves and never tells your mother where, so what’s to tell?’ His face was hot and panicky and bunched up like a kid’s, and that’s when I knew for sure that he really did love her.

“‘What home?’ I said.

Dad looked confused.

“‘Grandma Cindy came and got her from a home. What home?’

“And that’s when he started to tell me the rest, but I already knew, you know? I knew even before he said ‘Florence Crittenton House for Women’ and ‘Little Rock, Arkansas,’ before I googled it and blew up the small picture on my phone until I was looking right into that white-framed window in a dark house. It was empty in the picture, but I knew.”

* * *

I didn’t even want to look at Amnesia at the end of this story. I just stared at my drink. Goose bumps. It made me think of my own mother, whom I’ve hated ever since she abandoned us. My most vivid memory of her isn’t even a memory of her; it’s a memory of Dad sobbing and telling me she’d gone back to Romania. That was the first and last time I ever saw him cry. (Except in February, when I visited him right after I first dropped him off. Dad thought I was his mama and began crying and begging me to take him home, that this was not a good school, that he missed Zbura, his pet starling. But that doesn’t count toward his lifetime crying total because he has dementia.) I don’t cry either—not crying runs in the family. I haven’t cried since I was ten and broke my arm roller blading down Poyer Street. Not that there’s anything wrong with crying, if that’s your thing. It’s just not for me. Dracula didn’t cry either.

“That’s a ghost story,” said Darrow.

Amnesia shook her head. “No. It’s a story about connections. We’re under the illusion that we’re separate beings, but underneath, we’re metaphysically connected.”

“That’s too deep for me,” said Vinegar. “I don’t want to be connected to most people—just my children, Charlotte and Robbie, and only then sometimes.”

“I think it’s a story about the stoicism of women,” said the Lady with the Rings, turning toward Amnesia, but Eurovision broke in.

“Please. Let’s not overanalyze one another’s stories,” he said. “This isn’t a lit class. So—who’s next?”

“As long as we’re on the subject of stoicism and death,” said Lala, sweeping us with her huge black eyes, “I have a story.” She leaned forward, hands clasped and then opening, eager, even desperate to tell it. She adjusted her seat—a tall stool that she perched on like a nervous bird—propped her hands on her knees, and in a small but intense voice began to speak while looking at the surface of the roof, as if she were speaking to herself instead of the group.

* * *

“It happened a few years ago, before I moved to New York.

“I was still working that Friday night, though getting ready to shut things down, since it was after three a.m. When the phone rang, I looked at the caller ID and saw my father-in-law’s number come up. My father-in-law is eighty, my mother-in-law eighty-four, and both in fairly feeble health, so I was already mentally preparing to go out to meet the emergency when I picked up the phone.

“It was my father-in-law, Max himself, though; he said that my stepmother’s sister had just called him, being unable to reach me (in the stress of the moment, they must have been calling an old phone number)—my dad was at Good Samaritan Trauma Center, and that was all Max knew.

“I woke my husband—scaring him out of a sound sleep—and got dressed, thinking as I did so that I must take a warm sweatshirt, because hospital waiting rooms are always cold, and no telling how long I might be there. I promised to call home as soon as I found out anything, promised not to drive too fast, repelled the efforts of the dog, who wanted to go with me—I didn’t know how long he might be left in the car alone—and left.

“I was driving carefully, all right, but in that state of nervous agitation attendant on being pulled out of the solitude of the night to face unknown anxieties. I was praying, of course, in the unformed fashion one does in the face of such things. And then, some distance down the highway, that stopped.

“The praying stopped, the agitation stopped, the anxiety disappeared. It was 3:26 by the dashboard clock, which is always two minutes slow. I never saw the death certificate, but I don’t need to.

“Everything was simply . . . still.

“I was still driving; a car passed by me now and then. The lights went by, I took note of the road signs, but my heartbeat and my breathing had gone back to that state of quiet solitude from which I’d come. I tried to form a prayer, but the words wouldn’t come. Not that I couldn’t think of them, but that there was no need; whatever I would have asked had already been answered.

“Everything was just . . . peaceful.

“I sometimes feel my mother near me, sometimes summoned, sometimes not. She isn’t always there when I call, but always comes again, sometime. I reached for her, in the middle of the stillness, and felt her there, but it wasn’t she who answered me.

“I daresay I haven’t thought of my grandmother Inez once in ten years, if that. She was very old when I was born, died when I was eleven (I remember only because she died on my birthday). We saw her once a year, pro forma: a tiny old lady who smelled funny and spoke no English. We learned a few Spanish phrases, which we repeated to her like Latin prayers in church; understood, but with little sense of communication.

“She came into my mind then, though. White-haired, but with her face quite young—and with what appeared to be her own teeth, rather than her dentures, I noticed.

“‘Somos duras,’ she said to me, and then, ‘Somos.’

“‘Dura’ is a word that means hard. Depending on the usage, it means everything from difficult or painful (things are hard) to tough and resilient—strong. ‘Somos’ means ‘we are.’

“‘Okay,’ I said.

“I reached the hospital and parked in the visitors’ lot. There was no need for hurry, and I didn’t want to take space that might be needed near the Emergency entrance. It was a gentle night, very balmy. I passed a woman sitting on a bench outside the Outpatient Surgery Department, smoking. I smiled at her and nodded as I passed.

“I walked up the long ramp to the Emergency Trauma Center; it’s on the second floor. Two of my stepmother’s sisters were standing outside, crouched over their cellular phones like Secret Service agents. I touched one on the shoulder and she turned; her face crumpled up with grief and she embraced me, squeezing hard and thumping my back.

“‘It’s okay,’ I said, after a little of this. ‘I’m all right.’

“‘I’m not!’ she said, and clung to me, sobbing, as we went in.

“‘Somos duras,’ said my grandmother again.

“I saw his feet first. They’re just like mine; short and wide, remarkably small in proportion to his body. I don’t have sparse black hairs on my toes, and he had a chronic nail condition that made his toenails thick and yellow. The same round heel, though, and short, high arch; the broad, short toes that point up just a little, when the foot is at rest—ugly feet, but happy feet.

“There were several people around him; he was lying on a gurney, half covered by a flannel sheet. My stepmother was there, holding his hand; I took no notice of the others. I needed to see his face.

“He looked as he always did when asleep; he had a habit of falling asleep watching television. In the years after my mother died, before he married again, I would always get up at midnight when I was in the house with him, to wake him and tell him to go to bed. I think he was afraid to go to bed alone.

“His ears were faintly purple. My son has his ears; a smooth clamshell with a fleshy lobe. There was a deep crease across each lobe; I’d read somewhere that that’s an indication of a predisposition to heart disease.

“I had thought I would be seized by grief at the sight of him, and was surprised to feel instead the most peculiar sense of . . . completion. He was a happy man, for the most part, but not in any way a peaceful one; he had jagged edges that crossed his personality like fissures through a glacier. Always restless, always moving. A vicious and accomplished hater, a bearer of implacable grudges. Now that was finished. Not gone, exactly, but finished. Now he had a peace that he had always missed; he was complete.

“‘Somos,’ said my grandmother, very softly, and I knew what she meant.

“My stepmother embraced me, and I her.

“‘What happened?’ I said. She said she’d gone to bed at midnight; Dad followed her a little later. She woke about a quarter to three, because his breathing had changed; he was snoring very heavily. She poked him to roll over, and it changed again, to ‘horrible noises.’ She turned on the light, saw his face, and knew something was wrong; ran to the front bedroom to get her sister and brother-in-law, who were visiting from California.

“They ran back and did CPR while my stepmother called 911. They live only a few blocks from a major hospital, so the paramedics arrived in two minutes. They worked on him there, and on the way to the ER, managed to (she said) restart ‘part of his heart muscle’ but could not revive him.

“The unknown man at my father’s head came to shake hands with my stepmother, explaining that my father had been ‘nice and warm’ when he arrived; everything was all right. The priest, come to give the last anointing; there is a popular supposition that if the body is at least warm, the soul is still close enough to benefit.

“He was still warm; everyone had a hand on his body: bare shoulder, hand, or the huge round mound of his stomach—he was always overweight, but carried it all there. I laid a hand on him, too, for a minute. Then looked up and realized that I was looking at my uncle Albert, who lives in Albuquerque; my father’s last surviving brother, also my godfather. I hadn’t noticed him at first, because he looks like my father—all the brothers had a strong facial resemblance. It seemed completely unremarkable to see my father lying down and standing up, simultaneously.

“Under the rather surreal circumstances, it first seemed quite natural for Albert to be there. Ours is a very large family, and all through my youth, whenever someone died, all the relatives would gather, going from Albuquerque to California or back the other way; they’d all stay briefly at our house, as Flagstaff is midway. Then it dawned on me that my father had been dead for less than half an hour; I knew it takes at least an hour to fly from Albuquerque.

“‘What are you doing here?’ I blurted, thinking a bit too late that I hoped this sounded only astonished, and not ungracious.

“He was solemn, but not outwardly upset. He’s the last of the brothers, and in his seventies; he’s seen a lot of death.

“‘I was here,’ he said, with a little shrug. He’d come, by coincidence—or not—for a New Year’s visit. He and Dad stayed up all evening, talking and laughing, then went to bed at twelve thirty.

“My stepmother’s sisters—three of them, by then—came and went, bringing Kleenex, cups of water. The hospital attendant came now and then, a quiet, compassionate young woman, bearing forms to be signed, questions to be answered.

“Which mortuary? Burial or cremation? And—she apologized, saying by law she had to ask us—would we consider organ donation?

“‘Yes,’ I said firmly, hands on my father’s stomach. I felt strongly about it; I could feel my stepmother hesitate. She is the kindest and gentlest of people—no one else could have stayed married to my father—but consequently she can be bullied. I would have done it, if I had to, but she said yes.

“‘But are they usable?’ I asked, glancing down at him. ‘He’s sixty-seven.’

“‘I don’t know,’ the young woman said, frowning uncertainly. ‘I’ll check.’ She did. The corneas, she said; they could use the eyes and corneas.

“The sisters touched him constantly, exclaiming every so often, ‘He’s still warm here!’ and clutching whichever part it was (my father’s often-expressed opinion to my stepmother—frequently given in their hearing—was, ‘Your sisters are very good people, but’).

“I stood aside a little. They asked if I wanted to be alone with him for a little while, and I said no. It wasn’t necessary. It wasn’t necessary to touch the body again; I had no feeling that this was my father. I knew exactly where he was; he was with me, with his wives, with his brother, with his mother. Somos. We are.

“I was not upset at all, though I wept now and then in sheer emotional reaction. After a time, it became clear that there was nothing more to do—and yet it seemed impossible to leave. Albert said quietly that he would go back to the house and rest. More of my stepmother’s family came—she has a huge family, too, all very loyal and supportive.

“I looked very carefully. What of his features remained in me and my children, those I could still see. But what was unique, that I must remember now, because I would never see again? My hands are his, as well as the feet; my sister has his eyes. The swell of broad shoulders I’ve seen in my son since his birth; my youngest daughter shares the shape of his calves.

“At last the young woman came back and said softly but firmly that she would need to take him now, ‘to finish taking care of him.’ I touched one foot, said, ‘Goodbye, Dad,’ and walked out without looking back.

“Out in the waiting room, we met the young man from the organ-donor program and went with him to fill out the necessary forms. I have had few experiences more surreal than sitting in a consultation room at five in the morning, answering questions as to whether my father had ever accepted money or drugs for sex, or had sex with another man.

“The answers (no, by the way—or at least not so far as I know) all proving satisfactory, we left at last. I prevented any of the sisters from coming with me, with some difficulty, and headed home across the dark city. It seemed important to get home before the night ended, maybe because I thought it might seem more real by daylight.

“So now there are rips and rawnesses, surges of grief that catch at throat and belly. All the difficulties and distractions of dealing with sudden death.

“And yet I remember, and reach to touch that great stillness, like a smooth stone in my pocket.

“Somos.

“I was . . . astonished.”

* * *

Merenguero’s Daughter was watching the storyteller, nodding, clearly moved, murmuring something about la familia. I could tell none of us on the rooftop wanted to break the spell Lala had just cast. Into the silence intruded a faraway siren, of course, as always, with its whisper of distant pain. I thought of how, all through the city, right now, people were being ripped from their loved ones. Fathers and uncles and sisters-in-law were dying all around us, on ventilators or worse. The way she described her father—his ugly, happy feet—God, it made me ache for my dad.

“What a story” came a woman’s voice from across the roof. “Thank you for sharing it. It’s such a reminder of what we’re losing, keeping people away from their loved ones as they die. The loss of those last touches, the hands on the warm body. It’s heartbreaking.”

She was right. From where I was sitting I couldn’t see who it was, but she spoke for all of us. This damn coronavirus wasn’t just stripping away our ability to be together in life but also to be together at the moment of death, to say our goodbyes. A terrible thought passed through my mind before I could stamp it out: a wish that my father had died before this pandemic hit at all.

No. I would find a way to see him again.

Eurovision had turned to the new speaker, his eager-emcee smile looking a bit frozen at this point in the evening. “Welcome,” he said, a little too cheerfully. “I’m not sure we’ve met. Which, uh, apartment are you in?”

“2C.”

I was a little surprised. My bible listed 2C as empty. I hadn’t recorded her arrival on the roof that evening, either—she must’ve slipped past me, or joined us late. Her ponytail, lack of makeup, collared shirt, and preppy LL Bean plaid skirt looked out of place, especially here on the hipster Lower East Side. Plus, she was wearing a mask—an actual surgical mask. Where the hell did she get her hands on one of those?

“I just got here,” she said, a little nervously. “I’m from Maine.”

“Maine?” Eurovision asked, as if she had just declared her arrival from Outer Mongolia. “And you moved to New York City during a pandemic? Are you crazy?”

“Maybe I am,” Maine said with a little laugh. “I’m a visiting ER doc, right around the corner. At Presbyterian Downtown. I was surprised to land this apartment so close, actually. I volunteer through a program of medical workers coming to New York to assist with the Covid-19 crisis.”

“Oh,” said Eurovision, “sorry, I didn’t mean to— Thank you. Really. Thank you!” He said this—in complete sincerity—while also moving his chair back bit by bit, trying to look nonchalant. It’s not like I could blame him. Looking around, I could see others pretending to adjust their chairs, giving delicate little coughs as an excuse to cover their mouths, all the time quietly backing away. Taking stock of their distance from her. I don’t think the mask was making anyone feel any better. I realized I, too, was leaning back a bit harder against my red sofa.

“You’re one of the people we’re cheering for every night!” said the Lady with the Rings, with an edge of extra enthusiasm, as if to cover the rising tension.

“All except Vinegar,” said Florida acidly.

“That’s Jennifer, and I am thankful. Of course I am. Very thankful. I just don’t think banging on pots and hollering is a decent way to thank anyone.” She glared at Florida and then turned to smile at Maine.

Maine nodded, unperturbed by our nervousness. “My story is also about the end of life.” She paused. “Perhaps it isn’t appropriate? Given how much we’re surrounded by death these days.”

“It’s not like we can keep ourselves from dying by not talking about it,” said Vinegar, patting her knees decisively, “no more than we can get rich by not paying our bills. They come due when they come due.” She raised her chin and looked around at the rest of us. “So you go ahead and tell your story, because nothing’s off-limits on this rooftop.” Was it my imagination, or had these past few days of storytelling softened even Vinegar a bit?

Maine gathered herself up, speaking louder than the others had, perhaps to make up for the muffling of that surgical mask.

* * *

“This, too, is a true story. I hesitate to share it, because I am a person of science, trained to believe only in what can be tested and confirmed using rigorous scientific methods, and this story is about what cannot be proved. Some of you won’t believe me, and why should you? I am new to your building, just the temporary tenant in 2C, and since I never leave my apartment without a mask, you’ve never even seen my face. While you hide safely inside this building, I step out every day to meet the enemy. And when I return after my shift in the hospital, I’m sure you worry that perhaps I’ve brought the enemy home on my clothes, on my hands, in the air I exhale. I know this is why you avoid me; it’s because you’re afraid, and no wonder. With every ambulance that screams by, you’re reminded that death is right outside the doorstep. You can feel it, smell it, circling closer and closer.

“Just as Sister Mary Francis once could.

“She was a nurse in the Catholic hospital where I worked thirty years ago. She belonged to the Franciscan order, what I think of as the ‘friendly’ nuns, and Mary Francis was certainly that: round-cheeked, smiling, a dark-eyed little dumpling of a woman who wore clunky orthopedic shoes beneath her white nun’s habit. At forty-something, she had the serene face of a woman who’s at peace with the choices she’s made in life. She was one of a dozen Franciscan nuns who worked as nurses in the hospital, and initially, I didn’t pay any particular attention to Mary Francis.

“Then I discovered her secret gift.

“I first encountered it during morning rounds, when we medical interns accompanied the senior physician as he visited patients on the ward. As we approached one of the rooms, I saw Sister Mary Francis standing outside the door with her head bowed. Quickly, almost furtively, she made the sign of the cross and then she walked away.

“‘Uh-oh,’ one of the other interns whispered. ‘That’s a bad sign.’

“‘Why is it a bad sign?’ I asked.

“‘Because Sister Mary Francis always knows.’

“‘Knows what?’

“‘When someone’s about to die.’

“It’s not particularly difficult to ascertain that someone’s about to die. It certainly doesn’t require any supernatural talent. Any doctor can read the signs, whether it’s a deepening coma or a stuttering heart rhythm, and I assumed that Mary Francis could simply recognize the same clues a physician would. But when we stepped into that room, we did not see a patient on her deathbed; instead, we saw a woman who looked very much alive, even chipper. She was scheduled for a coronary catheterization, and she expected to go home that afternoon.

“But the patient did not go home. A few hours later, during her catheterization, she suffered a cardiac arrest and died on the table.

“That’s when I began to pay attention to Sister Mary Francis and her furtive little blessings. You had to be alert to catch her doing it because she did not make a big show of it. She’d simply pause to dip her head, sketch a cross in the air, and then she’d move on. A few days might go by, sometimes even a week, but whenever I saw Mary Francis perform that silent little ritual outside a patient’s room, death inevitably paid a visit.

“I know you are all thinking exactly what I thought: that Sister Mary Francis was one of those homicidal nurses you read about in true crime stories, an angel of death who slips into a patient’s room at night and smothers him with a pillow or injects him with a fatal dose of insulin. It’s only natural to assume there must be a logical explanation, because the alternative is . . . well, there is no alternative. Not if you believe in science.

“So I kept my eagle eye on that nun. I noted which patients she singled out for her ominous blessing, and how and when those patients expired. There had to be a pattern, I thought, something that would reveal how she managed to ensure their deaths.

“Except there was no pattern. While some of those patients died during her shifts in the hospital, others died in the operating room where she did not work, or on days when she was not even in the building. Unless she’d found some way to commit murder by proxy, Sister Mary Francis could not have killed them.

“The mystery began to drive me crazy. I had to know how she did it.

“One afternoon, while she and I were sitting at the nurses’ station, writing in charts, I finally found the nerve to ask her. Clearly she’d been asked that question before, because she did not even look up from her paperwork when she answered.

“‘Death has an odor.’

“‘What does it smell like?’ I asked.

“‘I can’t really describe it.’ She was silent a moment, thinking. ‘It smells like the earth. Like wet leaves.’

“‘Then it’s not a bad smell?’

“‘I wouldn’t call it bad. It just is.’

“‘And that’s how you know someone’s going to die? You smell it?’

“She shrugged, as if that ability were completely normal. To her it must have seemed so, because she’d been born with it. Whenever the door to the afterlife creaked open, she could catch the scent of what was approaching. She felt it was her duty to prepare the departing soul for its journey from this world to the next, and so she blessed them.

“I am not a superstitious person. I’ll say it again: I believe in science, so how could I accept this mumbo jumbo? Yet my medical colleagues in that hospital believed that Sister Mary Francis really did have the gift, that she really could peer through the veil between life and death. Perhaps they’d worked for too many years in that creaky old building, which was generally acknowledged to be haunted. In such an institution, where ghosts are considered part of the ambience, it wasn’t hard to believe that a Franciscan nun could smell death’s approach.

“If there was a logical explanation, I could not find it. Yet I continued to be skeptical. I kept waiting for her to show her hand, to make a mistake.

“And one day I believed she did.

“I saw Mary Francis pause outside the door of a newly admitted patient. She was not the man’s assigned nurse, and she had no reason to know who was even inside the room, but something made her stop. She bowed her head, made the sign of the cross, and walked on.

“A week went by and the man was still alive. Not just alive—he seemed to be in fine fettle. He’d had a minor heart attack, but his cardiac function and rhythm remained perfectly normal. On the day he was cleared to leave, I saw him walking in the hallway, smiling as he said goodbye to the staff. Sister Mary Francis has finally made a mistake, I thought. This man is definitely going home alive.

“Then ‘Code Blue! Code Blue!’ blared over the hospital speaker system. I sprinted down the hall to join the scrum of doctors and nurses trying to resuscitate a man who’d just collapsed. The same man who had smiled at me only moments before.

“Sister Mary Francis had been right. She had indeed caught the scent of death on him.

“It’s been thirty years since I worked in St. Francis. The place no longer exists. Buildings, like people, have finite life spans, and that old hospital, ghosts and all, was demolished to make way for condominiums. I still think about Sister Mary Francis, especially these days. When I pass people on the street, I wonder which ones will show up in my emergency room with a cough and a fever, which ones I will have to intubate. Which ones will not make it, no matter how hard I work to save their lives. With so many desperately ill patients now pouring into my hospital, I sorely need a Mary Francis at my side. Someone who can tell me which lives I should fight to save, and which ones are already lost.

“If she is still alive, she would be in her seventies now. I like to imagine her enjoying her last days in a cozy home with her sister nuns. A place with good food and kindly attendants and a garden where roses bloom. In such a place, death would not necessarily be an unwelcome visitor. And when her end comes, as it’s bound to, she will surely catch its scent. She’ll know that this time, the door has opened for her.

“And she will smile as she walks through it.”

* * *

There was a long, silvery silence. For once, the city was quiet, free of the ubiquitous sirens, even the distant ones.

“Oh my,” said Eurovision. His emcee affectations had temporarily abandoned him.

The Therapist said, “I can’t imagine what it’s like in that ER right now.”

“You have no idea,” said Maine quietly. “I’ve been a doctor for twenty-five years, and I’ve never seen suffering like this. They suffocate to death. The ICU is like a roomful of people being waterboarded, except all you can hear is the sighing of the ventilators. But you can feel the silent, end-of-life terror.”

Please, God, protect my father from that in New Rochelle. “When will it be over?” I asked. “Another month? Two?”

She looked at me, an infinite weariness in her eyes, and simply shook her head for a long time, her ponytail swinging, as if shaking would somehow derail the future.

Old St. Pat’s began tolling out the hour.

“Ah, the bells,” said Eurovision. “What would you all say to calling it a night, and meeting back up here tomorrow evening? That’ll give time for others to prepare your own stories. And maybe a few more will join us.”

Subdued, people began gathering up their stuff to go down to their separate apartments. I casually picked up my phone and hit the Stop button as I slipped it into my pocket. Back in Hades, I spent half the night transcribing the stories, surprised that I was almost beginning to like some of these tenants—despite my best intentions. Then I had an idea: maybe I could get the ER doc to find out what was going on in my father’s nursing home. They couldn’t just blow her off like they were doing to me.

When all this was over and I could see my dad again, I thought, I’d read him my account of our rooftop gatherings. It would at least get him off the TV, which, last time I was there, had echoed down the halls of Pussgreen Manor like the jabbering voices of the damned.