Shya Scanlon - The Guild of Saint Cooper

“Blake’s in another place,” Kent said.

I opened my eyes. Everyone was staring at me.

“Everything all right, honey?”

“When I was probably sixteen,” I said, “just about when I figured out I was the center of the universe, I used to close my eyes in bed and listen to Mom and Dad talk. I didn’t think of it as eavesdropping at the time — I don’t even think I listened much to what was being said — but it was astonishing to me how life simply carried on in my absence. Mom, you’d be talking about your work, or taxes, or the news, or whatever. You know, just unremarkable, quotidian whatever — the more banal the better, actually, because I’d lie there and listen and think, there’s no way people would intentionally make this stuff up to fool me into thinking the world was real.”

My mother was wearing a look in her eye I knew to be one of sly approval. It was a look she wore when some peculiar slant of perception tickled her.

“I’m so glad you decided to believe we exist,” she said.

I leaned forward. “Yes, me too.”

Kent began to bring the dishes into the kitchen, my mother disappeared into her bedroom at the back of the house, and Blake came around the table to sit beside me. She could see I’d had a moment of some kind, and was being tender. She quietly took my hand and ran her fingers along the inside of my arm, gently, softly, so that it gave me gooseflesh.

“Are you all right?” she asked, once we were alone.

“I’m sorry about yesterday.”

Blake sighed. “Me too. So what’s up?”

“It’s just the book. I don’t know. I look around me and… I’ve just spent so much time blocking everything out that I look around me and everything is barely recognizable.”

Blake pushed her face close to mine and opened her eyes wide. “Everything?”

I nodded toward my brother, who was standing in front of the sink, running water drowning us out.

“I look at Kent: all of a sudden Mr. Fix-it. What can I do? I’m dead weight around here, and it’s kind of painfully obvious.”

“Wow,” Blake said. “Two clichés in the same sentence!”

I pushed her away, and she giggled.

“Oh, come on, I’m sorry, I was kidding! Look, you’re being a little dramatic, don’t you think? You’re here, and that’s what matters. You’re here.”

Blake picked up a piece of carrot from the table and slipped it absentmindedly into her mouth.

“You’re right,” I said. “We’re here.”

I stood. It will be terrible, I was thinking, when I have to remind her of this conversation and use her words against her.

“I’m going upstairs for a second,” I said. “There’s a line I need to get down on paper before I forget.”

“See? There we go.”

I walked upstairs and paused at the top, listening to Blake tell Kent that I was feeling useless. Kent made some remark I couldn’t quite hear, and Blake laughed. I went through my room and out the door to the roof. My mother had put the door there with the idea that a roof deck would follow it, but it would now forever open to the flat black tar of the addition. I crawled around to the side and up to the peak. The roof tiles crumbled slightly under me, sending a trickle of sticky grains down to the driveway below. The sun was disappearing behind the Olympics and the dying light caught along the brutal spikes of the monkey puzzle tree. A light breeze spun the pinwheel fixed to a house on the block behind ours. I watched for crows.

“Hey, up there — psst.”

I looked down toward the voice, one I nearly didn’t recognize, to see a small figure standing right at the edge of light cast from the living-room window. It was Alice. She was partially hidden by the overgrown vines along the fence separating our driveway from Brock’s, peeking up and into the house as someone’s movement flicked a shadow across her face.

“Your parents are worried,” I said.

“Can I come up there with you?”

I pointed to the ladder — still up against the side of the house. “You’re welcome to try,” I said, “but you’ll have to cross in front of that window, and if you’re seen I can’t promise my mother won’t march you right to your folks’ house. Or even Kent.”

She waited for a moment and then moved swiftly up the ladder. On the roof, she crab-walked over and sat beside me. She was wearing cutoffs and an overlarge orange T-shirt with the word “Californication” on it in silver, puffy letters.

We sat for a while in silence while the sun set. “How would you describe that sunset?” I asked finally.

“I was just thinking that,” Alice said. “Maybe, fleshy? Or no, a wound?”

“The sun set like an open wound.”

“Yeah, see?”

“Well, I’m not sure that covers the range of colors we’ve got up there. Don’t you think we should somehow indicate the spectrum?”

“Meh,” she said. “Do one thing, and do it well.”

“I like that.”

To the south, vast darkening patches were eclipsing neighborhoods until now speckled with light.

“When I was probably about your age, I used to look out my window,” I said, tapping the roof, “and wonder what was going on behind each spot of light. It was incredible to me that so many people were living their lives, doing whatever they were doing.”

“Huh. I guess it’s true what my dad’s always saying.”

“What’s that?”

“Kids grow up faster these days.”

“Ouch.”

“Hey, isn’t that your mom?”

I looked down to where Alice was pointing, and sure enough, my mother was carefully walking through the back yard. She looked over her shoulder, but only at the porch below us. I held my finger to my lips and we watched in silence as she pulled a cigarette out of her pocket and lit it. Seeing my mother sneak a smoke was fun, in a childish way, and Alice was stifling laughter. It was silly, I thought, that my mother would find it necessary to hide her behavior from us, her family. The thought that she’d expect us to get mad saddened me. This was her house, after all. We were all just guests. It wasn’t like she was doing drugs.

Then it dawned on me.

“I don’t think that’s a cigarette,” I whispered.

Alice looked at me with delight, and a laugh rose up inside her that she wasn’t able to contain. It was a squeal, a bird call, really — a strange, nearly inhuman sound that, in the silence of the falling darkness, hung in the air like a warning shot. My mother looked up and I ducked, pulling Alice down with me, and we lay on our backs on the roof. The stars were coming out, spraying the sky with flecks of white paint. There were more of them, I noticed, now that the city had cut its level of light pollution, and I was reminded of my first days in New York, where it had always seemed to be night without sky.

Below us, I could hear my mother crunching back through the tall, dry weeds toward the house.

“Shoo!” she said. “Shoo, shoo!”

I peeked over the edge of the roof and saw her staggering around, arms raised and waving, trying to protect herself.

THE LARGE PALE WOMAN sitting beside me scrolled through an app affording her an endless supply of aphorisms for the train ride home. I looked without moving my head, straining to see what wisdom she’d been given. For the sake of authenticity, the lines appeared on a scroll, a weathered papyrus curled at the top and bottom. She read each one quickly, then, with a flick of her thumb, hurled it into the digital abyss.

The first one I could see clearly was from Dante. “The experience of this sweet life,” it said.

Flick.

The next was from Woody Allen. “Seventy percent of success in life is showing up.”