Next day, Aunt Millicent’s knee
looked like a Texas grapefruit.
She put ice in a zip-lock and her feet on a chair and wrapped an ace
bandage around the zip-lock to keep it in place, but it kept sliding off anyway. She was in miserable pain. She didn’t say anything—in fact she
didn’t complain once the whole time, but you could tell. She smoked four cigarettes that
day. “That’s what I get for
overdoing,” she muttered, bumping around the apartment on her cane.
We
sat and read most of the morning and then she gave me some math problems and
bumped into her office to work.
When I finished the problems, I went into the office and she corrected
them and handed me a page of code she’d copied on her scanner.
“Still
want to work on the code?” she asked.
“Sure.”
“Take
this and circle any place you see the numbers five, three and eight side by
side. They can be grouped together
or separated by a space, or even at the end of one line and the beginning of
the next. Okay?”
“That’s
it?”
“For
right now.”
The
numbers were small and written in an old fashioned style and a few were almost
blurred out, so it took awhile to catch all the five-three-eight
combinations. When I brought the
page back in, Aunt Mill compared it to a second copy that had all the same
combinations circled already.
She’d been testing me. She
nodded, satisfied, and handed me another copy of another message. “Same thing. Fives, threes and eights.”
“What
am I actually doing?”
“You’re
discovering number patterns.”
I
did that all afternoon with different copies of different coded notes, never
the real thing, just the copies.
Then, after going through about twenty copies, Aunt Mill asked me to
count the digits and spaces between each occurrence of five, three and eight
and list them on a separate sheet.
Action packed, this code breaking.
When
I came in with my completed list, Aunt Mill was staring at her computer, screen
saver doing its waiting-for-you dance, cigarette crooked in her fingers, thread
of smoke gliding up, ash a half inch long.
“Aunt
Mill?”
She
flinched, ash dropping, nudging her mouse, computer screen lighting up with a
grid of numbers. I held out the
copies and my list. She seemed
surprised to see me.
“You
okay?” I asked.
“Just
thinking. All done with
those? What’s the largest interval
between occurrences?”
I
checked my list. “Eighty-seven
numbers.”
“What’s
the most frequent interval between them?”
“Most
frequent, let’s see. Um, I found
five times when there were seventeen numbers in between.”
“Good.” She handed me a yellow
highlighter. “Go back and
highlight between the seventeen number occurrences. Then write down the string of numbers between, in those five
examples, including the spaces between.
And be absolutely accurate.
One small mistake can really mess things up. Okay?”
I
nodded and marched out. I had no
idea what this all meant, what I was supposed to be looking for, or what she
was looking for, but still it was way cool.
That
evening she phoned in an order and sent me around the corner to bring back couscous d’agneau aux légumes. (Le
Saint Gervais was closed on Sunday
evenings.)
Monday
morning was torture for Aunt Mill.
She called a taxi to get to school. You could tell she hated calling a taxi. She didn’t even bother saying how bad
smoking was when she had her cig by the window. Then I had to help her down the stairs. It was super-slow going. Her jaw was locked the whole way
down.
Still,
she managed to write out two-dozen math problems before she left. Tough ones. Maybe she wanted me to share her pain. Or maybe she was testing her new
code-assistant. I couldn’t even
solve the first one. I stared at
it for like six months.
Nothing. I was tempted to
e-mail Lucia for help. Would she
even be awake? I wanted to crawl
back into bed and pull the covers over my head. Stupid math.
Escaping
into one of the green chairs, I read my book about Jeanne de la Motte for the
rest of the morning. The sun got
brighter. Math disappeared
entirely. Just when I was thinking
about getting up to spread butter and jam on a piece of grilled baguette, Sief
thumped into the window like a bird.
I
couldn’t believe my eyes. He hung
by a rope, four stories above the street, just squeezing into the little
balcony that jutted out a few inches from the living room window. He signaled for me to open up. I stared like an idiot. He became frantic, tapping the glass,
shouting, “Come on, Grace Kelly, let me in.”
“Are
you crazy? You could kill
yourself,” I said when I finally forced open the window latches. He tumbled into the room, flat on his
face, looking up with a triumphant smile.
“Grace
Kelly!”
“Don’t
call me that. What do you think
you’re doing?”
“I
come to see you since you never come to see me.”
“You
never heard of knocking on the door?”
“This
is more adventure-full.”
“Yeah,
but what if I wasn’t here? You’d
just hang in the balcony like a squished sardine till Aunt Mill came home?”
“I
would make a cat burglar escape back to the roof. I comes down from the roof, you know. And anyways I knew you were to be
here.”
“You
are so cracked, Sief.
“You
want to go for a walk?”
“No. I want you to get out of here. I’m busy.”
“You
are just reading of a book.”
“Maybe
I want to read a book.”
“Maybe
I will read of a book too.” He
started looking through Aunt Mill’s stacks, pretending to be interested. “Is there anything of books on cat
burglars?”
“What
is it with you and cat burglars?”
“That
is what I am going to be—a famous roof man. I come in like silence, steal the lady’s jewels, and vanish
into the night like a black cat.”
“Are
you kidding? Why don’t you just
turn yourself into the police now and get it over with.”
“The
police will never catch me, Grace Kelly.”
I made ugh-face. He grinned
and shrugged a kind of it-is-so-obvious shrug,
then turned and closed the windows.
“Do
you know anything about math, Sief?”
“Like
what?”
He
followed me into the kitchen. I
handed him my sheet of problems.
He studied it, picked up my pencil and then stopped. “You got another paper?”
I
went to my room, brought back a notebook, flipping it open to a clean
page. He sat down, licked the end
of the pencil, started writing out the first problem, saying, “when I am done
you must destroy of this paper so that Madame Millicent never knows I do this for
you.”
“Is
that the right answer?”
“Of
course it is the right answer.”
I
watched as he worked, slow and steady, running through all twenty-four problems
one after the other, never saying a word, looking up now and then to think,
setting back to work till he had them all answered. I didn’t trust him so I followed what he was doing the whole
time and sure enough one problem after another became clear to me just by
watching. How could that be? How could he do them and I understand
how he did them, understand that he had the correct answer even, and yet when I
was alone I couldn’t see past the first problem?
“Fini,” he said, handing me the notebook. “Now copy out the numbers with your own
hand. Then I destroy my
paper.”
He
handed me the pencil. But I
couldn’t do it. I sat there
staring at the answers, feeling like a creep-tard, thinking where this would
end up, thinking about all the lies that would grow like weeds from this one
lie. So what if I could never do
math and break codes and so what if Aunt Mill was disappointed with me—what did
it matter to me if she was disappointed, or rather, which kind of disappointing
did I want to be? I tore out the
page from my notebook and handed it back to Sief. “Here, just take this and destroy it.”
He
didn’t take it. He just
stared. I couldn’t look him in the
eyes. “You are a very cool cat,
Grace Kelly.”
“Can
you just take it and forget about it.”
He nodded. I didn’t know
what to say next. I wanted to hit
the disappear button. “You want to
go for a walk or something?”
“Only
if you want to.”
“I
think I got to get out of here for awhile.”
He
nodded, creased the notebook page and shoved it in his pants pocket. “You want to go for someplace
super-super cool?”
“How
far is it?”
“Not
far.”
“I
just thought of something. The key
to the apartment is in the safe.
Without the math answers I can’t get the key to get back in.”
“No
problem,” he said. He took the
notebook, ripped out a sheet of paper.
“Go get of your coat.”
When I came back with my hat and coat he was standing at the door,
folding the paper into a tiny square so it would keep the latch from catching
when the door was pulled closed. I
stepped out. He eased the door
shut behind us. I started down the
stairs. “Not down,” he said, “up.”
I
paused. He pointed then started up
the steps, stopping two flights up, at the top floor landing, where, around a
bend in the shadowy hallway, a ladder—last used to storm the Bastille—rounded
steps, rounded vertical rails, varnished till it was purple-black—was set into
the frame of an open skylight. Up
Sief shot, through the open hatch, hopping outside in a flash, smiling back
down at me. “Come on, Grace Kelly.”
Eyes
wide, I climbed. He took me under
the shoulder as I came through the hatch.
The angle of the roof was steep so we just sat there for a moment, my
butt glued to the cold, gray zinc.
I could make out Notre-Dame and Tour
Saint Jacques and Le Centre
Pompidou and even, way off, the tiny Eiffel
Tour, plus all the ragged, orange chimney pipes and antennas and satellite
dishes and gray rooftops of the Marais, of all Paris really, spreading out forever in an immense forest of
creamy stone.
“Cool.”
“Told
you.”
He
crawled on all fours to a blocky chimney with a dozen pipes coming out the top
and undid a rope from around one of them, dragging the rope up from the roof
edge where it had dangled down to Aunt Mill’s window.
“You’re
totally nuts, Sief.”
He
coiled the rope into a tidy package and tucked it into a corner, setting a
brick on top of it, then said, “Come on.
I show you round.”
He
sauntered off, bent low, staying to the crest of the roof. When he got to a chimney block that
stuck up six feet and formed a barrier from one side of the building to the
other, he turned back and signaled for me to come. I crawled on all fours, moving like a snail, keeping my body
low. When I got to the chimney I
grabbed hold of Sief, then let go, realizing how creep-o that was.
“I
show you the other side.” He
monkeyed up some metal handholds, balanced on the top of the chimney block for
a second then disappeared down the other side.
“Sief?”
“What? I am right here,” he called back. “Don’t be afraid.”
“I’m
not.”
“No?”
“No.” I grabbed the iron holds and pulled
myself up hand over hand, heart thumping, ears ringing, short of breath. I leaned onto the top of the chimney
block, squiddled my legs over, shimmied across on my butt. With an ear-to-ear smile, Sief looked
up from the other side.
“I
thought maybe you fall asleep.”
“Where
are we going?”
“All
around. This is my private park.”
He
put out his hands and guided me down as I snailed down the handholds. He took off across this roof, strolling
like he owned the place. I got
more comfortable, walking a tad more upright. There were actually yards of roof on either side and the
angle wasn’t very steep here, so there was no way you could fall, unless you
went crazy suddenly and took a giant running leap at the same time gravity
decided to take a vacation, but somehow the strangeness of being up here, or
the badness of it, or whatever, made me wary anyway. We scuttled around a smaller chimney block where the mansard
roof dropped off steeply, sticking to the foot-wide rim around the chimney, hopping onto yet another zinc rooftop. On and on we went, one building connected to another to
another in an endless chain.
It felt like we walked for miles, till we climbed onto the bottom ledge
of a slate-covered dome on the last building and sat side by side.
“This
is maybe my all-time favorite place in the world,” said Sief. I could see why. We were scary high, all alone with this
view that nobody else except maybe pigeons could see, with all the church
towers poking up through a forest of slate and zinc, all carving odd angles
into the sky. Sief pointed out the
Pantheon and Sacre Coeur and the Opera House and Tour Montparnasse and a hundred other things. We sat looking out a long time.
“Why
did you come to Paris, Grace Kelly?”
“To
learn math from my aunt.”
“They
got math teachers in America.”
“Yeah-but,
well, my mom’s having a baby and she had complications, you know, like trouble
with the baby, so they wanted me out of the house.”
He
nodded, puffed out his lips. “You
missing your mom?”
“I
guess. Yeah. Not really. I mean, I don’t know.”
“All
mixed up.”
“I’m
not mixed up.”
“Maybe
not you, but your feelings are.”
“I
am my feelings.”
“Maybe
not so much sometimes.”
I
gave him a that-makes-no-sense
look. He shrugged.
“So
are you really going to be a cat burglar?”
“Maybe. It would be fun. Only trouble is, when I pique somethings, you know, when I steals them, I don’t
feel so good after. I always
worrying about the person, you know?
But maybe if it was from a rich-rich person, like jewels and diamonds
that they don’t need, that would be different.”
“How
do you know they don’t need them?”
“Did
you ever see someone begging for food?”
“Yeah,
of course.”
“Did
they ever wearing diamonds?”
I laughed.
I laughed.
“I’m
seriously.”
“I
know you are. But I’m freezing,
Sief. Let’s go back.”
He
nodded, hopped off the ledge, held out his hand. I took it, hopped down and followed him back the way we
came. He walked fast now, like he
was walking on a sidewalk and not a roof.
He was like a cat burglar,
zipping up and over each of the chimney blocks that divided one building from
another. I tried my best to keep
up with him, pretending I was the great cat burglar’s assistant, with pockets
full of diamonds and jewels, with the police hot in pursuit, with endless days
of sunning on a tropical beach ahead, if only we could make good our escape.
The
small chimney block with the foot-wide rim got me. I didn’t notice the satellite cable, or whatever it was,
till it snagged my toe. Over I
went, bumping down the roof, taking the end of the cable with me. To say I freaked doesn’t come
close. To say that time slowed or
stood still or any of that crap doesn’t come close either, except when I wake
up in the middle of the night, reliving it, screaming-heart-slamming awake from
a nightmare that feels like time is
standing still and I am still
falling.
All
at once I saw the edge of the roof coming closer, felt the ridges of the zinc
roofing panels smacking into my back, heard Sief shouting, running, flattening
himself so he had maximum surface friction as he slid down feet first toward me,
felt the cable, still hooked on my toe.
Like a trout in mid-air, I flipped myself up, fingers to toe, latching
onto the cable. It swung me round
in an arch, down the roof, away from the chimney, while whatever little nails
that held it popped out one after another—plip-plip-plip—till the cable snapped
free and I lurched down again, holding a plastic coated wire tied to
nothing.
As
fast as Sief was coming to me, which was insanely fast, I slid faster, digging
my nails into the zinc rib of a roofing panel till my fingernails and skin
burned off with the friction. And
then I was at the end. Feet
whisking over, then legs, waist, chest, breath stopped, voices from somewhere
screaming, Sief screaming too, my finger tips clamped into the nubby lip of
metal for a fraction of a second while some voice from my stomach, yes my
stomach I swear, shouted at me to just hang on for even a tenth of a second
more, just to slow the fall, which would surely kill me, but a tenth of a
second more of life would somehow be worth it all.
How
fast we think, we react. I saw
Sief’s eyes. He saw mine. He was not going to reach me and if he
did, all he would accomplish was falling with me since there was nothing for
either of us to hold on to. He
looked so horrified, so determined, and I knew if I held on for even a
nanosecond longer he would reach me and grab on to me and go over with me, like
a complete idiot. So I let
go.
☠
