went up to the roof and stared out at all the tall buildings, the sky hazy with the glow of the city. She sat so still that the pigeons, unsettled by her arrival, eventually touched down and flocked around her. As the weeks passed, they learned to anticipate her arrival, especially after she started bringing them morsels left over from dinner.
Sometimes, the words Lucy whispered to the pigeons were the only ones she uttered all day, other than the terse conversations she had with Mary. The frequency of her visits with the pigeons became a barometer for her loneliness. A hundred times, Lucy thought about running away. But where would she go? She had nothing, not a dime to her name. Mary had known about her secret hiding place all along, allowing Lucy to keep adding coins and bills to her stash until the night before they left, never letting on that she knew. Now she kept their accounts at the rooming house and diner, and stored her money in a cloth wallet that she wore around her neck, even while she slept.
There was no way to escape. And even if she could, the penalty for leaving was one that Lucy could never bear. She wouldn’t give Mary a reason to hurt Garvey further. So she waited. She just had to endure a little longer. And endurance was one thing Lucy knew how to do well.
Mary told everyone they met that Lucy was her ward. No one asked questions. The people here were nothing like Lucy’s old neighbors in Los Angeles. They were not friendly. They seemed willing to take Mary’s explanations at face value, and if they didn’t seem repulsed by Lucy’s damaged face, they didn’t seem the least bit interested either. Lucy watched the other girls in the building grow bigger and bigger until one day they simply disappeared, and she would know they had given birth and gone back to whatever lives they’d had before, or whatever new ones they were able to carve out for themselves.
* * *
Finally, the baby arrived, making remarkably little fuss during her arrival, as though she knew her conception had already caused enough problems.
A few nights later, they packed their suitcases. In the morning, Mary would go to the train station for the first leg of her journey back home, but before she left she would give Lucy the money she owed her and the key to her new apartment, a shabby studio near Mission Dolores. She seemed surprised by Lucy’s decision to keep Patricia—Lucy had chosen the baby’s name from a little booklet one of the girls had left in the rooming house parlor—but also indifferent. For her part, Lucy’s decision had been made after one glimpse of Patty’s tiny mouth, her black eyes bright with life, her little hands shaped like starfish. Besides, she could never have left Patty at the orphanage, knowing that the staff wouldn’t try to place a baby with mixed blood. Lucy refused to doom Patty to the life she herself had narrowly escaped.
Lucy had little to offer, but it would have to be enough. She would find a job, someone to watch Patty while she worked; their needs were few. She would take care of Patty and she would not be afraid and she would not allow fate to swallow them as it had her own mother. She would survive as she always survived. I can, Lucy had whispered to herself the first time she held Patty in her arms. I can.
* * *
Lucy waited until Mary was asleep to make one last visit to the roof. The baby was asleep and would, if the experience of the last few nights served, remain asleep for at least a couple of hours, more time than Lucy needed.
Lucy climbed the twisting staircase, out into the drizzling, misty December night. Fog obscured the buildings all around, creating glowing coronas around the windows where lights burned all night long. Lucy looked out over the rooftops, across the financial district, toward the sliver of the bay that she could see on clear days. In the tenement a block down Franklin, she imagined figures silhouetted against windows, and wondered, as she had every night of the past three months, what Garvey was doing at that moment back in Lone Pine.
Lucy took her customary place on the parapet at the roof’s edge and immediately the moist air surged into her ears, her eyes, her lungs. It was a small inconvenience. She