through so much, with the miscarriage and everything, and it’s difficult to know that none of the people she normally counted on were there for her.”
Shame and outrage swelled, nausea with claws. Your daughter was a bitch, Mrs. Iredale. Your daughter peeled us off one by one like strips of dead, sunburned skin, and—
“Anyway, what do I know? It just shakes me to think about that dream. Here I thought someone else was trying to hurt her, but the person who hurt her was her.”
Edie and someone she trusted. Someone who threatened to push her off the building, who’d wandered into the room at just the right time, who knew how to pick up a handgun, throttle high on the grip, click off the safety, nestle the trigger inside the crease of the pointer finger’s knuckle. My heart pounded in my ears.
“Anyway, I’m sorry to be unloading on you.” She stood and her purse slipped from her shoulder. She caught it awkwardly. “I should probably get going.”
“You don’t want to climb up Summit Rock?” I asked.
“I can’t anymore,” she replied, and left.
I stood looking up at it; I pictured tiny Edie scrabbling up its face, sunlight rippling off her Ariel waves. I began to climb it myself, thrusting my weight forward against its pitch. At the top, I looked around: dense trees in every direction, no real indication that this was the park’s highest point.
Sometimes you can’t prove something. There’s no empirical evidence, no definite input from your senses. But you just know. You just know.
I looked down at my feet—black sandals, red toenails, the dirty hipster spelunking crammed so far into my past—and pictured how blood would flow over the rock’s surface here, rolling outward and then channeling into its crevices. As I watched, the stone turned to glitter and something pitched up my spine. I’m going to pass out, I realized, and my head and knees dropped instinctively.
“Hey, lady, you okay?” someone called. I blinked through the glitter, which beat hard inside my skull and hands. You’re okay, just breathe, you’re fine.
“That lady looks like she’s about to boot. Lady, you okay?” The rock was coming back into focus and I turned my head to see the teenager, wide-eyed and alarmed, clutching at her friends.
I opened my mouth to tell her I was fine, but what came out instead was a cough, an intense, body-racking hack that began somewhere deep and grew and grew and grew until my lungs squeezed shut and out came a stream of vomit, acidic and foul. The three girls gasped and made grossed-out noises. I spat and sat back on my haunches, crying.
“I’m sorry, I’m okay,” I croaked, standing carefully. We stared at one another, and then I turned and walked away, a blotch of my fetid insides drying on the rock behind me.
* * *
I almost skipped work on Monday, thinking vaguely that I was in trouble for Friday anyway, remembering that I needed to get a new phone but what was even the point, and then at the last minute I pulled on a dress and hailed a yellow cab in front of my building.
On the bridge, Manhattan blared into view outside the window, the morning sun a spotlight on the whole jagged skyline. I leaned over and stared like a kid, noticing how all the stubbier buildings grazed the true skyscrapers’ knees. How huge they must have seemed when they were first constructed; how solid and invincible. Now they were just background noise, anonymous and serving only to give the massive towers contrast.
A subway roared past us on the bridge and I jumped at the noise. In the rearview mirror, the driver’s eyes fell on me.
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yep,” I lied, although of course I couldn’t be.
Bewilderingly, no one mentioned my absence on Friday. Truly no one would miss me if I were gone. I answered emails and passed story proofs in a fog, closing the door to my office as often as possible so that no one would try to speak with me. At night, I cleaned up my desk before I left, deleting some personal things from my hard drive and wiping the crumbs off the space around my keyboard. I walked all the way to the subway entrance and watched it for a moment, the frantic influx and outflow like ants at the top of an anthill. The breeze picked up, and I walked over to the ferry instead, feeling the floating docks bow under