before. Although her view wasn’t from this side of the river anymore-what everyone also knew was that Mr Ryan was retaining his apartment on Pineapple Street in Brooklyn Heights, near us, and Mrs Ryan and Claire were renting a place in a mysterious Manhattan neighborhood called Alphabet City.
‘Go on,’ my father said, making a shooing motion with his hands.
When we reached the roof, Claire looked at the buildings across the East River. Back when we hung out a lot, we had names for each of the buildings we could see from my apartment-the tall pointy one was Lester, the squat one on the harbor was Fred, and the twin towers were Scooby-Doo and Shaggy, the only two characters on the show worth caring about. I glanced at Scooby-Doo-One World Trade-and counted twenty-two flights from the top and three windows over. My mother’s office. I’d never been inside it, but I was certain there was an official-looking name plaque on her desk, Meredith Heller-Davis. The room was still dark. I squinted hard, willing the light to come on.
Claire ran her finger along the edge of the charcoal grill. There was rust on it, but we used to cook out on the roof a lot. All four of us, my mother, father, my brother Steven and me, we would come up here and point at the boats and buildings and eat hamburgers. My father used to bring up a boom box and put on a bunch of old jazz tapes, even though my mother preferred music that, as she put it, ‘actually made sense.’ When it was time to eat, my dad turned his back and whipped up a condiment that he said was his Aunt Stella’s Famous Special Sauce. Once, I remarked that it tasted like nothing but mayo and ketchup mixed, and my mother snorted. ‘Stella probably got the idea from Burger King,’ she said with a laugh. My father chewed his burger. ‘Stella’s a good woman,’ he said stiffly, not that it was in question.
Later, my mother and I would watch the boats on the East River through binoculars, making up stories about some of the yachters. The man in the sailboat named Miss Isabelle still lived on his parents’ estate. The man in the yacht with a naked woman figurehead had made his fortune by patenting the long plastic wand used to separate one person’s groceries from another on the belt-how else could a man with such a tacky comb-over own a boat that big? When it was Steven’s turn with the binoculars, he always aimed them at the buildings across the water, watching the people still in their offices, working. ‘What do you think they’re doing in there?’ he asked out loud on more than one occasion. ‘I bet they’re doing math,’ my mother or I always suggested, struggling to remain straight-faced. Steven’s love of math was an ongoing joke between my mother and me; we were convinced that he slept with his graphing calculator under his pillow.
Claire’s belt was fastened on the very last notch. ‘So my new neighborhood is weird,’ she informed me, as if we’d been talking every day. As if I knew everything about her-which I kind of did. ‘Last night, I saw a man dressed as a woman.’
‘How did you know?’
‘I looked at his arms.’
I’d never been to her new neighborhood before, this mythical Alphabet City. When kids at our school traveled into Manhattan, they went to SoHo to shop, or to the Upper East or West Sides to visit grandparents. No one ventured into the East Village, and definitely not to the avenues with the letters.
The Staten Island ferry chugged away from the west side of the island, spewing a contrast of black oil and crisp white waves behind it. ‘So.’ Claire tapped the top of the grille. ‘What’s new with you?’
‘Not much.’ I kept my eyes on the ferry. ‘Same old, same old.’
Claire curled her hand around a rusted spatula. ‘I heard about your mom.’
A hot fist knotted in my throat. What did everyone know about my family?
Before I could reply, a noise interrupted us. Claire’s mother clomped up to the roof. My father followed. ‘Time to go,’ Mrs Ryan announced.
Claire crossed her arms over her chest. ‘We just got here.’
Mrs Ryan gave her a tight smile. ‘We have a lot of things to do today.’
‘You have a lot of things to do. I don’t.’
‘Well, you have to come with me.’ Mrs Ryan’s expression didn’t falter.
‘I can ride the train by myself.’
‘Seriously. Time to go.’
Claire put her head down. ‘Fuck off.’
My father’s eyes widened. Mine did, too. I’d never heard Claire swear.
Mrs Ryan swallowed, then stood up straighter. ‘Fine.’ She turned around stiffly and started back down the stairs. My dad and I stood there, waiting to see if Claire would move. She didn’t. My father looked blank. He wasn’t good at dealing with things like this.
Claire sighed. ‘Unbelievable,’ she eventually said, and stood up. The doorway down from the roof to our apartment suddenly looked too narrow for her to fit through.
My father and I walked them to the door. We watched them out the window as they marched toward the subway, not talking, not touching. The wind blew, shaking the plastic bags caught in the trees.
‘Did Claire ask you anything about it?’ my father murmured out of the corner of his mouth.
I shrugged. ‘It’s none of her business.’ Or yours, I wanted to add.
‘Claire’s your best friend.’
‘Was. Two years ago. For like a second.’
He jingled loose change in his pockets. ‘It’s okay to talk about it, you know.’
‘I don’t need to talk about it. There’s nothing to talk about.’
He looked at me desperately. The jingling stopped.
‘There isn’t,’ I repeated.
He pressed his thumbs into his eye sockets, breathed out through his mouth, and made a funny choooo noise, like a train pulling into the last station stop and easing on its brakes. Then, he patted my arm, sighed, and went into the kitchen to turn on the TV.
Claire was born one year, one month, and one day before I was. When we were friends for like a second two summers ago, she liked to remind me of this when she held me down and tickled me: ‘I am one year, one month, and one day older than you,’ she would say, ‘so I have full tickling privileges.’
She was going into ninth grade and I was going into eighth. We were forced to be around each other a lot that summer because our mothers, who both worked in the events department of Mandrake & Hester, a high-end private bank, had become best friends and rented a share on Long Beach Island. When my mother told me about it, I panicked. Spend eight weeks at the beach with a girl I didn’t know? I didn’t even like the ocean. And I wasn’t very comfortable with strangers.
My mother wanted me to like Claire-and even more, for Claire to like me-and at the beach, it didn’t seem that hard. Claire’s long, ash-blonde hair became knotted and caked with sand, and her full, pretty lips were constantly coated with Zinc. She wore ratty t-shirts and cut-offs, and she roughhoused, tackling me into the surf. She indulged my need to spy on our mothers, who liked to sunbathe on the beach and read magazines. We had a foolproof system: the lifeguard stand was on a mound by the dunes, and
