The Rooftop Wife

The bus let Ashley off at the corner at 2:10 in the morning. She was thirty-four and had worked the night audit desk at the hotel for five years, and the walk from the corner to her building never got easier. The heat wave had run four days straight. The air sat on her like a wet coat.

She climbed the three flights to the apartment she shared with Keith, for nine more weeks. They had agreed in April, over takeout and without a single raised voice, that the marriage was finished. The lease ran to the end of August, and there was one bedroom and one bed and a line down the middle of it neither of them crossed. He was asleep in the bedroom, snoring through the box fan that aimed at the bed. She left the hallway light off and went into the kitchen to eat standing up. Cereal, warm milk, whatever. Then she peeled off the uniform shirt in the bathroom and dropped it in the hamper.

She came into the bedroom to get a clean t-shirt and stopped.

There was a woman on the fire escape. She sat cross-legged on the iron grating outside the window, facing the room, like she had been waiting a while.

Ashley did not scream. She should have, probably. But it was 2 a.m. and she was tired and the woman did not look like she was going to break anything.

"Hi," the woman said. Her voice was normal. That helped.

"Hi." Ashley stood there holding the t-shirt against her chest. "You know this is the third floor."

"I know. It's a good height. Not so high you can't see faces. Not so low you can't see anything."

Ashley looked at her. The streetlight came through the slats of the fire escape and striped her legs. She wore shorts and a tank top and no shoes. Her skin looked a little off in the light, like the light had trouble sticking to it, but Ashley decided that was the hour.

"I'm going to need you to explain this," Ashley said. "Because I'm not calling the cops at two in the morning, but I'm also not just going to bed with a stranger on my fire escape."

"That's fair." The woman unfolded her legs and stretched them out along the iron. "My name is Sonya. No last name, I don't have one. I've been watching your building for three summers. You never noticed me because I don't come close to the windows until after everyone's asleep."

"You've been watching my building for three summers."

"This window especially. It's the only one where somebody leaves the curtain open past midnight."

"That's my fault. I read before bed. Keith sleeps through anything." Ashley pulled the shirt on. "Sonya. Okay. And you live where?"

"Nowhere, really. I don't need a place to sleep. I don't need sleep at all." Sonya put her palm flat on the iron grating. "This is the best spot in the neighborhood after ten. The iron holds the heat from the day. It's warm under my hands until almost dawn. You people pay for heated floors. I get them for free."

"You're sitting on a rusty fire escape because it's warm."

"And because of the people. You can see into six windows from here if you stand. Sitting you get three. People think nobody can see them at night, so they stop performing. It's better than television."

"Okay, that part's creepy."

"A little," Sonya agreed. "I know. But I'm not doing anything with it. I just watch. And tonight you caught me, so now I guess we talk."

Ashley sat on the edge of the bed. Her feet hurt. Twelve hours on the hotel carpet in bad shoes. She looked at Sonya and Sonya looked back and neither of them said anything for a bit.

"I'm Ashley," she said finally. "Obviously. You already knew that, probably."

"You said it to the desk phone at the hotel on Monday. I heard you through the open window when you rehearsed your shift handoff notes out loud. You say them twice, once to yourself and once to the phone."

"I do do that." Ashley rubbed her eyes. "God. Okay. Well. I'm going to sleep now, because some of us need it. Can I ask you to not be here tomorrow?"

"Do you want me to not be here?"

Ashley thought about it. The honest answer was no, which annoyed her.

"I don't know," she said.

"Then I'll be here and you can decide after."

Ashley woke at eleven with the curtain still open and the fire escape empty. She told herself she had dreamed it. Then she remembered she had not dreamed in years, and she made coffee and did not mention anything to Keith, because what would she even say.

* * *

The second night she got home at 2:15. Sonya was on the grating again, same spot, cross-legged, like furniture that had grown there.

Ashley stood in the window in her uniform. "Give me ten minutes."

She changed in the bathroom, got two beers from the fridge, and climbed out the window onto the fire escape. It was the first time she had sat out there in the six years they'd lived in the apartment. The iron was warm through her shorts, exactly like Sonya said. The city hummed down below, half asleep, dripping air conditioners.

"Beer?" she said.

"You don't have to."

"I know I don't have to." She handed one over. "But it's a hundred degrees at two in the morning and you sat on my fire escape twice, so you're having a beer."

Sonya turned the can in her hands like she was reading it. She opened it eventually. She drank a little and made a face that meant she was being polite.

"So this is what you do," Ashley said. "Sit outside. Watch people sleep."

"Watch people not sleep. You're the not-sleeper. You and the guy across the street who plays the same game every night until four."

"That's embarrassing for him."

"Very." Sonya looked out at the street. "Can I ask you something blunt?"

"You've been pretty blunt so far. Keep going."

"What does marriage feel like?"

Ashley took a drink. "That's a big question for a fire escape."

"You don't have to answer."

"No, it's fine. I just don't get asked it." She thought about it while the traffic light down the block cycled through green for nobody. "It feels quiet. Mostly. We met through friends when we were both twenty-eight, dated two years, got married. Keith works construction, comes home dirty, wants dinner and sleep. I work nights, so we pass each other like ships. We're comfortable. We don't fight. We don't really talk a lot either."

"Do you like it?"

"I don't dislike it." Ashley picked at the label on her can. "That sounds bad. It's not bad. It's just... I thought marriage would feel like something. I figured out around year three that mostly it feels like a well-run apartment. And I decided that was fine, because a lot of people have it worse, and I'm not dramatic, and..."

She trailed off. Sonya waited.

"And I guess I've never said any of that out loud," Ashley finished. "So in April we called it. Nicely. He gets his mom's old couch, I get the books, the lease runs out in August. Nobody cried, which tells you everything."

"Quiet is a strange thing to want and also to be disappointed by at the same time," Sonya said.

"Yeah. That's it exactly, and I couldn't have said it."

They sat and drank. The beer got warm fast. Ashley noticed she felt lighter anyway.

"I should sleep," she said at some point. "Same time tomorrow?"

"I'm always here."

"That's an unsettling sentence, but okay."

* * *

The third night it was worse out. Ninety-one at midnight. The box fan in the bedroom did nothing but move hot air around. Ashley came home at 2:20, changed, and climbed out with two more beers, and Keith was awake.

This had never happened before. She had the window half open, one leg over the sill, and his voice came from the bed.

"Where are you going?"

"Just outside. Hot in here."

"At two in the morning."

"Yeah. Well." She got the other leg over and sat down on the grating before he could ask a third thing. The window was open about eight inches behind her. Sonya was there, low against the wall, in the shadow where the window light didn't reach. Ashley held a beer up to her and Sonya shook her head.

"You're not on the phone," Keith said from inside. "Who are you talking to?"

Ashley's stomach dropped. She thought fast and it came out smooth, which scared her a little.

"It's my mom. She can't sleep either. We talk when I get home so I don't wake you."

Silence from the bed. Then the snoring started up again, the fake kind at first, then real. Keith could fall asleep mid-sentence. She had watched him do it at parties.

"You lied," Sonya said quietly. She had moved forward into the dim light.

"Yeah."

"Why? You didn't do anything wrong. You're sitting outside your own window."

"I know." Ashley looked at the beer in her hands. "It's just easier. If I said there's a woman on the fire escape, a woman I've talked to three times, then it becomes a thing. He'd want to see you. He'd want to know what you are, and I don't actually know what you are, and he'd ask questions I can't answer, and..."

"Your mom doesn't live in the city, does she."

"No. She's in Ohio." Ashley drank. "God. One lie and now I've got to keep the whole story straight. My mom calls at two in the morning now. That's my life."

Sonya pulled her knees up. "I could leave. You could go back inside and sleep and this would be over."

"No." Ashley said it before she thought about it. "No. Stay. Just... stay low if you hear him move. I don't want to explain you."

"Okay."

They drank. The heat pressed in. Somewhere down the block a car alarm went off and quit, and the city went back to its low hum.

"How long do summers last for you?" Ashley asked. "Yours. Not the weather ones."

"Longer than yours," Sonya said.

Ashley believed her. That was the part she turned over later, lying in the dark next to Keith, listening to the fan. She had believed a stranger on the iron outside her window, and it had felt easier to believe than most things she'd been told indoors.

The fifth night was still ninety-one, and Ashley got home at 2:15. She stood at the window with the screen still in place and watched Sonya sit cross-legged on the landing below her. The streetlight caught the edge of her jaw.

"You're early," Sonya said without turning around.

"You're always early. You're always just there." Ashley pushed the window up another inch. The screen was between them, old aluminum mesh with one bowed corner. "I can't climb out tonight. Keith fixed the bedroom door last weekend. It squeaks now. He'd hear it."

"So sit at the window."

So Ashley sat on the sill with her legs inside the room and her beer on the grating outside, and they talked through the screen like kids on a porch. It was stupid and she knew it was stupid and she did it anyway.

Sonya asked her about the hotel. About the man across the street with the game he played until four. Ashley answered, and somewhere in the middle of describing the handoff binder she reached out and set her hand flat on the screen, just to have somewhere to put it.

Sonya put her hand on the other side.

The mesh was between them but Ashley felt it anyway, and it stopped her sentence in her mouth. It wasn't electric. It wasn't warm. The closest she could get to it later was that it felt like the moment before a storm breaks, that flat pressure in the air, except it was in her hand and moving up her wrist.

She pulled back. Sonya pulled back too, fast, like she'd been burned.

"What was that," Ashley said. It wasn't really a question but it left as one.

"I don't know." Sonya was looking at her own hand. "I've never done that through anything before. Glass, screens, it should be nothing. It should be like touching through a wall."

"Well, it wasn't nothing."

"No."

They sat there for a minute. The traffic light cycled. Down the block the car with the bad exhaust passed, same as every night.

"Do it again," Ashley said, and then heard herself and said, "Wait. No. Maybe not. I don't know what that was and I don't love not knowing."

"That's fair." Sonya kept her hand in her lap. "For what it's worth, I didn't plan it. My hand just went there."

"Yeah, well. My hand just went there too, so." Ashley drank. "We're a couple of geniuses."

Sonya laughed. It was the first time Ashley had heard it, a short surprised sound, and it did something to the night.

* * *

The sixth night Keith was out late, a job running over in the heat, and he texted her at one: not home till 4, don't wait up. Ashley read it in the break room and felt the whole shift change shape. By 2:10 she was on the train thinking about the window and whether the screen came out.

It did. It just lifted and tilted and