wasn’t possible for Andy to be sitting here in front of her, not as a teenage boy anyway. Was he a ghost? A spirit come to call? Rather than answer he drew his knees up to his chest, placing his hands out into the snow on the roof behind him. He stretched his head back and looked up into the sky. She realized for the first time, though the temperature was in the twenties, he wore no jacket. Just a dark colored t-shirt and jeans.
“I remember when we used to look at the sky together Rosey,” he said. “Remember? You used to sit on my back porch and we would just look into the night sky and talk for hours.”
She nodded her head, and opened and closed her eyes a few times as if it might make the young boy vanish. As if it might restore some sanity to her world.
Sanity? Being stoned out of your mind and jumping off a building in the middle of the night is sane?
Shaddap
A thought slowly slipped into her mind. If he were in fact a ghost, that would mean Andy had died. She felt a loss she didn’t think possible. Andy must have had died while she was living her life of party-time, and she hadn’t even known. And now he was a ghost come to her on the night she was going to die.
Party-time---
“Your whole life was party-time, that’s why we lost contact.”
She looked up at him. Could he read her mind?
“Who are you?” this time almost shouting it. “What do you want? Why are you calling me Rosey, no one calls me that. That’s not my name. My name’s Sally and always has been. You need to get down from this roof; your parents will be worried about you.”
She stood up wanting to pull him up from his sitting position and make him tell her who he was but she couldn’t stand. Her legs felt like rubber and she swayed with the effort of maintaining her balance. Her thighs bumped the ledge behind her and she sat back down hard, almost teetering backwards over the edge.
“You’re going to fall for sure if you don’t stay seated.”
“I must be really far-gone if I’m starting to have hallucinations,” she said softly. The boy, if boy he was at all, didn't respond. He sat in the light coating of snow, watching her closely.
She stared back, “Are you Andy?” She began to believe it might be some type of last-ditch effort of her subconscious to stop her destructive side from the planned nosedive. Maybe, she summoned the image of Andy to rescue her, as he had done so many times in their youth. She had taken advantage of his good nature and obvious love for her. Many was the night, when her grandparents fought with her until she left in frustration, that she had woken him by throwing rocks at his window. He never complained, always letting her in to sleep in the bed while he slept in the chair. Telling his parents he was sick the next day so he could skip school, then waiting until they left for work, to make them both breakfast.
He nodded slowly, never taking his eyes from her.
She hung her head and began to weep, the alcohol allowing the tears to come easy. Andy stood, and as he had when they were young, he reached his hand to the nape of her neck and brought his head to rest on hers as she cried. She had needed him for so long, but had been too ashamed to call. She had heard through the few calls she had made to her grandparent’s before they died, that he had gone on to college as everyone thought he would. She also wound up in exactly the type of life everyone thought she would.
She pulled the boy close as she cried burying her head in his neck. He smelled of summer, wet grass and fresh tilled earth, of ozone before an afternoon rain, and of apple trees and cherry blossoms. He smelled of home. He whispered soft reassurances to her and patted her back while she wept. He felt real; certainly no illusion would have substance. She held him tightly, her grief and loneliness found solace on the shoulder of a teenage boy. After what seemed like hours, but couldn’t have been more than a few minutes, she pulled back, wiping at the tears on her face and trying to look at him closer.
“If you’re Andy, why are you so young? Andy would be my age now, older even.”
“I am what I am now because my soul stopped the night you left Rose. The night you told me you were leaving for L.A. my being shattered. I am this way, because my life, in many ways, stopped that night even though my body went on.”
She blinked and tried to clear her head. The whiskey was settling in now and was beginning to get a firmer grip on her, and things were beginning to make even less sense.
“So you are just an illusion then? I thought so. S’too good to be true.”
“I didn't say I was an illusion, only that this is how I was that night, and will remain until you come back home.”
“Back home?” She looked at him, unable to articulate the questions she had. He still had his hand on her neck and went on speaking softly to her.
“I am now, what I was then.”
She nodded, though she couldn’t understand what he was saying as he went on speaking.
“What’s so bad in your life that you'd consider suicide Rosey? What’s so horrible?”
She laughed, but there was no humor in her voice as she spoke, “Because I’m bad Andy. I’m bad. That’s why.” She shook her head, and looked away. “I’m what most people refer to as a loser. Do you get it? I’m not what you bring home to ol’ mom and pops. My own folks didn’t even want any part of me; they dumped me at my grandparent’s. I’m not the girl next door or did you forget? Don’t you remember what they used to call me in high school?”
He reached out his hand and brushed the tears from her cheeks. He then smoothed her hair back from her forehead, much the same way he had when they were teenagers sitting on his back porch under a moonlit sky, back in any number of summers when they were kids. “I remember. I also remember that within you is goodness, I see it now as I saw it then. One day you too, might see it, but until you do, you’ll continue to find yourself on rooftops, watching life as it passes you by below.”
“Life has passed me by as long as I can remember,” she said as she stood and turned around, stepping up on the ledge again. “And I’m tired of fighting it, I’m tired of what my life has become. I’ve reached a point now where I actually have debates with ghosts. I really can’t go on like this.” She turned her head to look at the boy, her vision much worse now that the last of the booze was absorbed into her system. She could barley make him out, but it wasn’t due to the lack of light. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, letting the tears run down her cheeks. She turned back to look out towards the night, noticing the winos still sat at their fire by the tracks. She swayed with the night’s breeze, the snow blowing its icy barbs into her exposed face. She looked into the pre-dawn sky and noticed it had lightened considerably. Sunrise was not far off now but she no longer wanted to see it.
“Life passed me by Andy. And I got no one to blame but myself,” she whispered.
“Come down Rose,” he said, appearing on the ledge next to her. “There’s no need to be up here. Just take my hand. It’s simple, just take my hand and we can go home. It’s simple.”
She didn’t turn to look at him, “Is it? Nothing’s been simple for a long time. Not for as long as I can remember. Everything’s been hard. I don’t even know where I went wrong; I don’t even know what happened. I think—- She trailed off, not knowing how to finish, or even what she was trying to say. It all seemed so confusing. When she was stoned, the streets didn't look so dirty, the feeling of opportunities lost, not so distressing. When stoned, even if only for the moment, life was bearable. Now, however, with the reality of adulthood pointing its many-fingered hand at her, the sense of guilt cut too deep and the reminders of her failures as a person were far too much to bear. These truths, so long held dormant by self-indulgence, now came to slap her in the face.
Party-time Richy, party-time
The wind cupped her body like a familiar lover, gently pushing her towards the edge. Her head rolled on a neck that seemed made of elastic, dipping forward until her chin rested on her chest. The lights of the city shone, then retreated, as she swayed to a melody onl
y she could hear.
“Take my hand Rosey, you don’t need to do this. Just take my hand, just for now. There are thousands of rooftops throughout the city, you can pick anyone of them you desire if you still are of the mind to, but for now take my hand and come home.”
She turned to look at the boy as he held his hand out to her. His young face so familiar, and though she wanted to believe it was him, so desperately needed to believe it, she just couldn’t. It wasn’t possible. But if not him, then what was it? Was it her psyche calling from the deepest part of its memory, a spectral reminder in the form of a teenage boy from her childhood to reminisce about old times on a cold rooftop in Chicago?
“Go home? I don’t have a home.”
“You’ve always had a home Rose, always. It’s there now, as it was when you left it. Everything is the same as the day you left. Everything. And you can go back if you want. Just take my hand.”
He held his hand out to her. She looked from his face to his outstretched palm. Could she believe that a ghost from her past had come to rescue her from her own demons? It would be nice, but as everything else in her life that was good, it wasn’t real. Goodness, like the spirit before her, was nothing but an illusion. It could only exist in the mind of a fool. She looked at his face; the glasses had crept down his nose again. He was also