I’ve always wondered what her dentist would have said if he’d ever gotten a chance to see her teeth again.
It wasn’t a hard thing to do, and I was able to get a closer look at her mouth than she expected, because I had a telescope, all the better to see everything on the earth and sky I was missing. Roni stood in her window and smiled a wide, crazy smile, and I let it fill the telescope’s eyepiece, and first drew her teeth the way they were, how the ones around the side tilted in and one in the front overlapped the other. Then I concentrated really hard and started changing the lines a little at a time. Twice she said it hurt, but didn’t want to stop.
After we were done, it took a while before she came back from the bathroom mirror. But she said I’d done a good job.
It wasn’t the first time I’d fixed something, and I was better at it by now than I was before, when I was smaller and my fingers didn’t move as well, and this was all new to me, and something my parents didn’t understand. All I’d done until that time was little things around the house, like switch the arms and legs on a dancing figure that spun around on top of my mother’s music box. They never suspected, not until the night they had a party, for Christmas, I think, and they marched me around to all the guests, and had me show off things I’d drawn so everyone could see what a great artist they had here.
One of the guests asked me to draw his portrait.
So I did.
Except I drew him the way I wanted him, because I didn’t like him. He was loud and his breath stank and he spit when he talked and it hurt my ears to be around him, so first I drew his ugly flapping mouth, and then I smeared it out, and his eyes, too, to stop him from looking at me the way he was starting to.
That changed the party in a hurry.
My parents figured things out, finally, and made me put him back together again, but I was scared by then, and didn’t draw as well, and it was the first time I’d tried to make anything the way it was before. A few days later, when I was eavesdropping on my parents as they argued about what to do with me, I heard them say the man was going to be having surgeries for years.
So it was good to help Roni.
But there wasn’t much else that needed changing, so the rest of the time I just drew without any other reason behind it, mostly other places I would rather be, if only I knew how to get there.
The school year ended for everyone but me, and summer got hotter. Whenever I wasn’t having lessons and Roni wasn’t somewhere else, we lived at our open windows, so our top floors got warmer, too, and we wore the windowsills smooth with our elbows.
Plus we’d never taken down the rope.
“Do you think we should?” I asked one night.
“No. Definitely not,” she said. “They never paid any attention to what’s going on over their heads before, so why would they start now?”
So we used the basket to pass stuff back and forth, like books and magazines and comics and music and other things we liked, plus things we made. I sent her drawings, some to keep, and she sent me some stories she was working on, not only to read but for me to draw pictures for them.
She admitted they were all set in the place where the songs came from.
Roni had never stopped singing after that first night. I was glad of it, and by now she didn’t seem to mind if I heard or not. I still didn’t understand the language, and she wouldn’t tell me what the words meant, but I began imagining what they must’ve been about from the sound of them. And from her stories, which I did understand. These were mostly about girls who killed trolls and ogres, or held them captive forever, or held them captive awhile and then killed them. At first I felt sorry for them, because as a fellow prisoner I knew what they were going through, but then I realized each one of them had done something terrible to the girls, so it was probably for the best when the princesses and peasants and warrior girls started by cutting off the monsters’ hands.
Then, one evening, when the sky was soft and purple and fireflies flickered close to the ground, she peered at me with her head cocked at a curious tilt. “It was you, wasn’t it?” she said. “Those people in the park, in the winter. You did that, didn’t you?”
I’d been waiting for this for weeks. “I didn’t mean to. It was an accident.”
“Three different times it was an accident?” She laughed the way you laugh when you don’t believe something, but didn’t sound mad. She hadn’t known them, so what was it to her if their heads had come off. “How did you do it without paper?”
I asked if she ever had known what it was like to want to do something so bad, only not be able to, that you thought you were going to explode. She didn’t have to think about it. Well, that was me without paper. Until I’d noticed a layer of frost on the inside of the windows overlooking the park.
“All I did was look through the glass and use my fingernail to scratch an outline around them.” And then flick my fingernail across their necks. “I didn’t mean anything. The first time I didn’t even know it would happen.”
She looked confused. “When I first asked you how it worked, you told me you did have to mean it.”
Right. I had. So maybe I was mad at the people for being able to be out while it was snowing and I had to stay inside. Maybe I’d done it the second time to make sure the first was really my fault. Maybe a third time just because I could. Mostly I remembered the way they fell, first one part and then the other, straight down into the snow without any sound.
“Is it something you’ll always be able to do?”
“I guess so,” I told her. “But I heard my parents talking once and they were wondering if I might grow out of it someday.”
She nodded, very solemn, very serious. “I have to think about this.”
“Are you mad at me?”
But she was already gone from the window. I still heard her voice, though, and it gave me hope: “I’ll never tell on you, if that’s what you mean.”
Later that night I was awakened by the basket clunking at the window. I turned on a light, the only light burning in the whole world, and got out of bed to see what she’d sent me. It was a picture, Roni and two boys, one obviously older and one who looked younger, plus a woman and a man. Roni wasn’t smiling, at least not so you could see her teeth and whether any of them were crooked or not, and I sort of remembered what it was like, having to pretend to smile that way.
Her voice was a whisper now, floating like a mist across the space between our rooms.
“If someone was going to come over, and I told you what time, and you knew who to look for, and you saw him, could you do it then?” she said. “The trick with the head?”
I rubbed my eyes and looked at the picture some more. “Who to?”
She made a sound I’d never heard. “Don’t make me say it.”
A little later I turned out the light because maybe it would be easier on her that way, and I listened to her breathe and leaned in the window in the moonlight so she could see I would stay there for as long as it took.
“The one in the middle,” she finally said.
It was early August when I heard her crying. I didn’t even know she did that, because she seemed very much older to me, twelve or maybe as old as thirteen, and I thought nothing could get to her that bad any more.
I suppose I’d always been afraid that all of this would only be for the summer, or a year, anything but forever, that it was too good to last. I’d made a friend and so had she, and as far as I knew, no one else in the downstairs world was even aware of it, and this was just the way we liked it. But tomorrow she would be going away again. They would be coming to pick her up and take her home again.
“Nothing will change there,” she told me. “They say it will this time, but I know it won’t.”
It was a long time before I understood what she really meant by that. At the time, all I knew was that it meant a lot to her, meant everything to her.
“You could come over here,” I said. “I’ll hide you.”
She laughed through her tears. It had been a long time since I’d heard it, the you’re-such-an-idiot laugh. “You don’t think your parents will notice me down there looking for the keys?”
“That’s not how I mean. Just come across. Like we did with the paper and everything else.”
“On the rope? It’ll never hold me.”
It could. I was very sure of this. I told her how it could.
I didn’t mean for this to make her cry even harder, but it did.
I stayed awake the rest of that night, pinching myself whenever I got sleepy, in case Roni changed her mind. It was kind of fun, because I hardly ever got to see the sunrise, and now I had a reason, something important to do for once.
“Okay,” she said when the sky was first beginning to go pink and orange. “I think I trust you.”