American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [27]
It was in this spirit of anticipation that she would look out the window of their second-floor apartment waiting for her mother to return from a class or a cup of coffee with a friend, and would try to commit the street scene to memory in case she was called upon by the police to make a report in the event of her mother’s disappearance. Her powers of concentration and observation were absurd. She accepted this burden as perfectly normal. She never questioned that it was necessary for her to exert such mental discipline, just as she never questioned why she lived with the expectation that one day her mother would not come home. She took note of the colors of the cars as they drove by and the order in which they drove past. She watched the rain fall and studied the patterns of the drops on the window, the rhythmic timing with which one lone raindrop would slide down from the top to the bottom, snaking through the freckled surface of the glass, giving the impression that the window itself, overcome with emotion, had begun to cry. She memorized the look of the leaves as they waved back and forth to one another from the trees, and she envied their casual relationships. She memorized the clothes on the people who occasionally walked past the little house on the quiet street. She remembered their postures of worry or calm and she thought she could read entire lifetimes into the slope of a shoulder or the back of a head. Her memory was mystifying because she didn’t appear to be thinking or even exerting the slightest effort as she took in so acutely the world. If a hand had been waved in front of her face while she was looking she would have registered it, but her eyes would have acknowledged not a flicker of awareness.
The young girl sat in front of the window and fixed her gaze on an insect traversing the glass in such a way that it appeared to be climbing up the side of the house across the street. The insect flew away. A man was sitting on the roof of the house across the street. Honor did not recognize him. She saw that he was wearing a blue windbreaker and khaki pants. His face was turned to his left as if he were waiting for someone and gazing across the rooftops for their arrival. His legs dangled down. The building was three stories high. Honor had never seen anybody up there before and now she stared with amazement as the man, who appeared to be anywhere from fifty to seventy years old, turned his head to look in the opposite direction. The young girl opened her mouth to call out to her mother but her mother was not home. She continued to stare at the man who had stood up and had put his hands in his pockets. Then he took his hands from his pockets, stretched his arms above his head as if he were about to perform a salutation to the sun, and as he lifted his arms two enormous dove-colored wings unfurled on either side of him. The young girl opened her mouth to exclaim, even though her mother was not home, but this time there was no sound because her powers of speech had been eclipsed by fear. The man stood on the roof with his wings outstretched for some time. They were the size of American flags and their feathers looked thick and soft from a distance. They did not appear to be shadows or a mirage. The man was wearing sneakers. He folded back his wings, and the space around him returned to its usual emptiness.
There was no one walking down the quiet street. Honor, as if instructed by some higher self, left the house and called up to the man. He was friendly and unthreatening and he climbed down from the roof, wingless, and accepted her invitation inside. He was an angel. He was thinking of working in the neighborhood. He subverted her expectation of those in his profession with his plain, almost bland demeanor. He seemed sad. He was an average height, medium-build man, handsome in his youth obviously, with a healthy complexion and a muscular torso that moved gracefully within the confines of his blue windbreaker. He had a full head of graying hair that was ruffled from the wind and clear green eyes that took in everything.