05.07.2001
She thought a lot of things that hadn't gone the way she planned. She mulled it over while she watched the people on the street fourteen floors below scurry back and forth in a strangely comfortable pattern. The building was a large iron cast structure from the century before the last that had recently passed. The building was the subject of much debate when the city’s landmark committee buzzed like bees about what else in town they wanted to preserve. They were a high powered knitting circle that decided the fate of buildings worth millions but they couldn’t get around to preserving what everyone figured was already a landmark. She had been told that it was such on her first day, three weeks after she moved into town, and it wasn’t until a year later while paging through a book on the history of the city that she found it to be false. She had always liked the building, and had always especially liked the windows that seemed almost carved out of the façade on which she now stood precariously. While no one down below seemed to notice what was happening above their heads – being more concerned about the days chores, accomplished or otherwise, and wondering what they would do with their evenings – her coworkers, some of whom were her friends, cried out to her asking her why.
She didn’t know why. She knew that it had been a hard day and that for some reason the nagging thoughts that kept racing through her mind provided the impulse to step out onto the ledge. The window was high – much higher than her barely five foot person could comfortably climb – and was forced to lean over the window ledge – carefully clearing off the planted pots before hand so as not to spill them – and pull herself up and gently out the window. She still wore her black boots that zipped snuggly up the sides of her athletic calves and, while they helped steady her on the ledge refusing to let her weak ankles give out, they also proved to be something of an impediment in her movement as she inched along the weather worn outcropping that connected each of the windows on her floor. When she found her spot, squarely between the windows at which sat her friend Patty sat and her boss Ted, she leaned back carefully against the iron of the exterior wall and kept her weight on her heels providing her with an almost comfortable position that required little effort to maintain. She wanted to think and somehow the city was quieter up there making it the perfect place to do so.
Nearly the perfect place anyway.
The wails of Patty – who had seen her hoist herself up onto the windowsill, at first thought that what she was doing was something of a joke – distracted her more than all the others. She liked Patty. Patty had been nice to her when she needed to be nice to and was appropriately condescending when she needed another woman to tell her what her mother should have which was one of the things she wanted to think about. She wanted to think about her mother. She wanted to think about reasons why the woman who was supposed to care for her daughter and teach her how to be when she was older would disappear. She wanted to know why her mother washed all of her husband’s dishes and put away all of her family’s clothes before permanently disappearing to the supermarket for a six pack of Miller. She wanted to know why a note wasn’t left with an explanation, leaving her and her siblings to her father’s bourbon induced rantings about how her mother was with another man at that moment and starting another family. She wasn’t able to think about any of it though because Patty, who was held back from climbing out herself by Robert and Jean, waved her arms out the window and cried in a most distracting way.
She closed her eyes, leaned back, and tried to focus on the unusually quiet traffic noise that floated up from below. She must have looked as though she was preparing to jump because Patty’s wails grew exponentially louder. Ted poked his head out his window and started talking to her in the southing managerial voice he usually reserved for those times when he had to call in a charge of his and explain that the company didn’t believe as though they had earned their expected three percent raise but that if they worked just-a-little-bit-harder, they could easily get it next year. "Come down," he said gently. "Roz, Come on down." He looked so earnest with his singular brow arched in an expression of genuine concern and his normally well-groomed chestnut hair making short trips back and forth as the wind whipped through it.
It was almost funny, she thought, that everyone was so concerned. She had no plans to actually leap from her precarious perch yet people that she didn't like and who she was pretty sure didn't like her peeked out from every window and tried to wave her back into the building. The thought put a large smile across her face and she hugged her arms around her body and felt the pressure as though it was the entire office that was squeezing her. She had never known what she wanted to do with herself and was never quite sure that she even liked her job, but she felt good about it then as though her coworkers were waving their care and concern towards her instead of trying to entice her back in.
"I’ve don't like how you wear flats with your skirts," her boyfriend had said to her at their high school graduation party. He wanted to break up with her and that was the only reason he gave. "You just don’t look sexy," he said. "It’s too easy to imagine you barefoot and pregnant." His words created tears in her eyes she couldn't wipe away. She had been seeing him since midway through their junior year and figured that they would always be together. She didn't apply to a university because she figured that she could take classes at the junior college near by while he got his auto repair certificate. She thought that the two of them could get a little apartment across from the grocery and have barbeques with their friends during the summer months. She forever associated the smell that was all around on the first real day of spring with him because of the day they had gone for a hike up into the hills.
"And, Roz, I don't want a girl who's looking to get that way," he continued. She wouldn't, she answered. She would be however he wanted. She just didn’t want to end like that, she said. "Whatever," he replied. "I just graduated high school today, babe. My life's just beginning." And that was how her first boyfriend broke up with her. Her few friends had never gotten along with him and she had all but abandoned them by the, so she found herself a quiet place on the deck of the house the party was held at and curled up on a lawn chair to be alone.
The building on whose ledge she stood was old. Guidebooks claimed that it was among one of the first skyscrapers to ever be built – something that surprised her when she saw that it was only a little of twenty floors – and that it was also of the rare cast iron construction type. It had taken her a long time to finally understand what cast iron construction meant and, upon discovering, was forever impressed. The tragedy of the building though, was that because it was iron that created the façade, parts of it were far from suitable for standing because of sheer age and deterioration caused by the ionization of the metal. She didn't notice the rust when she inched along the side and she didn't feel the slight give from the ledge when her boot pressed in. Roz didn't feel anything until a two-inch section beneath her left foot suddenly crumpled like wax paper and fall to the sidewalk below. The sensation that the loss of footing created caused her to glance down and she noticed that two police cars had pulled up into a V at the foot of her building, pointing to the mobile phone store that occupied the ground floor retail space. She watched as the police who had occupied their cars scurried into the building to talk her down and it felt like seconds before she realized that no one needed to because she was already on her way.
When the ledge gave way, the boots that had made it a comfortable place to stand restricted her movement enough that it was impossible to attempt a recovery. She'd never had much balance and her foot slipping through clad in a five-pound shoe just pulled her down. For a second, every sound in the city was excruciatingly clear to her. A couple bickered on the sidewalk below her. The sidewalk she was headed towards. Patty stopped wailing and quietly mumbled, "Oh Christ." A cab below honked at another that honked at another that stood for a second too long at a traffic light recently turned green. Inside the building, she faintly heard Chris talking about the Jets and then she fell.
She didn't cartwheel so much as belly flop. The way her foot had pushed through had tilted her so that she watched as the ground, fourteen floors away and getting closer every second, rose to greet her. She flew by the twelfth floor and people the next day who saw her told their friends that she smiled to them on her way down. The truth was though, she wasn't smiling at anything in particular. The police who would later interview those who witnessed her fall would explain that the wind forced her face into an expression resembling a smile, but the witnesses wouldn't believe them. And for that they'd be right. She did smile as she fell. All fourteen floors of it with a grin on her face.
She didn't know why her mother had left her. She didn't know why she had never gone to college. She didn't know why her boyfriend from back home had been so ridiculous. She didn't know why she really went out onto that ledge but she smiled. She wasn't happy about falling and wouldn’t have done it by choice, but the end result wasn’t such a terrible idea to her. It provided a degree of certainty where her life had been full of the opposite before. There were things she still wanted to do, and places she still wanted to see and she regretted not having done any of it until a second to late.
The last thing she saw was bubble gum. She didn’t know the guy who was had tried unsuccessfully four times to quit smoking, who had spit his Wriggly's out one the sidewalk. She didn't know that it had happened a summer five years previously and that for a week people were getting it stuck on their shoes and cursing their gods silently for their little tests in life. She wasn't aware that she herself had walked over it many a time on her way in and out of her building. She just knew that it was directly in front of her and that the little brownish plastic-looking bump on the cement sidewalk was as good as anything else to be the last thing she saw because it didn't matter to her what it was. She knew what was going to happen to her and the kinds of things people would say about her in the month or so afterward before it was completely erased from the collective memory and it became like it didn't happen. She knew that she wouldn't ever know why things had happened but she realized that it was okay.
The only shame of it was that she wasn't going to be able to tell anyone else.