Nova Ren Suma - A Room Away From the Wolves

NOVA REN SUMA

A
ROOM
AWAY
FROM THE
WOLVES

Algonquin 2018

For my mothers wild city
the place that stole my heart, broke me and made me broke, and still somehow made my dreams come true

&

For E,
here with me through it all

A room is a place where you hide from the wolves outside and thats all any room is.

Jean Rhys, Good Morning, Midnight

Contents

part one

In the Dark

When the girl who lived in the room below mine disappeared into the darkness, she gave no warning, she showed no twitch of fear. She had her back to me, but I sensed her eyes were open, the city skyline bristling with attention, five stories above the street. It was how I imagined Catherine de Barra herself once stood at this edge almost a hundred years ago, when the smog was suffocating and the lights much more dim, when only one girl ever slept inside these walls of stacked red brick.

I was with my friend, if she could be called a friend, on the rooftop that night, close enough to pull her away or slip a word into her ear, close enough to push. I saw how far the gate was, how long the jump would be to reach it. I was there to witness how she flew.

It was dark, and I blamed the darkness. For those few moments, when she was midair and not even kicking, I practically became her. I grew her long legs and longer eyelashes, I lost the jumble of knots in my hair, I let the mistakes spill out of my suitcase and scatter without a care into the wind. I was falling, and falling fast. There was a hum in my ears like a song leaking through floorboards. The windows on the way down were all lit up, every one, people I didnt know living their private lives inside as if no one could see. The skyline above sparkled the way stars used to at home, and I didnt want to ever hit ground. I was someone here. I was someone.

Maybe that was what she saw, what she felt, what this house turned her into. She was out there beyond the ledge with nothing beneath her feet. She was high enough to clear the gate many times over. I swore she was out there. I swore the air had her, the night had her, the lights cast a ring all around her, and then the patch of darkness was empty.

I could see past where shed been, as if I were sailing straight over buildings, beyond spires and scaffolding, past roof gardens and water towers, down through Lower Manhattan to the southern tip of the island, where the gleaming black bay took over. I saw the whole city spread out before me, sinister and strange and perfect. The air was clear, and she wasnt in it. No girl was falling or flying. Every window was dark. And how oddly quiet it became, like a patch of forest where no person had set foot for what felt like days upon days.

When I remembered where I was, I crept closer to the edge, gripping the bricks to stay steady, and I did what I knew she wanted.

I leaned out into the vacant nightthe air boundless, feathery gray, and blooming with possibilityand I looked down.

Solid Ground

Monet Mathis, my downstairs neighbor and the first person on this patch of crowded earth who knew who I was and not who I tried to be, didnt disappear into thin air, not exactly. The night I lost her was clear and gray, hot and only faintly harsh-smelling. I couldnt tell where the tangles began and the stories took over, but I spotted her as soon as I looked down. Shed made it to the sidewalk. It was past midnight, and she was on the other side of the gate, on hard ground, beyond the limits of where I could even hope to reach her.

The story became that she fell out of the night sky without warning. According to some witnesses on the street, she came out of nowhere, dropping like debris from a passing plane. Others said they saw a figure on the rooftop, a figure flirting dangerously with the edge, and assumed she must have sent herself sailing. There were those who said she hurtled down from the sky howling, fighting the wind. Then there were those who said she dropped like a stone, knocked unconscious by the fall, that she didnt make a sound until the crack of impact when her body met sidewalk.

They didnt know a thing.

It was true Monet landed just outside the gated entry to Catherine House, where she had a room that faced east on the fourth floor. Passing strangers couldnt have known that this was a boardinghouse for young women, first opened in 1919 after a personal tragedy, and that it was the last remaining boardinghouse of its kind in Manhattan. In the gates webbing of wrought iron, the words catherine house could be made out, but the houses namesake was long gone and the gate itself secured for the night, as it was solidly past curfew. No girl was getting in or out, even if she banged on the bars. We all agreed to that rule when we moved in.

The girl who appeared from the skythey didnt know her name, they didnt know her way of feeding on secrets while never offering any authentic ones of her ownnarrowly avoided being skewered by one of the spiked posts gaping up at the darkness. The sidewalk fractured beneath her, hairlines skittering in all directions as if from a lightning strike. Belly down, arms reaching, cheek to pavement, she was the center. The sound of her landing practically popped eardrums. Then quiet, so much quiet the streetlights could be heard letting out their hum. The M20 bus could be made out careening along the nearest avenue, heading downtown through the Village, all the way to South Ferry. A car alarm bleated in the distance.

Though it was late, a small sleepless crowd gathered around to help, and to do a little gawking. A few people from the block came down from stoops, gripping house keys, searching out the source of the noise. The old lady in the basement apartment across the street came out clutching a squirming cat. The lady was threatening to call in another complaint to 311. A gaggle of tourists, whod gotten turned around where Waverly Place met, somehow, impossibly, Waverly Place, paused to point. A man walking his tiny dog on a studded leather leash glanced at the body, then doubled back and took a detour around the block. They were all strangers to us. The house may have seemed like a magnet to tragedy, a patch of shrieking static in the otherwise calm. What went on inside they would never know.

To them, Monet was of another world, there on the sidewalk, caught and pinned to the page like a winged bug. She was illuminated in the glow of the streetlamp. Her short hair made an upward swoop at the back of her neck. She wore white, but the night turned it graythe way ghosts are gray when they dissipate and cant be made out from the shadows. She was perfectly still, one foot shoeless, her mouth open. It wasnt clear if she was breathing.

Photographs were taken, filtered, captioned, shared. People shuffled around, waiting for an ambulance to arrive. A yellow cab screeched to a stop on the corner. The driver emerged and stepped out into the street, vacancy light still on so he could catch a fare. Someone poked the body. Someone said, Dont move her, wait for the ambulance. Someone, out of sorts, hunched over and started to sob.

Stories swirled on the street about her possible motivations. Some were saying she jumpedshe had the look of a jumper. Some assumed drunken accident or foul play. These were hunches. Guesses. Dangerous, dangling insinuations.