He used his key to enter the house and locked the windowed patio doors behind him. His dog came running and Simon leaned over, petted the thick white fur. “Hey, Scooter, you good? You hungry?” In the kitchen, he filled up the dog’s bowl with kibble, gave him fresh water, took a bottle of red Gatorade from the fridge, and left Scooter munching away.
Simon climbed the wooden staircase to the second floor, hitting each creak deliberately, his hand sliding up the rail. Usually, he took a sharp right turn into his bedroom, the door to which he never left open, but he had this morning, to show his mother he could be neat, an organized human being. He went down the hall instead, past his parents’ bedroom, past the bedrooms formerly inhabited by his older sisters, Phoebe and Rachel, to the very end where a thick rope hung from the ceiling like something left over from an abandoned lynching. He pulled the rope hard and released the hidden ladder to the attic.
Over the years, he had made many secret trips up there, always hoping to find something more than the leftover rolls of pink insulation, the trunk of old stock quotes that belonged to his father, the box of costumes his sisters had worn for Halloween when they were children, a brown tool chest filled with hammers and nails and the like that no one ever used. He opened the lid and pulled out a screwdriver.
At the far end of the attic, facing the street, was a diamond-shaped window not meant to be opened. Simon unscrewed the panes and stacked them on the floor. Then he dragged over his father’s trunk, stepped up, and boosted himself out the window, onto the flat roof of his home. He took a long swallow of his Gatorade.
He had never seen the neighborhood from this height: desert plants instead of grassy lawns, front doors painted red, orange, yellow, and green. Their own door, which he could not see, was blue. In the late afternoon heat, trees were drooping in front yards and the houses looked sleepy.
He had only ever lived in this house, in dry, dusty Bakersfield. His parents and sisters had once lived an entirely different existence before he was born, in a place with snowy blue winters, where they made snowmen in the front yard and played games in front of the fireplace. For some reason, he was thinking of this when he walked across the roof and looked into the backyard. Shanks of sunlight sparked up from the shallow water in his old wading pool, and he remembered playing in it when he was little, Phoebe and Rachel sitting on the grass, dunking him again and again.
It felt good to be up here alone, above it all, where he could think quietly. What he had told his mother he needed to do. He kicked off his tennis shoes and curled his toes over the roof’s edge. He drank down the rest of the Gatorade and left the bottle on the gravel. To be free and airborne suddenly seemed a wonderful thing to do at the onset of summer, and before giving it any more thought, Simon Tabor leaped out into the pure blue sky, experiencing seconds of marvel and awe before he plummeted down. Later, he would remember nothing but the way the water had sprung up like a waterfall in reverse, how the sun-warmed drops rained down on him. Then he lost consciousness.
Nathan Felt, the new neighbor from across the street, a man whose belongings had been unpacked the year before, but he had never been seen, watched Simon soaring through the air, and thought, maybe, though it couldn’t be true, that kid could really fly. When he heard the splash, then the implosion when Simon struck the ground, he dialed 911, and ran across the street, through the Tabors’ gate, into their backyard. Simon was half in and half out of the water, the plastic hissing with a leak, and he held Simon’s hand until the ambulance slammed to the curb and burly men raced into the backyard with a red medical box and a gurney. They strapped Simon’s neck into a brace, strapped him to the gurney, yelled out, “Desert Memorial,” then took Simon away, and Nathan Felt waited out front for some member of the family to return.
It was both parents at once two hours later, driving their cars into the garage, the mother waving at Nathan as he rose from a boulder in their front yard.
“You’re the new neighbor, well, not so new now,” Renata Tabor said, placing a cake box on her car roof. “They had his favorite cake,” Renata called across the garage to her husband.
When Nathan Felt walked into the garage, Renata was thinking he was handsome, the kind of man she wished her eldest daughter, Phoebe, would date. But Nathan Felt wasn’t saying, “It’s nice to meet you.” Instead he was saying, “I’m so sorry. And I’m sorry, but I don’t know your son’s name—” and he continued on, tripping over the words he had considered how to say, about what he had witnessed—their son leaping off the roof. And what he had done—his immediate call for help. And the aftermath—that Simon had been unconscious when Nathan reached him, but he stayed with him and the EMTs had come quick. He was only part of the way through when Renata pressed her hands over her mouth to stopper her screams. Nathan Felt did not tell the Tabors how it sounded, the roar when their son struck the cement.
The streetlights were against them. Harry braked hard at the first red, then he sped up and caught yellows all the way, until they blew into emergency parking at the hospital. Renata was desperate, Harry wild-eyed, prepared for more violence in the emergency room, but when they ran in, it was quiet and empty, as if nothing bad ever happened in that long room filled with sick bays. The privacy drapes, green fabric on tracks, every one was pulled all the way back.
There was silence at first and Renata thought her hearing had been blown out by fear, but then she heard music, an old-fashioned transistor radio on the nurses’ counter, tuned to the oldies station, and Renata recognized the Neil Young song, about a needle and the damage done, and she remembered being with Harry when they were young and unmarried, listening to that song while Harry’s index finger inched down and he tried to find her perfect spot which back then he had not yet found, and Renata roared, “Off with the music,” and the music was gone.
The emergency doctor on call appeared in front of them, pushing thinning blond hair back from his sunburned forehead. “Tabor,” Harry said, and the doctor nodded. “He’s alive, but several surgeries, to pin and plate together your son’s shattered ankles, the mangled bones of which tore through the skin, to set his broken femurs, immobilize his unhinged clavicle, and his shoulders, which were wrenched from their sockets. We set his broken arm, too.”