NOW
At this time of year, Amanda’s favorite part of the day is when the morning sun hits just right. Its light plays over the city with the faintest tincture of yellow, imbuing it with a warmth that should conflict with the cold hues of concrete and steel but nevertheless makes the silvers and grays and blacks of Manhattan gleam with a special shine.
The sky is an incandescent blue mottled by thin veins of white. It looks like a painting, a cliché that always makes Amanda grimace, amused by the irony that her calling should be to render that which looks like a painting into an actual painting. But here, in the sky, 1,550 feet in the air, what is ironic also feels holy. She does her work among the clouds akin to an angel. Pigeons turn circles above her, a silent reminder that Amanda is treading on their turf.
It took six months and a troop of lawyers to get the requisite permits and approvals, a panoply of bureaucratic sign-offs, to work here on the roof of 225 West Fifty-Seventh Street, what the developers dubbed “Central Park Tower,” the tallest residential building in the world. Standing at the roofline, with the city laid out before her bathed in immaculate light, Amanda is surprisingly at peace.
After Switzerland, after the accident, she thought she might never pick up a pencil or paintbrush again. Her paintings came from her subjects—God’s-eye views of her favorite city in the world—but her art came from within, from the images she formed in her imagination. But when she closed her eyes, all she could see was Jonas, his own eyes staring back at her, lacking the spark of life but nevertheless conveying confusion, a deep shock that he should find himself hanging lifeless amid broken and twisted steel and plastic and shattered glass. For more than a year, those eyes haunted her—the last thing she thought of when she tried to sleep, the first thing she envisioned upon waking, and the subject of every dream in between.
Friends were concerned. Colleagues were worried. Family members tortured themselves trying to devise new ways to prompt her to rejoin the world. She slept intermittently. She ate rarely and drank far too much for anyone’s comfort. Eventually she withdrew into her apartment, rarely leaving.
In all her life, she had never known such despair. A therapist, whom she reluctantly started seeing at the urging of a friend, liked to talk about the five stages of grief. But Amanda knew only the fourth, depression. And it did not feel like a “stage.” A stage is an interval you pass through, a time that eventually ends. She felt only depression, like a new, permanent destination. Jonas had won the Nobel Prize for proving the existence of a nearly infinite number of realities, but for Amanda there was only one, a universe where the man who had been her entire world was gone.
For a time, she tried to motivate herself with the notion that the cloistered life she was living wasn’t what Jonas would have wanted for her. She berated and chastised herself, trying to transmute her grief into self-loathing, punishing herself with the idea that her despondency was a kind of betrayal of her husband’s memory. But even that didn’t work. Her sorrow was a biological imperative, a compulsion she could neither ignore nor deny any more than she could resist breathing.
Eventually, the idea of joining him took root in her mind like a disease. She imagined going to a rooftop, taking in the view of the city one final time, and diving off into another world, another universe, where she and Jonas would be reunited. In that new, imagined reality, she was no longer barren. She would be the mother she’d always hoped to be and give Jonas all the children he deserved, all the children she so desperately wanted. They would have his brilliance and her gifts, and she would love them with every cell in her being.
Amanda recognized the malignancy of this fantasy. But she was in pain—legitimate, understandable, rational pain. She knew she should grasp at one of the many lifelines—therapy, treatment, counseling—that her friends and family threw to her, yet she resisted them despite her best efforts. With each passing day, the idea of reuniting with Jonas took on more shape and substance in her mind.
In time, it also took on specificity. She chose One World Trade Center, the tallest building in Manhattan. The building’s official height is a deliberate 1,776 feet, but the roof height is “only” 1,368 feet. At that altitude, she’d been told at some point, a person falling off is likely to pass out before their body explodes into mist on the ground.
Getting access to the roof wasn’t difficult, not for an artist who plies her trade on rooftops all over Manhattan. In fact, she’d already painted from the top of One World Trade Center. But once she got onto the roof and positioned herself at the northwest corner, she was struck by a profound flood of emotion that swept over her like a tsunami. The cityscape she saw before her was as familiar as her own reflection. She had captured it perfectly in the painting she had titled Pinnacle, the painting Jonas had been taken by in her gallery the second time she ever saw him. She remembered the look on his face, the amazement and disbelief that she had so movingly captured the majesty of the city on canvas, conjured with her paints and her brushes. Amanda had never been able to shake the feeling that when Jonas learned that she was the artist behind Pinnacle, that was the moment he had fallen in love with her.
She had no memory of falling to her knees. She had no recollection of when she’d started to cry. She had cried after the accident, of course, and at the funeral, and after the funeral. In fact, she’d cried every morning and nearly every night since. After two years, she thought she had no more tears left to shed. But in that moment on the roof, the grief rose inside her and flew out in a torrent of tears. Kneeling, her body heaved uncontrollably as she keened and wailed, feeling as though she were performing an exorcism on herself. Even now she is amazed no one heard her cries. Her only audience were the birds wheeling overhead.
She still had difficult days and troublesome nights, but eventually the time between them grew. She no longer declined dinner invitations. She didn’t drink as much. Her friends started to comment that she was “looking better” and “putting some weight back on.” She could not claim to be happy, but at least she was no longer depressed. She existed in an emotional purgatory, a liminal space between all-consuming grief and a future without Jonas that she couldn’t yet see.
She spent her days walking the city, pummeling herself with a singular, tortured question: What will I do now? The idea of moving sprang to mind, but New York is home to her, and the thought of leaving it is anathema. Her agent fielded calls and emails proposing commissions. Her gallery made repeated inquiries with varying degrees of politeness. Whatever artistic urge that once drove her seemed to have died with Jonas. But unlike Jonas, she did not mourn its passing.
Then one day, on one of her walks, she found herself in the shadow of a looming tower, one of the many new constructions that had sprouted up amid her despair. She charmed the doorman into showing her the rooftop and was awed by what she saw up there. Staring out at the city, she started editing the image in her mind, imagining it beaming in the morning light.
And she knew she would paint again.
She’s worked at the top of the Central Park Tower for three weeks now. Sketches. Studies. Experimenting with angles. Finding the light. Trying to recapture that spark of inspiration she felt eight years earlier when she first stepped out onto a roof and saw the city the way birds do. It has been slow going, but she finally feels like she’s there. Two days ago, she felt confident enough to bring her bespoke canvas, five feet by five feet, up through the freight elevator. Her hand now feels free again, the pencil as light as air between her fingertips as it glides along the canvas, leaving beauty in its wake.
Amanda is so consumed by her work, so deep in the zone, mesmerized by the cityscape slowly pouring out from the tip of her pencil, that at first, she doesn’t hear him. And when she does, it sounds like a memory, a trick of the mind.
“Amanda.”
The voice is tremulous and tentative but unmistakably his.
“Amanda,” it comes again, a little louder now. A little surer.
Amanda feels a compulsion to turn around, but she ignores it until she feels a presence behind her and the sound of footfalls on the asphalt. This is ridiculous. The inchoate thought blazes through her mind as she turns around.
And sees him.
Backlit by the sun, shimmering like a mirage. An illusion. But with details no hallucination could account for. He’s thinner, his clean-shaven face slightly gaunt, his cheekbones more pronounced. And older, his hair salted with wisps of gray. His clothes are threadbare and appear as if he’s been wearing them for days.
He walks toward her, slowly, his footsteps labored. He has a look of awe on his face like a penitent staring into the eye of God.
Amanda opens her mouth to speak, but no words come. Her mind screams at her that this isn’t real, can’t be real.
But then he’s taking her in his arms, and his embrace feels like the most real thing she’s ever known. She surrenders to the moment. If this is what her losing her mind is like, she doesn’t want to be sane.
They’re both crying now, a chorus of joyous sobs in the light rush of the wind.
Eventually, Amanda manages, “How?”—the single syllable carrying all the astonishment and amazement of divinity.
“It’s a long story,” Jonas says. “I know that sounds horribly cliché, but it’s true. It’s really true.”
“And this is real?”
“It’s real.”
Suddenly aware that her eyes have been closed, she opens them to take in Jonas’s face. She reaches to confirm he’s real. Light plays off a tear running down his cheek, throwing a tiny sparkle. Her whole adult life has been spent replicating the world as she sees it, and she knows that no mirage could ever be so detailed.
As she wipes away the tear, another man steps into view behind Jonas. Another ghost. Another impossible resurrection. But after this remarkable reunion, she can no longer deny the evidence looming in front of her. Somehow Victor Kovacevic, eighteen months dead from pancreatic cancer, is here on the rooftop with them.
“Victor?” she whispers.
Jonas turns and sees him, too, one mirage recognizing another. “How—”
“Jonas, what’s going on? What is this?”
“I’ll explain everything,” he reassures her. He looks at Victor. “How can you be here?”
Victor smiles, a serpent’s grin. “Don’t be so dense, Jonas. You’re smarter than that.”
Amanda watches confusion play across Jonas’s face. Her mind is churning, trying to make sense of what she’s witnessing. She hears a sudden crack of thunder, and her heart leaps in her chest. The morning sky abruptly darkens. Overhead, cumulonimbus clouds appear without warning. Sheets of rain begin to fall. Lightning strikes inches from where Jonas is standing. Any wonder or confusion Amanda has been feeling is replaced with a primal sense of fear.
“What’s happening?” she yells over the din of the storm, her voice laced with terror.
“It’s the universe,” Victor answers. “It doesn’t want this.” Then, with an eerie calm, he reaches into his coat and pulls out a handgun. “It wants this,” he says, leveling it toward her.
Amanda has never seen a gun outside of television and film, and the sight of one causes her to gasp. All around her Mother Nature rages, hurling rain and lightning down on them. Behind Amanda, raindrops drum away at her embryonic painting. If she turned from the gun and looked, she’d see a weeping canvas with grayish streaks crying down its surface.
Jonas is surging forward, trying to reason with Victor—Can it really be him?—while rain and lightning lash about them. “Victor . . . you don’t want to do this. Just—just put the gun down. Put the gun away and we’ll talk. Whatever the problem is, we can talk this out.”
Victor raises the gun another inch. “I’ve already talked it out. This is what the universe wants.”
Amanda watches his finger curl around the trigger. Everything moves in slow motion, taking on the quality of a dream. That’s what this is, she thinks. Of course, it has to be a dream. With that epiphany, all that is happening—the preternatural storm, the two dead men resurrected, Victor’s mania—snaps into focus and makes sense.
When Victor fires the gun, Amanda first mistakes the report for another thunderclap. But then she sees Jonas drop to his knees. Her mind reconstructs the previous second: Victor shot at her, and Jonas threw himself in front of the bullet. She watches, slack jawed, as crimson mists into the puddle beneath Jonas’s crumpled form.
She drops to her knees, instinctively cradling him in her arms. His form sags ominously in her grip. Everything blurs as her eyes fill with tears and rainwater. She clears them with the back of her hand and sees a bloody chasm where Jonas’s heart should be. Her hand rockets forward to stanch the bleeding, but his blood geysers between her fingers. She thinks to move for her phone, back near the roofline with her forgotten canvas. She could call for help, but that would mean leaving Jonas, and she fears he’s too far gone already.
Jonas’s fingers tremor toward her face. Blood peeks from between his teeth. “I did it,” he breathes. “I made it back to you.”
