Chapter 3 - The Radio on the Roof
The access ladder to the roof was hidden behind a linen press on the third-floor landing, just down the corridor from Jonathan’s closed office door. The wood of the ladder was old pine, splintered at the edges where the house had settled into the ridge over the decades.
Nora climbed first, a small tin tray balanced on her left forearm, holding two bowls of the white rice and black beans and the six pieces of green apple wrapped in a clean dish towel. When she pushed the heavy zinc hatch open, the full weight of the canyon wind hit her, throwing her curly hair into her eyes and turning the hot steam from the rice into small, white clouds that vanished instantly over the parapet.
The roof was flat, covered in grey gravel that crunched like river ice under her shoes. In the far corner, sitting between two heavy air conditioning condensers that hummed with a low, industrial vibration, was Ivy.
She was wearing her noise-canceling headphones, but the wire wasn't plugged into a phone. The gold jack was tucked into the pocket of her sweater, her small fingers holding the metal pin as if she were waiting for an electric current to clear the line.
"The beans are getting cold," Nora said, sitting down on the gravel three feet away from the girl’s knees. She laid the tin tray between them, her fingers securing the dish towel against the wind.
Ivy didn't remove the headphones. She just slid the left cup behind her ear, her grey eyes reflecting the yellow lights of the San Diego port miles below. "You can’t hear anything over the fans. The last lady said the fans were ruining her ears and that we were all going to go deaf before we turned twenty."
"The fans are just moving the air, Ivy," Nora said, picking up a spoon and tasting the rice. It lacked salt, but the beans were hot and tasted of the green label. "They don't have a voice. My mom used to say that when a house is this big, the wind gets stuck in the chimneys and tries to make up stories to get out."
Ivy looked down at the tray. Her small hand reached out, her fingers picking up one of the six apple pieces. She turned it over twice, checking the white core for any sign of the brown spot Brooke had cut away. "Mom said she was going to be a star in the constellation with the belt. Orion. But I looked through the telescope in Dad’s room and there’s nothing there but old dust and rocks."
"Orion is only out in the winter, Ivy," Nora said. "Right now, it’s July. The sky is full of the summer stars. They're different. They don't have belts; they have triangles."
"I don't like triangles," Ivy said, but she put the apple piece into her mouth, her jaw moving with a slow, deliberate rhythm. "Hazel says we have to stay bad so Dad stays home. If we let the nannies clean the rooms, he goes to New York for the board meetings. When he’s in New York, the house smells like nothing. It smells like the inside of a new car."
Nora looked back toward the zinc hatch.
Hazel was standing in the shadows of the exit, her twelve-year-old face half-hidden by her jagged hair. She had a plastic bucket in her left hand, filled with what looked like old tennis balls and half-used tubes of blue caulking compound.
"You're thirty-eight," Hazel said, her voice dropping into that hard, defensive rasp she had used on the stairs. "Why are you still here? It's ten o'clock. The double money is active now. You should go get your bag and call the car."
"The rice is still in the pot, Hazel," Nora said, not rising from the gravel. "And I haven't found the key to the pantry yet. The twins said it was in the piano, but I don't play the piano."
Hazel walked out onto the gravel, her boots making a loud, aggressive sound that cut through the hum of the condensers. She stopped right above Nora, her face dark against the coastal sky. "The twins lied. The key isn't in the piano. It’s inside the water tank in the blue room. We put it in a plastic bag with a rubber band so it wouldn't rust."
"The room with the blue curtains?" Nora asked.
Hazel’s jaw tightened, her fingers gripping the handle of her plastic bucket until the skin over her knuckles went yellow. "We don't go in there. Dad locked it from the outside and took the brass plate off the handle. He thinks if we can’t see the keyhole, we’ll forget about the bed."
Nora stood up slowly, her knees making a small popping sound in the cold air. She picked up the tin tray, leaving the remaining pieces of apple for Ivy. "I don't need a keyhole to open a door, Hazel. My dad spent twenty years fixing the locks on the commercial trucks in San Ysidro. He taught me that if you take the hinge pins out from the side, the whole door comes off like an old box lid."
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Hazel stared at her, her grey eyes widening just enough to show the white rim around the iris. "The pins are grease-locked. They’ve been there since the house was built."
"Then we’ll use the lard from the pantry," Nora said. "Or the oil from the blue box. Everything moves if you give it enough grease."
