But there was more to it than that, wasn’t there? It wasn’t enough just to know that Ena had been telling the truth. It had been wonderful to stand, however briefly, in the lighted rooms of Ena’s heart and know things as she knew them. But she was dead now. And were you really part of something if you were part of it alone?

  That must be why I’d been wondering whether my revelations would pass muster with my mother. All this while, I had known that I would eventually have to invite her into my knowledge. And my mother would not come willingly. She would rage. She would scoff. She would want proof.

  So there would be no point in my going upstairs while Bezi and the dogs were out. I would have to do it during one of Bezi’s daytime errands, while the dogs were men. I would have to be able to say I had seen them with my own eyes. One two three.

  I tried to calm myself down. There was no rush. Before any of that happened, I had to find out if the key actually worked. If it did, I could plan my next steps. If not, I could go back to berating myself for handing over my collateral to May without waiting to see if our trade was legitimate.

  And so, on an unremarkable Wednesday when the air was clear and the weather good, I waited for Bezi Duras to disappear on her errands, let myself into her courtyard, and plunged that hard-won key into the port.

  The elevator doors slid open. The car looked exactly like the one in the main tower. Dark-paneled, clean. Tinged with that faint metallic smell that pervades all elevators of a certain vintage.

  I only meant to step inside for a moment. Just to see what it felt like to stand there under its single bulb. But then the doors closed behind me, and the car began to climb.

  The immediate thrill of this was brief. I realized I was now heading into a situation for which I was completely unprepared. Where would the elevator doors open? Into an access hallway? Or just straight into the penthouse itself? Why hadn’t I thought to ask May whether the dogs would be just outside, waiting for me the moment the elevator doors opened? One two three.

  It was one thing to climb thirty-plus stories in the main building—the fortress of the Morningside, its warm, humming density, pressing in all around you. There were plenty of reassurances to interrupt the dark anxiety of the ride: little darts of pressure between floors, signs of life where the rising car bypassed light and sound and murmuring residents waiting to catch it on the way back down. Plenty of opportunities to hit the button for an upcoming floor and get off there. But this—there was no way off this, no detour. No way down till you reached the top. Too thin. Thin of air, thin of substance. The higher I went, the thinner it all felt. How could something so fragile, so rattletrap, support the mass of all three dogs at once?

  There was an unnerving thump as I passed the counterweight on its long journey to the ground. The car began to lose momentum. I hit the button to go back down. No matter what happened next, I would crush myself into the very back of the compartment, unseen as a shadow, silent as death, until the doors closed again. And then I would be carried back to the courtyard, and all would be well.

  But then—the sky. The doors rolled open and all around me, the sky spread out, blinding, filled with bolls of summer clouds.

  What had I imagined I would find when I finally reached the top? Certainly not a rooftop garden. Certainly not a warm veil of silence, disturbed only by the wind and the soft rustle of short, twisted trees that stretched away in unbroken rows toward the penthouse, a pale little temple at the far end of the roof.

  Then the elevator doors rumbled shut, and my wilding heart and I were ground-bound.

  * * *

  —

  Later, I set about trying to untangle the knot of shock and disappointment that had followed me back from the penthouse. Why had I assumed the elevator would open straight into Bezi Duras’s apartment? Because May had talked about the paintings. He’d stolen the key all those years ago so he could go up here and look at them—which had led me to assume that the elevator would open into a place where paintings were kept. A hallway, a gallery, some indoor space. So yes, though May had told the truth about the key summoning the elevator, he had lied about the rest.

  May hadn’t stopped by the courtyard since our exchange of letters and key, so I had little hope of unloading my frustrations on him. Imagine my surprise when, a week or so after my heart-stopping excursion to the roof, I ran into him on my way back from Ricky’s. I was just starting up Battle Hill with a bag in each hand when I saw him turn the corner on the opposite sidewalk, salmon coat flaring out behind him. All that old anger flattened my airway, and without further thought I lurched onto McCobb Street after him. I dodged a bicycle and a skirling van and was charging May’s side with one of my bags before he’d even had a chance to look up and see what all the honking was about.

  The bag—which had been threatening to rupture since Ricky’s—burst. Toilet rolls bounced in every direction. I yelled, “Thief, liar!” while trying to get enough of a purchase on my surviving bag to take another meaningful swing at May, on whom it was just beginning to dawn that the assault was coming from below eye level. “Snoopy?” He tried to grab my arm. “Jesus!” Seeing that the street was empty, and that the only witnesses to this event were the drivers I had just enraged during my lunatic dash across the street, he shoved me in the chest and sent me sprawling. “What’s the matter with you?”

  I couldn’t even cry. I was too furious—with him, with the injustice of my ordeal, but also with myself for having failed to prepare what I would say when I finally saw him again.

  “Liar!” was all I managed.

  May pulled me to my feet and onto a stoop. Then he went up and down the street, gathering my disemboweled sundries into what remained of the bag.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” he said, giving up on a sorry roll of toilet paper that had traveled the length of the gutter and now sat doomed in the intersection just outside Tufaah.

  “There were no paintings on thirty-three,” I said.

  “Is that all? Jesus, Snoopy.”

  “It was just a garden.”

  “Yes—the rooftop where she paints. Did you look around for her easels?”

  “There was nothing.”

  “That’s too bad.”

  “You made it sound like they were everywhere. Paintings wall to wall.”

  “Now, hold on. I didn’t promise you’d see paintings. I promised you a way up—isn’t that the truth?”

  It was clearly the truth. But slippery, and he knew it.

  “You didn’t tell me I wouldn’t be able to get inside.”

  “Inside her place? I didn’t know that’s what you were trying to do.”

  “Yes, you did. You made it sound like I would. You made it sound like—there was a gallery, or something. Like the elevator would open straight into her apartment.”

  “That’s just not true, Snoopy.”

  “You didn’t say: it’s just a massive rooftop.”

  “You didn’t tell me you were looking to break into her home.”

  Here it was: the thing I hadn’t thought of. The sliver of misinformation that would have been apparent to Ena. All my doubts about my worthiness were entirely warranted. I hadn’t done enough—hadn’t been clever or curious enough. And here I was, crying and unable to help it, and embarrassed that May was witness to my hapless, sodden rage. It served me right for being so disdainful of his tears the other day.

  He gave me a nervous little squeeze. “Stop crying. Someone is going to call the police.”

  “Do you have the other key?”

  “What other key?”

  “The one for her place.”

  “No. And I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

  I blew my nose.

  May went on looking at me. “Snoopy, I don’t know what you’re after in there—and, frankly, I don’t want to know. I understand being young and bored and wanting to get into things. But there’s places that are safe to break into. And then there’s places that aren’t. Those are big dogs. That’s their place. You don’t want to bust in on them when they’re guarding it. You get what I’m saying?”

  “Has she always had those dogs?”

  He thought about it. “I guess so.”

  “How long were you super?”

  “About five years, give or take.”

  “And that was what—ten years ago?” I said. “They’ve been around for fifteen years? Are they the same dogs?”

  He smiled. “I don’t know what it’s like where you’re from, Snoopy, but here people tend not to switch out their dogs when they get old.”

  “But shouldn’t they be dead by now?”

  This was clearly a suspicious and unexpected turn. “What are you actually asking?”

  I shrugged. I could feel him watching me.

  “Give me that key back.”

  “No,” I said.

  “You’re going to do something stupid, give it back.”

  “It’s mine,” I said. “I earned it.”

  He smoothed down his trousers and stood up. “Snoopy, Bezi Duras is a very strange lady. You’re lucky she didn’t catch you up there. And I sure wish you’d leave it alone.”

  * * *

  —

  May was afraid of the dogs, of what they might do to me. I couldn’t explain that I wasn’t because I knew they weren’t dogs at all. What I feared instead was my own unworthiness. That I had failed to be adequately observant, adequately reverential. That I’d cut some unknown but vital corner, and that whatever forces were looking out for Bezi Duras—presumably kin to the ones that had eavesdropped on my mother and threatened my downfall in the various scenarios she had laid out for me over the years—were unimpressed by my efforts. Perhaps they had already decided that it was not for me to know anything more about Bezi Duras.

  I returned to the rooftop the following week, determined to resolve the matter once and for all. If the time was right, the way would open to me. If it did not, I would give up until I drifted into the desired knowledge by some more deserving means. This might never happen—and I was all right with that.

  Of course, the elevator key did not work on the penthouse door. I stood amid the rosebushes on Bezi Duras’s front steps with my ear against the pale wood. Not a sound. Surely the dogs, if they were dogs at all, would have heard me by now. They should be going crazy in there. But nothing. Silence.

  In all directions, the long-shadowed grid of the city stretched out. To the south, the buildings, stacked shoulder to shoulder like coffins, the pale roofs with their vandalized water towers, and between them the blazing figure of Dancing Girl. To the west, the endless park, black with trees, and beyond it the hazy smear of the bay.

  The penthouse windows were huge but barred by blinds that rose up from the floor and ended just a foot or so from the top of the frame. The interior was visible, but only from an upward angle. I could see that Bezi Duras’s walls were painted a blinding white, and that her fixtures were those same black chandeliers my mother was forever repairing on the lower floors. But apart from the occasional top of a mirror or the stray arc of a lamp, I couldn’t see anything else. The dogs might very well be in there. They might very well be men. But from out here it was impossible to tell. It was almost comforting. As though by its very design, the architecture around me confirmed the secret it was hiding.

  But then—where had I seen Bezi Duras undressing? There had to be an open window around somewhere.

  And there was, on the far side of the building. Bezi’s penthouse sat with its back against the shaft between the east and west wings of the Morningside. There, a wall neatly circumscribed the three-hundred-foot drop that plunged between the wings and into the courtyard below. That was how I had managed to see her. I leaned out over the chasm and tried to get a look at the windows, but the angle was impossible. Try any harder, and that would be it for me. What a sight I would make, whizzing past Mrs. Sayez’s window. Imagine that fun card. What would make your new home even better? Well, a parachute.

  Through a window on the eastern side of the building, I could see the top four or so inches of a long, leaning mirror. If I was going to try to gain some altitude, I should do it here. Luckily, there was a planter with a tallish tree pushed right up against the wall, and here I made my stand, throttling one bough as I climbed another, willing myself higher even though the whole flimsy trunk had begun to sway. The few feet of extra height got me nowhere near enough to see any portion of the room. Neither did the halfhearted jump with which I closed out my attempt before I came thumping back down again.

  I stood up and took stock of the casualties. My hands were scraped up. I had managed to sink an incriminating footprint into the flower bed. Thick, gooey fruits loosened by my trip through the branches lay smashed on the ground all around me.

  They looked like figs.

  And didn’t they just smell of fig jam.

  Without thinking, I raised a bit of the splatter to my mouth on the tip of my finger. Yes, it did taste familiar. That old-new sunlight taste.

  I hadn’t taken a moment to absorb the gardens at all. These were not, as I had blindly thought, just ornamental trees. They were fragrant, vastly different from row to row, bursting with fruit: lemons, oranges, plums. It wasn’t a garden at all—it was an orchard.

  Maybe you would have seen it sooner. But I didn’t until right then.

  The world tore open, and I looked and saw what was underneath it.

  Bezi Duras was not a painter at all. She was a Vila.

  One two three.

  Of course. How obvious the signs were. The tower. The dogs, their magical transformation into men. Her secrecy, the purpose of which was to conceal this precious garden. The immensity of it caught me off guard. I sat down so I wouldn’t fall.

  A Vila.

  Here it was, the “more” Ena had intended to share when the time was right.

  I felt a great surge of pity-laden affection for May. Poor blind May, who had gone through all the trouble of stealing the key with the sole purpose of coming up here to look at paintings—all the while unwittingly trespassing into a Vila’s garden. What a risk he had taken without ever realizing it.

  The figs. I had four or five of them in the crook of my arm already—some rescued from the ground, some pulled down in the minutes of confusion before I’d realized where I actually was. And there was nothing to do now but take them with me. I couldn’t exactly put them back.

  I don’t know how long I’d been wandering there like that when the elevator chimed, and something inside the shaft whirred to life. Its rumble could mean only one thing: Bezi Duras was back.

  In all the years Bezi had been living here, had she ever turned the key downstairs only to find that the elevator had gone back up all by itself? Of course not. She was the only person with the key. The elevator should be exactly where she left it. And if I hadn’t loitered, hadn’t spent so long hemming and hawing up here and trying to lizard my way up unclimbable walls, I would have gone back down when I was supposed to, and her suspicions would never have been aroused. But that possibility was gone now.

  I fled to the far end of the rooftop, dived behind a lemon tree, and waited. An eternity later, I heard the familiar, faraway rumble of the elevator doors opening. Bezi Duras’s shoes on the concrete, somewhere far up ahead, crossing to her front door. “Hullo?” she said distantly. “Is somebody up here?”

  Better to stand up and announce myself than go on crouching behind my tree. Even if I somehow managed to steal away unseen, Bezi would find herself waiting for the elevator to come back up the next time she summoned it. And then she would know for certain that she had been right to be suspicious—somebody had been up here, after all.

  Better to own up to it now.

  But something small and cowardly sat pleading in my gut. It would not allow me to raise my head. “Get up,” I kept telling it. “Show yourself.” But it just twisted into itself, away from me. I went on crouching there until I heard the penthouse door slam behind Bezi. Then I slunk along the wall and into the elevator and went back down to the mortal world.

  Downstairs, I laid the figs out on the dining room table. What would I say when my mother asked about where they came from? Ascribing my haul to a surprisingly fortuitous rations draw was out of the question. These tasted so much sweeter, looked so much fresher, than anything we had ever received in a government delivery.

  There was nothing to do but sit down and eat them. One two three. Four. Five. After they were gone, I took myself to bed and lay there, letting the warm benediction of the Morningside dilute my nausea. Here I was, safe, content, unexpectedly full of figs, lying in a small fairy-book bed in the beating heart of this venerable old tower, a speck of dust five thousand miles from a home I’d never known. All around me lay the city, with its steeples and junkyards, its beaches of waterlogged debris, its water towers and mussel-laden piers, and the roaming tide. And everyone in it—the neighbors; the sneering Mrs. Gaspard; Mrs. Sayez, with her sweet, dull kindness; the entirety of the Dispatch, that faceless murmuration outspread among the different neighborhoods; the Dancing Girls on their billboards; and May; and even and especially my mother—they all inhabited the same world, in which Bezi Duras was just a painter.