False Memory

but one of the lamps, she retrieved her purse from the coffee table and led Martie through the apartment.
    As she was crossing the kitchen behind Susan, Martie found her attention drawn to a wicked-looking item that lay on a cutting board near the sink. It was a mezzaluna knife, a classic Italian kitchen tool: The curved stainless-steel blade was shaped like a half-moon, with a handle at each end, so it could be rocked rapidly back and forth to dice and slice.
    Like an electric current, scintillant light seemed to sizzle along the cutting edge.
    Martie could not look away from it. She didn’t realize how completely the mezzaluna had mesmerized her—until she heard Susan ask, “What’s wrong?”
    Her throat was tight, and her tongue felt swollen. With audible thickness, she asked a question to which she already knew the answer:
    “What’s that?”
    “Haven’t you ever used one? It’s great. You can dice an onion in a flash.”
    The sight of the knife didn’t fill Martie with terror, as had her shadow and the bathroom mirror. It did, however, make her uneasy, although she couldn’t explain her queer reaction to it.
    “Martie? Are you okay?”
    “Yeah, sure, let’s go.”
    Susan twisted the knob but hesitated to open the kitchen door. Martie put her hand over her friend’s, and together they pulled thedoor inward, admitting cold gray light and a sharp-toothed wind. Susan’s face drained of color at the prospect of entering the roofless world beyond her threshold.
    “We’ve done this a hundred times before,” Martie assured her.
    Susan clutched the doorjamb. “I can’t go out there.”
    “You will,” Martie insisted.
    Susan attempted to return to the kitchen, but Martie blocked her. “Let me in, this is too hard, it’s agony.”
    “it’s agony for me, too,” Martie said.
    “Bullshit.” Desperation clawed some of the beauty out of Susan’s face, and a feral terror darkened the green of her jungle eyes. “You’re getting off on this, you love it, you’re crazy.”
    “No, I’m mean.” Martie gripped the doorjamb with both hands, holding her ground. “I’m the mean bitch. You’re the crazy bitch.”
    Suddenly Susan stopped pushing at Martie and clutched at her instead, seeking support. “Damn, I want that Chinese takeout.”
    Martie envied Dusty, whose biggest worry of the morning would be whether the rain would hold off long enough for his crew to get some work done.
    Fat drops of rain—at first in fitful bursts but soon more insistently—began to rattle on the roof that covered the landing.
    Finally, they stepped across the threshold, outside. Martie pulled the door shut and locked it.
    The extraction phase was behind them. Worse lay ahead, however, and Martie was unable to see most of it coming.
    6
    Skeet ran exuberantly down the steeply pitched roof, toward the brink, angling for a point of departure that would ensure he landed on skull-cracking pavement rather than on mattresses, bounding along the convex orange-brown tiles as though he were a kid racing across a cobbled street to an ice-cream vendor, and Dusty ran grimly after him.
    To those watching from below, it must have appeared that the two men were equally deranged, fulfilling a suicide pact.
    More than halfway down the slope, Dusty caught up with Skeet, grabbed him, wrenched him off his intended trajectory, and stumbled diagonally across the incline with him. Some clay tiles cracked underfoot, dislodging small chunks of roofer’s mortar, which rattled toward the rain gutter. Remaining upright on this rolling debris was no less difficult than walking on marbles, with the added challenges of the rain and the slimy lichen and Skeet’s energetic and gleeful resistance, which he waged with flailing arms and spiking elbows and disturbing childlike giggles. Skeet’s invisible dance partner, Death, seemed to give him supernatural grace and balance, but then Dusty fell and took Skeet down with him, and entwined they rolled the last ten feet, perhaps toward the mattresses or perhaps not—Dusty had lost his bearings—and across the copper gutter, which twanged like a plucked bass string.
    Airborne, plummeting, letting go of Skeet, Dusty thought of Martie: the clean smell of her silky black hair, the mischievous curve of her smile, the honesty of her eyes.
    Thirty-two feet wasn’t far, merely three stories, but far enough to split open the most stubborn head, far enough to crack a spine as easily as one might snap a pretzel stick, so when Dusty fell flat on his back on the piled