Bedroom Window

The telescope was a gift from her grandparents. They were good grandparents. At eight years old she really liked barbies and the color orange, so her grandparents bought her barbies and clothes the color of oranges. At twelve years old she became obsessed with Star Wars, so her grandparents did not buy her barbies, even though at eight years old she had wanted the newest Barbie more than anything in the world. No, she was twelve by then, and did not like barbies any longer, so her grandparents bought her Star Wars VHS tapes and collectible action figures and the Star Wars novels.

She discovered the stars at the age of fourteen. They had always been there, of course, but she had never looked up at them. When something is always there it can be easy to take for granted. But at fourteen, the stars fascinated her, which is strange, because in her previous fourteen years of life they never had.

Cutie Dimond was born and raised in New York City. At night, she and her friends would go to the observatory on the 86th floor of the Empire State Building and look down at the world. Lights illuminated windows. Headlights from cars blended together in the rain and turned the streets into luminous pulses of energy and life.

Cutie Dimond liked to imagine the people who belonged to the lights. She imagined a family living behind the window that just went dark. The mother was blonde and didn’t need to do her hair for it to look nice. The dad was tall and spoke like a gentleman. They had two kids, one girl, one boy, exactly two years apart in age, down to the day. The boy had an electric scooter he would ride around his neighborhood, following people he found interesting until they could not ignore him. The girl would feed the pigeons, leaving a trail of food so that the birds would follow her all around Central Park.

Cutie Dimond imagined one of the individual lights lost in the luminous pulse of energy and life was a taxi. The taxi driver was middle-aged, not married, though he had been married before. He had three kids but did not know about them. In five years, during a visit to the hospital for a routine checkup, he would be diagnosed with brain cancer. And two years after that he would die in his tiny Manhattan apartment. The parrot he kept in a cage hanging beside the window would find a way out of its confines two days after the death. The parrot would make so much noise that eventually the landlord would come to the apartment, and discover, on a twin-sized bed with springs that protested at every little movement, the dead taxi driver. But that was seven years away, and on the night that Cutie Dimond imagined his story while standing on the Empire State Building in the rain, on that night, the taxi driver would go home to his tiny apartment with nothing in it--not even the parrot that he would buy after learning he had brain cancer--and the taxi driver would open his computer and start messaging a woman that he would become infatuated with before morning, meet in a year, marry in three, and divorce one month later.

These were Cutie Dimond’s stars. The lights of people living and dying in the city. They were not above her; they were below.

When her parents packed up and moved halfway across the country to Montana, she was not happy. Not at first. The sky she had known and the stars she had obsessed over were suddenly very far away, and she felt like a person in a different part of the universe. But Cutie had not lost her stars; they had simply moved. Five miles down a dirt road, away from the rest of the artificial lights of cars and vintage lamps, was a sky. Not singularly black like she had always known, but rather filled with stars. It was like a face that before had been boring and ordinary, but was now covered in freckles. Her grandparents listened when she started talking about the stars more than Star Wars, and they bought her a telescope.

A ravine ran down from the top of a hill. Near the bottom of the ravine was Cutie’s house, nicely secluded amidst greenery and hanging branches. On the other side of the ravine, set at a higher point than her own, was another house. It was slightly bigger, much redder, and with more acres of land. Those people had at least two dogs, at least one of which had been replaced twice, and geese that frequently traversed to the other side of the ravine but ran away before Cutie could feed them.

The back of her house faced toward the ravine, and from the back deck she could look up at the house on the other side of that ravine. Using the telescope, she would watch the family through the windows. It was just like she had always imagined: a pretty mom with blonde hair; a tall dad who was funny and strong; and two kids, one girl, one boy, who looked to be exactly two years apart in age. The boy was her age and older than his sister. He had blonde hair that fell perfectly across his face.

When he became handsome in her eyes, she did not know. His window was the easiest to look into, and he always had it open, even in winter--especially in winter. For the first year Cutie Dimond lived in Montana, the boy tried to learn guitar. It was an acoustic guitar, blue in color. He watched tutorials on how to play and bought books and tried very hard to read sheet music. Sometimes, if Cutie Dimond listened hard, the music would drift from the boy’s window down to the back deck where she sat, and watched, and listened. Some songs sounded better than others, and some sounded nothing at all like songs, but even these chaotic sounds were not vile to Cutie’s ears.

He gave up guitar on Cutie’s fifteenth birthday. She watched him leave the house with it one Saturday morning and return in the afternoon without the guitar. Work began in earnest for the boy that year and she rarely saw him until late in the afternoon. Sporadic was his weekend presence, for he sometimes left to hang out with friends, and they sometimes came over to hang out with him, and sometimes they did really dangerous things. But Cutie thought the friends were fun, because the boy laughed more when in their presence. In winter, when the snow piled up two feet high, the boy and his friends would jump off the roof and land in the deep snow. They would get stuck and had to abandon their boots in order to get free.

Cutie hated this, of course, because it was not safe. Nothing bad ever happened to the boy or his friends--not really. But Cutie could imagine. She could imagine that the neighbor boy landed in just the right way to break his ankle and then get stuck in the snow, unable to free himself due to the angular way in which his bone had snapped, like a hook trapping him to the spot. Or she could imagine that he landed face first and suffocated while everyone tried to extract him before death welcomed the boy into her home. Yes, Cutie could imagine.

The boy stared at the sky an awful lot, but for different reasons in every season. In spring he watched the storms, laughed at lightning, held his hand under the rain, and looked into the storms dreamily, as if they were a beautiful face or a curious story.

In summer and autumn he watched the sunset. If the sky was clear and the morphine-bright colors were unobstructed, then he watched less attentively. But on cloudy evenings, he was entranced, and Cutie soon became entranced as well. The sunset colored not only the visible sky, but also the clouds, turning them pink and yellow, like monochrome pictures in a coloring book suddenly being filled in with a crayon.

Winter was when the boy gazed at the stars. And is it any wonder why? For after a blizzard fills the world and muddles all visibility, it leaves a perfectly clear, glinting sky, with the milky way pulsating vibrantly and clusters of stars like tiny islands with the Big Dipper on one side and the Little Dipper on the other. Cutie watched him watch the sky and she imagined they watched it together.

When she turned sixteen, the boy disappeared for a week. During his absence, the family came and went in a staccato beat, until the boy returned, healthy and happy, and the family’s life found a familiar rhythm again.

The boy bought a cat that year. It was a white cat that bore a minor resemblance to a lion. The cat followed him everywhere, ate off his plate, and slept in his bed, using the always open window as though it was a cat door.

Longing grew inside Cutie’s heart. She wanted to know the boy’s name, why he stopped learning guitar, what his shampoo smelled like, and the sound of his voice. She imagined that the geese got stuck on her property and she had to take them back to their home, to the boy, and she would laugh and ask his name, and it would be a wonderful name, and he would say she looked pretty, and they would talk on the phone and visit each other in the ravine to steal kisses.

But nothing of the sort transpired.

On Cutie’s seventeenth birthday she concocted a plan: she would go over to the house and offer the neighbor boy a guitar. A new one, blue in color. She would confess to watching him and he would find it sweet, not creepy, and she would laugh and ask his name, and it would be a wonderful name, and they would talk for a long time, and come over for visits, and meet secretly in the ravine to steal kisses. The plan would not be set in motion until she was eighteen. She would be wiser and braver when she turned eighteen, because eighteen is old enough to be an adult. She would act on the plan when she was wiser and braver and eighteen, and when she had bought a guitar.

But eighteen never came. Not for the boy. Cutie turned eighteen, and then she turned nineteen, and eventually she was old enough to drink and buy a house and work a job.

For the boy, nothing. He disappeared when Cutie was seventeen-and-a-half. The family came and went in a staccato rhythm for much more than a week, and then for much more than a month. Eventually, the family’s life resumed its mild, familiar rhythm. Except for the boy. He did not come back like the last time, and the family did not seem happy like the last time. The seasons changed and Cutie turned eighteen, but the boy did not return.

Her telescope remained trained on his window. The cat rarely left the boy’s room, and the family rarely entered it. Winter’s sky was not vast and full of hope, but rather it was lonely. No one watched it from the window. No one but the cat.

At the age of nineteen, Cutie read the realtor sign through the lens of her telescope. The family was moving. The cat had gone. Friends no longer jumped off the roof. Not a sign of life stirred in the house. Only dust.

Cutie was nineteen. She was not wiser, nor braver. She walked up the sloping gravel road that led to the house she had watched for so long, a goose held in her arms. It had gotten stuck on her property. The house had three cars instead of four, and the sky was cloudless. The window to the boy’s room was open.

Cutie knocked on the door.