But now Casey didn’t pull up a café chair. She sat on the wide parapet bordering the roof, dangling her legs against the north side of the building facing the street, not caring if her white pants were dirtied by the brown brick facade. The night breezes, undetectable in her mother’s airtight kitchen, brushed against her battered face. There was little light in the sky, no sign of the moon, and as for stars, Casey had never seen any in Queens. The first time she saw a black sky pierced with what seemed like an infinite number of white holes was on a trip to Newport with her roommate, Virginia, to her grandmother’s house during a school vacation. What Casey felt initially was the pause in her own breathing. The sight literally took her breath away. Then she craned her neck to stare at the swirl of the Milky Way, and she could hardly be persuaded to go back into the great house despite the mosquitoes nibbling on her ankles. For the remainder of her visit, the senior Mrs. Craft pronounced Casey “that starry-eyed girl.” The next day, when her mosquito bites grew fat and pink on her ankles and toes—forming their own raised constellation—Casey felt no regret whatsoever. At the age of nineteen, she’d finally seen stars.
Casey yearned for the darkened steel layer of city sky, banded by pink-and-gray ribbons of twilight, to be stripped to reveal the stars. There was no way to see them. Fine, she thought, feeling deprived. From where she sat, there were countless identical apartment unit windows brightened with electric bulbs, each covered by a square glass shade screwed into the ceiling. On both sides of Van Kleeck Street, there were attached rental apartment buildings raised in the late 1960s by the same developer—all with the same floor plans, Whirlpool refrigerators, and small closets. Inside them, lightbulbs flickered invitingly. The apartments were brick beehives—defined pockets of air, sound, and light. Casey wanted to believe that in them there could be happiness and not just droning.
Casey began to play her favorite roof game. There were hardly any rules, only one objective: to choose a window, then to study the contents in view. She had the idea that your possessions told about you: A plaid, duct-taped armchair showed a man’s brokenness; a heavily gilded mirror reflected a woman’s regal soul that had not yet faded; and a paper cylinder of store-brand oatmeal left out on a kitchen counter witnessed a lack of coins in a retiree’s purse.
Across the street, at eye level, Casey made out a South Asian boy and girl watching television in a modest-size living room. They were perhaps elementary school age. Casey wanted to sit beside them, silent, invisible, and breathless, because their handsome, earnest faces possessed wonder about the images transmitted to them. The glow of Casey’s cigarette kept her company, but she would’ve preferred a lamp and a book or, in her current mood, a rerun of Mary Tyler Moore or The Bob Newhart Show. Always, Casey had been a reader and a viewer. The contempt others had for television made no sense when Alice, The Jeffersons, All in the Family, The Love Boat, Fantasy Island, The Bionic Woman, The Brady Bunch, Little House on the Prairie, and of course Wonder Woman had served as guides to the Han sisters’ understanding of America. The literary classics borrowed from the Elmhurst Public Library had taught the sisters about Americans and Europeans from long ago, but modern life had been extrapolated from the small screen. Joseph and Leah did not discourage television. With the girls’ irreproachable report cards, television was a treat even the Hans could afford.
Casey heard Tina’s wooden sandals clacking toward her.
“Don’t jump,” Tina said, her voice edged with teasing.
“Ha,” Casey replied. “If only it were so easy.” She glanced down at the concrete pavement ten stories below. Opposite the red fire hydrant, neighborhood kids crowded the stoop of the building catty-corner from hers and ate Sicilian pizza straight out of the box. Casey envied their appetite, feeling none herself.
Tina dried her wet hands on her blue jeans. She’d been on her knees mopping the kitchen floor with a fat sponge. Downstairs, their mother was still washing dishes. It had been Leah’s idea for the younger one to go find her sister.
“So what are you going to do?” Tina asked.
Casey shrugged, saying nothing. Her feeble smoke ring lost its form.
“I expected a blowup some time around August. Not in the first week of our arrival at chez Han,” Tina said.
“You’re awfully funny tonight.” Casey dragged on her second cigarette.
“Can you stay at Jay’s?”
Casey nodded. “Looks that way. Virginia is in Newport for a month, then off to Italy. It must be nice to have pots of money. And time to piss it away.”