The door opens at 3:17 AM. That is the first thing I notice, and I have noticed it every night for eight months now, ever since Diego died. The rooftop door on the forty-second floor — always locked, always alarmed, always the same heavy steel door with the red EXIT sign above it — opens silently. No sound. No alarm. Just a breath of cold air moving through the corridor, carrying the smell of rain and diesel and something I cannot name. I keep mopping the marble floor. I pretend not to notice.

The figure is a man. Maybe forty. Maybe sixty. Thin, wearing dark clothes that look thrift-store. No hard hat. No safety harness. He stands at the edge of the rooftop for hours. Sometimes he walks. Sometimes he doesn't move at all. I watch him through the glass panels of the forty-second-floor lobby — which I have cleaned forty times now, week after week, floor after floor — and I write in my notebook: dates, times, weather, what he does. My writing is bad. Spanish-tinged. Pragmatic. Never poetic. That is not who I am.

"March 3," I write. "Windy. He walked left to right. Forty steps. Didn't look down." "March 5," I write. "Rain. He stood at the edge. Twenty minutes. Then walked back." "March 8," I write. "Wind from north. He sat down. Stayed there until 6 AM."

My son Diego died six months ago. Fentanyl. Found in his apartment in Bushwick with a syringe on the bathroom counter and a phone on the floor playing music I didn't recognize. I went to the funeral in a dress I had bought for his wedding — which never happened, because Diego's girlfriend left him three weeks before the date and Diego didn't leave his apartment for two months after that. I cleaned forty floors of this building every night for eight months. I never speak to the residents. They are all strangers. Rich strangers who walk past me in the lobby without looking at my face, as though I am part of the furniture.

Officer James Torres is the only person I talk to. He is a retired NYPD detective, now the building's security guard. He is Puerto Rican like me, from the Bronx, and he knows about losing children — his son is in Rikers, charged with something involving a gun and a drug deal and a witness who changed his story. We talk sometimes in the lobby after his shift starts at midnight. He says: "You gonna keep cleaning forever, Diane?" I say: "What else is there?" He says: "There's a whole world outside these walls." I say: "I know the world. The world killed my boy."

On March 17, a nor'easter hits New York. The wind howls through the building like a freight train. The rain slants through the glass panels of the rooftop terrace in sheets that would soak through any coat in seconds. The power flickers. The lobby lights dim. I am on the forty-second floor, mopping the marble, and I hear something. Not the wind. Something else. A sound from above. Like footsteps. Light, careful footsteps on gravel.

I don't think. I just walk to the stairwell, take the stairs to the forty-second floor, push through the rooftop door, and step out into the storm.

The wind nearly throws me off my feet. Rain blinds me. I hold onto the concrete parapet and walk across the gravel-covered terrace in forty-mile-an-hour winds, my mop bucket forgotten in the stairwell, my shoes soaked through in three seconds. I find him at the very edge, standing where the terrace meets the roof's drop-off, looking at the Manhattan skyline through sheets of rain. His back is to me. His hands are in his pockets. He is perfectly still.

I speak to him for the first time. My voice is barely audible over the wind, but I say it anyway: "You know your son would be ashamed of you."

He turns. I see a face carved by loss. A face that could be anyone's father. Anyone's brother. His eyes are red-rimmed and exhausted, but they are not crazy. They are not the eyes of a madman. They are the eyes of someone who has seen something terrible and cannot unsee it. He looks at me for a long moment and says: "I'm not looking for death. I'm looking for the line."

I reply: "There is no line. There's only the ground and the sky, and everything in between is just... falling."

We stand there together in the wind for twenty minutes. Neither of us speaks again. The rain soaks through my clothes. My hair is plastered to my face. My shoes are full of water. I don't care. I am standing next to a stranger on the roof of a building forty-two stories tall in a hurricane, and for the first time in eight months — since Diego died, since the funeral, since the last time I held his cold hand and closed his eyes — I feel something that is not grief. It is not happiness. It is something else. Something I don't have a word for. Maybe it's just the wind.

The figure stops coming. I feel both relief and loss. I don't understand why I feel loss. He is a stranger. I don't know his name. I don't need to. His absence is a kind of presence.

One morning, I find a small object on the floor of the forty-second-floor lobby. A piece of chalk. The kind used to mark lines on construction sites. White, rough, slightly damp. On the chalk, someone has written a single word: "Thanks."

I pocket it. I finish my rounds. I go home.

My apartment is small. One room, a kitchen corner, a bathroom with a shower that leaks. The walls are thin. I can hear my neighbor watching television through the plaster. I sit on my couch — a secondhand thing with torn vinyl — and pull the chalk from my pocket. I stand up. I walk to the center of the room. I kneel on the linoleum floor. And I draw a line.

A thin white line across the floor of my tiny living room. From the kitchen corner to the doorway. Twelve feet long. Not impressive. But not nothing.

I stand on it with both feet. I close my eyes. I breathe. The building hums around me. Somewhere above me, the rooftop door creaks in the wind. Somewhere below me, the lobby lights flicker. I stand on the line with both feet and I am exactly where I am supposed to be.

Author Note & Copyright: