The hospital rooftop is off-limits, but the maintenance door lock is older than me and pops open with a credit card.
I come up here during my breaks, when the beeping and the waiting and the worried families get too loud.
Today report cards would have come home. I haven't gotten one in fifteen years, but the date stays in my bones.
At home, on her windowsill, there's a paperback copy of The Secret Garden, warped by years of rain leaking through the frame.
She used to read it to me on the porch, voice soft as the summer bugs.
Now she doesn't remember the story, or me, or the porch.
From up here I can see the whole county seat, nine thousand souls, and I wonder how many of them are hiding too.
The sun is setting and the sky is the color of a bruise healing.
I think about how long I've been coming to this roof — four years now — and how every time I sit here, I'm watching my mother slip further away.