The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction Read Online Free Page B

because I am taking the stairs two at atime. When I reach the end of the seventh-floor hallway, I am startled to find the hatch to the roof still closed, latched from my side. I take out my key ring and unlock it, climb the short ladder, and step out, blinking in the sunlight, onto the terrace.
    The roof is the only beautiful part of the Frangi, and the part that no one really sees. Over the years my mother has turned the space into a miniature botanical garden, filling it with pots of flowers, dwarf palms, lime trees, hot pepper plants, cacti, and cooking herbs: basil and mint, cilantro and sweet lemongrass. Before he died, my father built a crooked little arbor up here, and my mother has come to sit under it every evening of these two decades since his suicide. I help her and Ba Noi with the watering, and sometimes Mr. Henry does his early morning tai chi up here.
    She is curled on her side on the red tiles at the far end of the roof, facing away from me, and still wearing the same ao dai, which looks more silver than black in the sun. As I watch, she slowly extends one sandal-shod foot and nudges a bamboo plant in an elephant-shaped ceramic jar off the ledge. A second later I hear the distant crash, followed by a bellowing that must come from Mr. Henry. The foot is moving dangerously toward a bonsai, and I rush over to try to intercept it.
    I am too late. It topples and meets an unfortunate end on the sidewalk below.
    “Stop it! Stop!” I skid to a halt precariously close to the unrailed edge and stand over her.
    She rolls onto her back to gaze up at me, and her voice when she speaks is too cheerful, too high and strained. It’skind of scary. “It took you long enough to get here,” she chirps. Her lips are chapped and her eyes are wild and red-rimmed. For a moment I wonder if she will try to push me off the roof, too.
    “I couldn’t think of any other way to get your attention,” she continues brightly. “I was thirsty, so thirsty, and you never came back! The window was open last night and the rain started coming in, so I just …” She pauses and runs her tongue over her lips. “And it tasted so good. It made me stronger, much stronger than your bathwater did. I came up here and drank and drank and drank the rain. But then it ended and the sun was so hot. It made me weak again. I didn’t mean to break so many of them, but I was trapped, you see?”
    Her lower lip sticks out sulkily. She looks so young; little more than a child. The sun is beating down on the back of my neck and I feel droplets of sweat forming on my temples.
    “How did you get up here?” I say quietly. “The only way is through the hatch back there, and it was still closed when I came out. I locked it myself last night.”
    “Do you really want to know?”
    Something drops in my stomach.
    “Tell me.”
    “I crawled out the window and then up the side of the building.”
    The nonchalance with which she says this makes my skin prickle: Our building has no ladder or fire escape. I look into those dark, dark eyes and there is no doubt in my mind about what she means. Last night, while I was sleeping, she—if I canstill call her a she—must have passed by my window as she scaled the slippery concrete, opening her mouth to catch the falling raindrops while she climbed.
    “What are you?”
    “Oh, Phi, not that question. Ask me anything but that. You don’t want the real answer, believe me.” She smiles in a way that shows too many teeth.
    “All right, how old are you then?”
    To my surprise she gives a light, rippling laugh.
    “How very cheeky of you, Phi! How very cheeky and how very clever. I’ll tell you this much, for I am tired of this game: I’m a great deal older than you think. I can remember many, many things. I remember a time when you could still watch the Chinese junks sailing down the Red River. I remember a man who spoke in French, smelled of opium, and liked to weave the yellow flowers that fell from a certain tree