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Ned started rigging up cable and hooks around them to hold Nancy’s hammock.
    “Hoo-rah!” he said, making a little salute toward the first hook on the first pole. “Soon you’ll have a place to hang your—” He studied the second pole, eyeballing the distance from the first.
    “My hammock?”
    “No, your—” He got distracted, unfocused. He hooked the ring at the head of the hammock to the firstpole and walked over to the second, a length of steel cable in one hand, a cotton cord in the other. “What’s your mother doing tonight?” he asked.
    “Why don’t you call her up and ask her?” she asked. What was the purpose of the two of them being married, anyway? she might have asked, but already knew what the answer would be: “You,” they’d say, both of them. She thought it was a cockeyed reason.
    She went outside and sat down in a little café chair Ned had put there. It was a corner building, taller than the rest of the block, so she could see down onto rooftops and gardens, from a higher vantage point. Also, being in Park Slope, it was on a hill, which made it higher than lots of areas of the city. The line of skyscrapers stood out in the distance, a miracle made by people who apparently weren’t worried by the sucking space between themselves and the ground.
    She caught herself thinking that maybe that boy was a roof dweller, too, then did her best to erase the thought. What remained, though, were warm rubber crumbs that would not disappear: he had good balance, and she couldn’t help wondering—hoping, really—that he had a secret hidden.

7
    D ion did have a secret, several, in fact. The one that pressed hardest on his mind was the one he could do the least about. He and Mina had come home from school that day and found their apartment empty. Dion went to the roof to bring in the laundry left drying up there. But he was the third one on the roof. Mom had tried to fall over the edge, and Dad had made a massive leap across the roof to stop her. He had the scratches on his face to prove how she’d tried to fight him off.
    Dion’s oldest secret was that his mother, a counselor, needed help herself. It had started long before the day of jumping. Far from helping herself, it was as thoughshe hated herself, hated her skin, anyway, enough to scratch at herself, make herself bleed. Dion’s father had promised,
before,
to get his mother help.
After,
Dion had bawled at his father, raged at him: “You said you were getting that doctor in!”
    His father still hadn’t kept his promise—not that one or the promise to stop writing so many Angel stories—and Dion couldn’t live in the same house with him. That meant not sleeping there. It meant getting by on his own. It meant eating less. It meant sleeping and washing, hanging his laundry on whatever quiet roof he could find. It meant cutting school. And he had shaved his hair; he would keep it shaved until things seemed different, better. What difference that made, he wasn’t sure, only that he
felt
different without his hair, less recognizable, more invisible. He sneaked home when Dad wasn’t there, to see Mina and check on Mom.
    Dion’s saddest secret was that his mother was worse now, not better.
    At least his father had jumped. For jumping, Dad could be relied on. Dion’s father was the best jumper around, the fastest, strongest jumper.
You should see him on a basketball court.
That was what Dion had thoughtabout his father, back when he was proud. His father had a jump shot you wouldn’t believe. It was just about the only way he used to be able to get around his mother, who was a formidable guard, though tiny and stocky.
    Rose hadn’t been on the basketball court in a while. Neither had Dion. He’d practically grown up hanging off the fence around the cages to watch Niko and Rose play one-on-one, or pickup games, when they weren’t teaching him. Well, basketball was done now.
    Another secret was that Niko and Rose didn’t worry much about