Rapunzle, Rupunzle

I am house sitting in a lovely house that overlooks the entire Salt Lake valley. I invited Abbie to come and enjoy the hot tub with me, while we soaked in the cool canyon breeze with the lights of the city laid out below us. As soon as she arrived, I poured her a glass of white wine and started a tour of the house. After we finished with the ground floor, we moved up to the top floor and out one of the bedrooms onto a balcony with a panoramic view. The day had been cloudy, and suddenly one of the cool canyon breezes became more than breeze and, with a vengeance, slammed the door behind us.

My first thought: Oh, no. Please let this be one of the doors without a locking door handle.

I tried the door, it was locked and the wind was blowing harder. Abbie's voice began to rise in pitch and volume, shrieking-muttering words that I couldn't quite make out, other than, "and on a school night!"

"Don't worry," I said. "We'll call someone."

"Except we don't have a phone," she said.

"Oh, well no wonder you are freaking out. We have a phone." This house is so large that I have taken to carrying my cell phone around in my pocket because otherwise I would never hear it ring. "I'm sorry I didn't tell you right away," I said. I started scrolling through my list of contacts. Who exactly is the right person to call when you are locked outside on a balcony, in a wind storm, on the outskirts of the city at 11:00 at night? My sister? No answer.

"I don't want to call anyone," said Abbie. "I want to find our own way out of this."

"You are right. Let's do that." I reached over the balcony ledge and felt the texture of the roof shingles. They were rough and hard, the way I remembered them as a kid- the last time I climbed on a roof. Fortunately, I hadn't even tasted the wine yet, so I was relatively sure that my judgement was mostly sound when I climbed over the balcony ledge and started scrambling across the roof. Abbie wasn't so sure.

"This is crazy, this is crazy!" she repeated.

I turned the corner of the roof, expecting to find the balcony to the room where I was sleeping, where I knew the door was still open. No luck, the roof didn't continue and the roof that led to the other balcony was a good 7 feet over my head. I stared at it for a while and then looked down over the roof edge. My new car was parked under the roof, but the roof of my car was still a serious plunge away and I imagined myself slamming into it, denting it and me. I tested the stability of the drain running along the edge of the roof, imagining myself hanging from it and then nimbly dropping onto my car. Then I imagined hanging onto it and ripping it off, along with some of the roof and trying to explain why I had inflicted thousands of dollars worth of damage to an innocent roof. I gave up and scrambled back to Abbie.

The wind was gusting harder and the clouds were threatening. "Abs, we gotta call someone."

"Can't we just drop down there?" she asked.

"Where?"

"To the balcony below us."

This was a sign of true desperation. "Dropping down" would have required one of us to sling ourselves over the edge of the balcony, drop almost twenty feet and land on a metal pole railing a few inches wide. Missing the railing would mean hitting the cement of the balcony on one side, or falling another 10 feet to a rocky, terraced hillside. "Um, no. We can't just drop down there."

I called a few more people. No one answered. After the tenth person, it seemed inevitable. "Abs, we are going to have to call Jay." Jay is my stepfather. He's the person we called when I was staying at Abbie's house and the garage door broke and after an hour of trying to fix it or lift it, we called him and he explained to us the simple laws of physics and instructed us to stand at opposite edges of the door and not try and lift it together from the center. We called him the next night when the fuse blew, and after flipping them all back on, I couldn't get the electricity to work again. And then we called him when the internet stopped working and we couldn't start that either. And now, we would have to call him and explain that we would once again need his help, and this time, over the phone wouldn't be enough.

"Hello?"

"Jay, we need your help!" I said desperately- relieved that he had answered. And then realized that calling someone in the middle of the night and shouting those words wasn't exactly good for the heart. I imagined him imagining me by the side of the road, in jail, in a hospital, or maybe that I had been by the side of the road in a car accident, until I was taken off to the hospital for examination, then pronounced in stable (but injured) condition and finally carted off to jail where I was able to call him. That was how I sounded anyway. "Actually, we are OK," I corrected, waiting for the sigh of relief, but he was still just listening.

I explained our predicament, in the background I could hear Abbie: "He'll never let me near you again. How does this happen to us?" He agreed to come.

Relieved, we finally sat down on the balcony floor to wait for his arrival. Abbie turned philosophical, "We might as well make the most of this, because as soon as he gets here, I have to leave." We picked up our wine glasses.

"I'm sorry," I said. "Let's pretend that this is how we wanted to spend the evening, a glass of wine, a view of the city..." That was when it started to rain. I am not taking any poetic license here- it really started to rain. We scrambled under the four feet of covered roof space and crouched against the wall. The whole city had been waiting for this rain for days. It's been over 100 and we all needed some relief, and it finally came. Impeccable timing. "I better at least make it onto your blog for this," Abbie said.

Thirty minutes passed, and our hero arrived to find the two golden haired Rapunzels stuck in the tower. From that height, we were able to direct him around the edge of the house in the darkness and in through one of the side doors. After losing his way in the middle of the house, he finally made it to where we were stranded. Relief!

Together with Jay, I finished Abbie's tour of the house. He figured he might as well see the house that he had to drive to in the rain in the middle of the night. I hugged him at the door, promising dinner, wine, chocolate, all of the above.

"I better go too," said Abbie. "Oh, no. My keys aren't in my pocket." We began hunting through the house, the sense of panic rising. After a few minutes I asked, "Maybe they are in your car? You'd better check. I am staying inside though, in case anything happens to the front door."

She tromped out through the darkness to the car and started laughing as soon as the interior light came on. "They are here! Thanks god the damn door is broken so it doesn't automatically lock!"

She looked up at me. "You had better end the blog entry with this. In fact, I plan this shit! This was all staged!" She came inside to grab the cookies that were supposed to go with the wine. "I really need these," she said, and headed back out into the darkness.